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Dear zoos, friends, and interested others,

I almost forgot to explain Zoo Pride Week.

Zoo Pride Week is very simple. Just find any zoo or group of zoos that you can celebrate together with for one week, either in person or over the Internet. For us zoos, it is normal for us to only have eyes for our non-human companions for most of the year, and that is as it should be. However, Zoo Pride Week is for spending some time showing that you also care about your friends that happen to share these feelings you have toward non-humans.

Some of us do very simple things like just having some cocktails and then playing Exploding Kittens together, or we might watch a classic film together. We might binge on a favorite television series together, too. Simplicity is really a part of the mode, in my experience, and I personally find simplicity to be humanizing.

Besides, the first week of July is too damn hot to spend out at the dog parks, my friend. When things stick to your butt when you sit down while wearing blue jeans, you know it is time to take some enjoyment in the great indoors. Air conditioning feels good.


Thank you again,
Sigma
Dear zoos, friends, and interested others,

I want to clarify something about my views regarding anarchism. I actually have unorthodox views on anarchism, and when I self-identify as a "moderate anarchist," that confuses many people.

When I self-identify as a "moderate anarchist," I really mean to say that I disagree with the authoritarian perspective on society.

According to people that embrace authoritarianism, the people are only motivated to do anything good if the government forces them to do so, and they are only restrained from doing evil if the government makes them afraid to do evil. The authoritarian perspective on society is that fear and forcible compulsion are the primary forces that motivate human behavior. The conservative Judeo-Christian idea of a wrathful god that punishes people for being wicked and rewards people for being obedient constitutes an authoritarian vision for society, and even though there are more liberal sects of that religious group, it is undeniable that there is a strong authoritarian movement in that religion.

However, many traditional anarchists do not really reject the authoritarian perspective, but they just embrace the "evil side" of the authoritarian perspective. In other words, they embrace the idea of a society that is completely disordered, violent, chaotic, and utterly not inhabitable. The types of so-called "anarchists" that have a perspective that is based on breaking windows, sabotaging trains, and otherwise creating crises are not really rejecting the authoritarian perspective, but they are really just buttressing that perspective and reinforcing it. If what you call "anarchy" is based on creating chaos and danger, then you are just reinforcing the argument that the people need a strongman government and police that have unlimited authority to use violence and intimidation to control people's behavior.

Instead, I reject the entire narrative. I think that there are better ways to organize people.

Something I like to say, regarding anarchism, is that the definition of "anarchy" that I most readily accept is just the natural way that friends behave toward each other. If you have some very close friends in your life, then a normal part of your life is that your friend is allowed to go into your refrigerator and get a bite to eat when that person comes to visit your house. If your closest friend were to suddenly become homeless, then as long as your friend were making a serious effort to improve their situation, then it would be a natural thing for your friend to spend a couple of weeks sleeping on your couch, and you would not even think about it. This would be a normal way for you to behave, and it would be a normal way for your friends to behave. Furthermore, if one of your closest friends were doing something that was highly illegal but not really harmful to anybody, then you would not really want that person to get into trouble. The point is that, between friends, our boundaries regarding our personal property are less likely to matter, and between friends, statutory law is less likely to matter. There is a natural sense of anarchy within the context of a strong friendship.

However, it is also true that groups of friends are also highly capable of organizing themselves around a united purpose, and to me, that is proof that an anarchist society is actually possible as long as we can develop a type of society where people have strong friendships with each other. In fact, that is the only kind of anarchy that I see as realistic or sustainable.

In a recent blog post, I said, "friendship is anarchy!" and I was serious.

Therefore, I want to take this as an opportunity to remind people that your friendships are not just the most valuable resource in your life, but if I am right, then your friendships are also the best hedge that you will ever have against authoritarianism. When the people in your life are accustomed to the way that friends behave toward each other, then authoritarianism sounds insane because authoritarianism is so far removed from how they think it is normal to behave. Friendship is your best weapon against authoritarianism.

When I say that I am an anarchist, that is really all that I mean. Not all anarchist philosophers and adherents of anarchism agree with me, and that is okay. If they disagree with me, then I disagree with them back. My perspective on anarchism is based on deviating from the idea that the fear of punishment should mean more to us than our sense of loyalty and trust toward our friends, our families, and our communities. When we have strong communities and loyal friendships, then that is powerful.

I just don't want to be misunderstood. When I advocate anarchism, what I mean to advocate is strong communities and meaningful friendships. That is our best weapon against authoritarianism.

Snuggle power!


Thank you as always,
Sigma
Dear zoos, friends, and interested others,

Let me tell you this neat trick for surviving COVID: don't get it. Jeez, did someone get the license plate number on that truck?

