Note: I was writing this text throughout the past week. Yesterday Trump signed an executive order (Erin Reed breaks it down here) which forbids changing one's appearance to conform with the “opposite biological sex”. I spent all my big words in the text. TL;DR Bathroom bans are an entry point to criminalizing being trans, which now must be crystal clear that it was.

Two common comebacks with which trans advocates respond to respond to the scourge of bathroom bans are the following: On one hand, it is not feasible to confirm people’s assigned sex for an act so mundane as visiting a public restroom. On the other, enforcing the bans cause cisgender people to be questioned and harassed if they do not meet expectations of how a member of their assigned sex should look like.

Trans advocate organizations, and some Democrats, during an early 2025 hearing of an anti-trans sports ban, correctly stated that such a ban will open up opportunities to perverts to interact with children to “inspect their gender”.

The legislation has an “intrusive focus on scrutiny of students’ bodies,” according to over 400 human rights organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD and Advocates for Trans Equality. The groups issued an open letter to the legislature in opposition to the laws, which they said “invite scrutiny and harassment of any other student perceived by anyone as not conforming to sex stereotypes.”

According to trans man scholar Jack Halberstam[^1], masculine, androgynous, butch, women, trans men, all face policing a women restrooms as well, despite being assigned female at birth. Bathroom bans enforce gender role stereotypes: rather than biological sex, it is feminine self-presentation that it is enforced. Even expected statistical variation within cisgender women, such as height, can also make a person target to gender policing vigilantes. To bring this point home, many cis-passing trans women are not questioned in women restrooms, whereas butch cis women are. It is not chromosomes or genitals that are beholden in these cases, but perceived femininity.

But if appearance is not a conclusive estimate of a person’s assigned sex at birth, advocates continue, the only way to enforce bathroom bans is to have genital inspectors, public restroom permits and certificates, which are impractical and defeat the very concerns of dignity and safety, which are the very issues supposedly stemming from "allowing" trans women in female bathrooms.

By the same coin, enforcing restroom use according to chromosomes or genitals will mandate that trans men use female restrooms, which itself reverses the problem. The right suggests that self-determination will allow any man enter female restrooms by “faking” trans in order to commit sex crimes. But this would also be true if the bans are upheld: trans men are then forced into female bathrooms, and yet again there will be masculine-looking people walking in freely into female restrooms (you know, like male janitors do all the time).

Thus bathroom bans are correctly fenced off as absurd, self-defeating, and eventually pointless. Advocates are absolutely correct in their analysis, and I agree to all the arguments I cite above.

How are they then wrong?

Advocates fail to realize that what the right really wants is to delegitimize the public existence of people whose appearances are not consistent with their assigned sex at birth. Florida attempted to designate to present oneself as the opposite gender in public as a sex crime. It also sought to pass laws that assert that all artistic impersonations of a sex different than the performers are inherently obscene.

Bathroom ban proposals stipulate a problem about which they fearmonger, without a shred of evidence that there is a problem that needs to be addressed, in stark comparison with the problem of trans women being harassed, and raped in male prisons, or even cis women that are mistaken for trans sometimes. This is a real problem that we could be addressing the past decade if the right did not choose this avenue of trans vilification and demagoguery.

But we have a greater problem here[^2], which is a threat to democracy itself. The bathroom bans, which do not appear in isolation but bundled together with several other measures that prohibit being trans/in public/altogether, do not address any real problem, as they do not address the real problems of children and cisgender women, whose reproductive rights and credibility in case of real sex crimes perpetrated en masse by cisgender men, they want to stripe away.

Here is why I think bathroom bans are entry points to the corrosion of democratic values.

If people are to use exclusively the restrooms that match their assigned at birth sex, then all people must be the sex that they are perceived to be. Trans advocates were not paranoid enough to imagine that the right wants to wipe trans people out of public life to such a degree, that no ambiguity about a person's sex can further be possible, except for those "extremely rare genetic accidents" Ben Shapiro keeps talking about.

Public erasure, however, of transgender and gender-nonconforming people amounts to the enforcement of cisgenderism by a state that defines sex as a natural binary with no exceptions, and no behavioral, nor performative, nor psychological deviations from the norm. This take is inconsistent with modern understanding of sex biology and endocrinology, the psychology and phenomenology of gender expression and gender identity. It wants to perpetuate for trans identities to be medicalized and intersex people be erased. It aims to enforce strict gender roles, identities, and expressions, coded on the appearance of external genitalia at the time of birth. It wants to hinter any progress in the societal issues brought up by professionals and activists surrounding trans and intersex people.

