This blog is a collection of the broad range of things I write about. Due to the work schedule for my day job, my writing on here is rather sporadic. If you want to receive updates about new writings, you can follow me on Twitter, on Mastodon (union.place/@firewithfire), or subscribe by email at the very bottom of this page.

I’ve tried to organize the tags and categories in such a way as to make it easily navigable. Some posts are about organizing for radical social change, including all degrees from organizing theory to concrete organizing tips and strategies (I do a lot of union organizing as a rank-and-file worker). Some posts are about political theory pertaining to power, liberalism, capitalism, and such things. Some posts are about research projects I’m pursuing in science and philosophy.

The articles on this blog are not bite-sized or flashy. The writing mostly springs from needs I have for content that doesn’t yet exist and that I think is valuable to write about in some depth. Nor am I a professional activist, academic, or writer, but craft ideas on here in the spirit of the amateur, as experimental filmmaker Maya Deren describes it:

The major obstacle for amateur filmmakers is their own sense of inferiority vis-a-vis professional productions. The very classification “amateur” has an apologetic ring. But that very word–from the Latin “amateur”–“lover” means one who does something for the love of the thing rather than for economic reasons or necessity. And this is the meaning from which the amateur filmmaker should take his clue. Instead of envying the script and dialogue writers, the trained actors, the elaborate staffs and sets, the enormous production budgets of the professional film, the amateur should make use of the one great advantage which all professionals envy him, namely, freedom–both artistic and physical.

The name of this blog is a reference to power and that to meaningfully change society you have to build and exercise your own power to fight those currently in power. This does not necessarily require taking power by seizing the state through electoral or other means but rather building popular and grassroots power. Many are apprehensive about building and wielding power, and while I think there is reason for caution and care, I see no other way around it. We have to fight fire with fire and power with power.