Make up your mind, will ya?
The one that is well documented is a fact. Guessing that someone is trying to round us up and nuke us is a theory. My mind is still made up.
The amount of bullshit in this video is astounding.
That feeling you have right there... I've felt it myself once. That's the feeling of an unpleasant truth dawning in on you.
Yeah, well, no. The feeling i had was one of hearing a realy realy dumb person talk about their fantasy. I felt replacement embarrassment for her for bringing that shit in a serious way. Didn't you notice how stoned she was?
If only real life was as simplistic as this lady makes it out to be.
If everyone thought and behaved like the cute little cartoons on her cute little island then her cute story would have some merrit.
So you totally missed the dozens of parts where bad actors DID pop up on her island and everyone pulled out guns to defend themselves?
Were you even watching the same vid??
Yes i did see the cartoon. I just am not of the type that needs their information in cartoon form to understand the implications...
The way she deals with 'bad actors' is pretty immature and reactionary. I think she is traumatized by a robbery or something because she is really only focussing on the possibility that her island will be raped by a gang.
In reality there are many many crimes possible in society and most of them are either unstoppable by wielding a gun or would escalate in more violence. This is part of being in a human society and has nothing to do with government.
The INCREDIBLE irony is that there are MANY places on earth that have such eroded governments that you would actually need guns to protect yourself from gangs and robbers. It is a just a very very shit situation to live in so people don't go live there. I would suggest to this lady to go live in one of these places instead of making crap fantasy youtubes.
Her whole story is based on assumptions that just don't always work out in the wild.
Because the wild has a government in it.
LOL, no. I was talking about how people would behave if there was no consent of monopoly on violence. People would still become organized and rape her village and she would not have enough production in her village to have enough guns to outshoot the villains. Even worse, her little village may becme prey to two other fighting factions. If two large groups fight it out (because there is noone to stop them) do you think either of them would care about that little shitty island? I don't think so. If one of the parties thinks the other is hiding on the island they will napalm the shit out of it. Our little cute stoned hyppie cartoon chick would need a fucking frotress to deal with the outside world.
Yeah, just note that most of these were small communities with a high food and water autonomy and were fully embedded in a bigger structure upheld by what we could call governments.
This is not the situation for most humans.
The very fact that we talk to each other via computers and internet is a testimony that we as a society have grown beyond small farm towns that need to defend themselfs. We have reasonably stable
world markets nowadays. It is only because the chinese can produce so cheaply that we can buy cell phones for under $2000,- .
Good luck producing computers or cell phones when you're on a fortress island spending all your resources on just surviving.
What is also striking about the list of texts you point to is that they seem to be propaganda like in nature. It is not research, it is proving their own point. The authors often have an agenda to eagerly show the world how anarchy has worked in the past.
Take this example:
"An Ancient Stateless Civilization: Bronze Age India and the State in History
by Thomas J. Thompson
"The urban civilization of Harappa in southern Asia flourished economically and culturally for seven centuries, leaving archeologists with artifacts galore but with no evidence of wars or threats of war—or even a state.
Most likely, Harappa’s archeological uniqueness has to do with the civilization’s having generated purely voluntary government." "
I mean, how selective can you get with truths?
It obviously never occured to the man that the indus river was so fruitfull that it could feed everyone who started a farm and so noone had a real reason to get organized on a bigger level?
And where the hell does he take the notion that government could only have existed if they would have found war machinery?
It's like reading an instagramized text. Everything is selectively processed and most of it is black and white.
That's just not how reality works.
If you look a egypt you can see that the situation there was a lot worse environmentaly.
There were regular droughts and the population died off in large numbers once every few years when the nile failed.
Farmers that tried to keep their own stash for the bad years were robbed because there was noone to protect them and absolutely everyone was hungry and willing to pillage their supply.
This all changed when a leader started taxing everyone in grain (this is one of the earliest examples of taxation, altho the babilonians did it earlier for similar reasons). This grain was stored and kept safe untill the bad years came and it was re-distributed amongst the farmers. That way, altho some power was taken away from individual farmers, the population survived better as a whole and became more robust against environmental changes.
Anyway, there are many examples of anarchistic communities. They, however, share some characteristics.
-They are all small and act locally.
