Tiresia
@Tiresia@slrpnk.net
- Comment on How would an anarchist society work? 2 hours ago:
Maybe you’re using some formal or narrow definition of “structure” but in my experience there are lots of things I would call structures in anarchist theory and practice, from meeting templates to the mental flowcharts of emergency medicine.
- Comment on Armored Lady 💯 19 hours ago:
Uncensor it you coward.
- Comment on How would an anarchist society work? 21 hours ago:
The Zapatistas show that region-scale anarchy can work and remain stable. You need more careful and explicit structures to do things at scale, but the same goes for nation-states, just look at the average state’s legal and regulatory codes. Compared to trying not to break the law in a nation-state, participating in local anarchist organizing committees is child’s play.
We’ve only had the opportunity to apply this at a scale larger than the smallest 30-or-so nations, but in theory systems like sociocracy can nest exponentially, meaning there are applications that are already halfway to a world government.
- Comment on Nutritional Hexes 22 hours ago:
Oh no, reducing people with eating disorders’ sense of personal responsibility for their disorder. What a nightmare that would be.
Next up, let’s yell at someone with anorexia for throwing up in the bathroom!
- Comment on "Science isn't political!" 1 day ago:
Convincing people your interpretation of reality exists is literally all that politics is.
Unfortunately, despite being correct, science is also an interpretation of reality.
- Comment on Nutritional Hexes 1 day ago:
“Just stop being depressed and enjoy life”.
People are overweight because something in their diet, psychology or physiology overrides the natural desire to stop eating when they’ve had enough calories. As long as that thing isn’t addressed, trying to use willpower to overcome it can easily lead to burnout and disappointment. Sometimes raw willpower works, but most people who are overweight have tried that and found it doesn’t work for them.
Those people aren’t failures, they just happened to have a problem that didn’t eliminate itself when using willpower. If your problem is the chemicals in fast food, then stopping fast food by willpower can solve things, but if your problem is pica for some vitamin deficiency than stopping fast food by willpower will not solve things. People that stop by willpower alone are lucky, nothing more.
So most people who are overweight do in fact need more scientific knowledge, or better environments, or both. A pedestrian-murdering hellscape isn’t great for getting enough exercise. Micronutrients, letting your stomach rest, avoiding blood sugar spikes and dips, metabolism-affecting drugs like caffeine, stress eating, etc can all affect things.
And because people can’t just get up and move to a pedestrian-friendly area, or because vegetables are twice as expensive as meat per calorie, or because their job requires them to sit still for eight hours, they want to try the messy imperfect solutions that do as much as possible in their limited environment.
I can well believe that intermittent fasting works better than “burn more eat less” for someone with the unnatural lifestyle of sitting in an office chair for hours straight. The traditional 3 meal structure was built on a society where people did lots of physical labor throughout the day every day, so just trying to eat less in those 3 meals doesn’t change the fact that your body needs far fewer calories at certain times than that diet frees up, and the same goes for exercising outside of work hours.
- Comment on Is the "Gen z stare" a real thing? 1 day ago:
If it’s not social engagement, then why are you experiencing a particular social signal from it?
A boycott or a strike is political engagement. Deliberately ignoring you is social engament. A blank stare sends a stronger signal than small talk: It means actually engaging with your ideas and judging you for them. Where small talk seeks to neutralize tensions with noncommittal affirmations, a blank stare communicates a boundary clearly and efficiently.
- Comment on This is what ignoring experts looks like. 1 day ago:
That wasn’t terror, that was genocide, which unfortunately can work. See also the USA genocide of native Americans.
- Comment on How would an anarchist society work? 1 day ago:
The issue is that it’s not one problem, it’s thousands. Anarchism has countless solutions for countless power vacuums, from regulating the flow of meetings to federating different Zapatista towns.
You yourself are probably engaging in anarchic power vacuum mitigation when your friend group decides when to hang out and what to do; if anyone got too much power or responsibility you would take action to make things fair again.
Generally speaking, power vacuums are dismantled by dissolving the hierarchies that can be dissolved, changing the material conditions so power is decentralized, and building a social structure to hold the remaining power conditional on not being authoritarian. You can probably remember doing these things with your friends (or former friends).
Anarchist theory is either descriptive, like critically analysing the Zapatistas, or it’s putative, like sociocracy. So far we have no proven overarching theory of what works for everyone everywhere in every situation, but we do have lots of small anarchist collectives that are benefiting their members and their society in limited scopes.
- Comment on 4 days ago:
This is looking at global data. Most countries are a lot less wasteful than the US. It also completely disregards waste food, though it says it only makes up 5% of global caloric production.
