You all know from the big anarchy post that I don't like the stereotypical anarchist activities that involve blowing stuff up and burning stuff down both because they're impractical in a surveillance society and because there's always a risk of innocents becoming collateral. Ex: Even if you made sure the building you were going to explode was empty, maybe some 5-year-old kid gets away from his mom, chases a butterfly into the parking lot, and ends up in the blast radius - there's just no way to make sure that everyone will be clear of the area unless you tell everyone what you're doing, and if you do that, you will not be doing it lol.

But I also want to give you all an example of collateral and how to think about/minimize collateral in nonviolent activist situation.

So this is a story from my final year of high school. We had one particular teacher who was very abusive to us. Unfortunately, she also taught five classes, so it was VERY hard to avoid interacting with her at some point. She assigned massive workloads, tasks designed to be impossible, and she had frequent mood swings that she took out on us. If you confronted her about it, she'd just blink and be like "Well I didn't know I was stressing you all out," fake apologize, then go right back to doing it. The general consensus was that she must have some form of mental illness or a medication imbalance because she'd go from bringing us snacks in class and letting us watch a movie as a surprise to ranting and raging at us unprovoked.

She was specially HORRIBLE about workload. Two major projects per week that required massive amounts of time and effort and group coordination. They were also frequently juvenile and completely unrelated to anything we needed to learn (for reference the class with her I'm talking about now is AP Gov). Presidential paper dolls comes to mind. But here's the thing, we had to abandon studying for the tests, which were based on the textbook, because none of us had time to read the textbook to study for the tests because if you got a bad grade on one of your average 8 projects per month, that was worse than completely bombing an exam. My test average couldn't have been above 60, but I made it out with an A because I nailed every stupid project. Unfortunately, the textbook is what the AP TEST is based on, which is what determines whether or not we get college credit for the course. So not only are we losing sleep over 8 intensive projects per month for one class (for me, out of the EIGHT classes I was taking), we're all mortally terrified we're going to bomb the AP exam.

Aside: Also in class, sometimes she'd come up and yell at one of us for nothing just to personally victimize us individually, and some days she'd assign double digits of electronic readings that we had to take quizzes about immediately afterward, and if we couldn't get them all done in class, we got zeros for what we couldn't do. She assigned homework over the weekend (i.e. after we had already left on Friday) to be done on Monday, and you got a zero if you didn't check Canvas all weekend to make sure she didn't assign anything. Some kids in the class did not have internet at home btw, so we had to team up to text the people we knew couldn't know about the assignments, send them the readings, and help them get to internet sources to complete assignments before Monday.

Anyway! I did not like her. She filled me with rage. But I also knew her more personally that I would've liked to. She was the faculty sponsor for one of the clubs I was in, so I had, in fact, been to her house before for a charity activity on the weekend. I met her husband. Icolored with her toddler-age son. In early high school, I also spent a lot of time with her as the coach for another extracurricular. She drove me home from a meet when my parents' car broke down. We talked. Against my will I knew her pretty personally, and I knew 1) she was the breadwinner, 2) her husband is an asshole, and 3) her son, who she really did seem to love, was an unplanned pregnancy.

Fast forward to April of my senior year: I have all of her projects under control through the end of the year, but I am fed up. I gather all our previous projects into my backpack, and I march myself down to the guidance office. I ask for a meeting with my counselor, and I tell her what's been going on - the mood swings, the abusive homework, the crazy ass projects that only vaguely relate to AP government. After I dumped out all the projects and went on my rant, my guidance counselor looks at me and says, "I can't do anything to help you this close to the end of the year."

And I say, "I've got the work handled. This isn't about me. This is about me leaving here in a month and knowing she's going to do this to everyone who comes after me. I cannot, in good conscience, let her do that unchallenged."

Administration at my high school knew I was one serious 17-year-old, so the guidance counselor pauses then says, "What do you want done about it?"

And here's where the calculation about collateral comes in:

Me: "I don't want you to fire her. If you fire her, she'll just go somewhere else and do the same thing [collateral calculation: another whole body of high schoolers at a school that doesn't know what she's like]. Also, she has a young son, and I don't know what's going to happen to him if she loses her job [collateral calculation: the kid], and her husband is a jerk, so I don't know how he'll react [collateral: her. I don't want her abused as punishment, just stopped from doing what she's doing]. I want you to reign her in. I want you to watch her and limit how much and what kinds of things she's allowed to assign."

Counselor: "Do you think other students would tell me this if I asked them?"

Me: "Yes, but only if you push and make them understand that it's okay to tell you how they really feel. You can tell them I started this to make them comfortable, but don't tell her [the teacher] it was me directly until after I graduate. She's going to know who it was anyway, but I don't want her to know officially. Otherwise they're [the other students] just going to laugh uncomfortably and say 'Oh, it's fine' because they've been trained to minimize their issues with people in authority."

