TOTW: My body, my choice

okay google play "world's smallest violin" on anarchy tube

While autonomy has a special place for anarchists, one aspect of it, bodily autonomy, has a lot of currency in mainstream thought as well. Particularly now, you can see the protest of “my body my choice” taken up once again against the new Texas abortion restrictions and conservative anti-masking or anti-vax protesters cynically appropriating that same language though to a similar end - don’t tell us what to do with our bodies.

The fact that such oppositional forces are saying the same thing makes me think the slogan “my body, my choice” leaves something to be desired. At a glance it shares the fundamental “no” of anarchy (don’t tell me what to do), but for many who hold up this slogan the body is an isolated consumer to be freed from laws and social strictures. We live in a society in which people can’t afford abortions even when they’re “free” to have them, AK Press is urging people to donate to abortion funds, and not masking at an event can be as much of a social act as an individual preference.

Not only does society challenge our choices, but the body itself often shapes our choices through disability, age, sickness and a relationship with a whole host of forces and lifeforms around us. Is the “I” speaking in “my body, my choice” separate from the body? Can we speak of meaningful choice if we’re not able to choose how our bodies work?

How well does “my body, my choice” coincide with an anarchist position on bodies? How do we do bodily autonomy, and how do we push it farther?

note: the intent of this topic isn't to debate the technical merits of masking but the idea of bodily autonomy and how anarchists do it and think about it - comments about masking with respect to bodily autonomy are okay, but we'd encourage you to think about the broader topic, and further comments to the effect of masking = good or masking = ineffective etc will be limited to those that are considered on-topic

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As far as I am concerned, everyone owns their own body absolutely-and has absolute sovereignty over their own body. Abortion choices, sexual choices, drug usage etc are all subsets of this.

I see the issue here (a sovereigns in conflict issue) as NOT being whether someone wears a mask or not, but rather one of entering the airspace of another (inside infectious range) in a dangerous condition without consent to do so. That means those anti-maskers who insist on entering indoor spaces unmasked take away the right of others in that space to control what risks they take-in this case, of outright invasion by the virus. The exception is if lots of others in the same space are obviously and visibly unmasked: entry to that space then becomes consent to risk.

Someone in an empty park walking their dog without a mask by comparison is totally harmless.

If it is a sovereigns in conflict, an assumption cannot be made that because someone doesn't have a mask on that they are infected with disease and contagious. That's blatant irrational fear. Might as well say that if a black person comes to your gathering that they're a criminal thug who is going to rape your women. Might as well say that your anarchist book fair is an insurgency against the government and the fbi should raid it and imprison attendees.

A person wearing a mask and who gets vaccinated and social distances is fully protect against any possible threat and is responsible for protecting themselves not imposing mandates or restrictions upon anyone else.
The fact is, an unvaccinated person has more to fear from a vaccinated one than the other way around. After getting the shot the person goes around shedding the virus and is infectious to those around them. That's medical science by peer review medical journals.

A person who doesn't have covid going up in your face and breathing is totally harmless, a bit annoying and invasive of personal space, but safe.

Facts over fear.

Nice chump trolling but:

- Masks are not meant to protect you against anything. You'd need an N95 or something higher for protection... Spring 2020 where've you been?

- Vaccines do not offer full protection against the virus. Proof being that several countries, starting with Israel, with the highest vaxx rates also got a significant Delta variant wave, for ??? reason. A healthy lifestyle and nutrition is key to a good protection against such a virus. Keep sugar intake as low as possible, and consume kale and oranges regularly to keep the immune system strong.

- Social distancing is irrelevant, and this is why many governments enforced masking regulations. Water droplets can travel further than 2 meters when sneezing without blocking your mouth. The release pressure is from 5 to 24 times the Pa you get at high exhalation of breath (like when yelling or something).

Now let's talk about your FEAR of the Covid God for a moment...

"Masks are not meant to protect you against anything. "

even surgical masks absolutely do offer some protection in both directions, let alone kn95 or n95. see recently completed study in bangladesh.

