The goal isn’t what you assume it is. You’re projecting your own goals and concerns onto those men.
My guess would be exhibitionism. They get sexual gratification from acting sexually towards women regardless of how those women feel about it. As for women talking to each other, that’s less of a risk on dating apps, and even irl it has never been decent at preventing sexual offenders from having plenty of victims.
I see you don’t know who Lucas Pope is or what his previews consisted of. I really liked his blogposts about designing a game for a retro handheld console that really doesn’t seem worth buying. His dev blog gave me more vivid appreciation for the art of games.
I really hope he’ll publish the dev blogs after the game.
Mines don’t need to be maintained actively, so it would make sense if Iran were about to lose its capacity to sink ships in the strait by other means. As the US said would happen a few weeks ago.
So US media said Iran would or did mine the strait. And sometimes people believe propaganda even if they know better than to trust it.
If you think 8 million people hanging out noticing that nonviolence isn’t enough and sharing that dissatisfaction with each other doesn’t help progress things towards more effective means of resistance, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s like complaining that grade school doesn’t teach children algebra.
So when all the hard work is done you want to take credit?
Uncensor it you coward.
Ownership isn’t a preference. It’s the material anchor of class power.
Why do you think only ownership can be a “material anchor”? When someone can “own” something they’ve never been within a thousand miles of, why couldn’t another form of institutionally enforced authority over that object fulfill that same role?
But the solution isn’t to abandon proletarian authority. It’s to deepen mass line, criticism-self-criticism, recall mechanisms.
You reformist! ;)
Why would regulation offer any more resistance against the pressure of material relations between authority and worker within state communism than in liberal capitalism?
they end up adopting positions functionally close to MLs, because material conditions demand it. The “authority is inherently tyrannical” line is tyranny of bedtime idealism that collapses on contact with actual struggle
It’s natural that functions converge when pursuing the same goals, especially when the pressure is on. Pulling someone out of the way of a moving bus is going to look the same in all ideologies.
It’s also natural that when you ask someone raised in a statist society what they would do, they’re going to be primed to answer in a more centralized way. One of the nice things of anarchy is that other people can exercise their better ideas, so even if I give a bad answer they are free to give a good answer and people can go with that instead. That’s how you prevent beginner mistakes like the four pests campaign or the holodomor from killing millions of people.
You can’t dismantle the bourgeois state with decentralized cells.
You can if you want primitivism, but yeah dying of smallpox sucks. That’s why anarchists prefigure structures, as you note.
You can’t break imperial chains with sociocracy.
Why couldn’t you?
As I mentioned before, the below are just my personal guesses of what would be good options. Anarchist society is larger than me and will do better than me.
Who are “the people”?
Everyone, with those who can’t communicate effectively being assisted to have a say.
How do they coordinate at scale?
Sociocracy, federations, and whatever else they come up with and consent to.
How do they defend against counter-revolution
Shaping the material conditions towards decentralization and voluntary association, so there is nothing for the counterrevolution to seize.
imperial invasion
Shaping the material conditions to make places as hard as possible to hold with force, and the prevent the existence of strategic positions for the empire to hold. Decentralization, guerilla defense infrastructure, weapons caches. Mass solidarity. Propagandize among the invader’s population and encourage revolution and resistance there.
economic sabotage?
Decentralized local production. Long-lasting repairable goods. Living within your ecological means.
Perhaps to help make these ideas more concrete we could have drills/competitions where different communes or federations showcase the strategies they think work best so groups can share and learn empirically.
For those curious, this is 9-18 hours of (US federal) minimum wage per day.
Now they will. Spanish resellers have an opportunity to make bank.
Honestly, the ludonarrative parallels to the experience of a sub are impeccable. The label of “failure” is a reward in-and-of itself and tying it to the actual game experience of failure fills the same role as pain or bondage in BDSM. Yet, like a comic artist needing to learn how to draw well in order to be able to draw “messily” well, a sub has to learn how to navigate their sexual life with skill so they can learn to “fail” in new and more hot ways. The player enjoys their liberty and “competence” all the more knowing that at any point the game designer can yank the chain and make them eat dirt.
This is looking at global data. Most countries are a lot less wasteful than the US. It also completely disregards waste food, though it says it only makes up 5% of global caloric production.
