the_abecedarian
@the_abecedarian@piefed.social
- Comment on [deleted] 4 days ago:
because AI is primarily being used against workers of all kinds, accelerates climate change, provides cover for nations to use violence, and gives state bureaucracies excuses to screw us over by having supposedly “neutral” AI make decisions
- Comment on If people hate Trump so much they try to assassinate him don't they know it will have the opposite effect and turn him into a Martyr? 6 days ago:
there are people so far to the right that they prefer him as a martyr instead of letting him make the right look terrible to everyone who isn’t a cultist. they prob also want to make room for a more committed and smarter fascist to lead.
- Comment on From a socialist perspective, what are the solutions to doomerism, and that "can't find love" feeling that I've been seeing on Twitter (specifically a frontend)? 1 week ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFz_2GFRzxE
see if there are local groups and resources
- Comment on From a socialist perspective, what are the solutions to doomerism, and that "can't find love" feeling that I've been seeing on Twitter (specifically a frontend)? 1 week ago:
actually you can! start or join a skywatch group tracking/identifying DHS aircraft using adsbexchange.com ; do accounting or other logistical planning for a mutual aid group; etc.
- Comment on From a socialist perspective, what are the solutions to doomerism, and that "can't find love" feeling that I've been seeing on Twitter (specifically a frontend)? 1 week ago:
Act locally. there has never been more opportunity to do so: ICE watch, mutual aid, community safety groups, union organizing, skill shares…
- Comment on Stop the datacenters 1 week ago:
- Comment on Stop the datacenters 1 week ago:
one person can’t fight them everywhere, but a bunch of connected local movements can.
- Comment on Durian supremacy 2 weeks ago:
so you’re saying Artemis III will have a durian heat shield
- Comment on Borders 5 weeks ago:
i cited wars as counterexamples against peace. if that doesn’t make sense to you, im not sure we can have a productive conversation.
i completely agree that humans are part of nature. So if you like, everything we do (and everything that occurs ever) is “natural” because everything is part of nature, but that’s a fairly useless definition. we also do some relatively unique stuff, too, that is not mirrored by other animals. Nation states are not the same as wolf packs or bonobo societies or whale pods.
the most important difference here is that nations have institutions (such as a border) that exist despite the actual relationship of the people on those borders. the people on both sides of the Berlin Wall didn’t want it to be there. The people who live in Beebe Plain, a town divided by the US-Canada border, have much more in common with their neighbors than the politicians in Washington DC and Ottawa who make decisions for them. this is not the same as pack membership setting territory boundaries, this is control from a distance by strangers.
anyway this has been interesting, im gonna get on with my day.
- Comment on Borders 5 weeks ago:
you said “decide to keep the peace” which I provided counterexamples against. I shorthanded that as “negotiate” but you can just sub in your exact language and the point stands.
i don’t deny the social abilities of wolves. i don’t even claim that there are zero similarities between social boundaries and formal borders. what im doing is pointing out that borders formed by the institution of the state are fundamentally different from social boundaries adopted by people, wolves, or any being capable of negotiating them.
my motivation here is to undermine the idea that national borders are “natural”, which tends to legitimate them in many people’s minds, like the meme in this post tries to do. I want to undermine that because i believe it isn’t true and because there are fundamentally better ways to organize society.
- Comment on Liberals and Leftists should buy guns. 5 weeks ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X39IkX2OpBs
tl;dw consumption alone is meaningless. you need organization first and foremost
- Comment on Borders 5 weeks ago:
so the borders of the US were agreed upon by entities who decided to keep the peace, not established by war and genocide? the borders of several African states were not set by colonial violence? the border between Russia and Ukraine is being “renegotiated” and not fought over? Israel “renegotiating” with Lebanon?
there’s a big difference between populations who come to agreements with each other and states who do things for power.
- Comment on Borders 5 weeks ago:
the state is an organization that includes a tiny minority of people who get to command and control the greater population. you can argue that its power is legitimate because of elections if you want, but it is not the same as the people. meanwhile, the wolves don’t experience that kind of government.
- Comment on Borders 5 weeks ago:
those aren’t borders, those are territories arrived at by wolves interacting with each other and deciding to keep the peace. has nothing to do with formal borders imposed on us by states
- Comment on What’s the difference between communism and socialism? 5 weeks ago:
Well, why does it have to be the size of China? “China” refers to a state, a centralized government made of a small number of people who command and control a huge territory and its peoples. It doesn’t make sense to define a future communist society by the criteria of a state. Instead, take all the land and people that are currently within the state of China. If we tried to set up a communist society there, how can we do that? People can have different answers (especially when it comes to details), and I’m certainly open to ideas.
Disclaimer: the following is not “the answer”, it’s a set of ideas that I believe are compatible with a communist society and can be one example of how such a society could look.
I’d imagine that power that the state usually has would need to be dispersed among directly democratic assemblies and unions:
Geographical Organization : Since government is something everyone participates in and since everyone affected by a decision gets a say in it, we can have federated layers of assemblies of the people. So, at the most local level, a single neighborhood in a city or a single village or a single other municipal unit (e.g., “the people who live along this 2km stretch of river") can have an assembly. Neighboring assemblies can talk to/cooperate with each other to solve issues that affect all of them. Local assemblies can regularly send delegates (who can be instantly recalled, don’t serve timed terms, have no power of their own, they just communicate their assembly’s position) to meetings and create citywide, regional, etc medium-level assemblies to handle bigger projects. That could include rail lines, ecological issues like forest management, anything that needs to be produced at a larger scale, etc. Then, for those few questions that really and truly affect a territory and people the size of China (e.g., coordinating defense vs a large national army; dealing with climate change; coordinating specialized, high-tech production of medicines, and so on), there can be “national” assemblies. Again, the power would need to be held at the lowest level, or else you risk forming a state when a few greedy people use their position to accumulate power.
