Ex Machina, with a different ending.

They aren’t settlers - they’re state-sponsored terrorists.

In the spirit of the Defense Department being renamed the War Department, the Environmental Protection Agency needs to be renamed the Environmental Destruction Agency.

When it’s fully groan.

Now your twice daily reminder that the President of the United States is an unhinged lunatic.

I’ve long believed that Trump himself is not a fascist, mostly because his brain just doesn’t work that way. He’s an ego-driven, sociopathic petty tyrant who just wants his own way, exactly as a four-year-old throwing a tantrum in a grocery store wants his own way. It’s not so much that he’s not a fascist as that the organized thinking and ongoing attention necessary to hold to any sort of ideology is simply beyond him.

And that in turn would mean that the actual problem is that he’s surrounded by sincere fascists (and other assorted opportunists) who are whispering in his ear and directing his limited attention to whatever will serve their interests. And since he’s psychologically and intellectually stunted, it generally works.

It’s easy to see what happened here too - a woman was nice to him, so he wanted to believe her. It’s really just that simple. Like most manbabies, there’s nothing that will turn him into mush faster than a woman being nice to him.

Which probably means it’s about time for Laura Loomer to pay another visit to the White House.

There will be no deal because there can be no deal because the Israeli government is irredeemably evil and will not settle for anything less than the complete and utter destruction of Palestine and the death, displacement or subjugation of every single Palestinian.

I’m willing to bet that it isn’t just greed that’s getting him to resign into the private sector - that he’s doing it one step ahead of what would otherwise have been a career-ending scandal.

anarcho-cops, anarcho-prisons and anarcho-government

Is Non-compete an an-cap?

I used to spend time trying to debate the an-caps on Reddit (partly because even with their faults, they tended to be closer to actual anarchism than the r/anarchism totalitarians, and partly because I got banned from r/anarchism the first day I was there).

I never saw any of them refer to their proposed systems of laws and police and courts and prisons that way, but I often did.

program for world building

To their partial credit, I think a lot of people try to frame anarchism as a defined system to be implemented mostly just because they’re impatient. Right on the heels of the understanding that anarchism is a societal structure that can only come to be when enough people are ready, willing and able to make and bear responsibility for their own decisions and cede to all others the right to do the same comes the realization that human society is nowhere even close to that yet, and that can be pretty discouraging. So I understand to some degree the desire to speed the process up.

But then there are also the ones who frame it that way because they just reflexively presume, like all other authoritarians, that whatever they believe is so obviously right that anyone who disagrees can and should be forced to submit.

Re: the rules essay -

Again, you neatly assembled a whole bunch of things I’ve been saying piecemeal and often unsatisfyingly for years, and I find myself equal parts pleased and jealous…

Rules without a mechanism of enforcement are not rules - they’re merely suggestions. And any mechanism of enforcement is an archy.

Have you read Ursula le Guin’s The Dispossessed? She neatly makes that exact point (and it amazes me how many self-proclaimed anarchists miss it) - the “anarchism” depicted there is nothing of the sort. It’s overtly a hierarchy with established laws the violation of which is punished by designated people invested with the required authority. That it all hides behind anarchistic rhetoric makes that no less a fact.

On another note - one of my pet peeves is when newcomers show up on an anarchist forum and ask “How would X work in anarchism?” and then somebody launches into a detailed account of all of the specific procedures that would purportedly be followed.

I sometimes respond to try to make the point that nobody knows how anything would be done and that’s part of the beauty of anarchism, but I find that generally confuses people, angers them, or both.

But it really is.

To me, one of the most appealing things about anarchism is that nobody can possibly know in advance how anything will be done, because whoever’s involved will have to reach an agreement right there on the spot as to how to do it. But we can know that it will be done in the way that is best for all concerned, simply because nobody will have the authority to force anyone else to settle for anything less. What more could I want?

And you touch on a thing I refer to as “authoritarian reflexes” - the tendency, as with newcomers to anarchism, to just unconsciously assume laws and authority, even when they’re nominally considering anarchism.

And your rant on natural law reminded me of another of my pet peeves - the NAP. I have no particular problem with it in and of itself, as a standard against which to measure ones own actions, but that’s not the way it’s generally treated by its devotees. They almost invariably use it as a direct substitute for a system of laws, and so vividly that one could almost see them pulling out their trusty sidearm and shouting, "Halt! You’ve violated the NAP!

And so on… there’s so much there, and it’s so rare to run into somebody who already understands the things I see…

Ah… yes. As if it wasn’t already enough of a problem with some influencer’s take on some designated authority’s ideas, we can now look foward to AI slop pieced together out of influencers’ takes.

