CERESUltra

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Words are my favorite stim toy


NireBryce
@NireBryce

It's probably good to just let some people think mutual aid and charity be synonymous while trying to build the self sustaining structutes of actual mutual aid.

because one of the big points of mutual aid is to be able to go "look at this. why aren't the government or NGOs doing this?" to people curious about it.

theres much more actually to it, but even people who think mutual aid means actual things disagree on what it means.

you can't win language fights without either dedicating a whole lot of better spent labor hours to it, or using coercive force and shame (even if you don't realize that's what you're doing).

Colloquialism happens because someone else out competed you on definitions even and especially if some of them were grifting. What makes you think you'll win this time, when the endless september isn't listening to you, just the people who explain it badly with their more palatable YouTubes and TikToks and Substacks and Twitter feeds.

go help build things or create a new concept that has stronger underpinnings instead of yelling at people you resent. they aren't going to join your thing. It's definitionally a local thing anyway.


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

mm. counterpoint: we've had people explain to us that they've tried doing this but it winds up being quite hard to get anyone interested in the ideology that motivated those structures LATER, if you don't do so from the start.

it's quite hard even without the charity, I'm not really willing to believe it helps or harms much until we've gotten to the point of actually like, seeing more than that I guess.

the people who say "isn't mutual aid just charity?" were saying that in 2017 as bad faith even though the charity-without-structure were a small minority of the use, and they kept torpedoing support in the larger orgs trying to explore it with their much better resources.

so it doesn't change much to aknowledge that fighting colloquialism isn't something we can put energy towards if we actually want to build things. not successful, anyway.

it's like how everyone wanted to use "party" in the 20th century european sense even though even a lot on the left thought that meant "be like the green party". it's impossible to fight colloquialism unless you've got a lot of people or less people putting a lot more labor into fighting the misconception

yeah, tho I'll say mutual aid has already been muddy enough and five different historical movements often contradicting each other, so it's really used for want of a better overarching term that acknowledges the whole instead of trying to get people to go down a path that's been google-poisoned for the entire history of web search

fighting over most words is a cursed endeavor. i feel like unnecessary quibbling gives cover to shitty people and outright bad actors, the whole general vibe of "grassroots that won good and got defanged into money-draining nonprofits" included. many times it is necessary to define terms with precision but it seems better to just... define your terms in conversations that matter, instead of trying to enforce entire specialist grammars for everyone

right, you can't fight majority use without being one or producing enough to look like one, so it's time to either find a better way to bracket and describe the concept, or exploit it like i mentioned (or other better ways, for other things)