#philosophicalmusings — Public Fediverse posts

I think the idea that a society where we've achieved a utopia would be boring is just absolutely disconnected from reality. If we ever accomplished that, it would free so many people from a life of grinding poverty and suffering. For the first time, society would enable all people to be able to truly thrive and have the opportunity to live up to their full potential.

Of course actual utopia isn't possible. But that doesn't mean we can't make a society so much better than this one that it seems a utopia by comparison. The bar is just...so low.

I think a lot of political attitudes are unrealistic because they internalize the idea that change is impossible, when in fact change is inevitable. Our choice isn't between stasis and change--it's between good change and bad change and what we are going to individually contribute to. 

"But this change can't happen in my lifetime" is a statement people have been very wrong about again and again throughout history. It's not just individual policies that change, but political parties and even entire governments. Successful revolutions occur, and governments merge or splinter or collapse. All of these things can and will happen again. We can't know when or how, but discounting them completely is to not acknowledge the clear reality of a world whose only constant is change.

If we want to create a better future, we need to study history to understand what happened and why, to understand what worked and what didn't, to understand what we should replicate and what we should discard.

I think the internet is simultaneously very important component to activism and a large way that people get siphoned away from meaningful activism. It's very much a double edged sword--an essential tool for organizing in the modern day, but also full of capacity to lead us in the wrong direction.

Moving on Without Forgiving

I'm a big believer in the idea that forgiveness is optional. I think the incessant pressure on victims to forgive their abusers is oppressive and a way to validate and further uplift the oppressor.

That doesn't mean that it can't be prudent to move on, to remove the hold a person has on your thoughts. There are those who say this can't be done without forgiveness, but I say that is nonsense. A person can move on by escaping or removing the power of and deprioritizing their oppressor, their abuser, their assaulter. A person can decide that other things and other people are more important to them and choose to give those precedence. 

The escaping or removing the power of is a very important part, though, and unfortunately not equally available to all. However, forgiveness has no advantage here. A person who forgives without removing themself from the source of the harm from is much worse off even than a person who likewise can't remove themself and doesn't forgive. The person who gives forgiveness without having their grievances addressed is victimized both within and without. This kind of forgiveness is nothing more than acquiescience to abuse.

So I say that not only can one move on without forgiving, but if no adequate attempt to address grievances by the perpetrator is made, than moving on without forgiving is the better option. And even when it is not possible to move on, it is still better to not forgive in the absence of adequately reparative acts from the perpetrator.

As important as knowledge and understanding is, there comes a time where action must be taken and decisions must be made. It would be ideal if we could act from complete and perfect knowledge, but such knowledge is never possible. Instead, we must seek as much knowledge as we reasonably can obtain, and then act on that knowledge in the best way we know how. Because while this certainly will result in many errors, a complete unwillingness to act, either from indecision or from the fear of errors, can never bring about worthwhile change. 

This is not to say that action is always better than inaction, but that inaction only has value insofar as that it enables a better future action than the present one avoided. We cannot defer action indefinately. We must therefore accept that we cannot always avoid mistakes and lapses in judgment and instead focus on resolving to correct them as best we can when they arise. And we must accept that inaction cannot allow us to avoid such mistakes but in fact can itself be a mistake.

One way that people try to dismiss revolutionary action is by trying to position it as preventing reform. But I don't think that's true at all. I think that in a system like the one we live in, that fundamentally exists to serve the few at the expense of the many, reform only happens when there is a rise in revolutionary sentiment, as an attempt to quell revolution. While reforms are never adequate to fix deep-seated societal issues, they obviously can have some utility for allieviating suffering. So I don't see reforms as inherently bad. 

However, I do see reformism as counterproductive, even to bringing about reforms. Why? Because I think it fundamentally misidentifies what causes reformists to be elected and what causes reforms to happen. I think reforms can only happen in an environment of rising revolutionary sentiment. Because reforms are a desperate effort by a failing society to stave off revolution, not something granted when people play by the rules of that society. When people play by the rules, society knows it doesn't have to do anything to change itself. When people play by the rules, society knows that words, that lies are enough, that no action is needed. Society  doesn't want reform. So reform only happens when it needs to stave off something it doesn't want even more: revolution.

What I'm trying to say is that even if someone is only aspiring for reforms, it's counterproductive to malign and obstruct revolutionaries, when it is only because of revolutionaries that society implements reforms in the first place.