*shakes out her wings*

Anyhow, here is some good anytime reading, which I think would have made good COVID reading if I had not already read it previously. I decided to finally sit down and read the literary classic Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift, from an adult perspective. This led to me forming some very interesting insights about Jonathan Swift, himself.

For one thing, Jonathan Swift had some surprisingly feminist views for his time. The Lilliputians actually had an egalitarian education system, and while it was still sex segregated, boys and girls were taught in accordance with the same standards. This is an important thing to note because these kinds of ideas would not really start to enter wide public discussion until much later, and the first British feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, was actually born much later. Even though Jonathan Swift would not be considered perfectly feminist by modern standards, he actually had some surprisingly progressive ideas about gender, considering that he spent part of his life working for the Tory Party.

I looked into that thing about him working for the Tories for a while, and it turned out that the Whigs were not as sympathetic as the Tories were toward poor clergymen, and this was apparently the deciding factor in Swift's change of party loyalties. While Swift might have had almost shockingly liberal views for his time, in regard to most subjects, he was also an ardent high church Anglican, which I think has confused many people into regarding him as more conservative than he actually was.

In fact, the idealized society of the Houyhnhnms, while it may have been class structured, was also effectively an anarchist society. The Houyhnhnms really had no concept of command, but instead, they would "exhort" based on reason. This would really make Jonathan Swift effectively a proto-anarchist. However, Jonathan Swift does also maintain that the Houyhnhnm way only works because the Houyhnhnms find it very strange to say what is not true, and when they speak, they are under a cultural and perhaps natural compulsion to speak honestly. This allows the Houyhnhnm society to be one that is governed based on reason rather than based on force. Therefore, I think that Swift might have been acknowledging that Houyhnhnm society was a utopia that could never really exist as long as human beings had the cultural norm and the natural capacity to lie, but I think he also believed that a government would need to exert less force if the people that were governed by it chose to live honestly and to respond to reason more readily than to force. While that can never be perfectly true, the idea of a utopia is to give us an idea of how perhaps we could make it less false, and I think that Swift might be right that a society that valued reason and truth could be ruled with less force.

In Bromdingnag, which is the land of giants from Gulliver's Travels, one of the remarkable things about Bromdingnag is that they do not allow for any law that has more words in it than there are letters in the alphabet, so they are restricted to a 26-word word-limit in the description of any statute. Swift's idea was that the laws should be easier for common people to understand without the help of an attorney. This reflects a high degree of sympathy toward commoners.

I think that if we put these notions together with Swift's notable satirical essay, "A Modest Proposal," Swift seems to be very consistent in his support for common people's inclusion in political discourse and for the humane treatment of the poorest members of society. The complexity of his political career was really related to the complexity of the politics of the time-period. I think that Swift was nevertheless consistently a defender of both personal liberty and the rights of the poor.

If you have a sexuality that would be suppressed by an authoritarian government, then this makes you a natural enemy of authoritarian governments, even if this would otherwise go against your natural inclination. If it were left to pure majoritarianism, then all non-heterosexual sexuality would still be a crime, and this is viscerally real to me as someone who grew to adulthood while the sodomy laws were still in effect. If my state had been given a vote on whether or not to maintain its sodomy law, then I would still be considered to be a felon just for my relationship with my husband. That law would have only been overturned if the people of my state had been persuaded to place a high value on personal liberty.

On the surface, it might seem to be curious that there is such a strong historical connection between sympathy toward the poor and sympathy toward personal liberty, but this is not surprising to me whatsoever. The rich are and always have been immune to the law. The rich can always afford an attorney. In general, an authoritarian society tends to be a society of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. Police are ultimately nothing more than the military that protects the rich from the poor, and it is unsurprising that the police are allowed to use weapons on the masses that would have them in war crimes tribunals if they were to be used against foreign nationals. This is the left-hand side of libertarian philosophy that tends to be haughtily ignored by the libertarian bourgeoisie, but I think that limiting the power and influence of the police is actually one aspect of libertarian philosophy that we should spend more time talking about. Ultimately, authoritarian governments can only ever be safe for the rich.

I think that Jonathan Swift might actually be on to something in his approach to anarchism, though (he does not call it anarchism, but again, Houyhnhnm society was effectively an anarchist utopia). In a society that values reason and truth, the idea of being compelled based on force would seem to be repellent and strange. Therefore, I think that any ally of liberty, regardless of how unwilling, must also be an ally of reason and truth. While this can never be perfectly realized as a utopia, we need not be brought to the degree of perfection that is represented by a utopia in order to make ourselves better off than we might have been without a vision. Putting aside their social stratification, which I see as a defect in Swift's vision, I think that it would be good for us to endeavor to emulate the Houynhnhnms in some of their values, and their society really constitutes a vision that is worth aspiring toward.

