Oh, no, I’m doing the thing again, aren’t I?
You are getting sent to the America place
As I always say when this comes up…
If you’ve got a plan to make it happen before the next election, I’m on-fucking-board. Otherwise, harm reduction is not morally optional when the question is fascism vs. anyone less fascist, including neoliberal ghouls. The question of significant reduction of harm, even if in a still-fundamentally-fucked-system, is not something that can be dismissed on grounds of ideological purity, unless one holds that personal ideological purity with no concrete gain for the ideology’s actual goals (and potentially significant damage to the cause) is worth the lives of millions of marginalized peoples.
Those in polities with less-fucked politics, electoral systems, and executive power than the USA might find it less necessary at present, but I would argue that the point is broadly applicable even there.
Personally I usually vote. Because I usually have welfare that if I didn’t have I wouldn’t be here much longer. So like for me voting feels life and death.
Even if I don’t see myself getting emancipated by vote. Hence I’m an anarchist. For me it’s more just survival. While 99% my political energy goes into prefiguration/direct action etc.
But I definitely also can understand people who won’t vote for the “less worse candidate”. If the less worse candidate has been bombing your family yeah no. No vote. Obviously.
But I do want to say, unless you philosophically reject all electoralism under the current system which is an arguable position I guess. Unless you do that, do at least vote primaries. That’s where we sometimes get better choices.
Don’t mistake them for emancipation. But it makes a hell of a lot of difference in, for example, many homeless people’s lives if buses are free and social housing is fast tracked and kitchens are well funded and police doesn’t harass for existing. It doesn’t save homeless people. The system put them where they are and the system must be dismantled. But it lets many of them survive a little longer.
Personally I usually vote. Because I usually have welfare that if I didn’t have I wouldn’t be here much longer. So like for me voting feels life and death.
Fucking mood. I’m currently fighting with healthcare and SNAP. As if dropping 40 pounds in the past fucking year and a half wasn’t enough.
But I definitely also can understand people who won’t vote for the “less worse candidate”. If the less worse candidate has been bombing your family yeah no. No vote. Obviously.
Who does that serve? Murdering someone else’s family? Murdering more members of one’s own family?
Fuck, man, several million people are already slated for death because the less horrific candidate didn’t win the last election in the fucking USA.
Voting isn’t a love letter, and if someone thinks their feelings of moral purity are more important than lives of marginalized people, they aren’t moral in the least.
Let me put it this way - the SPD, KPD, Zentrum, conservative parties, and the Nazi Party were all intensely homophobic. The SPD was less bad than the rest.
Is letting the Nazi Party win in Weimar Germany, then, a morally acceptable alternative to voting for the SPD, or any of the others, if you’re a member of the LGBT community?
If a Ukrainian-American refused to vote for a candidate promising to stop supporting Israel’s genocide against Palestine because the candidate didn’t pledge any change in support for Ukraine in their struggle against Russian imperialism and genocide, would that be morally acceptable?
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.
Also, ha, “next election”, good one.
Thanks, humor is the only thing that keeps me going in this kafkaesque nightmare of the coutnry
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.
I only mean that as in “If you want offer this course of action as an alternative to voting, it better take effect before the next election.”
Reasonably speaking we should all be onboard for long-term planning for what comes after the fall of the current system.
I wish you had never learned the term “harm reduction”. To apply it to an ongoing genocide is grotesque beyond description. There is no bargaining. No nuance. No complex structural analysis that can cast shadows upon such a bare moral outrage. Is there any bridge too far for you? Is there any atrocity you won’t co-sign so long as double it is threatened? Draw a line and stand behind it.
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Convincing the 2024 non-voter of the error of their ways is as fruitless of a task as convincing a Trump voter of the error of their ways.
The non-voter would have to accept the fact that their not voting directly contributed to worsening the situation and literally has gotten people killed, which they will never accept despite it being factually the case. They would rather continue to pretend they have an ethical high ground
This is no different than a Trump voter having to come to terms with the fact that their vote for Trump is factually the reason why they cant afford rent, food, healthcare, lost their manufacturing job etc. Likewise, the Trump voter will rather pretend that they did not do that to themselves by voting for Trump, and maintain cognitive dissonance as if the two things are unrelated
Are you seriously letting some bad policies prevent you from endorsing the movement that has the best chance of defeating Trump in the coming years?
If you can vote for people that choose to make genocide worse, you can support people that vote in a way that makes genocide worse.
If you can vote for people that would rather hand the election to Trump than prevent genocide, you can support people that would rather hand the election to Trump than support genocide.
So why are you wasting energy in-fighting in a way that undermines our big tent opposition to Trump? Isn’t the most important thing to join together in a single front to stop him?
Is your pride and self-righteousness so precious that you would throw more bodies onto the fire?
