I only eat beef that’s fed on the certifiable virgin grass, immortalis gramineae.
It’s very important to me that the carbon the animal has eaten has a natural chain of custody. I don’t want to eat a carbon that’s been combusted or God forbid erupted out of someone’s ass at one point.
Another point of view is that elections are way to make people believe they are represented and therefore won't fight a state that maintains the monopoly of force, which can impose taxation, arbitrary laws, and a lot of other attacks to individual freedoms that people wouldn't be keen to accept naturally.
Yes, that's a common view among several schools of anarchism. Reading Makhno's criticism of democracy, and his alternate proposals, which to my eyes seemed to be a railroad towards dictatorship, made me realize that I was not an anarchist but a social-democrat. Which is often a slur in anarchist circles.
A society where democracy can not work because it would be "corrupted by bourgeoisie" has even lower chances of making anarchism work IMHO.
Anarchists generally criticize representative democracy, not democracy in general. Makno's own experiments in the territory that his forces controlled were basically a form of very distributed and localized council democracy.
Having read the proposals he made after his defeat, his "Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists" [1] I disagree. He just talks about democracy, indeed talking mostly about representative democracy, but the system he proposes has no voting of any sort.
Actually, reading it reminded me of another such book I had read a while ago. Qaddafi's Green Book, where he lays down his ideal system, the Jamahiriya.
On paper, it is pretty cool: every matters of state are decided by local assemblies that can call for a higher level assembly when deemed necessary. But devil is in the detail. The Guide has a final say, in a bit of an unspecified way, exactly how Maknho stays pretty vague on the whole decision process.
I am sure that if Qaddafi had been defeated in his youth, many anarchists would be musing about this system in the way we do Makhno's.
Note that I was referring to the actual practices in the Free Territory, not Makhno's theorizing. The local councils did run things in most communities.
Qaddafi's green book is just a rehash of the council democracy. But yes, it can certainly be implemented differently - just as you can have a multi-party representative democracy on paper that is a totalitarian dictatorship in practice, as in e.g. DPRK.
I think better examples of functional democracy along these lines can be seen in the Zapatista-controlled areas in Mexico, and especially in Rojava/AANES. Rojava is interesting because they have an actual written social contract that captures the details of the electoral system, which is not very typical for such forms of governance: https://www.scribd.com/document/441234886/Social-Contract-of...
I think Anarchism is ultimately but radical direct democracy with strong emphathis on the principle of subsidiarity.
A paraphrase of a bit from the Makhno article on Wikipedia:
""" The first Congress of the Confederation of Anarchists Groups issued five main principles:
1) Rejection of all political parties
2) Rejection of all forms of dictatorships (including the dictatorship of the proletariat, viewed by Makhnovists and many anarchists of the day as a term synonymous with the dictatorship of the Bolshevik communist party)
3) Negation of any concept of a central state
4) Rejection of a so-called "transitional period" necessitating a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat
5) Self-management of all workers through free local workers' councils """
There may be a discussion to be had about these principles, but they certainly do not sound like "a railroad towards dictatorship" to me.
"Democracy is one of the forms of bourgeois capitalist society.
[...]
As a result, democracy is merely one variety of bourgeois dictatorship, its fictitious political freedoms and democratic guarantees are a smokescreen designed to conceal its true identity. " [1]
In his "constructive part" [2] he carefully avoids talking about assemblies or votes. It is clear he does not know really how to solve conflicts and just hope none will arise.
He also mentions the need of an army to have a unity of command, but just specifies this must be decided quickly, without giving clear advice on how to do that without dreaded centralization nor democracy.
Given that the "Platform" document was written with anarchists in mind as the target group, maybe the authors just took it for granted? It seems to be more about strategy and tactics than about ideological basics. Which makes sense, as it is an attempt to address and explain the anarchist movement's failures during the Russian revolution outside Ukraine.
One can claim anything about the goal of a democracy. Politicians are particularly good at "selling" it to the public with all sorts of marketing strategies.
In practice I think it's hard to fight that the ultimate goal of any form of government is to make the government itself persist.
I’m very curious as to how you define “work[ing]” in the context of a currently operating government. It would seem that democracies all over the world “work” for quite a few more people by ratio than other forms of government.
I’m also quite curious as to if you have alternatives; it’s all well and good to bash democracy, especially in the current moment, but are there better realistic alternatives? Are you advocating for revolution?
