US Politics, January 2022 — a pro-God, pro-family, pro-bitcoin state

xps

Fair enough. I think a conundrum for the anti-state position is that while the state is obviously often (and everywhere) an instrument of oppression, it can also sometimes, certainly not everywhere, be an instrument of liberation. The idea of individual rights, e.g., is one that — at least in human history so far — has only ever been achieved to any degree with the power of the state behind it. In the U.S., the state enabled and slavery and segregation, but also ultimately dismantled them (and at gunpoint, at that).

So I'm much more sympathetic to ideas of the "just state" — plenty utopian in its own right — than I am to ideas of statelessness.

(My partner and Cindy used to live together— they often disagreed because Cindy was too positive, lmfao)

The idea of individual rights, e.g., is one that — at least in human history so far — has only ever been achieved to any degree with the power of the state behind it.

"Rights" are a creation by the state as a means of controlling populations, and exist, like law, on a field of pain and death.

oh cool this discussion again, I said everything I wanted to in the poll thread but

you can absolutely have effective organization without hierarchy, which is a lot of what "anarchy" is actually about, but it also involves lots of undoing of learned patterns and the inherent conflicts and contradictions (and inevitable hypocrises (sp?)) of trying to work for a better world while living in a dystopia

see also Deleuze & Guattari, rhizomatic vs. arborescent, etc.

"Rights" are a creation by the state as a means of controlling populations, and exist, like law, on a field of pain and death.

As theory, this is fine. As history and political science, I don't know how you get to rights without going through the state. Happy to see counter-examples.

it also involves lots of undoing of learned patterns and the inherent conflicts and contradictions (and inevitable hypocrises (sp?)) of trying to work for a better world while living in a dystopia

I'm all in favor of the undoing of learned patterns, but the most practicable vehicles for that are inherently state-based — e.g., public education. How do you get the undoing of learned patterns absent social structures designed to teach new patterns? And if your answer is that you're going to have new non-hierarchical social structures to accomplish this, I'm going to say that you're actually still talking about a state, you're just calling it something different. Any structure sufficiently organized to inculcate universal acceptance of behavior patterns is going to end up serving a state-like function, whatever you call it.

on what topic

if you are inclined, I'm asking you to identify public health initiatives not yet tried here that have a ghost of a chance of replicating their impressive success at stopping omicron elsewhere.

I'm literally saying that "rights" are an invention and don't actually exist, and yes, I do believe that.

I'm all in favor of the undoing of learned patterns, but the most practicable vehicles for that are inherently state-based — e.g., public education.

There are some lovely current examples of Indigenous communities taking their children out of colonial schooling frameworks and teaching them through traditional lifeways.

If I had kids, there is no fucking way I'd let them near public schools. I'd homeschool them.

"rights" are an invention

no argument about that from me. seems obvious.

and don't actually exist

invented things have been brought into existence. rights exist, just as money exists, by social convention alone. knowing this is true doesn't dissolve their reality.

Fair enough— but absent fealty to social convention, they do not.

If only there had ever been any other states other than the united ones we might have seen real world examples of how certaing things might be different, possibly even better but alas no way of knowing rly

Rights don’t exist unitil some people with more power than you start to take things from you and then you’re like damn why are these guys stealing my shit and forcing me to work for them for free.

I'd homeschool them.

Talk about anarchy.

Are anarchists just libertarians without a state to enforce property rights? Do they then active individually to act collectively to enforce justice, or do we get rid of that construction as delusion too, as with rights?

“act”

Rights don’t exist in any natural or inherent form, obviously. But the Enlightenment-era invention of the idea was overall a pretty significant step for individual autonomy. I don’t think arguing against rights advances any progressive or leftist agenda in any way.

If only there had ever been any other states other than the united ones we might have seen real world examples of how certain things might be different

sorry, deems. in the US politics thread we only glance briefly, if ever, at other states. we're buried up to our eyelids in USA-ness.

Anarchy is already present and influential in our lives via international relations. I would guess it has been one of the most destructive forces in human history (one country invading another), if not the most. Taking away the nations and competitions between tribes, individuals, groups, and daily life will still be too bloody. My reading of history is mostly that laws and govt have been built in response to violence begun by anarchic violence.

