#interdependence

[librarycards]

Spanning nearly two centuries of global history, the basic pattern of trans misogyny is much older than TERFs, or right-wing Christians, and extremely consistent. Trans misogyny is not a mere psychological and irrational hatred of trans women. In fact, trans misogyny as a concept helps explain how individuals, or interpersonal violence, can act on behalf of the state or other abstract political movements. At the interpersonal scale, however, trans misogyny testifies to the uncomfortable thickness of social bonds across hierarchies of gender, class, and race. When a straight man lashes out after dating or having sex with a trans woman, he is often afraid of the implication that his sexuality is joined to hers. When a gay man anxiously keeps trans women out of his activism or social circles, he is often fearful of their common stigma as feminine. And when a non-trans feminist claims she is erased by trans women’s access to a bathroom, she is often afraid that their shared vulnerability as feminized people will be magnified intolerably by trans women’s presence. In each case, trans misogyny displays a fear of interdependence and a refusal of solidarity. It is felt as a fear of proximity. Trans femininity is too sociable, too connected to everyone –– too exuberant about stigmatized femininity –– and many people fear the excess of trans femininity and sexuality by getting too close. But sociability can never be confined or blamed on one person in a relationship; it's impersonal, and it sticks to everyone.

The defensive fear and projection build into trans misogyny, whether genuine or performed, is an attempt to wish away what it nonetheless recognizes: that trans femininity is an integral part of the social fabric. There will be no emancipation for anyone until we embrace trans femininity's centrality and value.

Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny.

#yes i have a pre print copy no i should not have a pre print copy yes i am posting mic drops anyway #jules gill peterson #transmisogyny #readings #interdependence #autonomy #disability #community #relationships #mine

[a-queer-seminarian]

As the Israeli government continues to commit war crimes against the people of Gaza, it’s important to remember how all struggles for justice are interconnected. For instance, the movement to Stop Cop a City here in Atlanta is also a movement to stop US police from collaborating with the Israeli military.

A delegation of Georgia law enforcement representatives pose with members of the Haifa, Israel, Police Department in August 2023. USAmerican and Israeli flags wave above them.

Through the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE), Israeli soldiers come to train right here in Georgia, and US police travel to Israel to learn their tactics…which is, frankly, terrifying, and a ludicrously literal example of the militarization of US police.

This relationship between Georgia and Israel has been going on for three decades, since 1992.

(Note that GILEE isn’t the only program in which US police collaborate with the IDF. This article from 2018 goes into more details about what tactics cops from various city police departments across the US have picked up from Israel.)

If Cop City opens, Israeli soldiers will be invited to come train there. Both sides will be able to hone their tactics for brutally stomping out even the most peaceful of protests.

STOP COP CITY. FREE PALESTINE. Here and there, settler-colonialist states target Indigenous lives, Black lives, and other POC.

Our struggles are interwoven. None are free till all, all are free from this imperialist horror.

#Gaza #palestine #Atlanta #GILEE #stop cop city #Israel #interdependence #current events #solidarity

[inkydrew]

✨I dream of interdependent community✨

#I dream of interdependent community #community #original art #my art #art #artist #artwork #ink #inkdrawing #fairy #fairycore #mushrooms #mycology #deer #fawn #angel #unicorn #fantasy #lgbtq community #interdependence #forest

[thirdity]

It is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows.

Rachel Carson, Lost Woods

#nature #organism #environment #interdependence #community #quotes #Carson #Rachel Carson #Lost Woods

[philosophybits]

The connections of isolated phenomena can very rarely be discerned. As a rule, several causes at once produce one effect. Owing to our propensity for idealising, we always make prominent that cause which seems to us loftiest.

Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible

#philosophy #quotes #Lev Shestov #All Things Are Possible #cause #effect #causality #interdependence

[unwelcome-ozian]

#trauma recovery #abuse recovery #helping #asking for help #interdependence

[themotherofrevelation]

Self-reliance is the ultimate bondage; self-reliance opposes the natural design of life. Hyper-independence is a trauma response. Rely/lean on Goddess; Goddess’s way is whole communion.

