They say that, but there are people out there deliberately breeding humans to keep the population up so human hunting remains justified, and these wild humans do terrible damage to the environment by over-foraging.

So that’s a no? If Trump is people breaking from mainstream 2000s Republicanism, and Harris is mainstream 2000s Republicanism, then Trump and Harris must be different, right?

Anyway, more on the content: You seem to seriously underestimate how bad the USA can get. There are limits to how much you can brutalize people politely, so “brutalizing politely” also means brutalizing less.

The difference between Harris and Trump is whether or not being transgender in public carries the death penalty (project 2025 says trans = pedo and pedo = death).

The difference between Harris and Trump is whether or not people with an ectopic pregnancy will bleed to death.

The difference between Harris and Trump is whether the library has books written by feminists and Marxists or not.

The difference between Harris and Trump is whether the internet lets you access lemmy and wikipedia or whether it only gives you access to a ChatGPT-generated world of lies engineered to drive people towards fascism.

Harris means oppression, Trump means a suicidally fascist doomspiral.

Okay, so do the Republicans of the early 2000s and Democrats of 2024 overlap with Trump?

Could you explain why?

No, you disagree with myself and pretty much all historical usage on the definition of “right-wing”. Whether it’s the original right wing in the parliament of the first French Republic, monarchists in general, 19th century British Tories, imperialists in general, ethno-nationalists, fascists, etc.

Mussolini was fascist, but held left wing beliefs like welfare and relief for the poor and government intervention and ownership.

Welfare for the in-group is not (exclusively) left-wing. The Nazis had welfare for blonde blue-haired ‘aryans’ that produced lots of children. Also, neoliberal and conservative western governments love giving welfare to corporations and rich people. Even if your in-group is “all Romans” (in case of the ancient grain dole that Mussolini was inspired by) or “all Italians”, if the motivation for welfare is to empower the in-group to exploit the out-group, it’s right wing.

Government intervention and ownership are not (exclusively) left-wing. The original right wing - the monarchists in the French parliament - were pro-government intervention and ownership, with the government being embodied by the king. Government spending is consistently higher among Republicans than Democrats. Large ostentatious state projects with kickbacks for the in-group are bread and butter of pretty much every right wing government, from the massive Nazi government-owned holiday park Prora to the Space Launch System. Right-wing governments often forcefully nationalize projects run by the out-group, like Jewish shops in Nazi germany or Black Panther community support networks in the US.

The right wing may cloak themselves in the guise of the free market or of individual liberty or decentralization of power, or in the guise of community and centralization and rights that must be defended at the cost of freedoms. They will present themselves as underdogs and punks and outsiders or as rightful inheritors, powerful leaders, loyalists and patriots. Often they will switch narratives from topic to topic, going from underdogs fighting against the liberal elite who says you can’t say slurs anymore to patriots bemoaning the lack of solidarity of people kneeling in protest at a flag.

The one thing that unites them, the one thing that is consistent, is to exploit and oppress the out-group to benefit the in-group.

Contrast communist authoritarianism and mass murder, which were generally justified as being for the good of all mankind.

You’re right that there is a definition of anarchism that nobody will meet, just like there’s a definition of feminism or capitalism or communism that nobody will meet. Those definitions are therefore useless, but that doesn’t mean anything goes.

There’s a difference between self-styled ‘anarchists’ who name themselves after oppressive systems and consciously include oppressive tools in their proposals for change and self-styled ‘anarchists’ who name themselves after systems that can help empower anarchism and that try to include as little archism in their proposals for change as possible.

The anarchist movement isn’t a static definition, it’s a vector force pulling at present-day society. Ancaps don’t pull along that vector. Non-vegan anarchocommunists do.

Amazon’s Human Resources Department buys all the land around where you stand, kills you of you violate the NAP by trespassing, and then barters for your unending indentured servitude in exchange for food and water.

Anarcho-capitalism is like taking the worst parts of feudalism and chattel slavery, but with fewer human rights.

If you prefer to eat the entire cherry tree, that’s your perogative. Personally I prefer using more precise tools so I only take what I need to and do as little damage as possible, though rest assured the cherries are hand-picked. The noise must be on your end.

A brief history of regulation…

• Euclidean zoning
• Alcohol prohibition
• Subsidies for fossil fuel companies
• 2008 financial crisis bailouts

A brief history of self-regulation…

• Decriminalization of drug possession and consumption
• Nunavut self-governance
• Cash donation charities; UBI
• EU Schengen agreement

Maybe: poor people self-regulating > governments regulating > corporations self-regulating > rich people self-regulating?

but if you give people the opporturnity to do something that is convenient for them and fucks over others, far too many will do it.

