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Agreed. The problem is that you can't have discussion with anarchists. Whenever you ask them to explain their views, their underwear gets wrapped up in a ball.
As I said to oddball before he broke down crying that he wants to be a mod again was so completely genuine. If he could explain to me convincingly how the government I still want could actually work in anarchy, he could convince me. I HATE government.
But he's so busy licking his wounds that he can't do it. Then again, other anarchists can't either. That's why I keep comparing them to Marxists. They are 100% ideology and 0% real world.
I'm a libertarian because I'm 100% real world. Government sucks. But there are problems I can't see solved any other way. We need a military, police, civil and criminal courts, roads, recognition of property rights and management of limited resources.
But every time I ask an anarchist what their solution is other than government, they just melt down. It's pathetic.
Oddball is a typical leftist. To question his views is a personal insult to him. No, it's not, not at all. He needs to buy a dictionary and look up "personal"
Once again, you expect certainty of outcome in an uncertain world...You're talking and acting just like the statist educrats who refuse to privatize the schools, because nobody can say with absolute certainty that the sainted pooooor, won't get an education, as though they're getting one right now.
And speaking of certainty of outcome...Say we shrink The State back to terms that meet with your approval...What's YOUR guarantee that it won't grow back to the same unruly mob, or worse, that we have today?
I have nothing to defend...I'm not arguing to maintain the most destructive and murderous entity in the entirety of human history, you are....Your argument boils down to a variation of that used by the southern plantation owners, who claimed that the slaves were too stupid to know what to do with their new found freedom, and anyone who can't prove you wrong (i.e. prove a negative) can just just up.I *grew* to reject the presumed authority of The State...It's not me who has anything to defend, that task belongs to the statist.Straight up though, I'm disappointed. Something happened to you since you were here. I'm not sure why you can't defend anarchy, but it's not up to me, is it?
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If you can't defend, discuss and explain anarchy in your own words, then your words are hollow. I was interested in a discussion. You're not defending shit about your views. You're no different than all the useless Democrats on the site who just keep flipping their positions based on who's in power.
My offer to actually discuss stands. But you're going to have to pull the stick out of your ass and actually start answering questions and discussing the topic
You can call me what you will, but that simple dynamic remains.
I'm not interested in your insults, statist.I'm not a Libertarian, never have been.
You shouldn't have come back. You're just embarrassing yourself. You used to be somebody to a lot of people. Now you're just a shell. I can't believe a website took your manhood away. Maybe they didn't and it was something else.
So tell me one thing if you're capable. Why are you not capable of discussing your views? What about that scares you so much?
History has shown that your model is doomed to self destruct. Once you create a government, it grows until it consumes all of society. The only permanent solution is to keep government out of the equation.The State refuses to stay in its box, be it federal state, local, or even the local school board...The historical examples of this are too numerous to mention.I reject anarchy as the most savage/cruel system as nobody has any rights, nor is there respect for anybody's rights.
I like a lot of the Libertarian (big "L") but it is too much government control over individual choice and too authoritarian for me to embrace it fully. For instance their most recent presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, who I know personally and like as a person very much, would have us have open borders and rescind all laws re recreational drugs. And he would make religious convictions illegal to consider in matters of government policy at all levels. It is that kind of lack of understanding of American values that keeps Libertarians from having much success at the ballot box.
So I embrace classical liberalism aka libertarianism (little "L") neither of which are on the choices DP offers for ideology. I identify as conservative as the most big tent option offered.
The libertarian believes the federal government should have only enough say to allow the various states to operate as one nation, to provide the common defense, and promote the general welfare meaning everybody's welfare without consideration of race/gender/economic class et al. And the people are then intended to be free to live their lives as they choose and form themselves into whatever sorts of societies they wish to have whether that be restrictive or lawless or any degree in between.
A new paradigm needs to be considered.
The original paradigm was the true classical liberal/libertarian one and it allowed the USA to become the most innovative, productive, generous, and free nation the world has ever known with little or no interference by the federal government. That is what we should look to now as the model to shoot for.
Which is government.No, you're arguing to remove government and have us be conquered by warlords and their armies of former Democrats who want to be dependent.
We have that right now...And the strong in The State are the ones perpetrating the most of the preying on the weak,I disagree. Once you take the ability to acknowledge and respect unalienable rights out of the equation you have nothing but chaos and survival of the strongest and meanest. You have pure license for the strong to prey upon the weak.
Yet that wasn't enough....They sought more, and more, and more power....Even the Constitution was a marked increase of centralized power, over and above the Articles of Confederation...The trend has never been reversed.But the nation the Founders gave us was a nation like no other that has ever existed on Earth before or since. The people would govern themselves and give the the central government only what authority it had to have in order to see that they would be able to do so. The government was restricted to those things the people themselves allowed it to do.
500,000 dead, along with countless maimed and left homeless in the 1860s might have a different opinion.That concept worked beautifully for our first 100+ years.
I defer to Lysander Spooner...It was Teddy Roosevelt who turned that concept on its head by packing courts with judges who would allow him to declare that the federal government could do anything that the Constitution did not expressly forbid. He was so popular, the people failed to see that he had accomplished a coup and taken their government from them. And as we have seen throughout history, once a government has seized power from the people who put it there, it never gives it back willingly.
