I swear I’m not Jessica
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Anarchists are the antithesis to authoritarians, not liberals, which doesn’t even mean they’re right. Besides, liberal democracy can support and enforce non government entities that take rights away from others. Even if you ignore slavery, where the liberal government arrests human beings if they try to gain freedom illegally, companies and owners can legally take away things necessary for life. Are the homeless, starving, and dirt poor really free in any meaningful way?
I personally think we can build on liberal democracy and the concept of private property, but serious adjustments need to be made to actually have a free society. We need, at the bare minimum, a welfare state that ensures everyone has the necessities, and access to the tools for self improvement. A society that doesn’t give people fair chances is not a free society.
I’m in favor of limiting the private accumulation of wealth and power, as people shouldn’t have the unilateral power wielded by the current ultra rich. This wouldn’t be communism, but it would maximize freedom and minimize class conflict. It would democratize economic power as much as possible. Another key change would be making it as easy as possible to check the power of those who wield violence. Police must have democratic accountability.
The most controversial thing I think we need is a federation for peace, who’s sole purpose is limiting and resolving interstate conflict. It would work to destroy or neutralize weapons of mass destruction, while also binding member states to enforce agreements made by the federation. It would be fundamentally decentralized, relying on the shared self interest of humanity to squash the selfish interests of humanity. The goal would be to prevent a single player from holding too many cards, even the federation itself. I don’t expect it to happen until people recognize that we need it, but it is a part of the puzzle that cannot be overlooked: the quest to ensure liberty must be global, as the mechanisms that take away the most liberty, mostly global capitalism and imperialism, have no borders.
Having a mentality of sovereignty won’t change much, if only because it doesn’t fix many of the inherent problems with a global human society. A big downside to capitalism and free markets are mortal limitations. We can’t predict the future or understand the full effects of our actions. We estimate based what information we have, but we can often be wrong even if we have good intentions. The externalities of our actions are basically impossible to calculate, and even when we discover them, we possess the ability to suspend our empathy and ignore potential harms.
I’m also not a fan of the assumption that we can’t tell others what to do until we put our own lives in order. Sometimes getting others to do things is essential to changing your own life and improving your own situation. On a personal level, you can set boundaries with toxic people in your life or convince others to leave you alone. On a large scale, you can overthrow an oppressive system or change laws that prevent you from living well. Telling others what they should do is not mutually exclusive to making changes in your own life.
Sovereignty is great and all, but even if widely respected by most, some will not, and those that do must step in to protect it. The way I view it, laws don’t exist for ethically behaving people, they exist because there will always be unethical people, and there’s no way to ensure that any ethical person will always be ethical.
The fundamental reality is that someone who wants to do good can participate in an evil system. Unregulated global capitalism uses child slaves and keeps people in poverty, all while pumping substances into the environment that harm everyone. You might respect the sovereignty of everyone you meet, but anything you buy can be made by manufacturers who don’t respect the sovereignty of people you’ll never meet.
Capitalism is too big for its problems to be solved by individual behaviors without changing our current system. We must change it to actually make a system that respect everyone’s anything, be it sovereignty, human rights, or the ability to live.
The problems start before Stalin. I also don’t know what you mean by capitulation or how the USSR worked less by it than capitalism.
As far as a system that everyone buys into out of their own free will, it’s probably not possible. Even in a system that perfectly ensures equality for all people, a couple of assholes will not like the system because they want to dominate others. Even anarchy would require a mechanism to uphold anarchy through violence. The best we can do is to create a system where everyone is equal and it is most prudent to uphold it from a rational point of view.
In order to own anything at all, you need a mechanism to protect that property with violence. When you have to protect your own property with violence through hired guards, it’s feudalism. A necessary quality of capitalism is that the government protects your property with violence. Capitalism cannot exist without governments that defend property with violence or the threat of it.
All modern states are the final arbiters of decisions, just like the USSR and similar governments. If business contracts are signed in America, it’s the governments that force people to follow them. If you have a property dispute, the government decides who wins through laws. The government ensures that individual rights are protected through violence, from basic rights like the right to life, to the right to have private property. Laws are backed up by violence, as laws only matter when enforced.
The issue with attempts to establish communism in the past is that their democratic mechanism either failed, or never existed to begin with. When democratic workers councils disagreed with what Stalin wanted, he just ignored them. What could they do about it? When member states of the Soviet Union got upset with federal decisions, tanks were sent in to silence any dissent. These states enforced systems that centralized power and allowed small groups, or even a single person to make unilateral decisions and never have their power challenged.
