dil [he/him, comrade/them]

Thanks for responding! I definitely agree on the major points. I’m having trouble making questions, but here are some statements that you should feel free to challenge:

(Focusing on just the US)

My perception is that there’s more than enough productive capacity to meet everyone’s basic needs (food, water, shelter, healthcare), and the reason folks go without is capitalism’s failure to prioritize meeting everyone’s needs. I agree that the simplest solution is to nationalize firms/industries, put them under democratic control, and collectively direct them to work for the good of the people. I’m down with that being priority #1, since people are fuckin’ dying.

We seem very far from having enough power to do that now, and I like anarchism’s prefiguration as a way of building a mass movement that is able to ultimately gain enough influence to make that happen.

I’m also personally fascinated by the emergent properties of a group of people and like viewing human society through the lens of a superorganism. Under that lens, the values a society holds guides each individual’s behaviors, and the aggregate behavior of individuals shape society. It’s certainly not materialist, but it’s why I focused on individual incentives above.

I’m mostly pulling from here for concerns about the state and here (and here) for individuals mutual influence with society.

Do you have pointers to help me understand what makes you prefer Marxism? I know there’s been a bunch of discourse on it already, and this probably isn’t the spot where we resolve it, but I’m relatively new to leftism and am interested in learning more.

Short(ish) version I have for preferring anarchism to Marxism:

My ultimate end goal is that everyone ascend Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and self actualize.

Self actualization requires freedom, agency, and control over things you care about. Pursuing self actualization is hard, though, and human brains want to be lazy.

I’m anti-capitalist, but a positive of (small-scale) capitalism is that it incentivizes individuals to think, “What should exist, but doesn’t? What can I do that others would like?” and then actually go do it. Our aim should be to encourage those types of actions, but with an incentive structure that doesn’t result in… this.

My concern is that a centralized state will result in folks voluntarily giving up their agency over stuff administered by the state, since it’s easier than feeling ownership of it. Over time, I worry this would would atrophy individuals’ agency and result in a kind of bystander effect, where folks look for the state to do things for them.

Thanks for sharing! I talked with my therapist about similar stuff, and it’s nice to see other folks with similar thoughts.

This video introduced me a two-axis gender spectrum (around the 4:44 mark), which I really liked bc I’m pretty apathetic about my gender identity.

There was a post recently that talked about how transphobia also makes cis folk’s life worse bc it limits how they can express themselves (similar to how homophobia limits how men can express affection for other men, or misogyny limits their emotional expression).

If transphobia is high, the only folks challenging gender norms are going to be the bravest ones that care deeply about not conforming to the norms. A cis guy who kinda wants to try wearing a skirt might not care enough to risk backlash, but as transphobia is lessened, folks are more willing express themselves in gender-nonconforming ways.

I think there’s likely a snowball effect as more folks challenge the norms and just wear whatever they want instead of concerning themselves with what’s “correct” for their gender, so I’m glad we’ve got folks like you that are normalizing nonconformity!

Reminds me of Steve the pencil from community: https://youtu.be/uAwSVOlOgH8

Right?? So fucking cringe to think about them patting themselves on the back about this.

“Yes, the world was destroyed, but we made some preeetty clever acronyms and what else could we do?”

Yes! and “74% of posts are on working days”!!

1. There are more working days, so there are more posts per day on weekends
2. It’s wholely unsurprising that federal news would happen on days when the federal government is doing stuff

Thank you for this!

I was curious about the 95.5% support and read that source, then stopped when they started cherry picking numbers to push a narrative (citing low % of “very satisfied” vs grouping both “somewhat” and “very”). This was used to say that township-level support was low in China vs high in the US.

Looking at the actual study, overall township-level satisfaction is 70%… which is exactly the support level that they cite for the US.

Upon what other theory can we justify the almost complete extermination of the Indians, the original possessor of all these States?

This is such an weird thing to say in his position.

It’s definitely acknowledging that what happened was mega-fucked, or at least would be without proper justification.

But it’s so wild to me to be open about your moral philosophy being based on cope.

My best guess would be that it was Very Bad to suggest that the folks who paved the way for their lives were anything but saints? There’s a YouTube video (innuendo studios maybe?) that talks about conservatives viewing individual people as good or bad vs viewing actions as good or bad (which leads to e.g. “the only moral abortion is my abortion”). Under that lens, Good People do Good Things, and the people who genocided the native americans were Good People, therefore there must exist a reason that it was a Good Thing?

You may have already looked into it, but I’ve been pretty happy with stremio. There are guides on getting it hooked up with real debrid + torrentio, and the end result is reliably search for what you want -> click play.