This is a great read! Thank you!

If I’m physically safe, I think between 8 and 10 depending on my energy level. If I’m threatened or hurt in a fight, still up to 8 at least. We can love our enemies and still fight them with all the force necessary (but no more).

Often this “evil” like hate is born out of fear or some other vulnerability so you can find the underlying emotion and emphasize with that instead. Oh the other hand, what I find really hard to emphasize with in people with fascist viewpoints is their lack of empathy. Like when they are not acting out of being afraid or hurt or anything, just really clinging to privilege and being indifferent towards racialized people.

That’s ridiculous! Falangists practically invented fascism.

Okay, but how does this relate to the meme about prison population?

Yes, but there are bosses right now. And they would still be very powerful, even if they lost control of the state. They don’t care about what’s best for everyone. They care about what’s best for them. They would still control all those machines, institutions, money, private armies, the media and they would have the total support of all the capitalist militaries of the world, ready to come in and completely crush horizontal power and suppress mutualism. So the class of bosses wouldn’t magically disappear over night.

If people organized (either “horizontally” or otherwise) to form some thing, some kind of organization or institution or loose federation of grassroots cooperatives or whatever you want to call it, that would be able to suppress this boss class and their military and everything. That thing would be what marxist leninists call a state by definition. Because when we talk about a state, we mean nothing more or less than a weapon able to force the will of one class upon another. Even if that will is just:“stop forcing your will on us non-bosses”. How horizontal it is internally dosn’t matter at all for the definition of a state.

Not at all. The Spanish revolutionaries were communists. Some in the communist party, but even the Spanish anarchists called what they fought for “libertarian communism”.

I’m happy for you and your dad but you say

“Sometimes I wish you were still Republican, so I’d have someone to yell at.”

as if there weren’t still plenty of very good reasons to yell at Democrats…