THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE
In these times of increasing political instability and increasing corporate power grabs, with a few billionaire bozos to also add into the mix, it seems to me it would pay us well to start considering questions we might not have asked before. It is the unreflective assumption of many that things will always go on as they always have but in times like these that is a dangerous and maybe fatal assumption. The wise imagine what could happen rather than merely observing what is happening.
So I wonder:
These, and other, questions are ones you might want to think about in a time when governments all over the place are going rogue or simply being taken over by ideologues. It makes sense to build some resilience into your living situation or have some kind of idea for what to do in an emergency. And the time to think about that is before it happens rather than when it's too late.
[#]politics #resilience #resistance
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You know there are serious Christian theologians who talk about the Christian myth as a matter of an eternal god's love for a suffering creation and so his action to repair that suffering and those within it. You may or may not like the story but at least its a matter of understanding and bearing with the suffering, a matter of solidarity in action.
Then there are American evangelicals who talk about "the sin of empathy" and counsel only death and hate. Their bibles presumably only have 10 pages and are all the bits about "smiting".
Might I suggest that patriarchal prosperity preachers, religious con men and people on the make are not good spiritual guides?
Indeed, one recalls the story where Jesus is asked "Who is my neighbour?" and he indicates it to be your sworn enemy.
Go figure.
[#]christianity #christian #politics
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SEX AND INTERSEX (AND GENDER)
"If a child is born with two X chromosomes, oviducts, ovaries, and a uterus on the inside, but a penis and scrotum on the outside, for instance, is the child a boy or a girl? Most doctors declare the child a girl, despite the penis, because of her potential to give birth, and intervene using surgery and hormones to carry out the decision. Choosing which criteria to use in determining sex, and choosing to make the determination at all, are social decisions for which scientists can offer no absolute guidelines."
(Biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, "Sexing the Body")
The recent US govt statement on "sex" talks about "sex at conception". At conception EVERYONE IS INITIALLY FEMALE as possible male characteristics cannot even develop for several weeks. That is part of a process which may, in some people, not develop in a binary way or in a predictable way. In addition, not everyone is either XX (usually female) or XY (usually male) in terms of chromosomes. In fact, the notion of a strict, hard binary is entirely false. This is NOT a matter of numbers for even the possibility of one single deviation proves the binary is not true to reality. The fact is a binary, which is the same as a deliberately created gender division, is artificial and a political project. As Fausto-Sterling says in the same book:
"But why should we care if a 'woman'
(defined as having breasts, a vagina, uterus, ovaries, and menstruation) has a 'clitoris' large enough to penetrate the vagina of another woman? Why should we care if there are individuals whose 'natural biological equipment' enables them to have sex 'naturally' with both men and women? Why must we amputate or surgically hide that 'offending shaft' found on an especially large clitoris? The answer: to maintain gender divisions, we must control those bodies that are so unruly as to blur the borders. Since intersexuals quite literally embody both sexes, they weaken claims about sexual difference."
Neither sex nor gender nor sexuality, a number of leading biologists say today, are a simple matter of "what's there". Increasingly, social factors are also seen to matter. For govts, it becomes a matter of politics (and political dogma) too. In one fell swoop, the US govt has attempted to wipe out intersex people and trans and non-binary people. This is based on ignorance and flawed thinking as part of a political agenda for an entirely political purpose.
They can never be allowed to succeed. For biology does what it can not what orange fools tell it to.
[#]trans #intersex #nonbinary #queer #lgbtq #lgbtqia #politics #usa
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I am currently thinking about "nature" in actual, philosophical and ultimate senses. What is nature? Etc.
I am reading a book, A Religion of Nature, written by a former Christian who, as is the nature of these things, seems to have gone from one extreme (Christian theism) to the other (gods, spirts, etc., are impossible and none of them exist or could exist).
But this forgets Alan Moore's take which is "The idea of the god IS the god". The author of the book I am reading thinks in an entirely and purely materialistic sense. Alan Moore imagines that the imaginary is just as real as the material even if it is only as something imaginary. When you imagine you really are imagining and the imaginary things really do exist in the imagination. Moreover, the imaginary manifestly and obviously affects material reality in myriad ways every single day.How you think and feel is not inconsequential.