According to the article, the US produces 14% of all agricultural calories on Earth. 28% of this is spent on non-food purposes, while 17% is spent on food but not animal feed, compared to 15% and 45% globally. This means that while the US produces twice as much calories per acre of farmland than the global average, it can actually feed fewer people per acre than average.
- Comment on Dumb bitch 6 days ago:
I hope my kids grow up to blame me for my mistakes, and I hope the same for yours. Thinking you’ve done enough by conscientious participation in capitalism is a mistake and I hope your children will grow to see that even if you don’t.
- Comment on People from or student of 3rd world nations. Is America going that way? Or do we long way to get there? 1 week ago:
“Third world nation” is a USA-invented term, meaning countries that are aligned with neither the USA nor Soviet Russia. So formally, the USA can never be a third world nation by definition.
Informally, US political culture has used “third world nation” as a pejorative, associating it with primitive society, bad economic policy, hostile non-representative forms of government, etc., to make the violent imperialist oppression of those nations more palpable.
So in a sense the US has always treated some of its population as “third world”, primarily black people and latino people. Recently the “third world treatment” has simply gone from treating these people like Mexicans to treating them like Argentinians during Operation Condor.
Though if you’re asking about when the US will treat white people like it treats people in third world countries, that’s probably going to start happening around the midterms. The Trump administration has committed too many blatant crimes to let themselves get voted out of office, so they will interfere with the election and use violence to try to get people to submit to it.
Though you’re thinking of the third world as the stereotype from US education, that’s not really how US fascism would go. By late 2027 it would probably be more like the US stereotype of Soviet Russia. Assuming any revolutionary action is unsuccesful.
- Comment on People from or student of 3rd world nations. Is America going that way? Or do we long way to get there? 1 week ago:
This is NoStupidQuestions. Please block this community if that’s the attitude you’re going to have.
- Comment on How much of it is society is collapsing versus the daily on-goings of the ruling class was so obscure that they were easier to ignore? 1 week ago:
We have the liberties we have because average people in the past knew otherwise. Union workers, revolutionaries, mass political movements, terrorists, soldiers, and civil servants. If the system steers society towards collapse, we all have to change the system by the least violent means available, which is sometimes a violent civil war.
- Comment on How much of it is society is collapsing versus the daily on-goings of the ruling class was so obscure that they were easier to ignore? 1 week ago:
Crises don’t pass, they are either resolved or they get worse. Your passivity is not a measure of the labor of those who have resolved previous crises. You are free to stick your head back in the sand, but do not blame us when we can no longer protect you.
- Comment on Anon owns nothing and is unhappy 1 week ago:
A decade from now, either we’ll be subjugated by AI drones and gaming is the least of our concerns, or the AI bubble and/or capitalism will have collapsed and the market will be flooded with data center hardware that can be adapted into PCs at scale.
- Comment on Are all rich peoples clothes designer? 1 week ago:
Please check the community title. If you don’t want to see this kind of stuff, block the community. If you want to bully people, fuck off.
- Comment on Anyone have the "resist fascism by making mistakes" copypasta? I can't find it because the internet sucks 1 week ago:
I seem to recall the fascists losing in Germany.
This sort of sabotage is for resisting a tyrannical government where resisting more openly means death. Its goal is to hasten a tyranny’s collapse, not prevent its formation.
If you want to prevent a tyranny from consolidating its power, what you’re looking for is revolution. Use your freedom of movement to organize into local militias/guerillas and make plans to take or destroy nearby key infrastructure. Optionally make contact with other cells to track their progress and coordinate. Then at either some broadly communicated time or at a watershed moment, execute your plans. If you succeed at your objectives, help ones that failed.
- Comment on If a revolution started tomorrow in the US to get rid of Trump, could the majority of society use hit and run tactics successfully? Or what would be the tactics the rebels would use? 1 week ago:
Revolutions typically only involve a small part of the population. January 6th only involved a couple thousand people and the fact they didn’t massacre congress and have a successful coup as a fait accompli was more down to the lack of dedication of the coup attempt than to the successful defensive efforts of the US government.
In a more hard-fought revolution, the people that take to the front lines are typically the ones who feel physically and strategically capable of doing so. Other people can handle the logistics, planning, and propaganda.
What tactics the rebels would use is kind of unanswerable because there isn’t a revolution happening tomorrow. The tactic current rebels use is to hide, train, recruit quietly, and propagandize. They choose this tactic because they know they aren’t in a position to win a revolution that starts tomorrow. If we imagine a world where a revolution would happen tomorrow, we have to imagine the world being different from ours in certain ways that cause the rebels to adopt different tactics that constitute “starting a revolution”.
Depending on the specific ways we imagine the world to be different, the rebels would adapt different tactics. The US military could stage a coup and arrest Trump as quickly as they kidnapped Maduro, then install an interim government to organize fair elections. There could be a surge of popular outrage resulting in swarm tactics that overwhelm key government buildings before adequate defense is raised. There could be a protracted civil war as rebels destroy military-industrial infrastructure while accepting aid from the US’ many enemies, with rebels having trained in secret militias and learning more on the go.
- Comment on What is your take on organ donation? 1 week ago:
I don’t think it’s ludicrous on the face of it. That’s basically what happens when an uninsured person dies from something that would have taken $10k to fix and an insured person gets their organs.
Doctors only get in trouble for letting someone die when that person has a medical right to the care that would have saved them. Even then there is leeway because whether someone has a medical right to that care is often something that depends on a doctor’s estimation of the situation, which means other doctors would have to testify against them for them to get in trouble. Which of course they’ll only do if they are sympathetic to the victim or unsympathetic towards the doctor and they know it won’t affect their career prospects too poorly.
So I wouldn’t be surprised if in Austria, ethnically MENA organ donors tended to die more often than ethnically MENA non-organ donors and this gap would be bigger than with ethnically European donors/non-donors (if that gap exists). Not even as some kind of conspiracy or malice aforethought, but as just a little bit of laziness here and there. Hell, not even laziness, just setting your boundaries for once and going home after only 2 hours of overtime instead of 2 hours and 15 minutes while ordering an extra test for that one patient who probably doesn’t even need it.
There is still the question whether you want to deprive someone of your organs for that small statistical increase in risk, if you’re even the sort of demographic that risks being dehumanized. And if you’re worried about malpractice, it’s much better to buddy up with a friend and agree to supervise the doctors and nurses whenever either of you is in the hospital. Most malpractice and medical mistakes are the sort of thing a lay person can catch with some attentiveness and internet searches.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 1 week ago:
Only if Steam shits the bed and it becomes harder to find indie games that don’t have AI.
AAA games have been homogenous slop for well over a decade, this will just lower their expenses.
- Comment on Theoretically speaking, if one wanted to sail the seas while being not very tech savvy – is using a VPN (Mullvad) enough? I would never, of course… but theoretically? 2 weeks ago:
Mullvad is good, but it’s not enough to make piracy safe.
An adblocker like ublock is essential, not just for blocking ads but for blocking malware.
Streaming piracy is about as safe as sketchy websites always are, which is pretty okay these days.
If you download anything, check the file type before opening and whether the type is safe. For example, .exe is extremely unsafe, .pdf is somewhat unsafe, and .mp3 is safe. Generally audio and video file formats are pretty safe because they’re very locked down in what they can do, while interactive formats are dangerous. Someone might call audio by a misleading name to troll, but it shouldn’t put your device at risk.
If you download .exe s, do not run them unless you are very confident the source is trustworthy. This means a trusted account posting on a trusted website claiming that a trusted person made the exe. I haven’t caught this guide in a lie yet, but when it comes to exes double- and triple-check everything.
The more tech savvy solution would be to run .exes (or all pirated files if you’re being paranoid) in a virtual machine so even if the virtual machine is pwned the rest of your computer wouldn’t be.
- Comment on Anon makes a wish 2 weeks ago:
Imagine needing reasons not to pre-order. I bet you pay more than €30 for games too…
- Comment on Is there a spreadsheet that doesn't mess with the data I enter? 2 weeks ago:
I was going to complain that clearly “spreadsheet” derives from paper-based tabular data editors. But apparently that term was only used consistently after 1906, while digital spreadsheets that aided calculation were conceived of in 1961. Meaning that it has meant a digital calculation aid for longer (65 years) than it only meant a tabular data editor (55 years).
- Comment on What the fuck is going on with Iran and what will happen next? 2 weeks ago:
Broadly speaking, the US is okay with invading Iran because Iran isn’t a US tributary and the Iranian state is unwilling to become a tributary because theocracy is incompatible with US tributary status (A king might swear fealty to an emperor, but god’s emissary can hardly submit to a heathen).
The primary objective of the US administration is to win the midterm elections. War has historically boosted Republican support under low-informations voters and centrists, and going by the standing ovation in Congress, Democrats are happy to go along with the narrative that this is a just war because they too support enforcing tributary status.
That takes care of the motive. The means is the US military-industrial complex. The opportunity comes in the form of the US breaking a nuclear non-proliferation treaty with Iran and then being outraged that Iran isn’t complying.
