Marxist ßastard

So we have a uniform criminal code, crime reporting, a police force, police internal affairs, presumably a whole criminal justice system... That's an awful lot of State you're bringing in already. The presence of a criminal justice system (which is a really crucial function for any society, statist or not) is not exclusive to a statist system of government. But it is a tremendous centralization of power, and it imposes a lot of organizational structure. You now have laws – who writes the laws? You have an organized police force – who gets to be a member? You have police internal affairs – how is their authority over the main police force made explicit? You try criminals – how? Do you have a prison? Are the prison guards allowed to just walk out? Personally, I'd say that even just having laws means you have a State, since the laws are imposed (by social contract) on people who didn't agree to them. There is such a thing as a minimal state. Pure anarchy implies rule-of-force. Also, you say "near-absolute" freedom. I'd like for you to elaborate on that – do you mean enforcing the maximum aggregate freedom for all residents?

Okay, I'd like people to be informed coming in here too. So first off I'd like to settle on a clear, one-sentence definition of anarchism. If you don't agree with the one in the OP, say so and I can edit it. If you also have any basic references you'd like added to the OP, I can add those as well. Wolff is seriously lacking. So we have a uniform criminal code, crime reporting, a police force, police internal affairs, presumably a whole criminal justice system... That's an awful lot of State you're bringing in already.

Okay, this thread has been derailed with anarchism a lot lately, and this prior thread is too old to be serviceable. I'll link again to In Defense of Anarchism, a 1970 essay by Robert Paul Wolff, a political philosopher and critic of liberalism (review). But really, it's just too obtuse. Based on what other members said earlier, I'd just define anarchism thus: Top-down, hierarchical organizations like the State ought to be abolished, their power given to the people, who will voluntarily organize themselves from the bottom-up while maintaining near-absolute freedom. And that's bunk. People naturally form hierarchical groups with top-down control, and this behavior is seen among hunter-gatherers, animals, and children at summer camp. Each of us needs an in-group and an out-group, people below us and people above; just as we seek friends, we seek enemies; and we all want to serve some higher goal in life. In anarchy, these needs are unfulfilled except during wartime, where the out-group is the enemy, survival is a sufficient goal, and everyone fights in solidarity. There were two examples of mildly successful wartime anarchies in the previous thread: Spain and Ukraine. Neither survived to see peace. But if they had, they'd have been left with no more statists to fight, no more churches to burn, and no obvious way to move forward. There could've been only three outcomes: Members voluntarily submit to state power in the name of efficiency.The whole society stagnates and falls prey to an outside state.The society tears itself apart looking for bandits, parasites, and tyrants within.And until one of those happened, the normal violence and chaos of war would not have subsided. "Winning the peace" is difficult even for powerful states – how should it be easier for unorganized workers' collectives? Remember that states and other top-down, centralized authorities can house people dedicated entirely to geopolitics, economics, military logistics, and so on – and where its skills are deficient, it can bring in specific experts. The best states consolidate power to a system which is more capable and better informed than any one person, drawing upon the expertise of all its citizens. Federalism can bring together distinct groups of people and force them to compromise and cooperate to their mutual benefit. But in an anarchy, there is only a mass of balkanized, unorganized collectives whose decisions reflect the lowest common denominator of their members. Anarchists have legitimate grievances, but anarchism itself means abandoning the greatest advance humanity has ever made, an advance upon which all others rest. It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

So – a precondition exists, and it's only right that the precondition should exist. You just don't "agree" to be bound by it. ... 'k. Go on and don't pay your taxes, then.

The precondition is implied within the social contract. If you reject the social contract, you may as well go around killing people because "you never agreed not to." So yes, a precondition exists. The only question left if whether that precondition should be there, and it absolutely should – it's only fair to pay back into the fax-funded infrastructure which makes it possible for you to get an income in the first place.

Okay, let me make this as absolutely simple as possible: I give you $10,000. Through cunning investment, you turn it into $18,000 in a year. Am I not entitled to some interest on my $10,000 since I gave you the money in the first place?

It's yours once it gets in your hands? You'd do great as a pickpocket. To be clear: It would be immoral to borrow a friend's car, then use it as a taxi for a day without getting the friend's permission or giving the friend a fair share in the profits. Likewise, it's immoral not to pay taxes – tax-funded infrastructure makes it possible for you to get an income, so you should pay into it what you owe.

Taxation isn't theft if the money wasn't yours in the first place. As it stands I'm sure that (much) less than 50% of your income is due purely to your own labor; the rest wouldn't be possible without tax-funded infrastructure. As I said last year (!), if you want to live off the land in California as a seasonal berry picker, not benefiting from government infrastructure nor funding it, you're free to do that. But for now you must pay into the system which makes your income possible in the first place.

So now not only do people think I'm a Marxist, but they also attribute the actual Marxists' posts to me. Wonderful.

Oh yeah, it's under More search tools. Or you could "enclose" "every" "single" "word" "in" "quotes" like a bad Yelp review. The first Lord of the Rings movie was still new. MEMod was getting started up. The government was just starting to look into this whole "Enron" thing. EDIT: Gas was $1.20/gallon.

Yes, Google has changed a lot in the past ten years. Oddly enough, if you enable verbatim mode, you get 4,120,000 results. So the new algorithms were helping you. Oh, and... Morrowind had not yet been released....But the original X-Box had just been released.US troops would not enter Iraq for 4 more months. The Iraq War would not officially begin for 14 more months.A top-of-the-line computer had a KT266A-based mainboard with a 1.5 GHz Athlon XP, 512 MB of Hyundai PC2100 DDR SDRAM, and a GeForce 3 Ti500. It ran Windows 98, of course.I think this is actually a better game.

