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

Imagine this place when Trump gets re-elected.

Better thread titles

Wow you really think hed beat hilary again

just checking -

sic is just a guy askin' questions

I agree that we’re not currently seeing anarchy but, rather, a devolved sense of stasis that has many wishing for anarchy instead. The net result of there being no illusions about a “greater good.” Biden’s pleas on behalf of one sound particularly feeble to opponents AND constituents.

Sometimes I think this board needs an in-person fight club, just to ease some tensions.

i did a lot of work organizing this and the results were horrible, just fucking terrible

The 200,000th Thread Anticipation, Celebration, & Physical Fights Thread

thanks for the links will check them out

i will fight you on those links
it's time to blow off some steam and duke it out

Capitalism and Covid has left us alienated and atomized. We need to organize into One Big Fight Club.

it's all one thing

Karl, wanna fight again

let's do it

but here's one thing about biden. i posted that long excerpt from the washington post earlier, about joe biden's no good terrible bad week. there are some things he could have done better - i was expecting someone to launch into a tirade on his covid response, including the embarrassing recent episode where some reporter asked psaki something like "hey why don't we have free covid tests, like other wealthy countries" and she's like "as if", like clueless, and then a week later they were all saying "d'oh!" and working on plans which led to the recent announcement that free tests would be available starting on the 20th. wow, that was dumb.

but in general, he is in a very, very bad spot. what's he going to do about manchin or sinema? so sick of reading backseat drivers that think they could talk to joe manchin in the right way and change his mind. it's very clearly joe manchin and sinema vs 48 other democratic senators. you can imagine a handful of other democratic senator assholes who are also in their pool but don't speak up, but i can very realistically point to the fact that new democratic candidates have an anti-filibuster litmus test -- the winds are completely in the direction of getting rid of it, and the only thing holding it up is manchin and sinema. biden just made a complete ass out of himself, the other day, trying to make it happen. dude is fucked! he's in a pickle!

it's not like I want him to run in 2024, that's for fucking sure. but good lord the anti-biden stuff is exhausting sometimes, his admin has been far to the left of obama's afaict, and no that's not total anarchy but neither is anything else

If that Wolff essay is the best expression anyone can offer of how anarchism might work at the societal level ... I mean, "utopian" doesn't even begin to describe it.

Humans are social animals, we function through collective organization, we always have. A little bit of anthropology and sociobiology would go a long way toward more sophisticated thinking about our realistic options as far as self-government goes.

Also, the economic model Wolff suggests is ludicrous.

Only extreme economic decentralization could permit the sort of voluntary economic coordination consistent with the ideals of anarchism and affluence. At the present time, of course, such decentralization would produce economic chaos, but if we possessed a cheap, local source of power and an advanced technology of small-scale production, and if we were in addition willing to accept a high level of economic waste, we might be able to break the American economy down into regional and subregional units of manageable size. The exchanges between the units would be inefficient and costly — very large inventory levels, inelasticities of supply and demand, considerable waste, and so forth. But in return for this price, men would have increasing freedom to act autonomously. In effect, such a society would enable all men to be autonomous agents, whereas in our present society, the relatively few autonomous men are — as it were — parasitic upon the obedient, authority-respecting masses.

Yes this is definitely something that could ever happen in any way and would certainly be a good thing if it did.

I'm not an anarchist and I'd say that Wolff isn't rejecting "collective organization" at all but economic organization is, uh, pretty much always the falling apart point of anarchism and why there's often a focus on social issues/personal autonomy within a left-wing framework (and thus why tankies call them liberals).

sic is just a guy askin' questions

you asked me to deliver research to you; I was clarifying on what topic.

She is a Bookchinist and I don't necessarily agree with her about some things, but my acquaintance Cindy Milstein does a decent job of thinking about what anarchism is and is not in this book: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/cindy-milstein-anarchism-and-its-aspirations#toc7

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.