Dating in the Toxic Era 1980-2005

18 years old in 1980.

35 years old in 1997.

(all text after this point is "heteronormative", the entire context is heterosexual, because it is my life story and the things I was especially concerned with.)

As I began to be interested in dating and courtship, I wanted to be a good guy in relation to women. I supported feminism as far as women being able to pursue any career, any vibrant intellectual, athletic or adventurous activity. There are all kinds of archetypical bad guys in relation to women, and one might say I was trying to not be any of them.

That noble goal encountered a new wave of norms - progressives and feminists were deeming unwanted advances as a fundamental evil. 

I took the meaning of unwanted advances to it's logical conclusion: if I asked a girl out on date or implied an interest in anything beyond platonic, and she said no, then I have already committed the crime of an unwanted advance. 

Beyond being trapped in this logical conundrum, I was backed into a corner emotionally as well. 

Since all this was deeply seated and sincere, I had many many beautiful, charming, intelligent women spending time with me over the years. The more I thought highly of them, and felt they were precious, the more I doubled down on never committing a wrong so grave as an unwanted advance. And by unwanted advance I mean even uttering an interest in them beyond being friends.

Once in 1992 I was a fitness instructor at a physical therapy clinic, and the receptionist and I had this magical rapport. She was one of the most attractive women I've ever seen. A few months into being at the clinic and the owner took me aside and said the receptionist was very upset that I had suggested to her a guy she might like to date, he said she was so into me and traumatized by my not being interested.

In 1995 at the age of 33 an older female friend (this one truly platonic, not in my age group) was listening to me tell some personal experience, and she interrupted me and empasized that if a woman takes her clothes off she's wanting intimacy.

All the above may make a reader wince. For me it is just painful loss of opportunity. To me, even to this day and with all the self-criticism implied in this writing, logically I still see the barriers to having realized those relationships.

The common person would get past the barriers by believing in physical cues, context, things being implied without explicitly saying anything.

I can access all the above non-verbal and implicit communication, and often did pick up on it in real time. But here is the final inner barrier: how can we be sure these subtle acts are truly communicating what we assume? Ultimately, in the strictest sense, we don't know. We don't know if long engaging conversations mean an interest in more. We assume, but we don't know.

Enough on "unwanted advances", now we move on to the feminist war on physically fit healthy women.

Where I was born, progressives were pro exercise and fitness. When I moved to Seattle I encountered my next hurdle constructed by feminists - a hostility towards women being expected to be physically fit. 

I had been a fitness geek since 1989, a weightlifting instructor, long distance runner and mountain and desert hiker. My only, and I mean only, vision of life with my spouse was as a daily active lifestyle of inner city biking, and effortless hiking in the mountains, especially hiking and camping in the winter.

Now, in Seattle, I was in a culture that shamed my vision of what married life should be. To expect a woman to be fit was tied to being concerned with her visual appeal to me a hetero male - and that can be construed as seeing women as a sexual object - which is another fundamental evil feminist culture cannot tolerate.

In 1999 I began dating this pear shaped girl I was thoroughly not attracted to physically. I was just trying to fit in. After a few months I tried to break it off with her, but it took a year for her to accept it.

Eventually I would marry someone I met in grad school. She was and is a life long third-wave feminist [Wikipedia]. She was the very vanguard of the movement - to keep the peace I dared not express any predilection towards fit women. On top of her ideology, her adult years had been a history of being slim then being overweight, back and forth. She spoke with pride about in her mid-twenties deliberately gaining weight to spite her mother's nagging for her to be more attractive.

I have the saddest deeply intimate story to tell. After the birth of our son, she got in the best shape of her life. I know because I've seen photos of her past, and the body she developed from aerobics and yoga at home was by far the most fit of all her years. 

One day she came out of the shower and was so amazingly sexy. Here is the emotion that hit me: I was elated then hid it and was sad. Saddened that if I had shown some great sexually charged enthusiasm that be valuing her new sexy fit self more than her previous self. I allowed her feminist value system to negate any of the special reaction and attraction her new body was prompting.

One year after her physical peak, she began to gain weight quickly, becoming so large someone asked her in sincerity if she was pregnant. To this day she is especially large, and we are divorced. 

