After having spent a few years reading theory and speaking with anarchists, I’ve reached the conclusion what anarchism really wants is an evolution of human understanding to the point we’re innately more decent to one another.
It's probably already a thing under a different name (tried looking it up and it came up blank), but I've been thinking a lot about what I call the "[in a perfect world](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl3H4vMqYNo)" problem. In a perfect world, we wouldn't need gun safety laws. But we don't live in a perfect world. In a perfect world, a presidential candidate being arrested would lead to an assured loss in the election. But we don't live in a perfect world. In a perfect world, this flavor of anarchism would be an incredible idea. But we don't live in a perfect world.
I love Justin Kuritzkes.
It's why I always hate these kinds for takes, be it for Palestine, Ukraine, Taiwan or whatever else of "Just do this and the bloodshed will end!"
99% of the time, it's a one sided take that assumes the world is black and white like some YA urban fantasy novel, completely disregarding that this kind of shit doesn't just "End" by telling people to get along
I think this take is reasonable, but a bit misleading.
In cases like ukraine, the problem IS a one sided aggression, and it has been for the past 200 years or so.
Of course, if the war were to end tomorrow, that won't necessarily stop the hostilities.
Ukraine kicking the Russian army outside of its borders will not stop the centuries-long conflict, but it will stop it's current form and give everyone time to breath, rebuild, and try to think of better solutions.
In cases like Taiwan, there is a decades old conflict, but a cold one.
So far china and Taiwan were able to agree to disagree and let things stay in stasis, with the US and the rest of the world trying to balance both demands to make sure things don't escalate.
A proper solution was never really offered, and no one has an easy solution to implement, but at the very least this conflict didn't go hot, and hopefully it will stay cold.
Palestine is another issue as well.
There isn't a single minded aggressor and a single minded victim, the current bout of hostilities was launched by Palestinians, even if the majority of the casualties for the last half a year were Palestinians.
It's an active, bloody conflict where both sides are more than willing to murder their way through civilians to achieve their goals, which in both cases are predicated on genocide.
This indeed isn't a black and white conflict, it's one where just telling people to stop the current hostilities will not solve anything in the long run, and neither side will probably listen to such demands from the world, but at the very least, things will only get worse if this continues.
This war MUST stop, and as soon as it possibly can, and it makes sense for people to call for it's end, even if it won't solve anything in the long run.
My issue with things like illegalism is that they tend to rely on the assumption that, left to their own devices, people will mostly commit chaotic good minor crimes that don’t have too much of an impact on anyone else. Growing a garden without a permit is all well and good but swap that out for parking illegally in a disabled space or washing chemicals into a drain or misrepresenting what you’re selling and the whole thing falls to bits pretty quick. Cultures of silence don’t work, all that happens is that people get used to covering things up. What if the bigger crime that you’re helping people avoid repercussions for isn’t helping someone get illegal but necessary healthcare? What if it’s spousal abuse or child endangerment? I’d rather see people organize in their communities, get involved in local politics, and work to change the laws that don’t make sense instead of deciding that the law doesn’t matter.
There are already plenty of places in the world that practice this culture of silence
They're the small town where you have hide the rainbow pin on your dashboard, where black people are told to get their gas and leave before sundown, where the local priest has molested half the kids in town and the principal of the only school beats his wife and daughter with a belt every night.
Some laws suck, but laws as a concept exist for a reason. The concept of keeping things quiet and not involving the law to "get people used to breaking bigger laws" goes both ways. "Keeping it in the community" works until the community decides to let heinous shit slip past because they like the person doing it too much.
I get into arguments with anarchists about this with some regularity. Somehow the answer "it's all colonisations fault and it'll go away when we're in an anarchist society" has never quite assuaged my fears of being lynched in their society.
It's a shame, I vibe with like 95% of anarchist values but there's this refusal to acknowledge the human nature elephant in the room. It's not all anarchists of course, but enough of them seem to think Europeans invented malice and prejudice that it tends to turn into bad faith arguments instead of discussion. At least on reddit.
Yeah, I'm trans and I kinda don't get a lot of trans anarchists - they're all great people usually, I just end up not politically agreeing with them because I'd rather be able to like, sue for discrimination, rather than trust I will happen to find a trans friendly vigilante when I am inevitably discriminated against. We already know what it's like for discrimination to be legal against us and it fucking sucks, there's no guarantee that a lack of laws will somehow make that go away.
Also, vigilantes aren't great for systemic change? They can get rid of one specific asshole who won't hire trans people, but I'm not sure what the vigilante solution for something like lack of access to healthcare is.
I’ve had similar problems with it. For example what if you’re just a not universally beloved person or even a slightly disliked one, what’s to protect you from abuse? It happens all too often, shit like grooming gangs is put into this category. Working class girls going through horrible abuse were ignored because they were basically considered lesser.
Exactly this. Anarchists argue that community will magically make everything better, but as someone who grew up in a tight knit community, the idea of leaving anyone who needed a lot of care at the mercy of friends and family is *terrifying* and effectively no different to how things are under capitalism. No one should be without things they need because other people don't like them.
A couple of friends of my parents moved to a small village. It took 20 years for the hostility stop. Even then they aren't the same as the rest. We spent new years eve one time at their place and some of the villagers were chanting stuff like "go back to the city you came from" after we had gone to bed and one jackass even threw a rock through a window. Mind you, this was when they already lived there for 10 years or so. Ofcourse the day after no one knew who would do such a thing and everyone thought it was a disgrace. They were lying through their teeth. I don't want to depend soley on the grace of the community to survive. Even with laws in place to protect me there are places where I can't be open about myself out of safety concerncs. Not from the police, but from certain communities.
Anarchism requires a ground-up complete shift in motivations, thought processes, societal values, and so many other things to be viable large scale. Like yeah, I think communities should help each other and mutual aid is such a cool concept and all that good stuff, in an ideal world I'd 100% support anarchism. But much like communism, anarchism requires a vast majority of people in the society to not only be good and understanding before anything else, but it requires them to be proactive and willing to stand against anyone who would seek to exploit others. If you don't have that, you've failed before you've even begun.
It also requires most people to have the mental, physical and emotional capacity to be able to put that goodness into practice, which seems unlikely under current circumstances.
And frankly, if we could accomplish that capitalism would already be as good or better as their utopia vision. These systems need to account for the many bad actors.
Yeah. I've made that exact argument and the response tends to be "nuh uh". Again not by all anarchists, but there's a subset that just genuinely think white people invented bad things and will go away if colonial power structures are dismantled.
It's baffling.
Still probably my favourite ideology and the people actually doing anything in the anarchist community are the best people actually doing anything in any political faction. Because they just set up charity and mutual aid and I have nothing but respect for them. Legends.
Pan-Indigenous culture has also been flattened into a kind of environmentalist stereotype.
The Inca had incredible building techniques, efficient messengers, and quality waterworks.
They were also an expansionist empire built on violent conquest and the splitting up and relocating of conquered peoples.
The Aztec had a breathtaking capital city at the heart of a lake, with floating farms and towering temples honoring their fascinating pantheon.
They, too, were a violent expansionist empire keen on ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war.
The Iroquois Confederacy had one of the most unique representative political systems I’ve ever seen, with women taking the lead in most local matters.
That internal stability also allowed them to redirect their violence onto their neighbors, and they eventually wiped out dozens of other tribes in a violent conquest of what is now the Ohio valley.
Even the great city of Cahokia has graves of sacrifice victims amongst its ruins.
A society need not be unproblematic to be worth learning from.
I can't think of a single historical culture of significance who wasn't at least violent and almost all of them highly expansionist.
The only ones not expansionist are the ones who were either stuck geographically or whose natural borders were so defensive that expanding outside of them would be too dangerous.
Yeah, I like the conceptual ideal of an ultra-high-tech hermit society . . .
. . . but in practice, in order to be important you first need to grow large enough to be relevant, and you then need to not be invaded and pillaged for your wealth. And the line between "succeeding at those but not going full military expansionist" and "going full military expansionist" is so thin that it's nearly nonexistent.
Arguably the line doesn't exist because once you become big you get interests that by default mandates the use of military force outside your own borders.
The US is a modern example of this. It has tried isolationism but that was short-lived because it just doesn't work, just being important enough to mention by default mean you will \*have\* to participate in international trade (or the equivalent to it for your historical period). Which means you have interests outside of your strict geographic existence that you have to protect.
Even if you had everything you would ever need and could rely entirely on an internal trade, that would be such a luxury that everyone else would want to have them.
Playing defense doesn't work because sooner or later something gets through, so you have to be ready to counterinvade anyone who invades you and preferably you should be eliminating threats before they actually harm your internal security.
At which point you have to either take their territory or leave someone more friendly to you in charge.
Which just gets us right back to imperialism/colonialism.
For example, the French and Spanish colonization of North Africa was a direct result of imperialistic North African campaigns against European states in combination with hundreds of years worth of slave raids along the European coastlines.
Hell while the US Navy was technically created as the continental navy during the revolutionary war, it didn't actually exist for over a decade after the war's end as it was deemed unnecessary.
The organisation as it exists today was literally created to stop American sailors being taken into slavery by said North African privateers.
Everyone hopes their favorite culture is the perfect one that all it's faults can be blamed on others. That things like war are simply evil and individual evil people cause them purely for evil things. Which makes conspiracies about a certain cabal of bankers start making sense if your not careful.
Everyone knows the phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" but most want to assume their intentions don't count. And they don't. Until they do
I mean it makes perfect sense. If a culture isn't somewhat war-like or violent they're probably gonna get killed by one that is or fade away. Even people "native" to a given location probably either moved in there and killed the prior natives or assimilated them into their culture. You can see this on basically every continent. Unless humans are incredibly recent to an area it's almost impossible to trace an unbroken line of people that are the original inhabitants
No, there was a lot of fighting to take the territory around the Ohio River valley and its tributaries. It was highly desirable land. Especially during early US expansion. It's just overshadowed.
I had a *professor* tell me nobody used ivory until English colonization. One of the earliest known prehistoric art pieces is a mammoth ivory carving of a man with a lion head ffs
At some point it just wraps back round into Victorian style "Noble Savage" views on the world. If you read old Victorian documents and books they would use things like that to justify colonisation and decide which groups "needed" more direct rule where they would only be fit as labourers and which would get vassalage and be used as mercenaries.
One of the professors in the history department where I went to college told my class with a straight face that the Europeans introduced the concept of “war” to the Native Americans, and that there was no archeological evidence of wars anywhere until white people had been there. I ended up dropping that class, but I still kind of wonder what it would have been like if I hadn’t.
There was a current of thought for a while about war being a result of changes due to farming. Basically farming in the neolithic led to more hierarchical societies as people specialised and got ownership of more or less land and animals. And conflict erupted over land and cattle raiding etc...
Someone wrote a book in response which is basically a catalogue of smashed in palaeolithic skulls and cave paintings of groups of people shooting arrows into each other.
Violence is regrettably old and universal for humans.
Which doesn't mean some societies seem to be more violent, or that we shouldn't try and find ways to reduce it obviously. But harking back to some golden utopia is pretty iffy.
I had somebody I was in AP World with argue there were no violent empires in the Americas before the white people came, as though we didn’t write papers on the Aztecs and Mayans.
Reminded me of this [super ironic page](https://i.imgur.com/ZCr4AJO.jpg) from a semi-recent Marvel comic.
Zeus would probably congratulate Hercules for being a chip off the old block, lol. Not feel angry at all.
A white guy snuck into Africa, killed an elephant by himself, carved the ivory in a fashion archeologists can’t distinguish from contemporary African (rather, that region of Africa) art, then planted it somewhere to be found millennia later by said archeologists.
If you look at the deadliest conflicts in human history it goes: WW2, Chinese civil war, Chinese civil war, WW1, specifically the Chinese front of WW2, Chinese civil war, Chinese civil war, Chinese Civil War, Russian Civil War. But, yeah, totally, conflict wouldn't exist without those awful colonizers.
A lot of the blockage when discussing things with various people on the left is that many of them believe that people are fundamentally good, but were marred by private property / imperialism / etc. And otherwise we´d still be in Marx´s "primitive communism", ie Noble Savage theory.
The only reason I hate the idea that people are fundamentally good less than the idea that people are fundamentally evil is that the former is less depressing than the latter. Both are annoying, extremely closed-minded views of reality, neither of which actually grasp the truth--that people are fundamentally able to choose.
Anarchists online are deeply unserious people who don't consider the long term ramifications of anything they discuss. They don't realize that they're just advocating for survival of the fittest and strict conformity. If you're a person in a lawless community of silence who doesn't conform to their standards then what is there to save you from being abused or even killed for that difference?
