164 replies to this topic

[valkyrie_ice]

This is useless. You take democracy, I'll take anarchy.

Couldn't agree more. It's almost always useless trying to get someone who's substituted an ideological bias for reality to see facts.

http://www.npr.org/t...oryId=128490874
http://scienceblogs....matter_in_p.php
http://www.post-gaze...1104149-109.stm

Give me a better government than Democracy and I'll take it. The problem is that what you want has nothing to do with governing a collective and is entirely about a desire for unlimited personal license irregardless of it's cost to others in their personal liberties, so long as YOU can do anything you wish without repercussions. You've proven time again that there's only room for you in your worldview, and everyone else is just a "leech". You think that the system is "keeping you down" and that if you were allowed to do ANYTHING you wanted, while holding your magic gun to "defend your freedom", that everything that you've always wanted but could never have would just fall into your lap, that freed from the duties and responsibilities of belonging and CONTRIBUTING to a social collective you would suddenly and magically rise through the social pecking order to become that Alpha Elite you just KNOW you REALLY ARE.

I know this mindset all too well. Met far too many of them in jail, all thinking that same thing. "Man I could really BE somebody if it weren't for all these damn laws against taking what I want at gunpoint!"

[david ellis]

I regret this post.

Edited by david ellis, 26 December 2010 - 06:01 PM.

[chris w]

This discussion is getting out of hand here, we can argue about all the details of anarchistic vs. democratic societies, but you will never be convinced based on them alone, and obviously in many cases we'd be talking about hypothetical scenarios, because any and all examples of stateless societies (Somalia doesn't really count due to other governments' involvement) are from the past, before there even were terrorist attacks.

I think not if we take as crucial the factor of the lack of state violence monopoly on a given territory, with this - there are actual examples right now and on average don't look all that encouraging - some areas of certain Mexican states, Russian province, Brasilian favelas, "The Red Corridor" in India. In those places we ussually see that the vacuum is quickly filled not with self governing, mutually respectful societies of gun owning individuals, but with the reign of even worse thugs than the ones who had left.

The reason why I think the Government = Mafia comparison is strained, is that no Mafia in the world ever lets its protectees evaluate its service or have any say in how to allocate resources at hand, and step down, if judged poorly in supplying safety and predictability to the citizens. In well working democracies the ass of the guys in charge isn't conjoined with their "chair", in Mafias it is. Government is just a tool, not an actor by itself, the actual actors are easily changable and an individual has a chance of becoming one of them.

A nicer example of a society close to anarchy is Christiania, but altough I'm not entirely sure now, I think there probably still is the subtle hand of Gov over them regarding law enforcement when things get hot - I suppose if they find a corpse in the back street, Kopenhagen PD doesn't let the hippie detectives carry on the investigation.

And wait, why all of the sudden is Somalia not an example here ? Yes, since a couple of years the Ethiopian and African Union soldiers have been meddling in their affairs, but before - the conditions for an anarchic society were met ( unless you want to go Libman and say that "if they have teocratic-tribal militias fighting each other then it's still a socialist hellhole" ),and I guess particularly in Puntland they still are. You guys seem to use Somalia only when it's convenient to do so.

Also, I think it's innacurate to suggest that traditional stateless societies are free in the sense you allude to. They may be free as peoples, as in "not enslaved", but the individual inside doesn't have much degree of freedom, it's not like when the Elders Council has voted a decision in something that concerns you, you can say "I'll take a second opinion", violence still governs those societies, it's just that it's implicit, veiled in sacredness and customs, "love it or leave", only that leaving will usually amount to dying in the wild, unless you're lucky that another tribe accepts you into their own coercive collective. And waring is often just a normal part of life, like in Yanomamo where historically 1/3 of males died in combat.

Are we talking about standards like USB or safety standards?

Safety. If you have a coal mine owner that is the most significant employer in town, who has a steady supply of fresh workers, why would he have any reason to employ any safety standards in the mine ? The workers as individual bargainers don't have much power and not much choice if they want to eat the next meal, in the worst case - should one die, there will still be a dozen to fill his place, in similar working conditions. The worst example I can think from the perspective of an unskilled employee is an authoritarian, non - democratic and pro Big Bussiness government, like the Chinese one, in such case you're just screwed.

