if you are experiencing depersonalization or similar dissociative symptoms, psychologists and psychiatrists can be helpful

it sounds like an Australian accent. there are tons of accents that have their own history and context. it’s shitty to call them weird, bizarre, or bastardized and makes you seem narrowminded.

this is the kind of thing that makes me want to never post or comment anywhere on the internet

It’s very well written. This is just AI affecting how people view well-organized, nicely-formatted, and clear writing these days. Thanks for keeping us updated on the progress of the fediverse and for doing it so thoroughly!

i cited wars as counterexamples against peace. if that doesn’t make sense to you, im not sure we can have a productive conversation.

i completely agree that humans are part of nature. So if you like, everything we do (and everything that occurs ever) is “natural” because everything is part of nature, but that’s a fairly useless definition. we also do some relatively unique stuff, too, that is not mirrored by other animals. Nation states are not the same as wolf packs or bonobo societies or whale pods.

the most important difference here is that nations have institutions (such as a border) that exist despite the actual relationship of the people on those borders. the people on both sides of the Berlin Wall didn’t want it to be there. The people who live in Beebe Plain, a town divided by the US-Canada border, have much more in common with their neighbors than the politicians in Washington DC and Ottawa who make decisions for them. this is not the same as pack membership setting territory boundaries, this is control from a distance by strangers.

anyway this has been interesting, im gonna get on with my day.

you said “decide to keep the peace” which I provided counterexamples against. I shorthanded that as “negotiate” but you can just sub in your exact language and the point stands.

i don’t deny the social abilities of wolves. i don’t even claim that there are zero similarities between social boundaries and formal borders. what im doing is pointing out that borders formed by the institution of the state are fundamentally different from social boundaries adopted by people, wolves, or any being capable of negotiating them.

my motivation here is to undermine the idea that national borders are “natural”, which tends to legitimate them in many people’s minds, like the meme in this post tries to do. I want to undermine that because i believe it isn’t true and because there are fundamentally better ways to organize society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X39IkX2OpBs

tl;dw consumption alone is meaningless. you need organization first and foremost

so the borders of the US were agreed upon by entities who decided to keep the peace, not established by war and genocide? the borders of several African states were not set by colonial violence? the border between Russia and Ukraine is being “renegotiated” and not fought over? Israel “renegotiating” with Lebanon?

there’s a big difference between populations who come to agreements with each other and states who do things for power.

the state is an organization that includes a tiny minority of people who get to command and control the greater population. you can argue that its power is legitimate because of elections if you want, but it is not the same as the people. meanwhile, the wolves don’t experience that kind of government.

those aren’t borders, those are territories arrived at by wolves interacting with each other and deciding to keep the peace. has nothing to do with formal borders imposed on us by states

https://www.nts.live/

https://www.thelotradio.com/

bandcamp

don’t explain the tech, talk about the community

Well, why does it have to be one single government covering all of China? “China” refers to a state, a centralized government made of a small number of people who command and control a huge territory and its peoples. It doesn’t make sense to define a future communist society by the criteria of a state. Instead, take all the land and people that are currently within the state of China. If we tried to set up a communist society there, how can we do that? People can have different answers (especially when it comes to details), and I’m certainly open to ideas.

Disclaimer: the following is not “the answer”, it’s a set of ideas that I believe are compatible with a communist society and can be one example of how such a society could look.

I’d imagine that power that the state usually has would need to be dispersed among directly democratic assemblies and unions. This would create a federation of communist societies that work together on bigger issues.

• Geographical Organization : Since government is something everyone participates in and since everyone affected by a decision gets a say in it, we can have federated layers of assemblies of the people. So, at the most local level, a single neighborhood in a city or a single village or a single other municipal unit (e.g., “the people who live along this 2km stretch of river”) can have an assembly. Neighboring assemblies can talk to/cooperate with each other to solve issues that affect all of them. Local assemblies can regularly send delegates (who can be instantly recalled, don’t serve timed terms, have no power of their own, they just communicate their assembly’s position) to meetings and create citywide, regional, etc medium-level assemblies to handle bigger projects. That could include rail lines, ecological issues like forest management, anything that needs to be produced at a larger scale, etc. Then, for those few questions that really and truly affect a territory and people the size of China (e.g., coordinating defense vs a large national army; dealing with climate change; coordinating specialized, high-tech production of medicines, and so on), there can be “national” assemblies. Again, the power would need to be held at the lowest level, or else you risk forming a state when a few greedy people use their position to accumulate power.

• Membership Organization: Parallel to the geographic assemblies I mentioned above, you can also have unions and associations of workers who are in the same workplace and industry. Everyone who works in a local cafe has a say in how that cafe is run. Then the Cafe Workers Union can make presentations/have an additional say (beyond what the members already have in the geographic assembly) in any local or regional decisions involving, say, food service and safety, disposal of food scraps and cooking oils, and whatever else is relevant. This would go for any union: an agricultural workers union, a research physicists’ union, a students’ union, and so on. Also, since people can split their time how they like, maybe some minimum amount of commitment to a job would be needed for union membership? Not sure.

Where do these ideas come from? The Next Revolution by Blair Taylor and Debbie Bookchin (discussing the ideas of Murray Bookchin and others). Also check out council communism and, more broadly, Libertarian Socialism as a tendency. Communism is really interesting! There are many different ideas about how we can get there. Whatever you believe, even if you think we need to capture the state, we are at a point in history in which we need to work together to build the power of workers and ordinary people vs. capitalists and the state.

don’t believe these liars

socialism: workers control the means of production (the factories, the farms, the freight trains, etc). there is no separate owner. this is usually considered a key step on the way to communism.

communism: a society without any classes (no capitalists, no working class, no one in poverty, everyone is on the same level of society); without money (everything ppl need is provided for free and fairly, there are no capitalist markets); and without a state (government is not a separate group of people who command others, the people make decisions on things that affect them).

Even those communists who believe the right strategy to reach a communist society requires them to take control of the state first believe that the ultimate goal is for the state to “wither away” as it becomes less necessary over time. other communists disagree that it is a possible to reach a communist society by taking control of the state, rather the people have to build their own non-state power that eventually defeats it.

the points about ksitigarbha are much more lib left than auth left. the points about guanyin are center left at most

get a “digital signage” monitor with a full android install on it and you can skip the firestick (it’ll still have Google play services etc). make sure to check it has all the connectivity & ports you need.

commafeed

yeah, I mean I can’t say I consider an oil exec picking new places to exploit to be on the same level as the local car salesperson. Still, the question was ultimately about socialists’ positions on middle class insurance salesmen as a category.

at most, such things are an expression of frustration and desperation. there only resistance is organized resistance. also you have to build the alternative you want to see, otherwise it’s just destruction