May Day report

I had a pretty great May Day! I started by helping to put up the stage for the speeches and such at the end of the march. Then I took the tram to the starting point, found that they hadn't thought of finding someone to carry the red-and-black front flag, and offered to do it if there really was nobody else who wanted to. Which of course meant I ended up doing it, even though I did it three years ago. It's heavy and there's a harness to help you carry it.

Four nazis tried to attack the march, which was very stupid of them since there were 1400 of us. One of them ended up going to the hospital I think--they attacked the wrong part of the march, the one where the antifa people were. Or was that intentional? We speculated that maybe they do this kind of thing as a hazing ritual for newbies or something.

Anyway. The speeches at the end of the march were fine (I was a fan of the rule that limited speeches to three minutes) and also there was good music. Then we went to another rally, which stood and shouted slogans about the right to strike at the Social Democrats when they marched past (they're suggesting limiting the right to strike). Then went to the Social Democrat rally to give out flyers about same. Wow, they have super-long boring speeches.

And then I went to get something to eat with some of the others, and ended up at the May Day after-party and drank beer and came home at 2 am. I never go to parties! Also I drink very little. Well, I didn't drink much here either, I had like two beers. But I'm glad I went, I had fun.

Recent reading

Oops, forgot to write this up for a while...a lot of these are short though.

Late in the Day by Ursula K. Le Guin (2015)
Poetry collection that I really enjoyed, it touches a lot on political and other issues I've been reading non-fiction about. But of course very enjoyable on other levels as well--I love her language so much. Recommended!

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber (2004)
This is definitely worth reading! I like how it suggests avenues of possible scholarship/political thinking, but doesn't feel it has to flesh everything out. My thoughts about this book could maybe be a separate post, if I had the time/energy to write it up. But it's interesting how it talks about non-modern societies as arenas of political struggle that we can learn from and be inspired by. Also how groups that are often read as ethnic are often actually political in origin, for example, there's an "ethnic group" on Madagascar who are actually the people who didn't want to live under some authoritarian kingdom, and escaped and founded a more egalitarian society. I do however want to talk back to him when he talks about consensus methods vs voting as decision-making methods. His descriptions of voting as a method (driven by competition, shaming the losers, premised on the threat of violence to subdue the minority) just does not jive with my lived experience in organizations using that method. But I'm happy to discuss it more (probably in some future Skype talk with jesse_the_k).

All Systems Red by Martha Wells (2017)
For my fannish book club. We all enjoyed this, it's just a very readable book (well, novella)!

Return of the Peasant: a history of the world in ten and a half blog posts by Chris Smaje (2017)
The author seems to be a farmer in the UK with a blog who also publishes papers in various journals/magazines? I found this by blog-hopping somehow. He writes about a lot of stuff I find interesting (energy, environment, technology, agriculture, etc) and also his references make my to-read list grow. Obviously the "world history" here is not meant to be comprehensive, just a sort of dive into themes he wants to explore.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee (1989)
Recced by julia_here at some point, I think? It's about epic struggles between mankind and geologic forces, in three sections. I was most captured by the one about the US Army Corps of Engineers vs the Mississippi River, especially because of what it says about the side-effects of that struggle. But the one about Icelanders fighting a volcano eruption is also very captivating! Recommended.

ETA: Oh, and I can also recommend this essay by an archaeologist and an anthropologist about how human prehistorical social organization is more complicated than people previously thought. Specifically, it says that the generalizations "hunting and gathering society = simple, egalitarian organization" and "agricultural society = hierarchical organization" that people often make are not actually true in general. I wish that essay was a book instead.