Is it actually a good thing to trust the institutions?

[teo123]

What has convinced you to leave anarchism? Because I've seen you in the other thread claiming it's unethical to buy from the sweatshops, and it's hard for me to imagine any anarchist would think that way.

[NonZeroSum]

What has convinced you to leave anarchism? Because I've seen you in the other thread claiming it's unethical to buy from the sweatshops, and it's hard for me to imagine any anarchist would think that way.

Not unethical, grey area because you can chose to reduce consumption of all new clothes. Different predominant definition of anarchism outside the US within the labour union movement that predates ancaps. How you don't know this doesn't give me any confidence to discuss policy with you, I'm done.

[teo123]

Boycotting the firms employing those who need the job the most is the grey area? What's your reasoning? The wages they give them aren't THAT low. The average wage in Croatia is, I don't know, some 5.6$/h (5500 HRK/month). Yet I hear that, in USA, you can't survive on 10$/h. In Croatia, you have less money, but so do others. In US, for example, 500g of white bread costs, I believe I've read somewhere, 4$, and in Croatia it costs 0.67$. In India or Bangladesh you can probably have a decent living earning 1$/h. Besides, workers there are unskilled and can't make clothes that can be sold at a high price, so how is it exploitation to pay them less? Exploitation would be if someone makes you a lot of money, and you pay him little, it's not exploitation if you give someone who made you less money proportionally less.

EquALLity doesn't appear to know a lot about politics either, does she?

I guess one of the reasons it's a bit hard to debate with me is that, before my mother ended up in prison, I believed prisons didn't actually exist. Now I am thinking: "OK, obviously, they exist, but perhaps they aren't necessairy." I had put so much effort trying to figure out how the world works that it's hard for me to believe I got almost everything wrong (and that others, most of whom didn't think about those things at all, somehow got it right).

[NonZeroSum]

Boycotting the firms employing those who need the job the most is the grey area?

Not what I said, you need to improve your language skills or learn better reading comprehension before you can discuss complex issues like this.

EquALLity doesn't appear to know a lot about politics either, does she?

That's a really crass statement to make and no it's not the case, they've displayed A LOT more knowledgeability than you have in this 'discussion.'

I guess one of the reasons it's a bit hard to debate with me is that, before my mother ended up in prison, I believed prisons didn't actually exist. Now I am thinking: "OK, obviously, they exist, but perhaps they aren't necessairy." I had put so much effort trying to figure out how the world works that it's hard for me to believe I got almost everything wrong (and that others, most of whom didn't think about those things at all, somehow got it right).

Now that's really intellectually honest, I commend you for that, if your disbelief in the judicial system and things like air travel and round earth ran that deep you really do need to take some basic physics and civics classes to understand how the system is run and why it was set up that way before you can adequately critique it. You can still hold onto those gut philosophical virtues for when you learn the different models and decide which one you think holds the most merit based on hard evidence.

[teo123]

Not what I said, you need to improve your language skills or learn better reading comprehension before you can discuss complex issues like this.

I have been learning English for 11 years now, so you can probably explain what you mean in a way I'll understand. And why would that be a complex issue?

That's a really crass statement to make and no it's not the case, they've displayed A LOT more knowledgeability than you have in this 'discussion.'

She's read a lot of history books. And they are usually written by some mid-leftist Christians. So she knows a lot of things that aren't true (or are very controversial, but she doesn't know that).

you really do need to take some basic physics and civics classes

I have. I have even won the school physics competition two years in a row. That just doesn't seem to help.

[NonZeroSum]

I've seen you in the other thread claiming it's unethical to buy from the sweatshops. . .

Not unethical, grey area because you can chose to reduce consumption of all new clothes.

Boycotting the firms employing those who need the job the most is the grey area?

Not what I said, you need to improve your language skills or learn better reading comprehension before you can discuss complex issues like this.

I have been learning English for 11 years now, so you can probably explain what you mean in a way I'll understand. And why would that be a complex issue?

