>Therefor, Congress cannot pass a law granting the courts the power to compel speech, because compelling speech is equally an abridgement of free speech just as much as censoring free speech.
But limited censorship IS allowed by the US constitution and IS in fact regularly exercised by both the legislature and the courts. For example in a libel case if the publisher is found guilty, it would not be unusual for the courts to require that they print a retraction. In a slander case, they could order an apology.
There are severe limits on compelled speech (just like there is on restricting speech) but it is certainly allowed. In this case the court has effectively determined that since apple's lost the court case, their PUBLIC accusations of copying amount to slander, and ordered them to apologize and retract the slanderous statement.
I can't imagine any reason a court in the USA couldn't do the same. Granted your libel and slander laws are more liberal and actually wining a case of libel and slander is harder but if it's won - this is exactly the kind of thing that would happen.
A more interesting question is whether a US court can in the results of a trial sentence you for a further charge as a RESULT of the outcome even though you were never charged with it in the original proceedings (be it a civil or criminal charge). I believe they can in fact do so and testifying that you committed a crime can have you sentenced for it in the same trial but I could be wrong. Even that is not a certainty however as we don't even KNOW that this finding WAS tacked on - it's not unusual for companies when sued to claim slander in the other party and Samsung may well have included that as part of their counter-claim - in which case this judge just found Apple guilty of it and is now ordering a pretty standard restitution.
>I don't know how to get the message across that this is a very bad attitude to take and wins him no friends.
This is a prosthetic sight and memory augmentation device he wears due to a medical condition ! Throwing that out is no better than throwing out a paraplegic because you worry his prosthetic leg may scratch the floor tiles. As it stands, the device he uses doesn't even keep recordings for more than few seconds, what it does is to simply slow down the world a bit so he has time to process what happens. It's like a slow-motion-replay for reality. Just because he designed it himself doesn't make it any less a medically apt prosthesis.
In fact, it wouldn't normally have HAD recordings of the event- except that when they broke the device they disabled the onboard computer, which meant the cleanup algorithm that would have wiped the pictures couldn't run.
They themselves turned a medical prosthesis from a slowdown device into a permanent recording of the very breakage by which they changed it's nature.
>The mistake you make is the "because replacing a slave is expensive" - they're not. They reproduce just like free men do. And while a child isn't good for as much labor as an adult, they were certainly put to work as children...
That's a good argument - and like I said, I was not in the least trying to excuse slavery - I find the very idea abominable. But I do believe that slavery at least in the first generation may actually create an economic incentive for the well treatment of workers that is absent in unskilled free labour jobs.
This is not an excuse for slavery - but an assault on the working conditions we allow fellow human beings to be under, conditions which differ from slavery in name only.
It's interesting though that the idea of born slaves and life-long slaves was a relatively modern one. The confederate slave-owners cited biblical slave-owning as justification but conveniently forgot all the rules about slave-ownership established in the bible. Slaves could only be owned for 7 years, after which they had to be released, at this point a slave could voluntarily CHOOSE to enter lifelong servitude but this could not be enforced, and in order to do so the slave would have to get his ear pierced by the local priest (in theory - that means an independent witness to his further slavery being by his own choice). The children of slaves were born as free men, who could of course BECOME slaves later on, but nobody was born that way.
Now we can argue about how well the Israelites stuck to the rules, and whether those rules really would make it "okay" (I vote no), but it's just an interesting example of how those who use religion as an excuse for bad behaviour will always conveniently choose only the bits that suit them. "The bible said we can own slaves" but never "the bible also said we have to release them after 7 years". Or in it's modern form: "The bible says marriage is only between man and woman" but never "love thy neighbour like thyself".
In the end it comes down to what Terry Pratchett masterly summed up: All sin starts with thinking of people as things.
>Since, in the real world, very few people care about what is in line with anarchist thought or not, You're assuming that a condition which is present will always be present. In an anarchist society, most people do care - because it's life for them. Compare for e.g. the early Pennsylvanian Quaker Anarchisms which it took a lot of British soldiers with guns to force to accept government.
>the trip from voluntary leadership to dictator is only as long as it takes to draw a gun.
Not if enough other people draw guns right back. The ones standing beside one another tend to have the upper hand over the one guy standing in front.
Actually you could argue that on average the slaves were slightly BETTER off. I certainly WOULD argue that those slaves were on average better off than a modern-day sweatshop worker.
See a slave has value. You have to invest in a slave, to maximize the return on investment you need that slave to be productive for as long as possible. This means ensuring he has adequate food, shelter and basic needs (even rest) to remain healthy and working for as long as possible because replacing a slave is expensive. A sweatshop worker is cheap to get, and cheap to replace, so there is no reason to care if they are committing suicide, if they are working in extremely dangerous conditions and getting ill (not like they can quit - every other job is just as bad), no reason to treat them with dignity (make them pee in a bag at their work-stations). To maximize investment with sweatshop workers you only need to maximize SHORT TERM productivity of a worker- and replace him/her as soon as that goes down.
I don't know the history of the US North well enough, but I imagine it was rather similar.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't support slavery at all - I just don't support free labour that's WORSE than slavery EITHER.
>We are enforcing Afghanistan's 1941 signing of the Declaration of Universal Right of Man.
Negotiations on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights began in 1946, the year after the end of World War 2 and were concluded when the document was signed in 1948. The document you cite does not exist nor has any document by that name ever been signed, least of all by Afghanistan. Assuming you meant the UDHR the date is actually very important. The UDHR has it's origins DURING World War 2 when the Allies based their alliance on a reaffirming of their commitment to human rights, which led, in the aftermath of the war, to the drafting of a declaration on what those rights should be.
>For those who say it isn't our business to protect the rights of others, that line of thinking was invalidated by WWII and previously in the Civil war.
How has the US Civil War got anything to do with other countries. Of course your government has a duty to protect the rights of it's own CITIZENS. The end of slavery recognize black people as citizens with the rights there-off, a status previously denied them. This was not the right's of "others" but of your own damn neighbours who were less equal than other animals. As for World War 2, that was a spectacularly bad example as America refused to become overtly involved in that war until you were attacked on home soil. Your commitment to "human rights" was rather flimsy for the first years of the war when your only official involvement was war profiteering by selling weapons and tanks (the only apparent good thing you officially did in that time was to only sell them to ONE side - but that could just as easily be called 'not pissing off your best customer' - since Germany had much better capacity to manufacture their own, they weren't ever going to be a big buyer). The minor covert involvement of the USA prior to Pearl Harbour was basically a joke - again, meant for no other purpose than to ensure your customer (Britain) kept buying.
