• 129 Posts
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Joined 7 years ago
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Cake day: April 17th, 2019

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  • Not to mention you’ve poured your heart and soul into developing an incredible federated software that defies central control. I know why I like that, but I’m confused as to why you would.

    I don’t see this, or any federated service as anti-authoritarian. I see it as increasing the authority and power of normal people at the expense of corporate / capitalist authority. We must own our own tools, media, news, and communications platforms, and use the power and authority these tools give us to moderate and curate content according to what we think is appropriate, rather than pushing pro-capitalist and western-supremacist narratives that inundate the english-speaking media landscape.


  • These things are central to what I consider authority.

    That’s fine if you want to define it differently according to your own standards, and think that if proletarians make laws and rules, being forced to obey them isn’t authoritarian (although you would be going against most of your anarchist comrades with that definition, who consider any affront to personal liberty, “authoritarian”).

    Why? Are you some sort of anti-authoritarian?

    Mao and every other ML are defining authority in the same way; all consider the dictatorship of the proletariat to be equivalent to working-class democracy, and democratic centralizsm. “Anti-authoritarians” staunchly oppose Mao and the DOTP, so you’d be in a tiny minority of anarchists if you actually support the CPC.



  • does the crew agree collectively to pick such a leader, or is the leader forced upon them by threat of violence?

    That’s related to, but not fundamental to the definition of authority, whose core point is enforcement via class violence (IE either capitalist authority or proletarian authority). You can have a completely democratic selection process, and the enforcement of that decision is still “authoritarian”, unless you want to allow everyone to break the decisions that are reached.

    Marxists already have this collective democratic process, its called democratic centralism, which takes many different forms depending on the situation, but is essentially “diversity in discussion, unity in action”. One of the first practictioners of it was Mao, who impressed that individual red army units during the Chinese civil war should select their own officers.

    Once decisions are selected, they are binding upon the members. I can tell you from experience that “anti-authoritarian” types consider even democratic rulings “oppressive”, and that they feel free to break them since that imposes on their individual freedom.

    What if they want a different leader, are they able to choose a new one?

    That also is related to, but not fundamental, to the question of authority. Recall exists(ed) not only in communist countries, but even in liberal dictatorships, where recall does absolutely nothing to hinder the authority of the capitalist class.

    If anti-authoritarianism to you (like many anarchists) means the freedom to disobey (even democratic rulings), then its no wonder that every single historical anarchist attempt has lasted less long than it took most of us to get through highschool.

    The only way for a revolution to survive is for proletarian authority to be even more organized and more disciplined than its capitalist opponents.


  • which is famously known for showing a complete lack of understanding for what authority actually means.

    I imagine this is the point where you start defining authority in a completely abstract and arbitrary way, rather than the most simple, common-sense one intelligible to every worker already.

    Engels is already one step ahead of you:

    But the necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas. There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and absolute obedience of all to the will of one.

    When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that’s true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.



  • Should we try to change this stupid two party bullshit? Absolutely…but not right now. Right now, there is too much at stake.

    Its sad that people are so ignorant they don’t realize that the controlled opposition wing of the US empire has done this for every election, and people are still falling for it. Liberals have the memory of a goldfish, and are naive enough to think the US is a democracy.




  • When a user submits a new association between a Magnet Link and a YouTube tag, what verifies that that’s actually the appropriate file?

    In one sense, its not really a problem, since torrents are static data. Incorrect files would not only look wrong (and not be seeded as a result), but have different hashes than the youtube ones. But the service which hosts / shares these magnet links would need to source the uploaders, so that their torrents could be removed if it turns out they’re spam.

    I run a csv-based torrent service, but after many years, I’ve been the only one to really contribute to the data. There the process of adding data is tracked via pull requests. Any other service though which allows ppl to upload magnet links / torrent files would need to have a login system / tracking to prevent spammers.