The leftism/anticapitalism leaving people's bodies the zeptosecond you imply that disabled people who aren't "productive" still matter in society and need to be treated like intrinsic equals who have a place in this world:

Genuinely asking, isn't self-diagnose with a condition kind of dangerous? Because legitimizing self-diagnosing opens a door to many malicious people who would want to exploit the fact they can self-diagnose? And in turn, make the space of autistic people worse?

Was going to skip this, but I’m writing a LONG response because I’m VERY exhausted with the amount of misinformation I see on this “self dx is dangerous” take, so buckle up and allow me to info dump.

Recently, authentic_autism_advocacy, an Instagram account run by a supposed medically diagnosed autistic woman was discovered to be a non-autistic woman, Connie Manning, posing as a medically diagnosed autistic person to spread hate and anti-self diagnosing speech. In reality, she is a neurotypical mother who regularly uses her autistic son for clout; she also turned out to have a hand behind CalmWear, a brand of sensory compression products designed for disabled people. Not only had she been spewing hatred towards other autistic people, she had been accusing well known AFAB autistic tiktokers like beckspectrum of faking being autistic and threatening self diagnosed autistics and saying they are a danger to the community, and engaging in other incredibly discriminating behaviour. Yes, she herself was a neurotypical person posing as a medically diagnosed autistic to perpetuate hateful rhetoric about self diagnosed people and used her voice to speak OVER autistic folk for financial gain and exploitation of autistic people, including her own son. If you want to read this roller coaster of a story, an autistic person wrote an entire article on it with tons of screenshots and sources.

So let me make one thing clear to you.

The purpose of actually, genuinely self diagnosing is not done to attract attention or to parade around and exploit other autistic people. Self diagnosed autistic individuals have recognised due to difficult life circumstances, financial hardship, bigotry and stigma within the medical/legal world, being a minor, lack of insurance, lack of proper access to safe care facilities, being denied assessment due to incompetent or biased practitioners, and/or any other obstacle that they may temporarily or permanently be barred from diagnosis. Self diagnosis does NOT instantly mean a person is posing for clout, nor does it indicate a person is trying to wring money from assistance services or exploit other autistics. And nts who use self diagnose with intentions of harming the community? That’s NOT self diagnosis, that’s abuse of something meant to aid people blocked from medical care or financial means to that care. All we can do for autistic people, no matter who we perceive them to be, is treat them the same way we would any other autistic person. Because the moment you start deciding by your own book who deserves respect and who doesn’t, you’ll be on a slippery slope to locking out thousands of autistic people from the community. If it’s discovered a person like Connie is literally abusing the system of self dx to intentionally mislead the community, by all means, we must hold them accountable. But you cannot simply go about granting and revoking access from people just because someone lacks a diagnosis or doesn’t fit your idea of what being autistic looks like, especially if it’s based on stereotypes.

Moral of the story? Isn’t it ironic how anti-self dx people will 100% believe a user who claims to be medically diagnosed but shows no “written proof” of it, yet always demand written proof from a self dx person? It’s almost like even anti-self dx people can’t tell the difference between someone who is medically diagnosed autistic and someone who isn’t. Well, that’s because they can’t. While there might be common traits, autism has no set model, it is a spectrum, no autistic person is alike; Policing self diagnosed people about their self diagnosis isn’t a form of protecting the community. It’s a form of gatekeeping. If you find yourself granting instant acceptance, without asking for proof, to a person insisting they are medically diagnosed like this neurotyical mother, but then prohibit self dx people from entry entirely on the grounds of not showing proof of medical assessment, you are upholding a double standard. This is why policing autistic people’s diagnosis, self or not, is inherently useless.

So here’s the thing... instead of asking people to stop self diagnosing, what you should instead be asking yourself is, “Why do people self diagnose? What kind of medical system could possibly be in place where people feel they need to resort to self diagnosis rather than get an actual diagnosis?”

Well, it’s mainly common knowledge among most of the autistic community that diagnosis is NOT easy to come by.

One of the main reasons why people cannot get a diagnosis is due to financial/insurance reasons. It’s reasonable to estimate that by the end of 2020 almost 30 million Americans alone were without health insurance. I’ve heard costs out of pocket for an autism diagnosis are between $500-$6000. If a person or a family cannot afford health insurance—which by the way on average is around $5,400 a year for a single person and $13,800 for a family here—where are they supposed to pull out $6,000 to get screened?

You might be asking, “Well aren’t insurances supposed to cover disability?” Sure, there are options for disability care through health insurance—not even going to get into that—but like a lot of things in the US, this is a severely flawed system. A lot of private health insurance will stop or limit coverage for an autism diagnosis or assistance services once a person reaches 18 to 21 years old. In most states, coverage has a higher chance of being denied to autistic adults coming with the added age cap or ONLY covering ABA, an abusive, manipulative “therapy” used to force social compliance and trait suppression on autistic people. The fact that ABA, a conversion therapy, is covered, but little else, shows exactly what insurance companies think of autistic people: they’ll only cover us if we want to learn to be “normal”. This can leave many undiagnosed autistic adults who cannot afford analysis, insurance, or safe assistance services with nowhere to turn. If I was not on my parents’ insurance, there is NO WAY I would EVER be able to afford a diagnosis. I don’t have $2,000 lying around. The MONEY ALONE would prohibit me from getting a diagnosis, no matter how many autistic traits I presented.

When I was going through this system years ago to start a diagnosis, I was shocked to find no therapist within three hours of me was accepting adult patients. “Up to 18 only” their websites would say. And in the event I had found one (1) that accepted me as a then 20 year old with X insurance, and that person refused me diagnosis, I would be out of options unless I planned a 5 hour drive which may have also led me to another biased screener. A person seeking self financed assessment can waste thousands of dollars therapist hopping.

People will say, “Well I live in X place, and where I come from, it’s covered!” Well the reality is that everyone in the world does not live where you live. It’s not realistic to assume everyone is in the same position as you or your family to afford care or access the same resources as you. When you say, “Just go out and get a diagnosis! It’s not that hard!”, understand you are speaking from your personal vantage point where screening may be easily accessed or easily covered/is free OR you have no personal knowledge of what that process is like yourself.

The second thing that bars a ton of people from being diagnosed is the fact that when autism was first discovered, its research was HEAVILY centered on white, cis, heterosexual men. The idea that autistic people are ONLY cis, white, heterosexual men carries on to this day. If you are an outlier to this stereotype, your chances of being misdiagnosed with something else or refused diagnosis skyrocket because so-called “professionals” don’t know how to observe traits in any other person besides a cis, white, heterosexual man, and refuse/fail to recognise the endless ways in which a person can be autistic. ALL the time I hear how AFAB people will go in to get screened only to find out their screener does not believe AFAB people can be autistic, because yes, sexism and anti-lgbtq+ ideas play a huge role in the incredibly outdated diagnostic process, because autism is still believed to be an “AMAB only” thing. People report going into a therapists office and being asked questions like, “Do you like going outside? Do you like having friends?” and being told that if you agree with either of these, you cannot be autistic because criteria at some places is so backwards, you can’t even say you enjoy conversation without failing the test. Other things commonly heard during the analysis are screeners telling someone they are too smart/articulate to be autistic, gas lighting them by saying they are mistaking their symptoms for something else/making them up, telling a person they seem normal, dismissing clear autistic traits by saying they’re unique “superpowers”, or intentionally misdiagnosing a person as ADHD INSTEAD of autistic. People on social media have also pointed out what influences racism has on the diagnostic process as well and how lack of research and understanding of autistic POC contributes to under-diagnosis and stigma has only contributed to refusal of care and under-representation of POC in the disabled community, as one autistic Black woman points out on Instagram, “I found excellent articles that support and validate my feelings and experiences, but I could find no research on autistic Black people.” Additionally, because research has primarily been done on young men, this means anyone who is not a cis man and is over the age of 18 and is seeking a diagnosis has a much higher chance of not receiving one because screeners don’t understand how autistic traits may present differently in adults, especially since adults are very likely to mask. Some autism screeners are so against autism they have told clients they would only diagnosis a person autistic if it was their last resort to avoid “placing a burden on their shoulders”. These reasons are largely responsible for why autism is incredibly mis/under-diagnosed. This ask would be the length of a novel if I included every single type of discrimination and mistreatment during the evaluation process alone, but understand it can be incredibly biased, sexist, transphobic, racist, or just flat out ableist. And guess what? Though this process can take as little as a month to get sorted, that is rare. The assessment SHOULD be very short. But a lot of autistic people have reported their diagnosis took more than 2-4 years because of having to waste time, energy, and money hopping from therapist to therapist looking for someone to take them seriously, as many autistic people compiled on the actuallyautistictiktoks page on Instagram point out.