Now I want to move on from this diary of experience. There is hope and some good news. Technology has thoroughly killed some of the toxic effects of the unwanted advance conundrum. Dating apps and sites like OKCupid and Tender are now the common way people find each other. Being on the site, and especially explicitly stating in one's profile what you are after, is explicit and declarative. 

Problem solved (a bit late for my generation).

Next let's think sociological, I have an insight that is plain as day to me but haven't heard from anyone else.

You know how in hospitals and maybe other environments sterilizing can wind up killing good germs and leaving predominantly the bad lethal germs? 

A lot feminist hostility has done just that - nullified and silenced good men and left the truly dangerous and hideous men unscathed.

As of this writing in 2020 we have in recent years had ghastly murders of women for simply being women. I'm thinking especially of the man in Florida who walked into a bank, asked all the women to lie on the floor, and he executed them.

The agenda of feminists is a hot house flower - only able to live in the most favorable environment. College campuses, city bureaucracies in the more progressive metropolitan areas, high profile companies et cetera are where the criteria of feminists is taken seriously. Beyond that, on the individual level, it's the sensitive, thoughtful men who give the feminist criteria a role in shaping their behavior.

But not anyone in Pecos Texas (for example), and not any of the groups of mean, brutish, aggressive men that are the actual perpetrators of real hurt to women.

I contend these men are more toxic and violent to women than in the pre counterculture years precisely because we have abandoned the critique of men in the form of demanding some degree of gentlemanly behavior towards women, leaving a void. 

Toxic third-wave feminism, toxic women hating men

....and the main harm going to nice men and women.

TikTok: Challenger to American WOKE Hegemony

Hegemony: leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others.

Cultural Norms: the agreed‐upon expectations and rules by which a culture guides 

the behavior of its members in any given situation. 

Cultural norms theory: A theory of mass communication which suggests that the mass media selectively presents, and emphasizes certain contemporary ideas or values. According to this theory, the mass media influences norms by reinforcing or changing them.

It is 2020 and I as a resident in United States live in a media landscape dominated by companies for the most part headquartered in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and New York City. Over the last decade online activists have pressured America's media to subtract content that is un-affirming to LBTGQ, obese women, blacks and latinas. Media has been shamed into praising poor, fat(females only) and gay. 

WOKE/Feminist/Marxist activists have deftly pruned and reshaped social media, movies and advertising we see and re-share by years of shaming campaigns, with news outlets reporting on the shaming campaigns and in effect normalizing their extreme illiberal intolerance by covering it in the plain vanilla mainstream news sphere.

Enter a giant wildly popular social media phenomenon...that is headquartered in Bejing. (Please leave aside the question of national security risk, or communism and focus on cultural influence. I really don't think those Korean/Japanese/Chinese dancing and lip-syncing young women are communist soldiers)

Back to headquartered in China. Finally, a company that would be deaf to a social justice shaming campaign coming from (for example) a student organization at UC Berkely. China is just too big a population of consumers to worry about an American sub-group. 

Not because Chinese companies are rude, rather... ironically... they are not used to American censorship via our social justice warriors. And not only is the company not perceptive nor receptive to this pressure, I would posit the users/consumers on their platform wouldn't bend their behavior to please American militant leftists.  

The illiberal conservatism of the American Left casts a long shadow, that thankfully ends at the west coast, and thankfully there are other big wealthy sophisticated cultures that can produce content that avoids the intolerant pathologies of American social justice ideals. 

In the U.S. the Left have worked deftly to change society to omit the heterosexual default in public discourse. 

Heteronormativity: the belief that heterosexuality, predicated on the gender binary, is the default, preferred, or normal mode of sexual orientation. It assumes that sexual and marital relations are most fitting between people of opposite sex. A heteronormative view therefore involves alignment of biological sex, sexuality, gender identity and gender roles.

Backtrack a little for context and intent. I am presenting these views without respect to religious ideas. I am agnostic-atheist, and for the most part China is also. I do support gay rights to live happily, safely and with access to any right heterosexuals have. I am not on offensive against gays, rather, I am on the offensive towards Leftist illiberal extremism and offering that TikTok is a giant counterforce to that extremism.