According to the article, the US produces 14% of all agricultural calories on Earth. 28% of this is spent on non-food purposes, while 17% is spent on food but not animal feed, compared to 15% and 45% globally. This means that while the US produces twice as much calories per acre of farmland than the global average, it can actually feed fewer people per acre than average.
And yes to slavery for millions of people imprisoned because cops lied about what they did.
Waving away ownership because it’s a “social construct” is a dodge.
I am not waving it away, I am lowering its status to be within the same realm as concerns that are secondary in capitalism. Concerns that may become primary when capital is undone, as in state communism.
You’re using “class” as a catch-all. I’m using it in the stricter sense that actually lets you explain things, relation to production, control of surplus, reproduction of power. That’s what gives the concept teeth.
And all of these can continue to be monopolized by a specific societal subgroup without the use of “ownership”. Any group with authority over these matters that can have solidarity within the authoritative group will serve as a ruling class that gains from exploiting the working class.
So no, solidarity isn’t a matter of interpretation. It’s grounded in position. People can misread their interests, sure. They can be won to chauvinism or reformism. But those interpretations only stick because of material conditions, and they only last as long as those conditions hold. Real solidarity has to be built on shared relation to production and shared interest in ending exploitation. Anything else is temporary alignment at best.
The relation to production of different groups change over time. Serfdom, slavery, automation. Worldwide alignment of workers’ interests is temporary and shifting like intranational alignment, which is why it historically hasn’t happened yet.
If the singular working class as a concept had more teeth than nationality I would expect it to, well, take a bigger bite out of history. For French revolutionaries to abolish slavery in their natural solidarity with other workers rather than continuing exploitation because their interests did not in fact align with slaves in the colonies.
If every exercise of authority or unevenness in incentives is already the seed of a new ruling class, then organised transformation becomes impossible by definition. Any revolution complex enough to survive would already contain the embryo of its own betrayal and again we should just give up and kill ourselves now.
No, we should become anarchist. Unevenness is a vulnerability that we build social structures to prevent from turning into authority, and complex social structures with far less authority already exist from sociocracy to decentralized guerilla cells.
As with your narrative of state communism, these systems are imperfect and will develop places of authority and abuse, and we will learn from that and alter the systems to be less authoritative.
But where you expect administrators to make such improvements to their personal and (sub)class’ detriment, anarchy keeps the power to make these changes with the people so the changes are made in the people’s favor.
We are able to be anarchist (or state communist) even within capitalism; the countless seeds of authority we carry with us into the postrevolutionary society will be far easier to wrangle than the full-grown monstrosities of capitalism.
The dissolved oxygen has to leave the beer somehow to get the yeast to produce alcohol. You could use some energy-intensive process to remove the oxygen, but otherwise it naturally gets turned into the CO2 beer drinkers expect. And I doubt that energy-intensive process would be worth it in the end.
Though maybe the naturally present oxygen isn’t enough to make it as carbonated as consumers expect, and more air or CO2 is pumped in to make it more carbonated. In that case using captured CO2 instead of letting the yeast turn some more of the wheat into CO2 would make a difference.
Ownership is a social construct like any other. Limiting your intepretation of class to ones defined by ownership makes the analysis pointlessly inapplicable when looking at societies where ownership plays less of a role. Feudal society didn’t just have lords and serfs, it also had peasants and free cities and church land that don’t fit the “feudalism is defined by owning the land and the serfs on it” schema. Theocracy, bureaucracy, caste systems, white supremacy, patriarchy, and anarchy all benefit from a class-based lens.
Marx focused on ownership as the primary class divide because that’s how capitalism works (especially in the 19th century before social liberalism muddied the waters through pension funds, unemployment benefits, small business loans, etc.), but any conflict of interests between groups of people seeking to achieve economic prosperity will do. For example, migrant workers are actively imported under liberalism to divide the working class, which was so succesful not just because of racism but because of genuinely different economic incentives between those with citizenship privileges and those who are floundering in a hostile legal system but for who what little they get is more than they could have gotten back in the imperial periphery. In essence, citizenship becomes the division between two distinct working classes.