The last thing I want to touch on is this idea that people have that self diagnosing is dangerous. “What if someone self diagnoses and they take advantage of services that are meant for autistic people?” ...The Big Things you think I am going to take advantage of as a self diagnosed autistic person, like scholarship money for instance or SSDI, I do not have legal access to without a formal diagnosis. I cannot waltz into a law firm and ask for a $5,000 scholarship for autistic people without a diagnosis, because they WILL NOT give it to me!

Let me tell you some of things I’ve “cruelly taken advantage of” as a self diagnosed autistic person. I bought glasses with blue light protection, because screen and fluorescent lighting at work and even natural blue toned light from the sky lowers my threshold for some sensory input like noise and social interaction; wearing them to work everyday has improved my sensory thresholds incredibly. I’ve talked to my manager and told him I’m autistic and that I have a hard time understanding vague direction and may need to step away briefly on occasion to tend to a shutdown before a meltdown comes on at work; he had no problem with this. I use subtitles; sometimes I have trouble processing audio or reading facial expressions and tone, and being able to see the words displayed on the screen gives me a significantly better understanding of what I watch. All my life, I have been having meltdowns which I had mistaken for mental breakdowns or panic attacks and having access to resources that walked me through preventative methods and tips on what to do if I have one has been ENORMOUSLY helpful to me. All my life, I was trying to deal with them thinking they were something else; becoming aware of this and accepting that they are in fact autistic meltdowns has helped me not only go through them, but has helped me redirect stims which at their worst previously had me hitting and clawing my arms, slapping my face, and even hitting my head. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wait 4 years for a diagnosis to use resources I could be using to make my life more accessible right now!

People will say, “Oh well yeah, I don’t mean You are one of Those Types of self diagnosed autistic people, you clearly sound/look autistic, I’m talking about other people.” The thing is, there is no broad “sounding/looking autistic”, that’s stereotyping, and you can’t demand everyone who interacts with you show you their Autistic Card, because again, not everyone is able to be diagnosed, especially given the mistreatment and stigma present towards autistic people in the medical field! And what made you ask for their diagnosis? Because they “don’t seem autistic” to you? Why didn’t you ask for their diagnosis? Because they “seemed autistic” to you? By denying anyone who doesn’t have a diagnosis resources they may very well need, you are denying assistance to thousands of people who are without means to be diagnosed. And I am SO tired of seeing comments online on self diagnosis posts that “people don’t know what they’re taking about” as if they know us personally, like are you me? Are you my doctor I’ve consulted? Did you watch me academically research and consult with other autistic people about being autistic for over 3 years? I’m tired of “well, one time a self diagnosed person laughed at my actually autistic diagnosed friend...so all self dx people are evil” because there is ZERO correlation between a person being self assessed and their behavior towards a non self assessed person. The fact both those arguments are in use whenever self dx comes up is yet another form of gatekeeping.

Self diagnosing autism is not begging for attention or Evil Criminal Money Funneling Schemes. It is a result of a deeply flawed medical and insurance system that has failed to give proper attention and care to those who need it, it is a result of resources not made available, of safe support systems not there for kids and adults alike. You want to talk about what’s truly dangerous? How the hate group Autism Speaks has been parading itself around since 2005 as an advocacy group for autistic people and has been misusing millions of dollars worth of donation money and promoting stigma and hatred around autistic people; no autistic members are present on their board. How Sia and her new film Music was nominated for 2 Golden Globes despite it replacing the original autistic actor with a neurotypical actor, using offensive stereotypes, and using the main autistic character as a prop, and featured an extremely dangerous bodily restraint scene on an autistic person having a meltdown in public and featured very insensitive content due to Sia’s lack of consulting with autistic people to make the film (spoilers in that article).

Instead of policing autistic people, whether they fit your idea of what an autistic person is or not, redirect your efforts and your energy to dismantling systems and holding others accountable for perpetuating harmful stereotypes about autistic people that are legitimately dangerous on such a scale that they have created insurmountable damage to the autistic community. But I guarantee you, worrying over whether your classmate is “faking it” will not do any justice to the decades worth of discrimination autistic people face still today.

I understand. You care about the community, you don’t want autistic people to be exploited or taken advantage of. I don’t want to be exploited and taken advantage of as an autistic person, and I don’t want that for others! But I also understand that when we self proclaim ourselves as judges of random autistic strangers on the internet or start accusing people of faking or demanding to see medical paperwork from people when the basis of our suspicions is “this person doesn’t look like my stereotyped view on how I think an autistic person should act”, THAT is when you really run into trouble. Because if you are allowed to deny self dx people entrance into the autistic community, what’s stopping you from thinking you have the power to deny ANYONE entrance into that community?

And there is power in self diagnosis for many autistic people. When the evaluation system is literally rigged to set you up for failure and put you through unnecessary hardship, self dx is a self affirming, empowering tool to take back control from a process designed to gaslight and crush you. The evaluation process was NOT formulated by an autistic person, nor was it made to be inclusive of all autistic people. Until the evaluation system in place for autistic people is safe, accessible, and free to ALL, you have EVERY right to self diagnose.

I think one of the major problems with the modern left is a focus on cultural analysis instead of economics. When I say culture I EXPLICITLY DON'T MEAN racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and Indigenous rights/decolonization.

Stupidpol and their ilk are reactionaries and should be treated as such. What I'm talking about is the focus on things like analyzing TV shows or picking over the latest issues of the NYT op-ed column, the sort a caricatures you see on Chapo.

Zizek is emblematic of this syndrome. He's a theorist of ideology, a film critic, a Lacanian psychoanalyst and complete reactionary on gender and immigration issues, and he's widely considered to be one of preeminent Marxist scholars alive. And, and this is important, Zizek does fuck all actual economic material analysis. Mark Fisher, who was an excellent Marxist theorist, covers almost exactly the same ground from a different perspective, and you can repeat this across academia.

Inside academia the problem has gotten so bad that the best economic analysis is being carried out by the fucking post-humanists. Take, for example, Anna Tsing's excellent Supply Chains and the Human Condition. Tsing is a brilliant theorist but she spends most of her time writing about multi-species interactions between humans and mushrooms. Carbon Democracy, one of the best theories of the carbon economy ever written, is by a left-Foucaldian.

There are some exceptions to this, Andreas Malm's Carbon Capital is wonderful, Riot Strike Riot is great and I have to mention the group I call The Other Chicago School, Endnotes, whose infrequent analysis is a breath of fresh air. But Endnotes isn't particularly well read even inside the academy, which takes back outside the ivory tower in the dismal mess that is what passes for popular left "economics."

I want to go back to Occupy for a second because what happened there is indicative of the problem. Occupy, at least technically, actually had a theory of economics that went beyond "neoliberalism bad, welfare state good." And it's really not as bad as its critics have since accused it of being. Graeber's "the 1% meme" was supposed to be part of an MMT analysis of the ability of banks to create money out of nothing, see Richard A. Werner. The theory then goes with the ability to create money out of nothing the question becomes who should actually have that power. The 1% are the people who control that power and use that it to gain wealth and their wealth to gain power.

This is essentially what happened after 2008 and it relates to an entire analysis of the politics of debt and war that's captured really well in the last chapter of Debt, The First 5000 Years, drawing from Hudson's excellent Super Imperialism. Again, not bad, and not the disaster it became in Liberal hands. But note two things:

1, His work is intentionally detached from the production process- Graeber uses a value theory of labor about the social reproduction of human beings. That theory is really interesting and I'll leave a link to his It is Value that Brings Universes into Being here. But Graeber is an anthropologist, not an economist, and his recent work is mostly composed of a set of theories of bureaucracy.

And, don't get me wrong, I really like Utopia of Rules and Bullshit Jobs, and it's possible to build an economic theory out of them, but almost no one actually does. And this gets us back to my second point about Occupy and economics.

2, Not a single other person I have ever met, including people who were in Occupy, have ever actually heard the theory behind the 1%. Part of this has to do with Graeber’s rather admirable desire to not become an intellectual vanguardist. But, I cannot overemphasize how much of this is a result of the left's retreat into an analysis of consumerism instead of capitalism and its further insistence that the entire fucking global economy can be explained by chapters 1-3 of Capital and this just isn't a "read more theory" rant, it's not like reading the rest of Capital is going to help you here. But even that's better than what's actually happened, which is people reading Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and the Communist Manifesto and trying to derive economic theory from that, or getting lost in a Gramscian or psychoanalytic miasma trying to explain why revolution didn't happen. But we can't keep fucking doing this.

