Octopus Filmed Changing Colours While Sleeping.

I recently learned how much changes you can do without doing anything drastic or illegal. I won't call it anarchy, but you can do so many things. I recently noticed my city hall is throwing trash in the forest next to my house. I organized a forest cleaning, and made someone from the city hall come to give me trash bags. I told him about the trash they are throwing in the forest and he just called some people and they cleaned it within a day or two. This was a huge amount of trash that I couldn't physically pick up, and they just did it happily. People are good and support good things if you act for it. Also some people I don't know came to the forest cleaning and it is much nicer to go out now. It made a change

Somewhat on the vibe of "your glorious revolution doesn't exist," I want to talk to you all, especially the young folks, about effective anarchism.

Spoiler alert, it's not blowing stuff up or arson.

I am considered the most anarchical person of all among my friends. Granted, most of my experience has been wreaking anarchy against the systems present in my high school and college, but the principles are the same.

Practical anarchy is not the big, flashy, romanticizable thing people online make it out to be. It's more about the long haul - digging in your teeth and just being a menace that no one can really get rid of.

Everyone's "Why vote when you can firebomb a Walmart" posts (that they don't follow through on) are just not pratical because this is a surveillance society. With CCTV and DNA testing and cell phone cameras and GPS tracking, if you do something big like that, you are GOING to be caught; then that is the end of your anarchical career. And, keep in mind that you might get caught while you're setting up this big event - it's a crime to blow up a Walmart and also a crime to conspire to blow up a Walmart, so your career in anarchy might end before it begins, and then you are permanently out of the game. No matter what causes you were working for that inspired you to do something big and violent that you thought would get someone's attention, you now can't help at all ever again in your entire life. What you did will be a passing headline on the news, and then everything will go back to exactly what it was because big, acute actions can't compare in effectiveness to small, constant actions (just being a thorn in the side of the system, poking and poking, but unable to be dislodged).

This is just the practical side of it too: think about the risk of hurting innocents if you really advocate for doing things like that. You think blowing up a Walmart would really make a dent in that big of a corporation? But if you intentionally or unintentionally kill a bunch of Walmart shoppers, that's going to devastate families that had nothing to do with whatever your cause is.

So all that big talk about violence and destruction: not practical, not effective, not ethical.

The only way I've started to change oppressive systems around me is by justing chipping away from within the confines of the rules of these systems, and/or only stepping just outside them (never breaking rules in a big way that could have allowed said system to easily and "justifiably" get rid of me).

So if you're going to be an anarchist, you need to consider:

Having the longest career in anarchism possible (i.e. being careful enough and judicious with your actions so that you don't get expelled from the system you wish to fight).

And then for any given anarchical plan:

2. Potential consequences.

3. Insurance.

I'll give you an example. I had serious beef with the culture of my college's science department. Students were constantly overworked, and if they expressed their misery outloud or reached out to any of their professors about their struggles, they got apathetic responses if not direct insults to their abilities or dedication. I had too many similar disparaging interactions with professors in one week, and I realized a lot of the responses I was getting were just the result of professors not really knowing how they sounded when they said certain things to students (ex: If someone says they're struggling with a course, don't IMMEDIATELY respond with "change your major," - you can give that as an option, but if you make it your first suggestion, the implication to the student is that if they're having any trouble with the course, they're not good enough for the program).

So I wrote up a flier of examples of good and bad ways to respond to students having anxiety with explanations and distributed it to every professor in the department. Everyone who knew about this perceived it as a great personal risk - that I would get in some kind of unspecified trouble or piss off an important professor, so before embarking on this project, I considered...

Potential consequences: I couldn't really think of any specific college or department rules I could be violating. People postered and handed out fliers in the department all the time. What I was doing fell pretty clearly under freedom of speech. I just shoved the fliers under professors' doors, so I didn't trespass in anyone's office. Worst I could think is that individual professors would get mad at me and make my life difficult, or I'd simply be told to stop fliering in the department.

