Anarchism

Occam's razor?

I am 100% sure that we do not have the correct version of history at our fingertips.

I am also 100% sure that we do no have the correct vision of the future at our fingertips.

These two beliefs give me precisely zero basis for finding most of your assertions in this thread more or less believable.

The inaccuracy of one position does not imply increased accuracy of another, unrelated position. To believe otherwise is lunacy. For example:

I once believed that my current girlfriend thought I was ugly and not worth talking to. Turns out that I was wrong. This discovery does not support the hypothesis that Angelina Jolie would find me attractive and worth talking to.

To find out if Ms Jolie would like to spend time with me, I would need evidence relating to that situation.

To be convinced of something I need a combination of evidence and sound, consistent reasoning or logic.

Unfortunately, I see neither of those two in any of your posts on this thread. It may well be true that everything you claim as truth is, in fact, correct. Shame that none of your posts take me any closer to understanding, evaluating and accepting your assertions.

If you want to convince people of things, then please help them to see the evidence and use carefully reasoned arguments to help them shake their prejudices.

Sometimes I wonder if there is not a lot of money to be made as an image and debating consultant to people with extreme, minority views. Shame that my ethics would preclude me from doing that kind of thing.

fuck you, dammit, and your succinctness

This is the best thought out post on this thread so far. I salute you.

Damning with faint praise :)

On anarchism, one way that you can look at it is to imagine that rather than having one axis (left to right), politics has two axes: left to right (goods and services produced through central government planning to the left, by private enterprise to the right) and an axis of freedom - anarchy on one end, totalitarianism on the other.
The left-right axis essentially represents someone's views on how big the state should be, with a proper old-school communist viewpoint being that the state should encompass all activity, while a full-on free-market loony like Milton Friedman basically believes that the state should disppear altogether.
The second axis represents your views on how much force and control the state should use to ensure that people comply with whatever arrangements are going on. So Stalin was far left but also way over to the totalitarian end; some anarchists believe in collective provision of everything (far left) but no control of the individual by the state whatsoever (anarchy). Your US Libertarian believes in no state and no control; your US Republican believes in a small state but plenty of control. And so on.
In this analysis, anarchism is not the desire for absolute anarchy, but a feeling that it's important to keep the pressure on society not to slip towards totalitarianism - to move towards anarchy, but not neccessarily all the way there.
On the bee issue, you can leave the little guys enough honey to live on all winter and still have loads for yourself, and they're much healthier that way. A hive only needs maybe a pound or two to keep them going through a winter, and they'll make you a hundred pounds a year if you look after them. So if you're keeping bees, let them keep a bit, eh? Our relationship with them can be very mutually rewarding if we don't take the piss.

The NHS has more people doing the paperwork than offering treatment, is that really neccessary?

Evidence is everywhere you just have to look.

Yeah it is. In the accounts that every NHS organisation has to publish. We are a monster NHS organisation; 3rd biggest hospital group in the country and our accounts for 2007-08 said that out of 5831 employees only 1284 worked in admin or estates.

And most of those admin staff are clinic receptionists, ward clerks, records dtaff and medical secretaries doing the stuff that you don't really want clinical staff like the other 4547 doctors, nurses, lab technicians, physios, pharmacists, pathologists and theatres technicians to be doing instead of treating patients.

Occams Razor...not sharp enough...well...it is and the easiest possible answer, isn't the one you were force fed as a child/teenager/adult/cannon fodder/blah/etc/whatever...

and as for convincing anyone...who do I need to convince, you are all perfectly happy. Why burst your bubble? Soma anyone?

If you were actually going to take anything on board then you wouldn't be defending your right not to look...

Conspiracy theory, it's just another term that people hide behind, that way they can continue with there heads in the sand.

I'll stop throwing pearls now ladies...

as you were.

conspiracies

lol

I still consider myself an anarchist, albeit a philosphical one, not one that goes about smashing Starbucks every day instead on having a job, which seems to be the way that most of you believe anarchists behave.

They best way I have ever heard anarchism summed up is "the radical view that no one is more qualified than you to decide what to do with your life" (Crimethinc)

Occams Razor...not sharp enough...well...it is and the easiest possible answer, isn't the one you were force fed as a child/teenager/adult/cannon fodder/blah/etc/whatever...

and as for convincing anyone...who do I need to convince, you are all perfectly happy. Why burst your bubble? Soma anyone?