And here we see how solidarity is a matter of interpretation. Right-wing citizen workers attempt solidarity with capitalists by invoking their shared citizenship while left-wing citizen workers attempt solidarity with the migrants by invoking their shared worker status. These are different strategies that are both within range of what the material conditions make plausible. One hopes to reinforce imperial oppression, creating the material conditions that can be leveraged into greater citizenship privileges as traitors to the international working class; the other hopes to leverage the power of a united labor front grants either to demand more privileges at the negotiating table (socialist reformers) or to have a revolution whose reorganisation leaves them better off than before.
I wish I could say for certain that being traitors to the international working class is a foolishly bad bet. But it worked okay for western workers in the past century. I truly can’t say if a median income middle aged white male American would expect less prosperity under Trump than in the conflicting mess that would be an American leftist revolution.
Those in power have similar choices between mutually contradictory strategies, reshaping material conditions in different uncertain ways. In 2015-2024, the USAmerican capital class was divided between going full hog dictatorial fascism and trying to reform through the slow decline of their empire. Neither is objectively better for the US capital class; they both have different risk profiles, and fascism is a big enough swing that it can’t be hedged against very well. If the US collapses, billionaires may well end up being hunted down and killed, which is worse for them than becoming multi-millionaires in a world where China is the dominant nation.
It’s interesting because this means downscaling the SLS corruption cash cow, which has been an important way for congresspeople to get kickbacks. Combined with the increased funding for AI, the fossil fuel industry, and the military-industrial complex, this represents a shift of the fruits of corruption from congresspeople to private enterprise.
Which makes sense in the greater context of Project 2025 and the US becoming a dictatorship governed by executive order.
The point of lunar gateway was to get an infrastructure benefit to all future missions to anywhere on the moon. Changing it to a lunar base that is stuck in one location is a massive reduction in the scope of their ambitions. It would be like the 19th century US scapping plans for the transcontinental railway network and using the parts to make mining outposts.
So you made a straw man of what I was saying. There are degrees of freedom in how material relations are shaped which can be chosen between by a revolutionary movement.
Administrators, officials, organisers, these are roles within a system. In a system where production isn’t privately owned as capital, people in those roles don’t become a separate class just because they have authority.
Feudalism did not primarily maintain its classes through ownership either. Like a feudal lord, an administrator primarily maintains their position by social maneuvers towards their near-peers. Justifying bad metrics as unavoidable while claiming responsibility for windfalls, shaping their domain to play better within these social dynamics, and sabotaging rivals who don’t fit in their narrative.
Unlike feudal lords, administrators don’t own a personal demesne, but for the most powerful feudal lords that demesne was miniscule compared to their power base that came from vassalage. A feudal lord conquering a rival kingdom would distribute it to loyal vassals like an administrator cannibalizing a rival ministry would distribute it to loyal managers.
In this game, administrators want to increase authority over their domain of responsibility to better weaponize it. Modes of production are turned towards political usefulness for the administrator rather than towards the benefit of workers, alienating workers in the process.
Simply put, authority becomes a form of control over the means of production which shapes an administrator’s class incentives differently from workers. It isn’t ownership but it doesn’t need to be.
And yes, administrator roles do tend to be leveraged into nepotistic inheritance of authority, with family being appointed to higher roles in exchange for favors.
This is talking about the weather conditions at which a person is guaranteed to die if they are outside for six hours in the shade (or at night).
Previously climate scientists said this would happen at a wet bulb temperature1 of 35 Celsius, theoretically enough to prevent a sweat-drenched human body from overheating. However, research has demonstrated the threshold is lower and doesn’t perfectly follow a single wet bulb temperature. And the scientific article that the news article is about shows these conditions have already occurred several times, when it was previously thought this threshold had not been breached yet.
Of course people can find shelter in an air conditioned buildings, underground, or under a forest canopy. But billions of people do not have access to these options. At some point they can either die or migrate, and this research shows that point requires less climate change than previously predicted. Combined with climate change occurring at a faster rate than the median expectation, mass climate migration is coming a lot sooner than expected.
1: the temperature a thermometer indicates if the bulb is wet. If the air is dry, evaporation will cause this temperature to be lower than the air temperature, which is also the temperature a thermometer indicates if the bulb is dry.