TotW: Harm Reduction?

I found these poetically provocative words type-written on a piece of paper and tacked on a bulletin board at our local community space, and they really got me thinking and questioning, in a topical sort of way…

Harm Reduction

You no longer dream.
You have trapped your thoughts
in the quagmire of harm reduction.
You have lost today in misery,
and so you dedicate all of your time
to alleviation.
You have forgotten joy and beauty,
freedom, love and life, ...
You have convinced yourself
that they are impossible,
drowned in the toxic sludge
of an endless calamity,
of the most mundane of everyday horrors,
of the gutless excuse you call necessity,
of that passionless fear that moves you to cower
behind your screen,
of the domination of survival
that guarantees you never live,
you never whirl into the wild,
the Dionysian howl
of the ecstatic!
You "play" it safe!
But that is no play at all.
It is the cowardice of work,
of vulgar self-enslavement.
It is the drudgery of being relevant,
of keeping down with the times!
And dreams have no place
in the toxic swamp of relevance;
they might spark imagination,
whirl you away
in the magic of dew-bejeweled spider webs
where your heart is kissed by beauty,
and the love of unchained wildness
dances you beyond all boundaries
here and now!
And that is dangerous!!!
It may cause harm to tender hearts
who've learned to fear
all who dare to whirl beyond necessity,
beyond the chains of even the worst traumas,
beyond the self-enslavement
of endlessly playing the victim.
So you keep your heart small
and hope this keeps it safe ...
But there is no safe!
You have given up the radiance of your life
for a delusion ...
And this is why we free spirits
will never cease to fly
upon the stormiest winds
where we find such dangerous beauty
dancing with a mad chaotic joy.
And this is our untrammeled freedom,
our boundless, unchainable love,
this is the wild and never-owned treasure
that I and my kindred uniques
call life.

So the topic of the week that I propose is this:
What is anarchistic about harm reduction? Who does it help? What does it perpetuate? What does it actually reduce? Where does it end? What is the point? Why?

Listen to the conversation here!

There are 93 Comments

"What is anarchistic about harm reduction?"

Nothing unless it is reducing harm created by authority.

"Who does it help?"

Those who have been harmed.

"What does it perpetuate?"

Reduced harm.

"What does it actually reduce?"

Harm.

"Where does it end?"

When the harm is reduced.

"What is the point?"

To reduce harm.

"Why?"

The desire to reduce harm.

some find the wild joy this poem posits in sobriety, some find it in drunkenness. the anarchy of harm reduction is figuring out which applies to oneself, and not forcing others to adopt your particular view on the matter.

Where does it end?

With Bluestockings Books in NYC is (or was) recently facing eviction. The NY Post wrote a hit piece on the subject called:

"Woke NYC bookstore that lured strung-out junkies with freebies faces possible eviction " Jan 6, 2024
"The woke Lower East Side bookstore that was luring drug addicts to their storefront by pushing free clothing, food and “harm reduction services” – as well as a bathroom where they can shoot up – is facing the first step in the eviction process."
read the rest:
https://nypost.com/2024/01/06/metro/woke-nyc-bookstore-that-lured-strung...

Pweaze can we stop using “harm reduction” to refer to shit that isnt public health practices like syringe programs or free condoms. Thats what harm reduction is. I dont understand what else people are talking about if not that. Is this poem talking about that? Maybe it is and Im big stupid. But its confusing because people say the words harm reduction and I have noooo fucking idea what they mean. Someone wanna help me out?

I think historically anarchists and/or other non-state players first developed the practice of what is now called Harm Reduction by state funded health programs.

Don't find the text to be poetic as much as posturing in a way predictable of anarchists. Still, I think it raises a solid point. Though I don't see the point applying to the areas of harm reduction that I'm familiar with (trying to consume drugs without dying or getting sick).

I was actually an avid drug user when I was a kid. And long before I was an anarchist I discovered a web forum by and for drug users, which introduced the concept of harm reduction to me and generally imparted an idea of not using drugs like a complete jackass. For some people, harm reduction is just an everyday strategy for remaining alive. The politics of harm reduction often lend itself toward anarchism, I think.

That's how I have always understood "harm reduction". The poem seems more a criticism of safety, with which I largely agree. I see safety as being, in the main, illusory. Enjoying life is sometimes unhealthy and often dangerous. I say, enjoy regardless. No one is really safe, and that's a fact. (The poem could also be read as a critique of addiction, which, fair enough.)

