I'm considering using stasher as a home base for writing compelling articles. I have a lot of controversial views that you might observe via my bio or activity on the site so far. That being said, I want to start small. What is a good controversial topic that you might want discussed? I am a secularly conservative vitalist anarchist and I have knowledge in finance (personal and broader), economics, some philosophy, some theology, some cryptocurrencies (although I'm not TOL (terminally online) so don't ask for an opinion on ppbuttcoin), tech (again not TOL or a hedonist, I prefer just works older stuff), privacy, etc. I give no guarantees that I will use your suggestion, but I will still award the post to the best suggestion within the defined characteristics. No articles about racialism, philo/antisemitism. Not saying I don't have opinions, just saying I'm not there yet.
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1 mXMR \ 19 comments \ @OldNorseAnarchist 25 Sep bounties Loitering_and_Lollygagging bounty 20 mXMR · funded
article idea: make the case for existence.
all my friends are either medicated or they think the same thing i do.
so write something actually convincing. why call it vitalism instead of just coping.
If you're talking about what I assume you're talking about do the things below.
#339944
If you're determined to go the more drastic route, I won't stop you. I've been close before myself. I would offer you the thing that gave me comfort "Why should it be me and not the people who create and maintain the structures causing the trouble in my life?". If you're willing to risk it all, why not risk it all trying to fucking win?
Based on that^^ line, I suspect you’ve already thought about this topic more than most people ever do + your theology background + the vitalist-anarchist lens, I think you could actually write something worthwhile on this instead of the usual culture-war noise. It would be interesting to read that perspective (ofc I can only speak for myself).
Article idea:
Religion/Spirituality Done Right - and when/how it took the wrong turn in human history.
Asking me to go thermonuclear day one I see 😂. For what it's worth, I don't have a background (formally or in practice often) in pretty much anything. I just have curiosities I explore and every once in a while I stop to question something people repeat a lot and then wonder if it's true. I get bored hearing people repeat the same shit all the time so I seek out the people that say something interesting that gets mentioned offhand. It's like a flow chart going from consuming tertiary information aggregators to more fringe secondary information aggregators to engaging with more primary information yourself. Much of the truth isn't actually counter intuitive (it's often gated more by taboo than complexity) so when you take the time to hear fringe, but interesting viewpoints and then investigate them you often learn more than many (even professionals/experts sometimes).
^^ @OldNorseAnarchist, you stole my fav self-unpitch!
if you do not want thermonuclear options, just do not ask AilliA lol :P
... and if you want to make it nice and slow for the beginning: keep the rainbow & unicorn "Done Right" half and throw a blanket over the rest. People who "don't have a background in pretty much anything" will read between the lines.
https://stasher.news/uploads/499
for everyone else "one blanket can change the whole meaning" ;)))
https://stasher.news/uploads/500
That's fucking hilarious. Those are new to me. I'm usually pretty direct and it annoys me to not be so I generally try to just avoid thermonuclear topics since so few people ever change their mind in real life and I have had no online presence before Stasher. I'm also not sure I can describe the positive vision without explaining the negative aspects of the current status quo because of how much the status quo has established the framing in support of the predominant worldview. That being said, I'll keep in mind that the thermonuclear option is almost always your preferred choice :). Honestly, I'll go thermonuclear at one point and probably never stop past that point. We're probably not that far from that point honestly. The current status of our dystopia pisses me off to no end.
...fingers crossed your "predominant worldview" != just "predominant Western 'worldview'" ;)) e.g. Central Asia and China have a shit ton of people living inside a very very different "predominant worldview" lol.
https://stasher.news/uploads/501
Few realize the most important news is never in the news, as I wrote here: "If you don’t get it, you are just lucky and there is no point to argue" ))
I'd be curious to hear more specifics on your ideal anarchist setup, specifically the transition problem. What happens to wealth that was built up under the current system, especially by companies that got there through state subsidies, protections, or tax breaks? Who decides how that gets redistributed, and based on what?
Rothbard actually tackled this in "Confiscation and the Homestead Principle," arguing state-subsidized property should go to the workers/users already homesteading it, and even floated a 50% government-revenue threshold as a cutoff. But even there the mechanism stays pretty vague past that point, just "the workers" or "the taxpayers" without settling who exactly.
I'd genuinely like to read your thoughts on this in article form. Honestly, I'd read whatever you write on anarchism more broadly too.
This is probably the second most controversial and interesting topic suggestion here imo, the first being @Aillia 's. I'll think about it a bit more, do some research, and write about it regardless of who gets the bounty. I'm glad I've piqued your interest.
