Hey folks, time for the weekly monthly whenever I can remember check-in. How are we feeling? Read anything good lately? How's the weather?
Been thinking about anarchism as realized in rural areas versus anarchism as realized in urban areas. I've always thought that anarchism is more realistically achievable in the short-term in rural areas - they have a higher degree of independence from authority, and oftentimes there's greater per capita involvement in social structures that could (and sometimes already do) perform most of the work formerly performed by the state.
I'd love to see an anarchist municipality realized, and I'm a shameless :LIB: ertarian municipalism apologist, but I just don't think that it would be as easy to implement the same kind of social structures that exist in rural areas. Is this a bad take? Thoughts?
Edit cause I fucked up the emote oh shit oh fuck
I have met 2 people IRL who said they were being gangstalked (plus a third who had experiences of "electronic harassment"). Both of them are effectively beggars for life, having decided for whatever reason that they don't want to work or that it would be futile.
It's easy to give up when you go through what we do. I cant do anything in my profession anymore because my references collectively ghosted me.
Do you have people in your life whom you still have friendly and "balanced" contact with after 5+ years of knowing them?
Most of my contacts decided to follow me around and harass me in one fell swoop. There were a few that reached out, but they just ended up gaslighting me. I'm sure they'd pretend like nothing happened if I were to shoot them a text right now.
I've known a couple people who have identified themselves as "gangstalking victims", and every single one of them also displayed classic signs of delusional paranoia, the kind typically associated with schizophrenia. I'm not going to say that nobody has ever been "gang stalked", since we all know about the CIA/FBI going after people in the US, and the same thing happening in the USSR and East Germany. But if a normal everyday person isn't a powerful person leading a liberation movement or other type of thing that would cause the attention of a dozen or more govt agents, I'm far more willing to believe delusional paranoia, which affects as much as 2% of the population, is a more apt explanation simply by using Occam's Razor. Plus, anyone who is not suffering from delusions and actually being stalked, would take one look at gang-stalking websites, and their frequent discussion of "voice to skull" and "magnetic disruption" and other fantastic language, and do a 180 from the very term itself for the sake of legitimacy. Here's one of the (unfortunately few) academic papers investigating the subject https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7178134/, most people suffering from it fall into the exact same kinds of thought patterns and tropes, and unfortunately the internet has encouraged the spread of it via a sort of "mass-hysteria" as it was once called.
Here's a decent podcast about it: https://upcpodcast.libsyn.com/gang-stalking
I'm currently trying to help someone suffering from it right now, getting them off meth has helped a bit, but I'm fairly certain they are also schizophrenic and unfortunately absolutely refuse to entertain that possiblity or seek treatment for it.