Conversations such as these would be so much more productive if everyone meant the same thing when they used the word 'anarchy'. Anarchism is not The Purge, fyi.

Gunna say this thread could be improved by more AnComms commenting…

OL OTM, it's amazing that this still has to be explained in a political thread in 2022 tbh

Anarchy is already present and influential in our lives via international relations. I would guess it has been one of the most destructive forces in human history (one country invading another), if not the most. Taking away the nations and competitions between tribes, individuals, groups, and daily life will still be too bloody. My reading of history is mostly that laws and govt have been built in response to violence begun by anarchic violence.

― Van Horn Street, Saturday, January 15, 2022 10:44 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

This very well might be the most idiotic thing I've ever read on ILX.

One Country Invading Another Is Anarchism is a pretty, umm, interesting interpretation of a philosophy whose nexus is "human beings have no inherent right to govern others"

I’m just saying that the viability of such a philosophy is put to test by international relations, to no success. Considering there is anarchy in the sense that there is no higher autority than a nation, by now we should have seen if actors are capable of enough benevolence and avoid the moral pitfalls of competition, war, dominance, they aren’t.

It’s a nice utopia tho. Won’t happen in the US or elsewhere for hundreds of years.

How is anarchy "a sense that there is no higher authority than a nation"? I'm not following you.

The concept of anarchy is seen as the cardinal organizing category of the discipline of International Relations (IR), which differentiates it from cognate disciplines such as Political Science or Political Philosophy. This article provides an analytical review of the scholarly literature on anarchy in IR, on two levels—conceptual and theoretical. First, it distinguishes three senses of the concept of anarchy: (1) lack of a common superior in an interaction domain; (2) chaos or disorder; and (3) horizontal relation between nominally equal entities, sovereign states. The first and the third senses of “anarchy”’ are central to IR.

From shorturl.at/egCHT

Except some research fellow's paper about anarchy in International Relations isn't really tied to anarchist political or economic philosophy, as anarchism works primarily against the state, whereas the paper you're citing is about states coming to agreement or relating with each without the presence of a higher authority.

You and some int'l relations experts might see states working together without a higher authority guiding them as "anarchy," but it is not.

Use the word you want really! Fact remains, lack of rules and laws between states has been disastrous, it allowed for hegemons to rip apart smaller actors. Also, most peaceful states are the ones that tend the most to international law.

most peaceful states are the ones that tend the most to international law

This part of the analogy at least I think is worth considering, in that nearly all of the protections available to less powerful people in countries with quasi-functional democracies derive from leveraging state power. The civil rights movement in the U.S. relied heavily on bringing federal power to bear on the states, and the federal government remains the de facto (if deeply unreliable) guarantor of protections against discrimination and exploitation. To see that function as solely a means of "control" of the populace is I think to really, deeply misunderstand American political history.

if you are inclined, I'm asking you to identify public health initiatives not yet tried here that have a ghost of a chance of replicating their impressive success at stopping omicron elsewhere.

Again clarifying for context - are you no longer saying that no other states have taken more effective measures against the spread of COVID than the United ones, or reframing it here that you only want to hear about ones that have “stopped omicron” in some absolute sense?

(or is this one of those “well it would work, but the US will not adopt it, so it doesn’t count” hedges?)

committed and thoughtful anarchists probably should #useotherwordsplease given how easy it is for the VHS’s of this world to strawman them into supposedly supporting “no rules” or “state warfare” etc

are you no longer saying that no other states have taken more effective measures against the spread of COVID than the United ones

That was your misreading of what I said rather than what I said, drawn from it, but adding your conclusions, which were not inherent, but imposed upon it.

To clarify, what I was attempting to communicate was that the failures of the federal government of the USA to obtain successful results against the spread of covid since January 22, 2021 were based in factors quite apart from the design of its strategy, in that its strategy followed a design very similar to that of other nations, apart from purely authoritarian nations able to govern by direct commands backed by sufficient force to compel obedience.

