This is an absolutely incredible format for introducing anarchist ideas to people who would otherwise dismiss them out of hand. I’d wager that the Good Benn Jordan just awakened the anarchist buried inside of a lot of people with this video.

The Zapatistas mention made me very happy, buy still very sad that it’s over.

I’ve felt the same as you and have been working to find like-minded people in my area, and have found some success, so I can offer a bit of advice. Even in deep red rural areas there is likely to be an active Indivisible chapter, and the people who participate in those groups - despite their closeness to the DNC - tend to be on the more progressive side of liberal and more willing to act beyond just electoralism. Usually in the rural red areas they will skew older as well, but there’s almost guaranteed to be younger and more lefty folks lurking in the group chat, they just tend to have less free time to dedicate to it or they may be more cynical about the protests. You can also find leftists by volunteering at places like homeless shelters, soup kitchens, etc. so long as you avoid the evangelical ones. I’ve also found like-minded people at farmer’s markets, though that’s usually a mixed bag, but if you do something subtle to make yourself visibly inclusive like a pin or a t-shirt with a progressive message like-minded people might approach you, but of course you might want to be careful about attracting the wrong kind of attention. Look for more hippie-ish looking folks and you’ll hit more often than you miss.

I’m still working at it but I’ve managed to find a decent number of like-minded people in a much shorter time than I expected by doing some of the things listed above, and this is in rural West Kentucky. Form relationships with the people you find and the organizing can follow.

You’ve never seen those urinals that have complementary delicious cake?

People who try to convince you that words are meaningless are never up to any good. I’m sure it makes you feel real good about yourself to pretend I’m too stupid to understand instead of smart enough to see that words that are often misused still have meaning.

I would argue even further that genius is something that is cultivated in a person by placing them in an environment that encourages their creativity and is tailored to their strengths.

I believe that authoritarianism is the origin of class. All that it takes is for one person to draw a boundary, state “this is mine,” and then enforce that with violence. There is no end of history. Even if we do manage to create a classless society, there’s no guarantee that it will remain that way. To maintain such a society will require maintenance, and that means identifying and resisting authoritarianism when and where it inevitably emerges. It is therefore essential to have a word to describe the types of behaviour that can result in the reemergence of class society.

Explain.

Which is authoritarian in nature.

Look, western nations do often hypocritically point out authoritarianism in their geopolitical rivals for cynical reasons, but to pretend that the word was invented for this purpose and is meaningless just makes you look like an autocrat worshipping moron. It’s the same as how Trump supporters after being accused of being fascist insist that the word is a meaningless insult. The word authoritarianism exists because there’s a spectrum between a democratically elected benevolent leader and a ruthless dictator. You don’t want to confront the fact that they may have a point.

“Authoritarianism” isnt even real

It is difficult for me to imagine how someone could possibly convince themselves of this. What do you call it when a leader consolidates power around themselves, removing checks on their position and making unilateral mandates that are enforced through state violence against all who dare oppose?

I think there are several separate cognitive abilities needed to ask questions. Curiosity (which is very common), complex communication (much less common), and advanced theory of mind (exists on a spectrum, you need not only awareness of your own mental state, or metacognition, but awareness that others have a mental state that is distinct from your own. Humans actually develop this ability slowly throughout childhood, and it goes through stages). Though there are other species with similar traits, it might well be the case that humans are the only living species in possession of all of them simultaneously.

Anything to avoid accepting responsibility for ourselves, we have to blame “less developed” nations for our own failure to treat addiction at scale. Did you know the opiate crisis was created by the pharmaceutical industry for profit? Or that the CIA is known to have been (and let’s be honest, likely still is) involved in international drug trafficking, including financing the Nicaraguan Contras’ cocaine trafficking into the US, primarily in poor black communities?

Our for-profit healthcare system, the criminalization of drug addiction, and deliberate support of drug trafficking by our own government to achieve political aims both foreign and domestic created our drug problem. We have only ourselves to blame.

Fascism is imperialism turned inward. The US fears losing its grip on power so it’s begun to cannibalize itself in a desperate bid to restore its dominance.

Said model contains gigabytes of a bunch of weights that can never go back to the exact words of the book.

And yet, the tech bros do have access to the exact words. The only difference is that they don’t share, instead choosing to extract value from it by training an LLM and (eventually, hypothetically) turn a profit. The product is created by processing the intellectual labor of billions of people into a formless amalgam of human creativity, which is then exploited for their private benefit.

If we’re pirates then they’re privateers, and I know which I respect less.

Mmm, yummy endosperm.

We gotta bring back the term “robber barons.”

Then the solution is simply to not post it at all. It’s childish.

The way people seem to get whipped up into a frenzy over the thorn makes it inappropriate to include their username in the post. It’s an invitation for targeted harassment to make a post saying “isn’t what this one specific user does super-duper annoying? Please bitch about them with me in the comments.”

I use Actual and it’s very barebones, no BS, does one thing and does it well. Great if that’s what you’re looking for.