The Virtue of Shamelessness

Shame is morality enforced via social consequence and that is ultimately its fatal flaw. Because the value of shame stems from the quality of the values being promoted, but the power of shame stems from the social power of the ones enforcing those values. And nine times out of ten, the value and the power of shame are directly opposite each other. This is why being shameless may often lead to more principled ethics than being easily shamed.

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I think something that is often not acknowledged is that someone can be more than capable of understanding an argument, but understanding an argument is not just about being capable of understanding it, but wanting to understand it. And the latter condition is much more outside the control of the person making the argument than people may realize. Because the manner in which you present the argument has much more affect on the tone of the response than its underlying content.

So if your purpose is to get acceptance of an idea your tone is actually a much less useful part of that than if you just seek individual personal acceptance. So in the end, all you can do is try to be as clear and focused in your statements as you can manage. The rest is out of your hands.

I maintain that philosophy is a centrally vital field of study, but most philosophers are unimaginably evil.

I think my goal is to specifically see what I can do to integrate both a collectivist and individualist sensibility in my philosophical view. I think to really have a complete philosophy, both of these things have to be considered: individuals cannot properly understand the consequences of actions taken at the personal level without understanding how those actions fit into and will be responded to by larger societal frameworks. At the same time, we cannot achieve collective benefit without considering how collective actions affect individuals.

I do not yet fully know what philosophical and political frameworks would best help me construct this philosophy, excepting that I think communist theory will undoubtedly be a big part of it, and it will most certainly be very different than Objectivism, excepting the respect for personal bodily autonomy.

Rand was not a feminist, in fact she decried feminism, but she was pro-bodily automomy and supported the right to abortion and in general the right of women to work the same types of jobs as men. I think the thing that Ayn Rand and other right libertarians crucially misunderstand is that a larger social dynamic like misogyny will prevent women from having individual bodily autonomy. They don't understand it because they imagine the world as it is as a meritocracy where only the best rise to the top, and so they imagine the preponderence of men in high social positions is due to the inherent superiority of those men rather than misogynistic favoring of men regardless of ability. They don't understand that women will simply not be allowed bodily automomy in a deeply misogynistic society, that individual bodily autonomy in general will never be allowed most individuals in a capitalist society.

I really don't see a lot of value in guilt. Supposedly it's supposed to drive people to try to make amends for bad things they've done, but from what I've seen, it's either people feeling bad about things that aren't actually wrong or harmful or people just wallowing in feeling bad about doing bad things but instead of trying to fix any of that, they make a big production out of it and make it other people's problem, especially the people they've harmed by their actions.

Just seems the opposite of useful to me.

The thing about computer security is that while it is by no means absolute, that doesn't mean it's pointless. In the same way it's not pointless to avoid posting your credit card number online just because people can still steal it if you don't, it's not pointless to avoid revealing other information about yourself just because there are people who can find that information through other means. 

In fact it is a general principle that perfect security is impossible, whether online or offline. Increased security can sometimes also come at unacceptable cost, not just in money, but time, convenience, and social connection. So good security is about finding good tradeoffs, and what may be acceptable to one person may not be to another. 

But learning about security can help you figure out whether it's worthwhile to change your security practices.

People say a lot of things that are wrong. We can't concern ourselves with all these things, as our time is limited, so how do we determine which of these things to concern ourselves with? 

The answer is that we need to choose to focus on some subset of things which have real political relevance. Usually these are the things which are either being enacted by actual politicians, whether they are at the country level or more local, or have been implemented as de facto political policy within the context we are discussing. 

Most political talk is just that, talk. So we can largely ignore this talk unless it starts to have actual real life impact. The exception to this would be when discussing politics with someone you are directly organizing with. In this case, it can be important to address problems before they impact your activism. But in many other contexts this impact can't be anticipated unless it is part of an already existing political dynamic.

Advice For Young Adults (And the Not-So-Young)

Applies to high school, college, and getting your first jobs after graduation, among other situations:

Imposter syndrome will happen, but keep in mind that you aren't done yet. In fact, for as long as you live, you won't be done. Celebrate those times you figure it out, whatever 'it' may be, and keep in mind that it's a myth that your brain stops growing at 25--your brain grows your entire life. You have the rest of your life to grow and change and learn.

Keep going!

They haven't even seen your final form yet!