However, it is notable that Jonathan Swift never married, and he seemed to have had a very high opinion of horses.

*queues a suggestive whinnying sound-effect*


Thank you as always,
Sigma
Dear zoos, friends, and interested others,

Well, I'll be darn. Apparently, the right inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (right IFOF) also plays a role in nonverbal semantic memory. Tests for non-verbal semantic cognition usually involve matching a sound with a picture.

*wing-shrugs*

Anyway, the right IFOF, according to a study by Ivanka Savic and Stefan Arver back in 2011, also acts like a sort of internal barometer that helps determine your gender identity. The way that this works is through a phenomenon called fractional anisotropy (FA). Your FA value is like the degree to which the information that travels through your brain has to travel in a straight line, rather than scattering in a more diffuse manner, and it seems that high FA in someone's right IFOF is associated strongly with that person having a female gender identity, the reverse leading to a male gender identity.

However, I cannot stop wondering why it turned out to be one of the circuits that control nonverbal semantic congnition has such a strong bearing on one's gender identity that it remains one of the few parts of the brain that are clearly linked with some people being transgender. Does my gender really come down to my nonverbal semantic cognitions?

*snaps her tail against the floor thoughtfully, a gesture akin for her to tapping one's fingers*

Well, I am looking back, in my memory, on a 2015 study I once read about the so-called "gay lisp," by Benjamin Munson. Benjie's explanation is that transgender girls are really lisping because they are attempting to pronounce their words in a more crisp, more precise kind of way. While the pattern was not uniform, it was nevertheless consistent enough to be statistically relevant.

*tilts her head wryly*

Maybe the semantic connection explains my propensity for epistolary effusion. Hah. I'm being silly, here.

Anyhow, everyone knows that I am a zoo. Something else that you might not already know about me is that I am also a transgender woman and a seriously obsessive science nerd. I think that this aspect of my life is very important to talk about among the zooey community. I talk about it in the zooey community for the same reason why I talk about it with my neighbors and my real-life friends. I like for people to understand this aspect of my life.


Happy Pride Month,
Sigma
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Dear zoos, friends, and interested others,

I have gotten obsessed with some new color pencils I got, and it's just been really fun. I am not moving away from traditional media anytime soon. I just find it tactile and comforting.

While I was listening to some material by Emma Goldman, I found out that it is all but impossible to read anything about or by Emma Goldman without eventually running into the name of Peter Kropotkin, and I spent today reviewing some of Kropotkin's ideas about mutual aid.

Many people get confused by the concept of mutual aid, though. Sometimes, they think it's some kind of special scheme that strangers get into in the name of an ideology, but it's not really like that. I want to eschew any seeming endorsement of communes, cults, or any other such strange or dangerous social arrangements. I do not endorse such arrangements, and I would never counsel anybody to get involved in them.

In reality, mutual aid actually refers to basic benefits of natural relationships between people. For example, let's imagine that there are three friends, Sally, Bob, and Carter. Sally has pet milchgoats, Bob raises vegetables, fruits, and mushrooms, and Carter raises hens. All of them also have regular jobs, and they only do this as a hobby. Nevertheless, all of them produce more than they can use on their own, so they share their surplus with their friends. That way, all of them always have vegetables, fruits, and mushrooms, all of them always have goat butter, goat cheese, and goat's milk, and all of them always have eggs and, occasionally, chicken. They give their surplus away because they are proud of the things they create, and they like the fact that their friends enjoy and appreciate those things.

However, that sounds like strange behavior if you are not accustomed to how people behave in rural communities. Trust me, they do, and you will see it anytime you go into a truly rural area and start getting to know the locals. Nevertheless, it is very hard for people that have never lived surrounded by farms to understand how that kind of behavior could be the way that normal people behave, even though it is actually quotidian for people from rural backgrounds.

Instead, let's say that there are three furries living on one block in Boston, Massachusetts. This is reasonably possible in a large city. Their names are James, Mary, and Jennifer. Mary has a very large and well-kept house. James is the only one that knows how to make a fursuit, and he knows enough about art to teach his friends how to draw. Jennifer makes incredibly good finger-food, and while she lives in a small and cluttered apartment, she has a huge collection of expensive gaming equipment. By themselves, all of them would have rather boring lives, but they really prefer to party together, sharing their resources in common. They actually get a lot more enjoyment out of life than they could by living in isolation from each other.