Teo I tried very hard to engage you on a number of issues and you just kept saying I don't understand or it's not possible to understand. Now you're stuck on this one issue insisting I explain it to you, why didn't you join the discussion in the other thread? I will do but understand that I'm not finding this productive and if you're not willing to go back and answer my original critique then I don't want to discuss further.

I refused to say buying from sweatshops is ethical because it's not clear most consumer habits are ethical full stop. I presented a third option which might be more virtuous, reducing your consumption to limit all wasteful industries of which sweatshops take the brunt of filling demand. That would free up more money to go into union advocacy, solidarity, charity and party political campaigns. I do agree tumblr tagging yourself cruelty-free is a joke and more unethical out of a number of bad options.

Campaigns to end sweatshop conditions don't need to hurt the workers, can come in the form of funds and training from other unions supporting them whilst bringing awareness to bad industry practices that need solutions. Often after an industry disaster happens the company spends millions on teams of lawyers and public representatives who smear sources. Or they change brand name or empty the register, claim bankruptcy and get absorbed into another company which takes over operations.

Sweatshop conditions exist in developed countries as well where regulation isn't enforced, the asylum and migration process fails, and families take kids out of school which is most urgently in need of intervention and a direct result of government failing and unequal wealth distribution.

That's a really crass statement to make and no it's not the case, they've displayed A LOT more knowledgeability than you have in this 'discussion.'

She's read a lot of history books. And they are usually written by some mid-leftist Christians. So she knows a lot of things that aren't true (or are very controversial, but she doesn't know that).

More conspiracy nonsense, still going strong.

you really do need to take some basic physics and civics classes

I have. I have even won the school physics competition two years in a row. That just doesn't seem to help.

Keep at it, maybe the best thing would be to read some books by ex-flat earthers, or ex-conspiracy goons with difficult upbringings who managed to turn it around, you're still young, still need to explore the world outside of a computer screen, still uncovering those cognitive biases, give it time and just be humble in the process.

[teo123]

I presented a third option which might be more virtuous, reducing your consumption to limit all wasteful industries of which sweatshops take the brunt of filling demand. That would free up more money to go into union advocacy, solidarity, charity and party political campaigns.

I don't know. You really think labour unions would help? I mean, see how they are working here.
Charity appears to be only a temporary solution. Is it better for people to have their clothes delivered by a foreign aid or is it better to have them have a factory in which they can produce clothes themselves?
And how do you know the regulations that are supposed to help the workers won't in fact lead to monopolies?

More conspiracy nonsense, still going strong.

Where is there a conspiracy, for God's sake? Most of the people, for example, believe that laws making child labour illegal helped. So do the people who write the history books. Therefore, in the history books, it's written that child labour laws helped. Equallity has read many history books, and thus she accepts that as fact. She doesn't know that most of the experts in things relevant to child labour agree that laws making child labour illegal in poor countries in fact increase the child labour, rather than decrease it.

Keep at it, maybe the best thing would be to read some books by ex-flat earthers, or ex-conspiracy goons with difficult upbringings who managed to turn it around, you're still young, still need to explore the world outside of a computer screen, still uncovering those cognitive biases, give it time and just be humble in the process.

I don't believe the Earth is flat any more neither do I believe in conspiracy theories. The only beliefs I hold now that are considered crazy by the society is my belief in anarchy and my belief that the world we live in is a computer simulation. Brimstonesalad suggested me to study a bit of quantum physics so that my belief that the world is a computer simulation might go away, but I've studied it a little and it didn't. Besides, if it was easy to prove that this is the real world using quantum physics, there wouldn't be a Nobelian physicist believing that our world is a computer simulation, called Gerard 't Hooft. Also, veganism is considered about as irrational by the society I live in.

[NonZeroSum]

I mean, see how they are working here.

Is not an argument.

Respond to my original critique or don't expect me to respond to you. I've already explained in the politest terms possible that you not sticking to a singular process for this discussion and your repeatedly stated lack of understanding and misunderstands even over the founding schools of your own ideology, make this discussion not productive to me, despite the large time and effort brimstoneSalad, EquALLity and I have all gone to helping you, hence I don't wish to continue.


