I’m not sure what the venn diagram of people into mutual aid and people who buy scratch tickets looks like, but I’d suspect it’s a small overlap.

But hey who knows, if this stuff is getting more popular traction then I might be wrong about that.

There’s a guide out there about what to do if you win.

Basically, tell nobody before you talk to a senior partner in a big law firm, get trusts set up for yourself and the people in your life so everybody is looked after and you can’t fall below a decent living wage even if you fuck the rest up. This also stops people hounding you for a slice and destroying your relationships.

Then there was stuff about setting up investments, and setting aside some spending cash.

Personally I’d want to put most of the “investments” into various mutual aid projects to build lasting social stability rather than using it to further the stock market, but other than that it’s pretty good advice.

“It’s the market” is another way of saying “because I can”.

They don’t have to raise the rent to match the market, the market is simply a signal to them that if they lost you by raising the rent, they could potentially replace you for the same or higher rent.

They could ignore that and leave your rent alone. They don’t. It’s a choice.

I’m not going to get a meaningful exchange with you, I can already tell. I think I made that pretty clear, as well as my reasons. Your reply is empty of anything but a very unsubtle attempt at emotional manipulation, so I’d say I’ve made the right call.

It’s not about force or having authority to define something, this is about being able to have a real conversation, and you left the main term undefined except in your own mind, and then when I asked you for it you gave an absolutely wild definition that makes no sense and which I can’t find anybody else using, and yet you still called it “the” definition and not “your” definition.

If nothing else that means you’re not someone it’s worth trying to talk to, because you’re not even trying to communicate effectively. I don’t care if you have your reasons, they’re not good reasons but I feel like in the spirit of this conversation I just shouldn’t fucking bother to explain why, because based on precedent you’ll just insist I’m wrong for your own inscrutable reasons and carry on as you were, and if I try to wrest those reasons out of you they’ll be nonsensical. Also you’re not worth trying to convince because you’re not somebody anyone else will listen to for long before they realise you’re completely full of shit.

Goodbye.

That definition of authority is so immediately, obviously wrong that I don’t even know where to start dealing with it.

It’s so uselessly broad. I literally said at the start that authority isn’t just any inqeuality, and you didn’t address it. You should have if you thought that was wrong, because that’s literally the definition of the thing that we’re talking about.

I would like to see you justify this incrsdibly broad definition. If you want to see my justification for my definition, I would invite you to look it up in any dictionary.

I need you to define the word “authority” in that case. I’ve given my definition, so what is yours and how does it differ, please? Because I already addressed the fact that an imbalance doesn’t create a hierarchy, and your description of imbalance does not fit my definition of authority.

Power imbalance doesn’t automatically create the conditions for domination. For that you would need both expertise and monopoly.

And the solution to a misunderstanding isn’t to concede the definition of the word “state” but to educate. The state is any entity that has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence in a region. That applies regardless of the system of government that rules it.

Your definition isn’t a definition, it’s just a collection of categories that gives no useful information.

We don’t need to be dominated in order to clean up our garbage. And the state is often really bad at collecting garbage, so just teach people that.

I honestly hate the concept of “bootmaker authority”, because it’s exactly the same wrong conflation that Engels makes. Not every inequality is a form of authority. Expertise is not authority, it is expertise.

Authority is the socially-recognised power to dominate. Getting a bootmaker to advise on or perform bootmaking tasks is not domination. The bootmaker can’t hold you at gunpoint and command you to wear a certain kind of boot, nobody would allow that. There aren’t bootmaking cops.

Like what exactly does the bootmaker’s “authority” entail in this theory? Giving consent does not confer authority. Authority operates regardless of consent, that’s what makes it bad.

This seems to come from the assumption that right wing views have equal validity and exist on an equal footing, but they just don’t.

Right wing autoritarian attitudes are just whatever is propped up by the propaganda of the prevailing hierarchy. They’re blasted out of mainstream news outlets everyday. They don’t survive on merit, but on funding.

Like honestly, if you want to hear what conservatives have to say, go watch their news, listen to their pundits, join their social media apps, but if you’ve got half a brain then you shouldn’t be surprised that it’s just a pile of callow, self-serving bullshit. You will be disappointed. You won’t see a reasonable debate of the ideas.

Like this is an open system. Anyone can make an instance. You know why right wing instances just… aren’t? Because they can’t stop themselves from being bigots, which most people hate, actually, and gets them yeeted, so they don’t thrive here. It’s not some conspiracy or bias, it’s just what happens when assholes aren’t shielded by some big daddy corporation. They can’t hack it.

Neoliberalism is fascism with extra steps, so by that formula this is just fascism.

So that tracks perfectly actually.

What the fuck is that stock image? They really said “contemplating suicide but make it corporate”.

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!