I had an account at a bank that did something like this. It sure was great fun having to type in my password 3 times because it didn't like the way I typed it. And forget about trying to log-in from a mobile device.
(and before you tell me to switch banks, they do have other advantages that make it worth it. Just online-access is a pain-in-the-ass.)
There are about a thousand individuals in the US with enough political power to get the ball rolling for change in this matter. Of them, their demographics put them with an average age of upper 40's to lower 50's making well over a million each year. Among those who still have kids living at home, to most of them, their thousand dollar settlements is chump change.
It may be chump change to them, but there are plenty of millionaires who would sooner knife their grandmother than willingly give up a thousand dollars for something stupid like that.
That's assuming a rather broad definition of "hierarchical power relationships". The only power people have over each other in an anarcho-capitalist society is that which is granted voluntarily. If people choose to form hierarchies, on what basis do the anarcho-syndicalists justify coercive interference against those relationships?
I guess I'm not familiar with examples of anarcho-syndicalists justifying coercive interference against those relationships. At most, I could hear an anarcho-syndicalist arguing that such relationships aren't really anarchistic in nature, and then an anarcho-capitalist disagreeing with that assessment, and then that's the end of it (after some fruitless arguing.) If people re-align themselves into structures that mimic what we typically think of as a governing hierarchy, is it anarchism? An anarcho-capitalist would argue that a person always has the right to sell themselves into slavery. Maybe, but is that an anarchistic relationship? Does a person have the right to allow someone to initiate violence (or a threat of violence) against them? Is it still anarchism if that's done voluntarily?
If you take the exact same roles that are provided by the government today and put them into private hands, suddenly it's OK? The underlying power structure hasn't changed one bit. What's the difference?
First, that's a big "if"; capitalism does not require or imply highly concentrated ownership of property. That does, however, tend to be a consequence of corporatism, the use of political power toward the aggrandizement of certain wealthy or well-connected individuals or organizations.
We'll have to disagree on the nature of capitalism. I'm sure you've heard all of the arguments against it, and I've heard all of the arguments for it. I maintain that it necessarily results in the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, with or without government interference, while the anarcho-capitalist argues that it's only government interference that allows such wealth to accumulate. No one is changing anyone's mind here. I'd go one-further and argue that it's the nature of civilization itself, with our class stratification and division of labor and land ownership that necessarily results in the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few, and as long as we continue to organize ourselves in this way, there's no way around it, regardless of the economic system we attempt to use. There are some upsides to civilization, but that's one of the downsides.
Second, even if wealth is concentrated, that does not mean those with more wealth have "power" over those with less.
Again, here is another major point of disagreement. Those with control of property can deny the use of that property to others. If all property is already claimed (land and resources are finite) then some people are going to be fully reliant on the property of others in order to live. You can argue that it's voluntary, but as long as the owner can decide the fate of the workers at a whim, it's not exactly a relationship entirely without coercion.
I'd argue that the closest things we've seen to anarcho-capitalism are the old "company towns" which usually were pretty disastrous for the workers when in the hands of less-than-enlightened ownership.
You are glossing over at least one very important distinction, which is how those guns are used. Any security organization worthy of the name will naturally have the ability to act coercively; that's their purpose. However, the difference between a genuine security organization and a government (if perceived as legitimate) or criminal organization (if not) is that the security organization only uses its coercive abilities defensively, to counter prior aggression. A government / criminal organization is not so selective. As you say, the latter practice aggression simply "because they can, because they have the guns."
Are you saying that these hunter-gatherer societies typically don't have a "head-man" or respected matriarch or small decision making council of elders? That's still a nascent form of hierarchy.
Often they don't, and when they do, those people don't have any real power. They might be the oldest/wisest/smartest, and people might listen to them because they're old, wise and smart, but there's no full-time leadership class, full time police/soldier/enforcement class, etc.
If you want to call that a hierarchal power structure, fine, but we'll have to agree to disagree there.
There are some anarchists (mainly anarcho-syndicalists) who disagree with the libertarian anarchists / anarcho-capitalists on the matter of property rights, but (IMHO) these difference are largely academic.