They certainly don't work for me. I have to pay something between 20-80% of all my income and financial gains to governments despite the fact I don't agree with anything they do, or with their existence. I never signed a contract with them agreeing on that sort of taxation, and if I don't pay the taxes the government imposes on me I can have my property taken away from me, get arrested and even be assassinated. I also have to comply with laws that are created out of some old man's ass, "respect" the police and the military otherwise they will kidnap, torture, or kill me, etc.
That said, I don't advocate for anything, nor I think revolutions or reforms would "fix" a centralized system that persists on the basis of the monopoly of force, such as the so-called "democratic" governments we have all over the world.
What I think, however, is that those centralized systems will inevitably and progressively fail due to their own inefficiencies, and as the transaction costs [1] diminish. As that happens, the centralized state's functions will leak into the decentralized market, until the state loses its ability to hold a monopoly of force.
I think we're a few decades away from seeing the end of the governments and states as we have today. The "alternative" will be a free, decentralized market that will emerge progressively as the governments disappear. We don't have to do anything "special" for that to happen. Just sit down and observe.
And who prevents the criminal or military leaders from taking over once the governments fail in your scenario? Are you saying there won't be anyone around who attempts to seize power? That isn't how things have played out in areas of the world where central governments have failed.
The more likely scenario is that we're headed toward a world state. That's the direction civilization has been heading since nation states and regional trade became a thing.
A third scenario (if cooperative globalism doesn't work out) is currently democratic countries gradually converting into totalitarian states in order to compete with China, who seem to be clearly demonstrating that Totalitarianism Done Right >> Democracy (and yes, with this approach comes greater systemic risk, but such risks can and are routinely ignored).
A fourth (ideal) way is a true New Enlightenment - true as opposed to (for example) what globalism is often mistakenly considered, imho due to hardly anyone thinking in a disciplined and critical manner, but rather rationalizing their personal in-group ideology.
That again disregards the fact that those regimes have to be sustained economically.
See, no matter what people believe, which gods they pray for, what ideologies they follow and how they manage their lives, they inevitably increase the means of production. Even if a given person is dumb and useless, that person would still prefer cheaper goods to more expensive ones, therefore generating economic signals for investments in production improvements.
Increased means of production mean lower transaction costs. Lower transaction costs generate decentralization. Decentralization progressively make centralized regimes not viable.
> That again disregards the fact that those regimes have to be sustained economically.
I don't really see how I'm disregarding that. I mean, sure, I didn't explicitly include a list of necessary pre-requisistes, of which this is just one, but I don't see why either of my scenarios are not possible because of economic constraints. I'm totally open to hearing any reasoning behind this belief though.
> See, no matter what people believe, which gods they pray for, what ideologies they follow and how they manage their lives, they inevitably increase the means of production.
Unless I'm misunderstanding (am I?), this suggests no examples can be found in history of ideologies being adopted that result in decreased production.
> Increased means of production mean lower transaction costs. Lower transaction costs generate decentralization. Decentralization progressively make centralized regimes not viable.
Sometimes, maybe. Many things are possible, this theory is just one of them.
"China, who seem to be clearly demonstrating that Totalitarianism Done Right >> Democracy"
I wish that was not the main take-away people had. China has a very unique economic system that does not require totalitarianism: free-market capitalism with many public actors especially in finance.
China could be democratic and maintain such a system. I'd like to see it tried somewhere else.
They could retain their micro economic system, sure, but could they retain their superior social harmony? Of course, it's possible, but totalitarianism (censorship, cultural cleansing, etc) is far from irrelevant.
And what about their ability to rapidly implement strategic policy initiatives, including displacing massive numbers of people against their will? Unfortunate for the individuals, but incredibly beneficial for the group, compounding over time.
The idea that "if a government fails, another government will take its place" only makes sense in an environment where centralization is viable economically.
There's this idea that "because things have been playing out in a way, they'll keep being played out this way", despite the fact the increased means of production (call it "technology") change things fundamentally all the time.
It's very expensive to maintain the military. It's only possible nowadays as governments can impose taxation and due to the currency monopoly they can print as much money as they want to fund that sort of self-preserving activity, which is technically called "debt spending".
As decentralization spreads over, the management costs of taxation skyrocket, and the currency monopoly disappears. Without that governments can't fund their own activities. Which means they'll shrink progressively. As time goes by, they'll start failing at providing law and order, and private companies start providing protection, insurance and private arbitration services to people. Further down the road those companies in their aggregate will start protecting people from the state itself. The state then either becomes a company which some people voluntarily contract services from, or it vanishes.
