>I'm an anarchist because I think the principles so succinctly put are a good pole star for my personal life.
That's nice to hear, me and my friends feel that way too. BTW we're coming to take your stuff, enslave your family, and kill you of course. Isn't freedom from the oppressive state just great?
> I'm an anarchist. The license plate on my Jeep is literally "ANARCHY." I'm actually not sure I could name a political position that's more strongly opposed by more people.
You're not an anarchist and you should stop try to adopt an identity with a vivid anti-capitalist history to represent your desire for corporate feudalism with guns. Anarchists are socialists and anything otherwise is misusing the word.
You aren't harassed for your beliefs because people with your economic beliefs literally hold every branch of government.
I'm sure you'll come back with something about republicans wanting big government to police morality, but those differences mean almost nothing when your economic incentives are aligned.
> If you believe in individual freedom at all, then it should be held that the collective force (government) can have no more power than that of an individual, and the government does not have the legitimate authority to grant powers and privileges to one individual (police, fire etc) that are not granted to all individuals.
That does not follow.
What you're basically saying is that you're an anarchist. That's a perfectly legitimate position to take - hell, I'm all in favor of anarchism as a personal philosophy - but it's not a terribly practical method of organizing and running a large society, and if you don't believe in the social contract you're not going to have much common ground with most people.
I’m not convinced that it is meaningful to make that assertion. But this is fine, I’m an anarchist because I oppose coercion and you’re a criminal for supporting it.
> Because it's cheaper to provide social programs than to deal with rolling peasant revolts.
And so that makes it moral to suppress peasants with unjust taxation regimes?
> And indeed so. So are you then an anarcho-primitivist? Or anti-propertarian?
I decline to identify as a proponent of any belief system because of the harmful epistemological consequences of group identity.
> If they were truly against the government's monopoly on force, they would be anarchists, but they aren't, they're statists by a wide margin.
I’m an Anarcho-Capitalist, and there are a significant number of us in what is seen from the outside as the “Second Amendment” community. I would consider the healthy majority of people in that community as either “conservative” or “moderate libertarian”, but there is a lot more political diversity than you would expect.
> they [the libertarians] reveal an anarchism very much at odds with itself
Oh the irony in being able to call this out on the people who believe in a variation of what you believe but not being able to see that the exact same is true for your own overlapping beliefs.
We need to form a collective around the idea that all organized social structures are evil! Unite in disunity!
Organized anarchism is an inherently ridiculous idea. You don't even have to make it passed the title to see that it's an irreconcilable contradiction.
> I really, really wish all the libertarians would get off HN and move to Somalia or some other place with no functioning government where they could finally be happy.
That's harsh. Most libertarians aren't anarchists...
> Yeah, so is slavery. So is monarchism. So is marital rape.
So is property. So is language. So is symbolic thought.
> I’ll identify myself as an anarchist for being opposed to violent coercion of resources if you will identify yourself as a criminal for being in support. Sound fair?
Anarchism is an existing ideology with many school of thoughts within it. You seem to be an anarcho-capitalist, to be precise. I, of course proudly admit to being a criminal (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEXTt9OmJis&t=1m18s) insofar living in modern society makes criminals of us all, yourself included, even under duress.
> Norms of wearing clothing are not dictated by puritans but arise and are maintained by repeated intentional participation.
As is tax law.
> In fact we invite you to explain how any tax is just.
Because it's cheaper to provide social programs than to deal with rolling peasant revolts.
> Not at all, one may as well say that arguing that slavery is immoral is arguing against all of human society since agriculture.
And indeed so. So are you then an anarcho-primitivist? Or anti-propertarian?
>>The market. I want to be free from it a la Freedom from the Market:
So you want to be free from the state of others having the right to engage in mutually voluntary economic interactions? Their right to free assocation, is a tyrannical infringement of your right to dictate how they live? You can't just leave other people and form your own socialist commune somewhere?
> You only think this because you were brainwashed by your preferred flavor of anarchism ever since you started reading those propaganda web sites on the internet.
No, you're lying. The state is an artificial construction, and I'm advocating the lack of thereof. I'm not promoting the construction of an institution that is supported by enslaving men and women. If you're, finding a way to defend this sick vision of the world is on you.
> Making such a claim doesn't bring any value to the conversation and only serves to estrange you from this community, which is a form of self-ostracization and self-censorship, which in itself is quite funny and ironic.
In other words: you disagree with me, and you want to ostracize me, and would be happy to see me estranged by society. This is a psychopath thinking. If I were you, I'd rethink it.
No, the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline is a little more nuanced than that.
It happens due to accepting the impossibility of a free society, and it goes something like this:
1. I want to be left alone and leave others alone, and freely contract and associate with whomever I want.
2. The left won't let me do this, and they're willing to use force to ensure it.
3. The far-right also advocates using force, which I'm against, but the society they envision much more closely aligns with my own vision, and I would enjoy greater freedom under their regime than I would working to death in Gulag Part Deux.
4. If voluntaryism is literally impossible due to the authoritarians, my best gamble here is to align with the least-bad authoritarians and hope we can dismantle the worst parts of it when the dust settles.
> You got this the other way around. Private property needs force to be upheld.
I don't follow this at all, but I'm willing to listen? How does private property require any more force to uphold compared to any other possible system? Even anarchy, if you want it to stay anarchy requires force if you have defectors.
>I think he's _wrong_ about Ancaps not being "true" anarchist
I don't believe they aren't "true anarchists", I believe they aren't anarchist at all. They aren't even in the realm of consideration of what constitutes anarchist. Their ideal society would end up corporate feudalism.
> Your assumption is that we led happy and fulfilling lives before what we now call society, which is false.
No, that's not my assumption, and I'm confused why you think it is. I'm simply saying that I, right now, in our current state of society, am not driving a car to work or buying water bottles in my current happy and fulfilling life, and the only reason I did that previously (and might do so in the future) is because a corporation backed by our current form of government made it so that I needed to do that to have a happy and fulfilling life.
I didn't say anything about the state of humanity before modern society. You make some good points, but I don't think they have much to do with this particular discussion. You may well be raising a different good objection to anarchism, but it's not the objection I'm responding to.
I think if you agree with him on government, big corporations and manufacturing consent you pretty much just agree with him :D What do you disagree with?
> Also, anarchy is not so far away from libertarianism.
At some point I thought the same, but I think there are some core differences that would eventually lead to vastly different real world results. Mostly I think they stem from two ways of looking at people: either as primarily individuals who voluntarily form (contractual) bonds with others (this would be the libertarian take), or primarily as social creatures who try to carve out some room for their individual freedoms but always remain part of an organic whole (think of Kropotkin, mutual aid etc.).
>Anarchism without considering the legacy humanity instincts inherited is not realistic and not worth considering.
Man, if only in the last 200 years of philosophical work done on Anarchism one of the anarchist philosophers would have stopped and considered human nature and history. Thanks random HN poster for completely dismantling the entire field by bringing up this one point that no one has ever thought of before!
>Anarchy has no buying and selling. The strong just take. Without a non-violence consent aka state, there are no rules and no syncdicalism survives that.
Man, if only there were like ways that Anarchists could organize and fight that.
What makes you think everyone would just sit by and let people just steal from them? It's almost like you aren't considering the legacy humanity instincts and history of the planet if you think that's how people would react.
edit: Also, warlords are absolutely rulers, so no. Not like mogadishu in the 90's.
That's nice to hear, me and my friends feel that way too. BTW we're coming to take your stuff, enslave your family, and kill you of course. Isn't freedom from the oppressive state just great?
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