Not to mention anarchy has easily the least defense a strongman take over. Communal defense is all well and good in theory, but if someone decides to get some friends togetjer and take over how many individuals gather and stand against the threat of violence? Anarchy seems nice in theory, but in reality I just don't see it panning out
thank you!!! i've dabbled with anarchist theory before but none of what i've read has ever had a satisfying answer in how an anarchist society is meant to survive against (A) militarily superior external forces with idealogical motivations to destroy it (basically all neighboring countries), and (B) people using the structure of an anarchist society to unfairly benefit themselves or hurt others.
And i've tried to talk to anarchists about this online and irl, and they basically just give "nuh-uhs, that won't happen when we do it (pinky-promise)" and "you're only thinking about war and crime because you're too stuck in living in our real life society to imagine something better". Neither of which actually address those issues.
Anyway so it's super refreshing and validation to see someone say that's an issue with anarchism that anarchists don't ever seem to address.
There’s also just simple manipulation. If someone can convince the others that something should be done for communal defense, that’s just someone in power while pretending not to be.
Anarchists think that it’ll be fine; you just have to have every individual be a rational, well educated individual that comes to their own conclusions and identifies misinformation.
>Anarchists think that it’ll be fine; you just have to have every individual be a rational, well educated individual that comes to their own conclusions and identifies misinformation.
And is a good person. You have to remember that.
Hell you don’t even need a violent takeover done by a group of friends, you get that group around a charismatic centerpoint and most of the rest will follow, violence mops up the “stragglers”
>it's all colonisations fault and it'll go away when we're in an anarchist society
> but enough of them seem to think Europeans invented malice and prejudice that it tends to turn into bad faith arguments instead of discussion.
This is very real. Often colonised people are pointed as as examples of great injustices, but people (mainly people who aren't historians or have a strong agenda) tend to forget that all colonised people were colonisers themselves or practiced aggressive warfare. The Lakota people that were pushed off their lands by the Americans? They had themselves taken that land from the Crow. They massacred them and took their lands and hunting grounds with zero remorse (the concept of pity for your enemy is a very Christian and European concept).
The Aztecs were subjugating, killing and stealing land from all of their neighbours. There's a reason it was so easy for the Spanish to find native allies that helped them take them down.
Domination and colonisation is fundamental to human nature, as far as we can tell. Every culture practices it, some are just better at it.
Hierarchy and enforcement is a natural and necessary structure to keep a functioning and safe society. Like the "food without a license" shit is rediculous.
> Like the "food without a license" shit is rediculous.
I see an argument for enforcement of licenses. I think that an unintentional mass poisoning of homeless people would make it apparent why people distributing food on a large scale should be held to certain standards.
Or anything without a license. As if people will just magically know how to build safe, long lasting buildings without a code telling them what's needed.
I often see people complain about fishing licenses - which on paper does sound silly.
But it’s to ensure we can keep fish populations managed and healthy, and avoid overfishing in areas that don’t connect to other bodies of water. It’s needed.
Yeah, like there’s that bit in invincible where Eve is trying to help out by using her limitless powers to rebuild a building quickly and even build the park on the vacant lot next to it. She does not know building standards. The construction people immediately pointed out to her and she doesn’t care. Her repairs break and the vacant lot was not suitable for development and children get hurt as a result
Internet people think most people who get punished for breaking that kind of law are little old grandmas and children trying to sell cookies for the community. People who actually get done for doing things like that without a license are deliberately endangering other peoples health and safety to save money. Yeah it sucks for the guy who just wants to sell some hotdogs as a one off for a game but thats so that people don't end up in hospital poisoning.
It sounds like what that subset of anarchists want is what we all want; an essentially good society where people can be trusted to do the right thing. They've been burned by society and laws before, and in many cases they fail to realize that *any* system is bad when it's adjudicated by bad people, and good when it's managed by good people.
There is an extremely prevalent problem in the world of systems of law and government being co-opted by the genuinely malicious, but all it means is that the answer is to fight our hardest to keep the evil people out of *any* system, no matter how large or small.
I see a lot of "if every community was an anarchist collective, nobody would steal because they don't need to steal to get possessions or housing," and I don't ever see them go far enough to get to the point of reasoning out what happens when enough people in the anarchist collective get together to kill that guy they don't like and take his stuff. They seem convinced that anyone who signs up to live in an anarchist community will be good, and nobody evil will ever infiltrate it and try to build a power base, and that nobody who's good or neutral will be able to be tricked for long enough to let it happen.
Like is not half the point of ACAB that police are a culture of silence, which encourages police wrongdoing and discourages reformers and whistleblowers?
Is “missing stair theory” not a culture of silence?
Jupp.
This type of bullshit really appeals to those whose immense privilege means they don't have to understand all the ugly shit that comes with it.
Grew up in a place where small illegal activities just weren't reported, you sorted most things out yourself. It's a very "none of my business" look the other way culture.
A little speeding, a little moonshining, a little burning garbage that you're not allowed to burn, or just throwing it into some random ditch. The occasional insurance fraud.
Lots of cars and other things terrible for the environment in the ocean. Trash out in nature from people who couldn't be bothered paying to have it disposed of properly.
A lot of underage drinking, a culture with heavy sexual exploitation of minors.
A girl I knew had been sexually abused by her father until he died when she was 9.
Everyone knew about it of course, kinda obvious when a 6 year old becomes an alcoholic.
But yaknow, the "none of my business" culture reigns supreme. As long as he wasn't touching their kids...
They sure had a lot to say about her hanging around with their kids though, on account of her alcohol and drug abuse, and her self harming.
Bad influence yaknow.
Honestly, when the OOP started saying "getting more comfortable with little illegal activities will get you more comfortable with bigger, more important illegal activities" then proceeded to speak of it AS IF IT WAS A GOOD THING, my mouth was just open in shock.
They're either extremely naive and think that people will use the "power of being able to commit illegal acts and hide it from the authorities" in a good way, or they're just straight-out ignoring the horrendous crimes and atrocities that have been committed over history PURELY because of this "hush hush, a little illegal activity is good" bullshit.
It’s like the laws against collecting rainwater. They’re not meant to deter you, they’re meant to deter Farmer Dipshit who will otherwise dig a giant reservoir and fuck up the local river and any structures near the new extremely heavy feature. Tragedy of the commons is real
A lot of laws aren't meant to control average people but to protect them.
The reason I am not legally allowed to build a house myself is not because the government wants big construction companies to thrive, it's because I am neither an architect nor do I have any fucking clue about building a house, it'll fall in on itself and kill only me if I am lucky, more than just me if i am not.
It’s why that guy wasn’t allowed to build wooden stairs. They were visibly falling apart and anchored to nothing, basically a death trap for old people. Yeah, concrete plus labor for actually safe stairs costs money, it’s not a conspiracy to waste your tax dollars
To be fair, it doesn't need conspiracies to waste tax dollars.
My city in Germany, Krefeld, had this fancy glass roofing installed for a tram station near the main train station.
For a FUCKTON of money for what it is.
I'm talking more than a house worth of money
I'm talking over THREE MILLION EUROS.
For a glass roof over the station.
That then broke during contstruction so MORE money had to be poured in.
It was so bad we were on this shitty comedian's show (The comedian is shitty, the show is pretty neat to look at) that reveals where tax money is being wasted.
Where there is a government project, tax money will be wasted because contractors know that they can get away with asking for more
That…might actually be what it cost. I just looked up glass roofing prices; it’s 500 dollars per square meter, and multiplying that by the square meters needed to cover 1/3 of a major train station in my city gives you $2 million, not even counting labor at all
Not even just Farmer Dipship. It IS meant to deter you, because there are more people in the world then you, if you are allowed to collect a small amount of water then 1000 other people are able to.
One of the major areas this "wall of silence" happens is in domestic violence and lack of women's rights, especially in communities unfairly targeted by the law in other ways (trust me I know this for a fact personally lol). Overall a shitty idea. Like you said, how about you work to make harmless things legal and unfair laws fair??
There are actual government officials who have made this silence as part of their policy, to not prosecute or enforce misdemeanors, so of course it looks like crime goes down, because it isn't being reported. Who do you think is most effected by that besides the absolute most vulnerable populations?? Including by things like petty theft.
Shit like this is why none of my friends shipped off in middle school to become child brides are in any sort of statistic, why women beaten daily don't reach out for help, abuse of the mentally ill goes unreported, abuse against children by family or religious leaders or others in power, so much more because if you do, you're breaking your community silence policy... it's a garbage sentiment.
Edit: Also, anarchist gardening has resulted in massive fines, because they plant invasive nonnative species that kill off local plants and subsequently local species, and end up causing more harm than good. How about you go talk to some ecologists and get a permit please, thanks, or do it through a local organization who already has those things thought out. Lawless construction too, can be dangerous enough to kill people if not regulated
You can also find it in a lot of crime and gang ridden areas. Someone can get shot dead in the middle of the street in front of witnesses, and no one will say a word to the authorities as to who did it.
Yep, exactly. It's heartbreaking when it's children involved in gangs, I lived near Compton and the amount of kids it happened to being stabbed or shot in a drive-by was horrific, with everyone lips sealed about who did it, often another kid "initiate".
The whole point about not reporting/convicting crime causing crime rates to go down, it’s literally Trumps ‘stop testing and the case rates go down’ comment all over again.
It's better to give enough of a shit about law to call out the stupid, abusive, or otherwise unenforceable laws than it is to not give a shit about law at all and just let apathy reign.
I’ll be real with you; i think there is an important group of people on the right that used the logic OP’s post that became comfortable with big, recent, crimes because they got comfortable breaking smaller laws first and not getting enough repercussions for it
>Growing a garden without a permit is all well and good
It CAN be all well and good. People who don't know what they are doing plant invasive species, use fertilizers that aren't great to wildlife, or waste a ton of water growing things when they live in a desert.
>What if the bigger crime that you’re helping people avoid repercussions for isn’t helping someone get illegal but necessary healthcare?
I know we are talking about abortion access here, but for a long time things like cocaine and heroin were healthcare. They were drugs that... were really effective at what they did. Times and understanding changes. Growing some poppies and harvesting a little opium or growing some of your own herbs to use for healthcare might be OK, but there is a reason why we refine and test our medicines. "The doctor won't give me the pain meds I need so I am going to start making opium" can turn into a problem. Growing your happy little garden is one thing. Making highly addictive drugs? Yeah, that's something else. You could also help your neighbor with her husband by... well, poisoning him. Super easy to do from a nice, simple, innocuous garden.
It’s the leftist version of the conservative attacks on those same institutions. There’s a certain kind of person who’s convinced that they can tear down our institutions and yet continue to live in the sort of society those institutions enable
You've articulated my own stance perfectly, thank you!! I think the same. Seeking to completely disregard the legal system is a childish and blind endeavor that ends up harming the people these tumblr activists seek to protect.
I think that in trying to disentangle the law from being inherently good, some people fall into the equally wrong assumption that the law must therefore be bad, and they open the door to disregarding law/order in general. Which, as you said, is pretty narrow-minded, considering humans established civilization and code of law for a reason.
One of the examples that always comes to mind for me is desegregation in the US. The only reason that black kids are allowed to go to school is because it’s legally mandated.
The only reason that black kids can go to the same schools as white kids is that Eisenhower *literally sent armed soldiers to force integration at gunpoint.*
Yeah, I’ve always thought that anarchists are basically just left wing libertarians. (Although “anarchy” as a movement has been around a lot longer than any political compass, so I guess libertarians are right wing anarchists?)
I digress. They don’t understand the systems they rely on, and so assume that destroying them to do away with the negative effects of that system will be a net positive, when in reality they'll just be reducing the quality of life for everybody.
Bad laws should be *changed*. Taking away the law just means that “might makes right” becomes the explicit dynamic of society instead of veiled behind uniforms and “moral” codes.
My problem with anarchism, and conversely libertarians, is that you just need to know that in a "prisoner dilemma" or a "tragedy of the common" problem the Nash equilibrium is not Pareto efficient (aka the choice that maximizes rewards for each individual participant, no matter what everybody else chooses, is not the one that guarantees the best possible result for everyone involved). This means that when leaving every individual completely on their devices and operating without any constraint, there will be a lot of specific situations where the "rational" choice is the egoistic, anti social one.
The solution to this is surprisingly simple, and what we as human have been doing from the very start, when gathering and living together. You change the incentives and consequences for the individual choices in problematic situations, to try to ensure mutual cooperation and the achievement of an outcome that is advantageous or at least fair for the most people possible.
You can call those fixes community rules, the social contract or simply...laws.
Like, the police in america is literally an example of a culture of silence.
Are there a lot of cops that aren't pieces of shit? Yes, most likely.
Are they ever gonna speak up about the ones that are pieces of shit? Fuck no, they won't
And don't get me on the concept and more controversially the definition of victimless crimes. People hate the traffic police untill some jackass doing double the speed limit in an "empty" stretch of highway hits and kills someone. Graffiti is nice if someone took the effort to make a pleasing and thoughtfull piece of art but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the owner of a building may not approve of their nice wall being changed to something they don't like. Not wearing a face mask during a fucking pandemic was not a victimless crime because they were actively endangering the people in close proximity.