It's rather silly to claim that America had a major national issue with the IDEALS of Nazism prior to Pearl Harbor since a hell of a lot of the same laws were on YOUR books (indeed they were cited as defence by many during the Nuremberg trials), you had more extensive eugenics laws than the Germans did, you just didn't have the final solution. In fact the last state to get rid of a eugenics based forced sterilization law in the USA didn't do so until 1974 !
If Germany hadn't been so good at making their own guns that they actually needed yours - you would quite likely have fought on the opposite side in world war 2 - it would have suited your cultural and legal position at the time better than Britain's did.
>Windows 9 will probably make 'Windows Lockin' mandatory on x86 as it does on ARM, and it dramatically increases the difficulty of installing an alternate OS. No more booting Linux from CD and installing without even touching the BIOS.
Nor, for that matter, trying out Linux on a live CD before you commit to installing.
Microsoft's requirements for ARM systems to be marked windows 8 compatible are that they must not include the possibility to disable secure boot or change the keys via the bios. Your claim doesn't WORK on those systems.
I was doing refurbishment for charity for about 6 years - we used a different method. LTSP with one new machine acting as a server and turning the refurbs into thin-clients with no moving parts except fans (which are cheap to replace).
That got rid of all the bits that end to be flaky and failing and network boot with network-desktops took care of everything while we could still benefit from the motherboard, cpu and ram (which in poor countries are by far the most expensive parts).
>most studies indicate that females have a higher social status in bonobo society.
I was referring to social status only in terms of authority. Respect and authority are both measures of social status but they are not identical in outcome. I would be interested if any studies have suggested females actually have higher AUTHORITY in Bonobo societies.
> Also, they exhibit their peaceful side in the wild, probably in eareas where resources are abundant. In captivity they have been known to mutilate and bully each other. This tells me that they are not so natually peaceful as you would like
So your argument is that a certain behaviour isn't really natural because they don't behave that way in unnatural conditions ? You do see the inherent contradiction in that don't you ? By that logic, mating and is not natural behaviour for pandas because they avoid doing so in captivity.
>But resources are not limited and must be distributed and as such is the case, I am not convinced that humans (or bonobos for that matter) can be trusted to not be selfish when our own survival comes into the equation.
That's not actually true. There are still many resources that are rare, though the actual need for many of them are questionable (tens of thousands of people die in gold mining accidents every year, the vast majority of what they are dying to dig up end up locked in vaults - never to be actually USED for anything). But this is simply not true of the essentials. There are more empty abandoned rooms in the world then there are homeless people - but property law means those homeless people end up sleeping on the pavements OUTSIDE the empty office buildings instead (I live in a country with a large degree of that, children as young as 8 should be sleeping on pavements without so much as a blanket in mid-winter outside buildings which nobody has used for a decade is just not conscionable to me). The food that the USA and Europe collectively destroy every year is enough to feed every hungry person on earth three times over.
That right there is the biggest problem in capitalism - it only WORKS while resources ARE scarce. It has no way to sustain a post-scarcity model. Europe and the USA destroy crops rather than donate it to charity or sell it at market prices because that would drop prices so low (supply higher than demand) that the vast majority of farmers would go out of business. Capitalism predicts food should be the cheapest commodity in the world now, but it's not because of artificially induced scarcity created by force of arms to prevent that happening. In things where we have TRUE post-scarcity (infinitely reproducable digital goods- not just supply higher than demand but supply infinite) the law of supply and demand predicts a price of zero. This is the price the black market has set. But then how do you fund INITIAL production ? Many of us argue for funding it via indirect means (e.g. musicians making money from live performances rather than recordings) but the approach of business and government has been to introduce an artificial scarcity by force of law. That is to massively reduce individual freedom in order to maintain that artificial scarcity - the more effective the reproduction becomes the harsher the enforcement becomes. This is the model ALL industries face - we will only have MORE post-scarcity industries over time (energy for example moving to sustainable sources means far lower [indeed near-zero] material costs - and comes down to only the cost of operations - eventually). Right now we have countries that flaunted international trade agreements to deliberately ignore artificial scarcity laws for essential medicines rather than let their citizens die - which made the biggest economy in the world very, very angry.
The more post-scarcity our technology becomes - the more the market will depend on enforced artificial scarcity, which can only be achieved by limiting individual liberty to ever greater degrees.
>Is there really a practical difference? What will happen is that people will form attachments to the charismatic people in the group and those people will become leaders.
There is a huge difference between voluntarily following the advice of an expert, and being forced to follow the ruling of authority. The former is perfectly in line with anarchist thought, the latter is not.
But, the system has been tried and philosophers have studied what worked and what did not - and proposed improvements with those facts in mind. They certainly did spot the thing you're pointing out, and did propose solutions for it.
You also seem to know very little about how philosophy really works. It's a science (indeed philosophers are the ones who defined the scientific method - based on observation of what did and didn't work - so that other scientists can use it) - not some ivory tower thing. I suppose the best definition of philosophy is to call it a meta-science, most sciences study the world - philosophy studies the sciences themselves.
In actual fact - if you were there, opposed the decision being made, and it went ahead anyway and there was prosecution - surely you would then volunteer as a witness for the prosecution ? Isn't that what people do when they are present at the committing of a crime they do not abet ?
The "lack of responsibility" argument has been made of non-hierarchical structures in every element of human existence, luckily structures lack the ability to hear and many such structures continue to exist merrily away - their success drowned out only by the clamouring of those who declare their continued existence to be impossible.
In fact a variation of this argument is the reason why a true cooperation cannot exist under British law (though close facsimiles can and do exist). The argument being that "there must be a single person who can be held responsible and accountable for the actions of the business, therefore there must be a person with absolute power - as one cannot hold a person to account for a decision he lacked the authority to prevent."
Other's have argued more loudly that cooperations must be inefficient, must be incapable of producing profit for their members - that the lack of a clear leadership makes practical success impossible.
Yet in most other countries in the world cooperations do exist, and produce goods - profitably, as they have for hundreds of years. They are even the leaders in some markets. The arguments against a collective military you are now making is much the same as those made against collectivist worker-owned businesses - yet the evidence that those arguments are false is quite apparent: cooperations DO exist, DO make profits and if they break the law ARE held to account.