#personal #self-reliance #independence #interdependence #trauma

[astranemus]

If a cursory study of somatics shows that we think with our entire body, then how much better could we think, if we thought with our entire web of wild kin? I want to think and feel and weep and grieve with my whole multi-species, poly-nucleated mind. I want to let the yolk of my small desires slide into otherness. I want to nucleate a symbiotic quest for a better future. Throw open all the doors in my cells. Let my river run both ways.

Sophie Strand, Supracellular

#quote #Sophie Strand #Supracellular #ecology #interdependence #self #somatics

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Alissa Quart's 'Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream'

Steinbeck never said that Americans see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” but that misquotation is so pervasive because it captures something vital about one version of the American Dream, the idea that anyone can make it in America by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, which means that if you haven’t made it, it’s because of some defect within you, and not because of a rigged system:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#Disputed

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/10/declaration-of-interdependence/#solidarity-forever

In Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, Alissa Quart — director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project — addresses the meritocratic delusion of the “self-made man,” the story that, in America, the rich are good, and therefore the good are rich, and therefore the dwindling slice of the pie shared among everyone else is no more than they deserve:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/bootstrapped-alissa-quart?variant=40517189599266

Quart’s book braids together four strands: a factual account of the reality of social mobility in America; a kind of psychoanalysis of what the myth of being self-made does to your mind; a power analysis of how the self-made brainworm benefits the rich and powerful, and a program for breaking free of the stultifying grip of a belief in the self-made.

Start with the factual: America is not a bootstrap-friendly land. If you have money in America, chances very good are you inherited it. Gone is the culture of “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” where “the first generation makes it, the second generation spends it, and the third generation loses it.”

Instead — as Abigail Disney has described, in a rare glimpse behind the scenes of American oligarchs’ “family offices,” American wealth is now dynastic*, perpetuating itself and growing thanks to a whole Versailles’ worth of courtiers: money managers, lawyers, and overpaid babysitters who can keep even the most Habsburg jawed nepobaby in turnip-sized million-dollar watches and performance automobiles and organ replacements for their whole, interminable lives:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

But it’s not just that the America rich stay rich — it’s that the American poor stay poor. America is a world-trailing loser in the international social mobility league-table. If you change classes in America, chances are you’re a middle class person becoming poor, thanks to medical costs or another of the American debt-traps; or you’re a poor person who is becoming a homeless person thanks to America’s world-beating eviction mills:

https://evictionlab.org/

As a factual matter, America just isn’t the land of bootstraps; it’s a land of hereditary aristocrats. Sustaining the American narrative of meritocracy requires a whole culture industry, novels and later movies that constitute a kind of state religion for Americans — and like all religious tales, the American faith tradition is riddled with gaps and contradictions.

Take Horatio Alger, the 19th century American writer whose name is synonymous with rags-to-riches thanks to the enormous volume of stories he wrote about young, male “street urchins” rising to positions of power. There are many problems with Alger’s work and our conception of it. For starters, 19th century American street kids overwhelmingly lived and died in stagnant, grinding poverty. Nineteenth century America was not a country of ex-homeless kids who rose to positions of wealth and prominence.

But even more: Alger didn’t even write self-made man stories. The Alger formula is not a boy who rises above his station through hard work — rather, the Alger stories are universally tales in which young boys befriend powerful, older men who use their power and wealth to lift those boys up. An Alger hero is never self-made.

Even more disturbing: Alger was a pedophile who lost his position as a minister after raping adolescent boys. He was only spared prison when his father — a powerful religious figure — intervened, promising the young Alger’s furious parishoners that Horatio would leave the clergy — which Horatio Alger did, turning instead to writing. Quart notes ominously that Alger went on to adopt two young boys.

That the cult of self-reliance elevated a pedophile who wrote endlessly about how the way for poor boys to get ahead was to move in with older, richer men to legendary status is just…amazing. I mean, I know “every accusation is a confession,” but the fact that the groomer panic set are also giant Alger stans is…wild.

Not all of the self-reliance mythmakers were sexual predators, but they were all liars. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s incredibly popular Little House on the Prairie books recounted her family’s “pioneer” past as a triumph of self-reliance and gumption, glossing easily over the vast state subsidies that the Ingalls family relied on, from the military who stole Indigenous land, to the largesse that donated that stolen land to the Ingallses, to the farm subsidies that kept the Ingalls afloat.

