Tiresia, tiresia@slrpnk.net

Looking at how they calculate the CAT fair share, they do not address my critique that it’s unfair that if someone buys a polluting product, only the producer is held responsible. This “fair share” score still unfairly gives economies that export services and import goods a free pass.

I trust those scientists to have gotten an accurate measurement of their working definition of fairness, but I have no reason to trust the procedure that gave them that working definition.

Er, I am not American. But as far as greenwashing is concerned, my nation is using American greenwashing rhetoric for plastic recycling, subsidizing American electric cars because they’re good for the environment while cutting funding for public transit, letting American companies advertise their greenwashing initiatives on television and billboards, etc. Chinese corporations keep quiet and there’s propaganda associating them with environmental harm through fast fashion and products that are quick to fall apart or made of poison.

American greenwashing is endemic, treated as inevitable and as the best option possible. China has the benefit of being the alternative to that dominant lie, but it’s still merely “the alternative”.

Ah, but there’s the beauty. The only way an anarchist is going to have the power to act on a global scale is if they’ve acted in good faith.

Humans are multi-faceted beings. We develop the parts of ourselves that help us in the environment we find ourselves in. All humans are capable of good faith and of bad faith depending on what they think will help them. Capitalism rewards bad faith behavior, resulting in people cultivating their bad faith sides. Anarchism does the opposite.

Because anarchism is free association, the only anarchist communities that survive are the ones that maintain a culture of acting in good faith with one another; the ones that don’t become places nobody wants to go to. And because anonymous currency, hoarding of goods, and other forms of amassing wealth are red flags to be unmade, people can’t raid one anarchist commons to get a leg up in the next; whatever damage they cause results in them having less power than if they cooperated.

Anarchist societies continuously develop new procedures to prevent the development of hierarchy, abuse of power, and other bad faith activity, as their situation evolves and as they learn new ways from other anarchist groups or through experience. Ones that don’t get corrupted and fall apart, which none of their members want because society is where everything they like is. So everyone is working to improve the procedures to make bad faith actions harder and harder.

By the time you’re working with communes that can trade punches with multinationals and nation-states, they have risen above such a gauntlet of bad faith people intentionally or unintentionally trying to tear them down that there’s a very good chance they can handle the next conflict in good faith too.

This isn’t blind trust, of course; blind trust is a great way for bad faith to flourish. Anarchist societies that succeed cultivate a culture of checking each other’s work. Guerillas would be expected to be as transparent as opsec allows, and there would be reporters on location ready to get the homefront to revoke their material support for the guerilla the moment things get unacceptable.

At this point you’re just ignoring what I’m writing and regurgitating your own nonsense.

Expanding the number of supreme court seats to ensure a DNC-aligned majority. Fillibusters. Executive orders. Gerrymandering. Giving state rights to left-leaning territories and split states to create extra DNC-aligned senate seats. Attack ads. Restrict campaign funding for major donors so Republicans have less propaganda funding than Democrats do. Give migrants citizenship so they vote Democrat.

Basically, use every trick they can get away with to push the Democrat agenda through and to increase the chances of Democrats winning future elections.

This is incredibly misnamed. Neither a “worker’s” nor a “handbook” nor “to the apocalypse”. It has no consideration for the needs of workers, no proposals for action, and no advice for surviving change.

Where are the guides on how to facilitate mass migration? Where are the guides for agriculture in the absence of international supply lines and fertilizer? Where are the checklists of supplies for individuals, small communities, and large communities?

I am a “doomer” too. But I understand that we can be the difference between 9 billion and 2 billion deaths, between 98% of species and 80% of species going extinct, and it would be nice if a handbook to the apocalypse helped in any way to bring those numbers down.

The other did not reply with a plan, they tried to get you to think. I’m spoonfeeding you.

It’s true that the amount of anarchist anti-hierarchical labor is finite, which means that regularly injustices will continue when they could have been prevented (whether they are caused by humans or not), and regularly injustices will be prevented in a way that could have been less violent or even less hierarchical. We can learn to spend this labor more effectively and in a more well-balanced way, and that learning process will go on for the rest of human existence.