-They require that all the resources for their survival are within their community.
-None of them became industrialized.
-None of them scale to sustain the current world population and actually require people in less fuitfull areas to just die off to be able to claim a worldwide success. It's the success story of taking a good piece of land, defend it with guns and say fuck you to everyone else because you've got your own good piece of land now.
Great place to live, i'm sure. Real hospitable..
She is even so stupid to think that organised crime is exclusive to governments and that anarchism would somehow make it go away with guns. I've got a story for her: Organized crime can allways get more and better guns.
And crime is parasitic to anything of value anyway, no matter the form.
The thing is, how big could it get? It doesn't have a police department to grow into and control... It doesn't have a congress and a white house that already lays down a power structure across the land for everyone to obey, to control.
Dude, use your imagination. If there is anything to get there will be people trying to get it as long as they can profit from it. It's outrageous to think that a government is required for criminals to organize themselfs. They can do that all on their own. The fact that there is an anarchy does not change this.
Sure, there won't be statist tools to exploit. But exploitation is a world on its own. It can be applied to any situation. Anarchy is no exception.
All it can be is a roving gang of armed thugs and if they piss off enough people, they're going to find that the people have put together a collection for their own temporary Army to go and kill those armed thugs. Therefore the thugs will know to be polite, like they tend to be in places like Switzerland where everyone is required to have a gun now.
Nah, that's just your a-team rambo fantasy.
Thugs can get organized in better ways than just roving gangs. Nothing prevents them from acting like a bank, for instance. Nothing prevents them from growing larger than any one island state. So at best you will have a constant war between the good citizens of happy island and the bad roving thugs of the crimi empire. So let's see how well the island can produce food when they get shot when working in the fields.
That's the problem with this lady's story. It's all so fucking happy happy joy joy. She just draws happy little cartoon people waving guns and everything is good again. She didn't draw farmers with their brains splattered over their land and i bet she doens't actually want to think about the realities of such situations. Yet these realities exist and are the reason people put trust in structures like governments.
As i said, she looks so crummy that i'm pretty sure that if she realy was in a situation like she describes she would be one of the first to run for statist tools to get the problems under control.
She just didn't think it through very well.
In fact, right now in the USA, you are simply not allowed to build a small army to protect yourself at all. There is a monopoly of force and you're not allowed to have any, and are told you must receive your protection from the POLICE... Because you know, when seconds matter, Barney Fife is only an hour or so away.
Then again, i don't see a lot of roving bandit gangs raping villages for profit in the US either.
And as far as i know you are allowed to protect yourself when you live in remote areas where you cannot expect normal protection from police.
She has some strange ideas about gun ownership. Seems guns are the fix-um-all for all her social problems.
A thief is a thief, so the gun is the best solution.
Gun Ownership (not specifically whipping them out in public, but just the populace being armed) is very, very well documented to deter would-be theft. "An armed society is a polite society." -Robert A. Heinlein
LOL. ok but please explain why europe has a 4x lower homicide per-capita rate than the US?
Or, never mind, it will get too complicated. Let's just say that there are many countries that have gun control and people are still polite. And at least it's not 'politeness' out of fear of being shot in the head...
What she does NOT consider are the important things about governments.
She hasn't forgotten anything. Her husband, Larkin Rose, wrote many books on the subject. It's a big subject, one that has been very specifically kept quiet by our evil school systems and the mainstream media.
Here's a short vid with answers to a lot of these questions from David Friedman:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4oIf you have the time, I recommend this (free) ebook:
Practical Anarchy.
At least download that and look at the table of contents... Groups of questions like "defense from outside threats" are clearly marked.
I'll have a look.
How are the supplies negotiated that will make that society run?
Contracts between private companies.
Private companies have no implied incentive to do the best they can for their clients. Without an overarching structure of rules and a way of forcing these companies to abide by the rules you have no chance of winning against a well organized structure.
There is no reason to put trust in a privately owned company as these are just as corruptable as any other large scale organisation and are privately owned so the public has no say whatsoever. It will just become a replica of everything you hate about goverment but will be privately owned with no democratic process whatsoever.
Or does she assume this anarchy will automatically produce the right ammount of goods to sustain the population?
