Presumably when we’re talking off-site backups we’re talking about a separate company sitting somewhere in an abandoned nuclear bunker which can justify the price of a tape drive or twenty.

Isn’t that what tapes are for.

anyone can host an email service

Eh, no. You could in the 2000s, nowadays spam protection is so tight, and necessarily that tight, that you need at least a full-time position actively managing the server or you’re getting blacklisted for some reason or the other. Other servers will simply not accept emails sent by you if you don’t look legit and professional.

Definitely possible for a company with IT department, as a small company you want to outsource it (emails being on your domain doesn’t mean you’re managing the server), as a hobbyist, well you might be really into it but generally also no. Send protonmail or posteo or whoever a buck or something a month.

Last I checked making a statement stating that you’re confused about something counts, semantically, as a question. No question mark needed.

But, fine, if you don’t want to tell me you don’t have to. I’m able to contain my curiosity. Certainly can’t put my ID, driver’s license, cash, and a hair tie into my phone. Nor, for that matter, put my phone into an ATM.

I’m confused why would you need a phone to pay via NFC. All you need is your card.

You’re still putting complete trust into Google by using any android that isn’t thoroughly de-googled, built from scratch, and installed on a jailbroken phone. They’re integrated on the OS level they can do whatever they want.

I’m not exactly sure but often the whole comment history is nuked so there’s really nothing left to migrate.

They can’t ban you from the whole platform it just so happens if some admin wants you gone chances are your home instance admin wants you gone, too.

That level you describe also exists – instances are self-policing their users, though it’s an admin thing, not a mod one (mods are for communities).

lemm.ee just posted some numbers for the year and after kbin.social, which seems to get many spam accounts, they’re mostly banning lemm.ee users for misbehaving. No great need to ban .world users because .world admins are keeping their own ship clean, “are your users a bother to me” is a big factor in federation politics.

OTOH not giving communities the ability to police themselves would leads to problems because the only way to deal with anything would be to choose the nuclear option: You might get heated in a discussion about your favourite comic book character and lash out, calling people names, but otherwise be perfectly reasonable, the mods temp-banning you from their community is the right approach, there, not making you switch instances, or depriving others of the furry porn you post to the same instance as the comic community is on, or whatnot.

Added

The anarchist definition of state is a very different one from the Marxist and also from the dictionary one (“people, organisation, territory”). You can usually freely replace “state” in Anarchist texts with “hierarchical power”. I myself don’t like and don’t use the anarchist definition as there’s better terms it’s just unnecessary confusion. Has its historical reasons, but we’re usually not ones to pray to ashes instead of passing on the fire so why should we be doing it there.

And, sorry, but no, it isn’t Anarchists who are couping liberal democracies. That’d be Bolsheviks.

Council communists would have a better track record if they realised that they are Syndicalists, which have plenty a track record. Until that happens, it’ll continue to be methadone therapy for recovering MLs.

I already made that critique: If your means employ authoritarianism and domination, then your ends will never be a classless society, for you are fuelling the very beast of domination and oppression. Giving it another coat of paint or another justification does not change its character. It’s like saying “but my anger is righteous!” instead of realising that anger is always blind, unproductive, irrational, self-destructive to the individual and society. You’re much better off taking a step back, take breaths until you’ve collected yourself, and then start to strategise with a cool head.

It’s why I gave (dunno if in this conversation but definitely in this thread) Council Communists the non-tankie pass. I think they’re a bit uptight, just like Syndicalists, but whatever that I can deal with.

Among the entire revolution, they were among the most radical.

“radical” in what sense? As in “fuck over everyone who brought about the February revolution, do a coup in October and call it a revolution?”

“No, no,” Kropotkin replied, “if you and your comrades think in this way, if the power is not going to their heads, and if they feel that they will not be going in the direction of oppression by the state, then they will achieve a lot. Then the revolution is truly in good hands.”