That said, anarchy has one massive advantage compared to surveillance states: it’s anarchic. You’re not delegating responsibility to strangers in the surveillance state, everybody can use their moral sense in their daily lives to look out for the people around them that they are already familiar with. Right now, in our daily lives, we have all these impressions of people around us. We see them, we form opinions, but our institutions only allow us to act on those opinions in extreme situations. We can’t shut off this natural anarchic mindset so we feel frustrated and powerless, or we dissociate from those feelings and become numb.

Speaking from personal experience, anarchic justice can be immensely liberating and amazingly straightforward. You don’t need a surveillance state to stop harassment, you just need a community that is ready to fight harassers. You don’t need a surveillance state to stop a hierarchical organisation, you just need a community able and willing to cut ties with any organisation.

But yes, it is possible that hierarchies go uncountered and become overwhelmingly powerful. Some say this has already happened. And it’s hard to overcome such overwhelming oppression; most ideologies don’t succeed at it for decades or centuries. Still, the playbook is clear: amass resources and supporters, guerilla revolution, fill the power vacuum with your ideological structures.

If this works, then we have a playbook that should translate to any future hierarchies if they are somehow left to become overwhelming. Hierarchies that only overwhelm a small section of the world population can at worst be overcome in the same way by the people they oppress, though in practice aid from the rest of anarchist society can almost certainly enable a better path.

In terms of surveillance, there would probably be wellness checks and food and safety inspectors and teachers that report possible signs of abuse to child protective services and an expectation for organisations to make their meeting notes public and people ready to call someone out the moment they step into a role they are likely to abuse and lots more. A community looking out for each other.

And there you have it. Teach your child that they don’t have empathy and they will not understand how to be empathetic. Add patriarchy and an unempathetic AMAB asshole can become a whole-ass adult without ever being made to stop and imagine how others feel.

That really isn’t as impressive as it sounds. English compounds are often (but far from always) separated by spaces or hyphens while German compounds tend to have no separation. Thus German compounds technically qualify as words while English ones don’t, even though they are functionally the same.

The word you pasted is Dutch rather than German, but it literally translates to “culpabilityassessmentadjustments”, or “culpability-assessment-adjustments”, or “culpability assessment adjustments” if you insist. Like with English you can just substitute one part of the compound with another to change its meaning. Aansprakelijkheidswaardevaststellingsbegroting means “culpability assessment budget”.

English can have unseparated compounds too, like “un|separated” or “base|ball”, but it feels weird to invent new unseparated compounds, while in German and Dutch it feels weird to leave those spaces. But a German compound word is as ordinary as an English compound.

Fun fact: if you’re shocked, that means your model of the world is incorrect. Luckily, you can learn and switch your world-interpreting paradigm to one that works better.

Historical materialism predicts this pretty well. I haven’t been surprised by the US since I became an anarchocommunist.

Woodchippers can’t handle the moisture content, but this is literally what industrial meat grinders are built for.

If they want to abuse people? Well then you help their victims and you try to prevent future abuse. Or are you proposing anarchists let cops abuse people because it’s what those cops are free to do?

Concretely, if someone tries to re-establish capitalism by selling stuff, you might drive them out of business by giving away free bootleg copies. Or if they try to re-establish capitalism by being a landlord, you might get the neighborhood together to fight off whoever would kick the tenant out and then let the tenant know they don’t need to pay.

If they try to re-establish capitalism by hoarding goods, you help people that need those goods to get them from the hoard. And if they try to re-establish the state by hiring cops to enforce laws written by a parliamentary majority, then you might follow cops around to protect their victims so the law is unenforceable, and help the minority establish their own voluntary structures in spite of the law.

etc. etc.

But if their “victims” want to be dominated? That’s free association, baby. You can roleplay whatever hierarchical structure you want, as long as anyone can exit the roleplay whenever they want to without negative consequences.

Talk to him. Try a translation app. Try to figure out what language he is speaking and call your neighbors if there’s anyone who speaks the language. Call your neighbors to see if someone is home so you can go inside and drink tea with the three of you.

It’s mostly not a personal failing of the woman. American culture constantly reinforces racist paranoia and treating everything you don’t like as an externality, so it’s natural that she would internalize that. It’s hard to be conscious of the fact you’re putting someone’s life at risk when you’re doing what your culture says you’re supposed to do.

But it is that cultural mindset that gets people to want to hand these tasks over to heavily armed murder-racists, and to vote for parties that empower the heavily armed murder-racists. Waking up to the police’s systemic cruelty and wanting to abolish them will necessarily involve realizing that calling the cops in a situation that involves a brown person is violence against them.