Now where my kindred uniques at??

oh, i thought this poem was about people that hand out narcan and fentanyl test stripes and shit until i read the comments. i was like woah, this is pretty harsh and cynical

But I guess I mostly agree that a bunch of safety policies can come at the cost of more joyful experiences. if that's what the poems saying idk

when i see anarchists talk about doing "harm reduction" it is usually services that are already provided by government and non-profit social workers. it reeks of that "anarchists are here to help you" stink. it also often postures as mutual aid, but very rarely mutual. it sucks energy, time, and thoughts about how we create our own lives with people we have deep affinity with. it can also be used, as we have seen here before, as a way to push authoritarian agendas...

ive been frustrated with the need to call things mutual aid. portlands super guilty of that with all sorts of free thing projects that are neat but not mutual. i feel like its become mutual aid has become when anarchist does helpful thing. like a lot of harm reduction groups need charity type funding like grants and thats fine.

i just finished watching Dear Mama, a 5-part documentary about 2pac and his mama, former Black Panther and political prisoner Afeni Shakur. Both 2pac and Afeni have some interesting things to say that connects here. Afeni warned 2pac about giving too much to "the community" because they drained her and ultimately let her down and 2pac was resentful of this because he grew up suffering the consequences. He said she spent too much time giving herself to "The People" rather than "her people". I loved that distinction. The abstract and politicized "People" or the real and intimate "people". This is something that many even so-called post-left anarchists refuse to learn. Take care of yourself first, then the people around you. If that positively affects those we come into contact with outside our families, gangs, and tribes, directly or indirectly, so be it, but that is not our reason to be. Harm reduction, inherently misses this point. Sure, as an occasional drug user, i like test strips and narcan, but i can pick these up anywhere. We don't need anarchists spending their time caring for people who could not probably give two shits about them. Same goes for Food Not Bombs, and all the other activist charities out there. Somewhere along the line, anarchists started putting bandaids on shit. Fuck that!

mostly agreeing with the anti-charity points people have made here. but also, harm reduction is a policy of meeting people where they're at. so aside from how NGOs use it, it's generalizable as "not insisting that people be a certain way before we.... assist or interact or engage".

that way of talking about harm reduction makes it another way to talk about reform vs revolution, for good or ill. (not sure we need another way to talk about the question of Many Small Shifts in the Service of a Proposed Big Shift vs Proposed Immediate Big Shift... but there it is.)

what does "meet people where they are at" even mean?

are we evangelists? idea pushers? running for office?

and then:
"not insisting that people be a certain way before we.... assist or interact or engage"
what does that even mean? and how is that "harm reduction". its not any way i have heard the do-gooders --who are actually socialists but know it not cool to be that so they say they are anarchists -- use the term. it has always meant helping people in the most charity-tinged way possible, rather than any mutual exchange

does it mean 1:1 reciprocity? does it mean that they're already your friends/loved ones? does it mean that y'all participate in the same (nonexistent) non commercial alternate economy? does it mean you feed them and they commit crimes?
is it only mutual if all involved persons are operating according to logic that makes them unsusceptible to the incentives/coercions of the social order? does that logic even exist?

mutual aid is something you do together, not something you do for someone. we are broke so we got stale bagels put of the dumpster together. or like fnb where youre welcome to get the dumpster bagel or help spread jelly on them but you dont have to and thats chill.

I can't see what ia anarchistic in this. Sharing between people? Great. No it's always *at least* great, and a sign you got better value in life than the normies out there.

But anarchist? What is the relationship?

Anecho-Lefties have just been ham-fisting things a lot the past few decades. Ancom feds and bad authors like Chumpsky are to blame. If only they'd be doing that *other* type of fisting...

a week or two ago here on anews, someone said that anarchists don't talk to a certain kind of people (normies, or something, i don't remember exactly). so in response to that idea, meeting people where they're at could mean talking to a normie friend about what i think is a better way to do some certain thing(s), perhaps without referencing jargon or citing authors they won't have read, or making them learn terms just to know the basics of what i'm talking about.

an extremely rough example, because the point of noting that it can be generalizable is that it can apply to a wide variety of situations and relationships.

obviously it's a particular frame (that now seems to put whatever we're doing and calling HR in the realm of charity, since NGOs et al are taking over the words), but the more we leave words to be defined and constrained by state-actors, the poorer our vocabulary and our history gets.

Do you feel like your ego is out of control to be thinking of someone else as a "normie" and that you just have to teach them a better way to do certain things? This seems sOoo xtian evangelical to me! Yuck!

Maybe in their eyes you are the "normie" and you haven't yet learned their ways of not being a know-it-all?

