You're right; anarchism never lasts in societies which don't believe in peace and solving problems with diplomacy and reason, they always revert to the state system as it is far more efficient for those who win these power struggles to combat entire nations.  The only way anarchism can work, which is why you see so many people here agreeing that anarchism is a good thing, is when you have a society of peaceful, rational people who believe freedom can only exist as a right when one accepts it, and grants this right to others; without this consistent agreement to shut-out the violent sociopaths, they always succeed in ruling over others, as they have no qualms using violence to get their way.  What we're looking at here, in the world right now, is the end-result of a power struggle that's evolving into global government, of people who do not believe in secular anarchy, only anarchy for themselves, which is slowly evolving into totalitarianism.  The nonstop wars and power struggles is literally the end result of limiting freedom to the few, since those with the power to govern are given a lot of power over those who aren't; any time a person has a lot of power over others, they have a powerful incentive to abuse it for personal gain; it just happens over and over again in history.

To simplify things, we can refer to anarchism, the political philosophy, as a society full of dictators of the self; we can refer to anarchism's opposite, totalitarianism, as a society with one dictator of everyone; everything else is in-between these two concepts, with varying levels of dictators and those dictated; the closer you get to totalitarianism, there is a decrease of dictators and an increase of those dictated; the closer you get to anarchy, there is an increase of dictators and a decrease of those dictated.  The goal, depending on who you are, is either to equip every person with the tools they need to govern, or to relieve every person of the tools they need to govern; you will generally move closer or away from these concepts depending on your political beliefs.  Moving toward anarchism is referred to as libertarianism, whereas moving toward totalitarianism is referred to as authoritarianism.

Anyhow, anarchism is literally just a non-hierarchical society; I realize it is a popular belief that anarchism is a synonym of chaos, as it is also a popular belief that without the state, people go full-retard out of the blue, but I assure you that anarchism is not about there being no rules, it is only a matter of ensuring nobody has the opportunity to rule over other people, thereby ensuring there is nobody above the law; if anything, it's about there being stronger rules, since nobody can just decide to go to war with another nation and waste billions and billions of dollars they don't even own.  It's not about there being no government, it's about spreading government out, or in other words decentralizing it, as opposed to our current centralized system of the state.  Wars would be quite rare due to being so expensive; you can't wage endless war without an empire, as you cannot build an empire without watering down the currency, as you can't force a currency if you have no more power than anyone else, and so you're much more likely to see peace than not.

Depends on our definition of politics:


The word originates from Aristotle's work:


However, anarchism is defined both as a political philosophy and as anti-statism, so it can be viewed as outside of the purview, at least in the traditional sense, of politics, whilst pertaining to politics.  Anarchism is about governing the self, as opposed to governing others, which makes it an unlikely candidate for our definition, unless we can influence other people indirectly, which I do believe is entirely possible.

I suppose this can be more easily summed up with the question, "Is atheism a religion?  Does atheism pertain to religion?"  Atheism, I think, is a position on religion, but not a position within religion.

LOL this might be an argument for self-moderation

Apparently this

I can see this happening, though I've never seen it used in this way.  I believe this scenario falls under the "rare" category; usually when something like this happens, it's offensive and usually involves the Jewish people, but in the off case, a mod has always been able to handle it; the security of a regular thread, in my view, is worth the trade-off for being incapable of handling an offensive poster immediately.

It's still lame; if the purpose of a thread, perhaps not everywhere but particularly in politics & society, is to present a problem or happening in the world and discuss it, then it becomes a moot point to make it self-moderated, to delete any dissenting opinions or remove people you dislike; what good is a conversation when only people you agree with may remain?  It's little more than an echo: "Oh you agree with me?  You can stay.  You don't agree with me?  Gtfo."  Any other reason to moderate is rare and very well handled by mods; my only option in the case of self-moderated threads, as has always been the case as I often have uncommon opinions, is to recreate the same thread with the same topic without the self-moderation just to ensure posts can't be unfairly removed.

I see good uses for this in, for example, the marketplace, where discussion isn't the point; in this subforum, at least, it's a nuisance.  Any chance certain boards can be excluded from this feature?

This is one of the few features I passionately dislike.

Precisely; the notion that there are geniuses is false, there are only people with pursued interests and those without

No wonder it's so popular these days

This is more important than you probably realize.  Remember this when you're about to drop the bucks to attend a fancy college.

I like this analogy

It's never as effective as cutting off the head

New bitcoin mascot?

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT BITCOIN IS...

This is why I proselytize liberty

What the fuck is this.

I think I had it lucky here; although as a kid I would say things like, "Only criminals want privacy because they're the only ones who have something to hide" (pretty sure I was just repeating what my mom was telling me), I never had a real interest in politics until I was around 19 years old, when I first started college and began taking courses in government and sociology.  I was only a democrat for a short while, so there wasn't a terribly large amount of de-education I had to do before picking up on libertarianism and anarchism, though it did take a bit of arguing to realize that gun bans really wouldn't help anyone.

They had the wrong perspective; this isn't a currency, it's reward points.

Also it was centralized

Also

It had a silly name.

Yes, anarchists believe in communities and working together towards a common goal; what do you not like about it?

Yes, I believe it'll take a hit, but I don't believe Bitcoin will be taken down; public confidence in torrenting, however, has never been higher, and economies have had to adapt to it (consider music-streaming services & online radio such as Pandora and last.fm and video-streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu to give people a reason not to bother with torrents.)  It doesn't matter if it's illegal if the public prefers it; people consistently break laws they didn't make if they don't agree with them, as they should; only thing governments can do is get in the way, and if governments get in the way of the world, I'd side with the world.