#nixcamp #Liverpool #Birkenhead #UnitedKingdom #borders #passports #visa #residence #swidenning #SlashAndBurn #ShiftingAgriculture #Zomia #SmashTheState #stateless Abolish #KYC #AML #DMCA #facerec remote #biometric identification #frontex
New instance, new #introduction. Edit: I have supplemented this introduction with replies to this post.
I see this instance has a *nice* *long* character limit for posts.
I have a Ph.D. in Human Science (2016, Saybrook University), which is about the experience of being human in social contexts. It is the mother of the social sciences but is now, at least in the English speaking world, and at least as far as I can tell, a dead field.
I studied #conservatism for my #dissertation. And yes, the #Democrats are far too #conservative for me.
Once upon a time, a very, very long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a computer programmer. It was the wrong career choice.
I am a #vegan #LibertarianSocialist (recovering #anarchist) mostly from the #SanFrancisco #BayArea in #California, presently residing in #Pittsburgh, #Pennsylvania, hoping to move to #erie
In #kyriarchy, I mostly focus on #classism and #ageism, but since arriving in Pittsburgh, have been confronted with blatant #racism (and yes, many white people here do see it). But #SocialJustice has to be for everybody; to focus on any one identity, to the exclusion of others, is nothing more than to elevate that identity over that of the predominantly wealthy white males who are now in charge.
I oppose all #imperialism and #SettlerColonialism, not just U.S. and NATO imperialism and settler-colonialism. Having lived on the underbelly of #capitalism most of my life, I am #anticapitalist and ferociously opposed to #neoliberalism. I oppose physical and structural violence.
Human beings have #HumanRights. These rights are not constrained by their governments' failures to ratify certain human rights treaties.
#Borders exist to mark off territory controlled by elites whose competition accounts for most if not all wars and to deny human beings on the "wrong" side of an arbitrary line rights and privileges available on the "right" side. This cannot be justified ethically. I am hostile to #xenophobia
Finally, I am pessimistic about the future of humanity. #COVID19 and the #ClimateCrisis demonstrate our unfitness for survival.
Open borders are natural and possible in a more civilized world. #WislawaSzymborska #Poetry #Borders #Immigration #Civilization #Humanity #Empathy
PSALM* by Wislawa Szymborska, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity; how much desert sand shifts from one land to another; how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil in provocative hops!
Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers or alights on the roadblock at the border?
A humble robin—still, its tail resides abroad
while its beak stays home. If that weren't enough, it won't stop bobbing!
Among innumerable insects, I'll single out only the ant between the border guard's left and right boots blithely ignoring the questions "Where from?" and "Where to?"
Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos prevailing on every continent!
Isn't that a privet on the far bank
smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?
And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms, would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?
And how can we talk of order overall when the very placement of the stars leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?
Not to speak of the fog's reprehensible drifting!
And dust blowing all over the steppes as if they hadn't been partitioned
And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves, that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters.
Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.
*Translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh and excerpted from the book, Wislawa Szymborska, Poems New and Collected 1957-1997.
