Slutty Monarch explains Anarchy (with rebuttals)

[Username17]

ISP can't really respond to that, because child abuse is a huge problem in any anarchist framework. While you can take force out of the interactions between two adults (leaving aside the problem of crime, which is another big anarchist problem), coercion is still a necessary part of the relationship between a parent and a child. The parent can force their child to eat their vegetables, go to bed, stop playing videogames, go to school, and wear shoes. The parent can decide what is best for the child, and is empowered to use coercive methods to enforce their decisions.

But there is an assumption in there that the parents have these powers because they want what is best for the child. But what if, as happens in a minority of cases that is nevertheless far too frequent, the child's guardian decides that what is best is something we don't like? Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse aren't mythical animals, they really happen. To real children. And it's bad.

The relationship between the child and the guardian allows the guardian to coercively abuse the child. If all the adults have only non-coercive voluntary associations with each other, who is watching the watchmen? Who can make the abuser of the child stop doing that against their will?

-Username17

[tussock]

The whole point of universal human rights is that being human transcends being from X country.

Well, historically we get the notion of rights (and constitutions and such) as the idea that the power of Kings to enforce their whimsy is not unlimited, because the elite enforcement arm of the Monarchy will totally just tell them to fuck off if they're ruining a good thing.

Also, Kings telling the Pope where to get off, and various lesser nobility and non-nobles slowly claiming their own share of the pie forever after, until you get down to levellers and such pointing out that we don't really need the hob-nobs in the first fucking place given that common folk are doing all the enforcement these days anyway, and what are you gunna do about it?

Which in some states lead to statutory rights and constitutions where the "Crown" (or other similar notion of state legitimacy) wrote down limits on what their successors would be allowed to do, and local consensus has made those stick around to some extent. Each and every right was given over under grave protest.

Then there was other states where the Kings kept doing whatever they liked until the people cut all their fucking heads off, or more commonly some other constitutional state disestablished their office by the use of extreme force. Turns out being a gigantic hovering dick over everyone's lives isn't good for your military.

Plus the last lot where the King/Amir/First-Citizen/Religious-Dweebs/whatever is still the big dick in town and is totally playing SimCity with everyone's lives. In those places your only "right" is to do what the boss says.


And we got the idea that some arbitrary set of citizen-rights and constitutional norms is "universal" after WWII, when the victors just fucking said they were, that states didn't really get to avoid joining this club of ours any more, unless they didn't join anyway, but fuck those guys.



Which is to say, you have all the rights that some well-armed and organised group of belligerents made each state give them a little bit at a time over many centuries (like voting), and none of the ones that the state does not currently recognise for whatever reason (privacy of communications: ON TOPIC!).

[Chamomile]

The title of this thread had me thinking for a moment that someone was posting about a member of some royal family who was making an incredible fool of themselves.

[Blasted]

I for one totally enjoyed this thread. I was hoping ISP would attempt to explain how his anarchist system worked, or how rights work, but I'm afraid the hilarity seems to have come to an end.

[...You Lost Me]

But in large territories, the goverment has no actual power, and so no one follows the laws, and they instead have purely private lethal force not subject to any laws that regulate the use of it. IE, your wetdream.

Right... roaming criminal gangs running around trying to steal, rape, and murder. In other words: mini-governments. Which I am against, and you are in favor of. So because of that, it seems Somalia is a place you might enjoy. So you are just confusing and confused.

OK I didn't see this until I scrolled through the rewritten thread.

Best post to come out of the entire thing right here.

[Maj]

Wow. I come back after a weekend of birthday party only to find that I have started a thread called "Slutty Monarch explains Anarchy (with rebuttals)." Awesomest thing I did all summer.

---

I'm going to hope that ISP can find time to answer DSM's question because it's mine, too: You believe that there exists a framework of rights which is objectively valid. How does {your brand of anarchy goes here} guarantee that those rights are respected, relative to competing social structures?

