One way would be to use a polycentric form of law where each individual could determine what or which form of law to live under that protects them by voluntarily entering some sort of protective group. Or choose none at all and merely protect their natural rights on their own.
A key difference here from democracy is that merely living in one place doesn't lock you into a specific legal system.
Of course these also suffer one of the same weaknesses as democracy, e.g. if certain groups disagree with you they can just kill you if they're able. We see this in US for instance where if a guy named Randy Weaver cuts a shotgun 1/4" too short than what the 'people' say your right to bear arms includes and then for contested reasons doesn't show up for court, then a man named Lon Horiuchi can snipe his wife dead while holding a child and then get promoted and go on to do similar things at Waco.
It’s illuminating and sad to piece together the picture of what you actually want. You mention dictatorship being better than democracy and then talk about “polycentric law” which seems to basically be sovereign citizen stuff. And then you trot out Weaver who was specifically under siege for refusing to appear on charges of dealing illegal arms to white suprematists.
You don’t have a problem with democracy. You’re just a white supremacist. You want a white dictator so you don’t have to worry about the voting rights of minorities or whites who might be sympathetic to minorities.
It must be tough trying to illegally deal arms at an Aryan Nations meeting and not know which guys are really white supremacists and which are undercover agents.
Weaver never 'tried' to be an arms dealer. The ATF approached him and asked him to do it. The ATF was the only 'white supremacist' that we even suspect Weaver might have discussed gunsmithing with. And as far as I know, he's never even been convicted of doing so. The only thing Weaver was convicted of AFAIK is not showing up for court, for something he is still presumed innocent of (edit: actually, fully acquitted of).
It's quite possible he didn't even cut the shotgun too short. The barrel of the gun is supposedly in ATF archives somewhere, but no one seems to know where it is. Very convenient.
And that’s shitty and entrapment. Which is why the charges were dismissed.
I wonder how you see the government do something bad and think a dictatorship is the solution.
> The ATF was the only 'white supremacist' that we even suspect Weaver might have discussed gunsmithing with.
Is there something backing this claim? Like, was there testimony somewhere from the rest of the Aryan Nations group that he never discussed this with anyone else?
You’re also putting “white supremacist” in quotes like that’s questionable. Maybe the ATF agent was not a white supremacist but this was at an Aryan Nations meeting and Weaver was a self described white separatist.
>Is there something backing this claim? Like, was there testimony somewhere from the rest of the Aryan Nations group that he never discussed this with anyone else?
OK I stand corrected, you still suspect it, even though the only evidence has turned up is that he dealt to ATF agents after they asked him to do it but actually he was acquitted of that. So you suspect he did this with others without evidence just like I might suspect he is Bigfoot or DB Cooper since I cannot prove that negative.
>I wonder how you see the government do something bad and think a dictatorship is the solution.
I do not. I am not in favor of any monopolistic form of government, so that eliminates both democracy and dictatorships.
> One way would be to use a polycentric form of law where each individual could determine what or which form of law to live under that protects them by voluntarily entering some sort of protective group. Or choose none at all and merely protect their natural rights on their own.
I don't have much in the way of critique or judgement to offer on this political philosophy, just an observation: it sounds tribal or even pre-civilization. Out of curiosity I asked an LLM what present day countries most closely implement it. It came back with Somalia and a label: anarcho-libertarianism, with the caveat that it isn't an exact match. Historical examples were also interesting. I'm curious whether you think that's a good example or not.
If the world had more unsettled land I think your ideal would be a lot easier to implement. The U.S. was borne out of people fed up with their current situation (legal or otherwise) deciding to start something new. The fact that it's made up of 50 states, each with their own set of laws and relatively high internal mobility, suggests that its already a mild compromise away from pure democracy and toward your ideal.
To me the purest form of your ideal seems unstable, especially in the face of power imbalances and conflicting choices, and I suspect it would inevitably evolve into something else. As far as I can tell history supports that view.
Yes it was sort of done in Somalia. That's how xeer law works -- there is a great book by Dutch lawyer Michael van Notten[0] that explains how polycentric law works in Somalia. It was found by most objective measures to be more stable and prosperous than democracy there [1] -- the researchers called it 'anarchy' but actually the period of 'anarchy' in somalia wasn't so much anarchy but decentralized legal system.
This allowed Somalia to be one of the few regions in sub-Saharan Africa that had a fairly smooth negotiation between interacting with various tribes while preventing any majority tribe from crushing the minority tribes. Tribes could still live in the same regions and practice their own laws while allowing feuds to be appealed up intertribal 'courts.' Thus even if it was just a guy and a camel and another guy and a camel, you still had law and you could even dish out the consequences yourself but still be held accountable up the chain.