So to imagine a world of nature as merely material seems a misstep, one contradicted by the history of human existence as integrated mind/body organisms no less. You and I are not merely bodies. Neither are we minds trapped in flesh that can somehow be liberated and wander off elsewhere. Rather, the material and immaterial seem to fuse indivisibly and nature is not just "stuff".
Or?
[#]nature #philosophy #human #thinking #ecology #pagan #spirituality
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Certain conservative figures in certain countries want "sex" to be defined as "sex assigned at birth".
But these self-same people can often be found on social media sites saying that various, often female, often black, athletes are men EVEN THOUGH they were born female, were assigned female at birth, and have never lived as anything else. When pressed, they simply double down on their aggressive stupidity.
Thus, their whole take on the subject is founded on ignorance and totally confused. They bang on about what "a woman" is but don't recognise one when she stands in front of them.
[#]women #female #sex #science #feminism #trans #lgbtq
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Gaiman's abusive and controlling behaviour is deeply disturbing. "Why isn't he in custody?" you might be thinking. Well it seems at least some of his victims, who all suffered from a power imbalance, either went along with it for some time, not wanting to fall out with Gaiman (like all predators, he chose prey that was vulnerable to him), or they took money to "make them go away" or keep quiet ( which will always muddy the waters in the eyes of the patriarchal law). Making Gaiman a powerful man with money put him in that position and turned him into a man who, knowing his wealth, thought it could buy him whatever he wanted because he could pay people to shut up or go away. Thus, his only ethic was that the rich can abuse the poor because they are rich. He didn't need to make victims out of vulnerable women though. He has enough money to pay any sex worker in the world for whatever he wants. But he didn't do that. HE CHOSE VIOLENCE.
However, it outrages me his lawyers try to explain this away as "BDSM". Fuck off. This is coercive violence and deliberate abuse. According to the reports, it was done without consent, in the face of cries of "stop" and "no", and, moreover, was sprung on the victims spontaneously. None of this aligns with BDSM which is a highly ethical, negotiated and organised form of sexuality. So not only are the (again highly paid) lawyers lying for their client, they are trashing an ethical sexual community as well in order to do it. In BDSM, for those not in the know, the person apparently WITHOUT the power is actually the one in charge and the sexual activity has almost certainly only commenced after possibly long discussions about what is and isn't wanted or desired by them. And do you think the disgusting Gaiman was ever going to let that happen? Fuck off all the way to hell.
[#]writing #sex #abuse #bdsm #ethics #power #patriarchy #feminism #books
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CHILD SAFETY
Let me preface this by saying I'm not a parent and never will be.
I was just out for my walk (which was cut short cos too cold). It happened to be when the kids got let out of school so I saw several girls 11-13 walking home together. They all were looking at phones.
That phone, I considered, is a direct access line to hell, to misogynists, rapists, pedophiles - and that's only to mention presidents and rich men. Who knows who they are talking to or being contacted by? But, just as bad, who knows what views and attitudes they are ingesting regularly, systematically, on a constant basis? As an example, it wasn't old people who killed the trans teen Brianna Ghey. It was teenagers. It was teenagers who had learned to hate.
Would I give my 11-13 year old their own phone? I highly doubt it. What goes in your head has effects and I would not want any child of mine exposed to the sewer before they had grown and developed to a certain ethical and intellectual maturity.
You wouldn't let a person of that age have sex so why let them have access to the sewer?
[#]childhood #childsafety #socialmedia
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PLEASURE, CAPITALISM AND RELATIONSHIPS
"Re-imagine the value of pleasure (especially including sexual pleasure) and remember its social worth and uses. Undo the enchantment, in which we have been trapped, of the commodification of desire (which is the imprisonment of pleasure with ideological chains) and the economic control of desire. Pleasure must be re-imagined along uneconomic and anti-economic lines. (Death to Only Fans!) Our pleasures and desires are not for their economic exploitation or to entice and exploit others. Pleasure and desire are not commodities and life is not a vehicle created for economic profit or the acquiring of resources. “Capitalism”, the utilisation of things as “resources” for the purpose of private enrichment, is an anti-social imaginative trap which imprisons you in a spiral of constant acquisition and constant exploitation. It ossifies relationships for such purposes. It is anti-creative and anti-change. It simply wants to turn your life into a slavery to things rather than a freedom of relationships. For capitalism to work the relationships must be fixed and minutely controlled. This is why capitalism also hates any true or real diversity in or of relating, a thing which the poetic terrorist thinks of as life."