If we do we're just going to keep getting stuck in endless fucking inane arguments, one of which is about which countries are Imperialist or not based on trying to read the minds of world leaders, and the other of which is a bunch of racists trying to argue that they're actually "class-first" Marxists and that if we don't say slurs and be mean to disabled people we're going to lose the "real working class," which is somehow composed only of construction workers banging steel bars.

So let's stop letting them do that. One of the reasons Supply Chains and the Human Condition is so great is that it describes how the performance of gender and racial roles creates the self super-exploitation at the heart of global capitalism. Race and gender cannot be ignored in favor of some kind of "class-first" faux-leftist bullshit. THEY ARE LITERALLY THE DRIVER OF CAPITAL ACCUMULATION.

Most of the global supply chain has been transformed into entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs (see the countless accounts of Chinese garment factory workers who dream of getting into the fashion industry and who attempt to supplement their meager income by setting up stalls in local marketplaces to sell watches and clothes).

The fact that global supply chains have reverted to the kind of small family firms that Marx and Engels thought would disappear is a MASSIVE problem for any kind of global workers movement, because it means that the normal wage relation that is supposed to form the basis of the proletariat isn't actually the governing social experience of a large swath of what should be the proletariat, either because they're the owners of small firms contracted by larger firms like Nike who would, in an older period of capitalism, have just been workers or because the people who work for those firms are incapable of actually demanding wage increases from the capitalists because they're separated by a layer from the firms who control real capital, and thus are essentially unable to make the kind of wage demands that would normally constitute class consciousness because the contractors they work for really don't have any money. These contractors are in no way independent.

Multinational corporations set everything from their buying prices to their labor conditions to what their workers say to lie to labor inspectors. The effect of replacing much of the proletariat with micro-entrepreneurs is devastating.

The class-for-itself that's supposed to serve as the basis of social revolution has decomposed entirely. Endnotes has a great analysis of how this happened covering more time, but the unified working class is dead. In its place have come a series of incoherent struggles: The Arab Spring, the Movement of the Squares, the current wave of revolutions and riots stretching from Sudan to Peru to Puerto Rico- all of them share an economic basis translated into demands on the state. We see housing struggles, anti-police riots, occupations, climate strikes, and a thousand other forms of struggle that don't seem to cohere into a traditional social revolution and WE HAVE NO ANSWER.

I don't have one either, but we're not going to get out of this mess by trying to read the tea leaves of the CCP or analyzing how Endgame is the ruling class inculcating us into accepting Malthusian Ecofascism.

I want to emphasize YOU DON'T NEED TO SHARE MY ECONOMIC ANALYSIS to develop one, I'm obviously wrong on a lot of things and so is everyone else. The point is that we need to start somewhere.

There are other benefits to reading economics stuff even if it can be boring sometimes, like being able to dunk on nerd shitlibs and reactionaries who do the "take Econ-101" meme by being able to prove that their entire discipline is bunk. Steve Keen's Debunking Economics is absolutely hilarious for this, he literally proves that perfect competition relies on the same math that you use to "prove" that the earth is flat.

Or learning that the notion that markets distribute goods optimally is based on the assumption that what is basically a form of fucking state socialism exists, and that the supply demand curve is fucking bullshit. Here's a page from Debunking Economics looking at the socialism claim, it fucking rules, and it's the result of the fact that neo-classical economics and central planning were developed together. Kantorovich and Koopmans shared a Nobel Prize.

But wait, there's more! We can PROVE that THE MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS DOESN'T EXIST. Do you have any idea how hard you can own libs with facts and logic if you can demonstrate that THE MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS DOESN'T EXIST?

But seriously, if you go outside of the Marxist tradition there are all sorts of fun and useful things you can find in post-Keyensian circles and so on and so forth. I'm a huge fan of Karen Ho's Liquidated, an Ethnography of Wall Street/Liquidated_%20An%20Ethnography%20of%20Wall%20Street%20-%20Karen%20Ho.pdf) which looks at how the people at banks and investment firms actually behave and, oh boy, is it bad news (they're literally incapable of making long-term decisions which is wonderful in the face of climate change).

Oh, and also, all of the bankers are essentially indoctrinated into thinking they're the smartest people in the world, so that's fun.

This may sound like I'm shitting on Marxism, and I sort of am, but there's Marxist stuff coming out that I absolutely love! @chuangcn is a good example of what I think the benchmark for leftist economics and historical analysis should be.

Chuang responded to the call put out by Endnotes to cut "The Red Thread of History," or essentially to stop fucking arguing about 1917, 1936, 1968 and so forth and look at material conditions instead of trying to find our favorite faction and accuse literally everyone else of betraying the revolution, and then imagining what we would have done in their shoes. The present is different from the past and we need to organize for this economic and social reality, not 1917's.

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Chuang produced an incredibly statically and sociologically detailed account of the Chinese socialist period in issue 1 and the transition to capitalism in the soon to be put online issue 2 that focuses on shifts in production and investment and shifts in China's class-structure and how urban workers, peasants, factory mangers, technicians, and cadre members reacted to those movements and shaped each others decisions and mobilizations. They largely avoid discussions of factional battles of the upper level of the CCP, which dominate liberal and communist accounts of the period and produce, in supposed communists from David Harvey to Ajit Singh, a Great Man theory of history.

Instead, they trace how strikes and peasant protests shaped the CCP's decision making and how the choices of people like Mao and Deng Xiaoping were limited by material conditions, in this case by their production bottleneck.

What's great about Chuang is that their work is so rich in sociological detail that you don't need to agree with them at all about what communism is and so on for their account to be useful, and they force us to think about the world from the perspective of competing classes bound by economic reality, instead of the black-and-white "good state/bad state," "good ruler/bad ruler," discourse that dominates our understanding of both imperialism and the global economy.

I'm just going to end this with a TL;DR: Cut the read thread of history and stop fucking arguing about 1917, use economic theory to dunk on Stupidpol and shitlibs. When you talk about "material conditions" talk about the production process, supply chains, capital movements and so on, not which states are good and bad (the bourgeoisie is a global class friends), recognize that strategies need to be built around current economic and social conditions, WHICH ARE INSEPARABLE FROM RACE AND GENDER, climate change is more complicated than the 100 companies meme (I only touched on this but please read Fossil Capital and Carbon Democracy), and in general try to learn more about different schools of economics and social theory, I swear reading something that wasn't written in 1848 isn't going to kill you.

Flashback: Unabomber Publishes His ‘Manifesto’

Ted Kaczynski was a madman who killed and maimed innocent people – but did some of his worries for the future come true?

By 2017 standards, a bearded man ranting in his manifesto about how “one of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism” might, at best, have a chance ending up name-checked by Alex Jones. Most likely, he’d become the hero of a thousand faceless message board posters. His 35,000-word diatribe against technology titled “Industrial Society and Its Future” might be suitable for a personal blog, but a national newspaper? Surely not.

Of course, more than 20 years ago, when Ted Kaczynski mailed out what would come to be known as the “Unabomber Manifesto,” it was huge news. After over a decade spent living as a recluse without electricity or running water in a cabin in Montana – sending mail bombs to university academics and corporate airline executives – Kaczynski sent letters to the New York Times and the Washington Post demanding they publish his manifesto and agree to print an annual follow-up for three years. If they did, the bombings would cease. If not, the Unabomber hinted at more bombings to come. 

It had started in May of 1978, when a package exploded and injured a Northwestern University security officer. A year later, another bomb was sent to the same college, injuring a graduate student. Also in 1979, Kaczynski snuck a bomb into the cargo hold of an American Airlines flight. It went off mid-flight, causing an emergency landing and afflicting 12 passengers with smoke inhalation. In 1985, he switched things up, and sent a shrapnel-loaded bomb to a computer store in Sacramento, California, claiming the owner as his first victim. By the mid-1980s, the Unabomber had become a real-life American boogeyman. A killer who would strike without warning, and without much reason. Why was he doing what he did – and when would he do it again?

