• 172 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • you really only disagree with how (and whether) it was applied in this instance.

    That’s correct - I’m not arguing for a blanket ban on invective, just its widespread and inappropriate use. Persuasive argument has better long-term results than peer pressure.

    Peer pressure through abuse is exclusionary - you may get compliance, but more often you simply turn people away from your group or cause. This creates the group phenonmenon of ‘evaporative cooling’ where more moderate members of a group leave and the group becomes smaller and more insular, which harms the group’s ability to interact with the outside world.

    The argument you’re responding to sounds very similar to Bakunin’s “In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker” distinction between types of authority. Your disagreement with them also seems semantic rather than substantive. I don’t want to get into the weeds of your argument, only to point out that it appears to be a minor disagreement between people with similar values.

    We exclude fascists, but I don’t want to encourage a particular anarchist orthodoxy, or even an anarchist orthodoxy on this instance. We’re openly welcoming to liberals here. Good ideas can come from anywhere, and the problems we face are large enough that we need large coalitions to fight them. Practicing disagreement without dissolution means both our ideas become more potent and our movements grow larger.


  • I was recently reading Emma Goldman’s account of her travels in post-revolutionary Russia. Something that stood out to me was her experience at a meeting where Bolsheviks dominated, and a non-Bolshevik asked for the floor.

    Immediately pandemonium broke loose. Yells of “Traitor!” “Kolchak!” “Counter-Revolutionist!” came from all parts of the audience and even from the platform. It looked to me like an unworthy proceeding for a revolutionary assembly.

    I think your intuitions about peer pressure are invariably true - it is a powerful tool for social and political change. But it is a very poor tool for ensuring that the achieved goals are worthy. I often wish civil debate between neutral people had a much bigger part in progress than was the case.

    I don’t expect you to engage in good faith debates with transphobes or politely protest oil companies, but @solo is neither of those things. If you consider their post and comment history, I think you’ll find you have a lot more in common with them than you might expect. One of our goals here is to grow great things through cooperation, but each act of verbal abuse adds to the toxicity of the soil. When it comes to cooperation, often it is less important that people agree with you than it is that they like you and trust you - and being able to disagree with someone without unfriending them is a powerful skill to develop.





  • Is there a clear business model? It seems like the goal is to make it free for collectives and non-profit use, and then collect fees from for-profit companies. The CC-NC-SA has an obvious business case because not everyone has the capability to set up and use the software, but it’s popularity can create a secondary market for people to pay for other people to host it for them -> leading to revenue. Basically the Freeware model with the addition of the source being open. With art it creates a carve-out for copyright that allows free sharing, but once the art is used in a commercial context, the artist should get a cut of the revenue.

    But if there’s a secondary market of collectives providing that service without the need to pay, wouldn’t they out-compete a privately owned service that pays for the software? Why would a privately owned service fund a software company that doesn’t want them to exist? Likewise, why would a corporation use an artist’s work that was shared under this license?