I’m not saying some subset of anarchists are authoritarian (you are right, none of them are authoritarian), I’m saying that Anarchism can get lumped in with Marxist-Leninism under the concept of ‘Far-left’ with horseshoe theory.

Horseshoe theory makes it seem like being on the far-left is authoritarian. I would put forward that any authoritarian ideology is in fact right-wing, and the true Far-left are Anarchists/Left-Libertarians, which the stethoscope theory makes more clear by separating out the tankies.

Horseshoe theory doesn’t account for Anarchists who are far left, but not authoritarian.

I get waaay more comments and replies on my posts here than I ever did on reddit around the API situation.

There’s less people here, but your comments aren’t buried, and my posts are much much less likely to be removed by power tripping mods. (I’ve had posts about Stop Killing Games removed from the popular reddit gaming subreddits).

This place is way nicer to interact with by far.

I think the defense of Stalin comes at the end of a particular path that can be very appealing to people for various reasons.

One potential driver of it is that ML/Stalinist groups are not too dissimilar from a secular religion; it has a group of people ready to welcome you as a friend and ally as long as you agree to a certain worldview and a very specific reading of history from approved texts that always pose historical Maxrist-Leninists as righteous figures who didn’t really do anything that bad, and if they did, it was for the greater good, and justified.

Those texts can even make a certain amount of sense if you’re disillusioned with the status quo, and distrust western media. It’s also likely extremely comforting to believe that while the western world is fucked up and exploitative, there are at the same time powerful allies elsewhere in the form of the AES states, which in their view are making steady progress towards the promised socialist utopia.

So ML groups can offer a feeling of belonging, friendship, a comforting worldview, and the belief that if we just follow the directions of long dead prophet-like historical figures (like Lenin or Stalin), then we will someday have heaven on earth. These are extremely appealing aspects to someone who may be very lonely, or who may have suffered a severe trauma and may not have their basic needs met (which may also be what leads to some people being attracted to the MAGA cult)

To someone well versed in history and a desire to find multiple viewpoints for a historical event to avoid propaganda bubbles, the true nature of ML/Stalinism and its authoritarianism becomes self-evident. But for those who never went down that path and are in a vulnerable state, a ‘scientific’ cult offering you hope, meaning, and companionship is very easy to fall into, and thus willingly self-delude themselves to attain in-group status.

Just like with normal religions/cults, once they are deep inside it, they are heavily encouraged by the in-group to suspect any outside information that challenges their narratives or isn’t approved by the group, and thus the cognitive dissonance they could create if looked at more objectively can mostly be avoided.

Also similar to religions; a ML member is strongly encouraged not to have doubts about the validity of the approved sources/texts/history. If doubts are voiced, the group will attempt to re-affirm the validity of the texts (keep the faith). But if that fails and the member continues to voice doubts, they are likely to be ejected from the group, which is very traumatic for most people, but especially so if there is no other support groups to lean on. This likely results in many keeping doubts to themselves, or convincing themselves those doubts are just CIA lies, similar to how Christians try to reject their own doubts with the concept of Satan spreading lies to tempt a Christian from their faith through logic or archeology.

Guns are only a small, small aspect of political power.

I agree, though there is a place for firearms.

a decentralized egalitarian society was implemented with over 3 million people in 1936 Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. By all accounts it worked extremely well, and did not suffer from authoritarianism or genocide.

And there’s resistance bands, which if combined with a door anchor can replace weights for a fraction of the space and cost. A doorframe pull up bar would be the last piece of kit a home gym would really need when combined with the bands and calisthenics.

Finding information on if it was universally adopted is proving difficult. Best I could find is when states started enacting legislation against 3-Cueing. Mississippi was the first to require phonics be taught to children back in 2013, and they are the only state in the OP’s graph to show a strong improvement since 2015 (even though it’s still not reading at grade-level). Unfortunately Covid threw a wrench in our ability to suss out if eliminating 3-cueing is helping, as even if it did, the lack of schooling during that period seems to have really set back all of the kids who went through it, as they can’t really benefit from teaching phonics if they’re receiving it poorly through tele-schooling.

Social media likely is a contributing factor. The pandemic is another factor for lower literacy elsewhere. I suspect that the poor reading method taught in the US only compounded those issues to an even harsher degree.

100%, the pandemic likely compounded the issue dramatically.

I suspect a big reason for this can be blamed on the US no longer teaching kids to read with the phonics method (learning how yo sound out words by individual letters), and instead have been teaching a method to figure out what a word means with context clues, but many kids cannot sound out an unfamiliar word since they weren’t taught the phonics method.

Only now are states beginning to reverse that in an attempt to reverse reduced literacy rates, which will take some time to have a noticeable effect.

Tenet owned housing cooperatives are a way to have apartments without rent-seeking.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of Andor S2’s pacing at first, but after episode 3 or 5 it changes directors and returns to the tight pacing of season 1, and reaches some fantastic highs.

Yeah he usually does 80’s synthwave stuff, but he’s been branching out to the other genres. Lately he’s been doing a lot of trance music.

Not only is it possible, a decentralized egalitarian society was implemented with over 3 million people in 1936 Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, and by all accounts it worked extremely well.

Unfortunately, Sailfish OS uses a proprietary (closed source) android compatibility layer, as well as a closed source UI.

For the parts they have open-sourced, they implemented a CLA that contributors must sign. It’s the HA-CLA-I-ANY license, which specifically allows them a perpetual Copyright and Patent license, and permission to re-license your code contributions to a more restrictive license which enables them sell or package it into a closed-source proprietary app.

Personally I’m be more comfortable supporting the development of PostmarketOS instead, since it is completely open-source with no CLA, meaning no chance of any rug-pulling in the future.

That’s a different argument entirely, I have no issue with having MAID be an option for people with no chance at a good quality of life, even with assistance. I have personally taken care of a terminally ill person and seen far worse than bedsores.

The issue of younger demographic collapse under capitalism will cause a tremendous amount of suffering for elderly who are still capable of a good quality of life with financial or medical assistance, is what I am referring to.

GrapheneOS is great, and it’s what I currently use, but it is ultimately a hardened Android fork. One downside of that is it is completely reliant on manufacturer updates to continue to support a phone. Once a manufacturer drops support, the Graphene team must also drop support, as they are reliant on the closed source GPU/hardware drivers that are tied to specific android kernel versions.

PostmarketOS is not based on Android whatsoever, it’s a Mobile focused Linux distro using the mainline Linux kernel. It uses open-source drivers for the GPU and hardware which can be maintained and supported for decades, and is completely independent of Google’s influence. However, it’s still currently rough enough around the edges that it isn’t ready as a daily driver, which is why it’d be so helpful for us to donate to it so they can hire more developers to polish it up, as they recently did to improve the audio support of Qualcomm devices.