I’ve been watching situations unfold in Ukraine and Venezuela lately with some interest from an anarchist perspective and I’ve been trying to get an idea of what is truly going on, but I find out that lately it’s been almost impossible to get a perspective of what is going on that is not extremely biased towards US-interests.
As the internet and social media has started significantly eroding established news sources for information dissemination, so has propaganda and misinformation tactics evolved to take better advantage of these new media, and the results are painfully obvious in places like reddit, where popular subreddits like /r/worldnews are dominated by specific perspectives.
Fortunately sources like /r/anarchism or individual blogs I follow are impervious to this blatant manipulation so I am able to discover articles like the following:
Now, I’m not saying that the authors of those pieces might not have their own biases, but it seems to me that they provide a more complete view of the situation rather than simply supporting one specific perspective.
At the moment I believe crowd-sourced information is severely compromised. People who want to get an idea of what is going on are better served following trusted sources explicitly, or using smaller and more focused social media (e.g. /r/anarchism or indymedia) which cannot as easily be dominated by special interests and astroturfers, since the nature of their subscribers defeats positive feedback on misinformation.
I just read this article about human psychology and the counter-intuitive way our brain functions in regards to the things we like or hate. The more I read into it, the more it seemed to validate on the most common practice of Anarchism: Direct Action. Or more specifically the core concept of anarchist theory that the only actual systematic change can come from each of us by actively doing things ourselves.
Very often I’ll speak with people of differing ideologies who support this or that political party and during the conversation I often say something like: “This all sounds nice and well in theory, but how do you plan to get your party into power, or otherwise put your theory into practice”? The disappointing answer inevitably is something along the lines of “proper education” or “more convincing others” (from the optimists at least). Subsequent questions on where this education should come from tend to be unsatisfying.
On the other hand, pessimists or people rejecting anarchist theory, tend to say that no signicant change can come because people are too stupid/ignorant/lazy to take care of their societies and as such, not only is Anarchism painted as a utopian ideal, but even their own theories are deemed as impossible to actualize (Or patently ridiculous plans are suggested)
But anarchism, tends to suggest something different; that change can only come by putting practice first. It is by having people actually put the future society we’d like to have, into practice, that we actually demolish the current one. Surprisingly, original Anarchist theorists seemed to have understood exactly how we need to act, given what we’ve recently discovered about human psychology: The way we act forms the person that we are.
This is the reason why anarchists support forms of self-organization such as unions, co-operatives, mutual banks, communes etc. A workplace union is not just a place for syndicalists to join, it’s an actual conversion tool! A worker who joins a union starts getting converted to a mutual aid personality. It does not wholly ((I suspect there are limits to how much personalities can change given a starting point)) matter if they were lazy or ignorant before, because taking part in such an org will actually change how they act.
Same is true for neighborhood unions or any other form of direct action mutual aid. By actively having people practice mutual aid, you make them the kind of people who want to do so.
This is why always the most important question about a political theory is: “But how are you going to achiveve it?”, because if it’s just based on “convincing people first” it’s just doomed to fail. Nobody will be convinced if what they’re currently doing in their daily lives is the completely opposite of what you’re suggesting, regardless of how good what suggest is in theory.
I’ve posted in the past why I’ve stopped using Kiva to try and do charity, and the more I hear about microlenders and their practices, the more I see that I’ve made the right choice.
Reasons for this result? The Internet was mean to the poor rapist. “The girl looked older chronologically.” The latter suicide of the victim complicated things for the prosecution…Yep.
Just saw this nice little video about the history of modern physics
Not bad, but something struck me immediately as odd. Where are all the women physicists? They couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Marie Curie, even in passing?
It’s just sad to see male whitewashing being as dominant as ever.
When police arrived, they found Hutchinson under an overpass on U.S. 65 Saturday morning, Springfield’s KY3 News reported. The boy had fallen 30 feet off the overpass and was lying on the shoulder.
When the boy didn’t respond to police, they Tasered him, repeatedly.
What the fuck?
However, Ozark police say the wounded boy was a threat.
“He refused to comply with the officers and so the officers had to deploy their Tasers in order to subdue him,” Capt. Thomas Rousset said. “He is making incoherent statements; he’s also making statements such as, ‘Shoot cops, kill cops,’ things like that. So there was cause for concern to the officers.”
Because it’s completely unexpected for someone in extreme shock to say incoherent ramblings..
Authorities say their use of a Taser weapon should not be questioned, because they were trying to help Hutchinson to safety.
“It’s a big concern for the officers to keep this guy out of traffic, to keep him from getting hurt,” Rousset said.
What the Flying fuck?
I can’t believe this story is real. Is WND.com a joke site like the Onion? This is just too unbelievable to be true.
Recently I’ve been getting more and more active in the BoardGameGeek.com community for Android:Netrunner, since I’m so active in the development of the OCTGN game definition for it, as well as liking the game itself quite a lot. And yesterday a usual event occured that gave me an insight into forum culture.
