• @[email protected]
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    19 months ago

    Democracy is not made of elections.

    Okay, I’ll start saying elections for whatever remains of this conversation. I’m not convinced ordinary people actually taking interest in groundwater allowances far away could ever happen, which is what it sounds like you’re talking about.

    If you want more than holes; read the damn book I recommended. It goes over this at book length.

    I’ll put it on the reading list. My expectations are low though, TBH.

    I didn’t understand what you meant by casual (we’re paraphrasing, I see)

    If you get arrested, you can’t just slip the cop a hundred and leave. In many countries, that’s almost always an option, to the point they’ll just straight up tell you they want a “brown envelope” or whatever the local euphemism is. This was the case in all civilisations historically.

    Food not Bombs

    I’m familiar. My impression is that it’s a brand for throwing potlucks.

    They tend to be pretty secretive, because when they’re not the cops murder them or arrest them for terrorism.

    Usually they splinter within like a year and then hate each other forever, if that’s the sort of group you’re talking about. If they don’t, it’s because they grow a governance system, and just push out dissenters periodically.

    If you haven’t studied human coordination, even casually, why spout off about your opinions?

    I have. Anthropology is great, sociology and political science are neat too. You may have noticed my interest in history. Just not “management philosophies”, except enough to realise they’re largely snake oil for people faking competence.

    You’re an idiot.

    We all are.


    Bandwidth

    This is actually neat to hear, so it gets it’s own section. That’s exactly how I think of it. The difference is that as far as I can tell it’s a bottleneck between every single human, including us right now. Nobody understands things handled more than a couple of degrees of separation away, which is insufficient to directly run a complex industrial economy.

    When organisations work it’s because they’re self-correcting regardless of some opacity. Yes, that always involves guns, even if it’s at the very abstract level; pacifism gets you killed.

    • @[email protected]
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      9 months ago

      Well it seems you know so much about these organizations than me, despite my decade of experience, and so much more about the phenomenon, despite my years of study. I defer to your expertise.

      we all are

      This conversation is not generalizable to the population at large!

      bandwidth

      What youre talking about is attenuation. Also, how is an authority immune to this? Nobody who makes decisions is within five degrees of normal. There are ways around this. I can recommend a dense podcast or a dense doorstopper book+a normalish book as a primer.

      an ‘organization’ is a magic spell that completely negates this immutable human nature ive been talking about. And yes requires a fuhrer.

      K

      yes that always involves guns

      Nah, your way doesn’t threaten anyone in power.

      • @[email protected]
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        19 months ago

        All right, well, I’ll just end off with “Fuhrers don’t control anything”. Look at Gorbachev; he tried to change the system and it launched multiple coups against him until he was gone. Organisations (or institutions, or whatever word you’d prefer) run themselves, there’s no such a thing as a leader.

        Last word is yours, I guess.

        • @[email protected]
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          19 months ago

          So institutions are magic and unaccountable inhuman systems are a good thing?

          I remember a story about a guy, world war one vet, that war fucked him up, became a rabid Nazi literally in it for the dehumanization and (the ‘I jack off to being turned into paste by a beautiful perfect machine’ itallian futurist) type philosophy, Until he saw what the Bolshevik reactionaries did with Russia.

          He was immediately and unironicly like ‘hey, wow, this is so much worse. I’m defecting to these guys now.’ and then did it.

          You remind me of that. This is praise of your novelty, condemnation of your everything else. Big ‘thanks, I hate it!’ Vibes