Gender non-conforming expression is a fundamental freedom

The elimination of sex and gender variation and non-conformity is incompatible with fundamental freedoms, such as the freedom of expression, and the freedom from discrimination on the basis of sex. In fact, the same actors and organizations do not attack sex and gender minorities alone. They consistently mock and delegitimize a number of other accommodations we have established as a decent society, such as racial equity, reproductive rights, disability measures, and accessibility.

This broader attack to fundamental protections shows it is not only bathroom bans that are embedded into a broader picture of plans of trans genocide, but it is also trans genocide itself that is embedded into a broader picture of a rightwing attack to established democratic freedoms, which entail freedom of speech, reproductive rights, religious freedoms, protection from discrimination.

Advocates fail to reflect on the horrific divide in assumptions: they assume a world order in which trans people can freely move and exist in the public space without the knowledge of cis people. When proposing the bans, the right assumes a world where trans people will not be allowed to exist at all, and they now have the means to implement this world order.

Bathroom bans are a gambit to attack fundamental pillars of constitutional law and human rights protections in western societies and they seem very consistent and well thought out in their conception: No one should be allowed to appear to be a different sex that the "biological reality"[^3], and this should be enforced by the state. But for this to be enforced by the state, fundamental rights and protections should be abandoned, including the rights of children and cisgender women.

Bathroom bans are to be understood as coal mine canaries of the rise of totalitarianism in Western Societies.

[^1]: Female Masculinity (book) [^2]: In fact, Trump's fresh executive order will force trans women (and some cis ones too) into male prisons. [^3]: I literally arrived to this conclusion a couple days before Trump's executive order. I wish I had realized sooner.

The Syrian Revolution (PDF)

This reader is a simple compilation composed out of 22 texts about the Syrian revolution. There is a common focus of the Western left, to which the editors count themselves, on North & Eastern Syria, the liberated area also called Rojava. Other parts of the struggle in this region have been widely sidelined. This has been criticised by many of the authors in this reader. Thus, the reader is an attempt to spread the views, ideas and efforts of revolutionary people in South and West Syria.

All texts have been published on websites, online archives, magazines before. The authors and interviewees have different approaches, views, and backgrounds. Readers are explicitly welcome to keep adding to and changing this compilation and spread it.

Omar Aziz (wikipedia)

It was:

• Easy to hide behind the prevailing cisgenderism, the core idea behind transphobia, according to which only cisgender people's gender identities are genuine and valid.
• Easy to hide in an anti-intellectualism, that conceals all nuance, and reinforces the most vulgar and stigmatizing, pathologizing, and demonizing stereotypes for transgender people.
• Easy to embed in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, and link to a broader list of topics in the conservative agenda: political correctness, climate change, vaccine skepticism.

"If these institutions push something so outlandish that men can be hypersexual kitten and shit in special dollhouses, it is because there is Jewish-Marxist conspiracy at play, against the white man, against the Christian family".

Now all the instincts of the authoritarian that felt oppressed all these years are running rampant. They have got the power.

But the reasons we reached a point that trans identities were recognized and protected was nothing of the above. It was the protections on freedom of expression, free speech even religious freedom.

It was the protections resulting from the developments in anti-racist policies, the developments in anti-sexist policies, and the struggle of queer liberation, which itself drew from the labor movement, the feminist and black liberation movements.

The recognition of trans identities was an extension of all we think as pillars of democracy, and decent society for the past 30 or so years. It wasn't even subverting cisgenderism: It was mostly comprised of extensions to the rights and protections that capitalist courts have recognized to women, gay people, and generic freedoms in general, even paralleling freedoms of religious expression.

With the anti-trans rhetoric they have managed to de-legitimize all of these protections, and whoever thinks this is only lead to trans genocide and end there, is deplorably in error.

These people are not only conservative but outright backward, and profoundly undemocratic. They are against constitutional society, and they are against the rule of law.

They are corporate fascists, and they got here with four decades of plotting and agitating. I am sad and angry that we did not do all in our power to fight it, we instead ignored it, we let it happen.

Now we will have to witness the revival of hatred and irrationality, we will have to fight uphill, from a position of weakness and helplessness against their social media, their military, their sick, disgusting lack of reason and empathy.