In the case of your collectivist army having some members commit a war-crime, this is not difficult to solve. There was a vote, electronically - it must therefore have been recorded, check the log and prosecute those who voted in favour of the atrocity. They, each, shared in giving the order, and so share in the responsibility for it.
Let's assume for the moment that the logs aren't available (perhaps the system autowipes them after announcing the results). You can easily see who participated, and who was capable of participating but chose not to do so. Now you CAN prosecute the soldiers who did it at least, even if it means some who voted "yes" get away that's a minor concern - the pressure would be provided not to act on votes for atrocity.
Well this is the point where your sig becomes apropos. Mind you Ambrose Bierce also said:
"Land, n. A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognized. It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist."
>You say, correctly, that the United States will not deliver up its soldiers for ware crimes trial by the Hague Tribunal. But what European powers have done so?
There is a huge difference - not many Europeans have been tried (that's true) but they all acknowledge the JURISDICTION of the court over both their soldiers AND their leadership (at least in theory), the USA does neither. You shouldn't be ABLE to ask a court to prosecute your enemies if you are not willing to accept the jurisdiction of that court yourself.
Even then - it's not the soldiers on the ground who would have much to fear, soldiers are hardly ever tried for war crimes anyway (for exactly the reasons you cite) - it's their leaders, the ones who GIVE the orders who should (and usually are) held to account. The Generals and the heads of state who ordered the unjust war, who signed of an attack on civilians, who recruited child soldiers.
War crimes tribunals are never all that concerned with the ones who pulled the trigger (or failed to pull it) - simply because proving where a soldier in good conscience OUGHT to draw the line is hard (this is usually left up to the military's own justice instead through court martials) - but GIVING an order to commit a war crime, THAT is what war crimes tribunals are mostly meant to prosecute. It's what the USA is happy to charge it's enemies FOR in The Hague, while AT THE SAME TIME refusing to recognize the right for the own military leaders to be charged by that SAME court.
>No you couldn't. Monarchism (or despotism) is not a philosophical theory. It is the result of what happens when someone uses personal power to control other people. See the man with the big sword? He will kill you if you don't pay him money. Oh, your sword is bigger? Kill him then and take his place.
Bullshit. Some philosophers supported monarchism (especially in ancient times) as the best form of government since those who govern are literally groomed and trained for the job from childhood and so should in theory be perfectly skilled at it. One of the philosophers who suggested that was Plato - in his argument about why democracy was bad.
>Anarchy will never "just happen". Anarchy is a political theory.
That's just false. It would be far more correct to say that anarchy is the DEFAULT state of a society and it only changes from that when 1) The society is conquered 2) The society chooses to move to a hierarchical structure because of a perceived need for greater security. The latter isn't guaranteed and didn't happen in all societies, but where it didn't, they were ultimately conquered by others that did. That's just like saying that collectivist societies cannot exist- but they DO exist, both among humans and in Nature. Bonobo's are collectivist and anarchist and they are very closely related to us (as close as chimps are), while chimps are hierarchical and structured and competitive. Humans seem to have elements of both in our DNA - and which route any particular society took historically seems to have been more a case of "which genes were the majority in that population" than "what works better". You even see this correlate in other ways. It's no surprise that economic conservative and social conservatives are so often alligned, they both embrace hierarchical social structures where the only progress is that of an individual up or down the ladder. It's likewise no surprise that social and economic liberals usually align - if you see people as equal before the law then it's natural to see economic equality as just as merritious, but it goes further. Bonobos share sexual partners rampantly, most bonobos mate with numerous partners of either sex several times a day - it's just natural to them. There is no dominant sex with bonobos, both sexes are rampantly promiscuous. Chimps guard mating privileges jealously and they are acquired by moving up the social ladder and their society is strongly male-dominant.
Liberal humans tend to have a bonobo attitude to both sex and gender (though perhaps not AS extreme in most cases - but only because of the pressure from conservatives holding them back). It's no surprise that the most recent version of free love came from the hippies. Conservative humans tend to be jealous over their sex partners and use words that describe them as owned property. Liberals tend to believe in the equality of sexes. Conservatives tend to be male-dominant.
And both approaches to survival are EQUALLY viable. If one was MORE viable, it would have supplanted the other (basic evolutionary theory), but when both are EQUALLY viable - that same evolutionary theory predicts exactly what happened: the Pan genus split into two species (so physically alike we didn't even RECOGNIZE they were two species until the mid 20th century) with each species using one of the two approaches.
Humans have used either. Even if you discount genetics (or assume humans cannot be genetically predisposed to want what EITHER idea offers but must rationally choose one), the message from our close cousins in nature is that BOTH approaches are perfectly viable and we can choose either. So if both are equally viable - the debate should be about which is morally BETTER, not why it may fail.
>Right, so if we decide to dump raw sewage into a river it won't affect anyone downstream? And when they decide to force us to stop, it won't affect us?
And that's step 2, representatives of community councils who vote on behalf of that community in larger councils on issues that affect larger regions. But unlike governments those officials have no right to an opinion on their own - they are only there to present that community on the larger council and to ensure they vote as per their community's wishes they are instantly recallable and unpaid. So in your example, that river will now affect several communities, your community may vote for the right to dump sewage in it, but the others will vote against it. It's the bare minimum of governance based on equal decision making power by all limited ONLY to the barest required need to prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. I shouldn't need to explain this, 5 minutes on google will tell you all the details. Again - do you really think thousands of philosophers over centuries didn't think of such an obvious thing ?
>Anarchism would require human nature to change to be the least bit viable, I could say the same thing about monarchism, dictatorships, republican democracy and... oh right EVERY SINGLE POLITICAL IDEA... EVER. I just happen to think it's slightly LESS unviable than THOSE crazy concepts.
>If it's truly anarchy, then there is no collectivism or capitalism, except perhaps among small groups of individuals. Both capitalism and collectivism require a structure, which is anathema in anarchy.
False. Anarchy is only anathema to HIERARCHICAL structure, that's why it's NOT chaos. Anarchist societies most certainly ARE structured, they just have a FLAT structure.
>Besides, collectivism (socialism/communism/fascism) has killed many tens of millions (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, Mussolini). Collectivism in the real world that means everyone, except those in power, share an equal amount of misery.