The free market always has before... It's only when a ruler tried to dictate a market do things get out of balance.
Nonsense. In all known civilizations free markets only blossomed within the stability created by governance. Free market requires a soil of steady input and output to be able to function in a way that can sustain a population. It cannot function on a large scale on its own without leading to massive abuse. Slavery, for instance, was a free market. You could score yerself some africans and transport them to the americas. Pure profit, you know! Free enterprise! I'm from holland and i can tell you that the dutch were very much into these free markets in the past. You just need to ask yourself if the slaves saw it as a free market.
And that's the problem with humans. Humans can be incredibly crewel and abusive when given the freedom to enrich themselfs at no cost. Without some sort of monopoly on force held by society there is no chance of having a free market. There is a real need for rules that apply to everyone and there is a real need to force this.
It doesn't really matter what form the big group has, if left unchecked it will grow out of proportions. This process is independant of the state form. So it happens in
all forms of large scale organisations.
And that is why all the anarchist dreams stop at the local scale. They don't actually solve the problems of having these big complex societies that have particle accelerators and communication sattelites as output. Instead they deal mostly with the economical interactions of limited sized populations that happen to be already balanced out when it comes to survival. The reality is that there is a pretty hard limit on the availibility of land that allows such unefficient use of the eaths resources.
All these anarchist fantasies only deal with small farming communities, but how would you get organized to get your rare metals from china to build your mobile phones in india that work together with the standardized frequencies in the US?
What if there is a drought and the neighbours don't want to share?
Assurance, usually. Co-ops, charities, and trusts in extreme cases.
Assurence is only possible if you produce enough extra to pay for the insurance. And then again, if the grain crop fails you can get all the insurance money you want but that still does not make the grain magically appear in your field. So if your neighbors don't want to share (they realy don't like you) you will be eating dollar bills this winter.
Co-ops only work locally and would need a more centralized approach to function on a larger scale in a stable way.
Trusts need to be trusted.
Without an overarching way of controling these ad hock organisations will too grow out into unwieldy economical monoliths that are sensitive to central corruption. No problems solved whatsoever.
If you don't want to force people to share, how will you prevent abuse of accumulated power?
You mean like we have now?
You simply don't let the power exist by giving it to someone else.
Yeah, i think you have a fantasy where by telling someone they have no power over you they are unable to harm you in any way.
In reality you would need to have more and bigger guns then the other party to be able to assert such baldness.
This is a really simple concept but no one indoctrinated by a government can ever easily understand it. You simply do not have the power to rule me. Unless you willingly sign a contract that say I can rule you, then I can't.
Now there is a stupid proposition if i ever seen one.
Who the hell are you going to employ to make sure people keep their side of the contract?
What kind of force will you need to keep these institutions in check?
Or do you expect them not to become abusive and if so why? They are humans after all.
If you do want to force people to share, how will you do that without a central body of force?
Give them an incentive. Money works pretty well I hear.
Yeah but that was not te problem, einsten.
The problem was that they don't want to share. Enogh history of groups of people denying other groups of people some resource.
Humans can perfectly well have ideological reasons for wanting others dead at any price.
That's one of the reasons a big society based purely on consent is impossible. People can act stupidly and egotistically in a very destructive way. As soon as you leave out the overarching balancing structures these elements in society will assert themselfs in a strong way.
...Or were you thinking that there could EVER be a case when It's acceptable to force others into slavery against their will or steal their rightful property?
Reality is never this simple or black and white.
What is or is not acceptable is a point of view. Slavery was perfectly acceptable just a few centuries ago. And it was mostly driven by the free makets of the new world. Get yerself a boat financed with public funds, sail out to africa and get yerself some of those ape like things, sail them over to the west indies and bingo, profit!
In a lot of ways these guy were the prime example of anarchism. It even went all the way down to piratery in the caribean. Happy times..
Needless to say this was one of the saddest examples of the consequences of free enterprise in known history...
And this is just a small fraction of the sorts of problems you would need to solve to make a new societal form work on a similar level to our current society.
They've all been solved a million times over. The Mises institute, Voluntaryists the world over, and others have written skyscraper-high stacks of books on the subject but the sheeple just don't want to read them. There is only one problem not solved and that is the propaganda from governments that has filled heads like yours.