NO PASSARAN

geteilt von: https://lemmy.ml/post/24679007

Remember it is important to repeat the messaging to the degree it is amplified to population segments that are the least likely to have heard those already.

Make no concessions regarding the basic facts, the stronger the harder the longer it engages the target.

Remember this is an attack to Reason, to Scientific Inquiry, to Democracy, to the Environment, to Women Rights, and to Racialized People. Surrender no inch to the corporatist fascists.

Gender dysphoria: A concept designated in the DSM-5-TR as clinically significant distress or impairment related to gender incongruence, which may include desire to change primary and/or secondary sex characteristics. Not all transgender or gender diverse people experience gender dysphoria. https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/what-is-gender-dysphoria

DSM-5 aims to avoid stigma and ensure clinical care for individuals who see and feel themselves to be a different gender than their assigned gender. It replaces the diagnostic name “gender identity disorder” with “gender dysphoria,” as well as makes other important clarifications in the criteria. It is important to note that gender nonconformity is not in itself a mental disorder. The critical element of gender dysphoria is the presence of clinically significant distress associated with the condition. https://www.psychiatry.org/File%20Library/Psychiatrists/Practice/DSM/APA_DSM-5-Gender-Dysphoria.pdf

Major medical associations agree that gender-affirming care is clinically appropriate for children and adults with gender dysphoria, which, according to the American Psychiatric Association, is psychological distress that may result when a person’s gender identity and sex assigned at birth do not align. Though the care is highly individualized, some children may decide to use reversible puberty suppression therapy. This part of the process may also include hormone therapy that can lead to gender-affirming physical change. Surgical interventions, however, are not typically done on children and many health care providers do not offer them to minors. https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/03/politics/tennessee-gender-affirming-care/index.html

For transgender and gender-diverse youth who have gender dysphoria, delaying puberty might:

• Improve mental well-being.
• Ease depression and anxiety.
• Improve social interactions with others.
• Lower the need for future surgeries.
• Ease thoughts or actions of self-harm. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/gender-dysphoria/in-depth/pubertal-blockers/art-20459075

Regardless of the controversy on how and when to administer treatments to trans and nonbinary kids, psychological science is very clear that gender-affirming care helps trans kids, said Singh. “It is unconscionable that politicians would label it as child abuse,” said Edwards-Leeper. A study out of the University of Washington discovered that among 104 trans and nonbinary youths ages 13 to 20, gender-affirming care lowered the odds of moderate to severe depression by 60% and suicidality by 73% (Tordoff, D. M., et al., JAMA Network Open, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2022). Another study, which used data from more than 27,000 people collected by the National Center for Transgender Equality’s 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (PDF, 2.22MB), showed that transgender youth who began hormone treatment in adolescence had fewer thoughts of suicide, were less likely to experience major mental health disorders, and had fewer problems with substance misuse than those who started hormones in adulthood (Turban, J. L., et al., PLOS ONE, Vol. 17, No. 1., 2022). https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/07/advocating-transgender-nonbinary-youths

Defy Sex Binary

Sex, gender, and sexuality are all distinct from one another (although they are often related), and each exists on its own spectrum. Moreover, sex cannot be depicted as a simple, one-dimensional scale. In the world of DSDs, an individual may shift along the spectrum as development brings new biological factors into play. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/visualizing-sex-as-a-spectrum/

Misgendering, harassment not protected speech

The court went to great lengths to stress actual discrimination cases will continue to turn on their specific facts and that ‘gender critical’ speech, including but not limited to speech that misgenders trans and/or non-binary people, will continue to be subject to the laws of the land, including the provisions of the Equality Act. In practical terms, the impact of the decision is limited. In particular, the protected right does not extend to speech constituting harassment or discrimination against trans people. https://criticallegalthinking.com/2021/06/29/not-a-nazi-but-forstater-v-cgd-europe/

Detransition myths

The study, conducted by experts from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, examines reported regret rates for dozens of surgeries as well as major life decisions and compares them to the regret rates for transgender surgeries. It finds that "there is lower regret after [gender-affirming surgery], which is less than 1%, than after many other decisions, both surgical and otherwise." It notes that surgeries such as tubal sterilization, assisted prostatectomy, body contouring, facial rejuvenation, and more all have regret rates more than 10 times as high as gender-affirming surgery. https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/landmark-systematic-review-of-trans