(Anarchy and Nothingness)
[#]sex #pleasure #politics #relationships #capitalism #love #solidarity #cooperation #anarchy
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WISDOM FOR 2025
"Put simply in my own words: movements can be derailed very easily by taking out the leaders. Many are just sheep joining in anyway. But the individual who acts is motivated for themselves and far more committed as a result. They will act in their own interest and with much less possibility of being caught or stopped for they have told no one about it since there is no one to tell. Their strike is out of the blue. It comes from a desire for wildness and a feral wish to be free. Imagine if people just acted for themselves! No one could stop that. In fact, the bosses of capitalism and workerism are banking on you creating movements; they are much more easy to control and subvert than people just acting for themselves at random. We see it again and again. Such people thus fear INDEPENDENCE the most. What is being revolted against here is a daily practice coercive others in business and politics want to impose upon them or subject them to. Don’t think that’s true? Then explain why the current British Labour(!) government is trying to force even officially sick and disabled people into work and threatening their benefits should they not comply. The workerist cancer is everywhere and it infects most...
So, in that case, remember the anarchist wisdom which is anarchist wisdom for a good reason: BECOME UNGOVERNABLE.
(From "Anarchists of Nowhere: The Imaginative Task" part of a book to be made available in 2025)
[#]politics #2025 #anarchy
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"Humans, whether individually while in the womb or as a species newly climbed down from the treetops that we’d shared with kissing-cousin Bonobos, discover early on that sexual self-stimulation is a source of great gratification, practically unique in our experience as mammals in that it is easily achievable and, unlike almost every other primitive activity, can be accomplished without risk of being maimed or eaten. Also, it can be acquired completely free of charge, which may well be a factor in society’s subsequent attempts to regulate the sexual imagination, and which is a point to which we’ll be returning later."
Prose which tells you that this is the first paragraph of an essay written by Alan Moore. This is, in fact, the first paragraph of his essay "Bog Venus vs. Nazi Cock Ring: Some Thoughts Concerning Pornography".
[#]sex #porn #writing #alanmoore #comics
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"Most people—in order to live at all—seem to need around themselves a penumbra of “illusion” that the world is just rolling along as usual, some good days some bad, but in essence no different now than in 10000 BC or 1492 AD or next year. Some even need
to believe in Progress, that the Future will solve all our problems, and even that life is much better for us now than for (say) people in the 5th century AD. We live longer thanks to Modern Science—of course our extra years are largely spent as “medical objects”—sick and worn out but kept ticking by Machines & Pills that spin huge profits for a few megacorporations & insurance companies.
(Peter Lamborn Wilson)
[#]nihilism
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"Taking the long view (and allowing for noble exceptions) science does precisely what State and Capital demand of it:—make war, make money. “Pure” science is allowed only because it might lead to technologies of
death and profit—and this was just as true for the old alchemists who mutated into Isaac Newton, as for the new physicists who ripped open the structure of matter itself. Even medicine (seemingly the most altruistic of sciences) advances and progresses primarily in order to increase productivity of workers and generate a world of healthy consumers."
(Peter Lamborn Wilson, "Green Hermeticism")
[#]science #pagan #magic #alchemy #ecology
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WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE? WHAT IS YOUR TIME FOR?