Without those LIES in the way of your rational thought process, you'd see it easily and just stop accepting the state.
Yeah, voluntaryism? Seriously?
You do understand, i hope, that voluntaryism requires people to act according to it in a
voluntary way?
I don't know if you understand the statistics of humans, but there will only be a small portion of the population that will voluntarily adhere to any given set of behaviours. If you have no way of dealing with the rest then you have failed before you even start. There is no known way of organising humans on a large scale based purely on voluntary cooperation. It could only work for a small fraction of the earths population. It's a very egotistical way of thinking thought up by people fully supported by our current system.
I just want to note that i'm not too happy with this current system.
I do, however, believe that the structure we have now is given shape by human interactons. These interactions do not change with state form. They are particular to humans in any situation.
So changing the state form is not a solution. The problem is in getting everyone to point their noses to the same side without fighting. And an anarchy is not a magical solution to get this done.
She somehow magically beliefs that things around her will automatically organize themselfs into a usable and good functioning society that is worth protecting.
That's called the free market. You should try partaking in one sometime... You know, like BITCOIN.
Yeah, but a free market cannot guarantee a supply. The goods will always go to the one paying the most, not to the one needing the most. This will destabilize any power relations in the system, making the powerfull even more powerfull and capable of exploiting others. Before you know it you will need a big organisation who's function it is to secure some resource. This organisation would have so much power that there would be no distinction between this and our current governments.
The shape our governments have are based on how society works. They are actually shaped by the conflicts between groups in the world. Anarchy proposes to reset this situation but i can guarantee you that this structure will grow back in any state you wish and will carry the same problems we see now.
The problems have nothing to do with the state form, they have to do with resource conflicts and human nature.
So let me give another example.
Island A has a lot of good land and produces a lot of food.
Island B has a lot of rubber trees, but not so much farm land.
Island B cannot produce enough food for themselfs so they sign a contract with Island A for the regular delivery of food in exchange for bicycle tires.
Now we have a few years of drought.
What happens is that Island A cannot produce enough food to feed themselfs.
They have this contract with Island B but they figure that if their people are hungry they won't give away their food for bicycle tires because, you know, rubber is really tough to chew.
So they say, screw it, and just don't fulfill their side of the contract.
Now i ask you, how would your proposed system deal with this?
How would Island B assure their survival in such a situation?
Meanwhile she has no plan to actually organise a meaningfull society.
No meaningful society could ever have gotten that way from organization.
That's a strange thing to say because meaningfull societies are nothing BUT organisation.
And that kind of thing can actually work on mutual basis, if you have like 10 people in the community and you are self sufficient in water and food. But as soon as this becomes bigger you will start to see problems.
Tradgedies of the Commons. About half of that skycraper-high stack of books was written about these specifically.
The ebook I listed above goes over them in depth; but in short; the free market balances these problems in every case.
The problem with this is that society could not evolve beyong simple farming on this premise.
You realy need something like industrialisation to get anywhere near, say, crypto currency technology.
There was an incredible ammount of organisation needed to get us from 1+1=2 to making mobile phones that have built in computers operating at megaherz frequencies.
I don't expect a cooperative farming community to get a waver fabthing going.
And that doesn't even touch upon the basics of just getting your food on the plate when the environment is not cooperating.
It turns out that certain societal necessities are better organized centrally because large commercial entities would abuse it even more than governments.
False.
Large commercial entities have THE MOST to lose by running a region dry or resources or pissing off their customers in a free market.
That's why the de facto operation is milking. Or maximizing profits, however you want to call it.
And this will happen in any free market.
Prices will be as high as possible, that's where it will balance out.
Nevermind once these firms start to get monopolies on some resource.
From the perspective of a large organisation it is easy to abuse the people that make up the profits. The larger the organisation the less it is affected by pissed off customers.
The psycho-babble propaganda you hear from governments can just as easily be applied by non-governmental organisations.
Ever noticed how steve jobs acted like a athoritarian leader and all the apple fanboys falling for it?
That's a privately owned company selling an image for 3x the price of the good that is delivered.
Free market players will become
at least as abusive as current market players. And there will be even less to stop them once they tip over to the large scale economics.
