Didn’t the MCU movies make a point to say it only matters if the person is worthy by Odin’s standards? I guess it just means Magneto meets Odin’s standards, whatever they are.

Decentralized infrastructure can be physical as well, such as microgrids that enable peer-to-peer solar energy sharing.

And sidenote: software engineers are exploited workers like the rest of us, and it’s a respectable profession. The “tech bros” you have to worry about are the wealthy CEOs masquerading as inventors and engineers like Elon Musk.

You’re using an example right now.

I don’t need to present a perfect alternative for my critique of Western Democracy to be valid. Critique is the means by which we can improve upon what already exists. Some short-term solutions could be to overturn citizens united and end legalized corporate lobbying, introduce voting reforms such as abolishing the electoral college and switching from first past the post to ranked choice or star voting, or expanding direct democratic programs like ballot initiatives. All of these have the effect of minimizing the influence of capital and maximizing the influence of people on the political process.

Longer term solutions involve bottom-up organization of things like mutual aid, unions of various types, decentralized infrastructure, community-run libraries (and not just for books), community gardens, etc. These kinds of dual-power structures always start small but have outsized positive effects on the communities they form in. If they were allowed to grow unhindered they would eventually grow together and easily supercede the top-down power structures that pervade our lives today, which is why they end up being suppressed or co-opted by the same.

A good example of how this occurs is how despite the internet providing a way to collect and distribute all the knowledge on earth for free to everyone on earth (the greatest library in all of human history), powerful corporations - with the help of governments around the world - unnecessarily spend vast amounts of wealth and resources to restrict the free exchange of ideas along socioeconomic lines.

No

I believe there are a lot of government orgs that could be forces for good if they weren’t completely at the mercy of powerful corporations.

It points out the contradiction of being in a supposedly free Western Democracy but still being totally at the mercy of others. It isn’t necessarily that Western Democracy is the cause, but that it fails to address these problems.

My paychecks from the CCP must be getting lost in the mail.

That’s some pretty wild conspiratorial thinking, do you actually have proof or just some anecdotes about people disagreeing with you?

I wish for once I could just have a civil conversation about my views without people immediately jumping down my throat and accusing me of being a CCP or Russian shill, or a dirty liberal, or a filthy communist. This is what I’m talking about when I say I just end up getting shit on from all sides. Every unsavory label in the book gets stuck to me before I even get a chance to clarify my views.

The problem I see here is that you perceive this as being anti-democracy when it really isn’t. Criticism of western democracy isn’t equivalent to a total rejection of democracy in general. Capitalism renders democracies ineffectual, which is what I perceived this meme to be pointing out.

Care to elaborate on that?

As an anarchist this is me on a good day. I more often find myself in the middle getting shit on from both directions.

If you too want to get out of the liberal vs communist showdown and smoke weed on the side come to slrpnk.net where only our memes community has liberals and communists fighting in the comments.

I wholeheartedly agree, I’ve been going down the pipeline myself and this has been my approach. Recently I’ve been working with family and neighbors to get a community garden going.

The programmer to homesteader pipeline is real.

I’ve noticed a trend in some new American media coming out of more openly positive depictions of socialism/communism. The new HBO The Last Of Us series for example has this scene, and the new Fallout series has a more centrist/neoliberal take but at least calls out how the right uses communist as a “dirty word,” though she qualifies the statement by first saying “I’m not a communist.”

What you described is just welfare, not socialism. Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production, meaning there would be no need to re-distribute wealth as it would be fairly distributed from the start.

What you’re thinking of is more along the lines of what Scandinavian countries have, which is just capitalism with social democracy and extensive welfare programs.

Imagine enforcing shitty copyright laws on yourself like some code of honor. We developed the technology to make infinite copies of any media and then spend endless resources fighting it because it undermines our parasitic economic model.

Imagine for a moment that society embraced the full potential of digital technology. We could have a library of all human art and knowledge ever produced available for free, instantly, everywhere. If book libraries didn’t already exist and were proposed today the excuses for rejecting it would be the same. The answer is also the same, change our economic model to support people’s basic needs unconditionally and directly subsidize the production we need/want (like art).

Craigslist was always on the fringes, before Facebook marketplace came in there were a bunch of separate and disconnected online marketplaces. Facebook marketplace had the advantage of already having a massive user base (larger than any of the existing online marketplaces), causing it to become the largest one right out the gate, which then of course makes it the most attractive option for sellers since they will reach more people.