RatifyGuy1776

RatifyGuy1776 wrote

A post-capitalist world will happen one of two ways: their descendants eventually crawl out of their nuke shelters and do whatever the fuck they want until the last dregs of humanity does or doesn't make it, or we drag them kicking and screaming to the negotiation table and somehow manage to convince them to stop drinking the world's blood in exchange for not being a head on a pike. In either case, the ultimate answer to "what do we do with them" is "not much, really." Attempting to give that question any other answer just motivates them to COINTELPRO harder. It is impossible to win the information war against the people who run all media. Nothing less than "we'll let you get away with it if you stop" is ever going to get past three dudes in a discord getting maneuvered into the news cycle by the five feds assigned to watch them.

2

RatifyGuy1776 wrote

The beginning is a little odd to me, as seeing bugs/animals is more like what I've heard people get from diphenhydramine. That's the other common OTC cough syrup ingredient, (aside from tylenol, obvs) so it's possible you mixed them up. It's also possible that's just how you are on DXM, though. It's a dissociative which can pretty much be a deliriant at high dose, and shadowy critters are common for that class.

Generally speaking, as long as you're not taking so much you get serotonin storm (you have to go WAY past even a recreational dose for that unless you're on something else serotonergic) or doing it so often that it messes with your liver function, DXM is scary way before it's dangerous. It can be, however, quite scary. Even at lower recreational doses, what's referred to as first and second plateau experiences, DXM really likes to convince you you're dying, even though absolutely nothing permanent is happening unless you try to use stairs or something stupid like that. Once you get past that paranoia, it can be really fun, but it might take practice. You might wind up in a weird spot where you think you're dying/dead but you don't actually feel scared of it. It helps to have somebody to supervise you so they can take your phone away when you try to call 911 just in case for the third time in 20 minutes. I promise you won't actually die of it. The LD50 of DXM is stupid high, you're virtually guaranteed to puke or pass out first.

If you have the wrong set and setting in the third plateau, you can wind up in really irritating and confusing time loops in simplified versions of your real space that you can't seem to leave. (For a good experience, I find the best method is to put on some calming music and a Mandelbrot zoom before you forget how to use your computer, and to focus on that for as long as you can tolerate sitting upright.) Fourth plateau experiences are kind of harrowing even when you've been through it a few times. You might "find divine secrets," or you might just be scared and locked in a body that can't hear or see for a couple hours, or you might simply blackout and waste your time completely. As somebody who has had legit positively transformative experiences with the fourth plateau, I can't recommend it at all because you barely have any control over how it hits you no matter how many times you do it. I've never had access to any of the "real" psychedelics, but I am given to understand you can get to the right place much more reliably with any of those, and they won't leave you stuck wherever they put you for three eternity-hours.

Nobody at the ER is gonna yell at you for using drugs, especially not relatively harmless OTC ones, unless they think you were trying to commit suicide, which is pretty unlikely with DXM. That's your primary care physician's job; you can talk to them until you're blue in the face about how Olney's lesions aren't real and the paper about them was retracted years ago, and they'll still frown and tell you to get help with your lack of a problem.

If you ever decide to try it again, google something like "dxm plateau mg/kg." If I remember correctly, one of the first sources you'll find from those terms is a dipshit fed PSA about how DXM abuse is such a horrible problem, but they actually have the right numbers, which you'll be able to corroborate pretty closely from other sources. Plug in your mass in kg, and try to shoot for the middle of the third plateau. You can play around with your dose from there as you get more practice. Or you can just not do it at all, which I recommend, even though I enjoyed it quite a bit for several years. It can be fun, it can give you transformative insight, and it can also be a completely unnecessary and fake traumatic memory. If you get the dose wrong or you're not in the right place, the only thing you'll learn is that you should find another hobby unless you're willing to be quite disciplined about it.