…yep, Anarchists back then hadn’t yet understood that there’s no way around power getting to ML’s heads. Maybe not individually but structurally it’s going to happen one way or the other. I do acknowledge that Lenin said that under no circumstances must Stalin be allowed to be his successor – he still became his successor. That’s why centralisation of power is inherently counter-revolutionary. Power corrupts, and power attracts the already corrupted. What you’re left with is a mess.

It does not. Revolution occurs without prompting, yes, but there will always be a group of the most radical within the larger group, the group taking the majority of the action.

That certainly wasn’t the Bolsheviks in Russia. They weren’t the sailors of Kronstadt, they weren’t the workers in the factories.

“if the USSR was imperialist then where are it’s private monopolies? Where is its participation in multi-national corporations? What industries, what mines, what petroleum deposits does it own in the underdeveloped world? What worker is exploited in Asia, Africa or Latin America by Soviet capital?”

If the Mongol empire was imperialist, then where are its private monopolies?

Are you saying that before capitalism, there could not possibly have been empires, or imperialism? If that’s the case, then, again, that’s rhetorical slight of hand, serving nothing but the confusion of the masses instead of their radicalisation.

…also just as an aside much of Russia is absolutely underdeveloped, and yes that’s where the natural resources are.

We can learn from what worked and what didn’t.

Oh and by golly did Anarchists learn from it. For one, that you should never turn your back to a Marxist-Leninist.

Someone is organizing any revolution, otherwise it just won’t happen.

History tells us otherwise. You might be confusing revolutions with coups.

The Worker’s Councils weren’t killed and forgotten, they were replaced.

In the beginning of the Russian revolution, they had power. Come the Bolsheviks and they ceased to have power, they became mere propaganda appendices of the party.

The USSR was most of all one thing: The continuation of Russian imperialism with a new coat of paint.

I’m on lemm.ee… and I never said anything about defederating, I think that’d be silly. The whole post was about making it easy and convenient for users from all over to not be subjected to lemmy.ml mod policies.

If this conversation was on grad, it’d have been silenced ages ago… in fact it wouldn’t even have started as I’m banned there so gradists can’t see me. It may or may not have survived on lemmy.ml.

If I understood you correctly as a proponent of a solution that is yet to be evolved, why reject the input of MLs? I am personally curious about learning more about anarchism, that is if the theory is not so weak it would but all be destroyed by the breath of a ML.

The theory is absolutely deep, though I can see how it might seem otherwise when all you ever see is people writing short essays about specific things or aspects, we have quite little of that “big, grand, theory” stuff going on. That said though, Anark recently made a synthesis of pretty much all cornerstones out there, video (there’s three parts) and script.

Oh, as to “why reject them”: Because it’s like talking to a TV that makes up shit on the spot. Because they’ve killed off multiple revolutions, often while allying with fascists. People defending that line of thought are generally one of two things, and that is naive to the actual history and experience of revolutionary movements at large, or they’re assclowns who just want power. Anarchists very much try not to be naive and want noone to have power over nobody so that’s some rather crass incompatibility, there.

The most radical among the Anarchists are a sort of Vanguard. All a Vanguard is is a group of radicals that are helping organize the revolution, at the forefront.

Noone’s organising the revolution. We’re organising society such when the revolution happens it won’t be hijacked by vanguard fucks attempting, yet again, to take power from the people. Also, in the mean time, chocolate pudding.

As for State Capitalism, Lenin

…conveniently forgot to mention that he was crushing worker’s councils with that move. He was taking absolutely nothing from capitalists, he took it from the workers.

Please explain how there was competition, accumulation among bourgeois elements competing in markets, forcing prices lower and thus rates of profit, with private corporations.

The way in which influence and backrubs were traded mirrors capitalism, which shouldn’t be too surprising because capitalism is essentially legalised corruption.

What would be a Marxist revolution in your eyes, if not a revolution against Imperialism by Marxists?