"Vaccines do not offer full protection against the virus. "
DUH! nobody - even the lame govmnt - ever said it does. no vaccine does, btw. it does not prevent infection or transmission. it DOES seriously reduce the chances of severe symptoms, hospitalization, and death.

" Social distancing is irrelevant"

damn you be ignorant. sharing air allows for transmission. keeping distant reduces shared air. experience all over the world has shown that NOT gathering in crowds results in far less transmission than gathering in crowds. is the logic invisible to you?

do as you will, but at least get the "facts" right if you're gonna claim em.

Generally people take away my right to exist in fully insulated risk-free state. The dog might bite someone, though another person not walking a dog may also be a risk as the non-existent dog they are not walking with could be able to save a person drowning in the river nearby the park.

Then there's the risk of billions of masks filling the landfills and oceans and air and whatnot. No one yet knows how safe it is to ingest plastic particles on daily base.

It forbodes badly, then everyones kidneys block up with microplastics.

this fuckin guy doesn’t care about transmitting a deadly airborn virus but wants us to believe he cares about the biosphere. fuckin trolls.

Wait till he learns what dead human bodies do to the biosphere once they’re “prepared” for burial or cremation…

Best way to risk-free life is to sterilize oneself so future generations don't need to deal with the human problem. For state-loving mask-mandating scum the solution is of course authoritarian: sterilize everyone.

How is authoritarian state-mandated masking any less of a solution to "the human problem" than authoritarian state mandated sterilization?What is "the human problem" and what is a "risk-free life"? How do you function day-to-day with the overflow of shit inside your brain?

The human problem is the impossibility of living harmless lives and dying harmless deaths. I don't understand your first question. Risk-free life is the ultimate pipe dream of mask people.

I could wear the mask but the idea of doing so makes me feel anxious so I won't do it. It could be some kind of subconscious aversion to how the mask is not just a protective equipment but acts as a sign. The risk of wearing a mask for me might be psychologically huge, no one knows.

Maybe I didn't understand your question, but I would expect mask-mandaters to be sterilization-mandaters too, for the sake of collective health and risk-free life of course, they are not competiting solutions but complementary. It has happened already in the eugenics movement in a partial scale, but if we are now making the conclusion that human life is harmful per se, the logical authoritarian conclusion would be to exterminate it for the sake of the health of everyone else.

Eugenics and biopolitics in general is not so much about extermination, as thanatopolitics, but about potentiating life. Eugenics and anarchism have a history together. What would be interesting in discussing is the overlap between body modification and genetic modification. The person with a womb can not only opt to carry on with the pregnancy or abort it, but also alter the genetic makeup of the embryo before birth in what's called "designer babies". Transhumanists are the most vocal advocates of body autonomy with regards to morphological freedom, and also embrace all aspects of being cyborg and using techne to accommodate for functional diversity, slandering anything other than techno-utopia as ableist. Yet if the technology allows for it, they'd eradicate all genetic predisposition to illness, as well as take other eugenic measures, as well as eschew bodies in favor of shape-shifting holographic anime avatars.

Yet abortion comes in many varieties, the low-tech herbal and infanticide, and the high tech pharmaceutical and modern medicine using industrial products. Even higher tech alternatives to deal with pregnancies and reproduction have been imagined, like artificial wombs, cloning, etc.

Yet regardless of all of that, the issue of laws governing bodies remains. A service is criminalized, an action, an insertion, an ingestion, an expulsion. Anarchists oppose that, whether they're primmies or transhumanists. Liberals need the law to condone it, conservatives need the law to repeal it.

The mask is but a one piece of in the risk puzzle but people are over-invested in it right now due to momentary panic. It's funny how people who learnt to wash their hands in 2020 are now acting like they are the ultimate saviours of (bare) life.

Conservatools are just making the usual stupid mistakes... you just can't compare masking with abortion, as the former is used to prevent your body from spreading the virus to other bodies. Having a baby or not will only affect you and the baby, at short term, 'til you mother relationship and the baby starts to affect (not infect) others.

Babies, tho, can be seen as a kind of virus...

The anti-masker attitude is akin to not wearing a condom, more so than to the person getting an abortion. Not wearing the condom, or not being sterilized as well (which would be akin to getting vaccinated) is the negligent act which could lead to a pregnancy (akin to infection) and the health care services needed for abortion or labor/delivery (akin to being hospitalized and put on respirators).