Where did I say I am perfectly happy?

I, for one, would love to live in a world in which the conspiracies were true, where I had a real reason to be afraid of the dark. I'd love to have angels and daemons and gods and others roam free. Alas, that is not how it is.

But I cannot understand how you -- even when faced w/ insurmountable evidence to the contrary -- are able and willing to cling to your beliefs and willing to accept, it seems, almost everything that comes from sources not proven. I've done it a few times, too. But I got burned (was proven wrong) and learned.

Where does your info come from? Is it from people like you? Have you ever thought they might be "false prophets" with their own hidden agenda?

And why can't you fathom the idea that maybe, just maybe, the things we -- the masses -- believe in could be "the truth", the real deal? You know, most of that stuff is based on our planet's history and old writings and hundreds of years of learning and experimenting. And yes, I do think science was born when we managed to kill god.

Why is it that the things you rant on about lack this? When did the trve learning end? Who is responsible for it? Was it the Gnomes of Zürich or the Bavarian Illuminati or the Masons? The Holy See, maybe? Who has veiled our eyes and when the fuck did it happen? Whose order was it? I think there should be a starting point or the originator of this Operation Obfuscate.

If you are referring to Huxley's soma (I hope it's not The Strokes' Soma) I do feel it is you that need it as it seems you are the one having difficulties accepting every-day life.

They best way I have ever heard anarchism summed up is "the radical view that no one is more qualified than you to decide what to do with your life" (Crimethinc)

I kinda get this (at least I hate being told what to do), but there are idiots. And lots of them. They are not qualified.

I still consider myself an anarchist, albeit a philosphical one, not one that goes about smashing Starbucks every day instead on having a job, which seems to be the way that most of you believe anarchists behave.

Now here's a thing. I consider myself a capitalist, but I can hardly pass a Starbucks without heaving half a brick through the window.

How is it I can read an internet argument this long, boring and dumb at 4am and still not fall asleep!

I'm off to 4chan/ chat roulette to look at cocks and try to get some brain cells back before work.

How is it I can read an internet argument this long, boring and dumb at 4am and still not fall asleep!

I'm off to 4chan/ chat roulette to look at cocks and try to get some brain cells back before work.

It's the magic of teh interwebz!

Now here's a thing. I consider myself a capitalist, but I can hardly pass a Starbucks without heaving half a brick through the window.

Likewise.

I thank you for the link. It's been a good read, although I still fail to see how anarchy would work in practice (kinda like communism, I guess).

The following, for example:
*"And, just to state the obvious, anarchy does not mean chaos nor do anarchists seek to create chaos or disorder. Instead, we wish to create a society based upon individual freedom and voluntary co-operation. In other words, order from the bottom up, not disorder imposed from the top down by authorities. Such a society would be a true anarchy, a society without rulers."

• 
  When co-operating you are creating an entity which will lead by its numbers and/or presence. Okay, so it again lacks an official title, but it will be the one that leads. It'd be a democratic mini society. Others might not follow it. They'd make up their own click. Then you'd have, in essence, two warring factions (no blood needs to be shed, but there'd still be at least those two groups).
  
  

This is a good point, and there is always a danger of groups of people disagreeing and that disagreement becoming a bigger dynamic that overshadows potentially much deeper commonalities. I can only speak for myself, but i'd imagine that in an anarchist society, poeple would not feel the need to bludgeon others into submission like we do in wars between states now.

For example - in the Spanish civil war (especially in 1936-7), huge swathes of the country were run collectively by anarchists. Instead of going down the Bolshevik route of coercing people into collectivising against their will, they would persuade farmers or workplaces to colelctivise voluntarily. if they didn't, they were given a reasonable-sized plot of land separate from the collectivised areas to do with it whatever they wanted. Many of those people eventually realised that they were better off joining the anarchists and colelctivising, because co-operation was clearly better for their self-interest than 'go it alone' forms of competition between different viewpoints.

So in an anarchist society (and in anarchist organisations and collectives in the here and now), difference is dealt with in a way that emphasises the benefits of co-operation, without the use of coercion. Anarchists emphasise mediation and consensus-finding between differing viewpoints. Of course, you will get the occasional person (or group of people) who will refuse any kind of mediation or co-operative practices, but like the Spanish example, their decisions to act in this manner will often result in them being worse off for it.

