then again... once we have replicators and phasers i'm fine with it 😄

well it sounds nice when you put it "Everyone who works will be able to afford everything they need, and not live in poverty

sugarcoat it

Yeah, it looks really good on first glance, you realize it's unfeasible with just a little bit of thought, and then you're thankful it's so unfeasible after thinking more about the implications of living under communism.

But I'd argue that the whole 'stateless society' concept is why communism 1. is deceptively attractive to people who think it's not ultimately authoritarian, and 2. the main reason it ends in dictatorship. It's why Social Democracy, admittedly, works a fair bit better than communism-minded socialism.

Social Democracy is generally the same as communism minded socialism

You just exchanged the means of production,
With the means of sustainance,


Basically,
Instead of redistributing resources,
You redistribute money to pay for those resources.

It's an enhanced form of statism, as opposed to a freefall of anarchy that leads to harsh totalitarian statism

Basically it cuts out the middleman. I'm not saying it's good, I'm just saying it's slightly more stable.

~~STATISM, MORE LIKE SATANISM~~

~~My brain's too non-focused to weigh in, just making a funny, carry on~~

It's pretty stable as far as systems go.
Most people (Especially younger people) who say they're communist have in mind the stateless, or at least kind of libertarian concept of it. Not Stalinism.
There are a few stalinists out there though. They vary from stupid to malicious. Seem to be in the minority from what i can tell, as least in north america.

I think i can safely call people who want political prisoners and gulags to be a thing 'malicious'

I dunno

Just call them political tenants and political residents and it sounds a lot better

The holocaust did happen but Israel is really milking it for international support

The African Slave Trade existed in Africa before American the AA's are milking it in America.

Inconvenient facts.

a bigger inconvenient fact is that the term slave comes from enslaved white people,

the "Slavs" from eastern europe

so they literally appropriated white terms! 😮

If the N word was invented by white people, are black people who use it culturally appropriating it?

yes

You were damn fast on that, herr doctor.

every time they wear beads and use a mirror they're appropraiting white culture

We sold those "shinies" to tribes so they'd capture our slaves! 😛

@RyeNorth thats what she said 😦

Oh. :(

so i reported her to ICE and she's now back in Mexico! 😉

Zing!

@Ryecast, @Dr.Wol about your thing from yesterday.

Ryecast is right. The reality is that hierarchies always form. A lot of it is just that not all people are equal in ability and ambition and there are people who tend to want to follow and people who want to lead. You put any significant number of people in a group and someone emerges as a de facto leader. When that person gains the ability to force conformity (an inevitability in a group of people with any shared identity and collective problems) you are left with the beginnings of a tyranny.

This is fundamental human nature. It is also is the case that as power concentrates, power corrupts and the formed institutions become vulnerable to subversion and abuse.

Ultimately, we must ask though, when it comes to stateless communism and democratic socialism, what is the difference between production and consumption and how is it allocated. In a capitalist system this is decided with money and ownership of property. If we abolish money and property but instead use 'abstract points' to allocate resources, is that not equivalent to money? What if we use cultural influence? Would the fact that Tim Pool has more influence and a bigger platform for any of use indicate he should have a better say in the distribution of resources? Would these things not form a hierarchy and something akin to money (you could, after all, count something like twitter followers and derive some kind of index of influence)?

"fairly distributed society" is like true stateless society, it's a myth. Democratic socialism falls from the same issues of socialism except that it admits the reality of a state and of money. But conceptually, you run into alot of the same issues when it comes to the allocation of resources (namely, it's very easy to game).

As it is, we should also remember that not all "democracies" are democratic. China has freedom of speech enshrined in it's constitution (and some Chinese will insist they are more free to speak than we are) but I don't think there are any illusions about how effective that guarantee actually is. North Korea is a "Democratic People's Republic" (with elections!) but it's rather totalitarian in practice. Simply creating a democratic superstructure is insufficient to actually guarantee democracy.

a faction that calls itself "Democratic" can be as democratic as the leftists are for freedom, or be actually democratic (aka, true to what they call themselves)

That said

Capitalism solved the issue of how money should be allocated, and its a heirarchy made by the people themselves.

