Idzie

Anarcha-feminist, queer, vegan, grown unschooler. Big fan of cats, all things food and cooking, nature, hiking, birdwatching and bird/nature photography, SFF & romance novels, varied TV shows. Chronically ill (aka literal armchair anarchist). Plans to run off to the woods shortly. Writes about self-directed education and youth liberation (formerly on the blog I'm Unschooled. Yes, I Can Write).

Private alt Idz (npub1acr…ngff)

Location: Greater Tiohtià:ke / Montreal
Writings (majority paywall free): https://www.patreon.com/idzie
Pronouns: She/her

Public Key

npub1zs5a7tn4hfk2uht7dlehq354s0n4aqgzcn4sll339jvln6ufuuhszwedza

NIP-05 Address

idzie_at_kolektiva.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqspg2wl9e6m5m9wt4lxlumsg62c8e67sypvf6c0lccjex0eawy7wtcl7tk2d

Author Public Key

npub1zs5a7tn4hfk2uht7dlehq354s0n4aqgzcn4sll339jvln6ufuuhszwedza

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Last Notes

2025-03-28 17:07:33

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that does look very like the juvenile Cooper's hawk I saw a few months ago (in my backyard, funnily enough), and at the time I was also thrown by the juvenile plumage :)

2025-03-26 23:40:00

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omg I love them!!

2024-08-18 02:51:31

One of the cats just LOVES corn on the cob. This evening when someone was not keeping a good eye on their plate, she snuck up and started happily chowing down. She eats it pretty methodically too, much like a human would. It's very funny (it wasn't my corn lol) 😆

2024-07-08 20:02:01

Any plant people have advice/resources on identifying *specific varieties* of blackberries? Like I have a bunch growing, and would love to know what they are beyond "blackberries" (and whether they're a wild or cultivated variety) but search engines are broken and I don't know how to find this information!
#gardening #foraging #blackberries #rubus

2024-07-08 19:43:49

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oh no I would also be horrified lol 😆

2024-07-04 15:52:20

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"Homeschooling is fascist!" when fascists do it, yes, when leftists and anarchists do it (hell when most liberals do it) actually no, it's not!
We live in an adult supremacist society where the family and schools are both frequent sites of abuse. There are children who find respite from abusive homes in school, but just as importantly there are children who find respite from abusive schools with their family! Often children face abuse at both locations.
Youth liberation is desperately needed, and part of that project is a vast widening of possibilities for children, so that they have countless opportunities outside of either family or state control (the two of which overlap in many important ways). But in the meantime, making "education" solely the purview of the state is wildly dangerous and absurd for an anarchist to wish for. Homeschooling is a necessary option within the current framework, because more options for kids is actually better than less.

2024-07-04 15:42:02

People with zero knowledge of the various political currents and histories within homeschooling movements should really stop talking about the subject with such an annoyingly large amount of unearned confidence

2024-07-04 15:23:00

I remember once on twitter I'd talked about how modern unschooling theory is largely developed by women, yet men continue to get an out-sized share of the credit. And this incredibly annoying anarchist man (who was also a shithead to others I really like) said I was completely wrong because The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning (JUAL) published mostly male authors.
And I still think about that on occasion, because 1) having been immersed in the unschooling world for about a decade (I no longer really am, though I still have some connections) I can confidently say that most unschoolers have literally never read that journal and 2) annoying manarchist unknowingly provided a perfect example of exactly what I was talking about in the first place.
If, as I do, you understand theory to be the development of ideas whether inside or out of academia (a position all anarchists should hold), then my point stands: it's women producing most of the theory. And the fact that an academic journal in contrast publishes mostly men is literally a textbook example of the erasure of marginalized gender's intellectual labour.

2024-07-04 05:02:50

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an excellent selfie!!

