Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)

Most laws govern interaction between two or more people, how exactly are you going to have that work with privately selected sets of laws? Is everyone going to have a little glowing icon above their head so I know what agency I'm dealing with? For N law sets, will we have N * N law set combinations when people from two different law sets interact? What about if there's three or four or five different ones at once?

I agree somewhat, but sadly I think it's stuff of decades maybe hundreds of years for culture & language to go and take more root, here in Brazil there was already a phenomenon of very close information control, semi-monopolies in communication, so, you know, the instrumentation of ignorance & misinformation here found veeeery fertile soil, people lost their shit.. I'm kinda into stoicism too so it's like "yeah you can't force ppl and getting stuff is complex so it's slow", and yes I'm into "persuading", I'd call it "communication" instead though, add to that you'll probably have less 'communication power' than the opposing forces for long periods if not always.. so, it's an spectacular challenge

> The second you mentioned 'boomers', you mentioned what is very specifically an American phenomenon.

I used boomer as a shorthand for "person rooted in the old ways" all over the world, not just US older citizens.

> Of course, like every other generation since, for thousands and thousands of years, once they aged they became just like those they wanted to replace.

Yes, they both sold out and are watching from the bleachers as things get progressively worse (rate of home ownership, food stamp usage, life expectancy). Don't tell me what they did in their early teens/twenties absolves them from criticism.

> However, what you are suggesting is that people will simply "all get along".

OK, this response has put me firmly in the "you need to really read about anarchism a bit, bbarnett" camp. Anarchism doesn't magically will away human tendencies to lie, cheat and want to have power over others. It simply turns the tables on illegitimate authority.

A 2 min browse over Wikipedia could have netted you:

"anarchists are opposed to irrational (e.g., illegitimate) authority, in other words, hierarchy – hierarchy being the institutionalization of authority within a society."

For anarchists, the centralization of political power is the cause of cronyism and ineffective representative democracy. Practical solutions include decentralization and strengthening of local power. As for police work, community policing and other proposals are part of anarchist manifestos.

It doesn't take a genius to realize democracy as it stands today has failed us. Stricter gun control, for example, is something the overwhelming majority of US voters want and yet it will probably never be enacted. The problem is centralization, the problem is authority without legitimacy. Anarchism doesn't want to abolish the rule of law, it aims to humanize it.

It has nothing to do with a mythical need to change human nature - in fact, it gels with it much more than the current status quo. Of course, like socialism, the word has been tainted over the years. But before you criticize it further as a "mad fantasy", you should probably know what it is you're criticizing. This is a good book to get you started https://www.amazon.com/Fragments-Anarchist-Anthropology-Para...

We have power enforced without any of kind of consent. We get to vote for our rulers, and ~half of us get ignored any given period. There's no consent there.

Your example of murderers just reinforce that you don't understand the ideology you're arguing against, and opt for arguing against strawmen instead.

You can have people opting out easily without the extremes you suggest. E.g. a murderer can not reasonably "opt out" because they "opted in" the moment they engaged with someone else without their consent.

Again the key is consent, bottom up organisation and voluntary association, not relinquishing all means of protection.

A more reasonable example would be that it is coercive to deny others the freedom to choose what they ingest. Even if it's drugs you don't like. If you want to organise on a small scale a drug free commune, that'd be reasonable. If you try to expand that to a country, it becomes coercive and unjust be nature of forcing massive upheavals of peoples lives, and enforced monopolies over large swathes of land if they don't want to live like that.

Which brings us to this:

> What do you think countries are?

Structures I have no ability to withhold consent from without uprooting my life and/or subjecting myself to another, which unjustly claim monopoly on power over large parts of land. Reject property rights, and by extension territorial claims of states comes part and parcel with all left-libertarian ideologies.

The coercive nature of the relationship means there's a power balance that precludes any reasonable claim of consent.

This highlights the typical left/right view of de facto rights vs. de jure rights. The ability to leave a country confers me de jure rights to extricate myself from the rule of a given state. But de facto I have no ability to find anywhere that provides the freedoms I want, because nowhere exist where they are available. A right wing view is that the existence of the de jure right means I am free. The left wing view is that the de facto barriers to achieving the goal means that I am oppressed, because real world abilities trump theoretical possibilities any day.

> It's clear there's no point in debating this.

Well, if it's not worth discussing, I'll leave you to wallow in your ignorance. It's clear your mind is made up.

> Most major change has come through protest and people rising up, nothing as naive as what you suggest here.

Perhaps, but the converse isn't true, and the converse is what's more relevant to this discussion.