"Get over yourselves" -Emma Goldman

whatever mom, i have seen NO difference in how NGOs use the term "harm reduction" and how many so-called anarchists do. The only difference is how they use rhetoric to explain it, and even that differs very little. you can not put make-up on a pig and tell me its a golden goose. i am tired of liberals, progressives, and socialists who pretend to be anarchists doing this kind of opportunistic wordplay.

bad faith begets bad faith.

if your only rebuttal is "i've sen anarchists do this bad thing" then you're not telling anyone anything new. anarchists do everything, every possible contradiction. you can complain or you can celebrate the looseness of the definition. or both, obv. lol.

Duh, that is an easy way to dismiss the comment above. the only rebuttal isn’t "i've sen anarchists do this bad thing”. it is a common thing many so-called anarchists do a hell of a lot, not some random and rare occurrence. but go ahead and brush off the criticism, and keep your faith in activist “anarchists”.

i have no faith in activists of any kind. i also don't work hard to respond to anons who do things like call other anons "mom".

diminishing returns, sadly.

I ain't saying anarchists shouldn't waste time talking with them if they're showing interest in a convo, but given all the conflicting sensibilities and especially moral convictions normies have (people not fitting along to perceived social norms and the law), that doesn't make them to be very good bedfellows... if they ever agree to get into bed with a "smelly, fllthy anarchist" that goes to the dumpsters, wears second-hand clothes without knowledgeable brands and likely does not use perfume ad hair spray.

Like if you had a choice between convincing a jock or a nerd to use Linux... which will be the most receptive person? You think the jock will even care or understand what you're talking about? It's like that Gigachad meme...

"(people not fitting along to perceived social norms and the law..." being perceived as "losers" or "whacks")"

So-called harm reduction is reformist crap! Either eliminate harm entirely or get the fuck out of the way.

or die in obscurity

I am going to take a Ragnar Redbeard’ish stance here

[Trigger Warning Snowflakes!]

How long do people want to give CPR to corpses? How old is too old to suck on eternally maternalistic teats? How miserable is it to live on paternalistic strings-attached loaded gifts? How many times can someone take narcan before they are ever-so gently advised to consider another lifestyle? Sorry, these are choices not diseases. Go ahead an regurgitate whatever opinions called studies that are just thinly-veiled agendas to “disprove” this. We all have personal agency. Yes, its harder for some of us than others due to power structures, our lived experiences, and yes, personal weaknesses. That’s life. We make choices.

Look, all bullshit aside, some people have just given up on life, so do we coddle them endlessly? There are 8 billion of us, right?

Sorry to stigmatize, but sometimes shooting street drugs up your arm is just plain stupid and dangerous and if you are gonna take the risk, maybe you should actually take the risk instead of having a bunch of do-gooders constantly carrying safety nets around for you, to grow accustomed to falling into, to cushion the blow. Same goes for unprotected sex with strangers. I’m not saying this from a moral position. I’ve done both more than a couple of times and have no moral issue with them, but let’s stop protecting everyone from themselves. Consequences DO HELP PEOPLE MAKE BETTER CHOICES!!! Not legal ones, you dumb fucks, but actual real lived consequences. That’s how we learn. Oh, that’s right, that’s not what most of you want. Many of you are just fine with a nanny state that pretends its not.

Oh, back to the 8 billion humans. Every human on the planet displaces so many other life forms, I mean soooo fucking many other animated and alive beings. If people are so far gone that they need harm reductionists following them around making sure they don’t get a boo-boo, that they have food to eat, that they can shoot up their daily dose of meth in a hospital-like setting, maybe they are too far gone to care about. Maybe?

We live in the most artificial life-support system that has could ever have been conceived. No other life form that has ever existed would coddle the weak to this extent. It weakens the rest of the pack. Temporary injuries or illness, sure. Old age, ok, for a while. But endless lifestyle choices that are dependent on harm reductionists for survival, sucking vital energy from the tribe or pack? No fuckin’ way!

Hopefully, each of us has developed and curated deep and caring relationships in our lives, to replace tribal ones which where bread or beat out of us, to help us when we need it, not some vague “community”, altruistic harm reductionists, or social system to depend on. We all need help from time to time, but some people live off of it, and continue to live because of it. Maybe it is time to see how they do without it. Let’s see who survives. Fitness is not about physical strength or conditioning, its main component is the mere will to thrive, and many have lost that. Is this sad? Sure, but since when do we let sadness guide us? That is a trap that those with power use against us.