Needless to say, there are lots of “spooks haunting their own brains” out there,
inauthentic, bad faith humans who lie to themselves every day about who they are
(slaves to a work/death machine) and what their life is for (meaningless survival for as
long as possible). Ask nearly anyone in this incarcerated landscape why they have a job
and they’ll reply, in that zombie tone, with, “I need to live”. Is that living then? Is this ‘life
at any price’ existence worth it? Is this the only way to achieve “life”, this imprisoned,
gaslit, policed life? Hakim Bey (and I hope all enlightened and free-spirited people
everywhere) imagine not. Bey says that “almost everything enjoyable is in fact illegal. Babylon hates it when anyone actually enjoys life, rather than merely spends money in a vain attempt to buy the illusion of enjoyment.” It used to be imagined that “the best things in life are free” but this will sound like dangerous anarchy in the ears of a bought and paid for capitalist politician or a business leader going about their business under the auspices of the authoritarian State. And so, should you be found enjoying yourself, “here come the peasants with their torches, eager to do the State’s bidding without even being asked.” Yes, part of our incarcerated life is that most of the prisoners also double up as guards. Don’t rock the boat, don’t dream of outside the walls, don’t even spend a minute of your time imagining an Other to this imprisoned normality. Or else! “Do you have a permit to exist?” (A prescient and disturbing question in an era when trans people are finding their “permits to exist” increasingly revoked.) The politics of self-organisation formally contradicts the politics of oppression, coercion and control. Expect attack if you employ the former from all under the influence of the latter. Expect to have to go on the offensive if you would not be just another one of the policed and the coerced.
(Black Dog - link in bio)
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"SEX WORK IS WORK" - A LONG READ
For a few centuries now the world has had an increasing problem. That problem is work. It should be well known that before the industrial age the working landscape was entirely different to what it is today. There was a lot more subsistence. There was, until the prelude to capitalism, a lot more commons. People could survive by having little and doing little. But then capitalism came, told everybody they needed a job (when what was actually true was that already rich people with ideas for getting richer needed workers) and started providing them with lots of crap they didn’t need but which it told them they had to have. Thus began the death spiral of capitalism which traps people into work, uses them up, spits them out, and exploits them like all the other natural resources it uses to generate its often crappy products. This pathway, all about profits for a few, leads only to eventual climate disaster and treads a path of constant human misery to get there. But never mind, a few billionaires have yachts and private jets so it was all worth it.
Now I have nothing against sex workers anymore than I have anything against other kinds of workers. All are equally trapped into a system which forces them to sell their bodies and attention for a price. Few are they who escape this cage. Everybody, so we are told, has to do something to live. So I imagine sex workers, like any workers, are rats in a trap. The issue for me is that the claim is often made “sex work is work” – and I wonder what this means and implies. The charitable narrative is that it is a call for sex workers to have the same rights and protections as any other kind of worker, rights and protections which have always had to be fought for on behalf of any kind of worker and which are often under threat (as in the case of companies like Amazon or workers in the so-called “gig-economy”). This slogan is in my head at the moment, in fact, because I saw a story about Belgian sex workers winning some rights. As far as it goes, that’s all good.
But, to me, the slogan “sex work is work” is as much a problem as a statement of fact or a call for rights and protections. This is not a problem because of the sex – about which I am far more liberal than many – but because of the work. That sex work “is work” is exactly my problem in fact. It is a problem because “work” is a problem in the political space I come from which is that of anarchy. “Work” is the chain by which we are enslaved and don’t let the fact that you are thrown a few crumbs from the table for your work kid you into the idea that work is anything other than slavery. See how the society you live in treats those who can’t or won’t work for references on that. Not just bosses or billionaires will happily watch people starve in the streets, millions of “workers” will too. All have bought (or been plugged) into a system of economic relationships and morality which teaches that you don’t deserve anything unless you work. Do you realise how unnatural that mentality is? Only a few thousand years ago “work” in its entirety was an unknown concept – and people survived. The “job” is basically an invention of the Industrial Revolution and so practically brand new to human thought. Don’t be kidded into thinking this is all normal and natural when its artificial and enforced. Our relations and our existences don’t have to be carried out this way and they only are because force is being applied to make it so. “Work” is a coercion.
This remains true even if you are working for yourself, of course, because your existence is not just based on what you do. Its also based on what system of economic relationships you find yourself in. In a system where doing each other favours was good enough no one would need money. Each would just do another a favour and all would be smoothed over to everyone’s satisfaction. Anthropologists talk of systems based on gift giving or on forms of communist living. There are even systems where the economy is a sexual economy in that the nookie is shared around far more liberally than in places where sex is imagined restricted to marriage partners, etc. In this respect, the idea that sex might be a saleable commodity is both a novelty and a particularity. We might examine this further for I would find it hard to believe that many people would imagine that sex is an activity human beings do which is just like any other. My point of dispute here is not what people may or may not do with their sexuality. It is with examining the effects of imagining it is a saleable commodity (which is itself only a subset of the imaginary which imagines ANYTHING is a saleable commodity). Why would anyone imagine to BUY AND SELL sex?