Insurance: Just in case there were any consequences that I didn't think of and to insure me against the ones I had thought of, I didn't put my name on the flier. It was typed in Word, something everyone had access to. I came in to do it after professors had all left for the day but before I needed to use my ID to get into the building (no electronic record of me being there). I took the elevator to the first floor offices because the stairs require ID swipe after 5pm, but the elevators do not. I found out the building had no cameras by asking about it on the grounds that something of mine had been stolen a few weeks prior. I shoved the flier under the doors of dark offices and left it outside offices with lights on (so that no one would come out and spot me). And here's one of the most important pieces of insurance: I put up a few of the fliers on public bulletin boards in the building. This was important so that if I slipped up and said something that conveyed that I had knowledge of the content of the flier, I would have an excuse for that, i.e., I read it on the bulletin board before class this morning.

And then I did the thing. And surprisingly, it was incredibly well-received by professors. A few who knew that the flier must have been mine (because of previous, similar anarchical actions rumored to be associated with me) told me that everyone was RELIEVED that they finally had an instruction manual from the student perspective on what the hell they're supposed to say when one of their students is panicking. It sparked a real change in the vibe of the department and student experience. Had it instead pissed people off, I would have simply said I could not claim authorship of the flier but had read it and thought it contained good ideas then gone on creating more anarchy while angry people grasped at the zero straws I had left them to pin the action on me.

That's an example of a single action I took that was part of a much longer (~3 years) campaign of mine to change the culture of my department. Everytime I did something in that campaign, I made that consequences vs. insurance calculation to make sure they couldn't expell me from the program, the department, or the school before I succeeded.

amy pond dies more times than rory williams

y’all know rory as “the boy who dies” but you are WRONG

Rory deaths:

Turned to dust in Amy’s Choice

tardis crashes into the cold sun in Amy’s choice

Erased from existence in Cold Blood

Drowns in Curse of the Black Spot

Jumps off a building in Angels Take Manhattan

Dies of old age in Angels Take Manhattan

Amy deaths:

Drives a car into a house in Amy’s Choice

tardis crashes into the cold sun in Amy’s Choice

Killed by auton Rory in The Pandorica Opens

Killed by those weird dolls in Night Terrors

Old Amy is erased from existence in The Girl Who Waited

Jumps off a building in Angels Take Manhattan

Dies of old age in Angels Take Manhattan

that’s 6 deaths to Rory and 7 to Amy. furthermore. y’all know amy as “the girl who waited” because she waited for fourteen years, but rory waited for two thousand years and you just ignore it ???

switch. the. labels. amy is the boy who died, rory is the girl who waited, there ya go.

My English teacher told us that half of Shakespeare's works were written by queen Elizabeth the first. I told my literature teacher, and he said, and I quote "what the fuck". Apparently my English teacher didn't mean it seriously but she's crazy so you can never know

Do it. Write the fic. We will all love it

Look Daredevil vs Kingpin is a classic and it's great but imagine how infinitely funnier it would be if it was Kingpin vs Jessica Jones. Just imagine how helpless Fisk would be against her. She is a not a vigilante since she has a private detective licence so she is legal. He can't intimidate her because she is a depressed alcoholic with super strength. He can't threaten her loved ones because the only person she ever truly loved is her sister who is in the most high secure prison on the planet way out of Fisk's reach. He can't besmirch her reputatation and set the media against her because she doesn't have any repuation. He can hold the most eloquent passionate speech denoucning her and when the media finds her passed out in the garbage in front of a bar and asks for rebuttal she will just call him a prenteious cocksucker and New York will immediately side with her. Also as a private detective not only is she used to digging dirt but the dirt she digs is legally admissable so will immediately take down quite a few of his minions And worst of all at the end of the day Fisk is a brawler. He dreams of nothing more then to fight Daredevil one on one and beat him but he can't do that with Jessica because she has actual super strength and she can knock him out with one punch....if she is holding back. If she is not holding back hat one punch would burst him open like meat pinata. He is physically impotent against her and this would enrgae him to an insane degree

Y'know all the Gen Z folks online who oversimplify the entire world and all morality into a binary oppressor and victim dynamic which...just doesn't reflect reality?

Which routinely regards murdering, raping, suicide bombing, gay-hating, misogynist terrorists...as the good guys?

Want to know how they developed this particular set of cognative distortions?

This worldview, often seen among Millennials and very common among Gen Z leftists, was produced by the corruption of a good and useful bit of critical theory meant to address nuance, complexity, and compassion: intersectionality.

Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality began as a way to explain how different forms of discrimination overlap and interact, especially for Black women who face both racism and sexism in ways that neither anti-racist nor feminist frameworks alone fully addressed.

So, for example:

A white woman might face sexism but not racism.

A Black man might face racism but not sexism.

A Black woman faces both, and often in compounded ways.

This seems like a helpful way to understand complexity in lived experiences, right?

Because it is! It's fantastic and appropriate and necessary! Sojourner Truth brought it up in 1851.

So late Millennials and Gen Z college students were exposed to sloppy versions of Crenshaw's thesis and, like a lab leak, the idea spread beyond academic critical theory into activist and online spaces...where it began to mutate into something else entirely.

Instead of just understanding overlapping disadvantages, intersectionality became a kind of oppression calculator.

People began to stack their marginalized identities in a way that assigned moral authority. The more marginalized identities you hold, the more your voice is prioritized.

If you have "privileged" identities (white, male, cisgender, etc.), you may be expected in leftist spaces to sit down, shut up, and only listen.

The problem: it is awfully illiberal to grant agency to (or take agency from) an individual based on their group association.

(Liberals recognize that as old fashioned bigotry masquerading as justice.)

Oppressor/Oppressed

So this framing helped flatten the complexity of individuals into a binary of oppressor or oppressed, based solely on which and how many marginalized identities one can claim.

This inevitably led to hierarchies of victimhood in which competing identities are ranked to determine whose suffering is more valid.

Leftists seemingly trade memes like the one below without irony:

That's the origin of Oppression Olympics.

This is where it went completely off the rails, with some movements and organizations deciding that only those with certain identities or performed political perspectives should be permitted to speak.

But...what if you're not a holder of one of these victim identities? Well, if you belong to a privileged group, you're now the proud owner of collective guilt and are held responsible for the system of oppression...even if you've personally done nothing wrong.

This made it easy to turn entire groups, millions of complex people in varying and nuanced circumstances...into simplified moral symbols.

If a group is judged powerful or privileged, it (and anyone associated with it) is an oppressor.

If a group is judged marginalized, it becomes the victim.

Wait, though - it gets worse.

Once this kind of "intersectionality" (which no longer resembled Crenshaw's) became part of the social media discourse, algorithms boosted simple, emotional content that aligned with the victim/oppressor binary. In social media, engagement is everything, and it distorts everything.

Gen Z folks are particularly susceptible to these distortions because they have spent most of their lives soaking in performative social media activism which offers a (wrong but) clear, simple, binary moral compass in a world which otherwise feels messy, confusing, and overwhelming. This gives them the opportunity to express solidarity with those who suffer injustice, which makes them feel like they're good people for siding with the good people against the bad people.

So intersectionality went from "people are complex" to "if you check [X] boxes, you are righteous, and if not...you're complicit."

Intersectionality started as a tool for empathy and nuance, helping us see how systems of oppression intersect and interact. This, I want to repeat, is great.

In social media activism, though, it got flattened into a worldview where people and nations are judged morally and collectively based on their group identities and perceived power.

You know how you can tell that this isn't really justice? Justice is rarely so simple, binary, and completely devoid of nuance.

Okay, so there's the mindset of the Gen Z leftist. Let's look at how they apply it to Israel.

The many and complex facts and long history of the Arab/Israeli conflict don't fit neatly into this framing, so the narratives must be re-written to cram them into the shape such leftists demand:

Palestinians = oppressed

Framed as an indigenous, stateless people living under military occupation and suffering from systemic discrimination, they are exclusively innocent victims without agency who need the good people of the West to save them from...

Israel/Jews = oppressors

Cast as a colonial, European, settler colonialist, imperialist, racist power, seen as inflicting structural violence on a vulnerable population.

And because these leftists don't read history (just memes and TikTok), they believe this oppression has been going on from time immemorial.

(That's perhaps part of where they get the idea that "Palestine" is an ancient civilization.)

This framework, this need to be on the right side of a false binary requires them to aggressively ignore, bury, appropriate, downplay, or invert all Jewish historical trauma, indigeneity, and security concerns...all to make a complex set of circumstances fit into the box of their simple moral binary.

Think about it. Isn't that the content of most of the ugly comments you get from them? Simple, moral binaries which aren't supported by facts, evidence, or reason?