An anti-masker does not alleviate anyone any burden by their action, while endangering and potentially burdening others (same with condom). I can't imagine a scenario in which it isn't an exclusively selfish act.

Someone who has an abortion might be alleviating a burden to other people, like for example someone who already has other children they take care of and not enough time, resources, support for another pregnancy, so it's not necessarily an exclusively selfish act.

There are also countless cases of people who have been made pregnant, and give birth, and care for children against their will, but it would be hard to find a case of someone made to wear a breathing mask against their will. In fact, the contrary is true, anti-maskers forcing other people to remove their masks.

Mask was given the current inflated meaning in identity politics by the fact that states wanted to keep their deathly machinations going as efficiently as possible during pandemic.

This discourse has grown pretty tired. I don't think topics get boring, I'm sure there's a lot more that could be said that is interesting on this topic or of covid broadly. But in this specific scene it seems evident the lines have been drawn, the positions stated and the nuance espoused.

So instead of giving a long specific explanation in response heres a short general one: people should do what they want.

This talk HOPE 2020 (2020): Hackers in a Post Roe v. Wade World , among many other things, that google, phones, and different apps are tracking people's data to criminalize abortions. For searching for such basic knowledge, for example such as this: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/annwen-herbal-abortion, but also googling pregnancy symptoms, period trackers, and other online behavior.
It mentions the most common abortion method is Mifepristone + Misoprostol.
The need for good infosec and opsec (vpn, tor, etc) when sourcing, and making sure source and product are legit.
There's also manual vacuum aspirators, a medical device that can be used by a nurse, can be bought on Alibaba and ebay.
These could in theory be 3-d printed.
There's also the Del Em which is an improvised device that can be easily made, and used by a trained group of 3, but it has low effectiveness compared to the prior methods discussed.

so many dude bros and people in general taking tacticool training for squad tactics they'll never use, fewer take dirt medicine courses, why isn't learning how to do abortions and midwifery courses more common? an unwanted pregnancy is a far more likely SHTF scenario. tough guys imagine themselves battling against an army but can't manage to learn how to kill one fetus? they rather avoid paying child support i guess

This is all absurd. I don't care for the idiots trying to use language for protecting people's autonomy to have abortions or qanon fools anymore than all these leftists moralizing over protecting every human life at all costs. And I'm tired of the dichotomy that you're one or the other.
If we want to obsess over how we are impacting other people to this level that we will freak out over people not wearing a mask when we are or not taking the vaccine when we are, then let's get some consistency and start to examine all the ways that we take for granted on a day to day basis that the government and public health doesn't freak out about. Hopefully none of y'all have ever smoked a cigarette in front of everyone else cause ya know, lung cancer also comes from second hand smoke. Or do we only care about survival when it comes to covid?

Or do we care about survival only when it comes to unborn fetuses? you could also ask
All these rightists moralizing over protecting every unborn human life at all costs.

to me this incessent wrangling over whose experts are more expert is ridiculous. no one online is going to trust some other anon online. get the fuck over yourselves.

what is this level of conversation good for? it's good for perhaps learning more information about something you care about (which this straight up NUH UNH gets in teh way of).

it might be good for understanding the breadth of the disagreement you have with some other ill-defined group of people that might as well be cops or moles or whatever the fuck because this is ONLINE AND ANONYMOUS. so there is NO REASON to get het up about whether someone agrees with you or not.

i say this for whomever here is capable of hearing me, so not makhno.

anybody else want to have a more interesting conversation about, you know, the boundaries between bodies? how they do and don't exist? where our lines are from one relationship (or moment) to the next?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the questions you pose at the end. Personally I find the boundaries that we try and draw between our selves and the world around us are entirely arbitrary and often the distinctions we do draw reflects ones ideology. Especially I would say most people who identify a concrete self often do so with very humanist ideas in mind.