What most people miss about both of those situations, both the rural community that shares resources and the urban community that likes to party together, is that in both of those kinds of situations, the people in those communities have had years to get to know each other, and in some cases, they have grown up together. They share their resources because they knew each other in the most vulnerable parts of their lives. These relationships have to develop. They are normal and natural for the people that are in those relationships, and if you tried to talk to them about the theories of an anarcho-communist philosopher that died more than a century ago, then they would probably think you were high. Nevertheless, an aspect of those people's lives is what those theories were really about.

During my late teens and early twenties, I did not form very many permanent friendships, and that part of my life was marked by seemingly continuous perigrination over several different communities and the assumption of several different identities. In fact, I only know one person still from that period of my life, and we rarely talk anymore because both of us have kind of moved on. Therefore, it has been a relatively recent development, in my life, to have settled on a community and an identity that feels like me and where I belong.

When I was a sort of solitary drifter, though, every place I went to had cold and impersonal admins and moderators that really knew nothing about me, and the way that people with power behave toward a bizarre stranger always tends to be both distrustful and authoritarian. I really did not have very much freedom of expression because, whenever I brought up something controversial, people's lack of any context for where it was coming from would result in immediate bad faith.

In other words, the absence of personal friendships, wherever I went, resulted in the default type of relationship that I had with people being defined by domination and submission, and even between putative equals, it was still a battle for domination. Without interpersonal trust, there was no real sense of liberty.

Well, this is something that you need to know if you are a zoo. Reality is this: your sexuality is inevitably going to be controversial among strangers. Somebody that has no context for what kind of person you are is not going to try to understand your real motives. Instead, they will project motives onto you, usually the motives of a psychopath, and they will assume that that projection is the real picture of what kind of person you are. If you claim to have any other motives in you besides that projected persona, you will be treated as not just a psychopath but a psychopath that is also a compulsive liar.

If you are a widely misunderstood minority, then filling up your world with strangers is a bad idea. It is a very bad idea. If there is something controversial or strange about you that you genuinely cannot help, then the only way that people in your life will understand who you really are is if you give them time, preferably years in which you maintain an acquaintance with them in spite of the normal peregrinations of youth, in which to get to know you and to understand you. People need time to have seen you at your best, at your worst, at your strongest, and at your most vulnerable.

When the backlash against zoos got into full swing, in about the early- to mid-2010's, I found out that the people that I had known for years were immediately sympathetic toward me, even if they did not already know that I was a zoo. No matter what most people were saying about zoos, what most people said counted for nothing compared with those people's years of experience with me. They were not going to believe I was some terrible person because they already knew what my real faults were. They would not have denied that I did have faults, perhaps serious ones, but they would not have believed that being outlandishly evil was one of those faults.

In other words, I have come to rely deeply on well-established friendships that I have developed over the course of years, and while some of those friends and I, even from that time, have drifted apart, I have gradually learned, since then, my survival really depends on hanging onto people that I can trust.

However, one of the first things that Emma Goldman talks about, in her autobiography, is how important and valuable her friends have been in her life. Emma Goldman, who was arguably one of the greatest anarchist thinkers in history, reached her old age, and when she looked back on life, she realized that friendship had been the most valuable thing in her entire entire existence.

It is natural that an anarchist would value friends, though. There is a natural anarchy among friends. Among friends, property means less, and sharing just seems like the natural thing to do. Sharing, among friends, is so natural that we do not even think about it. It really seems strange to think about this behavior intellectually at all, but I think it could really help us to try. The anarchist ideal of property being freely shared among people and of people cooperating without the need to be commanded is nothing more, in the entire world, than the natural behavior of friends.

Hasbro got it wrong. Friendship is not magic. Friendship is anarchy! Between friends, all of the unnecessary rules and taboos and superstitions of society mean nothing. Between friends, the misguided statutes of the state are nothing but the opinions of ignorant men. The bonds of friendship are stronger than the state.

If you are a zoo, you need every weapon that you can get in the fight against authoritarian governments. Your single best weapon is friendship. The way that friends naturally behave toward each other is the closest thing in the world to the anarchist ideal of a stateless society where resources are shared in common.

When we zoos were going through our darkest hours, a few years ago, it became clear to me how empty and meaningless it was when strangers claimed that they endorsed freedom of speech or claimed they accepted anybody. People that claimed they were "libertarians" were the first to throw me under the bus, and they did so gleefully because those people really did not care about liberty at all. They cared about being allowed to hurt others without consequences, and I was just another person that they could hurt without consequences.

Feeling free is more important to me than being happy. Feeling free makes me feel like I have wings that I can use to fly. Feeling free still feels good when I am also sad. It still feels good when I am crying. I have only ever genuinely felt free among my friends.

