I also find it hard to fathom how anyone could think that voluntary trade is ever exploitative. If I trade you a loaf of bread for a fish, obviously you value the bread more than the fish and I value the fish more than the bread. If not, why would we voluntarily trade? By trading, we each come away with something we find more valuable than we had originally. We are both better off. How is that exploitative? It's not. I asked the same question of FatherMcGruder. Still don't understand it to this day.
Actually I did, in practical terms. That site is yet another bogus pseudo-anarchist utopia bs.
which aims to create a society within which individuals freely co-operate together as equals. -> Is it? And what if they don't want to co-op? Will call the cops on them?
As such anarchism opposes all forms of hierarchical control -> Yeah! Everybody does the same... and everybody does nothing.
For all of the anarchist BS you end up always with the same; A HUGE LOAD OF RULES, even worse than the "archists" (with government). And to very bottom a nobody understands how lack of ways to enforce such rules.
Sorry... anarchism is plain non-sense. There's nothing to understand because other than break public stuff and join protests to unleash violence, anarchists themselves can't understand or even conceive in practice their own theories. Are just a sort of political hooligans...
You should read some more of my posts or peruse that FAQ some more. Then you don't understand anarchism. If you want to know what anarchism is about, ask an anarchist. Here comes one now... To be an anarchist only means that you believe that aggression is not justified, and that states necessarily employ aggression. And, therefore, that states, and the aggression they necessarily employ, are unjustified. It's quite simple, really. It's an ethical view, so no surprise it confuses utilitarians.
Accordingly, anyone who is not an anarchist must maintain either: (a) aggression is justified; or (b) states (in particular, minimal states) do not necessarily employ aggression. Stepha Kinsella is not an anarchist. He is a capitalist. Can you tell me what your definition of "work" is, and how it is decided how much one person should rightfully collect? This will help me understand your position better. I've been using the word work to indicate the process of creating something new, or restoring something, by your own labor. That which you create or restore by your own labor is rightfully yours. So, if I go and farm a potato myself, that potato rightfully belongs to me. One can only own the product of some labor if he himself does that labor. So, if someone simply claims to own the farm on which I farmed the potato, a landlord, he does not rightfully own that potato. I believe that people can use markets to determine the value of that which they produce and trade it accordingly. However, under capitalism I cannot freely access a market. I have to go through the landlord, a middleman, who will give me less for the potato than what he can get selling it on the market. He will gain the difference between the market value of the potato and my wage without having done any work. Because I rightfully owned that entire potato, I will have lost that difference. The only way landlords can get away with being landlords is if they have the authority to do so. Either a larger state grants them this authority, or they establishes it themselves by whatever forces they can muster, thereby creating their own little states. If I try to bypass him and keep the potato or the entirety of that which I can get on the market for it, my landlord will persecute me. Capitalists love gaining without doing work and therefore strive to become landlords, employers, and usurers. You can throw intellectual property holder in there, too. But, capitalists cannot be these things without some kind of state. To be fair, other anarchists have different, non-market ways of valuing and exchanging the products of labor. An Anarchist FAQ describes some, but they don't really appeal to me. |
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Ultimately Anarchists are the worse sort of... Capitalists.
"No rules" applies from rich to poor, the poor may try to rob the rich, but still the rich can hire muscle. You can't come with a "no rules" society and expect such to be even close to any sort of "utopia communism".
To the end, discuss anarchy is like discuss any other utopia, it's senseless and roundabout to a bunch of violent folks and spoiled kids in need of soccer (football if you're American) more often to play around with riot police. Nothing to take serious... You have not described anarchy here. For a better understanding, I recommend you start here. |
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I read it. It's well written, but only a partial justification for anarchy because it only covers abandoning government. I agree that we ought to do so, as opposed to violently demolishing it, and that it would diminish the ability of capitalists to engage in super profitable enterprises. However, simply abolishing government isn't enough to preclude capitalists from consolidating their efforts and forming a new government to allow for super profitable enterprise again. Also, imagine that confused workers might take up arms to defend their employers in the absence of government. If these loyalties persist, or capitalists can generate new ones, after an old, large state disappears, we will simply have lots of mini-states which people could only ever inhabit at the mercy of the capitalist kings. Ultimately, anarchism will only work if, in a given society, capitalists exist in the minority if at all. I do agree that markets will function better without government intervention, and that governments will always intervene despite the promises of their supporters. However, free markets will never exist in the presence of middlemen gatekeepers, employers, renters, usurers, people who collect more than their work entails, if they actually do any. The other think that grates me about the article is its presumption that anarchy and natural law are one in the same. In the midst of all this theorizing, it is easy to forget that anarchy is - anarchy becomes defined by - however humans naturally interact, not how we wish they would interact. In other words, true anarchy is an empirical reality, and we have only to discover it by removing privilege. Arguing over what it shall be and shall not be presumes we can dictate how humans interact, a positively authoritarian concept. Whatever human nature might be, any anarchism worth pursuing starts there, and the kernel of proportionality and balance that could inform this matter may be sought there as well. Given this approach to anarchism, what can human nature tell us about distributive justice? According to the folks at NAMBLA, it's human nature for adult men to bugger little boys. I would think that if we somehow discovered that they were right, anarchists would still oppose pederasty because anarchists, first and foremost, oppose authoritarian relationships whether or not they naturally occur. Certainly, many anarchists and capitalists believe that their philosophies describe natural law, but that does not make it so. If it should turn out that humans naturally behave capitalistically, anarchists will either continue to oppose that behavior or stop subscribing to anarchism. |
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Haha, Does anyone actually fall for those things?
