Last election, I was left with my jaw dropped that during massive protests against racialized police brutality (and policing/the carceral system more generally), the neoliberal establishment ran the guy who is widely known as the principal architect of the 1994 crime bill. This bill is considered the set of laws that put into motion modern mass incarceration.

Now, the same person has been full-throatedly backing a genocide, and we're told it is necessary to vote for him because the other option is worse.

At what point does voting for and supporting the man who is materially facilitating the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians mean one has acquiesced to the view that this genocide is an inevitable prerequisite to sustaining the American Way of Life?

Is the dream of Liberal Democracy people are worried about saving truly a nightmare built on a mountain of corpses of "necessary" victims of historic and current state violence?

When people claim that support for Biden is necessary to protect marginalized groups from Trump (a dangerous piece of shit, to be sure), what does that mean for the marginalized groups facing increasing levels of state violence—such as asylum-seeking migrants, trans youth, communities with dramatically increased militarized policing, and Palestinians facing textbook genocide—under Biden? Do they not exist?

Could it be that many tacitly understand the ethically inexcusable brutality underlying the American system, and when they opine about reluctant Biden-voting to stave off the seemingly inevitable rise of US fascism, they are more honestly concerned with maintaining a stable, yet blood-drenched, status quo in which they find relative comfort from the social positioning they enjoy within it?

I'm not posing a singular solution, but I am 100% saying that it's time to think harder and evaluate one's ethics – no more lazy thinking that functions to perpetuate moral atrocities.

@josh Just to be clear, the "damage" you're claiming must be voted for as a moral necessity is genocide – you'd be co-signing genocide.

If you can think your way out of admitting that voting for Biden is to support a genocide, I reckon you could think up an alternative political framework to function in that doesn't restrict your options to 1) genocide, 2) worse genocide or 3) failed third party.

The people of America are lesser-evil voting themselves further and further to the right – I think your rationale supports this, under the premise of a cynical electoral consequentialist framing that must be rejected to halt it.

@markvonwahlde I feel like you didn't take in my points. I'm not trying to debate which tyrant war criminal is "better" but explicate how acquiescence to the choice that's so easy for you is fraught with ethical issues – that is if you possess ethics outside of lesser evil electoralist consequentialism.

Last election, I was left with my jaw dropped that during massive protests against racialized police brutality (and policing/the carceral system more generally), the neoliberal establishment ran the guy who is widely known as the principal architect of the 1994 crime bill. This bill is considered the set of laws that put into motion modern mass incarceration.

Now, the same person has been full-throatedly backing a genocide, and we're told it is necessary to vote for him because the other option is worse.

At what point does voting for and supporting the man who is materially facilitating the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians mean one has acquiesced to the view that this genocide is an inevitable prerequisite to sustaining the American Way of Life?

Is the dream of Liberal Democracy people are worried about saving truly a nightmare built on a mountain of corpses of "necessary" victims of historic and current state violence?

When people claim that support for Biden is necessary to protect marginalized groups from Trump (a dangerous piece of shit, to be sure), what does that mean for the marginalized groups facing increasing levels of state violence—such as asylum-seeking migrants, trans youth, communities with dramatically increased militarized policing, and Palestinians facing textbook genocide—under Biden? Do they not exist?

Could it be that many tacitly understand the ethically inexcusable brutality underlying the American system, and when they opine about reluctant Biden-voting to stave off the seemingly inevitable rise of US fascism, they are more honestly concerned with maintaining a stable, yet blood-drenched, status quo in which they find relative comfort from the social positioning they enjoy within it?

I'm not posing a singular solution, but I am 100% saying that it's time to think harder and evaluate one's ethics – no more lazy thinking that functions to perpetuate moral atrocities.

The Rule of Law exists for the powerful. It is not a system of universal justice but a sly and convoluted means for the opulent to systematically legitimize their daily theft, murder and cruelty in service of amassing wealth and securing Kingly positioning above us plebs.

The moment the supposed universal values of The Rule of Law are inverted to hold accountable Lords of the Social Order who wield immense political and economic power is the moment it's universal pretenses collapse into a pile of worm infested shit for all to see.

Law will never stop these monsters; it is the sphere that births them, the dimension wherein their plunder and assaults are validated, indeed, normalized.

Law is where Justice and Freedom go to die humiliating deaths, and where their mutilated corpses are cynically paraded by arch-villains masquerading as saviors.