The only reason you believe otherwise is because you have never seen a free market that you were aware of. All big-money markets in the western world today have government contracts and regulations woven into them to such an extent that they can actually make more money by delivering inferior product!
That's not true, i know many free markets. But they usually come in two varieties. They are either too small to be affected by society as a whole or they are too big.
For instance, most multinationals operate in the shady free markets of supranationality.
They still have to deal with governance on the local scale but they basically have an out of sight free-for-all party on the supranational level.
Does that benefit society?
I don't think so.
Would an even free-er market make these companies behave in a better way?
I don't think so.
If these companies did not have to pay taxes or abide to the law in the countries they operate in would they suddenly stop accumulating money and power?
I don't think so.
Would they care if the underlying system was anarchy?
Sure as hell they would. Anarchy leaves the people less protected and easier to subdue and control.
Anarchy will end in megacorporations that will have every sign of government but would be privately owned and would have little insentive to serve society beyond keeping them alive to work for them. And a lot of the resources would be spent on fighting off competing firms.
Every commercial entity has a rule. This rule says that if this entity thinks they can get away with screwing you they will screw you. They exist to make as much money as possible in any 'legal' way possible.
Correct.
Now if you take the "legal" part out of that thought, and there is only a free market, what do you have left? Competitors who have to win over customers the hard way in order to survive.
Lol, no. You somehow fantasize that people cannot be somehow forced to be on your side.
Once any of these firms somehow manages to control a resource everyone is basically screwed.
If they can control it (and they can because they are a very big organsation that can produce their own weapons in enough quantities to protect the resource) they can use that to control the people depending on the resource.
Hoping that no company would get in that position is a dream at best.
That is the core of the problem. People are assholes on a regular basis.
Your ideas
require large autonomous privately owned companies to play nice.
I can tell you beforehand that this is not going to happen uless you genetically modify all humans into being less asshole-ish.
If she can't get proper control over her project it will become abused and it will corrupt, and at unexpected scale and speed. It will be over before she can have a good look around her island.
Control control control! Are you running for office?
The free market needs NO control to work properly. Any attempt to control it and you wind up with what we have now.
Fantasies, fantasies, fantasies.
Even in a free market a participant can become so powerfull as to undermine the market as a whole.
When left free to run and expand, a free market will produce fighting parties that will have to put increasing amounts of resources into just competing. If they fall over they will grant their competitor a monopoly because the arms race brought both competitors to new heights of controlling the 'free' market.
The winner(s) now have enough resources to outbid any upcoming competitor by just dumping the product on the market for less than production costs. The small competitors are without any chance to play on the market. The big party has the resources to just keep their position as monopolist.
And guess what, we already have these but at least there are some hoops they need to jump before they can excert their power. Not that it helps a lot, but a free market would have none of these.
I'm sure you can organize a lot on small interpersonal scale, like protecting your shop. But if everyone in the street has a shop then it's cheaper to have a security firm handle the job. Before you know it there are just a few security companies covering millions of citizens. What makes that different from the current police?
You can't fire the police and hire their competition. And who said there would be just a few?
The first quastion you need to ask is if the competing firm will be any better than the last one.
The second question you need to ask is whether the second firm is armed enough to stop abuse from the first security group. The various security groups will be competing and since their job is to threaten with violence they will apply that to the competition. This will lead to an arms race with only a few top dogs emerging as winners. This is a selective process that takes place in free markets.
Free markets do not automatically provide the best solution for society. They just make sure there is an entrance for competition. But it doesn't prevent a more powerfull market perty from absolutely crushing the competition purely based on the fact that they are smaller and have less resourcess to piss away.
It's a resource hungry dog-eat-dog process of elimination that invariably leads to uncontrolled monopolies.
It would be so much simpler if gun manufacturers just produced guns and soda companies just produced soda.
But what if papsi were so big that they could organize raiding parties that destroyed all the coca cola machines?
Of course you would hire some security firm to deal with pepsi, but what if pepsi had a small army ready to defend them?
How would you call a security firm that was large enough to take on such multinationals?
How would you go about controling such a mighty security firm when they are the ones with the big guns?
You see, you solve nothing because the problems of human interactions do not change.