Yes. I had an asshole co-worker who fell for one. The creepy thing was that he was pretending like he really helped a guy in Côte d'Ivoire once who then got rich farming cocoa. He explained that his friend got killed and his daughter needed help to save the family fortune. Despite this guy saying this as if he really had a cocoa farmer friend in Côte d'Ivoire, I told him it sounded like a scam. Later on I would find the same scam script online. A few days later, he shows me some official looking documents from the country explaining that his funds were seized under suspicion of funding terrorists. The documents looked fake and I expressed my disbelief. Another few days later, I hear him angrily speaking to his bank because they froze his account because they realized that he was getting scammed. He insisted that it was not and that the whole story was true. I think he was especially pissed because the account was for the McDonald's franchise he said he owned, although I don't really believe that he actually owned one. So yeah, I watched someone get scammed with my own eyes. At least he was an asshole. Apart from my anecdote, I recall some article explaining how lots of people fall for them. My mom almost fell for one once and I had to set her straight. |
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As cited earlier, the drug law isn't racist, the application of the law can be.
Neither is the choice to use drugs. I am not afraid to subscribe specific attributes to blacks. However, having worked in Africa, I wouldn't subscribe drug use to poor "Blacks", I would sub-scribe the use to American Poor Blacks. There are lots of poor black people, and I don't believe it is their race that makes them choose to use. But there is some correlation between drug use and poor black americans.
I know what I believe it is. But most won't agree. It is the culture of entitlement. But I don't limit that to any particular race.
I will agree that sometimes problems are attributed to drugs without proper evidence. Just because it is easier to blame drugs than find and solve the real problem.
Despair is a hard problem to counteract with laws. Funny thing is that despair is taught through entitlements. Have and Have Nots.
No child knows he is poor until he is taught he is poor. Rather than teach the status, teach the methods to change status.
Poor and Rich as defined by me do not include a Net Worth Spreadsheet. Just so long as we can teach people to be on the positive side of of Debt rather than the negative, happiness will ensue and family will matter more.
We have a cultural problem in the U.S., the problem is that we lost our culture. We lost our patriotism, our nationalism.
This sounds familiar... Nanaimo? |
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What the hell are you talking about? First, what "power" does Jobs have? Second, how do you get that an LSD trip helped him gain that "power"? From his Wikipedia page: In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India.
Jobs then traveled to India with a Reed College friend (and, later, the first Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment. He came back a Buddhist with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing.[35][36] During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life".[37] He has stated that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.[37]
Jobs returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered US$100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them $700 (instead of the actual $5000) and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.[38][39][40][41][42][43] And so he continued to exploit others and build his fortune. |
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I've been toying with the idea of buying and selling bitcoins face to face. The only problem is that I'd have to go through middlemen. I'd like to buy bitcoins via bank transfer, like how I pay my electric bill, and reduce the amount of middlemen to just one, my bank.
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I bet we'd get there a lot faster if people traded their Statism trip for an LSD one. By his own admission, an LSD trip did help Steve Jobs get so much power. |
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Just that I didn't over analyze my comments and relied on intent rather than specifics. But someone pointing out specific can be a downer.
Like the 2+2=4 example. The intent is obvious but to be specific, there is no such thing as 2+2=4 in the real world only in the abstract world.
i.e. 2 apples plus 2 apples approximately = 4 apples because no 2 apples are the same.
I see. I think it's important though not to purport untruths about drugs. People can get hurt that way. |
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Open your case and point a fan at it?