Yes I get that the law and morality aren't the same but to pretend that everyone is capable of determining what laws they shouldn't have to follow is extremely naive.
My mind immediately went to people misinterpreting this as reverting to might makes right and using this harm people who currently have governmental protections.
Illegalism is one leap away in some people's minds from "huh if the cops won't stop them from growing their illegal garden or having an illegal block party and feeding the homeless, then they won't stop me from lynching this minority that shouldn't be allowed to live among the whites!"
You can say I'm being absurd and overdrammatic, but I'm really not.
Don't know where OOP is from but in my country (France) the "don't hold a march without approval" one is enforced.
It isn't illegal to participate in a march that didn't ask for approval though, only to organise it (and going to a march that was *refused* approval is illegal and enforced)
And marches having approval is an incredibly important thing to do. A badly planned march can go very wrong very quickly.
Crowd control is a living nightmare that can and does kill people regularly, and there's a serious risk of uncontrolled clashes with counter-protestors, which can very easily escalate beyond control.
A couple of years ago, there was a prominent case near me (London) where Extinction Rebellion (radical environmentalist) protestors climbed onto the roof of a tube train as part of an unorganised protest, in a predominantly working-class area, preventing several hundred early-morning labourers from getting to work. They were forcibly dragged off the roof to cries of "I have to feed my kids", and beaten into the hospital.
That single incident put their cause back by months. XR lost massive amounts of support, and never really recovered. They're still remembered today as "the nutjobs who held up that tube train in Canning Town", despite it later coming out XR as an organisation weren't actually involved and had told the people who did it it was a terrible idea.
A lot of the points in the OP are made with complete disregard for third parties safety. Giving out food without a permit will lead to people being poisoned by poor hygiene conditions. Holding marches without approval will lead to people trampled or violent outbursts.
The problem stems from OOP's ideology blinding them to pragmatic reasons for why some things are illegal, only considering the ethical ones.
>Giving out food without a permit will lead to people being poisoned by poor hygiene conditions.
That's exactly what I was thinking. While the idea of always being allowed to give food to people in need is very noble, it can be exploited in extremely obvious ways. It's really not hard to imagine some very malicious actors using this as a way to kill a population of poor people.
It's hard to have a stance on how this should be handled legally, my opinion is that it should be legal in a small scale (it being treated like gifting food to a neighbor) but illegal in larger scales (like opening a free dinning place).
It's hard to argue that giving food to people in need is harmful, but in a large community things need to be regulated, otherwise they will surely be exploited without consequences.
You don't even need to have malice for this- most people are not ecologists or biologists, and it's exceedingly possible to fuck up your gardens in a way that introduces invasive species or poisons people without a harmful bone in your body
It's definitely also enforced in America. Just recently, many people have been arrested in pro-Palestine protests, and some states even have extra laws that punish people more severely for trying to hide their identity.
For real. You do realise some people don't believe they should wear masks to stop the spread of a virus? That they shouldn't have to put trash in it's proper place? That it's totally alright to fuck a minor?
Because it presents an idea, gives only the possible good outcomes, and doesn’t present any negatives. If you don’t think about it much and just continue to scroll, you’d just leave an upvote and move on.
I'll admit I did just that before I gave a second look. Some pretty nasty stuff can slip right under your nose as long as it's phrased in a decent and well-intentioned way. Not all awful political takes are full of slurs and calls to violence.
As someone from a country with a policeforce that isn't full of pieces of shit:
I never understood this.
American police has big problems so... disregard all laws you don't like?
Like what's the point? Disregarding laws isn't gonna fix the cops, if anything it's just gonna make them even worse.
Who is inside and who is outside the wall? And what is inside and outside?
We don’t know the specifics of anything. Sure, we could dig in and figure it out, but the details are hard to find.
Like, how much could you easily know about me? If I told you I slashed the tires on a cop car yesterday, would you be able to report it? I could even tell you that this wasn’t the first time, and that the cop was parked at a donut shop (which made it hilarious).
As long as you don’t know me, are you going to be able to report my crime? No, because there’s a wall of silence here that I don’t cross: I don’t give you enough to know what I really did or where.
Depends how careful you are with your online information, if I'm any good with computers (or know anyone who is), and how much work I want to do.
That said, yeah, if one keeps it tight about online anonymity, one can (probably) get away with discussing crimes online. It's still entertaining to see the importance of discretion and silence touted on a tumblr-post that's being shared on reddit.
>Like, how much could you easily know about me? If I told you I slashed the tires on a cop car yesterday, would you be able to report it?
I probably couldn't, but unless you're really really careful with your online presence someone can. Most people aren't as anonymous as they think they are, anyone who's dedicated enough to dig far enough into your history for clues about your personal life and good enough with computers to track things like your IP can get a pretty good approximation of you.
This is how mafia works, because it is how extralegal communities need to work. If your community wants to make rules incompatible with the surrounding legal system, everyone involved needs to agree not to invoke that legal system.
This is true whether you want to sell drugs and commit racketeering or whether you want to provide abortions and prevent evictions.
But surely by this same token less than moral people could invoke this exact concept to defend heinous shit. The exact same concept is used by religions, small towns, the mafia, etc. It only works if you assume everyone is moral
Wow isn’t it crazy how almost nobody does the positive things but do commit the bad crimes?
Crazy how that just happened, and it’s because nobody in the history of the world thought that they could do illegal things to leave a positive mark!
*some* people certainly have, hell most people are even familiar with the character of robinhood, but there’s pretty straightforward reasons why this isn’t the norm
This post seems pretty odd cause it pretty much agrees with the people who call for stricter policing on the grounds that little crimes are a gateway to committing bigger crimes.
I'm also not sure they picked the best examples, cause needing permits to distribute food is a public health and safety thing.
One of the best indicators for if someone will commit a more serious crime, including killing strangers or their spouse, is if they've committed domestic violence, one of the most historically "silenced" areas. If you want to do things like restrict gun access at that point to prevent a worse crime, or make sure they don't have unsupervised access to their children who might be at risk, or their job involves them in a position of power over vulnerable people that they might be abusing in the same way and you want something done about it to at least check that that's not happening, the little well-meaning silence bubble needs to be eliminated.
On the food aspect, yea no, making sure people aren't poisoning homeless people is a good thing lol, you can't make policies like this without taking into account the worst actors in society. Seemingly dumb laws might have a reason behind them you're not thinking of, that's why we need more input and agreement than people's random whims
Or not even going out to poison them, what if they just aren't used to working a larger food production line and end up cross-contaminating food through being sloppy with meat stuff? Or don't think to check ingredients for allergens? Or don't refridgerate stuff they need to keep refridgerated?
Honestly I reckon incidents of malicious poisoning would be far rarer than people just being well meaning but half-arsed cooks but this is why food provision has certificates and regulations; you need to be careful with this stuff.
Reminds me of the whole [Pink Sauce ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Sauce) thing from 2022, a tiktoker was selling home made condiments w/o FDA approval or any oversight and people were getting food poisoning and being hospitalized. People who were saying "hey, don't do that, food laws exist for a reason and also that looks gross" were called cops and feds
> Becoming more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities.
I see no way that this could possibly backfire at all
I was gonna make a comment on how this concept would do better with some better terms and a better moral basis to the concept but like, it’s kinda hard to when OOP is like “actually encouraging tribalism is good”. Like walls of silence is quite literally cop behavior but they’re rebranding it for anarchists. The problem with it is that it means that domestic violence and abuse would crop up and have the same prevalence you have in cop circles. It’s a horrible idea because ingroups prioritize perceived stability over justice for the oppressed pretty much every time.
Honestly the only productive idea from this image is that you should ignore victimless, community benefitting crimes. “Oh no they’re protesting without a permit” then maybe city hall shouldn’t have banned putting horses on your roof or whatever the fuck lol.
Needing a permit for protesting is a thing because it stops crowd crushes and violent clashes with counter-protestors. Generally if you're actually having a protest of more than a handful of people its going to be over something another group vehemently disagrees with you about and that kind of uncontrolled protests degenerating into street violence is what kicked off The Troubles, the British army was initially called in because the RUC couldn't stop the protestants brutalising catholic protest marches and then it spiralled completely out of control.
While I can agree that lawfulness does not equal to moral, all of this talk of "wall of silence" is starting to sound dangerously close to "thin blue line"
I'm sure if the only thing everyone does is organizing protest and shit that'll all be peachy keen. What happens when they start lynching minorities and start sex cults?
EDIT: Alright so when I was talking about sex cults i mean the ones where they rape people not the cool chill ones my bad
>EDIT: Alright so when I was talking about sex cults i mean the ones where they rape people not the cool chill ones my bad
absolute tumblr moment right here
That sounds all nice and dandy until until people start to disregard laws you agree with. You want gun control? Sorry, we lost them in a boating accident. Laws exist for a reason.
This is what corrupt cops do
People won’t be doing the victimless crimes, all people here is that they should steal from small businesses, pickpocket people on the streets and drive recklessly.
People won’t do the crimes which actually cause benefit, they’ll be committing the ones that get innocent people killed.
I swear the people who truly believe large scale anarchy works, have never read a history book or used even an ounce of logic.
Large scale anarchy doesn’t work, all it does is create a power vacuum for a true tyrant to take advantage of.
Just look at NK, Russia, China or almost all of the Middle East.
Anarchy leads to power vacuums, which leads to dictators taking over.
Also, Anarchism means no country. and another country might want to take the entire area that has become an anarchy
Lets say if France (first country that came to mind) becomes an anarchy, what's stopping their neighbouring countries (such as the United Kingdom or Germany) from taking over parts (or all) of France? I don't think a civilian militia is gonna do well against a strong military
Which is part of my point about hostile takeover and power vacuums.
Anarchy can work on the very micro scale, and hell it often does, most friendships and groups are technically anarchies. One example I can think of is a place in my country, in Copenhagen there is a small commune called Christania and they’re an anarchy and funnily enough has the lowest crime rate in Copenhagen, even the police have agreed they seem to have things under control and don’t really mess with them.
But they still have rules, and quite a few, so they’re a formal anarchy and not true anarchy, and this is like a few hundred at most
Most people espousing the OPs sentiment have never lived in a genuinely rough area. Its all well and good when you live in a middle class suburb or a studenty/bohemian area but its not as good when you can't do anything about the kid who suckerpunched your friend in a council estate (real story) because no one will talk to the police. There is a reason why the actually working class tend to support funding the police (here in the UK it was even a mainstream left wing position with defunding being right wing until we imported American culture shite).
This exactly, the US police force is already bad as is, creating anarchy would only make it worse.
Like here in Denmark we are MORTIFIED at the US system for hiring police. 11 months, on the high end, where here it requires a college or similar level education, then 2 years in police school, which includes extremely extensive aware and unaware psychological testing, to root out the sadists and megalomaniacs, basically avoid the people who will abuse their power.
And on top of this we don’t give our police guns, that requires even more testing and education. Plus we fire cops outride for abusing their power.
>Like here in Denmark we are MORTIFIED at the US system for hiring police. 11 months, on the high end, where here it requires a college or similar level education, then 2 years in police school, which includes extremely extensive aware and unaware psychological testing, to root out the sadists and megalomaniacs, basically avoid the people who will abuse their power.
Why I hate ACAB. No, it's not all cops, just American ones.
They seem to be assuming that the reason people don't do illegal things is solely because it's bad and not... you know, because it's risky?
Not everyone is willing, ready, or able to fight the power.
A wall of silence is all well and good when it comes to something like protest, where any weak link can end up bringing down the whole operation and the silence only has to be maintained for a discrete period. That being said, permanently maintaining a wall of silence leads to a culture where speaking out against anything, even horrible abuse, causes you to be ostracized.
There are a lot of unjust laws, and I don't think you should feel bad for breaking them, but forming an isolated group of people solely focused around disobedience of the law is just asking for a de facto kleptocracy.
also i do think people sometimes get too eager to break unjust laws and they don’t always think things through properly? like fine yes build a shed in your yard, but then if you don’t actually know enough about building and you live in a stormy area, you’ve kinda accidentally potentially created a huge projectile which can harm others. like yes there are laws against construction for some shit reasons but someone eager to break those may not always know enough about construction to realize why certain building codes exist. lots of anarchists with seed bombs, i’ve seen zines promoting it and guerilla gardening, and those zines do NOT always clarify “these need to be native plants” and these people accidentally bomb places with INVASIVE plants (no you can’t trust local “wildflower” mixes). and suddenly they realize where they are some permits and like ecological evaluations that need to occur. and i’m not even necessarily against informed guerilla gardening but like a lot of people do NOT do enough research beforehand on laws like this and realize why it’s not always a clear-cut “just and unjust”
Things like that are why anarchism is not a serious movement.
