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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Personally, I’ve yet to see a single American successfully use guns to protect any other constitutional right from government infringement.

    The Battle of Athens is probably the most uniquely clear-cut example of what you’re asking for, unless we count the American Revolutionary War itself.

    Other successful examples mostly involve activists using non-violent protest to push for change, while using firearms to protect themselves from violent reactionaries that would otherwise murder them. Notably, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. For a modern example, there’s various “John Brown Gun Clubs” and other community defense organizations providing security at LGBTQ events against fascist groups that seek to terrorize event-goers.

    It’s also worth noting that resistance is often worthwhile even if it doesn’t result in unqualified victory. For example, the Black Panthers’ armed cop-watching activities saved a lot of Black folks from brutal beatings at the hands of the police, even if the organization was eventually crushed by the federal government.

    I have seen lots of examples like Waco and Ruby Ridge, where the government should have tried harder to deescalate, but in the end, everyone died. The closest example I can think of where the government did backoff was the Bundy standoff and all those guys were “defending” was their ability to let their cattle graze illegally on federal land because they didn’t want to pay for access like everyone else.

    It sounds like you might be in a bit of a filter-bubble. I don’t mean any offense by this, it’s a normal thing that tends to happen to people. If the news sources you read and the people you talk to don’t mention these things because it doesn’t mesh with their worldview, how would you hear about them?








  • Well, I’ve never heard of a well-informed anarchist either, so there you go.

    They just don’t understand any of the basics of organisation.

    It sounds like you haven’t had much interaction with anarchists beyond maybe high-school, and haven’t read anything that we’ve written.

    Also, police organizations complain that anarchist activist groups are too hard to infiltrate because there’s too much reading to do:

    Infiltration is made more difficult by the communal nature of the lifestyle (under constant observation and scrutiny) and the extensive knowledge held by many anarchists, which require a considerable amount of study and time to acquire.

    Literally “I can’t blend in with these fucking nerds because they read too much”.

    They just base their whole ideology on the delusion that everybody’s just gonna play nice, nobody will want to do anything for their advantage and, cucially, that crime just doesn’t exist.

    Our philosophy is centered around dealing with the organized crime of the state and the exploitation of the capitalists. If you generally can’t trust people to play nice, putting a few of them in positions of power tends to make the problem worse, not better.

    I wanna see how any anarchist society deals with a murder.

    Which aspect of it? Basic security is pretty simple, and there’s a number of ways to provision it. Forensics would be handled by contracting professional specialists. Trials would be handled by a polycentric legal system (as opposed to the monocentric one that we currently have. Punishment would generally be in the form of either restitution paid by the perpetrator to the victim (or next of kin), or exile.

    But that’s already much too high for anarchists, who barely understand basic human incentives.

    C’mon now, this is just confidentlyincorrect material.





  • The people who generally want to destroy a system and rebuild anew are usually clueless or have an ulterior motive.

    It’s worth noting that “destroy and rebuild anew” is a point of contention among anarchists. Some of us favor a revolutionary approach, but some (myself included) favor an “evolutionary” approach instead. Same end goal, just achieved through steady incremental change, rather than a big upheaval.

    In practice though, success likely wouldn’t fall cleanly into either category. There’d be incremental change punctuated by occasional (smaller) upheavals. But I guess all social change happens like that, really.


  • The difference is than in an ideal anarchist polity, the minority can secede, even down to the individual. “Majority rule” only happens to the extent that the minority doesn’t find secession to be a worthwhile option. Whereas under democracy, the land and resources of the minority, and even the people themselves are considered to rightfully belong to the state. Any serious attempt at secession is met with violence.

    Actually-existing “anarchistic” societies may not completely live up to this ideal, but it is what we strive for. Anarchists consider freedom of association and freedom of disassociation to be paramount.





  • Before I get into curmudgeon mode, I want to plug my two favorite roguelikes:

    • Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - Zombie/sci-fi apocalypse survival roguelike with a bonkers level of depth to it. It’s very actively developed, and the devs are constantly adding more stuff to it. They also have their own lemmy instance at cdda.social.
    • Doom Roguelike - Perfectly encapsulates the early Doom games in roguelike form. This one is on the opposite end of the complexity spectrum from CDDA. Much simpler gameplay, though still highly tactical and challenging when you crank the difficulty up. The same author has created a spiritual successor, Jupiter Hell. I haven’t logged enough hours for it to supplant DoomRL’s position yet, but I do have to say that the atmosphere of it is fucking amazing.

    With that out of the way, let’s move on to “old man yells at Rogue Legacy”:

    The term “roguelike” has been stretched to the point of uselessness, often for marketing purposes. This necessitated the introduction of the term “traditional roguelike” for those of us that still want to discuss actual roguelikes. Binding of Isaac, Dwarf Fortess (fortress mode), Dead Cells, and Slay the Spire are all excellent games, but they’re not roguelikes in any useful sense. If I’m looking for games that are “like Rogue”, none of those are good suggestions. Moria, Nethack, Pixel Dungeon, DCSS, and DoomRL are.

    Cataclysm: DDA occupies a bit of a weird space here. It fits within the technical definition of a traditional roguelike, but the overall experience is more of a departure from Rogue than other traditional roguelikes are. It’s almost more akin to Minecraft or Terraria, in that you face dangers to gather resources to create items to face bigger dangers to gather more exotic resources to create more powerful items… and so on. I sometimes refer to this type of roguelike as “neotraditional”, in order to acknowledge this departure.

    Before anyone accuses me of being prescriptivist, sometimes prescriptivism is important. I’m not for haranguing people over every terminological deviation, but some terms are unique and useful, and we should try not to muddy them. “Begs the question” and “reactionary” come to mind. “Roguelike” was one, but it’s pretty far gone at this point.