One failure of the 'listening to x voices' mindset is how it is fundamentally premised on this false idea that good principles can arise from simply passively taking what one is told at face value. Selecting what values to promote is always an active choice, even if that choice is made with little thought. If listening is taken to mean adopting a position as one's values, then listening to some voices necessarily precludes listening to others. And if listening is not taken as endorsement of a position, then it is simply a cowardly excuse to avoid expressing values of one's own at all. 

What should be done is to amplify the voices of the oppressed. But that cannot be premised on the idea that it's possible to be a passive participant in one's own decisions on who is oppressed and who within this group best articulates what needs to be done about that oppression in the first place. Yes, mistakes can and will be made, but not owning up to them only compounds the problem.

I don't really think it makes sense for anyone to be smug about their politics right now. No one is doing enough to fix the sorry state of our world, and unless enough people do some real introspection on why that is and work to fix it, things are not going to get better. 

I conclude that:

Some groups have the numbers needed for change but lack the political understanding or action needed. Some groups have the political understanding needed but lack the action needed. And some groups have both the political understanding and perform the needed actions, but lack the numbers needed for change.

Sure, maybe we get meaningful change in 10, 20, 100 years down the line just as a result of things becoming more and more intolerable forcing people to become more meaningfully politically active, but I guarantee that people passively waiting for that while collectively just doing the same thing repeatedly and hoping it works out differently this time is going to be the absolute worst decision we could ever collectively make.

Dreams are not activism or accomplishment, but if a person's dreams can be made small, they can kept from activism and accomplishment. Therefore, this is one way that society keeps us chained, by keeping our dreams small.

This is why I try to dream big. A dream of me suddenly being a billionnaire able to dispense charity to my chosen causes would be a small dream. It accomplishes almost nothing that is fundamentally important to me and simply positions me as a higher class in the existing system. It improves my life, and perhaps the lives of some fortunate individuals, but would actually do little to make the world a better place.

No, my dream is for us all to be able to live like millionnaires. To have reliable housing and food and water and all our basic needs met, and to be able to pursue our highest aspirations. To never have to worry about healthcare or education debt or transportation. To be able to live fulfilling lives.

Locked in with The Iron Garden Sutra https://www.allforgardening.com/1655711/locked-in-with-the-iron-garden-sutra/ #garden #LockedRoomMysteries #PhilosophicalMusings #TheIronGardenSutra

https://www.europesays.com/ie/385212/ Locked in with The Iron Garden Sutra #Éire #IE #Ireland #LockedRoomMysteries #PhilosophicalMusings #Technology #TheIronGardenSutra

The word story is not synonymous with fiction. We tell stories for reality, too. Stories are how we make sense of the world. They are a reflection of the storyteller's understanding of the world, of what caused an event and what it in turned caused, of whether it was good or bad. In a sense, these stories are still not real in that they may say more about the storyteller than they say about the event. 

And in a sense, stories are always to some extent about the storyteller, even when the storyteller is not a subject of the story, because they reflect the  storyteller's values. This is because all questions of what should be done are a reflection of a person's values, including for questions as fundamental as who or what a story should be about in the first place. And these judgments by the storyteller become reflected in their story. A person who cannot answer the question of what the story should be about cannot tell the story in the first place.

While I do overall tend to prefer when people agree with me than when they do not, what is even more important is: is it clear to me that  they understand what I am saying, and do I understand what they are saying? Misunderstandings can be more frustrating than simple disagreement.

Scavenging, Freeganism, and Veganism

One area that I think there can be quite a bit of contention on is whether scavenging and freeganism are vegan. My answer to this is: it depends. I think the context in which the question is being asked is important.

My personal approach is to avoid scavenging and freeganism, and I feel this approach is optimal to the group of people in my particular situation as the optimal way to practice and model veganism. But I don't think it applies to people who live in extreme poverty or live a subsistence lifestyle where choices are greatly restricted because veganism is about doing everything practicable to avoid animal exploitation, and what is practicable to someone like me is not necessarily practicable to someone with greatly restricted resources.

Furthermore, I also think that in a context in which avoiding it is not practicable and the option is available, scavenging and freeganism is not only reasonable because it is practicable, but it literally is the vegan option. I think that practiced correctly, scavenging and freeganism do not exploit animals. I don't think all use of something that came from an animal is inherently exploitation.

Allow me to illustrate with a couple examples. If someone wanted to collect the hairs I naturally shed as I was walking around outside, I would not consider this exploitation. What would be exploitation would be forcibly cutting my hair, especially if I were treated in a similar manner as the vast majority of commercial sheep are (hyperexploitation). 

