Hate Wins and Love Loses

everyone says join your local mutual aid groups and build community, but uh, what do you do if a lot of them seem to have dissolved and the other ones don't have consistent recurring meetings.

this is real, and it's a thing that a lot of people are going to run into in the fact of calls to "get involved," especially if they're people who haven't been deeply involved in their communities before. so here's what I can share:

> The college I attended was small and very LGBT friendly. One day someone came to visit and used the word “gay” as a pejorative, as was common in the early 2000s. A current student looked at the visitor and flatly said, “we don’t do that here.” The guest started getting defensive and explaining that they weren’t homophobic and didn’t mean anything by it. The student replied, “I’m sure that’s true, but all you need to know is we don’t do that here.” The interaction ended at that point, and everyone moved on to different topics. “We don’t do that here” was a polite but firm way to educate the newcomer about our culture. […]

> It turns out talking about diversity, inclusion, and even just basic civil behavior can be controversial in technical spaces. I don’t think it should be, but I don’t get to make the rules. When I’m able I’d much rather spend the time to educate someone about diversity and inclusion issues and see if I can change how they see the world a bit. But I don’t always have the time and energy to do that. And sometimes, even if I did have the time, the person involved doesn’t want to be educated.

> This is when I pull out “we don’t do that here.” It is a conversation ender. If you are the newcomer and someone who has been around a long time says “we don’t do that here”, it is hard to argue. This sentence doesn’t push my morality on anyone. If they want to do whatever it is elsewhere, I’m not telling them not to. I’m just cluing them into the local culture and values. If I deliver this sentence well it carries no more emotional weight than saying, “in Japan, people drive on the left.” “We don’t do that here” should be a statement of fact and nothing more. It clearly and concisely sets a boundary, and also makes it easy to disengage with any possible rebuttals.

> Me: “You are standing in that person’s personal space. We don’t do that here.” > Them: “But I was trying to be nice.” > Me: “Awesome, but we don’t stand so close to people here.”

> Them: Tells an off-color joke. > Me: “We don’t do that here.” > Them: “But I was trying to be funny.” > Me (shrugging): “That isn’t relevant. We don’t do that here.”

If safety in your ideal society is entirely based on care by networks of affinity, and does not provide care for people who are not liked by anybody, then your society is actually even worse than the situation we are in now.

Pissing off people close to you or over-exhausting your social network or isolating yourself is often an inherent part of many mental health problems, addictions, etc. By the time people need care the most, they have often lost all their networks of affinity, and with some bad luck, any of us could find ourselves in that situation.

There has to be unconditional care available for the more unlikable of us, or there isn't really a safety net for any of us.

The thing that concerns me the most is that the people I see arguing for only informal/community support networks are often in communities that have a lot of interpersonal drama and poor conflict resolution skills. So it's like...this should be your primary support network, but also people get excommunicated on a regular basis? That's a terrible idea for everyone involved. People who have caused harm still deserve help, and people who have been harmed deserve the ability to set boundaries and remove people from their lives in ways that aren't sentencing that person to losing all their options for basic support.

when setting a boundary comes hand in hand with sentencing someone to a slow and painful death by isolation and neglect, setting boundaries becomes incredibly frightening and painful for everyone involved. help should be available to everyone, free of charge and judgement, no matter how bad they fucked up.

Yeah. Like, this is also necessary from the caretakers point of view.

How many of us are stuck accepting kinda shit, maybe even abusive, behavior from our elderly parents because they would literally die without us? How many are not setting boundaries because while a person is very shitty to us we still love a part of them and we don’t want them to die?

Safety nets of unconditional care also mean none of us are individually forced to care for someone who is uniquely toxic to us.

What might such a network of unconditional care created on anarchist terms look like?

People organize together to provide networks of care

And when you need it, you ask for it and you get it

Even if you’ve done bad things, even if you’re difficult to be around.

And if the network can’t cope they ring up the network next door and ask “hey, things are not working out over here, do you have room for one more?” And the others go “sure.”

Because in an anarchist society that prioritized well being instead of profit, we prioritize care. So there are so many overlapping abundant networks of care in place that if one can not provide, another always can.

Like, that seems really obvious to me. Making something not unconditional is harder to organize really, since you have to actively do the work of putting conditions in place.

I’m sorry if you were, like, looking for an entire manual on how to set up an anarchist-run hospital. I don’t think I could write that on my own. I think that would need to be the result of cooperative work by a community of anarchists with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences, some of which include knowing how hospitals work.

A thing that gets misunderstood about mutual aid is that people often assume that it functions as some sort of closed community in which aid is circulated so everyone receives as much as they give or there is some kind of guarantee that the number of givers and takers will balance out. . But most mutual aid is open and unconditional. It’s a community kitchen where everybody and anybody can get food. It’s a free shop where everyone takes what they want. It’s a street medics team that doesn’t ask why you need care. The most successful mutual aid projects are often completely open, completely unconditional and trusts that enough people will recognize the value of that to contribute to it, and as a result there will always be enough for everyone. And a looooot of the time that works really well.

While the CDC has given up on providing any guidance on risk control measures for covid, The People's CDC is filling the gap and continuing to track and update guidance as the situation evolves. Here's where you can download their Safer In-person Gatherings Toolkit:

Here's an extremely detailed guide on what to do if you have covid that includes how long to isolate for, how to set up your house with hepa filters and ventilation, what supplies to have on hand, when to go to the hospital, and guidelines on how to pace from the MEAction Network in the event you end up with long covid:

The work these guys are doing is amazing. They're still tracking wastewater data too so you can still figure out transmission levels in your area and not just the hospitalization levels. Check them out!

ayo can anyone supply me w a link to the transunity discord server and/or the server on transmasc issues and research, im lookin for sources for a university research project

Hey, so at present, there isn't a discord server, just the blog. But feel free to scroll through our archive- there should be quite a few sources!

Due to popular demand, we are looking into creating a transunity discord. We will update once it is ready