Made From Trash And Glue. He Is A Distinguished Gentleman And I Love Him

I recently learned how much changes you can do without doing anything drastic or illegal. I won't call it anarchy, but you can do so many things. I recently noticed my city hall is throwing trash in the forest next to my house. I organized a forest cleaning, and made someone from the city hall come to give me trash bags. I told him about the trash they are throwing in the forest and he just called some people and they cleaned it within a day or two. This was a huge amount of trash that I couldn't physically pick up, and they just did it happily. People are good and support good things if you act for it. Also some people I don't know came to the forest cleaning and it is much nicer to go out now. It made a change

Somewhat on the vibe of "your glorious revolution doesn't exist," I want to talk to you all, especially the young folks, about effective anarchism.

Spoiler alert, it's not blowing stuff up or arson.

I am considered the most anarchical person of all among my friends. Granted, most of my experience has been wreaking anarchy against the systems present in my high school and college, but the principles are the same.

Practical anarchy is not the big, flashy, romanticizable thing people online make it out to be. It's more about the long haul - digging in your teeth and just being a menace that no one can really get rid of.

Everyone's "Why vote when you can firebomb a Walmart" posts (that they don't follow through on) are just not pratical because this is a surveillance society. With CCTV and DNA testing and cell phone cameras and GPS tracking, if you do something big like that, you are GOING to be caught; then that is the end of your anarchical career. And, keep in mind that you might get caught while you're setting up this big event - it's a crime to blow up a Walmart and also a crime to conspire to blow up a Walmart, so your career in anarchy might end before it begins, and then you are permanently out of the game. No matter what causes you were working for that inspired you to do something big and violent that you thought would get someone's attention, you now can't help at all ever again in your entire life. What you did will be a passing headline on the news, and then everything will go back to exactly what it was because big, acute actions can't compare in effectiveness to small, constant actions (just being a thorn in the side of the system, poking and poking, but unable to be dislodged).

This is just the practical side of it too: think about the risk of hurting innocents if you really advocate for doing things like that. You think blowing up a Walmart would really make a dent in that big of a corporation? But if you intentionally or unintentionally kill a bunch of Walmart shoppers, that's going to devastate families that had nothing to do with whatever your cause is.

So all that big talk about violence and destruction: not practical, not effective, not ethical.

The only way I've started to change oppressive systems around me is by justing chipping away from within the confines of the rules of these systems, and/or only stepping just outside them (never breaking rules in a big way that could have allowed said system to easily and "justifiably" get rid of me).

So if you're going to be an anarchist, you need to consider:

Having the longest career in anarchism possible (i.e. being careful enough and judicious with your actions so that you don't get expelled from the system you wish to fight).

And then for any given anarchical plan:

2. Potential consequences.

3. Insurance.

I'll give you an example. I had serious beef with the culture of my college's science department. Students were constantly overworked, and if they expressed their misery outloud or reached out to any of their professors about their struggles, they got apathetic responses if not direct insults to their abilities or dedication. I had too many similar disparaging interactions with professors in one week, and I realized a lot of the responses I was getting were just the result of professors not really knowing how they sounded when they said certain things to students (ex: If someone says they're struggling with a course, don't IMMEDIATELY respond with "change your major," - you can give that as an option, but if you make it your first suggestion, the implication to the student is that if they're having any trouble with the course, they're not good enough for the program).

So I wrote up a flier of examples of good and bad ways to respond to students having anxiety with explanations and distributed it to every professor in the department. Everyone who knew about this perceived it as a great personal risk - that I would get in some kind of unspecified trouble or piss off an important professor, so before embarking on this project, I considered...

Potential consequences: I couldn't really think of any specific college or department rules I could be violating. People postered and handed out fliers in the department all the time. What I was doing fell pretty clearly under freedom of speech. I just shoved the fliers under professors' doors, so I didn't trespass in anyone's office. Worst I could think is that individual professors would get mad at me and make my life difficult, or I'd simply be told to stop fliering in the department.

Insurance: Just in case there were any consequences that I didn't think of and to insure me against the ones I had thought of, I didn't put my name on the flier. It was typed in Word, something everyone had access to. I came in to do it after professors had all left for the day but before I needed to use my ID to get into the building (no electronic record of me being there). I took the elevator to the first floor offices because the stairs require ID swipe after 5pm, but the elevators do not. I found out the building had no cameras by asking about it on the grounds that something of mine had been stolen a few weeks prior. I shoved the flier under the doors of dark offices and left it outside offices with lights on (so that no one would come out and spot me). And here's one of the most important pieces of insurance: I put up a few of the fliers on public bulletin boards in the building. This was important so that if I slipped up and said something that conveyed that I had knowledge of the content of the flier, I would have an excuse for that, i.e., I read it on the bulletin board before class this morning.

