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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 23rd, 2023

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  • You’re just not calling it a state.

    I love how that was the one moment you weren’t willing to expand your explanation and just left a link. Did you notice yourself accidentally describing a state and decided to not leave the opening?

    Whatever diplomatic routine you pull that results in the organization that communists are striving for: that’s the state. An external force with a plan about how people organize. You can call it whatever form of state you want, you can call it a commune, a collective, but whatever method the people use to organize themselves that way is that state.

    Think it through: how are decisions made, do we cast a vote? Well contracts, you have a democratic state. Do we use diplomacy? Congrats, you have a diplomatic state. Okay so what if we just want some rules for who does what and we don’t make people make those decisions, congrats you have a constitutional state. Uh oh people aren’t following rules, looks like we need to hire people to enforce those rules… Ever wonder why every communist system ever had an overabundance of police?

    The link you posted is completely untrustworthy by the way. I mean, look at this:

    If anything, getting paid to do something makes it less enjoyable

    Any health brain in the world would throw up alarm bells at this. A classic sophist technique, to prime the conclusions by peppering little lies that make it more palatable. Every study ever performed on paid/unpaid labor has this solved, don’t start pretending it’s true now.

    Here’s a hint: unpaid labor is called what exactly? Using unpaid labor to get things done, what’s that called?

    Plus, look at how this comment chain started. The original replier made the point that communism fascism and socialism all need a state to exist. Your source, when arguing that you don’t need bosses or state control mentioned a case where 500,000 workers over through a factory and controlled it democratically. He suspiciously doesn’t mention how long it lasted, only that it happened post WW1. He also doesn’t mention that that’s immediately before the fascist takeover of Italy, in which Mussolini cooperated with many of these violent revolutionaries called syndicates, and they were unproductive without right control.

    I hold the same sentiment as you in regards to the state, I have a natural distrust towards it I suppose. However, I do not agree that this is at all compatible with an ideology that necessitates maximal cooperation. It’s not any wonder to me at all that the regimes who felt most passionately about how people should cooperate and live together end up the most oppressive


  • Why is the only possibility for you to either get on the roads or do nothing? The criticism is that road blocking is an ineffective form of protest, not that protest as a whole is stupid.

    I work in IoT by the way, and I’m directly involved in programming small computers that increase fuel efficiency in heaters. In other words, if climate change is your primary concern, you shouldn’t be inconveniencing people indiscriminately, because there’s risk of stopping someone like me who’s actually doing something that addresses the problem in a productive way.

    I’m hardly close to the most important job that you’d be inconveniencing, just the most ironic one. These protests are certainly inconveniencing nurses on their way to their patients, lawyers on their way to their clients, families coming home to meet up for the first time since Christmas. Not to mention emergency workers being held up during active emergencies. This has all happened, and it’s happened way more than any goals achieved by the protests.

    So no, we’re not all talk. I think most of us here giving pushback are all trying to better the world in our own way, and these protests are a consistent impediment to that, across the board. In fact, I would say anybody who bothers to take the time to say how stupid they think these protests are are doing infinitely more good than road blocking protestors, simply by virtue of maybe getting someone to stop that stupid shit.


  • The post doesn’t argue the point adequately though, it basically just implies people who think these protests are useless are ignorant. It’s completely pseudo intellectual, there is no argument made here. Stop pretending there’s some great wisdom lost on us when we point out how obvious it is that this is pissing people off and hurting your cause.

    We’re not ignorant, we just disagree. On the contrary, it takes quite a bit of ignorance to brush off criticism of how harmful these protests are when it’s happening right in front of you.


  • I’ve learned to treat comments that start with “what those people don’t understand…” With a little bit more skepticism than others. I find that if your opening move is to imply that not believing your ideas shows ignorance, then chances are really high that you don’t have much confidence in arguing your case by its own merit.

    Economic pressure can be a strategic move, sure. But, the road block has been largely indiscriminate, and the goal seems to be to create as much disruption as possible. Where’s the strategy in indiscriminate disruption? In fact, the corporations you advocate against are probably least hurt by shit like this, because it would be such a comparatively small hit than everyone else.

    You are far more likely to inconvenience someone just trying to get by, or someone with something person and time sensitive going on than any corporation you’d like to “pressure”. They don’t feel this, they don’t think about this. You’re not disrupting corporate supply chains, you’re inconveniencing regular people.

    That doesn’t even get to the fact that road blockages are extremely dangerous in emergency situations, and you’re putting far more lives at risk than your own by going out there.

    If you are genuinely interested in taking a structured approach to protests, then I strongly suggest you start thinking of some other methods.


  • Considering science has only gotten robust enough to prove anything like that far more recently than any good examples of ecological collapse, I’d say this parameter is a little arbitrary.

    The best example I can think of regarding ecological collapse is during and after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Their climate decreased in temperature, which reduces crop yields, which weakened the empire and encouraged migration from northern Europe, which brought their collapse (plus like 12 other things lol).

    In 535AD, during Justinian’s reign in the east, the first black plague happened following a supermassive volcano that left the sky covered in ash blocking the sun. This was a massively ecologically damaging period of history and it caused the death of countless plant and animal life, along with the deaths of half the population of the Mediterranean.

    It’s not like people of this age were taking soil samples and references trends or whatever, but they certainly understood how things were going poorly.