monsoon season @deluge@ni.hil.ist
raining on your parade
Joined Jan 2020
Pinned post
fuck off
cultivating hostility toward police and frustrating their efforts is something everyone can do in many creative ways. but there is not really anything that anyone can do about "abolishing" the police, including people in positions of "power"
"abolish" already starts out as a kind of policy demand, ready to be watered down and compromised away like all demands on governance. and making demands on government for better conditions is playing the role of citizen.
contempt and hostility toward my enemies feels like a better place to start and not making demands between their various manifestations
fuck the police > abolish the police
information wants to decay
washing off in a puddle
i am not around these things usually and haven't seen my reflection in weeks so when i am visiting a place with mirrors their presence is much more glaring
thinking about the effects of being surrounded by your own image constantly: in mirrors, shiny glass, webcams
a constant reminder to think about your appearance, how you are seen by others, whether you conform to certain internalized ideals
shortages causing shortages
in a world where events happen for unsatisfying, complicated, and highly context-dependent reasons, how can anyone be in charge of anything? especially when the people who think they are at the top of a hierarchy know the least and so have the worst ability to realize their ill-informed goals and can only do so through a highly mediated process of delegation to more informed lower levels. lower levels who are constantly tasked with pointless, counter-productive, or impossible projects
increasingly of the opinion that nobody has ever been "in charge"
chaotic events that spill over into other unpredictable chaotic events so that the lessons from the previous interruption are already out of date or the inability to acquire and retain institutional knowledge (with high turnover or other reasons) seem like more likely scenarios for institutional decline and collapse
just to temper enthusiasm, remember that every outage teaches the organization how to prevent the next one similar in kind
i suspect that "collapse" doesn't look very dramatic most of the time because the systems that surround us are very fragile and a combination of modest but sustained interruptions are enough to severely degrade their operations.
but at the same time, the failure of a system leads to changes in behavior and neighboring systems which might subsume some of the roles of the failing neighbors. for a current example, soldiers driving trucks or staffing hospitals. these temporary arrangements can end but they sometimes become "indefinite" and strain the reserve capacity of the society to respond in other situations. in rich places, there is a lot more of this reserve capacity to burn through and a large-scale "collapse" seems unlikely any time soon even if that is a safe bet long-term.
but what opportunities open up in a world of uneven and slow deterioration, where it becomes harder and more expensive to organize large-scale endeavors as uncertainty and chaotic elements ruin long and medium-term planning? and where the debris from failed prior modes piles up
medical systems are falling over right now anyways: full of people sick from the virus the hospitals can't do much of anything else. with rolling shortages of medical equipment and supplies like oxygen in some places.
people who say shit like "but what about hospitals/medicine/doctors" have never been wrung through the medical bureaucracy of constantly justifying yourself and proving your condition to technocrats you've never met before and will never see again
fuck doctors, fuck hospitals. take veterinary drugs from the internet. superglue your wounds shut.
imagining what it would be like to live without language, how different the patterns of thought and experience of living would be
the news search results for "shortages" have gotten more grim this week
happy to discover that christmas is cancelled again this year
i think of most secular functions as articles of religious faith and practice. register to vote? sorry, i'm not religious
raining on your parade
Joined Jan 2020
