What About Direct-democratic Planning, With Or Without The Recommendations Made By A Committee Or Any

"My enemies are dehumanizing me by calling me a remorseless monster. Time to prove them wrong by dehumanizing them as a justification of cruelty towards them."

They REALLY don’t like the NPC meme. Keep pushing it! Maybe they’ll stop fucking calling us “Russian bots”.

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These are reasonable complaints; it sucks when people

1. Fail to interpret you correctly and act reasonably 2. Act polite to such an extreme that it comes off as passive-aggressive, sarcastic, or even threatening (a big man staring resentfully at a small woman for "making" him side-step is probably threatening to the woman, especially alone and/or at night 3. Treat you like a fragile object or an antagonist rather than someone who's entitled to basic civility.

I just had three guys consecutively stop dead in their tracks and side step me. One of them even said, “excuse me, mam!” I want to puke.

I’ve been out shopping a lot lately and this is the new hot trend and I may start screaming soon

I'm pretty sure this was a case I saw recently; what happened is that the federal funds had originally been transferred via ACH (which is different from a wire). ACH transactions can be reversed by the sender within 5 business days, which Elon just managed to do (he did the reverse on day 5, if I remember correctly).

This is obviously unprecdented and concerning, but the government does not have the means to directly remove/transfer funds from within your private account. They can stop transfers from a government account(or again, reverse them within a limited window) or "request" a bank to freeze/close your account for suspicious activity, but they can't just reach in to your checking account and take your money.

Elon and DOGE have access to your banking info and can drain your account.

Russia needs money? Maybe they will access your life savings. Putin is Musk ally.

Speak out against Musk? He will target dissent.

Want to file a complaint? They got rid of CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This is beyond apocalyptic.

Idea: Resolve this problem by giving workers the power to fire colleagues that they deem lazy or dangerously incompetent. Terminated workers have the right to defend themselves in a court-like environment, with consideration given to the importance/inherent danger of their job and the consequences of letting them stay or forcing them out. Terminated workers are compensated with unemployment benefits and recieve assistance from local government in finding a new occupation.

“ (Also, I’ll grant you there’s something to *the basic idea*, but “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is actually untenable.)”

Could you elaborate more on this? I’m curious how you arrived to this conclusion when we produce more than enough food to feed the planet and when we (in the United States, at least) have more empty homes than homeless people. If those kinds of surpluses can be achieved with only small parts of the population engaged in agriculture and construction, what could we achieve if everyone worked to the best of their ability? Even with marginal returns on labor.

I genuinely mean it; to me, nothing is more untenable than the idea that allowing a small percentage of people to control nearly all resource and labor allocation will benefit humankind in the long run, except maybe the idea that unchecked productive activity in a competitive system will somehow miraculously save us from the ecological catastrophe caused by that activity.

funny thing about talking about capitalism/communism is if you don’t explicitly say ‘capitalism’ or ‘communism’ and take out the marxist jargon people will agree with you 90% of the time

I pity them and am perfectly willing to forgive them of their sins, but I also want to democratize their property with every fiber of my being so they can stop this system before we all die from it.

tfw you don’t know whether to be envious of the upper classes for having a bunch of utilities provided for free-or-below-market by venture capitalists trying to boost growth before they find a profit model, or to pity them for relying on platforms that are doomed to ineffably disappear because they have no sustainable model.

This tendency always fascinated me. There's a guy in my neighborhood with a big sign on his fence claiming that Obama passed a certain law making propaganda legal, as though Obama (or any ruler) would want to make sure his naked seizure of power was legalized prior to doing it? Such a strange mix of total paranoia combined with a childish belief in the law as inviolable.

i’ve been thinking about a bit in a recent Shaun video, where he has a short clip taken from a terf or anti-vax or wayfair truther rally, i don’t remember which (sort of the point, these groups all bleed into each other), where someone was claiming that the mRNA vaccine was a plot by transhumanists to alter people’s DNA so they wouldn’t be human anymore and thus, under the law, they would no longer have human rights.

and, like, the major takeaway here is just “oh, these people are crazy crazy,” but i can’t help but be kind of astounded at the logic regardless. like, the existence of legal rights predates the discovery of DNA. your rights as a person do not at all depend on your genome. nevermind that the casual conflation of DNA with the true essence of a living organism is a fundamental misreading of science; if you could magically remove all the DNA from someone’s body, they would still (in the brief interval before they died horribly) have human rights! no court anywhere on Earth would entertain the argument that someone’s legal status as a person is dependent on a DNA test.

and obviously there are much more salient objections to this whole line of reasoning, which is purely emotive “technology bad” nonsense rhetoric, but like… do they think that if they trick someone into standing next to a strong gamma-ray source, they have the legal right to murder them??

We will never know their names.

The first victim could not have been recorded, for there was no written language to record it. They were someone’s daughter, or son, and someone’s friend, and they were loved by those around them. And they were in pain, covered in rashes, confused, scared, not knowing why this was happening to them or what they could do about it - victim of a mad, inhuman god. There was nothing to be done - humanity was not strong enough, not aware enough, not knowledgeable enough, to fight back against a monster that could not be seen.

It was in Ancient Egypt, where it attacked slave and pharaoh alike. In Rome, it effortlessly decimated armies. It killed in Syria. It killed in Moscow.  In India, five million dead. It killed a thousand Europeans every day in the 18th century. It killed more than fifty million Native Americans. From the Peloponnesian War to the Civil War, it slew more soldiers and civilians than any weapon, any soldier, any army (Not that this stopped the most foolish and empty souls from attempting to harness the demon as a weapon against their enemies).