It's all academic. We don't exactly have competing forms of anarchist political organization running around in the real world. The few existing functional anarchist societies operate closest to what we'd call anarcho-communism. Anyone in one of those societies who tried to exercise any sort of property ownership would immediately get smacked-down by the rest of the society.
But anyway... The anarcho-syndicalists would argue that their goal isn't just to remove the state, but to eliminate all hierarchal power relationships, something which is lacking in the anarcho-capitalist philosophy. In a capitalist society, if all property is owned by a small capitalist class, that puts them in a position of power over anyone who doesn't own property. It doesn't matter if that power is enforced by their privately hired mercenaries, or an external state (which, in reality, is owned and operated by the capitalist class anyway.)
The honest truth is, there's no fundamental difference between a government and any other large organization with lots of guns. The US government is just the largest and most powerful security organization, which also happens to build roads and schools. They take your money (via taxes) because they can, because they have the guns.
What makes you think that the anarcho-capitalist version of say, Walmart or Halliburton or GE or ExxonMobil or whatever other large company wouldn't do the same, just because they can? Some vague notion of a philosophy that they'd stick to? Who needs philosophy when there's money to be made?
The "statist" argument I make is that hierarchical governance will establish itself in human society no matter what. We are descended from a long line of social animal species and cohabiting with many others.
That's not exactly true. If you look at existing immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies, they generally lack what we'd think of as hierarchal governance, and it's likely that our ancestors lived in a similar way for hundreds of thousands of years.
Hierarchal leadership and the necessary support system to maintain that hierarchy really only came into play when sedentary agricultural societies began to take hold.
I really think we should start calling these "libertarians" what they really are... Anarchists.
Not so fast there. The anarchists don't want them either.
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 1
Everything is toxic. It depends on the dose as to when it reaches toxic levels. For sugar, the LD50 is >10,000 mg per kg of body weight. In comparison, caffeine's LD50 is 100 mg/kg and nicotine's is 1 mg/kg. "All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose permits something not to be poisonous." Paracelsus, the father of toxicology.
Correct, so the question becomes, is sugar toxic in the quantities that most Americans typically consume it? This guy seems to think so, and there might be some evidence to back it up, although there isn't definite proof yet.
I've been saying this a long time now. The biosphere is supposed to be in flux, and for all the species that go extinct (and 99% over earth's history have, and that's not hyperbole) that everybody seems to wring their hands over, nobody seems to notice the species that develop (and that the number of species over time on an epochal scale has always been net positive).
Right, but for 99% of the earth's history, it wasn't human-caused extinction. One reason why species would go extinct is because new species would develop that would out-compete the old ones. Now, humans are the only animal that is out-competing the species that are going extinct, and new species aren't developing at a rapid rate to replace the old ones.
But generally, they should be able to talk about both without fear of reprisal, so long as they don't denigrate either.
Not in a science class, they shouldn't. One of the successes of the creationist/ID crowd has been to promote intelligent design as a viable alternate scientific theory to evolution, and argue that both have a place in a science class.
No. One has a place in science classes, and one has a place in the garbage bin of history.
Well, the bill itself specified "[t]he teaching of some scientific subjects, including, but not limited to, biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning"
So it could apply to any of those things you talk about, but the bill itself is specifically aimed at the topics a certain segment of society finds especially distasteful.
What you want is whatever food grows best in a given environment, along with a wide variety of other foods just in case any one of them fails.
It's a really, really bad idea to depend completely on one type of food. Any sort of disease that wipes out that crop and you'll have piles of starving people on your hands.
Some initial analyses from scientists with the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative estimate that there will not be sufficient phosphorus supplies from mining to meet agricultural demand within 30 to 40 years. Although more research is clearly needed, this is not a comforting time scale.
Another issue with abstinence-only education, is the teenagers who don't know anything about birth control grow up into adults who don't know anything about birth control.
Even after they get older and get married and are "allowed" to have sex, they still won't know enough about birth control to prevent unwanted pregnancies within the marriage.
Count one more vote for the experts-exchange hate.
In fact, a while back I had emailed google and asked them to add the option to block websites from search results because I was sick of getting experts-exchange results.
Hmm...hell, one of the reasons so many of the countries in the EU can have all that 'free healthcare' and other entitlements, is because they don't have to pay much for their military defense...the US does.
That may be part of it, but the US still pays vast amounts of money for health care... it's just going to the insurance companies via premiums instead of the government via taxes.
Constitutional != Moral, Ethical, et cetera. The deprivation of the rights of the convicted is not only wrong on its own, but is also often abused by those in power to torment those who do not deserve it.
I agree with you 100%, but it's a tough battle since it's apparently legal to enslave the imprisoned, and defending rights of prisoners isn't exactly a popular political move.
agree with what you say about prisons treating prisoners as a cost center, but our society is very much going the other direction, with more private prisons and even privatization of existing prisons: unabashed state-sponsored slavery.
I think according to the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, using prisoners as slaves seems to be perfectly legal:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
In fact, there are prisons in the US that are still run essentially as old slave plantations.
What this tells me is Putin (and folks who are behind him), is gearing up to take over the reins from Medvedev in 2012.
I don't know. I'm not an expert in Russian politics, but from what I've heard, Putin already holds the reins and is the real power behind Medvedev anyway.
I mean, I know a great number of black people find the word offensive (although strangely enough usually only if a non-black person uses it, they often call themselves niggers in everyday conversation), but do people of other colors find the term to be THAT offensive?
Yes, it's that offensive.
It's offensive because a white person using it carries a history of racial violence. When black people use it amongst themselves, it doesn't carry that history.
You hear negro up north, and nigger or nigra as my grandmother used to say it in the south. Your grandmother grew up in a time of segregation, when black people did not receive the protection of the law that white people received, and blacks were regularly lynched for the crime of being black at an inconvenient time and place. This is the history it carries, along with a perceived threat of racial violence.
That's like saying the answer to world hunger is to feed everyone.
That's cute, but it's absolutely nothing like that. It's more like saying there are alternatives between letting a bunch of people starve because it's not profitable to feed them, and having a government steal food from farmers at gunpoint and giving it to the hungry.
I don't want the government to censor what I can see on the internet, and I don't want my ISP to discriminate against certain types of data either.
If the internet is regulated, you can be oppressed by government policies. If it isn't regulated, you can be oppressed by corporations trying to squeeze every last cent they can out. Either way the individual gets screwed, but you can choose by whom.
Or, we can try to find a reasonable balance between the two extremes. Admittedly, this will be pretty difficult given the current pack of idiots we've managed to elect to represent us, but in theory it's a possibility too.
See, I don't have a whole lot of faith in the police in general, but from my experience and what I've heard from others, generally if you do your own detective work and put together a case like that and hand it to the police, they're probably going to do something about it, if only so they have one less open case to worry about.
I think in the case you describe, they'd either have to be seriously lazy, seriously constrained by laws/regulations, or severely understaffed to not take advantage of a slam-dunk case like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Better check the handbook again, genius.
I had an account at a bank that did something like this.
It sure was great fun having to type in my password 3 times because it didn't like the way I typed it.
And forget about trying to log-in from a mobile device.
(and before you tell me to switch banks, they do have other advantages that make it worth it. Just online-access is a pain-in-the-ass.)
It may be chump change to them, but there are plenty of millionaires who would sooner knife their grandmother than willingly give up a thousand dollars for something stupid like that.
I guess I'm not familiar with examples of anarcho-syndicalists justifying coercive interference against those relationships. At most, I could hear an anarcho-syndicalist arguing that such relationships aren't really anarchistic in nature, and then an anarcho-capitalist disagreeing with that assessment, and then that's the end of it (after some fruitless arguing.) If people re-align themselves into structures that mimic what we typically think of as a governing hierarchy, is it anarchism? An anarcho-capitalist would argue that a person always has the right to sell themselves into slavery. Maybe, but is that an anarchistic relationship? Does a person have the right to allow someone to initiate violence (or a threat of violence) against them? Is it still anarchism if that's done voluntarily?
