I said something along the lines of:
“Wow, I haven’t had a reason to smile ear to ear in a while.”
Along with
“Nah, the more dead corpos dragons, the better.”
In response to some liberal going off about how violence is never the solution, not mentioning how this murdered dipshit has personally overseen a system that perpetuates harm, suffering and death (violence) in the name of profit.
…
Good ole’ civility clause.
Whats the paradox of tolerance?
.world mods have never heard of it I guess.
I’m just here to point out that everyone’s going to use the downvote button as a “disagree” button and the upvote as “agree,” and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop us. You can’t hold back the tide.
Yes.
As an anarchist, I am keenly aware that rules are merely suggestions, and are utterly meaningless when no system exists to actually enforce them.
The whole thing is all just made up. There are no “rules” written down like there are for software systems. There are just shared habits and models of the world, and traditions for how to react. In general, people agree and keep it all consistent enough from day to day that the rules in their heads translate into behavior and dependable systems in the real world. But it’s all just made up. It’s just people deciding what to do, every minute, in every society, based on what they decide in their brain, no matter how strict the “rules” that supposedly exist are.
Like how we could ‘make up’ having a healthcare system that provides universal affordable care to all citizens, but instead … we …
(not actually all of us, actually the extremely wealthy and influential people who control government policy and all the media that tells us what to think about government policy)
… ‘we’ make up a horrible, unjust system that perpetuates suffering, violence and death, so that a tiny minority of people can profit!
What I’m saying is that there is no mechanical system that puts those particular people in charge.
We had the gilded age, we had the labor battles that laid the foundation for the working economy of the 20th century, we had the New Deal and prosperity for a lot of people, then we let it get away from us and the crooks took charge again. But it all can change. We can make it different. People have fought their way back to good government from places a million times worse than modern-day America.
I’m not sure what you mean by mechanical.
Obviously there is not a physical machine like a 3d printer that produces a sociopoliticaleconomic system.
But there are absolutely empirically verified theories within sociology, political science, and economics which describe why historical events happened with a pretty good degree of accuracy, and a lot of them do function pretty mechanistically to predict likely future outcomes, though with a wider margin of possibility than physics predicting a physical machine.
I’m saying that nothing enforces these particular people being in charge, other than everyone agreeing that these are the people in charge, and that can change.
It has, in huge ways, for better and worse depending, all throughout history.
Is this a joke?
You’re saying there’s no military, no police, no jobs that take all our time just to stay alive, no media that reinforces the desired narrative, no corruption, no broken electoral system, no economic stratification, no relgion and bigotry used to convince people to support their own materially worsening lives, no intentionally broken education system… none of that enforces who is in charge?
I could go on for actual hours about ludicrous this statement is, you have to almost entirely ignorant of history, poli sci, sociology, econ, a whole number of other fields, to be able to say something like this.
I’m saying that the military only reacts to each set of orders they get because they decide to. In the recent past in the US, it’s always been deciding to follow every order to the letter, which is the usual way, but that’s not set in stone. People in the military switching their allegiance or having conflict between one or multiple “systems” which are trying to tell them what to do, and their own conscience, is a key feature of times of upheaval like the one we’re about to enter into. Same for the police. More than once, the final stage of the revolution has been the commanders ordering the military to fire on the revolutionaries and the military simply saying, “No.” I don’t expect that particular detail to come into play, but it might, and I definitely think there will be conflicting “systems” telling various military people what to do, and how they’ll decide to act is not obvious in advance.
Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter between US troops and Vietnamese civilians, at My Lai, and told his men to shoot the Americans if they tried to advance. They apparently were ready to, and he ended the massacre, and although it’s a little bit complicated they did give him a medal for it when he got home.
Jobs that take all our time is a real thing. It was far, far worse back in the late 1800s. At least today you get paid in money and live in housing not provided by your job. People worked it out, though, although it was harder than anything I’ve ever done and probably anything that you’ve ever done. We can do it, though. They did.
Media is the same. People decide what media to follow. A huge amount of it is corrupted by propaganda, but again, at least the oppostion media is legal. For now. It may be different a year from now.
And so on. I’m saying that all the systems you describe are things that other people are deciding to take part in. I’m not saying they’re optional from your perspective when you’re interacting with people who are obeying their systems and ready to enforce them with violence. I’m saying that their obedience to that system is a thing that can change, too. It’s happened before, many many times.
Great cherry picking. They did continue that statement. And these other people still have agency. Nobody says there are no reasons why the people agree who is in charge but in the end it is still the people from whom all power originates.
Nobody can rule alone.
I think you two are talking past each other. I interpret what they’re saying as basically: we made this system, we can unmake it. Military members, police officers, people working in the media- they’re all just people and if they all changed their minds tomorrow, things would be different. Obviously getting them to change their minds is basically impossible for one person, but the point is that solidarity is the only (incredibly painstaking) solution to this kind of mess.
I saw that old tired “It’s not a disagree button! Only downvote comments that don’t add to the discussion!” thing time and time again on reddit, but I’ve never seen it here. I hoped that it was accepted and understood that they are indeed agree/disagree buttons.
People might think that they shouldn’t be that, but it’s immaterial. That’s how people are going to use them, so other people might as well get used to it.
Honestly, I’ve never seen it be a problem for them to be like that. Whatever people were afraid of, it clearly wasn’t a big deal. They work fine.