And the phrase “anarchy means no rulers, not no rules” is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me, so I’m looking forward to that essay.

Ah… I wish I’d written this - it says so many things that I’ve been trying to get into words for years now, and it does it so clearly.

I’d add - only part of the problem is the algorithms. Or more precisely, the algorithms are a problem because of a more fundamental problem, and one that has been a problem all along - the fact that all too many people are unwilling or unable to even take the first step of forming their own ideas about anarchism, and instead just look for some authority to tell them what is required and what is prohibited. And then they turn around and insist to other people that this is required and that is prohibited, because this authority said so.

So it’s not as if the algorithms and the influencers they promote are somehow hijacking people on their way to understanding anarchism. Rather, it’s simply that a great many of the people who are interested in it haven’t even taken the first necessary step toward understanding it, so are essentially looking for exactly what the algorithm supplies.

Which illustrates why one of my basic ideas about anarchism is that it is, first and foremost, a way of thinking. The system will never be able to come into being until enough people can and do think in ways that facilitate it.

But once enough people do think in those ways, it will not only be possible, but inevitable.

If Israel was a person, they’d be on an involuntary psych hold.

“Statehood” isnt just a label. It carries with it specific legal realities and rights, chief smong them being territorial sovereignty and the right to self-rule.

And a state has legally esrablished borders which, under international law, can only be altered with the willing agreement of the affected people.

Which means that the actial legal borders of any nominal state of Palestine are those laid out in the Balfour Declaration, as it was adopted by the UN in 1948. Those were the last legal borders in the former Palestinian Mandate and all since have been in direct violation of international law.

If the state of Palestine is not granted the powers and rights inherent to statehood, then this “recognition” is just an empty gesture, and if there’s no intention of granting it those powers and rights, then it’s a lie.

That’s actually most of why I mentioned the economic lie that society benefits when resources are withheld from the poor.

It’s a thing I’ve been growing aware of alongside the right-wing tendency toward dishonesty - there’s a sort of overlap between the general lack of empathy and concern for others and the tendency toward dishonesty.

In a sense, holding the position that society should strive to equitably distribute resources is a simple bit of honesty, while the position that the rich deserve to hoard however much they can accumulate is fundamentally a lie. It’s not even really just a matter of differing viewpoints - it’s a break between a relatively objective and verifiable truth and a relatively objective and verifiable lie.

But yes - even with that, it’s likely that I underestimate the effect. I long ago recognized that there was a fundamental toxic self-centeredness and sincere lack of empathy among notably ambitious and acquisitive people that was completely alien to me, but it’s so completely alien that I still have to regularly remind myself (or be reminded) of that fact.

Huh… that’s a good point

I’ve been thinking lately about the seemingly natural proclivity for right-wing dishonesty - the fact that conservatism is built on lies - that society was better off on the past, that they can return society to that nominally better past, and that they do return society to that nominally better past - and the fact that right-wing economics is similarly built on lies - that society benefits when resources are withheld from the poor and concentrated among the rich, that the market can and will regulate itself…

I hadn’t considered the profit angle though - that the right generally is more sensitive to and ready and willing to do whatever it takes to take advantage of profit-making opportunities and the left is relatively poorly equipped to beat them at that game…

So it’s even worse than I thought…

Meta - it’s sort of cynically amusing that, as a generalization, the right has tended to lag behind in taking advantage of modern communication tools that generally presume a good faith effort at telling the truth - like Wikipedia - but have so easily leapt to the forefront of the newest dynamic in online communication - lying with AI.

True, but I think he’s too feckless and desperate for approval to do that. He’s stupid and self-absorbed enough to move towards doing it, but I’m sure that all it takes is a few judicious words in his ear to make him once again chicken out.

The few exceptions appear to be things on which the oligarchs apparently stupidly agreed with him - like trying to head off Chinese AI development by cutting them off from western chips, which ended up being just the kickstart that the Chinese chip industry needed to ramp up their production to the point that China no longer needs foreign chips.

I can see how they might want to blame something like that on him, but I don’t know if they’d stick their necks out that far, or succeed if they did.

But yeah - if there’s any chance of him actually being punished for his many and egregious crimes, “no longer being useful to the oligarchs” would be it.

And even then there wasn’t enough integrity or courage to carry through with the next step and remove him from office, so the impeachments were ultimately just empty gestures.

And now we won’t even get that.

I’m reasonably certain that at this point there’s absolutely nothing that Trump could do that would actually be “impeachable” in anything other than a speculative and legalistic sense, since making it a reality would require courage, determination and integrity, and those qualities are in vanishingly short supply in a Congress comprised almost entirely of co-conspirators, sycophants, enablers, sybarites and cowards.