@cee I wonder: can an ontological anarchist even position themself in the center? To me, such concept as "centrism" does not apply to an ontological anarchist. In fact, one's position on the political compass is pretty much irrelevant. Economic centrism would be something like welfare capitalism. Cultural centrism would be something like humanism. Clearly these categories do not apply here.
@cyberspook I agree, hence why I used the commas.
Didnt you see me shitting on the political compass before?? Oh wait nevermind, i forget that you don't follow me 😔
that's okayy.

I made a post before about how i reject the political compass: ancaps, ancoms, mutualists, stalinists, nazbols and fascists all seek to preserve the industrial-urban society and are all sects of the church of humanity. But normies simply cannot comprehend that i am neither, left, right or centre.
But hey, I'll get rid of it if it helps you sleep at night.

I feel the pressure even more so as a femboy, people have high expectations of me. im either getting dog-piled by the right and called an SJW jesus, or cancelled by the left and called a fascist femboy. It's all bullshit, it's all a psyop, it's all spooked.
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@cee @cyberspook I still get shit on by people of both sides even as an ancap. Both sides still refuse to acknowledge that nationalism vs globalism is a false dichotomy.

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@xianc78
Pretty sure that Marxists (at least the Orthodox ones) were in support of neither nationalism (which they saw as enriching national capitalists) nor globalism (which they saw as economic imperialism). Marx absolutely despised free trade and globalism. Yes, Marx did say that free trade is preferable but it was more of a Machiavellian move on his part. "What if… we accelerated global capitalism and then capitalism just broke itself and then the workers will rise?" Well, obviously that didn't happen. No wonder why neo-Stalinists retreated to nationalism. The kool kid on the block now is "multipolarity." "We support Trump and Putin but it's not that we support capitalism. It's that we support anti-imperialism. We need to defeat Atlanticism."

Pure opportunism.
@cee
@cyberspook @xianc78 @cee For all the complaints about Communism, practical, theoretical, and applied, it is very obvious that Stalin and Stalinism is in no way representative of Marxism, and abandons the Marxist goal of phasing out the concept of higharchial government by halting the progress at the theiretical middle-period, the Dictatorship of the Prolitariat, and using this quasi-formed middle-period instead to impose a Left-Wing Totalitarian Fascism upon the masses. Read "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" by Wilhelm Reich.
@se7en
I'm aware. That's why I pointed out that Orthodox Marxists were neither nationalist nor globalist. Stalinists were just revisionists.

When it comes to Marx, Orthodox Marxists are the closest to what he actually wrote.
@cee @xianc78
@cyberspook @xianc78 💯

I mean, my crazy conspiracy theory is that, NATO is IngSoc, the Eastern Bloc is Neo-Bolshevism and East Asia like Japan is Death Worship, all unironically. I've already read some George Orwell, like Homage to Catalonia, and I have a copy of 1984. I see it a lot, socialist and capitalist politicians are bipartisan.

This is what it's like in Australia:

Neoliberals: Get a fucking job you lazy piece of shit 😡

Social Democrats: Get a fucking job you lazy piece of shit 😄

They've delayed the community garden yet again, and now they're pushing me to work at a recycling plant in the next town, 2.5 hour drive over the next 2 months. The problem is, these fuckers are gonna keep pushing me to overwork (more than my limit, 15 hrs a week), like bruh, i'm literally crippled. I'm gonna let loose and start spitting hard facts at my "job provider", i swear.
@cee
I mean, it's not a conspiracy by this point. Sidney Parker (he's a very educated and respectable Stirnerite, you should read him) basically said that the future is some twisted fusion of 1984 and Brave New World.
@xianc78
@cyberspook @cee @xianc78 we've gotten into a few discussions. I think you used to follow my last account.

It's not entirely random. The joke was that the WEF has written the fanfic that combined the two worlds.
@thatguyoverthere
Small d democrat. You were the editor of the Liberty journal, right? You also listened to a Killswitch Engage concert through a hole in the wall. I remember that.
@cee @xianc78
@cyberspook @cee @xianc78 yeah I saw killswitch a few times. Not a literal hole in the wall but small venue which has now sadly been shut down in favor of a hockey arena. The Jeffersonian report was where I was writing. Haven't touched in months. Probably should at some point.
@cyberspook @cee @xianc78 yeah I shutdown charlestown.social and moved my main here. I'm also over at @thatguyoverthere

I will be standing up an instance of my own again soon enough. My hosting costs were getting uncomfortable and I had a need to trim some fat. Resources were being used in a way that I couldn't easily do that without killing my fedi instance. I cut costs more than half but I'm going to go even further and kill the remaining services on that account once they've been replaced elsewhere.

