Think of it like this: you end up in prison, and your naked, alone, you have no allies or friends, while taking a shower with about 100 other dudes, and Bubba comes over with a grin saying “you’re awful pretty”. How would you feel?

Erect?

You know, it really makes it feel like those comments are particularly useless when, just by having used the website for a long enough time, you can imagine them simply by the scars they have branded onto your thinking goo. It becomes totally redundant at that point, totally useless, even worse than it having contributed nothing but empty space in the first place, it now occupies empty space in the brain. It’s like old farts constantly remembering and bantering about ad jingles from their youth, it fills me with dread.

It encourages violence, it desensitizes us,

We can understand why that’s like, not a very concrete justification to be against espousing violence, right? I also find it weird, right, that we’re doing this step-around thing, where you’re calling everyone out for the hypocrisy of, oh, well, people are against this violence, but they’re not against this violence? Have you maybe considered that the two forms of violence are distinct? Perhaps that the two forms of violence are actually not similar? That people have reasons for, say, wanting violence against one party, but not another?

That’s what they’re commenting about. You say “it’s either all okay or none of it’s okay” because it encourages violence, right, but, I am giving you an opportunity to show your work, when it comes to this very basic claim, upon which rests the rest of your argument.

This is sort of like the same phenomena of the politically correct (not in the PC sense but in the sense of like, what is and isn’t like, correct in the realm of political discourse. Like definitions of semantics and shit) definition of liberalism that leftists have to kind of churn through and give, every time someone says liberals and leftists are the same thing, and then it’s explained in some sort of hackneyed way usually that “on the global scale of leftism actually you’re wrong sweetie”, when realistically the better way to describe it is that liberalism isn’t necessarily left or right wing because it’s kind of a mercenary ideology that leaves up a free market which may either be left or right wing, depending on circumstance.

And then everyone gets confused by that distinction between liberalism and leftism, and just go back to using the words how they were using them to begin with, and calling people libtards, despite themselves wanting a free market more than their opposition (usually). So what I mean to say is that your definition is technically correct by all given definitions, and is the only one that makes sense, right, but, despite that, when most people refer to libertarians, they’re referring to this exact type of twat who drives a yuge truck, is generally obsessed with firearms, may or may not be a pedophile who doesn’t like the age of consent, may or may not be an austerity hawk, and believes in the NAP as some sort of holy preventative doctrine that you can build a society on. Hackneyed, conservative-flavored anarchism, basically. That strain of conservatism where they actually believed Reagan when he said the enemy was the government. That’s what people mean when they say someone’s a libertarian, and it’s usually also what people mean when they self-define as a libertarian.

It’s not a technically correct or logically coherent definition, but it’s the one that’s worked it’s way into common cultural parlance.

Is that what’s created their safer culture, though, or is that just something that they also have? uhhh ummm the nordic countries the nordic countries! you ever heard of those! everybody loves those for all their cool examples of policies! no but fr like, portugal with their decriminalization has also had success in eliminating large swathes of their drug problem, oregon, not so much. So I question whether or not it’s that singapore is really having success with their draconian tactics “but at what cost”, or if the draconian tactics are just a secondary element, and then they’re also just doing other shit that would cut down on their drug problem, like having disproportionate funding for their DEA equivalent. I dunno, I just find it hard to believe that draconian crime policy is doing the heavy lifting there, cause those come with some pretty heavy caveats in most places.

I dunno singapore might just kind of equivalent to a slightly more privileged hell joseon though so what do I know.

Using Singapore, which has the death penalty for drug use isn’t comparable.

I need you to draw a clear through line to why that’s related to public housing policy in any given country.

I’m also gonna like, cite the soviet bloc style apartments, or china’s rapid urbanization in around the same time period that the US decided to make public housing be a thing. I know for the soviet lunchboxes, you had your standard complaints of, oh, long wait lists, subpar build quality, yadda yadda, and then of course towards the beginning of the program you had a large issue with people who had previously been unindustrialized farmers basically just not knowing how to live in an apartment, shit like having your pigs stay indoors and stuff like that. I think similar issues were/are probably a part of chinese publicly subsidized housing complexes. I think barcelona’s superblocks are also publicly subsidized but I don’t know to what extent, and they seem to be working out pretty good. Now those are all places that provide publicly subsidized housing and have provided it to those who were pretty impoverished at the time. They also had/have (again idk barcelona don’t even know why I brought it up) work programs and shit, which we used to have in america, so that might contribute to your point more, but I still think, you know, it is bad to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The projects were majorly flawed, but they are probably preferable to the whole like. rust belt suburban crime shit. I dunno, realistically it doesn’t really matter what context an apartheid ghetto scenario is happening in, because it’s going to have basically the same consequences on everyone involved.

