“In Harrison, Virginia, we set up an anarchist community center, allowed homeless people to sleep there through the winter, and provided free food and clothes out of that space. Within six months the cops shut us down with a creative array of zoning and building codes. In the 1960s, the police took an active interest in sabotaging the Black Panther program that provided free breakfast to children. How exactly are we supposed to build alternative institutions if we are powerless to protect them from repression? How will we find land on which to build alternative structures when everything in this society has an owner? And how can we forget that capitalism is not timeless, that once everything was an “alternative”, and that the current paradigm developed and expanded precisely out of its ability to conquer and consume those alternatives? Ehrlich is right that we need to start building alternative institutions now, but wrong to de-emphasize the important work of destroying existing institutions and defending ourselves and our autonomous spaces in the process. Even when mixed with more aggressive nonviolent methods, a strategy based on building alternatives that constrains itself to pacifism will never be strong enough to resist the zealous violence that capitalist societies employ when they conquer and absorb autonomous societies.”
— How Nonviolence Protects the State by Peter Gelderloos
told my cabbie for the 3am airport trip that I was feeling a bit nauseous and he immediately took my bag away from me and said "Trip to the airport is 12 dollars. I'll drive slow." and then he did-- no fast corners, very gentle stops at the lights. and I was willing to pay the extra few dollars for it, but when the meter hit $12 he clicked stop and let me ride the rest of the way free. and it might just be the insanity of waking up at 2:30 after 4 hours of sleep but I was really emotional about it. Like ok Mr Sandeep, the world is still good actually.
If you go to the doctor putting no effort into your appearance and looking as sick as you feel, they’ll be like “Hmm…this person is a mess. Possibly indicative of a mental health issue or drug-seeking behavior. No reason to take anything they say seriously.”
If you show up to your doctor’s appointment well groomed and well dressed, they’ll be like “They’re saying they feel very poorly but they look good and have the energy to style themself well so I’m not going to take anything they say seriously.”
So you have to guess what a respectable sick person looks like and arrive looking like that. And don’t even think of dressing alternatively.
smartphone storage plateauing in favor of just storing everything in the cloud is such dogshit. i should be able to have like a fucking terabyte of data on my phone at this point. i hate the fucking cloud
I saw a post the other day trying to dunk on someone by saying "You will never see anarchy during your lifetime."
At the risk of sounding trite, I think we all see anarchy during our lifetimes, in those (admittedly and increasingly rare) moments when we're free from coercion and drudgery and can enjoy freedom and comradeship. I would almost go as far as to say that seeing anarchy in our lifetimes and wanting to see more of it is what makes people become anarchists