2025-07-25, 0830h

It's hard not to get confrontational when I see some folk in North Carolina complaining about how hard the region has been getting hit by climate breakdown recently. There are folk who I am, or used to be, mutuals with, posting about it, and it's just... hard not to jump in and be like, "Hey, do you regret not putting more effort into organizing against these things earlier, like when I was living in the region, screaming about how the models were underestimating how bad things would get and how quickly?"

Because I was in the region, spearheading guerilla land use projects and trying to agitating political "radicals" toward the same, and it did not work. When I put in requests for specific help to deal with the legal and material consequences of doing guerilla work without an adequate support network, I was ignored, or told that I should have prepared myself better for such consequences, since they're obvious.

And it's my fault, for believing that the political rhetoric people used Web discourse would relate to how they'd chose to act.

Anyway, it's tough sitting with like, the names of people I know declined to do anything to help someone organize climate adaptation in a region without any organized climate adaptation and are now trying to step into that organizer role themselves, as though they aren't responsible for its absence today.

And it's tough because what passes for mutualism in America is so loose and so subsumed within normative power dynamics, that these folk will totally get away with being the climate adaptation leaders of the second half of the decade, because they were the same folk who prevented climate adapting mutualism in the first half.

Just consider, the next time you see some white settler with a job complaining about how hard climate breakdown is making it for them to maintain their consumerist delusions of being engaged with climate adaptation, that they might personally have declined to let someone camp in their lawn to steward a nearby watershed, because "property rights" said it was wrong to do so. That they might have chosen to go to their dayjob rather than listen to anyone explain how dire the environmental system is. How they continue to go to their dayjob rather than listen to anyone.

Most of all, though, I'm angry because it's harder than being sad: sad for all the people in the region who don't wake up with the social privilege to choose how they'll ignore and defer crises that day. It's hard to not just have sympathy for those who truly can't make a different move, and let the feelings end there, in a warm and fuzzy sense of compassion.

But that doesn't give me anything to do. It's harder to be angry at the people who maybe could do better and simply aren't. It implies that I have to do something about it, even if that something is just, get a little confrontational with my babblings.

But shit. Someone should. There are a lot of cowards who have been living like cowards their whole lives, and platforms and social norms collaborate to let them seem like the bravest fuckers around.

But they aren't, and tbh, as someone who is getting older (at least as far as political radicals go), I am ready for young people to start demanding of everyone older than them: "If you know so much about what's wrong and how it should be better, how come you didn't do that shit?"

Climate breakdown is not news. Liberalism being fascistic is not news. America being racist and imperialist is not news. They haven't been news for anyone currently living. Anyone presenting it that way is hiding something, if only their own guilt over their complicity, and you should call them on it.

This is me taking a step toward calling folk on it. I hope the folk who are fretting at young folk about climate breakdown today, so they can advocate for elections and recycling and whatever crap, who ignored me fretting about it 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15, 20... see this post and realize that while they can lie to Zoomers and Alpha, there are some of of your contemporaries who see how shamefully you've used this life you've been given, and we're appalled at the low moral standards you hold yourself to.

This is a tangent but TBH I'm just really struggling with the fact that emsenn and my family had to deal with a gang of armed sex traffickers secretly funded by Marxists and that situation was taken so unseriously by everyone who learned of it.

Like... there is a lot to unpack there about like, settler-Indigenous relations, leftist relations, there's just a lot to unpack.

And no one is taking even a passing interest; it seems like it is assumed that if there is anything to care about there, I'll write about it, connect it to theory, do all that work myself.

Of course, the work will be invalid because it's coming from someone who was affected by it...

...After all, that's what happened when I took the time to write back against the academic/institutional narrative of Stop Cop City. Still honestly a bit shook up that someone who called themselves comrade so thoroughly misrepresented things - and more surprised than I'd like to admit that the wider abolitionist field has chosen to completely believe the misrepresentation.

I guess that's my message:

If you're young and not white, and reading this, please move forward with a greater confidence in your doubt of settlers. The white worker with the Very Good Sounding Post you just read might be, in another tab, stashing money into their own retirement, while joining a chorus of settlers in a leftist Discord to affirm that liberal organizing is a prerequisite for legitimacy.

Because, as someone who has gotten to see behind the scenes of a lot of leftist scenes... they aren't much different than the behind-the-scenes at a military base or intelligence conference.

People are playing complex games with their heads and bodies to affirm the liberal way of things as reasonable and legitimate, and they will use whoever they can as a pawn in that, if they can.

It's not about you, it's not about us. It's just about them getting to a place where they can get to sleep without the guilt of their way of life keeping them up, and if climate change has to be a mortal threat to their kids in one breath and something we can manage with a slight shift in the property tax code in the next, then that's what climate change has to be.

And if something as massive as climate change can be so massively reframed, just to support a feeling, then you better be damn aware that you can, and will, be reframed even more, if it's necessary to maintain coherence.

Also, just to humanize myself a bit but I have been getting sick every morning for the past 8 mornings, which is a lot for me! I normally struggle with nausea a lot, because of a very bad back injury.

