Messages

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

61

The Rubber Room - Not Safe for Work / Re: Why the opposition to pacifism?

« on: November 19, 2010, 08:42:54 PM »

What else could it mean? You can't run away all the time; sometimes you have to sleep. Living in a castle or a labyrinth, or a property that is 100% protected by passive security measures (which would still have to keep your attacker from harm in order to be consistent) is prohibitively expensive. There's nothing left but either submission, or resistance.

62

The Rubber Room - Not Safe for Work / Re: Why the opposition to pacifism?

« on: November 19, 2010, 07:55:06 PM »

I assumed nothing. I defined the term specifically in my post. If you define it differently, then I wasn't talking about your position.

63

General / Re: What's the Missing Link?

« on: November 18, 2010, 04:16:05 PM »

If you choose to live in a society instead of withdrawing as much as you can from that society and/or banding with others against it then you legitimize it.

False.

Except some would think that you own it illegitimately. Others have different views on what property is and what exchange is.

And they would be wrong. Words have meanings for a reason. Property is the result of a part of nature transformed by labor into a good. It is YOUR property if you create it or obtain it peacefully. That is what property IS. It is the original definition; it is the definition that is most widely accepted; it is the only useful and meaningful definition in that it differentiates it from other concepts, such as possession and territory.

Governments, too, are built upon the protection of property. If you protect your property, if you band together with others to protect your property - then you are controlling a territory.

Property and territory are two entirely separate concepts. I defined property above. Territory is either untransformed nature (not property) or someone else's property that is controlled through violence. Words have meanings for a reason.

Really? Are there good examples of stateless roads, water, police, and fire services?

Yes. Not that we need such examples to postulate that they could exist. Three hundred years ago, there was no such thing as a modern society without slaves picking the cotton, and people were saying that there was no way there could be such a thing. They were wrong, and so today are the statists, who are the modern defenders of slavery.

Water has been privatized in Third World countries and it resulted in riots over the private companies raising the rates for the water beyond what the people could pay.

Giving monopoly privileges to a single firm is NOT privatization.

Privatization of police is little more than a mercenary army, and you do know what mercenaries do when they don't get paid, right?

Historically, they quit. And they should. Otherwise, they are slaves.

Fire services, maybe, but on a volunteer basis rather than a capitalist basis. The only example of a fire department that I can think of that was organized on a capitalist basis was the example of Crassus.

Then you need to read more.

You must have a whole barn full of strawmen. Somalia is anarchy; state-controlled monopoly is privatization; property is territory. What's next, war is peace and freedom is slavery? ...Oh wait, you've already implied those things.

You legitimize the state and the government by choosing to live within it instead of choosing to withdraw form it.

False

Which is why you should do it with like-minded individuals. But then, to survive, you would need some kind of communalist living space and you would need to have a quasi-pastoralist lifestyle.

As if the state wouldn't put an end to that if we didn't give in to their demands. Even the Amish pay taxes.

Again, you present a false choice: either submit to the state on your terms, or divorce from the state on your terms.

Well, your terms are shit, and I reject them.

64

General / Re: What's the Missing Link?

« on: November 18, 2010, 01:01:24 PM »

The "courage of my convictions" is precisely what leads me to stay here and fight for the land I love, rather than turning tail and running like a frightened dog.

Yeah yeah boo hoo.

This is why I admire someone like Libman. He (supposedly) lived as much as he could away from people, avoiding buying taxed goods as much as he could, in a trailer in the woods somewhere.

Yeah... I'm an agorist. I wouldn't be able to support black markets that undermine the state by living in a trailer in the woods.

Besides, it's not actually *your* land, anyway. What have you done to earn it?

I pay for it, with money that I earned through my labor. Do you not have even the most basic understanding of what property and exchange mean?

Also, in a completely anarchic society, what is stopping someone like me from killing you and taking it? - If you say "you and other people," what diffentiates that from a government/state? How is it differentiated?

It's different from a government in that it is built upon the protection of property, not the control of territory. There is also no compulsory funding, and no monopoly on the provision of services. If you can't see how that makes it an entirely different concept, you're beyond hope. You might as well be arguing that an elephant is the same thing as a table because they both have four legs.

It's intelligent to give into a robbers demand who has a gun pointed at your head. It's also intelligent to run away, but I fail to see how that justifies the legitimacy of their action.

Except if you claim you aren't getting any benefits from this "robber" you claim the government to be, you're lying. You drive on roads, you (if you live in a city, like the vast majority of people in the USA), you get county water, you're (nominally) protected by the police and fire departments, etc.

The state curtails the benefits we receive from those services by depriving us of choice in their provision. It's not like there wouldn't be roads or water or police and fire services without the state. All of those things have been provided without the state in the past, and can be again, and would be made better by the fact that we could fire any of them if they didn't meet our demands.

If you feel you are legitimately oppressed, you need to leave. If you are being legitimately oppressed, then you should fight back as hard and fast as you can. People in Cuba are oppressed. People in Sudan are oppressed. Just because you're paying taxes you're not fucking oppressed. And, if you have a problem with paying taxes, you should write a letter to the IRS saying that you refuse to pay your taxes for such-and-such a reason. There were tens of thousands of people who did EXACTLY THAT during the Vietnam War era because they objected to their tax money being used to fund the Vietnam War.