That’s called kleptomania, and it’s actually pretty rare.

Normally, people are far too considerate of others and far too scared of even a slight possibility of losing someone’s friendship or being marked as a thief to do things that fuck over others just because it is to their best judgment convenient for them.

Where it goes wrong is that people are placed in an artificial position where they are shielded from any such consequences. Where the best thieves hold the places of highest honor and wealth, where thieves have legal and physical protection if they steal the right way (including during scientific experiments, where the defectors are shielded from others through anonymity and the legal and social authority of the scientist), where people are forced to steal under contract under pain of homelessness. When there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, what more is defecting on the commons?

A mentally healthy person seeing the opportunity to screw someone over for personal gain warns that person that they’ve got a vulnerability so they can address it. They tell people when they drop their wallet. They look away from people typing their passwords. They give food to the hungry if they have enough to spare. They don’t bother to lock their doors because to them locks are less binding than suggestions. Capitalism isn’t the only force that get people to act like kleptomaniacs or xenophobes, but it is the first ideology that has managed to saturate the entire society with those modes of thought.

Clearly your country’s immigration system isn’t labyrinthine and bureaucratic enough. Add enough systematic hatred and anyone can be turned into a burden to society.

Here in the Netherlands, immigrants are not allowed to work, so everything has to be provided to them by the state. The construction industry has been regulated and defunded so that building houses for the lower class is never profitable and is only built through quotas that are too low to meet demand, leading to immigrants competing with locals for extremely rare housing, leading to abuse victims being forced to stay with their abusers or go homeless. They are not taught the local language and children have to go to segregated schools to prevent them from forming attachments. There is an army of bureaucrats, cops, lawyers, judges, and public defenders involved in determining whether they have the right to stay, regulating how they live, enforcing how they live, litigating how they live, appealing litigation, and going after immigrants who are required to leave.

ASML is basically a strategic asset. Breaking them up to have a more level playing field inherently threatens the West’s economic-political position. If ASML abused their position, it wouldn’t be the regulators so much as the CIA that showed up to tell them to reconsider.

Sisko (and Keira?) by time travel shenanigans ends up in the grim dark future of 2024, where capitalism and loss of solidarity has lead to rampant homelessness and unemployment, and disregard for those affected. The homeless people are forbidden from being in public except in heavily guarded ‘sanctuary districts’, i.e. concentration camps.

Bell, a black guy and political agitator living in a sanctuary district, gets killed shortly after Sisko arrives. Sisko remembers from history that him being shot by police let to riots that resulted in a leftist movement that put the world onto the path towards fully automated luxury space communism, but Bell got shot too soon, so it’s up to Sisko to impersonate him.

Character drama happens, Sisko waxes poetically about solidarity and kindness, and eventually Sisko gets shot and then timey wimeys back to the 24th century. He looks in the archives for newspapers of the riots and sees his own face as Bell.

If two people doing little more than breaking a fence and climbing into a machine can seriously damage your nation’s essential infrastructure, that’s more on the government than on those two people. Any actual sabotage and there might not have been an infrastructure left to save.

The electrical grid should be able to handle any one power plant shutting down unexpectedly. Ideally it should be able to handle severed power lines and multiple simultaneous failures, with emergency generators for anything essential. Not even because of sabotage, just because power plants are complex machines that can just unexpectedly fail.

Because by using their definition consistently you ridicule and defang the phrase, same as ‘queer’. Even by your definition, there have been good terrorists like the abolitionist John Brown, so it is in everyone’s best interest to stop acting like terrorism is worse than fascism.

John Brown was a based terrorist. The British Suffragette movement had a bunch of based terrorists. Mother Jones was based, and as much of a terrorist as most of Al Qaeda (i.e. not personally involved in terrorist attacks, but supporting movements that did engage in terrorism).

All you need is a sufficiently abhorrent status quo and terrorists who are otherwise decent human beings.

Maybe they’re going for something similar to RDJ’s Sherlock Holmes. A veneer of propriety over a ruthless and savage intelligence.

Foelly

That’s the neat thing about workers’ rights. Workers have more interest in making good products than investors, especially in artistic fields. Investors will gladly sabotage a product’s quality for the sake of personal gain and move on to the next company with goodwill to exploit, but for workers a job well done is inherently rewarding.

Unionization directly leads to better games with more artistic merit.