I’m not trying for a ‘gotcha’. I really would like for horizontal power structures to work. I’m fascinated by systems in which an orderly outcome can be achieved without any centralized control by the individual agents each following a simple set of rules, e.g. sidewalks and roads (mostly) function well on a mass scale with entirely autonomous agents. I try to envision sets of rules like that at work, or in the club I’m in. These kinds of systems work because the incentives line up: The community is better off when everybody follows the rules, and the individual is better off by following the rules.

Indeed, if half of a community cheers on violence, it’s not a failure of anarchism. However, it’s a real scenario, and if anarchism is to work in the real world, it has to handle such situations. And such a scenario is not at all hypothetical, it’s just a simplification of the political situation that we find ourselves in the United States in right now. The half of the population that deplores violence, or fascism, is trying to organize, resist, and dismantle the power structures enabling it, but there’s only so much we’re willing to do. The incentive structure is not aligned. To make the community better off, individuals would have to make themselves much, much worse off. Unless, of course, everybody participated, like a massive game of Prisoner’s Dilemma.

So what is the answer from anarchism? How do we stop the people who don’t think like us, and want to hurt us, or at least wouldn’t mind?

The question that comes to my mind is, “Who’s ‘we’, Kimosabe?” (It’s the punchline of a joke.)

In the drone example, half of the community acknowledges that the operators are doing terrible shit. The other half of the community things it’s fantastic. What then? The half that deplores the killing isn’t likely to do much about it, because the killing is happening to somebody else on the other side of the world. If they try to stop it violently, the killing will start happening to them.

The Girl Who Could Talk to Birds

Thanks. That is what I’d expect, and highlights the disconnect I saw in this comment chain: I think what some other folks were trying (less-than-artfully) to say is that there’s a difference between what one might expect case-insensitive means as a computer programmer, and what one might expect case-insensitive to mean in human language. All three of those should be the same filename in fr_FR locale, since some French speakers consider diacritical marks to be optional in upper case. While that might be an edge case, it does exist. English is even worse, with a number of diacritical marks that are completely optional, but may be used to aid legibility, e.g. café, naïve, coöperation. (Whether that quirk is obvious or not, or whether it outweighs any utility of case-insensitivity is not something that I have a strong opinion on, though.)

I don’t have Windows here to test, so I keep wondering, are all of these forms the same?

• facture-février.pdf
• FACTURE-FÉVRIER.PDF
• FACTURE-FEVRIER.PDF

Impressive still! I had assumed that it was the output of a translation program.

Oh, man, as the network admin for several hundred machines, “Windows” and “works” in the same sentence is hilarious.

However, I must point out, Celsius is not metric. It’s been adopted as the step-child of SI, but it’s not metric. You can’t meaningfully multiply and divide degrees Celsius; 100°C is not ten times hotter than 10°C Celsius. Sure. you can use the metric prefixes, just like i could measure things in kiloinches, that doesn’t make it metric. It’s just as arbitrary as Fahrenheit, and people have to make arguments regarding water and life to try to pretend otherwise. True, it’s officially defined in terms of Kelvin, but then, so is Fahrenheit.

I want the bad-grammar version of Old English.

I used to deliver the newspaper to Chris Farley’s parents. I saw him only once when he drove by on his way to their house, but he smiled and waved at me. Another time, I was out early delivering the Sunday paper, and a man jogging by waved to me. It took a bit longer, but I later recognized him as Tommy Thompson, the governor of Wisconsin, and later Health & Human Services secretary for Pres. Bush.

Oddly, his predecessor at HHS was Donna Shalala, who’d been here as chancellor of the university, so I may have seen her around, too. The most famous person that I’ve seen IRL was Cindy Crawford, but I didn’t interact. She walked by in a hallway at the student union, like a totally normal person.

Only one of the interviewees said location. That would be key for me. If the theater was close by and integrated integrated into daily life, I’d probably go a lot more often. Instead, all of the theaters are way out on the edge of town, often in some grotty commercial area where the land is cheap enough for the obligatory huge parking lot. It’s a commitment to get there, as in, you intend to go to a movie and only to a movie, because there’s nothing else to do nearby. No dinner and a movie, no random matinee as a break from the office grind, no movie followed by hanging out with friends at the bar across the street. I might as well watch at home.

I would much rather see ex-Redditors leave the word “you” at the door, as in, telling other Lemmings who they are, what they believe, or what they’re doing. Like, “you clearly think…”, “you don’t know…”, or “you believe…”

Even if those things may be true, that kind of phrasing leads to arguments and vitriol about 100% of the time, even if the initial difference of opinion was a misunderstanding. If somebody is really a nasty troll, or bot, or shill, or tankie, or whatever, block and move on.

There is a word in philosophy of mind—the qualia of redness.

No, I’m done giving him the benefit of the doubt. The President of the United States should be able to clearly articulate a thought.

Remember that their fascism is based in feelings of superiority in addition to fear.

Hi, it’s me, I’m the “well akshuslly” guy today. Fascism (and the whole right-wing mindset) is based on fear, primarily fear that they, personally and individually, are interior. That’s why they need the constant and over-the-top demonstrations of dominance and claims of superiority—to drown out those fears.

Obama did collaborate with corporations, the banks, and local police forces in forming a national task force to crush OWS, often in violation of the 1st and 4th Amendments, but OWS was more a howl of economic rage, and I don’t recall any efforts to take over the Democratic Party.

It turns out that, despite allegations to the contrary, the United States is actually small. Like, really, really tiny. We just don’t have the room to put supermarkets in places near where people live.

Disable the ad block, wait for all of the ads to load so the text stops jumping around like a crack-addled wallaby, accept the cookie notice, try to hit the tiny X to close the inevitable video overlay with shaking fingers, try to hit the tiny X to close the ad overlay, too, decline signing up for email alerts, decide whether to accept notifications, and then read the article one sentence at a time while scrolling past ads.

Maybe your local news sites aren’t as insane as mine?

They already do.

Samesies. I remember back in college powering through a writing assignment with a 2L bottle of Coke and a 1lb. bag of M&Ms. Totally not healthy, but I learned later that it has to do with the relationship between insulin and neurotransmitters, like dopamine.

I think I need to read up on that link more.