The publication of the manifesto would end up being his undoing. Members of Kaczynski’s family had a slight suspicion Ted could be the person behind the terror campaign. His brother David was one of the thousands of people who called the FBI tip-line after the manifesto was published and a million-dollar reward was offered for information leading to the capture of the Unabomber. After a long search, FBI agents arrested an unkempt Kaczynski in his Lincoln, Montana cabin on April 3rd, 1996. They found bomb making components, over 40,000 journal pages and the manifesto’s original typed manuscript.

There’s no defending the actions of a person who mails bombs with the intent to do serious harm. But Andrew Sodroski, executive producer of the new Discovery mini-series, Manhunt: Unabomber, thinks there is plenty to take away from Kaczynski’s words. As he said in a phone conference with reporters leading up to the show, “What the manifesto has to say about our relationship with technology and with society is more true right now than it was when Ted published it.”

Not many domestic terrorists convicted of murder get called prophetic by television producers – and there are scholars from different sides of the political spectrum who agree that the the Unabomber’s anti-technology stance was ahead of its time. “His work, despite his deeds,” wrote Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team, “deserves a place alongside Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and 1984, by George Orwell.” Ray Kurzweil, noted author, computer scientist and futurist, quoted a passage from the manifesto in his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. Some believe he’s a murderous modern-day Henry David Thoreau, while others say he’s a genius and a prophet. So what, exactly did he get right?

Kaczynski opens his manifesto with, “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” The technology he goes on to rail against, keep in mind, was mid-1990s – before smartphones, before Twitter, before “Likes” on Facebook and algorithms helped pick out things for you to buy and experience. Although the word “dystopia” never shows up throughout the essay, Kaczynski believed (and you have to assume still does so from his prison cell) that the future wasn’t some Philip K. Dick or Handmaid’s Tale scenario; the dystopian future started happening a long time ago. Computer networks, the mass-communication media, the modern health care system, pesticides and chemicals, all products of the Industrial Revolution, are destroying the planet, he writes. As one portion of the manifesto is sub-titled, “The ‘Bad’ Parts of Technology Cannot be Separated From the ‘Good’ Parts.” 

In point number 49 the manifesto, Kaczynski writes, “In the modern world it is human society that dominates nature rather than the other way around, and modern society changes very rapidly owing to technological change.” One of the big problems, he believed while writing his manifesto, was the inevitable growth of artificial intelligence and how humanity will cope with it. “First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them.” As one Wired article explained in 2015, “A manufacturing device from Universal Robots doesn’t just solder, paint, screw, glue, and grasp – it builds new parts for itself on the fly when they wear out or bust.” From checking you out at the grocery store to flipping burgers, robots are being designed to integrate into the labor force and cut costs.

He goes on to write in point number 172, “In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.” When Kaczynski’s thoughts were published, we were still dealing with the Terminator version of the robots overtaking humanity and destroying it – it was a nightmare scenario, fiction. But Kaczynski wasn’t writing speculative fiction; he was stating, from an academically-trained point of view, where he saw technology headed.

Technology overtaking humanity was only one of the scary possibilities. The rise of the “one percent” super rich and corporations controlling everything, was another. “Human freedom mostly will have vanished, because individuals and small groups will be impotent vis-a-vis large organizations armed with supertechnology and an arsenal of advanced psychological and biological tools for manipulating human beings, besides instruments of surveillance and physical coercion,” he wrote. 

Tech companies have untold amounts of data on every person that logs online for everything from shopping for cat litter to ranting on Twitter. How to understand that data – and what to use it for – is an industry in itself. Could it be used to manipulate us? See the 2016 U.S. election and the rise of fake news spread through Facebook. “Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate,” as one 2016 BuzzFeed article put it, showed up in feeds even if the people didn’t follow those groups. Some of the false news was spread the old-fashioned way, through word of mouth; but, as John Herman of the New York Times explained, misinformation on the social media service thrives or dies, “at least in part, on Facebook’s algorithm.” As Kaczynski believes, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. All of this seemed farfetched when Kaczynski’s words were put in front of a mass audience. In 1994, audiences were being told suave cyberterrorists like the ones in the movie The Net were the ones looking to steal your information online and do whatever they please with it.

After all this, however, calling Kaczynski a prophet might be a stretch. He’s a highly intelligent person who wanted to try and stop where he saw humanity headed by any means necessary – including murdering people. Yet he routinely points out throughout his manifesto that there very well might be no stopping the inevitable. The entire point of his manifesto, as he states, is revolution, anarchy: “Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.” Kaczynski, who has stated admiration for the eco-anarchist movement (“but I think they could do it better,” he also said in an interview in 1999), takes aim at both leftists, including “socialists, collectivists, ‘politically correct’ types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like”). He also writes, “conservatives are fools,” and that they’re, “just taking the average man for a sucker, exploiting his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business.” Kaczynski even engages in some gaslighting: “Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.”

All of this reiterates the point that Kaczynski is no hero whatsoever. The person who wrote “Industrial Society and Its Future,” is a fanatic. And as is sometimes the case, fanatics can take things to the tragic extreme. Yet there is something to be taken away from his words if you read closely; it’s that we give up a piece of ourselves whenever we adjust to conform to society’s standards. That, and we’re too plugged in. We’re letting technology take over our lives, willingly. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t take a madman dressed up like a prophet to tell us; it’s all too evident. Kaczynski, to steal a phrase from the tech world, was just an early adopter of these thoughts. Yet his warning will probably forever go unnoticed because of the horrific deeds he carried out to get his message across.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/flashback-unabomber-publishes-his-manifesto-125449/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Hi, when you say that you understand completely the reasons why people don't like the better binder project you're being very presumptuous. It's not the same as well-meaning but ignorant abled people attempting to solve highly complex and expensive problems of access for disabled people. And furthermore, the way you talk about this is really condescending and frankly just...you make assumptions that you understand the intimacies of how people think and feel that are just not true or analogous.

Like I mean this in the nicest possible way, but cisgender people’s relation to trans people is just not the same, and it would be a lot less patronizing and transphobic of you to *not* characterize every possible negative and/or critical reaction to this blog as being a reflexive anger and automatic rejection instead of being a justified and/or reasonable wariness. Like I absolutely hope this project succeeds, but there’s no reason to think that you’re qualified to make it succeed.

I’m going to use this also as a way to respond to your post, which didn’t show up on my Acitivity, so I’m glad someone pointed me to it.

1. My ability to listen to criticism

For the last couple weeks, I’ve been monitoring the activity of my posts, especially looking for people saying things like, “This will never work”, “this is a bad idea”, “won’t work for me” and so forth. Then a lot of the time I’ve messaged them to say, “Hi, I want to hear about your thoughts and experiences, do you have time to talk?”. I’m in a little bit of a backlog with this because some really smart and informed people have been commenting on it but I’ve been busy. For example, if I got the chance to listen to @the-scottish-costume-guy at greater length and in greater detail in the next couple days, I’d be really happy.

So while some criticisms have been reflexive rage or despair, others have been completely on point and I’ve already integrated them into my design (for example, recommendations to slope the boning diagonally down and to the outside). And others have been logical on the surface, but don’t apply to the specific thing I am trying to do (eg. “corsets are expensive”)

2. My credentials

I’ve been sewing seriously for the last 20 years. In some of that time, I’ve been paid for my work. For much of it, I’ve both been reading academic sources on the topic, and sewing in the workshops of vastly more experienced sewists. Over and above all my other sewing experience, I’ve made and worn numerous corsets. There is no set certification for a “professional tailor” but yes, if I wanted to do that as a job, I do have the resume and portfolio for it.

Tailoring isn’t actually the field you want here, though. Since beginning this project, I’ve located and contacted several researchers in the fields of human ecology, mechanical engineering, and biomedical engineering, who have relevant expertise. None have yet gotten back to me, probably partly because it’s summer. If someone more qualified than me wants to work on this project, I am 100% willing to collaborate with them, or hand the project off to them.

3. My profiting from this project

I’ve already made some very particular and pointed decisions about this. If I wanted to significantly profit from this project, I would:

Keep my R&D process secret

Patent and license the design

Sell patterns of the design I made for individuals wanting to make their own, individual, copy

Sell binders I myself made, or possibly outsource their production and then sell the result

Send cease&desist letters threatening to sue anyone selling copies of my binder, or any other binder on similar design principles, or any pattern for such a binder

Demand that anyone wanting to profit from the use of my design principles pay me a licensing fee.

