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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • LFI denoncerait systématiquement les résistances violentes contres les oppresseurs, ce serait une position cohérente (à défaut d’être intelligente), mais faut pas beaucoup suivre leurs positions pour y croire. Ils refusent de classer l’invasion russe dans la catégorie des impérialismes et je ne comprends simplement pas pourquoi.

    l’OTAN est un traité qui a permis aux USA de mener des guerres par proxy

    Un mensonge courant auquel j’ai longtemps cru Tant il circule à gauche. Puis j’ai appris comment l’OTAN fonctionne : par consensus et volontariat, comme le premier groupe anar venu. Les membres de l’OTAN sont pour certains impérialistes mais quand ils veulent l’exprimer, ils le font à l’extérieur de l’alliance qui refuse assez systématiquement l’aventurisme.

    Et la difficulté qu’a l’Ukraine a entrer dans l’OTAN, malgré leurs demandes répétées, et l’embarras des US à le leur refuser montre bien à quel point la rhétorique présentant l’OTAN comme une organisation expansionniste est perchée





  • Une preuve que ce genre d’événement est essentiel.

    Pour les justifications, c’est d’une souplesse intellectuelle plus digne d’un contorsionniste que d’un joueur de foot:

    le joueur estime que son refus d’y prendre part « n’exprime ni rejet ni jugement, seulement une fidélité à ce qui me construit »

    « Chacun porte en lui une histoire, une culture, une sensibilité. Vivre ensemble, c’est aussi reconnaître que cette diversité peut s’exprimer de manière différente selon les personnes »

    « Je crois au respect mutuel – celui qu’on doit aux autres, mais aussi celui qu’on se doit à soi-même et à ses convictions »

    Imagine quelqu’un utilisant ces arguments pour refuser de jouer contre des musulmans.

    Et on va finir par un petit racisme anti-égyptien:

    « Certaines valeurs profondément ancrées, liées à mes origines et à ma foi, rendent ma participation à cette initiative difficile »

    Tous les Égyptiens sont homophobes, d’ailleurs y en a aucun qui est gay, c’est bien connu.







  • I am part of a citizen’s collective that promotes direct democracy. They did not theorize the narcissism-authoritarian link explicitly, but gave a few tricks that worked here to make some bad actors flee:

    • Avoid one-on-one conversations with potential bad actors, have a public channel and put things there even when they insist on communicating directly (they hated that)
    • Talk explicitly about how positions of powers are going to be distributed but also how they are NOT going to be. The earlier you have them tag you as a dead end for their political career, the better.

    And I think that we failed on that account here: recognize that they are going to go from friendly to hostile in the blink of an eye and be ready for it.

    One thing I will do differently in the future is that I will not waste too much time with people who can’t clarify their positions and disagreements.



  • I am really happy that this question led to so much elaboration. It does come from a person I know IRL who talks a lot about the psychology of power structures, having had to deal with too many psychopaths himself. If you are interested in the profile of authoritarian followers, which is different from leaders, there is an abundant literature on RWA profiles (right wing authoritarianism, but a bit ill named as stalinists followed similar patterns)

    Power/authority needs to be based on trust, and it needs to be lost at the same instant as the trust that supports it is. The overhead of getting everyone together to hold a vote of no-confidence is way too high.

    We should reverse the logic of the ‘signing onto law’ where a final formality gives a president, a chancellor or a queen an actual but rare veto power.

    There should be something like a representative assembly that has to give a ‘go’ vote for coercive power to be exerted. Nowadays it can be very lightweight: remote voting can be secure easily if it is not anonymous (representatives, one can argue, should vote publicly).

    It should be almost automatic when trust is there, but if it is absent, mere doubts should be enough to block an action.

    We would live ina very different world if the representatives of a neighborhood had to give the ‘go’ for a police operation





  • Over the past years, reading more about the dark triad/quadriad, I am becoming more and more convinced that authoritarianism is the political expression of narcissism and that it is 100% of the explanation, that there is nothing more to it. Want to fight authoritarianism? Stop narcissist. It is not a matter of ideology, of left or right, of reformist vs revolutionary, it is just a matter of psychological profile. Stop the narcissist, that’s all.

    How do we build systems that are resilient to sabotage without falling into authoritarian logic?

    I had a eye-opening moment with this videp, whose title (“Can 100 people self-organize without a leader”) is actually misleading, as it (IMHO) failed to demonstrate what it wanted to test, but demonstrated something much more interesting. The task given to 100 people was too simple to require multiple people (a “hack” they forbade has shown that one person was enough to do the full task) yet, a hierarchy “naturally” emerged. Even though the sample population is biased towards people who would not be very hierarchical.

    My main takeaway was that an organization that does not want a hierarchy does not only need to make it possible to self-organize, but needs to actively “weed out” hierarchies. That’s hard, I don’t know of any examples of it.