You get compensated for how many resources deliver,
And society determines the value of these resources.

Look at athletes,
They don't exactly contribute to the success of a society, but they get paid millions.
Because they are of high value to the company that pays them.
That company gains millions by having them attract the public.

If the public decides an athlete isn't interesting, they wont attend, the company that pays them has no use for having them around, so the athlete doesn't get anything

Its like that for all things, you can pay Tim Pool because you value the information and opinions he gives.
His work is as valuable as the consumers make it.

Thats the glory of private property, YOU get to decide what you do, not someone else. So if you agree, you can support it with your resources, if you don't, you don't have to and no one will take it from you

the issue with social democracy is saying "We get to decide what you do with your money" and they get to do it under any pretense, "the good of society", "help the poor"

Which means your money isn't even your money to begin with anymore. as with socialism and the lack of private property

All you have is by the grace of the state at that point

and as you said yourself, the state is corruptable too

I'm with JP on this one. When you look around at the stuff that does work, even if it's barely limping along, I have to wonder how it functions at all

Like, why does the US not be even more like China?

Why does a piece of paper have any power?

All these people who complain about the state having all this power and act like the state is the enemy, yet can't tell me how they have this power. Why does anyone in the police force bother enforcing the law? Why does the military do as it's told? They talk about fait currency? I say governments have fait power.

That's the danger. It doesn't. That's why I'm concerned of the present political moment. There are forces, especially cultural forces, that believe it doesn't and it shouldn't.

This is most pertinent and obvious if you see the free speech debates at Universities.

The government does have a great deal of power. But it's power confined by convention and popular edict. If the government does too much too fast, there's the threat of rebellion.

The police and military have power because they hold a monopoly on violence and no one wants to get in a shooting war with either. The government leadership hold power as long as they hold the support of key institutions.

The state isn't the enemy, the state is Order,

And if everything is ordened, then nothing can change, nothing improves,
The state should maintain the order of the people,
And let go of how the people manage things,

This way society will have chaos to break loose the weakness,
And have order to rebuild it.

And in the end, through a mixture of chaos and order, you evolve stronger.
Weak perish, strong survive.

But **why**

it is a cycle

Like, if the military turned around and said "fuck off leadership".... What would they do?

Dr. Wol gets it. The state is order. It can be a good force or a bad force.

They would have no power

It depends. What if the CIA said "fuck off Trump" but the US Army responded "no you don't"

That's why it's a balance of power between institutions which hold their own influence and power.

I mean, the CIA really has no physical power

They just have dirt on people

They hold *alot* of pseudo-miiltary power. Particularly if the revolution is localized.

you are correct Grenade,

but the military is there to ensure the sovereignty of the state.

The people in it (the soldiers) stay loyal because they believe the state is there to protect the people they love.

They are the fist of society

Imagine what you could do if you could dox anyone at will, if you knew what everyone was doing, and had a couple trained assasins and hackers at your disposal.

But that's a side issue.

and well, its the Central Intelligence Agency,

All they do is gather intel, its not the Central Elimination Agency 😉

My point is, why do all these individuals work together at all? And literally play house.

I just seems so impossible yet here we are

strength in unity,

They want to protect their own, so they stand together to fight off those that would be a danger to their families

This is also why people go around proclaiming the 2nd amendment as the "ultimate defense against tyranny."

A large, sudden organized force can violently revoke the monopoly on violence of the state.

Yes. And in tyrannical states, the military is specifically designed so that members cannot defect easily without exposing themselves and or their families to grave danger.

And any incipient rebellion cannot spread easily.

as much as i like the 2nd amendment,

Organised force is not gonna happen, too many people, too many aggression, and too many targets,

But no organisation

Yeah, the organization element is the big issue. Really, the bigger issue is how easily any potential leadership could be targeted.

