It’s democratic confederalism

Yes, it’s possible. Any system built by people can be destroyed by people.

Now, of course, there would be a reaction. What specifically that would be I can’t say. I’d like to think it would cause serious blowback, but I’m also pretty jaded and don’t really have that much faith in people all the time.

Great example! These little turns of phrases and wordplay that reveal the incredible right-wing bias of our media are all over the place if you learn how to look for them.

Another great example you see all the time is “office involved shooting” whenever someone is shot by police. It’s always something like “John Smith died after an officer involved shooting” or “a gun was discharged in an officer involved shooting that resulted in the death of Jane Smith.” Where it should be “Officer Joe Blow murdered John and Jane Smith.”

Those of us who pay attention know.

However, the media ecosystem is INCREDIBLY conservative and pumps out the rah-rah jingoism whenever it can. Those of who just stick to the mainstream echochambers think the US is a bastion of freedom and peace.

This is a common myth that isn’t really backed up by the historical or archeological record. Most pirate crews were not proto-anarchists looking to live a life of absolute liberty. They were more comparable to modern street gangs. The captains tended to be a strongman type leader who imposed their will over the crew through fear and coercion. The pirates themselves tended to be outcasts from society who couldn’t turn to authorities to try to escape their situation for a variety of reasons, mostly because they were criminals who knew they’d be imprisoned or killed if they went to authorities.

Probably the only place where anything close to what you describe ever really existed was small communities in Madagascar which became the inspiration for the probably mythical Libertatia. The communities that definitely did exist weren’t some ideological project to try to craft a society absent hierarchical power structures. They were just small, impoverished communities of families where the patriarchs (the pirates) spent most of their time away (at sea doing pirating) so the communities largely ran themselves without a power structure. This isn’t because they had an ideological opposition to them, but because the authority was the pirate leader who spent 3/4 of their time away (and, therefore, couldn’t do the job of being in charge) and when they were home they spent their time partying.

No, the idea of authority is not necessarily contrary to anarchism. You need to first examine the source of that authority’s power, the structures which put them into power, and how that power is enforced.

If it’s coercive in any way, that is, if you are threatened with violence in some way if you do not comply, then it is indeed counter to anarchism. However, that’s not how anarchist brigades in 1930s Spain, the Makhnovshchina, the Korean People’s Association in Manchuria, the anarchist brigades during the Russian Civil War, etc worked. First, membership was pretty much always voluntary. If you didn’t want to follow an order, you didn’t have to and you wouldn’t be executed or tried as deserter or whatever like in most traditional armies. If you didn’t want to follow an order, it was generally accepted that it was your right to refuse.

Second, there weren’t set terms between elections like you might be thinking of within a modern representative democracy. If an elected officer was issuing commands the rest of the soldiers didn’t agree with or like, they could be voted out at any moment, including in the middle of battle. This tended to present problems in the Spanish Civil War where the Soviet Union tried to exert complete control over everyone on the anti-fascist side. They’d send in Soviet officers to lead anarchist battalions. As soon as the Soviet gave an order that the rest didn’t like, they’d vote him out. When the Soviets refused to give up authority, the entire battalion would disband, steal all their supplies, and reform a few miles away as a “new” battalion and elect their own leader.

They also weren’t usually structured like we tend to think of military units with a mass of enlisted and a few detached officers issuing orders. The officers tended to come from the enlisted ranks. The officer position was less of a leader and more of a coordinator. Plans were usually made collaboratively by the whole unit (or those who cared to take part). If the heat of battle when snap decisions needed to be made, the officer tended to be the one who made those decisions, but there was no expectation that anyone who disobeyed would be killed or court-marshalled. People obeyed because they knew the person making the decision, why they were making the decision they made, and that if it was a bad decision they could replace that person.

It was called the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine led by Nestor Makhno as part of the Makhnovschina movement.

There was also the anarchist CNT-FAI which had an army of decentralized militias, collectively organized by Buenaventura Durruti during the Spanish Civil war of the 1930s.

During the Russian Revolution and early parts of the Russian Civil War, there were also a lot of anarchist militias and military units, most notably the Kronstadt sailors. The various groups never coalesced as a single army, and, therefore, were easily crushed by the Bolsheviks.

There was also the Korean People’s Association in Manchuria, which was an anarchist society of more than 2 million people in the late 20s/early 30s. They never had a whole army, but they did organize militias along anarchist principles.

The Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, founded in 1994 and still active today, is organized along decentralized principles and is closely associated with anarchism.

More recently, the YPJ and PKK operating in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and the militias fighting the ongoing revolution in Myanmar are not entirely anarchist, but have strong principles of direct democracy at their core.

