existentialspicerack [she/her,they/them]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 3rd, 2021

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  • existentialspicerack [she/her,they/them]toMainWhy are you an ML?
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    edit-2
    4 years ago

    okay so the core idea behind anarchism is like... have you ever played a pen+paper RPG? have you played enough of them that you've seen good groups and bad groups and problem players and shitty GM's?

    you can't make a bad group a good group with the rules sytem, and you can't make a problem player or GM not a problem with the rules. they'll either cheat, disregard the rules, or keep being a problem. a "no being rapey at the table" rule won't make someone less rapey. and severe consequences are just shitty and has a chilling panopticon bullshit effect on everybody else, unless you dehumanize the problem player before you shoot them in the head for being appropriate, which has the same effect just about dehumanization rather than whatever the initial punishment was gonna be, and also someone might get brains on their character sheet and claim that makes their character extra smart and cheat at rolls or something and then you have to kill TWO members of your group, and do you have any idea how hard it is to get enough players to show up consistently for a game? it's such a pain in the ass.

    the way you fix that is to fix the people. which isn't always practical, but nothing else works, short of just killing them all, and jesus the whole hobby would be fucking dead if we spent all our time murdering problem players and none of it playing. and then new problematic people would join and we'd never actually be DONE and it would all just be a big dumb murder cult. which actually sounds pretty fun as like an organized hobby where we keep score, but I digress. also, when you fix a problem, it can help fix OTHER problems and be on your side next time instead of a problem!

    except with geopolitics and genocide and war and inequality and rape and capitalism instead of dice and pencils. maybe still murder cults.

    that's the general-case anarchist thing. causes have effects, and if you pull the problem at the root, cutting the underlying causes, it may be harder, but you're actually stopping it, rather than just chopping down weeds forever and having to buy a machete and spraying the ground with pesticides and causing all sorts of other problems that are usually at least a significant fraction as bad as the weeds were. and having a cool machete.

    as much as punishing people and their symptom behavior might be satisfying, it's not an actual solution. it doesn't really fix the problem long term, and there's always collateral damage to deal with that will eventually coalesce into a cancerous ecosystem of oppression. you gotta change the culture and the people, or they'll always be vulnerable to expoitation and authoritarianism. until that's done, there is no fix.

    and don't give me "strong central planning is necessary to oppose imperialism", it's super close to hitler's "fascism is cool because it necessitates your enemies becoming at least a little fasch if they want any hope of beating you". modern (by which I mean "the past hundred and three years") military doctrine requires a certain amount of decentralization and autonomy of ground level commanders, and just about every time a more decentralized autonomous 'modern' doctrine influenced force has come up against a more ridgid old fashioned absolutist top-down command structure, it's been a blatantly one sided slaughter. even in the americas where the technology was wildly mismatched, the indigenous peoples still fought more than 1-1 against better armed better equipped colonizers with top-down authoritarian structures, who didn't fully win until they had repeating rifles, artillery, and long range electrical communications-against the almost-naked spear-and-stolen-musket-wielding apaches. you also see this play out among the steppe nomads who were basically a force of nature to the ancient world (and while ghengis/kublai were more authoritarian and disciplined than their predecessors, they were still less absolutist than their opposition with more autonomy granted to low level commanders)

    as far as economics and distribution goes, there are a lot of subcategories, but generally it's creating independent infrastructures. take community gardens as an incredibly cliche example: you don't just set out a plot of land and say "okay, land here, seeds here, shovels here, go nuts!", you find the most passionate people who will take an interest in the project long term, and naturally gravitate to stewardship roles once they've devoured some knowledge. not in charge like managers, but more like docents or curators at a museum who can pass on knowledge and keep things organized/maintained according to the needs and desires of the community. but with everything. and a general despecialization. demystifying the world so generally everyone sees fewer black boxes,and can do more of their own stuff if they want to, having to rely less on toxic systems and infrastructures of capitalism so people are more free to resist. creating less wasteful transportation-not necessarily 0-and useful resiliency/decentralization in case of disaster or conflict. some climates just can't grow some things. some things take a long ass supply chain to build. sometimes those fuckers over there just make really kick-ass chairs. and ofc there's wonderful art everywhere so obvs you gotta spread that shit. collaboration across communities is natural and good, and keeps people in touch and reminds us that the world is not small. but not having to, having local stockpiles in case the river floods or the pass is snowed in or whatever, is good and efficient and lovely.

    if you want to be less solarpunk and way more nerdy about all this: kind of like using bittorrent(an excellent analogy to anarchism) instead of FTP(a good analogue to state communism in the metaphor) (or streaming, fuck streaming and the capitalism it represents) for all downloads-data transmission is neither free nor carbon neutral. there might still be trackers and central repositories, some users may have better seed ratios, but all in all it's less wasteful more resilient and more humanizing to store+create your shit closer to where it's gonna be used. those are the general solutions behind anarchist thought, and if you want them applied more specifically, im sure somebody (possibly me, but maybe not) can help you there.