But organization springs up quickly given the proper threats. And decentralized organization is actually advantageous in a hypothetical 21st century civil war.

Because it becomes harder to eliminate.

you get a guerillia war

That's what a hypothetical civil war would probably look like, TBH

and at that point, you'd better hope the state still has a shred of humanity left

Unless something cleaved people apart politically in clean lines beforehand.

I think at that point, we can assume the breakdown of order means the destruction of just about everything and extreme bloodshed.

nah, an American Civil war will not end in extreme bloodshed

The hypothetical civil war scenario only makes sense with very widespread popular backing.

Honestly, it's so hard to figure out how a new American civil war would end, it's probably better not to speculate.

The most important factors are the kinds of factors that are hard to predict.

It's also the kind of thing that's going to get everyone on here put on a watchlist. Care to change topic?

an american civil war will end with a very 1 sided massacre,

considering the people who want to abolish guns, are against

-The Police
-The Military
-The NRA
-The people who like guns
-The State

And the ones who don't wanna abolish guns favor the current ruling party 😄

you're not gonna be put on a watchlist for speculating civil war,

We're not plotting to overthrow the government, in fact,

I for one support the current US government 😄

Still, no one else is in awe that this has worked and more or less stayed together at all?

That's what people *say* but so much is dependent on how it starts.

Did the state cleave cleanly? Are there divisions within states? Is it a set of guerilla actions? Is it more of an open rebellion? Is the rebellion contained to one region? Who is most directly opposing the government? Where is the foreign support?

all these questions can dramatically change the outcome.

One thing that can be said, is that if the US descends into a true civil war, everyone (and I mean everyone, including outside the US) loses. It's an outcome better avoided IMO.

I actually am not,

I had to do school projects, where 8 people have to make a product, and none of us know what we're doing, yet the project was completed succesfully


Reality is pretty much the same on a larger scale :D

A bunch of idiots being forced to work together to finish something favorably

You would think. But human society has a weird way of finding stable regions and holding together.

Humans were built, in some sense, to create societies of one form or another.

If the system wasn't somewhat stable, it would collapse into something stable (barring world-ending or species-ending events)

like i said, an american civil war will end very fast and quickly,

Because 1 side is against using guns and against the state
and the other side is for guns and is with the state

The non-gun side will get steamrolled

IDK. I think you can get armed pretty quick if given support.

not to mention 95% don't even want a civil war

^ That's the big thing.

It feels like there's alot of pushing for something like that, but everyone knows that everyone loses.

It's brinksmanship at it's core.

having a gun doesn't make you an expert,

A guy with a machine gun and doesn't even know how to arm the gun (take safety off etc) isn't gonna put up much of a fight against a person that actually knows how to use a pistol

also the faction "pushing" for it, is the same faction that said hillary had a 95% chance to win the election

I wonder if a second "civil war" would be much like our second "great depression".

in name prolly, many people will GET depressed 😉

economy might not feel much because you'll flush california mighty-clean

I think Tim Pools' video on the possibility was hinting it would probably be more like the bombings of the 70s.

That's not outside the realm of possibility, but it's different than what most people would consider a "civil war"

If that's what you mean, I think I could agree that it would be alot like our second "great depression" in that it's alot of hyperbole.

a civil war would require two factions to clash

Otherwise its just terrorism

@Dr.Wol you don't understand, 2008 has been called "the second great depression" by some

I know, because the economy dropped by what was it? 3%?

Wasn't the 1933 great depression like 20%?

To which I'm just like "either the great depression was a lot more laxed than I thought, or we are so fucking pathetically cosy that having to lease a car rather than own it and not being able to buy a new house every year is "the second worse thing in the world"'

In history*

I think its the fact that media needs to keep people hooked

I mean, if Trump is the new Hitler
and America is a tyrannical state now

then dafuq kind of lies have my history books been telling me about the German Reich? 😄

Ikr