My next fedi instance will not be tied to my local area. I couldn't get people to sign up, and the more I interacted with locals on nextdoor the more I realized I didn't really want to be their admin anyway. The few people that did sign up never used it.
@cyberspook @cee @xianc78 I guess I see some value in democracy but I think as time goes on my hope that we can extract that value without poisoning ourselves in the process is waning. I think generally speaking people should have a say in how they are governed. I would say I'm more about voluntarism than democracy though. There needs to be an exit for people who feel their minority voice is not being heard. The problem I have with democracy is the idea that you must accept whatever the vocal majority decided to do to you. I think democracy could work in smaller social groups but I doubt it's ability to scale.
@thatguyoverthere
If the minority voice is being heard that's actually more democracy. I think you're confusing it with liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is democracy of the voting ballot. It's majoritarian as hell and its fundamental structure isn't that different from a monarchy.

Democracy is highly misunderstood nowadays. It's assumed to be the tyranny of the majority while in actuality the tyranny of the majority exists only when there isn't enough democracy. Accelerate democracy. Drive everything to the grassroots, demolish top-down institutions. Then you'll have a democracy that respects you. Think of individualism. Individualism is viewed badly because we're not individualist enough. We're dividuals, we reduce ourselves to some identity categories and some social roles that we are "supposed" to fulfill. "I am not an individual. I am a consoomer." "I am not an autonomous agent. I am a market agent." "I am not a unique being. I am a black person," etc., etc.
@cee @xianc78
@cyberspook @xianc78 @thatguyoverthere What are the odds, I listened to Landstreicher's critique of identity today actually.
@cee
POST-LEFTISTS: Oh, I see. It is a Trolling Woketards on The Anarchist Library Day. My favorite time of the year.

Never change, post-leftists.
@xianc78 @thatguyoverthere

@thatguyoverthere
Ironically enough, the wokies want to give minorities more power because they are minorities. Which means their voices aren’t being heard. There was a time when the word “minority” wasn’t associated exclusively with race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability and other physical and behavioral categories. A minority is simply that: a minor part of the population. It saddens me that we can’t use this term more generally anymore without people assuming vulnerable groups of the population.
@cee @xianc78

@cyberspook @cee @xianc78 yeah one thing Orwell got right was the use of language to manipulate and control. I think the way words/symbols evolve over time can be (and often is) manipulated to force a particular line of thinking. Minority is a perfect example. I was using it in a non racial context, but these days it is often understood to mean "vulnerable group $x". In politics many of those vulnerable groups are elevated in status (at least the appearance is put forward).
@thatguyoverthere
Yeah, definitely. I couldn't even imagine how much our language gets twisted, like with saying "socialism" in reference to neo-Stalinism or saying "Linux" in reference to GNU+Linux. Like, cringe. Imagine calling GNU+Linux as Linux. Couldn't be me.
@cee @xianc78
@thatguyoverthere
I feel physical pain when someone says that Android is Open Source or that mayonnaise is an instrument.
@cee @xianc78
@thatguyoverthere @xianc78 @cyberspook Orwell talks about how the state can dominate us through the use of newspeak and doublethink. Whereas Huxley imagines what would happen if the pharmaceutical industry merged with the state and stared dominating us through the use of reward power (pleasure).
@cee @xianc78 @cyberspook yes but there was a sit down interview with the two authors and I think it was Huxley who said something to the effect that he believed that future powers might start out looking like 1984 but evolve into brave new world because the 1984 authoritarian model was expensive and hard to maintain for long periods.
@thatguyoverthere
Well, totalitarianism was indeed hard to maintain for long periods. But the same can be said about hyper-consoomerism. So I guess they were both wrong.
@cee @xianc78
@cyberspook @cee @xianc78 yeah or at least they were both incomplete. It seems false dichotomy is something we humans are persistently creating.
@cee
Well, Huxley failed in that prediction: the Big Pharma hasn't merged with the state and isn't the source of consoomerism nowadays, although, like any megacorp, they cooperate with and bribe the state. The main source of consoomerism are the entertainment industry and commodity fetishism. Like Debord said. Wonder how BNW would look like if Debord wrote it. Would read it.

