Stuff I have found recently

Haven't been feeling up to writing again recently. I have a huge list of posts i'm meaning to write (or maybe topics i'm meaning to write posts on), quite a few of which are ones i've said i would write to other people, which i really do intend to write soon (for a given value of "soon"), but it's going to have to be when i've got a more coherent head on.

I recently created a Livejournal account, for the intended purpose of being able to comment on Livejournal blogs (my actual blog posts are going to stay here), but it's also led me to browse LJ using some of its fairly nice networking functionality. I'm really not a "social networking site" kind of person, and not really inclined to do things like friends-locked posts, but i kind of like the thing LJ shares with Wikipedia of links leading all over the place to random stuff.

One awesome post i found which definitely deserves linking is Pro-Choice, But by thauts, which basically sums up my views and feelings on abortion and being (truly) "pro-choice" pretty exactly.

Also this report from the queer/trans demo in Manchester, and a link to the responses to it on Indymedia, the transphobic so-called-radical so-called feminist ones of which are just fucking depressing, altho i'm gratified to see that there are several people ably countering them...

edit: just seen this bullshit counter-attack from the radfems, claiming that the trans/queer bloc was a "protest against women only spaces"... ffs, i don't know if i can even be bothered to step into this...

further edit: Caz (in the comments) speaks TRUTH:

This paranoid ranting about "the queer lobby" is straight out of the conspiratorial pages of the hetero-supremacist Daily Mail, who use a similar strategy: play minority groups against each other - feminists vs Muslims, African-Caribbean Christians vs LGBT people, working class householders against travellers and so on. They can't stand any of these groups of course, but it suits their purposes to stir. Beware of the deliberate wrecking policies persued by the straight male left also: to some factions, feminism and queer politics have been a source of hostility for nigh-on 40 years now. Trying to pit female and gay activists against each other is an old CP style tactic which can only weaken the feminist and queer movements.

On a more theoretical tip, i came across this really awesome quote, which deconstructs corporate heirarchies while showing up the fundamental contradictions of both statist "socialism" and pro-capitalist "libertarianism" very nicely, here:

"These large corporations have the internal characteristics of a planned economy. Information flow is systematically distorted up the chain of command, by each rung in the hierarchy telling the next one up what it wants to hear. And each rung of management, based on nonsensical data (not to mention absolutely no direct knowledge of the production process) sends irrational and ass-brained decisions back down the chain of command. The only thing that keeps large, hierarchical organizations going is the fact that the productive laborers on the bottom actually know something about their own jobs, and have enough sense to ignore policy and lie about it so that production can stagger along despite the interference of the bosses.

When a senior manager decides to adopt a "reform" or to "improve" the process in some way, he typically bases his decision on the glowing recommendations of senior managers in other organizations who have adopted similar policies. Of course, those senior managers have no real knowledge themselves of the actual results of the policy, because their own information is based on filtered data from below. Not only does the senior management of an organization live in an imaginary world as a result of the distorted information from below; its imaginary world is further cut off from reality by the professional culture it shares with senior management everywhere else. “…in a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below.”12

The root of the problem, in all such cases, is that individual human beings can only make optimally efficient decisions when they internalize all the costs and benefits of their own decisions. In a large hierarchy, the consequences of the irrational and misinformed decisions of the parasites at the top are borne by the people at the bottom who are actually doing the work. And the people doing the work, who both know what's going on and suffer the ill effects of decisions by those who don't know what's going on, have no direct control over the decision-making."

-Kevin Carson, Studies In Mutualist Political Economy (In print: page 322, online: http://www.mutualist.org/id88.html )

I really don't agree with the rest of the post it's quoted in, but don't really feel knowledgeable enough to jump into the comment thread (although it's really interesting).

Searching for Kevin Carson on Libcom found me this thread, which also... contains pretty fucking interesting ideas, but once again leaves me feeling like i would be flamed or laughed out of the thread if i tried to respond. When it comes to the subcategories of anarchism, i always seem to find myself stuck somewhere between the anarcho-communist/anarcho-syndicalist consensus at Libcom and the individualist, pro-market anarchism of people like Johnny Red or Rad Geek, with each "side" generally regarding me as the other.

I do really need to overcome my fear/inability of stepping into discussions without getting flamed and/or ridiculed by all sides, although every time i think i have, there seems to be another setback (this, for example). Or maybe i just need to stop letting it affect me so much... but then, maybe that line of thinking is internalised oppression from a lifetime of neurotypical people trivialising and ridiculing my serious emotional reactions to... just about everything. I don't know.

Anyway, hopefully some proper posts soon...