Voting is the absolute least we should do. Voting is not democracy.
Voting is a poll. Voting will not get us what we desire.
We should vote, then we should do the organizing for a better future. Unionizing your workplace, feeding and housing your community, whatever is needed in your community.
“Why are you wasting your energy fighting in a way the undermines our big tent opposition to trump?”
You have a point with this question, so I will delete my earlier comment. But I think it applies to you too.
Like I’ve always said don’t accept false binaries derail the train.
Instructions unclear, everyone is dead.
On the upside, we just achieved multi-track drifting.
why are there palestinians on both sides and lgbt’s on one side? what does this mean
The blue track is voting democrat, the red republican, the green third party.
The meme is saying whatever way one votes, the us government will still support Israel in spite of what the ICJ calls a “plausible” ongoing genocide of the Palestinians, especially in the Gaza strip. And calls for destroying the system.
explaining the colors rlly helped, i thought they were of no significance. thanks :)
Noooo! That’s uncivil!
Civilization is the most uncivil human creation
Yeah, having no government or legal infrastructure would turn out really well for those marginalized people.
The government and it’s legal infrastructure is the main source of oppression for those marginalized people. Systemic shit, comes from systems in power.
What ICE is doing right now is just a small taste of what some men will do when they think there will be no accountability. You don’t really want society to return to a state of nature.
what some men will do when they think there will be no accountability
This proves my point. The police are already not accountable. Just look at “qualified immunity”, and their protections are written into the law.
Anarchy doesn’t mean no accountability. It means no gods and no masters.
https://anarchymag.org/2015/08/for-the-abolition-of-police/
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/strangers-in-a-tangled-wilderness-life-without-law
…But in reality, the people in this world who act with total freedom and no responsibility are those so privileged in our society so as to be above reproach, such as the police and the ultra rich. Most of the rest of us understand that in order to be free we must hold ourselves accountable to those we care about and those our actions might impede upon: our communities and families and friends.
An anarchist is one who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
- Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974
The police are already not accountable.
This is just obviously not true. The police get away with committing crimes sometimes, but it isn’t unlimited unaccountability like it would be in a stateless society. Even ICE, with their supposed “immunity”, aren’t roving minority neighborhoods lynching every brown person they can catch. That’s what a lot of them would like to do, and would do, if childish anarchists got their wish.
There’s not unlimited unaccountability in a stateless society. Did you even read the comment you replied to? If you’re gonna proselytize from your liberal high horse, at least read some theory so you can form a coherent argument
You caught me. I didn’t read your pamphlets.
Are you genuinely ignorant of the fact that anarchist theory exists? Zines and essays are great, and you should read some, but there’re plenty of books too. Bakunin, Kropotkin, Bookchin… Anarchism isn’t inherently childish- you just have a childish view of it
Can it be worse than genocide?
The visionary answer is yes, a totally controlled society.
Yeah, it could extend to the diaspora in the US. Which is what would happen if the US was in a state of anarchy.
The historical answer is no. But nuclear war is still on the table.
Ask Chiapas, it went well for them.
Not like governments are the leading cause of marginalized oppression.
Governments don’t build infrastructure, people do, governments gatekeep infrastructure
Para todos todo, para nosotros nada
Yeah it really would. Look at how well marginalised peoples were in the Rojava vs Syria.
Rojava had a great deal of pre-existing organizational infrastructure from ~70 years of activism and irregular warfare.
I’m not saying you’re wrong to knock the legs out from under the state. But I am saying, when you do, you have to have something ready for when everyone tumbles down, not just a wing and a prayer, or a concept of a plan.
We are already ready though, we do it all the time. Your local rec league, your DnD group, hell even at a protest you’ll find ad hoc organization that arises from collaboration. You put people in an area, have em share a language, share stories, a culture arises. No nation state needed.
You’re currently in the middle of a massive example of self governance just posting to the fediverse.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448251336440
All that being said, love you boo. @[email protected] your posts in noncredible defense, power tripping bastards and the rest encouraged me to make an account on here.
Oh no, man, I am absolutely not saying that it’s not possible. It absolutely is possible. I’m just saying that the parallel institutions have to be set up before you knock down all the pins if you want things to go… somewhat reliably in the favor of anarchy and not nostalgia for authority.
I mean, fuck, getting five people together for a D&D group is hard enough on short notice. When the state falls, you’ll be dealing with literal millions of people, all of whom have different needs, schedules, desires, reliability, and locations. Hell, as for our own little slice of the Fediverse, we’ve had plenty of growing pains, and unreliability was a nonzero factor in the loss of many of the initial exiles in 2023. Self-governance is possible, absolutely. But no governance is possible at scale without preparation and experience.