False. State-socialism has done those things (but capitalism+dictatorship did the EXACT same thing - Hitler and Mussolini are in THAT category as is Pinochet). This claim is NOT true of anarchist and libertarian forms of socialism.
>Capitalism is abominable, horrible, and outcomes for individuals vary widely. However, it's still the best system ever devised for empowering the individual person and allowing them the most personal liberty and freedom possible. False and unproven assertion. All your examples show is that it's better than state-socialism, you have shown no evidence that other forms of socialism didn't and couldn't do better.
>>>Capitalism is the only system ever created where wealth is a renewable resource for everyone as long as they are willing to work and/or come up with an idea, skill, invention, or service thatÃ(TM)s valuable to someone else.
False, capitalism always degenerates into either classism or facism.
>>>Capitalism has raised more people from poverty and raised more people to higher standards of living than any other system ever created.
False and unproven assertion. Many would argue that capitalism has CAUSED worse poverty for than any other system. What capitalism HAS been good at is HIDING poverty by subjecting somebody else to it, there is no example in history (including present day) of capitalism working while all participants are equal before the law. In the USA they used to export the suffering to slaves (not seen as 'people' because they were black), in Europe to the colonies. Today they export the suffering to China. As soon as Europe lost it's colonies and the suffering came home - the great capitalist continent went socialist VERY fast, because voters don't like feeling the pains of capitalism THEMSELVES.
>>Capitalism has allowed more people to live in more freedom than any other system ever invented.
False, unproven assetion. Wage-slavery is NOT freedom.
>May I suggest reading up a bit on history from first-sources.
May I suggest reading a few sources OUTSIDE those that support your preconceptions ?
>Oh, and "socialist-libertarianism"? Hello, Captain Oxymoron. Well, Hello Captain Idiot then. Libertarianism was socialist in it's foundation, and has remained so for over 500 years. The idea of capitalist libertarianism is a historical oddity that really only exists in the USA - anywhere else "Socialist Libertarian" would be a tautology. It was a major political force in Europe until well into the 20th century and was only removed from that position by violent opresion - NOT by people rejecting the idea. Anton Pannekoek's council communism is a form of socialist libertarianism as well and the world is full of socialist-libertarian enterprizes. Every coffee shop in India, the largest fabric manufacturer in the United States and even kickstarter.com (the idea of consumers rather than investors funding the production of products they want so that the actual PRODUCERS can also be the OWNERS is PERFECTLY in line with socialist libertarianism and exactly the opposite of how capitalism funds entrepeneurship).
>Specialization will produce a position of power if your skillset requires a high investment to acquire it. High investment will make these specialists rare and not easily replacable, which they can in turn use to gain power.
False. If they have to report TO the collective, then they are in a position of service, not power. Some people may not be easy to replace, but nobody is IMPOSSIBLE to replace. Do you really think a thousand philosophers over 5000 years have all managed to overlook something THAT obvious without considering sollutions and YOU managed to spot it ?
Personally I blame the eventual end of Iceland's anarchy on the fact that it was a capitalist anarchy rather than a collectivist one.
That said - historical context is valuable in evaluating the possible results of a philosophy but it's certainly not absolute - there was one revolution that ended up in a fairly free democratic state without just replacing one dictator with another. One must also consider the circumstances of a particular instance, something that never worked before for anybody may work for somebody, somewhere. Participism is a form of socialist-libertarianism (which itself is a form of a collectivist-anarchism) that seems to be very well thought out and likely practically feasible.
More importantly - new technologies make possible ideas that were previously untenable. The largest city of the ancient world was Rome. In Ancient times it's population was estimated to have maxed out around 600 thousand people. Today it's a city of 2.8 million people - and if you count the greater metropolitan area a more accurate figure of almost 4 million people.
A city that size would simply have been impossible to manage or govern with ancient technology, but today it's not even one of the largest in the world. In the same way - many of the failings of various anarchist philosophy could potentially be overcome by modern technology (and high literacy levels) - at least in theory. Not to mention that most anarchist philosophies are fundamentally built on large-scale decentralization - one way of reducing the potential for chaos is to keep the voting communities (and thus the issues they have to vote on and the impact of their votes) very small and localized.
It's a fallacy to raise an objection to an idea if the system it's meant to replace has the same problem. "Not an improvement with regard to X" doesn't mean it is not an improvement in other ways.
And this really is a "not an improvement" thing- right now the most powerful army on earth and it's leaders is immune to prosecution from the international court we set up to prosecute war crimes. They actually claim the right to deliver accused war criminals to that court for judgement but refuse to recognize it for their own actions - and nobody has the political, economic or military clout to force them to do so. The only time anybody gets punished for war crimes by the USA is when a soldier with a conscience leaks the video and they are forced to hold court-martials for P.R. reasons. Why do you think that this would NOT happen with the kind of consensus based military predicted here ?
>That sort of democracy can quickly turn into chaos and then anarchy.
There is no similarity between chaos and anarchy. Please educate yourself on anarchist philosophy before equating it with chaos. The absence of authority does not equal lawlessness. Somalia has no legitimate government but it certainly is NOT an anarchism either (though it is chaos). Iceland on the other hand was an anarchism for nearly 200 years - and it worked very, very well.
>We would do *nothing* else all day long except vote on issues we would barely understand.
Bull, nobody would force you to vote on every issue, and one of the fundamental principles of direct democracy philosophies (such as socialist libertarianism, anarchism and the like) is complete decentralization. That is - no nation states, you'd vote only on issues in your own small community, and the decisions taken would affect only that community. People would vote on the issues they care about, which with modern tech is already a minor burden and will only become easier and smaller in the future - and those who don't care/ are not informed about the issue won't be affected at all (not even by having to vote).
What anarchist philosophies teach is that everybody has a RIGHT to an equal say on all decisions that affect them, not that they have a DUTY to use that right.
>but surely the individuality of each of the hive mind participants will come to be used in the fields it excels in forming a recognizable structure and disrupting total equality.
Any socialist libertarian or anarchist will tell you that specialization of roles is not a disruption of equality. It's only authority over roles that disrupts equality, if you take responsibility for a task because it fits your skillset, and you report to the collective rather than to a boss (or the collective reporting to you) - then it's still equality.
That's one of the most inspiring thing for socialist libertarians, our vision of small highly decentralized true democractic communities is no longer an ideal but a highly likely logical outcome of current events and technology.
Slashdot Mirror
>Therefor, Congress cannot pass a law granting the courts the power to compel speech, because compelling speech is equally an abridgement of free speech just as much as censoring free speech.
