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So you know the world sucks...

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The_Walrus
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14 Apr 2014, 6:51 am

AspergianMutantt wrote:
When we see a starving 3rd world country, do we not feel heart and send aid?

Eventually most all labor work will be taken over by machines, Soon we will have quantum computers that will be able to out think us and so put many others out of work in other fields too. And then comes robotics, sure it sounds nice to let them do all your work for you and you get paid for it, but thats unrealistic since any corporation could then just buy their own. this would put even more people out of work.

You are forgetting one crucial thing: energy.

We're running short on energy as it is. If we replaced everybody with a robot and a quantum computer, we'd need a load more energy. This would require us to build even more nuclear power stations than the ones we need to replace fossil fuel ones and electrify transport. That is a significant challenge.



AspergianMutantt
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14 Apr 2014, 8:48 am

Are you sure about that my young friend? perhaps you should pay more attention to what research is going on.


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14 Apr 2014, 7:21 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
But saying "it's a process" solves no practical problems of implementation. Even further, societies aren't so flexible that we can continually implement trial and error to major questions. You know how it's easy to order what you want on a pizza for 1 person, rather difficult to get agreement between 3 people, well imagine millions of people and trying to get agreement between the entire mess? It's not easy, and truth be told, maybe not even doable. I realize that this issue can be complicated, but we're dealing with a completely untested ideology against a system that actually works to some extent, and in a world where nobody really understands things well enough to just say "Ok, we're implementing THIS social system" at one day and expect it to work, and where to the extent we know how the world works, there is cause to be cynical and skeptical.

People would only vote on the things that affect them. If there is large scale policy to be made each community can pick a delegate. Each delegate can get pulled down by his or her community if they don't do their job. People use consensus all the time. People do it when they get together with friends. We debate, but that's a good thing. Conflict isn't always bad.
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That these people wouldn't need economic growth/improvement? No, that seems pretty basic that their economic situation is bad and that they need growth/improvement. Even further, in a decentrally planned economy, it seems the problems of selling one's wares would be even worse. If no central committee is advocating for you, or organizing the conditions of your payment on your behalf, then it stands on you to sell yourself, politically or economically, or to starve, it would seem like. I mean, I realize that these issues can be complicated, but I'm not sure that we're talking about real solutions right now, or that reinventing an entire political/social/economic/legal system is a real option.

Well why is this guy selling? We are no longer looking at a market economy.

You can't sell something unless people are willing to buy it. He would be better off just giving the stuff away for free, and he would receive goods and services from the community. There are forms of anarchism that have wage systems, but that's not the type I'm advocating. I want to get away from that.
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Bureaucracy is terrible AND essential. Every large system has bureaucracy, both corporate and governmental, and the role of this is to standardize procedures and thus increase the efficiency and/or stability and/or political acceptability of these processes. To say something like "bureaucracy is terrible" suggests a failure to reason through bureaucracy as a social structure and to appreciate that it was incorporated into society for reasons.

People can delegate a regulatory committee if they want to, and you are no longer looking at a bureaucracy because power is flowing upwards.
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Would it matter how many councils? No matter how it plays out, there is going to be politics involved there. Either the politics of one council per task, or the politics of bypassing the inevitable deadlocks of a multi-council system for each task.

Each council may or may not be political. The ones that would wouldn't have any resemblance to what people associate with the word political today.
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I'm not sure that people are such stooges that we should consider them manipulated by advertisements and unable to make their own choices, and even if THEY ARE so easily manipulated, then I'm not sure we could trust them to run their lives in any sort of democratic way either. If the human mind is this weak, then this does give us reason to doubt a democratic pressure for any process and/or placing an emphasis on greater empowerment to the people.

I think the mind was good enough from the start, and the companies tainted it. We need radical education, and rehabilitation through solidarity.
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Markets are democratically complex. They weight certain people more than others. They involve feedback processes between buyers and sellers. As strange as it seems, markets are somehow *more* democratic than democracy in that the responses are more direct, while still openly being elitist and crass in many ways.

Government conception of democracy (representative democracy); is far removed from what I advocate as democracy.
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You mean because anarchists are literally quite powerless at this point in time???? I mean, comparing the actually existing with the nonexistent is hardly a fair comparison in this matter.

US government alone has killed millions of people post-WWII. Anarchists do not like to use deadly force. Violence is authoritarian. Most of us only want to fight in self defence. If we are going take a facility we may occupy it, and if someone tries to evict us, we may react in self defence.