tranarchy

tranarchy wrote

I can agree to disagree with people who aren't anarchists yet still share many of my goals or moral values. I can't agree to disagree with those who I consider to be fundamentally immoral in values or behavior. If someone says "yeah, I think we need to take action against racism and fascism and authoritarianism and strive towards a more free and just world, but I don't think anarchism is practical" I can understand that view. If someone says "racism is necessary and there must always be a race on top", then I will never be able to agree to disagree with that. Civil debate seems to me to be a pretext for pretending that both sides of the debate are of equal value and merit equal consideration, and that's simply not always the case. There are things that cannot be civilly debated. I'm not going to have a civil discussion as to whether my rights or the rights of others should be abridged.

If we can agree that things like racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, transphobia, and other axes of oppression exist and something should be done about them, then we can have a civil discussion about how we should approach doing something about them. If not, then we can't.

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tranarchy wrote

apologizing for the actions of islam

Islam cannot act, it is a concept, not a person.

It seems like a lot of people on the left more closer to the center than here have this obsession with "caring about lgbt rights" only when it is convenient for them.

If you care about LGBT rights, you should care about the freedom of LGBT Muslims to practice their religion. Intersectionality and all that. Do you think gay Muslims are defending or protecting homophobic Muslims by practicing their religion? Do you think you know their religion better than they do?

Opposition to homophobia and transphobia is simply that, opposition to homophobia and transphobia. Since there exist gay and trans Muslims, then that means that Islam cannot be inherently homophobic and transphobic, otherwise LGBT Muslims would not exist.

Certainly there exist issues regarding LGBT rights within Muslim communities, both in the West and elsewhere, but the same goes for literally every community outside of the ethereal LGBT community itself. Homophobia and transphobia are issues that transcend religion. The Soviet Union severely restricted religious activities, and they also criminalized homosexuality. Restricting religious rights does nothing to help LGBT people.

The left also calims to be against "islamaphobia" despite the fact that islam is just like any other relgion, and is opressive at its core, should be feared as much as any other religion, and often times used by a lot of bad people to justify a lot of bad things.

That's because Islamophobia is fundamentally, inseparably based around xenophobia, racism, nationalism, white supremacy, and Christian supremacy. Religion is not oppressive at its core, religious institutions forming the basis of communities and nations are, and in the West there aren't Islamic institutions with any real power. Muslims in the West are as a class oppressed, not oppressive. If you want to rail against an oppressive Islamic power structure, go to a place where there exists a Muslim majority that effects government decision-making and upholds religious authority and supremacy. In the West, the oppressive religious authority you're looking for is Christianity.

Now obliviously this is not to say that all Muslims are bad imo (they are not), but more of the fact that as a religion Islam is not a postive thing even if the majority of people who follow it may be fine.

No religion has any inherent moral value. It is only when people practice it that its ethics can be examined. The gay and trans Muslims are just as much Muslims as the homophobes and transphobes. They are practicing Islam. They obviously consider it to be a positive force in their lives despite the disagreement of other Muslims. Islam has to be examined not only from the perspective of those who use it as an excuse to do harm, but also from the perspective of those who use it as an inspiration to do good, just like every religion should be.

The domination of religious practice by hierarchical, authoritarian institutions making decrees and laws does not preclude the existence of libertarian religious practices, any more than the existence of an oppressive state precludes the existence of democratic and libertarian social organizations. Corporations exist, but that doesn't mean worker co-ops can't.

Is their some reason islam is special that I am missing?

The practitioners of Islam, in the West, are victims of racist, fascist, and nationalist violence, and should be defended from that violence as should any other person, and that includes recognizing that Islam is not a special case, not different from any other religion. Islam is singled out by racists and fascists and nationalists as something fundamentally different from Christianity because racists and fascists and nationalists want to further Christian supremacy (and yes, there exist atheists among those bigots furthering Christian supremacy, you don't have to be a Christian to be a bigot).

If you are anti-religious, that's fine, but that doesn't mean you can throw Muslims under the bus when we're up against a blatant fascist threat. Defending against this threat means supporting those who are victimized by it, which means supporting the lives and liberty of Muslims against those trying to take it from them. If you want to protect the rights and the lives of the downtrodden, and you live in a country where Muslims are a victimized minority, that means protecting Muslims and their right to practice whatever religion they desire as long as they're not harming other people. Attack the real issues: patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, xenophobia, capitalism, etc. Support the voices of Muslims who speak out against these issues. Realize the fact that there do exist Muslims who are not dangerous despite practicing a religion, and that they are under attack by actually dangerous people.

If someone is practicing a religion in a way that does not harm anyone, why should they be stopped? We don't need to burn books and erase cultures to dismantle oppressive social structures.

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tranarchy wrote

Could we convince some amount of ancaps into aiding with or at the very least not hindering leftist activities? Probably.

Should there be some kind of synthesis or "big tent" organization that includes both self-professed right-libertarians and left-libertarians? No. They are ideologically contradictory.

If right-libertarians want to aid anarchists, socialists, and communists, no strings attached, they are certainly welcome to, although I don't see why most of them would. If they want to attach strings, then how is it aid?

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tranarchy wrote

support. the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. if there were a way to make shared anon accounts with restrictions, that would be nice, but if this is not the case I don't see any reason for there to be shared accounts on a free site where anyone can make an account already

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tranarchy wrote (edited )

paper sometimes, which i get from bookstores, libraries, thrift shops, wherever. digital i usually google "[name of book] pdf" and click through until i find it, and i read that with an app called ReadEra for Android that i found by googling "ereader". if you could tell, i'm not too much of a connoisseur :P

as people have mentioned, libgen, archive.org, tpb, and various leftist sites (theanarchistlibrary.org, marxists.org, libcom.org) are good resources as well

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tranarchy wrote

most moisturizing soaps/conditioners can serve the purpose well enough, and there are many shaving products marketed towards women as well (usually with a bit of unnecessary markup). estrogen-influenced hair tends to be soft, so since shaving creams and gels are partially meant to soften hair, they're less necessary for estrogen-dominant individuals, but these products are also meant to moisturize skin, so if you don't use it and you don't use moisturizer at all you can have irritation.

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tranarchy wrote

too bad google still has trouble translating languages with a large internet presence

Google is calling on speakers of the newly added languages to contribute their own interpretations

translation: "Google is hoping that people will volunteer and perform unpaid labor to help further secure Google's monopoly on machine translation by contributing data points to a closed-source for-profit database"

(sorry for the cynicism, I just hate Google)

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tranarchy wrote

Reply to by !deleted1759

there's tons of great artistic indie games out there, a good site for finding them is itch.io, i just browse until something catches my eye, but you can search for specific tags if you prefer

the first game that came to mind when i read "weird artistic game" was Joy Exhibition

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tranarchy wrote

it's a counter-argument against the age-old propaganda spiel that life under "communism" was hell and that everyone welcomed capitalism with open arms. it's good to point out that economic liberalization actually made conditions worse for most people. beyond that, i don't think it does a good job arguing in favor of these regimes. improving conditions doesn't make a regime good or communistic. it's the bare minimum you have to do to keep people from rioting in the streets. if improved living conditions for some percentage of the people is the criteria by which we determine whether a government was "good", then we'd be calling the Nazis good.

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tranarchy wrote

How many people, and is want to the key word here? We've already been at the point of some people wanting to overthrow the government since government was created. Governments are very resilient. My opinion is it doesn't matter how bad things get, that's no replacement for real organization. There's no point of "badness" at which a superb socialist structure is spontaneously spawned into existence. We shouldn't wait until it gets worse, we should start now and convince people it's already bad enough.

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