But limited censorship IS allowed by the US constitution and IS in fact regularly exercised by both the legislature and the courts. For example in a libel case if the publisher is found guilty, it would not be unusual for the courts to require that they print a retraction.
In a slander case, they could order an apology.
There are severe limits on compelled speech (just like there is on restricting speech) but it is certainly allowed. In this case the court has effectively determined that since apple's lost the court case, their PUBLIC accusations of copying amount to slander, and ordered them to apologize and retract the slanderous statement.
I can't imagine any reason a court in the USA couldn't do the same. Granted your libel and slander laws are more liberal and actually wining a case of libel and slander is harder but if it's won - this is exactly the kind of thing that would happen.
A more interesting question is whether a US court can in the results of a trial sentence you for a further charge as a RESULT of the outcome even though you were never charged with it in the original proceedings (be it a civil or criminal charge). I believe they can in fact do so and testifying that you committed a crime can have you sentenced for it in the same trial but I could be wrong.
Even that is not a certainty however as we don't even KNOW that this finding WAS tacked on - it's not unusual for companies when sued to claim slander in the other party and Samsung may well have included that as part of their counter-claim - in which case this judge just found Apple guilty of it and is now ordering a pretty standard restitution.
>I don't know how to get the message across that this is a very bad attitude to take and wins him no friends.
This is a prosthetic sight and memory augmentation device he wears due to a medical condition ! Throwing that out is no better than throwing out a paraplegic because you worry his prosthetic leg may scratch the floor tiles. As it stands, the device he uses doesn't even keep recordings for more than few seconds, what it does is to simply slow down the world a bit so he has time to process what happens. It's like a slow-motion-replay for reality. Just because he designed it himself doesn't make it any less a medically apt prosthesis.
In fact, it wouldn't normally have HAD recordings of the event- except that when they broke the device they disabled the onboard computer, which meant the cleanup algorithm that would have wiped the pictures couldn't run.
They themselves turned a medical prosthesis from a slowdown device into a permanent recording of the very breakage by which they changed it's nature.
>The mistake you make is the "because replacing a slave is expensive" - they're not. They reproduce just like free men do. And while a child isn't good for as much labor as an adult, they were certainly put to work as children...
That's a good argument - and like I said, I was not in the least trying to excuse slavery - I find the very idea abominable. But I do believe that slavery at least in the first generation may actually create an economic incentive for the well treatment of workers that is absent in unskilled free labour jobs.
This is not an excuse for slavery - but an assault on the working conditions we allow fellow human beings to be under, conditions which differ from slavery in name only.
It's interesting though that the idea of born slaves and life-long slaves was a relatively modern one. The confederate slave-owners cited biblical slave-owning as justification but conveniently forgot all the rules about slave-ownership established in the bible. Slaves could only be owned for 7 years, after which they had to be released, at this point a slave could voluntarily CHOOSE to enter lifelong servitude but this could not be enforced, and in order to do so the slave would have to get his ear pierced by the local priest (in theory - that means an independent witness to his further slavery being by his own choice). The children of slaves were born as free men, who could of course BECOME slaves later on, but nobody was born that way.
Now we can argue about how well the Israelites stuck to the rules, and whether those rules really would make it "okay" (I vote no), but it's just an interesting example of how those who use religion as an excuse for bad behaviour will always conveniently choose only the bits that suit them. "The bible said we can own slaves" but never "the bible also said we have to release them after 7 years". Or in it's modern form: "The bible says marriage is only between man and woman" but never "love thy neighbour like thyself".
In the end it comes down to what Terry Pratchett masterly summed up: All sin starts with thinking of people as things.
>Since, in the real world, very few people care about what is in line with anarchist thought or not,
You're assuming that a condition which is present will always be present. In an anarchist society, most people do care - because it's life for them.
Compare for e.g. the early Pennsylvanian Quaker Anarchisms which it took a lot of British soldiers with guns to force to accept government.
>the trip from voluntary leadership to dictator is only as long as it takes to draw a gun.
Not if enough other people draw guns right back. The ones standing beside one another tend to have the upper hand over the one guy standing in front.
Actually you could argue that on average the slaves were slightly BETTER off. I certainly WOULD argue that those slaves were on average better off than a modern-day sweatshop worker.
See a slave has value. You have to invest in a slave, to maximize the return on investment you need that slave to be productive for as long as possible. This means ensuring he has adequate food, shelter and basic needs (even rest) to remain healthy and working for as long as possible because replacing a slave is expensive.
A sweatshop worker is cheap to get, and cheap to replace, so there is no reason to care if they are committing suicide, if they are working in extremely dangerous conditions and getting ill (not like they can quit - every other job is just as bad), no reason to treat them with dignity (make them pee in a bag at their work-stations). To maximize investment with sweatshop workers you only need to maximize SHORT TERM productivity of a worker- and replace him/her as soon as that goes down.
I don't know the history of the US North well enough, but I imagine it was rather similar.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't support slavery at all - I just don't support free labour that's WORSE than slavery EITHER.
>We are enforcing Afghanistan's 1941 signing of the Declaration of Universal Right of Man.
Negotiations on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights began in 1946, the year after the end of World War 2 and were concluded when the document was signed in 1948. The document you cite does not exist nor has any document by that name ever been signed, least of all by Afghanistan. Assuming you meant the UDHR the date is actually very important. The UDHR has it's origins DURING World War 2 when the Allies based their alliance on a reaffirming of their commitment to human rights, which led, in the aftermath of the war, to the drafting of a declaration on what those rights should be.
>For those who say it isn't our business to protect the rights of others, that line of thinking was invalidated by WWII and previously in the Civil war.
How has the US Civil War got anything to do with other countries. Of course your government has a duty to protect the rights of it's own CITIZENS. The end of slavery recognize black people as citizens with the rights there-off, a status previously denied them. This was not the right's of "others" but of your own damn neighbours who were less equal than other animals.
As for World War 2, that was a spectacularly bad example as America refused to become overtly involved in that war until you were attacked on home soil. Your commitment to "human rights" was rather flimsy for the first years of the war when your only official involvement was war profiteering by selling weapons and tanks (the only apparent good thing you officially did in that time was to only sell them to ONE side - but that could just as easily be called 'not pissing off your best customer' - since Germany had much better capacity to manufacture their own, they weren't ever going to be a big buyer). The minor covert involvement of the USA prior to Pearl Harbour was basically a joke - again, meant for no other purpose than to ensure your customer (Britain) kept buying.