The usual way they happened were a) a vanguard capturing a spontaneous revolution, followed by brutal authoritarianism, or b) a coup of some sort by a vanguard, also with brutal authoritarianism.

Secondly, I truly don’t see what the purpose of advocating against change is for

Me neither. Why do you think I’m doing that? Have some Malatesta in the context of how anarchism is necessarily gradualist:

[W]e can’t make the revolution on our own; nor would it be desirable to do so. Unless the whole of the country is behind it, together with all the interests, both actual and latent, of the people, the revolution will fail. And in the far from probable case that we achieved victory on our own, we should find ourselves in an absurdly untenable position: either because, by the very fact of imposing our will, commanding and constraining, we would cease to be anarchists and destroy the revolution by our authoritarianism; or because, on the contrary, we would retreat from the field, leaving others, with aims opposed to our own, to profit from our effort.

I know, I know, it’s hard to get rid of the spooks. But that’s what materialism looks like.

A worker state where the workers collectively own production is what Marx advocated for.

…so Lenin lied when he spoke about the system being state captalist, not communist, and now somehow capitalism was “really existing socialism”? It’s a bunch of rhetorical smoke grenades to obscure the fact that power moved from the nobility to the nomenklatura.

There was no competition, no M-C-M’ circuit resulting in accumulation among borgeois actors, no tendendcy for the rate of profit to fall.

No, there was the exact same thing just with corruption.

Taking Cuba as our example, Marxism guided the revolution, and it hasn’t seemed to fail yet

The Cuban revolution was not a Marxist one, it was a war of independence and once Batista was toppled and Castro got to make hour-long speeches at the UN, the USSR wasn’t his first choice of ally, but the US. The revolutionaries were generally lefties, yes, but far from unified Stalin-admirers. They absolutely would’ve gone with a vaguely socdem “between New Deal and Europe” like thing with the US as an ally: Workers’ rights, unions, yes expropriate the slavers but that doesn’t mean we can’t have capital in the country. The US wanted to have none of it, just having lost its colony, I mean think of the United Fruit and Bacardi campaign contributions.

As such, when Cuba adopted Marxism-Leninism as a prerequisite of being an USSR ally they adopted it with Cuban characteristics. On their own terms, generally from first principles, without a forge-welded vanguard at its core.

There’s parallels of that in Vietnam, of course, also a war of independence.

Secondly, if Anarchism is an ever-evolving theory that hasn’t really seen any large-scale results, would it not make sense to concede that Anarchism can play a valuable role outside of Revolutionary change while Marxists actually change the whole of society?

No, it wouldn’t. Because a priori there’s no reason to believe that a proper revolution is materially possible when you insist on going for “large-scale results” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), and a posteriori there’s neither. See means/ends unity. Materialism doesn’t care about your impatience. To quote Adorno: Actionism is the anti-intellectualism of the left.

And, no, MLM states didn’t change the mode of production: State capitalism is still capitalism. Again, Yugoslavia would’ve been a better example. Sometimes I do wonder how the world would look like now had Stalin sent another assassin and then Tito his single one.

I think it’s a bit hypocritical to wash the words of revolutionaries you claimed were good Marxists.

I never said “Che was one of the good ones”. I called Cuba promising (as in: On its way to proper democratic socialism) and I called Council Communist essentially Anarchists.

If you want me to say something positive about Marx we’d have to talk labour theory of value or such.

It loses its revolutionary potential and becomes Idealism.

See from the anarchist POV most Marxist-type socialisms are idealism, down to mostly two factors: a) no means/ends unity, making failure inevitable, and b) trying to foresee the future. We, at our current level of understanding of human nature and society, influenced by various material factors holding us back in terms of even imagination, cannot possibly craft plans that would be appropriate for our grandchildren: The revolution must necessarily be gradual because that’s the only way that our descendants get to put us up against the wall for being counter-revolutionary. Without those things there cannot be theory of revolution that’s actually material.