“While you might initially think anarchists might be a bit more about personal freedom and bodily autonomy than the rest in America, it’s actually quite the opposite.”
No, I would not have thought anything else initially about American self-proclaimed “anarchists”. I don’t think they really know what the word means. They just like to wear black, break things, and harass people. They really love the idea of using force to coerce people into doing what they want. Which is the polar opposite of anarchy.
The “anarchist” label is just like a sports team mascot. It’s a brand. They are no more actual anarchists than the players on the Chicago Bulls are actual bulls.
Just a few days ago, apparently several anarchists attacked and destroyed the books of a communist group who'd paid to table at the Oakland anarchist book fair. Someone showed me screenshots of anarchist accounts celebrating this with pictures of the communists who were there with targets drawn on their head saying "Marxist-Leninists are next." Meanwhile, the act is being celebrated by anarchists on forums as a strike against "authoritarianism."
Thanks for the comments on sexuality in Europe. I think that your misgivings relate to your arguments in past posts about how U.S. categories regarding race colonize Europe.
Americans are remarkably quick to categorize people racially--think of all of those earnest posts on Facebook about the brownness of Jesus. (That same sympathy for brownness seldom extends to genuine sympathy for the Palestinians and their cause.)
It is done visually. Yikes.
Just as U.S. racial categories, besides being inaccurate and toxic, don't fit Europe, U.S. sexual categories, which are often deeply puritanical, don't fit Europe.
In the Mediterranean basin, the idea of "transgender" doesn't apply so much as the ancient category of hermaphrodism (a union) does. The concept of "trans"-anything fits U.S. ideas of redemption and journeys. But in the Mediterranean world, one has an archetype of two of the most popular gods, joined. (See Two-Spirits as a metaphor.)
Queerness (and queer is a word that is never going to lose its sting no matter how many academic conferences use it) and nonbinary as a description of one's sexual persona (to use a term from the dreaded Camille Paglia, whom you should read), are U.S. categories. And puritanical.
And nonstarters? They lack that certain je ne sais quoi that leads to sensuality.
As a disciple of Colette, who is sometimes described as "queer," I can only assue you that you should read her. And it will become evident right away that the category "queerness" doesn't apply to her. She had bigger ideas of sentimental education.
that reminds me: one of the groups of gender-variant people the person mentioned was in Italy, I think near Venice, and had been there I guess for several centuries.
There are the femmenielli of Napoli / Naples. The film Napoli Velata (Naples in Veils), which you should watch, begins with scenes with them. Then it gets even more mysterious. The director is Ferzan Ozpetek, who is a Turkish immigrant, a gay man, and highly influential as an Italian film maker.
For the area near Venice, look for Carlo Ginzburg (and others) who have studied and described the benandanti, who are a kind of protector of the crops, engaged in ancient fertility rites. They also were reputed to fliy at night to battle witches trying to destroy the harvest. Rumor has it that benandanti endured till the 1800s.
As one of those Left public intellectuals smeared as a Trumpist, conspiracy theorist, fascist, white supremecist, and anti-Semite, and disappeared from the left sites that used to publish me, as a result of my Covid dissent and criticism of big pharma and big tech, the surveillance state and medical totalitarianism, etc., I very much appreciate this article. Left is no longer left. Those who call themselves that are, to a large degree, merely an identity grouping rallying under the Woke banner.
Rhyd, thanks for featuring the Permanent Pandemic essay and what it highlights. From a British perspective, it is a relief to see this kind of critique finally reaching the mainstream - I'm one of those who's watched with growing horror as the Left - my 'tribe' all my adult life - inverted or dumped its core values, apparently almost overnight. This includes close friends, members of my former community (I left the country), all the institutions I counted on, and the Labour movement/party who have consistently called for harsher, longer measures. The very long lockdowns in Britain were tolerated and welcomed by those in a certain social class who didn't seem to be able or willing to think outside their own interests while passing them off as for the common good. I still haven't come to terms with all this, although I AM clear that I'm no longer part of that group and can only really describe the different values I uphold as 'human'. Not sure where we go from here, but somehow, somehow, the task ahead involves reminding our formerly liberal societies of the basics of human flourishing.