Ingalls Wilder wasn’t just a mythmaker. She was a close literary and political collaborator with her daughter, the far-right ideologue Rose Wilder Lane, who used the Little House royalties to fight the New Deal, and, later, to create a school for oligarchs, the “Freedom School,” whose graduates include Charles and David Koch:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/little-house-on-the-prairie-conservatism-214237/

Of course, no discussion of American pro-selfishness mythmaking would be complete without a mention of Ayn Rand, whose ideology and apologists Quart dissects with expert precision, including the absurd take that Rand’s reliance on government handouts was “ideologically consistent” because Rand was just taking back the money the government had illegitimately taxed away from her.

For Quart, all this mythmaking serves two purposes: first, it helps convince the vast majority of Americans — who work longer hours, earn less, and owe more for schooling, rent and education than their peers abroad — that any problems they face are their own, representative of an individual failing and not a systemic problem for which they should seek redress through mass political movements and unions. So long as America is a land of the self-made, then anything you can’t do on your own is your own damn fault for not making enough of yourself. Are you worried about climate change? Well, what are you doing about it? Recycle harder!

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

The self-made myth serves America’s oligarchs by befuddling people who might otherwise busy themselves building guillotines on the lawns of the nation’s mansions. But the rich depend on the myth for more than safety from others’ wrath — the myth also protects rich people from themselves, from their consciences that might otherwise recoil from the moral injury of having so much when others have to little. The myth lets the richest man on Earth ascend in a penis-shaped rocket, return, thank “every Amazon employee,” adding “you guys paid for all of this,” even as his warehouses maim those workers at twice the rate of his competitors’ facilities:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/12/study-amazon-workers-suffer-serious-injuries-at-twice-rate-of-rivals.html

Quart makes a case that American progress depends on breaking free of this myth, through co-operative movements, trade unions, mutual aid networks and small acts of person-to-person kindness. For her, the pandemic’s proof of our entwined destiny, at a cellular level, and its demonstration of whose work is truly “essential,” proves that our future is interdependent.

Mutualism produces benefits in the here and now — it’s how we get a larger share of the profit generated by our work; how we secure education, health and housing; how we rescue one another from life’s exigencies and the attacks of our social betters. But the money, power, space and peace that we get from looking after one another has another benefit: freeing us up to demand more change, more equality, more democratic accountability.

Quart’s case-studies of organizers and rank-and-file in different movements are prescriptions for systemic changes, while her urgent case for reframing how we think of ourselves and our society present an individual-scale project for all of us.

I read Boostrapped in the audiobook edition with expert narration by Beth Hicks. I got my DRM-free copy on libro.fm, which I loaded into my waterproof MP3 player for my daily physiotherapy laps in the pool, and, as is the case with the best books, Quart’s words and Hicks’ reading made the time fly by:

https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9780063028043-bootstrapped

There’s only one week left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

[Image ID: The Harpercollins cover for Alissa Quart's 'Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream]

#pluralistic #books #alissa quart #reviews #gift guide #interdependence #mind palace #mutual aid #meritocratic delusion

[thestarlightforge]

Some days, I feel like I’m not a whole guy and my sibling’s not a whole guy, but if you stack us in a trench coat, we almost make one whole guy—and that’s disabled interdependence in a nutshell

#is this anything #lmao #disability #disabled #interdependence #social model of disability #economic model of disability #wheelchair #wheelchair user #autism #actually autistic #neurospicy #neurodivergent

[apenitentialprayer]

What I own, what I use, —what I for a brief moment call my own— is not my own; because I am called to own nothing. Saint Francis used to exhort his brothers with a simple phrase, "sine proprio" — without appropriation. We are but pilgrims, poor men, who use what we need to survive but claim nothing as our own. [… T]here is something truly life-changing about this notion of sine proprio; what if we could go through this life as a pilgrim, claiming nothing as our own? What if, even the things were bought new, we approached as simply items we are borrowing and using? What if we looked at our cars, our houses, our dining sets, our furniture… whatever it may be, as something that someone else might use after us? While there are certainly plenty of products that will be used by no one else after us (a sad product of a single-use, throwaway culture), there's still something significant about viewing everything we use within the context of our own mortality. That we came into this world with nothing, and we will leave this world with nothing.