If you are anything like the kind of person I was, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, then freedom is something that matters to you. You might identify as either a libertarian or an anarchist in your ideals, and you might have a romanticized concept of a life without connections to hold you down. You might see your peregrinations as an expression of your liberty. The longer I have lived, though, the more I have realized that it is within a relationship that is based on natural affection that I can feel that way every day. It is only within those relationships that the fact that I am a zoo did not matter, back when it was popular to condemn zoos in the strongest possible terms. If you truly want to feel what anarchy is like, then start with friendships, and on the basis of those friendships, a natural community can grow. That's where the real freedom is.


Thank you,
Sigma
Dear zoos, friends, and interested others,

I can have a flair for the dramatic, and sometimes, I take inspiration from historical military strategy. That can often lead to a miscommunication.

Violence is not really a means of fighting a war, at least what the war really is, but violence is a symptom of when the leaders in a war make mistakes. In The Art of War, by General Sun Tzu, the general says that very little is remembered of the best military leaders in history because of the very success of those military leaders. They won strategic victories, and they gained the concessions they wanted with little or no violence or loss of life, and the general public was hardly even aware that a war was happening at all. There were no great battles, and there were no heroes; there was only a talented leader that avoided the need for them and was happy for the entire affair to be forgotten.

No matter what you might think, there are bloodless wars constantly going on in our society, often ideological wars. The fact that these wars remain either wholly or mostly bloodless is evidence that the leaders, on both sides, have at least not completely shit the bed through incompetence or arrogance. I will compare and contrast a few different situations where ideological wars have, in one case, very nearly reached a critical mass where they could translate into violence and, in the other case, steered largely clear of any potential for open or acknowledged violence.

For my first example, let us take the ideological battle over racism in the United States, which led to the Black Lives Matter movement. I actually support the political interests of Black Lives Matter, but on the other hand, I believe that more could have been done, by the movement's leaders, to prevent the kind of escalation that could lead to people potentially getting hurt.

This is a marked contrast with past civil rights movements, such as the peaceful protests that were organized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. Dr. King is only one example of a great civil rights leader that materially contributed to the improvement of conditions for African-Americans.

I would also point to artists, in the hip-hop community, that have materially contributed to peaceful and largely united relations between African-American majority neighborhoods in Atlanta, Georgia, which is unsurprisingly (to me) one of the few metro areas in the United States where the living conditions of African-Americans have been improving and also the capital city of one of the few states in the United States of America where African-Americans have succeeded at increasing, rather than decreasing, their political empowerment over the past generation. Voting drives have played a huge role in African-American activism in that state. More unity messages could have led to the Black Lives Matter cause being adequately united and organized to prevent the potential for serious escalation.

The LGBTQ community has largely followed suit with African-American community, except in one notable respect. I will get to that later. The use of a mega-acronym was a somewhat silly method of doing it, and I like to think that "queer" refers to "all you other odd ducks" rather than inquire whether we should expand the acronym beyond LGBTQ. Anyhow, at the heart of the success of the LGBTQ movement is unity, and because of that, we have largely managed to keep our political messages organized.

However, let me tell you why violence against LGBTQ is rising and the LGBTQ community has been suffering from some political setbacks, this year. Notice that the people that are calling for treating the families and physicians of transgender youth like criminals are using words like "groomer" and other scare words. If you look at the rhetoric and the tactics and if you are zoosexual, you might see something familiar.

It looks familiar because the people that are currently terrorizing LGBTQ youth and their support networks are the same people that cut their teeth on harassing the politically and socially isolated zoosexual community. The fact that we have fewer means of fighting back makes us a relatively safe target for people that really just want a punching-bag to practice on, in preparation for a higher stakes fight.

We zoos are really a made-to-order punching-bag for people that want to refine the tactics that they intend to use later against the LGBTQ community. Zoos represent a cross-section of the human race, and because of our political isolation, we do not really have a united political movement behind us or a particular political party that we identify with. That comes with all of the baggage. It comes with all of the blemishes. Furthermore, because we are probably born this way, rather than made, most of us really have little or no mental preparation for how to fight for any political cause, but if all we know about ourselves is that we are queerly drawn to non-humans, we know very little at all. Because of this, we have perfectly natural human reactions to being isolated and scared. When we are taunted, we get angry, and we make fools of ourselves because nobody had a chance to teach us to do otherwise. People that choose to cut their teeth on bullying us get an extensive amount of practice at bullying other people that are born with queer genders or sexualities.

Well, currently, the transgender community, in the United States of America, is in serious trouble, and if you look at the rhetoric and the tactics that are being used to terrorize those people, I'll be jiggered if many of those people are not literally the same human beings, using different screen-names, that were terrorizing zoosexuals a few a years ago. I particularly aware of this because I am also a transgender woman, aside from my occasional sexual experiences with animals, and I just keep seeing the same shit. These are exactly the same people, and the same people have been gleefully driving the rising tide of transphobic violence in the United States.