3

RatifyGuy1776 wrote (edited )

Everyone wants a relationship like that, sure. That doesn't sound much like transforming them into an anarchist, though. That's just... making them happy. If you wanted to frame it in terms of anarchy, you're letting them pretend they live in it for a little while. This is good, and making somebody feel this way is certainly an expression of love. It's really unlikely to change anyone's mind about politics or the economy. That involves more thinking than feeling.

My whole experience of being an anarchist is knowing that any feeling of comfort and stability in the current year is an illusion, and therefore being impotently angry about the massive difference between "does" and "should." Even if I didn't have problems relating to and communicating with people, (and boy howdy do I) doing more than this would probably still feel sisyphean. Any idea that isn't "everything is magically fixed, effective immediately" draws suspicion because its compromises are seen as compromising. Why wouldn't they, when that's what we've seen happen to every movement ever?

That's what I mean when I say it's a really cruel thing to inflict on somebody you love.

Being right sucks. It sucks so bad, and feels so hopeless, that I often wish I could just be oblivious again.

2

RatifyGuy1776 wrote

Reply to do you work? by lentils

nah, I'm disabled

not sure if that means I'm diverting money from the government's criminal pursuits or if I'm just a revolutionary with a pension

1

RatifyGuy1776 wrote (edited )

my experience with talking to other anarchists indicates that this is an incredibly cruel thing to do to somebody you love

Edit: I feel a need to elaborate.

When talking with other leftists in general and with professed anarchists in particular, I've found that suggesting any actual plan of organized action is ignored at best. Left/anarchist discourse online has basically devolved into a neo-Catholicism where your devotion to fixing climate change is measured by mortification of the wallet. Have you ever purchased anything? That's original sin and you're reactionary scum. This isn't even hypocrisy; everyone has bought something, everyone has original sin, including your accuser. Anarchists mostly hate themselves, so they can't help but hate each other.

real cool how leftists reconstructed neocon bullshit about "rugged individualism"

4

RatifyGuy1776 wrote

"pandemic response" like mandatory digital ID that will be used to implement social credit in all the "democratic" countries as soon as they implement CBDCs

obvs it's already a thing but I predict the opposition to it will be completely flaccid and bankworld will become eternal

1

RatifyGuy1776 wrote

If we require that people not benefit from the present way of things in order to take it seriously when they say they want things to change, we have to believe that nobody in this whole world would take a loss because it's the right thing to do. We are saying that all reasoning is motivated, that convincing people of anything is meaningless, because they will only accept what their station validates.

I prefer to think things will get better someday. They'll probably get worse first, but I believe people can learn.

2

RatifyGuy1776 wrote

The technology does exist. It's not being built essentially because it doesn't justify the state's present scale.

The implications of a nuclear meltdown in a thorium reactor are "the plant stops reacting." These designs fundamentally cannot run away from the operator, because thorium won't do the thing on its own. When you remove it from the tiny little piece of plutonium that activates it, it stops.

To the best of my knowledge, this isn't just not science fiction, the designs are stupidly simple. These things haven't been built solely because electrical power generation is currently synonymous with political power generation. It's a suppressed technology, not a fictional one.

1

RatifyGuy1776 wrote (edited )

My understanding is that nuke plants don't have to be ecocide. The ones we have are bad on purpose because the empire builds them, and the empire derives its power from the petrodollar. Alternatives to burning stuff always have to be worse as a matter of "defense" policy.

They don't even need to come with massive hierarchy; in addition to being much cleaner (virtually no waste compared to existing power plants) and safer (overheating makes the fuel drop completely out of the reaction chamber) than anything we're doing right now, thorium reactors can be much, much smaller. We might one day have a little one in every basement, or a bigger one that powers a block. At that point, rather than being huge public works, the main "hierarchical load" of the technology is just that from mining the materials. I know you don't really want that, either, but good luck on getting humans to stop digging holes, tbh.