And then I did the thing. And surprisingly, it was incredibly well-received by professors. A few who knew that the flier must have been mine (because of previous, similar anarchical actions rumored to be associated with me) told me that everyone was RELIEVED that they finally had an instruction manual from the student perspective on what the hell they're supposed to say when one of their students is panicking. It sparked a real change in the vibe of the department and student experience. Had it instead pissed people off, I would have simply said I could not claim authorship of the flier but had read it and thought it contained good ideas then gone on creating more anarchy while angry people grasped at the zero straws I had left them to pin the action on me.

That's an example of a single action I took that was part of a much longer (~3 years) campaign of mine to change the culture of my department. Everytime I did something in that campaign, I made that consequences vs. insurance calculation to make sure they couldn't expell me from the program, the department, or the school before I succeeded.

You basically have four options:

1. What most of my non binary friends do, change. One sentence uncle, one sentence aunt. דוד/דודה if you prefer Hebrew

2. Use plural. That sounds unnatural, but I guess works. דודים in Hebrew

3. Use the male version. The male version is always the default one, so you can you that. דוד

4. I have heard some people use things that are in-between, like דודֶה (dode) but the can only refer to you as aunt/uncle in a gender neutral way, and of you say "my aunt/uncle is great!" The great part will be gendered

Question for nonbinary jumblr:

I’m nonbinary & need a gender neutral alternative to aunt/uncle for my nieces & nephews to call me. I know English has “auncle” & “pibling” but both sound uncomfortable to my ear. My instinct to construct an at least natural-sounding equivalent would be to go back to the etymological root for aunt & uncle to reconstruct a version that isn’t gendered. The problem is, aunt & uncle don’t share an etymological root, so this isn’t really possible.

On the other hand, דודה & דוד in Hebrew clearly do share etymology & seem like they would relatively easy to make gender neutral (besides the obvious that “gender neutral” isn’t how Hebrew typically works lol). However, I’m aware that there’s a project/movement to Queer Hebrew / introduce non-binary gender to it, and I’m curious if anyone knows what would be a way to make דודה / דוד gender-neutral?

Grian be like:

If there's one thing that humanizes me to my fellow productive member of society, it's that I love a good button. Elevators, jukeboxes, medical equipment: if you make a quality button, I will push the hell out of it. I've bought tons of things on impulse, just because the buttons were of a high quality.

What that device is does not really matter to me. Like I just said, I'll buy anything if it's satisfying to push. And lots of high-quality, expensive stuff just... isn't. There's no excuse for why your hugely pricey stereo system feels worse to jab your finger into than any given Fisher-Price toddler toy.

I didn't know much about buttons at all when I was a kid. Just took them for granted, like you do for so many other things: gravity, breathable air, the option for grandpa to hide you from family services when they start wondering why your mom and dad are off auditioning for the circus again instead of feeding you. Buttons, though, have a long and fascinating history. And you won't read about it here, because we have things to do.

So if you're about to throw something away that has a satisfying button on it, pry that button out and keep it. You'll wish you had it the next time you encounter something with a button that sucks. And it's not like the police can really get you for "vandalism" just because you pried out that bullshit touch screen from your apartment elevator and crammed a nice Otis part in there. At least, not if you do a good enough job of wiring.

Oh this makes me so fucking mad

So SO fucking mad

You mean israelites, hebrews ffs you mean CANAANITES

THERE WEREN'T PALESTINIANS 3,000 YEARS AGO

THERE WERE JEWISH KINGDOMS

If the tatreez originated 3,000 fucking years ago it makes it jewish, israelite. NOT palestinian

This horrendous cultural and historical erasure of a whole ass ethnic group is absolutely sickening

This accepted activity of rewriting and changing jewish history is so fucking disgusting

This is the kinda shit that makes it so hard for me to feel sympathy and accept the modern palestinian identity

ITS NORMAL FOR NEW IDENTITIES TO EMERGE AND BE BORN, BUT ITS NOT OK TO CHANGE HISTORY SO IT'LL LOOK LIKE YOU HAVE AN ANCIENT AND NATIVE IDENTITY!

I Just fucking hope for the sun to blow us all up soon ffs

♥︎♡ 3> הן אפשרויות

אפשר בבקשה לדבר על זה שאי אפשר לכתוב סימן של לב בעברית כי הכל מתוכנת על ידי לועזים שכותבים הפוך

כאילו מה זה הבולשיט הזה <3

זה נראה כמו ראש של עז עם קרניים

Y'know all the Gen Z folks online who oversimplify the entire world and all morality into a binary oppressor and victim dynamic which...just doesn't reflect reality?

Which routinely regards murdering, raping, suicide bombing, gay-hating, misogynist terrorists...as the good guys?

Want to know how they developed this particular set of cognative distortions?