Okay then you go live with the Taliban and soon you'll realize, especially if you are female, that its preferable living in a capitalist statist nation rather than a fundamentalist religious dictatorship.

just go live in texas...

comparing one crappy system to another doesn't compel me.

also, the u.s. is worse in some ways, that are invisible to people who grew up in the u.s. and vice versa.

You obviously don't comprehend how logical comparison is an important part of critical thinking and that subjective experience has no part in empirical analytics.

guess it seems like a nuanced, good faith conversation would be necessary for the topic and how well do those tend to go around here?

i'm always doing my best to respect people's comfort levels until they really seem to be over reaching for bad reasons.

my background is such that i'm often dealing with the huge spectrum of random people's reactions to arbitrary rules while sharing space since long before the pandemic. most are far too meek and accepting which is typical and sad. then you've got the ones who try to assert themselves in clumsy ways that reveal their stunted skills and narrow motivations for doing so, probably because most of us are poorly socialized for this stuff? regardless of which side of the fence?

what's rare is someone who's fully able to hold their ground when necessary as well as being accommodating and fair minded, which I suppose is the paragon of an anarchist in my wildest, most optimistic imagination for personal conduct. luckily i'm accustomed to disappointment!

anyway, bodily autonomy would be covered by all this too. of course it should be obvious from a liberatory perspective but the devils in the details with exactly where your bubble of liberty collides with another. simple as paying a lot of attention to what signals you're getting from other humans, none of which has anything to do with the state or its mandates.

I’m kind of just interested in how users of this site feel about coming down on the same side of an issue as the far right. I was a heavy user of this site about a decade ago when “post-left” meant something like “influenced by the ultra-left”/autonomist-left. I’m not sure what it means here, now…

Yeah I was around this site 10 years ago and post-left still means the autonomous individualist consciousness evolving and adapting to the socio-political climate it experiences whereever that may be. The antifa and altright binary neurosis is just a side-show.

Well, I don't know what the moderators expected when they posted this topic, but no surprises here. Glenn Greenwald is more of an anarchist than half the people commenting in this thread, when he points out the blatant hypocrisy of the ACLU recently taking the position that bodily autonomy is not absolute (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/opinion/covid-vaccine-mandates-civil-...), when in 2008 they took exactly the opposite position: https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/privacy/pemic_report.pdf

The '08 decision you are linking to was back when Nadine Strossen ran the union. Under her they were very much Greenwaldian in values. Now they've become a joke more like what CCLA is(Canadian). It's high time that org had a good ole fashion split where the Greenwaldians and the Strossenites created something akin to what it used to be very recently. ACLA(association) maybe.

so some liberals who belong to an organization that exists to defend speech in the existing legal framework said something at odds with what some other liberals from the same organization said 13 years ago, and some other liberal called them out

what the fuck does any of this have to do with anarchy or an anarchist idea of bodily autonomy? there's been no mention of vaccine mandates, much less anyone speaking in support of them, so who are you talking about here besides the spookies you've dreamed up on this site?

bodily autonomy, if I'm not mistaken - specifically in the context of State policies regarding pandemics, and anarchist responses to said policies. It is disgraceful that a bunch of liberals in the (2008) ACLU are so much more anti-authoritarian than many of the so-called anarchists posting here. I strongly suspect that the reasons for the ACLU's recent about-face on bodily autonomy are the same as for those in this thread making similar excuses - a general social climate that fosters disregard for such an important concept, and apathy about the erosion of our personal freedoms.

They aren't anti-authoritarian though - they're just believers in a different kind of authority, much like the chuds you're celebrating in the montreal thread for throwing some stones. your use of sloppy language ("i suspect" "general social climate" "similar excuses") and handwringing about the mildest suggestion that someone might ask you to wear a mask (without the intention of forcing you to do so) shows your embarrassingly thin evidence for comparing anarchists to the state, but I guess you've got friends like glenn greenwald and these canadian creeps now, anarchists you've magicked up to somehow accuse actual anarchists of being authoritarians.

Lots of folks I know support vaccines but oppose dangerous(tracking etc) electronic vaccine passports or governmentally-imposed mandates. As much as I oppose any system that has the effect of tracking the general public, I also probably could not survive much longer without having used the vaccine itself due to a genetic lung condition. I need it for direct self-defense.