I do agree the 50 states was an interesting and helpful idea. Under the constitutional form of the federal government, which narrowly restrains the federal government via the 10th amendment, there was a lot more room for states to 'compete' yet free travel and trade between the states.
You could probably get a lot closer to a hybrid of ideals by pulling the powers of the federal government way back into what the constitution authorizes. It wouldn't be polycentric law but it would make the monopoly far less onerous, as the cost of moving between jurisdictions is pretty cheap. There were a lot of challenges with racism and sexism in early USA but overall the restraints on the federal government were very good at giving the states a close approximation of polycentric law. Most of this started to get crushed in the very early 1900s and completely crushed by the 30s, although the civil war's elimination of any notion of a right to secession pretty much sealed the deal that the feds could gain an iron grip and the states couldn't check those powers by seceding so they had no real teeth to stop it.
>o me the purest form of your ideal seems unstable
Yes this is the story of the history of man. Hardly any theoretically pure form of governance has been able to exist in the history of man, let alone be stable in that form.
Honestly most dictatorships are less effective at crushing the freedom and spirit of the populace as democracies are. If you go someplace like Myanmar or DRC, the response to the whims of a dictator are something like "you and what army." Most of their populace doesn't even listen to what the dictator says, nor pay taxes or any of the like. Democracy scams the populace into thinking the government is actually 'them' which disarms them into subservience.
Occasionally you do find a dictatorship that can run with an iron fist and actually subject the majority of the population. A couple of divergent examples are UAE/Dubai -- which ranks higher in economic freedom than the US. On the other hand you have places like DPRK which are just an absolute shithole all around.
Depending on where you're at democracy definitely functions worse, than say a kritarchy (ex: Somalia, which was more prosperous and peaceful and better respect for individual rights under decentralized 'xeer' law than under any democratic government.)
Anyway, if you think people are going to give up their rights without any pushback, you’re in for a really scary decade. 37% will not be able to rule by fiat over the remainder without, essentially, civil war.
Democracy is the process by which people are conned into 'giving up their rights.' People go about voting themselves other people's life, liberty, and property all under the scam that because the majority says it's ok that it is.
The victims -- conned that because they 'voted' they are part of the 'people' who make up the government and they've only done it to themselves.
You could avoid that by having a government with limited powers - limited enough that the voters could not use those powers to seize others' rights and property.
We had an imperfect, but still pretty good, example of that. Had. It's been eroding for a while now. But it's eroded the fastest under the current administration, which has tried very hard to overrun all the limits on power, and has succeeded far too often for me.
Those anti-democratic limits are where the devil lies. I think that they can only stay intact indefinitely by having competition for governance. Part of a reason why I'm a proponent of polycentric law, so that a single monopoly of governance can't slowly crush the populace.
Once the majority realizes they can't tyrannize the minority because the minority can run away and work under their own system of law, a balance might be found. Under such a system there is no monopolistic democracy, but people might voluntarily enter into one until they find their rights too suppressed.
Why would the minority prefer to live under a 'democracy' when the majority have decided they would kill them because they don't acknowledge their 'legitimacy'? That's when they need to avoid monopolistic democracy the most! You present the strongest case for my argument!
Under the split model they at least have a chance; the minority can bind together, form alliances, and frustrate the 'majorities' force. This is what we see on the world stage -- minority populations like USA or India form alliances and somehow survive without a world government to force the will of a vote of the majority of the world. The USA population is a minority and most are extremely happy it's not a world democracy which is what the logical conclusion of your argument leads to, based on your implied threat that minority USA would experience.
Under your proposal, they all simply are voted into being democracy's 'lackey' assuming the majority don't simply vote them dead.
Not to mention you're contradicting yourself in your statement -- a dictatorship is a minority rule yet you imply they can't exist because the majority would destroy the minority in power.
In reality even in the incredibly unlikely case minorities can't form alliances strong enough it's not worth the risk to try to crush them -- even then in the real world it's often better off for both sides to engage in trade and coexistence rather than to simply kill each other. Of course, even in democracies, war exists, and they would under all other forms of governance.
You can read all about the actual stories of minorities rising up to fight majorities in history books. This isn’t some hypothetical we have to approach from a purely philosophical standpoint.
All modern functioning democracies I’m aware of have a set of rights they have agreed everyone has a right to. This has largely been achieved through bloodshed.
Your idea that we’re should devolve into feudal tribes seems quite obviously destined to result in a great deal of bloodshed. We have the term warlord to describe those who frequently end up in charge in this sort of arrangement.
