People are not yet as pacified and domesticated as IWC would like them to be. As early as 1977, Guattari observed that ‘ever-widening social groups are not content to go on as they always have. An increasing number of people are beginning to reject certain forms of consumerism. To exhortations to acquire more cars, more private houses, more household machines, more ready-made entertainment and, in order to do so, to work harder, join the rat race, wear oneself out before one’s time, they reply, “What’s the point? Who does it help?”’ (1984: 251). These people obviously share a similar sense of alienation from the capitalist consensus, but how can they act collectively to alter their circumstances? 'Rather than looking for a stupefying and infantalizing consensus,’ he proposes in The Three Ecologies, 'it will be a question in the future of cultivating a dissensus.’
Guattari’s finely nuanced, radically dissensual approach to social ecology requires the collective production of unpredictable and untamed 'dissident subjectivities’ rather than a mass movement of like-minded people.
'Work on oneself, in as much as one is a collective singularity; construct and in a permanent way re-construct this collectivity in a multivalent liberation project. Not in reference to a directing ideology, but within the articulations of the Real. Perpetually recomposing subjectivity and praxis is only conceivable in the totally free movement of each of its components, and in absolute respect of their own times - time for comprehending or refusing to comprehend, time to be unified or to be autonomous, time of identification or of the most exacerbated differences.’ (Guattari and Negri, 1990: 120)
(…)Dissensus is principally a call for the revival of individual competence as a social force, for the development of new, 'egalitarian, decentralized, participatory democracies, orientated towards an environmentally sustainable way of living’ (Carter, 1999: 300).
There is of course a tension at work here between solidarity and dissensus. It requires that a plurality of disparate groups come together in a kind of unified disunity, a pragmatic solidarity without solidity; what one might call, for want of a better word, 'fluidarity’. The common enemy - IWC - has become so ubiquitous, and its deleterious effect on the planet so apparent, that no strata of society is immune from its effects. This is what makes ecology - or ecosophy - such a potentially radical force in the world. We are all of us prey to environmental degradation, we are all stranded on Spaceship Earth.
-Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, from the translators’ introduction to The Three Ecologies by Felix Guattari
Soooo I was playing around with the 3d models in clip studio and since I was having so much trouble with this pose I went and made my own reference for it just to teach myself how to use the tool… and because I just can’t leave things alone.
Animal Crossing AU done as a part of the Starfighter Secret Santa for @tardigradedeathposture!!
Surprise, I’m your secret santa! I had a completely different idea when I started this but I just bit off more than I could chew and it wasn’t turning out. Everyone in the discord seems to be pretty into animal crossing lately so I thought it might be cute to draw the OT3 as animal crossing characters! I’m sorry I’m posting this so late but I hope you like it and that your holiday has been a merry one <3
Hey guys I posted on my Instagram a mutual aid fund that I created to help people with severe mental health issues pay for things like medications and virtual talk therapy it would mean a lot to me if you guys could either re-blog or contribute in someway shape or form and if you need funds please feel free to apply love you
STOP calling Mina a lesbian she is BISEXUAL and SO EPIC FOR IT!!! Jonathan is ALSO bisexual!!! They’re not each other’s beards !!!!!!!! They’re bisexual in love with each other and also in love with other men and women because they’re polyam ICONS !!!!!!! You FOOLS !!!!!
this person came to self check out and had two trans flag pins on their hat and they were holding like five different kinds of sushi platters and struggling and then they looked at the machine and then at me and stared at my trans necklace for two seconds and then walked pass me and into the main hall and i just assumed they went to get a cart but then like 20 minutes passed and they never came back . they saw my necklace and was like yeah this guy won’t tattle , massive respect to whoever that was i love you
My first book is finally LIVE!! I’m very excited to introduce you to Lexi and Kade, I hope you love them as much as I do!! Click the link above to get acquainted
Word of mouth is GREATLY appreciated!! If you know anyone on other platforms that you think would like to know about this, please tell them!!
Also, the Kindle version will be available June 2nd!!
You can pre-order the Kindle version, it goes live tomorrow!!