____________________

How do people live knowing their political ideology is based on a lie?

This is the extent to which you've still not responded to my critique of your political ideology, you also need to reply to brimstoneSalad's summation of the conversation on welfare economics above.


_________________ Process _______________________

Teo I suggest you get specific if you want to engage better and foster good faith in your discussion partner, think about what question you're asking and what premises you want addressed, to either have accepted or discredited. Here are two interpretations and a third subject ranging in scale from hardest to easiest to discuss without getting lost down rabbit holes.

I'd encourage you to pick one and stick to it before digging yourself in any deeper with easily refutable extreme positions with disastrous consequences and no time frame, should I expect the purge ideally tomorrow?

Lots of grand claims and assertions, and refuses to provide evidence.

I think I am experiencing a bit of political discrimination here. Political discrimination is by far the strongest form of discrimination today, yet people rarely talk about it.

I came on the forum announcing myself as grounded in anarchist philosophy and wanting pragmatic libertarian socialist policies instituted, and was given a fair rap - http://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2944

If you think you are being treated unfairly, explain how and we can only try to do better.

OK, I might have exadurated. But Brimstone did make extraordinary claims (that without laws people will be going around shooting each other), and when I asked for evidence, he said he'd ban me.

This is a drastic misrepresentation Teo, stop lying.

________________________ Option 1 ___________________________

All institutions should be gotten rid of, too much power concentrated in too few, the only authority should be the capacity to inspire trust etc. etc.

This is highly speculative and nigh impossible to defend, your only hope is pointing at real laissez-faire capitalist leaning policies and their outcomes to convince us of our misplaced faith in institutions. I've argued against single issue economic pragmatism (market fundamentalism) for being too close minded, and the need to factor in the interests of all historical intersections to squash those memetic biases handed down from generation to generation. Just looking at the tinder-box of London right now after the fires, with so much talk of more riots, the resources it takes to provide everyone including first-generation immigrants a safe home on arrival might not be strictly practical and only speculatively costed for in the long-term. But it is incredibly important to stop pursuing policies that only put further divides between communities like prettifying buildings rather than fire safety, so new housing projects, convincing empty property owners to stop sitting on their derelict houses accruing property value, etc.

---------------------------------------

Regulation

Maybe not all regulation. But let's do a little thought experiment. Suppose there is a scarcity of salt in some country. Now, a stranger comes and tries to sell salt. But that salt contains less iodine than government regulations prescribe. Do those regulations then do more good or harm?
Now, it's possible that FDA is doing that with drugs.
Brimstonesalad says that we need to empower FDA to end pseudoscience in medicine, but I think that's a violation of free speech.
Furthermore, what when politicians don't do what they promise? If homeopaths should be punished, so should they.

Is what's at the root of your distaste with regulation is you dislike national regulations because they typify a negative nonzerosum game between countries? That when two countries are protectionist over their markets, they both lose out? I agree to an extent but the answer isn't throwing hard fought for health and safety protections out the window as EquALLity showed, and it's not entering into international trade agreements that allow companies to sue the tax payer if those countries don't relax their laws and they want to do something illegal but are stopped, claiming it's anti-competitive when they're not allowed to do terrible environmental damage. If you don't like monopolies but you want economic liberty you should give this a read:

https://c4ss.org/content/4043
http://radgeek.com/gt/2011/10/Markets-Not-Capitalism-2011-Chartier-and-Johnson.pdf

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welfare

Now, most of the welfare in mainstream politics appears to be a scam. You know, like laws that tell the unemployed "If you can't make your employer 7$/h, you mustn't apply for a job." or that tell the employers "You must take away x$ every month from the wages of your employees and give them to the ensurance companies." Brimstone thinks that we should do scientific experiments on small towns to determine what's the best welfare system, but I think that's unethical.

That's not really an argument against welfare economics, that's an anecdote about how the system might not be working very well in your area, you haven't given me enough information to comment. What is your time-frame? If welfare ended tomorrow there would be civil war, do you like that idea because you think abolitionism is the fastest way of bringing about liberty?