A big problem with  commercial sheep is they are bred to not shed their hair naturally, causing them to require shearing which their natural counterparts do not. This breeding is exploitation in itself, as it produces traits harmful to the sheep that exist only to benefit humans. Commercial sheep are then further exploitated in the most deplorable ways imaginable. Shearers are typically paid by the amount of wool they shear, not by how long they work, which incentivizes fast shearing that inevitably leads to frequent shearing injuries. Suffering is the price of profit to the capitalist class, for both the shearers and the sheep.

Consider another example. I die of natural causes or of an accident. If a human stumbles onto my rotting corpse, as long as they didn't cause my death, I don't think they're exploiting me if they decide to...eat that.  Not going to spend a lot of time thinking about it since I'm not personally into vore, but I wouldn't consider it exploitation. Now, other people may feel differently, and I think that should be respected, but I don't think human conceptions of the treatment of their corpses apply generally to nonhuman animals (though this is potentially a more complicated question for animals like elephants that also seem to practice their own death rituals).


So I think scavenging can not only fit the definition of veganism for qualifying as the best practicable option, I think that in some cases it fits the definition in the sense that it doesn't cause the exploitation of any animal.

Nevertheless, I don't think scavenging and freeganism is vegan for everyone. And one big reason for this is that capitalism exists. Capitalism makes exploitation inevitable in a search for greater and greater profits. And regardless of capitalism, people can lie to both themselves and others about whether something was truly scavenged or acquired in a freegan way. They can also simply be mistaken.

For example, eating the free non-vegan pizza served at the university event isn't practicing freeganism, though it may seem to be. This is because while that pizza may be free for the person eating it, it was bought by someone who is thus producing a demand for it. On the other hand, eating a non-vegan pizza that was obtained by dumpster diving is freeganism because no additional demand is being created by that act.

I also think that if an item is being sold under capitalism, that even if people start purchasing only scavenged items, a strong incentive exists to label items as scavenged that definitively are not, in the same way that greenwashing occurs and in the same way that corporations lie or exaggerate about how well they treat their workers.  Additionally, this incentive is increased given that scavenging is not nearly as scalable as more exploitive methods of production, and so practical veganism needs non-exploitive solutions that can be deployed at scale in order to effectively counter animal exploitation.

Quite simply, there is no way out of exploitation of any kind without being able to deploy solutions that can scale to fill the necessary demand, which scavenging and freeganism cannot do. And this is why, even though these can be vegan, even optimally vegan, in certain situations,they are not vegan in a general sense. Additionally, in the current environment, for some people, they are vegan only in the sense that better options are not practicable for the people in question. This is because I think it's important to show that one isn't 'too good for' ethical solutions that can be deployed at scale. Otherwise the position becomes that avoiding exploitation is somehow only for the well off, which is not itself a vegan position since that would necessarily only reduce exploitation for a small fraction of the animals currently being exploitated. There is therefore also a larger obligation, when possible, to push society to deploy the solutions that veganism needs to end exploitation at scale, and not just on an individual level.

And this also just so happens to help end the exploitation of the most oppressed and hyperexploited of humanity as well, because the hyperexploitation of animals of today is fueled by the hyperexploitation of human workers in a way that simply cannot be resolved at scale for the human workers involved without abolishing the exploitation of the animals involved.

Things absolutely can get better but action is necessary for that to happen. To solve a problem, one must first acknowledge and understand it. Negativity without positivity is a dead end, but positivity without acknowledging the negative realities of the world is equally so. And the person pointing out a problem doesn't need to be the one fixing it--sometimes different people have different roles they are best suited for in the political project. However, the people working to solve a problem must work in tandem with the people identifying and analyzing it. And so, the positive solution can only arise from understanding and facing the negative, from understanding and confronting  the obstacles to that solution.

I think one of the biggest problems in character judgment is what I call the 'but they were always nice to me' fallacy. It's the fallacy that because someone was always good to you or generally pleasant or decent in the contexts in which you dealt with them, that they are that way to everyone else or in all other contexts. 

There are people I know who are unpleasant with me who might be otherwise decent people, or who might be absolutely delightful with  others. There are people who have been perfectly nice to me, who I know due to them mentioning details about their past or catching hints of it in casual remarks of theirs are deeply unpleasant to others, or even have committed full-scale atrocities on others. You can't truly understand the scope of a person simply by how they behave to you or around you. People don't treat everyone they meet with the same level of regard or fairness and they don't in general present the same face to everyone. 

