brave and steely-eyed and morally pure and a bit terrifying… /testimonials /evil /leet .ask? .ask_long?
"No! Seasons are bad! We need to build a wall to keep the seasons out, and the sun will pay for it."
(via sinesalvatorem)
TECHNICALLY
The sun pays for 100% of everything on this planet except Icelandic aluminium.
(via shieldfoss)
(via shieldfoss)
3 weeks ago · tagged #shitposting · 27 notes · source: sinesalvatorem · .permalink
Gentrification creates a stifling homogeneity in urban areas that makes it less suited for the everyday lives of the lower class and more suited towards the leisure and tourism of those with expendable income.
An old, decrepit laundromat gets replaced by an upscale bakery? And people are mad? It’s not that the poor hate organic vegan cupcakes, it’s that most of us don’t have a way to do laundry in our own home.
Run-down corner stores replaced by hand-made designer clothing boutiques? We don’t hate your eco-fabric shawl, but I can’t eat that for dinner after work like I could have a can of beans I grabbed from that corner store when I don’t have time to take the bus to the real grocery store after work.
What gentrification brings in and of itself is not typically bad, it’s that gentrification brings institutions of leisure and pleasure and makes it so that the poor have to go farther out of their way for basic necessities. It turns low-income living spaces into local tourist attractions. It can even create food deserts by putting restaurants, grocery stores, etc. in that the majority of the lower class cannot afford.
Imagine if someone totally renovated your house and turned it into a mini theme park - they took away your sleeping space, where you prepare food, where you clean yourself and get ready for your day, and replaced it with things that will please people who are visiting, who have their own homes they can go back to, who are here not for their entire life but just as a distraction from their otherwise mundane existence. It’s not that you hate theme parks, it’s not like you’ve never been to a theme park and vow to never visit one again. It’s just that you need to live! To survive! And the leisure of those who have more than you should not invalidate your existence.
And that’s why immigration is bad.
??? immigrants aren’t the ones gentrifying neighborhoods, they’re the lower class, what are you talking about
gentrifiers:neighbourhoods::immigrants:nations
#approximations #semi-endorsed
i can’t believe i’m even entering this conversation, but you do realize that (at least in the context of the united states, canada, and western europe), most immigrants are….uh, not wealthy people who would be totally fine staying in their nations of origin and are just swapping countries for funsies, or so they won’t have to pay as much for rent, or what have you? & if there are immigrants who fit that description, they certainly aren’t the immigrants anyone on the anti-immigration side of The Discourse is scaremongering about. like, make an anti-immigration argument if you want, but comparing it to neighborhood gentrification is really odd and off-base.
i get how it could seem like a tempting analogy– you might think “well, from my perspective it sounds like these are both cases of people barging in where they don’t really belong and **~*changing the culture and environment*~** over the objections of the people who already live there– BUT WAIT!!! most leftists think gentrification is BAD and immigration is GOOD (or at least OKAY). ha ha, CHECKMATE, LEFTISTS~~”
like if you only think about it for a few seconds, it’s a pretty good rhetorical “gotcha”
unfortunately, whether you are pro- or anti- immigration, it falls apart after more than a few seconds of thought, especially when it comes in response to a post like this, which emphasizes that the main problem with gentrification isn’t some vague “people moving in where they Don’t Belong” or “neighborhoods Changing Over Time and becoming demographically/culturally different”– it is specifically that upper middle class and wealthy people, who could live almost anywhere they wanted, are displacing poor and working class people, who do not have many options as to where they can go. this particular post is saying that the rich are coming into poor neighborhoods and replacing needed, functional features and businesses that were already there with frivolous luxury and leisure businesses and features that the original residents of the neighborhood can’t even afford. they aren’t just “moving in” and “changing things” or using the resources a place already had to offer– they’re turning a neighborhood/community into a “theme park”, a “luxury” playland for tourists/hipsters.
the immigrants people are arguing about– again, at least in the context of immigration discourse where i live, in the united states– are not people who are wealthy or privileged compared to the vast majority of the country’s actual citizens, and literally no one is claiming that the problem with them is that they’re replacing necessary things with glitzy tourist-trap stuff almost no native-born citizen cares about or can afford. the power dynamic is completely different; the socio-economic implications are completely different, the things people who worry about or dislike immigration fear will happen If This Is Allowed To Continue are completely different. it just isn’t an analogy that holds up, and it makes you sound kind of like you are either embarrassingly ignorant or trolling people when you pull it out, especially without any sort of attempt at justification or extrapolation.
sorry.
but it does.
I did say it was an approximation :)
But I think it holds up better than you say, for two reasons:
1. Immigrants have, almost by definition, a lot more freedom of movement than the native-born working class. They already have some experience of international travel, there’s likely another country where they have citizenship, they rarely have obligations which tie them to a single city or region, and so on. This isn’t the same as the agency granted by huge pots of cash, but it’s more than the native poor have.
2. Immigrants become a lot better off as a result of immigration, while native workers become worse off (although the degree to which this is true is debatable, yes, and may be less important than other factors). Poor people getting richer at the expense of other poor people isn’t unfair in the same way as rich people turning the lives of poor people into theme parks, but that doesn’t automatically make it okay.
Immigrants are coming into native neighborhoods (which to them are abstract entities consisting of some number of their own people and some amount of economic advantage for them, certainly not, you know, neighborhoods, each with its own unique social context, history, set of traditions, etc.) and replacing needed, functional features and businesses that were already there with businesses targeted at immigrants, which the original residents of the neighborhood have no need for, and often can’t even make use of, because the signs aren’t in English and the employees don’t speak English. The natives these immigrants are replacing, however, are almost always working-class, which is why it’s standard for wilfully ignorant, status-signaling Brahmins – note that the person you’re arguing with here has posts about getting art commissions and rejection letters for poems – to concoct a supposedly clear-cut moral distinction between immigration and gentrification.
Tbh some chinese supermarket are kind of a nice innovation for poor people provided it doesn’t displace too much other types of supermarkets.
Yeah and from a purely economic standpoint the incentives to create businesses targeted at english speaking residents is still there in a way that isn’t true with gentrification. Immigrants and natives don’t have the same disparity in terms of ability to influence the market.
I buy a shitload of my food from immigrants’ shops, despite being whitest and nativest native who ever whited, because the immigrant shops sell better and cheaper stuff than the white people shops. And the æsthetic is less corp-y and more human too. And who cares if the employees speak Arabic, and even if they couldn’t speak Finnish (although the ones working the front-end alway can), if they speak €€€.
My favorite snack bar in the Helsinki Railway Station is an immigrant place; the last time I was there the vendor was east asian, there was a sheet of paper scotch-taped on the wall saying in Arabic that someone has a van for rent, I don’t even know what half the foods were, I suspect their compliance of regulations is best described as “creative”, and yeah it’s cheap. Not too far from it there are the corp chain cafes, the finnish equivalents of Starbucks or whatever.
That’s basically the exact inverse of gentrification. Gentrification smells like corp, immigration has the æsthetic of freedom.
And who cares if the employees speak Arabic, and even if they couldn’t speak Finnish (although the ones working the front-end alway can), if they speak €€€.
Beautiful. Case in point: I initially read it as $$$, but whatever goes.
Also, spot the libertarian.