[Kaelik]

This is directly relevant to this thread:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3113#comic

[RobbyPants]

This is directly relevant to this thread:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3113#comic

Did you mean this one?

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3114#comic


I read it twice to try and figure out the relevance. Then, when I started catching up on the SMBCs I missed in the past week, I found the other one.

(I guess I could see anarchy as instilling dread, but still )

[Red Archon]

There's no chance in hell isp is going to have a coherent answer. Nor a short one. What we will witness, at best, is a meandering and wordy collection of paradoxal, intellectually dishonest and completely incomprehensible statements and conclusions that won't even address the very question, which I will copy/paste later on in this post. The second best option is an exclamation of injustice, how we're ganging up on him, some vague personal insults and an "I can't talk with you idiots"-themed rage-quit. But the least satisfactory and most likely result is that there will never be an actual response and we'll all just shake our collective heads and move back to talking about D&D.

But just in case you want to prove me wrong, infected slut princess:
You believe that there exists a framework of rights which is objectively valid. How does {your brand of anarchy goes here} guarantee that those rights are respected, relative to competing social structures?

[Lago PARANOIA]

So how do anarchists deal with the problem of democracy? That is, you have a few thousand or up people like Mormons or Liberation theologists or pirates or whatever and they want to implement a democratic state. Within this democratic state the government has a monopoly of force and has a social contract in which people are forced to do what the government at large wants.

I mean, we already know the libertarian response to this. Throw up as many constitutional barriers as possible while simultaneously claiming a monopoly of force such that the end result is indistinguishable from the tyranny they claim to hate so much -- that, or just kind of shuffle their feet and admit that democracy has invariably overturned libertarian states such that their preferred form of government is on a time limit.

But anarchists haven't even gotten that far. Seriously, we have Anarchatopia, but three thousand socialists voluntarily come together to establish Robofrance 29. How does anarchy preserve itself?

[Ancient History]

Ostensibly, anarchy is the default state of humanity, and all forms of government are just temporary social constructs that will eventually collapse with time. If you have two random people that meet in a wilderness, the relationship between the two is going to be an anarchistic one - one might rob the other, or enslave the other, they might fight or fuck or trade or team up. You don't know! Your options are limited only by your imaginations and your ability!

Which is part of the reason you (rarely) get anything like a "stable" anarchy, because that involves a bunch of unwritten mutual assumptions of conduct between many people with no enforcement, and that only tends to happen in disasters or where society breaks down - at which point people often default to "working together," and once you have a degree of organization the anarchy tends to go away as the new, competing structures work themselves out.

[Morat]

AFAICT, functional anarchy collapses if anyone decides to abuse power (the farmers get together and jack up their prices, dudes with guns start taking shit, whatever). Okay, so if you can guarantee that everyone is superhumanly well-behaved, why does anarchy matter? Every form of government works perfectly under those conditions; you could randomly pick some guy and hand him absolute power and things would be fine.

[tussock]

If you have two random people that meet in a wilderness, the relationship between the two is going to be an anarchistic one - one might rob the other, or enslave the other, they might fight or fuck or trade or team up. You don't know! Your options are limited only by your imaginations and your ability!

Shit, dude. I usually just ask what the way's like up ahead, or talk about the weather or something. Sometimes even just walk on past with nought but a smile.

[DSMatticus]

So, some recent-ish events had me catching up on Somalia, and while the most relevant bits of Somalia reading will always be "ARR SHIVER ME TIMBERS" and "oh, hey, a bunch of foreign Islamic extremists are making a powergrab of it, this is totally going to go well for everyone", the telecom story is pretty amazing. A bunch of homegrown entrepreneurs stepped into fill the gap caused by the lack of preexisting services and no central licensing/regulation, and the competition drove prices ridiculously low exactly like it is supposed to do. Now, sure, there's the problem that none of these services were interconnected and you had to have like half a dozen simcards, but them's the breaks. Aaand now this little experiment in good ol' mostly-kinda-sorta-free-market competition has had clear winners who are huge and are finally signing interconnectivity agreements, thereby laying the groundwork for a cooperative oligopoly that will be vastly larger than any single "authority" in Somalia.