By their abandonment of zoosexuals, the LGBT community have given their enemies an absolutely perfect punching-bag. They have given their own enemies a safe target that they can do literally anything to terrorize in order to perfect their methods of doing so. They have given their enemies a training ground.

Unless the LGBTQ community changes their mind about zoosexuals, we zoos might remain on our own for a while, but the same principles must ultimately apply to our internal politics. Let's take the example of the hip-hop artists in Atlanta, and let's work on establishing our own political unity. Let's work on developing a platform that we can agree on, and by "platform," I mean to include agreement on what tactics and rhetoric we want to encourage in the name of zooey activism.

Whether we like it or not, we are involved in a culture war, but a culture war does not have to be violent. Violence is just what happens when people fail to do it well. You cannot prevent serious trouble unless you can get people on your side to unite well enough to establish tactical, strategic, and ideological unity. Diversity is good for you because, when you bring in people from diverse backgrounds to your cause, you tend to mellow out extremist sentiments, and your leadership tends to be more conservative (not in the ideological sense but in the practical sense) in what kinds of risks they want to take in their strategy and tactics.

It's not a war that we wanted, but it is a war that has come to our door. I abhor violence, but that is all the more reason why we should learn to fight a culture war well enough that we can avoid violence, particularly against ourselves. A large part of what you need to do, in order to avoid violence. If we can establish a clear platform, which includes a widespread sense of agreement on how we should correctly respond to people that choose to bully us, we can do a lot to keep violence out of the picture, and in time, we might be able to produce a strategic victory.

Furthermore, we must stop letting bad guys use us as a training ground. We must stop letting them use us as a punching bag in preparation for terrorizing others. As long as we continue letting those lunatics engage with us, they will continue using their experience at terrorizing us to get them ready for terrorizing other minority groups, including transgender people.

I will tell you how to help the transgender community if you chose to do so. Do not engage with people that really just want to use you as a punching-bag. Do not let them sharpen their knives on you. Do not engage. Do not engage. Do not engage. Do not rise to their bait. Stop letting evil men use you to train up in preparation for terrorizing others. Stop letting the most evil people in the world use you as a tool. Stop letting yourself get used. Stop it now. Start there.

After that, let us unite on finding and engaging successfully with friends. Friends matter.


Thank you,
Sigma
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Dear zoos, all of our friends, and anyone else that is interested.

I am Sigma, the barely sexually active zoosexual trans-dragoness that really just likes to talk about seemingly random political philosophy, but pay attention, zoos, because political philosophy is something that anybody needs to know about if they want to get serious about social change.

*snaps her tail resoundingly for attention*

I am going to talk with you about the concept of platformism, now that the country where it was born is being ravaged by war.

Just a sec. Russia, jeez, how many times does Ukraine have to say no? That old treaty was between the Cossack Hetmantate and the Tsar. First, the Tsar failed to hold up his end of that treaty, which was why the Hetman declared it null and void, and then another of the Tsars later destroyed the Cossack Hetmantate and attempted to force the people of what is now Ukraine to live under the institution of serfdom, which is basically like keeping people in roofless prisons and giving the local bully boys you call "aristocracy" the right to beat them to within an inch of their lives if they don't work. They naturally rebelled several times, and under Nestor Makhno, his Black Army--which was a bunch of utterly rugged badasses that called themselves anarchists--marched, as part of an alliance, with the Red Army in this really big revolution in which they kicked the Tsar's butt. However, the followers of Makhno and other leaders like him were not volunteering to become subjects of the Soviet government by participating in that revolution, and they righteously fought against both the Soviets and the Nazis, both of which were authoritarian regimes that just did not get what "no" meant. Ukraine does not and never will belong to Russia. The governments that that treaty applied to stopped existing a long time ago, so give it up, Russia. Ukraine says no.

Communism was not principally a bad idea, in my opinion. Unfortunately, Lenin's vanguardism sort of blew up in his face, in a way, because the supposed "vanguard" ended up being just as corrupted and selfish as any aristocracy, which was what Orwell was trying to point out to us in that book where he had this really cute horse that had a heart bigger than his brain. Animal Farm did not, as I think Orwell had intended, discredit socialism or communism, but the book very effectively pointed out the problems with vanguardism. The pigs were like the vanguard of a communist movement, and unsurprisingly, they ultimately behaved with the same self-serving greed as the aristocracy that they replaced.

