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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Congratulations, you missed any notion of nuance and scale in my original comment. A community is indeed much larger than a single commune, in much the same way a village is bigger than a farm.

    If a given commune’s members move to another commune, nothing is truly lost. The original commune is down to the two who hate eachother, or one will screw up enough to get forced out before that happens, so what? Eventually, new members will show, or nearby communes will take on the work and any resources no longer being utilized.

    Meanwhile, you’re insisting the whole setup requires twenty or so people, hell-bent on being insular and self-sustaining(near impossibilities for long-term survival in Western countries - the Feds will come calling), all under the same roof. These are ALL notions I rejected in my initial comment. A commune, and/or a community composed of communes and individuals/infrastructure hosting multiple communes, is more than a glorified polycule or a cult.

    Don’t look to me to defend the effigy you’ve decided to burn in your head. If you read my other comments, I’ve made clear that my own preference is to avoid en-meshing myself in any potentially dysfunctional, singular commune.

    If we’re going to extremes, I prefer the Beduins or Travellers to the setups you’re concerned with “disproving” or whatever. Even though I called it a lazy example on my part, there’s good reason I mentioned the Amish originally, and not the Branch Davidians or all the FLDS drama you can watch on TV. If you’re so concerned about Jonestown, stop pretending that’s the only setup out there, or that glorified polygamy with religious overtones is what people want from a commune.


  • Communities shouldn’t be able to fail like so. Your average stand-alone commune doesn’t get that much bigger than a family-farm. The idea that everyone should have to lock-in to such an arrangement is kind-of toxic.

    Don’t approach the problems you’re talking about from the perspective of a serf.

    EDIT: On reading your link, you’ve hit upon precisely why I wouldn’t encourage too deep an integration between artisans and single communes. Everyone in the commune should know how to make their commune work and who do go to outside the commune when specific tools or expertise are needed beyond their commune’s residents.

    No one person in a commune should be irreplacable or capable of taking the whole thing down in a way that prevents residents from being able to just up and leave.


  • Honestly, almost any job I’ve been hired for has involved a hand-delivered resume(or paper application, when I first started out). Applying after the interview was basically an afterthought.

    The more time goes on with shady hiring agencies and clueless HR departments, and then the automated processing that was messing this up long before the AI slop, the more it seems we’re heading back towards paper resumes and in-person first-contact.

    Then there’s the fact there were always people you could pay to polish your resume. In that regard, AI has kind-of levelled the playing-field for job-hunters.




  • Eh. If you’re shopping local strictly for health benefits, you’re doing it wrong. Reduced transportation costs still has an important environmental effect, the money helps the local economy, and there are just so damn many fresh products that can’t be obtained any other way(fresh milk and un-bleached, un-washed Eggs, for starters).





  • Like I said, it was a lazy example on my part, but the medical care issue is both a failure of society at large, and an issue of triage that remains even in countries that provide free healthcare.

    Yes, the male-only voting is its own issue, but whether its them or healthcare professionals alone deciding, privacy issues will prevent such decisions from being entirely fair, transparent, or democratic in almost any setup.

    Personally, I’m only so hung-up on privacy as it takes to keep me out of prison, and even that’s still broadly negotiable, but I’m not one to pry or pretend my priorities are for everyone.



  • They work best and are most resilient as networks of smaller farms, co-ops, and communities.

    Anyone saying they can’t last or support the elderly is ignoring the Amish(among others, but I went with the the first too-big-to-ignore and surviving example that came to mind), and so long as they can support and raise children and young adults, they pass muster vs historical societies in ways that un-bridled capitalism flat-out doesn’t. Same goes for the length of time a given commune lasts - individual farms and villages that last centuries without moving or significant change were far from the rule throughout history and pre-history.

    You need semi-independent artisans and experts at the periphery(well, between individual communes, and able to form external/transactional/distant trade/relationships) as an interface and buffer, and even seasonal assistance for things like harvests - scale requires diversification and organic trade/distribution - but for some reason popular imagination all-but-stops at stalinism/maoism vs individual farms.

    The whole notion that its a pipe-dream if it can’t scale the same at all levels and from one end of the earth to the other is an unreasonable goalpost used to justify power grabs and the status quo.