cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27372186

Rudolf Rocker (1873 - 1958)

Tue Mar 25, 1873

Image: **

Johann Rudolf Rocker, born on this day in 1873, was an anarchist theorist, historian, and activist, known for critical anarchist texts such as "Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice" (1938) and "Pioneers of American Freedom" (1949).

Though often described as an anarcho-syndicalist, Rocker was a self-professed anarchist without adjectives, believing that anarchist schools of thought represented "only different methods of economy" and that the first objective for anarchists was "to secure the personal and social freedom of men".

Rocker was involved in helping organize a number of labor strikes and represented the federation at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907. Rocker was well-read in his lifetime - his readers included figures Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Herbert Read, and Bertrand Russell.

"Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order, as it has so often been called, since on principle it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts."

- Rudolf Rocker

• Date: 1873-03-25
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, libcom.org, theanarchistlibrary.org.
• Tags: #Birthdays, #Anarchism.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

This is another thing that was lost in the torrent of executive orders, that I now think it might require some closer attention.

Like Greenland and Canada were initially treated as typical Trump dementia, but we see there is more and more to them, and news keep getting back at these topics.

We see that the anti-Christian bias thing pops up in places. And we can bet it stems from deep places within the Christian Nationalists in the Heritage Foundation Trump team sent questions to international researchers funded by the US, asking (among others), whether they work to combat Christian persecution

Previously, Trump issued an EO to "eradicate" anti-Christian bias. This is also in line with some fundamentalist Christian views that LGBT visibility and acceptance is a personal attack to them and their faith.

There is a plethora of ways this can go wrong, not only in the extreme forms of oppression these fundamentalists are after, but also in overt state sponsored violence against the LGBT and other groups who work within a religious tolerant framework, eg the Unitarians, and constitutional protections of freedom of religion - for non-Christians of course.

Why are the two worst crimes in the US: (a) vandalizing a Tesla and (b) protesting at a liberal arts college?

The left is getting killed on the trans sports issue [^1] [^2]

Do you have any data backing this? And what analysis goes with the data?

Don't let me be misunderstood: Rights are not defined by majorities, otherwise you could have a white majority voting on the humanity of black people, and wolves voting on the right of sheep not to be eaten.

On the other hand, the public's views are heavily conditioned by misanthropic, anti-democratic propaganda, that shifts the window of acceptable discourse, and excludes people from a set of fundamental freedoms that cisgender people take for granted. As a consequence, the ubiquitous genocidal discourse against trans lives, if left unchecked leads (and this is by now not a prediction but a historical fact) to erosion of rights of women, blacks, indigenous, disabled, and every other citizen. Because these freedoms are not "special" to trans people, but are mere extension of legal scholarship and the rule of law. The ongoing American fascism is not an overreach of "legitimate concerns" but it is profoundly, structurally embedded in challenging the legitimacy of trans people. This is why TERFism was initially deemed "unworthy of respect" by British courts: because it goes against TONS of legal precedent.

Long story short, in the times of "Der Stürmer" you could have said that the majority of German did not think Jews should be married to Germans. So what? So much for the argument that we should sacrifice human rights of ANY group because they are unpopular.

ALL protections exist so that UNPOPULAR groups enjoy the rights that the majorities take for granted. Outside that logic there is only fascism.

It is much like segregation (which, surprise, is coming back again) and apartheid: The Feelings of uneasy white people sharing bathrooms and sports with black people, are of no importance whatsoever, because, simply, segregation is dehumanizing and unjust.

By extension, what you suggest is morally corrupt and inhumane, and it is deeply fascist in its very conception.

Now, we are arriving at the data. Bear with me.

You people hand-wave a fucking lot when you suggest that trans rights are so unpopular that they have lost you elections, when there have been multiple arguments that Democrats barely touched on the topic, apart from being loosely against killing trans people in pogroms and LUKEWARM at that. So your argument amounts to little more than "Fascist discourse is more trendy so let's do that instead", which is not JUST the Ratchet effect: it is "being complicit to actual genocide".

So you HAND-WAVE about an IMAGINARY regular person (who is that fucking nazi?) to whom we must bow under all circumstances? Fuck that populist tactics, and fucking educate people.

But does this IMAGINARY nazi-enabling regular Joe even exist?

