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DDOwen
@llyfrgellbabel.bsky.social
Un sy'n ceisio cerdded i ffwrdd o Omelas. Ffuglen wyddonol ac yn y blaen. "Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood." -Lu Xun
202 followers270 following1.8k posts
Dllyfrgellbabel.bsky.social

Not only that: you learn to write it by writing it, and if you've not internalised good models of the form (and other forms) then your attempt at doing something wholly new may fall completely flat as you've accidentally recapitulated something old. (Samuel Delany argues this in "On Writing")

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Dllyfrgellbabel.bsky.social

Yeah, I guess the distinction becomes (sensibly, he said, being a sympathiser) that states themselves aren't good, but they can do good things. Which has to be part of any serious anarchist theory of the state, else you'd have some trouble working out why they're still around.

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Dllyfrgellbabel.bsky.social

*affected

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Dllyfrgellbabel.bsky.social

The reasons things like earthquakes tend to be the paradigm examples is I suspect because it's very difficult to convince oneself that nothing is going on and if it is you won't be effective when you suddenly don't have a house and neither does anyone else...

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Dllyfrgellbabel.bsky.social

Covid strikes me as closer to a famine than an earthquake, if that makes sense -- it's a drawn out, constant thing where lot of the ways you have to act to minimise its effects is both really stressful and runs counter to the kind socialisation that disaster utopianism runs off.

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Dllyfrgellbabel.bsky.social

Having something like the NHS around probably makes a difference here (like, Colin Ward's problem with it wasn't that it existed, it was how it was organised).

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Dllyfrgellbabel.bsky.social

The value of the argument is mainly that there's a perception that the immediate aftermath of big disasters is "everyone for themselves" and that doesn't seem to be universally true. (Famines seem to be the main exception, I think.)

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Dllyfrgellbabel.bsky.social

This is possibly because it turns up later when the effect has worn off (and so looters are potentially actual looters rather than people trying to get hold of needed food etc to distribute it) and just because external organisations don't have the same interests as the local authorities.

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Dllyfrgellbabel.bsky.social

The state writ large itself when it turns up generally isn't thar big a problem.

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DDOwen
@llyfrgellbabel.bsky.social
Un sy'n ceisio cerdded i ffwrdd o Omelas. Ffuglen wyddonol ac yn y blaen. "Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood." -Lu Xun
202 followers270 following1.8k posts