This worldview, often seen among Millennials and very common among Gen Z leftists, was produced by the corruption of a good and useful bit of critical theory meant to address nuance, complexity, and compassion: intersectionality.

Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality began as a way to explain how different forms of discrimination overlap and interact, especially for Black women who face both racism and sexism in ways that neither anti-racist nor feminist frameworks alone fully addressed.

So, for example:

A white woman might face sexism but not racism.

A Black man might face racism but not sexism.

A Black woman faces both, and often in compounded ways.

This seems like a helpful way to understand complexity in lived experiences, right?

Because it is! It's fantastic and appropriate and necessary! Sojourner Truth brought it up in 1851.

So late Millennials and Gen Z college students were exposed to sloppy versions of Crenshaw's thesis and, like a lab leak, the idea spread beyond academic critical theory into activist and online spaces...where it began to mutate into something else entirely.

Instead of just understanding overlapping disadvantages, intersectionality became a kind of oppression calculator.

People began to stack their marginalized identities in a way that assigned moral authority. The more marginalized identities you hold, the more your voice is prioritized.

If you have "privileged" identities (white, male, cisgender, etc.), you may be expected in leftist spaces to sit down, shut up, and only listen.

The problem: it is awfully illiberal to grant agency to (or take agency from) an individual based on their group association.

(Liberals recognize that as old fashioned bigotry masquerading as justice.)

Oppressor/Oppressed

So this framing helped flatten the complexity of individuals into a binary of oppressor or oppressed, based solely on which and how many marginalized identities one can claim.

This inevitably led to hierarchies of victimhood in which competing identities are ranked to determine whose suffering is more valid.

Leftists seemingly trade memes like the one below without irony:

That's the origin of Oppression Olympics.

This is where it went completely off the rails, with some movements and organizations deciding that only those with certain identities or performed political perspectives should be permitted to speak.

But...what if you're not a holder of one of these victim identities? Well, if you belong to a privileged group, you're now the proud owner of collective guilt and are held responsible for the system of oppression...even if you've personally done nothing wrong.

This made it easy to turn entire groups, millions of complex people in varying and nuanced circumstances...into simplified moral symbols.

If a group is judged powerful or privileged, it (and anyone associated with it) is an oppressor.

If a group is judged marginalized, it becomes the victim.

Wait, though - it gets worse.

Once this kind of "intersectionality" (which no longer resembled Crenshaw's) became part of the social media discourse, algorithms boosted simple, emotional content that aligned with the victim/oppressor binary. In social media, engagement is everything, and it distorts everything.

Gen Z folks are particularly susceptible to these distortions because they have spent most of their lives soaking in performative social media activism which offers a (wrong but) clear, simple, binary moral compass in a world which otherwise feels messy, confusing, and overwhelming. This gives them the opportunity to express solidarity with those who suffer injustice, which makes them feel like they're good people for siding with the good people against the bad people.

So intersectionality went from "people are complex" to "if you check [X] boxes, you are righteous, and if not...you're complicit."

Intersectionality started as a tool for empathy and nuance, helping us see how systems of oppression intersect and interact. This, I want to repeat, is great.

In social media activism, though, it got flattened into a worldview where people and nations are judged morally and collectively based on their group identities and perceived power.

You know how you can tell that this isn't really justice? Justice is rarely so simple, binary, and completely devoid of nuance.

Okay, so there's the mindset of the Gen Z leftist. Let's look at how they apply it to Israel.

The many and complex facts and long history of the Arab/Israeli conflict don't fit neatly into this framing, so the narratives must be re-written to cram them into the shape such leftists demand:

Palestinians = oppressed

Framed as an indigenous, stateless people living under military occupation and suffering from systemic discrimination, they are exclusively innocent victims without agency who need the good people of the West to save them from...

Israel/Jews = oppressors

Cast as a colonial, European, settler colonialist, imperialist, racist power, seen as inflicting structural violence on a vulnerable population.

And because these leftists don't read history (just memes and TikTok), they believe this oppression has been going on from time immemorial.

(That's perhaps part of where they get the idea that "Palestine" is an ancient civilization.)

This framework, this need to be on the right side of a false binary requires them to aggressively ignore, bury, appropriate, downplay, or invert all Jewish historical trauma, indigeneity, and security concerns...all to make a complex set of circumstances fit into the box of their simple moral binary.

Think about it. Isn't that the content of most of the ugly comments you get from them? Simple, moral binaries which aren't supported by facts, evidence, or reason?

(Yes, the far right Gen Z folks do the same thing for different reasons and in a mirror...where victim and Oppressor switch places. That's how we get cishet white Christian males who are certain they're being oppressed, but that's a topic for another time, maybe.)