I tend to think that twd is fiction, and the people who negan piss off, who want to kill negan, only need to get lucky once, while negan needs to keep succeeding over and over (I’ve never seen the walking dead tho I’m just kind of going based on vibes).

I’m not the smartest guy or the most well read or what have you, but the idea is basically that whenever someone becomes overtly greedy or authoritarian, the mutual benefits of co-operation kind of ensure that this is a non-issue. Everyone that’s co-operating would simply choose not to co-operate with that person, or that organization, and then they end up not getting very far. Maybe if it turns violent, then the same thing happens, just in that everyone kind of mutually crushes the organization, or dissolves it, or what have you.

You know I think the point most people fire back with is that authoritarianism tends to be thought of as like, more effective, right, because they can “make the trains run on time”, or some such nonsense, but I think they’re just conflating this with the idea that authoritarianism is more effective in a crisis, which is partially why authoritarianism is constantly inventing crises to combat. The idea, basically, is that if you have a singular leader, you can pivot and accommodate things more easily, make judgement calls easier, and you gain a capacity for rapid response. This is, you know, questionable, things end up being more complicated in practice, and leaving everything to a singular point of failure is a pretty easy way to make a brittle system. At the same time, even were it completely true, it’s still only true for the short term, that it’s more effective for short term gains. Long term gains, mutual co-operation, is much more effective.

Basically, the refutation is that greed isn’t really a fundamental component of humanity insomuch as it is a choice, and anarchism tends to think that greed is a pretty bad one. Not only for everyone but the greedy, but just generally, for mutual, long term gains. If you change the environment significantly enough that you can ensure this is more overwhelmingly the case at the macro scale, then you’ve kind of “won” anarchism, in a sense, you’ve won the game.

Even though I agree with all of this, it seems like this speaks more to an american perspective than to any other given country, and all your citations are from an american perspective as well. Though I think you could maybe make an argument on how the police are conventionally leveraged to protect private property, and private property is bad, and how if you were to take away the “protecting private property” element of their job description, you’d basically be abolishing the police. You could make that argument, along more universal lines, but that’s kind of contingent on people agreeing that both private property is bad, and that police are exclusively the protectors of private property, and nothing else.

In any case, I wouldn’t really be willing to make so certain of a statement on the police departments of other countries. I’ve never really heard anyone say anything bad about, say, finnish police, for example. British cops, they wear funny hats, they go “oy”, and shit, I’ve not really heard anything good about them, but finnish cops? Never heard bad about them. I also think a lot of what makes the police in america bastards, is because the prison system here is so fucked up and so punitive, and so particularly bad, compared to a lot of other countries.

I also kind of like, as an aside point. What do we do about park rangers? They’re technically cops, but you wouldn’t really hear anyone thinking that we shouldn’t have them, or that they should be actively abolished. I say this to mean, you know, as with the first paragraph, what do we really mean by “police”? You’ve given a pretty good description of the fact that the police suck, but not really why, or how they could be fixed.

I mean, anyone can put up that sign, though, that doesn’t really mean it really has any bearing on reality.

I also don’t really think that “whether or not they can afford repairs or insurance” is on the foremost mind of looters. Well, foremost, I would think “hey this is easy money” for the vast majority, or “hey fuck everything”, maybe,

But I would also think that, in terms of political activism, you would want to target businesses which aren’t equitable, and which are leeching things out of the community. Gentrified businesses, businesses which are just kind of, external to the community, businesses where the owner is just a real piece of shit, stuff like that, I think, would be more in the realm of political activism. You know, if you’re doing any of that, then you would more likely want to target businesses that don’t have insurance or can afford repairs, actually, because you’d be more likely to get those businesses shut down, or driven out of the community.

Walmart and businesses like it are part of the biggest lobbying groups for increased police presence and these events are a gift to their narrative.

That’s kind of an argument you could make against any political activism, though. The civil rights marches were framed as riots in the media of their time, and obviously, they got at least some of what they were looking for, in the end, so their tactics were successful. Arguments about optics never really strike me as supremely convincing. They don’t argue about the merit of the act in general, they argue about the aesthetics of it, which is much more fraught, and theoretical, and doesn’t actually really have to do with the thing itself. I also don’t really find this whole like, strategic nihilism to be a convincing counterargument either. “oh, well, walmart as a whole won’t be toppled by any actions we take on the ground, our energy would be better spent doing something else”, and then you ask “what else” and people just kind of gesture in the direction of a nonprofit, or local politics, or something to that effect. That’s not to say those more organized forms of activism don’t have their place, but if we were just relying on easily corporate captured nonprofits and easily corruptible local politics for activism, we’d also be fucked.

Both things, to me, would seem to have their role. They are all mutually beneficial to one another in terms of political leverage.