I know, I know, I’m leaving…

i don't disagree with the thrust of this, neo-ragnar, but who decides when someone is learning a lesson and when someone has had enough chances and isn't going to learn so can just be let die?

it's easy to say in the abstract that there are the two distinct tracks that you're creating, but that's not what it looks like on the ground (ex CHOW here), it's not even good theory (being binary and all), and creating a structure where there is some policy where certain people are thrown away is in fact what harm reduction was responding to, as a crappy, classist, moralist system. obv HR doesn't fix the problem, but the practicalities of what you're talking about is going backwards to a(nother) bad system.

i really don't think neo-ragnar is deciding for anyone but themselves and with people in their tribe or pack "when someone is learning a lesson and when someone has had enough chances", nor do they seem to be advocating "two distinct tracks" and certainly not "creating a structure where there is some policy where certain people are thrown away". i think they seem to be pushing back on the humanist, and to be perfectly honest, christian morality of leftist anarchists who seem to be always available to help everyone before taking care of their own shit.

Generally agreeing with anon 9:51.

I wanna say that when I said that I think the politics of harm reduction lend itself to anarchism, this is what I mean: Growing up, school, when it came to drugs and risky activity relied on the Just Say No shit. Predictably, it did not give us ANY useful information about... well, anything. So my experience of seeking out information on my own and finding harm reduction, that to me was a kind of self-empowerment. I was then more aware of what I was actually doing, capable of making better decisions than before (since, for me, abstinence was really never gonna happen, it just wasn't, and that's obviously true for a lot of people). So that's what it was to me, it was more about the decisions of the drug user rather than the decisions of those around the drug user (although there's nothing wrong with that either).

But, self-empowerment is not disconnected from social empowerment. And lots of people who I see doing harm reduction as an activisty thing are mostly people who have been drug addicts and have deep sympathy for that experience and so they want to share something and be useful. This is a desire that I understand, even if it does often come off as identical to Xtian charity. But there are ways of going about this that are more anarchistic or less anarchistic. I share the critique of activism for its own sake. But this is also a question of, "whose life is being valued?" and that can take it in an anarchist direction too, challenging the implicit valuations of the dominant social order which sees people on the margins of society as being totally disposable.

Mostly, for Ragnar, I'm not seeing your position as being very socially relevant. Which is maybe the point for you. But if that's the case then I have to wonder why comment on @news about it? Maybe that's unfair. But it is difficult to discern any meaningful difference between your perspective and mainstream conservative attitudes about drugs users and addicts. It's reasonable to say that we all make decisions, but to just stop there and call it good is severely myopic. It does just seem like the other side of the coin to what you're criticizing.

I just don't see this as a simple problem with a simple answer.

minona, thank you. you seem to be one of the few people who regularly chime in on anews that has a thoughtful and nuances perspective. i guess i would briefly respond by saying that i come at this from a egoist/individualist and slightly misanthropic place, but one wanting to create something slightly more solid than a union of egos, let's say a gang, pack, or small band. i won't go into too much detail here, but from this perspective, the subject of harm reduction is simply not a thing. we take care of our own people, not everyone else. this, i believe gets stronger the more we focus inward, on our people, and gets diluted the more we let our energies seep outward, towards "the community". add to this thousands of years of domestication and the last hundred or so of social welfare (i don't mean that in a political way, but in a social way). people have become less and less personally responsible, something that cannot happen to the same degree in a small group that is interdependent and face-to-face. add to this the last few decades of increased victimization politics and the culture it has created. add to this the technological dependance everyone is strung out on. the math is getting very problematic and overwhelming now....anyway, i think you get my point.

and yes, some harm reductionists come at it from personal experiences, i get that and don't want to judge that too harshly, for sure. my aunt was a junkie, and she got clean and helped other junkies. cool. but i'm referring to the endless number of anarchists who are really activists doing "good things for the community" and calling it anarchy AND the authoritarians who use the concept of harm reduction to force their mandates and requirements onto others.

agreed, my opinion is not socially relevant. i am against society. but it is very relevant to an anarchist discourse, a discourse against society and for personal empowerment and agency, is it not? when so many people push what is more less a socialist agenda in the anarchist world, why not push back on that now and then?

as far as your difficulty "discern[ing] any meaningful difference between your perspective and mainstream conservative attitudes about drugs users and addicts." well, that's on you. i am a drug user, etc. but i take personal responsibility and don't blame others when i fuck up and rarely ask for help, except when it is desperately needed, and then, i ask those i have consciously developed deep relationships to over time. i certainly don't expect anything from anyone. actually, let me take that back, i expect people to be mostly cowardly, even if they conceal it well with rhetoric and smiles.