Make a Debord edition of BNW. Surely we can generate it by feeding Society of the Spectacle and Brave New World to GPT.
@xianc78 @thatguyoverthere
@cyberspook Yeah that would be cool.
Mind you, drugs like xanax and opiods are a concern, but mostly anti-anxiety meds since opiods are a bit too strong and get people killed. I watched a tedx talk about how anxiety isnt a disorder, but a legit emotion that shouldnt be supressed.

@xianc78 @thatguyoverthere
@cee @xianc78 @cyberspook xanax (and other antianxiety meds) might be the closest thing to soma on the books today
@thatguyoverthere @xianc78 @cyberspook Yeah, it actually makes sense now, it is connected. Why xanax is perfectly legal, but DMT is completely forbidden. Actually, doing DMT the second time, and then stumbling across Ralph W Emerson a couple days later, made me into a conscious egoist.
@cee
Laws are whatever the ruling class doesn't want you to do, for whatever reason. They are not supposed to make sense.
@xianc78 @thatguyoverthere
@cee
Anxiety is the result of capitalism putting you in a stressful environment. It's all connected. Neoliberalism breeds mental disorders and then tries to fix the results of its own creation. That's the essence of reformism: when you try to fix the symptoms, not the causes. Obviously it's like chopping the head of a hydra: not very effective.
@xianc78 @thatguyoverthere
@cee
Hot take: psychiatry is reformist. It literally tries to "reform" its patients, its reformist nature couldn't be more obvious.
@thatguyoverthere @xianc78

@thatguyoverthere@shitposter.club @cyberspook@soc.redeyes.site @cee@freethinkers.lgbt @xianc78@gameliberty.club Orwell wrote an obvious dystopia, Huxley wrote a more subtle argument against a certain type of utopia, Huxley wrote something way better

@cafkafk @cee @xianc78 @cyberspook both are great books if you ask me. I was referring to a conversation they had
@thatguyoverthere
No.

1984 is about brainwashing and surveillance, Brave New World is about consoomerism and manufactured consent. Two different approaches to governmental control. Modern governments don't use one or the other but the combination of the two.
@cee @xianc78
@thatguyoverthere
Compare neo-Stalinism and neoliberalism. Neo-Stalinism is privacy-invading and repressive but explicitly anti-consoomerist because they reject the "bourgeois lifestyle." Meanwhile, neoliberalism is consoomerist and gives a lot of power to megacorps but it isn't necessarily police statism (in theory at least).
@cee @xianc78
@cyberspook @cee @xianc78 yeah we love somewhere in between. Consoome but make sure it's under 600 dollars or we might ask questions. Make sure you only engage in "white markets" (as opposed to "black" or "gray" markets) and stay in the light so to speak so we can see you clearly (on and offline surveillance)

@cyberspook @cee @xianc78 I am thinking of a letter (not a sit down interview as I incorrectly remembered) written by Huxley to Orwell. I agree the modern governments use a combination of techniques.

Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.

@thatguyoverthere
They definitely did but Huxley was certainly wrong when he thought that this will be the primary method of control. When consoomerism doesn't work, police violence and political imprisonment take its place. They are trying to increase the latter so we have less room to maneuver. The PATRIOT act for example. The three letter agencies. They're essentially modern Gestapo. It's a layered approach: when bribery with material goods fails they force you to obey the hard way. And certainly brainwashing through TV and the Internet is stronger than ever. It is the layer in-between of consoomerism and political repression. It is in the state's best interest to spread misinformation and spooks. Our whole society is build on mass hallucinations.

It's like a slider: on one end we have 1984. On another end we have Brave New World. And the IRL governments fluctuate between the two.
@cee @xianc78
@cyberspook @cee @xianc78 agreed. I think humans have a tendency to force things to appear binary but they rarely are.

All that said I think there is still room for Huxley's vision to be more realized. We don't (yet) have a good soma candidate, and we still leave procreation up to people. The stick will probably never go away, but the state is always looking for a sweeter carrot.
@thatguyoverthere @xianc78 @cyberspook the more repressive and violent the state gets, the more likely people are gonna revolt en masse. Fordism is definitely something that frightens me the most, for someone like me who is grey asexual and prefers living in solitude. Fordism is also much harder to resist than 1984.
@cee
>"job provider"
Ah, so that's how they call the capitalist class now. We had "enterpreneurs," "employers," "businessmen," "business owners," "company owners," "CEOs." So many fluffy names to describe a single thing, like… LMAO, Porkies do be trying to pretend to be nice.

