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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 8th, 2023

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  • Hey guys, this right here is a super valuable point to address and really strikes straight to the heart of the ability of a system like this to give the illusion of choice. People absolutely will still think, despite this, they are still in control and we need to address it not dismiss it.

    I’m undoing the downvote on this comment, it absolutely is a big part of the conversation, even if you think it’s naive.




  • Look, I’m a man, I’m not feeling insulted by this at all. If you are, maybe it’s time to ask why.

    I have no problem being a man while also acknowledging that sexual assault by men is a problem that is big enough that it has created a “caution culture” where people teach their daughters to be vigilant and women will cross the street if someone is walking behind them to stay safe. It isn’t like this is overblown, studies vary but all agree it’s somewhere more than one in ten women are victims of sexual violence in their lifetime. That’s a non-dismissible statistic.

    Sure sexual assault by women is a thing too, but men tend to handle it differently than women do. All we are doing here is acknowledging that in our culture “male stranger danger” is a thing that exists and is pervasive and strong enough that many women would be willing to risk the bear because at least it won’t rape them.

    Why would you be taking that personally?






  • So let’s say we do it. We transform our country and it becomes everything you hoped and then the neighboring country invades. How does the anarchist society stand against that? How do they have a militia that can operate beyond the immediate resources of each member (beyond begging door to door)? How do you maintain supply lines without people doing that full time? How do you buy supplies without taxes to pay for them? How do you administer supplies without someone doing that full time? How do we respond to rockets fired into our territory? Does Bob have an anti missile system in the barn?

    It just seems like a nice idea but too fragile to succeed.


  • Anarchism leaves no openings.

    The way I see it, anarchism leaves nothing but openings. Your egalitarian paradise only needs one family to want to seize power gather weapons and find like minded people to form a feudal military organization and they can start picking off and dominating families one by one. Individuals would not be able to stand against this centralized power and the time it would take to meet, agree, and mobilize a militia wouldn’t help.

    It isn’t that anarchism evolves into feudalism, it’s that it takes centralized power to resist centralized power. And as soon as you start concentrating power, having a standing army with wages, or other centralized systems to pool community resources, that’s government. Even, yes, a descentralized non-capitalist deregulated egalitarian democracy.

    It doesn’t bother me that people want this kind of system, it bothers me that people want to call this simplified form of community governance “anarchy” which is by definition “the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government” because as soon as you start imposing rules like “we can expell a murderer if everyone else votes to” it becomes a simple form of communal government and the definition no longer applies.






  • because the private company should create as much profit for the owners as possible - it has to be as lean / efficient as possible.

    Yeah but no. It would be if the owner/shareholders weren’t skimming of the top. The process may be lean but the pricing is designed to maximize and take as much as the market will bear. Which undoes the benefit the efficiency could bring to a public service.