Counselor: "Okay."

And then that's what happened. I watched them interview all my classmates one at a time at lunch, and then I got it confirmed from a rising junior the next year that they'd reduced what she could assign. Eventually she found the restrictions so stifling that she left on her own and went into online K-12 teaching. I don't love that for the reason I said before - new people don't know what she does - but at least the kids can shut the laptop or fake a faulty internet connection now.

The major point of this story is that this is how I started developing a concept of "ethical revenge." This is one facet of that idea: Minimizing collateral damage, even in a situation that didn't have very obvious collateral like exploding a building does. I could have gone full fire and fury and protested to have her fired. That would have hurt her more than I intended and put other people at risk (unacceptable collateral for me). No matter how much I might have hated her, I did not hate her 3-year-old son, and I did my best to take firing off the table for him, because I didn't know what her husband would do if she got fired (I wanted her to stop victimizing students; I didn't want her hurt or verbally abused in return), and because I didn't want to improve life for people at my high school at the expense of a whole other group of students at whatever school she went to next. I thought long and hard about this before I went into that guidance counselor's office and devised a plan that would only affect her.

So in short, any time you're going to act against something or someone that is a problem, think about who else might get hurt as a result and try to move those people out of the range of the consequences that could be brought by what you're doing.

Do Not Talk To Me About Homeschooling And Education Unless You Have Watched These Three Videos

A lot of people seem to implicitly believe (or desperately want to believe) something to the effect of "the facts of the world make my value system convenient."

For example, anarchists tend to have a value system which says that hierarchies and systems of domination are inherently unethical. This is something I agree with very strongly, and is why I often describe myself as an anarchist. A common question then posed to anarchists is how, without hierarchy, bureaucracy, or other such systems of social control/management, it would be possible to achieve the large-scale coordination needed to accomplish certain tasks that are considered necessary for human flourishing: industrial-scale production of antibiotics and vaccines, management of carbon emissions, maintenance of a power grid, and basically anything else that requires a sustained, large-scale and legible set of social processes. Rather than addressing these (in my view) very valid concerns, most anarchists respond by dismissing the question. They claim, for example, that without capitalism we would have no need to manage carbon emissions, because the market incentives to emit would be gone. Or that industrial production of medical supplies isn't really necessary, because sufficient quantities could easily be made by small-scale local producers, etc.

And I'm always tempted to say "wow, how incredibly convenient". We don't even have enough understanding of human psychology to successfully model human behavior in our own society, and yet you're absolutely sure that in your hypothetical future society, humanity would just... no longer have any desire to engage in high-emission activities? You're absolutely sure that the physics and biology and chemistry and engineering involved in medical production all just happen to work out to make small-scale manufacture consistently doable? You're absolutely sure that all these problems people are posing just happen to be non-problems?

You may be right, certainly. It would be lovely if these things all worked out to be non-problems. But that's not something that can be determined through political theory. It's something that can only be determined through rigorous empirical study and technical work, and the conclusions that work comes to might just not turn out to be very convenient ones. This is why I sometimes don't call myself an anarchist.

But either way, my values stay unchanged. No matter what the answers to these technical questions are, I remain absolutely steadfast in my belief that systems of hierarchy and control are deeply unjust things. Either way, I will continue (as much as I can) to work towards a society in which these things can be done away with to the greatest degree possible, and their deleterious effects can be mitigated wherever they remain. And I think that I'm far more able to actually do that for being honest with myself about what the challenges of this project really are.

I want to be clear, this is not just a tendency I find with anarchists. I've encountered people of basically every political ideology engaging in this sort of dismissive optimism, insisting that the questions raised by their value system in fact demand no answers. But ultimately, it's not intellectually honest to insist that the universe has conspired to make your value system an easy one to hold. And that kind of intellectual dishonesty actually gets in the way of successfully working towards realization of the values you have.

Which is why, in my view, the most effective way to approach your social values is not as positions to be defended but as goals to be achieved. Inconvenient facts are not points against you, they are obstacles in your way. Perhaps they're insurmountable obstacles (that really would be, I think, a point against you), but perhaps they're not. The only way to find out is to acknowledge them as genuine obstacles and to try to find solutions. The inability to acknowledge the challenges in front of oneself has been the downfall of many, many movements, and the solution is as simple as having a little intellectual humility. And personally, I'd rather not let my ego get in the way of building a better world.

Cops, teachers and all the other prison guards.

When we think about who upholds the state, we usually think about the obvious dogs of the state, who chose to make harming people in the name of state power their main job: cops, soldiers, prison guards.

And maybe we think of the bosses and the managers, who hold little allegiance to the state but build little dictatorships of their own. They are no better at all. 