I believe in universal basic income to give people the time to follow their interests in study, it would bring into focus what work is most useful and allow community councils to concentrate resources on certain industries, once slave wage labour had been outcompeted, tax could return to a community level mutual aid and large populations would gather around successful industries with good returns.

Recommended reading: Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society by Andre Gorz

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Public education

Well, there isn't much evidence that it increases literacy, so why bother forcing children to go to public schools?

Parents send their kids to public schools because they don't have the time or capability to teach their kids everything themselves, it's neglectful not to do so in such a case, that's why they're forced or social services intervenes. In Sweden most kids don't go to school until they're 7 years old because they can trust parents to teach them basic arithmetic and language faster 1 to 1 than in a big classroom, when they are still learning to become emotionally competent that can be best fostered under the supervision of parents who know them best. Primary age home schooling is quite common in the UK, as long as groups of parents are also letting kids get together and build their communication skills.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Punishment

I just said that putting murderers in prisons, places from which they return with even more psychological problems, which made them murder in the first place, may be doing more harm than good.
Brimstone says that we need courts to resolve the conflicts between people. But I think judges and lawyers generally (not all of them) have no interests in bringing justice and peace to the society, but that they actually want people to argue because, well, that's how they make money.

Social isolation after a traumatic event is an incredibly necessary event to coming to terms with your part in those actions, sometimes court cases are necessary in beating that into you with hard facts. Waving you're right to have a person forcibly arrested so they can go through that process is noble minded but would be disastrous if instituted nationally right now, but it's something we can work towards by setting up restorative justice groups that can be practiced on a small scale on a voluntary basis.

http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/04/05/25059107/why-the-activist-shot-while-protesting-milo-yiannopoulos-doesnt-want-his-attacker-to-go-to-jail
Principles%20of%20Transformative%20Justice%20-%20collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Generation5_Principles_of_Transformative_Justice.pdf






________________________ Option 2 ___________________________

A healthy skepticism towards certain types of institutions.

So not wanting to work as a bailiff or for the NSA say, because you can't justify the necessity of some of those jobs being carried out under our current political climate.

Why Shouldn't I Work for the NSA? (Good Will Hunting):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOZllbNarw

I hope you'd agree that knowing what you know about how people being free to dress how they like doesn't have to lead to societal collapse; it would be morally reprehensible for you to join the religious police and enforce the law on the hijab. In the same vein that a draft resister would shirk a bad war even if they believed in the necessary preparedness of the military and the good consequences of involvement in previous wars. That is leave the job to someone else who believes in it wholeheartedly. Try to make your people see the ugly effects such a job has on a person.

-----------------------

I'd encourage you to pick one and stick to it before digging yourself in any deeper with easily refutable extreme positions with disastrous consequences and no time frame, should I expect the purge ideally tomorrow?

I'll choose the option #2.

What movement activism do you see for reducing faith in institutions that are endowed with too much political power? I see merit in wildcat unions like the IWW and CGT who are most focused on reclaiming liberties through collective bargaining and public mutual aid groups like SeattleSolidarity that aim to redress the balance of power between landlords and tenants.

Recommended reading: Understanding Social Movements by Greg Martin






________________________ Option 3 ___________________________

The legitimacy and correct usage of the "Invisible hand"

Throwing this in more because you do need to back up your statements with evidence, but it is also an interestingly overused buzzword in ancap circles that could use fleshing out.

I like Chomsky's theory, but I ultimately think it was just another one of Smith's cosmopolitan ideals which I reject.