As is common with geek culture in online communities, some people tend to form strong opinions about various aspects of their hobby and want to share those opinions with others. But sometimes we get to see things heat up a little too much. Apparently randomly, one person will reply rudely to someone known for strong opinions suddenly there’s an outpouring of negativity against the opinionated player coming from all directions.
Someone reacts badly to a strong opinion
The opinionated person is usually taken aback from such hostility as they don’t understand where it’s coming from.
I’ve seen this reaction occur quite frequently, but it usually happens in hobbyist discussions, such as the ones revolving around games. This is because those tend to have a low-impact consequence to a change within them being bad, which makes most moderate people not bother as much with online discussions about them, unless those people are opinionated or bored.
This however means that someone who does react strongly about changes that they perceive to be important, tends to stick out like a sore thumb. Why does someone gets constantly flustered about something as insignificant (in the large scale of things) as a game? And why do people get annoyed at such common reactions?
This hadn’t actually click for me until today, as I was reading the above exchange and I was also considering that I also felt annoyed every time I saw such strong opinions being posted by the same people. But I couldn’t put a finger as to why. Why was I irritated about someone taking a card game too seriously?
And then it dawned on me, that I wasn’t getting annoyed by the opinion itself. I wasn’t even annoyed by the opinion being put forth as a fact. It was rather the situation that the same people would post the same kind of “the sky is falling” commentary every time and then, predictably, others would reply aggressively in to point out why they are completely wrong, which would trigger a discussion that took over most of the thread from that point on.
In short, those posting strong opinions ended up almost always focusing the whole topic on their ideas, “heating up” the thread and making the whole discussion revolve around them. It’s an attention grab! And it’s this constant attention-seeking that is annoying the people around them, possibly without them realizing the true reason. And thus ending up with random lash-outs like the above screenshot.
I suspect that the people behaving this way do not realize why they are doing it. For them, this is a hobby that they really love and they have strong opinions because they’d hate to see it ruined by bad decisions. So it’s understandable that they post those opinions on every relevant discussion and make threads about them, isn’t it?
It just so happens that this behaviour makes them the superstar of every discussion. Sometimes negatively, sometimes positively, depending on how much they reflect the popular sentiment, but almost always there will be one or more people with an equally strong opinion on the other side who’ll be annoyed enough at the arrogance or stubbornness to reply likewise, and thus a heated discussion will begin, centering around their comments. And given that humans are social creatures, this is addictive.
It’s addictive to always be the center of attention, as long as that attention is not overly hostile. So any behaviour that brings about this state of affairs is going to be repeated as long as the reward is reinforced. And given that most people, on both sides, don’t realize what is going on, is is going to be reinforced every time.
And then people in the community are going to start getting annoyed, because it turns out that any thread where particular people comment on (in their usual style), immediately takes a few steps towards flamewar status, and it just so happens that everyone will be discussing those comments for the next few pages, and every other interesting comment will be ignored as those most inflamed by the arguments are going to focus on just that.
So you see this kind of comments, and you grind your teeth, mutter “Oh it’s this person again? What horribly wrong opinion do they have to present now?”. And after months of the same procedure, someone else tells them to “STFU because nobody cares” or something, and you think “Fuck yeah” and pile on at the opportunity to put them in their place, until the whole thing escalates and feelings are hurt.
I think this whole thing can be quickly de-escalated if people realize the true reason why such comments create a negative attitude. The attention seekers need to stop trying to make the kind of inflammatory comment that will make them the center of discussion, and I believe the way to achieve that is not in random hostility, which is likely not to achieve anything as it’s vague and misdirected, but to call those people out explicitly for their attention seeking and how that negatively affects the community around them.
I want to think of anarchism as a description for what is wrong and what needs to be plucked out, but once I think of its implementation I can’t help but to think it doesn’t fit humans as a whole. We need to rise intellectually before it can be applied. Right?
So here’s a chance to address this quickly
Is the reason why anarchism is still not the norm because humans aren’t yet ready for it?
No. Anarchism is the most compatible with what anthropology and psychology tells us about humans social relations. The problem is that the environment you live in (i.e. society) shapes what things you accept and humans have been either too conditioned by hundreds of years of coercion and violence to accept capitalist values, such as wage slavery, or actively prevented from seeking the alternative even now.
Most humans would gladly shake off capitalist concepts of work and wage and exploitation given half the chance, but those who have the most benefit in doing so (the poor in other countries) are actively repressed by violence funded by their exploiters (the rich and middle class of rich countries). In turn, the middle class and the poor of the richer counties are palliated by the crumbs from the theft which occurs wholescale in the rest of the world, so that they don’t rise up. And when the palliatives fail, actual violence is again employed.
Rich countries did not get rich through free trade, but through the use of protectionism and other state interventions such as capital controls and subsidies.[…]
Money did not arise as a solution to the ‘double coincidence of wants[…]
Peasants did not freely move from their land into 12+ hour days in factories because it was ‘better than the alternative.[…]
Worth a read.
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