> a dictatorship is a minority rule yet you imply they can't exist because the majority would destroy the minority in power.
Nowhere did I say or imply that. Those in power usually stay in power because they have power. Numbers are only one sort of power.
Taiwan is considered by the Chinese to be part of China. Their strongest hypothetical allies, USA, when added to their population doesn't even come close to reaching the population of China. By all counts, they lose the popular vote of China (which again, considers Taiwan part of it). And China does not recognized their 'minority' government.
Yet Taiwan still exists, all while having less military power than China.
How is that? Seems to throw a bone in your whole idea that a rogue minority government in the envelope of a majority that considers them encompassing part of their country, is destined to fail or devolve into some pre-civilization caveman situation.
>>> Keep going. What happens when the majority refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the minority government?
>> a dictatorship is a minority rule yet you imply they can't exist because the majority would destroy the minority in power.
>Nowhere did I say or imply that. Those in power usually stay in power because they have power. Numbers are only one sort of power.
And here we get to the truth of what you're saying. We can just handwave away 'numbers are only one sort of power' to mean literally anything could happen if the majority refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the minority government. Including, most common on the world stage, simply carrying on with trade while maintaining a tenuous balance and the occasional wars that happen even on inter or intra democracy lines. Because most often, it's not worth a violent fight. So basically, nothing of interest beyond the status quo to note here.
"Go down the hole deep enough" and you’ll figure out why my assertions are true -- the world is a collection of minorities in various alliances that manage to by those means still exist.
How’s Tibet doing? How’s it going in Georgia? Ukraine? How about the southern United States? Remember when they formed a confederacy and how well that worked out?
Taiwan is largely protected by the US. I expect that absent some other interesting developments, Taiwan will indeed eventually be absorbed into China. And I already addressed the population comment. Population alone is not the only factor to power consolidation.
I do wonder where you imagine all these disenfranchised minorities are expected to flee to in order to establish their independent nations or whatever. There’s literally no unclaimed land on the Earth aside from Antarctica. Are they going to flee to extremely undesirable areas of their existing country and hope the originating country just doesn’t care enough to stop them? Are they going to break away and take valuable land with them? It’s pretty rare for part of a nation to successfully cleave itself away. Even more rare without a massive war.
So your argument is what, Ukraine should be absorbed because the majority of the Ukraine-Russia say so since the majority of the people in that land mass say they're the same country and the majority also agree that country is Russia?
I don't want to live in your dystopia. Your thesis is that if you just submit to the mob, violence could be less. I don't find life to be an optimization for the least amount of confrontation. I have never asserted my view of the world guarantees no violence. What you have to offer is basically well the same thing could happen to you as happened to a fraction of these other people unless of course you just submit to the mob.
>I do wonder where you imagine all these disenfranchised minorities are expected to flee to in order to establish their independent nations or whatever. There’s literally no unclaimed land on the Earth aside from Antarctica. Are they going to flee to extremely undesirable areas of their existing country and hope the originating country just doesn’t care enough to stop them? Are they going to break away and take valuable land with them? It’s pretty rare for part of a nation to successfully cleave itself away. Even more rare without a massive war.
This applies to any form of human organization. If every country were feudal you could argue democracy was broken because there is no place where it could be practiced. It's not an argument that's able to contrast the two. No matter what form of governance or organization people lived under, their option is either to wait for a vacuum to emerge, to engage in war, to negotiate, or to simply ignore those in power and wait to see what happens -- the same would apply in forming monopolistic democracy where it doesn't exist.
No. My argument there was that your “we can just live like a bunch of independent tribes and no one will interfere if we can get rid of that pesky central government” idea is not based in reality. We have seen that underpowered minority groups get frequently trampled.
I certainly did not say minorities should submit to the mob. You keep inventing imaginary things for me to have said.
> you could argue democracy was broken because there is no place where it could be practiced
No. You literally said “the minority can run away and work under their own system of law” and I am asking you where in your hypothetical system they could run to.
At the end of the day, you’re falling for a variant of the politician’s fallacy. You see the flaws in the current systems of government and say, okay, here’s a different system. We should do that. But the fact that your system is different does not mean it is better.
Indeed your system is basically just the existing system scaled down with all the same exact issues that arise because humans are flawed, just without the benefit of the centuries of work that have been put into trying to make our current governmental bodies manageable.
You don’t actually get to live your own rules just because you hypothetically run away to live with roughly like-minded folks. The first thing any community does is establish rules. They establish rules that everyone in the community has to follow because the alternative is that bad actors prey on the group from the inside. They restrict your freedoms to protect the group. And sometimes their rules go too far for one person and not far enough for another. Welcome to government. And sure, you can hypothetically go find unclaimed land and start a one man nation with only your rules. Good luck with that.
