Tenant unions and rent strikes are wild. There was a funny reddit screenshot that was going around during the pandemic that I cannot find, but I remember it being the icon for a podcast, which I found and linked. It’s a good source on what rent strikes could do and critiques of its use.

https://crimethinc.com/podcasts/the-ex-worker/episodes/75

No. Of course not. I put it in quotes since I was being sarcastic.

but Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, can’t even get the mental health services he obviously needs

Lmfao

I’d rather get healthcare at all. I’ve been too poor to afford any medical care at points in my life, I’d settle for even some low quality care as opposed to none at all and hoping that this new weird pain either is insignificant and goes away without issue, or it gently takes me out in the night.

I’m excited to see where pirate medicine goes. I’ve met a trans woman who told me that her DIY HRT was life changing in the best possible way, and I can only dream of what would happen if people started making their own Insulin or T or whatever

I fucking love pirate medicine. Fuck the US healthcare system, what good is having the “best healthcare in the world” if you can’t even afford mediocre healthcare?

I love my car for the fact it doesn’t do anything crazy. Buttons and switches for everything, bluetooth for music, and a minimalist infotainment system that may as well only be there for the phone pairing process.

I might be in the minority, but I hate Apple CarPlay/Android Auto. I don’t want anything fancy, just music. I don’t want all the bells and whistles of my phone, just music.

I’m not familiar with taoism, and I do not understand the point you are trying to make. I’ve read the chapter on this site.

I think you are talking about this paragraph:

Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness. When goodness is lost, there is kindness. When kindness is lost, there is justice. When justice is lost, there is ritual. Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.

I don’t get what you are trying to say. Are you saying that Li is Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_(neo-Confucianism)), or in the quote I have, ritual? Are you saying I’m an advocate for Justice in the sense of this quote? I think you are either misunderstanding me (I know I am not understanding what you are saying since it is unclear), or ascribing a set of values to anarchism that doesn’t line up with what I’m arguing in order to dismiss my argument.

To be fully clear, I’m going to elaborate on what I’m saying. I’m giving a simple cause and effect statement here, not some moral justification. When there is a liberatory movement that threatens the power structure that enforces hierarchy that oppresses people, those in power will use their position to make the movement, threatening tactics/techniques of, or other things done by the people of the movement illegal, necessitating breaking the law to continue. Working within the shifting bounds of law is insufficient.

Yes, but since most people for whatever reason believe that you can fight the state only by the rules the state makes, you won’t be able to do anything about it.

I agree. As an anarchist, I do not think following whatever rules the state makes will ever be sufficient for achieving any liberatory goals.

They are doing this pretty intentionally. Tomorrow is always different from today. People have been complacent, while some other people perceptive of the future in a bad way have made plans for taking unprecedented power over societies.

This is why I advocate for decentralizing power (and the dissolution of all hierarchies and hierarchic power structures). The last thing I want is a despot using the current mechanisms of power and centralize everything, and have such an absurd amount of power.

You are saying this [cut quote about my advocacy of decentralization] as part of a discussion, but they are not discussing this with us. Public opinion won’t stop them. Only force will.

I agree. Every single movement that has gone against a component of the government required either violence, or backed, credible threats of it. The government will never reduce its power to the benefit of the people, even if that policy is popular.

You are absolutely correct, I’m just worried about one less barrier.

FOIA is great and all, and so are public records laws and disclosure laws.

But the state is gonna state, and when push comes to shove, social media will be another tool to manufacture consent, break up movements, and preserve itself over the interest of the governed.

I’m not concerned about the ability to FOIA shit about Twitter or Facebook’s algorithm, as much as I’d like to know about how it targets the content slop to its users. I’m concerned about how it will consolidate power into fewer hands, and how state sponsored social media will be abused. And I don’t think FOIA would ever reveal that if it happened.

Fuck nationalization of social media. Honestly, this is one of the worst ideas I’ve heard.

The idea that giving the government a monopoly on the biggest data hoarders is somehow better than having the capitalists own it is mind-boggling.

The government doesn’t need a warrant to search through its own data.

The last thing we need is to give the state more power over our lives, more insight into our lives, and more control over the narratives we learn.

Every time humans have centralized more power into fewer and fewer hands, nothing good comes from it. We need more decentralized forms of media, not more centralized forms.

A few times, only when dealing with student loan servicers, banks, and my credit card company

Marriage is a social construct not built upon love or companionship. It is just a social relation that is related to the two, with religious and legal backing to fortify it.

If you see marriage as a means to love and companionship, you are not gonna have a loving relationship. Love and companionship are completely viable (and I’d argue stronger) outside the strange little box that society tries to place it in

Fuck marriage.