You know, I think looting maybe gets a bad rap. I think maybe stealing is actually cool. Reminds me of how people are chill with diogenes shitting on the sidewalk, but then as soon as someone does that in real life, they’re gross and weird. Everyone is cool with robin hood, or some gentleman thief or rogue, but as soon as it happens in real life, everyone turns into the sheriff of nottingham’s little armored men.

I would like to see the statistics on what percentage of post-looting walmarts stayed in the neighborhood, because I think it would be a pretty clear win if those walmarts left those neighborhoods. Worse in the short term, as jobs won’t automatically get propped up, and even in some long terms you can see things turn into food deserts, ghettos, or ghost towns as other forms of capital just get pulled out, and people get nothing. Sort of a choice between shit and shit, there.

Other alternative that people bring up is locally owned stores, but plenty of locally owned stores, ones that are easier to topple over and more vulnerable to looting, are/can be owned by shitheels. Being a small business owner doesn’t preclude you from doing active harm to your community/not actually being a part of that community (this is more often the case than not), and it isn’t inherently a good thing. It isn’t inherently beneficial to society at large, and you still have just as well a chance of being a parasite and running your local business in an exploitative and shitty way, and in a way where that shit needs to get thrown out of the community. The only thing that being a “small business” means is that you’re potentially just doing less damage than walmart, not that your actual structure, or existence, is better, or more well justified. Which, to be fair, is an advantage. Small business owners are specifically going to be more likely to see pathways to mutual benefit because they’re more vulnerable.

So the alternatives to walmart, in the common conception, are kind of a mixed bag, or are negative. More on that later.

In any case, looting will probably not topple walmart anytime soon, unless it maybe every walmart in america got looted of everything they had, like, seventeen times in a row. But the point isn’t to topple the corporation as a whole, the point is just to drive them out of the local community (potentially), and take back something in the process. You can even use this as leverage against local governments, like with the george floyd protest. It’s an “objective legal decision”, or whatever, to send derek chauvin to prison, but it’s also a decision that the local government is forced to make, because if they don’t, there will be more protests/riots/lootings, more large businesses will pull out of the community, and be less likely to invest in the community in the future, which damages the municipalities bottom line, and could potentially even put them in jeopardy. d

Again, you could argue against this, on the basis that, if less tax money is being put into the local government, they will be more likely to cut everyone’s benefits and resources, over, say, dropping police budgets, right, but again, is that an argument in favor of the status quo, or is that just saying we need to redo some of the shittier parts of the local government as a whole? It’s just like with walmart pulling out of the local community, and then everyone loses jobs and, it turns into a food desert ghost town situation.

I also kind of really doubt that walmart is providing more to the local government than they take, in a lot of cases. They’re eating up lots terms of tax revenue, to maintain the ability to travel there. Yuuuuuge parking lots, car-centric design, which means they’re more likely to be farther away and require more public infrastructure to subsidize them. This is going to be more the case for your appalachian municipalities, though, your rural communities, I think your urban communities are gonna make a little more money on walmart, maybe enough to break even.

So, to me, it would seem kind of obvious that the toppling of walmart isn’t necessarily the big problem here, it’s the lack of good alternatives.

I.e. give me aldis, give me costco. Give me a sustainable and equitable co-op that can provide local jobs, while reinvesting excess funds into the community from which the people who run it are hired. Give me a credit union that’s willing to give that co-op a loan to start their business. Gentrification is potentially not a bad deal, for reinvestment into these communities, as long as it doesn’t price out the existing residents, and push them into a lower cost suburban hellscape, where they will be atomized, and taken advantage of even further, with even less recourse to escape. Which will always be the case, of course, the primary investors into these communities are always predatory business interests, and not co-ops, which are basically nonexistent in america and typically have less capital to invest in ventures like this. Race to the bottom.

It always seems like a problem, that people need to somehow construct an entire alternative world, and start from basically scratch, in order to make a better society, right, but realistically people just need like. The most basic investments, which they aren’t getting. This is why dual power is pretty important. I would be willing to wager that people are pushed more into this anti-social self-destructive nihilism, because it’s very easy for people to burn out in it/become just cynical mercenaries, you can more easily justify their arrest or murder, and because you control the systems and avenues they would otherwise use to build that real dual power. So, you can more easily lock them out and force them down the other path. That’s just kind of my rampant speculation, though. Why you see a lot of screaming disillusioned people who know that the system is wrong but don’t know why or what to do about it except try to tear shit down.

I dunno. The discourse around this issue really bugs me still.

also lemmy really needs paragraph indentation and line breaks hoo lee this shit is hard to structure after I’ve written it all out in a rambling garbage sort of way. had i more time I woulda written a shorter letter probably though