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Catherine Bunnington

@catherinebunnington / catherinebunnington.tumblr.com

that's long for catbun | old enough to follow horny blogs

That one trans girl that draft dodged the IOF because she was radicalized by marxist theory is a million times braver than every single Israeli

The Refuser Solidarity Network, which encourages Israelis to refuse the draft, is collecting letters to send to her while she is imprisoned. It's likely that this will not be her only stay.

from the interview

Something I’ve noticed is that leftist movements tend to turn practical, thought out tactics that were part of a larger plan for liberation, and remove them from their context. Then we often use these tactics as symbolic ways to mark our distaste for empire and harken back to older movements. However, these tactics are often already accounted for by the system, and sometimes are actively encouraged as ways to harm our people and defang our processes.

Here is an example;

In the Civil Rights struggle, getting arrested en mass was seen as an important part of the process of freedom. The civil rights leaders realized that the areas they were in did not have large enough jails to confine them all, and that if they filled the jails up, the police simply could not confine everyone else in the movement. Getting arrested in coordinated ways was a noble and helpful sacrifice that kept your brothers and sisters from getting arrested. Due to less strict sentencing at the time, and the ability of the movement to scare the police into releasing people, getting arrested often wasn’t the utterly disabling and free-life ending process it is today. (That’s not to say getting arrested was easy on people; the police brutality of the time was incredibly intense.)

Those who spent time in jail were given almost a reverent status. That had gone through much suffering to keep others from the same fate. Often, their ability to taking confinement completely off the table for the rest of the activists is precisely what allowed for certain other actions to be successful. Paying for legal defense and moderate bail costs was something of a drain on the movements scant, resources but it could often be worth it due to the role arrests played.

However, the state responded to this, and turned it to their benefit. The next fifty years saw a prison boom. Now, economically deprived small towns were made to bid and beg for prisons to be built in there areas; not only to lock people up, but also because working at the prison was presented as one of the only jobs left in rural America. Additionally, thisdrove the labor minded population to be further in conflict with other movements in some areas.

As the capacity of the government to capture and confine increased, the capacity of the movement to fill up the jails and prevent further arrests did not. Now, the system was hungry for more and more bodies for its endless rooms. It further instilled and mechanized the capacity of prisons to force labor, undercutting labor movements. Sentences became longer, parole became stricter, fines and restitutions increased to exorbitant amounts. Those who went in for petty arrests often never came out.

But, the feeling that getting arrested was a noble and venerable goal did not leave the movement. Some transitioned tactics; instead of filling up the jails to allow others to act without recourse, they sought to get arrested in test cases, as they had seen work occasionally before. But this too became more and more difficult, as the legal system realized it did not have to play by its own rules. Slowly but surely, the legal mythology that because it is written and because it is fair, it will be ruled so, began to overtake the minds of activists; even as they failed time and time again to win this way, they still threw countless of their friends into the mouth of the enemy, and condemned them to life in prison.

Even this had become a shadow of itself by the 2000s and 2010s. Arrest became an aesthetic goal instead of a practical one. The most radical in the movements were culturally encouraged to throw their lives away for petty protests that none would see, and would have no material impact on the operations of the system of dominion. The reality that getting kettled at a non violent protest could land you with the same jail time as a political assassination did not dawn upon these activists until long after hey were already in jail, and already disconnected from the movement. Their friends would gather all their meager savings towards bail funds, oftentimes going into debt, or otherwise extracting money from the rest of the marginalized communities supportive of the activism. Those funds would then go to the government in the form of bail, and then right back towards operating the same policing systems that targeted them. In this way, the main economic output of the leftists movement of the time was to fund the very systems of policing that they sought to destroy; and to get themselves and each other locked in cages in the process. Instead of developing practical systems of change, radicals were taught to emulate key aspects of the tactics of prior generations that had specifically been recuperated into the goals of the state.

