• CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    7 months ago

    I mean, taxing away houses and then giving them back to the homeless still counts as an expenditure. You’re probably going to want to give them each a nurse and a meal plan as well, if you want them to stick around, because as mentioned these people often have persistent issues.

    Not the government. The people.

    The people have never done shit. Not once in history.

    • melpomenesclevage
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      7 months ago

      Taxing is the government. They work for the owners, not the people dying on the street. Governments are all, at this moment in the supreme court, advocating for the right to criminalize sleeping outside even when there’s literally no other legal option.

        • melpomenesclevage
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          7 months ago

          Oh. I guess every single history source I’ve ever read lied then. Thanks for informing me.

          • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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            7 months ago

            What have you been reading? Pretty much the only place where the people magically, spontaneously organise is in political speeches. The Patriots wouldn’t have existed without guys like Jefferson, the French revolution was run by rogue military factions and exclusive political clubs, and the Leninists have it right in their name.

            • melpomenesclevage
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              7 months ago

              Oh. Shit magical and spontaneous? So there’s nothing other than a master with a whip and a fucking wizard?

              Its not what i favor, or what im proposing, but spontaneous organization does happen. Youve never been in a disaster, or started digging a hole at the beach, have you?

              • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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                7 months ago

                So there’s nothing other than a master with a whip and a fucking wizard?

                Kind of, yeah. The way I see it it’s a human limitation; we need a certain level of indirection to pull off anything bigger than a band of hunter-gatherers. Some systems are more whippy than others, though.

                Youve never been in a disaster, or started digging a hole at the beach, have you?

                Actually, yes I have, but never have I seen more than a handful of people get involved at once, and I never heard from that dude who started directing traffic again. I’ve also seen the bystander effect. Never in history. Maybe on the beach, but not in history.

                You’ve never tried to organise any kind of activism, have you?

                • melpomenesclevage
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                  7 months ago

                  So, the beach thing. Why does it happen, and why does it ‘not happen anywhere else’?

                  Have you read ‘a paradise built in hell’?

                  Did you read my point about believing in the existence of, but not favoring spontaneous organization. A deliberate but headless structure is possible! They’re actually really cool! Good thing too, because strict hierarchies are wildly inefficient and trend towards flattening the territory to match the map, which tends to lead to fascism.

                  And if I believed it was only a fuhrer or a grand wizard, I’d fucking kill myself and take as many as I could with me. Thankfully I’ve seen (and executed) proof to the contrary.

                  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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                    7 months ago

                    As far as I can tell, being in a novel enough situation emergency puts people in a different headspace. After a while, normality creeps back in, and if the emergency continues it looks less like a community pulling together and more like Haiti or parts of Myanmar. Mostly, though, it’s an empirical observation. Besides what we’ve covered, it’s hard as shit to get people to show up or care about activism, and if a meeting gets big enough it stops working, so you have to appoint someone to head whatever thing. This proves true over and over again.

                    I don’t think that automatically means Hitler, though. Representative democracy seems to work if set up just right. Hopefully it’s here to stay.