https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/
TLDR deregulating medicine has been a disaster. Monopolistic hospitals, ridiculous drug IP laws, and medical price middlemen with bad incentives make the US medical system the most expensive in the imperial core countries with the worst outcomes.
I think it's worth differentiating between men's rights and men's liberation.
Men's rights organizations are often interested in advocating against legitimate issue in the courts system, lack of assistance for male victims of abuse and more. However, some bad actors have used it as a smokescreen to roll back the gains feminism has made for women. Some going so far as to demand violence.
Men's liberation on the other hand is more about becoming healthier people with good relationships. It's about divorcing our expectations for ourselves from societies expectations for men and by extension changing what it means to be a man in society.
Both movements I think have value but I don't think it's surprising that many feminists side eye men's rights orgs.
Skill issue
A bit of a tangent but the year of jubilee is an interesting concept in the Torah. The idea is every 49 years they did an economic reset. Slaves were freed, debts forgiven, and land returned.
Unsurprisingly the concept was very appealing to enslaved people. During the US Civil War, many enslaved folks used it as a justification and rallying cry to escape to the north. In Defense of Looting argues that this was one of the most effective instances of mass political theft in history. This also had the effect of hollowing out the South's economy, swelling the North's military ranks, and scaring the shit out of racists everywhere.
I don't think reconstruction would have gone as far as it did without this mass political action and the power it gave formerly enslaved people.
Yes, except a heat pump is capable of being more than 100% efficient because the using the power to move heat around is more efficient than converting power directly to heat
That would be nice, but how? They have 50 years of excellent, unearned, PR. 20% of scripted television is about unrealistically wonderful cops. When a local government has a problem their first response is always to throw cops at it. Any time they get the slightest pushback they threaten to stop doing all the things the municipality thinks they're doing. Every time a cop's ability to do whatever they want, including nothing, is threatened a massive media reaction rises up to defend them.
That's why I think we need alternatives. We need to replace cops. The people who solve problems cannot think of themselves as sheep dogs protecting the sheep from the wolves. Someone protecting a potential DV victim from assault might need a gun but someone handling traffic enforcement does not. People running welfare checks don't need guns. People responding to a public mental health emergency almost never need guns.
Citation needed and Behind the Bastards cop episodes are excellent background if you'd like to know why I'm so jaded when it comes to cop reform.
The system is designed to fail the vulnerable. Cops are domestic abusers, racists, and fascists. We need to develop ways to protect ourselves and our community. Wilkinson should have had an option other than the cops. She needed people who had been victimized in the past or at least would believe her and stood to protect her. Folks who would take turns keeping watch over her or give her and her kids a safe place to stay.
I don't think the cops can be reformed but that doesn't mean we can't keep each other safe.
People tend to think of anarchism as a power vacuum. As soon as a charismatic person comes in they'll start gaining more and more following. But that's not really how it works. Anarchy is about filling that vacuum with everyone. If a decision needs to be made you bring in everyone the situation effects to make it. You start at the level of a household to neighborhood to watershed to biosphere. A charismatic wanabe tyrant will be frustrated every step they take towards getting more power.
Anarchists develop structures and agreements that discourage concentration of power. They enable people to guide their own lives and improve their communities. When violence occurs, when agreements are broken the community decided what is too be done.
All that assumes you're already there. One of the primary differences between anarchists and MLMs (Marxist Leninist Maoists) isn't necessarily their longest term goals, it's the means by which they reach them. MLMs believe that they must use the state, capitalism, and by extension coercive control in order to reach those goals. That brings the risk of capture and co-option of those structures. They've also accomplished incredible feats of human uplift so I wouldn't say their position is without merit.
Anarchists see the revolution coming about through a unity of means and ends. They create a better society by building it while the old one still stands. Their groups are horizontally organized. They create organizations to replace food production and distribution; and devlop strategies for housing distribution (squatting).
Buying clubs, when you and all your neighbors and friends buy directly from producers can cut out a lot of the graft. This lowers prices, connects you to your neighbors, and lowers the divide between the rural and urban. There may already be buyers cooperatives local to you. Some even give food based on volunteering.
My favourite theory of revolution is where these clubs start to encroach into housing and medicine. Eventually you have an economy based on mutual dependence and responsibility.
Having app developers be able to avoid Apples forced 30% fee is great. The fee is pure rent seeking masquerading as curation.
You're in a media bubble. It feels like there's no way anyone could see it differently. The people who disagree with you are also in a media bubble and don't understand how you could believe what you do.
For everything you said they
Reality may have a leftist bias but most people don't live in reality. Most people live in a reality constructed by corporate media. Social media is largely derivative of it.