My answer to all these things is the same -- do you really think monopolies can do a better job than what free competition can produce? You are questioning the ability of people to know which private intelligence agencies are crappy, before shit hits the fan. I suppose you are correct in assuming that one could start a shitty agency, get a couple of unknowing customers who then die because of the agency. But don't you think this kind of news will spread fast? Do you really think businesses like this stay in business for long? Since this worries you, I assume several other people would be worried too, which means there is demand for a business that reports on various intelligence agencies.

How is that not hardcore utilitarian ? What you're saying here is that it's ok if a number of "foundation sacrifices" happpens on the way to the new order of things.
And besides, one more technicality thing - the intelligence agencies would have to have agents operating outside the country, to discern a threat before it takes formidable shape. The image of dozens of homeowners associations maintainning agents in the Middle East and other places smells somewhat surreal. Again, I think people will just mostly let it go, hoping that no attack will ever happen to them particularly, which is why its chances of actually happening rise.

Government has a handufl of reasons to put effort into security - foremost, it's just logical that a succesfull attack from outside forces invites even more of them. No government wants to appear weak, and no government wants to fall prey to another one ( or any other informal, military force ). Also, if all else fails, the want to keep you alive to munch off you, dead people don't create wealth.

[JLL]

All the objections statists have against voluntarism are also -- in fact, much more -- objections to governments.

Statists are afraid that private defence agencies will take over the world, but what is there to stop a democratic government from enslaving the people? The government has a better chance at succeeding -- governments can collect taxes and print their own money, for example.

There is simply no logical way of showing how giving all the guns and all the power in the hands of one group that uses coercion could be better than dividing that power between several parties that operate on the free market.

[valkyrie_ice]

All the objections statists have against voluntarism are also -- in fact, much more -- objections to governments.

Statists are afraid that private defence agencies will take over the world, but what is there to stop a democratic government from enslaving the people? The government has a better chance at succeeding -- governments can collect taxes and print their own money, for example.

There is simply no logical way of showing how giving all the guns and all the power in the hands of one group that uses coercion could be better than dividing that power between several parties that operate on the free market.

So now you're pulling the "Every argument just proves my point!" routine, hummm? Despite the fact that they have done anything but.


Really JLL, that's a pretty pathetic desperation ploy.

[chris w]

All the objections statists have against voluntarism are also -- in fact, much more -- objections to governments.

Statists are afraid that private defence agencies will take over the world, but what is there to stop a democratic government from enslaving the people? The government has a better chance at succeeding -- governments can collect taxes and print their own money, for example.

There is simply no logical way of showing how giving all the guns and all the power in the hands of one group that uses coercion could be better than dividing that power between several parties that operate on the free market.

Fuck logic, long live empiricism - somehow violence rates have been on decline since XVII century ( check the S. Pinker link ), so even earlier than I would have thought, and the major vector since then has been the centralising one ( the post Westfalian order ), not the opposite direction mostly.

Also we don't exactly see floods of people running away from democratic countries, saying "God, we are so enslaved here, let's travel to the Colombian jungle where we can choose between FARC and AUC competing for our protection". In a strange way lots of people still prefer to live under their stabilised violence monopolies than outside them, if they are presented with a choice. Really, do you see the Finish government as having any teeth left whatsoever, with potential to become totalitarian ? Sounds like political sci - fi ( well, oh, yeah, there's that comming tobacco ban in two decades ).

Steven Pinker - The History Of Violence

At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts--such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men--suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But,in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley, Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population wide rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.

Remember that the large numbers of deaths inflicted by states in XX century may be attributed equally to the bloodthirst of totatlitarian governments as to the existence of more technologically effective means of killing applied.

On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.

Pinker gives three possibilties as to why there is this fall in violence, 1 and 3 concern us here :

The first is that Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the inescapable logic of anarchy. Any beings with a modicum of self-interest may be tempted to invade their neighbors to steal their resources. The resulting fear of attack will tempt the neighbors to strike first in preemptive self-defense, which will in turn tempt the first group to strike against them preemptively, and so on. This danger can be defused by a policy of deterrence—don't strike first, retaliate if struck—but, to guarantee its credibility, parties must avenge all insults and settle all scores, leading to cycles of bloody vendetta. These tragedies can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence, because it can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for retaliation. Indeed, Eisner and Elias attribute the decline in European homicide to the transition from knightly warrior societies to the centralized governments of early modernity. And, today, violence continues to fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier regions, failed states, collapsed empires, and territories contested by mafias, gangs, and other dealers of contraband.