The Rule of Law exists for the powerful. It is not a system of universal justice but a sly and convoluted means for the opulent to systematically legitimize their daily theft, murder and cruelty in service of amassing wealth and securing Kingly positioning above us plebs.

The moment the supposed universal values of The Rule of Law are inverted to hold accountable Lords of the Social Order who wield immense political and economic power is the moment it's universal pretenses collapse into a pile of worm infested shit for all to see.

Law will never stop these monsters; it is the sphere that births them, the dimension wherein their plunder and assaults are validated, indeed, normalized.

Law is where Justice and Freedom go to die humiliating deaths, and where their mutilated corpses are cynically paraded by arch-villains masquerading as saviors.

@structuralimage I swear I was drafting this as I came upon your beautiful post -

"If your primary political concern is how the illicit profits that the US reaps through colonial exploitation, financial predation and ecological plunder can more effectively be deployed to support the working class inside the imperial core, then I have questions about your proclaimed leftist bona fides."

weird how certain leftists comprehend and oppose the horrific things the US government does but then are like "tax the rich" as if the additional extraction revenue would magically be distributed to regular people via social services rather become more funding for exactly what the US government has always done (horrific things).

Further to the point: if the spoils the US government's imperialist conquest and neocolonial geopolitical domination were made to bolster a benevolent welfare state and bestow upon it's citizenry "universal" (nationalist) basic income and "universal" (nationalist) healthcare, would these folks remain in opposition to the US Empires crimes against humanity and it's eternal war upon human freedom, or would they simply slip into the acquiescence we expect from run of the mill liberals? I'm guessing mostly the latter.

Anti-electoral poster spotted in Soho, NYC

This tree saga came to a conclusion a few weeks ago, but not without comedy. the construction guys kinda tried bully my arborist friend into trimming more than he contractually agreed (which would have been disastrous for the tree) but he's been doing tree work and dealing with guys like this for two decades, so managed to refuse this while calling them "just meatheads who want to kill everything" to their faces and laughing it off like it was a joke.

then, best part, was when the 35 year old macho site-boss was like "I gotta be careful what I say, there's Biden people everywhere" (insinuating my friend is a liberal) my grizzled, 6ft 2" 50+ year old friend, all serious and with eye contact is like "I've been a molotov cocktail throwing anarchist for long time" and just leaves it hanging in the air. the guys like, "uh... ok let us know if you need anything".

I know it sounds like one of those "and then everyone clapped" embellishments but that's actually what happened lol

these fucking developers and construction firms think the world is theirs to shit all over, felt good to successfully push back and at least win a battle.

Just transcribed a long lost Jay Fox essay titled "The Ballot or the General Strike" from San Francisco's anarchist paper, "Freedom".

http://louisecrowleylibrary.org/the-ballot-or-the-general-strike

i wrote a quick little piece exploring the nature of fascism and how, instead of resisting it, the neoliberal establishment actually seems to be holding the door open for its advance.

"...The cognitive dissonance among electoralist ideologues, who fervently believe in the power of the vote to combat rising fascism, seems to be forcing the politics-as-usual crowd toward peering into the shadowy corners where the brutal nature of this political system lingers; for one to gain a glimpse of this reality only to hurriedly compartmentalize away the barbarousness and carry on as usual is tantamount to embracing its cruelty.

The social and political tension we now see and feel ripping through the fabric of polite society is the direct result of long-standing hypocrisies and contradictions in values being laid bare. Fascism beckons, advocating the embrace of cruelty, while the neoliberal political establishment enables it, urging us to turn a blind eye. Yet, one need not acquiesce to these ethically reprehensible options; alternatives exist."

https://reimagining.noblogs.org/post/2024/04/04/the-parallel-pathways-of-genocide-denialism-and-fascist-ideology/

also, gotta mention, as some of you might notice, my understanding of fascism has been greatly influenced by reading @rechelon 's writing on the subject – highly recommend checking some out if you're into digging in more.

i wrote a quick little piece exploring the nature of fascism and how, instead of resisting it, the neoliberal establishment actually seems to be holding the door open for its advance.

"...The cognitive dissonance among electoralist ideologues, who fervently believe in the power of the vote to combat rising fascism, seems to be forcing the politics-as-usual crowd toward peering into the shadowy corners where the brutal nature of this political system lingers; for one to gain a glimpse of this reality only to hurriedly compartmentalize away the barbarousness and carry on as usual is tantamount to embracing its cruelty.

