alyaza [they/she]
internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she
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- 316 Comments
6·2 days agobut I feel like the people who oppose congestion pricing / are pro-car operate on feelings and vibes.
you’re describing a small percentage of the population here–most people have no strong opinions on congestion pricing (because it doesn’t really have a prior in the United States), and as such it’s extremely important to write articles like this which can show them that it is working and it benefits them in every way
congestion pricing has been pretty consistently found to make air quality better for obvious reasons (fewer cars on the roads) so you can safely infer this is also the case here. unfortunately, there are several significant air quality variables outside of NYC’s control that are probably going to make reductions less obvious than, say, Stockholm or London. most recently, nearby and unseasonable wildfires caused the city to have several days of terrible air quality. back in 2023, those huge Canadian wildfires caused the same problems on and off for their entire duragion.
3·4 days agoon Chiapas:
- Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government Through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language (Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater)
- Zapatista Spring: Anatomy of a Rebel Water Project & the Lessons of International Solidarity (Ramor Ryan)
- Developing Zapatista autonomy : conflict and NGO involvement in rebel Chiapas (Niels Barmeyer)
on Rojava:
- Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan (TATORT Kurdistan)
- Revolution and Cooperatives: Thoughts about my time with the economic committee in Rojava (anonymous)
- Make Rojava Green Again (Internationalist Commune of Rojava)
on Revolutionary Catalonia and various aspects of the anarchism there:
- Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (Gaston Leval)
- The Anarchist Collectives (ed. Sam Dolgoff)
- The CNT in the Spanish Revolution (José Peirats Valls)
- Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution (José Peirats Valls)
- To Remember Spain (Murray Bookchin)
- Ready for Revolution (Agustín Guillamón)
most of these should be findable on Anna’s Archive, or by just googling the title. if not, i can track copies down.
9·4 days agothis is not serious enough for the mod shield, but my god stop misusing the word clickbait and stop being confidently incorrect. some of you literally just use this to mean “thing i don’t like” or even “thing that explains itself in a way that is not my fancy”–neither of which is what the word actually means.
communism is about works collectively owning the means of production.
to be clear: you’re kind of mixing terms up a bit here and this needs to untangled, because otherwise it will cause problems in answering what you’re asking. the correct word for “worker ownership of the means of production” is technically just socialism. communism, at this point in leftist history, consistently refers to a more specific thing: an ideological system that seeks to create a stateless, classless, moneyless society in addition to achieving common ownership of the means of production.[1]
this might sound very pedantic–and, to be clear, it is likely the vast majority of socialists are also communists–but conflating these terms can be genuinely problematic when asking a question like this for the simple reason that they are understood to be two different things in practice. you can have socialism but not communism, in short. (indeed, “socialism but not communism” is the rule among states that have arguably been socialist. even if you play fast and loose with the defining characteristics of communism and think there have been existing socialist states, i’ve never met a person who believes those socialist states achieved anything resembling communism.)
in terms of the actual question you’re asking: most people would probably agree that no, the properties of socialism and communism make “authoritarianism” or a “dictatorial” figure antithetical to either–at least without that desire for “authoritarianism” being shared across the entire working class somehow. this is the reason many leftists consider most or all existing (and former) states that called themselves socialist–your Soviet Unions, your Chinas, etc.–to not be socialist or to have degraded back into capitalism.
leftists adhering to variants of socialism typically characterized as “authoritarian” and “dictatorial” would obviously disagree with this, however. to generalize a bit: they tend to believe that it is an acceptable tradeoff for a vanguard (the most revolutionary and ideologically advanced section of the working class) to steward and speak for the rest of the working class through the revolution, to the establishment of socialism, and toward the creation of a communist state. separately, they tend to consider the political structures of these countries as facilitating worker ownership of the economy, even if it is not direct. many of them had central planning of the economy, and most of them had highly delegated (for example village bodies which elect city bodies which elect country bodies, etc.) or sectoral (for example X, Y, and Z interest groups must obligatorily be represented in decision-making) political systems that meant workers were represented at every level of government and decision-making.
unfortunately, whether this is “really socialism” or “really communism” is not a falsifiable belief–and while there are better arguments for the view that “authoritarianism” is incompatible with either in my mind, it’s not as if there are no arguments for the contrary view. so you’re never going to get a definitive agreement on this.
