Borrowing a passage from David Graeber:

“At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts. Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions.”

Or phrased another way:

• Humans have the capacity to be and to do good
• Humans can also do terrible things
• Hierarchical power structures can lead to harmful feedback loops where bad actors who gain power can continue to gain power
• Even well intentioned people can slip into modes of unhealthy power dynamics
• Thus building a truly equitable and just system requires ongoing work

If the question at hand is “bad actors exist. What should society do about them?”, Anarchism as a school of thought is an attempt to answer that. It’s not a solved problem, so Anarchism is far from the only possible answer to that question. For example, someone else might argue that an authoritarian government is the best way to solve the bad actor problem. Of course, I would disagree with this hypothetical person, but my point is that social movements like anarchism arise in response to some crisis, tension or problem in society — if society was working well for everyone and everyone got along, then anarchist thought would have never emerged. Whether you feel it’s an effective answer to the problem is a different matter, but to properly analyse it, we need to recognise what anarchism is trying to do.

This is only tangentially related to your story, but you reminded me of an old maths teacher who had a PhD in maths and once upon a time, had applied to work at an accounting firm. As part of the interview, he was told that he would have to sit a numeracy assessment. He responded “you do know I have a PhD in maths, right?”. They sympathised with his point but told him that everyone had to sit the test, as a matter of course.

So my maths teacher goes and sits their silly test, and he scores so well that they accuse him of cheating! I can only assume that this debacle broke him in some way, because it wasn’t long after this that he started teaching. It’s a particular kind of weirdo who has a PhD in a subject and decides to teach teenagers. He was probably one of the best teachers I ever had (I wonder if I can find contact information for him to tell him that)

I agree. I learned a lot of bioinformatics stuff from the ground up, because I was learning python at the time, and found it super useful as practice. Years later, I discovered https://rosalind.info/ and cursed the fact that I hadn’t had access to that when I was learning.

“I became sexually active at 26 after folks from the kink community noticed my nerdy vibe, and they schooled me in some basic human interaction.”

Solidarity fist bump. My own experience was somewhat different, but there is the common ground of learning communication skills on a lag, and learning from a niche community of lovely weirdos

Oooh, give me some of the words on your words list. I have one of my own, and accordingly, will share a random selection of recent entries: “that”; “nuisance”;“apotheosis”; “knobbly”; “vehement”; “perfidious”; “befitting”; “timid”; “verisimilitude”; “knack”.

During COVID, I had a mental breakdown when I finished a university exam (which had been at home, on my computer) and was desperate to be anywhere but at my desk, sitting at my computer. However, I was also desperate to decompress with my friends, but they were in my computer.

When the UK switched to using plastic for the denominations of money that come as notes (£5, £10, £20, £50), people who use cocaine found that the new, plastic notes had a tendency to cut or scratch their nose. Because the £5 notes were the first ones to be switched to plastic, and they have Winston Churchill on them, apparently this phenomenon was termed “being Winstoned”. E.g. “careful with that, you don’t want to be Winstoned”.

I have no other point to make, I just think that this is hilarious.

Do it.

At least the crippling depression isn’t mixed up with the wire. A functional organisation system isn’t a substitute for a will to live, but an inability to find the right tools would certainly not help

Edit: I am also extremely fine, and I am wishing us both all the best on that front; I hope that some day, you are able to be better than fine.

These guys are as bad as the terrorist group Palestine Action (sarcasm, directed at the fact that the proscribing of Palestine Action as a terrorist group happened in the same vote as this group; if an MP had wanted to vote to outlaw RIM but not Palestine Action, it would have been impossible to do so)

No sexy man companions? Psh. And they call us man haters

No, Anarchism is one of the approaches one can take when we acknowledge that there are bad actors, and that there is no magic method to make everyone get along. If there were such magic, there would be no need for Anarchism.

I appreciate that your title makes it clear that this is an old article. Certainly it’s still relevant, but going into the article with knowledge of its age calibrates my mindset

Iconic answer

I really like this. What style/script is it? I can’t place it amongst any of the scripts that I have learned (though to be fair, it has been a long while since I have done calligraphy)

I’m not saying that leeks are onions (though they are alliums, i.e. of the same family). To me, whilst they do taste quite different to onions, there is still a flavour that I would describe as onion-y

Related: Daniel Gritzer of Serious Eats explored different ways to mince garlic, finding that some methods significantly increased garlic’s pungency/strength (and also that long cooking methods negate much of this difference)

I’m curious about how far your onion dislike goes. For example, I recently cooked lohiketto, a Finnish salmon soup. It feels like a rare meal that doesn’t use onions (it’s basically leek, carrot, potatoes, cream, salmon and dill), but the leek sort of fills the role that onions usually would, albeit more delicately.

This quiz was stressful. Like, there were so many times when I knew I was being cued up for a trick question, but I still fell for it.

The most fucked up thing is that Grok does seem to have guardrails — except they’re geared towards preventing it from being “too woke”