Gender and orientation aren't the only domains TikTok sets up a counter to WOKE. Wired magazine had a cover story on why the West should be suspicious of TikTok from a values standpoint. The writer takes up a sizable op-ed to claim "digital blackface" is rampant on the platform. 

(TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface)

The Wired article is talking about this: hundreds of thousands of cute Asain girls use black male rap tracks as the audio track to lip sync and/or dance to, the Asian girl being the video star and the rap is the soundtrack. The point of view of the Wired piece is black culture is ripped off. The Asian girls probably see few to no black people, and use rap without any real care for people of color.

I counter that this cultural appropriation is beautiful, a natural result of an interconnected world, and art, especially digital copies of art, have no borders. 

If TikTok is bought by an American company I fear the new owners will care what that Wired piece said, and the subsequent waves of shaming, which will kill everything good on the platform.

Enough with the set-up and meta statements. Let me plunge into presenting instances on the TikTok platform that support my assertion (talk about and quote several TikTok videos).

First up is minseonk1m and her English language teacher skit. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJDUcc4y/

The laugh is she pronounces Coke as cock. Beyond the humor what is a useful challenge to American queer-friendly feminism and the whole gender fluid and Questioning nonsense. This video shows a strikingly beautiful Asian female assertively being as sexually binary as possible. She strongly wants the sexually opposite. She is a good role model for confused American females.

Another video (https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJDUcwBg/ ) by minseonk1m uses a female rappers track, and the gist is an aggressive hetero female with zero solidarity with other women.

Lialiu_chinese has a cute video (https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJDyepDo/) teaching the phrases "ni hao" meaning hello, "niang" means mother, and "ni hao niang" means... "you're so gay".

TikTok has challenges for it's video makers. Some audio track is put on the platform and video makers are to use the audio to make a 'face zoom' vid, or dance, or some collage to reflect the song. 

The challenge is competitive, goal is to get the most views and likes. TikTok pays per view. 

One challenge is an audio track of black male voices saying "which chicks will you NOT date?" and several replies of 'Asian'. The audio ends with an Asian female voice saying "what are talking about? You can't even get in that side of the club". Asian girls use the audio and make videos with them looking stunning and not-assessable on the last words of the track.

Another challenge has girlfriends entering a room surprising their boyfriend by being totally nude. It's POV and the girl isn't seen, just the boyfriend's reaction.

There is a #foryou hashtag, and the vids are overwhelmingly young fit females in revealing clothes or bikinis and word bubbles asking guys what they think. The #foryou hashtag is completely general, often beautiful Chinese mountains or cities, a few animal vids. But the dominant content is sexy females trying to appeal to men. I've never ever seen an unattractive person on #foryou. I've never seen unattractive scenery in the background of any video. There are rumors TikTok screens out poverty and unattractiveness.

A final note. TikTok is driven not by the social network paradigm. It is pure cutting edge Chinese machine learning. And I as an American citizen, praise it, want to use it. 

WOKE

Wokish is a different language from English. Failure to understand the differences and their purpose is double plus ungood.

The differences can be seen in sudden shifts in word frequencies starting in the Year 2013. Just as the Mayan Long Count calendar aprocryphally ended in the year 2012, so did the English language disappear for many people, replaced by the vocabulary of a new age: Wokish for woke folx.

I'm not making any of this up. You can see these sudden shifts using Google's ngrams viewer, which now incorporates texts from recent years. The results are uncanny. Here we can see gender-affirming beginning to replace life-affirming in 2013, and grow for the last 7 years as fast as life-affirming did in the 1990's.

Crits [history of critical race theory] don't affirm universals and individuality. In fact they find that whole notion an abhorrent product of liberal, western, capitalist domination designed to enable racist oppression. Just as in Orwell's newspeak, wokish employs doublespeak. Words sometimes deliberately mean their opposite - not depending on context, like an auto-antonym, but simultaneously holding two contradictory meanings, forcing you to accept an absurd contradiction as truth.

Affimation is an example of doublespeak. It is not the intent of affirmation to make people of color, women, LGBTs, people with disabilities or people of a certain size feel good in their skin. On the contrary, because there are many intersections of privilege, and new ones remaining to be discovered wherever there is [capitalist] domination, the point of affirmation is to "challenge" the dominance (privilege) of whatever is not being affirmed.