And what studies you cite for him not being able to revise being a shit person

Views differ even more widely along party lines. For example, eight-in-ten Democrats say they favor laws or policies that would protect trans individuals from discrimination, compared with 48% of Republicans. Conversely, by margins of about 40 percentage points or more, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to express support for laws or policies that would do each of the following: require trans athletes to compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth (85% of Republicans vs. 37% of Democrats favor); make it illegal for health care professionals to provide someone younger than 18 with medical care for a gender transition (72% vs. 26%); make it illegal for public school districts to teach about gender identity in elementary schools (69% vs. 18%); require transgender individuals to use public bathrooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth (67% vs. 20%); and investigate parents for child abuse if they help someone younger than 18 get medical care for a gender transition (59% vs. 17%).

Which is from Pew which others like you like to point to as a general "trans rights unpopular with our voter base", but if you actually read you will see that you can even find a small percentage of Republicans that are not vehemently against trans rights. And let's not forget that the percentage of Democrats against trans rights would be very much different if Democrat's media outlets weren't fucking complicit in amplifying genocidal "gender critical" misanthropy, and there weren't a score of fucking "leftist" intellectuals adopting their talk points, when there was ZERO voice given to the marginalized trans scholarship. So, this consent you talk to is manufactured by complicit Democrats to start with.

You would not make this argument unless you wanted to appeal to the Republican voter base, but doing so only shows that it is voter trends that guide your politics and not principles, and in fact, you are willing to enable crimes against humanity to appeal to a fascist voter base. This is unscrupulous and misanthropic.

Instead of succumbing to extremely well-funded racist and nazi propaganda, a principled political advocate with such means and resources as the Democrats could help alleviate what is a systematic attack to decent society and inclusive democracy. Therefore, your advocacy ultimately paints the Democrats as a manufactured opposition, and essentially a fascist party, once it does not stand for human rights, as it never were.

Centrists should be actively considered agitator agents for fascism at this point. Like, have you clowns even considered that your voter base might want you to grow a fucking spine and stand up for human rights, with trans rights front and center? Because I only see your democratic voter base being alienated by your flirt with fascism.

[^1]: In the original response, this "Trigger Warning" was prepended Trigger Warning: Get a pack of Kleenex and load your favorite Daily Wire playlists to have handy, because this is not going to be a light read for a self-proclaimed intelligent centrist.

[^2]: The discussion in question: https://lemmy.ml/post/27381625 , and the comment in question: https://lemmy.ml/post/27381625/17379633

The authors hit out at a “growing portrayal of protesters as alleged threats to democracy rather than a vital part of public participation.”

Two major Acts of Parliament – the Police Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 – have “changed the legal landscape” for protest drastically over the past few years.

Site with Google Translate https://inicijativa-org.translate.goog/clanci/398/novi-sajt-anarhosindikalisticke-inicijative/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US

This thoughts were inspired by https://lemmy.ml/post/26866136 (Warning: go straight to the human curated translation in the comments.)

TL;DR Think-tanks with unlimited resources use different techniques to game social media algorithms. They are consistently pushing towards racist pseudoscience and Nazism. EU has the legal frameworks to stop targeted advertisement and hate speech, and the time to do is now. The consequences if it doesn't are dire.

1

There are just to many think-tanks. It was only recently that the Heritage Foundation made news, but it was too late, wasn't it? Heritage has been around for many years, playing the field of fringe religious communities, and field-testing its policies overseas.

What most people fail to realize is that Heritage is a drop of an ocean of think-tanks, which are a mostly invisible power of political influence. And this raises the question, how the fuck are these foundations so well-funded, seemingly having unlimited resources. Well, who the fuck can even have this type of unlimited resources?

Many think-tanks have been active for decades in climate skepticism, and this provides perhaps the more familiar mind map to understand their operation. They are funding intellectuals, politicians, journalists. They organize seminars, publish books, make podcasts, all from behind the curtains. They have huge lists with public relation contacts.

Keywords and talking points from think-tanks find their way to every medium of mass communication in the Western world. This is not even a modern problem. This used to be a problem twenty years ago. Think-tanks have more tools and more powers today.