A third theory, championed by Robert Wright, invokes the logic of non-zero-sum games: scenarios in which two agents can each come out ahead if they cooperate, such as trading goods, dividing up labor, or sharing the peace dividend that comes from laying down their arms. As people acquire know-how that they can share cheaply with others and develop technologies that allow them to spread their goods and ideas over larger territories at lower cost, their incentive to cooperate steadily increases, because other people become more valuable alive than dead.

I suppose one will choose the answer that best suits him, but I think all the above shows the case is not as clear cut as you'd like.


Anyway, I've said whay I wanted to say, I promise to read Molyneux as soon as I have the time to think about it ( I've been writing most last posts here having come off nightshifts at a part-time, a bit too jaded to absorb heavy doses of Anarcho Capitalist thought and be healthy ).

Edited by chris w, 28 December 2010 - 04:39 AM.

[valkyrie_ice]

The first is that Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the inescapable logic of anarchy. Any beings with a modicum of self-interest may be tempted to invade their neighbors to steal their resources. The resulting fear of attack will tempt the neighbors to strike first in preemptive self-defense, which will in turn tempt the first group to strike against them preemptively, and so on. This danger can be defused by a policy of deterrence—don't strike first, retaliate if struck—but, to guarantee its credibility, parties must avenge all insults and settle all scores, leading to cycles of bloody vendetta. These tragedies can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence, because it can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for retaliation. Indeed, Eisner and Elias attribute the decline in European homicide to the transition from knightly warrior societies to the centralized governments of early modernity. And, today, violence continues to fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier regions, failed states, collapsed empires, and territories contested by mafias, gangs, and other dealers of contraband.

A third theory, championed by Robert Wright, invokes the logic of non-zero-sum games: scenarios in which two agents can each come out ahead if they cooperate, such as trading goods, dividing up labor, or sharing the peace dividend that comes from laying down their arms. As people acquire know-how that they can share cheaply with others and develop technologies that allow them to spread their goods and ideas over larger territories at lower cost, their incentive to cooperate steadily increases, because other people become more valuable alive than dead.

Actually both are non-exclusionary. The larger a "government" is (i.e. in land territory) the stabler it is, and the more economically tied it becomes to other large governments, the less likely it is to disrupt it's own economy for warfare against an economic partner. Why do you think the only "wars" going on right now involve countries WITH NO MAJOR ECONOMIC VALUE TO THE US? They have massive POTENTIAL value due to oil and minerals, but are currently worthless economically. They were "safe" countries to attack, because the other large nations also had no economic value tied up in them either.

That's why I have no worries about China "attacking" the USA. we're their largest customer, and will be even as we decline as a superpower. Sure, they are going to put their economy into the ascendant, and rearrange the global power structure so it is less lopsided in America's favor, but war is NOT IN THEIR OWN INTEREST. Why do you think they want so little to do with NK? Because it NK starts a war and they support them, it means war vs US, and that would tank their economic growth. NK on the other hand HAS NOTHING TO LOSE because it has no economic growth, and won't so long as KJI is leading it. They want to take over SK to co-opt it's economy to replace it's own. They don't comprehend that it's their power structure that is killing their economy, and would do the same to SK. SK on the other hand want's access to the resources NK is sitting on because it would supercharge THEIR economy while simultaneously quickly raising the standards of living for NK residents.

Dictatorships, tyrannies, and anarchy stifle economic growth. Democracies, with proper regulation to prevent abuses by corporations who become large enough to no longer be responsive to the correcting mechanisms of the market, promote economic growth. (And yes, corporations DO become too big to be responsive to market forces, at which point they seek to become market dictators, seeking to prevent any competition and stifling any innovations that could bring about their demise as dictators. And just like a political dictator, they stifle economic growth. This is why a truly free market is one in which strong, enforceable, regulation is imposed to ensure that all players, even giants, are playing by the same rules and subject to the same forces.)

JLL claims to love the "Free Market" but deludes herself as to how it functions in the REAL WORLD as opposed to how she believes it SHOULD function in her fantasy world.

The problems with governments have to do with individuals co-opting them to serve personal agendas, like Bush seeking to avenge daddy's honor against Saddam. Without these personal interests hijacking it, democratic government is the closest thing to a neutral rational actor we have ever succeeding in creating.