So for example fat, disabled, poor, black transgender women in prison are not "affirmed" in the sense of having their accomplishments celebrated and their issues priorities. They are "affirmed" in the sense of drawing attention to the oppressive dominance of whatever-they-are-not. Affirmation involves these people becoming woke or re-educated about their own internalized oppression as well as the internalized dominance of their oppressor. And even then intersectionality is not done working it's verbal magic until our fat, disabled, poor, black, transgender female inmates start calling out each other's privilege as non-indigneous people who benefit from historical colonialism and genocide.

Affirmation = degradation.

Wokeness is not about loving some things or people and hating others. It's about getting everyone to hate themselves, so they'll become angry and support a revolution which brings crits to power. Then maybe things will get a little less horrible, they tell us.

Do not believe a word of it. It's irrational and harmful. 

Related: rights are good affirming is wrong

Racism

[ written by friend. posted anonymously ]

First, even in science, the role of science is to inform not to decide. This is the empirical method. We do science to prove something, and then we use that to inform our next steps. This is and always has been the appropriate role of science. The fact is, science is merely data, in this context. Data can't make decisions. It definitely cannot make value judgements. Politics is all about value judgements. Data is really good at providing context for value judgements, but it can't make those judgements. What does science say about racism? It exists. The distrust of people who are different is an evolutionary trait, evolved because it was useful for improving odds of survival. It is no longer strictly necessary for that purpose among humans, because we have developed civilized cultures where we don't go around murdering each other all the time. Is racism evil? This is an opinion, not data. Science does not have opinions. Science cannot make that value judgement. If we add a value judgement, science can answer the factual parts.

For example, if we decide that all people deserve to be treated well, science can be used to conclude that racism that results in poor treatment of people is bad. Note, however, that given that axiom, it doesn't support the conclusion that being racist is evil, only that mistreating people (out of racism or not) is evil. In addition, the same axiom can be used to conclude that treating racists poorly is just as bad as racists treating people they are racist against poorly. Of course, this isn't the SJW axiom. The SJW axiom is that merely being racist is evil, even if it doesn't result in bad or harmful behavior. They've cut science out the problem entirely, which is just a little ironic, I think.

History of critical race theory

[ written by a friend. posted anonymous ]

Herbert Marcuse: Critical Theory is an alternative to traditional theory. Traditional theory strives to be objective. Critical theory seeks to expose and challenge power structures. In other words it's revisionist Marxism that tries to explain the failure of socialism and rise of fascism in the West as a problem of false political consciousness: the sheeple need to get woke. Any kind of left wing political violence is considered a good sign in Critical Theory, because the status quo is always assumed to be on the verge of going full Third Reich.

Angela Davis: Student of Marcuse, communist, radical feminist and black power revolutionary. Returns to the academy after left wing political violence peters out in the 70's. Loves every kind of communist dictatorship and left wing cult (Jonestown.) Hates every kind of liberal democratic reform movement. For example instead of decriminalizing drugs, her "solution" to mass incarceration is "schools not jails." It's about which ideological tribe controls the bureaucracy and not the actual treatment and rights of people under that bureaucratic system.

Kimberle Crenshaw: Around 1990 develops critical race theory into Intersectionality. The idea here is that poor black women (or these days we would say LGBT+ BIPOCs) need to get woke so they can lead the movement using their personal knowledge as victims of multiple kinds of oppression. In other words civil rights reforms were just more false consciousness, because Western democracy and it's capitalist mode of production is fundamentally racist, sexist and homophobic, and nothing will change until people get really mad about that and take to the streets to force the current regime (i.e. liberal democracy) out.

Robin DiAngelo: critical race theory and whiteness studies scholar. Develops theory of White Fragility while giving corporate racial sensitivity trainings for the last 20 years. Shows up on the radar about 7 years ago with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement (which is very much built on critical race theory - see the About page of any organization affiliated with the movement.)

I was a very woke left wing socialist anarchist back in 2013 when "white fragility" appeared in our lexicon - 3 years before she spoke at Evergreen and 5 years she published her manifesto of the same name. However, my wokeness was with the old school Marxists, anarchists and communists, who were very skeptical of the "identity politics" of the critical race theorists. Critical race theory was a mental virus that infected our movement and turned us against each other, every white activist striving to call each other out for (purely intellectual) abuses of white privilege and defensive white fragility. It was all 100% NONSENSE, but it was also highly effective at derailing our movement, and has cost me several friendships.