TR only started a small snowball rolling, but it has been gaining in size and momentum ever since until now it mows down anything in its past. It will take a brave and insightful people to break it up and restore the America that was intended to be.
We anarchists reject your notion that The State is inevitable.Which is government.No, you're arguing to remove government and have us be conquered by warlords and their armies of former Democrats who want to be dependent.
The discussion goes around and around and the logical result is government.
Me: it would be cool if this ball would float in the air.
A: toss it up.
Me: I did, but it fell back to the ground. Wish it would stay up there. Can’t get rid of gravity.
A: have you ever tried?
Me: I just did. Didn’t work. I guess we will just have to live with gravity. Can’t get rid of it. Always pull me back to the ground.
A: Gravity pulls you down every single time, but you keep going back to to it like a battered wife.
Me: Well tell me how to get rid of gravity. I can’t do it. What do I do? I am stuck with it. I guess I will just have to deal with it.
A: how can you keep giving in and accepting gravity when you haven't tried anything else?
No, for me what makes the idea seem utopian is the belief that you can create a cooperative society while maintaining a competitive economic structure. Power doesn't derive from government it derives from controlling resources. You can take government away and people will still compete for the control of resources and whoever controls them holds power over the rest.A Utopian pipe dream if ever there was one. There is no way you are going to convince the ruling class to freely relinquish their power.
Have you never studied Marx? You think much the same, though his thoughts do not seem as Utopian.
"Hence, nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to."
Good quote. What makes the idea seem utopian is a misunderstanding of the nature of power and authority. Those who you say will not relinquish their power actually have no such power to relinquish. Our struggle is against an idea, a religion, a faith-based (and fear-based) belief.
A people who recognize the fallacious nature of authority will not blindly do another’s will, as all law enforcers and military personnel do. Without these enforcers, the power of the ruling class evaporates; peacefully and naturally.
A deception holds the whole thing in place, and it is not utopian to think a deception can be overcome on a societal scale. Mankind has left many such misunderstandings behind. The society is a body of individuals, so if an individual can be made to see more clearly, so can a nation, or a world.
"The man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, ‘Limit yourself’; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian." - Murray Rothbard
We already have been conquered by warlords, fool.No, you're arguing to remove government and have us be conquered by warlords and their armies of former Democrats who want to be dependent.
Oddball: prove me wrong!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Typical leftist
...by the consent of the governed.Government is the social organizaton authorized to use the monopoly on force. I don't know how you can get any more powerful than that.
...by the consent of the governed.Government is the social organizaton authorized to use the monopoly on force. I don't know how you can get any more powerful than that.
Disagree somewhat.That being said, I believe the continued expansion into higher states of consciousness will see capitalism left behind in favor of a gift economy of some kind. Competition is a by-product of scarcity, and scarcity is inversely related to technological advancement. In fact, if not for government controlling markets, we’d be a good deal further along right now, never mind after a couple of hundred years of freedom.
Basically my questions hit the two extremes. Legitimate disputes between honest citizens and criminals.
1) Your town is small. You have a house, fields, a pond and a patch of woods. You have a trail through the woods. You take a walk every day. You don't develop it because you want it the way it is. One day you're taking a walk and a new neighbor is cutting down your trees. You say it's your property, you use it. He says walking through it isn't using it, building houses and farming is and he is going to farm it. What do you do?
2) You go to bed early because you're tired. You wake up, go downstairs, and your wife and kids are dead. What do you do?
And I reject you premise that I am not a powerful wizard!We anarchists reject your notion that The State is inevitable
Never set that premise...But you set forth the notion that a coercive state is as inevitable (and even necessary) as gravity.And I reject you premise that I am not a powerful wizard!
Disagree somewhat.That being said, I believe the continued expansion into higher states of consciousness will see capitalism left behind in favor of a gift economy of some kind. Competition is a by-product of scarcity, and scarcity is inversely related to technological advancement. In fact, if not for government controlling markets, we’d be a good deal further along right now, never mind after a couple of hundred years of freedom.
First of all, scarcity will always be with us...For example, nobody is making any more waterfront property, therefore it will always be more scarce than the land-locked areas.
Also, there is no technological advancement without absence (scarcity if you will) of technology...There were no internal combustion engines or airplanes or before someone dreamed them up...These things wouldn't have been created were the current widely available modes considered good enough....There was a scarcity of better options.
That said, nobody can reasonably argue that crony capitalism isn't in fact a drag on innovation...There's little doubt in my mind that methods of vehicle locomotion and overcoming gravity by means other than mechanical lift may well have already been invented, if those inventions didn't interfere with the profits of one of The State's favored corporate pets.
It is not like I don’t want to. Tell me how I can.Never set that premise...But you set forth the notion that a coercive state is as inevitable (and even necessary) as gravity.And I reject you premise that I am not a powerful wizard!
If you're unable to at least temporarily suspend belief in that antiquated notion, then there's really nothing further to discuss.
