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dillekant

@dillekant@slrpnk.net

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ajsadauskas , to Fuck Cars
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

The toll road scam: A government-made monopoly you pay for.

Here's a funny-because-it's-true take on Transurban and the poor tax it imposes, from Punter's Politics:

https://youtu.be/FlKBakPAtiw?si=G39_0GcJzSB0SSA8

@fuck_cars

dillekant ,

Toll roads aren't bad, it's all in the details. The problem is that the government is often "captured" and therefore has no incentive to have a fair contract, so they'll add clauses like

  • If the company loses money because the government does something, the government will pay them. This often prevents the government from reducing or removing the toll road / other privately owned resource.
  • The government can't "compete" with the toll road, either with another road or (sometimes) through public transport.
  • The government will often, as a form of pork-barrelling, offer people reimbursements for the toll road usage, thereby funneling tax payer money into the private company.
  • Toll roads are tax deductible.

Ideally, toll roads encourage people to take the train.

dillekant ,

TIL on this one. Thanks dude.

dillekant ,

A recent Unlearning Economics Live video had Cahal mentioning that it was pretty easy to identify essential workers, and if that's the case we should earmark housing for those workers in the relevant areas. If it's been so easy to classify them, there should probably be other similar accomodations (eg tax breaks) from a payment perspective.

dillekant ,

Well that too, but it doesn't require legislative change.

dillekant OP ,

Happy Apr 1.

dillekant OP ,

If you live in the areas it's extremely clear this is satire.

dillekant ,

A key issue with many PHEVs is that the "P" is in name only. Their batteries are generally too weak to work without the ICE engine at least some of the time (eg high speed up a hill or when partially discharged). In my view this is quite deceptive, as many people would think (and many PHEVs allow) that you could effectively use the PHEV as a "pure" EV for the majority use case.

dillekant ,

Just legislate max car noise.

Memories of Aaron Bushnell (crimethinc.com)

On February 25, Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire at the gate of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC as an act of protest against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Hostile critics have attempted to shrug off Aaron’s action as the consequence of mental illness. On the contrary, Aaron’s choice was a political...

dillekant ,

He's me on a good day, maybe my best day. One thing is for sure, I never met him but he's our people.

dillekant OP ,

It appears to be age restricted due to the subject matter. Tom Tanuki is an Australian Anarchist who covers a bunch of stuff in the (usually) anti fascist space. In this video he goes in depth about Aaron and trying to preserve his own words when the media is going to try to spin it as mental illness or something. Also adds some thoughts about Palestine and shows the support he's getting from there.

dillekant OP ,

I missed the slrpnk discussion. I'll have a read there too. Thanks. Somehow having other people know about this is heartening.

dillekant ,

The right is not a big tent. The top 1% of people own half the wealth, so like... each person is a "big tent" all on their own. Importantly, the right doesn't actually believe in anything other than whatever they can get away with "right now". You can see this in the fact that the primaries in the US still have Trump as the head, and a party which is increasingly losing its grip.

Which is also not exactly a good thing btw, the democrats without a balancing force are just as dangerous.

dillekant ,

Someone shared this article a while back, and while I don't agree with it, I do think it's instructive. You cannot exactly have an "authoritarian left" get along with a "anarchist left". This video about Hegemony also covers how we can possibly work together.

One, because an authoritarian left looks a lot like an authoritarian right (to an anarchist left). When both the Fascist and the Marxist want to take away your rights, you really need to know which one you're looking at.

Two, even within Anarchist circles, there's some disunity about how to bring about "the revolution". Some advocate for destabilising forces, which would "naturally" cause people to seek freedom. Others think we need to strengthen bonds of society. This, for reasons explained in the article, does not work.

However, even the authoritarian left won't "work" because the end goal for a Marxist is to remove the actual infrastructure of oppression, and like Lenin said, it's not gonna happen; you can't get there from here.