People go to corporate sensitivity trainings to save their jobs, they listen to critical race theory in college because they want to learn and they show up at Black Lives Matter protests thinking that they are literally protesting for black people's lives, and then they get fed something different.

Because critical race theory is NOT about helping individual black people or solving specific problems that affect black people. It's about using racial anger and guilt, as well as sexual identity, poverty, disability, obesity, and other sensitive subjects to radicalize people and put leaders with the correct critical ideology in positions of political and bureaucratic power.

________________________

Struggle Sessions

Here's an article I had cut out from March 9, 2019; about a year-and-a-half ago, well before the virus and what I guess I will call our cultural conflict.

Peggy Noonan says:

"I ask you to entertain an idea that has been on my mind. I don't want to be overdramatic, but the spirit of the struggle session has returned and is here, in part because of the internet, in part because of the extremity of our politics, in part because more people are lonely."

The "struggle sessions" Noonan explains, were introduced by Mao Zedong in the mid-1960s to purge China of its enemies. University students were charged to "clear away the evil habits of the old society and extinguish what came to be known as 'the four olds'—old ideas and customs, old habits and culture."

So when Noonan proposes that "the spirit of the struggle sessions are here," she means there is a group of people in the United States who want to purge it of, what they perceive to be, political enemies and "evil habits."

"The air is full of accusation and humiliation. We have seen this spirit most famously on the campuses, where students protest harshly, sometimes violently, views they wish to suppress. Social media is full of swarming political and ideological mobs. In an interesting departure from democratic tradition, they don't try to win the other side over. They only condemn and attempt to silence."

This is a snapshot of how tense our society was a year-and-a-half ago. Primed and ready for the explosion that was sparked on May 25.

________-rights is good. _______-affirming is wrong

Today in the US minorities and the historically marginalized have rights. Even in the most backwater little town, if someone slaps a man for being gay at a grocery store, a deputy sheriff is going to show up and the attacker is going to be in handcuffs.

And that is real progress over how it was 50 years ago. 

________-affirming is not a right, it is optional and personal. Companies, campuses and others that demand for example queer-affirming or black-affirming discourse throughout the organization are creating a new kind of exclusionary dynamic. 

In the case of demanding queer-affirming dialogue the social damage goes further. The majority are heterosexual, and they have the right to discuss life, goals and the reality around them in a heterosexual way. Their rhetoric gets to be heteronormalized, for heterosexuals to do otherwise is absurd. The species is binary gendered and heterosexual by majority, it has to in order to make offspring and continue as a species. 

LGBTQ live on a heterosexual owned planet, having the right to live out their dreams in safety and unharrassed. 

....but not especially accommodated in all public discourse.

It is time for those that agree to undo the soft fascism in our more progressive organizations. We have mistaken a lot of silly language as progressive, and it is time to be rude to the toxic actors that have spread this garbage.

-------------------

post script: all the above written by someone supporting the legalization of gay marriage since the late 1970's. I am for legal rights.

Inspiration for this post came from this hilarious stuff by BLM.

Cause of Seattle Homelessness

Seattle did not make it's people homeless by a rising cost of housing. Those lower salary people moved for the most part to lower cost commuter cities to the south.

The homeless are from all over the United States. They selected Seattle because of the services for the homeless and especially for the leniency the courts provide.

Seattle homeless advocates actively recruited the homeless across the United States to relocate to Seattle.

While Amazon was recruiting the best and brightest tech workers from all over the US to Seattle, the city grew with this counterpoint of opposites -skilled tech and unskilled drug addicts and mental issue homeless.

Amazon the company recruited the best and brightest to add to the intelligence and wealth quota of Seattle, while Seattle government and NGO partners recruited the most problematic and unpromising individuals from all over the United States to come to Seattle in order to give these same compassion industry social justice careerists their own job security.