Fuck that. You have no right to impose false choices upon us. If you're offended by our choice to stay here and fight the state and not sacrifice the benefits of society that the state monopolizes, that's your own choice to be offended. I hope it drives you insane. Or more insane, since you clearly are already quite mad if you believe that you can issue categorical imperatives about what we should do in order to meet your completely uninformed and erroneous idea of what it means to be a consistent anarchist.

65

General / Re: What's the Missing Link?

« on: November 18, 2010, 12:25:57 PM »

The "courage of my convictions" is precisely what leads me to stay here and fight for the land I love, rather than turning tail and running like a frightened dog.

66

General / Re: What's the Missing Link?

« on: November 18, 2010, 12:16:05 PM »

If someone came over yo your house and sat in your living room, you are free to leave also. Does it really matter if the whole neighborhood agrees it's okay if you don't?

Except this is a different thing entirely. By choosing to continue to live in a certain territory, and doing things according to the rules of the governing authority of that territory, you are giving permission to that governing authority by choosing to continue to live there openly and not physically disputing their rule over you.

No I'm not. I know when I'm damn well giving permission and when I'm not. Nobody else gets to decide that for me.

67

General / Re: "Happy Armistice Day."

« on: November 17, 2010, 12:13:43 PM »

Yes, I agree. I'm using the generally accepted definitions, and TLV is making up her own, rhetorically convenient ones. This reminds me of the time I was trying to convince someone that increasing the money supply doesn't make people more wealthy, and he was all like "nuh-uh, money means wealth u idiot"

So, just one last response to TLV: So what? There is also no such thing as a cure for cancer today. That doesn't mean there can't or shouldn't be one.

68

General / Re: "Happy Armistice Day."

« on: November 16, 2010, 07:35:31 PM »

No.

The anarchist's definition of a stateless society has always been and is now a society unaffected by a state. There is no way any sane person can point at Somalia and say, "look, no state!" unless they are joking.

69

General / Re: "Happy Armistice Day."

« on: November 16, 2010, 04:38:27 PM »

In any case, pointing to it as some sort of ideal libertarian state is like pointing to North Korea as the ideal world proposed by statists. “What the? You favor Obama? Why don’t you just move to N. Korea, then!”

I'm going to have to remember that one for the next time someone uses the Somalia strawman.

70

General / Re: "Happy Armistice Day."

« on: November 16, 2010, 04:24:07 PM »

...except that is not, and never was, the definition of a libertarian paradise. The absence of the state is a consequence of libertarianism's central tenet. It is not libertarianism itself. Which if you'd READ MY FREAKING POST, you would have gotten already. But I'm sure it's much more convenient for you to keep setting up the same old strawman.

71

General / Re: "Happy Armistice Day."

« on: November 16, 2010, 02:22:31 PM »

What I want to know is, if the goverment doesn't like what I do with my own property, why don't THEY leave? Why is it the individual who has to leave?

Oh that's right; because the state is an armed mob and they'll kill you if they want to. Perfectly moral.

72

General / Re: My son didnt say the Pledge of Allegiance at school

« on: November 16, 2010, 11:38:11 AM »

That boy has strong, plentiful balls.

73

General / Re: What's the Missing Link?

« on: November 16, 2010, 11:37:06 AM »

On townhall.com, there is a character that goes by the handle "Patriotic Liberal" that is certain that without government, we would all descend to barbarism.  I would think that most people would adjust Point #1 to say "anti-social" rather than "social", which would form the basis for their argument supporting government.

I've found that people are just smart enough to realize that if people were anti-social by nature, they would have been incapable of ever instituting the social form of government. Therefore, man is a social creature, and created government to handle the anti-social exceptions.

Unfortunately, they don't apply the same principle to things like morality and intelligence (man is too immoral or stupid to be trusted to rule himself, therefore we must put man in a position to rule other men).

74

General / Re: "Happy Armistice Day."

« on: November 16, 2010, 11:05:54 AM »

The ICU (a state organization) currently controls most of Somalia. The instability is largely caused by groups backed by the UN (a state organization) and tribal forces (state organizations). The only non-state organizations involved in the conflict are the radical Islamists, though if they were to take over they would almost certainly want to establish a state. So, no, Somalia is NOT a post-state society. It is a land contested by multiple states. But so is Afghanistan, and nobody is using Afghanistan as a strawman against anarchy. Somalia is just the favorite strawman of the media who are pointing at the various state factions going at each other and saying, "look what happens when you don't have a state!" But what they mean by "no state" is a lack of a single, unified, largely unchallenged state. But what anarchists mean and have always meant by "no state" is a lack of state organizations shaping society. Two states in conflict shape a society just as easily, and often more violently, than one unchallenged state.

And I ignored your points because apparently you expect every stateless society to be exactly the way YOU want it to be, when in this place called "reality" it's not going to be the way you want it.

Apparently you ignored my points without ever having READ THEM, because that's not what I said at all. In fact, I said something rather strongly to the contrary.

75

General / Re: "Happy Armistice Day."

« on: November 16, 2010, 01:02:45 AM »

No, it's not a stateless society because it has a state (an organization claiming a territorial monopoly on legalized violence). And most of the violence in the country is either caused by it or in response to it.

Also, I notice how you conveniently ignored the rest of my post. I won't bother to repeat myself, because I'm sure that if you had any interest in the points I made therein you would have read it the first time.