As an intro and haphazard reply:
I think a lot of this would come about as a result of the transition to anarchism in the first place. That transition will likely include more actions than just "peaceful parallel systems" and part of that action will produce spoils that will redistribute those resources. Disrupt the subsidy/favoritism action itself, stand up competing businesses and systems, target known bad actors with direct action. That would drain them of resources by interrupting the flow of corrupt capital, driving business competition, and creating paranoia and financial expenditure on countermeasures. A lot of this can benefit from taking a page out of Santa Claus's book and making a list, checking it twice, finding out who's naughty or nice and then publishing it publicly as a means of establishing targets for action. All peacefully of course, I would never call for anything else. The people who steal from you, humiliate you, murder you, and actively harm you should never be physically harmed. Because that's bad!
As far as ideal setups go:
Probably mostly rothbardian/agorist/hoppean with a pre-christian/medeival Iceland feel stylistically. I think it would be in effect more distributed than rothbard alleges. I think the natural scale of society is actually often more horizontal than vertical. That being said, I think different peoples would implement it different ways. I think peoples and their religions, culture, and genetics co-evolve over time so what works in one area may not work in another.
Really glad to hear you'll write it regardless, dying to read it whenever it's ready.
The direct action angle makes theoretical sense, but the part that gives me pause is: unless you've already got a genuinely massive number of people ideologically on board, doing anything overtly disruptive just exposes you to something with an almost unimaginable amount of force behind it. And people don't actually hate authority itself, they hate specific people holding it, which makes that mass conversion a slow, uphill fight either way.
That's actually why Lysander Spooner's American Letter Mail Company sticks with me as the better model. He undercut the USPS so badly they had to drop their own rates to compete, real proof that a parallel system can work. But it's also a warning: the government still hunted him and his agents down with arrests and pressure on the railroads, and eventually just legislated a monopoly to shut him down for good. Even a purely peaceful, "just build something better" approach got crushed once it actually worked.
Which is why we need to be careful even about how we build these things. The good news is we've actually gotten a lot better at this since Spooner's time. Decentralized, anonymous-by-default systems end up close to unkillable, Monero's a great example, they can delist it from every exchange they want and it just keeps running regardless.
So my instinct is that the only route that's both safe and actually persuasive across every class of people is building something unbreakable and broad enough to survive that kind of pressure, which is a much slower and less exciting answer, but maybe the only one that doesn't just paint a target on you early.
I think you missed something key within my response. I'm saying you have some people build out parallel systems, some people take more direct action. They're meant to complement each other. You have people actively interfering with state aims and operations at the same time as you build the alternative. That essentially creates the demand that is then captured by the movement. Person A interferes with the state mail system and then person B operates an alternative mail system. You don't need to have a majority, you just need a radical minority willing to actually take action. Some of this will happen naturally. It's basically like Konkin's strategy, but with actually interfering via direct action on purpose with state aims. Konkin is much more "Let the state degrade over time and then take over with parallel systems". I'm saying build parallel systems while striking back against those persons and organizations that cause the capture itself. The government lost its fear of the people because the people became spiritually captured with ideologies and theologies that are contrary to driving action towards a given goal when that goal is against an authority. The past couple millennia has led to a decline in the willingness to take action against the state. I'm trying to say we need to reverse that by correcting the limiting beliefs and shedding the theological and ideological constraints that are on us. Learned helplessness is a huge part of that. Don't need to take direct action or build parallel systems if I know I'm going to lose anyway (or I think it's theologically or ideologically immoral to take direct action), which makes me want to accept that I'll lose, which makes me lose. Responding to your broad enough point, you can just get people to target complementary, but different targets. You act as the elephant in the dark room people feel out and each think is a different thing. Also, you're not building or operating off of one system, you're building multiple. It's a chain link of concentric circles of organizations targeting complementary, but different goals. It's posting a bounty and letting 100 bounty hunters try to catch a target instead of paying one bounty hunter and hoping he succeeds.
Thanks for spelling that out, I did miss the complementary part. Different people working different fronts at the same time, with the alternative already there to catch the demand, makes a lot more sense than the way I framed it. I also really liked your bounty hunter comparison. It sums up the case for spreading the risk nicely.
The food rules were a membership card
Okay so. I wanna drop this plain, because I keep watching people treat a molecule like a character flaw.
I eat ground beef. 80/20, not the extra-lean. Eggs, Full-fat dairy and seeds if they're around. I'm don't chase pasta so I can tell myself I got my minerals from a noodle. The fat is the point.
Cholesterol isn't fuel. It's not a calorie you burn off like sugar. It's structure. Sits in the cell wall so the membrane isn't soup and isn't brick. Hormones get built downstream of it. Bile comes off it, which is how you even digest the fat in the first place. The vitamin D path in your skin starts on a cholesterol-shaped thing and your body makes most of it anyway. Cut it off the plate and the liver often just makes more. That's not a trick it's your bodys job.
