Good morning lovely people!

the clouds are thick and low offer the inlet, but sparse out to the ocean. The last pink of sunrise is being chased over the western horizon by the milky blue of the morning.

I'm going to walk to the library today to return #ConflictIsNotAbuse by #SarahSchulman. A difficult and imperfect book, but one I believe would improve politics and relationships if more people read it.

#AmReading #weather

I don't always agree with #SarahSchulman in Conflict Is Not Abuse, but the ideas summarized above in this thread form the core of the book and I think are really important for understanding current US politics (and politics elsewhere).

#AmReading

"... [E]scalating Conflict to the status of Abuse obscures our desires, our own contributions to problems in our relationships, our own anxieties about sex, love, and HIV, our own projections from our pasts onto the non-deserving present, and it disavows our agency in a manner that enhances the power of the state. Escalation under these circumstances is a resistance to self-knowledge."

#AmReading Conflict Is Not Abuse by #SarahSchulman

"By escalating in the face of nothing, normative conflict, or resistance and acting as if it is Abuse, we avoid having to confront ourselves, or our family, our clique, our HIV status, our own individual and group shortcomings, our anxieties from an unresolved past. Instead, we use accusation to create an artificial furor to override or distract from our own responsibility.

#AmReading Conflict Is Not Abuse by #SarahSchulman

"The force that takes Conflict and misrepresents it as Abuse is called Escalation. Escalation is a kind of smokescreen to cover up the agent's own influence on events, their own contributions to the Conflict.

#AmReading Conflict Is Not Abuse by #SarahSchulman

@jernone I think @Are0h actually gets at a big problem with #SarahSchulman ‘s personal experience arguments in this toot here https://playvicious.social/@Are0h/100737024604399482 (though they are discussing general problems with social media) - we can’t actually assume good faith in many of our interactions.

Which is a damn shame.

"we have learned over and over again, through the almost mechanistic co-optation of a wide range of radical movements and disenfranchised communities, that as long as the system of domination and power remains intact, winning "rights" or realignment in the hierarchy simply means that the most normative elements of any community gain access to the state apparatus. ... the least powerful elements remain the objects of their force."

#AmReading Conflict Is Not Abuse by #SarahSchulman #poltheory

"The solution? Again, the police. This reductive, dichotomous, bad/good message has been reinforced daily for decades ... in a way that justifies the power of the police and falsly presents it as neutral, objective, and value-free."

#AmReading Conflict Is Not Abuse by #SarahSchulman

"the necessary social conversation that could help us to understand how people participate in the escalation of conflict became conflated with the real crisis of blaming victims, even though they are two entirely separate things."

#AmReading Conflict is Not Abuse by #SarahSchulman #discourse