Let's not forget christian fundamentalists. This is a momentary interjection, to remind you that those were fringe creeps that stalked women outside abortion centers, held their own little cultish events. The fundamentalist modus operandi influenced to a degree the TERF movements, with impromptu entryist demos about bathroom bans. And then there were the Nazis, always lurking around, and waiting to usurp spaces and communities, such as video games and anonymous networks.

All three of them were fringe, marginalized weirdoes, until recently. What the fuck changed?

2

We stand on a time point where we realize that the grim reality of our global politics has been influenced by an invisible, powerful player with zero oversight: Think tanks.

We can't understand how the deceptively grassroots facade of fringe movements came to the mainstream. We are witnessing a power takeover by Gamergater 4-chan flavor Nazi incels, nutjob christian nationalists, and oil companies.

Some knew that think tanks were shifting the goalposts of public discourse. Aaron Schwartz had realized and wrote a couple articles about it: By scraping and analyzing climate change journal articles he came about to the conclusion that think tanks also manufacture consent about affirmative action and racial determinism.

People who say that Aaron would be a free-speech absolutist if alive are not only utterly oblivious about his progressive politics (he worked with Elizabeth Warren), but also with regard to “free-speech” being a modern Nazi dogwhistle for “race realism”, ie racism. The same race science promoted by such figures as Chris Rufo and Peter Bogoshian, who turned out to be funded by Danish white supremacist Emil O. W. Kirkegaard.

In case you don't remember, Chris Rufo's first successful propaganda project for the Republicans was a “critical race theory” outrage. This campaign revolved around motivating angry mobs of white people against the idea that “all whites are racist”.

Rufo boasted that he had "changed the meaning of the term" completely, and projected on CRT "everything Americans hate". He set out to repeat the successful experiment with "gender ideology", shifting the meaning of "transgender" to sexualizing children or exposing children to "pornography". Only willful ignorance or outright nazism can prevent seeing the Nazi undertones of this blatant propaganda at this point.

3

It is an old Nazi trick to claim to be the victim of racism against whites. But the issue here is quantity, not quality. The critical race theory became huge, and it was one of the major pillars of Ron DeSantis early politics in Florida. It was also a test-case for the outbreak of “template legislation” we now witness with anti-trans bills.

It is easy to put the blame on public figures like Elon Musk, but it is also a premise to let him be the fall guy, the “excessive tormentor”, a scapegoat that will justify the system.

I tend to believe, no matter how much I despise Musk and deplore everything he stands for, that he is a fine example of the orchestrated Nazi radicalization process that happens online, with the funding of think-tanks, and the power of social media algorithms.

Musk probably fell into the rabbit hole by some anti-trans entry point, while obsessively scrolling during COVID, or even while possibly plausibly “researching” about his trans daughter. Can't we assume the same happened with Rowling? Katherine Cross makes an argument that Rowling's radicalization happened entirely within Twitter.

What we see with Musk, we see with thousands of white males online. It is the algorithms-gamed-by-think-tanks that have this effect. They might also have targeted billionaires to endorse their “cause”, in the first place. For obvious reasons, made now more obvious by chain-saw brandishing racists.

Starting out with being politically incorrect edgelords only to move on to adopting “national socialism” as a legitimate political ideology. Or starting out as Jordan Peterson fanboy incels, and by way of “evolutionary psychology” pseudoscience, delve deeper into “masculinist” criticism of “matriarchy”.

4

Virtually every asshole you hate in the present day has big think-tanks bucks backing them, their tours, their books, their podcasts, their interviews. And a huge network of media outlets that provide visibility and legitimacy. It was not long ago when a right-wing commentator explained how this works: a nazi will tweet something, Elon Musk will quote, Carlson Tucker will report, Fox will amplify it, and Joe Rogan will bring in some one to provide a “reasonable”, if not “unorthodox”, or “politically incorrect” account of it.

In a matter of hours, millions of people will have adopted, well, Nazi takes, as absolute facts of nature.

Don't forget what politically incorrect originally, and inherently means: Racist. Don't let slip that Nazism was primarily a racist movement, as it construed Jews as a “race”. Don't forget that Nazi-funded Peter Bogoshian was among the earliest contemporary commentators to accuse “liberal universities” of imposing a “religious-like orthodoxy” against “minority conservative opinions”. Well, it ...kinda was about race?