In all instances, the overall organization of the militaries were not entirely dissimilar to a traditional military. There were enlisted soldiers led by officers who gave orders that were expected to be followed. There was a higher level command structure which organized the army to distribute resources and coordinate strategy and tactics. The big difference, however, was that the leaders (officers) tended to all be elected democratically by the people they led and could be replaced/voted out democratically whenever the people who they led decided they needed to go…

There’s a common myth that anarchists are opposed to organization. Quite the opposite is true, in fact. Anarchists are all about organization. The thing we oppose is hierarchical power structures. Systems that place someone, anyone, above anyone else and say, “you must do what your superior tells you on threat of punishment” are inherently evil. But free associations are not. Rather than thinking of an officer in an anarchist militia/army as a leader whose commands must be followed or you’ll face steep punishment, think of them as a central coordinator. Their directives aren’t followed because you’ll be court marshalled or otherwise punished if you don’t obey. They’re followed because people at every level are included in the process and allowed to have their voices heard. Everyone has a degree of ownership and influence over the process. People follow directives because they understand where they’re coming from and why the decisions were made. Yet, if at any time someone decides they no longer want to take part, they have the option to just leave.

At the Tesla protests, yes. it’s mostly standing there with signs and chanting. At the one I attend, the dealership is on a major road with a TON of traffic. People line the street on either side stretching for about 1/2 a mile. The first protest had a bunch of people at the front door of the dealership, but police came and arrested one person. Since then, there has always been a police presence right at the front door. The cops tend to leave us alone if don’t go up to the door of the dealership. A couple of times every hour a group will organize to try to block the road. They’ll usually hold the space for about 5 minutes before the police come and force everyone back to the sidewalks. The point here is to challenge authority.

On a broader scale (I attend a LOT of protests), it depends on the protest. At those that are planned and coordinated by a larger organization (think the Women’s March, March for Science, etc) there’s usually a stage with a series of speakers “preaching to the choir” to energize the crowd. There’s lost of people chanting in unison various slogans/chants. Usually there’s a single rallying point where the speeches happen, then there will often be a march from that point to somewhere else. Along the route the crowd shuts down the streets, chants, carry signs, etc. The point here to make connections with like-minded people and demonstrate that there is popular support for whatever issue/concern there is.

At less coordinated protests without a central organizing committee (think the 2017 airport protests, the 2020 uprising) there’s not as much of set “schedule of events”. It’s more of a way for a community to express their collective anger/fear/outrage/etc. The specific goal will depend more on the specific event. For example, the 2017 airport protests were against the first version of Trump’s Muslim Ban. People entering the US from the countries he had tried to ban people from were being held in holding rooms at airports. A large number of activists showed up at airports where those people were being held and the sheer numbers and anger we were expressing got the people working at the airports to let the people go. There were also immigration lawyers who showed up to those protests. When the people in holding were released, they had legal representation right there waiting to support them. The 2020 uprising events were about showing that people weren’t afraid of the police and wouldn’t be silenced by police violence.

At every protest I’ve ever been at, there are always people from various organizations walking through the crowd trying to get people to sign up. Sometimes it’s just collecting names/emails/phone numbers for a fundraising list. Sometimes it’s staffers for politicians raising signatures to get on a ballot, or to get a referendum on a ballot. Sometimes it’s activist organizations trying to get people who might be willing to take further actions.

As virtually every protest winds down, there’s usually a group of people, almost always not affiliated with the “official event” who organize to continue taking action, typically less sanctioned, and dubiously legal actions.

Most protests don’t achieve their immediate goal. That’s how it’s always been. The way we tend to talk about it, any given movement or event has 3 sets of goals: short-term/immediate goals, mid-terms goals, and long-term goals. We usually fail at the short-term goals (although not always). But we’re almost always successful at the medium- and long-term goals. These Tesla protests, for example. The short-term/immediate goal is to shut down the specific dealership we’re protesting at. That has only happened where police presence has been light and where protesters are willing to take illegal action and get arrested (which is always a minority of protesters). This goal has largely been unsuccessful. The medium-term goal is to destroy the Tesla brand so much that the stock price plummets. This is already happening. After the election, Tesla stock prices skyrocketed. Since the protests started, the stock price has already dropped back to where it was before the election, wiping out all that value added since the election. Keep this up, and we’ll hopefully force it even farther down. If we’re lucky, they’ll have to start closing dealerships. The long-term goal is to remove Musk and Trump from power. Obviously, that hasn’t happened yet, but that’s why it’s a long-term goal.

If you say yes, your 17 year old son will be fucking his girlfriend in your house with your implied consent.