Those who saw the futility in this were readily pushed towards the defanged and self acknowledged pointless marches of the nonviolent liberal movement, which never had any goal other than to once again emulate the visual aesthetics and personal emotional fulfillment of past movements.

We see this pattern play out all the time. People insisting on the radical importance of a leftist print newspaper in a time when print journalism is dead. A fetishization of industrial unionism in a town where no factory has been for three generations. Arguments over whether to support long defunct governments and long dead leaders for some tactical benefit which will never arise from reality.

It is long past time for us to realize that the process of achieving human liberation does not come from symbolic actions, nor from following the playbook of past movements. We must learn our history, yes, but not to emulate it; instead we must learn it to understand its failures and its successes, and, most importantly, how our movement ancestors interacted with the material conditions of their time to create multifaceted plans that met the needs of their people and made successful guerrilla war upon dominion.

We need to imagine ways of making change that are suited to the times that we are living in, the problems we face, and the opportunities that we have. This utterly necessitates that we get deeply embedded into the places and communities around us, that we listen with open ears to the problems our people are facing, and that we fold those ever more towards opportunities of liberation and care for one another.

still mad about smart TVs. that shit should be in a separate box like you can literally buy one of them androidtv boxes for £30. it doesn't need its own ip address it doesn't need its own app store it doesn't need to replicate the functionality every device plugged into it already has

Smart TVs are one of the great evils of the modern era tbh. If I wanted spyware on my TV I should have to download it myself

i keep promising myself i won't become another technophobe yelling about those "dang newfangled machines" or whatever. that i won't Get Worse until going back to punchcards unironically seems like a good idea. that i'll enjoy new things as they come out.

but so much is actively evil, hostile or otherwise enshittified. i don't want to track my greebles with splorp i don't want to pay a teehee subscription to get round cacophany's file limits i don't need 17 ways to skrimple my scronk 7 of which secretly activate scrungly plus ultimate i don't need to link it to my flowolf account i don't want to manage it with the flowby mowby i don't care if poob does or does not has it for me. i don['t care

i want a big screen whose ENTIRE job is to show me whatever device i plug into it. and also audio. i want to save my documents. on the computer. that i'm using. i want to own the media i buy. i want tech that is fat, properly cooled, simpler, serviceable by a normal person, and not forcing me to constantly select the "onlly spy on me a little bit" box every couple weeks.

You are so incredibly right

If you are trans: do not apply for asylum in Canada YET.

The appropriate changes are in the works, but not official yet. You will most likely be denied.

If you are denied for asylum once, you can not reapply. EVER.

Things could change quickly, so you need to keep that option open. Now is the time to prepare, not act. Unless you are in immediately, and direct danger right now (not pending a court case, not that the social climate for our community is bad, immediate danger to you as an individual), you need to wait until something changes, sadly.

I'm obsessed with the Europa ice war

I still have nightmares about the tunnels.

Europa ice war buffs are the new WWII history buffs. Sure it might just be their special interest but so many of them are fascist sympathizers. It's such a huge red flag to me and I don't know why no one else even sees it???

There were self styled fascists in the tunnels, as any war attracts, and on both sides no less! The wfunny thing is they kept meeting unfortunate ends.

Jokes about these individuals would blame ice madness as if fascism was beautiful Europas fault.

If i had a a flake of gold for every one of these fucks that offed themselves in an attempt to avoid justice i could make a nice pile for one of those giant lizards back on Earth, Dragons I think they're called?

i do feel a bit like some sort of beautiful and fragile lemur watching an invasive species rock up to my habitat with the whole Elvis thing

he doesn’t even have to think up dumb magic puns he just puts woah mama before everything

are you gonna sit there and complain or are you gonna put a curse on him, bootstraps baby

the extent to which I do not want to would destroy your puny mind to comprehend

UPGRADES

One of my first comics feels outdated now style wise. Sooo I though I would update and upgrade it

You can find the OG and the post it's based off of HERE

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