1

RatifyGuy1776 OP wrote

Reply to comment by tuesday in Anarchopolitanism by RatifyGuy1776

The freedom to leave is a fantasy so long as capitalism exists.

It's like that now because there's nowhere to flee to. Imperialism hasn't missed a spot. Your best case is hiding out for a few years at a time, being a tiny little blight on some land they haven't got around to exploiting yet. If we somehow achieve a real federation of municipalities, you'll be able to leave the empire by walking, and have a reasonable expectation that you'll find a community doing something better. My model for this concept aims to make it even easier than that, with the Gatehouse system.

They say that they'd be happy to "allow" a left-anarchist commune exist but that's not true so long as that commune has usable space that a capitalist wants.

Getting as far as these two antagonistic polities existing presupposes that we've decentralized enough that the expansionist will not have the sort of control over media narratives that makes it easy to get away with now. If that's not an attainable goal, nothing will free us. A great deal of my plans are based on rolling the dice on extreme long shots like this, because it seems like they're the only thing that could work. Fortunately, in the past few years, we've seen that the hegemony's narrative control is already getting tenuous, even without us pitching the biggest tent possible to make conscious use of the tools we have. If there's an opportunity, it's now.

Then don't. It's that simple.

My life is already almost entirely composed of getting high and drunk to ease the impotent anger I have about humanity collectively committing suicide. I'm trying to figure out something else I can do about this bullshit. The more popular methods that feel more like justice have been ineffective for longer than I've been alive. The breaking point for me came when I realized that what makes the billionaires behave the way they do is fear. They rightly believe we are a mortal threat to them. If you're fighting the billionaires instead of talking to them, your enemy is primal terror. You're not winning that one.

Any ideology that advocates against violence done in defense of self and community is one that's asking to be dominated immediately.

I agree.

There's an implication built into essentially my entire project: "this probably won't work, but..." The first-order analysis of the state of the world is that the oligarchs have absolutely no reason to bargain with us. Their first instinct will be to refuse to do so, as it almost always has been. They have everything, and they don't even need most of us to maintain it. What the fuck can we bargain with?

This is what I advocate simply because it's the only thing that could work. I don't really think it will, at least not immediately. The reason it could work is that the specific way I've imagined doing it ultimately carries a very serious threat behind it.

The #Ratify core document is an explicitly non-violent call for a constitutional convention. Getting enough people shouting about something in the founding documents that the establishment supposedly derives its power from makes it impossible for them to ignore or suppress it without showing their authority to be completely illegitimate.

Americans have... problems... but the one thing that's really great about them is that there are thousands of them who have just been waiting their whole lives for the government to tip their hand like that. So far, the rifles never come off the wall in enough numbers to do jack shit because everyone only engages in electoralism, so it's trivial to turn everything into tribal bullshit and convince most of the people that the line hasn't yet been crossed. Right now, the US Constitution is just an artifact of the imperial cult, but that's exactly why it's available to us as a potent weapon.

You have to start by offering a peaceful solution. When they slap that offer out of your hands, more people will get angry. Eventually, the capitalists will be the ones who are forced to negotiate; their other option will be years of counter-insurgency against their own tax base. Our military is already bad at that when half of it isn't defecting. The people can't lose if they are actually roused to action, and that will happen by putting the establishment in a position where nobody can deny they broke the rules.

3

RatifyGuy1776 OP wrote

Reply to comment by tuesday in Anarchopolitanism by RatifyGuy1776

The saving grace of ancaps, as opposed to the people who know they're fascists, is that the idea of a "freedom to leave" is extremely easy to get them to agree to. They might write contracts that are effectively slavery, but I don't think they'd fuck with Dred Scott. As long as the punishment for "contract violation" is exile rather than death or incarceration, their bullshit little pocket empire has a clearly marked escape hatch. That's more freedom than we have now.