Noam Chomsky suggests that Smith (and more specifically David Ricardo) sometimes used the phrase to refer to a "home bias" for investing domestically in opposition to offshore outsourcing production and neoliberalism.[24]

Rather interestingly these issues were foreseen by the great founders of modern economics, Adam Smith for example. He recognized and discussed what would happen to Britain if the masters adhered to the rules of sound economics – what's now called neoliberalism. He warned that if British manufacturers, merchants, and investors turned abroad, they might profit but England would suffer. However, he felt that this wouldn't happen because the masters would be guided by a home bias. So as if by an invisible hand England would be spared the ravages of economic rationality. That passage is pretty hard to miss. It's the only occurrence of the famous phrase "invisible hand" in Wealth of Nations, namely in a critique of what we call neoliberalism.[25]

-----------------------

Option 3) The legitimacy and correct usage of the "Invisible hand"

I don't think we can discuss it on forums. Invisible hand, just like the wisdom of the crowd, is a sociological phenomenon that needs to be researched experimentally. Both of them obviously exist, but it's not clear what are their ramifications, where they can be applied and when they can't. Wisdom of the crowd, for instance, obviously doesn't work in politics, it brought Hitler to the power. The same may be true for the invisible hand, but there is disappointingly little experimental research on it (probably because the politics slows the science down). I'll choose the option #2.

It may be difficult, but we can and should talk about the research and it's implications. Classical crowd theory / collective behavior theory has been most useful for understanding historically irrational movements as you said the rise of Hitler, the Nuremberg rallies being a great case study, other examples include panic in the market around financial crisis. For that reason it has gotten a bad rap for being simply the study of mob mentality, but the theory is multilayered and nuanced.

It's not controversial to share a dim view of politics for how the public collectively group around simple conclusions to issues before fully understanding where the issue arises from and what it means to be confronted by those problems. But we know immediate lawlessness would unleash the worst kind of violent collective behaviour as fear and panic spread.

If you have an affinity for what fruits the wisdom of the crowd can produce in ideal circumstances, you should do more reading into Blumer's symbolic interactionism, it's the original developer of collective behavior theory's typology of social movements. I would be happy to have you on my side in debates against the narrow view that resource mobilization theory can adequately account for all peoples needs.
[/quote]

[EquALLity]

Because I wanted to finally get to a key question you seem to ignore.

I didn't mean to ignore it. We can discuss more than one thing at once.

See the article about child labour on Wikipedia. The general consensus among the experts is that child labour laws just push people further into poverty. You're probably getting your information about it from Greenpeace or something like that. Greenpeace is in the world of politics approximately what's PETA in the world of vegetarianism and veganism. They have good-sounding rhetorics, but policies that cause more harm than good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labour#Eliminating_child_labour

Where does it say that is the consensus?

I didn't get that from greenpeace. It's a generally held belief that child labor laws are good, because child labor is unethical. It prevents children from getting an education and moving up in society, and the labor was often extremely intense and hard for their bodies to cope with.

The rhetoric used to justify censorship was that we should stop the media from spreading stupid lies. The media does spread stupid lies, but censorship is not a solution. In fact, censorship makes the media spread even more misinformation. Journalists are bad at deciding what's true, but politicians are even worse.

No, but it's not censorship. Journalism =/= advertising.

Journalism = investigation into events in the world.
Censorship of journalism = government stopping people from reporting events in the world, likely due to the events making the govt look bad

Advertising = a corporation promoting a product
Censorship of advertising = government limiting what can be said in advertising to protect the public from lies from corporations designed to sell more products for profit

Those two things are completely different.
Also if you acknowledge the effectiveness of government censorship in any way, then you realize the government can be effective in achieving its goals. This opens the door to the criminal justice system too... the government isn't always completely incompetent.

I am not saying ALL murderers committed murder because they were drunk. I am saying most of the murderers I know committed murder because they were drunk. I see no reason to think I am looking at a biased sample. Do you have some statistics that show otherwise?
All the murderers you know are, I guess, fictional characters from criminalistic series. They are in no way typical murderers.

Can you please stop making assumptions about me that imply I'm a 9 year old who knows nothing about the world and believes everything everyone tells me on TV and shit? -_- Please?

Maybe you are looking at a biased sample because of your location. Maybe because of the people you choose to surround yourself with. You can't assume that your situation is representative of the general population; you're just one person. You're just explaining an anecdote.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/anecdotal

Why do you think that's the case?

?

That's US law...

There are different levels of murder... first degree murder, second degree, third degree, manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter...