Oh, and srsly, the immigrant places are beautiful. There’s one ex-down-the-street (I recently moved from the downtown muslim quarter to an old shipyard area) which advertises money remittance services and phone calls to Somali telecoms. On Fridays brown-skinned men in not-strange-anymore clothes gather around it and talk to each other about everyday things I don’t understand the language of but feel the inherent human connection to.
My usual immigrant grocery store sells big huge sacks of rice, hookahs, prayer rugs, rose water fragnances, care products for black people’s hair, legumes where the origin labeling is like an obnoxious hipster: “oh, it’s a really obscure country, you wouldn’t have heard of it” (except that I have because I’m a nerd) and which cost a fraction of what they would in Finnish Whole Foods (which is the only other place even selling them), fresh chili for a quarter of the price elsewhere, etc.
Then there’s the chinese supermarket with ridiculously cheap tofu (although I’d need to figure out how to cook it for my tastes because its consistency is different from corp tofu), fucken MSG (yummy), intriguing frozen veggies in simple transparent plastic bags instead of flashy packaging because they know their customers know what they are and that they are good and they don’t need to waste money trying to advertise them on the shelves, a dozen different varieties of soy sauce, all as inexpensive as the cheapest store label bulk product in the white people supermarkets.
Then there’s the anarchist cafe, which triggers the exact same sensibilities in my brain. Gluten flour in plain brown paper bags, labeled with black marker on masking tape and probably not weighed according to regulation precision, prices more than competitive with the corp stores selling the exact same product, the only difference being that the corp stores are more shiny. The (all-vegan) food items on sale have only allergens labeled, to an extent way exceeding official requirements. There’s a selection of radical subversive reading material to buy, worn-out board games to play, a free book exchange, gender-free toilets.
And on the outside there’s a thin string across the courtyard with a sign hanging from it: “no alcoholic drinks outside the marked area” because finns believe that this small piece of string, mandated by alcohol regulations, is the only thing keeping society from collapsing into Mad Max.
Apart from that string, this is what liberty looks like. Private as in “privacy”, not “privatized profits and socialized risks”. The vibrancy of people doing good for themselves and for each other, not the sterile emptiness of corps, fueled by regulatory limits on options and alternatives and the complacency of the crowd that prefers them (…and I’ll just cut here, you can read the rest from Ayn Rand Walks Into a Coffee Shop)
3 weeks ago · tagged #unleashing my inner randroid #specifics possibly slightly modified for privacy reasons #or because i've forgotten the details #but the spirit is true · 30,311 notes · source: soycrates · .permalink
im tired of “psychic powers misdiagnosed as psychosis” stories instead i want actual psychotic characters with psychic powers being constantly irritated as fuck because they cant tell whether their visions are prophetic or hallucinations and if the chosen one thing is a delusion of grandeur or not
They have a portal that leads to a fantastical world in their closet, but they don’t know if it’s real or not. It could be, but it could also be their brain screwing with them by taking forgotten bits of that one time they read Narnia. They low key sometimes throw trash through it and it seems to disappear but also sometimes it comes back like wtf is this, make up your mind fake portal.
their best friend comes over and is like holy FUCK dude narnia’s in your closet and they’re like lmao i know and the best friend is like what?? and they’re like i told you about that hallucination right?? and the friend is like no narnia is literally in your closet and they’re like SHIT DUDE I’VE BEEN IGNORING IT FOR MONTHS BC I FIGURED I JUST NEEDED TO ADJUST MY ANTIPSYCHOTICS
They go to their doctor and say “yo I don’t think my meds are working, cuz a giant black wolf is following me around and crowd keeps appearing????” Their doc just looks at them. “So that’s not your dog then?” “Oh shit, it’s real !? So it HAS been stealing the food from the fridge!”
i’m so here for a psychotic chosen one who ignores all budding signs of magic because they’re just like “yeah, same shit As Always”
(via gruntledandhinged)
3 weeks ago · 30,554 notes · source: commanderfraya · .permalink
i h a v e m a d e a m i s t a k e
strictly platonic therapy rimming
“sorry about the mathematical sexytimes” (definitely the time my girlfriend tried to give me some math lessons and it ended in sexy times and no learning) and “shameless punkrock femslash” (do i have to say more?)
“sorry about the mathemathical sexytimes” ok that’s it i don’t even need to click anymore
unsafe robot barebacking
gratuitous capitalist cuddling
@sinesalvatorem it you
your daily dose of punk-rock threesome
my actual first sexual experience
strictly platonic scientific fluff
seductive scientific sexytimes
your daily dose of zero-gravity fingering
passionate scientific threesome
emotional mathematical angst
naked recovery cuddling
subtle dictator femslash
emotional tentacle femslash
lovecraftian dictator threesome
#life goals
hashtag capitalist shenanigans
stop kinkshaming me (alternatively: whoops you guessed my Evil Plan)
your daily dose of dream OC’s
okay seriously, is it weird to feel sorry for my sm0l borderer (yes, my brain was considering Albion’s Seed stuff in the dream) girlfriend I was bringing to the big world to save from her background of no opportunities and future prospects, only to promptly forget about her in a party when an acquiantance turned out to be a half-Veela and confirmed the hypothesis that those powers work on enbians as well, and I think a friend of Chelsea Manning was also present and then when I woke up I was totally like “oh no I forgot the sm0lfriend”
exhibitionist internet
what I’m doing now I guess
3 weeks ago · tagged #nsfw text · 200,686 notes · source: apricitic · .permalink
Astronaut readjusts to life back on Earth
> Don’t give him a baby for a while.
(via kontextmaschine)
3 weeks ago · tagged #life goals · 1,181,379 notes · source: videohall · .permalink
Gentrification creates a stifling homogeneity in urban areas that makes it less suited for the everyday lives of the lower class and more suited towards the leisure and tourism of those with expendable income.
An old, decrepit laundromat gets replaced by an upscale bakery? And people are mad? It’s not that the poor hate organic vegan cupcakes, it’s that most of us don’t have a way to do laundry in our own home.
Run-down corner stores replaced by hand-made designer clothing boutiques? We don’t hate your eco-fabric shawl, but I can’t eat that for dinner after work like I could have a can of beans I grabbed from that corner store when I don’t have time to take the bus to the real grocery store after work.
What gentrification brings in and of itself is not typically bad, it’s that gentrification brings institutions of leisure and pleasure and makes it so that the poor have to go farther out of their way for basic necessities. It turns low-income living spaces into local tourist attractions. It can even create food deserts by putting restaurants, grocery stores, etc. in that the majority of the lower class cannot afford.
Imagine if someone totally renovated your house and turned it into a mini theme park - they took away your sleeping space, where you prepare food, where you clean yourself and get ready for your day, and replaced it with things that will please people who are visiting, who have their own homes they can go back to, who are here not for their entire life but just as a distraction from their otherwise mundane existence. It’s not that you hate theme parks, it’s not like you’ve never been to a theme park and vow to never visit one again. It’s just that you need to live! To survive! And the leisure of those who have more than you should not invalidate your existence.
And that’s why immigration is bad.