Fundamentally, this incredibly distasteful position is the one we're stuck with if we want anything to change. I don't like the idea of giving billionaires headpats for abdicating. I just reckon that pacifism is prerequisite for anarchy, if not in general, then definitely at least in the case of a world order defined by a transnational military industrial complex. That means you have to talk to the evil people. They have spent the past century demonstrating that they've consolidated enough power to laugh at any other approach we could try.

3

RatifyGuy1776 OP wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by tuesday in Anarchopolitanism by RatifyGuy1776

There's lots to hate ancaps for. What I've always found most irritating about them is that, as far as I can tell, they don't even know that they already live in the world they're asking for. They're too upset that they were born into an irretrievably losing market position to realize that. The "governments" of the world's imperial powers function almost solely as contract organizations that mediate between financial and military "service" providers. If it's not ancap, it's what ancap becomes inside of a decade. Preferring the status quo to working with ancaps is... ancap. I feel like that should be more obvious than it is, since almost all of the "actual" ancaps, in the event of hegemonic collapse, would all generally refuse to work with each other, because bunkers and Ferengi bullshit. No society has lower trust than the one that just exploded.

The people who run the world right now are ancap. The rules are for sale, and they won every game before this one, so they're the only ones who can afford them. You can convince them to stop doing that or you can remain in hell. You're never going to be able to force them to stop doing it. If you get in a position to even try, what you were doing to get there wasn't anarchy, and your movement is going to wind up like every other revolution to date: bought out by the same type of power-hungry asshole.

Empire, as hateful and disgusting as it is, is a natural human behavior. It must be, or we wouldn't have done it. Everything grew out of nature, and has nothing to use but nature when trying to build something new. Trying to forcibly alter natural human behavior is... Pretty much their whole game. We know how badly it works and how much suffering it causes. Our offer cannot be "we're gonna do it to you now."

4

RatifyGuy1776 OP wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by veuzi in Anarchopolitanism by RatifyGuy1776

Joke philosophy for a clown world.

The fact of the matter is that, despite the fact I personally believe it's mostly due to certain delusions being scratched into people's brains by the trauma of modernity, most people desperately want to build Big Fuckin' Things. For certain specific applications, mainly spaceflight, even I do. Maybe that's another bad idea, and I really should accept that reality is done with us when the sun is, but if I'm not ready to give that up from where we are, the teeming billions are never going to give up on their even more short-sighted desires and fears.

We as anarchists don't have the right to take their society away from them. I simply want to convince them we have the right to ours, or our lack of desire for one, which is a much easier sell. They have to see an alternative documented in the wild, or they'll never accept it. That's how empire persists to begin with; it stifles the imagination of the oppressed. If they can't see it anywhere, they don't think it exists.

I believe that anarchy ultimately will be created, if it can be at all, by existing and flourishing within a space that it wins from empire through negotiation. No, it isn't "real" anarchy. It's a toy, a pilot program, practically an insult from the perspective of a true believer. It also happens to be a necessary step on the road, because we live in a world with enough concentrated power that we're not going to do anything but keep dying of centralization if we can't sell the idea to those who hold it. Here and now looks like the best time to try. The system is becoming so unstable that even the demons that run it seem unsure what to do. If we offer them a way to participate in the world to come other than as a head on a pike, they might actually allow good things to happen.

I have more details on how I'd specifically implement that in the #CivNet manifesto, which I've also posted on this blog. The pathway to doing that in the United States, which is important to have since we're the source of the evil, is outlined in #Ratify, the meta-movement it's meant to be a part of.

4

RatifyGuy1776 wrote

Okay, I can see how this can be different. Most of our consumption is currently devoted to war, so it's fair to say we can bring it down significantly without sacrificing much. The word without this context really carries dire implications, so it confused me.

1

RatifyGuy1776 wrote

I generally feel like any "solution" that starts with "have less people and less technology" is how the establishment has tricked us into accepting what they're going to do to us anyway. If we can't do better than "enlightened self-genocide," the universe is better off without us, so there's no reason not to make the bet that we can find technological solutions to technological problems.