This analysis of systemic causes does not mean one should be divorced from compassion or helping the struggling. This systems critique simply spotlights the nurturing of a problem into a larger size by a class of careerists and their sentimentally alligned peers who reject any view other than them and their homeless being virtuious and beyond reproach, and wealth and the functionally intelligent being evil.
  

Black Lives Matter "What We Believe" Translated

Jump to: hilarious queer-affirming lines
On June 31 2020 I posted to Facebook this statement:

---

Want reforms that result with negating the unjustified killing of black men?

An end to racism isn't a goal connected with that.

There will always be racists in this country.

Especially with the moving goalposts of the Woke AF community, with the focus on ever nuanced categories like LBGTQ+fat and Trans Blacks as their heighted points of vigilance....especially if anyone is applying today's moral standards to America's past historical figures...as if we've discovered moral absolutes and can apply across all time. Woke AF has nothing to do with progress or a powerful nation and economy, their goal is the worst of all things: a self-righteous and small economy backward people, giving an eternal blank check to those of a global south and indigenous cultural heritage, and condemning the rest of the world (especially any great empire cultures such as British, American, Russian, Chinese) to eternal guilt. (exactly opposite of how we should respect cultures, the empires are full of the more significant history and valuable culture)

If black lives really mattered, specifically the need for regular black men just going to the store or to work to not be in danger due to the occasional pathological police officer, then this protest campaign would have stayed focused for the goal.

---

A friend of mine wrote the following unpacking of the official Black Lives Matter political platform, which is insightful, and more epsecially telling of how counterproductive to the goal the platform is.

---

I ran https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/ through the automated political BS translator:

Four years ago, what is now known as the Black Lives Matter Global Network began to organize. It started out as a chapter-based, member-led organization whose mission was to build local power and to intervene when violence was inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.

"build local power" = recruit black activists nationwide
"intervene when violence was inflicted" = use tragedies to get attention
"vigilantes" = George Zimmerman, who is a mentally unstable vigilante thug, but also a bit of a unicorn.

In the years since, we’ve committed to struggling together and to imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive.

"imagining and creating" = imagining
"anti-Blackness" = a demon that keeps people asleep until they get woke (no, I'm serious, I looked it up here: Recognizing And Dismantling Your Anti-Blackness: Janice Gassam: Forbes)
"social, economic and political power to thrive" = a sense of total despair, failure and helplessness

Black Lives Matter began as a call to action in response to state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism. Our intention from the very beginning was to connect Black people from all over the world who have a shared desire for justice to act together in their communities. The impetus for that commitment was, and still is, the rampant and deliberate violence inflicted on us by the state.

"a call to action" = words
"state sanctioned violence" = guns
"anti-Black racism" = cops
"connect Black people from all over the world" = sit at our computers.
"act together in their communities" = sit at their computers.
"violence inflicted on us by the state" = political power we would like to wield ourselves.

Enraged by the death of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of his killer, George Zimmerman, and inspired by the 31-day takeover of the Florida State Capitol by POWER U and the Dream Defenders, we took to the streets. A year later, we set out together on the Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride to Ferguson, in search of justice for Mike Brown and all of those who have been torn apart by state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism. Forever changed, we returned home and began building the infrastructure for the Black Lives Matter Global Network, which, even in its infancy, has become a political home for many.

"Dream Defenders" = communists who want to replace corporations, police and prisons with education and welfare spending.
"justice for Mike Brown" = use Mike Brown's death to get attention for our movement.
"Forever changed" = BLM became a communist movement that wants to compete for police funding.
"become a political home for many" = recruited many black people to spread our message.

Ferguson helped to catalyze a movement to which we’ve all helped give life. Organizers who call this network home have ousted anti-Black politicians, won critical legislation to benefit Black lives, and changed the terms of the debate on Blackness around the world. Through movement and relationship building, we have also helped catalyze other movements and shifted culture with an eye toward the dangerous impacts of anti-Blackness. These are the results of our collective efforts.

"ousted anti-Black politicians" = voter registration drives, canvassing, call centers and other staples of electoral politics
"won critical legislation" = letter writing campaigns, phone calls, petitions, etc.
"changed the terms of the debate on Blackness" = appropriated Black identity
"dangerous impacts of anti-Blackness" = losing your black card from spending too long in the Sunken Place.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network is as powerful as it is because of our membership, our partners, our supporters, our staff, and you. Our continued commitment to liberation for all Black people means we are continuing the work of our ancestors and fighting for our collective freedom because it is our duty.