So the real issue is that most of us can agree on where we want to end up, but we can't really agree on how to get there. The Authoritarian left has wet dreams that we'll all somehow learn "the theory" (and frankly given the comments even the commenters in this very subreddit do not know "the theory" and I barely know it), and then something something revolution.

The Anarchist problem is that we explain "the theory" in "common" terms, so it doesn't really sound rational to someone who knows "the theory". Even then, most people are dumb, like ChatGPT dumb. They'll use the right words in the right places but they mostly know that because they're text prediction engines, so they're nominally "anarchist" until the capitalist gives them more bread and circuses for a bit.

In the end, I think a lot of ostensibly "left" causes aren't really "left" at all, so we really need to look at these organisations one at a time. Like the Hegemony video states, this is less about "left" and "right" and more about shared interests.

The one thing that I know for a fact (as an Anarchist), is that the way anarchist and left Organisation works is through social interactions. Sports clubs, Mastodon / Lemmy, families, school friends, uni friends, etc etc. All of these links, if they are strengthened, if we can use them more often than we use the capitalist machinery, are the social consciousness we need. If you eat your neighbours' bread and give them your tomatoes, you're closer to a left utopia, closer to "left unity", and closer to working together against tyranny.

So, we need to fight for third places, we need to fight for places to live, we need to fight for social connections which are peer to peer, not mediated by tech companies. If we can work with that, we can work on a unified left.

dillekant ,

I initially read this as a pretty benign comment but I've sat on it overnight and the more I think about it the more it makes me angry. Sorry satanmat.

which direction forward?

I don't think this is true. There are huge swathes of progressivism which most if not all progressives agree upon. The problem is that the right has a deadlock. They can make incremental "improvements" to their goals because they've already "won" more or less. We're at the "end of history" and picking up the pieces as losers, and a fractured movement. This necessarily means more work to bridge that gap, but this doesn't mean no one agrees on the outcomes.

Workers get upset that we’re providing for immigrants

The right has effectively used globalisation + racism to kneecap unions. The "left" really has no answer. There are global unions but inequality is at such a scale that you couldn't get some sort of global agreement to labor, or labor rights which operate across nations (this also goes back to the previous point: For the left to fix one problem, it needs to fix a lot of problems at the same time).

Couple that with broadly progressive people having conservative ideas, and we can see that it's conservative thinking (racism, sexism, etc) limits how we can co-operate. All of us are free or none of us are free.

Israel should have the right to defend itself. BUT Palestinians should too.

I'm just going to link the Shaun video here. It's not Israel vs Palestine, it's (right wing, in some ways fascist) Zionism vs not. This is an issue of Media which largely frames the debate in terms the right prefers, thinking of it as a wedge issue.

The left tries but we’re by nature self destructive

As I hope I've made clear, the right has a lot of connective tissue, mostly because they have most of the bargaining power, and the left have been slowly losing ground over centuries. It's not destructive, it just has a much harder job.

dillekant OP ,

Holy shit is that serious or a meme?

dillekant ,

80% of everything sucks. It'll keep on sucking after anarchy. The only difference is the drive to do the sucky work comes from within, so "I hate Mondays" becomes more of an adulting exasperation.

Idea for disrespecting cars

OK so I came up with a slightly crazy idea. Do you know how cars are emblazoned with logos and emblems? Like the brand name (Toyota), the car name (Kluger), engine and other doodads (V6 etc etc). What if we made like jokey versions of these to replace on our cars? Like make a Toyota logo but it looks a bit more like a penis....

The movie "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" is a psy-op (the book is not) (www.youtube.com)

As an anarchist, I disagree with the linked video's notion that small groups shouldn't act autonomously. That is garbage. But the rest of what it says about security culture and safety and the fact that the movie was pretty clearly made to encourage activists to compromise their security and/or hurt themselves is right-on and...

dillekant ,

Saw it recently and couldn't have put the points better myself. High Five Five ;)

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