i am disabled just enough to be in a dilemma.

interpersonal trauma, audhd burnout and immunodefficiency don’t mean i can’t do anything or that i can’t even be as ‘productive’ *over time* as other people. what it means is that:

• i can’t give them ass-in-chair for 8 hours every day;
• my shortterm ‘performance’ cannot be consistent or predictable enough for the boss;
• i can never succeed at the day-to-day drudgework; and
• i can never be a ‘culture fit’ in any workplace.

it’s not that i can’t do anything; it’s that i lack the appearances of profitability.

despite huge past professional successes in complex projects: i am unemployable.

so instead i work a fulltime job with overtime researching my condition, my rights and the local law — filling out paperwork and attending a dozen appointments every month where i answer the same 20 humiliating and condescending questions over and over again, too exhausted to care for myself inbetween — just to keep the disability compensation flowing in. and in every meeting, my ‘giftedness’ and all those times where i was successful are used to clobber me and argue that i’m just being ‘lazy’. i’m never given any treatment, because the healthcare system has been balkanized into poverty by privatisation and New Public Management, and they’ve tried nothing and they’re all out of ideas.

i find time once or twice a month to study, on my own, with pirated courses and books. and the opensource projects i contribute to, and the organising work i scrape up spoons for, and the mutual aid and legal help i give to my disabled comrades, are things i still do. but i have to do them under aliases, and i can’t ever discuss them with anyone who knows me, because if the welfare office finds out: i can end up imprisoned, indebted and permanently marked for ‘welfare fraud’. because part of the deal of being disabled is that i can only be disabled.

no studies; no parttime; no volunteering; no activism. all because of the way i was born, and because i had the audacity to barely survive two separate attempts by politicians to sacrifice my demographics to Moloch. i know several other people in this same Kafkaësque hellworld.

how am i not supposed to end up radicalised?

there’s a bot that will do this for you over on lemmy.world. i think you’d like it better over there.

signed out, cleared cookies and cache, restarted browser, signed back in: same issue when in a new tab.

this is the type of comment i want to leave any time someone praises a scandinavian country for almost anything.

the image of the nordics most people outside of them have is from 40 years ago.

We produce 1000 times the food we need.

no, we don’t.

You’ve taken a roundabout way to tell me that mass adoption of veganism […] has nothing to do with our economic system.

no, i didn’t.

(literally the only way to save this planet)

no, it isn’t.

The only […] solution that can support our absurd population is […] tech advancements bordering on magic

no, it isn’t.

Lying is ugly. […] It is trivial to prove. Open Google.

says the person who cannot read, ignores sources, puts words in other people’s mouths, and makes simplistic, baseless, harmful assertions.

To feed the billions of sentient animals that are tortured to death each year in factory farms. Do you have any idea how sustainable that is?

i — a vegan — and the two sources i provided advocate for sustainable plant-based diets, and point to the systemic economic obstacles: agribusiness lobbying; little to no farmer control; subsidised incentives and poor farmers’ dependence on these subsidies; and severe economic and political inequality.

to quote another vegan in this thread who you’ve insulted:

for every animal I don’t eat, a billionaire throws a meat party and goes hunting for exotic animals. Again, why are you blaming me? Even if I ate meat every meal I wouldn’t come close in a year to doing as much damage as a billionaire does in a day. So again, stop telling me about it and go after them.

you’re arguing for a vote-with-your-wallet approach, which ignores conspicuous consumption, ignores the plight of the lower classes, and greatly favours the wealthy elite and the state (who can always outbid you). this is not to say we shoudn’t change (our) individual behaviour, but that it cannot be the sole solution, and that there are systemic changes which would boost mass adoption of sustainable choices.

i once again point you to my book suggestion, the concept of superstructures, and to the responses to your last malthusian tangents.

if you have anything else to say: tell it to a mirror.

Given that the environmental depredation of this planet is driven by […] can people explain why they believe that without capitalism

capitalist industry and commerce have been the driving force of the mass extinction of the last 500 years[0][1][2]. climate change didn’t begin until the late 1800s with the rise of tycoons, and accelerated with mass production in the mid-1900s.

for a current example: datacentres are wasting entire regional electricity and water supplies on investment grifter bullshit. because it makes money. it doesn’t even turn a real profit, and it’s not everyday people paying for it.

can people explain why they believe that without capitalism everyone would be […]

could be, not necessarily would. because a humanistic, socialised means of production would: allow for truly ‘democratic’ control over what is produced; remove nested interests and subsidies to overgrown polluting industries[3]; and make alternatives viable without the need to bend or break to top-down market pressures and monetary policy dictated by dragons.

I also assume they’re wearing hemp and have no interest in fashion.

capitalism has existed for less than 300 years. consumerism has existed for less than 100 years. when you have an economic system which emphasises the independent individual — simultaneously a motivator and a mere cog in the machine — and posits that the mere potential to own things is the source of value: buying wasteful, exotic, unnecessary shit is a way to define yourself and your status. it’s called conspicuous consumption, and it happens from the micro to the macro in the lower and the upper classes, and there’s top-down pressure to do so to keep currency current.

i recommend the documentary The Century of the Self for an overview of the commodification of identity and culture.