It was about fucking racism. As Aaron Schwartz had pointed out, right wing think tanks move the goal posts. Two decades ago the anthropologist concensus that there is only one human race went down without any objections. “Race realism” was hand-down considered debunked pseudoscience. Now we have these people in government who want to breakdown on universities with figurative chain-saws, in order to “save civilization”. (They mean white supremacy, duh.)

5

You may have noticed that these people are also seething climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, anti-vegan, and huge transphobic bigots? These are all orchestrated campaigns, gaming the social media algorithms with solid funding and coordination. You know how it is constantly reported that social media push right wing bias?

Well, we can't know if it is the algorithms themselves, or think tanks are paying huge numbers of agents to feint engagement, or they use bots, or make sponsorship deals with social media companies. They might as well employ all those tactics together. We know that the think tank talking points were there in 2016, and 2018, and 2021, and they were never properly moderated. Especially the targeting and vilification of queer people was stunning, reflecting genuine Christian Nationalist doublespeak, eg conflating homosexuality with “pornography”.

Think tanks embraced gamers-cum-incels-cum-nazis, christian nationalists, TERFs, and gamed the algorithms, pushing the most backward, unscientific, and hateful vitriol, and leading to the ongoing, racist-theocratic “cultural revolution”, that if not strangled in its cradle right now, will set the West back not 50 but two- or -three hundred years back, and lead humanity to atrocities and barbarism we were raised to believe was only a disturbing chapter of history books.

They are already pushing for making being trans illegal, by way of "identity fraud" or "sex offense". We all know that if they say they make it a capital offense nobody will even be surprised. The US Bible Belt might be a lost cause for human rights. But for Europe there is still time.

6

Europe is at a critical crossroads, to enforce and extend its Digital Markets and AI-Acts. Behavioral advertising technology applied to political propaganda is a terror, and leads to terror. It leaves voters and consumers, heck, it leaves whole societies helpless in an asymmetrical war of consent manufacturing, which leads to real violence, as Charlottevile has shown, as the rise in anti-trans hate-crime has shown, as the Southport riots in England have shown. Don't be fooled by the coverage: these riots were orchestrated by the far right very deliberately, and were influenced by racist think-tanks like New Culture Forum.

Europe still has time to take action. The Nazis made a fatal mistake: Concealing their true colors got them so far, they got the US government. But they were so wildly enthusiastic about it they dropped the act. Now Europe knows that it is, once again, fighting Nazis. And, in sharp contrast with the US, where Nazism is an abstract idea, Europeans know that humanity and civilization is at stake because of this repelling, murderous, sick-to-the-bone racist ideology.

Appendix 1

We have talked about this recently. Here is why Big Social platforms can't be protected by free speech laws.

• Hosting a platform with millions or billions of users.
• Exploiting algorithms that mine sensitive data to an invasive degree.
• Control the flow of information, to a very granular degree of precision.
• Experimentally collecting behavioral data in response to said control of information.
• Modeling user’s life expectancy, sexual orientation, political beliefs, consumer patterns, terminal illnesses.
• Selling said data and model outputs to private insurance companies as well as police states.
• Addicting users to withdraw from real life, and get hooked to their screen where they can happily serve the company for data mining.

I hardly think that any of the above should be gauged by the standards of individual rights to free speech. Even corporate entities viewed as individuals with a right to free speech. This is something else entirely, and whoever owns it, out of whichever country must have their ass regulated off. Even harder than the EU did. Operations of this type and size should be eventually dismantled. They are inherently antisocial, corporatist, and totalitarian in their conception and daily function. Sometime ago I started a discussion about the “Role of Attrition” in the effort to dismantle Big Social enterprises

Appendix 2

I don't think hate-speech is free-speech. I think that hate-speech is slander against whole groups of people on the basis of protected, immutable traits. By protecting hate-speech, democracies provide its worst enemies the tools they need to dismantle democracy (Joseph fucking Goebbels said that).

As for moderation in Meta/X, here are the thoughts from a recent discussion:

Nazism is explicitly deemed unworthy of respect in some legal systems, like Germany or the UK. MAGAs, white supremacists, and alt-righters are objectively too close to nazism, therefore their opinions are unworthy of respect to start with. There is also the paradox of intolerance. If you let these people in, to respect their opinion, they will take over and deprive people of the right to live. They don’t play by tolerant society’s rules, so they they don’t get tolerated.

