rexpop

Depends on if you're scaremongering about Capitalists or Commies.

Wow, thank you for this! I'd forgotten about enclosure for some years.

The law locks up the man or woman / Who steals the goose from off the common / But leaves the greater villain loose / Who steals the common from the goose.

Myspace is a favela. You've ever been to a Brazilian favela? It basically, politically, represents the structure of Myspace. You've got this remote, distant, old-school Brazilian tyrant. Anti-democratic, wicked mogul, pays no attention to you, supposedly owns the whole show, but the whole shebang is going south in a hurry.

You have no civil rights in Myspace. You can't go anywhere in Myspace, you can't organize in Myspace, you can't make money in Myspace.

You can have a hut in Myspace. And you live in the hut until they pull the plug. That's a favela. It's made of instructables. A favela is an emergent structure, it's made out of corrugated tin and breeze blocks.

You can't insure it, you can't get title to it, you can't raise kids in it. There's no inspection of the water, the heating, the electricity. It's a slum!

You built it yourself, with play-labor, but politically it's a slum.

— Bruce Sterling

"It costs money, therefore it's impossible."

You think social democrats never heard of a balanced budget? I don't know how you "fiscal conservatives" take yourselves seriously.

Vagueposting is much ruder.

Everything you believe about the police you gleaned from children's cartoons as a toddler.

he'd ignore people carrying a kilo gram of weed

This is an unequivocally reasonable approach. The prohibition of cannabis is a grotesque charade.

What the hell are you talking about?

I was afforded limited exposure to alcohol and sex starting around age 13, and I've got a vastly healthier relationship with the two than the rest of my society.

I think the internet, however, is a much greater threat to growing minds.

Americans, broadly, didn't vote—those who did are obviously brainwashed cultists.

It's slavery or nothing, eh? Whatever happened to nuance?

A parent as enlightened as you should have no trouble asking at dinner—without judgement or advice—"and how was your smoke sesh out back of the 7-11?"

I think it is so funny, albeit frustrating, that prevalent attitudes--both liberal and conservative--consistently lay the blame on the consumer side, and not on the production side.

"Their hands are tied!" I have heard so many moderates assert. "The customers demanded it!"

You know, you know how communism was supposed to be this nirvana where a central authority would collect all the information and dictate all operations for the good of the people?

Was it? Really? Doesn't sound like a commune to me. Sounds more like Walmart[0]. Marx did not specify a particular planning strategy; in fact, his co-author Engels said that "the time of... small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past."

Peter Kropotkin envisions a decentralized, federated economy of communes. Murray Bookchin advocates for decentralized, directly democratic municipalities that federate and coordinate economic decisions from the bottom up. Rosa Luxemburg--co-founder of the Communist Party of Germany who famously warned "socialism or barbarism"--consistently critiqued centralism, asserting, eg "the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."

"The essence of socialist society," Luxemburg declares in her 1918 What Does the Spartacus League Want?[1], "consists in the fact that the great laboring mass ceases to be a dominated mass, but rather, makes the entire political and economic life its own life and gives that life a conscious, free, and autonomous direction."

Whether or not that sounds particularly pleasant or effective, it's clearly not a proposal for central-planning.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal... 1. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm

"a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team" seems... impossible.

Instead of massive, centralized corporations, consider the highly successful family firms in Emilia-Romagna[0], as a model. These businesses have thrived for generations in a highly competitive global market not through rigid corporate chains of command, but through decentralized networks of mutuality, adaptability, and a highly skilled and committed workforce.

Even massive capitalist firms like Goldman Sachs or Exxon-Mobil essentially operate "communistically" internally to get anything done, ie when someone needs a wrench, a coworker hands it to them without asking what they get in return.

0. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-30/from-f...

The net of law is spread so wide, \ No sinner from its sweep may hide. \ Its meshes are so fine and strong, \ They take in every child of wrong. \ O wondrous web of mystery! \ Big fish alone escape from thee!

-- James Jeffrey Roche (1847 - 1908)

We live in the dystopia we deserve. We have built it with our own hands and it is here to stay.

That's a bit unfair. Not all of us who live in it had a hand in building it. In fact, very few of us had the leverage to fight against it.

OP is talking about corrupt officials, not charity workers, so how does "running lean" evade or obviate corruption?

Edit: my point is just that bribery and blackmail aren't the same as Global Northerners treating charities as synecures.

Did you forget that Elon literally bought out an entire major international social media platform and fundamentally re-oriented its algorithmic editorial policy? He did a lot more than "ask". He literally took the thing over and personally dictated censorship.

Open air illegal drug use, retail theft and illegal encampments are not their own root cause, and "keeping these repeat criminals in prisons longer" will only worsen the socioeconomic conditions which compel others to engage in this activities.

Going forward, I'll consider using the term "apophenic", instead of "schizoid", but my point remains the same—you are burying the lede, re: very real, dangerous ideologies of Yarvin et al. with unserious associations like "alternate man", and even the bizarre, esoteric epithet "Luciferian."

Not everything that makes a product more expensive to release is the end of the world.

Nice self-sealing beliefs!

"Altman" is from the Middle High German alt meaning "old", not from the Proto-Indo-European root al- meaning "beyond."

Or is English the language of the fates?

Edit: this kind of schizoid syncretism is dangerous because it obscures real, empirically verifiable material harms from technology. Every technology is a trade-off. We should follow the advice of (Freemason!!) Benjamin Franklin and not pay too much for our whistle.

You're confusing neo-feudalist oligarchical propaganda with the will of the people.

Are you trolling?

Elections are won by spending, especially since Citizens United. Democracy has not survived oligarchical propaganda.

Everybody starts somewhere. They've taken maybe their first step in the right direction.

Proud of them—it's scary to stand up to the boss, but we set the floor for eachother.

Driving down the street is risky. Owning a home is risky. It's all a matter of degrees, and insurance doesn't deny coverage for 3D printers, QED that's what it's for.

Self-respect is an act of charity.