??? immigrants aren’t the ones gentrifying neighborhoods, they’re the lower class, what are you talking about
gentrifiers:neighbourhoods::immigrants:nations
#approximations #semi-endorsed
i can’t believe i’m even entering this conversation, but you do realize that (at least in the context of the united states, canada, and western europe), most immigrants are….uh, not wealthy people who would be totally fine staying in their nations of origin and are just swapping countries for funsies, or so they won’t have to pay as much for rent, or what have you? & if there are immigrants who fit that description, they certainly aren’t the immigrants anyone on the anti-immigration side of The Discourse is scaremongering about. like, make an anti-immigration argument if you want, but comparing it to neighborhood gentrification is really odd and off-base.
i get how it could seem like a tempting analogy– you might think “well, from my perspective it sounds like these are both cases of people barging in where they don’t really belong and **~*changing the culture and environment*~** over the objections of the people who already live there– BUT WAIT!!! most leftists think gentrification is BAD and immigration is GOOD (or at least OKAY). ha ha, CHECKMATE, LEFTISTS~~”
like if you only think about it for a few seconds, it’s a pretty good rhetorical “gotcha”
unfortunately, whether you are pro- or anti- immigration, it falls apart after more than a few seconds of thought, especially when it comes in response to a post like this, which emphasizes that the main problem with gentrification isn’t some vague “people moving in where they Don’t Belong” or “neighborhoods Changing Over Time and becoming demographically/culturally different”– it is specifically that upper middle class and wealthy people, who could live almost anywhere they wanted, are displacing poor and working class people, who do not have many options as to where they can go. this particular post is saying that the rich are coming into poor neighborhoods and replacing needed, functional features and businesses that were already there with frivolous luxury and leisure businesses and features that the original residents of the neighborhood can’t even afford. they aren’t just “moving in” and “changing things” or using the resources a place already had to offer– they’re turning a neighborhood/community into a “theme park”, a “luxury” playland for tourists/hipsters.
the immigrants people are arguing about– again, at least in the context of immigration discourse where i live, in the united states– are not people who are wealthy or privileged compared to the vast majority of the country’s actual citizens, and literally no one is claiming that the problem with them is that they’re replacing necessary things with glitzy tourist-trap stuff almost no native-born citizen cares about or can afford. the power dynamic is completely different; the socio-economic implications are completely different, the things people who worry about or dislike immigration fear will happen If This Is Allowed To Continue are completely different. it just isn’t an analogy that holds up, and it makes you sound kind of like you are either embarrassingly ignorant or trolling people when you pull it out, especially without any sort of attempt at justification or extrapolation.
sorry.
but it does.
I did say it was an approximation :)
But I think it holds up better than you say, for two reasons:
1. Immigrants have, almost by definition, a lot more freedom of movement than the native-born working class. They already have some experience of international travel, there’s likely another country where they have citizenship, they rarely have obligations which tie them to a single city or region, and so on. This isn’t the same as the agency granted by huge pots of cash, but it’s more than the native poor have.
2. Immigrants become a lot better off as a result of immigration, while native workers become worse off (although the degree to which this is true is debatable, yes, and may be less important than other factors). Poor people getting richer at the expense of other poor people isn’t unfair in the same way as rich people turning the lives of poor people into theme parks, but that doesn’t automatically make it okay.
Immigrants are coming into native neighborhoods (which to them are abstract entities consisting of some number of their own people and some amount of economic advantage for them, certainly not, you know, neighborhoods, each with its own unique social context, history, set of traditions, etc.) and replacing needed, functional features and businesses that were already there with businesses targeted at immigrants, which the original residents of the neighborhood have no need for, and often can’t even make use of, because the signs aren’t in English and the employees don’t speak English. The natives these immigrants are replacing, however, are almost always working-class, which is why it’s standard for wilfully ignorant, status-signaling Brahmins – note that the person you’re arguing with here has posts about getting art commissions and rejection letters for poems – to concoct a supposedly clear-cut moral distinction between immigration and gentrification.
Tbh some chinese supermarket are kind of a nice innovation for poor people provided it doesn’t displace too much other types of supermarkets.
Yeah and from a purely economic standpoint the incentives to create businesses targeted at english speaking residents is still there in a way that isn’t true with gentrification. Immigrants and natives don’t have the same disparity in terms of ability to influence the market.
I buy a shitload of my food from immigrants’ shops, despite being whitest and nativest native who ever whited, because the immigrant shops sell better and cheaper stuff than the white people shops. And the æsthetic is less corp-y and more human too. And who cares if the employees speak Arabic, and even if they couldn’t speak Finnish (although the ones working the front-end alway can), if they speak €€€.
My favorite snack bar in the Helsinki Railway Station is an immigrant place; the last time I was there the vendor was east asian, there was a sheet of paper scotch-taped on the wall saying in Arabic that someone has a van for rent, I don’t even know what half the foods were, I suspect their compliance of regulations is best described as “creative”, and yeah it’s cheap. Not too far from it there are the corp chain cafes, the finnish equivalents of Starbucks or whatever.
That’s basically the exact inverse of gentrification. Gentrification smells like corp, immigration has the æsthetic of freedom.
3 weeks ago · 30,311 notes · source: soycrates · .permalink
scatterdarknessscattersilence:
Here’s a thing: there’s nothing sacred about callout posts. Anyone can make one. This includes abusive people.
In fact, given the common abuser tactic of isolating their victim from any possible support networks, I think it’s actually MORE likely for abusers to make callout posts about their targets than vice versa.
If you see a callout post on your dash that makes no effort to back up its claims, and you don’t know the poster? Don’t spread it. There is an extremely high chance you’d be doing an abuser’s work for them.
And if they DO provide links to back up their claims? READ THEM. Don’t just assume those links say what the poster claims they do. I have seen SO MANY callout posts cross my dash, where the descriptions of their “receipts” were just blatant misrepresentations of what happened– sometimes even outright lies– and the few that have checked out don’t REMOTELY make up for the many that started baseless witch hunts.
this is especially used against trans women, since transphobic ideas about them make it really easy for people to believe they’re sexual predators etc
(via thetransintransgenic)
3 weeks ago · tagged #bad sj cw · 6,498 notes · source: toasthaste · .permalink
I’ve gotta say, this is really kinda cute.
(Here’s a decrypting utility built around that key, by the way. If you know anyone who got hit.)
(via thetransintransgenic)
4 weeks ago · 188 notes · .permalink
It seems easy enough for a perfect Libertarian state to evolve/devolve into something very similar to what we have now without any non-Libertarian actions being taken along the way, if that makes sense.
If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.
To me this makes Libertarianism relatively uninteresting except as a reminder not to micromanage things and that centralisation has costs and should be employed sparingly.
This is a bizarre criticism to me.
If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.
There is no reason this would happen. If it did happen, it would be a bad outcome, because we’d be back in the position of an interventionist state. But again, I don’t see any reason why such a thing would happen without “non-libertarian actions being taken along the way”. And how to design institutions to minimize those is the chief project of libertarian jurisprudential theory.
In any case, I don’t see how this reduces the main points put forward by libertarianism, such as that nearly all of the arguments used to justify the existence of an expansive state are invalid, that nearly all government interventions in the economy or in people’s private lives are net harmful, etc. And if you agree with those, it’s hard to see how you could support an expansive state.
But if those arguments are wrong, that would be an entirely separate line of criticism from “a libertarian society would devolve back into a non-libertarian society”. Because in that case, the goal would be to prevent this from happening and/or minimize the role of the state as much as possible. Which is hardly the “middle of the road” position.
I think there are reasons why consolidation and centralisation would happen, as we are seeing in the corporate world across many industries today.
(In the case of monopoly on violence this is even more critical, and it is typical to see turf wars between nations or gangs flare up from time to time then settle into a steady state once they have negotiated who has control of which territory).