2024-07-02 19:30:09

Americans love to pretend that American policing is uniquely bad and that's why they're not doing a revolution or whatever, when my dudes have you looked at the rest of the world?? When there are popular uprisings attempting to topple regimes they're ALWAYS met with horrific violence!! That's what happens!! That's what nation states do!! Being afraid of being murdered by cops, social movements facing intense repression etc. is really, truly not a uniquely American experience and I'm baffled how Americans can continue acting like it is.

2024-06-30 16:36:45

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I have not! That's a good idea. One of the cats especially I bet would love that

2024-06-30 14:32:50

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two out of three (and the two worst fluff eating offenders no less) are already on specialized foods for other issues, so that's not really an option. We just have that horrible hairball goo in a tube for when they're having trouble getting it back up 😅

2024-06-30 14:24:48

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I'll add this to the list of ways I wish they'd be a little less curious with the tongues, and maybe learn that licking fluff always ends the same way 😭 I try to pull it out before they swallow, but often I am simply too slow!

2024-06-30 14:01:31

My cats are obsessed with eating every bit of fluff they find on the floor. Like do they like throwing up hairballs or???

2024-06-29 14:30:20

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oh no, it's definitely not you!

2024-06-29 13:27:42

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off topic but the comments on your posts are consistently so annoying I don't know how you stand it, I'm sorry people are so weird about everything you say 😕

2024-06-28 21:10:50

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A LOT of supposedly "radical" educational theorists and models still very much see education as something done to those they consider lesser, in order to produce the "right" kind of person.

2024-06-28 20:51:59

Any approach to education that frames it as something *done to* children will never be liberatory. An education that's liberatory must always be one which embraces the autonomy of every person, regardless of their age.

2024-05-25 15:38:26

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these are not remotely the same things, and the conflation of the two in order to shut down anarcho-feminists (most of whom ARE queer) is one of the most upsetting parts of the discourse.
KYLR is a statement that violence against patriarchal oppressors is justified. There are calls for violence against fascists all the time amongst anarchists, and I never see any anarchists claiming that this violent opposition to fascists is dangerous because fascists routinely say that leftists are the real Nazis (they literally do this all the time!). It's only when it comes to sexual violence, to patriarchal violence, that the handwringing about dangerous rhetoric starts, and to me that is extremely telling.
Fascists will co-opt anything, and they are always dangerous. But the use of KYLR as a slogan has absolutely no impact on what fascists do, and it's absurd to pretend otherwise.
Anyway, I'm sure those 16k words will do a wonderful job of breaking down all these arguments against it, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

2024-05-20 18:40:28

I often see adults claiming that kids are "resisting learning" or "wouldn't learn unless forced to" and what they ACTUALLY mean by that is that kids are not learning or would not learn exactly what the adults demand that they do.
This is an expression of frustration with children's noncompliance, because even a lot of "progressive" and "radical" folks think that, as long as they insist that its for their own good, children should obey them.
This is not only subjugation and thus completely unacceptable as a way to treat other people (children are people), it's also completely counterproductive.
People naturally resist compulsion. It actually feels like shit to have someone with far greater power than you attempt to control almost all aspects of your life, including what you think about, focus on, and do. We KNOW that. YOU know that.
If you make what you call "learning" into something forced, you introduce it as something to be resisted.
If adults are to stop attempting to coerce kids into "learning" (sometimes better termed "memorizing") what they want them too, that necessitates coming to terms with the fact that children (being people and all) have their own unique interests, passions, and goals, their own familial, cultural, and geographic contexts... In short? They're going to want to learn wildly different things, the same way you and I, as adults, choose to focus on very different topics and build very different skills.
The ethical necessity to stop perpetuating adult supremacy means confronting a whole lot of harmful beliefs about what "education" is supposed to be and what it's supposed to look like. It also means actually creating anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical places for kids to spend time in, because limiting their options to either the authoritarianism of State schooling or nuclear families, regardless of what those families are like, is such a miserably constrained set of options.
#youthliberation #selfdirectededucation #schoolabolition