rolling “Trump is gonna win” containment thread

did you know we survived for millions of years without the nation state

I hear people are saying that.

my darling I
I can't get enough of your posts babe

xposts to......ehh make your own pick as to where this slots in

did you know we survived for millions of years without the nation state

A little misleading, tho. Did we survive millions of years without concepts of territory, kinship-based social organization and competition for resources?

depends how you define territory specifically but the other things sure. they're not the nation state. how is it misleading?

Could you point me to some million year old contemporary sources, plz?

wow you got me

"Survived" is sort of the crux tho, ain't it?

how is it misleading?

Just that nation states are essentially evolutionary outgrowths of those things: organized ways to protect territory, population and resources.

the point isn't that ancient people were all perfectly anarchist/communist in the modern sense the point is the state didn't exist for a long time and it took an unfathomable amount of violence for people to start accepting it as natural and good

nation states are outgrowths of aristocratic / capitalist class warfare and genocide the notion that they represent or are connected to or are some primordial community is pure ideology (and proto-fascist)

"Show me where the ideal you're striving toward is being practiced now" is too stupid a question to demand even the usual back and forth about the merits of anarchism/socialism/leftism/etc..

Shit happens that hasn't happened before. Slaves revolt and throw off a European colonial power, a nation-state founded on chattel slavery as an institution abolishes it, etc.. There were no communist states in 1916 but that didn't stop the Bolshies.

xpost

Eh. Violence pre-existed the "state." Part of the impetus for the establishment of the state is to control/reduce violence. In contemporary times, the occasional breakdown of a state tends to be accompanied by more rather than less violence.

Which is just to say that I don't think nation states per se are the root of many of our challenges, even though obviously they lend themselves to actions and abuses on much greater scales than was possible in the pre-state world.

Also, if you DO think we need to solve the problem of nation states by replacing them with something else, is that more in the direction of One World Government, or a zillion autonomous collectives? And if the latter, what do you do the first time one collective collectively decides to take a smaller collective's cattle or whatever?

I think there's a difference between believing modern nations are a natural primordial state of being and believing that the US isn't in a position to transition peacefully into an anarchist collective.

Like, yes, a major revolution/transformation can happen, but it's probably a mistake to imagine that it will be all happy times when it does.

it won't but the point is it can happen

anything can happen, what actually will happen is probably not anything that we can fully wrap our heads around based on the lives we've led so far

uncomfortably reminiscent of "we had to destroy the village in order to save it"

I don't pretend to know the answer but a union of workers' soviets isn't a fundamentally bad idea

in practice though...

if we are fretting about how our bills went up in the Biden years, we are probably not ready for what that would look like after the US anarcho-communist revolution

The potable water wars and climate refugee crisis are coming either way, the question is really whether the response is more or less humane. The disarray of the anarcho-communist revolution might not look so bad compared to the exterminism of American capitalism in full reaction.

most revolutions arrive with a wave of exterminism of their own

Hobbes to thread.

Cue Mark Twain

most revolutions arrive with a wave of exterminism of their own

"My neighbor killed my family with an axe and stole my last two jugs of water, but at least he wasn't a *spits bloody tooth on ground* capitalist!"

seems kind of futile to speculate on the best form of chaos under a societal collapse due to climate catastrophe, but I am at least curious about how that will impact the 2024 presidential election

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EvN3c35VcAATraz?format=png

oh shit, pwned

Part of the impetus for the establishment of the state is to control/reduce violence.

lol I almost added "have a monopoly on" as a third option, sure, yes. But getting rid of state-controlled violence will not get rid of violence I regret to inform.

lol that actually is straight outta Hobbes

Organized violence as a way to resolve disputes with your neighbor over lawn maintenance

Violence, like lying, is such a blindingly obvious possibility that even three year olds will do both without so much as a lesson or role model to show them how.

Do we need a rolling "neighbors are going to kill each other to steal potable water in our lifetimes" containment thread?

I think that's this thread.

I already have that but it's called "rolling dystopian emails from my doomer brother."

comrade combover cannot fail, he can only be failed

The dicktatorship of the golfproletariat

comrade combover's got this!

finally gathered the paperwork to upgrade from green card (i.e. basically here at the pleasure of the executive branch) to citizen.

i had put this off for years for various reasons but https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/us/politics/trump-2025-immigration-agenda.html was enough to push me over the edge.

Good choice, provided you're OK with renouncing your allegiance to foreign potentates.

It came up at the weekend & sorry as a foreigner idk the rules here, will all the embarrassing Harry Potter libs start calling him “47” or what

harry potter libs?

are they transphobes?

though I'm guessing you mean something like a Sorkin lib or a Hamilton lib.

Hufflepost readers

"Whole Foods Democrats" C/D

lol ok I wasn’t expecting that part to cause confusion, respect for being logged off during that era I guess

For the sake of the question imagine some lame ppl calling him “45”

https://patriotscave.com/cdn/shop/products/2MMC-8155-4547_933x.progressive.jpg?v=1633175561

there we go!

apparently all the big donors are "fluttering towards Nikki Haley" and Trump is starting to lose a few minutes sleep in the republican presidential primaries, because the New Hampshire polling has opened up a remote possibility of some other quite horrible outcome, that doesn't involve Trump winning. lol I haven't a clue what is going on really, but just watched some msnbc on yt.