But the fact that this can easily happen means continual interventions and tweaking to keep the system from collapsing, maintaining it in a kind of dynamic instability much like a modern fighter plane, or going back further to Romance of the Three Kingdoms where any two of them can always gang up to prevent a takeover by the third. That’s not necessarily an efficient or fun process, though.
To take this line of thought further requires clarifying whether we are talking about a hypothetical state that still holds an absolute monopoly on violence or not, because that makes a huge difference.
Even a strong centralised state can be more discriminating in the interventions in which it undertakes, eg. a more sensible drug policy, fewer foreign wars, etc.
Doesn’t this sound exactly like how the world have been for a long time until relatively recently? It’s not not states even now holds absolute monopoly on violence.
I mean you are seeing the consolidation in industries, but not really comprehensively across industries. And it could be argued that tax systems and regulations actually disfavor non-big-businesses.
Few big corporations would be competitive against smaller challengers without state intervention to establish barriers to entry. Even the businesses themselves know this; advice to invest in those that have strong “moats” around them is cartoonish villainy and totally true.
Corporations aren’t magic; they are subject to the same information problems centralized states are. People usually know their own situations better than outsiders do, and a lot of the problems in eg. universities emphasizing “””productivity””” in terms of publications, or employers of programmers counting lines of code, are instances of precisely this: people can’t do the actually useful things because someone is trying to measure something that doesn’t lend itself to effective measurement, and the bad measurers should get outcompeted away in a functioning market by those who aren’t impacted by mismeasurement. This probably explains a lot of why academicians perform best in traditional public/monopoly-corporate settings where the rules are basically “you’re smart, here’s a bunch of money, figure out something cool, we won’t bother you in the meantime” and programmers are more productive in startups instead of corps burdened by mismanagement.
And state intervention also creates artificial and inefficient property rights. Copyrights, patents, etc. would be basically unenforceable without the state or an organization equivalent to it, and they have a massive centralizing effect on the economy. I don’t believe organic-pragmatic property rights would ever be able to extend to information in such a way as nobody could afford to hunt down pirates on their own unless the starting position is absolutely centralized to begin with (and that’s like “what if we turned the Soviet Union into a megacorporation but didn’t change anything else”; not libertarian at all in practice).
Bans on stripping DRM and stuff get legitimacy from the state; we’re seeing the backlash to “corps are trying to steal the stuff we own” even now and absent a state-equivalent enforcer all it would take is one defector who sells free-as-in-speech 3d-printers etc. to render such positions unfeasible in practice. And the world has way more idealists than a single one.
State and gang violence is seldom economically efficient either; a lot of it relies on the existence of a population those benefiting from violence can pass the costs of that violence on. Drafting soldiers, harming civilians, destroying value, etc.
So all of this turns into an engineering problem: how to craft a system that has, when accounting for known human biases, stable incentives against harmful centralization. My anarchist side suspects that the monopoly on violence is the key, specifically in the sense that its existence enables all the other centralization by passing the costs of enforcing that centralization onto others. When someone has that degree of power, it can be abused to create other forms of power as well, but if violent enforcement of monopolies of any kind is ~disrupted~ the prohibitive expense of trying to recreate them could protect a system made of smaller, competitive actors, from re-establishing them.
Of course, this necessitates solving the three key issues that the popular legitimacy of states presently rests on. One is safety, one is equality, and one is moloch. If people believe that only a state can protect them from crime, they will want a state; and if people believe that only a state can prevent a slide into feudalistic rentseeking by capital-holders and destitute indebted poverty for the rest, they will want a state; and if people believe only a state can disarm the shitty multipolar traps that will destroy everything of value, they will want a state.
The first one has seen a decent amount of work done on it, and I guess empirical experimentation would be enough to sort it out.
The second is what a lot of people object to, but I think simply stopping the state/crony-capital symbiosis of using artificial property rights and assignments to monopolize zero-sum things and propertyize non-scarce things would render it relatively inconsequential (of course, easier said than done); a lot of deliberate violent, coercive, and value-destroying action has gone to creating and maintaining economic hierarchies between people favored by states and people preyed upon by states, and modern technology makes maintaining a basic standard of living trivially cheap if one isn’t bound by rentiers holding artificial property rights. Thus basic solidarity, mutual aid, distributed productive capital etc. could ensure that even non-productive people would be able to have their needs met better than in current illfare states.
The third one is hard, but even states themselves are subject to the same pressures, and if we got from “states everywhere” to “Firewall has the monopoly on x-risk prevention and will nuke you if you act irresponsibly and refuse to stop doing it but otherwise you may do whatever you wish” it would still be a drastic improvement. And the less significant multipolar traps aren’t that terrible; I alone can name several clever ways of solving the fish farming example of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Non-Libertarian FAQ with trade.
For example, the most simple solution would be that the Filter Pact threatens to kick Mike’s ass unless Mike uses the filter. Or Mike’s Dia Paying Group, having negotiated the same deal with everyone else’s protection agencies, would tell him that disconnecting the filter is agreed to be illegal and obligates him to pay $999 in damages to everyone else (+10% for DPG) or they won’t protect him from attempts to kick his ass. The state bans this because kicking Mike’s ass is a crime but polluting everyone else’s fish farms isn’t, but an anarchistic system of organic property rights wouldn’t draw such a distinction as Mike isn’t able to lobby himself a special protected position from which to harm others.
Alternatively, everyone could agree to start paying $.29945 a month to everyone else who uses a filter once everyone has agreed to this deal and joined the Filter Fund. Thus, everyone will join it to earn $700, and Mike won’t disconnect his filter because he would lose the $299.15 he gets from others plus $1 from pollution while only gaining $300 from not operating the filter, making a net loss of $.15. And Mike won’t stop paying the Filter Fund because if he does it, everyone else will disconnect their filters because now they would make a profit of ~$.15 from doing so, and everything will go to shit. This should be a game-theoretically stable equilibrium afaik.
But the basic thing is: if there’s a problem that causes net harms, someone could make a profit by solving it. In the fish farming example, the solution will exist if implementing it costs significantly less than the $700 000 a month it would create in value.
For food regulation I could join with a bunch of people to pay our own food certification agency, which in turn is held responsible for the costs of illnesses caused by tainted food, and is thus incentivized to minimize its occurrence. And it itself would pay restaurants, manufacturers etc. to inspect their facilities so that it could get accurate information on risks. If the seller pays the regulator they will have an interest to collude, but if the buyer pays the regulator (whose entire point, after all, is to be serving the buyer’s interests) it’s possible to construct a system where nobody has an incentive to sell unsafe food. And this can naturally be bundled with a whole lot of other services in insurance, healthcare, etc. to create a de facto regulatory regime that is nonetheless voluntary and actually incentivized to serve the people, instead of special interest groups and the careers of lobbyists and cya-obsessed bureaucrats.
So in ~theory~, (and this is very much the sort of theory which is just entertaining instead of serious) if the emergence of states is a harmful thing, people would find a clever way to prevent it as long as they are permitted to do so.
And then there’s the cultural thing. Nowadays when there is a problem, people automatically think the state should do something about it, and try to pass a law. Fixing that would go a long way; instead of what-is-basically-violence-at-the-bottom people could try a different way of solving it.