We can’t have our children be exposed to degenerate freaks like these who come to corrupt their young, impressionable minds:
When you see things like this:
Go talk to them. Collect fliers and loot. Get some extra loot to share with your family. Ask if you can have an extra whatever for your sister.
Ask about job openings, what kind of skills they’re looking for. Ask about the process. If you have a notebook on you, take notes. Be polite. Smile if you can.
DISTRACT THEM FOR TWENTY MINUTES so they’re not making their pitch at someone who might actually believe their org exists to help people. If they’re wasting time talking to you, they’re not talking to 15-year-olds who think “any org that shows up at Pride must be gay-friendly.”
the original post forgot to include the last post in the thread, so i’m including it here :-)
This. So much this.
These reasons are the same ones that I cite when I talk about why I believe how harmful call out culture is.
An environment where any mistake is a total and unforgivable mistake is an environment that is not safe. And if give the choice, will consume the most vulnerable among us first. We fight that by refusing to create the foundation upon which it grows.
“You and your friends fill your mouths with big words–Social Justice, Freedom, Revolution–and meanwhile people waste away, they fall ill, many of them die. Speeches don’t feed people. What the people need are fresh vegetables, and a good fish broth at least once a week. I’m only interested in the kinds of revolution that start off by getting people sat at the table.”
— José Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion
Violence in some degree or form is inherent to any protest. Trying to divorce yourself from the insurrectionary forms thereof does little but make the job of those happy to bully you into submission easier. Don’t bring unnecessary harm to yourself and your allies by pretending otherwise.
I want to talk real quick about something really important to me:
When you have something important to say on the internet that you care about, you will be most successful at changing people’s minds if you take care to state your ideas in an understanding, non-aggressive, and non-accusing manner.
There has been a conversation a while back about how people of color should not need to be “nice” and “polite” when they are resisting being dehumanized and abused. This is true and I 100% agree with it.
However, it seems like some people have taken from that a principle that “if you really care about the truth, you should be willing to accept it even if the person saying it is not ‘nice’ or polite” and applied it to everything.
This is not good.
Emotional discomfort at being nice to someone who disagrees with you on a topic you are very emotionally invested in is not the same as the dehumanizing and demeaning experience of being “nice” in response to oppression and prejudice from people who think your life and the lives of people you love don’t have value.
What I’m saying is, if you are talking about why spiders are important to the ecosystem, why cats should be kept inside, or why public transportation is a good idea, it will not hurt you to be patient and kind.
You may not feel like the person arguing with you deserves kindness. You may not think that being kind will help them get their stubborn opinion unstuck. But not only is understanding and patience much, much more persuasive, it makes people comfortable enough to ask questions. If they don’t ask questions they will never get past their misconceptions.
People that would otherwise say “huh, I didn’t think about it like that but now I see what you mean” get defensive when people present new ideas to them like an attack.
I have done it. You have done it. When someone on the internet is making what feels like nasty, rude accusations about you, demeaning you for not knowing a piece of information, or haughtily proclaiming how Right and Correct they are, your instinct is to get defensive.
So put your ego up on a high shelf and show grace and kindness to people who are ignorant. This is just how persuasion works.
The indoor cats debate is the biggest and worst example of this I’ve seen recently.
People feel like they have to defend themselves when they are called an animal abuser that doesn’t care about their pets. Most people love their pets a lot, and most people think of “animal abuser” as an unspeakably evil category of people.
I get defensive about the indoor cats thing, because I had outdoor cats as a kid and bad things happened to many of them, and I used to feel incredible guilt about that even though I couldn’t have done anythingbecauseI was a kid.
The main things that people are actually getting stuck on with the concept of indoor cats are:
they grew up with outdoor cats, everyone around them growing up considered keeping cats outside normal and harmless, and it’s just weird to have a Literal Stranger expect you to accept that literally every person that ever loved you or who was kind to you growing up is an Animal Abuser
they think that cats, as a species, literally need to roam around outside or they will not be having their needs met.
These people are not at all wrong to worry about how to provide enrichment to an indoor cat!!! Cat furniture and puzzle toys and ipad apps with fish swimming around for your cat to paw at are not known to everybody. There’s also a persistent myth that cats cannot be trained and therefore training one to walk on a leash or play fetch is absurd.
(It also at least deserves mentioning that there are public outdoor spaces, activities and sports events meant for dogs.)
It has literally never occurred to many people that cats are an invasive species. They don’t know where cats are native to. They don’t know that there were no cats in their area before humans brought them there. It seems strange, I know, but you are ignorant about something that seems obvious to someone else, so please stay humble.
When you describe cats as “cold-blooded serial killers of native wildlife” or things like that, it really does sound like you are moralizing an animal being a predator. Cat lovers grew up suffocated in cutesy animal books, shows, and cartoons that demonized cats and other carnivores for being carnivores. Assigning morals to animals goes all the way back to Aesop’s fables and Pliny the Elder. You have to make sure it’s clear you’re not doing that. 
I write this because I wrote something about the harms of outdoor cats in a reply one time and went back and read the tags on that post later, and the sheer number of people who had written that my post specifically had changed their mind because it was the first post they had seen on the subject that wasn’t needlessly hateful and aggressive blew my mind.
Educating effectively requires you to think about the effects of your words. You can’t just say things you Know are right and consider your job done.
Here is another truth: the most effective tactics to create social change are not necessarily the easiest to sustain. If you can’t sustain being mild and approachable and patient while people ask the most frustrating, repetitive questions…
that is a sign that you need a break, or that you need to consider devoting yourself to a different kind of trying to do good in the world for a while, or that you need to rest. You do not have to be a teacher at all times. This is good, I say (as a teacher) because being a teacher takes work and skill and hard emotional control, especially when you are trying to teach people about something that you care very intensely about. Teaching is skilled labor, but it is always labor.
Speaking as someone who has done that work on the marginalization end as well as on the animal welfare end, on the science literacy end, on a lot of things I’m very earnest about: you have to set limits on education, and you have to be extremely clear with yourself about what is teaching work and what is self-protection from things that make your soul ache. When you’re teaching, starting from a non-confrontational place and encouraging people to view you as a trustworthy, safe figure who won’t judge them is absolutely crucial when it comes to establishing the basic safety necessary to consider changing our beliefs. The moment you make it an Us Vs Them fight, you lose the game. Doing it the hard way takes time and it takes effort and patience, and not everyone is suited to that work and no one is suited to it all the time.
When you’re trying to just keep the space from punching you in the soul on a deep bruise one more time, though, you have other goals. You don’t act from the desire to change the hearts and minds of the people you’re talking to; you’re acting from a desire to just get that crappy thing away from me. And sometimes we can orchestrate that within our social spaces, depending on who is watching and what our relative positions are, and sometimes we can’t.
The danger, the riptide that will drag you under, is calling yourself a teacher when you are acting like someone trying to preserve the comfort of a community for yourself and other people like you. That second goal isn’t necessarily a bad one to have! Sometimes we all have to engage in that kind of social behavior, because everyone needs a space in which they can feel safe to relax sometimes, even if that is a space that only a few kinds of people are allowed to come into. But lying to yourself that this kind of behavior is teaching, and that you are engaging in a higher form of moral wossname by doing so–when you don’t have the bandwidth to do that properly–that can really get you into trouble. First, it can get you into trouble by encouraging you to frame picking certain fights as a public service rather than an act of survival, which can cause you to overweight the possible successes of starting a conflict and underweight the possible consequences. Second, it lets you frame behavior that can be really quite bad for the overall project of changing minds in the general public as effective activism, even to yourself, which leads you to forget that activist initiatives should be measured in terms of efficacy rather than in terms of how they make you feel at the end.
Now, I’ve seen the scars from people who always focus on efficacy over being able to feel safe and to rest. I have those scars. People with the best intentions and the highest moral goals have thrown one another into a meat grinder of yearning for a better world that way. I’m not saying you always have to drop everything and be a teacher.
I’m just saying that you should keep your tactics distinct, your short term goals clear in your mind, and above all else, figure out where you can find a place to rest.