nobody handed me anything. i was born into shit and took it upon myself to figure a way out. it is possible for anyone. if we forget this, we have already given up.

of anti society people have been created by their birth society and died after a vibrant life that failed to protect any others from the effects of society? if your a priori assumptions consider this trajectory an inevitability, that's a fine life to live. if you don't believe in predetermined outcomes, it might not seem like such an inevitability. it depends on your willingness to practice hopeless determination or the joyful agony of a life among people who write you off without listening fully.
if someone like you or i were interested in locating/creating more friends from the ones we don't have, what might you or i do to break the spectacle of social/antisocial that positions meaningfully different people as unwanted enemies of society and neuters them through erasure, obscurity, or physical containment/destruction? what might we do to subvert that position into one of alluring antagonism? when a cop beats on someone the someone typically doesn't enjoy it much. but when a tasteful dom does the same thing, they come back asking for more... hmmm.

i brought this up bc some people's location of faith (spook) in mutual aid (spook) is based on allure to gather more (criminal) friends and the pipeline seems neither obvious nor inevitable to my dumb ears/ass

You say that you are anti-society, but only after articulating a social vision (a band society). I get what you mean (Andre Soudy also adorns my bookshelf ;) ) but after a while it just feels like so much rhetoric. Sounds cool, but is it true? Its truth depends almost entirely on idiosyncratic definitions (not necessarily a bad thing). I've met almost no one who does not possess (or is not possessed by!) some idea of sociality. Social, anti-social, words abused and misused. I'm anti-global society, anti-national society, anti-state society. But a non-state society, that might look pretty good. Anti-social? I'm certainly anti-social in the sense that it's defined by the existing social order--I've even got the diagnosis to prove it!--but why should we accept that definition in the first place? I'm with A! when he said that the society we live in is intensely anti-social. My point was that you're engaging in a broader anarchist discourse. Is that not social, even if we accept the conceit that we're speaking only amongst ourselves and FUCK Society? I don't know, sometimes words just weigh you down. Kind of like right now, too much damn time spent on these words.

But like I said, I think I get you. I don't expect society in general, or any stranger in particular, to adopt my values to accommodate me (that would be the definition of not possible & not desirable). If you talk about a gang or a pack or a band, I'm with you. That's always been what I want. But me, I like my boundaries porous, I want things to get through in all directions. (Let's spread the disease!) For me this has to do with a vision of infinite expansiveness. Intimate relationships, but also boundlessness. I don't want to circumscribe the possibilities.

I'm not unsympathetic. I've got a lot more Stirner in me than Kropotkin (whose optimism I always found alienating). But I'd also like a certain amount of theoretical complexity, and frankly, the classic theorists of egoism--aside from Stirner--are pretty lacking when it comes to that. (How many times do you have to qualify that your causes are YOUR OWN? I know that already. Just jump, take the plunge, *say* something, anything!)

As for "community". That word is nothing but a goddamn lie at this point, completely meaningless, the political word par excellence. Speaking of Kropotkin, even HE knew that the tyranny of 'the community' was the greatest tyranny of all.

One note about personal responsibility though. In the era of neoliberalism, in fact individuals are being burdened with an acute level of personal responsibility. You now become responsible for every aspect of your daily life, you become your own boss, etc. This is just another thing that complicates a simple view. "Personal responsibility" is in many ways the lingua franca of neoliberalism, obscuring any question of or challenge to the social order at large.

minona. thank you again for a thoughtful response.

a few quick things, because i probably won’t be back here for a long while:

i think we have different working definitions of society. for me society implies a certain scale and an alienation from direct decisions, desires, values, and responsibilities. i don’t think bands or gangs or families are societies. they have intimate cultural dynamics to place and people and situation. i do try to live this way as much as possible. you are catching me in a rare period of being online (where most of society is at this time, sadly), because of a certain situation in my life this week. but, ok, nothing can be fully removed from society at this point, which is why my main interaction with it is primarily against it, in negation, as opposed to the vitality i live with my peeps. i also am anti-society because i believe to conceive of a world on a societal level will always be authoritarian. i engage with anarchist discourse from time to time, in hopes of connecting to a few random people who might be somewhat similar in thinking to bounce ideas off of, and maybe collaborate in temporary projects of negation. plus, it bugs me when progressives, liberals, and leftist drag anarchy through their muck.