Trans Athletes

As Katrina Karkazis, a senior visiting fellow and expert on testosterone and bioethics at Yale University explains, “Studies of testosterone levels in athletes do not show any clear, consistent relationship between testosterone and athletic performance. Sometimes testosterone is associated with better performance, but other studies show weak links or no links. And yet others show testosterone is associated with worse performance.” The bills’ premises lack scientific validity. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trans-girls-belong-on-girls-sports-teams/

Misc Videos

For the most part of this video Vaush debunks every argument that puberty blockers are an experimental treatment https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=HhYruaFZEOI

Vaush The best pro-trans arguments https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=sB6YNRn2pQQ

Vaush 2 hours of pro trans arguments https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=HhYruaFZEOI

Jon Stewart destroys ignorant GOP lawmaker for criminalizing youth transition https://iv.datura.network/watch?v=NPmjNYt71fk

Meta's anti-LGBT rules are closely knit to their ending the fact-checking: It is science denialism and linked to racism and vaccine skepticism.

Homosexuality and gender identity are not considered mental illnesses, Sex is not a binary, and Race is not connected to intelligence.

Bigots never liked science on these three, and now they use political power to impose their narrative.

Meta never moderated such discourse. Nor reddit nor twitter nor youtube. There was no censorship to end here. What this is, it is a free pass to punch down trans and gay people. It is incitement to violence, and Zuckerberg and Musk must go to the gallows for it.

Don't get me started on the toxic harassment these platforms have allowed against African and Carribean reparation activists, how they have destroyed the lives of feminists, and how they have named all Palestinians terrorists.

At this point race realists and gender essentialists have ensured political and technological control of the narrative.

There is no room for debating sealioning trolls on this one. If they don't understand the social dynamics against gender/sex/minorities at this moment, they are no better than brownshirts.

It is permabans and hooks and jabs all the way, for every single weird freak that backs this deranged hateful shit.

Hello everyone, I wanted to reach out to anarchisticially thinking people because quite frankly I am very worried. I am worried about the rise of fascist and fascist-aligned governments around the world, obviously.

But on the flipside I am also worried about leftist reactions and quite frankly the absolute failure of leftist politics to capitalize on the brief window of momentum we had in the period of 2011 to around 2023. We had political momentum, we had the sympathy of much of the western world, we had many governments. What did we do with it? Not much. Now, the dialectical tide is turning as state power is in the process of being handed back to the right. Perhaps for good.

So how do we deal with this new reality? The worrying reaction I see in most leftist spaces is nothing but defeated groaning, meaningless phrases and ideological posturing. Do we have a plan? Do we have coherent guiding principles? Forms of organization? How do we get there?

I realize those are big and open ended questions, but I believe in our collective ability to think big. Because otherwise we might be doomed.

cross-postowane z: https://szmer.info/post/5462195

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FsSrnPAh0vE

Context This is my response to a discussion about Firefox collaborating with Ecosia, and the discussion that followed quickly went awry. Not only we need it seems to vote for Democrats[^1] no matter what their policies or our opinions are, but we also must support Firefox whatever its moves or shifts in values are, because of its nominal support for privacy in the W3C. But the political take this commenter took brings as back to the election debate we keep having on Lemmy. Like only recently I debated someone claiming that literally we should throw trans people under the bus because of utilitarianism (if Trump wins they say, global warming will kill way more people, and we are sacrificing those people for the "ideological purism" of protecting trans people).

So we see centrists are willing to sacrifice human life and demolish pillars of democracy to defend their centrist dogma, even reaching for far-fetched causality chains to make reality fit their trolley-problem meme obsession.

In defense of extremism

I don't want this post to just reiterate my response to the Firefox centrist. In fact, I was planning to write "in defense of extremism" with this main argument:

If Auschwitz II - Birkenau is peak capitalism, then anarchist extremist is virtuous. In terms of militarism, political intolerance, racial hatred, and labor exploitation, let alone the murder and stealing efficiency for which it most notorious.

An anarchist is by definition opposed to militarism, political intolerance, racial hatred, and labor exploitation. So anarchism is the logical opposition to all of these together, and there is no room for compromise with any of those:

• No middle ground for militarism
• No middle ground for racial hatred
• No middle ground for political intolerance including religion, sex and gender.
• No room for labor exploitation, in most historical cases supported by the above systems of oppression.