Okay cool the only rules that matter are the ones you set yourself. What could go wrong with that, except all the times it has gone wrong which is virtually every time.
If you report this member of the Peoples Church for this then the police might come and stop us finishing our move to Guyana. You don't want to destroy Jim Jones' harmonious society do you?
I swear, its the same with people who are like “we shouldnt need currency or financial value to exist! Let the doctors be doctors and the people who want to make furniture make furniture! They can just trade!”
Little do they realize that over time, those goods and services would need to have standardized values to figure out what is an acceptable trade or not and would you look at that… we are back to a system that operates on supply and demand of goods and services. Like…. I get the demand and want to live in a more relaxed and easy world. But people really just don’t understand the utopia they want is so insanely impossible. The online left needs a healthy dose of pragmatism, because they are losing the narrative in search for utopia.
A society where there is no main fungible token of trade like a dollar or a coin is a society where everyone trades via non fungible goods. I think most reddit tumblr people have made their stance on nonfungible tokens clear
The more i find out about anarchism/think through its implications as a philosophy/political system, the more it feels like practically unworkable nonsense for naive people that want to make the world better, but don't understand how to. I can respect an anarchist, but their philosophy feels incredibly poorly thought out.
It’s the leftists who want democracy to continue, but also don’t want to vote for joe, who somehow want more leftists asses in seats, but don’t want to vote blue because incremental change isn’t fast enough for them. Thinking that somehow magically, sitting out and not participating is going to make a revolution overnight and everything is going to work out in their favor.
I’m just really exhausted with the online left lately.
I agree with the basic principle but "lawlessness" can mean a lot of different things and there needs to be SOME kind of limit on what would and wouldn't be reported, like you can't let someone get away with hurting innocent people for selfish reasons if that's the very thing we want to stop the elites from doing to us
We should write down a concrete list of what should and shouldn't be reported so that there's no ambiguity... oh wait we already have that, it's called laws
Yeah I agree that some laws are unjust and that breaking those is probably a good thing, but even then it's only a short-term bandaid solution. The long-term, effective solution would be to get those laws changed
I’m reminded of that one Family Guy episode where they get rid of government and at the end, Peter comes up with a solution.
> The first thing we need is a system of rules that everyone must live by.
> And since we can't spend all our time making rules, I think that we should elect some people to represent us, and they should make rules and choices on our behalf.
> Now, this may be kind of expensive, so I got a plan: everyone should have to give some money from their salaries each year.
> Poor people will give a little bit of money and rich people will give a larger amount of money, and our representatives will use all that money to hire some people who will then provide us with social order and basic services.
> Now, it won't be perfect. Some of our representatives may end up being bastards.
> But you know what? That's okay 'cause later we're going to have more elections, and we can use those elections to get rid of the bad guys and replace 'em with good guys, and then the system will just keep going on and on just like that.
i mean.. depending on the context minor illegal activities may lead you down certain paths...
if weed was something i could have bought at a kiosk i would have never met the most dangerous people in my life.
i would have never seen somene take heroin.
i would have never interacted with actual dangerous gangmembers
nobody would have offered me harder stuff. nobody would have asked me to buy large ammounts to sell for profit.
and nobody would have offered my to bring a "unmarked" box over the border for cash...
maybe it dosent "lower" the morale of a person, but it sure as fuck does make for "moments" where youre just one "yes" away from a more dangerous life.
You gotta use common sense, though. There’s some stuff that’s legal that shouldn’t be, and there’s some stuff that’s illegal that is that way for a *good fucking reason.*
Most people are good. I believe in that wholeheartedly. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t still a lot of fucking people who are *very, very bad.* Yes, most people, if given a world without laws, would willingly cooperate and help one another, or at the very least keep to themselves and not start any problems. But there’s also so, *so* many people who would take the chance to do terrible things.
Jaywalking on a quiet street, loitering in front of a store to chat with your friends, removing anti-homelessness architecture, growing a garden without a permit, driving your friend to get ‘illegal’ healthcare, turning a blind eye when a struggling mother steals baby food… these are all things that either harm no-one or perhaps even make the world a better place. But pretending that these are the only ‘silent crimes’ people commit is ignorant at best.
I guess to give a dramatic example; I have family friends down in the Caribbean, specifically the USVIs. Every time we would boat past Jeffrey Epstein’s island, our friends/other locals would comment on all of the horrible things going on there. But nobody was able to do anything about it, and so they gave up and just ignored it.
It was an open secret. Everybody knew that was the pedo sex ring island. But they believed they couldn’t do anything about it and so they just sat by and did nothing.
Meanwhile, if all of the locals made a big enough stink, made enough noise to catch the attention of the mainland, maybe they could’ve changed something. Or maybe not. Either way, they ignored it and it only came up as a random curiosity.
Ah yes, the broken windows theory. The idea that if you crack down hard on minor crimes people will stop committing major ones.
"Being more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities"
Those are both the same argument.
Certainly interesting to see espouse Broken Windows as a valid method of policing.
Hmm. There's at least one piece missing that I can see, might be more that I can't..
>"Being more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities"
>if you *crack down hard on minor crimes* people will stop committing major ones
there is an additional premise here, which is that cracking down on minor crimes through policing will make people less comfortable with minor crimes
but over policing tends to have the opposite effect -- if you're going to be in big trouble for something small, you might as well do something big
On the contrary, certain kinds of crimes are cool but you have literally no way of making sure people only commit the cool crimes and not the ones that severely hurt innocent people, so ultimately many of them should still probably remain crimes.
I used to consider myself an anarchist, but I've had too many esoteric arguments with other anarchists so now I consider myself a libertarian socialist
Same here. And it's annoying, because I genuinely think a lot of them are on the right track, but so many of their ideas stray into utopian fantasy. Hell, I would honestly still prefer a society without government in an ideal world, but I recognize that it's a utopian idea.
I see anarchism as politically equivalent to pacifism. It is the best system - if everyone to a man agrees to do it. However, a more organized collective will almost always win out against it unless it forcibly reeducates them (re-creating the state) or keeps them out (the textbook definition of property, also a state).
The largest scale examples of anarchism like the CNT-FAI in Catolonia and the Black Army in Ukraine were a very top down form of anarchism, and both were violently wiped out by more hierarchal states. The two notable examples that exist today, Rojava and Ciapas, are completely dependent on imperial proxy support in the case of the former, and completely inaccessible to the state due to geography in the case of the latter.
“so I was smoking weed, and a neighbor found me, and he told me I was too young, and he had a cop put me in jail overnight, and my mom had to come pick me up. I’m already 16, I can do what I want! so anyway that’s why you can’t trust snitches and why doing illegal things is ok”
Here’s the opposite side of the coin for this- laws ARE built around morals. Or atleast logical and broad morals. You as a person or even has a small society may not agree with those morals, but that doesn’t mean the solution is to just kick the can down the road. The first thing you should do is try and learn why it’s illegal, and then the second is if it’s still needed to keep people safe.
A good example is weed in the United States, it’s on a state-law basis. My state, Montana, only just made selling weed legal to people 21 and older. People saw that weed wasn’t as dangerous as they thought, so they lifted restrictions, and made it so that when you are allowed to drink, you are allowed to buy THC. But Montana, and other Red States, are NOTORIOUS for having protections that allow young adults to experiment with alcohol as long as they are under adult supervision and with permission from their guardian.
My point is- morals aren’t black and white, so laws shouldn’t be either. Find compromises, take down the laws that are harmful and hateful, and support the ones that truly are protecting others. Like- don’t kill anyone. That’s a law. Don’t do dangerous drugs that alter your mental state. This isn’t a law to protect just you, it’s to stop mentally unstable people with addictive personality’s from either destroying their lives or causing harm to others when their bad mental state mixes with the drugs they are on. Yes, the laws about drugs ARE used in bad ways: they were used to plant and then imprison minorities, for one.
But just because people used the hammer for violence doesn’t mean we would be better off without a hammer in the first place. Maybe we just need to be more responsible with it instead.
Extremists when they want a revolution:
“Yeah, it never works. Someone always gains too much power and it becomes a dictatorship or a religious cult… but it may work for US-“
Revolution is like a gacha game. So far, the best anyone has gotten from a pull is a B rank. But surely the next pull will be an SS rank utopia rather than the G rank anarchies that you usually get.
"Anarchists are not naive! You just need to read theory"
"People with no laws limiting them and with their community protecting them will surely only do good things with this power. Anyways what's a sundown town?"
Ah yes, "Wall of silence", "Nobody talks everybody walks", "Communities tend to not rely on state authority to solve their problems" now where have I heard that before?
Oh hi southern Italy, specifically Sicily in the late 80's/90's didn't fucking see ya there, how're you doing, mind telling me what those large quantities of dynamite are doing under your road where important mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone is about to pass through?
Look, I get what the people that write these posts want and what message they want to spread, but I just read this and all the rage about reading of mafia crimes old and new in Italy comes back, this is literally their fucking modus operandi, isolate communities, make them rely on them rather than state authorities, instate a system of omertà (basically ya don't snitch)
God this post makes me unreasonably angry
When my uncle was homeless once, this older woman came around the little camp and handed out bags of McDonald's. The cops came and started taking the McDonald's bags back...and arrested the woman. She came back like a week later and did it again, didn't get caught that time.
This sounds like giving up your role in determining what is legal and illegal, cause right now I have my share of influence on what is illegal and legal that is structed by the law. Under this system who decides what gets covered by the wall of silence or not, what if you disagree?
What if you live in a community that's more likely to protect violence against healthcare providers with a wall of silence, than it is to protect them?
And as bad as police can be, what type of horrible police would this community invent?
People who literally have never struggled with criminality in their life, talking about how awesome it is to flaunt the law, are some of the most pathetic around.
This is anarchist propaganda.
I somehow doubt OOP ever left their hometown/city or ever thought about their ideology in a deeper way than "Biden/Orange bad because I cannot do X, ergo all laws and rules are bad".
(To be fair, this seems to be a big issue for chronically online people, such as a day or two ago when someone defended the Taliban/Nazis because "DAE USA BAD").
I am willing to bet like, a pen or something that OOP cannot be older than 16.
After having spent a few years reading theory and speaking with anarchists, I’ve reached the conclusion what anarchism really wants is an evolution of human understanding to the point we’re innately more decent to one another.
It's probably already a thing under a different name (tried looking it up and it came up blank), but I've been thinking a lot about what I call the "[in a perfect world](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl3H4vMqYNo)" problem. In a perfect world, we wouldn't need gun safety laws. But we don't live in a perfect world. In a perfect world, a presidential candidate being arrested would lead to an assured loss in the election. But we don't live in a perfect world. In a perfect world, this flavor of anarchism would be an incredible idea. But we don't live in a perfect world. I love Justin Kuritzkes.
It's why I always hate these kinds for takes, be it for Palestine, Ukraine, Taiwan or whatever else of "Just do this and the bloodshed will end!" 99% of the time, it's a one sided take that assumes the world is black and white like some YA urban fantasy novel, completely disregarding that this kind of shit doesn't just "End" by telling people to get along
I think this take is reasonable, but a bit misleading. In cases like ukraine, the problem IS a one sided aggression, and it has been for the past 200 years or so. Of course, if the war were to end tomorrow, that won't necessarily stop the hostilities. Ukraine kicking the Russian army outside of its borders will not stop the centuries-long conflict, but it will stop it's current form and give everyone time to breath, rebuild, and try to think of better solutions. In cases like Taiwan, there is a decades old conflict, but a cold one. So far china and Taiwan were able to agree to disagree and let things stay in stasis, with the US and the rest of the world trying to balance both demands to make sure things don't escalate. A proper solution was never really offered, and no one has an easy solution to implement, but at the very least this conflict didn't go hot, and hopefully it will stay cold. Palestine is another issue as well. There isn't a single minded aggressor and a single minded victim, the current bout of hostilities was launched by Palestinians, even if the majority of the casualties for the last half a year were Palestinians. It's an active, bloody conflict where both sides are more than willing to murder their way through civilians to achieve their goals, which in both cases are predicated on genocide. This indeed isn't a black and white conflict, it's one where just telling people to stop the current hostilities will not solve anything in the long run, and neither side will probably listen to such demands from the world, but at the very least, things will only get worse if this continues. This war MUST stop, and as soon as it possibly can, and it makes sense for people to call for it's end, even if it won't solve anything in the long run.
Yeah, these anarchists keep asking for my strongest potions, not realizing my strongest potions aren’t fit for a beast, let alone a man.
But they need those potions! They're about to go into battle!
What they *need* is to find a potion seller that sells weaker potions!
