781–790 of 839 posts
What is behaving in a reasonable fashion most of the time when there are anarchist terrorist attacks?
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Tons of crimes meaningfully cross geographic boundaries. > in the same way that we don't see Uber and Lyft shooting each other up. Do I need to point out the obvious here? Uber and Lyft are subject to whatever states they operate in, including those police forces. The ancap police forces you're talking about would be subject to...what, exactly?
> Do I need to point out the obvious here? Uber and Lyft are subject to whatever states they operate in, including those police forces. Would you still give Uber money if they were shooting up Lyft? > The ancap police forces you're talking about would be subject to...what, exactly? The voluntary support of their subscribers.
In the current context, no.
If street wars between rival ride sharing companies was the norm, then sure, maybe, along with everyone else. People are remarkably flexible when it comes to necessities.
Cabbies have been known to be racist as hell to black people for a long time, that didn't stop non-black people from taking taxis.
> The voluntary support of their subscribers.
Ah yes, and if they abuse others I'm sure their subscribers will withdraw their support, of course.
Curious, what's the ancap version of something like CPS?
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I tend to agree. Psychopaths are an unsolvable problem. People like them is “why we can’t have nice things”. If it weren’t for psychopaths we would not need passwords or encrypted passwords or security protocols, etc, etc., because everyone would behave in good fashion. But we don’t so we can’t.
That said, locking people in cages, treating them with inhumanity and violence, then releasing them into a world where they now have a harder time functioning in society and finding legitimate work doesn’t sound like a genius plan to solve psychopaths.
> Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. This can sound reasonable when you think of it in terms of, " most people behaving in a reasonable fashion, most of the time". But anarchists don't want to eliminate hierarchical use of force for most cases, but for all of them. Any time I've heard…
The interesting part is the reverse: If you believe that most humans aren't capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion, why would have a system were these people can be set up into a position of power over other people ? Which seems contrieved, but ... gestures broadly at everything, everytime, everywhere .
Social power isn't something that can be created or destroyed, only redistributed and restructured. The point of government is to hopefully structure it in a way that funnels people's collective and individual desires towards useful efforts and impulses.
In any case, I think that most people have a baseline level of reasonableness for most situations. But it's useful to have government to handle the various edge cases, and define certain expectations.
More cynically, if some assholes are gonna have power over others one way or another, it's better if said assholes are in a relatively transparent democratic system, rather than just, like, warlords.
Really, the most basic criticism I have of anarchism is that it doesn't seem capable of meaningfully sustaining itself in the long term as a larger state-equivalent community. The most famous example anarchists seem to bring up is anarchist Spain, which doesn't inspire confidence in the ideology's ability to last more than a year or two if other state actors look at it the wrong way.
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> would be full of people willing to throw that all away People do things for their own benefit, and for the benefit of others, all the time. For example, is everyone going to disown their friends and family, all for some nebulous concept of society? No, I don't think so. I think that many people's friends and family will be perfectly willing to continue to interact with someone who disagrees with the current state o…
>For example, is everyone going to disown their friends and family, all for some nebulous concept of society This isn't "some nebulous concept of society," this is the community that you have chosen to be a part of and are in control of. You say that you wouldn't abandon a family member, but what they are doing is akin to standing up and with a clear mind stating "I don't consider you family and want nothing to do wi…
Not everyone in the US lives in some 100 person small town "community". Instead, many people live in cities that have hundreds of thousands of people in it.
> That is what "rejecting society" entails. You would not still blindly support that person.
People absolutely still continue to support family members, all the time, even when they do "bad" things. It is extremely common. People care a lot about family. Yes, many people would absolutely still support them. I absolutely would continue to support them, as would many others.
And there is nothing that you could do to stop me from helping them, unless you are going to do something very impractical, like exile everyone who supports their friends and family as well.
> These people chose not to have access to food.
Doesn't matter. There would still be people who disagree with you, and would consider them to be disadvantaged, regardless of your opinion on the matter.
> they can't stay in the community if they won't be a member of it.
Of course they could still be in the community. They could still be in the community if they have friends and family who would be willing to support them. Which there definitely could be! People such as myself would absolutely continue to support my friends and family, even if they did this.
> Yes, some people will disagree. They can build their own society and we can coexist.
Or, they can continue to live in the same place as you do, and continue to support individuals who "reject" society.
