Authoritarians really suck at running countries! Something about an individual or small group with no expertise and a violent hatred of constructive criticism making arbitrary decisions doesn't seem to work out.

I don't like command economies but they can work. The USSR made the mistake of basing a lot of their government, academia, and economy principally on ideological purity. For example the collective farms should have taken decades to implement with regional studies, test farms, and slow conversion of the existing farming infrastructure to collective farms. Move fast and break things does not work in agriculture and other critical infrastructure. If the Soviets (especially during Stalin's time) had done their command economy differently they probably would have had a lot less famines early on.

Of course! Look at the sidebar though it is explicitly anarchist. I'm not an admin or mod, just some asshole, personally if someone is not an authoritarian and is anti capitalist we have a lot of common interests but have some ideological differences that can wait until fucking literal fascism and other forms of authoritarianism and done and dusted.

I'm an anarchist but I started as a far left libertarian. I wanted a small government that mainly administered a comprehensive social safety net, defended the environment, reined in corps, and kept up a small armed force to defend against invasion and maybe participate in UN anti-genocide missions. I found the book Post-Scarcity Anarchism and bought it on a whim which led me to Mutual Aid and I realized everything I thought a state had to do could be accomplished by the destruction of involuntary hierarchies, abolition of capitol, moving away from progress for progress's sake, replacing the army and police with voluntary community militias with strong community oversight, and an emphasis of living with nature than extracting everything possible from it. My views have continued to be refined and evolve but that was the gist of it.

Not to answer for them but DBZer0 is an explicitly anarchist server, in my experience most users fall into the bottom left side of the political compass.

The Soviets were at the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" part of communism the whole time, except instead of the proletariat there was an inner circle commanding a giant bureaucracy filled with people who were not chosen because they were good at their jobs but because they ticked ideological boxes. The collective farming system was also implemented without studying what the communities were already doing by people who didn't know how to farm and only cared about looking ideologically correct to their superiors. Hence failed crops and ideologically based taxes that literally took more than what was produced. Authoritarian regimes, especially total dictatorships, are usually quite ineffective at governing or providing for the general welfare outside of the few places where a command economy actually is a workable solution.

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.

Here is a pdf on the Anarchist Library. Unless you want to be really dogmatic about theory you don't need to study all of it. I like to read through a book of theory as my weekly book every month or two to better understand other ideas and see if there is anything I could add to my personal philosophy.

The question is what do you want government to do? There are non-state/non-corp solutions for every necessary function. Without the need for a profit motive or "progress for progress's sake" a lot of jobs would not need to even exist or could be automated or done by piloted robots. We don't need a $1T military if we are not trying to invade the world, active community militias and communally built defenses would make invasion more trouble than it is worth. A good book to read is Murray Bookchin's Post-Scarcity Anarchism. It builds off Kropotkin's Mutual Aid and factors in environmentalism and modern technology.

There is a cocktail version of this book as well!

I was always into punk music but I got heavily addicted to meth and in desperation made the grave mistake of joining the Marines to hit the reset button on my life. Luckily I fixed electronics so I never had to serve in a war zone or fire a shot in anger but the aircraft I supported ended up doing horrific atrocities when they deployed so my hands are far from clean. When I was in Okinawa I came to the realization on how expendable every person is when it comes to the state. We would poison the ground we lived on because in the end it will be the Japanese equivalent of a Superfund Site and the military could not give less of a shit if we all got cancer along the way. After I got out I found the band Behind Enemy Lines and started reading about the SoA, CIA involvement in the Argentinian Dirty War, and fell down a rabbit hole. I found the book Post Scarcity Anarchism by Muray Bookchin randomly at a bookstore and starting reading a lot more theory. Now I fall on the Bookchinish side of anarcho-communism.

Those are the three metrics the government reports on that Trump likes to brag about the most. The fourth is stock market gains but those are primarily reported by the markets themselves. If there was any way to spin the numbers in a positive way they would have shit something out, even if they could somehow only show even a lessening of a negative trend they can say started (rightly or wrongly) under Biden.

I moved from California to the midwest a few years ago and I barely see any MAGA or Trump flags anymore where they used to be quite common. At least in my area the cult is getting much less visible as the economic situation worsens. I went to the last "No Kings" protest to check it out and see if my rayhunter could detect anything. There were several hundred people there in my small town and a lot of them were former Trump voters who were fucking pissed. I think you are underestimating the damage official confirmation of how fucked the economy is would be to his narcissistic ego and the elect-ability of Republicans in general.