Keep in mind there are 8 billion people on this planet, so presumably they wouldn’t be having children either.

we are already producing enough food to sufficiently feed 1.5x the world population[4], and could continue to do so even within planetary boundaries[5] with changes to economic policy and the adoption of less profitable methods of agriculture.

i didn’t cover everything here, because i recommend:

1. the book Less Is More.
2. familiarising yourself with the concept of the superstructure; it’s a very helpful analytical tool.
3. going back to the last time you were on your malthusian debatebro bullshit and really trying to engage your imagination with much of the same arguments made there.

i believe they’re @ing you because they’re posting from Mastadon.

La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.

— Anatole France, Le Lys rouge

not the GP, but i did voice frustrations that were probably uncalled for.

i resonated with the image after this specific comment:

[…] assuming that all people are not going to be petty and antagonistic is even more utopian that post-scarcity.

this brought to mind thousands of conversations i’ve had before which would have effectively ended there — with the words ‘utopian’, ‘idealist’ or ‘unrealistic’.

OP got some good answers which they seem satisfied with. this was all a reaction to the state of the discussion at the time.

I get that anarchists probably get tired of answering questions, but it also seems like an important part of getting people who aren’t already 100% onboard to better understand anarchy?

i think this works best thru sharing anarchistic (not specifically anarchist) books (to add perspective), and praxis (to experience/internalise anarchist organising principles).

hypotheticals can be amusing among likeminds, but it’s usually just deconstructive otherwise.

in most places i’ve lived, my physical neighbours did not want to be known, and did not want to know anyone else, either. granted, most of them really only used their apartments/houses as a very expensive sleeping place and nothing more. they didn’t really live in their houses; it was just where they usually slept between working.

even when the neighbours were friendly, there were no common spaces and the housing too small to accommodate get-togethers, and no third places to go to. and the friendly neighbours were always apart of the conspicuously racist pensioner cabal.

as Cowbee wrote: the ‘free market’ narrative assumes the market is participatory, and that you can simply opt out (‘go live in the woods’).

but capitalism doesn’t work without a labour market, and the labour market isn’t stable without a buffer of un[der]employment. so living outside the market — and general ‘propertylessness’ — is criminalised or made so inconvenient/unsustainable that you’re left with ‘the choice’ between peonage or starvation. the people who fall into homelessness and houselessness serve as a warning to anyone who might consider ‘opting out’.

i don’t think anyone genuinely believes this is a real choice, but i’ve experienced this narrative being used to dismiss critiques of capitalism and wage slavery.

what does this have to do with houseless people?

my two favourite types of questions from nonanarchists:

• ‘how would anarchism handle [insert consequence of capitalist conditioning]’
• ‘how would anarchism work in [insert description of a group of capitalists]’

you can’t reject the premise of the question, because their eyes gloss over and they call you an idealist.

All the time spent thinking how to solve a problem is also work.

try telling that to every manager i’ve ever had.

tell you that violence is a terrible thing that can never be excused or condoned.

aha! but they say violence has no place in the so-called United States (if you ignore wage slavery, prison labour, the police, and the entire capitalist system). violence overseas always serves their interests, until it doesn’t.

checkmate tankie /s

i think it would be more symbolic to extend the rainbow peace flag over it.

growing up, the most common ‘counterargument’ (read: dismission) to ‘global warming’ i heard was ‘great, i love summer!’

i had to become a singer before i had the lung capacity to sigh hard enough.

I’m not disagreeing, but it seems to me I’ve known of white supremacist groups that do want other races to exist, but as subjugated classes.

not OP, but at least in Europe the raceless racist trope is more common, particularly among liberals. in one breath they’ll say that the concept of race is pseudoscience (true), but then conclude that this means racialisation doesn’t happen (uhhh). then in that same breath they’ll say that people from Muslim countries are destructive radicals who are ‘incompatible’ with European culture, which is almost neo-racist, until you realise that they don’t know what a ‘Muslim’ ‘looks’ like, and that in practise it’s ‘anyone with dark hair and/or a von Luschan index higher than 20’.

it’s not that they want to subjugate brown people: it’s that they wish they had never existed, and that they could never see them again. but the people they vote for to accomplish this do want to subjugate brown people.

before you know it: the group of ‘incompatibles’ has grown to encompass 2/3 of the world’s population by hair colour and skin index alone, and antisemitism is back on the table. but they believe in nonviolent democracy and the ‘rule of law’ and eat organic so it’s ok.

sidenote: this is why a lot of far-right supremacist groups in Europe tend(ed) to be more about (national) ethnicity than race. historically, even people from neighbouring countries were parasitic ‘others’ to be corralled and expelled.

Did you look for a nest or another bird in the original shrub?

i didn’t see anything in the bush at first glance. i tried to see if it was leading me somewhere, but it didn’t seem like it. i didn’t want to stress them out by approaching them too quickly or digging thru the bush.

they did seem very small, so it’s possible they don’t know how to feed themself. it’s not too far, so i can try checking on them sometime soon. i don’t want to invade their home, tho.

my guess is it was trying to get you to help one of its friends or something.

that was my first guess, but it didn’t seem like it was leading me anywhere.

i’m a little worried now.

I’d have had a good search around the area befriending crows can actually bring you some benifit like shiny gifts

when i was homeless, i shared my food with a crow. i got them to bring me coins by feeding them double portions when they brought monies.

or in some cases crow bodyguards as they actually recognise individuals as friends etc.

that’s my current relationship to the corvids in town. a long time ago i rescued a magpie from two seagulls, and since then all the corvids no longer fly away when i come near them. the magpies even defended me from a seagull one day!

but they otherwise don’t approach me, and we don’t ‘communicate’.