Which is relevant because it is hard to see people talk about "I would integrate things like decolonization into my climate adaptation if I weren't so busy with a dayjob" as though the working a dayjob isn't

1) a need induced by colonization 2) a privilege afforded by colonization and ability

And it's frustrating because people so clearly forget that I'm disabled - I'll write about how folk need to do land work, today, themselves, with their own bodies, and get asked why I'm not doing it myself.

And people also clearly forget that I don't have my personal documents, due to political repression, so am truly reliant on things like mutualism.

But people don't like that - they want mutualism to be philanthropy, not mutualism.

So, rather than support me because, y'know, we should do what we can to support other living things, it becomes about supporting me because I produce theory.

But then the theory has to do certain things: make readers feel moral about their own actions, and feel moral about judging the immorality of others actions.

Which is then a form of moral absolution, done through platformized discourse rather than sacred confessional.

And I wouldn't mind it all so much if the white able-bodied employed settlers who follow me and subscribe to my Ko-Fi were honest with themselves that it has a lot more to do with getting to sleep at night than anything political.

Anyway. I tried to tell folk that the climate situation in North Carolina would be this bad, and was abused for the notion.

Now the crisis is undeniably arriving, and I'm watching the same people who ignored me get ignored by their communities, and get distressed at the contradiction between emergency and lack of response.

And I'm hoping that reading a post like mine might get some of those folk to realize that, rather than keep trying the same things that led them to ignore the warning signs...

...maybe they should go back and actually try and listen to the messages written on the parts of the wall that are now below the waterline.

I guess what I'm working up the nerve to say in this thread is, in my life, I've made a lot of choices to do things about the things I've seen as problems. Choices to do things that are far outside the window of normal choice.

And I'm trying to have less patience for treating the opinions of folk who have lived their politics through Twitter threads and reading essays on their lunch break as coming from any sort of equivalently informed place.

Not as an appeal to my own authority, but more as a way to... highlight their lack of authority. Because it's clear that a certain demographic of person is only getting more confident in their ability to solve the world's problems by engaging with platformized social media just right, and I think that works in part because they can pretend there aren't people with hands-on experience in the same room.

And that works, in part, because "hands-on" experience is often criminal, or otherwise threatens a person's living.

It works in part because of how platformized social media works - yes, even the Fediverse.

It works in part because of how liberal ways of knowing work. Yes, even radical ways of knowing.

We're living in a world where someone who shows up to a months-long political thing for a weekend has more authority over how that political thing is canonized, because that someone has academic credentials, than a person with years-long connections to the things that induced the months-long thing.

And we're living in a world where people don't actively appreciate that their sources of truth are so shaped by institutions and such.

It's a bad spot for anyone trying to figure things out to be in, and I just wish that folk who clearly have nothing figured out didn't talk so loudly and convincingly at young folk, just to soothe themselves.

Being blunt, I don't feel like the white settlers and Europeans who read my posts appreciate the risk I take in writing them.

I don't have citizenship documents. They got destroyed by the government in one of the raids I experienced after Occupy.

For most of the time since this has been a massive inconvience: I can't get a drivers license, can't get a job, can't get food from most food banks, etc.

Under the latest presidency, the risks of not having an ID are changing.

And yet, I continue to bring myself to the same quality of work I was doing before, with the same quality of engagement I was bringing before.

And, on top of that, I continue to publicly share what I learn from that stuff, with an audience that has done more to accidentally dox me than support me, at least in recent times.

Y'all are scared your kids might not have as large of college funds if your boss sees your Fediverse post. I rehearse how to act if ICE raids our house with my family.

Our positionality relative to politics, our political engagement: it might, within the scope of the Fediverse, seem similar. After all, it all boils down to text and maybe some hashtags.

But the perspective that the posts were developed from? Wildly different.

And I think you, white settler radical, are counting on people to not be able to see the difference, so you can use words like mine, combined with the material reinforcement of settler-colonialism, to make sure the world keeps aligning with how you think it should be.

Asshole.

Also I want to be clear that often what I was asking for help for was not like, "Go out and plant corn in your corporate office parking lot," but like, "Help me with this bit of computer scripting that would auto-forward Associated Press articles mentioning the following cities to the following email address"

The sort of stuff they already do, for money, compartmentalized into nice little bits of work that would actually benefit folk...

But because it wasn't some moral performance like planting corn in a parking lot, it was largely rejected as any sort of solidarity.

Just, to be clear, I'm not salty because people wouldn't do spectacular acts of self-sacrifice for my benefit, but because they wouldn't do anything but that, no matter how much I said it wasn't benefitting anyone but themselves.

I honestly just would have assumed that as an Indigenous anarchist with on-the-ground experience in Occupy and NES, who writes satirical fantasy tabletop role-playing game materials and LISP code, I would not have found it so difficult to find associates, let alone friends or collaborators, in the Fediverse.

I mean my personal biography almost sounds like what someone would write if they were to make up a fictional mascot for the place!