Israel as White Colonial Power

Israel is increasingly racialized as "white" or "European," despite its multi-ethnic population (including ~50% Mizrahi/ Sephardi Jews and ~20% Arab citizens).

Zionism, instead of being recognized as a liberation movement for Jews after ~2000 years of genocides and ethnic cleansings, is recast as an extension of European settler colonialism...despite Jews being undeniably indigenous to the region and never meeting the definition of 'settler colonialism.'

The term's definition, the leftists realize, must be changed so they can cram Israel into the oppressor box! It's become a common tactic.

Remember when Amnesty International could only try to make "genocide" stick to Israel by changing the definition of genicide?

Remember when Ireland demanded that the ICJ change the definition of genocide for the exclusive purpose of slapping that label on Israel?

Its still effin' ridiculous, but at least this finally explains their cognative distortion of reality: They must distort reality in order to feel okay about themselves.

Palestinians as Eternal Victims

Palestinians, to be crammed into this framing, are depicted as having no agency, portrayed solely as victims of Israeli evil.

Violence by Palestinian actors (terrorism, 138 suicide bombings, incitement...October 7th...) is justified, excused, or omitted as a "reaction" to occupation. They're oppressed, say the leftists, so they bear no responsibility for their choices.

Like children. Infantilizing, isn't it?

Power is Oppression

Israel's military, economy, and alliance with the US make it the powerful party and therefore the oppressor. Why?

Because the framing requires the more powerful side to be morally wrong...even if it is acting in self-defense.

Not satisfied with ordinary Jewish Erasure, this victim/oppressor framing erases:

Jewish indigeneity to the land.

The Holocaust's role in accelerating global Zionist momentum after WWII

The ethnic cleansing of 850,000 Jews from Arab lands, most of whom went to Israel.

~2,000 years of Jewish ethnic cleansings and genocides.

This false binary requires that Jews be racialized as white and labeled privileged.

De-legitimizing the oppression of Jews usefully de-legitimizes their right to self-determination.

So history, facts and reason are set aside, any attempt to bring nuance to the conversation is shut down, any fact or point of view shared by an Israeli or a Jew is obviously a lie because Jews, remember, are oppressors. As a result, any defense of Israel is framed as siding with oppression. (As has been the case so many times before, Jews are just wrong and evil and will therefore be condemned regardless of what they do.)

Again, think about it. How many times on Tumblr have you seen a reasoned defense of Israel and the response from the tankies is something along the lines of 'you're lying and defending genocide?'

The victim-oppressor lens simplifies the complex, long-term Israel-Arab conflict into a grotesquely, dishonestly simplified morality play with a powerful villain and a powerless victim.

That's why kids who claim to care about justice do shit like this:

Understanding how they got like this is just the first step.

The next question is:

Can they be de-programmed?

Thoughts?

כשהייתי בחטיבה נסעתי לקאמפ אמריקאי ונדהמתי לגלות שלא הייתה חובה להיות עם כובע או קרם הגנה, כל יום בצהריים הלכנו לבריכה בשמש, וחצי מהבנות שהיו איתי בחדר נשרפו כל כך שהן לא יכלו לישון וכל העור שלהן התקלף. וזה היה במקום שלא היה בו המון שמש (ירד גשם!!! באוגוסט!!!) פשוט היינו בחוץ כל היום. אז אני חושבת שבסך הכול התוכנית הזאת והחינוך להגנה בשמש בארץ טוב

Have you ever been to SoPac in South Orange NJ?

I have never heard of that place. SoPac sounds like the house of Pac-Man, South Orange sounds like the southernmost part of the orange fruit, and it took me a google search to realize NJ is New Jersey and not North Virginia (I guess it would be NV but it sounds like it could be North VirGinia)

So no. Why do you ask? Is it important? Sounds like a goofy place

amy pond dies more times than rory williams

y’all know rory as “the boy who dies” but you are WRONG

Rory deaths:

Turned to dust in Amy’s Choice

tardis crashes into the cold sun in Amy’s choice

Erased from existence in Cold Blood

Drowns in Curse of the Black Spot

Jumps off a building in Angels Take Manhattan

Dies of old age in Angels Take Manhattan

Amy deaths:

Drives a car into a house in Amy’s Choice

tardis crashes into the cold sun in Amy’s Choice

Killed by auton Rory in The Pandorica Opens

Killed by those weird dolls in Night Terrors

Old Amy is erased from existence in The Girl Who Waited

Jumps off a building in Angels Take Manhattan

Dies of old age in Angels Take Manhattan

that’s 6 deaths to Rory and 7 to Amy. furthermore. y’all know amy as “the girl who waited” because she waited for fourteen years, but rory waited for two thousand years and you just ignore it ???

switch. the. labels. amy is the boy who died, rory is the girl who waited, there ya go.

Art by Dirty Iron