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- cross-posted to:
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cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/[email protected]/p/1617851/imagine-that-would-be-horrible
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It’s interesting to think about how many millions of deaths the people here are personally responsible for. It’s definitely above a dozen. The Clintons alone killed two to three million, not to mention the reintroduction of slave markets in Libya.
Dubya and his dad, though… Considering the role Bush Snr and his generation of evil bastards played in the Iran-Iraq war and many South American wars… They probably have fifteen million sewn up between them.
You don’t understand! There must always be pedophile warlords, it’s a fundamental law of reality! Do you want to have no say in which pedophile warlord heads the empire? Really?
I literally had someone arguing at me the other day. That without unmanageable pedophile bullies with a monopoly on violence. Who would keep the smaller more managable bullies without a monopoly in line.
What if we didn’t give the pedophile warlords free guns? That’s terrorist talk.
As long as positions of power exist bad people will use them to hurt others. We want to escape the bloody cage of history.
How? As long as humans can pick up a rock and threaten other humans, positions of power will exist. You can eliminate official positions of power, but that just removes checks on power.
Would you rather have a billion people with the ability to throw rocks or one person collect all the rocks into an asteroid and chuck it at the earth? Power is only an issue concentrated. Distributed it is the solution.
Just because you don’t officially have concentrated power, that doesn’t stop ambitious sociopaths from concentrating it themselves. Remember that humanity started off without governments, every oppressive system we have emerged from that stateless state.
The solution doesn’t lie at either extreme. The ideal would be for power to be distributed as thinly and equally as possible, while also being in a form that prevents individuals from concentrating their own power.
Personally - and a lot of other anarchists do as well - I make a distinction between a government and a state. A government is any kind of collective organized decision-making, while a state is something more specific; an organization that enforces a hierarchy on a population without their consent by maintaining a monopoly on violence. In effect a state is an extreme concentration of power that both coerces and requires the participation of an entire population.
The anarchy that I envision isn’t simply the abolition of the state, but its replacement with a non-hierarchical, horizontal form of government, which would also require - but not coerce - the participation of an entire population. There are many forms such a system can take, and there are some examples in today’s world that show a glimpse of how such a system could look, like the autonomous region of north and east Syria (AANES or Rojava) which is practicing what they call Democratic Confederalism, or the Zapatistas in Chiapas Mexico with their federated local autonomous governments. There are also less totalizing organizations that practice horizontal decision-making and which could perform the various functions of government, and occasionally do in situations where the state is slow or fails to respond such as natural disasters or when a community is a victim of violence perpetrated by a state where no other state intervenes. Organized decentralized power is capable of countering, disbanding, and even preventing the concentration of centralized power.
I agree, but at the end of the day every human being has the power of coercion through violence. There will always be individuals who will seek to do violence, to break the “laws” in whatever form your collective makes them: assault, murder, rape. There must be power to coerce violent individuals away from violence.
Whatever organization you devise, run a thought experiment to test it: imagine a clever, charismatic, amoral sociopath, hungry for power and willing to do anything to achieve it. If no position of power exists to seize, they will create one for themselves. They’ll blackmail people, threaten them, even kill them. They’ll surround themselves with thugs to assault and threaten people. They’ll create a criminal empire. How does your system prevent such tyrants?
It’s not enough to have a government which itself isn’t oppressive, it must be able to prevent ambitious sociopaths from becoming oppressors. Otherwise you’re just in a lull between tyrants. Violence can never be eliminated, ultimately it must be restrained by the threatening presence of superior violence. Ideally the presence alone is sufficient deterrent, but without any deterrent you’re constantly at risk of ambitious sociopaths
What checks?
Checks on power work only work by the coercion of other power. Given that power and coercion are thus unavoidable threats it’s reasonable to diffuse power as widely as possible so that no one person or organization gains a monopoly on it. The threat of abuse of power remains but the threat of overwhelming power and overwhelming abuse are substantially lessened when all work collectively to ensure than none can gain it.
Any system that depends on one person or organization wielding a large amount of power to do good is immediately subverted as soon as they choose evil, and given all that power the benefits they stand to gain from being evil are very tempting.
Which is why a highly distributed system with built-in checks and balances is best.
No power system means no preventing individuals from seizing unofficial power.
Don’t get me wrong, ideologically I’m anarchistic. But we can’t pretend that no official coercion ensures no actual coercion.
This video explains it better than i could.
Yeeepppp…it’s the paradox.
I believe anarchism in the most ideal state (no pun intended) can only be achieved on a global scale if humanity as a whole share the same value and culture; developing both mutual understanding and trust that everyone trust each other not to attack one another. But that can’t be achieved in the current global human culture where tribalism still exist, because it is a residue of evolution, and majority of humans don’t realise they are slaves to it.
Perhaps after the global population experiences The Bad Times™ in this century, while the ecosystem literally melts around us, and we are all fairly uniformly traumatized by it, it will be the catalyzing event for a transition to a peaceful world for the 13 people left alive.
Now that’s an old picture, can someone explain why Hillary Clinton is on this I can understand why Dick Cheney is.
Eric holder could have been a few other guys
Clinton was Secretary of State?
Ah, that makes sense, I was very young when she would have been Secretary of State
Sure but very notably not a warlord in that position. There’s so many better options.
The Secretary of State is the ‘outside’ representative of the US. It heads the diplomatic arm of the state and is an architect of their authority globally. The role holds considerable sway over their military and quasi-military positioning. Next to that she was also a senator and on the ‘armed forces committee’ before that role. She supported the “Afghanistan surge” of the military, and NATO in Libya in 2011. She is recognised as being a war hawk which means favoring military intervention. She is a warlord but not in the “beret and uniform” kind.
very notably not a warlord
Are you talking about the Hillary Clinton of THIS reality? Hillary Rodham “we came, we saw, he died” Clinton?
Warlord, noun: a military commander who exercises absolute political, social, and economic control over a region.
Personally I’d call her a moderately inept neoliberal bureaucrat who’s never ever broken a nail in anger much less commanded troops but hey maybe you think she’s more impressive.
At least Bubba was commander in chief, jeez.
maybe you think she’s more impressive.
In what way is “being a warlord” impressive??
There’s very little difference between a warlord and a pencil pusher, if the right pencil is being pushed. The average democratic politician might as well be screaming “Blood for the blood god and skulls for the skull throne!” in terms of the actual effects of their policies. The only difference is aesthetics and demeanor. You don’t get to act like you’re not a bloodthirsty psychopath just because you’ve beurocratized the orphan-crushing machine to the point that all you have to do to crush orphans is to sign a piece of paper.
The average democratic politician might as well be screaming “Blood for the blood god and skulls for the skull throne!” in terms of the actual effects of their policies.
And it would frankly be less detestable if they were that honest about it, in stead of hiding their blood thirst behind a veneer of civility so thick they make it the bulk of their public fucking persona!
Yes and no. We have a version of Democrats that do go around literally screaming about skulls for the skull throne, they’re called Republicans and they’re just as detestable.
Hilary, the butcher of Libia, Clinton isn’t a warlord?
No, also lmao that you think she’s even capable of the job.