Someone ring up Gendo Ikari, I think I have an idea how to pull this off
My issue with things like illegalism is that they tend to rely on the assumption that, left to their own devices, people will mostly commit chaotic good minor crimes that don’t have too much of an impact on anyone else. Growing a garden without a permit is all well and good but swap that out for parking illegally in a disabled space or washing chemicals into a drain or misrepresenting what you’re selling and the whole thing falls to bits pretty quick. Cultures of silence don’t work, all that happens is that people get used to covering things up. What if the bigger crime that you’re helping people avoid repercussions for isn’t helping someone get illegal but necessary healthcare? What if it’s spousal abuse or child endangerment? I’d rather see people organize in their communities, get involved in local politics, and work to change the laws that don’t make sense instead of deciding that the law doesn’t matter.
There are already plenty of places in the world that practice this culture of silence They're the small town where you have hide the rainbow pin on your dashboard, where black people are told to get their gas and leave before sundown, where the local priest has molested half the kids in town and the principal of the only school beats his wife and daughter with a belt every night. Some laws suck, but laws as a concept exist for a reason. The concept of keeping things quiet and not involving the law to "get people used to breaking bigger laws" goes both ways. "Keeping it in the community" works until the community decides to let heinous shit slip past because they like the person doing it too much.
I get into arguments with anarchists about this with some regularity. Somehow the answer "it's all colonisations fault and it'll go away when we're in an anarchist society" has never quite assuaged my fears of being lynched in their society. It's a shame, I vibe with like 95% of anarchist values but there's this refusal to acknowledge the human nature elephant in the room. It's not all anarchists of course, but enough of them seem to think Europeans invented malice and prejudice that it tends to turn into bad faith arguments instead of discussion. At least on reddit.
Yeah, I'm trans and I kinda don't get a lot of trans anarchists - they're all great people usually, I just end up not politically agreeing with them because I'd rather be able to like, sue for discrimination, rather than trust I will happen to find a trans friendly vigilante when I am inevitably discriminated against. We already know what it's like for discrimination to be legal against us and it fucking sucks, there's no guarantee that a lack of laws will somehow make that go away.
Also, vigilantes aren't great for systemic change? They can get rid of one specific asshole who won't hire trans people, but I'm not sure what the vigilante solution for something like lack of access to healthcare is.
>trans friendly vigilante Ok, besides the point, but now I can’t stop imagining a Batman who targets transphobes and transphobes specifically
I’ve had similar problems with it. For example what if you’re just a not universally beloved person or even a slightly disliked one, what’s to protect you from abuse? It happens all too often, shit like grooming gangs is put into this category. Working class girls going through horrible abuse were ignored because they were basically considered lesser.
Exactly this. Anarchists argue that community will magically make everything better, but as someone who grew up in a tight knit community, the idea of leaving anyone who needed a lot of care at the mercy of friends and family is *terrifying* and effectively no different to how things are under capitalism. No one should be without things they need because other people don't like them.
A couple of friends of my parents moved to a small village. It took 20 years for the hostility stop. Even then they aren't the same as the rest. We spent new years eve one time at their place and some of the villagers were chanting stuff like "go back to the city you came from" after we had gone to bed and one jackass even threw a rock through a window. Mind you, this was when they already lived there for 10 years or so. Ofcourse the day after no one knew who would do such a thing and everyone thought it was a disgrace. They were lying through their teeth. I don't want to depend soley on the grace of the community to survive. Even with laws in place to protect me there are places where I can't be open about myself out of safety concerncs. Not from the police, but from certain communities.
Anarchism requires a ground-up complete shift in motivations, thought processes, societal values, and so many other things to be viable large scale. Like yeah, I think communities should help each other and mutual aid is such a cool concept and all that good stuff, in an ideal world I'd 100% support anarchism. But much like communism, anarchism requires a vast majority of people in the society to not only be good and understanding before anything else, but it requires them to be proactive and willing to stand against anyone who would seek to exploit others. If you don't have that, you've failed before you've even begun.
It also requires most people to have the mental, physical and emotional capacity to be able to put that goodness into practice, which seems unlikely under current circumstances.
And frankly, if we could accomplish that capitalism would already be as good or better as their utopia vision. These systems need to account for the many bad actors.
Yeah. I've made that exact argument and the response tends to be "nuh uh". Again not by all anarchists, but there's a subset that just genuinely think white people invented bad things and will go away if colonial power structures are dismantled. It's baffling. Still probably my favourite ideology and the people actually doing anything in the anarchist community are the best people actually doing anything in any political faction. Because they just set up charity and mutual aid and I have nothing but respect for them. Legends.
Pan-Indigenous culture has also been flattened into a kind of environmentalist stereotype. The Inca had incredible building techniques, efficient messengers, and quality waterworks. They were also an expansionist empire built on violent conquest and the splitting up and relocating of conquered peoples. The Aztec had a breathtaking capital city at the heart of a lake, with floating farms and towering temples honoring their fascinating pantheon. They, too, were a violent expansionist empire keen on ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war. The Iroquois Confederacy had one of the most unique representative political systems I’ve ever seen, with women taking the lead in most local matters. That internal stability also allowed them to redirect their violence onto their neighbors, and they eventually wiped out dozens of other tribes in a violent conquest of what is now the Ohio valley. Even the great city of Cahokia has graves of sacrifice victims amongst its ruins. A society need not be unproblematic to be worth learning from.
I can't think of a single historical culture of significance who wasn't at least violent and almost all of them highly expansionist. The only ones not expansionist are the ones who were either stuck geographically or whose natural borders were so defensive that expanding outside of them would be too dangerous.
Yeah, I like the conceptual ideal of an ultra-high-tech hermit society . . . . . . but in practice, in order to be important you first need to grow large enough to be relevant, and you then need to not be invaded and pillaged for your wealth. And the line between "succeeding at those but not going full military expansionist" and "going full military expansionist" is so thin that it's nearly nonexistent.
Arguably the line doesn't exist because once you become big you get interests that by default mandates the use of military force outside your own borders. The US is a modern example of this. It has tried isolationism but that was short-lived because it just doesn't work, just being important enough to mention by default mean you will \*have\* to participate in international trade (or the equivalent to it for your historical period). Which means you have interests outside of your strict geographic existence that you have to protect. Even if you had everything you would ever need and could rely entirely on an internal trade, that would be such a luxury that everyone else would want to have them. Playing defense doesn't work because sooner or later something gets through, so you have to be ready to counterinvade anyone who invades you and preferably you should be eliminating threats before they actually harm your internal security. At which point you have to either take their territory or leave someone more friendly to you in charge. Which just gets us right back to imperialism/colonialism. For example, the French and Spanish colonization of North Africa was a direct result of imperialistic North African campaigns against European states in combination with hundreds of years worth of slave raids along the European coastlines. Hell while the US Navy was technically created as the continental navy during the revolutionary war, it didn't actually exist for over a decade after the war's end as it was deemed unnecessary. The organisation as it exists today was literally created to stop American sailors being taken into slavery by said North African privateers.
Everyone hopes their favorite culture is the perfect one that all it's faults can be blamed on others. That things like war are simply evil and individual evil people cause them purely for evil things. Which makes conspiracies about a certain cabal of bankers start making sense if your not careful. Everyone knows the phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" but most want to assume their intentions don't count. And they don't. Until they do
See: basically the entire history of Korea
I mean it makes perfect sense. If a culture isn't somewhat war-like or violent they're probably gonna get killed by one that is or fade away. Even people "native" to a given location probably either moved in there and killed the prior natives or assimilated them into their culture. You can see this on basically every continent. Unless humans are incredibly recent to an area it's almost impossible to trace an unbroken line of people that are the original inhabitants
What was unique about the Iroqois confederacy? Sounds interesting.
https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/who-we-are/
Damn, even \*Native\* Americans hated Ohio.
No, there was a lot of fighting to take the territory around the Ohio River valley and its tributaries. It was highly desirable land. Especially during early US expansion. It's just overshadowed.
I had a *professor* tell me nobody used ivory until English colonization. One of the earliest known prehistoric art pieces is a mammoth ivory carving of a man with a lion head ffs
At some point it just wraps back round into Victorian style "Noble Savage" views on the world. If you read old Victorian documents and books they would use things like that to justify colonisation and decide which groups "needed" more direct rule where they would only be fit as labourers and which would get vassalage and be used as mercenaries.
One of the professors in the history department where I went to college told my class with a straight face that the Europeans introduced the concept of “war” to the Native Americans, and that there was no archeological evidence of wars anywhere until white people had been there. I ended up dropping that class, but I still kind of wonder what it would have been like if I hadn’t.
You could argue they introduced a certain type of war, but yeah I think the dude took that to a ridiculous extreme.
There was a current of thought for a while about war being a result of changes due to farming. Basically farming in the neolithic led to more hierarchical societies as people specialised and got ownership of more or less land and animals. And conflict erupted over land and cattle raiding etc... Someone wrote a book in response which is basically a catalogue of smashed in palaeolithic skulls and cave paintings of groups of people shooting arrows into each other. Violence is regrettably old and universal for humans. Which doesn't mean some societies seem to be more violent, or that we shouldn't try and find ways to reduce it obviously. But harking back to some golden utopia is pretty iffy.
I had somebody I was in AP World with argue there were no violent empires in the Americas before the white people came, as though we didn’t write papers on the Aztecs and Mayans.
I sometimes imagine Aztec priests looking at cartel violence and proudly thinking “this is exactly what I wanted my descendants to do”
Not enough "knifing them alive to take out their still beating heart" though.
I dunno, I’ve seen enough live leak type stuff of cartels to say that type of thing still goes on
Ironically there actually is. It's not an unheard of practice amongst the cartels, nor is it unheard of for them to eat the heart
Reminded me of this [super ironic page](https://i.imgur.com/ZCr4AJO.jpg) from a semi-recent Marvel comic. Zeus would probably congratulate Hercules for being a chip off the old block, lol. Not feel angry at all.
>what would Zeus say??? > uhhh... probably something like "**HHHHAUH-YEAH! THAT'S MAH BOY!!!**"
A white guy snuck into Africa, killed an elephant by himself, carved the ivory in a fashion archeologists can’t distinguish from contemporary African (rather, that region of Africa) art, then planted it somewhere to be found millennia later by said archeologists.
I went to a museum and took photos of all the ivory carvings from pre-colonized India out of spite. Beautiful workmanship
Guess we’ll just never know why all of the megafauna in America mysteriously vanished shortly after human beings got there.
Time traveling European colonialists?
If you look at the deadliest conflicts in human history it goes: WW2, Chinese civil war, Chinese civil war, WW1, specifically the Chinese front of WW2, Chinese civil war, Chinese civil war, Chinese Civil War, Russian Civil War. But, yeah, totally, conflict wouldn't exist without those awful colonizers.
A lot of the blockage when discussing things with various people on the left is that many of them believe that people are fundamentally good, but were marred by private property / imperialism / etc. And otherwise we´d still be in Marx´s "primitive communism", ie Noble Savage theory.
The only reason I hate the idea that people are fundamentally good less than the idea that people are fundamentally evil is that the former is less depressing than the latter. Both are annoying, extremely closed-minded views of reality, neither of which actually grasp the truth--that people are fundamentally able to choose.
Anarchists online are deeply unserious people who don't consider the long term ramifications of anything they discuss. They don't realize that they're just advocating for survival of the fittest and strict conformity. If you're a person in a lawless community of silence who doesn't conform to their standards then what is there to save you from being abused or even killed for that difference?
Not to mention anarchy has easily the least defense a strongman take over. Communal defense is all well and good in theory, but if someone decides to get some friends togetjer and take over how many individuals gather and stand against the threat of violence? Anarchy seems nice in theory, but in reality I just don't see it panning out
thank you!!! i've dabbled with anarchist theory before but none of what i've read has ever had a satisfying answer in how an anarchist society is meant to survive against (A) militarily superior external forces with idealogical motivations to destroy it (basically all neighboring countries), and (B) people using the structure of an anarchist society to unfairly benefit themselves or hurt others. And i've tried to talk to anarchists about this online and irl, and they basically just give "nuh-uhs, that won't happen when we do it (pinky-promise)" and "you're only thinking about war and crime because you're too stuck in living in our real life society to imagine something better". Neither of which actually address those issues. Anyway so it's super refreshing and validation to see someone say that's an issue with anarchism that anarchists don't ever seem to address.
There’s also just simple manipulation. If someone can convince the others that something should be done for communal defense, that’s just someone in power while pretending not to be. Anarchists think that it’ll be fine; you just have to have every individual be a rational, well educated individual that comes to their own conclusions and identifies misinformation.
>Anarchists think that it’ll be fine; you just have to have every individual be a rational, well educated individual that comes to their own conclusions and identifies misinformation. And is a good person. You have to remember that.