The Ukrainian anarchist leader Nestor Makhno had a very different strategy. Nestor Makhno was not like most anarchist leaders, who tended to favor a more inclusive and less restrictive concept of anarchism, but instead, Makhno pursued a policy he called platformism. Platformism works a lot like the name sounds: the idea of platformism is that an anarchist organization must hold its members to an expectation of embracing a platform, which is a clear and concise agreement in regard to core beliefs and principles, and a platform may also delineate what that organization considers to be acceptable tactics.

However, I do not believe that Nestor Makhno's idea was entirely original. A very similar concept has been used for centuries in the organization of fraternal organizations, going all the way back to the early masonic organizations. The headless pyramid that we in the United States see on our money, with that creepy floating eye over it, represents something important about how masonic organizations are organized. While masonic organizations might have leaders within that organization, those organizations are really united, foremost, by a shared set of ideas, beliefs, and principles. In traditional freemasonry, this includes a shared belief in a supreme being, but it is 2022.

However, that symbol is still appropriate for the United States government because the United States government is a constitutional republic, which means that our country does not have a living ruler, our president only serving as the leader of one branch of our government. Instead, we have an abstract idea, embodied in the Constitution of the United States of America, that describes the shared ideas that define us as a country. In theory, our country's only true master is that single document.

On the other hand, the important part of that is not that we are a constitutional republic, per se, but the fact that we have a constitution at all. In fact, I believe that many constitutional monarchies have done a better job than the United States at upholding the principles that we claim to stand for in the United States. One example of how strong the limits of a constitutional monarchy can be is one famous instance when Queen Victoria had a very strong desire to have Prime Minister Palmerton removed from his post for praising the European revolutions of 1848, which is historically known as the Spring of Nations. As Prince Albert correctly pointed out to Queen Victoria, though, a monarch is not an absolute ruler in a constitutional monarchy. Therefore, that constitution was ultimately more powerful than the most powerful person in that country.

The idea that unites constitutional republics, constitutional monarchies, masonic organizations, many fraternities, and platformist-minded anarchist organizations is that all of these types of organizations of people are united by a shared set of ideas that they agree upon.

Many other anarchist leaders disagreed with Nestor Makhno because they believed that requiring members to agree to a specific platform would lead to an organization having fewer members, but when Nestor Makhno's once skeptical colleague, Eric Malatesta, saw Makhno's followers at work, Malatesta agreed that ideological unity had been good for helping bring Makhno's forces together with a sense of purpose. This is the reason why Nestor Makhno was the single most effective leader in the entire history of the Ukrainian anarchist movement. He understood the value of leading people based on ideas that they willingly accept.

This is important for zoos. If we are going to get serious about uniting politically in our own interests, we must also get serious about figuring out what we really believe. Many people point to the ZETA principles, but from my point-of-view, that is only like a sort of "bill of rights" for animals that belong to zoos, not really a full-fledged platform.

I think that, for us to really get organized, we would need to have open and serious discussions about what types of behavior we are willing to associate ourselves with and what types of behavior are really not us. Zoos have made serious mistakes in the past by letting people, who did not follow our established principles or best practices, seem to have positions of importance in the community, and this is not something we can ever allow to happen again. In order to avert those kinds of situations in the future, I believe that it would be valuable for us to start having serious discussions about what approaches to engagement with the public we are willing to accept. The wisdom that we have developed, over the past several years, could eventually be translated into part of a generally accepted platform.

*wraps her wings tightly around herself and looks very sad for a moment*

For the past several months, I have been very distraught over the sorts of problems that can arise when we fail to be clear on what our boundaries are, and it's time to get used to having to say "no," sometimes. There are certain things that are not tolerated in the zooey community, and if you need to ask why before you have gotten to know us well enough to intimately understand our history, then you are in the wrong community. We have the customs that we do because not following those customs has led to crises in the past. Not following those customs has led to good leaders becoming so frustrated that they just walked away, shutting down identities that some of them have had since literally the 1980's. Boundaries matter.

*smiles*

Boundaries are not about pushing people away, but sometimes, being clear about boundaries can save a friendship. I have been in three relationships, in my life, that have lasted for more than five years, only the first of which ended in a break-up, and the most important thing in the world, for keeping those relationships alive, has been boundaries. Being clear about boundaries can establish trust, and a relationship that is worth anything is really nothing but trust. If I talk to people about my boundaries, it's not because I want to push them away, but it is because I want a future with them.

An organization or a community needs the same wisdom. Boundaries, whether those boundaries are determined by a platform, a constitution, or a set of traditions, can bring us together. Boundaries make us strong, and they give us shared purpose.


