Jerkface (any/all)

Dark matter is not a theory, it is an observation.

Umm I meant replacing one of your school shootings or fertilizer bombs

It’s shocking there hasn’t been a major amateur drone attack in the USA yet.

Meanwhile, the proof of concept for societies with no state is what, a small group of guerillas in Mexico, with a low population of farmers in the mountains? The Paris commune that lasted like a week?

I’d rather cite the NGOs that actually do the work the state farms out in the modern era. As much as I hate this model and believe that the state “should” be directly employing those people if these are to be state responsibilities, the fact is that they just throw a small amount of money at them and then wash their hands of the situation. It’s small non-state organizations that are actually left to figure out how to fix things while not being empowered to do what needs to be done. Meanwhile the state holds all the levers that need to be pulled, and won’t pull them.

As a person living on ODSP (ie state disability income in Ontario) I feel qualified or at least entitled to hold the opinion that society’s current approach to supporting people who need help is horribly broken. I wonder if you have a romanticized view of the kind of help that people get, daydreaming about how things probably work elsewhere. State support of disability is universally “unreliable, inconsistent, and underfunded.” I certainly have no experience of anything else, nor have I spoken with anyone who does.

Human psychology harbours a deep, seemingly instinctive hatred of the poor and disabled, and it often manifests in the systems that are ostensibly meant to help us. No fixed address? You get half as much money to make sure you stay on the street. Live with a romantic partner? You get several hundred dollars less a month, because fuck you for trying to have anything normal people get to have. I know these examples are not universal, but this sort of paternalistic we’ll-help-but-we’ll-make-you-suffer-for-it-or-society-will-fall-apart philosophy is always blatantly on the surface of state services across North America.

You know how we use the police for all sorts of things that the police (ie the embodiment of the state’s monopoly on “legitimate violence” against its own citizens) fundamentally should not be used for? We should not be using the state for humanitarian concerns. For all the “for the people by the people” bullshit we get indoctrinated with, that’s not why states exist in the first place. Certainly not a colonialist state like the one I live in. A state does not have the capacity to be trustworthy, to have human relationships, to do good for humans. When we accomplish those things, we do it despite the state. Any love that a person has for something as capricious, inhuman, and amoral as a state will eventually be used against them.

It terrifies me to be dependent on a political entity that is currently ramping up culture war propaganda and scapegoating vulnerable people. The most powerful conservative politician in the country (pretending the PM isn’t conservative because it’s rhetorically helpful in this moment) recently dragged up the “welfare queen” trope: “There’s people who’ve been on Ontario Works—welfare, healthy people—for their whole lives, while these hardworking people are paying for them to sit on the couch and watch the Flintstones or the soap operas…”

Edit: You cannot live on Ontario Works. It is not even a pittance. It is half the pittance I get for being deemed unable to work, and less still if you have support in your life. Anyone who is collecting Ontario Works is miserable and if they had any other choice in the world, they would not be. Nearly everyone on OW IS disabled! OW on its own is not enough for a person to pay the rent, but if you are homeless, your payments are slashed in half yet again. It’s like it’s designed to offer false hope and then trap people.

The help one gets from the state will always come with conditions and indignities, and it will always be something to be given or taken away not because of a person’s need or worthiness but because it suits a politician’s career to give it or take it away in that moment. Everyone deserves better than this.

If we can do this well with a government that constantly works against us, just imagine what we could do with no government!

You’re describing a ponzi scheme. There must be more than just, “each generation is paid for by its successors,” or it eats itself. Fortunately, there is more.

Cite your source, please.

*child molesting rapist; people don’t commit assault out of mere sexual attraction.

I don’t even care if we make it anymore, just want this over

Evidently, they could not. No point in talking tough about it now.

But you do use some kind of proprietary, surveilled walled garden to communicate on your phone? you ever think of just changing your font size? or just getting rid of your phone?

I read this whole thing and I get that you have some kind of negative emotional association with email, but beyond that I cannot for the life of me see how email is the problem here.

So you would use WhatsApp if they were?

If Discord, why not WhatsApp?

It’s a series of fallbacks. Eventually you’re calling each other on the POTS like a couple of cave-people.

Yes yes a nuanced defense of being an asshole to the right people despite also hurting the wrong people as though the problem is not enough nuance

The problem is not that progressives cannot see the differences, it’s that bros refuse to see the similarities.

I don’t know what I expected.

There are differences anyone can see, but unfortunately there are also unavoidable similarities, including some of the consequences, and that is a lot harder to see.

C’mon. Fascist architects don’t give a fuck either way about the people they demonize. They don’t pick people because they have a personal issue with them, they pick them because they best fill the role a fascist needs of them.