“I like my boundaries porous, I want things to get through in all directions. (Let's spread the disease!) For me this has to do with a vision of infinite expansiveness. Intimate relationships, but also boundlessness. I don't want to circumscribe the possibilities.”

i like this, and generally agree, but i mostly open up to the rest of the incredibly vast non-human word in this way. in my years alive, this has always been more fulfilling and less problematic. the more humans i meet, the less i am interested in changing this priority. most modern humans tend to bother me more and more each day.

“One note about personal responsibility though. In the era of neoliberalism, in fact individuals are being burdened with an acute level of personal responsibility. You now become responsible for every aspect of your daily life, you become your own boss, etc.”

maybe in some ways, but as a whole, i totally disagree. who actually procures their own food and medicines, builds their own shelter, makes their own clothing, etc.? most people can’t even create anymore, its mostly cut and paste and copy and repost. and people endlessly seem to want to do less and less all the time. maybe we just are seeing different parts of the world out their, society, but when i peek my head out from my people’s self-directed place, i am pretty disgusted by what i see and feel almost no interest in investigating any further. i prioritize where my feet are at with those i have come to call family. yes, once in a great while a kindred spirit may cross my path, and even rarer, we go deeper.

i don’t think my view is as “simple” as you seem to imply. these are fucking posts on a fucking website, how much time should either of us give that to go deeper with each other, to expand on our opinions?

anyway, thanks again for your rigorous thoughtfulness, good luck out there!

is this really the world you want to create?

"This world is too peaceful, too acquiescent, too tame. It is a circumcised world. Nay! —a castrated world! It must be made fiercer, before it can become grander and better and—more natural."

“If one man smites you on the cheek, don’t turn the other soft and meek, but smash him back and lay him low, war for war, and woe for woe.”

“You can talk of "human brotherhood" until you're black and blue; no law of heaven or earth, or hell, can ever make it true.”

“This earth is a vast whirl of warring atoms—a veritable revolving cock-pit. Each molecule, each animal, fights for its life. You must fight for yours, or surrender.”

“Laws” and “Rules” imposed on you From days of old renown. Are not intended for your “good” But for your crushing down. Then dare to rend the chains that bind And to yourself be true. Dare to liberate your mind, From all things, old and new. Always think your own thought. All other thoughts reject; Learn to use your own brain And boldly stand erect.”

“Popular lies have ever been the most potent enemies of personal liberty.”

“Friendship is necessary and ennobling; but impersonal despotism is destructive of all dignity and manly virtue.”

“Human rights and wrongs are not determined by Justice, but by Might. Disguise it as you may, the naked sword is still king-maker and king-breaker, as of yore. All other theories are lies and – lures.”

The force that made the iron grow,
Gives weakness no protection.
It bids us battle down the foe,
Its logic is "Selection."

It shakes the nations in a sieve,
Each one must meet a rival,
And chooseth from the strong that live.
The strongest for "Survival."

-Ragnar Redbeard

again, is this really the world you want to create?

Hail mighty Ragnar, we will not help the snowflake wheelchair pilot through the swamp! WE WILL ALLOW NATURES EQUILIBRIA TO SORT OUT THIS AWKWARD CONSEQUENCE!

Gosh... this Ragnar Neckneard guy was the Basement InCel pompuous jerk 100+ years ahead of his time. He reads like that one from the Cobra Kai series.

y'all sound like a bunch of liberals who act like you don't want a social welfare state, but we know you do... or at least you pretend that anarchist could make a dent in all the suffering civilization brings.

it's not an unexamined pretense, it's absurdity. admit hopelessness, admit the unstoppable hum of the largest engine of suffering/destruction/harm on earth (besides earth itself), then, because you're a masochistic fuck who is motivated by impossibility, take steps to sieze/amplify/protect from the death throes brought on by global warming +. the future is not yet made although it is founded. each day the sun rises yet.

The UK EF! Gathering this winter requires everyone to take a Covid test before attending. How they plan to enforce this, I don't know.

is still a requirement but not in the common usage of the word. they said their piece. now people who come without shots know they're doing so in partial antagonism to the event planners. sounds fine. maybe someone will get shots or stay home. maybe someone will come and criticize the attempt to filter attendees by criteria.

Earth First! became harm reductionists over twenty years ago, as the shifted from a biocentric perspective to a humanist one that embraced identity politics and became Humans First?

fuck them. anything interesting about them ended long ago.

is taking steps to prevent/delay human extinction considered harm reduction or harm amplification?

Yes, Earth First! was so much better back when the malthusian pro-border boomers ran the show.

