This is not a question of whether someone should or not, but a question of whether doing so will make them feel safer.
The answer to the first question is usually “yes”, but the answer to the second question is usually “no”.
If the state wants you dead, a gun and a couple boxes of ammo aren’t going to be more than a minor inconvenience to the state.
I appreciate you being that guy. Differentiating by gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or anything else is just a distraction. A Union is much stronger than a men’s women + women’s union + non-binary Union + whatever else anyone wants to add.
Plus that avoids having to deal with TERFs.
They are also meant to be a photo opportunity for children.
Shhh don’t ruin it: everyone in the comments is too busy swooning
That’s a republic, not a democracy.
There’s plenty of room to participate even in democratic republics. It’s not as if you just elect 1 supreme ruler and everyone else goes home. Thus even in democracy you are burdened with the moral dilemma of inaction.
There is no true anarchy because government emerges spontaneously from human interaction. “Anarchists” start to add these structures and fail to realize that what they are creating is just an idyllic state without using the word “state” because they don’t like it.
I absolutely loath the “write something for the Community to review” aspect. There should 100% be a way to turn that off.
And make my profile completely private. I don’t want anyone else to be able to see my progress or even know that I’m using the app at all.
Be sure those societies are reduced to almost no people, usually in lands that are deficient in natural resources in the first place.
Just look up for a counter-example. The Earth’s atmosphere is full of space junk now because for decades no regulatory body had the balls to tell private companies not to leave their shit up there.
I would disagree with the “ALL” laws. Regulatory capture is a thing. There’s plenty of bad laws that exist to do things like keep new small businesses from entering into industries to compete, or to help the wealthy maintain power. I just view those as symptoms of the greater imbalance of society.
Laws are tools, and can be created and used for both evil and good.
I tried them out years ago. I had taken a bit of German in high school and liked it so I figured I’d give it a shot.
I didn’t love the gamification aspect. That’s something that applies to a LOT of modern software. I always hated gold stars and stickers as a child in school. I hated the stupid programs my various employers had to encourage coworkers to compliment each other - it’s all a tactic to generate positive emotions and avoid paying people more. And most of all, I saw the rise of mobile games and micro-transactions and skinner boxes. The way some people just go nuts and put hours into games they otherwise wouldn’t just to get some digital “trophy” or “achievement”. Duolingo had a decent amount of that.
I stopped because of privacy concerns. I forget the details now, but I think maybe they were found to be harvesting a lot of data from phones that they were not disclosing. Either that or they pushed out a mandatory terms and conditions update that just said they would be harvesting all of the data? So I uninstalled.
I watched my girlfriend use it last year and it’s so much worse. They have leaned so heavily into “dailies” and “streaks”. It’s like the shittiest mmorpg you’ve ever seen.
I recently started Busuu, and while it feels BETTER it still has a lot of the same stuff. A lot of encouragement to engage in, like, social and community aspects. To get streaks. Idk maybe I would be better off just finding books or something.
Profit chasing would not only exist, but would be allowed to run rampant and unchecked without government oversight.
Governing structures are a naturally emergent phenomenon of not only humanity, but all life.
Imagine what Bezos and Musk would do without any sort of government restriction at all? Historically speaking, those people under “anarchy” become warlords, chiefs, kings. In its simplist form, the power is held by those who are the best at violence. That is what biases almost every culture towards patriarchy in the first place. Eventually more cunning ambitious people emerge and find ways to form alliances and engage in politics. This has happened throughout all of human history and pre-dates concepts like nationalism or statehood. An example would be that the Congo was colonized by King Leopold personally, not the kingdom of Belgium.
If we dissolved every state in the world today, the world would instantly re-form into new states: X, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon. Palantir might be their own state. Then you have the defense contractors.