Meanwhile, my plan right now includes:

Publicizing my concepts and progress in a way freely accessible to anyone with an Internet connection

Maintaining a record of my progress to keep anyone else from claiming to be its inventor and licensing it in exploitative ways

Encouraging feedback from as many people as possible and seeking out trans, nb, and genderqueer perspectives 

Coming soon: Creating a survey about wearer experiences and health outcomes, asking anyone involved in this project to report back so the data can be disseminated and analyzed. If this project and my design are a failure, I will say so.

Making design concepts, and in the future, patterns and tutorials, freely available to anyone with an internet connection, and agreeing to their republication to reach other audiences

Only receiving donations from people who understand that this is an experimental venture, posed as the question, “What if I tried this thing,” and only profiting from items that I have ensured people could get for themselves some other way. (eg “Here’s a free tutorial on making this binder using items from the dollar store. However, if you want to buy a $20 kit of high-quality items pre-cut for your convenience, here’s my Etsy”)

Providing prototypes to their intended wearers for free in return for feedback about the wearers’ experiences, instead of selling half-baked designs for a profit

Openly encouraging other sewists to suggest design improvements, make their own versions, or make binders for other people without paying me

In the future, I’m very open to stepping back in my own role in this project, and handing it off to trans people who have taken the idea and run with it.

From a legal perspective, I have probably already ruined my chances of making big bucks from this project, and I did that on purpose. From the beginning, I realized that it is very possible for me to be exploitative in how I handle this project. 

I honestly asked for money because I can’t pay for medications, groceries and utilities right now. I got about $300, which was enough to cover most of my monthly medical expenses. Most of the clients I see as a psychotherapist are disabled, living on extremely limited incomes, and cannot pay me much more than the cost I pay to rent the room we meet in. I’m trying to survive and find a better job. If I had a full-time job and made a decent income, I would be funding this project out of my own pocket. I know how to market and monetize a project like this, and have, from the first, deliberately chosen not to, in large part because I’m cis and this isn’t my issue.

4. Binders over top surgery

This project has largely been inspired by a trans person with whom I have worked, whose parents were involved in a custody dispute beginning when they were 14. At 14 they realized they were trans, but they required the consent of both parents for medical procedures until the age of 18. One parent was extremely transphobic and would not consent to top surgery, although they didn’t see their child on a regular basis and didn’t know how they dressed and presented. During those 4 years, they used a binder as a way of dealing with the dysphoria that made them suicidal. Despite its negative physical health effects (pain, trouble breathing, rashes, etc) the binder was an essential aid to their mental health.

Yes, binding is a “stopgap” method compared to top surgery. However, one of my major areas of work is as a mental health therapist with LGBTQ people, especially teenagers. Not everyone can get top surgery, and not always as quickly as it is needed. Sometimes there is a gap you need to stop.

5. Why do we need better binders at all?

I didn’t go into this because I, frankly, had considered the need for improvements in binder technology so well-documented as to be completely obvious. Just today someone tagged this blog talking about how much they want it to work because “binding gives me rashes, makes my already shitty lungs hurt, makes my back hurt, and doesn’t actually work for me“ Would you like me to curate the research and accounts of people who have problems with the current models of binder available? Is that proof you in fact need?

7. Corsets are unsuitable/super gendered

Yep! That’s why I’m not making corsets. I’m trying to use the engineering elements from corsetry that would make the binder better, and make everything else as un-corset-like as possible. 

How possible this is is an open question right now. For example, corsets need to be fitted so precisely because they go from the bust to the hips, and therefore need the correct bust, waist, and hip measurement, and the correct height, and the correct ratio of all things to each other, and to have the correct vertical profile. My current hypothesis is that by making a binder that covers only the bust, I can eliminate many of these complexities. However, many informed observers of the project have told me that they think I’m wrong, and that the binder will need to extend to the waist to more evenly distribute the load of compression, and a garment that only goes around the chest will cause too much back pain over the long term. This is a question I think can honestly only be answered when I ship my prototypes to my genderqueer friend in Georgia, who shares my measurements and is eager to try each model out for hours/days/weeks and report back.

At present, I am experimenting with adaptations to sports bras, which I also know can be too gendered and induce dysphoria. I’m using them because my current project is aimed at people who have very little experience sewing, and therefore would benefit from only having to add a few elements to an already-constructed garment. After this, I want to see if I can transition those adaptations to something less gendered, like a tank top. After that, I can begin work on drafting a binder entirely from scratch, which, one hopes, I can make as ungendered as possible.

My askbox is open!

I indict the usgov an abusive drug pusher poisoning the ground you walk on.

usgov blamed you for their ambivalence to regulate the market and then made their own drugwar throwing pills at you till you couldn’t(afford to) talk for yourself.(since McCutcheon and Overturn of Austin V Michigan)

As submitted to Vox as a tip//

I indict the usgovernment for gross negligence in its allowance of the marketing and retail/supplement, corrections and drug enforcement industry and fashion industry at large to harass , exploit and disable the public with misleading claims of norms of beauty, health, sexuality and diet. The single payer healthcare debate has been going on for more than 100 years. In 1960s when President Kennedy raised the matter of mental health and again in the Clinton era.. healthcare was thwarted by the republicans. Republicans simultaneously also ended the assault weapons ban without requiring a separate license for weapons found as specific choice weapons among mass shootings. The party protecting the freemarket also insists in an unwell society and who themselves are reliant/codependent on fanatical religious reasoning. If  they could not admit as self claimed evangelists/evangelicals (self identified to edit and author religious dogma at will)  that their rhetoric was politically narcissistic then only one other conclusion could exist: republicans conceal their normalized schizophrenia in profit seeking agendas.  

As republicans have held the US government in all three majorities , and Donald Trump (their nominee and now US president) has suggested “the system is rigged”  a long winded two years of investigation has not addressed Trumps own accusations of election corruption. If a sensible person were concerned the system was rigged they , having such power , would call on DOJ and FBI to investigate it. Has Donald Trump at all efforted investigating election rigging and what were the results of that concern? By Contrast if I believed aliens exist, you could surely expect I would inquire on Area 51 and DARPA if in the White House. Donald Trump has also not made any gesture of regulating the fashion industry where he knowingly hesitated to allow his daughter Ivanka to be employed. If there is a problem with that industry that Donald Trump is aware of to protect his own family but not other Americans, I must raise a redflag on his cowardice on at least two occasions of his inability to serve office.  When or if the Mueller report is released, do we have any evidence of election rigging domestically and if yes, what has Donald Trump done or addressed be done about it?

Another current epidemic is the opioid abuse issue. I began this correspondence addressing a concern that I now intend to close in on. The market preys on target marketing young people to making them feel dissatisfied with their bodies. Direct to consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals originates a sense of rightness to shop for (industry solicited) doctors who will prescribe the newest medications. Some of these medications have their FDA trials fudged.  In the 1980s and 1990s the now understood result of this marketing decreased people's attention span. This effected children and the result of that symptom was concealed with ritalin instead of the government changing practices. Usgovernment /congress could have approved an ad authority as Britain has done. Instead the pill mills for antidepressants and ADHD AMPHETAMINES were thrown at the public. The Usgovernment was enabled by the Reagans ,Bush's and republicans to wage another drug war against society.. throwing drugs at their kids and making them pay for it.  The prohibition of street drugs was just a distraction for the monopolist pollution of the public with SSRIs and Ritalin.  , and restocking the slave people into prisons so their income would be exta low and unbargained.

The angle I have to hammer the Usgovernment on is in its enabling of the pharmaceutical pollution of the country to temper their resentment of unethical marketers and scammers, the widespread overuse of antidepressants heightened the chances of overdosing among anyone in the public. People were not advised not to flush their unwanted pills into the sewers. They did. The ingestion of SSRIs damages the nervous system, the liver , can trigger autism and slower learning from neonatal exposure.   Antidepressants effect the serotonin and dopamine centers of the brain; areas the government couldnt bother itself to actually know how to care for its public. Centers of the brain now contaminated with lead and other mining operation spills. Superfood from superfund sites was just reinriched as a West Virgina  River was flooded with some sort of hexane whose storage was set right next to it.  The fossil fuels and mining community are akin to republicans ; their brain damage is obvious. When it comes to the remainder of society shrugged off and ignored about climate, they become frustrated. Its like women seeing anorexic waifs and troubled this is called a norm of beauty.. In fact, its not. The couture designers desire transexual females to be their ideal and are doubtful pros to deliver a tailored to fit gown if they can't handle curves. Walmart and Target Sweat shop workers can handle post size 4 curves, why can't the more expensive couture cosmosexuals? Their will is sadistic hatred of females , a cult demanding anorexic loyalty to a dysmorphic vision of a female earning their right to wear their clothes.