Vaccines, vaccine passports, and vaccine mandates are actually three different issues

This may be trivial, but vaccine passports go hand-in-hand with mandates (at least partial mandates for more or less specific professions).

I'm worried of how, in the Covid State, when a new tactic's floating around, getting spinned around the MSM -even speculatively- it'll tend to become a reality later on.

The absurdity is how we've got a new wave flaring up in Canada -one that is becoming comparable in size as the first wave of March/April 2020- and some other massively-vaxxed countries, and the experts are attempting to blame it on the non-vaxxed, so this is set as precedent for enforcing a systematic vaxx mandate, to everyone.

If they could pull off a curfew just on the pretense of keeping people from evening visits to relatives in the evening.

Also can Thecollective please quit behaving like Twitter and censoring ANY comment that's even barely critical of Covid policies? I know there's the usual toxic or Far Right trolls, but you're like... becoming more than worrisome putting everyone in a same basket.

But I'm totally fine with governments making vaccines available for free everywhere, for those like Luke that need them. Of course *it's to every person to have a final say on what they do with their own body*, rite?

"... and the experts are attempting to blame it on the non-vaxxed,"

which experts are you listening to who say that you should not blame it on the non-vaxxed? how do you navigate your way through which expert is actually the correct expert? maybe ignore all the experts and trust your own expert opinion?

Did you even read the links you posted? They reinforce the opposite to your above claims regarding unvaccinated.

Your previous comment was rather vague... But my claim is that several medical authorities regarding as legit (CDC, Institut Pasteur and some Canadian medical experts) are indeed spreading the narrative of an "epidemic of the unvaccinated", where the unvaccinated are blamed for putting pressure on the medical system, if not contributing to the new wave. Do you need quotes from these articles?

Also to prevent from comment removal (lol), I just wrote the reply above.

You made a claim with an implied assertion:

"The absurdity is how we've got a new wave flaring up in Canada ... and the experts are attempting to blame it on the non-vaxxed"

A question was asked:

"which experts are you listening to who say that you should not blame it on the non-vaxxed? "

You provided links that reinforce the majority expert opinion that the non-vaxxed are to blame. How does this support your claim that this expert opinion is an absurdity or that the non-vaxxed are not to be blamed? If, however, your claim is that the experts are correct and the blame does indeed fall upon the non-vaxxed, then how is that an absurdity?

So if you won't even let me answer your questions, why ask in the first place, or not remove your comment altogether?

Is removing comments with legit arguments your way of having the last word in a debate? I'd like to see how would that work irl.

Look, Fauvenoir. the persons who are responding to you and the persons removing the comments are entirely different. There is more than one person on the internet.

I am not Fauvenoir. I admit it! It was all a lie and the whole NA anarchyland got DUPED badly. In the news... Dozens of Portland anarchist are losing it as we speak. The person writing this is someone else entirely. You gotta take my word for cash, as (yes) this is the internet.

"They could pull off a curfew just on the pretense of keeping people from evening visits to relatives in the evening. So what else can they afford to do? What are their limits of control?"

Due to heavy-handed moderation practices that stifle the spirit of open anarchic conversation all anons are boycotting anarchistnews.org for 48 hours. Any comments during this period are the result of mod alt-account trickery.

Nice try, mod

100 percent body autonomy to everyone, even if you don't agree with them

I don't see how this even needs to be discussed as *anarchists* if someone wants to get an abortion they can if they don't, they don't, it is simple and doesn't need Theory and politics

Where does your bodily autonomy end and mine begin? Your body requires an enzyme that only grows inside my matured feces but I do not want to share them with you. For your body to function in the way you want it requires the extraction of resources whose byproduct pollutes my drinking water and I don't want that therefore you die. Oh well!

I smear my New Age body with your feces as a gesture of bodily unity!

Your body autonomy ends when you sneeze on my body autonomy with your autonomous covid droplets.

It would be interesting to examine notions of body autonomy, personal space and freedom of movement alongside the discussion of technologies of the self by Foucault.

As a separate concern, it would also be interesting to question how said notions place requirements requirements on industrially mass-produced products, infrastructure, service providers, and other externalities.

