yeah.

that’s all i’ve got to say, but i have a strong urge to say it.

if i had a penny for every time a neocon accused me of being ‘uncivil’ right before and after casually dropping a slur…

It was a revelation to me: to have flat structures, you not only need to make it possible to organize without hierarchy, but you also need a process to constantly weed out emerging hierarchies.

i’ve noticed this is a common source of disagreement i keep having with nonanarchists.

where someone thinks that i’m advocating purely for the organisational aspects of anarchism, but not also materially, socially, culturally, and politically. they’ll dismiss my criticisms of the current system or proposals for alternatives as ‘that would never work today’, and instead cite monolithic, mythological essentialisms like ‘human nature’ at me which is just their opportunity to mansplain capitalist logic to me and throw down some ‘might makes right’ moral argument. people who think tool libraries would never work because one time their underpaid coworkers kept stealing other persons’ food from the breakroom fridge or something and well that’s proof of the greed inherent to all human beings and no we will not interrogate what leads them to stealing food. material conditions? what’s that?

anarchism to me isn’t simply a worldview or a form of organisation: it’s a lifestance, a lifestyle, a way of being, a way of thinking and a way of acting — and i believe it works best when it is all of those things. social change is cultural change is political change. when i advocate for change, i’m advocating to change both the system and the people who recreate it.

‘but how will you prevent [insert consequence of hierarchical conditioning] from happening under anarchism?’

i already have a pet theory:

• the sick children are sick because they’re subjected to secret medical trials.
• rescuing the children means rescuing the research which means secret new booster.
• bonus: the children will die either way.

now, the booster doesn’t need to be good. it would just be really funny if the immaterial benefit of saving the children turns out to be materially beneficial in an almost eviler way than forsaking the children for the antitank mines. (pls give fire resistance)

now, if the booster is bad, that would be thrice as funny: antitank mines forsook and children sacrificed, for shitty research that amounted to nothing really helpful.

this all could also explain how they’ve managed to survive so long.

mine came with a battery defect and no longer turns on. i used it a total of four times.

postcovid prevents me from going to the library to print the RMA and then to the post office to actually ship the fucking thing, and i have no one to help me get rid of it. so now it’s a paperweight.

she’s alluding to the fact that these characters — the ‘soyjack’ and ‘gigachad’ — are historically, and still actively are, alt-right charicatures. together with their friends, ‘tradwife’ and ‘doomer (girl)’: they represent misogynistic, racist, antisemitic, and white supremacist tropes.

you mean the migration ‘crisis’ and collapse in ‘“living” standards’ which were brought on by US-EU neoliberalism driving down the standard of living in other parts of the world before coming home to roost?

there are certainly ways of reversing direction, but people in the core would sooner choose literal fascism before giving up their imperial lifestyle. they use the IMF to politically terraform ‘underdeveloped nations’ and export their own harms so they can say they’re ‘meeting climate goals’, and then complain about all the emissions and migrants coming from those countries which are ravaged to supply their hyperconsumption. the same migrants which predominantly staff their service, medical and technology sectors to prop up their precious treats and their oh-so superior ‘knowledge economies’.

voting for fascism is the individualistic choice which lets them keep their treats and means they don’t need to interact with their neighbours or advocate for real change. it’s easier to blame the victims of their actions than to cut the DARVO shit and accept responsibility.

at which point your profit becomes linked to the degree to which you provide the functionality

except when the commodity is a basic necessity and there’s no alternatives. ‘the market’ can’t really ‘vote with their wallet’ on the cost and quality of shelter, particularly when price fixing is rampant.

sidenote: ‘voting with your wallet’ implies people with more money than you should have more say in what’s ‘more valuable’, because the rich can always outbid you, and homo economicus is only a thought experiment. (see: foreign real estate investment, conspicuous consumption…)

i’m going to ignore your posting history and assume for a moment you aren’t a contrarian debate pervert. what exactly is the point you are trying to get across?

you agree we should move past animal cruelty, but because we have animal cruelty today, we still need to have animal cruelty today?

you agree that animal testing is fundamentally wrong, but because someone was unconsensually subjected to unethical experimentation, we need to keep the animal testing?

why do you feel the need to agree with people but then say ‘but that’s not how it works today’?

i see these types of comments in every comment section about societal problems. ‘i agree X needs to change to Y, but we don’t have Y today, sweaty. 💅’ like- what? are you all really just trolls, or do you really think you’re being insightful and helpful? because this isn’t what a discussion looks like. it’s dis-miss-ion.

think disallowing votes (down or both) from non-subscribers would defeat the point of the all feed, which to me is to display the most active/interesting posts on the Fediverse right now. You can’t have that if it is only community subscribers that vote.

isn’t this what ‘scaled’ sorting is / could be for?

being trans and having auDHD with a childhood passion for natural philosophy inoculated me against heteronormative brainworms and their cousins: capitalist, workist, Protestant-work-ethic bullshit.

being mobbed, assaulted and abused because of this — by parents, siblings, peers, teachers and strangers — is what taught me to hate.

losing friends to war, suicide, and honour killings is what taught me hopelessness.

watching my parents work 90 hour weeks and still struggle to pay the bills showed me the contradictions.

being abandoned and homeless as a teenager when i started fighting back is what radicalised me.

Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, Luxemburg, Beer, Stallman, Graeber, Swartz and Serafinski taught me why i’m angry, and taught me how to imagine again.

the fight against triple oppression is what keeps me going.

it’s like you wrote:

providing a few predefined options for you […] instead of you having to find the words to explain how uncomfortable you are and what you want the solution to be.

i’m speaking from my experience with script change. it’s a low-friction, consistent way for anyone at the table to communicate both how they’re feeling and an explicit, specific resolution/action that is known to all players with the agreement that no one *needs* to get into details or explain themself. if something shockingly uncomfortable happens, it’s much easier to reflexively lift/tap a card, or type 2 – 3 characters in the chat, than it is to abrasively yell ‘stop!’ and then try to discuss it over.

i’ve seen cases where someone yelling to stop was interpreted to be IC. or that they were just ‘caught up in the moment’. (this is the reason for safewords; the cards are known to be meta/OOC.) or they didn’t completely know where a scene was going, but they had a suspicion, but they didn’t want to disappoint the group, and player safety wasn’t a part of the pregame discussion so they didn’t know how to express their discomfort and froze. the misunderstanding always only lasted some seconds, but it always lasted a few seconds too long for the person in discomfort. if it needs a discussion: ‘pause’ and take five to talk with the GM or another player privately.

in every group where player safety is discussed and safety tools are used: i’ve never seen a scene get far enough to make someone uncomfortable, and it rarely impacts the flow of the game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narodniks

syndicalism is a tendency of libertarian socialism. it was anarchists engaging in — typically violent — direct action that bred the popular labour movement, women’s suffrage, the abolition of racial segregation, and others.

How did a philosophy of minimized government involvement contribute to the regulations and enforcement mechanisms around our labor laws?

… because we live in a society? the State needs labour, but if all the labourers refuse to sell themselves until labour-buyers stop X, then the State may decide very graciously to abolish the practise of X. so the theory of syndicalism goes: rinse and repeat till you have eroded all the power of labour-buyers, and you can seize the workplace and cut out the State.

the same ‘literally nothing’ that currently stops us from ending starvation, poverty, homelessness, war…

people and ideology create the institutions which (re)produce and enforce a status quo. this is not inherently bad, and it would not be significantly different under any other ‘system’. we are all the state so long as we do nothing different.

• part 2: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=CvdcWnCsSBY
• part 3: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=fFfIVTZwSUA

i like this quote, from the end of part 3:

There is a strong tendency to speak of the machine as solving problems, when, in fact, really, it is the program which describes to the machine what the machines do. This is overlooked. I think a great deal of confusion arises from this.

It is not that we do not have adequate machines to solve our problems many times, but rather we lack adequate descriptions of how to solve the problem. And this is a very important point to understand.

— Richard Hamming, Computer And The Mind Of Man, Episode 1: Logic By Machine

Per the March All Hands discussion […]

i guess from experience that this was neither ‘all hands’ nor a ‘dicussion’. it was 'whoever[‘s logged in before office hours| doesn’t want to enjoy their lunch] gets to look at boomer memes and dull graphs for 2 hours while listening to the latest round of edicts graciously handed down by the Board.’

if you missed it, and you’re lucky, they recorded it. if you’re very lucky: you get an email with the slide deck and talking points for what could’ve just been an email to begin with.

what a harmful, elitist, high technocratic, economistic, no-true-scotsman take: someone who doesn’t view the world in pure quantitative terms and understand precisely a dialect of jargon has no valuable insight?

why ‘productivity’ specifically? why not GDP? or GPI? or SPI? or HDI? or HPI? or GBMI (Goodhart’s Bad Metric Index)?

you’re right that this character wouldn’t be part of a ‘solution’, under current conditions, because it would be formulated by a well-funded political thinktank, specialising in number-go-big policy, tacked to the end of a dredged report with absolutely no involvement from measly imperial subjects.

this assumes that:

1. all workers are ‘producing’ anything.
2. all workers are serving real needs.
3. the difference between supply and demand is really so low that any dip in ‘productivity’ would harm anything more than an executive’s RoI.
4. that the threat of this financial ‘harm’ necessitates more work.

with the increase in ‘productivity’ over the last century, if we reduced our expectations, and stopped letting monopoly money run our entire society, and stopped burning surplus resources because it’s ‘unsold’ or would drive down prices: we wouldn’t need to work even 20% what is expected of us now.

this assumes that:

1. dependence is inevitable if Europe is not the most competitive.
2. that economic competitiveness had anything to do with natural gas imports.
3. that our economic system and its basic dynamics are unchangeable.
4. that our needs are unchangeable.

the natural gas situation wouldn’t have been avoided if Europe were more ‘competitive’; neither would any other geopolitical situation. instead the EU should have — and is currently — diversifying its domestic energy sources. the EU could also work on energy coöperation and reducing energy usage.

interdependence works for everyone. independence is a destructive mindset.