How would that not need central management that would be just as susceptible to corruption as our current governments? I mean, by the time the security firm is big enough, why should they even care about some farmers somewhere complaining about something or other.
Also answered specifically in the ebook above.
Seriously, people like her can go live on a fortress island all of their own. Just deprave them of all output of our current society and see how long they are willing to survive under their own structures.
If you have any valid point in your entire rant I'll give you this one, sort of.
If all of the USA woke up tomorrow and decided to never have a ruler again, there would be less organization towards large projects like space missions and so forth.
[/quote]
LOL., nah., what would happen is a complete collapse of the US economy. This means most people would be without a job etc. Food logistics would go belly up, people would start rioting within a week and everything would have to be re-built from scratch. So actually most people in the US will probably die within the first few months due to famine and dissease.
They would first have to, on their own without the help of the rest of society, somehow produce some thing worth enough to get clean water, food and shelter.
Noone would care about large scale space projects. People would care about surviving another day. Happy times, no doubt.
Fewer big bridges would get built, because all roads would be private.
There would be no need for roads because noone will have fuel in any meaningfull quantity. and even if they have it they would not piss it away in the engines with piss-poor efficiency that power the america dream.
Products like iPads would take longer to get developed because obviously no one could enforce IP laws. (Which is also a good thing IMHO but that's for another argument.) So to an extent, yes, living in a society of anarchists would see fewer "structures" as you called them.
IP laws are the last thing you think of when soiety collapses and you live in a large city with absolutely no chance of producing your own food and water.
You make societal collapse sound like way too much fun. :/
It isn't, really. It's a mess of people doing everything they never imagined they could just to survive.
Your fluffy ideals can only be thought up by someone in a very very privileged position.
Reality of survival is pretty brutal and unforgiving.
But on the other hand... Corporations wouldn't have the VAST power to do the evil things that they do against us today, like Monsanto forcing farmers to use their seed and insecticides, cures for diseases like Cancer that aren't profitable to cure today wouldn't be suppressed, endless surveillance on everyone, and corn being the #1 ingredient in everything this nation makes. (Just to name the first few off the top of my head.)
The problem is that the would have this power. There are so many ways of manipulating populations that just thinking of it makes me sick to the stomache. The fact that these firms act as if the operate along the law is just because at the time this is the path of least resistance for them. But these corporations are so big that they can act as rivers washing away anything in their path. They would have even more power without the governmental structures. They would probably take on other forms but these forms would be just as estructive, if not more.
So let's take Monsanto. Do you think it is a problem for them to develop some poison that will kill all crops except their own? I'm pretty sure they already have it.
So in this free for all market of yours, how much trouble would it be for them to drop a bag of magic dust into a raincloud going over land with a competing gm product?
Who will check on them? Who will be big enough to be able to screen all their activities?
Surely not your local security force.
You're gonna need a bigger force that will, again, be completely susceptible to corruption, etc,etc,etc.
You need to realize that you are not fighting a system.
You are fighting human nature.
All of those horrible realities we face today couldn't be possible without the power that government gives them. Take that away and suddenly those evil bastards would have no way at all to fight their competition.
That's pretty naive to think. It's not how determined evil bastards operate. There is always a way to be an evil bastard on a large scale.
So all in all, I'll take the vision without government, thank you. Rather be using slightly older technology than knowing every word I type here is being read by my overlords while I'm denied life-saving drugs any day of the week.
Yeah, if i thought it would be workable i would take that vision as well.
But frankly, if i look at how people work on a psychological level i don't think its sustainable on a bigger scale.
About the technology level that can be sustained by small anarchistic communities, it would be pre-industrial.
So just forget about most technology from the past 100 years or so because you won't have the resources to pay for it. It will be back to home made candles (because what factory will produce the solar panels in enough quantity and cheaply so that you can buy it from the extra output of your commune?). I'm not sure most people would agree to going back to that situation. And so you will have a big problem of implementing this and to get everyone cooperating in this nice way all the while not thinking about the luxuries they had only yesterday.
So, actually, without forcing people to cooperate you won't get the people.
The only real chance of implemeting this is to first wait for current society to fail completely.
Then most people will have lost everything and would be willing (ould be forced) to try alternatives.
