becausechemistry

I dunno, it feels like we’re not gonna be able to convince the Bezos / Buffett / Walton family types to be cool with just words. And that’s not even going into the people who think violent political force is actually very good as long as their favorite strong man is the one to control it.

That genuinely does help. It sounds like the implementation of anarchism is a transformation of peoples’ attitudes and values. In a world full of people who think and behave that way, anarchism is the natural state of being.

My gut reaction is “well people tend to be just the pits, so that’ll never happen.” But I guess the argument is sort of like the argument for changing the way we do things to combat climate change. Some people think climate change is fake, but even if it is, we’ll end up with clean water and cheaper electricity in the end anyway. Similarly, just because we might not reach a state of anarchism in the next year, or ten, or fifty doesn’t mean the social transformation isn’t worth starting now. There are short term benefits that don’t yet involve a stateless society.

It does feel like a certain fraction of the population is always going to be, I guess, shitheads. I think unpleasant things are going to be necessary to weed those folks out. But even well-intentioned people, when forced to do unpleasant things, tend to be transformed by that process in a pretty negative way. And whoops, now we’ve got idealists who are good at wielding violent force, and those people tend to build followings.

Yes, genuine question. I don’t understand how the system doesn’t devolve into constant, chaotic vigilante justice.

Fortunately for us, everyone on earth has totally rational responses to all situations. And we all agree: we want things to be good, and not bad. And it’s very obvious what things are which!

The thing about the flowers is obviously trivial. There are other matters where a violent ‘direct action’ is obviously warranted.

There are a million things in the middle that are nuanced and difficult and entirely susceptible to ‘person who threatens the most escalation wins’ outcomes.

Not just that. But what if two anarchists disagree with each other? Who wins? The one who is willing to escalate the highest? My neighbor doesn’t like my native wildflowers, so we yell at each other until someone pulls a gun?

This is legit my biggest thing with anarchists. Rules without rulers, and such. Okay. So there’s someone violating the rules / laws / social contract / acceptable behavioral norms. What now?

I got banned from hexbear after a guy gave me a death threat but the mod said I wasn’t arguing in good faith. So. It’s not all rainbows and unicorns over here.

Mostly it’s just the tankies ruining it for everyone, but hey. Defederation is neat.

Admission: I stole it.

qntm’s cool science fiction stories are my favorite.

Worse: your sleeper ship arrives at what should be a pristine planet. But FTL capable ships beat you there. And they ruined the planet over a few thousand years. And now they’re sending out refugee ships of their own.

This sort of feels like non-news – of course they’ve been considering an empty Starliner return with astronauts on a Dragon. That’s sort of the entire point of having more than one option of crewed access to space.

Not that I’d ever climb into a Starliner. Thing’s a bucket of bolts. But we know that, and they know that.

It would be pretty cool if this situation is the start of accelerating a crew-rating program for another craft. Maybe Dream Chaser? If this is so embarrassing that Boeing drops out of the program, it would be nice to have two options again.

We eat him last.

You could try not constantly attempting to convince people likely to vote democrat to not vote, or vote for a 0% chance candidate. Nader. Stein. If they didn’t do what they did, we wouldn’t have had a Bush 2 or Trump administration.