The female public have no idea these fashion models signed away an ethical duty to sue their abusers; fashion models are conditionally famous by their  poorly esteemed willingness to trade abuse/rape/molestation for the fame. Their fans are stuck emulating diets only meant to keep an anorexic thin from run way to run way. The diets and supplements posted in the Vogue , Cosmopolitans and other interviews of models deplete a teens GI/immune system on wacky food combinations. Dr's mistake their resultant lethargy as psychological depression when its really physical, physiological depression of unbalancing gut bacteria with DIY foolishness and cleansing douches.  Why does couture want to promote anorexic thinness to women? why risk injure the youth with false adult maturity ideals?They want their heiresses/ collectors to believe they can be ageless princesses in their corsetry gowns and $700/oz anti age cremes: the fashion media market anorexia sells anti age crème to mid age to late age wealthy. The Usgov ignores this dishonest endangerment of the youth to be targeted marketed with coutures messages.

  In this unregulated market mess of false promises and self medication for the ageless bipedal white god-people.. they are also having their neurological systems damaged by antidepressants. If their system is damaged, it takes more to effect it. Hence I set a concern the lack of bother to correctly regulate the ad market and fashion industry has led to heightened opioid deaths and complications because of the publics difficulty in being medicated into silence.  The American public are victims of a two party government , including democrats, who at that time partnered with the insurance industry to compel consumerism instead of regulate.  

Antidepressants use on the long term leads to tremors, tics, loss of motor skills, neuroleptic malignant syndrome, damages that make suicide more likely (a Tuskegee type 'experiment'),  and child learning issues despite FDAs recommendation to use them during pregnancy.  Simultaneously the us government also allows many chemicals for industrial use other western countries (the same countries present at the Paris Climate Forum and Kyoto) ) consider carcinogens or worse.  I hold the Usgovernment and the republicans and democrats steering it to be grossly negligent financially and constitutionally; first serving party majority wants before federal duties a common man,common woman, common LGBT and common Stoner would deem appropriate. I claim each of these demographics important in a varied degree of basic deductive duty to service.

Michael Bench , MEP, WGSGC

Author of Native Supremacy

The History of the Conservative Party; and why you aren't really a Tory.

The Conservative party is arguably the oldest political party in the world. Way back in 1678, 'Tory' supporters of James Stuart, Duke of York were against his exclusion from the order of succession to the British throne on the basis that he was a Roman Catholic. The Tories opposed such exclusion, which was supported by the 'Whigs'. Throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the 'Tories', (who in the 19th century became known as the 'Conservative Party',)  represented one side of divide within the ruling 'establishment', the other side being the Whigs. Initially divided along sectarian lines, these two parties constituted a parliament which for hundreds of years represented the interests of a de facto 'ruling elite', made up exclusively of very wealthy landowners, who had over centuries  been 'granted' land, great wealth and privilege by the crown. Their priority was their own continued wealth and power. The overwhelming majority of the British population during this period had no right to vote in parliamentary elections, and no effective representation. The first and second reform acts (1832 and 1867) each brought in a degree of social change, but this was limited, and largely based on the minimum possible concession to avoid Britain 'going the way of the French', who had earlier rejected the dominion of Kings and aristocracy, who were executed in a bloody revolution which brought about the first French Republic, and subsequently the French Empire, under Napoleon I.

Both Tories (Conservatives) and Whigs (Liberals) thoroughly rejected the idea that anyone but the ruling elite should have a voice in parliament, but recognised the danger which mass movements posed, of catalysing revolutionary change. In 1817, in St Peter's Field, Manchester, an initially peaceful mass protest, calling for parliamentary representation, was cavalry charged by order of the local authorities. Men, women and one child were killed, either by sabre or by being trampled to death under the horses. Many hundreds were injured. This became known as the 'Peterloo Massacre'. The ruling Tory Party sent official congratulatory letters to the local officials for their handling of the protest. Subsequently, gatherings of more than 50 people for the purposes of public political meetings were criminalised, and newspapers were taxed out of the reach of the working population.

Throughout the Industrial Revolution, the gross exploitation of workers by industrialists, without the constraints of protective legislation, commonly led to the death or disability of workers in large numbers. The Conservatives and the Whigs, taking a very familiar position, refused to effectively legislate to protect workers' rights for decades ... throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, concerned only with the interests of landowners and industrialists.

The Chartists, almost two decades after Peterloo, formed to demand a vote for all working men over the age of 21, secret ballots, and the removal of the landowning qualification for MPs as well as payment for MPs, which was intended to enable working people to participate. Other demands of the People's Charter included annual elections, and equal constituencies. The political establishment   were having none of this, and by the mid 1840's, under successive Tory and Whig governments, many Chartists had been imprisoned or transported. However slowly but surely, pressure from the working and middle class led to a pragmatic expansion of the franchise, always only barely sufficient to quell mass revolt, but enough to gradually change the face of British politics. It was a change which created a number of problems for the elite interests, still represented by the Conservatives and the Whigs. It became necessary to at least pay lip service to the interests of the working and middle classes, and under Disraeli, the notion of 'one nation conservatism' was born. It was a paternalistic pragmatic response to the expanding franchise. Workers were appeased with legislation for factory and health acts premised on the idea that the needs of the many could be met by the benevolence and altruism of the wealthy and privileged, whilst they in fact simultaneously prioritised the interests of power and social position. This manifested in policies which gave a little, but were in modern corporate speak, cost v benefit analysed … basically if industrial deaths were too expensive to prevent, they would likely continue. As one of countless examples, white phosphorous, used for matches, was much cheaper than red phosphorus, but also much less safe. Consequently, the cost saving saw generations of working class women and girls in the East End of London suffer horrific health problems.

The idea of the 'natural authority' of the powerful, (power which itself in most cases was hereditary, not meritocratic) and their primacy with regard to decisions to balance profit against social responsibility, was the stock in trade of the Conservatives throughout the latter part of the 19th century. The need to protect the interests of workers was seen by most of the elite as a 'necessary evil', with concessions usually made only to the extent required to maintain order in society. By the late 19th century in was very clear that the only political organisation which would truly champion the interests of working people would be an outgrowth of the trades unions, into which many workers in various occupations had organised themselves. (On several occasions trades unions were outlawed, and membership criminalised, however by the late 19th century they were legal)

The Labour Representation Committee was formed in 1900, to put forward as prospective MPs, representatives who promised to work in parliament for the rights and interests of workers. It was not until the early 20th century that ordinary citizens, those who in any form needed to work to live, were fully represented in Parliament, and even then it was some years before a full Labour government came to power. The most significant period under Labour, was of course the post war government under Clement Atlee, an administration which produced the NHS, and most of the foundations of the welfare state we have today.

During the 20th century the Conservative Party presented themselves as authoritative, experienced and a party of 'natural leaders', who due to their history and experience were safer hands to run the many branches of state.  But it was not until the election of Margaret Thatcher as leader that the Conservative Party, who came to power in 1979, made serious claims to be a party who's aspirations and objectives could truly also embrace those of working men and women. The dream which Thatcher, and neo-liberalism in general sought to sell, was a meritocratic, inclusive society of home owners and shareholders, in their own modest way acquiring capital not only from their labour, but also from interest on shareholdings, (mostly in newly privatised businesses which had until that time been in collective (state) ownership). Many middle age Britons still subscribe to the view that they are now 'middle class', having elevated their social position as property owners, courtesy of Thatcher and the Right to Buy' Act. However this was in many respects a ruse, cost shifting property maintenance to the now mortgaged purchaser, and providing an asset against which further borrowing (debt) was secured. Some years later many found themselves in negative equity and unable to pay mortgage interest which peaked at almost 14% in 1982, and was still over 9% in 1988. Nor did successive governments use the income raised from council house sales to build new social housing. The Conservative Party continued after Thatcher, with a Thatcherite 'business as usual period under John Major.  (During which the claim of Conservative primacy in matters of fiscal policy was severely tested. In 1992 Major presided over ‘Black Wednesday’, and the UK’s ignominious ejection from the Exchange Rate Mechanism.) 