It's rather silly to claim that America had a major national issue with the IDEALS of Nazism prior to Pearl Harbor since a hell of a lot of the same laws were on YOUR books (indeed they were cited as defence by many during the Nuremberg trials), you had more extensive eugenics laws than the Germans did, you just didn't have the final solution.
In fact the last state to get rid of a eugenics based forced sterilization law in the USA didn't do so until 1974 !
If Germany hadn't been so good at making their own guns that they actually needed yours - you would quite likely have fought on the opposite side in world war 2 - it would have suited your cultural and legal position at the time better than Britain's did.
>Windows 9 will probably make 'Windows Lockin' mandatory on x86 as it does on ARM, and it dramatically increases the difficulty of installing an alternate OS. No more booting Linux from CD and installing without even touching the BIOS.
Nor, for that matter, trying out Linux on a live CD before you commit to installing.
Microsoft's requirements for ARM systems to be marked windows 8 compatible are that they must not include the possibility to disable secure boot or change the keys via the bios.
Your claim doesn't WORK on those systems.
I was doing refurbishment for charity for about 6 years - we used a different method. LTSP with one new machine acting as a server and turning the refurbs into thin-clients with no moving parts except fans (which are cheap to replace).
That got rid of all the bits that end to be flaky and failing and network boot with network-desktops took care of everything while we could still benefit from the motherboard, cpu and ram (which in poor countries are by far the most expensive parts).
>most studies indicate that females have a higher social status in bonobo society.
I was referring to social status only in terms of authority. Respect and authority are both measures of social status but they are not identical in outcome. I would be interested if any studies have suggested females actually have higher AUTHORITY in Bonobo societies.
> Also, they exhibit their peaceful side in the wild, probably in eareas where resources are abundant. In captivity they have been known to mutilate and bully each other. This tells me that they are not so natually peaceful as you would like
So your argument is that a certain behaviour isn't really natural because they don't behave that way in unnatural conditions ? You do see the inherent contradiction in that don't you ?
By that logic, mating and is not natural behaviour for pandas because they avoid doing so in captivity.
>But resources are not limited and must be distributed and as such is the case, I am not convinced that humans (or bonobos for that matter) can be trusted to not be selfish when our own survival comes into the equation.
That's not actually true. There are still many resources that are rare, though the actual need for many of them are questionable (tens of thousands of people die in gold mining accidents every year, the vast majority of what they are dying to dig up end up locked in vaults - never to be actually USED for anything). But this is simply not true of the essentials. There are more empty abandoned rooms in the world then there are homeless people - but property law means those homeless people end up sleeping on the pavements OUTSIDE the empty office buildings instead (I live in a country with a large degree of that, children as young as 8 should be sleeping on pavements without so much as a blanket in mid-winter outside buildings which nobody has used for a decade is just not conscionable to me). The food that the USA and Europe collectively destroy every year is enough to feed every hungry person on earth three times over.
That right there is the biggest problem in capitalism - it only WORKS while resources ARE scarce. It has no way to sustain a post-scarcity model. Europe and the USA destroy crops rather than donate it to charity or sell it at market prices because that would drop prices so low (supply higher than demand) that the vast majority of farmers would go out of business. Capitalism predicts food should be the cheapest commodity in the world now, but it's not because of artificially induced scarcity created by force of arms to prevent that happening. In things where we have TRUE post-scarcity (infinitely reproducable digital goods- not just supply higher than demand but supply infinite) the law of supply and demand predicts a price of zero. This is the price the black market has set. But then how do you fund INITIAL production ?
Many of us argue for funding it via indirect means (e.g. musicians making money from live performances rather than recordings) but the approach of business and government has been to introduce an artificial scarcity by force of law. That is to massively reduce individual freedom in order to maintain that artificial scarcity - the more effective the reproduction becomes the harsher the enforcement becomes.
This is the model ALL industries face - we will only have MORE post-scarcity industries over time (energy for example moving to sustainable sources means far lower [indeed near-zero] material costs - and comes down to only the cost of operations - eventually).
Right now we have countries that flaunted international trade agreements to deliberately ignore artificial scarcity laws for essential medicines rather than let their citizens die - which made the biggest economy in the world very, very angry.
The more post-scarcity our technology becomes - the more the market will depend on enforced artificial scarcity, which can only be achieved by limiting individual liberty to ever greater degrees.
Perhaps capitalism once WAS the key
>Is there really a practical difference? What will happen is that people will form attachments to the charismatic people in the group and those people will become leaders.
There is a huge difference between voluntarily following the advice of an expert, and being forced to follow the ruling of authority.
The former is perfectly in line with anarchist thought, the latter is not.
But, the system has been tried and philosophers have studied what worked and what did not - and proposed improvements with those facts in mind.
They certainly did spot the thing you're pointing out, and did propose solutions for it.
You also seem to know very little about how philosophy really works. It's a science (indeed philosophers are the ones who defined the scientific method - based on observation of what did and didn't work - so that other scientists can use it) - not some ivory tower thing.
I suppose the best definition of philosophy is to call it a meta-science, most sciences study the world - philosophy studies the sciences themselves.
In actual fact - if you were there, opposed the decision being made, and it went ahead anyway and there was prosecution - surely you would then volunteer as a witness for the prosecution ? Isn't that what people do when they are present at the committing of a crime they do not abet ?
The "lack of responsibility" argument has been made of non-hierarchical structures in every element of human existence, luckily structures lack the ability to hear and many such structures continue to exist merrily away - their success drowned out only by the clamouring of those who declare their continued existence to be impossible.
In fact a variation of this argument is the reason why a true cooperation cannot exist under British law (though close facsimiles can and do exist). The argument being that "there must be a single person who can be held responsible and accountable for the actions of the business, therefore there must be a person with absolute power - as one cannot hold a person to account for a decision he lacked the authority to prevent."
Other's have argued more loudly that cooperations must be inefficient, must be incapable of producing profit for their members - that the lack of a clear leadership makes practical success impossible.
Yet in most other countries in the world cooperations do exist, and produce goods - profitably, as they have for hundreds of years. They are even the leaders in some markets. The arguments against a collective military you are now making is much the same as those made against collectivist worker-owned businesses - yet the evidence that those arguments are false is quite apparent: cooperations DO exist, DO make profits and if they break the law ARE held to account.