The main thing is to make sure we don't take down the whole biosphere with us. As bad as climate change is, that's going to mess up life as we know it. Nuclear war, which seems inevitable if we don't stop centralizing, is significantly more final. Fortunately, our most exciting technologies are all about decentralizing. There's just this little quibble that they're mostly being used to buy stock in the heroin trade and trick poor people into doing the same. Hopefully we figure that out soon.

1

RatifyGuy1776 wrote (edited )

I don't think there are any small-time capitalists. There are many entrepreneurs who believe in capitalism, and may believe themselves to be capitalists on that basis. However, knowing... basically anything about how money and power actually flows tells you that those people are dupes. The capitalists are the guys at the top who dupe them.

My understanding is that the essence of capitalism, what makes it different from other terms Americans commonly conflate it with like "free market," "fair market," "entrepreneurship," or even (ugh) "property rights," is the idea of a guy with a big pile of money, i.e., capital, financing the creation of a business that they have nothing to do with the operation of, with the common but unnecessary exception of continuing to tell everyone what to do. In other words, to be an actual capitalist, your job is getting paid because you "created the opportunity" to work for you. The small-time guys, who more often than not get started with loans, are victims of this scamming jerk, even if they've been so thoroughly hoodwinked that they'll defend him to the death.

1

RatifyGuy1776 wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by BulletDog15 in What is anarchy? by BulletDog15

The wars are not any less brutal. They are arguably more brutal. The difference is that the brutality happens far from American eyes, so the voice that wants it to stop can be made quiet.

More to the point, I don't actually care how brutal they are. It's war. It's like that. People are like that. They're also better. The cycle of boom and bust, of war and peace, is natural and likely immutable. What I care about is that war is now waged by belligerents who each have the power to unilaterally scour the biosphere, and we only continue to live for as long as all of them remain devoted to this inherently unstable and thoroughly disgusting practice of extracting the wealth from their own people by waging no-win proxy wars.

One day, a "world leader" will get struck by the good idea fairy, and life on earth will be reduced, at best, to something like tardigrades for at least several millennia. I'd rather have the smaller conflicts. Nations have to go.

1

RatifyGuy1776 wrote (edited )

I'm not saying that IQ is a hard fact; we aren't that good at measuring anything. Further, it should be obvious to anyone that whenever the establishment sorts people on any axis, they do terrible and stupid things with that data. People should only be sorting themselves. What I'm saying is that it's at least an honest attempt to measure something that does exist. People have different limitations.

To reject the concepts of intelligence or even that genetics can have an effect on it seems to me to be a mistake; these ideas lead to eugenics only because that's what eugenicists already wanted to do, and oversimplifying this topic in a way that satisfies the privileged is unfortunately pretty easy. I'm not an expert on either topic, or indeed on any topic, but I know enough about genetics to know that eugenics is stupid: there are few genes that directly encode traits without side effects, especially when it comes to the brain. Biodiversity is always the winning strategy.

Meanwhile, a proper understanding of intelligence must include that regardless of whatever a person's genetic limitations might be, cognitive development and function are profoundly affected by environmental factors. We know that financial stress impairs it, for example, and compulsory schooling under the Prussian model is designed to make the kids sorted into the lower bin stupider. With automation on the rise, the public school systems are basically being re-tuned to make all students dumber by the time they get out, so that the common people can be maximally exploited by the prison-industrial complex. This wouldn't work if intelligence weren't real, however good or bad we are at measuring it.

On a deeper philosophical level, it should also be obvious to anyone that a lack of raw processing power does not hide the most important things about life from anyone. We all experience consciousness and connection, and develop insight from that experience that doesn't have anything to do with how good you are at rotating shapes in your head. That kind of knowledge is what makes life worth protecting, and you don't need to have wetware nearly as fancy as any human's to have that.

1