That B, I and I are basically the same thing reworded three ways so they can spell the word.

Okay, I appreciate you saying you’re interested, I’ve found that’s a useful filter to find good conversations, and I’ve always found this particular topic very frustrating to talk about. Hierarchical realism - the idea that there is no alternative to hierarchy - is incredibly pernicious. People seem to have a hard time questioning it.

So as to the assumptions:

That’s when you have an organised force opposing them, which doesn’t need to deal with internal disputes the way an anarchistic force would need to.

You have drawn the dichotomy between “organised” and “anarchistic”. This is such an entrenched misunderstanding that you can explain it plain as day to people and it’s like they don’t even hear it.

Anarchy requires far more organisation than hierarchy. In fact the classic anarchy symbol of a circle A means “anarchy is order”. Anarchy isn’t chaos, it is the absence of hierarchies of domination.

And internal conflicts happen within established hierarchies, all the time. You see this in strikes and labour activism. They’re a much bigger problem in hierarchies because the bosses can’t acknowledge or deal with them. They don’t know what to do when the “do as I say” lever stops working.

In fact, something that tends to get left out of typical histories is the military revolt that played a significant role in ending the US’s invasion of Vietnam.

So the idea that organisation is a feature of a dominance hierarchy is wrong. Domination is used when organisation can’t be. Anarchies have to be supremely organised to exist in the first place, and it doesn’t magically stop working because conflict occurs. The thing about organisation and consensus building is that it is actually far more robust than dominance hierarchies.

Hierarachy is strong but fragile, because it is necessarily arrayed in tension against itself like the molecules of a Prince Rupert’s drop. It seems impossibly hard and unassailable, but disrupt the right part and it explodes. It has no flexibility.

There would be no reason to believe hierarchy were better in any respect except that it is currently the dominant world order. That wasn’t always the case and it seems to have a hard expiration date. The question is whether we can destroy it before it destroys the ecology.

So that’s the spiel about assumptions. Sorry I went so long, I didn’t have time to edit it down. I could go on about how hierarchy has embedded itself so deep in all our psyches, but I’ll spare you that.

So as to the question about internal criminal activity, which seems like the best way to put it. You’re asking about any alternative to an “involuntary or enforced way of preventing them from exploiting society”. Well, there really isn’t one.

Like I said, voluntary prison is a method for dealing with individuals whose behaviour necessitates such treatment. Organised groups are a different situation, so the idea just doesn’t apply.

When I said the answer was violence, I was trying to make that point.

As for how to stop such organisations from metastasising, I don’t have any examples of such a thing actually happening, so I don’t know, except to point you to societies where it just… doesn’t come up. Rojava uses a reconciliation process to prevent things like murder from turning into full-on blood fueds, which used to be a problem in the previous society, but that’s a little different.

Apart from telling you that the problem just doesn’t appear to arise in the first place - and I could talk about “leveling mechanisms” here, but that’s getting pretty deep in the weeds - I can point you to an example where an indigenous horizontalist society excised criminal and state elements that were deeply embedded. It’s not the same, but I hope it’ll be illustrative.

It was Cheran, Mexico, where politicians, cops, illegal loggers and drug cartels were merged into a fucking rat king of corruption that was smothering the town. Murders were a daily occurrence, plus all the other problems you would imagine in that scenario.

An underground network of women organised and rose up against them. On the day it happened, there was so much popular support that they were able to evict the entire oppressive structure at once without undue violence - there were zero deaths. Once they’d clearly won, some young men wanted to start lynching the captives, but the women who’d run the day stopped them and told them to simply let them go.

The town still runs on horizontal organisation principles, it keeps out the state completely. No cops, no politicians, no corporations, no drug cartels. The murder rate dropped off a cliff.

Now, that’s not the end of the story. Let’s imagine you’re in a town with that history, and you want to start a crime syndicate. How do you do it? Who do you talk to? How long do you think it takes before you’re dragged in front of a town meeting to be dealt with? Would it even occur to you to try?

I suspect this is why the problem you brought up doesn’t have any examples.

