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Something about the "shaming IS harm reduction" idea makes me think there& #39;s maybe a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of intracommunity harm reduction.
"Killing the cop in your head" refers also to forgoing moralism and whatever "mutual understanding" you wish to see enforced on people who have not been consulted and simply exploring the possibilities of mitigating harm within the terrain that they exist.
Shame-as-social-control creates authority in spaces that have no use for it, and resent among the people cowed into the petty authoritarianism of clickbait morality.
Confronting the material reality of a plague with evangelizing moral authority didn& #39;t work in the 80s and 90s and won& #39;t work now. Condoms work. Needle exchange works. For people so hung up on historical materialism, maybe once in a great while it wouldnt hurt to learn from it.
Health-based harm reduction and prison / policing aboltion have a lot in common - much of that is recognizing the intentional limits of moral authority on doing anything to improve the lives of those being controlled.
Does this look like mask-handouts at illegal parties? Drinking straws that can be inserted below masks? Working with organizers to build spaces where safe distanced gathering can occur? Maybe!
Would all this be harder and less immediately rewarding than the moral crusade that passes for "activist DJing"?
Caring about your community means recognizing space for activity that may make you uncomfortable or not want to partake in. Using what small amount we have learned to help people make safer "bad" choices is better than creating shamed space where only unsafe "bad" choices occur
Staying home is a fine choice, and one I& #39;m currently doing besides my day-job. But shouting from the windows about good and evil betrays the longing to return to the spaces of alienation and authoritarianism we wanted to leave behind.
It is harder to confront COVID-permanence with solutions rather than the moral dialectics that weren& #39;t working last winter. In the immortal utterance:
