You think it's unethical to exercise political authority?

Hm... my impulse is to say yes, but only technically. I see the practicality of exercising political authority, but I think authority is most ethical when it's backed up by reason and not supported by force. I think there are a lot of good reasons for people to do what authority urges them to do, but currently the worldwide standard is to have a gun backing up the governance rather than a sophisticated compendium of good reasons and logical arguments.

I realize it's a bit utopian, which I why I have no problem complying with the current standard, but I would ultimately like to see humanity harness the power of the spoken word to hold people accountable rather than have people be physically arrested and imprisoned.

So, even the act of voting then becomes immoral? Voting is an exercise of political authority, after all.

Currrently, I would say it is, but only **because** the political authority exercised after the vote is backed up by force, but I have some degree of flexibility and nuance when it comes to these things. Just because I would prefer the political authority to be backed up by reason doesn't mean I prefer a system without any vote at all.

On a small scale, I would prefer me and my friends voting on a place to eat without the threat of violence to enforce the results of the vote to a situation where one of us has a gun and tells all of us "Okay, we decided to eat at KFC, and if anyone tries to do otherwise I'm locking you in the basement." But then I might prefer that absurd scenario to a scenario in which the friend with the gun picks the place and none of us get a say in the matter.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/294870219682217984/546816290170601472/michigan.png

I guess access to clean water isn't established as a "right" per se, but the preamble to the constitution has that whole "promote the general welfare" clause, so at the very least there's a failing of government to fulfill one of its purposes. Not sure where the blame is specifically, but between the state and the fed there should be a relief effort to solve this problem. Very calloused words on the part of the state government if that's really their attitude toward the problem.

Not sure if it's relevant to pin this on AnCaps though, since the government responsible for this position is not Anarchist, nor is there any evidence to suggest that this situation is the result of Capitalism itself.

Yeah, that would probably open up too big a can of worms.

See you guys debating violence as a form of enforcement. This guy explains it best. Sources included. https://youtu.be/bCAUmh99hMI

I don't like his definitions at all. He mentions nothing about hierachies in his definition of anarchy, which is what the "archy" in anarchy actually is. Anarchy is a lack of hierachy. His definition of power is loaded so as to associate power with a specific application of power, and then his definition of violence is further loaded so that he can imply by the definitions he used that anarchy is resisting violence.

You cannot have praxis without some form of power, even if that power is merely self-determination, but he danced around this so that he could use his loaded definition of power and avoid the notion that anarchists may also be acting to seek power.

He is against class structure. He might also be a communist.

In either case he does cite his references. Violence is essential to enforce any order.

I definitely think he's anarcho-communist. He implies that Marxists are among anarchists, but then by his own definitions he should be troubled by that notion considering Marx called for a dictatorship of the proletariat.

If you can have a dictatorship in any form, much less a dictatorship imposed by a class of people, and not use any sort of power or violence to keep that class-based structure in place, I'd be impressed.

Violence is essentially an admission of imperfection, but we live in an imperfect world.

His definition work https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anarchism/

I agree. It's my hope, based on trends in human culture, that we're approaching an eventual (way past my lifetime) state of affairs which is not enforced violently, but in the mean time I don't mind violence being a part of reality... at least not too much. Death kinda sucks, but the drama of violence makes the story of reality interesting.

(And I suspect our reality is a form of entertainment for interdimentional beings.)

It's not an entirely inaccurate in definition, it's just selective, and for that reason I don't like it. I'd need to read that whole... what is that? An essay? I'd need to read the whole Stanford entry to be able to criticize it further.

A lot of the sources in this article appear to be left-wing. I can't say for certain it's untrue, but the way it discusses science as being flawed because of the rules it follows, and how it implies "anti-LGBTTQIA" and "ageism" "smacks of hierarchy, domination, centralization, and unjustified authority" leads me to believe that whoever wrote this is far too left-leaning for me to fully appreciate.

It has some points I like, such as how ordinary human relationships tend to be anarchistic. All in all, though, this article may adequately summarize modern (or perhaps post-modern?) anarchist schools of thought. It's just I don't agree with the direction a lot of modern philosophers have taken the idea of anarchism. Their obsession with identity politics as a means to achieve global socialism and rejection of objectivity in relation to truth leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.

ID pol seems like identitarianism just with a larger collective formed by minority groups instead of the collective majority groups, and then both sides of the far-right and far-left seem comfortable rejecting science when it doesn't agree with their agenda, only one side calls their denial of science objectivity and the other simply calls objectivity bad because it excludes the value of personal experience.

