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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Aside from being reductive, yes, I’m an anarchist. I’m not opposed to writing down some rules, but I am opposed to the coercive use of force to impose them on others. It is possible to organize a system of preventative and restorative justice without the use of a hierarchy.

    This video is a good introduction to how justice can work in an anarchist society.




  • And this is where we disagree. Because, to me, thinking that every single lawmaker in the history of humanity (we have laws that date back thousands of years and are just copy-pasted between countries) was writing laws with malicious intent is some form of paranoidal insanity on par with “lizard people are controlling the government”.

    It’s not about the intent of each individual cog involved in the creation and application of the law, but the intent for which the system of laws and hierarchies were created. Plenty of reform-minded people or naive pro-establishment folks participate in the legal system with good intentions, and sometimes find success reducing the harm that it causes, but that doesn’t change that the system continues to uphold class society and was created for that purpose. The effect of our system of laws and hierarchical institutions is the preservation of a system of division between distinct classes, and since I have yet to see a legal system that does not do this in some form I have concluded that this is the fundamental nature of laws.


  • All of those laws are unequally enforced. Anti money laundering laws are applied only to the subjugated socioeconomic group (drug dealers belonging to the working class, etc.). The dominant socioeconomic group gets their children protected, their rape victims to receive justice, their human rights defended. The subjugated socioeconomic group rarely benefits from these laws, which is why thousands of rape kits sit in warehouses never being investigated, why children born into poverty are more often separated from their parents and institutionalized rather than receiving the help they need, and why human rights are routinely violated without consequence.

    The people making such laws can sometimes intend for them to be universal, but such people fundamentally misunderstand the nature of laws, and it never quite pans out that way in practice.


  • The law is extremely clear in this regard - the ICE dude murdered a person for no reason. The rules on the use of deadly force literally use a moving car as an example of when not to use deadly force - as long as there are “other defence options, such as moving out of the way”.

    When the people tasked with upholding the law consistently disregard it in particular circumstances - as they do when it comes to abuse of power by law enforcement - that law only exists in the circumstances in which it is consistently applied. Things like qualified immunity have effectively nullified any law that ostensibly holds law enforcement accountable. The law does not exist for any other purpose except to protect the dominant socioeconomic group in a given country without binding them, while binding the subjugated socioeconomic group without protecting them. Who is in which group is dynamic and always subject to change, but this rule almost always holds except in cases where very skilled lawyers are able to argue in court that someone in the latter group actually belongs to the former in some specific circumstance. That is the law being used for something that it was not designed to do, a bit like an exploit in a video game soon to be patched.


  • Progressives are consistently more popular in red states than centrist Democrats. I’m living in a deep red state in a rural area and have all my life. I talk to mouth-foaming reactionaries on a regular basis. The difference in our conversations about people like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris versus people like Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, and AOC is extremely stark. They never have anything good to say about the former, but always preface their disapproval of the latter with “I agree with some of the stuff they say about [insert progressive policy proposal here], but I don’t think it’s realistic / I don’t agree on their ‘woke’ stuff.”

    The centrist strategy of abandoning one’s own values to reach across the aisle to them comes across to conservatives as dishonest and shady (and they’re not wrong). They begrudgingly respect the progressive left for being uncompromising in their worldview, even if they disagree with it, and once you have someone’s respect they are more likely to meaningfully engage with your arguments. That’s how you change minds, and I’ve watched it happen on multiple occasions.







  • Just having POC and LGBTQ representation isn’t all that’s needed to deliver a progressive message. You also need to incorporate plotlines that thoughtfully explore themes related to their modern-day struggles. Old trek, namely TNG and DS9, did this well because they had writers that were genuinely progressive for their time (and even for this time if we’re being honest) and actually understood the politics. Despite being held back on direct representation (Garak and Bashir), they were still able to get their message across through the plot structure and story beats.

    Nutrek goes all-in on representation, but completely falls flat when they attempt to go any deeper because they don’t understand the issues.