Then there are those who work closely with power, the little politicians, the bureaucrats, the unemployment agencies, who may not carry weapons but are quite aware that their job is to uphold the rules, and they can easily do as much harm as the cops.

But then finally there are the many many unknowing guards of our prison. The parents who teach their children obedience and respect for authority. The teachers who think they’re passing on the beauty of books and science, but are mainly teaching children how to do dull work for 8 hours a day in an environment where you need permission to pee. The psychologists who think their priority is human well being, but they mainly end up upholding normality. And the many other authorities in our life who think of themselves as benign.

These do not see themselves as extensions of the state, but to stop serving the state would require rethinking everything they’re proud of in their life so far, and that might make them the most effective servants of the state.

As revolutionaries, we need to grapple with this. We need to figure out what a person needs in order to be able to reject everything they see as their achievements and to rebuild their identity doing the opposite of their life’s work. This is difficult, and we can expect the state’s unacknowledged guards to lash out at us as we nibble at their power and question their role in society.

But we need to grapple with it because we can not ignore how parents, teachers, psychologists etc uphold the state but to declare them all cops-by-another-name and have no hope for their recovery would leave us badly outnumbered.

Stand with Banned Anarchist Publishers

#NoAnarchistBan

Facebook has banned crimethinc.com, itsgoingdown.org, and other anarchist publishers solely on the basis of the roles that they play in covering protest movements. 

If there is no response, this will set a precedent for more bans, and embolden the state and fascists to engage in other forms of repression.

—Use the hashtag #NoAnarchistBan

—Spread the word: cwc.im/BannedonFacebook

—Use the support avatar: cwc.im/avatar

—Subscribe to crimethinc.com on RSS: cwc.im/feed

—Follow us on Twitter: @crimethinc

If you add two pounds of sugar to literally one ton of concrete it will ruin the concrete and make it unable to set properly which is good to know if you wanna resist something being built, French anarchists used this to resist prison construction in the 80s

I’m just gonna go ahead and reblog this for purely educational purposes.

added bonus is that concrete now taste good

Sugar does not really do that. What you need is citric acid (you get that to get the hard water residues out of your pots/water boiler/washing machine), looks like sugar granules. Or concentrated vinegar. Cement needs a high ph to bind properly. So if you add acid, it won’t properly set and/or needs 3-4 times longer.

Speaking as someone who works in the concrete forming industry: the easiest way to severely fuck up any large concrete pour is to delay it at the wrong moment.

If someone is trying to build a huge fuckoff concrete thing - say, for instance, a giant wall - they’re going to need an obscene quantity of concrete, and that’s all going to have to be transported there from the nearest mixing plant. This means they’ll have multiple trucks coming by to decant concrete in consecutive pours while the workers place it and vibrate it to ensure it all intermixes and sets properly, forming a monolithic mass. If one pour is allowed to set before the next one is added, you get a big, ugly, possibly structurally unsound gap between the two called a “cold joint.” A bad enough cold joint can completely fuck your whole project because the next engineer or inspector who sets foot on that site is going to take one look at that motherfucker and immediately embark on a quest for blood vengeance. You will literally have to cut that whole section of wall out, slap some dowels in the nearest structurally sound bits, and re-form and pour the offending segment from scratch, which represents a fortune in cost overruns and will make everyone involved very upset. This is an especially bad problem in hot climates, because the concrete curing process is exothermic - that stuff sets much faster when it’s really hot out, and its 28-day compressive strength tends to be poorer as well.

So if, hypothetically speaking, you wanted to completely shit up a wannabe dictator’s enormous unfeasible poured concrete vanity project, you could literally just randomly hassle and delay every concrete truck on its way there. Dude’s gonna end up with a giant worthless pile of shitty crumbling concrete and exposed reinforcing steel, and an army of pissed-off contractors to boot.

reblogging for purely educational purposes nothing more

Anarchist tip: if you need some piece of equipment, or anything really, look up if there are any alternatives designed in or otherwise for exploited countries. People have invented many of the necessities for renewable power, medicine, machining, internet - all the comforts of modern life really - in ways that are low-tech, small-scale, often made of recycled or abundant materials, using little to no electricity, and best of all, absurdly cheap

Like a microscope and centrifuge made of paper that cost less than a dollar together, and a non-electric sun tracker for solar panels that costs about 1/30 what a commercial sun tracker does

Great for squats, occupations, communes, mutual aid, personal independence, etc.

Buy the microscope here  and read the paper (open access) of the centrifuge with the details here plus the tutorial about how to build the SunSaluter (the sun tracking System)

https://the-eye.eu/public/murdercube.com/Survival/ < 

While I strongly recommend you’re careful and judicious about what you download from a site like this– don’t pirate books by living authors, trust but verify, etc.– 

the eye has an entire archive of old books about survivalism/building community in isolated and exploited countries that are “share as long as you keep it free”