i am disabled just enough to be in a dilemma.

interpersonal trauma, audhd burnout and immunodefficiency don’t mean i can’t do anything or that i can’t even be as ‘productive’ *over time* as other people. what it means is that:

• i can’t give them ass-in-chair for 8 hours every day;
• my shortterm ‘performance’ cannot be consistent or predictable enough for the boss;
• i can never succeed at the day-to-day drudgework; and
• i can never be a ‘culture fit’ in any workplace.

it’s not that i can’t do anything; it’s that i lack the appearances of profitability.

despite huge past professional successes in complex projects: i am unemployable.

so instead i work a fulltime job with overtime researching my condition, my rights and the local law — filling out paperwork and attending a dozen appointments every month where i answer the same 20 humiliating and condescending questions over and over again, too exhausted to care for myself inbetween — just to keep the disability compensation flowing in. and in every meeting, my ‘giftedness’ and all those times where i was successful are used to clobber me and argue that i’m just being ‘lazy’. i’m never given any treatment, because the healthcare system has been balkanized into poverty by privatisation and New Public Management, and they’ve tried nothing and they’re all out of ideas.

i find time once or twice a month to study, on my own, with pirated courses and books. and the opensource projects i contribute to, and the organising work i scrape up spoons for, and the mutual aid and legal help i give to my disabled comrades, are things i still do. but i have to do them under aliases, and i can’t ever discuss them with anyone who knows me, because if the welfare office finds out: i can end up imprisoned, indebted and permanently marked for ‘welfare fraud’. because part of the deal of being disabled is that i can only be disabled.

no studies; no parttime; no volunteering; no activism. all because of the way i was born, and because i had the audacity to barely survive two separate attempts by politicians to sacrifice my demographics to Moloch. i know several other people in this same Kafkaësque hellworld.

how am i not supposed to end up radicalised?

there’s a bot that will do this for you over on lemmy.world. i think you’d like it better over there.

signed out, cleared cookies and cache, restarted browser, signed back in: same issue when in a new tab.

:3c

And it probably would have been better for my mental health growing up if I hadn’t thought “wow if all these adults believe this thing then it must be true and I must just be an idiot” […] Basically the entirety of your hometown, and most of your family members are just delusional. You’re not wrong and they don’t just not believe you because you’re a kid, they just don’t believe in evidence, and there’s no evidence one can use to convince people who don’t believe in evidence.

for me, the thought was: ‘wow, these are the people who get to have power over me? and they use that power to actively limit my potential and freedom of association? these are the people who keep clawing me away from independence, because they think they know better what’s good for me?’

it made ageist remarks — particularly the sexist ones — go from irritating to infuriating. disappointment, anger and deep depression, that these people are allowed to have any responsibility at all.

when you have an AuDHD student who skips lunch every day to read and work in the library, and all the teachers are conspiracy-thinking fundamentalist yokels who: haven’t studied anything in over two decades; only became teachers so they could have power over children; regurgitate superstitions, fakelore and urban legends; and have no concept of information/media literacy — then it’s very possible to be smarter than your teachers and get regularly put in detention for pointing it out.

their diplomas would’ve been better used as toiletpaper.

a workplace problem that has persistently followed me thru my entire life: at school, at home, and at every job i’ve had, across multiple continents.

i have a ‘non-native’ name which isn’t hard to pronounce but which my coworkers refused to learn, so they started calling me something akin to ‘Jane Doe’ in $language.

when they were told by HR they can’t do that: they took to the funny ‘joke’ of calling me “the bot” and sometimes referring to me as ‘it’. ‘hey, where’s the documentation on this system?’ ‘idk, ask the bot’ my manager even got on my case about how i shouldn’t ‘use ChatGPT to respond to work messages’ — because i wasn’t using ‘enough emoji’.

but i’m the immature one for thinking all the NTs i’ve had in my life are insufferable. ok.

this is the type of comment i want to leave any time someone praises a scandinavian country for almost anything.

the image of the nordics most people outside of them have is from 40 years ago.

We produce 1000 times the food we need.

no, we don’t.

You’ve taken a roundabout way to tell me that mass adoption of veganism […] has nothing to do with our economic system.

no, i didn’t.

(literally the only way to save this planet)

no, it isn’t.

The only […] solution that can support our absurd population is […] tech advancements bordering on magic

no, it isn’t.

Lying is ugly. […] It is trivial to prove. Open Google.

says the person who cannot read, ignores sources, puts words in other people’s mouths, and makes simplistic, baseless, harmful assertions.

To feed the billions of sentient animals that are tortured to death each year in factory farms. Do you have any idea how sustainable that is?

i — a vegan — and the two sources i provided advocate for sustainable plant-based diets, and point to the systemic economic obstacles: agribusiness lobbying; little to no farmer control; subsidised incentives and poor farmers’ dependence on these subsidies; and severe economic and political inequality.

to quote another vegan in this thread who you’ve insulted:

for every animal I don’t eat, a billionaire throws a meat party and goes hunting for exotic animals. Again, why are you blaming me? Even if I ate meat every meal I wouldn’t come close in a year to doing as much damage as a billionaire does in a day. So again, stop telling me about it and go after them.

you’re arguing for a vote-with-your-wallet approach, which ignores conspicuous consumption, ignores the plight of the lower classes, and greatly favours the wealthy elite and the state (who can always outbid you). this is not to say we shoudn’t change (our) individual behaviour, but that it cannot be the sole solution, and that there are systemic changes which would boost mass adoption of sustainable choices.

i once again point you to my book suggestion, the concept of superstructures, and to the responses to your last malthusian tangents.

if you have anything else to say: tell it to a mirror.

