dont know how web designer as a industry is doing now.

Bereft with AI slop following sweeping layoffs, so not well.

Modern states suspend the rights of individuals to lifer or liberty as a punishment for breaking a rule. Rules like “don’t rape people”.

They also do it for rules like “wrong skin color,” “wrong country of origin,” “wrong sexuality or gender identity,” “born into poverty and stole food,” “suffering from drug addiction,” or even “possessed a completely harmless drug like weed.” And the punishment is often the total depravation of rights and forced labor tantamount to slavery.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike from stealing loaves of bread.”

At least in theory, you can move to another nation or campaign for better treatment in essentially all modern states, exempting a small group of pariah states that still mostly don’t rape people as punishment.

This wasn’t a good argument in feudal society when peasants could leave and find another Lord or live on their own, and it’s not a good argument now. Choice is pointless when all your choices share the same constraints.

Not a single person I’ve seen has so much as suggested any mechanism whatsoever that would keep “self organizing collectives” from becoming fetit pools of bigotry and violence. We know that will happen because such groups arise in every nation already, but their impact is curbed specifically by the power of the state.

What mechanism prevents states from becoming fetid pools of bigotry and violence, and how has it been working so far? The power of the state does not curb this behavior, it curbs its rivals while engaging in that very behavior themselves by maintaining a monopoly on violence.

“Get rid of the government and we’ll all do the right thing” is libertarian bullshit to cover their glee at taking things away from others. If you aren’t a pro-rape libertarian, figure out how your proposed system would protect the vulnerable at least as well as modern states do.

Anarchy is not the lack of government, it’s horizontal governance. Hierarchy is not necessary for community policing or restorative justice. I’m not an American Libertarian which is an irrational ideology, as it wants capitalism without the state, which is impossible because capitalism is enforced by the state. Without the state protecting private property there can be no capitalism.

What stops a self-organizing collective from becoming racist, sexist, transohobic, and pro-rape?

What stops a state from becoming the same?

Modern states at least have the benefit of a basic theory that they cannot simply un-person people who live within their borders.

What are you talking about? Most modern states routinely strip people within and outside of their borders of rights, deport, murder, or enslave them.

Without the backing of the Israeli state they would not be so untouchable.

Anarchy is a great ideal, but there are some things governments do that we shouldn’t trust to self-organizing collectives.

What makes states more trustworthy than self-organizing collectives?

Congrats on your soft, velvety pubes. Mine are coarse enough to use as a scrub brush.

The cute ones that look at you with intelligence in their eyes. I could never kill a jumping spider.

Maybe it’s friendly!

Temporarily suspending disbelief for entertainment and actually believing in the occult are different things. I’m sure there are lots of people who do tarot for fun and just suspend disbelief, but there’s also a lot of people who actually believe in magic and use it to make important decisions. One is harmless, the other betrays a dangerous lack of critical thinking that pervades every aspect of a person’s life.

You wouldn’t need plausible deniability because the prosecution would have to prove that your intent was to make the bill unfit for circulation. Intent is already notoriously difficult to prove in a court of law, and it would be very difficult to prove someone wanted to take a bill out of circulation by writing a message on it that they hoped would be seen by people.

Even if the result is that the bill gets taken out of circulation, the court would have to prove that you knew that would happen and wanted it to.

You forgot:

Independent media news show with a hyper-niche ideology covering political developments you had no idea were happening.

And also:

Marathon-length dramatic history reading with a beat-for-beat breakdown of events as they occurred.

An AI upscale that’s been fried back down to its original low resolution.

I agree with your broader point but the bit about supporting auth-left fighting Nazis is a risky bet. I don’t think we’re close to having a marxist-leninist vanguard party overthrow the regime here in the US, but historically when they have been empowered to enact violence against fascists they end up taking the state monopoly on violence for themselves and turning it on anarchists and other socialists with slight disagreements.

But Iike you said, they’re not the ones controlling the state at the moment. It’s just something to keep in mind for the future in case an ML vanguard party leading a revolution in the US actually ends up being on the table. Depending on how bad things get a lot of people might consider it worth the risk.

Late 20s, moved to lemmy during the Reddit API scandal like a lot of others, so it’s a deliberate anti-corporate choice. I’ve always been techy (I worked as a software developer at the time I made the switch) and I’ve always hated the corporate social media platforms. Reddit was the only social media that I ever used extensively and the API fiasco was the straw that broke the camel’s back. This may or may not be true for others who switched around the same time but it coincided with my political views becoming more radical; I used to consider myself a social democrat but by the time I fled Reddit I fully considered myself socialist and was on my way to becoming an anarchist.

I can’t help but be curious, what made you choose slrpnk.net - an instance for environmentalist anarchists - as a conservative? Did you misread conservationism or something?

No-fap and anti-fap communities have historically been breeding grounds (irony unintended) for right-wing ideology. That’s where a lot of the distaste for that kind of talk comes from; when someone starts moralizing about “porn addiction” it is so frequently followed by blatant misogyny and incel rhetoric that people have learned to immediately respond with derision.

I think the world is more complex than any individual person can possibly comprehend, but that doesn’t make us incapable of moral judgement or unable to imagine radical alternatives to the status quo. Yes, things are the way they are now for a reason, but rarely a good reason. I see the appeal to complexity as a cognitive trap serving as a thought-terminating cliché, and it’s the trap that a lot of social democrats have fallen into. It is easier to stick to what you know than to speculate about a world you’ve never experienced, but I promise you the latter is more fulfilling and a great antidote to cynicism.

I won’t speak for you, but when I was a social democrat I was pretty miserable and cynical. I recommend the book Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, as it is what snapped me out of being a social democrat, personally. That sent me into the world of radical politics and I found footing by reading David Graeber (The History Of Everything, Bullshit Jobs, etc.) which helped me put my thoughts into perspective and realize my beliefs had already been fairly anarchist for a while. I’m not an anti-realist like a lot of anarchists are, my worldview is still grounded in materialism, but I have become a bit more agnostic in that regard over time.

Alright, I’ll have a go at guessing your ideology since you asked. Given your status quo preference (“the generations before us aren’t stupid and things are the way they are for a good reason”), you’re not a radical so that leaves conservative, liberal, or centrist. Given you’ve implied that you used to have some anarchist beliefs it’s unlikely you went from that to conservative, so most likely you’re some flavor of liberal, like a social democrat. You’re vaguely sympathetic to some socialist and anarchist ideas but think you’re too smart to commit to them because the world is “just more complicated than that.” Capitalist realism has pulled you back from becoming a radical as you’ve gotten older.

Speak for yourself. All kinds of groups from conservatives to liberals to fascists to communists (although let’s be honest, it’s mostly the conservatives and liberals and ‘enlightened centrists’) love to arrogantly imply that their current worldview is the mature, rational conclusion that any intelligent person should reach in adulthood, and any other is just childish, naive, and poorly conceived. The people who do this aren’t speaking to anything concrete about the world, they’re just high on their own farts and confident in their ignorance.

And it’s the anarchists who catch the bulk of the sneering insults from these types, who will often demonstrate their own ignorance as they dismiss them as naive and uninformed. You did this yourself by extolling the virtues of markets as a defense of capitalism, apparently not knowing that markets are not exclusive to capitalism.

It would be easier to list the things that should not be done and over with by now.