(Yes, the far right Gen Z folks do the same thing for different reasons and in a mirror...where victim and Oppressor switch places. That's how we get cishet white Christian males who are certain they're being oppressed, but that's a topic for another time, maybe.)

Israel as White Colonial Power

Israel is increasingly racialized as "white" or "European," despite its multi-ethnic population (including ~50% Mizrahi/ Sephardi Jews and ~20% Arab citizens).

Zionism, instead of being recognized as a liberation movement for Jews after ~2000 years of genocides and ethnic cleansings, is recast as an extension of European settler colonialism...despite Jews being undeniably indigenous to the region and never meeting the definition of 'settler colonialism.'

The term's definition, the leftists realize, must be changed so they can cram Israel into the oppressor box! It's become a common tactic.

Remember when Amnesty International could only try to make "genocide" stick to Israel by changing the definition of genicide?

Remember when Ireland demanded that the ICJ change the definition of genocide for the exclusive purpose of slapping that label on Israel?

Its still effin' ridiculous, but at least this finally explains their cognative distortion of reality: They must distort reality in order to feel okay about themselves.

Palestinians as Eternal Victims

Palestinians, to be crammed into this framing, are depicted as having no agency, portrayed solely as victims of Israeli evil.

Violence by Palestinian actors (terrorism, 138 suicide bombings, incitement...October 7th...) is justified, excused, or omitted as a "reaction" to occupation. They're oppressed, say the leftists, so they bear no responsibility for their choices.

Like children. Infantilizing, isn't it?

Power is Oppression

Israel's military, economy, and alliance with the US make it the powerful party and therefore the oppressor. Why?

Because the framing requires the more powerful side to be morally wrong...even if it is acting in self-defense.

Not satisfied with ordinary Jewish Erasure, this victim/oppressor framing erases:

Jewish indigeneity to the land.

The Holocaust's role in accelerating global Zionist momentum after WWII

The ethnic cleansing of 850,000 Jews from Arab lands, most of whom went to Israel.

~2,000 years of Jewish ethnic cleansings and genocides.

This false binary requires that Jews be racialized as white and labeled privileged.

De-legitimizing the oppression of Jews usefully de-legitimizes their right to self-determination.

So history, facts and reason are set aside, any attempt to bring nuance to the conversation is shut down, any fact or point of view shared by an Israeli or a Jew is obviously a lie because Jews, remember, are oppressors. As a result, any defense of Israel is framed as siding with oppression. (As has been the case so many times before, Jews are just wrong and evil and will therefore be condemned regardless of what they do.)

Again, think about it. How many times on Tumblr have you seen a reasoned defense of Israel and the response from the tankies is something along the lines of 'you're lying and defending genocide?'

The victim-oppressor lens simplifies the complex, long-term Israel-Arab conflict into a grotesquely, dishonestly simplified morality play with a powerful villain and a powerless victim.

That's why kids who claim to care about justice do shit like this:

Understanding how they got like this is just the first step.

The next question is:

Can they be de-programmed?

Thoughts?

I was in an archeological dig from 12,000 years ago in one of the hottest places I have ever been in. The ground was so bright you couldn't look anywhere without blinding yourself. You would get heatstroke in the blink of an eye. The archeologists on site told me that 12,000 years ago, this place had snow. SNOW! I couldn't even imagine that, but the climate had changes since then.

starting an elite paramilitary black ops group who sneak into the homes of authors and cut one to three zeroes off any number of years given in a fantasy or sci-fi novel

קניידלך זה מעולה אבל החלק הכי טעים במרק בפסח זה פשוט לשבור מצה למרק

אני אוכלת מציה לארוחת בוקר כל יום בפסח ועד גמר המצות. מציה זה הכי אחי

עוגת מצות זה גרוע. עדיף מצה עם שוקולד.

צבא: בואי

אני: אוקיי. *יוצאת בשש וחצי מהבית, קופאת מקור ונרטבת בגשם*

צבא: אה דרך אגב רצינו אותך בעשר בכלל

צבא: אבל נכון לא ביקשנו שתביאי כלום חוץ מתעודת זהות? אז את אמורה להביא את כל קורות החיים שלך

צבא: שאין לך ואת צריכה לבקש

צבא: אז נפגש בעוד חודש?

