Also available in PDF form with an imposed option.
https://printedbybugs.com/pdfs/tangping-manifesto/
Translators Introduction
This piece’s exact origin is hard to discern. It seems to have been either originally posted to WeChat (A popular Chinese social media app), then shared to Chinese language platforms run outside of the control of the CCP, or else vice-versa, on June 1st 2021. Although its source is unclear and the author anonymous, it’s important to understand the context from which it arose.
Here are translations of some of the posts by Luo Huazhong (the Kind traveler) about their idea of Tang ping (lying flat).
These posts came from their now deleted Baidu account, screenshots and transcriptions of which you can find in various places by using a search engine. I started with machine translation and then went through and fixed the machine’s mistakes. There are certainly some things I got wrong, and I will continue to edit this post with further corrections, but even in its messy form this is a really beautiful bit of thought!
Also available in PDF form with an imposed option.
https://printedbybugs.com/pdfs/tangping/
Recently I've been playing with the idea of a body of water as representative of life, consciousness, time, or whatever the fuck. So in that image; initially anarchism came as a wave, at a time where the waters were already choppy, a wave which graciously hit the stern of my little boat, propelling me forward in some direction rather than capsizing me. This wave maintained my course through many other swells that sought to extricate me onto another even more enigmatic course, and pushed into clearer waters, where I found the weather improved and the horizon more expansive.
I'm trying to build out an anarchism that begins with power relations observable by an individual which then works its way from there in a relatively concise form, one that also intentionally avoids the historical and cultural aspects of anarchy.
I have some sense that the anarchism many people encounter has grown bloated and complex, with many diverse cultural interests telling an extreme variety of stories about what anarchy is and what living it can look like.
Wrote this guide ages ago and put it nowhere, so I thought I'd drop it here so maybe you too can have some fun!
CW: Suicide, extreme mental health hardship
Like many of you I’m sure, I’ve been considering the idea of “normal” recently. While at the moment people in North America are calling for a “return to normal” with about as much creativity as is to be expected from this continent, I would assert that most people's lives haven't changed all that much. They may have felt some irregularity in schedules, restriction of travel, or a slight increase in awareness of personal space but otherwise things are pretty much continuing as “normal” especially in contrast to the fast change of often theorized situations like revolution or fast paced collapse. There's only been a slight tweak really; we're still able to consume our goods, “go online”, and let media blast our senses. It's for someone else to do but I think the vapid nature of civilian life is being felt a bit more than usual, and this may be an insertion point for anarchists. If people are so displeased with a nearly unchanged access to life as society provides it, the only thing lacking being the loss of horizontal relationships, it's possible that our idea of authentic life beyond all that might be interesting to those for whom it doesn't come naturally. But again, that's for someone else to do.
I was reflecting on my own path into Anarchism, and subsequently the nihilistic position that I now embrace, and how they very much resembled a series of explosions and implosions, always destructive but also always leaving interesting rubble. Only possible when fuel, oxygen, and a spark meet, I'd like to share a series on those meetings. This will be the first.
These are my incomplete ramblings on an idea I intend to come back to soon.
Anti-speciesism exists as a rejection of the specific dominant morality that suggests humans are “higher” or more important than other animals, or at least that's my understanding of it.
It seems that many of the arguments in favor of speciesism center around who should be a part of the “moral community”.
I'm writing this mostly as a way to reflect on the vapidity of city life, the growing meaninglessness of the signifier “Anarchist”, and the lack of imagination that is endemic in so many self-described anarchists.
We’ve found ourselves in a rotting, collapsing carnival. And how? Some say we’ve always been here, others say they wandered towards the brightest light from the darkness outside the fence. Almost all pretend it’s still alluring. Fun.