When somebody says "my cholesterol," they usually don't mean the molecule. They mean the boats; the lipoproteins. Blaming cholesterol because it shows up where a vessel got hurt is like blaming the drywall for the house fire. I'm not saying the fire is fake, you know. Inflammation, oxidized junk, a wall that was already angry, that part is real. What got bastardized is the slogan. Number high, sat fat bad, eat the lean pasta, be a good citizen.
The fat I actually want is the stable kind and that's saturated baby!!!! Harder to oxidize, sits with you, fills you. People were sent looking for zinc and potassium in a bowl of noodles. Red meat, nuts, seeds already had it.
That rule wasn't something you could feel in a body. It was a membership card. One side of the club eats scared and calls it heart-healthy. The other side eats the fat and gets looked at like they failed a test. I picked the plate that feeds the cell. I'm not sorry about the 80/20. Some days the plate is just good enough.
I'm not here to fix your dinner. Changing somebody's eating from the outside is a bad job, and personal responsibility doesn't outsource.
That's just the start of what we've been told about food and how it works inside of us.
The Warburg effect is another on of my favorites to think about with Cancer.
After all Cancer needs glucose to feed on and grow. What do most hospital foods for you to eat? Carbohydrates.
I'll stop before I get cranky haha
High quality non-sequitur copypasta reply
I'd like the hear the reasoning for "Jesus never existed". Because all I've ever heard is that historians, disregarding whether he was the son of god or not, consider that Jesus was a real person that lived 2000 years ago.
But maybe thats not "starting small" haha
So honestly any of the topics you're knowledgeable on, written at an introductory level, for those of us who might have no clue what you're talking about. Would be interesting.
The basics are that nearly everyone who claimed to have seen Jesus was a follower of the religion. Paul is the main author who talks about Jesus in the bible, but in Galatians 1:11 and 1:12 he says he learned of him from revelation (reading the mythical figure from scripture). There are other verses that support this as well and the book of Enoch makes a lot of that clear as well. I believe the book of Thomas is helpful as well. They are considered apocryphal, but oftentimes dictating something as apocryphal isn't actually saying that it doesn't seem to be real, but that what it says is contradictory. That being said if its apocryphal status is an issue for you, the case still doesn't require it. The only two non-christian accounts for Jesus existing are Josephus and Tacitus. Josephus only mentions him twice you can look at the links below for some of the challenges there it's a bit complex. For Tacitus his account is basically just "I heard that this happened" no evidence provided. You can search the archive link for Christus in annals and see yourself. There should be a lot more evidence for Jesus's existence if he did exist as an earthly figure. Romans documented several cults that wouldn't be nearly as notorious as the followers of Jesus. Jesus existing as a mythical figure also explains why people claim to "see" him. They see him in a sense of understanding, vision, etc. Basically he was a midrash which is just taking old verses discontinuous verses (in this case from the torah aka the OT) and shaping them into a story to gain new insights. In this theory Christianity started as a mystical religion and then became more literal over time explaining the verses that match that style. For more info check out the work of Bart Ehram "Did Jesus Exist", David Skrbina "The Jesus Hoax", Adam Green's "The Jesus Deception: A Mystical Midrashic Myth". I also linked a yt playlist of Adam green's on the issue including episodes done with Skrbina. Keep in mind I wrote this mostly from the top of my head since this isn't the comprehensive case so I may have gotten a couple of things wrong. I'll make the comprehensive case later as I still have more reading to do on it, this is what I recall from my knowledge so far.
Short Primer video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZycpNhgr_LY
Adam green playlist
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlHRhql2x-_IKN2zOMsJbOTyWP-qPwCV6
https://mythicism.web.app/josephus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_for_the_historicity_of_Jesus
https://archive.org/details/tacitus-annals-loeb/page/282/mode/1up?q=Christus
Appreciate the detailed answer, will dive in when I have some free time.
One thing that is often missing is practical ways to exist the system. Usually means of exchange is broadly covered, but communication, community building, transport, energy, self reliance. You can add philosophical and spiritual comments
I'm impressed with the topics you comfortably here declare to know know about. I feel we do write down shit to learn new shit, like we plant seeds to get more seeds (and feed our intellectual ego in between). A cycle to connect dots between what we already know and the immensity of our innocent ignorance. Connect dots to follow or construct the path bringing us toward enlightening the vast unknow unknow denseness we navigate every day and night, if we wish. Most just prefer to stay comfy, don't they? How about something that challenges your known knowledge or triggers your soul to dive more into new unexplored frontiers? Would astrotheology invite you to do so? Because I'd love to read more diverse perspectives about it :)