Cultures grew and faltered, and it remained. Empires rose and fell, and it thrived. Ideologies waxed and waned, but it did not care. Kill. Maim. Spread. An ancient, mad god, hidden from view, that could not be fought, could not be confronted, could not even be comprehended. Not the only one of its kind, but the most devastating.

For a long time, there was no hope - only the bitter, hollow endurance of survivors.

In China, in the 10th century, humanity began to fight back.

It was observed that survivors of the mad god’s curse would never be touched again: they had taken a portion of that power into themselves, and were so protected from it. Not only that, but this power could be shared by consuming a remnant of the wounds. There was a price, for you could not take the god’s power without first defeating it - but a smaller battle, on humanity’s terms. By the 16th century, the technique spread, to India, across Asia, the Ottoman Empire and, in the 18th century, Europe. In 1796, a more powerful technique was discovered by Edward Jenner.

An idea began to take hold: Perhaps the ancient god could be killed.

A whisper became a voice; a voice became a call; a call became a battle cry, sweeping across villages, cities, nations. Humanity began to cooperate, spreading the protective power across the globe, dispatching masters of the craft to protect whole populations. People who had once been sworn enemies joined in common cause for this one battle. Governments mandated that all citizens protect themselves, for giving the ancient enemy a single life would put millions in danger.

And, inch by inch, humanity drove its enemy back. Fewer friends wept; Fewer neighbors were crippled; Fewer parents had to bury their children.

At the dawn of the 20th century, for the first time, humanity banished the enemy from entire regions of the world. Humanity faltered many times in its efforts, but there individuals who never gave up, who fought for the dream of a world where no child or loved one would ever fear the demon ever again. Viktor Zhdanov, who called for humanity to unite in a final push against the demon; The great tactician Karel Raška, who conceived of a strategy to annihilate the enemy; Donald Henderson, who led the efforts of those final days.

The enemy grew weaker. Millions became thousands, thousands became dozens. And then, when the enemy did strike, scores of humans came forth to defy it, protecting all those whom it might endanger.

The enemy’s last attack in the wild was on Ali Maow Maalin, in 1977. For months afterwards, dedicated humans swept the surrounding area, seeking out any last, desperate hiding place where the enemy might yet remain.

They found none.

35 years ago, on December 9th, 1979, humanity declared victory.

This one evil, the horror from beyond memory, the monster that took 500 million people from this world - was destroyed.

You are a member of the species that did that. Never forget what we are capable of, when we band together and declare battle on what is broken in the world.

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day.

So from OP's perspective, democracy is perfectly compatible with a class society that enables unelected managers the ability to totally control all (or nearly all) media through ownership in what is more or less a state media system, but democracy is threatened only when those managers start trying to actively and obviously crack down on messages they don't like, rather than passively controlling the narrative by choosing which stories reach publication.

Besides, Bolsanaro has praised Brazil's military dictatorship and spoken highly of torture, and he also has encouraged militia violence against criminals or suspected criminals, but I guess snobby cultural gatekeeping is worse than continuing to rape the Amazon.

i’ve said it before but today i’ve been reflecting on it again.

one huge factor in bolsonaro’s election was the decentralization of media. haddad’s campaign outspent his by an order of magnitude and had way more legally mandated free tv exposure.

bolsonaro’s electorate was formed on twitter, facebook, youtube and whatsapp messenger, while the mainstream media continued to maintain that he was unacceptable.

this suggests to me that whatever ideological homeostasis that existed was maintained by media gatekeepers. and as they become increasingly unable to perform said gatekeeping, we see more and more pressure, particularly coming from the left, for social media platforms to step in and moderate their content.

take a moment, especially if this make you uncomfortable, to reflect on what the meaning of democracy is.

What is "corruption"?

Both liberals and libertarians believe that too many politicians serve "big business" or "crony interests" instead of the "public".

But look at from the perspective of a politician. One group of citizens may be the majority, but they have little way of influencing you outside of letters or collective actions, which are rare, and to be honest, their opinions are often uninformed and they have no control over major social organizations, so they don't matter to you all that much.

But a small minority of citizens are very important people, who direct the majority of economic activity and control the fate of your nation or- perhaps even more crucially-your home state, because they control land and resources and can choose where to invest them to create jobs. You're going to listen to what they have to say, especially since they can afford to send specialized lobbyists to wait in your office all day with lots of impressive documents and charts.

And they don't need to threaten or bribe you to get what they want; all they have to do is to make a convincing argument on why voting a certain way on a given law or regulation will benefit them (and by extensions, your constituency) or hurt them (and by extension, your constituency).

"The public may have good intentions in supporting this higher minimum wage law, or in their campaign to resist privatization," they argue, "but with all due respect to the public, they just don't know the facts. This bill will destroy jobs and hurt your state. Look, let us take you out to a nice dinner to discuss it. If you back us up on this, we'll support you come election season. Everybody wins."

"Corruption" is not the result of personal moral failing. It is the natural, inevitable symptom of a divided society, where a small percentage of owners who control almost all property and economic activity have interests that oppose that of the property-less majority. The only way to end "corruption" is to subordinate economic activity to the democratic will of society at large via the abolition of private property and the developmemt of communism.