There are many people in the world who are Jekyll to some and Hyde to the rest. Alternately, there are people who may be awful to you for reasons that would be understandable to you if you had the distance to be less affected by their actions and the perspective to understand their reasons.

On the Fundamental Inconsistency of The Pro-Life Argument

I believe there is considerable evidence that most people who proclaim themselves pro-life are not actually even remotely consistently pro-life.

And this is generally the case even for people who are pro-life and also vegan anti-war pacifists opposed to the death penalty (and even this alone would be a veeeerrry small number of people).

The reason? Well, I'm going to give the most robust argument I know of regarding forcing the birth of a fetus based on preserving their life, and then show that this argument is generally considered unacceptable in other relevant contexts.

The most robust argument I know of for the pro-life position is this:

1. The risk of pregnancy to the life of the pregnant person is considerably less than the risk of abortion to the life of the fetus (often true).

2. Since life is being valued above all else, including bodily autonomy, denying the the pregnant person their bodily autonomy to force them to birth the fetus is therefore the lesser evil.

Here's why this argument is fundamentally inconsistent with what most people consider morally acceptable in other contexts:

Say someone has lost both kidneys. This person is not able to stay on dialysis indefinitely, and dialysis is determined to be far more risky for them than having a healthy functioning kidney. They need a kidney, or they will die. It should be easy to find a healthy donor. You just need to force a bunch of people to come in and do some testing to determine compatibility, find the lowest risk donor in that group, and then force that person to donate one kidney. Problem solved, right?

Except you might have trouble finding many 'pro-life' people who would advocate for this position...

The Left/Right Political Axis is A Fundamentally Broken Concept

So another fun thing I've been thinking over that affects a lot of the ways I and most other people characterize politics is the left/right political axis. I think a fundamental flaw with conceptualizing politics with a left/right political axis is that this supposedly single axis is actually the collapse of a whole bunch of different axes and so what moving left or right actually entails is really hard to quantify. 

Like take the example of someone who is a ecofascist eugenicist homonationalist TERF. There are probably going to be some people who look at those positions and say 'oh, this person is far right for sure' (me for one) because of the fascism, eugenicist beliefs, nationalism, and transmisogyny (TERFS can be and often are generally transphobic, but they are definitionally transmisogynists). But there are going to be others who think of these positions as mostly cancelling out and so maybe consider this person practically a centrist even though they are quite clearly an extremist. And then there will be some people, like maybe a gas guzzling climate change denialist who is anti-gay and a universal misogynist, who are going to look at this person and probably characterize them as far-left. 

And there's not really any good way to choose weights for any of these things. It's also not really possible to ignore this conceptualization because of how omnipresent it is. But this example shows that you can take the same person, ask three different people to characterize them, and get three wildly different answers. This system is basically operating almost entirely on vibes.

So that's a real mess.

Virtue Ethics is Bad Political Ideology

So, I need to flesh this idea out a bit more. but I wanted to get it out there, because I think this concept is kind of central to developing a robust political framework.

If I could name one big factor responsible for political failure, it would be the implementation of virtue ethics as political policy. Politics needs to be concerned with practicality, and regardless of what principles a given set of virtue ethics contains, it is going to be utterly impractical to implement, both due to the existence of competing ideologies and human inconsistency. This is not even getting into situations where different values in a given system may conflict with each other. Politics has to be concerned with consequences--too much focus on virtue (for just about any given value of the term) will be the downfall of any political system.

Though I must note that I think the most well known form of consequentialism, utilitarianism, is also fundamentally flawed.

So recently I've come to the conclusion that rights based politics is bad. However, since I don't think the reasoning behind this conclusion is particularly obvious, especially since it took me several years to come to this conclusion myself after first encountering someone saying that the rights-based franework is bad, I will explain why I believe this to be the case.

The concept of rights is common in political discourse today, coming up in such wide-ranging political arenas as human rights and animal rights. So in just about any area of political discussion, we encounter this concept. However, it has a fatal flaw: the concepts of rights actually says nothing about either what you value or why you value it. Actually, there is one scenario in which it can say something about values: if you derive your values from what you consider to be an inerrant authority, like a god or governmental power. But even then it doesn't make clear who or what you consider this ultimate authority to be.

Saying something is a right is like saying something is good: it is a pure value judgement that provides no rationale for how that judgment is derived. And saying 'I believe in human rights' is like saying 'I believe in doing good', as this doesn't even give any indication of what one believes should be valued.

It's like if instead of having political parties everyone just called themselves a Gooditarian whose primary precept is they believe in doing good things and not bad things. Except some gooditarians want to elimate world hunger and solve climate change, while other gooditarians believe that we should continue to have plutocrats that have extractionist control over the majority of the world's resources while vast numbers of people starve as a result, and that we should accelerate climate change so they can have cheap boat travel across the iceless North Pole. Sounds like gooditarian is a pretty meaningless term, then, no?

But the concept of rights is the same. Some people who believe in rights believe in the right to free speech, others don't. Some people who believe in rights believe in the right to privacy, others don't. Some people who believe in rights believe in the right to shelter, or food, or water, and others don't. And so on. So even if one wants to divorce the concept of rights from the idea of it stemming from any authority, or if one accepts that authority as good, there is still the issue that it is an essentially meaningless term that conveys neither the what nor the why of your value system.

Rights is just the real life gooditarian terminology. It's not an ideology, but believing in 'human rights' or 'animal rights' is often treated as if it is one. When in reality, it's a word that says nothing about one's system of ethics at all. We're better served by saying which of our principles we are talking about and why we hold them. For example, saying we value bodily autonomy tells you something of what we value and why. It's informative in a way that saying we value people's rights isn't. Of course, the truth is such things tend to not be all-encompassing values. But that's okay. If we just want to talk about all of our values in a general way, we can just say something like 'our politics' or 'our ethics' or 'our values' without using a terminology that functionally helps to obscure the differences between different value systems.

I think there's a tendency to do one of two politically harmful things: one of which is to mistake self-punishment for politically restorative action, another is to mistake an active choice to remain politically ignorant for avoiding the former.

I think it is important to avoid both of these tendencies. We must guard against the tendency to criticize ourselves merely for the sake of criticism, as if our guilt alone somehow cleanses us of culpability. We must guard against the attempt to expose ourselves to the negative merely for the sake of it, but also   against the tendency to avoid the negative and the unpleasant because we assume political futility; because we assume there is no value in knowledge that may be difficult or upsetting for us to confront. Because there is value in that knowledge--confronting that knowledge is the first necessary step to the actions that can heal our world.

I don't accept the idea that it's ever valuable to focus on arguments appealing to people's emotions to the exclusion of logical or factual rigor. In fact there is no reason a factually correct and logically rigorous argument cannot also take into account emotional presentational choices and a lot of reason that an argument using every rhetorical and emotional trick in the book while being factually incorrect or lacking logical rigor will undermine your position with a lot of people. Really the only reason to use the latter is if you yourself believe you are wrong and are trying to manipulate people into believing lies or acting against the best interests of themselves or others.

Ah yes, the deep, philosophical musings of 2025: the year when "vibes" replaced actual content. 🤔🎉 One would think that leaving the cursor behind would be mind-blowing, but alas, it’s just another year of buzzword bingo. 🍾✨
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/12/22/a-year-of-vibes/ #vibes #buzzwordbingo #philosophicalmusings #contentcreation #2025trends #HackerNews #ngated

I think personal attacks on others are generally counterproductive in political disagreements. For the same reason, I also think that personal endorsements or compliments should be avoided in a political conversation, whether the person being endorsed as wonderful-amazing-incredible-moral paragon is your political ally or your ideological opponent. Keep that kind of thing for your personal interactions, not your political engagement. Politics is about policies, not personalities.

I also think the specific phenomenon of being polite to political opponents in practice is typically only extended to those with some kind of significant political power (and thus overwhelmingly to conservatives). I almost never see this kind of politeness extended to  leftists, and in the rare times I do, it's pretty much only coming from other leftists. So it's something I more perceive as being motivated to appeal to the powerful rather than as actual principled treatment of other people.

While I think a necessary condition of being politically effective is collaborating with others, it's not a sufficient condition. And I think this, along with thinking the increasing the sheer number of people one works with automatically makes one more politically effective is a very common fail state and political dead end.

Here's the thing: the effectiveness of an organization depends primarily on how it is structured. Essential aspects of effective structuring:

1. Clear and consistent goals - it is nonsensical to evaluate an organization without clear and consistent goals. What tangible things does the organization hope to accomplish?

