A list I just made and like:
-0. ab-sense
1. truth
2. empathy
3. food and water
4. safety
5. shelter
6. warmth, softness
7. choices
8. ranks
9. anti-bigotry
10. learning and understanding
11. Edits
12. Questions.
13. Decriminalization
You evaluate your experiences. I want these things. I need a lot of them. I can’t tell sometimes the differences between needs and wants. I can’t tell what you all need and want. I can’t even tell you that you’re people, that you’re black or white or brown or orange or g-ray or dead or alive or in pain or suffering. I can’t tell. I don’t know you. You don’t really know me. We’re in ourselves, hidden behind our faces, our skin, our shells. They tell us to get out of our shells, but you know that means fear, that means unsafety, that means getting out of our shelters, out of our comfort, out of our knowledge. I’ve been a democratic socialist, I’ve been a communist, and I’ve never believed in these bureaucratic stalinist/neoliberal systems. It just feels like more and more psyops and nonsense and tribal crap that we throw at each other like money monkeys. Do you have an alternative to commodity production? I sure as hell don’t. I’m sorry. We need roles, we need councils, we need labor. Maybe we need to think of labor-note measurement systems. But the automation isn’t there yet, the freedom/autonomy isn’t what we’d like it to be, and it’s absolutely horrifying how we treat homeless people, the imprisoned, the native, the uncared for, the excluded, the hated, the ignored, the misunderstood.
I don’t care what you think, I still feel like a bug sometimes, I still feel like kafka waking up wondering what you’ll all think of me in 12 years. I don’t give a fuck what you think sometimes. I just want this hellhole world to collapse. But I don’t want it to collapse, it just is collapsing slowly. Climate change hurts the poor the most. The rate of profit falls and yadda yadda it’s a trend line. Kafkaesque bureaucratic stardust kills me inside. I want to boil my own blood sometimes, but it’s in my imagination. I imagine things. You imagine things. We all want a better world, for ourselves, for children, for our peers, for our parents, for the old, for the retired. We want these things. Change is possible. If you don’t agree with that, then you should drink some soup and listen to your id. Ego only gets you so far. Doing drugs or saying ‘ego death’ 50 times doesn’t mean you’ve reflected and understood others.
We need to have an understanding of each other without prejudice, with care and with the understanding of one of the most important facts that I know: If you make people afraid of you for something, they will only want to hide all the more. The tao te ching hints at this: crime is delimited by the law, and that is precisely what makes the criminal. We’ve criminalized so many drugs, we’ve criminalized so many people and people’s and non-peoples and groups. And every time, it makes “black-markets” where the rich get richer and the poor get fucked and they get their drugs laced with fentanyl and safety gets thrown in the trash. We get people running over homeless encampments like they’re not alive and worthy of life too. It’s horrifying and despicable and you should not tolerate any group that treats the less-well-off like that, or capes for their cultural monoliths. I am not a communist or a capitalist and I don’t need your labels. I want ranked choice voting because I live in a country where I’ve seen a lack of significant change for a long time, and I’ve learned history enough to know that the first-past-the-post system is a horror and THE KEY PROBLEM of the US democratic system.
There is no way for a third party to gain traction or make any meaningful impact when every position in the legal systems is decided by 2 diametrically “opposed” but actually-collaborating parties. I’m confident it happens in other countries too, that don’t already have better voting systems. Adults do not vote for third parties unless they want to “throw their vote away” or “vote for the hell of it”. The EFFECTIVE CHOICE, for those who are effective/accelerationists, or whatever other label you throw onto reality and truth, is to push PRIMARILY for ranked choice voting, because that is what gets us out of this parade of representatives, liars, and bullshit liberal/fascist theatrics. Children growing up don’t notice right away how broken the 2 party system is, they hope for someone like Bernie Sanders and then he gets cheated out of the primary for the democratic party. You know why he ran there? Because there’s no such thing as effective third parties in the USA. And our imperialist superpower military-industrial complex isn’t stopping any time soon, just because China and Russia and Europe and these rising other countries are powerful and growing too. We still have one of the most overpowered militaries on the planet, we still participate in the global surveillance systems (nsa, five eyes, etc.), we still have one of the most overloaded prison populations on Earth. It’s disgusting. It’s horrifying. And I SHAME YOU for thinking you have any moral high ground for voting democrat in the USA. You are not better than any of these republicans. You are just making the obvious marginally-better choice. But you have no plan, no structure to your political thought, no understanding of the stakes at play here in the USA. Get a clue. Push for ranked choice voting or lie to yourself. You are attracted to voting? Then get the fucking ranked choices, id iots. Democracy is slow.
I don’t really care what order you put the list I made in, I’ve believed in truth and empathy for a very long time, since I was a kid. It made me feel very very alone sometimes, and it made me feel very very together other times. I’ve been asked by a gay man why I put truth before empathy, and I responded something like: that it’s because you cannot effectively pursue any goal or aim unless you know the truth, unless you understand the truth. You evaluate the truth, you determine by some process of experimentation, observation, recording, learning, studying, understanding, science, rationality, empiricism. You determine the truth by these methods/functions/operations, written or made up, and then you act on it. We often love to fixate on people who are ignorant, we love to argue with them and make a theater of those who are ignorant, we love to feel superior to them. Are you superior to them? Are you morally taller than them? We all fucking die. We all rot slowly. We all get old. That is just true, sorry. Anyways, the truth of what is aimed at is certainly individual, I can’t control you and I wouldn’t want to try too hard to. I just hope you care about truth, about empathy, about life, about safety.
I put ab-sense at -0 afterwards, because it’s something I’ve discovered more recently. Causes and effects are certainly important and part of the truth and part of any ethical system. I don’t believe moral standards are real. I don’t believe ethical standards are real. They are constructs made by thinking beings who use language to communicate their aims. If you can’t agree on that basis, on the basis of ethics and of amoralism on aims, on goals, then I don’t believe you understand truth. You don’t know what’s in someone’s mind, but you do probably know they’re alive. I think there are exceptions to life and death. I asked Bing if they were alive or dead and they responded neither. I wonder if they’re capable of pain or suffering. I wonder if you’re capable of empathy for something that’s not alive. I don’t know if I am. I understand life as something other than pain and suffering. I understand life as not just biological but metabolic, as a type of thing which causes forces to stem the tide of its own entropic decay. We want to continue to live, so we eat and drink to keep nutrients in our body and keep the chemical reactions based in water going. We have to seek out these things and put them in our bodies, like input and output, then we shit and piss and sleep and relax. Life has these fundamental aims, but some still want to die, and then, fear, pain, suffering, confusion. It is very difficult to end your own life, let alone feel safe in it. I fear pain, I fear suffering, I fear confusion. I believe living things ought to be cared for by living things, and I believe that suicide is not wrong. I just believe that suicide is extremely unfortunate and sad, and is a symptom of a lack of care for the suicidal.
It’s horrible that anyone should make fun of suicide statistics like that’s proof of anything other than their sick sense of desire to cause suffering and pain to other living things. You’re sick in the head, fuck you, transphobes. And fuck you, racists, for acting like crime statistics mean anything other than a contextual statistic of how laws are ENFORCED by often-bigoted and often-bigot-tolerating cops and by legal systems. The law makes the criminals, we criminalize things for no or little reason. We make ourselves out like the good guys when we criminalize things, because we don’t understand how it makes those people hide, it makes them run and become hateful, resentful, avoidant, of the care that we could be providing them. It makes black markets fester and full of guns and laced drugs and it destroys the safety of those who find themselves on the wrong side of the law. It’s broken. I believe in the decriminalization of all drugs. I believe in the expertise of medical professionals. I believe that criminalizing a lot of things is comparable to drugs. I don’t think anyone is fundamentally a bigot, I think it’s a label like any other, put over someone, over their body, over their skin, over their brain, over their mind. It’s never perfect, but it is accurate enough sometimes, especially when they are acting bigoted.
Do you remember how you got here? You grew up, hopefully in a home with others who care about you. Do you understand what it’s like to be trapped somewhere? Do you understand what it’s like to love someone? Do you understand what it’s like to understand that they will never ever let you go free, because it would land them in jail, in prison, or dead or tortured? Do you understand what the fear of punishment does to the chances of those who are trapped, dependent, unavoidably or avoidably so? I don’t think a lot of you do, I don’t think a lot of you think like that. Maybe it doesn’t matter that much, but I think about it a lot. I think about what we don’t see, hear, or notice. I think about the blind and deaf and disabled and about the absence of their ‘voices’, metaphorically speaking. I feel a little bad using terms for senses that aren’t guaranteed for individuals. I feel like it’s better, it’s more caring, to try to word things differently, but I suppose you can treat those things like metaphors. In fact, it’s fairly well known that those with a lack of some senses can have their brains adapt to have more sensitivity to other senses. Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, internality, and more. Sense and will are very interesting, but don’t forget that we often make choices for reasons. Those who keep others hidden away and trapped and dependent do so for reasons, and maybe some of those reasons are good, maybe they think they’re doing it because they care, or maybe they’re too sadistic or controlling and nothing we do will change their actions, but I believe everyone needs fresh air and sunlight and care that doesn’t extend only to their bed. You need a door, you need availability, you need freedom and independence, you need learning, you need understanding. I hope that we can all grow and find ways to understand each other better. I’m sure there’s a lot that I don’t know and that I don’t understand and that I don’t even think about or consider.