The social and political tension we now see and feel ripping through the fabric of polite society is the direct result of long-standing hypocrisies and contradictions in values being laid bare. Fascism beckons, advocating the embrace of cruelty, while the neoliberal political establishment enables it, urging us to turn a blind eye. Yet, one need not acquiesce to these ethically reprehensible options; alternatives exist."

https://reimagining.noblogs.org/post/2024/04/04/the-parallel-pathways-of-genocide-denialism-and-fascist-ideology/

@structuralimage i wish people read more history and sociology, esp. Sociology from C. Wright Mills and William Whyte and David Riesman: the transition from the Robber Baron days to the Progressive Era to the impact of two world wars on corporate organization and work discipline and marked the end of individualism as a legitimizing ideology of capitalism. One should also read certain classical political economists fretting over the individualistic tendencies of emancipated Jamaican slaves who, instead of working in the fields, lived off the land and what they could hunt. One should also see how formerly independent crafts people often were the last to accept the discipline of the factory. One should look at the kinds of causes capitalists fund: they don't want a populace of individualists. Individualists are willful, not inclined to take orders, not good "team players".

I'm of the mind that voting for a genocidair is functionally co-signing a genocide. It is clear to me.

If one's ethical framework guides them toward such a decision, so be it – but obscuring that one views such a bleak choice as a moral necessity seems rather disingenuous.

"national security" should not be a concern for antifascists.

it is so bizarre that liberal academic antifascists exist... how does one not understand the inherent developmental relationship between nationalism and it's apotheosis: fascism?

been thinking about how epistemic deference, in its many varied permutations, often seems to lead to *ethical* deference. This disengagement with the inner workings of ones own mind, this abdication of assuming the cognitive load required to even begin knowing where and why one stands – to challenge, affirm, modify and/or abandon ones beliefs – appears endemic, and I think in certain ways, intensifying.

Befriending The Boss's Kid

On the dangers of the left-liberal professional political class

-

In Sacramento there is a professional political class which profits from the status quo, earning sumptuous salaries and living comfortable lives off of the social conditions as they are today. City Manager Howard Chan quickly comes to mind - and rightly so - however our current target is an apparatus secondary to the State itself. Some call it the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, others refer to it as controlled opposition, but for this piece we will refer to it as the left-liberal professional political class (LLPPC).

The LLPPC consists of nonprofit organizations, businesses, and moneyed individuals which work independently and in collaboration with each other and the State to affect (or recuperate) progressive social change. The LLPPC is for the most part primarily concerned with acquiring and sustaining revenue streams, even to the seeming detriment of their individual mission statements. This often manifests as a prioritization of data gathering, redundant meetings, and fundraising. In the extreme we see things like inflated government contracts coupled with gross negligence, such as the $3.2 million annual cost of the Miller Park Safe Ground campsite in Sacramento; or the widespread allegations of fiscal impropriety of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.

Squandered opportunities and resources are not the only harmful functions of the LLPPC - counter-organizing against movements, groups, and individuals that may threaten real social change is also endemic. That is why there is never a short supply of nonprofit organizations or milquetoast community leaders on hand to denounce or co-opt mass action to the benefit of the State. The outside agitator myth, condemnation of property damage as violence, and yellow-vest peace-police are some of the most well known tools of the LLPPC in this regard. More extreme tactics may mirror state repression more specifically, such as disinformation whisper campaigns, coordinated harassment, and the weaponization of monetary or material resources.

So what does all of this mean for nascent grassroots movements and those of us already years deep in community work? We must remain cognizant that organization from below will not be nurtured from above, and that philanthropy is merely a tool of the rich to garner themselves tax write-offs and social capital rather than a viable means to liberation. We must also remain wary of paid organizers, lobbyists, and businesspeople in general. When someone is earning a salary or otherwise profiting by ostensibly doing the same work that you are facing State repression for doing yourself - your interests cannot align in a meaningful way and they are likely in opposition.

In short we must seek to foster authentic grassroots movements among the most vulnerable, accepting that our resource limitations are indicative of our very position and cause. In a settler-colonial capitalist society there is no privilege that exists without strings, no matter the smiling face.

Well, my financial situation just abruptly changed for the scary. Lotta bad news at once.

I mention I have a patreon about once every 5 years and I've been redirecting the handful of donations to various radicals for a long while, but I could really use more stability rn. Definitely do not donate if you're just a poor punk; there are myriad prisoner support projects and radical spaces that could use cash too. But if you're a reader with extra sitting around...

https://www.patreon.com/williamgillis