"The notion of Palestine being Arab emerges, really, only in the 60s. because... what did Israelis do? the colonial era is over; the Ottoman Empire is gone, finally the British are gone, and the Jewish people finally, having outlived all these empires, going back to the Roman Empire, finally restore their sovereignty. What do they do? they do what every self-respecting people in history did when the colonial people were gone- they call the country by their name, right? so Siam becomes Thailand, and the Gold Coast becomes Ghana, and Palestine becomes Israel because Palestine was the colonial name and Israel is the original, indigenous name.

Once the Jews call the land Israel... in order to present the Jews as foreign, [...] thieves, interlopers, Arabs began to hijack the name Palestine, to say, actually we are Palestine, whereas previously everyone understood it was Jews. and I love it, because sometimes you see on the internet, oh look Palestine existed, and they show, like, the Palestine football team and if you look closely all the names are like [...] all Jewish [...] because this was the Jewish football team of the Jewish state in the making, and the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra was the orchestra of Jewish exiles that became the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. So, this is a classis [...] hijacking of the Arabs of something that was very Jewish, in order to present the Jews as thieves, rather than the original owners."

-Einat Wilf (source)

בתור אדם שקיבל חיסון לכלבת השנה:

מאוד קל להימנע מכלבת. ננשכתם על ידי חיית בר? ננשכתם על ידי עטלף? ננשכתם על ידי חתול או כלב באיזור שקרוב לטבע? לכו ללשכת הבריאות הקרובה לביתכם, ותתחסנו. אם עברו פחות משבועיים מאז הנשיכה, תהיו בסדר. אם ננשכתם על ידי חיה שאתם מכירים, או חיה שאתם יכולים למסור להסגר, חכו עשרה ימים. אם החיה מתה, תתחסנו. אם לא, לא צריך! חיסון לכלבת הוא מאוד יקר למדינה, אז עדיף לא להתחסן כשלא צריך, אבל אם יש חשד קטן שננשכתם על ידי חיה חולה, חייבים להתחסן. תחסנו את החיות שלכם! חשוב מאוד. האדם שמת מכלבת ננשך על ידי הכלב של עצמו.

בנוסף, דברים שלמדתי מהרופאה כשקיבלתי חיסון כלבת:

התעוררתם כשיש עטלף בחדר שלכם? תתחסנו לכלבת. אפילו אם אתם לא חושבים שהוא נשך אתכם או שרט אתכם, אבל ישנתם אז אתם לא יודעים בוודאות, חייבים להתחסן. עטלפים זה מסוכן מאוד.

אתם גרים בעיר? נשך אתכם חתול באמצע הרחוב הראשי ואתם לא קרובים לשום טבע? לא יחסנו אתכם. אין לכם כלבת. בישראל אין הרבה כלבת, ובערים אין כמעט בכלל. עדיין חשוב לחסן את החיות שלכם, אבל אתם לא תידבקו מכלבת באמצע בת ים.

מה לעשות אם חיה נשכה אתכם:

1. תשטפו את הפצע במים וסבון. מוזמנים לחטא באלכוהול. זה אולי יגן עליכם מכלבת, אבל אם לחיה יש כלבת פשוט תתחסנו. זה סתם יגן עליכם ממחלות וזיהומים אחרים בפה של החיה.

2. חיה מוכרת? למסור להסגר/אם זאת החיה שלכם להשגיח בבית. היא לא מתה תוך 10 ימים? ברכות! אין לכם כלבת

3. אי אפשר להשגיח על החיה? זאת חיית בר? החתול שנשך אתכם ברח ויש חמישה חתולים שחורים שנראים בדיוק אותו דבר ברחוב? תבדקו אם אתם גרים קרוב לטבע. ננשכתם באמצע רחוב יפו בירושלים? לכו הביתה. אין לכם כלבת. ננשכתם ליד הוואדי? לכו להתחסן.

והכי חשוב, ננשכתם על ידי חיית בר? תתחסנו!

לכלבת יש אחוז תמותה של 100%. יש מקרים בודדים של אנשים ששרדו כלבת, ועשרות אלפי מתים כל שנה. אם יש ספק, תתחסנו ותצילו חיים.

new fear unlocked x