The value is having a society that is tolerant of diversity of opinion. Here is the opinion of the scientific consensus on transgender people, which is have been so for years, if not decades. We have been harassed, bullied, doxxed, and banned for bringing those up in all major social media platforms. TERFs, white supremacists, misogynists, racists, have always gotten away in these platforms with punching down on leftists, African and Caribbean reparations activists, feminists, and queer people. They were protected by equally bigoted moderators under the guise of entitlement to their opinion, at the same time that all these other opinions are bashed and framed as “overstepping”. This is in line with what the EFF and Techdirt, which are both vocal First Amendment absolutists, have already said that what X and Facebook do now is in fact amplifying hate speech and effectively suppressing the free speech of gender and sexual minorities. And this has been the situation for years, take for example the online harassment of feminists . It is a deeply systemic bias, due to centrist indoctrination in broader society, that it is the leftist and inclusive spaces that are called out for lack of diversity for responding to harassment and bigotry, when the voices and lives of people are simply dominated and evacuated in major platforms without an iota of moderation and responsiveness to punch-down harassment. Let alone that in the light of the most recent developments, which consolidates the above tendencies, makes the timing of the tolerance argument even more ironic and dishonest.

The New Culture Forum (NCF) is a think tank founded by nationalist UKIP politician Peter Whittle.

The video in question is an interview with KCL war and "fortifications" specialist David Betz, who forecasts civil war outbreaks in the Western world, and praises Hungary as an island of sanity.

The amount of racist violent rhetoric in the comments is disturbing, and the chosen topic of a civil war, is not a good look for the supporters of these ideas. Long story short, there are numerous people in the comments seething to shed blood because they don't like seeing brown people in their midst.

The comments echo the aftermath of the widespread far-right anti-immigrant riots last August in England and Northern Ireland. The comment section reeks of the white supremacist Great Replacement theory.

Whittle's NCF seems to be embedded in an ecosystem of consent manufacturing right-wing, fossil fuel lobbying think tanks, active in the UK, and linked to conservative politicians.

For context, it was recently reported that Musk showed an interest to interfere in British far-right politics.

We can at least conclude that there are some powerful consent manufacturing apparatuses at play in England, and an invigorated far-right dynamic and anti-immigrant sentiment.

This is some scary stuff.

Shady actors like these do not pour their money in a Western democracy for no good reason, and it is only plausible that some shit is going down in a country where the political weaponization of trans people by the conservative party, has led to an early implementation of the anti-transgender health policy legislation now considered central in the US fascist takeover.

From the original post:

In far-right ruled Hungary's court trial against antifascist Maja T. continued today where Maja is accused of assaulting Nazis during Nazi-event, a speech by Maja facing 14 years imprisonment for antifascism, while about 200 flags-touting Nazis were gathered outside the court.

Ιf Canada is erased, there is an uninterrupted region linking Russia to the entirety of North America, except, well, Greenland.

“Oh come on, Trump is an idiot bully, who doesn't understand cooperation, only coercion. He doesn't realize his approach is actually harming US Economy.”

Or, does he?

“Canada erasure” is a take on recent Trump's trade-war on Canada, argues Drew Wilson

I am in no position to know Trump's true plans, nor read his mind. What I do know is that in the past we have been fooled by his apparent dumbassery.

We underestimated him. Some of the shit he spews are well thought-out plans coming from well-funded think-tanks.

The Heritage Foundation is one. It is not the only one. A Nazi eugenicist fund was revealed last week, as an incubator of his anti-DEI, and anti-gender politics. You bet there is more.

This Nature paper from Justin Farrel reveals a convoluted graph of meddling between anti-climate think-tanks and American media. And this is just scratching the surface.

Can we agree that there are heavily funded think-tanks shaping policy and public consent of a broad range of topics?

We also have good reasons to believe Trump is a Russian asset. As Orban is.

The whole saga of Trumps blackmail against Ukraine, and its recent culmination in the White House is only supplemented by the actual investigative journalism on Trump being poached as early as 1987.

