King James I of England sounded like an anime villain: source: J. P. Kenyon, ed., The Stuart Constitution 1603-1688: Documents and Commentary, 2nd Edition (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p12.

Found another early example of anarchism being linked to democracy. A 1937 article in Vanguard by the anonymous authors S.M. and R.W. described an anarchist communist society as one in which “democracy is therefore maximised and made an active process” (Vanguard Vol 4, no 1, p13).

"there is a republic in America . . . but the native peoples are reduced to desperate straits and hunted down like wild animals… What am I saying? In America, as in Rome and in Greece before her, we have seen that the republic is compatible with slavery!" - Malatesta, 1884

TIL that Ainu parents tried to manifest via child names.

The ethnographic atlas: only Unangax̂ [Aleut] men hunted birds and used traps. The first journal article I find: women hunted birds with traps and slings. This database underpins so much research in the field. I kept seeing it's name pop up but nobody seems to have systematically fact checked it.

The ethnographic atlas compiled by Murdock et al claims that among the Haida trapping and fowling are exclusively male activities. The source for this claim says that women snare birds. The author of this source is Murdock himself. I am slowly losing my mind fact checking this guy.

More evidence of some Inuit women hunting like men. Source: Diamond Jenness, Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913-18, Volume XII: The Life of the Copper Eskimos (F. A. Acland, 1922), p88.

Evidence of some Inuit women hunting like men: Source: Jean L. Briggs, “Eskimo Women: Makers of Men,” in Many Sisters: Women in Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Carolyn Matthiasson (The Free Press, 1974), p271).

The Ethnographic Atlas: only Washo men specialised in hunting. The ethnographic literature: women hunted gopher and squirrels. The taboo of women using men's hunting equipment to hunt larger animals was broken by widows trying to feed their families. I keep finding omissions like this.

The transphobes current slogan 'there is no such thing as a transgender child' is an obvious disguise for their actual belief: trans people do not actually exist and are just deluded. They focus on children because it's the best way to generate a moral panic.

I don't think there is anything political or radical about being trans. It's just a characteristic that some people have like being an introvert. The political and radical element is supporting and building towards trans liberation in a social context where trans people are oppressed.

Important read www.972mag.com/israeli-inte...

Always keep facts like this in mind when people say that we need a state to deal with rapists. www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023...

Aristotle thought (via the Homer passage quoted below) that prior to the emergence of organised political life humans lived in scattered groups where men ruled over their wife and children. Think this might be one of the roots of later 19th century anarchist ideas that patriarchy preceded government

Find it bizarre that anarchist debates about democracy often focus on the etymology of the word democracy in ancient Greek, whilst ignoring what democracy actually meant to ancient Greeks eg for all to rule and be ruled in turn or isonomia (equality before the law). Passages like this are typical:

One of the earliest examples of someone connecting anarchism with democracy is Ida Mett, co-author of the platform, saying in 1938 that "we may conclude by saying that anarchism had an influence on the Kronstadt insurrection to the extent that it advocated the idea of proletarian democracy".

One of the co-founders of this journal was Thomas Baty, who also wrote under the woman’s name Irene Clyde. In 1926 Clyde wrote that, “from my earliest years I hated sex. The reason was that I wanted to be a girl”. Clyde was also a lawyer who defended Japanese imperialism. So a mixed bag.

The mission statement of the early 20th century journal Urania. They wanted to abolish the division between men and women.

Am fascinated by the super fast sex changes in ancient greek sources eg in 53 AD "a maiden named Philotis, whose family came from Smyrna, was of marriageable age and had been betrothed to a man by her parents when male genitals appeared in her and she became a man".

Update: just read an anthropologist refer to men hunting moths! Why? Because gathering is woman coded and hunting is man coded. These kind of biases appear so much in the data on the sexual division of labour.

Ancient Greek misogynists were very explicit about their hatred of women and didn't feel the need to dress it up. In the Theogony, Hesiod just straight up says that women are an evil inflicted on men by Zeus.

I made an hour long deep dive into what Marx thinks a communist society is. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAB-...

Am extremely hyped to finally read this book. It debunks lots of sexist ideas in archeology and anthropology.

