I think one interpretation of the quote that includes the possibility of a patriotism that does not exclude criticizing wrongdoing of your country is that “my country, right or wrong” does not mean “i support everything my country does”, but rather “even if i don’t support some things my country does, i’ll support my country generally”.
Precisely, the quote takes into account the existence of a patriotism able to recognize that a country can be wrong.
a niche theoretical definition of anarchy
I’m just refering to anarchy as it is defined in politics, not in common talk. Anarchy as disorder is not politics, it’s something wider (a chaotic room could be called anarchy in that sense). Anarchy as politics is a system minimizing authority. You cannot say in good faith that disorder is the concept of political anarchy, it is (in your opinion) a consequence of it.
that’s an ideal, not a demonstrated reality
Anarchist societies of modern times are short lived indeed, but if you take a close look at them it’s always because of states intervention (Paris commune, Ukrainian revolution, Spain libertarian communists, and nowadays Chiapas and Rojava).
it flattens critical distinction. […] isn’t arbitrary.
Distinction is arbitrary in essence. You choose on which axis to operate the distinction. You can differentiate violences based on their organization, on their legitimacy, on their targets, on their respect of any arbitrary moral values, etc.
The state’s monopoly on violence isn’t radical, it’s foundational to modern governance.
Governance is a monopoly on violence. You can precisely not govern without enforcing it through monopoly of violence. It’s like saying “X is not radical, because it’s necessary for X”.
denying the distinction between regulated and unregulated force is intellectually lazy.
I’m not as much denying the distinction as denying its actual positive impact. If you want another way to put it than “all violence is bad”, see it this way : organized violence is easier to hold back but far worse when unleashed, disorganized is the opposite. I’m not denying their difference, i’m saying in the end the amount of violence is the same, so the difference does not matter here.
pre-state societies existed, but they weren’t peaceful utopias.
Neither are states. My goal is not to romanticize either past stateless societies or current states, it’s to get the best of both. I don’t like the “All we’ve known was bad one way or another so why bother making something better ?” argument.
“Universal” in this context clearly refers to the widespread nature
Well mb, you were actually making a involuntary hyperbole. Just to be clear, “universal” is used to mean “literally all”. You also used expressions “that everybody has” and “All people share” which makes me think that you are of bad faith here, and were clearly meaning to encapsulate everyone, but anyway, let’s say that’s not the case.
I then stand by my take : most anarchists i know do not feel patriotism, especially as in “pride to belong to a nation”, and more generally as in “pride to belong to something greater”. I certainly do not. I can not say much more since your claim is both vague (assimilating patriotism to simple pride makes it even less definable) and not verifiable (you cannot point out every people feeling patriotism, and i can only say i know people that do not feel patriotism but you can always say that’s exceptions).
Anyway, this discussion is beginning to be very splitted in subdiscussions, and i see that you engaged in a similar fashion with other people, so i’d guess it would be useful to sum up. I think all our points can be moved under those respective banners : it seems that your more important value is stability of a civilization, from which you conclude that current states are good, and therefore patriotism, monopoly of violence are too. You also seem to deduce from lack of stable alternatives that current states are the only good option, and therefore anarchism and anti-state theories necessary leads to disorder. My take is to start from solidarity rather than stability, making monopoly of violence and by extension patriotism bad, and therefore current states too. I deduce from lack of stable alternatives that current states are a dangerous form of organization for anything else, and therefore state theories, from fascism to authoritarian socialism along with bourgeois oligarchies, necessary leads to violence.
If i’m not mistaken on your position, since we start from different values, we will always disagree on what comes after. I’d propose to stop there if we cannot bring anything useful other than “there are multiple opinions here”.
order over anarchy
There is a lexical error/approximation here. Anarchy does not oppose to order, anomy is. Anarchy just says that order must not emerge from authority but from solidarity. You can disagree, but saying that anarchy is disorder by definition is a mislabeling.
mislabels the state’s monopoly on violence as inherently radical
I disagree with this being a mislabeling (though i understand that it remains an opinion and you disagree with it). It is common to see any form of violence as radical, and i’ve seen this logic used by tenants of authority themselves under the saying “Violence is never a solution”. Adding distinction of organized/disorganized violence is an arbitrary choice, and there is no logical imperative of doing so : holding all types of violence accountable, no matter their positive potential, is not a mislabel, it is a take on violence. On another note, i’ll add that organized violence can be undoubtedly far worse than disorganized one at times of war and massacre. Also, evolution from anarchydisorder to “order” is not that simple. From what we currently know, humanity lived far longer without structured power, and when those came with sedentarization, came wars and massacres too.
that’s a universal emotion that everybody has
Labeling something as “universal” without involuntary hyperbole is blatantly false. Humanity is made from diversity, and there are very few affirmations outside of physics that can correctly be applied to all of humanity. Everyone is unique, you’ll find some people without any patriotism (way more than you think) and even without pride.