If you take the exact same roles that are provided by the government today and put them into private hands, suddenly it's OK? The underlying power structure hasn't changed one bit. What's the difference?
We'll have to disagree on the nature of capitalism. I'm sure you've heard all of the arguments against it, and I've heard all of the arguments for it. I maintain that it necessarily results in the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, with or without government interference, while the anarcho-capitalist argues that it's only government interference that allows such wealth to accumulate. No one is changing anyone's mind here. I'd go one-further and argue that it's the nature of civilization itself, with our class stratification and division of labor and land ownership that necessarily results in the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few, and as long as we continue to organize ourselves in this way, there's no way around it, regardless of the economic system we attempt to use. There are some upsides to civilization, but that's one of the downsides.
Again, here is another major point of disagreement. Those with control of property can deny the use of that property to others. If all property is already claimed (land and resources are finite) then some people are going to be fully reliant on the property of others in order to live. You can argue that it's voluntary, but as long as the owner can decide the fate of the workers at a whim, it's not exactly a relationship entirely without coercion.
I'd argue that the closest things we've seen to anarcho-capitalism are the old "company towns" which usually were pretty disastrous for the workers when in the hands of less-than-enlightened ownership.
Often they don't, and when they do, those people don't have any real power. They might be the oldest/wisest/smartest, and people might listen to them because they're old, wise and smart, but there's no full-time leadership class, full time police/soldier/enforcement class, etc.
If you want to call that a hierarchal power structure, fine, but we'll have to agree to disagree there.
It's all academic. We don't exactly have competing forms of anarchist political organization running around in the real world. The few existing functional anarchist societies operate closest to what we'd call anarcho-communism. Anyone in one of those societies who tried to exercise any sort of property ownership would immediately get smacked-down by the rest of the society.
But anyway... The anarcho-syndicalists would argue that their goal isn't just to remove the state, but to eliminate all hierarchal power relationships, something which is lacking in the anarcho-capitalist philosophy. In a capitalist society, if all property is owned by a small capitalist class, that puts them in a position of power over anyone who doesn't own property. It doesn't matter if that power is enforced by their privately hired mercenaries, or an external state (which, in reality, is owned and operated by the capitalist class anyway.)
The honest truth is, there's no fundamental difference between a government and any other large organization with lots of guns. The US government is just the largest and most powerful security organization, which also happens to build roads and schools. They take your money (via taxes) because they can, because they have the guns.
What makes you think that the anarcho-capitalist version of say, Walmart or Halliburton or GE or ExxonMobil or whatever other large company wouldn't do the same, just because they can? Some vague notion of a philosophy that they'd stick to? Who needs philosophy when there's money to be made?
That's not exactly true. If you look at existing immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies, they generally lack what we'd think of as hierarchal governance, and it's likely that our ancestors lived in a similar way for hundreds of thousands of years.
Hierarchal leadership and the necessary support system to maintain that hierarchy really only came into play when sedentary agricultural societies began to take hold.
Not so fast there. The anarchists don't want them either.
Correct, so the question becomes, is sugar toxic in the quantities that most Americans typically consume it? This guy seems to think so, and there might be some evidence to back it up, although there isn't definite proof yet.
Right, but for 99% of the earth's history, it wasn't human-caused extinction. One reason why species would go extinct is because new species would develop that would out-compete the old ones. Now, humans are the only animal that is out-competing the species that are going extinct, and new species aren't developing at a rapid rate to replace the old ones.
Fair enough, this is true.
But as far as teaching it as a competing theory, like "maybe evolution is true, or maybe ID is true", then no.
So, we teach it in the unit on the scientific method, in the discussion of what is and isn't a proper scientific theory.
Not in a science class, they shouldn't. One of the successes of the creationist/ID crowd has been to promote intelligent design as a viable alternate scientific theory to evolution, and argue that both have a place in a science class.
