Post #4317562

@iro_miya@mk.absturztau.be the single most reliable approach I've found, which basically always works if someone is reasonably aligned on ethics and worldviews (doesn't have to be perfect, even pro-police stances are not necessarily an obstacle), is to talk about anarchism in depth *without ever actually calling it anarchism* like literally, just don't use the word. no "anarchy", "anarchism" or "anarchist" anywhere in the conversation. none of the anarchism-specific (or even socialist) jargon. just describing all of its components as free-standing ideas that don't have a particular label attached, but rather are just your views after a couple hours of conversation, you can mention "oh yeah this is what anarchism is about" and it'll just... pass by, as a casual remark, registered and accepted, nothing to argue about. because they've absorbed the meaning before there was ever room for a 'gut response' associated with the label and then after that point you can start generalizing by drawing a distinction between what's fundamental to anarchism and which bits were just your particular interpretation or preference for it, and it'll just be another completely uncontroversial conversation topic that people are interested in learning more about it requires a fair amount of patience to get through all of this, because it's likely to rapidly spiral into exploring half of anarchist theory, but IME conversations in this format tend to be very low-conflict (also preferably don't start with 'abolishing the police', rather let the conversation naturally flow to the question of fundamentally oppressive structures first, and only after that is understood and agreed, demonstrate how police ticks all the boxes and has the same problems and so therefore logically is a case of it - starting with 'abolish the police' as a premise is likely to upset people because they feel threatened about being 'without protection' as they do not yet have any concept of how else safety could be produced and so intuitively assume there is none)