So, what am I not getting? I really believe anarchy will not be a permanent state. It might be the state of things for a while, but it won't last -- it'd, well, evolve.

I am not trying to diss you or others that believe anarchy (in the form described in the FAQ) would be good for us. It's just that I really can't get my head around the concept of permanent anarchy.

You've actually hit upon something really important. You're completely right that anarchy would not be an unchanging utopia in which everything is perfect forever. There will necessarily be change over time, and there will necessarily be difference across space. The mistake that many socialists made was to try to forge blueprints for an unchanging utopian future that would carry on for ever and ever amen. They were setting themselves up to fail, especially because they tried (e.g. in USSR, China, N Korea) to take over the isntitutions of capital and the state in order to try and make it happen.

The thing with anarchism as a philosophy and a practice is that it refuses to conform to a fixed utopian blueprint for the future. Sure, anarchists have key principles that lay the foudnations for how people (inter)act, but many anarchists emphasise the importance of process, and learning-by-doing.

Rudolf Rocker (an east-end Jewish anarchist in the inter-war era) said that "I am an anarchist, not because I believe anarchism to be the final goal, but because there is no such thing." He recognised that as society develops, new social, organisational and cultural forms will develop, and new ways of living and relating must be developed in response. Just as capitalism has developed in different ways over the 300 or so years that it has been the dominant economic system, anarchy would develop likewise. In fact, Rocker, and other anarchists, believe that capitalism and institutions of authority (e.g. the state) actually impinge upon invention and creativity because they reduce possibility to profitability. Their replacement with a co-operative or communalistic society would potentially allow far greater freedom for future technological, scientific and social development.

gets off soap-box

and as for convincing anyone...who do I need to convince, you are all perfectly happy. Why burst your bubble? Soma anyone? people hide behind, that way they can continue with there heads in the sand. I'll stop throwing pearls now ladies...as you were.

Oh do fuck off you sanctimonious, presumtuous, patronising twit.

Oh do fuck off you sanctimonious, presumtuous, patronising twit.

Patronising?

Really...look at the last four pages, that will be Matronising. This is a thread about anarchy, any suggestion of anarchy has all you hard men screaming like the provberial bitch...

Bitch.

And I'm glad to see that you have had such an input, four pages later...such glorius exchange I was loving some of the stuff you brought to the argument....

I was presuming you knew all about this? Being presumptious about just how much you said about anarchy? which was fuck all...so after 4 days of every man and his dog treating me like a new age drip feed, and me not telling you how fucking patronising you are ...you decide to jump in now?

Some of you are attempting to tell me the scene in tiananmen square could never happen here, as we live in a nice, safe, perfectly honest 'we voted them in you know they'd never lie to us' democracy....

We lost more human rights in this country under the 'left wing' Blairite system than we did in a 1000 years of every one else.

Call me a sanctimonius twit (oh how very english), Just check the last four pages and see who has been patronised the most, thats what you get for attempting to talk even slightly away from the norm....

The thread was discussing anarchy, what the fuck did you expect?

I'm glad you involved your self so much...You are the guy at the end of the fight with the buckets and towels yeah?

go back to your comics.

*puts on ignore

gets off soap-box

No need to. I've learned quite a bit from your posts.

*puts on ignore

Gutted.

No need to. I've learned quite a bit from your posts.

manhandles ftony back on soap box :)

They predicted the flood that is the basis of the inundation myths around the globe, that later were interpreted as the 'Epics of Gilgamesh' which in turn became 'Noah'.

There is presently more and more evidence surfacing to suggest that these 'myths' were true . . . .

Can you point me towards this evidence that supports the flood myth ?

Also can you show me where to find this original flood predication ?

Rudolf Rocker (an east-end Jewish anarchist in the inter-war era) said that "I am an anarchist, not because I believe anarchism to be the final goal, but because there is no such thing." He recognised that as society develops, new social, organisational and cultural forms will develop, and new ways of living and relating must be developed in response. Just as capitalism has developed in different ways over the 300 or so years that it has been the dominant economic system, anarchy would develop likewise

That's kinda' what I was saying right at the start of this thread with "What we have is the result of anarchy."