TOTW: Belongingness

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we’ve learned most of what we know. Recently, we’ve waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
Spoken by Carl Sagan in the first episode of "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage"

TOTW: Joy

Topic of the Week – The bloom lives inside the bloom and everything blurs under its effect, lost in the inconsequential wavering of society! This week we’re talking about letting the good times roll, the joie de vivre, jouissance (whatever that means) and how you capture the child-like enchantment of it all and store that gem in your pocket to hang on to when the world is raging outside.

A refutation of common objections to Anarcho-Nihilism

From Aleph's Heretical Domain by Aleph Skoteinos

I decided that it might be worth my time to address some arguments against anarcho-nihilism, if mostly because I keep seeing them floating around. This is mostly in reference to arguments from non-anarchist communists, including Marxist-Leninists, but social-anarchists and standard issue anarcho-communists also tend to make similar arguments – either from first principle, as the case may be, or perhaps simply to take after the old “Anarcho-Bolsheviks” who thought that allying with the Soviet Union would save them after the suppression of Makhnovschina. In the process of this, however, we will not spend any time addressing any accusations of fascism, because in reference to our subject those are simply aesthetic slurs made with no consideration of the actual nature of their object, and as such can be dismissed out of hand.

Horrible Creatures

by Sever, via electronic mail

to all those who left after their comrades treated them horribly

When the survivors realize that all the mayhem and tumult was a revolution—our revolution—and that it's already slipped away from us, a mocking failure belying our pretensions to anything other than misery, other than failure, the blame will start.

Now Paging Doctor Bones

From Medium by Prosper Bonhomme (January 23, 2020)
Prosper Bonhomme

I’ve started smoking again.

It’s not allowed in the house, just the back deck. It makes the whole thing sort of futile when it’s nine degrees outside and I’m sniffing so much snot back into my sinuses I can’t even taste the tobacco. There’s a joke about how smoking takes seven minutes off your life, so it’s a good thing American Spirits last nine minutes, but in this weather I put it out in the snow a third of the way through and go back inside.

TOTW: Anarchist responses to climate change

The effects of extreme climate change, such as heatwaves, flooding, wildfires, and rising sea levels to name just a few are not confined to borders, nor the daily news headlines, but an experience many have come to expect. Breaking away from the false solutions of the State and corporate enterprises, how are anarchists reorganizing society in response to climate change?

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