But you are also right, the people with power aren't ever going to vote for that.

So I focus on my scale. I'm not here to change the world, I'm not here to run a campaign to change the world. I help a few dozen people, I talk about it openly but don't judge others for disagreeing.

And over time, people sometimes decide to get involved in their communities. I stopped charging rent because I read about someone else stopping charging rent. N-count of 2, but maybe someone will read what I did and stop charging rent and we'll go to n-count 3.

70 kilotonnes is roughly twice the tonnage of the nukes dropped on Japan, or roughly equal to the tonnage dropped by Germany on the UK (including during the Blitz and V2 rocket payloads).

One of my communities is farmers. Farmers get paid ~$7 for a bushel of grain (~50lbs). Those same grains can cost $5/lb at the grocery store. When I buy from the farmer, we've settled on a rate of $18/bushel, or <$0.50 per pound. I turn around and feed people for free with this. 50lbs of barley or wheat or whatever is an enormous amount of food, and $20 is a cost I can absorb every few months.

So, now two communities that I'm a part of benefit - the farmers earn more for their product, the hungry eat for free. The farmer community doesn't have to know the hungry community. And the only financial input is purchasing the grain for FAR less than retail, and without every middleman taking a cut.

Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread hypothesizes that if we gave the farmer everything they needed to farm and live comfortably, the farmer would give away the grain. If the grain was free, we'd have people make bread and feed others for free. (This part is at least partially true, because I know I do it, and I'm not the only one who does.)

People like making stuff. People like sharing.

I'm trying to find an in to a biodiesel community, to see if I cannot connect them as well, benefiting the farmer community and giving food and material to the biodiesel community. Haven't connected there yet.

Don't think of this as small town isolationism, but rather a distributed system of syndicates producing and sharing their excess with others who have a use for the excess. Makerspaces on a grand scale, with the resources of many, many people.

They've deployed white phosphorous. There are IDF soldiers on record saying they've shot children waiting in line for aid, because they drifted inches over the "do not step past this line" mark. Sde Teiman is a torture camp.

Hamas is evil, but you can fight evil without those things. I condemn Hamas, but "they did a war crime" is not a justification for total violence of any type as retribution.

And what about tolerance of settlers in the West Bank? The removal of journalists? The killing of aid workers? It's not just the Gaza Strip (though what's there is truly beyond the pale.)

Mutual aid is about building community and then sharing your excess with that community. My extra food is not going to random humans, but rather to people I know. Maybe not well, but we know each other. Charity goes out to strangers. You are giving something away, but not building community. Charity doesn't build resiliency, imo, the same way mutual aid does.

I eat the same food I'm serving alongside the people I'm feeding. This is precisely to build that community - I'm not just a faceless person, I'm someone they know.

And how do I cope with people taking more than their fair share? You accept inefficiency. I cannot tell you how many times I've watched someone take food, and immediately walk to the trash and throw it away. Feels bad, but I've got more to share, and because that's a member of my community and not a stranger I can ask them, "Hey, what's up, bud? Didn't like the food, or...?"

And when someone goes to take a huge pile of food, they often look around and realize, "Wait, all the other folks nearby need this food too. Maybe I'll just take a few, because I know who I'm leaving an empty table for."

But you know what? It's really pretty rare. I've seen it, usually when new people show up, or when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis, but whats much more common is people looking at each other and going, "You got enough, brother? Can you share? Sure, let me grab one for you."

You are accurately describing difficulties with charity, imo, though others might disagree with me on that of that. Add community to it, and the calculus changes quite substantially.

But I think theres multiple factors happening. One is scale. Millions of Palestinians are currently experiencing displacement, bombings, and settler colonialism.

Thats a large group of people. Multiple times the size of the Yazidi or Druze populations.

There's also the scale of the conflict and the weapons deployed. Israel deployed somewhere around 80,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza. Thats more explosives than were deployed in World War 2. Add in evidence of white phosphorus being deployed, and the scale of the devastation is newsworthy.

And I think access to communication is different, people care about what they can see. Footage of Gaza is readily available and terrible to behold.

Finally, and I'm not pleased about this one, I think many in the west excuse behavior of some countries because they have racist ideas about those countries. Like, many Americans probably expect developing nations to have atrocities, but then look at Israel and go, "I thought this was supposed to be a model democracy! We aren't supposed to do genocide!" (Of course this idea is nonsense, developed countries have done genocide many many times, but I think it does drive news cycles.)

Most people want to contribute, pay it forward, or give in their own way. Almost no one wants to do nothing to give back. (Usually, the people who do are the people who have been stepped on their whole lives, and by receiving aid it buys them a chance to rest. Once they've rested, they tend to help out where they can.)

I guess I'm going to believe my decades of lived experience with mutual aid over some stranger telling me things I've observed sustaining themselves are impossible.

No one made the claim this is the worse genocide ever. It does not need to rise to that bar to be a genocide. Your hyperbole is not a good faith effort to discuss the topic. And the whataboutism is a deflection. Genocide is bad everywhere it's occurring. Right now it's occurring in many places, one of which is within Israel/Palestine. If you believe it's also happening elsewhere, we should condemn those as well, not absolve the actions of Netanyahu.

One of the underpinning core beliefs of anarchist theory is "wellbeing for all". Every human deserves the best conditions we can collectively give each other, and we should all be working not for our individual enrichment, but for the enrichment of us all.

Some people genuinely believe that helping others get bigger quality of life is more important than helping themselves get rich. It's not impossible to believe that such a community, if it grew large enough, would extend that belief to spaces like factories and workforces.

I think it's possible to imagine a way in which a country could be delivered money and expertise to develop with no expectation of return on investment. (One needs only read conquest of bread to see I'm not alone in believing such a thing is mechanically possible.)

But I also agree it's vanishingly unlikely.

It's not new either. Sudan, Uyghers, Rohingya, Yazidi, Armenians, Hutus, Tutsi, Bengalis, Cambodians. The world has stood by and not intervened in many of these. Heck, Palantir just posted that they believe some cultures should be eliminated in the United States.

It's grim out there.

I don't think I ever said otherwise. FWIW I think cars are bad. Full stop. If they have to exist, electric cars appear to have fewer externalities.

Did I call anyone weird? Did I insinuate my opinion was somehow objectively better? I just have a different opinion than you on borders and immigration, and we're allowed to differ on opinions.

And the consequences are higher for the driver. You can insure an airbnb or trip. Are you going to pay for someone's legal fees when they get popped for being a drug mule?

It's really not difficult to shop large volume thongs without a giant car.