Sorry, but the protection of rights requires that governments limit freedom. All societies and nations on earth do this. If given absolute freedom, some would kill and brutalize to gain power, forcing everyone who wants to avoid this to band together and enforce rules that prevent that behavior. This is the biggest reason to rationally want a government. Even if you believe rights aren’t social constructs themselves, everyone knows they must be fought for.
Some tankies use the fact that governments inherently limit freedom to claim all governments are authoritarian, and therefore states like the PRC and the USSR are no better than liberal democracies. Your definition of authoritarianism supports the bullshit arguments tankies make.
Authoritarianism is a sliding scale, and not every limit on freedom is equivalent in contributing to a country being more authoritarian. Not having the freedom to kill others without consequence doesn’t make a country very authoritarian. Not having the freedom to publicly disagree with the government is a large factor in a state being authoritarian.
Communism and socialism do not necessitate having no freedom of speech or bodily autonomy. Communism, as defined by Marx, was the final stage socialism and anarchistic in nature.
The idea that communism is always authoritarian uses the idea of communism popularized by Marxist-Leninist movements, where dissent is highly controlled and limited. In reality, these regimes were socialist at best, calling themselves communists to claim that only their version of socialism would deliver Marx’s communism. Even to the authoritarian communists themselves, their states never achieved communism at any point.
Nah fam. Miss me with that nonsense. Why would a tiny nation control the US? They have influence with American interests in many ways, but control it? It makes no sense. The only position that this would make sense from is the same antisemetic cabal bullshit. A small group controls the world alright. The wealthy, most of whom are white Christians. They control things, not Jews.
When it comes to indie stuff or blockbusters that were huge risks for the studios like Dune, you should pay for it if you have the ability. Pirating doesn’t directly hurt most of the people who worked on the film, as they usually get payment upfront. It does hurt them in the future, as studios won’t finance similar future projects or projects with those creators. This is why you should pay for risky movies that are of higher quality.
If Dune didn’t make the money it did, the franchise would have ended there. I was surprised it did as well as it did, as while I never doubted that it would be a good movie considering the people that made it, I was convinced it wasn’t something most people would appreciate. The director’s last film, Blade Runner 2049, was better than the first movie, but not enough people saw it in theaters. I was blindsided by Dune even getting made, let alone being a financial success.
Bottom line, pay for movies you want people to make more of if possible. Pirate shit you don’t care about. If you can’t pay for media because of financial hardship, pirate away. Investors have made streaming services suck for consumers while squeezing workers into having little disposable income or time. They deserve piracy, as it’s the harvest they have sown. Property is a social contract, and by not letting workers see the benefits of ownership, they have every right to not respect it.
All elections, or just elections in liberal democracies? I can’t think of any major Marxist country that didn’t do some form of representational democracy, even if the elections are just a formality. China does it. The Soviet Union did it. They didn’t make elections dissappear, they just kept politicians that disagreed with the party line from running.
In large societies, not every decision can be made through direct democracy, so we need someone to make those decisions. Why not have a legislature? Is a group of unelected decision makers better?
Hamas would do it too if in the IDF’s position, but that’s even more of a reason for us to support Israelis that want lasting peace. Part of sustainable peace would be Israelis supporting anti-Hamas Palestinians. Attacking Gaza doesn’t really threaten Hamas’ power, but IDF reserves protesting Netanyahu did. If Israelis stop harassing Palestinians, Hamas risks getting replaced by a less fascist government. The goal of Hamas isn’t bettering Palestine, but ruling Palestine. Parts of your country being destroyed is preferable to getting overthrown for political entities like Hamas.
Any of the popular definitions. If they’re simply organizations against the government, they’re terrorists as Israel basically claims Palestinian land is their own. If they’re organizations that use terror, brutality, and fear against citizens to achieve political ends, they’re definitely terrorists, and so are the IDF.
I agree overall, but for Germany in particular, they have fewer opportunities for renewables than other countries. At the same time, their most plentiful source of home grown energy is coal which is worse in every way to the gas they were getting from Russia. The economy only matters in so far as it serves the people, but it unfortunately matters a lot for people’s well being, especially in the context of global capitalism.