Bodily autonomy is a spook.

Completely agree with your idea concerning the reification of bodily fear into an authoritarian right debatable by liberals whilst neglecting the real autonomous consciousness.

True... other people reclaiming their own bodies is a spook. They all belong to you, really. Because you said so. Not authoritarian!

For some reason, it bothers the hell out of the @news censors that I keep posting links to CDC data, so I've got something different here. The anti-lockdown/vaccine passport/vaccine mandate protests in Canada are heating up and yes, this is very much on topic, since these protests are all about bodily autonomy:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/8/what-next-experts-in-canada-alar...

Al-Jazeera is a pretty mainstream news site, so they follow the usual tactic of trying to smear all the protesters as crazy, racist, misogynistic right-wingers, without even bothering to consider whether they might have any valid grounds for complaint.

The thing these anarcho-leftists still won't allow their stuck brains to realize is how the Far Right creep is just recycling these movements in great parts due to themselves not only not supporting these movements, but bluntly supporting statist Covid policies and its narratives.

The anti-Vaxx Passport marches I've seen had a pretty diverse crowd of people with a rather small and not too vocal Qanon-like scum, which could be easily tossed aside or isolated. Most marchers are pretty ordinary or elderly people who might/might not have stupid political views but regardless got legitimately antiauthoritarian motives.

What I've noticed in the last few years are the growing number of dispossessed petty bourgeoisie joining the ranks of this Qanon horde. I have an uncle who fits this categorie like a glove.

I think anon (not verified) on Thu, 09/09/2021 - 07:49 hit the nail right on the head, and it really is the crux of this whole thread. The anarcho-leftists will fight vigorously for a woman's right to an abortion - as would I - because that is a politically correct issue that doesn't challenge their leftist identity. But start talking about a person's right not to wear a mask, or not to get a vaccine, or not to be locked down, and suddenly the protestors are all Qanon, or Trumpists, or some such bullshit. In this the anarcho-leftists are in perfect sync with the current ruling class narrative.

Please learn who Nestor Makhno, the leftist anarcho-communist was, if you're going to use their name as your screen name. It's past embarrassing.

Pregnancy is not contagious tho. Having an abortion is not contagious either.

Truthfully, I'm torn. I don't want to die from a respiratory illness so I wear a mask where called for and I got the vaccine. But I have no desire to tell others what to do. Have your precious bodily autonomy. Maybe you all will be the only ones to die prematurely from this. You and all the right wing ideologues. Alas, covid IS contagious so you are taking risks with other bodies who have different desires.

I chose that pseudonym long ago, after reading Voline and Arshinov, because I admired the Makhnovists' brave fight against incredible odds in the Ukraine. Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of the Leninist-inspired Platform that he helped write later, in Paris.

oh so the cool sexy violence but not anything to do with what he actually thought?

wonder what he would have thought about you and your little covid hill you keep tryin to die on...

I would still be interested to know what you think about what I actually said about anarcho-leftists and bodily autonomy in my previous post.

a multifaceted troll, thankya very much!

already did several posts about this, your leftist strawman isn't very interesting imo. lot of people seem to be really struggling to reconcile their stunted sense of personal liberties with having to share space in the new normal. usually it reveals to me how they've waited until now to bothering thinking about any of this much at all.

compare and contrast this petty bullshit about people glaring at you with your historical reference, who got half his face shot off in battle. not exactly filling those shoes in right now, are you?

is something I have become very good at, after years of experience in threads like these (and not always with the high level of censorship we see on @news). As I pointed out previously, the tendency among those I call "anarcho-leftists" to reflexively label people who demand bodily autonomy in areas like mask-wearing, lockdowns, vaccies, and vaccine passports as right-wing crazies perfectly mirrors the smear tactics used by the State and mainstream media - and has the exact effect that the ruling class desires, which is to shut down discussion, prevent possible mass resistance, and keep the discontented lumpen proletariat divided against each other.

Agreed, however I feel that the "body autonomy" stance must also require a voluntary avoidance of spaces requiring these impositions. It takes 2 to either tango or not to tango.
That's why I lived off the grid for many years and didn't participate in communal activities and recreation.

