PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]

amerikkka Anarchist, autistic, engineer, and Certified Professional Life-Regretter. If you got a brick of text, don’t be alarmed; that’s normal.

No, I’m not interested in voting for your candidate.

Free 🇵🇸, abolish Pissrael .

  • 65 Posts
  • 2.49K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • My position is that you should be seen to be entirely free to make your own choices, even if the choice you make is to rape me.

    I literally cannot conjure up a better example for what kinds of mistakes you can internalize by doing a clean-room design of anarchism.

    I end up discovering that their reasoning has been tainted by their own authoritarian habits, presumptions or even ambitions.

    That’s magical thinking. Yeah there’s no such thing as a pure anarchist text and we are all shaped by the oppressions we are subject to, but the reasonable response is not to retreat into your own head, since you are certainly just as “tainted” as anyone else. Instead, the reasonable response is to read all texts critically, i.e. assume a perfect text does not exist.

    And frankly, I don’t even want to read solely anarchist books. There are lots of people who make excellent contributions to various fields of endeavor who are not necessarily anarchists. E.g., I loved Omar El-Akkad’s book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This on the Gaza genocide, and I recommend every anarchist read it even though El-Akkad is not an anarchist to the best of my knowledge. It’s up to us to approach literature with a critical assessment.





  • It’s just a simple step from “you should convinced to do this” to “you should be compelled to do this.”

    It’s actually a huge step, actually. It’s like… the whole thing. It’s “here’s why it would be neat if you consented to this, but you can do something else if you like” versus “do it lol”.

    Which is a freedom the majority of the world already possesses, so rather obviously it doesn’t ensure or even imply anarchism.

    Privilege spotted. The majority of the world absolutely does NOT have freedom of association, even de jure.

    And beyond that, more pointedly but less obviously, ideological collectives (as yours does) always carry with them an unstated presumption that the entity from which people would be free to disassociate would rightfully hold some property.

    No they don’t, you’re imagining that. E.g., you can have multiple distinct anarchist collectives in the same area.

    So you’re actually, already, envisioning an entity that would … establish the norms that are expected of those who live there.

    1000% yes. If you join a chess club started by me, you can’t shit on the chessboards. You are free to start a chess club where shitting on the chessboards is allowed/encouraged. Establishing norms is not necessarily a system of domination or hierarchy.

    As long as people continue to believe that they can and should have some say over other people’s decisions, anarchism will fail.

    If someone decides to rape me, I am wrecking their shit. That’s a bad decision and I’m not gonna respect it at all. It’s not authoritarian to make and act on that judgment call. Obviously, this is perfectly in line with anarchist theory and praxis.

    There are plenty of less extreme examples where someone’s decisions will harm someone else, e.g. insert an example from almost any undergraduate ethics textbook.


    I gotta be so real with you: you seem like you want to do anarchism with the seriousness and care it deserves, but I suspect you’re trying to do a “clean room design” of anarchist principles. Please just do the reading. Anarchist literature is informed by generations of praxis and mistakes that you have no way of accumulating in a “clean room” within a single lifetime. There are even anarchists who make your arguments a lot more convincingly than you’re doing.




  • There are really only two broad options - whatever people make up an anarchistic society will make whatever choices they make for whatever reasosns they make them, and enough of them will be conscious enough of the need to compromise to do so, and they’ll end up with a more or less stable society that might be hastily generalized in some broad and necessarily inaccurate ways

    This… sounds like anarchism succeeding. IMO, being an anarcho-communist (or whatever) is trying to persuade people to use anarchist communism (or whatever) as the framework to make better choices “for whatever reasons they make them”, because we think that this is a good framework for reasoning about an uncertain world. But if you want to think differently about anarchism, that’s completely fine, welcome even. Diversity is strength. But that doesn’t mean I’m gonna stop passionately advocating for what I think is right.

    One of the many ways by which anarchism could fail is by ideologues digging their heels in and refusing to compromise on any of the dogma stipulated by the label to which they’ve sworn allegiance.

    All forms of anarchism organize on the basis of free association. Again, dissatisfied parties can freely disassociate and go do their own thing. Or, they can reach a compromise. Either outcome is not a failure of anarchism.


  • Every gamer in the world is already processing in 6 dimensional visual memory space.

    Nah, by your logic, they’re processing in much higher dimensions, one for each cone cell. But your brain processes these sensors into a two-dimensional spatial image that varies with time. (When a signal processing system performs this, we call it sensor fusion. And in fact, machine learning is a huge part of sensor fusion.) But even then, gamers aren’t just responding to the visual stimuli, but they’re tracking the abstractions of the game, such as players, enemies, terrain, etc. And then the physics engine inside a modern game typically implements either 2D or 3D space, plus time. And then the configuration space of all the objects a gamer needs to track adds dimensions.

    But these high-dimensional objects…they really have structure that enables us to split them into groups of 1, 2, or 3. That’s not necessarily a helpful move for high-dimensional spaces in general.

    Like I’m not saying that you literally never can or should visualize high-dimensional objects, e.g. in Hilbert spaces a lot of plane and 3D geometry intuition survives, but some situations are just not amenable to visual learning. (Conversely, of course, some situations require visual learning. But it’s important to be able to use all learning styles to some extent.)


  • As long as you’re not creating a new state, systems of domination, hierarchies, etc., then go do what you want. Anarcho-collectivism (or -communism, or -syndicalism, or mutualism) doesn’t mean imposing those frameworks of anarchist organization on the proletariat and the ecology; it just means we have a viewpoint on which mode(s) of organization have the best chance of achieving liberation.