I'm pretty sure someone would say that the "evil companies" would then merge and become another government, but that's only if that person missed the whole point: in the long term centralization is not economically viable, and in a non-regulated free market environment monopolies are not really possible. As those companies are voluntarily contracted by people, an attempt to fight their customers would be catastrophic as they'd unrecoverably lose their business to competitors.
It's telling of your bias that you lament imposing taxes but ignore imposing ownership. I guess the latter is included in "accepted naturally" for you but there's really nothing natural in ownership if you step outside the prevailing dogma.
Ownership is an abstract concept enforced by society. It recognize the right to "use and abuse" of a thing. Some societies will forbid you to do things to your body. Some will outlaw some opinions. It makes sense to say that in such cases, you do not own your mind or your body.
I am of the opinion that it is good that individuals have total ownership over their mind and bodies, but it is just that: an opinion. I can't demonstrate it.
If I could somehow infer it being a "natural law" it would not be a satisfying justification, it would just be a naturalistic fallacy. Most of human society's goals are to fight against "natural order" because we, collectively, aim at unnatural things like justice and fairness.
I'd encourage you to read about the logic derivation of natural law based on private property through argumentative ethics, as described in the article I mentioned.
I have. I think they are bollocks. Have you read and understood them and are ready to defend steps and axioms of this thesis or are you just enamored with his conclusions?
Specifically, I think this is nonsensical:
"Second, it must be noted that argumentation does not consist of free-floating propositions but is a form of action requiring the employment of scarce means; and that the means which a person demonstrates as preferring by engaging in propositional exchanges are those of private property."
It is a well accepted rule in logic and debate that propositions have merit on their own, therefore the way they are stated is irrelevant, whether they consume scarce means or not.
The jump from scarce means to private property is laughable.
Actually I have a hard time charitably following his reasoning. It is obvious the conclusion he wants to reach, but it is hard to understand where he sees an unfolding of logic arguments.
Even if his claims were true, which are, if I understand correctly, that the mere fact of engaging in a moralistic discussion presupposes the speakers assume a kind of private property instinctively, it does not follow that this presupposition is correct.
That's a naturalistic fallacy. It can be used to justify domination, sharing, violence, death of the weak. Using it to defend something as obviously artificial as private property is news to me, and I think pretty hard to defend, but even if it did, it presupposes we should care about "natural law", something most philosophers learned to dismiss since the 19th century.
From what I can tell, having followed several mises.org links over the years, castles-built-on-sand reasoning is kinda their whole thing. They rely on the reader missing some obvious objection, or some unjustified leap or connection between two things, early in their “logical” argument to make it all work. It’s dumb writing in smart writing’s clothing.
If property rights are derived by the ability to argue then babies can't own property. But they can... If the argument is that someone else does the argument on behalf of the baby then anything can use that argument.
We see other numerous counter examples - court cases on behalf of animal rights, collectively owned property etc.
It's a simple circular argument disguised in lots of complicated writing.
That's only if you didn't bother reading it carefully.
You missed the point about the ability of performing arguments. Babies and children might not be able to argument at the moment, but they are capable of argumentation. Therefore, for as long as they don't achieve maturity, tutors can act in the interest of the child.
Animals, on the other hand, can't argument at all, therefore are not capable of holding negative property rights.
Bear in mind that positive rights can't be reasoned without failing at Hume's razor, for the simple reason one can't have rights over other people's property. Collective property can't be reasoned either. In any case, I invite you to try to reason about said "rights" without resorting to positive law.
Which other articles didn't you like and that you claim are "nonsensical"?
Babies and children might not be able to argument at the moment, but they are capable of argumentation.
This is the "shifting sands" technique that was previously mentioned.
Counterexamples are simple to find: a baby with a terminal disease, a mature person in a vegetative state.
Animals, on the other hand, can't argument at all, therefore are not capable of holding negative property rights.
So you say. And yet animal cruelty rules are a good counterexample.
Bear in mind that positive rights can't be reasoned without failing at Hume's razor, for the simple reason one can't have rights over other people's property.
Of course they can. Building code rights are a good example. Appealing to Hume's razor is another example of the technique on that site - it makes it sound like something is factual whereas actually it is completely non-obvious that it applies at all.