Earth Second!

i don't think it makes the top ten for these idenitarian progressives

Yeaaa, except the Neo-Malthusians were ecofash scum. So not much better than these ultra-liberals, just another flip of the coin. Or shall I say... "COIN".

no, they won't, they just throw out big words to scare people and come running back to their lefty protectionism

Are you this brutish dumb as to be completely acting as if the eco-fascist *Dave Forman* and his cronies never happened? That's well-known to anyone who hasn't been living in a cave since the '90s.

they certainly existed, with worts for sure, but calling them eco-fascist is such an overstatement you sound stupidly antifa'ish.

How is Dave Foreman an "eco-fascist"? I'm no fan of his statist litigation strategies, but where's the "fascism" you speak of? Can you offer examples?

Dave Foreman dedicated latter part of his life to anti immigration activism. He also said the famine in Ethiopia was a good thing.

What are your sources? and more specifically, how do these positions equate to "fascism" ( a very overused/misused term)?

foreman did no such thing. he dedicated the latter part of his life to rewilding, which has been -- in activist terms -- a huge success. 'big wilderness' was his thing. stop just making shit up, for god's sake.

Is "boomer" really the best insult you can come up with, you social media-programmed toolbag?

boomer is also a statement of fact. you don't need to jump in front of that bullet, dad.

"boomer" is often mis-applied and is just as weak as the many other over-trended pop-culture retardations like "karen", "cringe", "base", "flamer", "noob", "rizz", "sus"etc. or the even more ridiculous abbreviated laziness like tbh, afk, lol, k, ttfn, cya, etc.

people keep getting dumber and dumber, lazier and lazier, and we're supposed to help reduce their harm (usually self-inflicted? fuck that hard.

Ok people keep making fun things with language. They call that "culture" but only the weak subhumans indulge into this! We STRONK übermensch seeth in ressentiment toward these prole cultures and assert the TIMELESS superiority of bad pompous poetry from 19th century racists who give themselves Viking names.

The individualist anarch must appreciate and welcomharm stoically because it reveals the inner ontology of self-awareness and humility, and will toughen them against external influences and coercion.
We will not whine and hide behind counselling and play the part of the victim in the State's game of citizen's rights, because we are tough and wise!

What is it to be against society? What could that entail? What is your world that you want to create outside the constraints of society and that type of arrangement? Why do so-called anarchists continue to put bandages on society when we should be slaughtering it or at least leaving it to die?

There is an enormous space to inhabit between reformism and accelerationism, with harm reduction being only a sliver away from former at its best. We live in a time when real personal responsibility is replaced by false, projected, and abstract allegiances, from the meaninglessness of “community” to the superficial identities and victim-statuses to ideologies and politics. We are misplacing ourselves in their shit at the expense of ours.

want to cut loose from a few concepts: guilty/innocent dichotomy, myth of property,law and wage labor, scarcity economies on housing/mental support/love/food/medical care/art/thoughts, producer/consumer dichotomies, spooks of all kinds...
arguably there is not a reform pathway to obtain these changes in "critical mass" or "large numbers" whatsoever. but there may be ways to self-associate into a subculture that develops these ways of being through practice. maybe with a lot of trying... the fun part is how those practices in development come back and interact with mainstream society :))) yeee

That's how I do it, I detach myself from the morality and ethics of any social infrastructure and live a non-consumerist and frugle lifestyle with people who love me.

Stick the blame to the wackos who decided to take anarchism into a "purely negative" "anti-political" direction and the dipshits who followed for whatever fucking reason.

lol BLAME

true but hey, the climate apocalypse has a way of forcing people to rediscover their basic values

by "wackos" you must mean non-leftists, non-activists, actual anarchists, who recognize the desperate need for negation and the disgusting nature of politics.

go on, and git.....there are plenty of lefty websites for you to inhabit.

not necessarily! most of those people (that's a lot of people that meet your criteria) aren't even interesting enough to achieve "wacko" status. except for "actual anarchists" which is of course .... your goalposts to move around as you please

ahhh, the double bluff! even better!

not you but your magical man made of straw that moves your goalposts.

like a full on puppet show at this point. very cool

no, lumpy, not a "magical man", the general scene has been absorbed into the left, but why wouldn't you take this stance, you were their before them.

only if you insist on reading history backwards ... or you're longing for when nobody understood much of anything at all? like the music scene maybe?

if you are referring to the fact that most anarchist history was a part of the left, sure, BUT there were always the one's who did not come from that perspective. add to these more authentic, less political, and non-marxist anarchists of the past with post-left and anti-civ anarchists of the 80s, 90s and 00s, and you have a clear break. unfortunately, identity politics, social media, ahistoric revisionism, foolish altruistic charity and delusional hope, and such, not to mention general stupidity, has brought the anarchist space solidly back into leftism. some may say it never completely shook it and it grew like cancer, and this may be true, but that should not be a place it stays.

i'm not reading anything backwards, and i understand my position very clearly, so try again lumpy.

i mean ... you conceded my point right at the beginning there? yes. that's what i meant.

as for your exceptions, sure, absolutely true as well.

but you made it sound pretty fukin a-historical the first time because of your not-so-subtle bias. no amount of foamy mouthed, anti-left sentiment on your part will change where the standard-ass, european anti-capitalist/anti-monarchist framing of most of anarchism came from. i don't limit my understanding to continental philosophy either.