Unregulated trade unions were nice until the state stepped in and ruined the labor market (the socialdemocratic corporatist labor laws in Finland were literally implemented as an anti-communist conspiracy, but just as usual the left has forgotten this and nowadays everyone in the unions defends the thing that was intended to destroy their influence, because redwashed rentiers got comfy jobs from it and it got tribally associated as “left” so of course they must support it; and nowadays everything related to work and welfare is an unholy hell of bullshit which hurts workers and honest entrepreneurs alike).
Mutual aid societies were nice until the state stepped in to implement price floors for doctors and artificially restrict the supply because doctors didn’t want to be in an equal bargaining position with working-class customers; they wanted to be authorities and the state obligingly served those interests because screw the poor that’s why.
Rojava is nice, but Turkey is a state which is doing its damnednest to step in and prevent it from being successful.
But basically, getting people from the mindset “the state should solve this” to “okay how do we solve this” would help a lot. And that’s the mindset I’m trying to operate in, and I’d love for the state to get out of my way when I make the world better.
okay this got excessively long and rambly and I lost track of what I was originally saying and whatever, enjoy
I alone can name several clever ways of solving the fish farming example of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Non-Libertarian FAQ with trade.
But, as the FAQ comments, those clever ideas did not, in fact, happen and are continuing to not happen when it comes to fisheries in international waters nowadays.
Any fool can imagine a utopia; the problem is that the incentive structures of economics will produce exactly one thing out of the space of things you could imagine might happen, and the one thing they pick is not, usually, your favourite. From the perspective of a human, there’s billions of free variables we can tweak in our imagination to get the result we want to fall out; in reality, those free variables already have specific values, and they’re not conveniently setup for anything in particular. Insofar as stable equilibria do appear, there’s lots of them and there’s no principled reason to expect the one you like to emerge- as demonstrated by the lack of clever coordination schemes in the real world.
I’d like it if “how do we solve this” could be consistently and universally answered without involving coercion, but I’m very dubious. You need a very specific pattern of people being able to coordinate effectively whenever it’s good and unable to coordinate effectively when coordination is bad that’s unlikely to emerge by chance; you’ll get cases where people can’t/don’t coordinate effectively where it’d be desirable, and where they coordinate effectively where it isn’t, e.g. to set up cartels, or to torture and kill people for being “deviants” because the owners of the the three nearby violence-handling firms don’t care enough about deviants, are better paid by the people doing it, and trying to start your own is just helpfully highlighting yourself as the next target.
The only way I could see it sort of working is if you could coordinate everyone to *create* that pattern, because it’s vanishingly unlikely to occur by chance. If you could get everyone to agree to a norm of cooperating and coordinating if and only if coordinating is a good idea for everyone and had near-perfect (possibly perfect; a lot of stuff doesn’t handle even a single defector well) value alignment and agreement on game theory between people maybe it’d work.But I think this boils down to a complicated description of requiring perfect humans to make your society go, rather than fitting a society to your humans- every instance of individual corruption is people failing to do that in reality, and it isn’t clear how you’d get people to all agree to not try to create regional monopoly violence handlers in any world you couldn’t get them to all agree to just not commit crimes- or not run a centralised government shittily.
And one reason you can’t do that is that human actions are noisy; in your lake scenario, some human is going to pay the 15c to defect because they get in their head the idea that they’re not going to let the other people tell them what to do, or because of some stupid argument over how the filter should be implemented, or something else (15c is a cheap way to make a point). Any system needs to be able to tolerate individuals being wildly and ridiculously bad at optimising for their own interests, which means it needs to have stability after defections even if defection is stupid. Even perfectly mentally healthy humans behave stupidly often, nearly always if the argument for “correct” behaviour is not intuitive. It needs to be able to tolerate channers deciding in numbers of about a thousand to try to fuck things up for the lulz of seeing the world burn.
And I’m really doubtful you can get that kind of quasi-stability without coercion, especially since you need it to persist over technological development and other things which will wildly change all the factors involved in decision-making.
EDIT: To put this last bit in engineering terms, your system would need Byzantine fault tolerance for up to some reasonable number of byzantine (arbitrarily, possibly maliciously designed with intent to break the system) failures. (There are impossibility proofs for byzantine fault tolerance with more than a third failing, but a third is much more than a reasonable number, so the problem remains not *proven* unsolvable)
Obviously. Incentive structures are everything; but there’s a certain laziness in “let’s have the state solve it” which regularly backfires. And state action has an entire class of shitty incentive structures that inevitably cause those backfires and massive large-scale harms. Just as there are inherent issues in voluntary coordination/consensual subjection to coercively binding agreements, there are inherent issues in having a centralized implementer of arbitrary violence. My claim is that people should be allowed to test the hypothesis “voluntary systems are less shitty than coercive systems” without getting shot at, because voluntary systems eradicate one class of failures (voting on promethea’s body) and there are incentives to migitate other classes of failures.
I might not be able to save the fisheries, but I could save many people from the violence inherent in the system. In a world with NSA, gender identity clinics, FDA, the war on drugs, privatized prisons, regulations banning non-rich people from making profitable investments, criminalization of poverty, cronyist businesses and lobbyist rentseekers, the entire mil-ind complex, FBI destroying the Black Panthers because fuck you that’s why, etc. the decimation of the world’s fisheries doesn’t sound like such a big deal in comparison.
Defence is a problem that anarchist states/communities must solve, it is the core function of states. You can’t simply claim it’s “not fair“ whenever the law or other coercion tries to stop you. If people believe the defense strategy will fail, they would be fools to join.
And well, there’s also the fact that, as it is we have all those investments and drugs existing to be banned, which is not guaranteed to happen in an anarchist system. You claim that coercion is worse, but there is a apparency issue there. You see the problems that happen in the factual coercive world, not the counterfactual anarchist world. You don’t really have a basis for believing that’s better.
I also think that banning “coercion“ will instead of limiting violence and oppression create a whole system of really nice excuses for why the violence and oppression they are doing isn’t technically coercion.
Rojava seems to be doing reasonably well on the “defence” front; not anarchistic but far closer than existing states. “Unifying ideology+militia+geopolitical opportunity” has pragmatically been observed to be at least a partial solution.
The drug and investment question can be addressed by voluntary mechanisms reasonably well; allegedly grey-market nootropic communities, darknet drug markets, and bitcoin businesses do a reasonable job of self-regulating. One could claim that it’s because their participants are of the competent edge of the bell curve, but if so, I think it just means that people should figure out how to give freedom to the competent while preventing the less competent from hurting themselves with it, instead of restricting everyone’s freedom to the level of the least common denominator. Bad stuff would still exist, but I’m challenging the idea that it would be obviously bigger than the bad stuff monopoly law creates. Anarchy-that-would-actually-exist needs to be compared to actually existing government, not hypothetical “does its job well” government.
And yes, the entire ancom-ancap debates are all about “why this isn’t coercion but that totally is”.
4 weeks ago · 40 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
It seems easy enough for a perfect Libertarian state to evolve/devolve into something very similar to what we have now without any non-Libertarian actions being taken along the way, if that makes sense.
If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.
To me this makes Libertarianism relatively uninteresting except as a reminder not to micromanage things and that centralisation has costs and should be employed sparingly.
This is a bizarre criticism to me.
If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.
There is no reason this would happen. If it did happen, it would be a bad outcome, because we’d be back in the position of an interventionist state. But again, I don’t see any reason why such a thing would happen without “non-libertarian actions being taken along the way”. And how to design institutions to minimize those is the chief project of libertarian jurisprudential theory.
In any case, I don’t see how this reduces the main points put forward by libertarianism, such as that nearly all of the arguments used to justify the existence of an expansive state are invalid, that nearly all government interventions in the economy or in people’s private lives are net harmful, etc. And if you agree with those, it’s hard to see how you could support an expansive state.
But if those arguments are wrong, that would be an entirely separate line of criticism from “a libertarian society would devolve back into a non-libertarian society”. Because in that case, the goal would be to prevent this from happening and/or minimize the role of the state as much as possible. Which is hardly the “middle of the road” position.
I think there are reasons why consolidation and centralisation would happen, as we are seeing in the corporate world across many industries today.
(In the case of monopoly on violence this is even more critical, and it is typical to see turf wars between nations or gangs flare up from time to time then settle into a steady state once they have negotiated who has control of which territory).
But the fact that this can easily happen means continual interventions and tweaking to keep the system from collapsing, maintaining it in a kind of dynamic instability much like a modern fighter plane, or going back further to Romance of the Three Kingdoms where any two of them can always gang up to prevent a takeover by the third. That’s not necessarily an efficient or fun process, though.
To take this line of thought further requires clarifying whether we are talking about a hypothetical state that still holds an absolute monopoly on violence or not, because that makes a huge difference.
Even a strong centralised state can be more discriminating in the interventions in which it undertakes, eg. a more sensible drug policy, fewer foreign wars, etc.
Doesn’t this sound exactly like how the world have been for a long time until relatively recently? It’s not not states even now holds absolute monopoly on violence.
I mean you are seeing the consolidation in industries, but not really comprehensively across industries. And it could be argued that tax systems and regulations actually disfavor non-big-businesses.
Few big corporations would be competitive against smaller challengers without state intervention to establish barriers to entry. Even the businesses themselves know this; advice to invest in those that have strong “moats” around them is cartoonish villainy and totally true.
Corporations aren’t magic; they are subject to the same information problems centralized states are. People usually know their own situations better than outsiders do, and a lot of the problems in eg. universities emphasizing “””productivity””” in terms of publications, or employers of programmers counting lines of code, are instances of precisely this: people can’t do the actually useful things because someone is trying to measure something that doesn’t lend itself to effective measurement, and the bad measurers should get outcompeted away in a functioning market by those who aren’t impacted by mismeasurement. This probably explains a lot of why academicians perform best in traditional public/monopoly-corporate settings where the rules are basically “you’re smart, here’s a bunch of money, figure out something cool, we won’t bother you in the meantime” and programmers are more productive in startups instead of corps burdened by mismanagement.
And state intervention also creates artificial and inefficient property rights. Copyrights, patents, etc. would be basically unenforceable without the state or an organization equivalent to it, and they have a massive centralizing effect on the economy. I don’t believe organic-pragmatic property rights would ever be able to extend to information in such a way as nobody could afford to hunt down pirates on their own unless the starting position is absolutely centralized to begin with (and that’s like “what if we turned the Soviet Union into a megacorporation but didn’t change anything else”; not libertarian at all in practice).
Bans on stripping DRM and stuff get legitimacy from the state; we’re seeing the backlash to “corps are trying to steal the stuff we own” even now and absent a state-equivalent enforcer all it would take is one defector who sells free-as-in-speech 3d-printers etc. to render such positions unfeasible in practice. And the world has way more idealists than a single one.
State and gang violence is seldom economically efficient either; a lot of it relies on the existence of a population those benefiting from violence can pass the costs of that violence on. Drafting soldiers, harming civilians, destroying value, etc.
So all of this turns into an engineering problem: how to craft a system that has, when accounting for known human biases, stable incentives against harmful centralization. My anarchist side suspects that the monopoly on violence is the key, specifically in the sense that its existence enables all the other centralization by passing the costs of enforcing that centralization onto others. When someone has that degree of power, it can be abused to create other forms of power as well, but if violent enforcement of monopolies of any kind is ~disrupted~ the prohibitive expense of trying to recreate them could protect a system made of smaller, competitive actors, from re-establishing them.
Of course, this necessitates solving the three key issues that the popular legitimacy of states presently rests on. One is safety, one is equality, and one is moloch. If people believe that only a state can protect them from crime, they will want a state; and if people believe that only a state can prevent a slide into feudalistic rentseeking by capital-holders and destitute indebted poverty for the rest, they will want a state; and if people believe only a state can disarm the shitty multipolar traps that will destroy everything of value, they will want a state.
The first one has seen a decent amount of work done on it, and I guess empirical experimentation would be enough to sort it out.
The second is what a lot of people object to, but I think simply stopping the state/crony-capital symbiosis of using artificial property rights and assignments to monopolize zero-sum things and propertyize non-scarce things would render it relatively inconsequential (of course, easier said than done); a lot of deliberate violent, coercive, and value-destroying action has gone to creating and maintaining economic hierarchies between people favored by states and people preyed upon by states, and modern technology makes maintaining a basic standard of living trivially cheap if one isn’t bound by rentiers holding artificial property rights. Thus basic solidarity, mutual aid, distributed productive capital etc. could ensure that even non-productive people would be able to have their needs met better than in current illfare states.
The third one is hard, but even states themselves are subject to the same pressures, and if we got from “states everywhere” to “Firewall has the monopoly on x-risk prevention and will nuke you if you act irresponsibly and refuse to stop doing it but otherwise you may do whatever you wish” it would still be a drastic improvement. And the less significant multipolar traps aren’t that terrible; I alone can name several clever ways of solving the fish farming example of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Non-Libertarian FAQ with trade.
For example, the most simple solution would be that the Filter Pact threatens to kick Mike’s ass unless Mike uses the filter. Or Mike’s Dia Paying Group, having negotiated the same deal with everyone else’s protection agencies, would tell him that disconnecting the filter is agreed to be illegal and obligates him to pay $999 in damages to everyone else (+10% for DPG) or they won’t protect him from attempts to kick his ass. The state bans this because kicking Mike’s ass is a crime but polluting everyone else’s fish farms isn’t, but an anarchistic system of organic property rights wouldn’t draw such a distinction as Mike isn’t able to lobby himself a special protected position from which to harm others.
Alternatively, everyone could agree to start paying $.29945 a month to everyone else who uses a filter once everyone has agreed to this deal and joined the Filter Fund. Thus, everyone will join it to earn $700, and Mike won’t disconnect his filter because he would lose the $299.15 he gets from others plus $1 from pollution while only gaining $300 from not operating the filter, making a net loss of $.15. And Mike won’t stop paying the Filter Fund because if he does it, everyone else will disconnect their filters because now they would make a profit of ~$.15 from doing so, and everything will go to shit. This should be a game-theoretically stable equilibrium afaik.
But the basic thing is: if there’s a problem that causes net harms, someone could make a profit by solving it. In the fish farming example, the solution will exist if implementing it costs significantly less than the $700 000 a month it would create in value.
For food regulation I could join with a bunch of people to pay our own food certification agency, which in turn is held responsible for the costs of illnesses caused by tainted food, and is thus incentivized to minimize its occurrence. And it itself would pay restaurants, manufacturers etc. to inspect their facilities so that it could get accurate information on risks. If the seller pays the regulator they will have an interest to collude, but if the buyer pays the regulator (whose entire point, after all, is to be serving the buyer’s interests) it’s possible to construct a system where nobody has an incentive to sell unsafe food. And this can naturally be bundled with a whole lot of other services in insurance, healthcare, etc. to create a de facto regulatory regime that is nonetheless voluntary and actually incentivized to serve the people, instead of special interest groups and the careers of lobbyists and cya-obsessed bureaucrats.