Subsequently, in  1997, Tony Blair 'stole the Conservatives' clothes'. The Tories did not regain power until 2010. However since 1979 the prevailing ideology of unfettered 'laissez-faire capitalism, and the idea of 'trickle down economics' has been pursued by the Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown Governments, as well as the Conservative led coalition of 2010, the Cameron Government of 2015, and into the current administration. The 'same 'trickle down theory' which has led to 85 people owning as much wealth as the poorest 3.5bn people on the planet. It can be demonstrated that this economic theory is flawed to the point of being groundless. It does not lead to economic growth, wage growth, income growth, or to job creation. But what it does do is provide huge wealth for a shrinkingly small elite. That elite, rich beyond the dreams of avarice, have acquired control of every lever to manipulate states; that elite controls almost all of the media in the major developed economies, utility corporations, the arms industry … the entire 'military industrial complex.. For all practical purposes, that same elite controls the Conservative Party. 

The Labour Party, branded 'New Labour' under Blair, operated in the thrall of the same interests. Since 2010, the austerity agenda pursued by the Conservative or Conservative led governments has served to illustrate that the Tory ideology which so repressed living standards and social mobility for hundreds of years is alive and well. The reversion to type is obvious and stark. The same Tory Party which fought tooth and nail against extending the franchise on consecutive occasions, and under who's administrations troops and cavalry have been deployed on the streets of the UK, is alive and well under a paper thin veneer of social concern. The Tories used military and tanks in Wales, Liverpool, and Glasgow against strikers or protestors. The Police were used as a paramilitary force against striking miners, not least at Orgreave. On each occasion, the use of force has been the extent to which Conservative governments have been prepared to suppress the demands of working people. Many of these events are almost lost to history, airbrushed out by establishment revisionists.

What has happened in recent times is the opening up of a fault line in the power holding superstructure. 'The Establishment' in the UK has a fatal flaw. That flaw, is that the entire edifice is not, as conspiracy theorists would have us believe, a nefarious fine tuned, elaborate, integrated architecture. It is actually largely reliant on a convoluted mosaic of elements with no individual overall management or managers. It simply relies on many disparate component parts tending to naturally harmonise and integrate through a common cause and common interests.

The fault line arose from a simple error of judgement. Ed Miliband (a claimed ‘leftie’ with barely more genuine left wing ideas than Blair himself, had intended to significantly weaken the power of trade unions, with sweeping reforms to Labour's internal voting system. It involved requiring union members to individually 'opt in' to Labour Party membership, as a disrupter to the union block vote. It also allowed for a 'supporter' membership, open to anyone, at just £3. No-one at the time imagined that it would bring about the circumstances in which anyone from the left of a party which was still mired in 'Blairite' 'New Labour' centre right praxis, could become the Labour Party leader. But then Jeremy Corbyn happened. The existential risk which anyone with a socialist agenda posed to the controlling elites was so glaringly obvious, that long before Corbyn was elected, the tsunami of slurs, smears and misrepresentations overwhelmed the objectivity of much of the population. A relentless barrage of anti-Corbyn rhetoric did much to form the majority view of Corbyn. Criticism repeated so often, by all media, at every opportunity, as to be believed by many purely on the basis of endless repetition. The Tories led the barrage, aided and abetted by the so called Labour 'moderates', and every other party and authority which feared a Labour Party truly committed to fairness and social justice. 

The abundance of anti-Corbyn rhetoric was undirected, unleashed in a scattergun approach, since it was impossible to particularly target Corbyn's potential constituency. In some respects directing criticism, whether justified or not, into the consciousness of the body politic achieved a short term advantage, but in no way sufficient to disrupt the election of Corbyn as Labour leader. It should not be forgotten that the unintended consequence of a socialist Labour Party leader arose with not only the approbation and dissent of the man on the Clapham omnibus, by the means under discussion, but also the active disruption and interference with process of much of the Labour Party in parliament, as well as the general secretary and much of the party heirarchy. This happened for one simple reason. Corbyn's core message had not been heard for more than a generation, and was inspirational.

Every time you hear about the impracticality or dangers of current Labour Party policy, it will originate from a source fearful that their interests and influence may be compromised. But it is an argument which is losing traction. It is true that there is a huge swathe of the population of the UK, particularly amongst the now middle aged, being somewhat comfortable, perhaps particularly by comparison with their own parents or roots, which still clings to the notion that they are middle class, and as such natural Conservative voters. Managers, small business owners, white collar workers, who fundamentally misunderstand both the Tory Party and their own best interests. The Labour Party is not 'the party of the feckless, the lazy and the unemployed' it is not even in any limited sense, the party of the working class. It is, and is especially under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, a socialist party. It aspires to a more equal distribution of wealth, and as evidenced by the recent party manifesto, to do this without the smallest disadvantage to 95% of the population. The problem with such a suggestion is the vast middle and moderately high income earners who believe that they would be personally disadvantaged by a Labour government. This is to misunderstand the gargantuan step change in the assets of 95% of the population compared with the top 5%, the even greater disparity between the top 5% and the top 1%, and the gigantic, almost inconceivable disparity between the top 1% and the top 0.1%. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the top 5% own 40% of the disposable wealth in the UK. The top 1% own 24% of disposable wealth. The top 0.1% earn an average of £1m annual income, and the top 3000 taxpayers pay more tax than the bottom 9 million ... (more than 35% of all income tax payers in the UK), whilst the wealth gap continues to grow. The Tory claims about cutting tax for the very highest earners to incentivise their further economic activity, seem somewhat hollow given these circumstances. Tax increases which had no more effect than maintaining, not growing the wealth gap would be socially beneficial, and in real terms, victimless. Labour is about making people more equally rich, not more equally poor.

We do not have to look far for examples of the type of economy which Labour proposes; contrary to the hyperbolic scaremongering which is a natural manifestation of the fear of various vested interests, many western economies function broadly in the way which Labour proposes for the UK. Denmark, Finland, Canada, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, New Zealand all subscribe to some, even many of the democratic socialist principles advocated by the Labour Party in the UK. Canada, Finland, Norway and Ireland are in the top ten countries to live in the world, as determined by the UN. Others, including Belgium, France and Germany have successful and popular state ownership of utilities, often through state run businesses which also have major investments in foreign countries. Many of the countries listed above have excellent welfare provision alongside an affluent and contented middle class, and nothing which is current Labour Party policy would be controversial in many already successful economies.

Returning to the Conservative Party, it is today, and has always been serving the interest of an already hugely wealthy elite. It's reinvention, first under Disraeli and again under Thatcher, was necessary to retain power. Policy needed to maintain a degree of credibility for the premise that the interests of the many, and particularly the middle classes were of genuine concern, have of necessity been implemented, but only ever with the greatest of care to protect, at the same time, the 1%, and most importantly, the 0.1%. If you are reading this, it is almost inconceivable that you are anything but one of the 99%. When Jeremy Corbyn speaks of 'the many', he is speaking of you and I. Consider this. Consider the possibility that 99%, or even 95% of the population, including yourself, would be advantaged by a democratic socialist model, as successfully implemented in many Nordic states. Now if you do not have enough personal assets and resources to test the hypothesis for fear that it might fail, then you are without doubt a member of the social group which Labour seeks to advantage with it's policies. If you do have the resources to comfortably undertake such an experiment, then you have little to lose. To deny millions of hard working people the hope that a fairer, more equal society is possible, is frankly crass, selfish, and worthy only of the Harmsworth’s, Desmond's, Barclay's, and Murdoch's of this world. I will end with a challenge. If you remain convinced that you are a Tory; by all means, read and digest the pro Tory, or anti Labour, or anti Corbyn news or opinion pieces. You are free of course also to agree with them. Just check, as an academic exercise, who actually owns the organisation which originated the article.

whats your fave dai party banter? mine is with cole and dorian, when dorian is kinda like "be careful where youre going with these daggers i was casting fire spells at the enemies" and cole is just like "it can't hurt me, it's friendly fire" and then dorian (and me) kinda goes "that's- that's not really what you think it means" (i always disable friendly fire bc im a noob and i can't stand to involuntarily hurt my allies but cole, sweetheart, please don't get in harm's way)

Heyaa!!

Omg nonny :’D First, I’m completely with you on this one - this is such an adorable banter omg. It has everything, Dorian being concerned, Cole being adorable - this is beautiful. (and i feel you on the friendly fire stuff, just.. let’s limite damage ahah)

I don’t have a fave banter, mostly because i’m still discovering some banters i didn’t have before, and a  l o t of them are gold. 