As with all other things Trump, at this point, not seeing that is either willful ignorance, or sth else. In any case, in a couple months, we will be right about this one as well.

Don't tell me you weren't taken aback by the swift spread of the anti-DEI thing. Just like Tik-Tok was adopted at an unprecedented rate compared to Facebook, the DEI acronym spread way faster than “woke”, “critical race theory”, and “political correctness”, COMBINED.

Why is the rate different? Because of the network of right-wing media becoming more and more coherent and inter-connected.

Nothing Trump does is an accident. His withdrawal from the climate summit and the World Health Organization was not an accident.

The argument so far is that Trump is an asset for an ultra-conservative, well-resourced, human crap actor networks, one of which is possibly Russia.

Many things that Trump says are the product of a well-funded public-relations work of think-tanks, who are in turn propaganda organizations paid to reach foregone conclusions, and were initially created by the military-industrial complex.

I have entertained Drew Wilson's theory of Canada-erasure, and assumed that Trump's ramblings are consequential and meaningful. I have also assumed that Trump is a mouthpiece for the actors that are behind the ludicrous funding of the propaganda apparatus. I therefore deem the question reasonable, who stands to gain from a possible Canada annexation, and why.

Siberia is adjacent to the US at the Bering Sea. This happens because the US owns Alaska. If Canada ceases to be a sovereign state in North America, there will be an uninterrupted block of land from the Russian border on Finland to the US border with Mexico.

If Greenland is similarly annexed, and Trump plays on Putin's side, the whole Arctic Circle will be surrounded. By Russia.

Russia also controls Europe with energy. There is something sexy up there, be it natural gas or fossil fuels. Also, things change quickly up there due to global warming. The future Arctics might provide opportunities we don't dare think about. The bastards might know something we know not.

On the other hand, we can be certain that climate change will lay the Global South to waste in the decade to come.

“Real estate for billionaires in the Arctics will be a riot in ten years time, Vlad”, a post-coital Trump might have whispered.

It is plausible, although entirely speculative, that some people have more complete information than us, and they could be making moves to secure their position in global power ranks in the next two decades.

Alternatively, the ruling class might be complete buffoons who don't think the NASA and the rest of climate and meteorological science is credible. I doubt the alternative.

https://www.newsweek.com/norway-news-intelligence-nato-china-arctic-military-research-russia-svalbard-2038550

https://www.newsweek.com/nato-russia-arctic-north-pole-2037200

geteilt von: https://lemmy.ml/post/26343289

In order to understand oppression as a subconscious thing, let's take a couple of examples.

Many women complain that they express an idea that is immediately dismissed, only for a man to be cheered for saying the exact same thing, minutes later.

I have witnessed time and again a woman pointing to the correct explanation or solution for a bug and a man just ignoring her repeatedly, only to exhaust all other solutions before arriving to the same conclusion and solution.

There is a ton of lab research to show this goes beyond anecdotal evidence. Some researchers recently showed that for the same length of speech, women speakers were judged as being overtaking the dialog.

In fact, the balance that the average listener gauged as fair was 70% male speech vs 30% female speech. Don't get me started about bias of doctors, not only against women and transgender people, but, let's face the elephant in the room, black people.

A recent study had found that doctors hold outdated racist tropes, for instance, that black people are more resistant to pain. Doctors are also more likely to discount complains from any marginalized group, and send them home with a "have less stress" tap on the back, when in reality they do have something serious. The list goes on and on.

There is a whole book, called "Dying of Whiteness", which shows that white people are opposed to welfare measures, when they think that black people will benefit from welfare too.

The number of leftist and anarchist people who maintain some blatant form of medicalized cisgenderism is astonishing. And this is not about transphobia only. The track record of many collectives with sexism is harrowing.

Someone recently wrote "Why I am not giving to your mutual aid project", TL;DR because every collective has a couple of skeletons of sexual abuse in their closet.

Haven't we all seen the silent machismo and the solidarity between male authority figures in these spaces? Whenever a story like this pops up, the whole repertoire of discount tropes for sexual abuse allegations is taken out from the secret place it is kept for emergencies like this.

This is consequential for broader organization as well, not only gendered and racialized oppression. In a strict Bakunian sense, the informality of a circle of buddies pulling the strings on any topic of field of activity is a form of State. A kyriarchy, or oppression.