Fr. Casey Cole (This Robe is Weirder Than You Think!)

#Franciscan #Catholicism #Christianity #poverty #Francis of Assisi #interdependence #community #ownership #consumerism

[protoslacker]

Research has shown that parenting that supports autonomy, encouraging children to make their own decisions and take responsibility for their actions, is linked to better psychological wellbeing in adolescents. Conversely, excessive parental control is associated with higher levels of emotional distress and lower levels of life satisfaction among adolescents.

Fiorentina Sterkaj in Attention To The Unseen, first in The Conversation. Young people are getting unhappier – a lack of childhood freedom and independence may be partly to blame

#meaning #happiness #play #interdependence

[theoreticallysensible]

Okay so my first post is going to be about the link between capitalism and existential angst, which is the most on brand thing possible for me, so if you like this there’ll be much more of it and if not… sorry. 😅

I’ve always had a proclivity for angsty existentialism. Multiple times a housemate has found me sprawled on a sofa moping about the meaning of life which sounds really pretentious but idk I feel like on some level that’s just being a student. And it’s that material side of it that’s got me curious recently like - were these anxieties just a result of the kind of individualistic, listless existence a student inhabits? There’s probably a reason the stereotypes of angst are people with enough wealth to avoid work but not enough respect or expectations to have a solid idea about what they should be doing: Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Søren Kierkegaard, etc.

In the first volume of his Critique of Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre calls out Kierkegaard specifically as a prime example of bourgeoise alienation, the result of which was literally creating existentialist philosophy - the idea that we have to create meaning for ourselves by force of will and taking a leap of faith. Lefebvre claims that existential angst is always a result of some sort of alienation. When Marx formulated alienation as the psychological suffering we experience when we are separation from ourselves, each other, the products of our labour, and nature, he was thinking about the way the working class are made to suffer under capitalism, but Lefebvre expands the theory beyond this. He describes how alienation is always relative and present in all types of society for all people within it. Alienation is not just a result of individualism and exploitation - it also presents itself when we feel too far from someone we love, and when we are mystified by the natural world. Crucially, we are alienated when we become detached from the fact that we are dependent on others for our survival, something common to all the bourgeoisie.

Acknowledging this dependency would make us aware of the injustice of how these responsibilities are distributed (according to class, gender, race, etc.), and getting past the separation would require a radical change in lifestyle involving the rejection of the serving of the individual self so integral to bourgeoise morality. It’s hard! But with the lines between proletariat and bourgeoisie becoming more and more blurred with the expansion of the middle class, recognising this particularly bourgeoise suffering is important, I think, if we want to articulate a reason more people can get behind to resist capitalism.

People suffer when they’re separated from people, when their material existence feels so isolated and insignificant that they have to rely on spirituality to give them any sense of grounding, but are unable to be confident in their beliefs so can only ever relate to religion through anxiety (both my best friends speak of religion in this way, and before I read Lefebvre I was tempted to join them because it sounded better than the nihilism I was struggling with). Seriously, read any Kierkegaard and you will know he was not a happy guy. He wrote book called The Concept of Anxiety, and Fear and Trembling for God’s sake. He’s not okay! 🥺 But poor Søren might have been okay if he’d been a bit less self obsessed, acknowledged the value of *inter*subjectivity rather than pure responsibility, and actually married his fianceé rather than worrying about his independent morality, which was really just arrogance. I sound mean but I love him really. He’s very entertaining and *painfully* relatable.

But this is why I find Simone de Beauvoir to be the absolute best of the existentialist canon, because she recognises the need for recognition and connection, even for the powerful. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she writes about how even tyrants suffer in hierarchical societies because they can never know authentic respect, since people always see their power and the threat implicit in it rather than their whole humanity. This doesn’t mean that we should never violently resist tyranny, because individualism is hard to overcome, even when it’s self-sabotaging, but awareness of this could get more people on the side of equality. This idea is apparently supported empirically in The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, but I haven’t read that one yet. I like to put it in Spinozist terms: the satisfaction of one desire can be excessive when it blinds us to our other needs and presents us from feeling other forms of joy.

