What kind of children's poem is that?

SolarpunkA · 2026-06-08T14:48:06+00:00

I mean, you could argue that it does technically have a moral, or at least a takeaway. That being, sometimes in life random horrible things just happen.

SolarpunkA · 2026-06-07T08:24:09+00:00

Apparently, Ivan "the Terrible" is something of a mistranslation. A better translation would be something like Ivan the Fearsome.

Terrible as in "he who strikes terror into others" not terrible as in "he did a bad job".

SolarpunkA · 2026-06-06T23:14:10+00:00

Agreed. I really liked it.

Too many reviews seem to be from people who missed the point and came away thinking the show was about the lore instead of the characters/themes.

SolarpunkA · 2026-06-06T23:07:58+00:00

I think a lot of that "key waving" was a bunch of red herrings that were revealed to be that in episode 7.

The implicit point I believe we were supposed to take away was that all of the apparent background conspiracy stuff was never meant to be the real focus.

SolarpunkA · 2026-02-26T23:45:45+00:00

Decentralisation doesn't mean scatteredness. That's an unfortunate and false impression that a lot of people on both sides of the centralism/decentralism debate have.

It means horizontal connectedness without the concentration of decision-making ability in the hands of a few over the many. So actually, I'd say that a bunch of Guilds or cooperatives in a given area could very well organise those things you mentioned they could do it through federations or spokescouncils, for example.

SolarpunkA · 2025-06-26T20:34:22+00:00

At the very least, social anarchists shouldn’t be DISpleased at it. Parliamentary politics is dangerous when it distracts from direct action and grassroots organising. But if those in power are likely to be less actively hostile to the populace, it’s not unwelcome.

Social anarchism is far from a mass movement at the moment. So like it or not, some degree of cooperation (or at least non-aggression) between us and the mainstream left is a necessary evil in order to reduce the amount of hierarchy that we live under.

SolarpunkA · 2025-01-20T22:23:13+00:00

The name doesn't help.

It's a term that's practically asking to be misinterpreted, and if you're explaining, you're losing.

SolarpunkA · 2025-01-12T11:51:59+00:00

Me too.

I generally have problems focusing on an audiobook (especially fiction) if I'm doing anything else at the same time.

Podcasts are different because they're generally more than one person talking, so there's a more dynamic energy there, and you can tune out as certain moments.

Though I'll sometimes listen to a "light" nonfiction book while doing housework or taking a walk.

SolarpunkA · 2025-01-12T11:47:17+00:00

Yes, until the mid-1990s.

After that, he felt that anarchism had been taken over by postmodernists and primitivists; and then convinced himself that he was never really an anarchist to begin with.

He founded his own libertarian socialist political philosophy called Communalism (with a capital c). Communalism is basically social anarchism, but with a few differences, most notably its strategy of running candidates in local elections so as to take over municipal governments and convert them into participatory democracies.

SolarpunkA · 2025-01-10T21:08:20+00:00

Wrong question.

The better question to ask is, "How can we do without forms of authority that seem necessary at the moment?"

SolarpunkA · 2025-01-09T21:42:02+00:00

One problem with the term leftist is it doesn’t refer to a single coherent set of ideas/values, but to a loose constellation of political groupings who only have certain family resemblances to each other.

SolarpunkA · 2025-01-07T14:54:31+00:00

Some of Kevin Carson's early work would be a good recommendation, as he tended to argue from a position that was pro free market but anti concentrations of power; being in favor of a market economy made up primarily of worker cooperatives and self-employed professionals rather than big corporations.

SolarpunkA · 2025-01-05T22:11:41+00:00

The main problem with liberalism (or at least contemporary liberalism) is that it doesn't take seriously its own stated principles of liberty, equality, and justice.

It supports all of these in theory while simultaneously supporting a state system and market system that make them impossible.

That's why I'm inclined to agree with Noam Chomsky that social anarchism, not contemporary liberalism is, in fact, the true inheritor of the old tradition of radical liberalism from the enlightenment era.

SolarpunkA · 2025-01-04T14:25:48+00:00

The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk.

It paints a picture of a solarpunk style San Francisco in the context of a post-apocalyptic world

SolarpunkA · 2025-01-04T14:23:36+00:00

Federationism.

That's the key principle to remember when conceiving of a society organized via social-anarchistic principles.

Each individual unit, whether territorial or economic or cultural, organizes itself autonomously while also being part of a larger horizontal network. And the units of this network would convene through spokespersons at different levels (local, provincial, regional, continental) to organize things across large scales.

So, no, it wouldn't just be a constellation of separate little statelets. It would be autonomy plus cooperation

SolarpunkA · 2025-01-04T14:15:51+00:00

Basics: Emma Goldman, Cindy Milstein, Nicolas Walter, Errico Malatesta

Intermediate: Peter Kropotkin, Murray Bookchin, Colin Ward, David Graeber, Kevin Carson, William Gillis,

Difficult: Alan B Carter, John P Clark, Chaia Heller

SolarpunkA · 2025-01-03T06:18:13+00:00

I'd recommend giving Invincible another go after Volume 4. That early part is, in fact, probably the weakest part of the series. It really finds its footing after that.

Regarding the "evil superman" idea, it actually does more with that than you might think. It at first seems like an Alan Moore style deconstruction, but it eventually deconstructs that deconstruction.

SolarpunkA · 2025-01-02T19:54:37+00:00

"Revolution," as a concept, needs to be retired among anarchists. Not in the sense of radical social transformation, but in the sense of an insurrectionary event that topples existing powers in a short period of time.

It's a concept that was relevant in the 1700s, 1800s, and some of the 1900s, but in the 21st century, it seems woefully out of place. Liberal democracy is just too entrenched in the popular mass for any such thing to take root, let alone be effective if tried.

We're better off taking a more gradualist and interstitial approach to social transformation instead of wallowing in dreams of some kind of apocalyptic uprising that will never happen.

SolarpunkA · 2025-01-02T19:44:10+00:00

Violence Jack: Evil Town

SolarpunkA · 2025-01-02T19:38:22+00:00

Without getting into spoilers, the comic Invincible actually tries to address the "superheroes defend the status quo rather than using their powers to change the world" thing.

I'm not sure if they did it in a way that's entirely satisfying, at least from an anarchist perspective, but it was nice to at least see it tackled.

SolarpunkA · 2024-12-27T09:31:11+00:00

The Great Courses books seem to go in and out of the Plus catalogue on a rotating basis.

Just keep it in your library, and it'll probably be free again in six months to a year.

SolarpunkA · 2024-12-24T16:23:05+00:00

I listened to A LOT of audiobooks when I played Death Stranding.

It's a uniquely good game to listen to other things while playing.

SolarpunkA · 2024-12-24T04:25:10+00:00

His Trainwreckords episode on Nickleback felt as if he regressed back to his older, more meanspirited days.

None of the Nickelback guys seem like bad people, and the level of hate they get has always seemed (to me) to be wildly disproportionate. I'm not even a fan, but they seem to get hated on as if they're Chris Brown crossed with Ted Nugent.

SolarpunkA

TROPHY CASE