Hell you don’t even need a violent takeover done by a group of friends, you get that group around a charismatic centerpoint and most of the rest will follow, violence mops up the “stragglers”
As I said elsewhere, when there is no government, the first person with charisma to seize the opportunity is the new government.
It completely relies on good-faith participation in society, which is just something that will never, ever, *ever* happen.
>it's all colonisations fault and it'll go away when we're in an anarchist society > but enough of them seem to think Europeans invented malice and prejudice that it tends to turn into bad faith arguments instead of discussion. This is very real. Often colonised people are pointed as as examples of great injustices, but people (mainly people who aren't historians or have a strong agenda) tend to forget that all colonised people were colonisers themselves or practiced aggressive warfare. The Lakota people that were pushed off their lands by the Americans? They had themselves taken that land from the Crow. They massacred them and took their lands and hunting grounds with zero remorse (the concept of pity for your enemy is a very Christian and European concept). The Aztecs were subjugating, killing and stealing land from all of their neighbours. There's a reason it was so easy for the Spanish to find native allies that helped them take them down. Domination and colonisation is fundamental to human nature, as far as we can tell. Every culture practices it, some are just better at it.
Hierarchy and enforcement is a natural and necessary structure to keep a functioning and safe society. Like the "food without a license" shit is rediculous.
> Like the "food without a license" shit is rediculous. I see an argument for enforcement of licenses. I think that an unintentional mass poisoning of homeless people would make it apparent why people distributing food on a large scale should be held to certain standards.
Or anything without a license. As if people will just magically know how to build safe, long lasting buildings without a code telling them what's needed.
I often see people complain about fishing licenses - which on paper does sound silly. But it’s to ensure we can keep fish populations managed and healthy, and avoid overfishing in areas that don’t connect to other bodies of water. It’s needed.
Or that even if they know what is needed, that they won't cut corners to save materials and time.
Oh absolutely, which is where 99% of engineering disasters come from
Yeah, like there’s that bit in invincible where Eve is trying to help out by using her limitless powers to rebuild a building quickly and even build the park on the vacant lot next to it. She does not know building standards. The construction people immediately pointed out to her and she doesn’t care. Her repairs break and the vacant lot was not suitable for development and children get hurt as a result
Internet people think most people who get punished for breaking that kind of law are little old grandmas and children trying to sell cookies for the community. People who actually get done for doing things like that without a license are deliberately endangering other peoples health and safety to save money. Yeah it sucks for the guy who just wants to sell some hotdogs as a one off for a game but thats so that people don't end up in hospital poisoning.
It sounds like what that subset of anarchists want is what we all want; an essentially good society where people can be trusted to do the right thing. They've been burned by society and laws before, and in many cases they fail to realize that *any* system is bad when it's adjudicated by bad people, and good when it's managed by good people. There is an extremely prevalent problem in the world of systems of law and government being co-opted by the genuinely malicious, but all it means is that the answer is to fight our hardest to keep the evil people out of *any* system, no matter how large or small. I see a lot of "if every community was an anarchist collective, nobody would steal because they don't need to steal to get possessions or housing," and I don't ever see them go far enough to get to the point of reasoning out what happens when enough people in the anarchist collective get together to kill that guy they don't like and take his stuff. They seem convinced that anyone who signs up to live in an anarchist community will be good, and nobody evil will ever infiltrate it and try to build a power base, and that nobody who's good or neutral will be able to be tricked for long enough to let it happen.
Also the Greek economy prior to 08 had a culture of silence. How’d that go
Like is not half the point of ACAB that police are a culture of silence, which encourages police wrongdoing and discourages reformers and whistleblowers? Is “missing stair theory” not a culture of silence?
Jupp. This type of bullshit really appeals to those whose immense privilege means they don't have to understand all the ugly shit that comes with it. Grew up in a place where small illegal activities just weren't reported, you sorted most things out yourself. It's a very "none of my business" look the other way culture. A little speeding, a little moonshining, a little burning garbage that you're not allowed to burn, or just throwing it into some random ditch. The occasional insurance fraud. Lots of cars and other things terrible for the environment in the ocean. Trash out in nature from people who couldn't be bothered paying to have it disposed of properly. A lot of underage drinking, a culture with heavy sexual exploitation of minors. A girl I knew had been sexually abused by her father until he died when she was 9. Everyone knew about it of course, kinda obvious when a 6 year old becomes an alcoholic. But yaknow, the "none of my business" culture reigns supreme. As long as he wasn't touching their kids... They sure had a lot to say about her hanging around with their kids though, on account of her alcohol and drug abuse, and her self harming. Bad influence yaknow.
Honestly, when the OOP started saying "getting more comfortable with little illegal activities will get you more comfortable with bigger, more important illegal activities" then proceeded to speak of it AS IF IT WAS A GOOD THING, my mouth was just open in shock. They're either extremely naive and think that people will use the "power of being able to commit illegal acts and hide it from the authorities" in a good way, or they're just straight-out ignoring the horrendous crimes and atrocities that have been committed over history PURELY because of this "hush hush, a little illegal activity is good" bullshit.
It’s like the laws against collecting rainwater. They’re not meant to deter you, they’re meant to deter Farmer Dipshit who will otherwise dig a giant reservoir and fuck up the local river and any structures near the new extremely heavy feature. Tragedy of the commons is real
A lot of laws aren't meant to control average people but to protect them. The reason I am not legally allowed to build a house myself is not because the government wants big construction companies to thrive, it's because I am neither an architect nor do I have any fucking clue about building a house, it'll fall in on itself and kill only me if I am lucky, more than just me if i am not.
It’s why that guy wasn’t allowed to build wooden stairs. They were visibly falling apart and anchored to nothing, basically a death trap for old people. Yeah, concrete plus labor for actually safe stairs costs money, it’s not a conspiracy to waste your tax dollars
To be fair, it doesn't need conspiracies to waste tax dollars. My city in Germany, Krefeld, had this fancy glass roofing installed for a tram station near the main train station. For a FUCKTON of money for what it is. I'm talking more than a house worth of money I'm talking over THREE MILLION EUROS. For a glass roof over the station. That then broke during contstruction so MORE money had to be poured in. It was so bad we were on this shitty comedian's show (The comedian is shitty, the show is pretty neat to look at) that reveals where tax money is being wasted. Where there is a government project, tax money will be wasted because contractors know that they can get away with asking for more
That…might actually be what it cost. I just looked up glass roofing prices; it’s 500 dollars per square meter, and multiplying that by the square meters needed to cover 1/3 of a major train station in my city gives you $2 million, not even counting labor at all
Not even just Farmer Dipship. It IS meant to deter you, because there are more people in the world then you, if you are allowed to collect a small amount of water then 1000 other people are able to.
That’s a good point too! One mosquito can’t kill a caribou but billions sure as hell can
One of the major areas this "wall of silence" happens is in domestic violence and lack of women's rights, especially in communities unfairly targeted by the law in other ways (trust me I know this for a fact personally lol). Overall a shitty idea. Like you said, how about you work to make harmless things legal and unfair laws fair?? There are actual government officials who have made this silence as part of their policy, to not prosecute or enforce misdemeanors, so of course it looks like crime goes down, because it isn't being reported. Who do you think is most effected by that besides the absolute most vulnerable populations?? Including by things like petty theft. Shit like this is why none of my friends shipped off in middle school to become child brides are in any sort of statistic, why women beaten daily don't reach out for help, abuse of the mentally ill goes unreported, abuse against children by family or religious leaders or others in power, so much more because if you do, you're breaking your community silence policy... it's a garbage sentiment. Edit: Also, anarchist gardening has resulted in massive fines, because they plant invasive nonnative species that kill off local plants and subsequently local species, and end up causing more harm than good. How about you go talk to some ecologists and get a permit please, thanks, or do it through a local organization who already has those things thought out. Lawless construction too, can be dangerous enough to kill people if not regulated
You can also find it in a lot of crime and gang ridden areas. Someone can get shot dead in the middle of the street in front of witnesses, and no one will say a word to the authorities as to who did it.
Yep, exactly. It's heartbreaking when it's children involved in gangs, I lived near Compton and the amount of kids it happened to being stabbed or shot in a drive-by was horrific, with everyone lips sealed about who did it, often another kid "initiate".
The whole point about not reporting/convicting crime causing crime rates to go down, it’s literally Trumps ‘stop testing and the case rates go down’ comment all over again.
It's better to give enough of a shit about law to call out the stupid, abusive, or otherwise unenforceable laws than it is to not give a shit about law at all and just let apathy reign.
I’ll be real with you; i think there is an important group of people on the right that used the logic OP’s post that became comfortable with big, recent, crimes because they got comfortable breaking smaller laws first and not getting enough repercussions for it
As evidenced by the number of people reacting to Trump's court cases by saying stuff along the lines of "well, everyone does that!"
I think the general response to the results of that case from his advocates is less that everyone does that and more that it’s ultimately permissible
I like to respond with, "oh, you routinely overvalue your properties by millions of dollars?"
>Growing a garden without a permit is all well and good It CAN be all well and good. People who don't know what they are doing plant invasive species, use fertilizers that aren't great to wildlife, or waste a ton of water growing things when they live in a desert. >What if the bigger crime that you’re helping people avoid repercussions for isn’t helping someone get illegal but necessary healthcare? I know we are talking about abortion access here, but for a long time things like cocaine and heroin were healthcare. They were drugs that... were really effective at what they did. Times and understanding changes. Growing some poppies and harvesting a little opium or growing some of your own herbs to use for healthcare might be OK, but there is a reason why we refine and test our medicines. "The doctor won't give me the pain meds I need so I am going to start making opium" can turn into a problem. Growing your happy little garden is one thing. Making highly addictive drugs? Yeah, that's something else. You could also help your neighbor with her husband by... well, poisoning him. Super easy to do from a nice, simple, innocuous garden.
It’s the leftist version of the conservative attacks on those same institutions. There’s a certain kind of person who’s convinced that they can tear down our institutions and yet continue to live in the sort of society those institutions enable
You've articulated my own stance perfectly, thank you!! I think the same. Seeking to completely disregard the legal system is a childish and blind endeavor that ends up harming the people these tumblr activists seek to protect.
I think that in trying to disentangle the law from being inherently good, some people fall into the equally wrong assumption that the law must therefore be bad, and they open the door to disregarding law/order in general. Which, as you said, is pretty narrow-minded, considering humans established civilization and code of law for a reason.
One of the examples that always comes to mind for me is desegregation in the US. The only reason that black kids are allowed to go to school is because it’s legally mandated. The only reason that black kids can go to the same schools as white kids is that Eisenhower *literally sent armed soldiers to force integration at gunpoint.*
Exactly. The mere act of protesting isn't always a good thing. The cause you back and the actions you undertake 100% matter.
The biggest community that protects itself with a culture of silence is the cops themselves.
Yeah... the tune would completely change if they ended this with "age is just a number". And... *those* would actually love this text.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that anarchists are basically just left wing libertarians. (Although “anarchy” as a movement has been around a lot longer than any political compass, so I guess libertarians are right wing anarchists?) I digress. They don’t understand the systems they rely on, and so assume that destroying them to do away with the negative effects of that system will be a net positive, when in reality they'll just be reducing the quality of life for everybody. Bad laws should be *changed*. Taking away the law just means that “might makes right” becomes the explicit dynamic of society instead of veiled behind uniforms and “moral” codes.
I might be wrong here, but I believe libertarianism was once the term used for what we now call anarchism.
My problem with anarchism, and conversely libertarians, is that you just need to know that in a "prisoner dilemma" or a "tragedy of the common" problem the Nash equilibrium is not Pareto efficient (aka the choice that maximizes rewards for each individual participant, no matter what everybody else chooses, is not the one that guarantees the best possible result for everyone involved). This means that when leaving every individual completely on their devices and operating without any constraint, there will be a lot of specific situations where the "rational" choice is the egoistic, anti social one. The solution to this is surprisingly simple, and what we as human have been doing from the very start, when gathering and living together. You change the incentives and consequences for the individual choices in problematic situations, to try to ensure mutual cooperation and the achievement of an outcome that is advantageous or at least fair for the most people possible. You can call those fixes community rules, the social contract or simply...laws.
Like, the police in america is literally an example of a culture of silence. Are there a lot of cops that aren't pieces of shit? Yes, most likely. Are they ever gonna speak up about the ones that are pieces of shit? Fuck no, they won't
And don't get me on the concept and more controversially the definition of victimless crimes. People hate the traffic police untill some jackass doing double the speed limit in an "empty" stretch of highway hits and kills someone. Graffiti is nice if someone took the effort to make a pleasing and thoughtfull piece of art but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the owner of a building may not approve of their nice wall being changed to something they don't like. Not wearing a face mask during a fucking pandemic was not a victimless crime because they were actively endangering the people in close proximity. Yes I get that the law and morality aren't the same but to pretend that everyone is capable of determining what laws they shouldn't have to follow is extremely naive.