No. One has a place in science classes, and one has a place in the garbage bin of history.
Well, the bill itself specified "[t]he teaching of some scientific subjects, including, but not limited to,
biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human
cloning"
So it could apply to any of those things you talk about, but the bill itself is specifically aimed at the topics a certain segment of society finds especially distasteful.
What you want is whatever food grows best in a given environment, along with a wide variety of other foods just in case any one of them fails.
It's a really, really bad idea to depend completely on one type of food. Any sort of disease that wipes out that crop and you'll have piles of starving people on your hands.
In addition to oil, our system of agriculture demands vast quantities of phosphorus, and that is running out.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/20/peak_phosphorus/
Another issue with abstinence-only education, is the teenagers who don't know anything about birth control grow up into adults who don't know anything about birth control.
Even after they get older and get married and are "allowed" to have sex, they still won't know enough about birth control to prevent unwanted pregnancies within the marriage.
Count one more vote for the experts-exchange hate.
In fact, a while back I had emailed google and asked them to add the option to block websites from search results because I was sick of getting experts-exchange results.
In conclusion, suck it, experts-exchange.
Hmm...hell, one of the reasons so many of the countries in the EU can have all that 'free healthcare' and other entitlements, is because they don't have to pay much for their military defense...the US does.
That may be part of it, but the US still pays vast amounts of money for health care... it's just going to the insurance companies via premiums instead of the government via taxes.
Constitutional != Moral, Ethical, et cetera. The deprivation of the rights of the convicted is not only wrong on its own, but is also often abused by those in power to torment those who do not deserve it.
I agree with you 100%, but it's a tough battle since it's apparently legal to enslave the imprisoned, and defending rights of prisoners isn't exactly a popular political move.
agree with what you say about prisons treating prisoners as a cost center, but our society is very much going the other direction, with more private prisons and even privatization of existing prisons: unabashed state-sponsored slavery.
I think according to the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, using prisoners as slaves seems to be perfectly legal:
In fact, there are prisons in the US that are still run essentially as old slave plantations.
What this tells me is Putin (and folks who are behind him), is gearing up to take over the reins from Medvedev in 2012.
I don't know. I'm not an expert in Russian politics, but from what I've heard, Putin already holds the reins and is the real power behind Medvedev anyway.
I mean, I know a great number of black people find the word offensive (although strangely enough usually only if a non-black person uses it, they often call themselves niggers in everyday conversation), but do people of other colors find the term to be THAT offensive?
Yes, it's that offensive.
It's offensive because a white person using it carries a history of racial violence. When black people use it amongst themselves, it doesn't carry that history.
You hear negro up north, and nigger or nigra as my grandmother used to say it in the south.
Your grandmother grew up in a time of segregation, when black people did not receive the protection of the law that white people received, and blacks were regularly lynched for the crime of being black at an inconvenient time and place. This is the history it carries, along with a perceived threat of racial violence.
That's like saying the answer to world hunger is to feed everyone.
That's cute, but it's absolutely nothing like that. It's more like saying there are alternatives between letting a bunch of people starve because it's not profitable to feed them, and having a government steal food from farmers at gunpoint and giving it to the hungry.
I don't want the government to censor what I can see on the internet, and I don't want my ISP to discriminate against certain types of data either.
If the internet is regulated, you can be oppressed by government policies. If it isn't regulated, you can be oppressed by corporations trying to squeeze every last cent they can out. Either way the individual gets screwed, but you can choose by whom.
Or, we can try to find a reasonable balance between the two extremes.
Admittedly, this will be pretty difficult given the current pack of idiots we've managed to elect to represent us, but in theory it's a possibility too.
Wow.
See, I don't have a whole lot of faith in the police in general, but from my experience and what I've heard from others, generally if you do your own detective work and put together a case like that and hand it to the police, they're probably going to do something about it, if only so they have one less open case to worry about.
I think in the case you describe, they'd either have to be seriously lazy, seriously constrained by laws/regulations, or severely understaffed to not take advantage of a slam-dunk case like that.