2. An actionable plan to achieve those goals.

3. Clear communication of member responsibilities.

The nice thing is that you don't have to be part of a formal org to have any of these three things. However, there are many formal orgs that are missing one or even all of these things. Additionally, even if an org possesses all three of these qualities, if the clear and consistent goals are not aligned with your own goals, working within the org is actually likely worse for achieving your goals than working with no one and doing nothing at all. Working against your goals is a lot of work to gain less than nothing. It's like deciding to deal with the problem of people bullying you by punching yourself in the face. 

Now, no matter how effective a group is, it needs resources like people, money, and time to increase the magnitude of its effect, but this is different from believing that any of those things by themselves automatically makes a group effective or means that joining it will help you accomplish your goals.

Though the power of any one individual is limited, we also often have a lot more power than we realize. And with that power comes responsibility.

Which is a reason people can be incentivized to believe they are powerless. Because if we can convince ourselves we can't do anything, then we convince ourselves we don't have to try, that we can tune out as the world burns. This lack of resistance cements the power of oppressors.

Not everyone can contribute in the same way, or to the same degree. What you can do depends on your situation. But for most people, there are things that they can do. The most effective of those things will likely involve collaboration with others, but the best form for that collaboration may be different for different people. But we should all be thinking about what action we can take and who we can work with as climate change and violence threaten our entire world.

Weird is Not Bad, But Also Not Inherently A Virtue

I don't think it would be too ridiculous an assessment to say that I'm rather weird. And I don't think that makes me bad, but it's also not an inherently good quality, either. Weirdness can be associated with positive behavior, but it's not intrinsic too it, nor is it inherently anathema to bad or malicious behavior.  At the same time, weirdness is also a big component of oppression. Because weirdness is a social construct. I think its important to defend weirdness without using weirdness to defend malice.  Because there is no one so oppressed that they cannot harm or oppress any other. So I think each of my actions, weird or not, have to be evaluated on whether they are beneficial or harmful.

I think one misconception that often gets spread about anti-imperialism, even by people who support it, is that it entails the imperial core being 'worse off' than it is now. In reality, it would only necessarily entail change, which every choice, including the status quo, will entail. If we are going to characterize a situation as worse, I think we need to answer the questions of 'in what way' and 'for who' and 'compared to what', because I think those questions would also help illuminate how certain very important things, like housing, water, food, and medical support would actually be much better for the vast majority of people, regardless of where they live. 

I mean, it's not going to be better for billionnaires of course, but who cares?

Are cheap bananas in the imperial core really 'better' than having enough food without worry? Than reliable healthcare?

The fundamental basis of capitalism is private property. You cannot have capitalism without it. And the fundamental way to obtain private property is through theft--the theft of physical resources and the theft of the value of other's labor. This is why there can never be a just society based around capitalism. And so, in order to have communism, private property must be abolished.

I think one big question whenever anyone like me talks about abolishing copyright is how to make sure that people who create works that would currently be placed under copyright would be compensated.

I want to first say that copyright does not exist to ensure fair compensation for creators. In the extremely unlikely situation that should happen to occur, it is, contrary to popular belief, an exception, a bizarre fluke. No, the rule is that copyright, in the vast majority of cases, serves as one of two things:

1. A lottery ticket to dangle above the poor. A way to get a larger mass of support for the laws underlying copyright besides the support of their primary beneficiaries.

2. A way for the primary beneficiaries of copyright, corporate suits who have never had an original thought in their life, to steal the rightful income of creators.

This is why I believe that copyright is worse for creators than having nothing at all.

Nevertheless, I do think there is something better than both copyright and not having any special incentives for creators. A system based on compensating digital works per copy viewed or downloaded. Note I didn't say 'bought'.

Because this system would compensate creators even if the work wasn't bought. Now, even in a system like this, some digital copies might go uncompensated. One can imagine scenarios where that would be possible. However, gone would be the days where someone else takes your work, sells it or gives it away for free, you find out, but aren't able to ever recoup that income. Instead, this system would compensate you for those works as well. At the same time, the other person would also be compensated for their advertising and distribution work. And thus, the pirate of today is tomorrow's (free to you!) advertiser and distributor.

Now, obviously, this system would require extensive logging technology. However, that technology largely already exists--activity counters and social media--it's mostly a matter then of modifying some specifics for that software and building the social and legal framework required to make a system like this work. 

Any system created by humans can be changed by humans.

RE: https://fandom.ink/users/unspeakablehorror/statuses/115208098068327686

I think that political labels can be important, but they also shouldn't be over-relied upon to adequately delineate someone's beliefs and positions alone. I think for that it's necessary to engage with the details of what someone is saying to truly understand their politics.