I absolutely agree: we have to remind people that life matters more than fear. It feels very much like the early years of the war on terror in the United States, the constant orange "elevated terror risk" warnings telling us all that we were not safe and should do exactly what we're told. And I remember a strange madness coming over people then, certain that we were always in danger. Even silly places like the goth club I regularly frequented in Seattle suddenly enforced bag checks at the door to look for bombs...
There is hope though in remembering how that madness just sort of faded away. Perhaps this one will end too.
Great article and great links too, Paul Mason is a real piece of work. He had a boner for years over the Arab Spring as the phrase goes, the core subject of his silly little book Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere. He relates there, for instance, with feigned surprise how a "protestor" he ran into in London mere days previously turned up again in Cairo. Small world huh.
Oh I didn't know that detail! I mostly just remember how the narrative was that Twitter had helped a revolution happen. Except it wasn't a revolution, and anyway one of the largest days was when Twitter was shut off for them. The US narrative was that everyone was protesting the repression of Twitter, rather than the more obvious one that without Twitter people couldn't just "protest" from their phones...
I have also noticed the rebranding of transvestites and drag queens as transgender--to the point that using the older, and IMO, more nuanced terminology is treated as hate speech by some. My ex-husband was a client of the Stanford Sex reassignment project in the 1970s so I was madly reading everything on the topic and hanging out with some of the other clients and so forth. At that time transvestitism was labeled a fetish if the person derived sexual excitement from the practice and it could range from wearing undergarments of the other sex under one's ordinary clothing to fully dressing and going out in public with the intent of "passing." Many, maybe most, transvestites of this type were heterosexual men. Drag OTH was a performance--sometimes but not always professional--no one really expected a 6'2" drag queen in 4-inch heels, wig and 6 o'clock shadow showing through by the end of the night to be taken for a RG (real girl). The transsexual clients at Stanford, on the other hand, were given lessons in grooming, dressing, speaking and moving in a ladylike fashion so that they would be accepted as women during their transition. That was the reality and vocabulary of the time and trying to revise history to match today's different understanding is insulting to the lived reality. This change in definitions and vocabulary also ties into the concerns of older lesbians that today's "baby butches" and tomboys are being convinced by social media and Wokeness that they are really transmen.
On the COVID front, are you aware that John Michael Greer has an ongoing series of COVID forums on his dreamwidth Ecosophia blog? He opens the topic about once a week. Many people asking questions, giving personal tales of vaccine reactions, and alternative treatments. Readership is international so complaints about Canada, Australia and other nation's governments as well as US.
As a herbalist I got to watch my community get completely broken by this. All off a sudden the ancient and honored practice of healing, based on the foundation of meeting an individual exactly where they were at in regards to their well being was replaced by a new directive and the commensurate public shaming. Unless you promoted blanket vaccination and mask wearing you were inherently insane and obviously one of the “non scientific” ie bat shit crazy woo woo herbalists who bring the whole profession down. In a community that recognized expertise in the field by peer review of practice over educational qualifications, in a community where the most thorough scientific minds still confessed to plant communication, this was devastating. And not surprising. Stephan h Bruner had just gotten cancelled (as well as a public face book burning of his books, by a board member of the American herbalist guild, one of those classic I’m so liberal I’m a fascist moves that is a trade mark of woke politics), ironically for warning us all of woke politics.
It was devastating as up until then we had been navigating Covid in a very open source and close manner, sharing freely what herbal protocols were effective and why and how. Very effective and with a true experience of camaraderie. Then along with public policy came the thought police and It became decisive with one side extremely vocal and the other side shut down and underground. Essentially anyone who thought that constitution and context might be considered when trying to advise a client around their Covid health choices disappeared.
Personally I don’t think that people factor in the amount of hidden money is in play here. The transgender phenomenon has a massive amount of mainstream financing making sure that folks are steered to a lifelong medical subscription.
Preying on the consumer has become very formatted and an easy pattern to spot
In hindsight, how badly everything was bungled is astounding. China went from pretending it didn't exist to complete lock down. Government officials spoke authoritatively in the US: no need to mask, fomites are the mechanism of transmission! No, wait, everyone mask, but only use cloth masks! You could go on and on. Of course, all of those authoritative pronouncements were made with scant evidence.