So in ~theory~, (and this is very much the sort of theory which is just entertaining instead of serious) if the emergence of states is a harmful thing, people would find a clever way to prevent it as long as they are permitted to do so.
And then there’s the cultural thing. Nowadays when there is a problem, people automatically think the state should do something about it, and try to pass a law. Fixing that would go a long way; instead of what-is-basically-violence-at-the-bottom people could try a different way of solving it.
Unregulated trade unions were nice until the state stepped in and ruined the labor market (the socialdemocratic corporatist labor laws in Finland were literally implemented as an anti-communist conspiracy, but just as usual the left has forgotten this and nowadays everyone in the unions defends the thing that was intended to destroy their influence, because redwashed rentiers got comfy jobs from it and it got tribally associated as “left” so of course they must support it; and nowadays everything related to work and welfare is an unholy hell of bullshit which hurts workers and honest entrepreneurs alike).
Mutual aid societies were nice until the state stepped in to implement price floors for doctors and artificially restrict the supply because doctors didn’t want to be in an equal bargaining position with working-class customers; they wanted to be authorities and the state obligingly served those interests because screw the poor that’s why.
Rojava is nice, but Turkey is a state which is doing its damnednest to step in and prevent it from being successful.
But basically, getting people from the mindset “the state should solve this” to “okay how do we solve this” would help a lot. And that’s the mindset I’m trying to operate in, and I’d love for the state to get out of my way when I make the world better.
okay this got excessively long and rambly and I lost track of what I was originally saying and whatever, enjoy
I alone can name several clever ways of solving the fish farming example of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Non-Libertarian FAQ with trade.
But, as the FAQ comments, those clever ideas did not, in fact, happen and are continuing to not happen when it comes to fisheries in international waters nowadays.
Any fool can imagine a utopia; the problem is that the incentive structures of economics will produce exactly one thing out of the space of things you could imagine might happen, and the one thing they pick is not, usually, your favourite. From the perspective of a human, there’s billions of free variables we can tweak in our imagination to get the result we want to fall out; in reality, those free variables already have specific values, and they’re not conveniently setup for anything in particular. Insofar as stable equilibria do appear, there’s lots of them and there’s no principled reason to expect the one you like to emerge- as demonstrated by the lack of clever coordination schemes in the real world.
I’d like it if “how do we solve this” could be consistently and universally answered without involving coercion, but I’m very dubious. You need a very specific pattern of people being able to coordinate effectively whenever it’s good and unable to coordinate effectively when coordination is bad that’s unlikely to emerge by chance; you’ll get cases where people can’t/don’t coordinate effectively where it’d be desirable, and where they coordinate effectively where it isn’t, e.g. to set up cartels, or to torture and kill people for being “deviants” because the owners of the the three nearby violence-handling firms don’t care enough about deviants, are better paid by the people doing it, and trying to start your own is just helpfully highlighting yourself as the next target.
The only way I could see it sort of working is if you could coordinate everyone to *create* that pattern, because it’s vanishingly unlikely to occur by chance. If you could get everyone to agree to a norm of cooperating and coordinating if and only if coordinating is a good idea for everyone and had near-perfect (possibly perfect; a lot of stuff doesn’t handle even a single defector well) value alignment and agreement on game theory between people maybe it’d work.But I think this boils down to a complicated description of requiring perfect humans to make your society go, rather than fitting a society to your humans- every instance of individual corruption is people failing to do that in reality, and it isn’t clear how you’d get people to all agree to not try to create regional monopoly violence handlers in any world you couldn’t get them to all agree to just not commit crimes- or not run a centralised government shittily.
And one reason you can’t do that is that human actions are noisy; in your lake scenario, some human is going to pay the 15c to defect because they get in their head the idea that they’re not going to let the other people tell them what to do, or because of some stupid argument over how the filter should be implemented, or something else (15c is a cheap way to make a point). Any system needs to be able to tolerate individuals being wildly and ridiculously bad at optimising for their own interests, which means it needs to have stability after defections even if defection is stupid. Even perfectly mentally healthy humans behave stupidly often, nearly always if the argument for “correct” behaviour is not intuitive. It needs to be able to tolerate channers deciding in numbers of about a thousand to try to fuck things up for the lulz of seeing the world burn.
And I’m really doubtful you can get that kind of quasi-stability without coercion, especially since you need it to persist over technological development and other things which will wildly change all the factors involved in decision-making.
EDIT: To put this last bit in engineering terms, your system would need Byzantine fault tolerance for up to some reasonable number of byzantine (arbitrarily, possibly maliciously designed with intent to break the system) failures. (There are impossibility proofs for byzantine fault tolerance with more than a third failing, but a third is much more than a reasonable number, so the problem remains not *proven* unsolvable)
Obviously. Incentive structures are everything; but there’s a certain laziness in “let’s have the state solve it” which regularly backfires. And state action has an entire class of shitty incentive structures that inevitably cause those backfires and massive large-scale harms. Just as there are inherent issues in voluntary coordination/consensual subjection to coercively binding agreements, there are inherent issues in having a centralized implementer of arbitrary violence. My claim is that people should be allowed to test the hypothesis “voluntary systems are less shitty than coercive systems” without getting shot at, because voluntary systems eradicate one class of failures (voting on promethea’s body) and there are incentives to migitate other classes of failures.
I might not be able to save the fisheries, but I could save many people from the violence inherent in the system. In a world with NSA, gender identity clinics, FDA, the war on drugs, privatized prisons, regulations banning non-rich people from making profitable investments, criminalization of poverty, cronyist businesses and lobbyist rentseekers, the entire mil-ind complex, FBI destroying the Black Panthers because fuck you that’s why, etc. the decimation of the world’s fisheries doesn’t sound like such a big deal in comparison.
I’m all for letting people try stuff (so long as they’re not coercing people internally or abusing children or anything), and I definitely agree that there’s incentive structure problems with how the people-that-comprise-the-state (meaning civil servants/agents + ‘representatives’, not citizens) are selected and behave and use their power, too.
I’m just very dubious that what will fall out of the new incentive structures would be any better- cronyism between companies as well as with the state becomes legal and not restrained by any need for appearance of legitimacy, and those companies also now run everything the state used to, and this seems unlikely to be any better than the old cronyism and probably a lot worse, and to promptly lead to a lot of the rest of the complaints as well as fascinating new ones that are not readily predictable from here.
I do agree you’d lose the NSA, probably, and military entirely. If you could avert the “monopoly on violence re-emerges” problem and not wind up with a single Police Inc you’d avoid the war on drugs and Black Panthers getting destroyed because fuck you thing, but as I’ve said I find this extremely unlikely and can’t think of anywhere with multiple violence regulators which didn’t have them immediately hash out territories to individually be monopolies within and tolerate other armed groups only insofar as they were clearly not threats to their supremacy.