While I am sympathetic to those who choose to live "off the grid" in order to avoid unwanted impositions on their lives, I am not yet ready to cede social spaces and our shared culture to the authoritarians, since everything that defines us as human involves social interaction and relationships of one kind or another - often antagonistic ones. I resist the new authoritarian attacks made under the guise of a concern for public health as much as possible - ignoring or openly defying rules whenever I judge the risks or the costs to be acceptable. I discuss, debate, or argue about these issues with anyone who shows an interest - either in person, or online. I even occasionally wear provocative t-shirts (and so far, have gotten mostly positive comments about those). I look forward to the day when there will be a high enough and visible level of resistance in Chicago that I will be able to find comrades (or as Wolfi Landstreicher might say, "accomplices") with whom to share the pleasure and the adventure of the revolution of everyday life.

it's funny you talk about sharing space when you come off as so unwilling to even entertain negotiating that space with people, so much so that you spent an entire day trying to accuse that anarchist gathering in montreal of being like 1984 because they want people to be willing to work out space with each other when it comes to covid.

You talk about shared culture and and social spaces but mention in the next breath that you don't have friends to do radical stuff with - are you just spending your time wearing provocative t-shirts (?) and arguing with people online?

tbh i have no idea how I'd share space with you because you come off as someone who's both very intent on asserting their autonomy (don't even ask me to do something i don't want to do you authoritarian) while totally disrespecting the autonomy of others if they're doing something different by accusing them of not knowing what they're doing, being sheep, being cops, not being informed, etc.

16:58 here, well,,,as a nihilo-anarch I regard "culture" as an artificial construct of minor significance to the really important aspects of life, like loyal empathic relationships with family and friends, so to me, important social spaces could even be an isolated compound in the wilderness as long as I'm enriched by my own companions.
To me, struggling against authority that doesn't encroach within my space is equivalent to entering the lion cage in a zoo when instead I could just continue walking and enjoying the neutral ambience of apolitical existence.

Friends are one thing, but accomplices or comrades who share one's most deeply-held political values are quite another, particularly when those values run counter to the mass hysteria being fomented by the State and mass media. Biden has now thrown down the gauntlet in the US, and remaining neutral will simply not be an option. I recently read a clever comment about leftists, which applies quite well to the anarcho-leftists who despise or mock the fight for true bodily autonomy: "Leftists love two things above all else - telling other people what to do, and being told what to do." I care for neither of those.

Biden is taking two big risks with his vaccine mandate: One is that 7 of 10 unvaxxed people in a recent poll claimed they would quit their job in response to a vaccine mandate. That means some companies will stop bidding on government contracts to avoid losing their workers, while others might have labor shortages in MAGAt areas where vaccinations are unpopular. The other is that the extreme right might see this as a declaration of war.

We need a way to allow people to refuse to share airspace or otherwise associate with those who refuse vaccines without resorting to making the vaccine compulsory. Then we get the whole vaccine passport mess.

For myself, I am vaxxed (genetic lung issue means unvaxxed covid would kill me), but will never allow a tracking app (vaccine or otherwise) on any of my electronic devices. I have kept all of my entertainment etc outdoors since this whole thing began, am not employed etc, so can get by without the apps so long as they are never required to by groceries etc. To clubs I used to patronize before the pandemic but which now collect phone numbers for contract tracing, I say "you do what you need to do, I am doing what I need to do and will see you when this is all the way over" with no beefs.

i'll be damned luke! a reasonable take! completely agree with you here. the plague isn't exactly a great issue to be an extremist about?

i'm the friendly neighborhood extremist on more than a few topics but epidemics just don't seem like appropriate terrain for hot takes and edgelording?! just a thought

When the French State tries to restrict their citizens' bodily autonomy, they don't just debate about it online - they hit the streets. Hundreds of thousands have been engaging in protests like this every week, yet he hear almost nothing about it online. It will be interesting to check anarchists' attitudes on this when I visit the NYC Anarchist Bookfair in a couple of weeks:

https://odysee.com/@SerebraSana:1/Paris-health-pass-protest-september-11...

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