Asking the Commune for Permission to Get Pregante 

We, on the other hand (my husband, my spouse, and myself) live in our own house in Renton, which is just southwest of Seattle, and we have a nice little triangular piece of property with lots of room for the greyhounds to run and a big garden (with the greyhounds fenced out, because they will eat everything). We even have a swingset made big enough for adults to swing on. And a hot tub, though that one is dying and needs replaced, but I'm sure we'll get a new one before too long. Anyway, I am disabled with major fatigue and chronic pain and so I don't do much with the gardening or anything, but my spice have done fantastically with it, and we get way more veggies and fruits from our trees than we can even use, so we're always giving things away. A friend brought meds last week because we have all been down with Covid here, and in return raided the garden and brought home enough for themselves and their neighbors. We can a lot of the fruit so it lasts all year, too.

How do people get into these places? I'm a trans enby "nyanarchist." I live in isolation on disability benefits with autism but I'm a hard worker. I have years of prepper survivalist experience and was a blue collar worker in carpentry etc. but it's gotten too dangerous and hard to get back into the workforce anymore. I had most of my stuff stolen and lost too. now I'm just stuck in a situation where, after being on the streets for awhile, I ended up stuck in smalltown midwest where my queerness is not generally accepted and all my money goes to rent. (Though a few people get it and are at least happy to coexist and like that I carry myself with an anti-authoritarian vibe and confidence. But they're also poor and ostracized so it's like all the cool people are stuck with all of our money going to rent.)

Honestly, if you can’t build community ethically and compassionately, the project is a failure. Any system has practical limits, but sacrifices should be geared to filling human needs, not ruthless efficiency.

I also got to show one of the kids that trans people exist. I am nonbinary and switched gender presentations at a later point (after the house fell apart but we still lived in the same town and hung out). He didn't recognize me and asked who I was, I said my name was X and that I used to be Y. His eyes lit up, "You can do that?!?" He got to start blockers in 5th grade and graduated high school a couple years ago. His sibling also came out as nonbinary recently, but I don't think I had a hand in that. I was 16 when I had the "You can do that?!?" reaction and came out (I'm now 40, I lived with them in my early 20s). So it's good for kids to have supportive environments where they are free of judgment and can live how they want to. It's really good to give kids both the security of family and diversity of experience with a wide variety of people. There's fears about raising kids in communes, some cults were horrific. But if it's a healthy environment, it's a very good experience for them.

The age old problem with parents wanting more control over their kids.

Depends on what you mean by "non-conformer". A good community would also have the means and the will to remove those who go a wee bit beyond the nebulous whitewashed "non-conforming". Say the commune is built as a queer sanctuary, so far so good. Then a Keffals or a Poppy and Zena seeks a shelter in it. OK, so far still good, but then the Keffals and/or Poppy and Zena start doing themselves and are entirely impervious to being reasoned with, all while due to the nature of their social and emotional malfunctions they cannot be rendered harmless within the community either. There are really two paths from there forwards, you either remove them from your society or they will remove the egalitarian socially cohesive community by either overtaking or destroying it. Some anarchists fixate on abolishing punitive justice, prisons and so on, but then ironically enough conflate punitive with the fact that some sort of violent justice will have to remain in case of hopefully rare contingencies. So, few months down the line with a Keffals on your hands, if you want your community to survive her, you have few effective options, some of which might be punitive (let's write those off without even considering them, as is ethical and moral to do) but none are non-violent. The least violent one would be to give her a months provisions and send her into the wild, and give a credible threat to fire on sight if she ever returns or approaches the buffer perimeter zone. Should also be noted, the least violent violent solution can also end up being you just throwing an armed hand grenade into someone else's lap, unless you have an inter-community communication network and are able to warn other regional communities to send her away on arrival as well.

@@AnEntropyFan My point is the imperative for a community to make room for diversity or variance. Without that and peaceful conflict resolution, it’s hard to see viability. Community is a sustainable network that meets members’ human needs. Human needs, however, shouldn’t necessarily be reduced to material needs. *None of this means anything goes.* If I seem hesitant to get granular, it’s because I don’t want to miss the forest for the trees.

@@Ian_Jules Well, of course, agreed. You want room for diversity and variance, objection, agitation and obtuseness as well; unless you're running a cult... I mean, cults can be viable, they are just not a good thing. Arsehole and dysfunctional/toxic still ought to be separated from predatory and power-hungry. With the former you can work with, while the latter you must not.

I'm familiar with it, my understanding is that it has less to do with who literally owns the land and more to do with working with indigenous groups to preserve ecosystems, which I would be willing to do if I owned enough land that it made a difference. I would like to build a pond if there isn't one on my land to raise the water table anyway to ensure the area has moisture even during dry seasons

That would be fucked

Was just throwin' out numbers

but also vertical farming tho

@@LuxanderReal I get that but with 50 people there should be much more land and much larger projects to take on. Living on your own small homestead is radically different from a larger scale village commune with consensus or participatory democracy. Idk, I felt like you were casting communal living over harshly. Mostly a teasing comment though.

Yeah this wasn't really a prepared segment, mostly me talking about how I'm too selfish to live communally lol

@@LuxanderReal Oh, I see okie