To repurpose a famous Marx quote: people make their own gender, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

Think a theory of being trans must explain at least why: (1) trans people exist across cultures and time periods. (2) in all these contexts only a minority of people are trans. (3) social pressure will not make a person not trans. (4) some trans people experience dysphoria, others do not.

Find this paragraph from Jules Gill-Peterson's latest essay strange. She contrasts working class material struggle with self-actualisation, which is a liberal American value. But the core of 19th century proletarian theory is that communism is a society based on individual self-actualisation. . .

This fun Bakunin fact made my day.

The best book on prefigurative politics is now available for free on the anarchist library. Strongly recommend it. theanarchistlibrary.org/library/sofa...

🆕🚨 New statutory Relationships and Sex Education guidance published today will: - Restrict schools from using materials that "encourage pupils to question their gender" - Teaches children the laws about "biological sex" - Removes all references to the word transgender What we know so far 🧵

What is being done to children in Gaza is so awful that I cannot describe it with words. www.hrw.org/report/2024/...

In 1899 the anarchist Errico Malatesta gave a socialist politician a tour of the island he was sentenced to live on. At one point he shows the politician a dorm and says "watch but don't say anything, I'll fill you in later". Afterwards he explains "it's the dorm of the sodomites!".

Intersectionality isn't the view that people can experience several forms of oppression at once. It's instead the claim that the intersection between multiple oppressive structures create outcomes that are greater than the sum of their parts. This is called an emergent property in systems theory.

Modern anarchists tend to know about only a few famous anarchist women from history like Emma Goldman. One woman who doesn't get enough attention is Milly Witkop-Rocker. She advocated the creation of women's groups within syndicalist trade unions. theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mill...

"Evidence gathered by Amnesty International demonstrates how over a month since the introduction of its militarized aid distribution system, Israel has continued to use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war". www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...

Is very funny in the anthropology lit on the sexual division of labour when people say stuff like: 'these women aren't hunting. They're just assisting male hunters by driving the animal in the desired direction'. In other words, being a key participate within a hunt. A hunter you might say.

Read a male academic this morning who suggested the following incredible hypothesis for why women don't hunt large fauna: "female body odors may at times constitute a major handicap under primitive hunting conditions that generally require approaches to within 25 m of the prey".

Losing my mind reading some anthropologists refer to women hunting small animals as "gathering". Women cannot stop gathering rabbits.

A Marx quote that makes me think about workers being forced to use AI by their bosses: "Even the lightening of the labour becomes an instrument of torture, since the machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content."

An underrated Marx passage: "this 'productive' worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn't give a damn for the junk". source: Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p273.

A trans woman reported this heartbreaking experience in 1890: Source: Douglas Pretsell, ed., Queer Voices in the Works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, 1883–1901 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), p183.

Contempory western imperialists often pretend to care about women's liberation and LGBT rights in order to justify bombing another country. For some reason it's never explained exactly how dropping bombs, which would also kill women and queer civilians, will fulfil the imperialists noble intentions

Ancient Greek medical texts claim that women are like sponges and this is why they menstruate.

How Marx defined communism: "free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth". Source: Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p158.

Marx believed that real wealth consisted not in jewels and palaces, but how much free time everyone has.

Kropotkin was such a massive nerd that his 1899 book fields, factories, and workshops featured images of how big wheat can get with modern farming techniques. He's just like check out this wheat. It's huge. Later in the book he shows a page size drawing of a greenhouse.

The quotes that made me transition: Karl Marx - a person under communism "strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming". ghost in the shell - "all things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you".

Marx didn't invent the slogan "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". In 1845 the front cover of Cabet’s Voyage to Icaria featured the epigraph: “First Right: To Live – To each following his needs” and “First Duty: To Work – From each following his strengths”.

Kropotkin thought that one pathway of state formation is "the sorcerer or the priest" seizes power from a military leader/judge who is beginning to construct a state. The sorcerer then joins "force and knowledge of customary law to his feared wizard power".

Turns out that the ICE MUST BE DESTROYED account was correct to end every post with moreover, ICE must be destroyed.

IT MAY BE THE ANARCHISTS