So in my estimation if we are going to have states, those states should recognize their power comes from the people in a democratic process, not money or land. The state should be used to regulate out greed: the most successful states are the ones that remove profit incentives through regulation. The problem with pretty much every state is that we allowed money to centralize decades ago, to the point where that money can use its power to take control of the state. Eventually this leads to revolution, though whether it’s a matter of days or decades is up for debate.
The system of value is imposed by the people, otnthe government. The government is an attempt to model that system of values.
The only way it would be better under anarchy is that you would no longer be shouldering the moral burden of participating.
In a democracy you need to come to terms with the fact that things are shitty. I held my nose and voted for Harris because YES she would have still allowed Israel to continue their campaign of terror against Gaza, but there’s a laundry list of terrible things that have happened under Trump that absolutely would not have under Harris.
To be an anti-democracy anarchist is to hide your head in the sand. To stand at the trolley switch without touching it, trying to convince yourself that the blood is not on your hands. Trying to pretend like we can sequester off pieces of this one planet into containers that do not impact each other.
It’s a great ideology for teenagers explore. To see things in extremes and think more abstractly without getting bigger down with the details of reality.
The part where people with better material positions consolidate power and influence, and exercise that power over the meek.
Or the part where greedy fucks “make their own decisions” that don’t factor in externalities or the impact they have to the common good. Resulting in things like the destruction of our natural environment and ecosystem.
Cheesecake.
I was a good boy who didn’t do drugs until adulthood, and I have medical marijuana now. The feedback I’ve gotten from pretty much everyone who did drugs in the 90’s and 00’s vs today is the same as your experience. The “weed nerds” have spent decades in their labs and the state-by-state legalization has greatly accelerated their progress.
Even my pharmacist warned me when I first got my medical card “if this is your first time using medical marijuana it’s a lot stronger than what is usually on the street, so watch out”.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but that article is just typical fear mongering BS. It keeps the eyes of parents glued to the screen and consuming ads. Doesn’t even say what “spice” is. Articles like this are basically broiler-llate and come out every few months. Notice how they manage to blame social media, and how they don’t mention any adults using it at all.
I found the wikipedia article on these things more useful and less biased. Spice seems to mostly refer to a designer drug that is similar to THC, but is not THC. And while it is often used to lace marijuana or mixed with weed vapes, it isn’t just weed.
It’s like hearing about people adding PCP or LSD to weed and freaking out about how dangerous weed is. Like… Yeah you shouldn’t buy drugs from some random guy on Snapchat.
DOGE would not have happened under Biden or Harris. Millions of people are dying because of cuts to US AID.
Venezuela would not have happened. Like, how crazy is it that you lost a handful of the most egregious things Trump has done recently and yet somehow invading another country and kidnapping their leader a couple months ago doesn’t make the cut? I don’t mean that as a criticism of you, just how much insane shit Trump has done.
Cuts to Education have been and will be devastating for years. Shutting down tons of science and information-gathering agencies. Economic data is going to be non-existent or useless for the foreseeable future. All the lovely anti-trust action Lina Khan was starting to do under Biden has been erased. All the work Jessica Rosenworcel was doing to restore Net Neutrality under Biden has been erased. The Republican party is about to pass a bill that will disenfranchise both trans people and women. The EPA has been gutted. Trump has given and cut off funds to states, both for regular projects and disaster relief funds, based on how they voted for him, while Biden (and no other president I am aware of) has done anything like that before.
So-called “communists” have a tendency to become EnLiGhTeNeD cEnTrIsTs.
That is basically why the Standard Deduction exists.
This article is using every trick in the dystopian playbook to try to emotionally appeal to people. Protecting women, especially the young girls!
But she still comes out and says what she really wants: more power vested into private, wealthy owners of spaces, to the state, and to the police.
Surely nothing can go wrong. Surely this is about equality for everyone and it definitely won’t disproportionately impact men of color. Surely this won’t run afoul of any tricky edge cases like trans people. Surely this won’t be used to deliscriminate against the poors while still allowing anyone in an expensive suit to do whatever the fuck they want.