They could count on Iran not complying because Israel keeps attacking Iran (and its other neighbors), ensuring Iran will defend itself in a way that can be treated as offensive. Israel keeps attacking its neighbors because that is what the US pays them for and because their history of doing that means that if the US cut funding for unrendered services, many Israelis would have to flee to escape facing justice for their participation in genocide.
So that’s means, motive, and opportunity for the US attacking Iran. Now how will it go?
Firstly, the motive being elections means the US will keep the war going until at least after the midterms. Economic consequences of this can be spun as justifying Republican autarky. The biggest consequence would be oil shortages in most of the world. Countries with large domestic production and/or strategic reserves, including the US, Canada, China, Russia, and Venezuela, would be less affected or have their position strengthened (with Venezuela going along with the US because they now know what happens if they don’t).
In Iran, the US will keep bombing targets until it is satisfied ground resistance is sufficiently mollified, then move troops in to occupy. Given Iran’s geography and the theocratic nature of the current regime, it will likely be a phase of shattering state power followed by a phase of occupation and guerilla warfare.
The US will attempt to create safe zones from which the tributary government and military loyal to the US operate and grow in power, likely centered around urban areas, key infrastructure, and strategic resources. Given there is more support for regime change in Iran than in Afghanistan, the tributary government might attract enough loyal troops to slowly take over the fight against the loyalist guerillas and not collapse immediately when US support drops.
This invasion has bipartisan support so even the Trump administration being replaced would not stop it. I don’t know how long the Iranian state can resist, but as long as it does the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz will remain in place, and even after that guerillas will make that route unsafe. After that, getting the tributary government shipshape could take years or decades, on the long end probably getting cut off like Afghanistan.
Iran or its supporters may attempt asymmetric warfare. If the US government wants to, it could replicate 9/11 and its massive boost for Republican popularity by having a similar lack of curiosity about suspected upcoming attacks. There have been articles about a possible Iranian drone attack from a ship off the coast of California which could fail to be stopped. Similar attacks may occur on the rest of NATO, and slowly ebb as Iranian loyalist power diminishes.
The economic consequences of an oil shortage would naturally hit vulnerable targets hardest. Food delivery vehicles might not be able to afford a trip into remote rural areas during a famine, while Europe can rely on electrified modes of transport for day-to-day stuff and reserve oil for essential services.
Countries with more oil, such as Russia and the US, may take advantage of this situation. Ukraine is not looking so good.
At any time, the US could move on to the next crisis and either stretch itself thin or leave the Iranian tributary state without support in what would then be a civil war. Israel will continue its aggression until its funding gets cut and it collapses.
So it goes.
- Comment on My mom really love NBC Good News tonight. How come there isn't a show where they report on the good news of the day instead of all the bad crap all the time? 3 weeks ago:
If advertisers loved a good news channel, all corporate news would be good news channels. But scared and tired people make far less informed decisions, making advertising far more effective.
The countless horror movies you can watch online are far more upsetting than a streamer saying “fuck”. Censorship isn’t about avoiding people getting upset but about having infrastructure for silencing speech that they and their corporate partners don’t like.
Imagine if cops couldn’t give out fines, then they would miss out on being able to choose to let white people off with a warning while fining black people for the smallest infractions. This means cops would be less effective at maintaining white supremacy. And so cops have to be tough on crime despite all evidence showing that it makes crime worse. Because cops exist to maintain and expand white supremacy, and more specifically the supremacy of rich white Christian men.
Likewise, an advertiser who has a well-established policy of punishing “advertiser-unfriendly” phrases like swear words can then use that policy to suppress certain voices while letting other voices gain fame by boldly defying the rules with only a slap on the wrist. This infrastructure has allowed them to very quickly start censoring Palestine, Minnesota, and discussion of productive forms of activism and resistance in general. Whether this is a service they sell to rich white men or if it’s them choosing to do this because of their rich white owners, the buck stops with them.
- Comment on Subtitling a video, what is this sound called? 3 weeks ago:
“[tinny distorted noise]”
- Comment on (serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting. 3 weeks ago:
Glad we live in the 21st century then, where the rest of my comment applies.
- Comment on What should've been the point or points for society to throw up their hands and stop supporting the government? 3 weeks ago:
- Saying that it is self-evident that all men are created equal but enslaving blacks and genociding natives and denying voting rights to 90% of the population.
- Comment on (serious) What would we be losing in a world where most people didn't own a car? Please read the OP before posting. 3 weeks ago:
Please actually read my comment, thank you.