> . Similarly, the punishment for someone harboring such an individual isn't my decision, it's something the community decides based on the circumstances.
Ok, and I am saying that people attempting to enforce punishment on every individual who harbors a friend or family member is going to be extremely impractical.
There are numerous motivations and reasons for someone to "harbor" others, and this "society" that you are talking about would require a near unanimous agreement on everything, which just isnt going to happen.
Instead, there would be a sizeable minority of people, who would continue to work with their friends and family. Why? Because thats what happens all of the time, in real life. People, all the time, continue to support their friends and family, even when they have done bad things.
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If you're an anarcho-capitalist, that's cool and interesting, but I think it's quite distinct from the more left-wing forms of anarchism people usually talk about (that revolve around self-organizing democratic cooperatives). I actually like a lot of things about Freidman's work, but I don't think it would actually function. The issue is that at the end of the day it's still just armed gangs living in tension with ea…
You make an interesting point, I don't think we'll ever find out without trying! I think a central corruptible government is key to have massive corporations, I would expect the market not to be as centralised if starting a company were easier and if we didn't have regulations. In case I'm wrong and we end up with a few massive competing law enforcement agencies, I still think it would be an improvement over the curr…
No, they have an incentive to consolidate control over territory and eliminate competition. Those that 'do their job' will be outcompeted by those who simply conquer. There is no need to 'do your job' to get profits when you can just take physical power over the customer and take their money, take their house, enslave them as workers or sex slaves, etc.
The point is that these law agencies you're talking about quickly just become de facto governments (armed gangs with monopolies on violence). It would happen basically instantly.
Then we're back where we started, but without any of the gains we made since 1792.
> Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. This can sound reasonable when you think of it in terms of, " most people behaving in a reasonable fashion, most of the time". But anarchists don't want to eliminate hierarchical use of force for most cases, but for all of them. Any time I've heard…
I just don't think this is true of humans. The good of is treat the ones close well but really don't treat distant people well. We are tribal by nature. Modern governments help restrain us from forming tribal lines and going to war with each other.
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> when there isn't those built hierarchies bad/selfish people don't amass power so everyone else can actually handle them on equal terms. This doesn't really ring true to me. In a society where hierarchy is removed, the bad people will form a hierarchy to create power. It being "not allowed" in that society doesn't mean it won't still happen, due again to the people being "bad" in the first place. Two bad people will…
This is the problem with much of the spectrum of political rhetoric in America, they're almost all somehow unrealistic in their basic, shared presumption of a world without some over-determining Other (a black box concept that is somehow causal of all social woes) is the goal: feminists, a world without patriarchy, anarchists, a world without hierarchy, Nazis and White Supremacists, a world without racial degeneratio…
I mean, you can essentially formulate any world view that takes any clearcut stance into the in-group and out-group dynamic. People who are pro democracy are looking for a world without oligarchy/monarchy, making those who want to consolidate power around a few people as the out group. Etc..
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On the contrary - mad fantasy is to think humans as they behave today is how they will always behave in the future. Humans used to roam around Africa and forage for food in tribes. Now I can reply to you, from another continent perhaps, by tapping my fingers on a tablet. To think humans will ever stop dreaming about more equitable systems of organization, and how to implement them, that truly is mad fantasy to me.
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AFAIK anarchy is not the abolition of the use of force, but rather the lack of a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. The federalist papers spend a bit of time debating inevitable rise of factions and pluralism without a dominant faction ordained by the people.
In less time than it takes to read those papers, a tyranny would rise in place of whatever power it succeeds, and that would be insurmountable monopoly. Imagine the American government disbanding. The kingpins would be Silicon Valley and other West Coast Tech executives because of the sheer convenience afforded by us depending on their hardware (their ideas too) for most communication. People would adapt over time, b…
What you would get then is not a society that had evolved into anarchy by a natural process, and therefore had institutions appropriate to such a society. (Yes, a society that is a functioning anarchy will still have institutions. But none of them will have a monopoly on violence.)
What you would get instead would be a society that had evolved with a hierarchical set of centralized governments, which was then forcibly deprived of those governments, without restructuring all of the other institutions in the society that only exist in the first place because the society had centralized governments. Obviously this will be worse than either what we have now, or what we would have if we lived in a society that evolved into anarchy by a natural process. But that is irrelevant to the question of whether a society that evolved into anarchy by a natural process could be better than what we have now.