If you spend enough of your life being rewarded for confrontation, you can start treating confrontation as evidence that you are doing something important. People getting angry means you hit a nerve. Colleagues objecting means you are independent. An institution pushing back means the institution is corrupt.
Genny Harrison: Ted Cruz Has a Point, and I Hate That for Us “”(newsletter)
Liberation is not the absence of structure. Liberation is structure that is accountable to the people it serves. Structure that protects rather than controls. Structure that distributes power rather than concentrating it.
Zedé: Your Critique of Structure Is a Trauma Response “”(newsletter)
Collapsing all structure into oppressive structure is not a political analysis. It is a feeling that has been given the language of analysis. And it is doing serious damage to the communities that need structure most, because those communities are the ones that cannot afford for their systems of care to collapse every time a key person burns out or a conflict goes unresolved.
Zedé: Your Critique of Structure Is a Trauma Response “”(newsletter)
Having rage with nowhere to put it will make you believe that almost anyone with a slightly different optic than yours is a problem or a threat.
Zedé: Your Rage Has Nowhere to Go “”(newsletter)
You can be too poor or too ill or too overwhelmed to obtain a grilled cheese sandwich, but the thought of one is attainable to anyone; the ideal is there, pleasant to the mind parched of gladness.
The Sword And the Sandwich: The Best American Grilled Cheese Sandwich Essay
“ ‘Whole Earth Catalog’ was very libertarian, but that’s because it was about people in their twenties, and everybody then was reading Robert Heinlein and asserting themselves and all that stuff,” Brand said. “We didn’t know what government did.
Anna Wiener: The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog” | The New Yorker
What this book is actually about, if you read it instead of vibing with the cover, is that rich people will kill you and feel nothing.
Andy learned to read and then told everyone she burned the books, which is honestly the most journalist thing about her.
Emma from Past Life, Present Cleavage: The Devil Reads Prada. (newsletter)
All too often, we colonize this heritage, claiming it casually, cheaply, as if it is something we possess rather than something that we give ourselves to.
A.R. Moxon: Patriots of a Land Yet to Come
It’s all pasted-up plastic gold frippery made to mimic quality, but all it does in the end is mock quality; it looks sad and wrong, much like an elderly racist doddering under a pound of pancake makeup, play-acting as a cartoon tough guy for all the other scared little Christian white boys to worship.
A.R. Moxon: Patriots of a Land Yet to Come
After all, the body learns on YES. We simply cannot transform away from something (fascism, terror…), we need to transform towards something that excites us deeply, in each cell of our body.
Erotics of Liberation: Why Is Fascism So Libidinal?
folks can’t even be clear about what they want to be liberated from. You’ll ask and they usually say “the system” and I think it’s such a cop-out response that really means “I don’t really know, I just know right now, it’s really bad and I want to be clear that I’m against it.”
