WatDabney

After many years of effortless romance and/or sex (I had the good fortune in my younger days to look like sort of a cross between Rob Lowe and Andre Agassi), I finally just burnt out on it and deliberately chose to pursue bachelorhood. I’ve never regretted it. (For whatever that’s worth).

I assumed that they were at least anarchism-adjacent - it’s pretty much a prerequisite for the bulk of their focus.

I hadn’t really looked into their political posting much though, and yeah - even with just a cursory glance, it’s promising.

And I hadn’t thought about that distinction between people who simply hold a position and people who “officially” wear the label in the context of anarchism (though I’ve noted it often with atheists), but yeah, there’s undoubtedly some truth there.

Thanks for the heads-up.

i’d like a stronger anarchist/libertarian community on lemmy.

That’s one thing that I’ve been both disappointed and surprised to not see.

The anarchist community on Reddit is fairly large, but not very anarchist. There’s a very strong authoritarian bent to their claimed anarchism. I had hopes that the nature of this place would invite a community that was anarchist not only in name but in spirit, but I’ve seen surprisingly little sign of that, or even really of anarchism at all.

I guess it could be counted as a weakness as far as attracting new users go, but I think it’s a strength overall.

It would be sort of nice if there was a stronger right-wing presence here, but at this point in our history, the right is overtly toxic. They’ve completely lost touch with honesty, empathy, integrity and simple human decency. Their entire identity at this point is built on hatred, bigotry and callous disregard for anyone other than themselves. They poison everything they touch, so the fact that they can’t gain a foothold here is very much to our benefit.

If we survive this era of Trump/Putin/Netanyahu/Polievre/Le Pen/Modi/Meloni/Hanson/etc., then hopefully the right will reconnect with reality, integrity and simple decency enough that they can take part in a community without turning it into a cesspool of hatred and lies, but unless and until that happens, this place is absolutely better off without them.

In his memoir, Stanley stated that “The right to bear children will in time be reserved to the fit.”

He died at the age of 90, with no children.

Broadly, for the same reason that tankies larp as communists - because they’re some combination of dishonest, deluded and blind.

Some are simply liars and schemers, and there’s no real analysis needed there. But that’s a minority - most appear to essentially mean well, but they just can’t or don’t grasp all of the necessities of the position they claim.

I think most of them start out as relatively sincere libertarians, which is to say, they’re relatively sincere about opposing government overreach and advocating for individual liberty, at least speculatively.

But then they run up against the fact that other people don’t share their views - that some don’t even share their basic views and many more don’t share all the specifics. And for whatever reason, they can’t tolerate that - they’re invested in their position and they can’t abide the thought that another position not only exists, but could be valid.

That’s exactly the point at which their opposition to institutionalized authority and purported advocacy for individual liberty should take over and lead them to simply accept the fact that other people have other views, and should be entirely free to do so, but they’re just not psychologically equipped to do that. So they instead jump to the position that those other views need to be stamped out and/or that people should not be allowed to hold them.

And since those other people are rarely willing to relinquish their views, they then tend to jump to the position that they should have the authority to force them to do so.

And that’s pretty much the end of libertarianism (or communism as the case might be) right there. It ends up with people who claim to be opposed to hierarchy and institutionalized authority not only proactively stipulating the institutionalization of authority, but treating it as rightfully theirs.

Sadly, I even see the same thing in anarchism - in fact, I see some variation on that dynamic far more often than I see people who actually hold to the ideal of eliminating hierarchy. It’s simply that so many people think nothing of presuming the right to decree that other people should not be allowed to [X], apparently completely oblivious to the plain fact that the moment they do that, they’re presuming that their opinion on what people should or should not be allowed to do supersedes the opinions of those who hold different views, and since those other people likely aren’t going to voluntarily submit, they more often than not then jump to the position that they are rightfully forced to submit. And boom - right there, we already have hierarchy and authority.