mozz

They were trying to justify why it's okay for conservatives to come and set up a table and hand out cryptofascist literature. Giving the interview was lecturing any left wing students that they need to get used to that because it's not stopping. Like a lot of their principles, they were only meaning for it to be applied in one direction.

I do think they were surprised that they'd even need to deal with refusing to apply it in the opposite direction against such a vocal opposition, because I think there is a general assumption in the minds of modern conservatives that all the "normal people" agree with them, and so it's always a little bit of a shock if a big bunch of people are unanimously against them (even if, in a logical sense, it shouldn't be surprising).

All of these were revolutions. If they worked, an anarchist one can work just as well.

All the revolutions I listed made things way worse. If they were catastrophes, an anarchist one can be as well.

Not technically wrong, but also not that useful as a way to analyze. It's not moving the goalposts to clarify statements or to draw different lessons from different events.

If you're honestly willing to learn about anarchism, I can link you to things

Sure, what should I read?

there's no point if you're here just to argue

If you interpret "Which one are you advocating for" and "for all I know, once I hear your details I will be on board for them" and "yeah I'm open to hear more explanation" as me just being here to argue, I think you are mentally unprepared for the kind of collaboration that'll be needed or the kind of resistance you might get to actually making an effort to destroy the system (by any definition of that phrase.)

Which, I mean, is fine; not everyone talking on the internet needs to be down to personally go out and seize the means of production. But I think if you're going to make that kind of bold statement about what "must" happen, it's fair to ask you to clarify and defend it at least a little bit.

I would recommend instead to specifically voice your concerns to Biden or to your congresspeople. It won't do all that much, but it will do infinitely more than just silently voting and nothing else.

Finding an organized group that is trying (through activism or voting or both) to influence policy is probably an even better way. Ralph Nader wrote a great article about this and he has a significant history of achieving wins like the creation of OSHA and FOIA -- basically in short summary, he recommended forming a coalition which will only vote for a particular leader if that leader will commit to some concession to humanity that you're trying to achieve. Then, communicating that to the leader in a credible fashion to put pressure on them. It takes a ton more effort and it's not guaranteed to work, and you have to get out of your house and find other people who feel the same way. But it does actually produce tangible results. Just leaving the box blank will either do nothing or produce a catastrophically worse result; there is no possible way that it can help in any capacity.

Fun fact: There were hundreds of triracial isolates in revolution-era America, i.e. communities of mixed white/black/native people all living together in a little anarchist-style arrangement that said more or less "fuck this" to the whole concept that we have to join up with some larger entity that gives us official permission to exist as a society. They all died out as one particular one of the large entities won the conflict and waxed in power and gradually took over the place, but for quite a while they were apparently pretty good places to live.

You realize that Britain was not a "foreign occupier" at that point, yes?

My point is that the system of having people physically on one side of the ocean making decisions for the people on the other side, with no pretense of it being fair or justified or representation for people from the New World, makes violent overthrow a lot more unavoidable. I think it's more sensible to apply lessons from the American Revolution to the Mexican War of Independence than to what will happen if you walk into Washington DC armed, with a million of your friends, and announce that the system is going to be different now.

Likewise, most liberal democracies you have now are results of revolutions against the monarchies. Exactly how do you think the world changed from monarchic feudalism to capitalist democracy? Magic?

There are different responses appropriate to different levels of oppression. Violent overthrow of a monarchy is often the only way. Violent overthrow of a foreign occupation is often the only way. My point is that looking at the current system in the US, there are a lot of ways to "destroy" the system that will do a lot of damage to its positive aspects and not change much at all about its horrible aspects except for making them worse.

You're in an anarchist server talking to an anarchist. Take a wild guess :D

Of course, it's easy and surface-persuasive to say "destroy the system and things will be better" and keep the rest of it vague. Once you start getting into details is where you run into the oh shit it's actually not that simple factor.

Who knows; for all I know, once I hear your details I will be on board for them. But it's hard to say if it's all vague and feely-good-based.

Iroquois Confederacy FTW

Removing a foreign occupier through violent revolution actually has a pretty good track record, yes (markedly different from destroying an unjust domestic system through violent revolution.)

Which one are you advocating for within the meme? Or something else? "Must be destroyed" can mean a few different things, all the way from FDR or Bernie Sanders which I'd be in favor of all the way to Russian Revolution which I'm not. I'm sort of just taking a guess at what it might be and responding based on the guess, but yeah I'm open to hear more explanation.

The system for all its significant faults is the only thing stopping Amazon from employing literal slave labor in the US, or any Republican who can pay / attract enough violent followers from firebombing every abortion clinic they can find the location of. Dangerous inequality of power isn't something the Americans created; it's a feature of the world which needs to be grappled with and moderated (whatever means you set out to use to do that.)

I'm not sure what you mean by "destroyed," but revolutions which set out to thoroughly destroy the unjust system completely have a track record of making things much much worse (e.g. French Revolution, Russian Revolution). If that type of thing is what you mean by destroyed I would urge you to look at places where what you want to do has been tried, and what happened after.

The system for all its significant faults is the only thing stopping Amazon from employing literal slave labor in the US, or any Republican who can pay / attract enough violent followers from firebombing every abortion clinic they can find the location of. Dangerous inequality of power isn't something the Americans created; it's a feature of the world which needs to be grappled with and moderated (whatever means you set out to use to do that.)

I'm not sure what you mean by "destroyed," but revolutions which set out to thoroughly destroy the unjust system completely have a track record of making things much much worse (e.g. French Revolution, Russian Revolution). If that type of thing is what you mean by destroyed I would urge you to look at places where what you want to do has been tried, and what happened after.

You can make a protocol that allows for not-yet-defined behavior, or has parts that are prescribed to work in a certain way if you're choosing to implement some certain behavior although you're not required to. The 7-layer OSI model and SMTP-email headers are two good examples. Even grafting encrypted or multimedia email on top worked, more or less, reasonably well and was still interoperable for the most part. They could have used that type of thing as a starting point, instead of doing the equivalent of "well we don't want to constrain what types of networking applications you might want to implement, so we're just gonna specify the from and to addresses. You do your checksumming and MTU management the way YOUR application wants to do it."

I mean I'm not gonna sit too much in judgement of someone who created something which is working and producing good things but it's hard not to be wistful about how much better it could be if the spec was specific enough that the different apps could substantively talk to one another.

Friends don't let friends use vague protocols

ActivityPub is popular because it solves a vital problem, which is fine. But the protocol itself as a protocol, in my unfair opinion, is way too loose and basically results in little single-app fiefdoms that communicate outside their borders poorly if at all. I don't know what the solution is, but it definitely is a problem that didn't need to exist in its current severe form.