After they experienced all that feelings of guilt? I don't think so.

If they were the type of person to feel guilty, I don't think they'd intentionally murder in the first place.

Which aren't even there. According to Wikipedia, murderers have the lowest recidivism rates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism#Recidivism_rates
Look, prisons only help with serial killers. And serial killers are very very very rare. Putting countless people who are essentially innocent into prison just to stop a few serial killers from murdering again doesn't seem like a good idea, does it?

It's not only helpful with serial killers, it's helpful with all intentional murderers.
And the reason why we don't have as many serial killers as we could is because we put people in jail for a single murder.

Ok, but that's only 3 years after the prisoners were released. That's not a long term study.
If there were no consequences for murder, then the amount of murderers who murder again would likely be much larger. The number of murders in general would be much larger, because people would only have a moral incentive not to murder, and some people aren't moral.

Right, just because most of the government policies are controversial isn't an absolute proof that government as a whole is bad. But it's still quite a good evidence for that.

No it's not. Just bc something is controversial doesn't that's really good evidence is bad.

Climate change is controversial among people. So is that a lot of evidence science as a whole as bad?

We don't really know that. Anarchy in Somalia, for example, gave a rise to a democratic government and not to a dictatorship.

That's one example against MANY others, and Somalia isn't a democratic government; it doesn't have popular elections.

Also, isn't your goal anarchy, not a new government following anarchy?
So: Best case scenario, hardship results in a "democratic" government, against your goal. Worst case scenario, hardship results in a brutal dictator.

[teo123]

I didn't get that from greenpeace. It's a generally held belief that child labor laws are good, because child labor is unethical. It prevents children from getting an education and moving up in society, and the labor was often extremely intense and hard for their bodies to cope with.

Just because something is unethical doesn't mean it should necessary be illegal. Abortion can hardly be argued to be ethical, but if we pass a law making abortion illegal, that's not going to help. It's not going to make abortion stop happening, it's going to make it happen illegally. And just because being drunk is bad, doesn't mean prohibition is a good thing. Do you think that the government should force people into being vegetarian? You need to look at the real-world effects of the laws you want to be passed.

Those two things are completely different.
Also if you acknowledge the effectiveness of government censorship in any way, then you realize the government can be effective in achieving its goals. This opens the door to the criminal justice system too... the government isn't always completely incompetent.

And what if the newspaper articles (whom people tend to trust more than the advertisements) about eggs "proven" to be healthy are a result of the government prohibiting that to be said in the advertisements?

Maybe you are looking at a biased sample because of your location. Maybe because of the people you choose to surround yourself with. You can't assume that your situation is representative of the general population; you're just one person. You're just explaining an anecdote.

Sometimes it's better to use your own reasoning and senses than to trust the statistics. Think of it this way: the Great Leap Forward Famine was partly a result of the government trusting the statistics that showed there to have been even more than enough food, when there was obviously a lack of food.

That's US law...
There are different levels of murder... first degree murder, second degree, third degree, manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter...

It's not obvious. Some drug abusers get longer punishments than do some murderers.

If they were the type of person to feel guilty, I don't think they'd intentionally murder in the first place.

It never happened to you that you did something bad intentionally, and only later felt guilty about it?

And the reason why we don't have as many serial killers as we could is because we put people in jail for a single murder.

So, why is the recidivism for some other crimes for which people are also put in jail so high?

The number of murders in general would be much larger, because people would only have a moral incentive not to murder, and some people aren't moral.

It's not only a moral incentive. If people know you've murdered someone, they likely aren't going to be nice with you.

Climate change is controversial among people. So is that a lot of evidence science as a whole as bad?

Climate change is just a small part of science. And it's controversial because the government makes it so by using it as a justification for its policies. And politicians, unlike scientists, can't agree on anything.

That's one example against MANY others, and Somalia isn't a democratic government; it doesn't have popular elections.

It claims to be a representative democracy, I haven't looked into it very much. The question was: do we see anarchies somehow turning into dictatorships all the time (as you claimed they do)? The answer is no.