My critique here is of CAPITALISM which imagines that ANYTHING can be bought and sold. It certainly has absolutely no qualms about selling human bodies, about forcing them into contractual obligations and about kicking them to the curb if they don’t play along. I would ask here that we don’t just simply accept this because, as someone coming from anarchy, I ask what promotes human freedom – and capitalism does not. As an imposed and forced system of relations, it promotes human slavery, human exploitation, coercion of humans (and animals and natural resources more generally). If anyone had a magic wand to bring freedom to our human communities and to our planetary ecosystems they would start by making capitalism disappear. So the issue with capitalism is what comes along with the acceptance of it and its practices. These are transformative. They take what was once thought of and related to in one way and they turn it into something thought of and related to in another way, the commercial way, the way of profit and loss, the way of exploitation. Capitalism is basically the exploitation and maximisation of a resource for private gain. It is what creates vast inequality in society, something capitalism largely ignores because it is the consequence of it.
This particularly impacts sex capitalism (which is what sex work is) if you think about it. Let’s ask a simple question: what is sex for? (Please note again that the issue here is not about what someone may or may not do with their sexuality. They may, if we are of an anarchistic mind, do with it as they wish. The issue for me in this piece, however, is if all things they could do with it are simply the same in consequential terms.) There might be some different answers given here. A conservative might say sex is for procreation (and so imagine it entirely heterosexually). A libertine might say sex is for fun. A capitalist might say it is for making profit. I would say it is for building caring human relationships as the basis of an anarchist politics. I have written about this, at some length, in one of my books called BLACK DOG and it is why the sex work example of work stands out to me particularly as an example. For if we imagine sex to be a means to a certain sort of diverse, interactive, sexually free and positive society, what one anthropologist, Camilla Power of University College London’s “Radical Anthropology” group calls “what made us human in the first place”, but, instead, sex is simply a commodity, something else you can buy or sell to extract profit much like a tin of beans, then there you have a total clash of values and ways of life. The sex example is more on the nose for me because sexuality itself is imagined by me in an alternative and intimate way which, in my imaginary at least (informed by anthropological research into more communally sexual communities which use(d) sex as a community bonding practice), clashes with the capitalist view of sex. So I am critiquing and criticising the imaginary of sex here and not sex workers themselves who, like any worker, are coerced people anyway – for we exist in a coercive system and situation.
It has not passed me by, however, that if some people (on “the Left”) even suspect that you might be saying something bad about sex work or sex workers then you must be some kind of sex worker hater or “swerf”. (I am neither “sex worker exclusionary” nor a “radical feminist” for the record.) For some reason, these people seem to take the attitude that sex workers are, in some sense, made uncriticisable because they are sex workers. Are sex workers made holy and untouchable by their sex work? I find this attitude bizarre and illogical. Are shop workers beyond criticism? Are factory workers? Are bus drivers, school teachers or chimney sweeps? Then why are sex workers? My issue here is one of seeing capitalism as an enemy, something to be destroyed and defeated (before it is we, including all those who work, who are defeated by it instead). Thus, I attack the capitalist system directly – which includes sex capitalism. So I conclude there can be asshole sex capitalists just like any other kind of capitalist. (Indeed, a check on social media reveals that LOTS of sex workers seem to support Donald Trump! This, of course, is not to besmirch all of them.)
So I agree with my mentor in anarchism, Emma Goldman, when she writes in her 1896 essay “Anarchy and The Sex Question” about the issue of women’s place in society. The fault is with the society, not the sex workers. Describing a vast contrast of wealth of rich and poor, she writes: “Look at these two startling contrasts, you moralists and philanthropists, and tell me who is to be blamed for it! Those who are driven to prostitution, whether legal or otherwise, or those who drive their victims to such demoralisation? The cause lies not in prostitution, but in society itself, in the system of inequality of private property and in the State and Church. In the system of legalized theft, murder and violation of the innocent women and helpless children.” Goldman’s view in this essay is that “prostitution” (something she says “disgraces humanity”) – which we may broaden today into sex work generally – is a phenomenon of its circumstances. If you force people into poverty and even desperation then they will do whatever it takes, no matter how extreme or unwise, to get out of it. Goldman, a vociferous free love advocate, was of the mind that sex work was less than ideal, a product of economic circumstances. She spoke and wrote about the day in which, in a freer and more equal society, it would be entirely unnecessary. But that is only because she spoke and wrote about the day when capitalist exploitation would just be a scary story of the past told to frighten children. Her view, as mine, is that capitalist relations should be remade and remade better.