Public health professionals should have been forthcoming: this could be bad, but we just don't know what this is going to look like long-term. We think everyone should behave with an abundance of caution, here are conservative recommendations. And as additional data points on CFR & IFR became available, treatments become available, vaccines become available...everything should have been ramping down. Instead, you had things like NYC officials insisting that someone who drives a delivery van and never comes within 10 feet of another person needs to be vaccinated to do their job (even though they had been forced to do that same job throughout the most uncertain times of the pandemic with zero protection anyway). Or you have people looking at the Shanghai lock downs now and wishing they could do that here.
In Dawn of Everything, one of the societal configurations they describe is where people accept hierarchy at uncertain times (war, hunting) and then reject it the rest of the time. I see some of this in some parts of American society. For example, mask use in the US was high in October 2020 - some surveys at usage reported at over 90% for sometimes in public and over 70% for always in public. The population was largely compliant in a period of significant uncertainty. There's much less uncertainty now, so much of the population is over following restrictions.
To one of your other points: I actually don't look to the intelligence community being behind the swing in leftist thought on this issue. I think many people in "leftist" oriented groups are much more involved in bureaucracy today than they have been in the past. Bureaucrats derive their power largely in controlling the flow of information & using state or capital power to enforce rules. So all of these people who are now running DEI consulting firms or taking positions as equity officers, for example, all have a personal stake in authoritarianism. And you couple that with a disinterest in the real world (whether that's evaluating the efficacy of their rhetoric or presenting material evidence to support their theories), you have a group of people for whom authoritarianism is very appealing.
Some of my organizer friends who go back to the Seattle protests in the late 90’s are firmly convinced that black-bloc groups have always been infiltrated/facilitated by US government agents provocateur.
“While you might initially think anarchists might be a bit more about personal freedom and bodily autonomy than the rest in America, it’s actually quite the opposite.”
No, I would not have thought anything else initially about American self-proclaimed “anarchists”. I don’t think they really know what the word means. They just like to wear black, break things, and harass people. They really love the idea of using force to coerce people into doing what they want. Which is the polar opposite of anarchy.
The “anarchist” label is just like a sports team mascot. It’s a brand. They are no more actual anarchists than the players on the Chicago Bulls are actual bulls.
And I agree that it’s not at all far-fetched to think the Antifa crowd is witting or unwitting tools of the authoritarian surveillance state.
More and more I agree with this.
Just a few days ago, apparently several anarchists attacked and destroyed the books of a communist group who'd paid to table at the Oakland anarchist book fair. Someone showed me screenshots of anarchist accounts celebrating this with pictures of the communists who were there with targets drawn on their head saying "Marxist-Leninists are next." Meanwhile, the act is being celebrated by anarchists on forums as a strike against "authoritarianism."
So tragic
Thanks for the comments on sexuality in Europe. I think that your misgivings relate to your arguments in past posts about how U.S. categories regarding race colonize Europe.
Americans are remarkably quick to categorize people racially--think of all of those earnest posts on Facebook about the brownness of Jesus. (That same sympathy for brownness seldom extends to genuine sympathy for the Palestinians and their cause.)
It is done visually. Yikes.
Just as U.S. racial categories, besides being inaccurate and toxic, don't fit Europe, U.S. sexual categories, which are often deeply puritanical, don't fit Europe.
In the Mediterranean basin, the idea of "transgender" doesn't apply so much as the ancient category of hermaphrodism (a union) does. The concept of "trans"-anything fits U.S. ideas of redemption and journeys. But in the Mediterranean world, one has an archetype of two of the most popular gods, joined. (See Two-Spirits as a metaphor.)
Queerness (and queer is a word that is never going to lose its sting no matter how many academic conferences use it) and nonbinary as a description of one's sexual persona (to use a term from the dreaded Camille Paglia, whom you should read), are U.S. categories. And puritanical.
And nonstarters? They lack that certain je ne sais quoi that leads to sensuality.