Thank you,
Sigma
Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

Look, it was not my idea for the admin of this old feral-themed chat to shut down their group. They kicked me out because I actually said the furry name of someone, who happens to be an outspoken zoo, that had given me a couple of kittens the night before last night, and my friends, which turned out to be the lion's share of active participants, followed me to a new chat that I had created. It was not my idea for them to leave the old one, but they apparently did. It was apparently the last straw after a litany of abuses, by the admin, against zoos. The admin of the old chat had some kind of a meltdown, and they shut it down for good, abandoning the handle that my own group has now appropriated.

Non-zoos are absolutely welcome at the new chat, but there is one catch: at least one of the admin is a zoo, and her name happens to be...


Sigma
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Dear zoos, zooey allies, and interested others,

If all goes well, I am getting two kittens, soon! A friend needed a new home for them, and I promised to send lots of pictures. I already have one adult cat, and it is going to be interesting to see how he acclimates to two new faces.

Recently, I had an experience with a chat administrator that was not exactly comfortable with zoo...or any other "adult" subject matter. It was really easy to find common ground with this person, though. We ended up having similar feelings about posting obscene material, especially obscene fetish material, in a safe for work chat. While I might do adult things, too, that is not all that I do. I have other tricks! I like to talk about animals for many reasons, not just because I occasionally fall in love with one of them.

Many zoos prefer to hang out in safe for work social venues. This might sound paradoxical, but there is a socially leveling effect to this. Nobody is encouraged to focus on adult subject matter, and zoos merely are not an exception. It is tragically unfair if NSFW material or even extreme fetish material is welcome in a chat, yet zoos are specifically snubbed. In a SFW chat, I only have to follow the same rule as everybody else. At all of the mixed zoo and non-zoo places I find on the Internet, with one notable exception (hi, Lykon), I keep finding people that I also know to be zoos almost exclusively in the safe for work chats. At the better ones, the admin are aware of this fact.

Also, most of us do not have to go on the Internet to find attractive animals. Most of us probably have one lying within three feet of us, if not on top of us, at any given moment. For some of us, the Internet is mostly for all of the other stuff we like to do, including posting totally SFW pictures of our animals. Some of us actually find it a little bit stressful to talk about our sexuality at all.

It is hard to get the better zoos out there to talk about their sexuality because they really just want to be normal people, and it puts them in a very uncomfortable position to be a subject of controversy. Many of them find the idea of zoo pride activism to be very stressful.

However, the word "activism" just means you seek change. One thing that I want to change is the belief, by non-zoo chat admins, that they have to be exclusionary toward zoos just in order to maintain a wholesome SFW atmosphere in their chats. I gently came out to that person, and I said that I really agreed with that person about their vision for the chat. I said that I am also queer, but I do not want to have queer pornography in a SFW chat, either. I just want to hang out with my friends, and I also like to have a place where I can show off some of my simple 15 minute pencil sketches. I agree with that person's vision because that person's vision benefits me.

Zoo pride activism is not always pursued in a positive way, and I am sorry for that. We are trying to get better. We are trying to perfect the idea. We are trying to establish protocols, so we can avoid situations where we generate unexpected epiphenomena and backlash effects. We do not quite have it down to a science, yet. We are still trying to instill a sense of decorum, restraint, and discipline in zoos that wish to pursue change.

Nevertheless, we must not just keep on getting triggered by the word "activism" because one way that we can pursue it is to talk openly with each other about our strategy and how we approach the pursuit of change. An acquaintance of mine on here is still not convinced about zoo pride activism, but I have actually been listening to that person's feedback. I have been trying to answer that person's criticisms. That person's words have not been wasted.

Activism, for me, means I want to make things better. It takes a lot of practice to really get good at it, but I really am trying. My favorite way to do it is to meet people halfway, to find common ground, and to make new friends. I might have a long way left to go, but you are not wasting your time if you just try to talk to me about things. Even if we are not exactly on the same page, yet, I would not be talking to you back if you were not worth my time. Thank you for some great conversations, and I hope that a time will come when we can really see eye-to-eye and call each other friends.


Thank you,
Sigma
I am just going to make this a very short blog entry.

The truth is that I am very surprised at how many zoo rights related organizations are already off the ground, at this point, and there are some that I was previously not aware of. In the past few weeks, I have had a chance to meet some of the world's most amazing people.

This is reminding me of what I have read about the Homophile Movement. Those early gay rights organizations all agreed that they wanted to make things better, but they also disagreed with each other on many things. Diversity of ideas is really a good thing, in the long-term, even though it is inconveniencing, in the short-term. It is like the difference between growing a tree and growing a weed: it takes so much longer to grow the tree, but the tree grows to be big, strong, and magnificent. Its roots are deep.

We are slowly reaching accords on the important stuff, and from those places of accord, we can build lasting unity of purpose.


Thank you,
Sigma
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