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You're a downer.  And 2 apples plus 2 apples doesn't equal four apples it equals approximately four apples. Not sure I understand where you're going here. |
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And for someone that hates the Government and its Machine so much; Why LSD, a "Government created drug", to "control" you. From the Wikipedia: "LSD was first synthesized on November 16, 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland as part of a large research program searching for medically useful ergot alkaloid derivatives." The CIA didn't get involved until the fifties. Sandoz Industries was a private company which we now call Novartis. Wouldn't you be better off taking "shrooms" from cow shit. One doesn't need manure to grow p. cubensis mushrooms. Just trying to clear up some FUD. |
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It is not far fetched. Workers will and do have solidarity, they just have different solidarity. The Garbage Men Workers solidarity will be different than the Programmers solidarity. The hunter's solidarity will be different than the prey's solidarity.
Solidarity is abound and around, but its far from being uniform. Obviously, workers will have the most affinity for those that they work most closely with. However, anarchists, as a matter of worker solidarity, will not prey on each other or other non-exploiting workers. Of course, individualists anarchists probably disdain solidarity and envision other methods. |
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So your system would check every transaction between people making sure that there was no "unfairness"? Life is unfair. If A agrees, however reluctantly, he does so because he thinks the transaction will make him better off. Even if it is not the ideal exchange he could hope for. And while I agree people should try to present "fair" trades to the best of their abilities, what system would you support that would ensure that all such trades are "fair"? I envision a system of worker solidarity, if you could call that a system. If one anarchist sees another getting ripped-off, he will come to the other's defense. Human's can empathize, after all, so I don't think worker solidarity is very far fetched. There really are only two cases. Either A is coerced, or he agrees (reluctantly or enthusiastically) because he will be better off than not making the trade. Even if it is a really shitty trade.
Now I agree that people shouldn't try to take advantage of others who are a bad position, but that's more in the realm of ethics. Can you really separate anarchism and capitalism each from ethics? Capitalists will try to argue that profitable things are ethical, but I guess the term for that is cognitive dissonance. Traditional anarchism, that is a complete lack of hierarchy cannot exist because humans are not created equal as far as abilities go. Some will naturally gain "dominance" over others. Some people want leaders. I just don't understand why you would think that somehow we can do away with all authority and hierarchy in human society. Would you do away with families since parents are hierarchically above children? Some people are physically stronger and/or smarter than others. They have to choose to use their strength to dominate others though. Anarchists believe that choosing to do so is wrong. As such, most do not consider families are necessarily hierarchical. Sure, family trees are hierarchical, but the actual relationships don't have to be. Families are hierarchical when parents exploit their children, as in the case of JonBenét Ramsey for example. A dominant spouse treating the other like an employee is messed up, too. I suppose it's even possible for children to exploit their parents. In an anarchistic family, all the members are partners. They depend on and care for each other according to their individual needs and abilities. As I understand it though, some individualists anarchists believe that children are property. I don't understand why, though. As for people needing leaders, I suppose in some cases they might. If a group of anarchists decide that they require management to properly do their work, they can democratically elect a willing, recall-able manager with specific responsibilities for that job. They will share with him the products of their labor according to any additional work that that job might entail. I kind of see your argument. Sort of like people without acceptable means to repay are charged higher interest which further degrades their ability to repay. Logic would dictate to charge them less interest and more favorable loans to enhance their ability to repay.
However, it is not the "sharks" asking for the money. If the fish don't accept the conditions the "sharks" will not eat.
As far as Black Mail, take the blame for what you did wrong and there will be no Black Mail. Blame the victim? Come to think of it, I guess Trisha Meili only has herself to blame. I mean, that's what you get for jogging in central park. Heck, that's what you get for jogging. Bitch should have ran! Sickness, Forced Labor (sweet shops), etc... I do believe that this is covered under the law. But granted, people will let themselves be subjected in order to survive. In America (if your a legal citizen), I don't know why you would though. You can force an employer to pay minimum wage, even the people that are not getting minimum wage would be "off the books" and tax free and would counteract the lower pay.
But if all you are saying is people take advantage of people, Ahh... Yea, of course they do. And probably always will. Its the Nature of things, the scorpion said to the fox. Capitalists take advantage of people. Humans can choose not to be capitalists. Humans are neither foxes nor scorpions. |
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Im sure no one wants to meet some random psycho in a dark alley to exchange bitcoins. I can just see the headline "Person killed after meeting a randomn stranger to exchange internet money"
I have an idea for something that would let people meet more safely to exchange bitcoins in person.
Would that be a popular thing ? I need to write up a proposal for it soon .
If the main way to get bitcoins is in person or cash transactions the actual physical meeting becomes a weak point that can be exploited.
So, drug dealers are usually homicidal maniacs? Where do get your drugs? |
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I feel like the Twitter feed belongs on the right side. |
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that image How can you sell an image that's practically free to reproduce? |
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