We just had a 15-20 year experiment in free market telecoms. The results aren't really surprising ("we've been paying way too fucking much for our telecoms all along," "the free market can't sustainably provide cheap infrastructure, because the mechanism of competition eventually fails"), but it's nice to see it in action.

[infected slut princess]

Evidence in favor of anarchism.

http://youtu.be/2MU_3M5FTGk?t=1m36s

[DSMatticus]

Evidence in opposition to anarchism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unabomber

See you in a month.

[Kaelik]

Evidence in favor of anarchism.

http://youtu.be/2MU_3M5FTGk?t=1m36s

Wait what? So a government official was doing shit that didn't hurt any of his constituents but is wrong for some reason (hey, why is that again, oh you still don't have any ability to describe why some things are wrong and others aren't, great) and then got his powers stripped by the other representatives who aren't doing that thing.

And presumably he will lose the next election. And this is evidence that government is bad because why? Because Toronto is still miles better than the anarchist utopia of Somalia?

[DSMatticus]

I think the argument was "politicians can be crazy," with the insinuation being either "anarchists are sane!" or "at least with anarchy you don't have to listen to the crazies!" A crazy anarchist who used anonymous bombings to coerce others into following his demands is a pretty good rebuttal of both.

[nockermensch]

In b4 "Unabomber was a one-person government, as evidenced by his use of coercion tactics" counter-argument.

[infected slut princess]

You guys have no sense of humor. I GET PLENTY TO EAT AT HOME.

Yeah the unabomber is bad and all but so is Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

[Kaelik]

You guys have no sense of humor. I GET PLENTY TO EAT AT HOME.

Yeah the unabomber is bad and all but so is Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

When you allege that something is evidence for anarchy instead of just funny, you have to show how it is such an argument. In this case, it turns out to be a compelling argument for the democratic checks and balances in modern municipal government.

Frankly, I'll take two questionable uses of nuclear weapons that might have saved lives followed by no one ever using them again because of government control over fissiles over anarchy's certain destruction of large numbers of people because they are assholes and I hate them.

[infected slut princess]

So in addition to being a welfare bum, you think nuking Japanese people is awesome. Cool.

[nockermensch]

So in addition to being a welfare bum, you think nuking Japanese people is awesome. Cool.

Also known as "I don't have any feasible idea of how WWII could be ended without the nukes, but I'll still talk shit about the real people that worked under real world constraints and did that."

Which is pretty much similar to libertarian/anarchistic arguments about, well, everything, so at very least congratulations for the coherence!

[infected slut princess]

Well I guess you are just a dumbfuck. The Japanese had already offered to surrender. They just wanted to keep their dumbass figurehead Emperor. The US nuked them instead.

http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm

I also think it's hilarious that Kaelik thinks killing 100,000+ innocent people is better than killing three innocent people. What a fucking loser.

[sabs]

You do realize that the first bomb was dropped because the Allied High Command (mostly the US) did the math right?

The battle of Okinawa was incredibly bloody. Forced Mass Suicides of civilians by the Japanese Military. Of some 100,000 Japanese soldiers, only about 7000 surrendered.

The Battle of Saipan. The Japanese Emperor promised Japanese civilians who commited suicide an improved caste in the after life. THe same as soldiers. Over a 1000 commited suicide during the battle of Saipan.

It was going to be a long trudge with more casulaties than died during both bombings. Now the second bombing was probably completely unnecessary, and more to prove to Russia that the US had more than 1, and was willing to use them. But do not claim your moral High Horse when you're staring at Japan during WW2 and trying to figure out the best way to end the war without letting them keep on doing the attrocities they had been doing.