The US strategy may have placed its emphasis on slightly different components of its strategy than other nations, but it consisted of the very same components applied by other 'democratic' nations. I see its failures as not being strategic, as was implied by the interviewer's question to VP Harris, but were instead due to fundamental and systemic weaknesses in the present state of US society. So that other nations were able to obtain somewhat better results using the same set of tools, only because those systemic weaknesses were not present with the same force.

OK?

btw, your 'just needing clarification' seems like it always comes down to your wanting to make me agree with your premises, when I keep trying to get you to state what your conclusions are based on. iow, your turn to do some clarification. what's wrong with the US strategy and what do you think would be a better one to replace it with?

if your answer to "what's wrong" is merely 'it isn't working', that is insufficient. I could hand you a large square peg and ask you to fit it into a small round hole and no matter what strategy you used it would not work. My telling you you are failing at your task and suggesting you need a better strategy would be based in a wrong perception of the nature of the problem. You need to establish that the problem is susceptible to a better strategy, including its fittingness to the fundamental conditions of the problem.

tl:dr quit setting snares and start conversing

How would anarchists handle COVID?

(jk not a serious question)

committed and thoughtful anarchists probably should #useotherwordsplease given how easy it is for the VHS’s of this world to strawman them into supposedly supporting “no rules” or “state warfare” etc

― Tracer Hand, Sunday, January 16, 2022 10:42 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

why should i cater my language to this fucking unfrozen caveman liberal

it's hard sometimes living in the same world with people who aren't you

i believe tracer was making a joke

lol sorry i was more "mad at vhs" than i was "capable of comprehending tracer's post"

How would anarchists handle COVID?

(jk not a serious question)

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Sunday, January 16, 2022 3:06 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

a serious answer:

https://twitter.com/FromTheHeartPNW?t=CR1c_a2pZKQN7MALUAfbmw&s=09
https://www.instagram.com/fromtheheartpnw/?hl=en

Yeah. Also:

http://www.deanspade.net/mutual-aid-building-solidarity-during-this-crisis-and-the-next/

Stale News Break... pic.twitter.com/IeYQwOMjr9

— Insane Clown Posse (@icp) April 22, 2020

Juggalos and mutual aid/community networks have literally done a better job of caring for people.

We have a nice mutual aid center here — small, but growing. Obviously it's not a replacement for a functional public health system, or even a dysfunctional one, but it can fill some gaps.

Scale and how big things should be is a different conversation and I'm no expert about political systems. But if you start from the belief that no person is disposable and you're not going to accept a certain casualty rate as "the cost of doing business," you at least have a chance of ending up with a system that cares for people more than profits.

This has got to be one of the more vindictive US politics threads I’ve seen (not that I’m the expert on these dumpster fires, heh).

Anarchism is quite compelling in the abstract, and I’d say in terms of more speculative/futuristic depictions of anarchist society that The Dispossessed by Le Guin is worth a read.

As someone who generally subscribes to deep ecology tho, anarchism seems to be of limited effectiveness to address our current era of the “anthropocene” (=great dieoff/extinction wave caused by human activity).

It’s difficult to see the difference between ancaps and libertarians in practice and imo the climate crisis is the ultimate failure of libertarianism. I’m hard pressed to imagine how ancoms would craft a much more robust solution to the crisis, other than starting with principles based more strongly on justice and equality. The US Constitution started with principles based strongly on justice and equality too, in principle.

Doh. You have reached the Department of Redundancy Department.

I guess sic wasn't interested in discussing his perceptions about the shortcomings of the US federal government's covid strategy after all. Funny, he seemed so eager there for a while, when he thought it was all about him proving something I said was WRONG.

It’s difficult to see the difference between ancaps and libertarians in practice

I had this thought too — the differences seem to be more about assumptions of human nature and priorities than anything else. Both start from a point of functional statelessness and build their visions based on what they think would be achievable from there. My own feelings about that are that we as humans did in fact begin with statelessness, and what we have now — the range of governing arrangements we have now — is the result. I don’t know that a theoretical clean slate is going to produce a whole lot of things we haven’t already produced, although obviously if you started NOW you’d have technological possibilities we didn’t have 1,000 or 10,000 years ago.