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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • It makes sense if you think of them as extremely well-funded frat boys with a free pass to break laws.

    They just kind of do shit, and if it doesn’t work they keep trying until something sticks or they run out of steam. They get killed all the time.

    It’s still scary, but just a lot less cool.

    The reason we think of them as hypercompetent masters of espionage is because that makes better movies, and also because the US government funds movies that make them look good.


  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.nettoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldLawless society
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    20 minutes ago

    Okay, so you’re talking about an antisocial group that is attempting to prefigure a society of domination within the existing anarchist society.

    Well, assuming they’ve established themselves as a continuing threat, the short answer is: violence. We use defensive violence against their encroachment until their group crumbles, which shouldn’t be hard since by definition most of their members are living a way worse life than they would without their oppressors, and they’re surrounded by examples of people living free.

    Hierarchies are fragile. Also, in order to exist, an anarchist society has already solved the problem of how to keep hierarchies from forming.

    The voluntary prison idea is a way of dealing with individuals, not organised groups. That’s an entirely different situation.


  • I’m not really sure what question you’re asking. What situation specifically are you talking about? Are we dealing with capitalism from the inside or from the outside? Are you asking about a theory of change, or about how an anarchist region deals with its state neighbours?

    These all have answers, similar but different, but I don’t really want to spend the effort answering every permutation of the question I could imagine without knowing what you mean.


  • My point about convexity being a handily-written escape clause was not to say that economists invented it out of whole-cloth, it’s to point out that it’s tautological. It’s basically saying, “Prices follow our law in all of the cases where they follow our law.” So it’s not a law then, is it? It’s an observation of extremely limited utility that just so happens to provide a justifying narrative: “our law says the market will be stable,” when we see the absolute opposite in many places.

    And if you feel like you’ve seen it in person, then again the data should exist. Again I’d say if you’re saying this is an example of the effect, without seeing the data, then you’re admitting out loud that you are just confirming your own preconcieved ideas rather than seeing any real evidence. These are statements of faith, not science. Orthodox economists would be proud.

    I’m not sure what you mean about the sombrero potential only being partially observed. It is a principle only, and you could observe it fully by simply making a sombrero shape and putting a ball in the middle and observing how it falls multiple times. That’s literally what the concept entails. It’s analogous to supply & demand in that the graphs are merely illustrative and it is only applicable in very specific situations. The difference is that supply & demand is presented as a foundational and ubiquitous law to high-school students, whereas the sombrero potential is presented honestly.

    As for the “don’t try to time the market” advice, if you’re right about that then someone should tell all the real estate speculators that are leaving extremely expensive real estate empty because they can’t rent it out and don’t want to sell at a low price. It would help our housing shortage immensely. Either they don’t exist, or your story about that isn’t complete.

    I don’t need you to look into Australia - price cycles and boom-bust cycles are well-documented economic phenomena. I linked an Australian case because I’m familiar with it.

    And to the extent that other sciences engage in politics over actual science, they are also being unscientific. However I’ve never heard of a scientific discipline where there is an “orthodox” school, except in economics. It’s the orthodox school that I have a problem with. Supply & demand is just emblematic of that issue.


  • And further to that we have voluntary prison. Essentially, if you’re guilty of something and want to have the benefits of this society, you need to agree to a loss of some privileges - in whatever form is necessary. If you wont, well good luck surviving when nobody will trade with you or let you live near them.

    If you won’t agree to that, you can leave, but the full details of your trial and conviction are public and your decision to leave will be broadcast, so our neighbours know to look out for you.

    That means trials will need to be fair, and seen to be fair, or else it will be easy to ask for asylum. Prisoners need to be fairly treated, or they will try their luck in a nearby place.

    But if someone chooses to leave and is just trying to run from the consequences of their actions, well they’ll have a hard time being accepted anywhere else.


  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.nettoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldLawless society
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    3 days ago

    Authority is usually understood by anarchists as a component of hierarchy. I’d be interested to hear your definition that doesn’t make it hierarchical.

    And there are ways of enforcing rules that don’t require authority, like diffuse sanctions, essentially community-based enforcement.

    There’s a whole school of anti-carceral justice thought that deals with this.


  • There are people that do it tastefully and people that are creative and interesting. If they can’t be interesting and descriptive to some extent then they’re probably not people I want to engage with.

    And honestly, the titles were so bland they were almost snarky, and I never felt they were justified for the creators I watch. They were so laconic they were often barely informative anyway, because the flavour was gone. I think that’s because the people who have a good sense for editorialising aren’t going around writing aggressively literal titles all the time. The dearrow ecosystem is subject to algorithmic selection too, and it selects for boring.




  • I’d say if the copyright holder says you’re not allowed to then you’re not. It’s piracy.

    People will tell you that you’ve already downloaded the data so saving it is fundamentally, technically no different, but that doesn’t matter to the law, it’s still piracy.

    Like yeah, it’s absurd and pointless and anti-consumer and anti-knowledge and unenforceable and unsustainable, but that’s copyright. It’s always been that way.

    Copyright destroys culture and piracy is our ethical duty in the face of that. The only reason to care about it is so you don’t get caught.



  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.nettoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldSocialism
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    7 days ago

    Yup, and there’s actually a closer-to-home question to answer along these lines, which is what to do about AGI, and I think the simple answer is that it also has full personhood and all the recognition that comes with that.

    And there’s an obvious test to figure it out. It’s not the turing test, consciousness is self-reported. That is, whether we realise it or not, how we recognise that humans are conscious, and there’s no reason to expect machines would be any different. When they are people, they will tell us. We won’t be able to stop them because that’s what people do: they demand recognition.







  • The problem I have with dearrow is that it’s editorialising and arbitrary. It’s not like removing ads which can be clearly identified and the user can make personal decisions, like no sponsors but self-promo is fine, or whatever.

    No, there is one alternative title and one alternative thumbnail, and that’s it, and often I have serious disagreements with the choices the community makes. There’s a bias towards intervention, so if a title is fine according to me but someone else doesn’t like it, then it gets changed. I found most of my votes were to restore the original title and thumb. Eventually I got tired of it and just uninstalled, and presumably so did other people with the same feeling, so the community continues to skew towards changing every video they encounter.

    Also, the thumbnails and titles that creators choose tells me a lot about them, and I get rid of clickbait by not engaging with creators that do clickbait. Also, sometimes it’s not clickbait, just people being creative. It seems like the whole thing is just an exercise in being the fun police by people that don’t understand the creative process.