I don’t think there is anything that a person of any gender can’t provide in a relationship. I do see that society shuns certain people from performing certain roles, but anyone can do any one of them.

If he is only ranting politics, he might not have anyone to talk politics with. Maybe he is the lone conservative, lapping up every scrap of talking points from Fox (or maybe Newsmax), but can’t spew them out around family who sees him as being crazy for watching Fox. If you aren’t pushing back, he probably sees you as safe, and if he is finding it hard for him to deal with political stressors, that’s probably why he is ranting and getting so emotional.

This is why I did a “walkthrough test” when I had to write documentation on this sort of thing. I’m a terrible technical writer, so this shit is necessary for me.

I grabbed my friend who knows enough about computers to attempt this, but not enough about infrastructure to automatically know what I meant when I was too vague.

Took two revisions, but the final document was way easier to follow at the end

Well, microsoft chooses bing for you sometimes

I met a southerner who speaks in a more northern accent, but sometimes slips into their original southern accent on certain words or when yelling, which happens in the busy kitchen I was working with them in.

It’s pretty funny to have someone behind you shouting about their hot trays of potatoes or about them carrying knives or whatever.

You don’t need to be downtrodden to feel like a party is failing you. Considering life is getting harder for so many lower and middle class people, a lot of people are feeling worse than they did 10-15 years ago. This is where people have been failed by both parties.

I mentioned that there are people who are feeling like they are losing their position in society. Some people are simply bigoted and are upset at seeing minorities get visibility, some are upset that christianity is less prevalent among Americans. I don’t think either of these reasons is valid, though, fuck the old hierarchies.

The issues faced by Americans in the rural south are completely different than the ones faced by Americans on the east or west coasts. We basically live in separate worlds. Republicans failed them, but to think the democrats didn’t is silly. For example, a lot of people live in rural areas, where the police would take an hour to get there if someone was being attacked by someone or some animal. Guns are a bit more necessary in places like this than they are in a big city.

Granted, I think the media’s lies is the biggest cause of the populism. And holy shit does right wing media spew lies at an incredible rate.

That’s true. I was just trying to explain my view of the US system.

Broadly speaking, do think that if a country has two dominant neoliberal parties, like the US, this will inevitably happen.

In a two party system, populist movements grow when the opposition party is failing (or is perceived as failing) people. Alternatively, both parties can fail the people before one becomes populist.

The two party system has failed Americans. But now that the republicans have created a populist movement, the failure of democrats to properly serve many people causes them to be pulled by populism. It doesn’t help that the culture war lets absolue horseshit issues fly by without actual basis in reality, since that fuels the fire without actually having to do the hard discussions about policy.

The MAGA movement is a “third way” that formed because the paths forward shown by both democrats and republicans seemed to lead to nowhere for many people.

I don’t think this is a cancer, I think this is a horrendous feature of the design of a representative democracy under capitalism (at least, in the American sense)

Capitalism will crush people while trying to wring every bit of profit out of them, and in a capitalist democracy, the state supports capitalism.

Representative democracy leads to unaccountable representatives. They still need to get re-elected if they want to (or they could just serve capital and dip), but with all the dogmatism caused by political parties, the hierarchy of the parties protecting the politician, and the benefits of having corporate sugar daddies, especially media corporations, they can get away with enriching themselves at the expense of Americans, while still having decent odds at reelection.

Further, people in power, for whatever reason gave this tendency to build their power, usually at the expense of those without it. The state gives itself new powers and new toys at the expense of everyone else. Fear of terrorism gave us some of the most draconian laws on the books, such as the patriot act, which has not been repealed whenever there has been an opportunity to. The police got afraid of the people, and bought themselves guns, counterinsurgency training and tools from a foreign apartheid state, armored cars, and raises. The supreme court went from writing itself into existence to giving the president near legal immunity, rolling out the red carpet for the authoritarian state to become an even more authoritarian state.

When you mix these tendencies together, its no wonder why this state has failed. And while it hasn’t failed everyone, the nature of capitalism leads to a pretty large exploited class ripe for exploitation. And this populist movement is ready to take advantage of that, between those primed by culture war drivel, economic suffering, or seeing their demographic and/or class lose power in some way.

This populism isn’t a cancer on an ailing democracy.

It is a symptom of a failing democracy, unable to sustain itself from the structure of itself.

It’s not just the phone manufacturer, but the mobile carrier, and apps with access to your location (like weather apps, or map apps)

If you have no desire to do rudimentary googling for a group project in college, that sounds like you aren’t a very helpful teammate. Last time I generated certs I used the first stack overflow result and was done in minutes, there’s no excuse.