Anarchism as a whole is false. The problem is that inevitably, some group or some person is going to be ever so slightly better and gain power. While small interactions tend towards anarchism, as the population increases it rapidly begins to form hierarchies.

The Identity politics is the form that the hierarchy would take once the current "authority" is removed and also the mobilizing element to overthrow the current order.

That's what I tend to think about anarchism. I don't know that it's necessarily false, but I know that hierachies of power naturally arise and I think this natural tendency is best harnessed by structuring the order of society such that power ends up in the hands of whoever does the best job of using the power to benefit people.

I'd be interested to see how mobilizing ID Pol works in the long run, though I may not survive to see that. I figure the culture war is basically over whether or not 1984 or Brave New World is more disturbing and that in the end we'll get some dystopian amalgamation of both.

When I say mobilizing, I mean it's how the far left gets it's activists to stand out in the rain and yell and intimidate people into toeing the party line. It's how you get into institutions and organizations and turn them into your mouthpieces. It's how you inspire your activists to viciously attack anyone who might oppose your orthodoxy.

In the long run, identity politics is almost certainly going to tear everyone apart into separate feuding nations or groups or impose a new hierarchy within the western world based on race, sex and religion. Judging how it works with issues like trans rights and how it is treats the sciences, I'm very certain that identity politics will tend to rapid authoritarianism in imposing the will of the most intolerant (in the sense of the loudest, and most unified) minority.

Obviously, this is very bad. Pretty much everyone agree racism is bad, so why would we want to impose it via legal scripture (*a la* Affirmative Action)?

Now what would be great is if we could simultaneously tear everybody down into their individual bubbles, make sure they only see information that confirms their worldview, **and** ensure that none of them gather in groups large enough to oppose the world order, which keeps them all working and being useful to everyone else.

Now *that's* a good system, if you ask me.

"A great system is where I control what everyone thinks and stop them from gathering any power."

No, no one controls what they think but them. That way they don't realize they're playing the game that keeps them oppressed. They voluntarily pick the news that they agree with, voluntarily oppose the science they disagree with, but never actually do enough to control anyone else.

Truth be damned. Just let people consume the reality that makes them feel good.

That sounds like a recipe for totalitarianism of the highest order.

So...Mass-enforced Virtual Reality?

Doesn't have to be enforced, just presented as an option. Who would pick the dreadful real world over a virtual world of their choosing? Maybe some people... but then what would distinguish the 'real' world as being more real than the virtual world. Perhaps this reality is just a simulation too.

By any means, if you don't have challenge, you will tend to stagnation.

Well we don't spend the whole day relaxing, do we? Most people get depressed living like that. So they get jobs, work to be productive, then come home to the virtual world. Happiness from the challenge, happiness from the recreational break, and the world order is happy too because they don't have to worry about people rising up against them en masse.

I mean, if you only ever follow what you want to hear you'll probably never have to overcome challenges and do anything new. And that applies to society as well.
Most people work because they have to if they want to eat.

I think they get a sense of meaning and responsibility from it too. And society will always find new challenges to overcome. Maybe quietly cull the population and replace them with clones of the best workers so they can control people enough to combat climate change and move out into the stars. Whatever works, so long as you minimize infighting among the species.

Now this is getting outright dystopian.

If you had a choice between playing games all day, debating on the internet all day or pulling weeds, which would you pick?

I'd roll a die to make an arbitrary choice, then extract as much meaning as possible from my daily activity.

Pulling weeds? Oookay.

I think most of us would pick the 1st. The 2nd would be 2nd most popular and doesn't really work well under your utopian vision. The 3rd is what you would *need to do* to keep people fed.

I like a little manual labor. Video games and the Internet give me headaches.

You know sure Nancy Pelosi's tweets about Jussie Smollett presuming his innocence may be bad optics but I feel that she shouldn't be criticized for assuming innocence

Hol' up, fren. You're being reasonable.

If she was assuming innocence, she wouldn't have believed him in the first place.

anyone here know about gangstalking?

I know that the fbi is the ultimate gangstalker. Im suprised people who get upset over gang stalking arent protesting outside of google and facebook

https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2019/02/u-n-proposes-initiative-to-ban-loli-shota-and-underage-drawings-and-cartoons/77229/ Okay, I can understand banning child porn, but to include drawings and cartoons into the mix does intrude on people’s freedom of speech. Besides the kids in these kinds of drawings and cartoons are fictional characters, FICTIONAL CHARACTERS.