There is a lot of confusion/obfuscation about terms. A leader is someone who is good at bringing people together and motivating them to accomplish a task through interpersonal skills. Leadership describes those skills. Government officials are not necessarily leaders, they are above us in the involuntary hierarchy we were born into that we are compelled by force to keep living in. Some of those officials may display leadership traits from time to time but leadership does not involve coercion by definition.

Leadership involves mutual respect, sacrifice, and a lot of interpersonal skills like conflict resolution. A leader may be doing different type of work but they should be doing at least as much work as the people who choose to work under/follow them. If someone is just watching people work without contributing they are at best a supervisor, usually an active impediment, not a leader.

All groups and projects do not need assigned leaders of course. Direct democracy or group consensus is usually the best way but some things require big picture organization or split second decision making making a voluntary hierarchy necessary. Constructing a building needs at minimum someone who can help organize the work. A community militia in combat needs a chain of command or they will get slaughtered.

I'm having trouble organizing my thoughts but I hope you find this opinion useful.

Edit: Sorry for the edit but I just wanted to add that Dungeon Masters and Game Masters could be a good example of facilitators and leaders. A group trusts them to act fairly while making a fun time for the group. If they turn into a power hungry asshole who fakes rolls to "win" the group will usually ask them to return to being a player or ask them to find another group if it is bad enough.

I get that it isn't the exact same imperialist cancer but it is there and growing and will end up with similar results. Western imperialism in the 20th and 21st century is economic coercion backed by (primarily US) power projection. The Chinese lack the ability to project military power globally at this point but they have started to spread their economic hegemony to the global south. They are actively building up their naval power, thus improving their ability to project power globally. With the active abdication/eradication of US soft power by the Trump regime China has started to fill the void as any rational actor that wants to be a global superpower would. That is the imperialist cancer I maintain is growing in China, it is implemented in a different order and wears a different ideological cloak but the outcome will essentially the same. We'll know for sure in a decade or two.

As for surveillance, I understand why a nation state not aligned with western capitalism would feel the need to defend itself against the CIA and its ilk. I don't like it and don't agree with it on a moral level but intellectually I can understand why Cuba feels the need to have its security state. China's surveillance state is on a different level. The "Great Firewall" got thoroughly infiltrated by a group with state level capabilities and they published all of the exfil'd data. Just on a technical level the amount of effort from all sectors of the Chinese state (Academic, Military, Corporate, Intelligence) to restrict access to information is staggering. Their internal censorship is also above and beyond what can be reasonably be explained as hardening against CIA propaganda. We've seen corporate influenced algorithmic behavior modification over the last few years with the rise of "unalived" instead of killed or "PDF File" instead of pedophile. It is immaterial if there are any consequences beyond having a post deleted under their current internal censorship program, for most people the threat of getting a post deleted is enough to modify behavior and speech.

I've seen in a few places in this thread that the social credit score was a pilot program that has been discontinued. I don't trust governments and corps to be honest if there is data to be harvested but lets say they really did discontinue the program. I can all but guarantee you that a mountain of data was collected and is still being analyzed, the source code and infrastructure plans still exist, and any modifications to physical and digital infrastructure are still in place. Governments do not give up power or control willingly without a way to trivially undo the changes. There is still infrastructure from the FBI's Carnivore/Omnivore program in most ISPs and almost all the world's government are unwilling to move away from the legacy PSTN standards from the 70's because of the ease of SS7 based surveillance. The Chinese literally chose to use a variant with these vulnerabilities despite the opportunity to innovate a new secure standard.

Let's imagine a glorious future where China is the world's sole superpower. The world is living in a state socialist golden age. Now is the time to end the dictatorship of the proletariat and fulfill the promise of full communism. Based on all of human history what are the chances that the President for Life will make a speech to the Politburo dissolving the government, ordering the military to lay down their rifles and take up a factory or farming job, the political elite to leave their positions of wealth and privilege, and the state corp C-Suite to toss the factory keys to the nearest machinist on their way to their new life of working a collective farm? Governments and the craven ghouls who control them never give up power willingly. That is the fatal flaw of state socialism or for that matter any state. Human nature, especially the nature of humans that desire power over others, will almost always prevail over their espoused ideology when faced with the chance of losing their power and privilege.

I've met Adam Savage a few times in comic con meet and greets. He was very nice to me and seemed to really enjoy interacting with fans, that being said he was "on the clock" so I have no idea how he is privately. I always found those celebrity cults of personality weird as hell, at least people seem to be more aware of what a parasocial relationship is now.

Webrings/WoT is back! The crab/train of the internet is still the solution everyone falls back to.

Fucking r/jailbait existed and u/Spez was mod. The pedos have always been in charge of that dumpster fire of a site.

I don't get it either. The west is an imperialist death machine and capitalism is taking down the whole biosphere in its death throes. Instead of looking at China and seeing signs of the same authoritarian and imperialist cancer metastasizing in its government tankies stop at "they oppose the west" and give them a pass rather than realizing that their system is fundamentally compromised as well. If they believe a state is necessary to achieve what they consider true socialism then have some standards beyond "opposes the west" and stop hand waving the suicide nets at the Foxconn iPhone factory and the totally not concentration camps in Xinjiang. If anarchist theory involved caging people behind barbed wire, conducting mass censorship and surveillance, and allowing the existence of something so beyond the pale such as billionaires I would never have even considered it as an ideology much less a hill to die on.