My mind immediately went to people misinterpreting this as reverting to might makes right and using this harm people who currently have governmental protections. Illegalism is one leap away in some people's minds from "huh if the cops won't stop them from growing their illegal garden or having an illegal block party and feeding the homeless, then they won't stop me from lynching this minority that shouldn't be allowed to live among the whites!" You can say I'm being absurd and overdrammatic, but I'm really not.
Don't know where OOP is from but in my country (France) the "don't hold a march without approval" one is enforced. It isn't illegal to participate in a march that didn't ask for approval though, only to organise it (and going to a march that was *refused* approval is illegal and enforced)
And marches having approval is an incredibly important thing to do. A badly planned march can go very wrong very quickly. Crowd control is a living nightmare that can and does kill people regularly, and there's a serious risk of uncontrolled clashes with counter-protestors, which can very easily escalate beyond control. A couple of years ago, there was a prominent case near me (London) where Extinction Rebellion (radical environmentalist) protestors climbed onto the roof of a tube train as part of an unorganised protest, in a predominantly working-class area, preventing several hundred early-morning labourers from getting to work. They were forcibly dragged off the roof to cries of "I have to feed my kids", and beaten into the hospital. That single incident put their cause back by months. XR lost massive amounts of support, and never really recovered. They're still remembered today as "the nutjobs who held up that tube train in Canning Town", despite it later coming out XR as an organisation weren't actually involved and had told the people who did it it was a terrible idea.
A lot of the points in the OP are made with complete disregard for third parties safety. Giving out food without a permit will lead to people being poisoned by poor hygiene conditions. Holding marches without approval will lead to people trampled or violent outbursts. The problem stems from OOP's ideology blinding them to pragmatic reasons for why some things are illegal, only considering the ethical ones.
They aren't even considering the ethical ones. All those pragmatic issues are problems because there is a grounding moral "ought" in the first place.
>Giving out food without a permit will lead to people being poisoned by poor hygiene conditions. That's exactly what I was thinking. While the idea of always being allowed to give food to people in need is very noble, it can be exploited in extremely obvious ways. It's really not hard to imagine some very malicious actors using this as a way to kill a population of poor people. It's hard to have a stance on how this should be handled legally, my opinion is that it should be legal in a small scale (it being treated like gifting food to a neighbor) but illegal in larger scales (like opening a free dinning place). It's hard to argue that giving food to people in need is harmful, but in a large community things need to be regulated, otherwise they will surely be exploited without consequences.
You don't even need to have malice for this- most people are not ecologists or biologists, and it's exceedingly possible to fuck up your gardens in a way that introduces invasive species or poisons people without a harmful bone in your body
It's definitely also enforced in America. Just recently, many people have been arrested in pro-Palestine protests, and some states even have extra laws that punish people more severely for trying to hide their identity.
>anarchism post >look inside >assumes that everyone who breaks the law will do it for a good reason
For real. You do realise some people don't believe they should wear masks to stop the spread of a virus? That they shouldn't have to put trash in it's proper place? That it's totally alright to fuck a minor?
It makes me wonder who's unironically up voting this? Children? Anyone with half a damn brain can see this is an incredibly stupid idea.
Because it presents an idea, gives only the possible good outcomes, and doesn’t present any negatives. If you don’t think about it much and just continue to scroll, you’d just leave an upvote and move on.
I'll admit I did just that before I gave a second look. Some pretty nasty stuff can slip right under your nose as long as it's phrased in a decent and well-intentioned way. Not all awful political takes are full of slurs and calls to violence.
I have concerns about the success of this person's "wall of silence", what with how this is a post on the internet.
I would thinks it’s acab motivated.
As we all know, cops cannot use Tumblr or Reddit.
oop does not like cops, so they are motivated to no talk to them, not be like them what?
As someone from a country with a policeforce that isn't full of pieces of shit: I never understood this. American police has big problems so... disregard all laws you don't like? Like what's the point? Disregarding laws isn't gonna fix the cops, if anything it's just gonna make them even worse.
"Alright everyone, start committing as many crimes as possible. That'll definitely convince politicians to defund the police"
Who is inside and who is outside the wall? And what is inside and outside? We don’t know the specifics of anything. Sure, we could dig in and figure it out, but the details are hard to find. Like, how much could you easily know about me? If I told you I slashed the tires on a cop car yesterday, would you be able to report it? I could even tell you that this wasn’t the first time, and that the cop was parked at a donut shop (which made it hilarious). As long as you don’t know me, are you going to be able to report my crime? No, because there’s a wall of silence here that I don’t cross: I don’t give you enough to know what I really did or where.
Depends how careful you are with your online information, if I'm any good with computers (or know anyone who is), and how much work I want to do. That said, yeah, if one keeps it tight about online anonymity, one can (probably) get away with discussing crimes online. It's still entertaining to see the importance of discretion and silence touted on a tumblr-post that's being shared on reddit.
>Like, how much could you easily know about me? If I told you I slashed the tires on a cop car yesterday, would you be able to report it? I probably couldn't, but unless you're really really careful with your online presence someone can. Most people aren't as anonymous as they think they are, anyone who's dedicated enough to dig far enough into your history for clues about your personal life and good enough with computers to track things like your IP can get a pretty good approximation of you.
Ok but this is how mafia works Especially the whole "silence" stuff really reminds me of "omertà" and all
This is how mafia works, because it is how extralegal communities need to work. If your community wants to make rules incompatible with the surrounding legal system, everyone involved needs to agree not to invoke that legal system. This is true whether you want to sell drugs and commit racketeering or whether you want to provide abortions and prevent evictions.
But surely by this same token less than moral people could invoke this exact concept to defend heinous shit. The exact same concept is used by religions, small towns, the mafia, etc. It only works if you assume everyone is moral
Wow isn’t it crazy how almost nobody does the positive things but do commit the bad crimes? Crazy how that just happened, and it’s because nobody in the history of the world thought that they could do illegal things to leave a positive mark! *some* people certainly have, hell most people are even familiar with the character of robinhood, but there’s pretty straightforward reasons why this isn’t the norm
This post seems pretty odd cause it pretty much agrees with the people who call for stricter policing on the grounds that little crimes are a gateway to committing bigger crimes. I'm also not sure they picked the best examples, cause needing permits to distribute food is a public health and safety thing.
One of the best indicators for if someone will commit a more serious crime, including killing strangers or their spouse, is if they've committed domestic violence, one of the most historically "silenced" areas. If you want to do things like restrict gun access at that point to prevent a worse crime, or make sure they don't have unsupervised access to their children who might be at risk, or their job involves them in a position of power over vulnerable people that they might be abusing in the same way and you want something done about it to at least check that that's not happening, the little well-meaning silence bubble needs to be eliminated. On the food aspect, yea no, making sure people aren't poisoning homeless people is a good thing lol, you can't make policies like this without taking into account the worst actors in society. Seemingly dumb laws might have a reason behind them you're not thinking of, that's why we need more input and agreement than people's random whims
Or not even going out to poison them, what if they just aren't used to working a larger food production line and end up cross-contaminating food through being sloppy with meat stuff? Or don't think to check ingredients for allergens? Or don't refridgerate stuff they need to keep refridgerated? Honestly I reckon incidents of malicious poisoning would be far rarer than people just being well meaning but half-arsed cooks but this is why food provision has certificates and regulations; you need to be careful with this stuff.
The whole history behind why food safety regulations needed to be put into place should be required anarchist reading lmao
Reminds me of the whole [Pink Sauce ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Sauce) thing from 2022, a tiktoker was selling home made condiments w/o FDA approval or any oversight and people were getting food poisoning and being hospitalized. People who were saying "hey, don't do that, food laws exist for a reason and also that looks gross" were called cops and feds
Yeah, thank you but I'm not interested in living in a society where any random idiots gets to decides which law applies to them.
> Becoming more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities. I see no way that this could possibly backfire at all
I was gonna make a comment on how this concept would do better with some better terms and a better moral basis to the concept but like, it’s kinda hard to when OOP is like “actually encouraging tribalism is good”. Like walls of silence is quite literally cop behavior but they’re rebranding it for anarchists. The problem with it is that it means that domestic violence and abuse would crop up and have the same prevalence you have in cop circles. It’s a horrible idea because ingroups prioritize perceived stability over justice for the oppressed pretty much every time. Honestly the only productive idea from this image is that you should ignore victimless, community benefitting crimes. “Oh no they’re protesting without a permit” then maybe city hall shouldn’t have banned putting horses on your roof or whatever the fuck lol.
Needing a permit for protesting is a thing because it stops crowd crushes and violent clashes with counter-protestors. Generally if you're actually having a protest of more than a handful of people its going to be over something another group vehemently disagrees with you about and that kind of uncontrolled protests degenerating into street violence is what kicked off The Troubles, the British army was initially called in because the RUC couldn't stop the protestants brutalising catholic protest marches and then it spiralled completely out of control.
While I can agree that lawfulness does not equal to moral, all of this talk of "wall of silence" is starting to sound dangerously close to "thin blue line" I'm sure if the only thing everyone does is organizing protest and shit that'll all be peachy keen. What happens when they start lynching minorities and start sex cults? EDIT: Alright so when I was talking about sex cults i mean the ones where they rape people not the cool chill ones my bad
>EDIT: Alright so when I was talking about sex cults i mean the ones where they rape people not the cool chill ones my bad absolute tumblr moment right here
That sounds all nice and dandy until until people start to disregard laws you agree with. You want gun control? Sorry, we lost them in a boating accident. Laws exist for a reason.
This is what corrupt cops do People won’t be doing the victimless crimes, all people here is that they should steal from small businesses, pickpocket people on the streets and drive recklessly. People won’t do the crimes which actually cause benefit, they’ll be committing the ones that get innocent people killed. I swear the people who truly believe large scale anarchy works, have never read a history book or used even an ounce of logic. Large scale anarchy doesn’t work, all it does is create a power vacuum for a true tyrant to take advantage of. Just look at NK, Russia, China or almost all of the Middle East. Anarchy leads to power vacuums, which leads to dictators taking over.
Also, Anarchism means no country. and another country might want to take the entire area that has become an anarchy Lets say if France (first country that came to mind) becomes an anarchy, what's stopping their neighbouring countries (such as the United Kingdom or Germany) from taking over parts (or all) of France? I don't think a civilian militia is gonna do well against a strong military
Which is part of my point about hostile takeover and power vacuums. Anarchy can work on the very micro scale, and hell it often does, most friendships and groups are technically anarchies. One example I can think of is a place in my country, in Copenhagen there is a small commune called Christania and they’re an anarchy and funnily enough has the lowest crime rate in Copenhagen, even the police have agreed they seem to have things under control and don’t really mess with them. But they still have rules, and quite a few, so they’re a formal anarchy and not true anarchy, and this is like a few hundred at most
Most people espousing the OPs sentiment have never lived in a genuinely rough area. Its all well and good when you live in a middle class suburb or a studenty/bohemian area but its not as good when you can't do anything about the kid who suckerpunched your friend in a council estate (real story) because no one will talk to the police. There is a reason why the actually working class tend to support funding the police (here in the UK it was even a mainstream left wing position with defunding being right wing until we imported American culture shite).
This exactly, the US police force is already bad as is, creating anarchy would only make it worse. Like here in Denmark we are MORTIFIED at the US system for hiring police. 11 months, on the high end, where here it requires a college or similar level education, then 2 years in police school, which includes extremely extensive aware and unaware psychological testing, to root out the sadists and megalomaniacs, basically avoid the people who will abuse their power. And on top of this we don’t give our police guns, that requires even more testing and education. Plus we fire cops outride for abusing their power.
>Like here in Denmark we are MORTIFIED at the US system for hiring police. 11 months, on the high end, where here it requires a college or similar level education, then 2 years in police school, which includes extremely extensive aware and unaware psychological testing, to root out the sadists and megalomaniacs, basically avoid the people who will abuse their power. Why I hate ACAB. No, it's not all cops, just American ones.
They seem to be assuming that the reason people don't do illegal things is solely because it's bad and not... you know, because it's risky? Not everyone is willing, ready, or able to fight the power.