This is why I don't like to put much in the way of political labels for myself in my bio--because I don't think my political beliefs can be adequately summed up by a few labels, and also because I'm still trying to more fully understand what different political labels even mean.

I don't mind using political labels for myself in my regular posts, though. I've got to talk about the specifics of my politics at some point, after all.

I think a combo that would be pretty accurate for me is an anti-zionist vegan communist. However, three words cannot properly delineate my specific positions on these matters, nor are they inclusive of all political positions that I hold. To that end, I want to say a little about how I think about each of these terms.

I am pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide, and anti-apartheid. Zionism is support for a Jewish ethnostate, which in its existing iteration is violently anti-Palestinian and in any possible iteration would be pro-genocide and pro-apartheid. This is what it means to support an ethnostate. There can be no justice where Zionism takes root.

I am vegan, which is to say that I support animal liberation (but not the author of Animal Liberation Peter Singer because I am very much opposed to the philosophy of utilitarianism, even when it's not being used to argue for ableism as Singer does). I am thus against slaughter or exploitation of other animals for human benefit. I not only think that animal liberation is compatible with human liberation, but that support for animal slaughter and exploitation often goes hand in hand with lending support for human oppression. However, even if not a single hair on a human's head was ever harmed in the name of animal slaughter or exploitation, these things would still be indefensible. I hold the same position regarding the environmental harms animal agriculture causes. These things are linked, but even if they weren't, unnecessarily harming another creature for one's own benefit is egregiously indefensible.

Though I do not consume animal products myself, and I think this is something most vegans should avoid, I do not think this is either a necessary or sufficient trait to call oneself a vegan. Veganism is the cessation of all harm to other animals that is practicable to avoid, but I acknowledge that what is practicable or even possible to avoid is not going to be the same for all people, and that some people cannot avoid animal products in their diet. In my judgment, that doesn't mean they aren't vegan, as long as they advocate for animal liberation and avoid the slaughter and exploitation of animals to the extent practible for them.

Lastly, I am a communist (nondenominational). While I acknowledge that there's a lot I have to learn in this area, my understanding of history and current events indicates that communism is simply the only sufficiently coherent anti-capitalist ideology that exists at this point in time, and the only way to adequately oppose the omnicide that capitalism promotes.

One reason I'm vegan and not just vegetarian is that I see the exploitation of animals as inextricably linked to their death. For example, the reason I'm against eggs is that even in an 'ideal' backyard eggs scenario where the chickens are treated as pets, treating eggs as commodities requires the continued intentional breeding of chickens in ways that are harmful to the chicken and shorten their lives. Chickens produce an enormous number of eggs of large size. This shortens their life and is harmful to their health. The same can be said of cows and milk, where cows have been bred to produce enormous quantities of milk which is taxing on their bodies and shortens their lifespan. Similarly, sheep have been bred so their bodies no longer naturally shed their wool, which eventually endangers their lives if they are not sheared. Being against this is really no different than being against breeding dogs to have respiratory problems so they will look "cuter".

And that's not even getting into the fact that all of these animals are routinely killed at a fraction of their lifespan after they stop being sufficiently profitable. Many chicks are routinely killed shortly after birth if they are not judged to be egg layers, and calves are often killed just so they don't have to be fed and/or so they can be used in something like dog food. Here's an article that is from an animal welfarist perspective, not a vegan one, but which I think has some value in that it discusses the practicalities and economic incentives behind the widespread slaughter of calves in the dairy industry that the layperson may not be familiar with.

I really dislike the term social distancing because it implies an inherent social hit with following a basic pandemic safety measure, and not only does that not have to be a problem with thoughtful implementation of such measures, but also following such safety measures helps disabled people among others to be less socially isolated. Thus not exerting the effort to physically distance oneself in appropriate ways contributes to socially distancing and isolating disabled people, among others, while simultaneously encouraging people to use the excuse that observing these safety measures inherently socially isolates them. This is not to say that making the implementation of such safety measures compatible with one‘s social life is necessarily always effortless, but that not observing such safety measures should be seen as the agent of social isolation of disabled people that it undeniably is.

Which is to say, that if you want to have a party or host an event, you should be making the effort to mask and/or host an outdoor event and/or stand a few extra feet away from people and/or have a remote attendance option, and asking others to do the same.

RE: https://fandom.ink/users/unspeakablehorror/statuses/114763433721256124