It’s like… a collective food pantry is absolutely an alternative to a capitalist grocery store. But neither are able to serve thousands just by flinging open the doors with some volunteers and gumption. You have to know who can do what, where the goods are coming from, how reliable the goods are, how to redistribute them, how to sort them, how to deal with wastage and accidents, record-keeping, etc etc etc. Parallel institutions learn that as they operate - which is why it’s so important to form them now, before shit goes down. They/You/We need the experience if there’s any hope of successfully providing, even just in part, the needs of the people after a collapse of the state.
Like I said about Rojava - they had parallel institutions, even though they hadn’t replaced state institutions, ready to go because of a long history of pre-existing activity in those sectors. And also because some of it has been tied in with traditional Kurdish cultural institutions, which is conditionally helpful, but not always desirable depending on the… traditions of one’s region. I wouldn’t trust the pre-existing social structures of my hometown in deeply conservative America, for example, as a auxiliary to developing an anarchist society. In fact, I would posit the opposite. So that option isn’t always there. But the lack of ‘friendly’ cultural institutions just makes things take a little more time and effort, that’s all.
Be Rojava. Be CNT-FAI. Be ready for the opportunity. Otherwise, you’ll have a hard time competing with other, more established parallel institutions that are NOT anarchist (churches, ideological orgs, clans or social groupings, etc), and likely be unable to draw majority support away from them. A better tomorrow means very little to most people if they lose a loved one today. If Trusty John’s Church-And-Gas-Station is giving medicine to True Believers when the state falls, and anarchist parallel institutions aren’t ready to do the same, most people with sick loved ones are not going to take the better future. They’re going to take their loved one’s short-term survival.
When the traditional state failed in Somalia, warlords and traditional patriarchal clan structures took its place. If you don’t have parallel institutions ready, that’s exactly what will happen anywhere else - warlords and local traditions of conflict resolution, which are often not in-line with anarchist ideals.
Thank you, by the way, hearing that my posting amuses always brightens my day!
When the traditional state failed in Somalia, warlords and traditional patriarchal clan structures took its place. If you don’t have parallel institutions ready, that’s exactly what will happen anywhere else - warlords and local traditions of conflict resolution, which are often not in-line with anarchist ideals.
Regarding Somalia I think a larger influence was/is external colonial powers who are greatly incentivized to build systemic systems of oppression that are leveraged to create out groups and encourage genocide. Specifically the Isaaq.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaaq_genocide
These systems you’re explaining though, they organize themselves from mutual aid groups currently doing the work. We’re in agreement. I just wanted to express the fact that every person practices self governance in their day to day life. Being like Rojava, it builds from a pattern of collaboration. Self governance is a habit. Jineology is a prime example of that. Plus, believe it or not, femme bodied people are often the best shots…
Plus, believe it or not, femme bodied people are often the best shots……
I actually remember reading at one point that it was speculated that there was a biomechanical reason for that. Something about sexual development giving women’s bodies on average innately better balance than men, I think, but it’s been a long time since I’ve read it.
I am all in support of tearing down current government of most of the countries in favor of rebuilding it from ground up. But in best case this wont change much, and in worst case it would make things much worse.
Running with no government will only create more issues. We need rules and laws. We just need much better ones opposed to what we have now.
Compare Brazil, a country with endemic corruption to the point of anarchy. Gangsters regularly murder political opponents. And has a particularly high prison population. So yeah, pretty bad.
Turns out solving systemic problems through destroying systems is like digging a hole in the beach. We have to provide better systems as alternatives. Which is why we support lemmy.
Compare Brazil
Brazil has an enormous institutional government both at the national level and via the various local mayoralties. Totally nuts to claim the second largest armed force in the Americas is “no government or legal institutions”. FFS, they did a soft coup with Operation Carwash that amounted to a defacto military dictatorship, until Bolsonaro basically shat himself out of office.
Turns out solving systemic problems through destroying systems
What system did Brazilian anarchists destroy?
The closest you could claim was Bolsonaro’s devolution of authority to corporate-aligned lackeys in the major metro areas. But then you’re in the position of claiming Kleptocracy and Corporationism are the same thing as No Government.
And you’re still left explaining how Lula’s been gradually clawing all that power back up to the top or where his sweeping economic reforms are coming from.
I don’t think you know what anarchism is.
Love this. I always wanted to kill the driver and I thought you could switch it while the wheels were halfway over to wreck the train but that probably just kills everyone
That’s how you end up with multi-track drifting.
Unironically, that’s approximately how you do a controlled derailment, which is the actual process in case of a runaway train.
Unfortunately in the real world, the train blaster is also a train.
… I’ve played enough milsims and seen enough combat footage that I could hear this image.
I’ve played enough FPS that I would die trying to rocket jump over the tram.
… but that wouldn’t stop the tram, lol.