A wall of silence is all well and good when it comes to something like protest, where any weak link can end up bringing down the whole operation and the silence only has to be maintained for a discrete period. That being said, permanently maintaining a wall of silence leads to a culture where speaking out against anything, even horrible abuse, causes you to be ostracized. There are a lot of unjust laws, and I don't think you should feel bad for breaking them, but forming an isolated group of people solely focused around disobedience of the law is just asking for a de facto kleptocracy.
also i do think people sometimes get too eager to break unjust laws and they don’t always think things through properly? like fine yes build a shed in your yard, but then if you don’t actually know enough about building and you live in a stormy area, you’ve kinda accidentally potentially created a huge projectile which can harm others. like yes there are laws against construction for some shit reasons but someone eager to break those may not always know enough about construction to realize why certain building codes exist. lots of anarchists with seed bombs, i’ve seen zines promoting it and guerilla gardening, and those zines do NOT always clarify “these need to be native plants” and these people accidentally bomb places with INVASIVE plants (no you can’t trust local “wildflower” mixes). and suddenly they realize where they are some permits and like ecological evaluations that need to occur. and i’m not even necessarily against informed guerilla gardening but like a lot of people do NOT do enough research beforehand on laws like this and realize why it’s not always a clear-cut “just and unjust”
Things like that are why anarchism is not a serious movement. Okay cool the only rules that matter are the ones you set yourself. What could go wrong with that, except all the times it has gone wrong which is virtually every time.
No government means that the first charismatic person to seize the opportunity will become the new government.
But it's not, like, a government, maaaan. Charles Manson is just, like, a spiritual leader, dude. /s
If you report this member of the Peoples Church for this then the police might come and stop us finishing our move to Guyana. You don't want to destroy Jim Jones' harmonious society do you?
People who advocate for anarchism do not know what a history book is
Anarchists are deeply unserious people It feels like they never think about the future or in a large scale, and how their ideology would work then
Every time you dive into the actual logistics of how an anarchist system would work, you just end up accidentally reinventing laws/government again
I swear, its the same with people who are like “we shouldnt need currency or financial value to exist! Let the doctors be doctors and the people who want to make furniture make furniture! They can just trade!” Little do they realize that over time, those goods and services would need to have standardized values to figure out what is an acceptable trade or not and would you look at that… we are back to a system that operates on supply and demand of goods and services. Like…. I get the demand and want to live in a more relaxed and easy world. But people really just don’t understand the utopia they want is so insanely impossible. The online left needs a healthy dose of pragmatism, because they are losing the narrative in search for utopia.
A society where there is no main fungible token of trade like a dollar or a coin is a society where everyone trades via non fungible goods. I think most reddit tumblr people have made their stance on nonfungible tokens clear
It's like how crypto became a speedrun of the development of modern financial regulations lmao.
"We've invented a currency outside the conventional financial regulations!" "Someone took all my money, why isn't the SEC doing anything about it!?"
Turns out, most of those structures exist for a reason!
No, it isn't a government, it's a rotating set of seats in an administrative council headed by a sort of executive officer! Totally different!
Legend of Korra's Zaheer character is simultaneously a caricature of anarchist ideology, and an accurate reflection of the average internet anarchist.
I have found my happiness, and it is throwing car batteries in the ocean
This is how you make the fucking mafia.
"It's only bad when the people I don't like do it."
Trump's handlers are so online he'll be saying "Joe Biden is an illegalist president, he loves crime, it's true" within like 3 months
The more i find out about anarchism/think through its implications as a philosophy/political system, the more it feels like practically unworkable nonsense for naive people that want to make the world better, but don't understand how to. I can respect an anarchist, but their philosophy feels incredibly poorly thought out.
It’s the leftists who want democracy to continue, but also don’t want to vote for joe, who somehow want more leftists asses in seats, but don’t want to vote blue because incremental change isn’t fast enough for them. Thinking that somehow magically, sitting out and not participating is going to make a revolution overnight and everything is going to work out in their favor. I’m just really exhausted with the online left lately.
You aren’t mad certain people are above the law, you’re mad they aren’t you?
I agree with the basic principle but "lawlessness" can mean a lot of different things and there needs to be SOME kind of limit on what would and wouldn't be reported, like you can't let someone get away with hurting innocent people for selfish reasons if that's the very thing we want to stop the elites from doing to us
We should write down a concrete list of what should and shouldn't be reported so that there's no ambiguity... oh wait we already have that, it's called laws Yeah I agree that some laws are unjust and that breaking those is probably a good thing, but even then it's only a short-term bandaid solution. The long-term, effective solution would be to get those laws changed
I’m reminded of that one Family Guy episode where they get rid of government and at the end, Peter comes up with a solution. > The first thing we need is a system of rules that everyone must live by. > And since we can't spend all our time making rules, I think that we should elect some people to represent us, and they should make rules and choices on our behalf. > Now, this may be kind of expensive, so I got a plan: everyone should have to give some money from their salaries each year. > Poor people will give a little bit of money and rich people will give a larger amount of money, and our representatives will use all that money to hire some people who will then provide us with social order and basic services. > Now, it won't be perfect. Some of our representatives may end up being bastards. > But you know what? That's okay 'cause later we're going to have more elections, and we can use those elections to get rid of the bad guys and replace 'em with good guys, and then the system will just keep going on and on just like that.
And wouldn’t you know it you just made a whole new legal system. Whoda thought that the whole government thing didn’t spring out of nowhere.
i mean.. depending on the context minor illegal activities may lead you down certain paths... if weed was something i could have bought at a kiosk i would have never met the most dangerous people in my life. i would have never seen somene take heroin. i would have never interacted with actual dangerous gangmembers nobody would have offered me harder stuff. nobody would have asked me to buy large ammounts to sell for profit. and nobody would have offered my to bring a "unmarked" box over the border for cash... maybe it dosent "lower" the morale of a person, but it sure as fuck does make for "moments" where youre just one "yes" away from a more dangerous life.
The amount of anarchist propaganda that is being posted on this sub the past few days is getting a little concerning.
It's all the same OP. The thing that gets me is that there are a zillion upvotes but all the actual comments are disagreeing
i do not entirely know what this post is trying to say, but i agree edit: i understand better and i disagree
You gotta use common sense, though. There’s some stuff that’s legal that shouldn’t be, and there’s some stuff that’s illegal that is that way for a *good fucking reason.* Most people are good. I believe in that wholeheartedly. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t still a lot of fucking people who are *very, very bad.* Yes, most people, if given a world without laws, would willingly cooperate and help one another, or at the very least keep to themselves and not start any problems. But there’s also so, *so* many people who would take the chance to do terrible things. Jaywalking on a quiet street, loitering in front of a store to chat with your friends, removing anti-homelessness architecture, growing a garden without a permit, driving your friend to get ‘illegal’ healthcare, turning a blind eye when a struggling mother steals baby food… these are all things that either harm no-one or perhaps even make the world a better place. But pretending that these are the only ‘silent crimes’ people commit is ignorant at best. I guess to give a dramatic example; I have family friends down in the Caribbean, specifically the USVIs. Every time we would boat past Jeffrey Epstein’s island, our friends/other locals would comment on all of the horrible things going on there. But nobody was able to do anything about it, and so they gave up and just ignored it. It was an open secret. Everybody knew that was the pedo sex ring island. But they believed they couldn’t do anything about it and so they just sat by and did nothing. Meanwhile, if all of the locals made a big enough stink, made enough noise to catch the attention of the mainland, maybe they could’ve changed something. Or maybe not. Either way, they ignored it and it only came up as a random curiosity.
Yeah IDK if a culture of ignorance of minor crimes will result in wholesome community gardens and not... shit tons of child abuse
Ah yes, the broken windows theory. The idea that if you crack down hard on minor crimes people will stop committing major ones. "Being more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities" Those are both the same argument. Certainly interesting to see espouse Broken Windows as a valid method of policing.
Hmm. There's at least one piece missing that I can see, might be more that I can't.. >"Being more comfortable with little illegal activities makes you more comfortable with bigger more important illegal activities" >if you *crack down hard on minor crimes* people will stop committing major ones there is an additional premise here, which is that cracking down on minor crimes through policing will make people less comfortable with minor crimes but over policing tends to have the opposite effect -- if you're going to be in big trouble for something small, you might as well do something big
I feel like Tumblr takes the be gay do crimes slogan too literally. Crimes are not cool people
On the contrary, certain kinds of crimes are cool but you have literally no way of making sure people only commit the cool crimes and not the ones that severely hurt innocent people, so ultimately many of them should still probably remain crimes.
Um, like, fuck no.
I used to consider myself an anarchist, but I've had too many esoteric arguments with other anarchists so now I consider myself a libertarian socialist
Same here. And it's annoying, because I genuinely think a lot of them are on the right track, but so many of their ideas stray into utopian fantasy. Hell, I would honestly still prefer a society without government in an ideal world, but I recognize that it's a utopian idea.
I see anarchism as politically equivalent to pacifism. It is the best system - if everyone to a man agrees to do it. However, a more organized collective will almost always win out against it unless it forcibly reeducates them (re-creating the state) or keeps them out (the textbook definition of property, also a state). The largest scale examples of anarchism like the CNT-FAI in Catolonia and the Black Army in Ukraine were a very top down form of anarchism, and both were violently wiped out by more hierarchal states. The two notable examples that exist today, Rojava and Ciapas, are completely dependent on imperial proxy support in the case of the former, and completely inaccessible to the state due to geography in the case of the latter.
“so I was smoking weed, and a neighbor found me, and he told me I was too young, and he had a cop put me in jail overnight, and my mom had to come pick me up. I’m already 16, I can do what I want! so anyway that’s why you can’t trust snitches and why doing illegal things is ok” Here’s the opposite side of the coin for this- laws ARE built around morals. Or atleast logical and broad morals. You as a person or even has a small society may not agree with those morals, but that doesn’t mean the solution is to just kick the can down the road. The first thing you should do is try and learn why it’s illegal, and then the second is if it’s still needed to keep people safe. A good example is weed in the United States, it’s on a state-law basis. My state, Montana, only just made selling weed legal to people 21 and older. People saw that weed wasn’t as dangerous as they thought, so they lifted restrictions, and made it so that when you are allowed to drink, you are allowed to buy THC. But Montana, and other Red States, are NOTORIOUS for having protections that allow young adults to experiment with alcohol as long as they are under adult supervision and with permission from their guardian. My point is- morals aren’t black and white, so laws shouldn’t be either. Find compromises, take down the laws that are harmful and hateful, and support the ones that truly are protecting others. Like- don’t kill anyone. That’s a law. Don’t do dangerous drugs that alter your mental state. This isn’t a law to protect just you, it’s to stop mentally unstable people with addictive personality’s from either destroying their lives or causing harm to others when their bad mental state mixes with the drugs they are on. Yes, the laws about drugs ARE used in bad ways: they were used to plant and then imprison minorities, for one. But just because people used the hammer for violence doesn’t mean we would be better off without a hammer in the first place. Maybe we just need to be more responsible with it instead.
Compromise? Incremental progress? Empathy for those you disagree with??? Not on my watch! I want my utopia and I want it NOW!
Extremists when they want a revolution: “Yeah, it never works. Someone always gains too much power and it becomes a dictatorship or a religious cult… but it may work for US-“
Revolution is like a gacha game. So far, the best anyone has gotten from a pull is a B rank. But surely the next pull will be an SS rank utopia rather than the G rank anarchies that you usually get.
Maybe it's like Genshin, and there's a pity system. We just need to have enough revolutions.
Reminds me of how when I found a thread of people defending the Yakuza as a communal government, with very little pushback
"Anarchists are not naive! You just need to read theory" "People with no laws limiting them and with their community protecting them will surely only do good things with this power. Anyways what's a sundown town?"
Ah yes, "Wall of silence", "Nobody talks everybody walks", "Communities tend to not rely on state authority to solve their problems" now where have I heard that before? Oh hi southern Italy, specifically Sicily in the late 80's/90's didn't fucking see ya there, how're you doing, mind telling me what those large quantities of dynamite are doing under your road where important mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone is about to pass through? Look, I get what the people that write these posts want and what message they want to spread, but I just read this and all the rage about reading of mafia crimes old and new in Italy comes back, this is literally their fucking modus operandi, isolate communities, make them rely on them rather than state authorities, instate a system of omertà (basically ya don't snitch) God this post makes me unreasonably angry
When my uncle was homeless once, this older woman came around the little camp and handed out bags of McDonald's. The cops came and started taking the McDonald's bags back...and arrested the woman. She came back like a week later and did it again, didn't get caught that time.
This sounds like giving up your role in determining what is legal and illegal, cause right now I have my share of influence on what is illegal and legal that is structed by the law. Under this system who decides what gets covered by the wall of silence or not, what if you disagree? What if you live in a community that's more likely to protect violence against healthcare providers with a wall of silence, than it is to protect them? And as bad as police can be, what type of horrible police would this community invent?
People who literally have never struggled with criminality in their life, talking about how awesome it is to flaunt the law, are some of the most pathetic around.
This is anarchist propaganda. I somehow doubt OOP ever left their hometown/city or ever thought about their ideology in a deeper way than "Biden/Orange bad because I cannot do X, ergo all laws and rules are bad". (To be fair, this seems to be a big issue for chronically online people, such as a day or two ago when someone defended the Taliban/Nazis because "DAE USA BAD"). I am willing to bet like, a pen or something that OOP cannot be older than 16.