And if you did end up with a single Police Inc, well, you now live in a dictatorship where social norms are that if you want defence by the police at all you better be able to pay for it, the police can arbitrarily charge whoever they want however much they want (including deliberately pricing you out, if someone else wants you priced out), cronyism is set up to go because we explicitly threw out the regulators, and the head of the doctors’ union has a meeting scheduled with the CEO about all this dangerous drug taking going on scheduled for 2PM and the rest of the CEO’s day is packed too. I think this would be a lot worse, wouldn’t want to live under it, and think the best hope would either be to be popular, or that the market goes so wildly dysfunctional it collapses and lets you try some other kind of government.I guess what I’m really picking up on here, though, is that the current democratic system is ultimately checked by the empathy of the electorate. This is a shitty check, and a lot of people get overlooked, including you, and it’s bad at complicated problems. But it constrains how *far* a bad consequence of the incentive structures can go. The current system doesn’t have all its problems stop just before the point the majority would get outraged by chance- it has an incentive setup which ensures that.
This new system would have no empathy checks, not even the shitty one. Its bad consequences of its incentive structures go *all the way*. To the extent it shares any problems, those problems are now unrestrained, to the extent it has new ones, they start out that way. And for all the current non-human incentive structure does awful things, I think a non-human incentive structure unconstrained by even the minimal constraints on the current one would be worse. I can understand how that is not such a concern for you given how shittily the current system treated you, but it’s a fairly major one for me.
And while I mostly expect this means it would be immediately overthrown by an angry and appalled population as soon as it spits out 18 hour workdays for children or a Child Abusers’ Mutual Defence Force, or something else obviously cartoonishly evil, there’s a good chance the fix for that will come in the form of a dictatorial Police Inc or something else awful, and it’d probably take centuries to get back to a State even as bad as the current ones again.But yeah, I’m for people being able to try it, so long as they’re trying it mostly with other people who want to try it. But I wouldn’t want it anywhere near me or the people I care about, and would fear for the people trying it even as I thought they should have a right to.
Cronyism between companies is enabled by centralized control of the economy; a sufficiently competitive market without big dominant players would help in reducing those possibilities. And even then there’s a limit to how much damage cronyists can cause when their ability to coordinate it (and to violently extract corporate welfare etc.) is reduced.
And if the psychological-cultural issue of “there’s a problem, let’s have a state solve it” is reduced (which I consider necessary; freedom is facto, not jure, and the culture most people form is very unfree and inherently coercive and disrespectful of people), people can just band together to destroy the Child Abusers’ Mutual Defence Force.
Anarchism is under no obligation to be nice to coercive people; if some people decide that slave trade is legal and okay and try to take slaves, I’d fully support violence against them until they stop trying to take slaves. And I’d expect other people to feel the same; but I don’t think they would be willing to do violence to stop people from smoking weed if they couldn’t hide it behind the facade of artificial civility of “laws”. Maybe they would scorn weed-smokers in their communities, but weed-smokers could move to other communities. And since there is no crystallized essence of coercion somewhere in the laws of nature that things could be compared with, the exact boundaries would always be a question of negotiation, fluidity and constant adjustment, and ultimately determined by the combination of what people accept and what they are willing to fight for.
If power to do violence is sufficiently decentralized, the point where the majority gets outraged is just as dangerous for those who are causing it, as it is now, if not more. And with proper coordination systems in place, it might be possible to create a sufficiently stable equilibrium where principles of symmetry, “I don’t mess with you if you don’t mess with me”, etc. complement the woefully deficient empathy of the majority enough to eliminate most of the democratic failures of coercion, while still serving as a check on flagrantly intolerable practices.
Cultural liberals and cultural conservatives could agree that they won’t shoot each other for saying disagreeable things, and won’t try to vote each others’ cultures into oblivion. Trans people could sign up with the Tranarchist Mutual Defense Force which would, with help of allied security providers, keep them safe, or evacuate them from the worst communities where keeping them safe is too difficult. Judge Rotenberg Centre could be at risk of getting raided by Dawn Defense which lets children sign up at age ten, and has made a niche in challenging abusive parents both pro- and retroactively. Dia Paying Group could have its Large Employees harass ArguProtect Platinum members to convince them to stop harassing DPG customers and respect restraining orders. Everyone could band together against the CAMDF and the slavers because fuck them.
The late 19th century-early 20th century saw violence in labor battles because people considered some practices sufficiently intolerable. The difference is that back then the state intervened to artificially favor the cronyist robber barons (eg. in the Battle of Blair Mountain the government even bombed its own citizens from the air); without state support for some groups over others, the knowledge that workers and people sympathizing with them would be willing to draw a line and the mutual desire to avoid violent confrontation could incentivize everyone to prevent 18-hour workdays for children.
Or another example; banks evicting people after a financial crisis has fucked up everything and there are lots of homeless people and empty houses. Without the state to back up the banks with police violence, I’d expect greatly increased amounts of squatting and renegotiating terms.
And this is what I mean by organic property rights; if I made up a paper claiming that I “own” a specific number or the entirety of Kibera, everyone would laugh and tell me to heck off. If I claimed that I made my child with my own labor and thus I “own” my child and can abuse my child however I wish, people would unkindly ask me to go to hell with my claims. But the state enforces patents, clears slums without compensating residents, and kidnaps runaway children and returns them to abusive parents. Democracy can’t ad hoc monkey-patch its rulesets pragmatically, so the rulesets will result in ridiculous edge cases and ever increasing sprawl of conditionals of conditionals to try to deal with them; but if the legitimacy of such an attempt at an exhaustive monopoly ruleset is thrown out, there’s less incentive to abuse those edge cases when there’s the risk of people just going “fuck it, that shit won’t fly”. And knowledge of this incentivizes people to craft agreeable rulesets that can avoid instances of “that shit won’t fly” while still enabling all the good things that rulesets make possible.
I won’t claim that it wouldn’t result in absurdly horrible things happening because everything results in absurdly horrible things, but I’m saying that monopoly violence enables certain hard edges in the culture that I’d expect to be less pronounced without it; and thus an anarchistic system shouldn’t be assumed to be “hard edges taken all the way, plus the novel failure modes” but more like “mostly novel failure modes” instead.
And as far as stability is concerned, theoretically all it takes is that users of violence coordinate effectively against anyone trying to establish monopolies. There are some claims that administrative burdens of inefficiency in policing set a natural limit on the size of security providers somewhere significantly below “big metropolitan police force” which is notably far below “state” or that monstrous “Police Inc”. And (attempts at) monopolies in violence happen in an environment where the idea of a monopoly of violence is relatively taken for granted, and organized crime etc. operate in the same constraints of police existing.
Furthermore, there’s an argument to be made that without a coercive government, trying to establish a coercive government would run against incentive gradients when people would rather be consensually governed. And in ~hypothetical perfect coasean utopia land~, coordinating efforts to stop the Absurdly Horrible Thing would be easier than coordinating efforts to create a state, as almost everyone can agree that AHT shouldn’t exist but rightists won’t want taxes and leftists won’t want morality legislation and thus neither would be willing to cooperate beyond stopping AHT; and stopping AHT could be done even by paying people to not do it and not tolerate it, if paying money would be easier than using violence.
And pragmatic-empirically, Rojava is planning to abolish police by training everyone in policing and having well-armed citizens united by a common ideological cause, and I’m extremely interested in how it goes, and extremely angry at Turkey for trying to fuck with the experiment. So far it seems to be only getting fucked up by authoritarians who don’t want freedom on their backyard, instead of rojavans shooting up sea slugs and shooting at each other.
(via jbeshir)
4 weeks ago · tagged #violence cw #this is a rojava fanblog #promethea's empiricism fetish #drugs cw #i am worst capitalist · 40 notes · source: argumate · .permalink