Repeating history being entirely compatible with patriotism, right ?
People supporting their countries is not exactly radical.
Well from an anti-state perspective, supporting a country that commits radical acts such as monopoly of violence is by extension radical, but i think you meant that patriotism is widely spread, and that is relatively true, at least most people have patriotic “instincts” (even though in my experience, discussing and questioning their patriotism often reveals that they are patriotic by default and could have a different position if they reflected upon it).
it’s very common everywhere but Lemmy because this place is filled with tankies.
I’d say tankies are also patriotic, just not for USA. Fatherland is a quite important concept in post-leninism forms of authoritarian communism. From my experience, it’s much more common to find anti-patriotism in libertarian communism / anarchism than in despotic communism.
I feel like all those traits from patriotism are on a venn with something else like internationalism/antipatriotism, like they can indeed be found in patriotism but are not at the heart of what it is. Like, technically, german, italian or japanese patriots fought alongside nazis. You can say your country can do better regardless of whether you support its existence or not. It’s not necessary to learn from history to be a patriot, etc.
Or maybe the uniparty is a bad enough option so you keep not voting for it and allowing Hell On Earth instead. Fuck em both, but let’s stop pretending we are superior for not voting, that’s not the point.
Consistent through the year, sparing on both pyjamas and laundry, 17 to 20 are the way to go
This website seems to indicate that you can either do it in the bios directly, or with traditional overclocking softwares like MSI’s Afterburner.
Though you specified you don’t want to take it apart, i’d recommand changing your thermal paste anyway to avoid damaging your cpu. Maybe you can bring your pc somewhere else if the place where it’s at is the problem. But anyway, that’s none of my business.
If you’re afraid it might cause a problem, maybe you could try to say no one time (ideally at some time when you sense it’s not that important for your son, like not during a storm or after nightmares), just to see if that’s ok for him, or if that raises problems.
There are communities dedicated to music on Lemmy, though it won’t be personalized recommendations, you can still find pretty cool artists. I also share music with friends : you share them one music you like, they send back a music of their own. At some points, a friend of mine organized a Discord server to create 5-songs playlists on a theme each week, which we listened to and vote for our favorite each week. It was a very cool way of discovering new bands !
You can technically do this in Lethal Company, but since there’s no permanent way of communicating on long distances in game (you have to get items for this), it could be a bit frustrating at first. Maybe some mods enable it though.
I really enjoy this extract, thanks for sharing !
I found Frieren to be quite slow, in a good way, but i think there are better options out there that i’m unaware of.
Ah c’est contre-intuitif effectivemment ! Apparemment ça vient de la peinture des capsules.
Ça fait longtemps que c’est sur Le Média le journal des briques ? Je viens de remarquer !
Hey there ! Thanks for your reply. Thanks also for making the discussion centered around a specific question, i indeed tried to reply quote by quote and found myself pointing out the same flaws over and over.
I’ll first talk about these flaws, which i think can be summed up to one : you do not argue (at least not here). I think i’m right to say it’s not an argument
because you use circular reasoning to say “There are only states, therefore they are necessary” and then “they are necessary, therefore there are only states”. If you don’t see the problem here, it will be hard to discuss, as it already has been.
you make an continuous use of the “general statement” argument that i talked about in my previous comment. You say something universal if taken as is, then claim it’s hyperbole, and then say that examples i give are “anecdotal”. This makes your argument pointless since no one can either prove it (it has no universal value), either disprove it (every counter example is discarded as anecdotal). I’m sorry if i sounded pedantic to you, but this is the way i debate, and i think the basis for every proper logical debate : we cannot just state vague facts about humanity as proof of our arguments, since their value comes from how common they are, and there is no way to prove this. We either have to take universal takes that enables proper counter-argument, either accept that the fact does not apply to a possibly large number of people.
because you jump from theory to practice and vice-versa. When talking about political theory, its “Then why don’t we see anarchists societies”. When it’s about examples of anarchist societies, its “They failed because anarchy is flawed as an ideology”. More generally, you do not answer directly to the passages you quote.