yes, i know these have been used synonymously at many points by many communists, and that even the distinction between socialism and communism has varied historically. but most people in my experience in leftist spaces do not use socialism and communism to mean the same thing at this point, nor do i. ↩︎
However, when we talk about modern nation state, I believe we have not seen successful implementation of anarchism yet.
well, anarchism is completely antithetical to modern nation states, so if you’re using that as the basis for evaluation you’re obviously going to be misled. it also begs the question of what a “successful implementation” of anarchism–or any form of leftist ideology in governing–actually is, because ask five leftists and they’ll give you six answers to that. nonetheless, and as far as i’m aware, in spite of their massive difficulties (and despite a non-anarchist self-identification in the first case) both EZLN-held Chipas and Rojava are widely held as successful, practically applied examples of anarchist theories of practice and production. likewise, so is Revolutionary Catalonia.
One problem is that even if it works internally, what would happen when a colonial power tries to conquer it?
i would encourage you to look to the Spanish Civil War or the EZLN occupation of Chiapas as examples, because this was simply not a problem for either of them. particularly in the former case, the Spanish anarchists acted very similarly to a “centralized” power in fighting the Francoists (until they were organized into the broader Republican military).[1]
and it should be noted, as an aside: what eventually undermined them and destroyed their power were not the Francoists but purges and aggression conducted by other leftists in the Spanish Popular Front against them. anarchists are, quite legitimately in my opinion, pretty aggrieved at their historical treatment by other leftist ideologies! ↩︎
7·10 days agoa curious development; of course, i would personally bet this does not actually end the conflict
12·12 days agoExcept it’s likely on purpose so they won’t have enough people to look into this and other large cases against corporations that might impact the people buying out the government.
this is exactly what has happened; previously, the FTC was aggressively pursuing anti-trust against Amazon, Google, etc.
science kind of demands rigorous definitions so i can’t pretend to know how this would be accomplished but yes, at least in spirit, a lot of these moons definitely feel like they ought to be called moonlets or a similar term
i doubt there is a strong religious justification for this—most likely, Bhutan is doing it because they are cripplingly poor and limited in how much they can diversify their revenue, and Bitcoin is a fairly good speculative asset
8·14 days agoI feel like there are better flyers people could be spending their time distributing
then make them yourself instead of complaining about other people doing work you’re not–bluntly: no investigation, no right to speak
Isnt nigeria basically the only african country right now that isnt a shithole right now?
Nigeria probably has the most theoretical wealth available to it of any African country because it’s super rich in oil, but there are definitely other countries that have it better than Nigeria (South Africa, Cape Verde, maybe Namibia or Kenya if you want some deeper cuts). Nigeria also has a metric fuck ton of problems (religious tension and sectarianism, terrorism, an openly corrupt political system which likely stole the last presidential election, and constant economic turmoil) that severely rob its capability to exploit its riches. and yes colonialism is a big part of that, it has fairly bad deals with major corporations to exploit that oil
5·23 days agowell… no, because you’ve just described removing several of the distinct things that define what a karaoke bar is, lol
you’re being very weird in this specific chain of comments, and it’s unpleasant to read and dragging down otherwise pretty decent conversation. dial it back, or you’ll catch a temporary ban.
hardly surprising. we talk about enshittification today but Skype was one of the most egregious offenders before the term was even coined, in late-stage Skype (circa 2016-2017) i couldn’t even run the fucking thing without lag because of in-line ads. the user experience was frankly awful, and once you’ve used something like Discord or Zoom there’s just never any reason to go back.
come on, this is not productive discussion
16·1 month agothe going theory is that this is effectively the western division of NetEase getting axed because they’re not important enough and “cost too much” to keep around
resetERA is an unusual source for this, but the OP is just direct screencaps off of LinkedIn of people saying they were laid off, and it’s hard to get more definitive than that in terms of sourcing
Moderates
in life. most people in NYC have literally never experienced this one way or the other before NYC implemented it, and certainly aren’t seeking out the kinds of spaces that would be partisan on it in some way. their opinions on this are accordingly malleable based on “does this feel good or bad,” and you can see this in how there’s already been a large change toward supporting congestion pricing as the benefits have become increasingly tangible: