Authoritarians really suck at running countries! Something about an individual or small group with no expertise and a violent hatred of constructive criticism making arbitrary decisions doesn’t seem to work out.

I don’t like command economies but they can work. The USSR made the mistake of basing a lot of their government, academia, and economy principally on ideological purity. For example the collective farms should have taken decades to implement with regional studies, test farms, and slow conversion of the existing farming infrastructure to collective farms. Move fast and break things does not work in agriculture and other critical infrastructure. If the Soviets (especially during Stalin’s time) had done their command economy differently they probably would have had a lot less famines early on.

Of course! Look at the sidebar though it is explicitly anarchist. I’m not an admin or mod, just some asshole, personally if someone is not an authoritarian and is anti capitalist we have a lot of common interests but have some ideological differences that can wait until fucking literal fascism and other forms of authoritarianism and done and dusted.

I’m an anarchist but I started as a far left libertarian. I wanted a small government that mainly administered a comprehensive social safety net, defended the environment, reined in corps, and kept up a small armed force to defend against invasion and maybe participate in UN anti-genocide missions. I found the book Post-Scarcity Anarchism and bought it on a whim which led me to Mutual Aid and I realized everything I thought a state had to do could be accomplished by the destruction of involuntary hierarchies, abolition of capitol, moving away from progress for progress’s sake, replacing the army and police with voluntary community militias with strong community oversight, and an emphasis of living with nature than extracting everything possible from it. My views have continued to be refined and evolve but that was the gist of it.

Not to answer for them but DBZer0 is an explicitly anarchist server, in my experience most users fall into the bottom left side of the political compass.

The Soviets were at the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” part of communism the whole time, except instead of the proletariat there was an inner circle commanding a giant bureaucracy filled with people who were not chosen because they were good at their jobs but because they ticked ideological boxes. The collective farming system was also implemented without studying what the communities were already doing by people who didn’t know how to farm and only cared about looking ideologically correct to their superiors. Hence failed crops and ideologically based taxes that literally took more than what was produced. Authoritarian regimes, especially total dictatorships, are usually quite ineffective at governing or providing for the general welfare outside of the few places where a command economy actually is a workable solution.

There is a lot of confusion/obfuscation about terms. A leader is someone who is good at bringing people together and motivating them to accomplish a task through interpersonal skills. Leadership describes those skills. Government officials are not necessarily leaders, they are above us in the involuntary hierarchy we were born into that we are compelled by force to keep living in. Some of those officials may display leadership traits from time to time but leadership does not involve coercion by definition.

Leadership involves mutual respect, sacrifice, and a lot of interpersonal skills like conflict resolution. A leader may be doing different type of work but they should be doing at least as much work as the people who choose to work under/follow them. If someone is just watching people work without contributing they are at best a supervisor, usually an active impediment, not a leader.

All groups and projects do not need assigned leaders of course. Direct democracy or group consensus is usually the best way but some things require big picture organization or split second decision making making a voluntary hierarchy necessary. Constructing a building needs at minimum someone who can help organize the work. A community militia in combat needs a chain of command or they will get slaughtered.

I’m having trouble organizing my thoughts but I hope you find this opinion useful.

Edit: Sorry for the edit but I just wanted to add that Dungeon Masters and Game Masters could be a good example of facilitators and leaders. A group trusts them to act fairly while making a fun time for the group. If they turn into a power hungry asshole who fakes rolls to “win” the group will usually ask them to return to being a player or ask them to find another group if it is bad enough.

Here is a pdf on the Anarchist Library. Unless you want to be really dogmatic about theory you don’t need to study all of it. I like to read through a book of theory as my weekly book every month or two to better understand other ideas and see if there is anything I could add to my personal philosophy.

The question is what do you want government to do? There are non-state/non-corp solutions for every necessary function. Without the need for a profit motive or “progress for progress’s sake” a lot of jobs would not need to even exist or could be automated or done by piloted robots. We don’t need a $1T military if we are not trying to invade the world, active community militias and communally built defenses would make invasion more trouble than it is worth. A good book to read is Murray Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism. It builds off Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid and factors in environmentalism and modern technology.

I was always into punk music but I got heavily addicted to meth and in desperation made the grave mistake of joining the Marines to hit the reset button on my life. Luckily I fixed electronics so I never had to serve in a war zone or fire a shot in anger but the aircraft I supported ended up doing horrific atrocities when they deployed so my hands are far from clean. When I was in Okinawa I came to the realization on how expendable every person is when it comes to the state. We would poison the ground we lived on because in the end it will be the Japanese equivalent of a Superfund Site and the military could not give less of a shit if we all got cancer along the way. After I got out I found the band Behind Enemy Lines and started reading about the SoA, CIA involvement in the Argentinian Dirty War, and fell down a rabbit hole. I found the book Post Scarcity Anarchism by Muray Bookchin randomly at a bookstore and starting reading a lot more theory. Now I fall on the Bookchinish side of anarcho-communism.

I’ve met Adam Savage a few times in comic con meet and greets. He was very nice to me and seemed to really enjoy interacting with fans, that being said he was “on the clock” so I have no idea how he is privately. I always found those celebrity cults of personality weird as hell, at least people seem to be more aware of what a parasocial relationship is now.

Webrings/WoT is back! The crab/train of the internet is still the solution everyone falls back to.

Fucking r/jailbait existed and u/Spez was mod. The pedos have always been in charge of that dumpster fire of a site.

From what I’ve seen Dogbert is really obsessed with the Chinese state to the point of ignoring the fundamental structural issues it has. Is the Chinese state better for the average citizen than the US, probably in a lot of metrics, but as everywhere it is heavily dependent on who you are and where you live.

I’ve done some reflashing of cellular modems and the best place for open source modem firmware I found was some Chinese language hacker communities and they didn’t seem jazzed about the hoops they had to jump through to get to the clear net just to collaborate with the rest of the world. When information is restricted to that extent it is symptomatic of an extremely adversarial relationship between the government and its citizens.

What authoritarians of any stripe don’t realize that by abdicating their autonomy to any state, no matter the color of the flag or what ideology it espouses, ends in one way repression and death. If there is an out group there is a high likely hood that even a true believer will find themselves in it at some point. There is a tendency for authoritarian structures like states and corps to justify their existence through a progress at any cost mentality. This is true for western capitalism as well as Soviet and Chinese implementations of socialism. Any cost may be Lake Karachay’s ecosystem or the cultural extinction and enslavement of native people who live on land rich in rare earth minerals, it also means any citizen who becomes inconvenient to the state.

The one of the largest problems with any state system or really any system that includes involuntary hierarchies is the decoupling of economics and morality. Power not only is a corrupting force but the people who want power over others tend to have the basest morality. Both western capitalism and the Chinese implementation of socialism are both perfectly happy destroying the environment, utilizing slave labor, and implementing surveillance states all in the name of “progress” and the continuation of a world order that primarily benefits an elite few while grinding billions under their boot heels.

It’s pure exploitation by the state of the ignorance and naivety of the average recruit as well as the capitalist system weaponizing its own failings. Most people in my boot camp platoon were under 20 and the vast majority of us came from disadvantaged backgrounds. I didn’t know the term at the time but most people joined for the hope of class mobility along with getting the fuck out of wherever they came from. It also showed the strength of the US propaganda machine, especially in the immediate wake of 9/11, where the media was complicit in a massive coverup of US/ISAF atrocities and a whitewashing of the savage inhuman brutality that is implicit in war.

That does not excuse our ignorance since millions of people our age marched against the wars, especially Iraq. In retrospect we unconsciously chose cowardice and selfishness and cloaked it in a delusion of honorable sacrifice.

Former Marine here. This illustrates the prevailing excuse endemic to the whole imperialist war machine. Every bloody cog has some way of passing blame up the chain. I fixed electronics so I never had to personally pull a trigger but the electronics I fixed helped fix aircraft whose pilots and aircrew were responsible for atrocities I can only imagine. I used to rationalize that this separation erased my culpability but now I understand it actually enhanced it. At the level of maintenance I was at a broken twidgit tip unaccounted for could ground an entire air wing for several days.

If you have made the massive mistake of joining the military please use your power of being a rusty cog. Report every chip on every tool to maintenance control, send every piece of gear missing a screw or emp braiding in for parts/DRMO don’t run to the hardware store for a quick replacement, CDI time is valuable and limited so make sure to never skip a CDI verification step and ask for their opinion on every anomalous reading, if you drop a torque wrench or break a cal seal ground that gear and send it back to the shop, take your time and verify every measurement, don’t gundeck MAFs, and follow all procedures to the letter. Don’t be afraid to involve maintenance control to make sure your shop is fully compliant and not taking shortcuts. If you had just sat on your rack and refused to work you would just get replaced, now you have weaponized the regulations and bureaucracy in a way that covers your ass for the rest of your enlistment while crippling the whole air wing. You can now get out and try to make amends for the catastrophic damage you have done to the world. However if you reenlist fucking die in a fire.

I regret every day that I joined and wish I was aware of the evil the system I was a part of was perpetrating. The few times I talk about my time in the Marines in the last few years is to warn people about how fucked up it is, how they brainwash and strip the individuality from recruits, and most importantly the reality of what the US Military does to innocent people all over the world and the environment.

I use Lynx for most things and Floorp if I need to use a graphics based service. I’m an edge case (ie very weird) so look into Floorp if you don’t like LibreWolf.