You choose on which axis to operate the distinction.: you did not explained why the legitimity of violence is not an abritrary choice, you explained why state is legitimate. You strawman my points : on pride, i didn’t push that “humanity as a collective lack pride as an emotion” (= most people lack pride), i said some people lack it, most anarchists lack it, i lack it.You ignore historical facts.
you never get stability or order at any point in an anarchist societyis plain wrong, look at the examples i gave (we needed more than a century to get back some of the social advances of the Commune, factories were more productive in Spanish War anarchist territories, ukrainian anarchist communes were functional). The reason you give for their short duration is not the one given by history : it’s not an expression when i say that each of them resulted in a massacre by a state, it is the actual case. You also contradicted yourself on this point : “[anarchy] always collapses on itself” cannot be true at the same time than “The rest of the world is not going to coddle some anarchists ideologues” : either it collapses on itself, either it is some external intervention (spoiler alert : it was the second option).About your question, i’ll answer it in a more general fashion than just about the US, because 1) i don’t know the US that well and 2) the case of a state and its branches suddenly disappearing is quite a fantasy.
Most anarchists and (left) libertarians base their theories on federalism. This idea, existing already in a weak shape in a lot of state-linked organization (including the states of US), is that entities can band and disband together. The idea is to create different groups on an individual basis (you can be part of multiple groups, such as the group of your neighbourhood, of your workingplace, of your political expression, etc.), and those groups can form greater groups (like the council of multiple neighbourhoods for a city, the association of multiple factories of the same sector, etc.). This network of groups is meant to replace the main advantage of state-like organization, which really is organization itself : communication and exchanges on great distances, optimization of knowledge, ressources, etc.
This can seem very complicated, but it’s akin to what already exist : there are councils for my building, my neighbourhood, my city. My boss works in a cooperative, which regroups around 15 winemakers, and this cooperative is part of a broader network which includes around 15 cooperatives. This stratification already exists in a rich way, the only question is to make it go from bottom rather than from the top.
You can have people dedicated to help those organizations work. They can be viewed as administrative/representative, but there are some differences anarchists promotes : people are delegated tasks, they do not represent you. The difference is that they cannot take any decision, they have one or more task to complete but can’t act outside. Yeah, but what if they do, you ask ? The other important part of anarchist delegation of tasks is immediate recall : mandate for people can be ended by a simple vote. What if people abuse this to prevent someone to be effectively mandated ? It’s probably the sign that either this person is not the right one, either there is a profound fracture in the group, which should encourage the creation of a new group (which is a good thing under anarchist ideas, each groups having their rules means that more groups means more chances for you to find or create the right one).
Really, you should be quite familiar with federalism since we’re having this discussion on the Fediverse, from different servers with different softwares.
One of the question you can have is : how to make sure everyone gets a house, food, clothes, etc? Well, there are workers and workplaces for those, and each group can produce and give according to people’s needs. If you really need people to have an interest to believe this will work, it is mutual aid viewed in a negative way : if you don’t give food to the carpenter, they won’t build your house (the positive way is, you give food to whoever needs it, and the carpenter builds houses for whoever needs it). Note this is close to what we have in capitalist states : you got to work if you want food or house. The only thing is, in our current societies, money and state enables people to do nothing or stuff we don’t need/want (banks, administration, mines, etc.).
There are two things here : the justice part, and the enforced part. The justice definition from a state perspective is easy, it’s what says the law. Anarchist societies propose to see it from the individuals perspectives : the goal is not to find a victim and a culprit to punish, nor to get to the “state of balance” where the society was before the unjustice, it is to bring the society to a point which everyones agrees to, ideally to prevent the unjustice from happening again. Now comes the enforce part : once an agreement is reached, it is far easier to enforce since everyone agrees to it. For the situations where this does not apply (before the argument is concluded, if it is not respected), it either comes from the good faith of everyone included, either falls back to forms of violence/authority, ideally limited (such as imprisonment until argument is reached for dangerous persons, etc.).
This is quite a hard question. Since everyone is asked to participate in multiple groups, one part of the answer is people could recreate groups that federate in a more central way. The difference with what we have currently, is they could be able to leave them at any time to build something else.
The other part of the answer is for people that want to impose central authority to everyone (which is a common will through most states, and is to my eyes the cause of states hegemony : they need people to provide the services they promise, so they cannot accept people outside of them. In the worst form, you get imperialism, when state not only feed on their people, but try to feed on other states’ peoples). I don’t have a good answer for that, the movment is quite divided between accepting agreements with states and fighting against the imposition of central authority (this is the weapon/bombs part of anarchy)). Neither is satisfying to my eyes, probably both will have to be used anyway.
Thanks again for this final question which, i’m happy to admit, resets the debate and will, i hope, show that every flaw i listed were only relative to our previous discussion.