“Free speech!”

Ok tankie.

“Not like that!”

I was in an argument with some .ml tankie yesterday, and they had the gall to say that “free speech that doesn’t threaten the government is tolerated everywhere,” in response to a comment saying that the CCP censors speech. They didn’t like my assertion that that statement also applies to Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Ingsoc party. It’s technically true, that free speech that doesn’t threaten the government is tolerated in Oceania. It’s just that the government considers any dissent threatening.

I can respect the Threads thing. That’s a valid reason other than “we need to be even smaller”.

My current instance doesn’t have downvotes, but it doesn’t matter to me either way.

🫶 In practice, every locality people are being the rescue workers to their neighbors Whenever and whereever Corporate & State institutions inevitably give way to their own weight and parasitism, the darker the times, the brighter folks shine. It isnt always intentional solidarity (rural townfolk often embody the practices as a matter of survival and culture, diverse as any peoples), and I’m always leery of calling things “natural”…but I do believe people have a tendency to want to help one another.

Local Mutual Aid organizations, and Encouraging anti-authoritarian parenting methods, are the two things we can do to drastically reduce violence in our society

“Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectually and morally.” Mutual Aid By Pëtr Kropotkin https://thereitis.org/kropotkins-mutual-aid/ https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarcho-mutual-aid-an-introduction-and-evaluation

“The structures of our state economies are going to matter in terms of protecting democracies, and by that I mean if you look at economies that were based in the kind of small producer economies like New England was vs states like the South and the American West that were always built on the idea of very high capital using extractive methods to get resources out of the land either cotton or mining or oil or water or agri business, those economies always depend on a few people with a lot of money, and then a whole bunch of people who are poor and doing the work for those Rich guys – and that I’m not sure is compatible in terms of governance without addressing the reality that you know if people have more of a foothold in their own communities, they are then more likely to support the kinds of legislation that Community [Education, Healthcare, …] and that may be the future of democracy, if not a national democracy"

https://youtu.be/D7cKOaBdFWo?t=2139 Heather Cox Richardson, professor of American history On The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on Trump’s Win and What’s Next

Our resulting interactions may seem chaotic and illegible to authority, but it is through that seeming chaos that vastly complex, horizontal, and resilient practices of learning, cooperation, and reciprocity have historically arisen. https://youtu.be/qkN_nQPpeSU Mutualism: What Anarchy Needs By Andrewism

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/jp3q4p/comment/gbesw1p/

About preventing crime, the short version is that it starts in the home.

Much violent crime can be traced back to cultural factors. Violent crime, such as murder, would probably decrease dramatically in an anarchist society because most of its causes — poverty, televised glorification of violence, prisons and police, warfare, sexism, and the normalization of individualistic and anti-social behaviors — would disappear or decrease.

The differences between two Zapotec communities illustrates that peace is a choice. The Zapotec are a sedentary agrarian indigenous nation living on land that is now claimed by the state of Mexico. One Zapotec community, La Paz, has a yearly homicide rate of 3.4/100,000. A neighboring Zapotec community has the much higher homicide rate of 18.1/100,000. What social attributes go along with the more peaceful way of life? Unlike their more violent neighbors, the La Paz Zapotec do not beat children; accordingly, children see less violence and use less violence in their play. Similarly, wife-beating is rare and not considered acceptable; women are considered equal to men, and enjoy an autonomous economic activity that is important to the life of the community so they are not dependent on men. Regarding child-rearing, the implications of this particular comparison are corroborated by at least one cross-cultural study on socialization, which found that warm, affectionate socialization techniques correlate with low levels of conflict in society.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works

As for the re-emergence of hierarchies, I think that the notion of anarchism is essentially ‘checks and balances’ turned up to 11. You get to a society that’s an ecosystem of fluid social relationships, and an anti-authoritarian culture which makes it impossible in a million ways for anyone to accumulate power. If we could get there, I think it would be more robust than current liberal democracy, where the branches of government can cooperate and you need buy-in from less people to enable power to be accumulated.

IMO, good anarchist praxis is to 1) encourage and popularize anti-authoritarian parenting methods and 2) build strong community groups and mutual aid networks.

Well yeah, implementation may vary with dictators.