Tootfinder

I wanna jump one more time on the whole "distraction" framing, because this is a point that needs to be hammered home (and I need a reminder to write something longer).
Attacks on trans youth are not a distraction from other types of coercion, they are central to it. Attacks on trans youth come from a conceptualization of children as property, which is literally patriarchy in the Roman sense of the legal objectification all people who share a household as belonging to a man. This legal structure, Roman slave law, continues to be the root of property rights and therefore the foundation of capitalism.
But colonialism also extends from it through the infantalization of colonized people as a justification for oppression. This can also be turned inward again manifesting as the justification for police (that is, some people "can't handle themselves and need external authority to act right").
The #Epstein stuff isn't some weird thing that rich people get away with, it's core to how wealth works. Money isn't useful by itself, it's a proxy for power. One manifestation of power is being able to violate laws that constrain others (this is the "freedom of the monarch" that Graeber talks about in Dawn of Everything). The war in Iran, especially the threats of nuclear weapons and genocide is not a distraction from the #EpsteinFiles, but rather a manifestation of the same thing.
Power must be demonstrated to affirm that it is real. War is a demonstration power. Violating the law without consequences is a demonstration of power. The most taboo things are using nuclear weapons and child sexual abuse. He has already done one of those, and he is going to do everything he can to do the other.
These are not distractions, these are all manifestations of the underlying thing that we need to fight. But we need to make sure we're fighting it as a single thing. We have to tie these things together, because if we do not then we risk reproducing the same thing again but worse.

I tried to write something up to talk about an idea, but it didn't quite work. I have a lot more I need to put into it. But I want to get an idea out, and, after talking with a person who pointed out some of the flaws in what I wrote, I think I can maybe write down the kernel of the idea here.
An acquaintance of mine did a deep dive on Operational Art and wrote his thesis (which prompted an earlier set of posts and an article I wrote for my professional-ish blog) on the intersection of the OODA loop and critical philosophy. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about Kilcullen's Three Pillars model (after watching Andrewism's wonderful video) and Beer's VSM. The TL;DR of it is that there's a much better insurgency model. Of course, the insurgency model also works for a bunch of other things, because cybernetics lets you do all kinds of cool abstraction like that.
So as I was reading the essay of a comrade the other day, that model popped back into my head and I'm going to try to share what I can of it.
When colonizers came to the Salish region, they saw what they believed to be an untouched wilderness. They failed to see the ways in which Salish people tended the land. Indigenous fire practices were common on the northwest coast, and the suppression of those practices remains a problem. There is an interrelationship between an environment and the systems within it. Systems, like people, animals, and cultures, adapt to the environment. In doing so, those systems will also change the environment.
Social technology was invisible, so colonizers defaulted to either some kind of Rousseauvian or Malthusian model of these people. They were not, for the colonizers, people who had developed advanced social technologies to live in harmony with their world. They were, rather, people in "a state of nature."
The European influenced left continues to draw this Rousseauvian model, which continues through a lot of Anarchist revolutionary thought. European anarchists were heavily influenced by observations and theories around the behavior of indigenous people. The remnants of this thought still exist in the idea that the system must only be destroyed for us to be free.
This is the same obliviousness to social technology, that social technology actually exists, often informs both early colonizers and modern radicals.
It is through this obliviousness that we fail to recognize how capitalism is a social technology that is managed into existence and maintained, and how changes in the environment can threaten institutions that have become over-adapted to a specific version of that environment.
We can extend Kilcullen's metaphor of a "conflict ecosystem" through cybernetics into a much more rich model, populated by viable systems. The ecosystem itself has a fitness function, which drives adaptation within the environment. But all actors in the environment also affect it. Some try to manage the environment. Revolutions are often over who manages a social ecosystem, over who controls the social technology and what it does.
Once we see this dynamic at play, calls of "riot" and "revolution" make a whole lot less sense. Rather, the question becomes, "how do we change the ecosystem in such a way that it cannot be 'managed' at all?"
Graeber/Wengrow talked about Turtle Island indigenous social technologies in Dawn of Everything, such as the system of moieties and clans described in the book. So I have a good reading list as I think through this model, but I hope the "ecosystem" model is helpful (if not completely fleshed out).
I'd be interested in any critiques or thoughts to help develop this idea more.