🌉🏛️ Feast of the Temple Sanctuary 🌁 033 Brumaire CCXXXII 🎃 24 October 2023 🌔 Waxing Gibbous Harvest Moon 🧅 9992 ⛩️

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Feast of Sanctuaries

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doing a lot of theorizing around Tribunes in response to Terra ignota for NHFP. trying a new app for organizing book documents, is good so far

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I'm working on a story where there's a computer that lives in the minds of honored subjects for periods of time, moving from mind to mind

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“and unlike a quarter that will be debased into nothing over a long enough time period the value of the Btc only increases over time.”

lol

a quarter printed in 2023 may be sufficiently rare in one hundred years that it could have some novel value and fetch a bigger market price than it's stated tender.

i do hope American money is made politically worthless by then but i doubt Bitcoin will be a net recipient

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tbh i just avoid Land's work because I'm not interested in reading the work of fascists without specifically needing to for research purposes

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i feel overwhelmed a lot. i spent all today 🪐 doing cat chores and apartment chores and grocery shopping and all this stuff i need to do and i haven't made any progress on the appeal since Wednesday ⚧️ and it's this really stressful form. is it ok if i forward y'all a copy and get your advice?

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i really liked your review of the alien mathmaticiacian Tillie. link to follow in the comments

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currently 🌅 I'm reading the third book of terra ignota, that series is kinda all I've read this October. tbh it's one of the spookiest books i could have asked for, but it's also made me want to cry. I've definitely been dreaming about the characters

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here's some notes on democratic centralism

Democratic Centralism

Democratic centralism, as i understand it, is core to the idea of a cadre party--a small, tight knit, highly disciplined organization of socialists who agree to bind themselves (ie to not publicly dispute) the official party line on any given issue, which is decided by the party members or their representatives in a central Congress.

the benefits of this tactic are pretty self explanatory: on every issue, the cadre party is able to throw it's full weight for our against any measure, maximizing their influence both as a voting bloc in any larger Congress or workers organization being what their raw numbers might otherwise indicate. this also holds true for non electoral politics as well: the party is theoretically capable of calling on all members to fight, organize, etc. with the same voice, up until a majority of the party members decide to change the line, in which case they have the full strength of the party pulling in the other direction.

such unanimity is not cheap, however. i'm familiar with at least one case where an American cadre party took a hard line against lesbian and gay people, calling queerness "bourgeoise decadence" and a distraction from the interests of the working class, which they assumed to be conservative or at best lukewarm on the subject. (sidenote but for various reasons the working class is now and was then more queer then the ruling class, and queer people born into wealthy families have routinely been made homeless when they come out to their families,) at the time, some queer cadre members objected, but were told by even their sympathetic fellow travelers that they needed to bide their time and change the party from within, even as it actively repulsed queer workers who might otherwise have joined, thereby ensuring that reform on that line would be long delayed. some queer members stayed, but those who spoke out against the party had no choice but to resign their membership or be expelled.

*this is not to say that democratic centralism is inherently homophobic by any means.* many contemporary cadre parties today have reversed themselves or where never homophobic to begin with, and the enforced party line in favor of queer liberation can be used to silent or expell cadre members who would otherwise promote homophobia within and outside of the party.

but it does highlight a critical aspect of democratic centralism: you have to be in close ideological agreement with all of the party's policies, even as those policies change over time.

on tactical questions this makes sense: as situations evolve the way you deal with those situations is necessarily also going to adapt.

in contrast, if there is a core principle that is or becomes divisive in the party, taking an official line will often be tantamount to inviting a party split: why stick around with people you don't agree with who are requiring you to support their goals when you and 40% of your party can just walk out the door and establish your own, really *really* anti revisionist People's Front of Judea. that'll show the Judean People's Front!

and this bears out historically: cadre parties are built to be small, disciplined, and adaptable, and when they become divided over an issue (say, for example, the personality of their charismatic leaders and their leader's charismatic opposition) they often split up, so as to maintain the purity of their official line. leading up to and following splits

to name matters worse, if you're part of a cadre party they usually require you to not be a cadre of any other party, or to form a sub party within their party which practices democratic centralism, as that often is a tactic for infiltrating parties or, if that fails, splitting them, so the overall effect is to divide many organizers into many small parties which may be able to cooperate with each other on paper but which often have so much bad blood going back through decades or even generations of take overs, mergers, splits, and suspicion that forming a big tent coalition for any length of time can be extremely difficult, especially if that big tent coalition expects to enforce it's own party line on the factions and sub factions it is composed of.

my own personal experience with DemCent is quite limited. I've been approached by recruiters from Socialist Alternative and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, or more specifically recruiters from the local chapters of each.

with socialist alternative i found myself amenable to the party line but at the meetings i attended there was huge pressure for everyone to be giving large amounts of money to the party, constantly one uping their past goals. at the time i was just coming out of being homeless and it all felt too much like tithing at a mega church: i was jobless and broke and wanted to find people i could do stuff with, not a group of people constantly asking for checks. (to their credit the party dues for people in poverty was pretty low, but still, the focus on raising money was just too much for me personally.)

when it came to the PSL,

…

i guess part of that got cut off, well it's on the reddit i think

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As is often the course with political parties, their realignments result, at least initially, in hybrid coalitions. The party doesn’t immediately choose its identity.

quote from an article i read recently, on the House Speakerless Fiasco

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Self Harm is a kind of writing, a kind of speech, which tells us about how pathological subjects re-constitute ourselves in states of political exception, surviving and resisting our material contexts. by studying this literature, we gain a rad pov on subjectivity, resistance, solidarity, and love.

ransome

pathology

Ransome note

hostage

surrendor

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Ward: Is there a sense in which Republicans are acting rationally, given the nature of the political incentives?

Green: I hesitate to use the word “rational,” because it assumes that that this is the only course that they could take, and it also assumes that this is what voters want. Because we have representative democracy, there’s always a gap between what voters think they want and what lawmakers do — and that gives lawmakers a lot of leeway to interpret election outcomes in a way that fits with their preferences or their interests. So I wouldn’t say what they’re doing is irrational, but they have choices.

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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/10/17/matthew-green-interview-jim-jordan-00121803

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think of a very big number. lots and lots.

five.

fascinating.

no wait, two.

two?

and 11/9ths

less than five.

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