On how it can be overcome though, I think Judith Butler offers an interesting frame for thinking about it. Though they’re best known for their work on the social construction of gender, my favourite book of theirs is Giving An Account of Oneself, where they write about how our mental life is a product of all our previous experiences, especially with other people. This seems obvious on some level, but it really undermines individualism. In particular, it deconstructs the distinction between attacking parts of yourself and attacking other people. If our internal and external lives are so interlinked, is it really surprising if attacking ourselves isolates us? Recognising that other people are in some sense present within us is conducive to greater intimacy, and though this can be uncomfortable if we dislike part of them, that doesn’t make it less true, and recognising this can make us more compassionate with everything within us. Self-hatred and hatred of others are intimately connected, and they reinforce each other.

I like to think of the relationship between different parts of myself in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic unconscious, where our minds are made up of interlocking parts from the larger social context. I think differ though in wanting to negotiate and find equilibrium between them rather than experimenting by letting certain parts go to extremes to make change though. I like the way Jacques Derrida writes about it in The Politics of Friendship, where to recognise the other in oneself, and so recognise the misalignment within ourselves, requires us to be a friend to oneself, which makes friendship so central that it undercuts any potential narcissism because by loving oneself as an other we learn to love others better (as well ourselves).

This doesn’t address the concrete politics of the situation though. The aspect missing is that we have to think of ourselves as inextricably linked to our social and political systems, part of a historical process, and our feelings about those systems are a very real part of that process, and if we want to be true to ourselves we have to act on those feelings rather than repress them. I’m still working out what that means for myself, and as Lefebvre notes it’s this final hurdle that most people fail at, but we can all try.

That kind of went all over the place, but hopefully it’s understandable and valuable, and if not it was helpful for me to articulate all these ideas that have been swirling around in my head for the past year or so. 😅

#existential angst #existentialism #marx #karl marx #henri lefebvre #simone de beauvoir #judith butler #soren kierkegaard #alienation #interdependence #individualism #deleuze and guattari #gilles deleuze #derrida #jacques derrida #deleuze #capitalism #bourgeoisie #communism #anarchism #spinoza #psychoanalysis #politics #social theory #sociology #philosophy

[eelhound]

"Asking 'Who is the villain?' is the prologue to asking who should be punished. But asking 'What are the conditions that led to this?' leads us to consider how to change those conditions so that the situation is less likely to happen again.

Reframing things in this way is a type of analysis known as dependent origination. Though this term has far-reaching and often abstract implications in Buddhist thought, it simply means that everything arises on the basis of multiple factors, and if we want to discourage something from happening again we have to address the factors underlying it. If our goal is to judge and punish, we will need to determine guilt, which becomes more difficult as we consider more causes. But if our goal is to gain a better understanding, then the fact that there are many factors is not a problem."

- Matthew Gindin, from "The Red Hat Rorschach Test." Tricycle, 30 January 2019.

#matthew gindin #quote #quotations #causality #dependent origination #interdependence #interconnectedness #understanding #zen #buddhism #change #activism #problem solving #behavior change #blame #villains #antagonists

[thirdity]

Truth also consists of relationships between events. Truth occurs when things communicate with each other on the basis of a similarity or some other form of closeness between them, when they turn towards each other and enter into relationships with each other, even befriend each other...

Byung-chul Han, The Scent of Time

#truth #events #connections #interdependence #relationships #quotes #Han #Byung-chul Han #The Scent of Time

[philosophybits]

Desire, aversion, and delusion [i.e. the defilements] are said to arise from false discrimination. These arise in dependence on the good, the bad, and false conception. What arises in dependence on the good, the bad, and false conception, those things do not exist intrinsically, therefore the defilements are not ultimately real.

Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Siderits & Katsura tr. (23:1-2)

#philosophy #quotes #Nāgārjuna #Mūlamadhyamakakārikā #desire #aversion #delusion #dependence #interdependence #concepts #existence #emptiness #buddhism