[JLL]

Fuck logic, long live empiricism - somehow violence rates have been on decline since XVII century ( check the S. Pinker link ), so even earlier than I would have thought, and the major vector since then has been the centralising one ( the post Westfalian order ), not the opposite direction mostly.

True, but there's different kinds of violence. We may not have public displays of torture these days, but the threat of violence is there -- like I said, stop paying taxes and see what happens. It's more convenient nowadays, when government thugs do the actual violence and all people have to do is vote.

I agree with this Pinker quote though: "Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler."

Also we don't exactly see floods of people running away from democratic countries, saying "God, we are so enslaved here, let's travel to the Colombian jungle where we can choose between FARC and AUC competing for our protection". In a strange way lots of people still prefer to live under their stabilised violence monopolies than outside them, if they are presented with a choice. Really, do you see the Finish government as having any teeth left whatsoever, with potential to become totalitarian ? Sounds like political sci - fi ( well, oh, yeah, there's that comming tobacco ban in two decades ).

The Colombian jungle is probably not the cradle of free markets and voluntarism. But within democratic countries, I think there already is a flow of talented people from more socialist countries to less socialist ones; a trend that will most likely continue in the coming years.

All Finnish politicians are spineless worms, but then again, so are most Finnish citizens, so the government does not need to sharpen its teeth that much to keep folks in line. The mindset here is very socialist. But taxes are going up here, prices are going up, protectionism is raising its ugly head, the Finnish customs is terrible, etc.

The first is that Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the inescapable logic of anarchy. Any beings with a modicum of self-interest may be tempted to invade their neighbors to steal their resources. The resulting fear of attack will tempt the neighbors to strike first in preemptive self-defense, which will in turn tempt the first group to strike against them preemptively, and so on. This danger can be defused by a policy of deterrence—don't strike first, retaliate if struck—but, to guarantee its credibility, parties must avenge all insults and settle all scores, leading to cycles of bloody vendetta. These tragedies can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence, because it can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for retaliation. Indeed, Eisner and Elias attribute the decline in European homicide to the transition from knightly warrior societies to the centralized governments of early modernity. And, today, violence continues to fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier regions, failed states, collapsed empires, and territories contested by mafias, gangs, and other dealers of contraband.

If the above was true, all countries would be doing pre-emptive strikes against one another all the time. Hobbes was a moron.

A third theory, championed by Robert Wright, invokes the logic of non-zero-sum games: scenarios in which two agents can each come out ahead if they cooperate, such as trading goods, dividing up labor, or sharing the peace dividend that comes from laying down their arms. As people acquire know-how that they can share cheaply with others and develop technologies that allow them to spread their goods and ideas over larger territories at lower cost, their incentive to cooperate steadily increases, because other people become more valuable alive than dead.

This I agree with.

[medicineman]

I don't support states (=monopolies of violence over geographic areas) in any form, which are always funded through theft and monetary inflation, so it makes little difference philosophically whether states are armed to the teeth or not. But from the perspective of a "balance of power", if you will, it would seem that the scenario you describe is better than one where only a handful of states have the weapons.

And anyone who opposes anarchy should logically support a one-world government. All else is bullshit.

Duh, that's all part of the plan, dude - the President of Earth must already be in office when The Contact is made - it was in the deal between Green Annunaki and Harry Truman back in 1947 !


So now there are two issues I'd like to hear you opinion on :

* Army. Should the states of Earth dissolve, what do you think would/should happen to all the military equipment, regular and WMDs ? The question of who they belong to I suppose is solved Rothbardian style - the first who put their hands on them, can keep them, by default these will be the soldiers. So basically you have in effect groups of males scattered all over the world in possession of deadly means that they know how to operate, yet with allegiance only to themselves. From here 2 options arise : some groups decide to seize power and reintroduce themselves as governments, as happened very often in history, others - to sell the gear to the highest bidder. And I assume we can both agree that people willing to buy nukes or Ebola are exactly those that should never possess those. So we now have to hope for a few benevolent gazzilionaires who show up and buy them ALL before they resurface in the midst of Pashtunistan and later forge them into neat, harmless ash treys. How do you see this thing solved in absence of state force ?