As a disciple of Colette, who is sometimes described as "queer," I can only assue you that you should read her. And it will become evident right away that the category "queerness" doesn't apply to her. She had bigger ideas of sentimental education.
that reminds me: one of the groups of gender-variant people the person mentioned was in Italy, I think near Venice, and had been there I guess for several centuries.
There are the femmenielli of Napoli / Naples. The film Napoli Velata (Naples in Veils), which you should watch, begins with scenes with them. Then it gets even more mysterious. The director is Ferzan Ozpetek, who is a Turkish immigrant, a gay man, and highly influential as an Italian film maker.
For the area near Venice, look for Carlo Ginzburg (and others) who have studied and described the benandanti, who are a kind of protector of the crops, engaged in ancient fertility rites. They also were reputed to fliy at night to battle witches trying to destroy the harvest. Rumor has it that benandanti endured till the 1800s.
As one of those Left public intellectuals smeared as a Trumpist, conspiracy theorist, fascist, white supremecist, and anti-Semite, and disappeared from the left sites that used to publish me, as a result of my Covid dissent and criticism of big pharma and big tech, the surveillance state and medical totalitarianism, etc., I very much appreciate this article. Left is no longer left. Those who call themselves that are, to a large degree, merely an identity grouping rallying under the Woke banner.
Yeah, what they did to you was awful.
Also, I'm going to spend the rest of the evening gushing like a school kid about how one of my heroes just commented on something I wrote... :)
LOL
Rhyd, thanks for featuring the Permanent Pandemic essay and what it highlights. From a British perspective, it is a relief to see this kind of critique finally reaching the mainstream - I'm one of those who's watched with growing horror as the Left - my 'tribe' all my adult life - inverted or dumped its core values, apparently almost overnight. This includes close friends, members of my former community (I left the country), all the institutions I counted on, and the Labour movement/party who have consistently called for harsher, longer measures. The very long lockdowns in Britain were tolerated and welcomed by those in a certain social class who didn't seem to be able or willing to think outside their own interests while passing them off as for the common good. I still haven't come to terms with all this, although I AM clear that I'm no longer part of that group and can only really describe the different values I uphold as 'human'. Not sure where we go from here, but somehow, somehow, the task ahead involves reminding our formerly liberal societies of the basics of human flourishing.
I absolutely agree: we have to remind people that life matters more than fear. It feels very much like the early years of the war on terror in the United States, the constant orange "elevated terror risk" warnings telling us all that we were not safe and should do exactly what we're told. And I remember a strange madness coming over people then, certain that we were always in danger. Even silly places like the goth club I regularly frequented in Seattle suddenly enforced bag checks at the door to look for bombs...
There is hope though in remembering how that madness just sort of faded away. Perhaps this one will end too.
Great article and great links too, Paul Mason is a real piece of work. He had a boner for years over the Arab Spring as the phrase goes, the core subject of his silly little book Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere. He relates there, for instance, with feigned surprise how a "protestor" he ran into in London mere days previously turned up again in Cairo. Small world huh.
Oh I didn't know that detail! I mostly just remember how the narrative was that Twitter had helped a revolution happen. Except it wasn't a revolution, and anyway one of the largest days was when Twitter was shut off for them. The US narrative was that everyone was protesting the repression of Twitter, rather than the more obvious one that without Twitter people couldn't just "protest" from their phones...
I have also noticed the rebranding of transvestites and drag queens as transgender--to the point that using the older, and IMO, more nuanced terminology is treated as hate speech by some. My ex-husband was a client of the Stanford Sex reassignment project in the 1970s so I was madly reading everything on the topic and hanging out with some of the other clients and so forth. At that time transvestitism was labeled a fetish if the person derived sexual excitement from the practice and it could range from wearing undergarments of the other sex under one's ordinary clothing to fully dressing and going out in public with the intent of "passing." Many, maybe most, transvestites of this type were heterosexual men. Drag OTH was a performance--sometimes but not always professional--no one really expected a 6'2" drag queen in 4-inch heels, wig and 6 o'clock shadow showing through by the end of the night to be taken for a RG (real girl). The transsexual clients at Stanford, on the other hand, were given lessons in grooming, dressing, speaking and moving in a ladylike fashion so that they would be accepted as women during their transition. That was the reality and vocabulary of the time and trying to revise history to match today's different understanding is insulting to the lived reality. This change in definitions and vocabulary also ties into the concerns of older lesbians that today's "baby butches" and tomboys are being convinced by social media and Wokeness that they are really transmen.