Then, I generally love Cole’s banters. He’s always sweet and adorable and always with the most amazing replies, it makes me so happy. 

then man there’s so much banters i love. I love Varric/Dorian always betting about stuff, Varric/Vivienne was an extreme amount of fun.Bull has a lot of dialogue I really like (especially with Sera and Vivienne, I love how strategic he gets with them to different extreme, and well, always soft spot for his dialogues with Dorian) but I really, really love his dynamic with Cole (he calls him “my squirrelly kid” i’m gonna cry). There’s something in Cole/Cassandra dynamic that i find really sweet too bc it starts very badly but they end up pretty close? it’s adorable.

…. so ye I’d say Cole’s banters are always a win.

edit: i ended up making a list of some of my fav and I actually love too much banters to just narrow them down i love those dorks

As for my favorite favorite, this is so hard to pinpoint one banter, they are all so cool? I can’t narrow down one orz

huuuh maybe a few randoms i really like: (which ended up being a long list so under the cut ;O take care!)

Varric: Okay, try it again, you’ll get it.Cole: Knock, knock.Varric: Who’s there?Cole: Me.Varric: (Sighs.) Me who?Cole: Me, and I’m telling a knock knock joke.Varric: Uh… that was… closer. Keep trying.

Cole: I like your horns, The Iron Bull.Cole: But they’re dragon horns, not bull horns. You could have named yourself The Iron Dragon.Iron Bull: Oh, shit. That would have been better.

Cole: You got to pick your name, The Iron Bull.Iron Bull: Sure did. Thanks for sticking the “the” on there, too. Most people forget.Iron Bull: It kinda makes it sound like I’m not really a person. Like I’m this dangerous thing, you know?Cole: You made it a joke on yourself, making a mockery, so you would never be that.Iron Bull: It kills the joke if you explain it, kid.

Dorian: Ah, Solas. You startled me. You’re always so… nondescript.Solas: Please speak up! I cannot hear you over your outfit!

Blackwall: Sera and I were just talking about you. We need you to settle a question for us.Solas: (Sighs.) Sera’s involved? So this question will be offensive.Blackwall: Yes, probably. Sorry.Blackwall: You make friends with spirits in the Fade. So… um, are there any that are more than just friends?Blackwall: If you know what I mean.Solas: Oh, for… really?!Blackwall: Look, it’s a natural thing to be curious about!Solas: For a twelve-year-old!Blackwall: It’s a simple yes or no question!Solas: Nothing about the Fade or spirits is simple, especially not that.Blackwall: Aha! So you do have experience in these matters!Solas: I did not say that.Blackwall: Don’t panic. It’ll be our little secret.Solas: Ass.Blackwall: Now who’s twelve?

Blackwall: Do you have any advice for fighting demons, Solas?Solas: Survive the first thirty heartbeats, and you’ll have already won.Blackwall: So I should try not to die? Helpful.Solas: I mean that demons are rarely intelligent enough to change their tactics. If you focus on defending yourself, you will see the full range of their abilities within the first thirty heartbeats. By then, you should be able to find a weakness and exploit it.Blackwall: Ahh, that is helpful! I will try to remember that.Solas: Also, try not to die.

Vivienne: Varric, darling, what manner of villain am I in your novel?Varric: You’re the scheming duchess, coldly maneuvering her political rivals into a trap.Vivienne: Yes, but what am I wearing? You are not going to describe me in anything less than the latest fashions, are you?Varric: I’m… going to spend the next few weeks researching Orlesian gowns, aren’t I?Vivienne: Yes, my dear. And my mask should be inlaid with opals.

Varric: I can’t wait for Chuckles to say something about the VeilSolas: I don’t always mention the Veil.Cassandra: You do. Always.Dorian: You do. You really do.Iron Bull: Yeah, you do.Vivienne: Of course you do, darling.Inquisitor/Blackwall: Yes, you do.Cole: You do think about it a lot.Varric: See? Told you.

Dorian: Come on, just answer the question, Varric.Varric: My mother didn’t raise any morons, Sparkler. I won’t touch that one.Dorian: You must have an opinion. And you’re a dwarf! Completely unbiased!Varric: There’s no way I’m answering “which inquisition mage is the best-dressed.” Not for all the gold in Orzammar.Vivienne: Also, the answer is obvious.

Varric: So, Sparkler, what do you think of the Inquisition so far?Dorian: It’s interesting, I’ll give you that. An archdemon attacking me is a first.Varric: Five royals says you see something weirder before the day ends.Dorian: I don’t think I should take that bet.

Varric: What do you think, Sparkler? Ten royals says the next thing we run into farts fire.Dorian: I’ll take that bet. I win either way.

Dorian: You owe me twenty royals, Varric. I’d like them paid in candied dates.Varric: I haven’t lost that wager yet.Dorian: You said we’d be ass-deep in trouble. This is more like knee-high.Varric: I didn’t specify whose ass, did I?Dorian: Leave it to a dwarf, always lowering the bar.

Varric: I got to ask, does any of this shit make sense to you?Dorian: To me? Are you referring to the giant hole in the sky? Or the creature out of Chantry cautionary tale who wants to be a god?Varric: Either. I’m feeling generous.Dorian: What’s the problem? Someone shows up, tears the place apart, declares himself king? That’s half of history.Varric: Corypheus is that terrifying drunk nobody’ll ask to leave?Dorian: Even after he puts a hole in the ceiling. Terribly common.

Blackwall: Corypheus. One of yours, isn’t he?Dorian: One of mine? Like a pet? Like a giant darkspawn hamster with aspirations of godhood?Dorian: ‘Dorian, why can’t you look after your little friends? Corypheus peed on the carpet again!’Dorian: In this analogy, the carpet is Haven.Blackwall: Is he or is he not a Tevinter Magister?Dorian: Meaning 'the source of everything bad and evil in the world’? They are the same, yes?Blackwall: Certainly feels that way at times.

Varric: I can’t believe you picked the absolute worst of my books to read. Why not Hard in Hightown?Cassandra: I have enough mysteries and investigations of my own.Varric: What? You don’t want to solve more in your spare time?Cassandra: Then you killed my favorite character in Chapter 3, so I threw the book across the room.Varric: Ah, a critic. Say no more.

Iron Bull: “Blackwall.” “Iron Bull.” We could fight crime!Blackwall: Isn’t that exactly what we’re doing? Right this minute? More or less?Iron Bull: Oh yeah.

Iron Bull: You could’ve been one of the Chargers, Blackwall. You’ve got the stature, the attitude…Blackwall: And you’d be my boss.Iron Bull: Hey, I’m a great boss. I’m a firm believer in No-Pants Fridays.Blackwall: I’d rather fight for a cause.Iron Bull: Hey, No-Pants Fridays is a cause.

Sera: So do all Gray Wardens have beards?Blackwall: Just me. I stole all the beards, and all the power held within. There can be only one.

Solas: Have you ever had any interest in learning magic, Sera? While it has not manifested naturally, there are ways to determine whether arcane gifts lie dormant within you.Sera: What? Don’t make me think about that. I have to sleep at night!Solas: Sleeping would give you the chance to explore the Fade. I could introduce you to spirits.Sera: Right, you’re messing with me on purpose!Solas: Why would I do that? It is not as though I know who filled my bedroll with lizards.Sera: Heh. Fair point! That was pretty good.

Sera: I sent a box of rabbit raisins to some Lord What’s-his-tits in your name.Vivienne: That explains the letter of gratitude. They were, by all accounts, delicious.Sera: Ewww! Ew, ewww!Vivienne: You underestimate both the fragility of his holdings, and the severity of tribute demanded of him in the past.Vivienne: Perhaps he was grateful it was not a stew made of some lesser cousin.Sera: That’s lies, right? Must be lies.

And one that i just find beautiful:

Solas: You truly are content to sit in the sun, never wondering what you could’ve been, never fighting back.Varric: Ha, you’ve got it all wrong, Chuckles. This is fighting back.Solas: How does passively accepting your fate constitute a fight?Varric: In that story of yours—-the fisherman watching the stars, dying alone. You thought he gave up, right?Solas: Yes.Varric: But he went on living. He lost everyone, but he still got up every morning. He made a life, even if it was alone.Varric: That’s the world. Everything you build, it tears down. Everything you’ve got, it takes. And it’s gone forever.Varric: The only choices you get are to lie down and die or keep going. He kept going. That’s as close to beating the world as anyone gets.Solas: Well said. Perhaps I was mistaken.

And i’m stopping there bc i already copied and pasted a lot of the wiki and i’m not even done with half of my favorite quotes, so i guess those should count

hope you like it nonny ;O

Take care ;O