Here is the lesson Goldman gives. It is that the way out of capitalism, and so out of its death grip, is not by embracing it, accepting it and simply normalising it. It is by resisting it, refusing it, subverting it and acting to destroy it. This applies to ALL WORK. It makes us question, and condemn, work itself. Or, at least, it should.
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Today I remember Renzo Novatore, Italian anarchist, nihilist and anti-fascist, killed 102 years ago today in a pub outside Genoa during a shoot out with police in the service of the fascist Benito Mussolini.
Renzo was an anarchist from childhood, refusing to go to school or work on his family's farm. He would steal farm produce, sell it, and buy books with it which he would read by himself. Becoming an autodidact, he soon became a self-taught philosopher and poet, reading philosophy and poetry and plays avidly. This gave him both a consciousness of power and authority and also an intense dislike of them. Consequently, he railed against both Church and State but also any who would seek to bring him under their power.
As a young adult, Renzo was in and out of prison. He set fire to a church and was also arrested for thieving and vandalism. By age 24 he was writing for anarchist publications but this was interrupted by the First World War when he was drafted into the Italian Army. Renzo would desert and be sentenced to death in his absence. He went underground and lived illegally but was eventually captured. However, an amnesty saw him released again - at which point he returned to his life of crime, decrying the notions of both "work" and "society" because both of them are held sacred and forced onto people. Novatore believed in people's right to create their own social worlds and thought that no one had the right to coerce them to lives they had not chosen for themselves.
By now Novatore was a regular writer for several anarchist magazines and his pieces are regularly both poetic and militant. Novatore was one of the few people who could not only talk the talk but also walk the walk. He could say the sorts of things he said exactly because he lived them. Habitually armed, he was once part of a raid on an Italian naval barracks because they wanted to acquire supplies from the arms depository there. In the summer of 1922, fascists who supported Mussolini surrounded his family home in an attempt to capture him. But he used home made hand grenades to disperse them and escape.
His eventual demise on Nov 29th 1922 occurred when two carabinieri (Italian military police) followed him and a colleague into a pub before they opened fire. Novatore was shot whilst his colleague shot Novatore's killer dead before escaping. Novatore was not your "let's all be nice to each other" kind of anarchist but he was the kind who lived as he believed and died doing it. He wished to destroy all authority and he lived practically all his life ignoring it. He was convinced that, right or wrong, one cannot be half a revolutionary and one should not cower before authority - for all that ever does is maintain it. No wonder, then, that he wrote things like the following:
“My principle is life and my end is death. I want to live my life intensely so that I can embrace my death tragically. You are waiting for the revolution! Very well! My own began a long time ago! When you are ready—God, what an endless wait!—it won’t nauseate me to go along the road awhile with you! But when you stop, I will continue on my mad and triumphant march toward the great and sublime conquest of Nothing!
Every society you build will have its fringes, and on the fringes of every society, heroic and restless vagabonds will wander, with their wild and virgin thoughts, only able to live by preparing ever new and terrible outbreaks of rebellion! I shall be among them! And after me, as before me, there will always be those who tell human beings: ‘So turn to yourselves rather than to your gods or idols: discover what is hidden within you, bring it to the light; reveal yourself!’ Because everyone who searches his inner being and draws out what is mysteriously hidden there, is a shadow eclipsing every form of Society that exists beneath the rays of the Sun!"
REST IN POWER RENZO NOVATORE!
[#]politics #anarchy
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“We are rebel poets and philosophers of destruction.
We are anarchists.
Iconoclasts!
Individualists,
atheists,
nihilists!