From what I've seen Dogbert is really obsessed with the Chinese state to the point of ignoring the fundamental structural issues it has. Is the Chinese state better for the average citizen than the US, probably in a lot of metrics, but as everywhere it is heavily dependent on who you are and where you live.

I've done some reflashing of cellular modems and the best place for open source modem firmware I found was some Chinese language hacker communities and they didn't seem jazzed about the hoops they had to jump through to get to the clear net just to collaborate with the rest of the world. When information is restricted to that extent it is symptomatic of an extremely adversarial relationship between the government and its citizens.

What authoritarians of any stripe don't realize that by abdicating their autonomy to any state, no matter the color of the flag or what ideology it espouses, ends in one way repression and death. If there is an out group there is a high likely hood that even a true believer will find themselves in it at some point. There is a tendency for authoritarian structures like states and corps to justify their existence through a progress at any cost mentality. This is true for western capitalism as well as Soviet and Chinese implementations of socialism. Any cost may be Lake Karachay's ecosystem or the cultural extinction and enslavement of native people who live on land rich in rare earth minerals, it also means any citizen who becomes inconvenient to the state.

There is some disagreement between people who, for example, favor Proudhon versus those who favor Kropotkin over the ownership of personal tools that are involved in individual trade-craft. As with any ideology there are varying schools of thought but the common ideological baseline is that anything that requires capital investment should be collectively controlled and operated for the common good. A person's personal possessions including their home and tools required for self sufficiency are not considered "property" or a "means of production" by almost anyone.

A good real world example is the FOSS community, most of us would be quite vexed to say the least if someone started changing stuff on our personal computers but we also actively share our code, experience, and knowledge with the world for free. Same goes for the open hardware folks, permacomputing community, and the open research community.

The one of the largest problems with any state system or really any system that includes involuntary hierarchies is the decoupling of economics and morality. Power not only is a corrupting force but the people who want power over others tend to have the basest morality. Both western capitalism and the Chinese implementation of socialism are both perfectly happy destroying the environment, utilizing slave labor, and implementing surveillance states all in the name of "progress" and the continuation of a world order that primarily benefits an elite few while grinding billions under their boot heels.

I would caution against attributing altruistic motivations to the actions of nation states. The Spratly Islands are having their ecosystem trashed so the various powers can have a fucking dick measuring contest over imaginary lines on a map. So far a bunch of fishermen have been killed and irreplaceable coral reefs have been destroyed, all in service of building artificial islands for reasons that vary depending on the state actor.

Debt trap diplomacy is a problem with every large power including BRICS, the west is currently the biggest offender because the World Bank and the IMF has the implicit backing of US military power projection. It is easier to strong arm "client states" into onerous loan terms and "free trade zones" when there is the threat of their nation being labeled as "supporting terrorism" and have a carrier battle group off shore within days.

I have no reason to doubt that once that BRICS has the ability to project power, basically whenever China has several modern carrier battle groups, they won't operate any differently than the west does now. The flag and justification will be different but the global south will continue to be exploited.

It's pure exploitation by the state of the ignorance and naivety of the average recruit as well as the capitalist system weaponizing its own failings. Most people in my boot camp platoon were under 20 and the vast majority of us came from disadvantaged backgrounds. I didn't know the term at the time but most people joined for the hope of class mobility along with getting the fuck out of wherever they came from. It also showed the strength of the US propaganda machine, especially in the immediate wake of 9/11, where the media was complicit in a massive coverup of US/ISAF atrocities and a whitewashing of the savage inhuman brutality that is implicit in war.

That does not excuse our ignorance since millions of people our age marched against the wars, especially Iraq. In retrospect we unconsciously chose cowardice and selfishness and cloaked it in a delusion of honorable sacrifice.

Former Marine here. This illustrates the prevailing excuse endemic to the whole imperialist war machine. Every bloody cog has some way of passing blame up the chain. I fixed electronics so I never had to personally pull a trigger but the electronics I fixed helped fix aircraft whose pilots and aircrew were responsible for atrocities I can only imagine. I used to rationalize that this separation erased my culpability but now I understand it actually enhanced it. At the level of maintenance I was at a broken twidgit tip unaccounted for could ground an entire air wing for several days.

If you have made the massive mistake of joining the military please use your power of being a rusty cog. Report every chip on every tool to maintenance control, send every piece of gear missing a screw or emp braiding in for parts/DRMO don't run to the hardware store for a quick replacement, CDI time is valuable and limited so make sure to never skip a CDI verification step and ask for their opinion on every anomalous reading, if you drop a torque wrench or break a cal seal ground that gear and send it back to the shop, take your time and verify every measurement, don't gundeck MAFs, and follow all procedures to the letter. Don't be afraid to involve maintenance control to make sure your shop is fully compliant and not taking shortcuts. If you had just sat on your rack and refused to work you would just get replaced, now you have weaponized the regulations and bureaucracy in a way that covers your ass for the rest of your enlistment while crippling the whole air wing. You can now get out and try to make amends for the catastrophic damage you have done to the world. However if you reenlist fucking die in a fire.

I regret every day that I joined and wish I was aware of the evil the system I was a part of was perpetrating. The few times I talk about my time in the Marines in the last few years is to warn people about how fucked up it is, how they brainwash and strip the individuality from recruits, and most importantly the reality of what the US Military does to innocent people all over the world and the environment.