My theory is them would admit to being racist given the right circumstances. Maybe a tiny sliver legitimately think they aren’t racist.
plus NAMBLA
1 Like
Whatever you call our system = Jeffrey Epstein
btw that guy was a Polish immigrant chef. It’s a tough one now for the anti-immigration and petrified-of-terrorists Brexit set who were hailing OUR HEROES.
1 Like
Yeah obviously there are plenty of good anarchists. But it does seem to attract the pedophiles for obvious reasons.
I guess I don’t have the faith in human beings that you do that anarchy can work out on any scale. It seems like eventually you wind up with a bunch of enforced mores that look a lot like what we have now.
Oh I think they know full well what they are but can’t admit it because of work. Having met one or two of their non-work friends I’m sure of that.
I think this is true. People are nicer to people they don’t think they can lose to. Whatever way the left does it, its goal has to be to instill the idea that we stand or fall as a society of equals.
What principle of anarchism is good?
As I mentioned before, it doesn’t have to work at large scale and large scales are not really what it’s about - it’s about small scales. It’s about communities that help each other out because that’s what people do; like say, your overlander community.
1 Like
Which is great. But we’d be kinda fucked I think w/o govt keeping the roads clear. I suspect we’d have to caravan, be armed to the teeth, and pay a lot of tolls to local warlords. Might be a little more adventure than I want.
Burning Man I think is a closer example. The only govt there is Nevada cops hassling people and busting them for drugs - totally unnecessary. For everything else they police their own.
Collective decision-making and freedom from oppression leading to a more just social structure.
I agree with this part because it takes a large organization to build and maintain roads, especially like long roads between cities.
I disagree with this part. The most anarchistic part of Mexico is Chiapas. I know you didn’t spend a ton of time there, but it’s relatively safe (homicide rate is about half of the neighboring states) and partly that’s because the Zapatistas and their community organizing has done a better job of keeping out cartels than the Mexican government has.
Slab city is probably an even better example and it does pretty well considering it is a magnet for meth addicts and its location is extremely inhospitable to human life.
1 Like
And yet collective decision making is a part of our current system, that is what voting is. A system where more time is spent voting than gathering resources is going to fail. The idea that anarchism isn’t going to be oppressive is delightfully short sighted. Any system where resources are distributed unevenly is going to result in people with more resources wanting to have the system continue giving them more resources while the people with fewer resources aren’t going to want to give them to those with more. IE, the landlord is always oppressive.
1 Like
I think the Zapatistas are probably a better, more pure and more practical model that rather than getting primarily at the political theory gets more to the heart of anarchism.
I don’t agree with much of this, especially your assumptions and definitions.
Everyone knows the Lenin quote about democracy meaning spending five minutes in a polling booth every five years or w/e. That’s delegating decision making, not collective decision making, unless you’re making the pedantic point that people are collectively deciding not to make collective decisions lol.
Talking about spending more time making collective decisions than “gathering resources” is a straw man, and ignores how new cultural norms would in time take over from some of the decision making,; and the supposition that it would result in failure lacks a definition of success and failure. Do you regard the current capitalist system as successful? If so, by what criteria? It seems to me as if it’s failing somewhat critically in important respects eg child poverty, wealth distribution, care of the elderly and population happiness.
You are of course welcome to your opinions. They would hold more water if we didn’t have first hand experience with collective decision making and how effective it is.
As a thought experiment, how much time do you think it would take to gather votes from everyone eligible in a small town? For purposes of this experiment let’s agree that everyone over the age of 18 is eligible and that number is 10,000. How long does that process take? Practically, how often are you going to be doing this? Every week? Every month? How many items are going to be on the ballot? Why do you expect the electorate to be more informed than the current average voter? How much time do think people are going to spend prior to the vote informing themselves? Currently, the US votes one or two times a year and the turn out is pathetic. Why would that change under a different system?
I agree that collective decision making sounds great, but I also don’t think it is ever going to replace the status quo in any generalized capacity. Not without fundamentally changing how a society interacts.
Whether our current system is successful or not has nothing to do with the efficacy of collective decision making. It would require a much better story than I can come up with to see a path from any developed country today to collective decision making x years from now. My disregard for collective decision making isn’t a vote of support for the status quo.
I don’t think there’s that much organization in the anarchist experiment as they envision it. The collective action taken is more willy nilly and essentially sanctioned by the goodwill of those without the most direct involvement - an atmosphere of consent.
Not sure how that would scale, and I wasn’t even looping in the anarchism element, just showing how impractical collective decision making is for anything more complicated than small groups.
1 Like
We should at least be able to express Romneyesque levels of dismay, if not concern.