We are the carriers of black flags…
We rush beyond every system
We rush beyond every form
We fly toward the highest freedom
Toward extreme ANARCHY!…
We have killed the “duty” of solidarity, so that our free lust for spontaneous love and voluntary parenthood acquires a heroic value in life…
We need an epic and barbaric song of new and virgin life sounding over the world.
We are the carriers of blazing torches.
We are the kindlers of crackling pyres.
Our flag is black.
Our road is the infinite.
And our highest ideal is the peak and the abyss.
We walk on!…
We walk on…
And if our dream is an illusion?
And if our struggles are useless and vain? And if the renewal of humanity is impossible to accomplish?
Ah, no! We will walk on just the same.
For our own dignity.
For the love of our ideas.
For the freedom of our spirits.
For the passion of our minds.
For the necessity of our life.
Better to die as heroes in an effort of liberation and self-elevation than to vegetate as impotent cowards in this repugnant reality.
Oh black flags,
oh black trophies,
emblems and symbols
of eternal revolt.”
( Excerpts from "Black Flags" by Renzo Novatore)
[#]poetry #writing #politics #revolt #rebellion #anarchy #authenticity #trans #lgbtq #struggle
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IS THERE A BASIC SEXUALITY FROM WHICH THINGS DEVIATE?
It seems arbitrary to imagine so. But if one does imagine so, as sexologists and others have imagined for around 150 years now, then that can only have a massive influence on how people then think about sex just as, in the past, people imagined various sex acts or couplings to be sins against God which condemned one to eternal damnation. This concentration on how, the circumstances in which, people think about things is important for us to recognise in my context here for I am arguing it is actually the crucial context. A relatively benign example here is "exhibitionists" who like to be nude in public. Now I know of a middle-aged woman like this who simply likes to be naked in public [and to be seen naked in public]. She does not flaunt it in people's faces or use it in a threatening manner [although neither does she hide that she is very full breasted and has a big, round ass] and she is far from a "slut" who, because she likes to be nude, equates this with fucking everyone who shows an interest [which is a lot of men]. But she will use any opportunity to be naked in the garden or go for naked walks in the countryside or at the beach as, in her mind, simply a natural expression of her existence that is free from moral interpretation as she goes about minding her own business.
Now some people, under the influence of the Victorian and Edwardian sexologists and their thinking, might designate this person a type ["the exhibitionist"] and think of them as a pervert or deviant of some kind, someone who finds identity in their behaviour. Perhaps, they might go on to suggest, depending on how they view public nudity, she requires "treatment" for her behaviour. [In this she would almost certainly be treated more harshly and judgmentally if she happened to have a penis as this particular member seems to have been particularly demonised in modern sexual morality - and especially if viewed in public.] But why might we imagine that her behaviour is to be judged in the first place? Because most other people wear clothes and avoid nudity? Because most other people acquiesce in a belief that nudity in public is something to be ashamed of? Because there are laws against it? Why is this behaviour either criminally or medically suspect at all? It can, in the end, only be because of values people hold which lead to overbearing and authoritarian morals being deployed [or, as Nietzsche suggested, are morals which have been deployed in the past and are now functioning as impossible to question authorities] and to narratives of deviance and criminality being constructed. A world has been fictionally imagined and constructed through an apparatus of human relationships in order to control what goes on within it.
In my conversations with people, in person and online, about public nudity [which are relatively common due to my affinity for it] it is extremely rare that anyone can actually muster a coherent argument for why it is even looked down upon. The most common
reasons ["think of the children" and personal disgust] are extremely poor reasons which are easily shown up as the transparent covers for unjustifiable authoritarian morality that they really are. No one is harmed by someone else's simple nudity [least of all children who don't even mark it out as noteworthy unless some censorious adult teaches them to despise nakedness as morally suspect] as they go about their business so there is no basis for a legal, moral or medical case to be built against it. And yet here we are, in a world where nudity will have you arrested and imprisoned [if not worse] in various places around the globe and branded, certainly by some, as filthy or licentious or "sex-obsessed" as if its impossible to uncouple the naked human body from sexual conquest or interpretation. In such a scenario, who is the one with the "sick" mind here who needs treatment for their condition, the nudist minding their own business or the herd who pronounce it as sexually provocative and deviant?