If you’re fine with that, go ahead and say yes.

If it helps mollify you any, I think it’s pretty likely they’ve already fucked.

Because society isn’t structured around proscriptive definitions. Just because you can craft a definition of human trafficking which sounds similar to a normal parent/child relationship doesn’t mean they’re the same thing.

Expecting consistency between beliefs and actions from bigots and fascists is a mistake.

There were well over 1000 people at the protest I was at on Saturday…

Next Saturday (April 5) is supposed to be a huge day of protest across the country, notably with a very large demonstration planned for the National Mall in DC. I plan to be at that one.

Or just say you want the comfy pillow.

It’s marketed as being a product for new parents. There’s no law that says is must be used that way.

a) No, nobody will judge you

b) If they do, fuck 'em

You can guess what happens next?

He fixed the cable?

My thought is no. I have kids, but mine are much younger (3 & 5). Right now, I’d prefer to wait as long as possible before I get them smartphones. My niece and nephew didn’t get one until they were 15, and I feel like that’s too young, too.

My big concern is social media. If I could ensure they weren’t on social media at all, I wouldn’t have as much of a problem. But I don’t think it’s safe or healthy for kids to be on social media that young. Hell, I’m almost 40 and I don’t think it’s safe or healthy for me to be on social media (yet here I am…).

Also, dude, Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.

I’m not talking about the guys who built the fucking railroad here.

Communism is just a red herring!

History is written by the victors

I have a BIG nitpick with this framing. While it is correct in many instances, it’s imprecise, and sometimes just flat out wrong.

A better framing is “History is written by the historians”. In other words, the historical narrative is set by those who put forth the effort to do so. In many cases, those historians are writing from the perspective of the victors, but not always.

I’ll give you a few examples:

The Mongol Empire was one of (if not the) largest contiguous land empires in world history. They conquered everything from China to eastern Europe and Mesopotamia. By any interpretation of the word, the Mongols were the victors in virtually every conflict they had. Yet they also didn’t really write histories. There’s only 1 real Mongolian historical text we have: The Secret History of the Mongols. It was an account of the life and conquests of Genghis Kahn written shortly after his death. Yet, as the title alludes to, it wasn’t a public document. It was written for the ruling dynasty. The earliest copy we know of is a copy from ~200 years after the original was written, and it didn’t become widely read until another 300 years after that. For the first half-millennia after the Mongol conquests, the historical narrative was entirely based on the accounts people who were conquered by the Mongols. In other words, the history of the Mongol conquests and their subsequent empire were almost entirely written not by the victors, but by the conquered. This heavily influences our popular conception of the Mongols as barbaric war mongers who committed horrific acts of violence. We don’t think much about any other contributions the Mongols had in the realms of culture, economics, political administration, philosophy, diplomacy, etc because the people who wrote about the Mongols (and set the historical narrative) had no interest in portraying them in a positive light. Compare that to someone like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, etc. All of them were similarly successful conquerors and warlords, yet the historical narrative about them is FAR more complex and positive than that of Genghis Kahn. Because the history of Genghis Kahn was not written by the victors.

Another example which is probably more accessible to a lot of people: The American Civil War. For most of the 150 years after the war ended up until just the past couple of decades, the prevailing popular narrative portrayed in pop culture and taught in schools was the Lost Cause narrative. The war was about States’ Rights. Slavery was not a part of the war at the beginning and the Union only brought it in later to justify their aggression towards the South. It was called the War of Northern Aggression by many. The South was primarily fighting to preserve a pastoral and romanticized way of life, etc, etc. This is the narrative portrayed in fiction such as Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation. Of course, we know this to be bullshit. It was a war over slavery and the South was fighting to maintain the most brutal and oppressive form of slavery the world has ever seen. Yet for over a century that wasn’t the broadly accepted historical narrative because after the war ended people in the South put a lot of effort into creating and disseminating the Lost Cause narrative while the victors (the Union) didn’t put any effort into crafting an historical narrative. The North was more concerned with reuniting the nation and rebuilding, so much so that they completely gave up on Reconstruction and let the same people who had led the Confederacy run the South as an apartheid state for the next century.

These are just 2 examples, but they aren’t the only ones by a long shot. History is not always written by the victors. It’s written by the people who put forth the effort to write it, and the historical narrative ends up reflecting this down to the modern day.

Remember: if you’re not paying for a service, you’re the product.

They harvest your data for a variety of reasons. 1) they pair your data with your broader Google profile (including search results, ad clicks, website views, etc) to better deliver targeted ads. 2) they train their AI (although that’s an indirect revenue stream, and much more recent).