"appealing to Hume's razor"... I don't want to sound disrespectful, but that's laughable.
It seems that you believe that positive law (meaning: law that you "think" is right and want to impose on others) is perfectly reasonable.
The deal with argumentative ethics is that it derives natural law through logic reasoning. You may not like it, you may hate the conclusions it achieves, but it's only way you can build an ethical system that allows for the pacific co-existence of individuals in a way that is perennial in time and space that we can possibly agree on (but not necessarily will). Once you start removing constraints (eg. no need to allow for pacific co-existence, or no need for being perennial), then pretty much anything goes, and we're in the authoritarian/totalitarian land we live with today.
In any case, it really doesn't matter what I think or what you think, as decentralization removes the ability states and governments to exist, law will be progressively handled by the free market. How do you believe that law will be handled in a competitive environment, with no government, no "constitution" and Kelsen's pyramid for people to bow to?
In the end the only thing we can possibly agree on is that we hold negative rights on other people's properties. Even if someone doesn't agree on that, the market will find a way to record that person's actions against other's property in a distributed database, which can make the life of that person a living nightmare in a fully technologically decentralized society. We are not there though, so let's have authoritarian ideas pushed right and left while we can.
It seems that you believe that positive law (meaning: law that you "think" is right and want to impose on others) is perfectly reasonable.
Both of our biases should not affect if the argument is valid. If I can find counter examples to that argument that simply then there is something wrong with the argument.
we're in the authoritarian/totalitarian land we live with today.
Ignoring the pejorative judgement ("authoritarian/totalitarian"), yes indeed we are in the land we live in today.
I'm not interested in an ethics system for some world that lives as a thought experiment.
Seriously, do not waste time on the details of the "reasoning". The pillars of it does not hold water either. Even if you assume these falsehoods, nowhere you go from "you need scare resources" to "private ownership is therefore natural"
"I think this is nonsensical" ... "Actually I have a hard time charitably following his reasoning".
Let me help you a bit by over-simplyfing the logic:
- If I state an argument to you, it can either be true, false or indeterminate. No matter what argument you make to me in that regard, you'd end up agreeing with that argument, which means that specific argument is "a priori". Moreover, you can only reach a conclusion about my argument by being you, which means you need to have control over your own thoughts to achieve that conclusion (self-ownership)
- If we define ethics as the minimal set of rules that we agree upon in order to maintain our voluntarily stable pacific relationships over time and space, the only possible way we can achieve those ethics is through an argumentative process (I invite you to think of a refutation of that statement)
- Self-ownership can't be maintained (therefore invalidating the time and space requirement) without some means (food, water, shelter, etc). Those means are scarce, and can only be used by a single person at a time. So if we define property as something that is scarce (therefore delimitable) and is being used (therefore modified and protected), private property is a necessary requirement for sustaining self-ownership.
- In conclusion: A minimal system of ethics require arguments to be produced. Arguments require self-ownership to be produced. Self-ownership require private property to be sustained. Therefore if the aim is to achieve a minimal system of ethics that allow for the stable and pacific co-existence of individuals over time and space, the agreement on private property is required -- and that itself constitutes the minimal ethical.
That said, it doesn't mean that you'll agree with anything I exposed. By not agreeing, however, you are implicitly agreeing (by stating an argument). The moment you generate an argument, by the means of logic, you're agreeing on the minimal ethics of private property (although you may not be acting in alignment with that ethics).
Yes, we are in agreement to what this so-called reasoning is. So let's criticize it then. I'll refer to your proposal by numbers if you don't mind.
1. is actually two propositions, the first one unnecessary to the discussion. But useful to frame the second part as as self-evident as the first one.
2. is simply false. We could agree to a relation of dominance. Several non-violent ways of doing that through cultural, religious, familial, societal means have existed in the past. Luckily for you, 2. is also totally useless to the argument being made.
3. Yes, if you define private property as the act of eating and drinking, then it is consubstantiated with our human condition. That's not the definition generally admitted though. My son (who is 5 yo) does not own anything, yet he eats food I own, is sheltered at our place, receives water we pay for. Does it make him incapable of reasoning? He frequently argues, occasionally reasonably.
Actually this jump from scarce to private property is the main problem of the argumentation. Scarce things don't have to be owned. That's the whole subject of the debate, you can't just assume it is true to prove it is true.