(from "The Sexual Imagination: Science, Fiction and Anarchy" by this author)
[#]sex #lgbtq
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CIVILISATION AND NIHILISM
“We heat our pen in the volcanic fire of our negating spirit. We dip it in our vigorous heart, full of rebellious blood. And in the atheistic light of our mind, we write and write…
So we write, quickly, without literary pursuits, without repugnant theoretical ideologies, without bigoted and sentimental mush from hysterics and political hacks, wrapped only in the cloak of our raging passions. We write only words of blood, fire, and light.
My rough, fiery, energetic pen creaks and scrapes over the white purity of this page, like a viper’s tongue over the tender throat of an innocent baby, giving it death, through poison.
Away, away from me, all ideologies, theosophies, dogmatic and political philosophies; far from me, all pre-established systems: everything has fallen and burned to ashes in the corroding flame of my negating spirit.
I am the complete nihilist, the radical atheist.
I did not just now find out, I did not just now discover and come to know that the one and only most beautiful framework within which proud human Individuality stands out free, solemn, and magnificent is Nothing, the true Nothing!” (Renzo Novatore)
One imagines this could be a terrifying vision to the civilised human being, locked, as they are, into “civilisation” as both material reality and as ideal. But not “the complete nihilist”. They experience this only as a prison, as a barrier to truly creative and free life. To be told where to go and what to do and how to be is to have your autonomy and agency countermanded and denied. You can have the wilderness or the tended garden. But you cannot have both. That image will strike the civilised as a strange one for they will imagine the tended garden, with its borders, trimmed grass and hedges, and serried rows, as preferable. And thus will they give away their utter domestication and their alienation from wild, vital life. No flower looks more beautiful and more vital than that which grows where it will rather than where it is forced to grow, unnaturally, in a bed or row. Life needs no help. It simply needs to be left alone. ”Civilisation” is coercion. "Civilisation" is unfree.
[#]politics #anarchy #nihilism
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Black Dog is an in-depth attempt to describe and argue for a more sexual politics as a type of anarchy. Drawing on modern politics in regard to sex and gender, anthropological research in regard to how people have lived and organised themselves around the world and the political model of pirates, a case is made for a politics of agency, autonomy and free association based on a new understanding of sex as "cooperative promiscuity", a return to the ancient relations of our species that have been destroyed by a modern and "civilised" turn to forms of authoritarianism, political, economic and moral.
Download for free or read online at:
https://archive.org/details/black-dog_202403
[#]politics #anarchy #sex
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PUBLIC NUDITY / SEX DISCUSSION
I was watching a little documentary about porn producers last night. They specialised in solo female public nudity. I was infuriated to learn that, even though they basically did guerrilla filming in the streets and in parks, they were obsessed about not being accidentally seen by kids. It was hard to tell if this was a personal obsession or more to do with public hysteria around sex. (Of course, these overlap.)
What's going to happen to someone under 18 years old if they see nudity? Corrupted for life? Unable to function? What's going to happen if they stumble across sexuality being filmed? Might they learn something exists the adults don't want them to find out?
This attitude infuriates me BECAUSE IT IS EXACTLY THE ATTITUDE THAT PUTS KIDS IN DANGER. Why puts them in danger? Because acting as if no one under 18 has a sexuality or a naked body is not educating them about who and what both they and we all are. And it gives them no framework or context in which to process what they are almost certain to see and experience anyway. The sad and horrifying reality of the sexual abuse of under 18s is massively fuelled by the fact that talking to anyone under 18 about sex (let alone letting them see it) is hugely anathematised by puritanical adults leading to a climate of fear and taboo WHICH HELPS NO ONE AND MAKES UNDER 18s MORE VULNERABLE.
It does not help non-adults to keep them ignorant. But it does make them easier prey for sexual predators and opportunists and it does fuck society up generally in regard to how it deals with sex. And the fact is - hopefully you are not learning this for the first time - a human being does not have the sexuality function switched off up until 17 years 364 days but it gets magically switched on at 18 years. Sending sexually uneducated young adults out into the the world does not strike me as mature behaviour. No wonder so many people have abuse stories to tell and sex seems to become something purely about exploitation.
[#]sex #porn #education
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