And there are more oppressions that we don't even know, in jobs, universities, hobbies, and more. Some of them can be traced back to sexism, like the hard-science superiority complex has sexist undertones, but wherever there is inequality, there is oppression.

It seems that people have a predisposition to form groups and make rules that reify social categories, for instance when some universities are considered elite and others shitholes, or some squat is seen as true hardcore anarchists and the others as alternative lifestyle hippies.

ALL of this operates subconsciously.

For quite some time I thought that the channels of anarchist organization would remedy human predisposition towards inequality, oppression, and bias. I now realize that this can not happen automatically, but a serious component of self-reflection to transcend internalized kyriarchies must be necessary.

But we now see the prevail of the most vulgar and raw inequality instincts, enabled by systemic capitalist indoctrination and consent manufacturing campaigning. And we know that this seed is also present in leftists and anarchists.

I believe that something horrible is about to happen the following five to ten years. We will then reflect, as we did in the aftermath of the two first world wars, on human predisposition to outgroup, other, dehumanize and eliminate.

We might as well reinvent the science of the human psychology of obedience, conformity, prejudice, oppression and kyriarchy. And anarchists might have to reinvent the principles of political organization, this time to include the understanding of subconscious oppression, and embrace procedures to address and transcend all kyriarchies.

That would stay truth to the spirit of complete abolition of all State, including internalized states of mind. (The pun is not intended.) In fact, I finally tend to agree with some anarchist pedagogists, that preparing people to be active members in an equal society, free of oppressions, the work must start in childhood, to eradicate the instincts of property, selfishness, power and supremacy.

So, although it might seem there could not be a bleakest time to raise such issues, that in fact the struggle for visibility, for the normalization of queer lives, for the subversion of verbal sexism, and so on and so forth, all were important and integral to the anarchist cause.

The white male racist kleprocratists might shed ours and many of our siblings' blood over the next ten years. But 2030's anarchism will re-discover the procedures that engender these demands and bake the relentless struggle for complete equality right into the channels of anarchist social organization and generational reproduction.

geteilt von: https://lemmy.ml/post/26542258

geteilt von: https://lemmy.ml/post/26542245

WTF people ? AmeriKKKa was never denazified either, was it? Fuck!

Free speech and public health are both on the line. As one whistleblower observed in the British Medical Journal, the Trump administration is banning basic words from the entire US federal research system, hampering scientific research on minority communities: “The words that must not be used include ‘bias’, ‘biased’, ‘women’, or ‘female’, and it’s impossible to see how scientifically valid research can be conducted without these words.”

This includes three of the American conservative movement’s most prominent critics of ‘diversity’: Peter Boghossian, Christopher Rufo, and Richard Hanania.

Documents dissected in Alt Reich reveal that Boghossian, Rufo, and Hanania have each been bankrolled by the top funder of this foundation.

The foundation, originally known as the “Pioneer Fund”, was relaunched and rebranded in 2022 as the “Human Diversity Foundation” (HDF) by Danish eugenicist Emil Kirkegaard.

Established in 1937 by a pro-Nazi American textiles magnate, Wickliffe Draper, the Pioneer Fund had direct ties to Nazi eugenicists and senior officials in Hitler’s regime. It actively promoted Nazi ideology in the US by distributing Nazi propaganda films.

The Nazis pinpointed Jews as the most dangerous group. Following the Holocaust, when antisemitism was no longer socially acceptable, the Pioneer Fund’s activities focused more broadly on minority groups and black communities.

By the mid-20th Century, scientific racism was discredited within the scientific community as biologists and geneticists increasingly discovered that the majority of the traits studied in eugenics had little genetic basis.

But last year, Hope Not Hate revealed that a network of white supremacist activists was secretly rehabilitating the Pioneer Fund under the new Human Diversity Foundation brand identity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Israel#Early_Zionist_movement_(1910-1948)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How are they then wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gender non-conforming expression is a fundamental freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Syrian Revolution (PDF)

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

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

Omar Aziz (wikipedia)

It was:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NO PASSARAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defy Sex Binary

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

Misgendering, harassment not protected speech

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

Detransition myths

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

Trans Athletes

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

Misc Videos

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

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

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

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