The point is also to disempower you and render you unable to resist extermination.

Within the next three years, we will either see a second American revolution or the mass execution of trans people who have done nothing wrong (though they will naturally be classified as sex offenders and felons).

You’re equally shitty to every walk of life.

So you’re being unequitable.

“The law in its majestic equality forbids both the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges” type shit.

Technically, the moment science would show an interaction between physical entities and something else, that something else would immediately be classified as a physical entity. In a very real sense, the discovery of radioactivity involved physical entities being found to interact with an as-yet unknown, invisible, intangible force.

If ghosts existed, the same would happen as with radioactivity. They would be researched, hypotheses on their nature would be tested, and a scientific theory would arise, and then they would be a part of the “physical world” too. And then all the mystics would be bored with ghosts because they are just incorporeal noospheric echoes of old people, as boring as neurology or biochemistry or stellar fusion.

Great to hear you’re on board! Please make your way to a local anarchist collective for more information.

Also, ha, “next election”, good one.

Though I am curious: why are you not on board with plans that take more than one election? It’s not like planning to break the system prevents you from voting in the mean time. You’re allowed to have hobbies.

Prison abolition doesn’t mean removing all forms of spatial containment of sentient beings from society, it means abolishing prisons.

The question is always what is the least amount of violence necessary to stop someone from harming others. Reconstructing a prison cell would require a very contrived threat profile.

First, why can’t they be in a house with a garden? What harm are you preventing by putting someone in a stone and metal box instead of somewhere comfortable? What harm are you preventing by prescribing what room they are located in, when they eat their meals, what meals they eat, or when they go outside?

Second, why can’t they have visitors? What harm are you preventing by preventing people who give informed consent from meeting them, or touching them, or doing whatever with them?

Third, why can’t they have stuff to do their hobbies? If they are a flight risk, what are they flying to? Can it be brought to them safely, can they find closure some other way, or can they be brought to it under guard?

Fourth, why are they physically contained at all? Could the harm they could cause be mitigated in a less invasive way? Could a sociopath be offered a strict social contract where they have no incentive to harm others? Could a “lunatic” be brought to an environment they don’t want to leave because it’s nice? Could a child rapist move into a child-free commune?

Fifth, why are we making this choice for them? At the very least they should be able to have a say in how things are structured, and they should be able to choose from all available options that are safe given their situation. Maybe they’re okay with trying out chemical sterilization, maybe they’re okay with a face tattoo warning others of how dangerous they are, maybe they would prefer to live in a mediterranean beach cove or on a tropical island or in a house near the people that would still enjoy hanging out with them.

It might be true that sometimes people prefer something that can reasonably be called prison over other options. It might be true that sometimes the only viable options are something that can reasonably be called prison, or death. But in every case, every liberty that is taken away, every option discarded as unsafe, and every restriction has to be justified.

There will be no crimes that carry prison as a sentence, no prison buildings that look like what we today call prison buildings, and no natural divide between safety restrictions that constitute a prison and ones that do not. I’m okay with summarizing that as “prison abolition”.

Except they also play those games when they’re the owner of a small company that can easily go bankrupt because of those games, or when they’re middle managers engaging in office politics that threatens their steady paycheck, or when they’re YUPpies working themselves into an early grave through the grindset, or when they’re working class and vote to dismantle working class safety nets.

Your comment reminds me of the five stages of grief. Denial, anger, fear of the paralysis depression would bring. But depression is not the final stage of grief, that honor goes to acceptance. I am not complacent, I am not paralysed, I am motivated by what I can still do in this apocalypse. Reading the news does not shock me or surprise me or fill me with anguish or horror; it is only a reminder that I am on the right path.

I don’t know your situation. I don’t know if it’s safe for you to unpack your grief and your trauma, because, yeah, that depression can knock you on your ass for months or even years. But you deserve to face the world with open eyes, and your activism will be better for it. Dismiss this comment as pretentious garbage if you need to, and I can take whatever words you throw at me. But one evening, when you sit down on your bed feeling particularly satisfied with how your week is going, remember it.

I wish you all the best, from the bottom of my heart.

PS: Please let me know if it helped: I don’t know for sure if this sort of attempted egg cracking is beneficial. Maybe I’ll comment in a year or two to ask.