Your “minorities banding together” to counter the majority is also just more centralized government. Welcome to the European Union. Welcome to these United States. Again, you’ve discovered an existing (reasonably) successful form of government.
Bluntly, you confuse your naïveté with insight. Just because ideas are new to you or you do not recognize them in the existent world does not mean they are actually new.
Could we hypothetically dissolve the USA and create a bunch of feudal territories that operate independently but trade with each other and establish a set of rules for interacting and courts that manage disputes? Sure. We call those things states.
Post-Trump, I’ve been noting accounts with unhinged and hateful opinions, auto-flagging and downvoting whenever I see them around, and getting on with my life. (Or aspiring to, anyway.) Yelling at people who are aggressively wrong on the internet is hardly worth my time: there’s too many of them and they never change their mind. But perhaps I can make them feel unwelcome and cause them to leave.
I try really hard to assume good intentions and take the most charitable interpretation which leads me at times to engage with people like this. I need to recalibrate.
The most charitable interpretation sometimes is that the person is trolling rather than crazy and willfully misinformed.
OK so you're simply in bad faith lying about the consequences of what you're arguing for. You argument is the one for Taiwan to be absorbed by China and for Ukraine to be absorbed by Russia.
>I certainly did not say minorities should submit to the mob. You keep inventing imaginary things for me to have said.
Yes that is what you have said. That's what democracy is, if the majority say the minority have to do something they must submit. Otherwise the means of government are used against them, usually that's violence, and usually if that is resisted it ends up being escalated until the most violent forms of violence are used. Of course this can still happen under other forms of law, but in democracy it's actually considered legitimate and the populace is actually conned into thinking that's true and they've collectively done it to themselves. Under monopolistic democracy, if you can't make the minority submit to the vote of the majority you simply have a failed democracy.
>>“we can just live like a bunch of independent tribes and no one will interfere if we can get rid of that pesky central government” idea is not based in reality. We have seen that underpowered minority groups get frequently trampled.
Strawman. And under any form of governance, interference still ends up happening.
>No. You literally said “the minority can run away and work under their own system of law” and I am asking you where in your hypothetical system they could run to.
Under polycentric law you don't physically run away. You run away into a new system of law.
>Bluntly, you confuse your naïveté with insight. Just because ideas are new to you or you do not recognize them in the existent world does not mean they are actually new.
I'm naïve but apparently up until now you still haven't figured out that you don't need to claim a new territory to adopt a new system of law in a polycentric law society. The fact you don't understand you didn't have to physically run away means you had no idea what you were even arguing against. And your naïveté about the application of democracy means you have no idea what you were even arguing for. You are stuck in the notion of a geographic monopoly of government, which is why you assumed if not democracy the only other option is a dictatorship while ignoring historically that hasn't even been universally true let alone in theory.
> You’re just a white supremacist. You want a white dictator
I want to close with these thoughts here. You're not arguing in good faith. You have, before any of this, publicly declared I'm a white supremacist who wants a white dictator. Maybe because I disagreed with your politics or maybe because I disagreed with an innocent wife with a child in her arms being sniped by an agent of the state after we the people thought the husband cut a barrel 1/4" shorter than what the glorious people think the right to bear arms includes and he didn't show up on time for the thing he was actually found innocent of (tellingly, you were very concerned about Weaver's possibility of being a racist but not at all about the state murdering a wife). I've been incredibly, incredibly kind and understanding despite the vitriol you've said about me. So please understand when I won't entertain this bad faith further.
It’s weird that someone can look at Russia where wealthy white folks frequently fall out of windows and think “yeah, that’ll probably work great for me”.
Too much main character syndrome, the assumption that in any alternate system they would go up in privilege and status.
The mothballed guy is just crazy, trolling, or lying.
I was going to respond to another comments of his in this thread when I realized he was the poster who laid out a false timeline of events by omitting the one comment that made him wrong in another post of mine.
You can also see it with him arguing about how democracy is bad because you’ve been tricked into losing your rights, but also his preferred governmental organization includes being taken advantage of by anyone stronger than you.
His stance is logically inconsistent on even a barest look and his hinting at sovereign citizen arguments and hero’s is telling me the answer is that he’s crazy
Naive and ignorant with a dash of crazy. The sovereign citizen type thinking seems predicated on the rejection of a central authority while still quietly assuming that somehow such an authority exists to protect your rights to be free from an authority.
“If only there was no government I could live however I want and everyone would have to respect my authority to live however I want.”
