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Joined 30 days ago
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Cake day: September 18th, 2025

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  • C’est quoi cette niaiserie? The exception does not make the rule. If you can’t accept human tendency to form hierarchies, it leads to fatal errors if attempting to create an egalitarian society. Can the majority of people live in isolated, mountainous regions living under pre-agrarian civilization conditions? No. It’s only possible small-scale under specific conditions, and even that region is slowly transforming into hierarchical structures on the fringes because of cultural transmission with the outside world.

    Zomia is the biggest remaining area of earth whose inhabitants have not been completely absorbed by nation-states, although that time is coming to an end.

    https://www.zomiacollective.com/zomia









  • The incentive is that resources are lootable, that doesn’t change by swapping out one ideology for another. We can point to the post-WWII eastern bloc, Cuba, and Afghanistan as examples of USSR installing dictators. Ideologies tend to be too myopic in their understanding of reality, all systems have a tendency to form into dominance hierarchies, that’s the core issue. Fortunately, all systems decay over time and after collapse there is a period of time where a decentralized, democratic system can exist for a period of time.



  • This feels like a post hoc fallacy. Capitalism is not the cause of those things, societies that organize into dominance hierarchies, regardless of economic organization, cause those things. Slavery, wars, dictators, barbarism, deaths, corruption, and hypocritical systems were present before and in absence of capitalism. The Soviet Union formed into a dominance hierarchy (bureaucrat class instead of capitalist class), and inevitably displayed the same attributes.




  • It’s called the Dark Enlightenment, they essentially want to accelerate civilization collapse so their utopian vision is realized. The financial backers behind Trump adopted this philosophy, and have articulated their plan: dismantle democracy, Balkanize America and establish a patchwork of technomonarchy city-states. People really need to be talking with their community about localization of production of basic necessities, otherwise it will be chaos, famine and death when the system fails.







  • Policy has only aligned with the will of the people 55% of the time. That’s not so bad, assuming we just ignore the observed and prevalent phenomenons of elite capture of public opinion and manufacturing of consent.

    Of course, democracy exists when we discard the unsavory bits of reality, anything can be democracy when its meaning is an empty signifier.

    Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

    I’m not saying democracy can’t exist, it can and it should, but it’s only a fleeting notion in any society based on dominance hierarchy. Democracy does not exist without a well-informed public, a people plagued by ignorance do not have free will, and in consequence do not make their own decisions.

    There is nothing representative or democratic about US democracy, if we are being honest with ourselves.