For these reasons I was planning to debunk centrism, since there is no middle ground between freedom and Birkenau, as there is no middle ground between sense and nonsense (eg like antivaxxers and medicine, there is simply no middle ground). Therefore, centrism is also morally wrong.

Responding to centrists

But the arguments I was playing around with in my head for the defense of extremism kept popping up in random discussions I had around Lemmy. Some of them were too good to waste on some rando centrist drawing parallels between Democrats and Firefox 😂. I kept the part that most easily generalizes to the defense of extremism, and best underscores the hypocrisy, intolerance, and immoral compromise of centrists, who are themselves biased ideologues with their own set of material interests.

Here goes:

I am a pragmatist, you are an idealist.

1. This is not what these words mean.
2. You don't get to define what other people determine themselves as.
3. I am ideologue with certain material interests, and you are an ideologue with a different set of interest, who is willing to solve equations with human lives.
4. A centrist although presenting as non-ideologue, is willing to protect his moderation bias even with the lives of other people he thinks as ideological purists.
5. By continuously compromising with the worst amongst the humanity for precious election points he makes society worse for all of us.
6. The real meaning of centrism is that you are flexible with your red lines against fascism and corporatism, and weigh human lives according to their ideological distance from oneself.

history shows that “radical solutions” are almost always a mirage

We have LibreWolf, Mullvad, TorBrowser, which are all Firefox forks of course. If we are talking about possible extinction of the gecko engine perhaps we could have this discussion anew, but because these other projects exist, not because we have to support any ill advised move Firefox makes that time and again alienates this community.

To further this argument, there is, well, open source in general, which many people frame by the same "moderate-biased" arguments you propose. Nonetheless it exists and thrives, and it is well shown that the GPL licenses are better for developers. All this happens because of what you dismiss as "idealists", since the era of Creative Commons, Independent Media Center, and the Internet Archive, up to the Tor Project, Tails, SciHub and all other good things the internet has to offer comes from ideologues. Even Lemmy that you are currently using.

The centrist as intolerant, purist and conservative

So whatever is outside the centrist's tunnel vision is just non-existent. That makes the centrist an extremist naive empiricist, lacking non only object constancy but also the intellectual sophistication to stipulate configurations of the world outside his immediate and temporary surroundings.

The blithe centrist happily leeches off to preach ad nauseam that middle ground with spooks, fascists and advertisers is a universal truth we must blindly succumb to. Then it is shown that the centrist is not just naive or misguided but actively hostile and dishonest (see first section of this comment for evidence of logical inconsistency and dishonesty[^2]) with people of different opinions, so they prove themselves not to be centrist at all, but diet fascists.

To sum up, in this post I have shown that:

• Centrists can be tactically motivated and intellectually dishonest.
• Centrist are in fact intolerant of views different than theirs.
• Centrists are immoral and undemocratic, in their pursuit of middle ground with perpetrators of exploitation and discrimination.
• Centrists are in fact extremist in their naive empiricism, tunnel vision, and glorification of the status quo that was given to them, which is by definition conservative.

Combining common terms from the above propositions: Centrists are tactically motivated, intellectually dishonest, intolerant to difference of opinion, indifferent to the rights of others, immoral and undemocratic apologists of exploitation and discrimination, extremist in their empiricism and conservatism.

Centrist? Better call them sentries of the status quo. Disclaimer: I hate centrists with a burning passion.

[^1]: I have made my point very clear in this post, including the contributions of others underneath. [^2]: The rest of the comment overlaps with the second part of this post.

"Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare since 2021, was shot and killed outside an entrance to the New York Hilton Midtown in Manhattan, New York City, on December 4, 2024. He was in the city to attend an annual investors meeting for UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare. Authorities believe the attack was not random. Thompson had been criticized for UnitedHealthcare's rejection of insurance claims, and his family reported that he had received death threats in the past. The shooting occurred early in the morning, and the suspect, initially described as a white man wearing a mask, fled the scene."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Brian_Thompson

(edit) I would like to point out that Luigi Mangione is only a suspect and there are currently doubts about the integrity of the evidence.

There was that John Stewart interview with Sarah Smarsh. That was a pain to watch, but the gist was that "we didn't pander to the American rural working class identity".

I felt weird about this framing of working class, which seems to mean the low-brow identity. "Oh sorry there, we were mistaken in thinking that NPR is par to Fox News". And now, what exactly Democrats? Are you going to cater to anti-intellectuals to get votes? You know like fascists do? So they will try to take a page out of Trump's book, but they are doomed because they can't do it as well as fascists do. There is a chasm between that (whatever is called...) NPR discourse and the pre-industrial dogmas and prejudice. That's why everybody says that even logical arguments do not work the same way with them, as we have seen time and again. They just were never modern, if you get my meaning.

I also read these politico articles. They go into many areas, but I want to focus on the identity thing, since this is the second hint in my feed about it. On the one hand they say "you know what, how we missed that, rural bigots are also an identity", on the other hand they say "we might have focused too much on identity". So which one it is m'fers?

The idea that the working class rural America is a forgotten identity is really weird to me. I was apalled by the fact (cited in one of the two articles) Harris refers to all the different sets of oppressed people as "the groups". The "groups" are consequential because simply they are not the dominant group. All this is gaslighting because the Democrats now say, yes the cisgender straight Caucasian uneducated transphobic male is also an identity, and we should cater to him too. Which is too similar to MRA incel shit to take seriously.

Then, I don't even see black, brown, woman, trans, gay, intersex, as identities, rather than inherent features of people. The meanings they have are due to societal groupings alone. And you bet they have been political in the past and they are as hell political now. Anti-identitarian leftists, leftists who split "identity" from "class consciousness" by default seem weird to me in that effect, because for example slavery was a mode of exploitative production, ownership and enslavement of women was integral in pre-industrial economic systems. This "laborist" sterilization of the working class definition reduces a snapshot of British 19th century capitalism to the canon of analysis for every historical period and every type of social stratification? How do you even approach other type of societies entirely, like tribal societies? Like marxist anthropologists tried to and ended up with all kinds of upgrades to marxist theory, but some people do not want to hear about it because of purity.

This leads to paradox, when on one hand you say "wage labor is like modern slavery" but then you ditch all analyses that explore the long aftermath of actual slavery in society, or the deep roots that oppresion of women has in society including labor relations. As if the fact that modern American society has nerfed the feminist, civil rights, and gay liberation movements by providing an inclusivity capitalist narrative, is itself the true essence and historical origin of these groups historical movements and demands. Some go as far as rejecting the concept of human rights on supposedly marxist and/or antiimperialist premises.

This way you just erase decades of movements, activist, and scholarship, because race and gender has been branded to you as a neoliberal smokescreen, but I can't take serious an analysis like that.

To get back to the original topic, Democrats are doomed if they want to start catering to the low-brow rural population. Especially coining this demographic as yet another identity is preposterous and ridiculous. This is rock bottom for representative democracy of the late stage "politician marketing" flavor. And from a strategic perspective, the fascists have long beaten them to catering to this demographic, and such obvious, after the fact, flattery will only worsen the results, even if they decide to be machiavelian about it.

So much for the Democrats, RIP, start organizing at the local level, and don't forget that working class means strictly you are exploited for surplus value, and you can't understand this without intersectionality. Rather than "identity politics", race and gender are historical components of worker exploitation, and sticking to a naive definition of the working class does little more than undoing the collective history of these movements.

Last but not least, it seems that blaming a specific identity is trending, and that would be trans people. We get several Democrat lawmakers speaking out the same ignorant shit as conservative conspiracy nutjobs. I won't go in depth here, but this is just scapegoating. Not to mention, all those who complain about identity politics they either think trans acceptance is "too much", or upon inquiry they also oppose gay marriage and are just centrist bigots. This new wave of Democrat anti-trans scapegoating only helps normalize Republican misinformation and bring it to the mainstream.

The two lines of news show that Democrats want to cater to the the straight white man and throw other groups under the bus, because this is just political marketing. They need the people to get the votes and serve their own fucking lobbies. Have no doubt about it. If they lose elections over Black Lives Matter and trans rights, they will move the goal posts more and more to the right, until they are indistinguishable from fascists. I was not with the camp against Harris vote on the election, but gauging Democrats behavior after their loss, I eventually think that people were right to shit on them, even at the cost of a fascist dictatorship in the US.

All year I've been making various attempts to found an organization. All of the books and zines tell me to get myself and some friends together and do an abarchy. I have 3 friends and they're all some flavor of liberal. Our politics are incompatible and they have no interest in anything left of Bernie Sanders. Perhaps my rhetoric isn't the best.

I've tried to get my coworkers interested in a union. Despite having terrible working conditions and recognizing the need for a collective voice, nobody wants to take the plunge with me. Nobody wants to make plans. Nobody cares enough to put the work in. I did the "educate, agitate, organize", I printed the pamphlets, I talked the talk, I set dates. Nobody showed up.

I table by myself at a local arts market on Saturdays. I hand out cold water and zines, I have great conversations with people from all walks of life. I haven't met a single anarchist and I haven't had anybody show up to the reading group I've been trying to start.

All year I've been trying to join an organization. There's a food not bombs run by social democrats in my city. They only want donations. There's a community garden that isn't looking for volunteers. There's a DSA chapter that only does campaign events. That's it. Those are the only secular, public organizations in my city that aren't corporate nonprofits that I've been able to find after months of searching. Barring a Marxist vanguard group that dissolved earlier this year, and a women's health ride share that fell apart two weeks into starting.

What am I supposed to do? I want to put the work in, I want to help build a better world. My state, my county, my city, and my neighbors seem determined to walk blindly into this catastrophe and it boggles my mind. Is there anybody out there who's been in my situation and managed to make something of it?

PLEASE US govt. It's the least you could do.

I was handing out zines and water at my city's pride parade today. I had a lot of fun and had some good conversations but I was struggling to describe anarchism in a way that invited further conversation. I've never done tabling before and I also have terrible social anxiety so my mind wasn't on its best behavior. Most of the conversations I had died off pretty quickly as a result.

I figured having a "script" of sorts might help me get through the start of these conversations more easily. The description I was going with alternated between "order without authority" and "opposition to domination and hierarchy". I'm sure there's a better way to put it so that people are more curious or at least walk away with a better understanding, if appreciate getting some help to find the words haha

Since federated moderation remains semi-broken and this community having only one remote moderator left, I tried locking it, but even that seems to not have federated. Edit: This seems to have worked now.

I highly recommend using one of the other "Anarchism" communities linked in the sidebar.

Edit: if someone wants to take over moderation, that's fine. But I recommend someone with a Lemmy.ml account as federated moderation is still quite broken.

also he thought that the CCP wasn't even suppressing free speech, guess who just got banned from a certain tankie cercle jerk instance

The issue, rather, is what picture of “political violence” this messaging serves: To say that “political violence” has “no place” in a society organized by political violence at home and abroad is to acquiesce to the normalization of that violence, so long as it is state and capitalist monopolized.

As author Ben Ehrenreich noted on X, “There is no place for political violence against rich, white men. It is antithetical to everything America stands for.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16439577

What have been some anarchist organizations or approaches to the problems of addiction and recovery? I've done a little bit of reading on the anarchist library and I'll continue with that. I know there are concepts of radical sobriety as well as critiques of the hierarchy within twelve step programs and the idea of addict as identity. I'm interested in any perspectives and ideas.

Something I personally find acutely annoying about recovery programs is that they're almost solipsistic not just about the profits involved and the larger political historical and economic story of addiction. Maybe it's taboo because it's not something one can solve the same way one can make choices in one's own life, but I feel like a bit of a pariah every time I want to remind people that we arent just fighting ourselves but the people who actively make money on our suffering. To me right now anarchism is the best model to describe reality, so I want to know how people who share this model have dealt with and thought about these urgent issues. Keen to be introduced to literature or communities in this vein

There are very few books on anarchism or anarchist authors in Poland - and even fewer female authors.

Such names of female anarchists as Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre, Maria Nikiforowna, Louise Michel, Maria Orsetti and others are completely unknown.

No wonder: no books are published either by them or about them.

The exception is Emma Goldman, although even so, most often people know only one quote from her (and that without knowing the context in which she famously said the words), although fortunately a book "Anarchism and Other Essays" was published many years ago.)

There is a chance to translate and publish another book by Emma Goldman entitled "Anarchism. "My Disillusionment with Russia." Like many others, the October Revolution (or, as some anarchists prefer: counter-revolution) disappointed Emma, who watched its course in detail.

The question is: does anyone have and can give or lend this book? If not, can anyone recommend where to buy it from? So far I've only been able to find it on Empik and Amazon, and surely there are better places to get this title.

*As far as I know, the publication of this book has encountered censorship problems. So please give me a hint which edition of this book is the best, probably even approved by the author.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/9766793

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/9430955