• PugJesus@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Exactly. Foucault argued that you can tell when a group has been subjugated, because they start to self-police according to the oppressor’s rules. From a liberal perspective, the state is desirable, so an individual internalizing and following the state’s laws is desirable.

    I didn’t realize anarchism meant never picking which battles to fight at a given time and arena.

      • PugJesus@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Running a public website of any sort is an incredibly vulnerable position. You can’t ‘run’ or even meaningfully ‘fight’, all of your information is ultimately traceable back to you, and your main asset is at the whims of the institutions of capitalist society. The more ‘battles’ you fight using the website as a means not just of organization, education, and agitation, but of a challenge to the law itself, the more your website’s effective lifespan will be shortened. In any area which one is going to challenge the law itself using the website, one should be prepared for that fight, not simply as a one-off “Fuck you pigs, I don’t answer to your laws” (which anyone who has attempted with a cop squad with a judge-signed warrant outside of their door can assure you is ineffective), but with meaningful arguments and preparations within the context of the society we are fighting these battles in.

        Put another way - running a mutual aid nonprofit is generally not the time to give the middle finger to the government on tax filing status, helping immigrants evade ICE is not the time to be flagrantly breaking traffic laws, and a soup kitchen for those abandoned by capitalism is probably not a good arena for challenging sanitation regulations. IF you are going to pick any of those additional fights, you should be prepared, not simply dismissive on ideological grounds - it might warrant the dismissal on ideological grounds, but on practical grounds, you are headbutting a 20 meter-thick brick wall and saying “It’s me or you!”. The end result is not in question; only the timescale.

        You don’t have to like the law to use the law against itself; you don’t have to be a supporter of the rules of the game to use them to protect yourself. But refusing to acknowledge their existence in a society where the law remains extremely powerful may sate your ideological urges, but it will sink all your ideological projects.

        • Unruffled [they/them]@lemmy.dbzer0.comM
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          7 months ago

          I feel you have a very US-centric and litigious take on this. Afaik it’s not illegal (in most places, yet) to discuss the topics of piracy or anarchism on the internet, or to allow younger folks who are interested in these topics to participate in the discussion. Maybe we just have a different outlook on these things. There’s nothing we talk about here that hasn’t also been discussed on Reddit and many other websites for decades. The alternative is to go the LW route and preemptively self-censor discussions to the point that users can’t express their honest opinions any more (e.g. about Luigi). And at that point we might as well close the instance down ourselves as it wouldn’t stand for anything.

          Anyway, appreciate you being concerned about us.