jwiggler

  • 16 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I agree but also I think you’re getting at a broader issue of the cooption/reclaimation of words, and the problem of language being fluid.

    Unfortunately for anarchism, its been an uphill battle. In Plato’s The Republic, Socrates refers to anarchy in the negative context we mostly see it used today, similar to just pure chaos.

    The term was reclaimed by Proudhon in the 19th century as he developed anarchist philosophy, but I’m not sure the term ever really got divorced from the negative connotation it had. And so I think we still see people use anarchism to refer to any anti state belief, or chaos, in general. Are they wrong or right? Eh. Id like to say they’re wrong because I was really moved when I read Kropotkin and Graeber and whatever. But then again, I’m not gonna really get mad when someone uses “gentleman” for a polite man instead of a member of the landed gentry or whatever the term “gentleman” used to mean.

    This is all me being an armchair linguist though and kinda talking outta my ass so take that for what you will

    Edit: I just read your objection about the mischaracterization of anarchism as a movement because of all this – and yeah that is a problem for sure. It does make it difficult to describe to people, “I’m not talking about anarchism like you normally think, like pure chaos. I’m talking about anarchism as a political philosophy. See, in the 19th century there were these dudes…” Yeah, that gets pretty old. But idk my opinion is conflicted on this because my personal philosophy around language tends liberal due to their fluid nature



  • Agree 100% but wanna add that some right wing libertarians like to glob on to the A because they fashion themselves as chaotic or watched V for Vendetta one time and now have Batman complexes. Obviously they are completely ignorant of anarchist philosophy. I think the OP is similarly ignorant here (sorry OP, not meaning that as a slight against you – most people think anarchy just means no government or chaos or whatever)

    Edit: oh yeah, as others have mentioned there are also ancaps, which are oxymoronic but I’m sure they don’t really care





  • I think I have seen a similar issue. Mine is that sometimes my firefox gets stuck in the background and I can click the icon in my dock to maximize it. Nothing happens. I have to hit the Windows key to view all my windows in that particular workspace, then click firefox to get it to the front. Sometimes it doesn’t work and I have to close out Firefox and reopen. Is that similar to what you’re seeing ?



  • jwigglertoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comCorporate social media
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    11 days ago

    The house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated, and furnished by innumerable workers–in the timber yard, the brick field, and the workshop, toiling for dear life at a minimum wage.

    The money spent by the owner was not the product of his own toil. It was amassed, like all other riches, by paying the workers two-thirds or only a half of what was their due.

    Moreover–and it is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding becomes most glaring–the house owes its actual value to the profit which the owner can make out of it. Now, this profit results from the fact that his house is built in a town possessing bridges, quays, and fine public buildings, and affording to its inhabitants a thousand comforts and conveniences unknown in villages; a town well paved, lighted with gas, in regular communication with other towns, and itself a centre of industry, commerce, science, and art; a town which the work of twenty or thirty generations has gone to render habitable, healthy, and beautiful.

    A house in certain parts of Paris may be valued at thousands of pounds sterling, not because thousands of pounds’ worth of labour have been expended on that particular house, but because it is in Paris; because for centuries workmen, artists, thinkers, and men of learning and letters have contributed to make Paris what it is to-day–a centre of industry, commerce, politics, art, and science; because Paris has a past; because, thanks to literature, the names of its streets are household words in foreign countries as well as at home; because it is the fruit of eighteen centuries of toil, the work of fifty generations of the whole French nation.

    Who, then, can appropriate to himself the tiniest plot of ground, or the meanest building, without committing a flagrant injustice? Who, then, has the right to sell to any bidder the smallest portion of the common heritage?

    Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/conquest/ch6.html

    Edit: and another of my fav Kropotkin passages, this time from Mutual Aid:

    It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy — an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.

    https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution



  • Okay yeah I get you now.

    I think you have a good point but I do think it could be sooner. If Newsom thinks Trump may cause more damage to to his state than aid (I’m thinking about lack of disaster relief, draining of reservoirs, sending military in to deal with protests, raiding schools for illegal immigrants, stifling scientific research, going after “woke” speech), what choice will he have ?

    Already, schools in Massachusetts are informing school nurses not to comply with ICE if they come through. What happens when Trump says that Massachusetts is defying the law and goes after leadership there? Will Massachusetts bend?

    But I think ultimately you may be right, I suppose it might depend on how antagonistic Trump is toward blue states.



  • We are living through the greatest constitutional crisis of our lifetimes – maybe since the Civil War. The US has never seen anything happen like this domestically. We are rapidly moving toward the dissolution of the US and civil war.

    If the courts do not prosecute Trump and Elon Musk, which is highly likely, the assault on EVERY federal service and source of funds will continue. “Throwing it back to the states” will cause the states to contract – without confidence in any federal assistance or regulations, states will need to figure it out themselves – and if they start seeing the federal government as something they need to protect their citizens from…well, why would they remain a part of that federal government? If the US government is completely unreliable due to the massive brain, experience, and regulation drain, what reason do states have to remain a part of that? Especially when the feds want to restrict speech and expression in the way they do.

    And if the courts somehow slap down Elon and Trump and they are removed? Then we’ve got violence from the J6ers and likely more.

    We very well might be witnessing the end of the US, as I see it. But maybe someone can offer some counterpoints


  • The video isn’t really about how each facet of a ‘network state’ would work though, it’s about how these billionaires – who proclaim out in the open the US is a failing state and needs to essentially be brought out back and killed so they can build it back how they want – have their voices in the Presidents ear and their money in his pocket. Seemingly he and JD Vance are repeating their (Thiel, Balaji, and ultimately Curtis Yarvin’s) philosophies and advancing their own goals, as stated by they themselves in podcasts and books.

    But to answer your first point, you dont buy an army, you buy the US presidency, which just so happens to be the most powerful it has ever been in US history.