"the work of our ancestors" = your black identity
"our collective freedom" = BLM's political power

Every day, we recommit to healing ourselves and each other, and to co-creating alongside comrades, allies, and family a culture where each person feels seen, heard, and supported.

"recommit to healing" = remind ourselves how helpless and oppressed we are
"a culture where each person feels seen, heard and supported" = a safe space where privilege is shunned

We acknowledge, respect, and celebrate differences and commonalities.

= We put victim groups on a pedestal  

We work vigorously for freedom and justice for Black people and, by extension, all people.

= We discourage black people from joining multi-racial social movements.

We intentionally build and nurture a beloved community that is bonded together through a beautiful struggle that is restorative, not depleting.

= We cultivate a mob mentality and addiction to social media because we're about power, not sacrifice.

We are unapologetically Black in our positioning. In affirming that Black Lives Matter, we need not qualify our position. To love and desire freedom and justice for ourselves is a prequisite for wanting the same for others.

= We discourage black people from joining multi-racial social movements. (This is the second time they've repeated that point. They sound a lot like black separatists, and a little like antifa.)

We see ourselves as part of the global Black family, and we are aware of the different ways we are impacted or privileged as Black people who exist in different parts of the world.

= We reject African-American identity and identify as an international Black race. (Again, 90% black seperatist, 10% antifa.)

We are guided by the fact that all Black lives matter, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expssion, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status, or location.

= We put victim groups on a pedestal. 😂

We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.

= We put the most vulnerable transgender victim group on the prow of our ship 😂 🤣.

We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.

= We are black lesbians who hate homophobic black dudes more than the white devil himself.

We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered.

= We are a coven of black lesbian witches.😂 🤣 🤣

We practice empathy. We engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts.

= We use unconditional love toward people like ourselves to recruit them into our movement. (That sounds very culty.)

We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.

= We recruit homemakers and single moms at the margins of the workforce who have some spare time.

We disrupt the Western-pscribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

= In our experience as black lesbians, you don't need a man. White people invented marriage. There's no patriarchy in Africa. 😂

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).

= We encourage straight people to keep that in the closet. 😂

We cultivate an intergenerational and communal network free from ageism. We believe that all people, regardless of age, show up with the capacity to lead and learn.

= Honestly we're trying to elect Joe Biden in 2020. Viva la revolucion!

We embody and practice justice, liberation, and peace in our engagements with one another.

= We police each other's thoughts and feelings.

CHOP Seattle Autonomous Zone Photos

All photos taken June 20 and 21 2020. 

An addition on June 21 was the presence of security. I don't mean professional security guards or police. They were CHOP community members with two way radios. They seemed highly organized, I was closely monitored by them any time I was on the zone boundary (their security stayed along the boundary)

The epicenter was in the area with the two SUVs in the photos. There is a large garden, plants are above ground in bags. The Riot Kitchen is in this area also. 

I write philosophy and science fiction. My better works have been The Oscillating Communist Capitalist Machine and Autistic Crow Computer. See all my books here: https://www.amazon.com/Lance-Miller/e/B003UQL0O6/

Do Not Tax Amazon

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/councilmember-teresa-mosqueda-unveils-her-own-proposal-for-taxing-seattles-big-businesses/

So wrong. Opposing this.

Tax for big tech companies in Seattle and directs the revenue for supporting undocumented immigrants. Mosqueda said this proposal "gives support to black and brown communities for which we owe for 400 years of oppression".

Here is why it is wrong.

1) Amazon and Expedia have spent big in building their headquarters in Seattle inner city. Revitalized the city. Now targets of shakedown by demagogues.

2) Across every culture from Ancient Greece, Ancient and Contemporary China.... the wealthiest work with symbols only (finance, law, literature, math, engineering, software) and the poorest of the poor harvest crops. This is a standard dynamic, and moral systems that try to shame or punish the dynamic are foolish, futile, and a route to poverty and ignorance.

http://progressive-positive.blogspot.com/2019/09/wealthy-tech-created-homeless-ultimate.html