* Counterterrorism. You may argue that the fall of governments will render many causes of terrorism obsolete, but it's not that easy - they might have beef not with politics per se, but with the financial system, Mickey Mouse or whatever else, so the threat is still there, especially given the situation above, with the black market ( well, now it's just simply part of "the market" ) bloated with all kinds of destructive stuff. Something tells me that a private "Manhattan Intelligence Co." would have done even a worse job preventing 9/11 than CIA has, especially that there isn't a strong reason why private entities dealing with terrorism would exchange vital information between themselves, thus is the nature of free market competition. It wasn't working too well even right now, with state counterterrorist agencies who actually *wanted* to cooperate efficiently, that's why SPIRNET was introduced in the first place. So ?


BTW
Don't take too much confidence from the system you adhere to being internally coherent, in itself that means exactly jack squat, if, as was said, for ex you start with premises that aren't shared by most humans or overlook something critical ( I think on moral grounds people lean on average more utilitarian than deontological, appart maybe from religious nut jobs, and you won't find that many who hold NAP sacred when faced with particular, ethical dillemas ) then it's doomed to fail, "garbage in, garbage out". That is - at least for anyone other then some moral/IQ elite group, unless you're ok with that, which is unarguable essentially, but IMHO makes an ideology definitely less appealing.

shit.... well put brother..... i havent been here in a while, but what a great post to catch skimming through.

[medicineman]

this thread has become a joke bar two or three decent posts.

im going to stay in the nootropics section from now on.

[Rational Madman]

this thread has become a joke bar two or three decent posts.

im going to stay in the nootropics section from now on.

Okay, but what forms the basis of your conclusion that the non-nootropics threads are somehow beneath you? Your own unimpeachable contributions? What you're really saying is: I value my convictions so very highly, and no longer want them to be threatened.

[eternaltraveler]

this thread has become a joke bar two or three decent posts.

im going to stay in the nootropics section from now on.

yeah, the nootropics section is a real bastion of rationality...

[medicineman]

this thread has become a joke bar two or three decent posts.

im going to stay in the nootropics section from now on.

Okay, but what forms the basis of your conclusion that the non-nootropics threads are somehow beneath you? Your own unimpeachable contributions? What you're really saying is: I value my convictions so very highly, and no longer want them to be threatened.

my convictions are no more important than anyone elses convictions. As a matter of fact, I consider nothing beneath me (unlike you) but threads in this subforum always descend into a right v left battleground of verbal attacks and insults.

And yes, the nootropics section is more evidence based than any of these 'humane sciences' forums. I would go for a double blind rct over conjectures based on historical records anyday.

Adios.

[Rational Madman]

this thread has become a joke bar two or three decent posts.

im going to stay in the nootropics section from now on.

Okay, but what forms the basis of your conclusion that the non-nootropics threads are somehow beneath you? Your own unimpeachable contributions? What you're really saying is: I value my convictions so very highly, and no longer want them to be threatened.

my convictions are no more important than anyone elses convictions. As a matter of fact, I consider nothing beneath me (unlike you) but threads in this subforum always descend into a right v left battleground of verbal attacks and insults.

And yes, the nootropics section is more evidence based than any of these 'humane sciences' forums. I would go for a double blind rct over conjectures based on historical records anyday.

Adios.

Okay, you're missing my point, because I've rarely witnessed you rise above the binary norm of discussion. And so by taking a stand now, and removing yourself from the ongoing discussions for your previously stated reasons, it seems a bit disingenuous.

Edited by Rol82, 29 December 2010 - 01:46 PM.

[chris w]

but threads in this subforum always descend into a right v left battleground

of verbal attacks and insults.

With the former I can agree to an extent ( but then I guess left vs right battleground is...the idea how it's supposed to be done ). It's hard to approach political issues without any degree of emotional reaction, if one was completely unaffectionate in such discussions, I would suspect he doesn't really care all that much about his own views. I mean, this stuff is important, no ? And it's not even like I will start to dislike somebody with opposing views as long as they remain in the range of sanity ( = not fascist ).

It's just that sometimes some egos get a bit inflated in the process of discussing...

And with the latter I don't agree, just going through the archives every now and then, I often came across debates that I found hugely informative, even if a poster got into some degree of ad homs it was still something like :

"You're such a retard because :

( here a well thought out post with graphs and stuff, and detailed analysis following ) "


And thanks for the kind word above, my balls felt gently stroked.

Edited by chris w, 30 December 2010 - 03:54 AM.