cacheson 🏴🔁🍊

Probably too soon, but I’ll give it an upvote anyway.

The electoral system is so focused on the specific immediate task at hand, the election these people were hired to win (and working people to the bone doing it), that there’s never any room to step back and build something long-term. No one is planning for the Democratic party five or ten years from now (at least, not in a way that affects local organizing) because that’s ten or twenty times as long as the average staffer is expected to last. The feeling seems to be that every minute spent planning for something further out than the next election is a minute not spent working on winning the next election.

So, when I get on my anarchist high horse now and talk about how we need to spend our time, energy, and money on something other than electoral politics, it’s not the voting part that upsets me. It’s all this bullshit. Every election, we have to burn out all our most promising organizers in six months because there was no infrastructure for them to build on, and they have to make it all from scratch every time. It’s like we’re working extra hard to pay off our last payday loan, then taking out a new payday loan at the end, ensuring we’ll have to do the same thing over again next time.

I feel like this part bears emphasizing, given the arguments over it that I’ve seen recently. I’m aggressively neutral on the question of whether or not anarchists should vote. The hour or less per year that an individual anarchist may spend on voting just doesn’t matter. Almost all the waste of electoralism is in the time, energy, and money spent on campaigning, and having nothing to show for it afterwards if your candidate loses.

On the other side, if a fellow anarchist doesn’t want to vote, fighting with them about it isn’t worth the social cohesion cost. Even if you see value in voting as a rearguard action, we’re not a big enough bloc for their non-voting to really matter.

I feel like we need something along the lines of “ML - Yes, that’s lemmy.ml” added to the acronym list. Or maybe “WKB - Well known bastards”?

From a totally amoral perspective, sure. War is interesting, that’s what drew me to NCD in the first place. The pager memes in particular felt like a throwback to 00s-era neocon bullshit, though.

I’m surprised no one has tried to give any dating advice here. OP, regardless of the virginity thing, do you want to find a romantic partner? It’s entirely reasonable to want both romance and sex.

Here’s what’s worked for me:

• Figure out what kind of person your ideal partner would be, what their interests are, and where they would hang out.
• Put yourself in places where you’re likely to meet that kind of person. For example, if you’re looking for someone that likes the outdoors and staying physically active, maybe look for a hiking group in your area.
• Be confident, and be chill. If you’re neither, fake it until you are.

That’s the basic outline. If you’re meeting people that are sort of like what you’re looking for, but not quite, that’s an indication that you’re on the right track and should keep at it. Dating is a grind and requires patience.

In terms of confidence/chill, that means:

• Assuming that someone you’re interested in could also be attracted to you, instead of just assuming they aren’t.
• Handling rejection gracefully.
• Not keeping your desires a secret, but also having the patience not to dump everything on them all at once. If you want to be sexual, be lightly flirty with them, and see if they respond in kind. If they do, then you can gradually escalate along those lines.
• Not requiring constant attention from them. Give them a chance to miss you. Don’t feel the need to respond to that text right away, for example. Wait 10 minutes or so, then respond. This lets them know that you don’t expect immediate responses, and they can get back to you later if they’re busy. It also slows the pace of conversation down, so that you don’t run out of things to talk about.

There’s a breath play joke here somewhere.

The human shield narrative is a whole other level of mental gymnastics for me. Is there something in the water preventing people from understanding militants are people and people live in houses and houses are typically built next to other houses?

I’m pretty sure that that’s something that the average person just does not understand. As both an anarchist and a proponent of civilian firearm ownership, I’ve seen and participated in many discussions with people saying that “there’s no way you can fight the government, they have tanks/bombers/nukes/etc”. Like they think the government is just going to do precision drone strikes on all the insurgents and then it’ll be over. The inevitability of “collateral damage” doesn’t occur to them, and they have no idea how insurgencies work.

People on NCD probably do know better, but some have picked a side, and confirmation bias takes over from there.

I’ve also been a lurker there. The pager memes were pretty fucking disgusting. There’s definitely a sizable “rah rah Israel” contingent there, despite the community leaning more leftward than one would expect given the subject matter.

Personally, I think the term ‘anarchy’ works against them because of its literal meaning and its connotations.

It does, but there isn’t much we can do about it. Its literal meaning (an-archos, no rulers) is exactly what we want, so we have to die on that hill.

The “bad” meaning of anarchy comes from what most people think would happen without some kind of ruler in charge of society. So if we were to largely switch to some other term, people would start to view that more negatively the more it caught on. Even “libertarian socialism” is pretty awkward, given the connotations of “socialism” in the mainstream.

Just picking a random point in this giant thread to chime in. I am an anarchist who is sometimes capable of being serious. So if you want to pick my brain, as PugJesus suggested, feel free.

One thing that I feel I should point out in regards to this particular comment is that anarchists do not advocate for creating power vacuums. Generally speaking, we advocate for people to self-govern in a much more direct way than representative democracy allows for. We urge the creation of voluntary institutions for managing social coordination, shaped by the needs of their members. We want to get rid of positions of power in ways that don’t result in a power vacuum, because people have their needs met and are no longer looking for guidance from a strongman.

We also (usually) recognize that our ideal isn’t going to be perfectly achievable, but we instead seek to get closer to that ideal as we discover new ways to practically do so.

I see that you read a summary of Kropotkin’s ideas, which is cool. He was an anarcho-communist specifically, which is probably the most popular anarchist tendency. I tend to advocate for mutualism, in part because I think it’s easier to understand for people that are accustomed to how capitalist societies function. The short, very oversimplified version is: abolish absentee ownership, create an economy of cooperatives, and gradually replace government institutions with more co-ops.

There’s sometimes tension between the different strains of anarchism, but usually we recognize that we’re all working towards roughly the same thing. Any future anarchist society is likely to be a patchwork of various frameworks serving different groups of people who have different preferences.