The Chinese government does a ton of bad things, but slave labor doesn’t make much sense here. I don’t think it would have significant enough savings. Like the other person said, them not being as safe probably plays a bigger role. I would not be surprised if we see a large scale nuclear disaster in China within the next 50 years.
I never said we’d be able to understand or prove everything, just that there is some logic underpinning reality. It might be that some things are fundamentally unknowable, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist to be known, just that we’ll never know it.
I also don’t get what the halting problem proves about reality. It might be possible that infinities or unresolvable results are real, so long as we can still exist. The cosmological principle proves that we have to live in a reality that it is possible for us to exist in, otherwise we wouldn’t be here to observe it. So long as the infinities or uncomputable problems don’t prevent our existence, it might represent reality. If the equation doesn’t allow us to exist, then it doesn’t represent reality.
Magic is just what you don’t understand. Everything is a mechanism. Even if there was magic, a human soul, the afterlife, God, it would still operate under certain logical rules and principles. Eventually, unless there was something keeping us from obtaining knowledge, we would be able to apply science to magical forces. Science will eventually understand everything it is possible to understand, which might honestly be everything.
We know that the universe was much denser and close together based on measurements, but cannot truly see the beginning. We think it’s most likely that the big moon in the sky most likely came from another planet hitting ours, but we don’t know exactly how the collision went down. Science is our best understanding, not some absolute source of knowledge. Our interpretations are often incorrect and updated accordingly, and even the most accurate theories are known to be an incomplete understanding. Until we understand everything, science is the search for knowledge, rather than knowledge itself.
The failure of the Biden administration to attempt anything on immigration has been seriously disappointing. I would have hoped to see even a half assed attempt, especially after how poorly the Obama strategy of trying to be shitty on immigration to impress independents worked. Seems as though they fully believe nothing can be done. Pathetic.
Or maybe it is true because the smaller purveyor is still pretty terrible and has openly been super imperialistic. They do not deserve support or respect simply because they oppose a country that is larger in almost every way. It’s possible to not simp for empires yah know. Enter transactional agreements with them to support yourself, sure, but don’t think of them as friends. Russia was totally in the wrong, as they started it to everyone’s detriment, including their own.
This might be a controversial take, but I don’t actually buy that Marxism is some sort of antithesis to fascism. They’re very much opposing forces in theory, but then again so is liberalism.
Fascism is not fundamentally about being illiberal or anti-communist, but it always is. It is about hijacking a system to enforce an ultimate hierarchy of might make right. Words, ideologies, principles of political philosophy are all meaningless tools to accomplish the fascists true goals. They only want power at the expense of others to the maximum extent. They want to enforce through violence a world where they reign over the infidels, the poor, the weak, the other They’ll eventually exterminate those at the bottom, sometimes quickly, but definitely eventually.
Communist states are probably harder to hijack than liberal ones as they require slightly different tactics, but it can happen anywhere. So long as the good ideals and principles that supposedly represent a nation are abandoned, any state can become fascist.
What this ultimately means for your friend is that either they are at risk of co-signing some terrible shit, or they don’t actually hate modern art as much as you think they do. It might be that they are more vocal about their dislike, but still respect that people find value in it.
The original meme is straight up Nazi propaganda. The Nazis and fascists in general are big on enforcing a correct view of what good art is. Anytime there is someone who has a very negative view of modern art beyond simply not caring for it, it’s a red flag. Those sort of people are either vulnerable to fascism or are already fascists.
Wow. Everything you just said was wrong. This war has empowered NATO and the US more than every action taken by the US in the last 20 years combined. The biolabs theory is a joke as is the idea that a republican FBI director appointed by Trump would protect Biden. I always hear about how non Americans have a better perspective on US news, but deluded misinfo like this makes me believe that idea is bullshit.
Effective individual behaviors rely on empathy and denying short term gratification for long term prudence. Empathy breaks down on large scales for most people, and denying short term exploitation to build a better world is not something even the best of us can reliably do. Good vibes aren’t useless, but they are not enough to make necessary changes.
As far as relinquishing power goes, my eyes are wide open. It’s necessary in theory, but I don’t respect laws that prevent people from living well. I respect the enforcement, but only because I must work to avoid it. I recognize that the only way to stop some bad things is violence, and that all rights must be protected by someone. It’s undeniable that violence, although often avoidable, is necessary to exist. Human made laws and concepts without enforcement will be trampled on and basically don’t matter.