How do we mourn?
Many anarchists reject the conventions of faith-based rituals. No gods, no masters, no religion… seems to be the line most anarchists draw. We talk a good line of not falling in to religion, but like so many other spooks, the stink of religion lingers when we look at how we treat the dead.

One of the major problems that anarchists wrestle with is what James C. Scott terms “legibility” - that is, “the state's attempt..to arrange the population in ways that simplif[y] the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion”. For Scott, this attempt at simplification includes large-scale centrally planned projects like relocating peasants and developing the streets of Paris to prevent rioting as well as standardized measurements and the encouragement of crop systems that lend themselves more easily to being taxed.

There is a tension between people who don't/would never call themselves anarchist but agree with (some) anarchist principles, and people who own the label. Projects like Crimethinc have perfected (?) the naming of things as anarchist, when some would call those things simple human behavior (like, making and eating meals with friends, etc). Obviously the main point of this sort of practice is to de-mystify anarchy and anarchists, to put the bomb-throwing in a larger, less scary context, or to negate the scary bits altogether.

The Zapatistas have a saying, “preguntando caminamos.”

We don’t need to be perfectionists. We don’t need to have all the answers before starting a project or pursuing a course of action—we can get started and work out the details along the way. Rapid prototyping, the process of ‘failing as fast as possible’ in order to gather feedback about what works and what doesn’t is an effective strategy for completing successful projects. But, to take a step back, why are we even motivated to work on projects or pursue any goals at all—why do we even walk in the first place?

Some years ago there was an anarchist magazine called Practical Anarchy put out by the Alternative Media project. The publication advocated for anarchy as a practice, "such as organizing housing cooperatives, environmentalism, workplaces and DIY media." In short, the idea of the magazine was about putting the ideas of anarchism into every day practice.

Everybody's doing it, so let's do it too: let's talk about Donald Trump. As anarchists, what are we to make of this guy?

Is this guy the new Hitler of the 21st Century? Or is he just a total idiot and ultimately inconsequential? Or is Trump himself a non-issue, but the pandora's box that he opened of blatant racism, xenophobia and the "Alt Right" the real threat that we need to take seriously?