Given that the environmental depredation of this planet is driven by […] can people explain why they believe that without capitalism

capitalist industry and commerce have been the driving force of the mass extinction of the last 500 years[0][1][2]. climate change didn’t begin until the late 1800s with the rise of tycoons, and accelerated with mass production in the mid-1900s.

for a current example: datacentres are wasting entire regional electricity and water supplies on investment grifter bullshit. because it makes money. it doesn’t even turn a real profit, and it’s not everyday people paying for it.

can people explain why they believe that without capitalism everyone would be […]

could be, not necessarily would. because a humanistic, socialised means of production would: allow for truly ‘democratic’ control over what is produced; remove nested interests and subsidies to overgrown polluting industries[3]; and make alternatives viable without the need to bend or break to top-down market pressures and monetary policy dictated by dragons.

I also assume they’re wearing hemp and have no interest in fashion.

capitalism has existed for less than 300 years. consumerism has existed for less than 100 years. when you have an economic system which emphasises the independent individual — simultaneously a motivator and a mere cog in the machine — and posits that the mere potential to own things is the source of value: buying wasteful, exotic, unnecessary shit is a way to define yourself and your status. it’s called conspicuous consumption, and it happens from the micro to the macro in the lower and the upper classes, and there’s top-down pressure to do so to keep currency current.

i recommend the documentary The Century of the Self for an overview of the commodification of identity and culture.

Keep in mind there are 8 billion people on this planet, so presumably they wouldn’t be having children either.

we are already producing enough food to sufficiently feed 1.5x the world population[4], and could continue to do so even within planetary boundaries[5] with changes to economic policy and the adoption of less profitable methods of agriculture.

i didn’t cover everything here, because i recommend:

1. the book Less Is More.
2. familiarising yourself with the concept of the superstructure; it’s a very helpful analytical tool.
3. going back to the last time you were on your malthusian debatebro bullshit and really trying to engage your imagination with much of the same arguments made there.

support a “right to work” instead of UBI. Work is great and it’s more than making money, you achieve self-determination through work etc etc.

this is common in most of western/northern europe, to the point that most social services for citizens or ‘integration’ support for immigrants ends at employment. the assumption being that any employment is all anyone really needs.

you’ve been fired from your last three jobs because of your worsening depressive spirals? but it didn’t stop you from getting that temp job last week! do some yoga or something smh.

you’re a migrant who doesn’t know the local language? well, it didn’t stop you from getting a job! take a night class or something smh.

you want to switch careers or further your education? but you’re already in a career; clearly your education is fine! attend a conference or something smh.

you have no friends or family and no freetime to develop your hobbies and interests? but you have a job! get drunk with your coworkers on Fridays or something smh.

workwork. okiedokie. zugzug.

La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.

— Anatole France, Le Lys rouge

not the GP, but i did voice frustrations that were probably uncalled for.

i resonated with the image after this specific comment:

[…] assuming that all people are not going to be petty and antagonistic is even more utopian that post-scarcity.

this brought to mind thousands of conversations i’ve had before which would have effectively ended there — with the words ‘utopian’, ‘idealist’ or ‘unrealistic’.

OP got some good answers which they seem satisfied with. this was all a reaction to the state of the discussion at the time.

I get that anarchists probably get tired of answering questions, but it also seems like an important part of getting people who aren’t already 100% onboard to better understand anarchy?

i think this works best thru sharing anarchistic (not specifically anarchist) books (to add perspective), and praxis (to experience/internalise anarchist organising principles).

hypotheticals can be amusing among likeminds, but it’s usually just deconstructive otherwise.

in most places i’ve lived, my physical neighbours did not want to be known, and did not want to know anyone else, either. granted, most of them really only used their apartments/houses as a very expensive sleeping place and nothing more. they didn’t really live in their houses; it was just where they usually slept between working.

even when the neighbours were friendly, there were no common spaces and the housing too small to accommodate get-togethers, and no third places to go to. and the friendly neighbours were always apart of the conspicuously racist pensioner cabal.

as Cowbee wrote: the ‘free market’ narrative assumes the market is participatory, and that you can simply opt out (‘go live in the woods’).

but capitalism doesn’t work without a labour market, and the labour market isn’t stable without a buffer of un[der]employment. so living outside the market — and general ‘propertylessness’ — is criminalised or made so inconvenient/unsustainable that you’re left with ‘the choice’ between peonage or starvation. the people who fall into homelessness and houselessness serve as a warning to anyone who might consider ‘opting out’.

i don’t think anyone genuinely believes this is a real choice, but i’ve experienced this narrative being used to dismiss critiques of capitalism and wage slavery.

what does this have to do with houseless people?

my two favourite types of questions from nonanarchists:

• ‘how would anarchism handle [insert consequence of capitalist conditioning]’
• ‘how would anarchism work in [insert description of a group of capitalists]’

you can’t reject the premise of the question, because their eyes gloss over and they call you an idealist.

All the time spent thinking how to solve a problem is also work.

try telling that to every manager i’ve ever had.

AuDHD, for context.