In the case of your collectivist army having some members commit a war-crime, this is not difficult to solve. There was a vote, electronically - it must therefore have been recorded, check the log and prosecute those who voted in favour of the atrocity. They, each, shared in giving the order, and so share in the responsibility for it.
Let's assume for the moment that the logs aren't available (perhaps the system autowipes them after announcing the results). You can easily see who participated, and who was capable of participating but chose not to do so. Now you CAN prosecute the soldiers who did it at least, even if it means some who voted "yes" get away that's a minor concern - the pressure would be provided not to act on votes for atrocity.
Well this is the point where your sig becomes apropos. Mind you Ambrose Bierce also said:
"Land, n. A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognized. It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist."
>You say, correctly, that the United States will not deliver up its soldiers for ware crimes trial by the Hague Tribunal. But what European powers have done so?
There is a huge difference - not many Europeans have been tried (that's true) but they all acknowledge the JURISDICTION of the court over both their soldiers AND their leadership (at least in theory), the USA does neither.
You shouldn't be ABLE to ask a court to prosecute your enemies if you are not willing to accept the jurisdiction of that court yourself.
Even then - it's not the soldiers on the ground who would have much to fear, soldiers are hardly ever tried for war crimes anyway (for exactly the reasons you cite) - it's their leaders, the ones who GIVE the orders who should (and usually are) held to account. The Generals and the heads of state who ordered the unjust war, who signed of an attack on civilians, who recruited child soldiers.
War crimes tribunals are never all that concerned with the ones who pulled the trigger (or failed to pull it) - simply because proving where a soldier in good conscience OUGHT to draw the line is hard (this is usually left up to the military's own justice instead through court martials) - but GIVING an order to commit a war crime, THAT is what war crimes tribunals are mostly meant to prosecute. It's what the USA is happy to charge it's enemies FOR in The Hague, while AT THE SAME TIME refusing to recognize the right for the own military leaders to be charged by that SAME court.
>No you couldn't. Monarchism (or despotism) is not a philosophical theory. It is the result of what happens when someone uses personal power to control other people. See the man with the big sword? He will kill you if you don't pay him money. Oh, your sword is bigger? Kill him then and take his place.
Bullshit. Some philosophers supported monarchism (especially in ancient times) as the best form of government since those who govern are literally groomed and trained for the job from childhood and so should in theory be perfectly skilled at it. One of the philosophers who suggested that was Plato - in his argument about why democracy was bad.
>Anarchy will never "just happen". Anarchy is a political theory.
That's just false. It would be far more correct to say that anarchy is the DEFAULT state of a society and it only changes from that when
1) The society is conquered
2) The society chooses to move to a hierarchical structure because of a perceived need for greater security.
The latter isn't guaranteed and didn't happen in all societies, but where it didn't, they were ultimately conquered by others that did.
That's just like saying that collectivist societies cannot exist- but they DO exist, both among humans and in Nature. Bonobo's are collectivist and anarchist and they are very closely related to us (as close as chimps are), while chimps are hierarchical and structured and competitive.
Humans seem to have elements of both in our DNA - and which route any particular society took historically seems to have been more a case of "which genes were the majority in that population" than "what works better".
You even see this correlate in other ways. It's no surprise that economic conservative and social conservatives are so often alligned, they both embrace hierarchical social structures where the only progress is that of an individual up or down the ladder.
It's likewise no surprise that social and economic liberals usually align - if you see people as equal before the law then it's natural to see economic equality as just as merritious, but it goes further. Bonobos share sexual partners rampantly, most bonobos mate with numerous partners of either sex several times a day - it's just natural to them. There is no dominant sex with bonobos, both sexes are rampantly promiscuous.
Chimps guard mating privileges jealously and they are acquired by moving up the social ladder and their society is strongly male-dominant.
Liberal humans tend to have a bonobo attitude to both sex and gender (though perhaps not AS extreme in most cases - but only because of the pressure from conservatives holding them back). It's no surprise that the most recent version of free love came from the hippies.
Conservative humans tend to be jealous over their sex partners and use words that describe them as owned property.
Liberals tend to believe in the equality of sexes.
Conservatives tend to be male-dominant.
And both approaches to survival are EQUALLY viable. If one was MORE viable, it would have supplanted the other (basic evolutionary theory), but when both are EQUALLY viable - that same evolutionary theory predicts exactly what happened: the Pan genus split into two species (so physically alike we didn't even RECOGNIZE they were two species until the mid 20th century) with each species using one of the two approaches.
Humans have used either. Even if you discount genetics (or assume humans cannot be genetically predisposed to want what EITHER idea offers but must rationally choose one), the message from our close cousins in nature is that BOTH approaches are perfectly viable and we can choose either.
So if both are equally viable - the debate should be about which is morally BETTER, not why it may fail.
>Right, so if we decide to dump raw sewage into a river it won't affect anyone downstream? And when they decide to force us to stop, it won't affect us?
And that's step 2, representatives of community councils who vote on behalf of that community in larger councils on issues that affect larger regions. But unlike governments those officials have no right to an opinion on their own - they are only there to present that community on the larger council and to ensure they vote as per their community's wishes they are instantly recallable and unpaid.
So in your example, that river will now affect several communities, your community may vote for the right to dump sewage in it, but the others will vote against it.
It's the bare minimum of governance based on equal decision making power by all limited ONLY to the barest required need to prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario.
I shouldn't need to explain this, 5 minutes on google will tell you all the details.
Again - do you really think thousands of philosophers over centuries didn't think of such an obvious thing ?
>Anarchism would require human nature to change to be the least bit viable, ... oh right EVERY SINGLE POLITICAL IDEA... EVER.
I could say the same thing about monarchism, dictatorships, republican democracy and
I just happen to think it's slightly LESS unviable than THOSE crazy concepts.
>If it's truly anarchy, then there is no collectivism or capitalism, except perhaps among small groups of individuals. Both capitalism and collectivism require a structure, which is anathema in anarchy.
False. Anarchy is only anathema to HIERARCHICAL structure, that's why it's NOT chaos. Anarchist societies most certainly ARE structured, they just have a FLAT structure.
>Besides, collectivism (socialism/communism/fascism) has killed many tens of millions (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, Mussolini). Collectivism in the real world that means everyone, except those in power, share an equal amount of misery.