I can picture lumpy in the 1970s wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt and beret, lolol

we've got you surrounded. come eat your positive political project.

I pledge to help those who shoot drugs in their arms.
I pledge to help those who have unprotected anonymous sex.
I pledge to help those who eat too much.
I pledge to help those who work out too much.
I pledge to help those who drink too much.
I pledge to help those who don’t drink enough water.
I pledge to help those who misplace their anger.
I pledge to help those who loose their car keys.
I pledge to help those who can’t feed themselves.
I pledge to help those who bring meaning to my life by needing me.
I pledge to help those who can’t help themselves.
I pledge to help those who…oh wait, this goes on forever…

its sad that the ANES podcast did not want to address this topic. it could have made for some interesting and nuanced discussions.

yeah, it's a drag that there was no conversation for this, but it wasn't related to the topic. the folks who were expected to do the conversation had stuff come up.

just bad timing :/

OUR COMMUNITY SPACE"S GUIDELINES
FOR SAFER SPACES AND HARM REDUCTION

In order to keep everyone’s mind, body, and emotions safe,
We have enacted the following policies:

* DO NOT speak or act in a way that has been determined to be inappropriate, dangerous, uncomfortable, or offensive to ANY group.

* DO NOT bring up ANY topics which may be triggering (without first submitting the proper paperwork and offering a pre-approved
power-point presentation).

* DO NOT use pronouns, names, dead names, identifiers, statuses, narratives, preferences, etc that are not up-to-date and current with the preferred preference of any individual, EVEN if you are unaware of any past or recent changes.

* DO NOT disrespect anyone’s opinion, no matter how whack it might seem, except of course, if it is WRONG (ie. anything that could be construed or perceived as obviously sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc, as determined by the most
up-to-date cultural and social authorities).

* DO NOT bring reading material (books, zines, flyers, etc) that may offend ANYONE (especially if written by a cis white hetero-normative male-bodied person, or assumed to be so).

* DO NOT use substances that may offend other folx’s sobriety, morality, or mood. (This includes, but is not limited to: alcohol, weed, illegal drugs, prescription drugs, caffeine, tobacco, chocolate, vitamins, minerals, performance enhancers, Pepsi-products, etc). Of course, depending on your Intersectional Oppression Score (IOS) or In-Crowd Status (ICS), exceptions are happily accommodated.

* DO NOT wear clothes, hairstyles, facial hair, tattoos, make-up, etc, that ANYONE might consider cultural-appropriation or offensive (ie. mohawks, dreadlocks, turbans, feathers, turquoise, piercings, hats, etc)

* DO NOT do ANYTHING that you would not want reposted online, because it will be.

* DO NOT live freely, consciously, and intentionally.
IT IS NOT SAFE FOR ANYONE.

Hi Anews! We have the opportunity to choose those who will represent us for the next four years.

I've been so lucky to see so many of you guys at my US shows recently. I've heard you raise your voices, and I know how powerful they are. Make sure you're ready to use them in our elections this year!

Long live anarchy!

-T@ylor

Yes, nothing like the inescapable binaries of state politics, now provided to you by your average MAGAtard commandeered by God Emperor Trump to wage a Jihad on Taylor Swift. We'll fight her on every beach and every comment section of the internet!

wow, maga, trump....really hard hitting stuff here. can't wait for the election when half of the "anarchists" start picking sides again, making stupid political jokes, and sounding like a bunch of liberals. its like fucking clockwork every four years.

This prolly wouldn't be such an issue if you wouldn't equally have sus "anarcho-curious" posting FOUR MORE YEARS through online anarchist channels.

Takes two flips to make a *COIN*...

Trump is again the personification of authoritarianism to liberal "anarchists"? But never Biden or AOC?

Im sure we can count on "anarchists" rioting for Trump's second (seemingly inevitable) coronation, but the messaging will be as confused as always, just when they appeared to be supporting the election of Hillary Clinton in 2016

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