RD on Nostr: #introduction I'm retired, a bit early due to covid-19 and the desire to protect ...

#introduction

I'm retired, a bit early due to covid-19 and the desire to protect myself and especially my older partner. We are both still doing what we can to avoid catching this insidious virus even once.

Most of my life I've been apolitical, but while coming from various perspectives over the years I've always been intuitively anti-capitalist and highly critical of the US. I tended generally toward progressive, unconventional, and counter-culture in most contexts but lacked any solid political consciousness or analysis. I was a worker all my life, most of it in the natural food industry (which I felt relatively good about), mostly at retail level. I never wanted to be anyone's boss so I was never a manager and never climbed the corporate ladder. In the later years I was fortunate to have a position that was not involved with sales but rather with protecting and informing customers (internal auditing for weights & measures compliance) which I also felt relatively good about but it certainly wasn't lucrative, lol.

I only became seriously concerned with politics during Bernie Sanders' first presidential campaign when I got a fleeting glimpse of supposed possibility for real change. I began to explore socialist thought and thought of myself as a demsoc. I was focused on electoral reform at the time, thinking that was the problem. I shared info with friends, family and co-workers about various projects to reform electoral politics and I started an account at the bird site (@RD4Democracy) in 2017 to have someplace to direct them to for more info and updates.

Fortunately there I found some very helpful voices along with all the noise, but I didn't immediately understand how to differentiate between it all so I was still following some garbage accounts for a while. Nevertheless my political thought evolved rapidly and I found myself following more and more anarchists and starting to understand anarchist thought. I realized I needed to better understand private property and learned about that. I read Graeber's "Debt" and got an understanding of money. I did some research to better understand what capital is and developed an idea of it as a sort of "god" or artificial intelligence with capitalism as its religion.

One of the helpful voices I want to specifically appreciate and recommend is npub1d7jhhvfqxd3j0x38yc9m4eam7qf588dlkgh0gmshd3p09wwpztks4lu8xc (npub1d7j…u8xc). With the help of HP and others I was able to successfully navigate the crossroads that many self-described socialists never seem to reach at all and where too many others take the wrong fork into the tankie world.

The pandemic and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine were extremely clarifying events that helped me finally see the nature of that fork in the road, as well as shining an intense light on all the shit accounts I was following and providing an opportunity for others I followed to show or decide their true colors. It has been very sad sometimes while very illuminating.

While I have adopted the anarchist position of opposition to all states, I do support the movement for an independent California. As a life-long resident (so far), short of achieving actual anarchy I think California as a nation state would be highly preferable to being part of the US. I also think it is within anarchist tradition to support creating conditions more conducive to advancing the anarchist project even if it is still in the context of a state.

And now here we are. I haven't left the bird site yet [edit 6March2023: I have now deactivated my twitter account] but I felt it important to participate in a non-corporate, decentralized and open source social project like this and the timing seemed significant. Let's see what we can do.

[Edited 29Nov2022 to update Heavenly Possum link]