False. State-socialism has done those things (but capitalism+dictatorship did the EXACT same thing - Hitler and Mussolini are in THAT category as is Pinochet). This claim is NOT true of anarchist and libertarian forms of socialism.
>Capitalism is abominable, horrible, and outcomes for individuals vary widely. However, it's still the best system ever devised for empowering the individual person and allowing them the most personal liberty and freedom possible.
False and unproven assertion. All your examples show is that it's better than state-socialism, you have shown no evidence that other forms of socialism didn't and couldn't do better.
>>>Capitalism is the only system ever created where wealth is a renewable resource for everyone as long as they are willing to work and/or come up with an idea, skill, invention, or service thatÃ(TM)s valuable to someone else.
False, capitalism always degenerates into either classism or facism.
>>>Capitalism has raised more people from poverty and raised more people to higher standards of living than any other system ever created.
False and unproven assertion. Many would argue that capitalism has CAUSED worse poverty for than any other system. What capitalism HAS been good at is HIDING poverty by subjecting somebody else to it, there is no example in history (including present day) of capitalism working while all participants are equal before the law. In the USA they used to export the suffering to slaves (not seen as 'people' because they were black), in Europe to the colonies. Today they export the suffering to China.
As soon as Europe lost it's colonies and the suffering came home - the great capitalist continent went socialist VERY fast, because voters don't like feeling the pains of capitalism THEMSELVES.
>>Capitalism has allowed more people to live in more freedom than any other system ever invented.
False, unproven assetion. Wage-slavery is NOT freedom.
>May I suggest reading up a bit on history from first-sources.
May I suggest reading a few sources OUTSIDE those that support your preconceptions ?
>Oh, and "socialist-libertarianism"? Hello, Captain Oxymoron.
Well, Hello Captain Idiot then. Libertarianism was socialist in it's foundation, and has remained so for over 500 years. The idea of capitalist libertarianism is a historical oddity that really only exists in the USA - anywhere else "Socialist Libertarian" would be a tautology. It was a major political force in Europe until well into the 20th century and was only removed from that position by violent opresion - NOT by people rejecting the idea.
Anton Pannekoek's council communism is a form of socialist libertarianism as well and the world is full of socialist-libertarian enterprizes. Every coffee shop in India, the largest fabric manufacturer in the United States and even kickstarter.com (the idea of consumers rather than investors funding the production of products they want so that the actual PRODUCERS can also be the OWNERS is PERFECTLY in line with socialist libertarianism and exactly the opposite of how capitalism funds entrepeneurship).
>Specialization will produce a position of power if your skillset requires a high investment to acquire it. High investment will make these specialists rare and not easily replacable, which they can in turn use to gain power.
False. If they have to report TO the collective, then they are in a position of service, not power. Some people may not be easy to replace, but nobody is IMPOSSIBLE to replace. Do you really think a thousand philosophers over 5000 years have all managed to overlook something THAT obvious without considering sollutions and YOU managed to spot it ?
Personally I blame the eventual end of Iceland's anarchy on the fact that it was a capitalist anarchy rather than a collectivist one.
That said - historical context is valuable in evaluating the possible results of a philosophy but it's certainly not absolute - there was one revolution that ended up in a fairly free democratic state without just replacing one dictator with another.
One must also consider the circumstances of a particular instance, something that never worked before for anybody may work for somebody, somewhere.
Participism is a form of socialist-libertarianism (which itself is a form of a collectivist-anarchism) that seems to be very well thought out and likely practically feasible.
More importantly - new technologies make possible ideas that were previously untenable. The largest city of the ancient world was Rome. In Ancient times it's population was estimated to have maxed out around 600 thousand people. Today it's a city of 2.8 million people - and if you count the greater metropolitan area a more accurate figure of almost 4 million people.
A city that size would simply have been impossible to manage or govern with ancient technology, but today it's not even one of the largest in the world.
In the same way - many of the failings of various anarchist philosophy could potentially be overcome by modern technology (and high literacy levels) - at least in theory.
Not to mention that most anarchist philosophies are fundamentally built on large-scale decentralization - one way of reducing the potential for chaos is to keep the voting communities (and thus the issues they have to vote on and the impact of their votes) very small and localized.
It's a fallacy to raise an objection to an idea if the system it's meant to replace has the same problem. "Not an improvement with regard to X" doesn't mean it is not an improvement in other ways.
And this really is a "not an improvement" thing- right now the most powerful army on earth and it's leaders is immune to prosecution from the international court we set up to prosecute war crimes. They actually claim the right to deliver accused war criminals to that court for judgement but refuse to recognize it for their own actions - and nobody has the political, economic or military clout to force them to do so.
The only time anybody gets punished for war crimes by the USA is when a soldier with a conscience leaks the video and they are forced to hold court-martials for P.R. reasons. Why do you think that this would NOT happen with the kind of consensus based military predicted here ?
>That sort of democracy can quickly turn into chaos and then anarchy.
There is no similarity between chaos and anarchy. Please educate yourself on anarchist philosophy before equating it with chaos. The absence of authority does not equal lawlessness.
Somalia has no legitimate government but it certainly is NOT an anarchism either (though it is chaos).
Iceland on the other hand was an anarchism for nearly 200 years - and it worked very, very well.
>We would do *nothing* else all day long except vote on issues we would barely understand.
Bull, nobody would force you to vote on every issue, and one of the fundamental principles of direct democracy philosophies (such as socialist libertarianism, anarchism and the like) is complete decentralization. That is - no nation states, you'd vote only on issues in your own small community, and the decisions taken would affect only that community.
People would vote on the issues they care about, which with modern tech is already a minor burden and will only become easier and smaller in the future - and those who don't care/ are not informed about the issue won't be affected at all (not even by having to vote).
What anarchist philosophies teach is that everybody has a RIGHT to an equal say on all decisions that affect them, not that they have a DUTY to use that right.
>but surely the individuality of each of the hive mind participants will come to be used in the fields it excels in forming a recognizable structure and disrupting total equality.
Any socialist libertarian or anarchist will tell you that specialization of roles is not a disruption of equality. It's only authority over roles that disrupts equality, if you take responsibility for a task because it fits your skillset, and you report to the collective rather than to a boss (or the collective reporting to you) - then it's still equality.
That's one of the most inspiring thing for socialist libertarians, our vision of small highly decentralized true democractic communities is no longer an ideal but a highly likely logical outcome of current events and technology.