On a side note: do you consider the precariat to be a part of the proletariat? Certainly freelancers do own the means of production but at the same time you won't really call them "petty bourgeoisie" because they still depend on the capitalists and their infrastructure for survival.
@xianc78

@cyberspook @cee I wouldn't consider enterpreneurs to be part of the capitalist class. According to agorist class theory, enterpreneurs are the ones who actually innovate and are in many times self-employed as opposed to the capitalist class who just merely owns the means of production and probably didn't come up with any of the ideas of the business. Both ancaps and marxoids usually conflate the two.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agorism#

Also, CEOs aren't business owners. They are elected by stakeholders, so they are just over-glorified managers. The difference between a company and a corporation is that a company is privately owned by an individual while a corporation is owned by stakeholders. This stakeholder model allows them to be considered separate legal entities from the owner. So if the corporation gets into legal trouble then it's the fault of the corporation and not on any individual.

@xianc78
Self-employed are a part of the petty capitalist subclass, the transitionary stage between the proletariat and middle capitalists. Marx has never denied that petty capitalists have characteristics of their own. He mentioned that the petty capitalist transitionary class is a self-exploiting class, forced to engage in market competition for survival and thus forcing itself to overwork for extra profit. The petty capitalist class is the class ancaps and mutualists appeal to, along with the proletariat. According to the revolutionary socialists, the only real problem of petty capitalists, aside from their tendency to mimic their richer folk (copyright protectionism, anyone?), is that they're very fucking indecisive, usually composing the voting base for the liberal moderates.

Konkin hasn't actually invented anything new. The class that he described as an innovating class is the petty capitalist class according to the Marxian class analysis. They are technically still capitalists in a sense that they hold the means of production. I would say that modern economists also describe the middle capitalists with the word "enterpreneur" however I think.

I would argue that Konkin stratifies the capitalists on petty, middle and big (something that socialists knew already) but ignores the wage laborers. The wage laborers are not capitalists, i.e. they're not the owners of capital in a Marxist sense. So in a way Konkin's model is incomplete and certainly ignores the class conflict between wage earners and capital owners, prefering to focus on state intervention more despite the profit motive itself being the sole reason of that state intervention. If the big capitalists don't have a state, they'll most likely create one. So it's easier for them to rig the market.
@cee

@cyberspook @cee
>I would argue that Konkin stratifies the capitalists on petty, middle and big (something that socialists knew already) but ignores the wage laborers.

Konkin was actually against wage-labor. He thought that the state was the only obstacle in preventing most people from being self-employed (e.g laws preventing one from selling their own produce). He also thought that innovation in the market would make self-employment much easier. It's part of the reason why Konkin considered himself more of a left-libertarian as opposed to an ancap.

@xianc78
Well, that's just mutualism by this point. Self-employment and worker co-ops. No conflicts here. Mutualists are pretty much contractualists, James L. Walker imagined market anarchism to be entirely contract-based. Though I must mention that mutualists also emphasize usufruct property as the generally accepted type of property instead of absentee ownership which modern economists call "private property" (sheesh, I hate that this term denotes both personal and absentee property, it's so confusing).
@cee
@xianc78
Firstly, it's called "shareholder." Secondly, it depends when it comes to CEOs: they may be capital owners, they may be overglorified managers. In the second case… yeah, sure, whatever.
@cee
@cee @xianc78 @cyberspook Job providers are a pile of fun. Last year I was doing only part time study, putting me in line for employment. Lady at the provider asked if anything stopped me from getting full time work.
"I study part time."
"Oh, you're upskilling?" [That word is *nasty* for reasons I can't describe, but anyways]
"...yes, but I can't fit a full time job in my time too."
Didn't seem to cut me any slack w.r.t disability either.

Fortunately I did get a part time job...of sorts, though entirely randomly and to no fault of the job provider (as someone needed a programmer three days later). Though the next person I met at the job provider agreed immediately that a full time job wasn't going to work.
@hayley
— Give me a decent wage and a place to live, I'll get my education.
— No, you have to get an education first.
— I need an environment that fosters my physical and mental well-being before I can start my education.
— No-no-no, we will not provide you anything.
— But how do you expect me to get a good education if I have other concerns unsatisfied.
— We don't care, figure this out yourself.

You know, maybe I should join a commune.
@cee @xianc78
@cyberspook @cee @xianc78 My debt does indeed say hello. And I mostly autopilot at home, as anything else will somehow land me into more shit.
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