Membership Organization: Parallel to the geographic assemblies I mentioned above, you can also have unions and associations of workers who are in the same workplace and industry. Everyone who works in a local cafe has a say in how that cafe is run. Then the Cafe Workers Union can make presentations/have an additional say (beyond what the members already have in the geographic assembly) in any local or regional decisions involving, say, food service and safety, disposal of food scraps and cooking oils, and whatever else is relevant. This would go for any union: an agricultural workers union, a research physicists’ union, a students’ union, and so on. Also, since people can split their time how they like, maybe some minimum amount of commitment to a job would be needed for union membership? Not sure.
Where do these ideas come from? The Next Revolution by Blair Taylor and Debbie Bookchin (discussing the ideas of Murray Bookchin and others). Also check out council communism and, more broadly. Libertarian Socialism as a tendency. Communism is really interesting! There are many different ideas about how we can get there. Whatever you believe, even if you think we need to capture the state, we are at a point in history in which we need to work together to build the power of workers and ordinary people vs. capitalists and the state.
- Comment on What’s the difference between communism and socialism? 5 weeks ago:
socialism: workers control the means of production (the factories, the farms, the freight trains, etc). there is no separate owner. this is usually considered a key step on the way to communism.
communism: a society without any classes (no capitalists, no working class, no one in poverty, everyone is on the same level of society); without money (everything ppl need is provided for free and fairly, there are no capitalist markets); and without a state (government is not a separate group of people who command others, the people make decisions on things that affect them).
Even those communists who believe the right strategy to reach a communist society requires them to take control of the state first believe that the ultimate goal is for the state to “wither away” as it becomes less necessary over time. other communists disagree that it is a possible to reach a communist society by taking control of the state, rather the people have to build their own non-state power that eventually defeats it.
- Comment on How come some Corporation or some Business don't sponsor a protest? Like McDonald's sponsoring that No Kings protest. Or a hotel giving free room and board to protestors and so on? 1 month ago:
because then they would be punished by the trump administration. he would have govt agencies cone up with reasons to investigate them, take away their tax breaks, etc.
the point of a company is to make money, that’s it.
- Comment on They cannot see the things that will hurt them 1 month ago:
it’s hard to keep your brand new society when the tanks show up immediately. this is not a weakness of anarchism or any political system.
you can look to rojava and the zapatistas for an example of defense that has worked for years despite long odds.
- Comment on They cannot see the things that will hurt them 1 month ago:
they did it for years in a significant territory. the state had no power there during that time. that was a success, even if it was rolled back by a nationalist military (supported by nazi Germany) and undermined by authoritarian communists.
also, again, there’s rojava & zapatista Mexico currently, plus other historical examples.
- Comment on They cannot see the things that will hurt them 1 month ago:
the point of anarchism is not to control the state, but rather to stop having one. for the territory that made up anarchist Spain, that was successfully achieved. it’s no weakness of anarchism itself to be defeated militarily; all kinds of societies have been defeated militarily.
- Comment on They cannot see the things that will hurt them 1 month ago:
anarchism rejects nations, so why should its success be judged based on national borders? a successful society is av successful society
- Comment on They cannot see the things that will hurt them 1 month ago:
read some of the links OP helpfully posted to clear up the misconceptions about anarchism you display in your comment
- Comment on The Hidden System Shaping Reality: Alexander Dugin, AI, and the Collapse of the Old World 1 month ago:
it simply describes their ideas, without criticism or even taking the time to explain “hey these are dark enlightenment thinkers whose ideas are driving the far right, so beware that esoteric fascism is what all this theory is leading to”.
for example, it simply names Julius Evola as an influence without noting that he was an esoteric fascist. only a few seconds of broader context is provided in the middle of the video. not only that, it takes dugin at his word about “rejecting” fascism.
i guess someone already pretty well versed in this stuff would be able to see what’s being described, but videos@lemmy.world is a place for general videos. Nearly no one in it will know a ton about the so-called ‘dark enlightenment’. it’s irresponsible to post this outside of a community that is already studying this stuff because it effectively platforms their ideas uncritically.
- Comment on The Hidden System Shaping Reality: Alexander Dugin, AI, and the Collapse of the Old World 1 month ago:
Dugin is a fascist whose ideas are given inflated importance by the right wing and the Russian regime. https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/just-call-it-fascism
- Comment on Is it the American way to complain about the US, or is it that other countries aren't worth complaining about? 1 month ago:
easier to complain about what you know. Americans do complain about other places when they’re not simply on vacation there
- Comment on Why do some racist, classist, homophobic ect people do "good" things sometimes? 2 months ago:
it’s a tv show, it was written to be that way because it’s part of a copaganda machine
- Comment on How would you actually tax the ultra wealthy? 2 months ago:
the only sure way is to abolish private property and give the businesses to the workers
- Comment on People who partaked in "ludes" or qualudes what were they like? In today standards? Is it really like The Wolf of Wall Street protrays them or what? I also heard sometimes prescribed? 2 months ago:
it’s a movie, it’s not real
- Comment on If Tyler Perry is a billionaire with his own successful movie studio then why are his films so bad? 2 months ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpgqWZyAJtM it’s long, but f.d. signifier is good at this kind of analysis. he discusses your question directly
- Comment on How does Chuck Schumer still have a job? 4 months ago:
because the capitalists like him there