Without the quotes, I get 2,670,000 results. With quotes is way too easy. In fact, the googlewhack rules explicitly said no quotes. Ten years ago. For reference: This is not "just" an old meme. If this meme had children, they would be old enough to call it an old meme. When this meme was created, George Bush was President. And he had an 86% approval rating.

I would say a sense of danger. The very best forum games present a real chance of getting banned.

Exactly! And we should vote on whether we want blacks in our neighborhood. It's called democracy, sheeple! Wow, failure. What, are you saying that the government should be able to enforce decisions that most people in a given area don't agree with?

Don't misquote me. I didn't use a font tag.

Exactly! And we should vote on whether we want blacks in our neighborhood. It's called democracy, sheeple!

Yeah, no. Your basic criterion for "gun experience" seems to be gun ownership. Restricting the debate to gun owners isn't like having rapists tried by a jury of rape victims. It's having rapists tried by a jury of other rapists. It's having rapists rewrite the Constitution to create a universal right to rape. If anything, gun owners' opinions ought to be valued far less in this debate.

Fixed that for you.

Okay, perfect. Tell the uncle that whoever his sons were burglarizing could've called 911, and nobody in that situation should've had guns in the first place, but instead his sons had to die because you like to collect killing tools. Be sure to include the bit about guns being just like pool cues. It makes you super sympathetic.

Okay, I think I've identified the problem here. You're living in a fantasy world. You're living in Kleck and Gertz's world, where 25 people turn into 2.5 million. You're living in Aurelius's world, where you can get rid of 31,224 individually hand-counted death certificates by cutting them up into a million pieces. Want to get back to the real world? Find the parents of someone who died from gun violence. It shouldn't be too hard. Call them and explain that their child had to die so you could collect more killing instruments. Tell them guns are just like pool cues.

Hey Syco21, nevermind. I looked up the source of your statistic myself, since you didn't feel the need to bother with it. It turns out the number is derived from a telephone survey conducted by FSU professors Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz in 1993. These two guys called about 5000 people and asked if in the past year they had used a gun to protect people or property. Just 25 people (!) said yes –­ that's a response rate of 0.5% ­– and they extrapolated 2.5 million from that number. Now you probably know what else went wrong here: This was basically just someone calling random people and asking if they had a cool story to tell. Doubtless, Many reported incidents that happened two, five, ten years prior. (This is called "telescoping," and it's a major problem with phone surveys.)Others inserted guns to make for a better story, or because they wished they had used one. Some respondents were gun activists who may have wanted to inflate gun-use statistics.Others inflated the danger they were in: Trespassing becomes burglary, burglary robbery, robbery attempted murder. (Yet still, in 20% of cases the respondent couldn't say the person they threatened, maimed, or killed intended anything more than trespassing or theft.)Still others made up stories entirely. No respondents' stories were rejected because they were intoxicated, delusional, or obviously lying.Respondents reported many more attempted crimes in every category than the best source for that same year, the National Crime Victimization Survey. And if we also extrapolate the number of people shot in these cases, we come out with 200,000 ­– yet emergency rooms only see 100,000 gunshot victims each year from every cause, and the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports for that tear reported only 350 justifiable homicides. On examination, nearly half (!) of the incidents reported to the survey have some obvious inconsistency –­ i.e., they were physically impossible. With only 25 people reporting a positive result, it would've been quite feasible for Kleck and Gertz to have followed up with each person individually to make sure they weren't drunk, crazy, or lying. They could've asked for dates, places, and names. They could've even asked for police reports. Yet they did no such thing. Statisticians give this exact number as a canonical example of a "mystical number" with no basis in fact. In fact, back in 1997 the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management nominated it for an award as the "most outrageous number mentioned in a policy discussion by an elected official or agency head," since it has "no reasonable basis." And now you're not only using that number, but saying that it represents people who have defended themselves in a fatal situation by using a gun –­ even though many of the incidents comprised people deterring a nonviolent burglar by just waving a gun around. Oh, and in spite of 20 years of declining crime rates and declining gun ownership, you're saying that this number –­ which was made up in the first place, and which you've grossly misinterpreted –­ reflects present reality. http://www.thebeerspot.com/forum/Smileys/classic/slow.gif So on the one hand, we have 31,224 real, individual people with names and families, people whose death certificates were individually counted by the CDC, people who were alive one year and died the next due to gun violence. And on the other, we have "2.5 million" fake people, extrapolated from a telephone survey 20 years ago. Again, this is a statistic that was nominated as the "most outrageous number mentioned in a policy discussion by an elected official or agency head." But I guess if you're cynical enough to support rewriting the Constitution, a number's a number.

In 2007 there were 31,224 deaths in the US due to guns, including both homicides and accidents. And now you're telling me that there are 2.5 million attempted homicides every year thwarted by self-defense using a gun. Yeah, right – get a source for that and then get back to me. At least I'm glad that we can agree that there is no legitimate use for a gun other than self-defense.

Is it so necessary to have guns that as a country we should ignore the deaths of 30,000 people every year? That we should continue the current campaign of gun deregulation that has required activist judges to take power away from states and rewrite the Constitution? Are you willing to call up the father or mother of a gun violence victim and explain to them that their child had to die and our Constitution had to be ripped to shreds – why? So you can hunt squirrels? Because you like to collect?

Yeah, and if you divide it by Avogadro's number you get 1.4×10-22. So really, there is no gun violence problem! Stop. These are 85 real, whole, indivisible people with names and families who have died from gun violence within the past 24 hours. You can't make their deaths go away using math.

Okay, I know numbers can be confusing and scary, so let me rephrase that: In the US, there's 1.25 Utøya massacres every. single. day.