Soooo... that's a no on the anarchy thing, then?

Alright, I'll just go find something less intellectually stimulating to do for the rest of the night.

You guys have fun arguing over who's the bigger asshole. Hint!It's me.

Re: Anarchy

Wouldn't anarcho-capitalist notions, put into practice on a large scale, be equally (if not more so) short lived? I mean, I can't imagine the "anarchy" part helping in any way to resist the slide closer and closer to monopolies.

No one's forcing you to be an asshole back at him, you're choosing to.

Like, right now if I was Nightshine I'd say "hmm, I should tone down the single-line dick posts and check with myself if I'm just about to post in a thread only to say whatever people are talking about sucks" and if I was nearly everyone else I'd say "so okay this dude's a real dick but whelp, I don't have to deal with him, here's my Ignore list" or "that seems worthy of a post report, let's go for it." You can't like everyone who visits the same public places you do.

Golden Rule
 

No, but I don't see why I should necessarily be expected to treat them with any more respect than they show others. You may think earning respect is bullshit, but even if it were, I definitely think you can earn disrespect.

The problem with anarchy is that there's a whole bunch of different types, all labelled "anarchy". The one way which has been most compelling to me and seems to be the norm among the more serious discussions of anarchy and the one that we use in communist circles as communism should in theory eventually lead to anarchism (according to some theorists anyway- I'm a little dicey on this point myself).
The interesting thing is that it's pretty much the exact opposite of what you think of when you think of anarchy- ie riots and looting and things.
The thing about anarchy is that it is best defined as "a lack of coercive force" but rule by violence, by strength is pretty much exactly "coercive force". The way anarchy should work is that everyone is their own individual unit. If you choose you can join together, work together, make systems of law because by combining your units you can achieve more than you could apart and the collective good will increase.
The key is that you have the same amount of power as everyone else in the system and there is nothing compelling you to work with the others- unlike currentely where you have to exist in a country and follow its rules and there are differing degrees of power in the populace.
That's the basic idea anyway. You can have structures and rules and laws in place but they are fluctional and optional. The society works in collective for its own good and every person has an exactly equal amount of power.
You are free to develop your own morality, your own rules, your own beliefs.

See that's my problem, is that the 'anarchy' would be short lived in all but name, as the corporations founded to handle things like security quickly take any and all power they want and take the place of government, as that any time you have capitalism you have competition and therefore have people/entities trying to do better than each other. This inevitably leads to seeking more power.

It's why anarcho-capitalism has always sat poorly with me.

That's what i was getting at.

I think it sits poorly with me for additional reasons, though.

Once you've created a system of law is it really anarchy and free of coercive force?

I mean if you make a law that people can't kill, for instance, and someone kills somebody, what do you do about it? If you use force to stop him or remove him from the community you are using coercive force. If you don't use coercive force what's to stop him?

Isn't this more mobocracy than true anarchy?

Edit for Arch who was nice enough to keep this from being a double post when I accidentally hit reply instead of cutting it to paste into my last post:

Yeah, I don't like the idea of corporations having that much power for a whole SLEW of reasons. Like I said, I hate the idea fervently, but discussing the more communist anarchistic ideals is pretty interesting to me.

I guess you could hope that people would start seeing the corporation as "the man" and actively resisting. I don't think that idea holds much water though.

Really, it seems like all forms of anarchy suffer from one flaw: Someone's going to be looking for power. You'd need something to prevent that, but that would require some organization, which is counter to the point of anarchy. I've never seen anyone argue for a version that didn't contain this. It's...hard to imagine one, honestly.

EDIT: Ninja'd twice. Ah well.

See that's why I like discussing it, MoM.

I'm in your boat on that one, but I like to hear how they think to get around it and what not, and they HAVE created anarchistic communes (and communist ones, for that matter), so there are ways around it, at least on the small scale and in the short term. As such it's a fun thinking exercise.

Also, a lot of people will say that a slow change in society could, potentially, train people to STOP constantly going after power and allow an anarchistic utopia to exist. I'm not sure if I agree with them, but it's a pretty nice thought--that humans aren't so terrible that we can never do it, our society just isn't ready quite yet.