4. follows from 3 so I consider it invalidated. I'll just ask this: is a slave unable to produce arguments? Or do you consider a slave owns their body, food, water, shelter?
Firstly, the definition of ethics ("the minimal set of rules that we agree upon in order to maintain our voluntarily stable pacific relationships over time and space") is wrong. Firstly, ethics are not-minimal. Secondly, there are numerous codes of ethics which lead to non-peaceful relations (eg many religious ethics).
"> Moreover, you can only reach a conclusion about my argument by being you, which means you need to have control over your own thoughts to achieve that conclusion (self-ownership)"
I don't see this as a given at all. A conclusion can be formed about some "arguments" (eg, X > Y) by mechanical means and others by other non-thought based means (drawing lots, dice etc).
Lemma (2) ("If we define ethics as the minimal set of rules that we agree upon in order to maintain our voluntarily stable pacific relationships over time and space, the only possible way we can achieve those ethics is through an argumentative process") is false in many ways.
For one thing "voluntarily" ignores the numerous cases of involuntary peaceful relations. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) gave Europe its longest period of peace in history and was not voluntary.
Secondly there are numerous protocols that lead to peaceful coexistence without argument. Hereditary rule and collectives are good examples.
Lemma (3) ("Self-ownership can't be maintained (therefore invalidating the time and space requirement) without some means (food, water, shelter, etc). Those means are scarce, and can only be used by a single person at a time.") is incorrect.
There are numerous examples of collectives where people do not own food and just use what they need. Hunter-Gather societies are another example.
Still confused. The argument goes: we can only assess the truth of statements through computing, computing requires control over some resources (e.g., you can’t have somebody come in and flip some bits randomly, or else your computation might be flawed), thus any use of logic requires control of resources because they are finite, hence private property?
Doesn’t the first step conflate verification of truth with truth?
Argumentative ethics is not about determining "truth".
It's about deriving the minimal ethical that we can agree upon using a logic derivation.
If the aim is to determine possible agreement it requires arguments.
Coming up with arguments require private property, starting with self ownership, and extending it to objects that can be delimited, modified, and protected.
Turns out the requirement for private property is the minimal ethical, as we can only agree (or disagree) that we can form arguments.
"democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the rest"
That's until you realize that representative democracy (rule of majority) is effectively an authoritarian system, which is based on the monopoly of force and the monopoly of currency, and which incentivizes politicians with low time preference to spend more money than what they take (by force) through taxes, therefore indebting and impoverishing the whole population progressively.
There's a social organization system that allows for individual freedoms: free markets with no centralized governments. It's not a setup that will be implemented through revolutions, reforms or good will. It's inevitable that we'll get there as the cost of transactions becomes increasingly small (therefore making centralized systems of organization not viable). Refer to the work of Ronald Coase to understand why that is.
Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. It leads to tedious, repetitive, and usually nasty discussions—see first reply below.
People understand these words differently, but by the standards that apply on HN, it's definitely ideological and generic. These are things we're trying to avoid, because internet forums don't have anything new to say about them. The arguments just get increasingly repetitive and nasty.
Why pick on this comment, though? The whole thread here is an ideological debate between forms of government and is repetitive; you may as well lock the whole thing at this point.
One thing to look for is whether a comment remains anchored in the specific content of an article, or has become unmoored from it. Most of this thread retains at least some contact with it. Even the parent of the comment I replied to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21866584), which is pretty generic, has at least a wispy string connecting it to the OP. But https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21867096 just goes into talking points.
Personal attacks aren't ok regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Please edit such swipes out of your comments here. We've had to ask you this more than once before.
Trying to impose "one way" to write commit messages is silly at best.
At work I follow whatever convention the team I'm on agrees with.
For my projects I use commit messages as a way to "tag" changes, more than to explain the changes using prose. That way it's very easy for me to search for changes in the codebase.
eg. #event-loop #fix #multiple-dispatch #repeated-message (remove the # and you get the idea)
qrencode also has a -t argument which accepts a utf8 value. Great way for quickly opening URLs you have in your clipboard on mobile devices during development as you can pipe in your clipboard to qrencode.
Both libqrencode and qrcode-terminal are capable of using ANSI escape codes for colored text to produce black and whites squares. Two space characters make about the right aspect ratio in an xterm window. I reinvented the same method myself a while ago, so it's funny how different people come up with the same idea. Haven't tried it on a VT100 terminal yet, but it should probably work there too.