There are so many assumptions in what you said that I don’t know where to start dealing with them. You’ve packed so many common misconceptions in such a short comment it’s kind of overwhelming. Let me know if you want to hear what I have to say, it’s a lot of work if you’re just trying to tell me I’m wrong.

But just quickly:

It’s well documented that decentralised autonomous cells are extremely effective. Special forces take a large portion of their tactics from guerilla fighters that operate the same way.

There are examples of decentralised societies today that are incredibly effective fighters. Rojava and the Zapatistas are two excellent examples, plus numerous small regions that have held off vastly superior state forces without centralised leadership. Community self defense is a powerful method that works even within overarching state oppression.

Anarchism isn’t non-violent. To assume anti-oppression and pacifism are one and the same is to make the same mistake Engels makes in On Authority.

Authority is violent, but violence is not authority.

Edit: on this topic I’d recommend Anark’s video on Power, where he explains that anarchism seeks to create a horizontal power structure. It is not the absence of power structures, it displaces oppressive power structures with egalitarian ones.

It makes sense if you think of them as extremely well-funded frat boys with a free pass to break laws.

They just kind of do shit, and if it doesn’t work they keep trying until something sticks or they run out of steam. They get killed all the time.

It’s still scary, but just a lot less cool.

The reason we think of them as hypercompetent masters of espionage is because that makes better movies, and also because the US government funds movies that make them look good.

Okay, so you’re talking about an antisocial group that is attempting to prefigure a society of domination within the existing anarchist society.

Well, assuming they’ve established themselves as a continuing threat, the short answer is: violence. We use defensive violence against their encroachment until their group crumbles, which shouldn’t be hard since by definition most of their members are living a way worse life than they would without their oppressors, and they’re surrounded by examples of people living free.

Hierarchies are fragile. Also, in order to exist, an anarchist society must already solve the problem of how to keep hierarchies from forming.

The voluntary prison idea is a way of dealing with individuals, not organised groups. That’s an entirely different situation.

I’m not really sure what question you’re asking. What situation specifically are you talking about? Are we dealing with capitalism from the inside or from the outside? Are you asking about a theory of change, or about how an anarchist region deals with its state neighbours?

These all have answers, similar but different, but I don’t really want to spend the effort answering every permutation of the question I could imagine without knowing what you mean.

And further to that we have voluntary prison. Essentially, if you’re guilty of something and want to have the benefits of this society, you need to agree to a loss of some privileges - in whatever form is necessary. If you won’t, well good luck surviving when nobody will trade with you or let you live near them.

If you won’t agree to that, you can leave, but the full details of your trial and conviction are public and your decision to leave will be broadcast, so our neighbours know to look out for you.

That means trials will need to be fair, and seen to be fair, or else it will be easy to ask for asylum. Prisoners need to be fairly treated, or they will try their luck in a nearby place.

But if someone chooses to leave and is just trying to run from the consequences of their actions, well they’ll have a hard time being accepted anywhere else.

Authority is usually understood by anarchists as a component of hierarchy. I’d be interested to hear your definition that doesn’t make it hierarchical.

And there are ways of enforcing rules that don’t require authority, like diffuse sanctions, essentially community-based enforcement.

There’s a whole school of anti-carceral justice thought that deals with this.

Sure, and I’d say that’s piracy too. I wouldn’t mind if it wasn’t also being siloed into private hands to enrich the wealthy and screw the rest of us.

I’d say if the copyright holder says you’re not allowed to then you’re not. It’s piracy.

People will tell you that you’ve already downloaded the data so saving it is fundamentally, technically no different, but that doesn’t matter to the law, it’s still piracy.

Like yeah, it’s absurd and pointless and anti-consumer and anti-knowledge and unenforceable and unsustainable, but that’s copyright. It’s always been that way.

Copyright destroys culture and piracy is our ethical duty in the face of that. The only reason to care about it is so you don’t get caught.

Right click -> inspect element (Q) works.

You can also press F12.