  • when I was a very very young, through absolutely no fault of my own (really before anything could have been considered my fault), tossed into a bunch of bullshit systems. everybody else had control of my life, and they used it with no regard to my well being.

    some of those systems were out to punish me when they were supposed to be educating me, and ended up holding me back in the places I excelled-I was once expelled for writing poetry as part of a writing assignment I'd misunderstood and gone WAY above and beyond on. after this happened twice, I didn't write any poetry again for twenty years, and I'm pretty fucking good at it. I was told not to read novels in class because it made the other students insecure. I was told I had to go out at recess, even though I'd have much rather enjoyed a book in peace and avoid the possibility of fights with other kids. it wasn't malevolent, at least not at first. they couldn't have hated me from moment one (though it definitely got to that point because I was a pain in the ass who insisted things make sense), it was just... the way the system was designed. and they couldn't bring themselves to deviate, even when it went exactly against the stated goals of that system.

    a system designed, supposedly, to give me a stable home, was being used to destroy any sense of home space or stability I had in ways that should be a crime against humanity when done against people in that developmental phase. I was treated like a criminal and ferried arbitrarily from place to place, by state thugs when I objected. I'd come home from school to find home was different and all the pets had died, kept from leaving the state, banned, week to week, from totally arbitrary activities (video games? reading? the park?) by literal court orders-not because I was 'criminal' or 'bad', but because some delusional asshole who had never met me decided it was 'for [my] own good'. some of them were corrupt as fuck, some of them meant well, but all of them hurt me. they didn't know how to do anything else, and no matter how loud I screamed or how hard I kicked or clawed at the doors of the police car or bit the thugs who dragged me away from home twice or more a week, I didn't seem to have a voice in my own life. that shit fucked me up for a long time. I had to do a lot of crimes to heal from that. an immoderate amount of violence and destruction too.

    I also had some pretty early experiences with monsters. the bad kinds. the kinds that we think of as the boogeyman around here. pedophiles, CIA fuckers, the military industrial complex. and they always had reasons for the shit they did. no matter how horrible the shit they did, they did it for reasons. real material reasons. sometimes delusional, sometimes bullshit, but there was always a reason, always a cause to the effect, and a reason they believed it, if you dug deep enough. and I figured, if you can change the reason, fix the cause, pull the problem out by the root, maybe you don't have any more monsters in the first place?

    I saw class disparity between the sides of my family. saw how some people had SO MUCH and others had nothing, and I couldn't find anything to justify it. there was no reason. they both worked s hard, they both cared about others the same amount. being a more or less morally upstanding person didn't seem to make a difference. but one side were kept from having nice things and cool toys and stable well kept homes, and the other had servants, and WTF? and there were armed thugs to enforce these distinctions? so I asked myself, "why thugs?", and came to the conclusion that if we all stopped being so stratified and unfair, there wouldn't be any point in thugs.

    and then I actually talked with people who had been suffering from addiction, who I'd been told were the cause of everything bad. and every single one of them had some deep pain they were trying to soothe with drugs, some old wound they couldn't find a way to heal. often that this shit society wouldn't let them heal.

    I saw people with money get away with things nobody should ever be able to do. because it was in line with the toxic culture. because it was in line with the 'social order'. im not even talking about bribes, they werejust 'the right sort', so they got off. I realized laws aren't shit. they don't protect shit. they don't fix shit. they don't stop shit. they have only ever been a tool of oppression, a way to make the weak oppress themselves.

    I was homeless and saw the difference between how I was treated when it was known I was connected to the moneyed side of my family. the difference in what I could get away with when I dressed certain ways vs others, and what I could do as opposed to darker skinned comrades. it was like fucking magic, and it was absolutely disgusting.

    and of course all manner of philosophy and theory and lived queernesses and meditations on identity and self and experiences in activism, some revelations while being actively suicidal that the more you give, the less possible it is to exploit you, and some other stuff at other times about how anyone in a cage is everyone in a cage, but I was mostly there before all that.

    so I can't respect authority, and I can't respect toxic systems, and I know laws and authority cause more problems (most of them) than they fix (none of them), and obviously capitalism is evil. and I can't stop thinking/seeing in terms of systems. you can't legislate away human error, you can't create a system that makes bad DM's or problem players not a thing, and trying just ruins the game for the rest of us. it's all made of people, and if you want to change it, you need to change people.

    I spent time making myself into who I wanted to be, and deciding where I wanted to go and who i wanted to be and what I would need if I wanted to do that, and I realized I would need a better world, or at last to be someone in the process of making a better world.

    I saw in various lefty spaces and histories (some of them ML, credit where due), how giving people agency and purpose made them so much more. I felt like that was a thing that the world should optimize for. and I saw how horrible it was when that was crushed out of people, reduced to bland delusional lib survival.

    so I'm an anarchist, because everything else leads eventually to something unpleasant and shitty. because any unfairness or coercion requires whole ecosystems of unfairness and coercion, like maintaining one lie requires telling other lies. its a cancer, and there's no room for that in any kind of world I want to live in. you can't half-ass doing the right thing, and you can't count on ridgid inhuman systems to act humanely without human influence and agency.

    and also black and red is just really aesthetically nice and something I naturally gravitate towards anyway, and it works with my complexion.

    though recently, while still believing all of this, I've become much more skeptical about the possibility of improving people at scale. i still don't think any other way can work long term, that ends to not exist independently from the means used to achieve them, and that everything we do shapes us. im just less optimistic about people and whether THIS will work these days. its still the most rewarding thing to attempt, until we can openly murder nazis.


  • existentialspicerack [she/her,they/them]toMainWhy are you an ML?
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    4 years ago

    i report pretty often, and you are better about removing it than a lot of places .it just gets under one's skin after while, because you're human and finite and have human reaction times. it feels like I can't avoid summoning a swarm if I say the C word along with anything less than glowing praise and appropriated nationalistic fervor.

    also, in part because you're good at removing it, i often here people deny that it happens. which is frustrating as fuck.