On the COVID front, are you aware that John Michael Greer has an ongoing series of COVID forums on his dreamwidth Ecosophia blog? He opens the topic about once a week. Many people asking questions, giving personal tales of vaccine reactions, and alternative treatments. Readership is international so complaints about Canada, Australia and other nation's governments as well as US.
As a herbalist I got to watch my community get completely broken by this. All off a sudden the ancient and honored practice of healing, based on the foundation of meeting an individual exactly where they were at in regards to their well being was replaced by a new directive and the commensurate public shaming. Unless you promoted blanket vaccination and mask wearing you were inherently insane and obviously one of the “non scientific” ie bat shit crazy woo woo herbalists who bring the whole profession down. In a community that recognized expertise in the field by peer review of practice over educational qualifications, in a community where the most thorough scientific minds still confessed to plant communication, this was devastating. And not surprising. Stephan h Bruner had just gotten cancelled (as well as a public face book burning of his books, by a board member of the American herbalist guild, one of those classic I’m so liberal I’m a fascist moves that is a trade mark of woke politics), ironically for warning us all of woke politics.
It was devastating as up until then we had been navigating Covid in a very open source and close manner, sharing freely what herbal protocols were effective and why and how. Very effective and with a true experience of camaraderie. Then along with public policy came the thought police and It became decisive with one side extremely vocal and the other side shut down and underground. Essentially anyone who thought that constitution and context might be considered when trying to advise a client around their Covid health choices disappeared.
Personally I don’t think that people factor in the amount of hidden money is in play here. The transgender phenomenon has a massive amount of mainstream financing making sure that folks are steered to a lifelong medical subscription.
Preying on the consumer has become very formatted and an easy pattern to spot
In hindsight, how badly everything was bungled is astounding. China went from pretending it didn't exist to complete lock down. Government officials spoke authoritatively in the US: no need to mask, fomites are the mechanism of transmission! No, wait, everyone mask, but only use cloth masks! You could go on and on. Of course, all of those authoritative pronouncements were made with scant evidence.
Public health professionals should have been forthcoming: this could be bad, but we just don't know what this is going to look like long-term. We think everyone should behave with an abundance of caution, here are conservative recommendations. And as additional data points on CFR & IFR became available, treatments become available, vaccines become available...everything should have been ramping down. Instead, you had things like NYC officials insisting that someone who drives a delivery van and never comes within 10 feet of another person needs to be vaccinated to do their job (even though they had been forced to do that same job throughout the most uncertain times of the pandemic with zero protection anyway). Or you have people looking at the Shanghai lock downs now and wishing they could do that here.
Replying to myself to finish this thought:
In Dawn of Everything, one of the societal configurations they describe is where people accept hierarchy at uncertain times (war, hunting) and then reject it the rest of the time. I see some of this in some parts of American society. For example, mask use in the US was high in October 2020 - some surveys at usage reported at over 90% for sometimes in public and over 70% for always in public. The population was largely compliant in a period of significant uncertainty. There's much less uncertainty now, so much of the population is over following restrictions.
To one of your other points: I actually don't look to the intelligence community being behind the swing in leftist thought on this issue. I think many people in "leftist" oriented groups are much more involved in bureaucracy today than they have been in the past. Bureaucrats derive their power largely in controlling the flow of information & using state or capital power to enforce rules. So all of these people who are now running DEI consulting firms or taking positions as equity officers, for example, all have a personal stake in authoritarianism. And you couple that with a disinterest in the real world (whether that's evaluating the efficacy of their rhetoric or presenting material evidence to support their theories), you have a group of people for whom authoritarianism is very appealing.
Some of my organizer friends who go back to the Seattle protests in the late 90’s are firmly convinced that black-bloc groups have always been infiltrated/facilitated by US government agents provocateur.