And if right click is blocked, on Firefox holding SHIFT will unblock right click. There is also a plugin that does this for you.

Often websites will put an invisible element in front of the content to intercept this trick, but you can navigate through the elements to find the one they were trying to obfuscate.

Yup, and there’s actually a closer-to-home question to answer along these lines, which is what to do about AGI, and I think the simple answer is that it also has full personhood and all the recognition that comes with that.

And there’s an obvious test to figure it out. It’s not the turing test, consciousness is self-reported. That is, whether we realise it or not, how we recognise that humans are conscious, and there’s no reason to expect machines would be any different. When they are people, they will tell us. We won’t be able to stop them because that’s what people do: they demand recognition.

Genuine answer is that you need to get a feel for when the clutch begins to bite. The rest of it - when to use the brake, handbrake etc, is going to depend on what you’re doing. Learning to feel the clutch is the critical skill.

The way to learn how to use the clutch is to start on a flat piece of ground with no traffic around, like an empty car park. With the engine running and the brakes off, press the clutch pedal and put the car into 1st gear. Then, slowly release the clutch pedal without using the throttle. Practice this until you can get the car moving without stalling the engine, and you’ll have a feel for it.

When starting normally you’ll gently press the throttle as you do this. Cars usually idle around 1K RPM, use the throttle to maintain about 2K RPM for a normal take-off.

Then all the other skills will fall into place. The key objective is that you should have the brake engaged until the moment the clutch engages and is ready to take control, then the brakes should be smoothly & quickly released.

You can do this with either the handbrake or the foot brake, but if you’re using the foot brake you need to be manipulating the clutch, brake and throttle at the same time.

That requires pressing both throttle and brake with the right foot, which is a more advanced technique, but very useful for smooth driving in a lot of situations. It’s often called “heel-toe”, but that’s misleading. You don’t use heel & toe, you use the two sides of your foot.

I assume this is objective truth then, something that definitely exists and we can definitely know. I’m sure they have plenty of science to back it up.

They wouldn’t just hear a bunch of thinly disguised bullshit built on the back of junk science and take it at face value without checking if any of it is real, not this person with their special objective truth brain.

Oh wow, it’s Christopher Lloyd in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That’s a deep cut.

Yup, I had this in mind as another example of the same thing when I was writing my comment.

When you try to explain that the general jankiness of linux is a big problem and a barrier, you get a lot of people very upset and defensive, but it’s just a simple, obvious fact, and only by facing that fact can anybody actually fix it.

I think the reasons for it are perfectly understandable - software is hard, and anyone able to volunteer could make serious money in so many different places. Capitalist enitities have gobbled up the vast majority of the talent for their own projects, even if they make them spin their wheels in bullshit jobs rather than make good software. The only people left to make FOSS are some combo of ideological, stubborn, and incapable of working within capitalist orgs, or just extremely tired because they already do work in those orgs. That’s not to mention the probably-non-zero number of saboteurs and psyops in the community.

Those people either don’t have the time or don’t have the inclination to spend their precious efforts making features for newbies who can’t just CTRL+ALT+T and start hammering out console commands like a 90s movie hacker.

Now that may not be the fault of honest linux devs who are doing good work, but it is linux’s problem. I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s got to be more than just pretending “linux is easy now” then pivoting to “if you’re not an expert you have no business here” the moment anybody points out how wrong they are. These exact same conversations were happening 15 years ago when I started linux, and the experience is still painfully perverse.

1984 was partly about how consent is manufactured using language. It’s a reality that the powerful systems exploit every single day very effectively to drive us towards extinction so the lines keep going up.

There’s nothing wrong with using those tools for good. Too many leftists are so concerned with the substance of the message that they forget how important the presentation is. I’m sure a lot of people think it shouldn’t be important, but because we’re social animals and not analytical engines of pure reason, it does matter.

You’re right, it’s not, but ignoring him doesn’t get rid of him either. That’s not how capitalism works.

Well we already deal with a mixed system, so they could relabel where possible and just phase out any machines where not, and in the interim just hand out slide rules with conversions on them.