But I’ll grant there may be a purely semantic argument that the system itself is immune to corruption, in the same way that a starving person doesn’t have to worry about food poisoning.

Yeah that’s what I was alluding to, hence “technically”. You’re correct that power is inevitable, and your system not prescribing power only limits its ability to moderate that emergent power.

That’s obtuse. Everyone bases everything on their opinion. You develop your opinion with information of the world. You’re likewise basing everything on your opinion. Heliocentrists make better arguments than geocentrists in my opinion too, doesn’t make that opinion wrong. Human reason is just the process of refining our opinions of the world.

I read the theory, I weighed it against the evidence of my experience, I came to conclusions. When theory conflicts with evidence, evidence takes precedence.

Sure, someone temporarily presides over functions, but that position can rotate and not give anyone real power. That’s all been considered and there are solutions. It’s nothing complicated.

Yes, exactly. How is that any different from the existing system where power given is temporary and positions are constantly rotated?

Popular tyrants can happen anywhere. It isn’t an argument against anything other than humanity

Yes, exactly. Any system without robust checks and balances is powerless against tyranny. You’ve got it backwards though, anarchy is by far more susceptible to tyranny because checks and balances are ultimately hierarchical. The Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society have spent decades laying the groundwork for their brand of tyranny, and still Trump doesn’t have the power to do everything he wants because the power we set up for him has rules and limitations, checks and balances.

You’re arguing with me and asking for ridiculous degrees of information, yet you aren’t trying to figure anything out for yourself.

Untrue. I only asked for the most basic information and you didn’t have anything. I’ve spent a great deal of thought over the last few decades trying to figure these things out for myself, aided by the hundreds of schools of political thought. I’m not saying these things and asking these questions because I couldn’t be bothered to think for myself. I say these things precisely because I’ve figured these things out extensively, and have found this particular class of thought to be desperately lacking.

You aren’t so smart you thought of issues 200+ years of incredible thinkers haven’t considered.

And precisely the same applies to critics of anarchist theory as well, have you read them? I’ve read both, and the critics have made better arguments than the proponents for 200+ years.

That’s what rules are for. Robert’s rules of order is a good point of reference for it for meetings, and does not require hierarchy.

That’s what I mean when I say “hierarchy” is a slippery term. Robert’s rules don’t function without a president authorized to adjudicate.

You just want to say “it can’t work” and then ignore anything else.

My experience has been exactly the opposite. You just want to say “it can work” and then ignore anything else. You completely ignored my points about popular tyrants, that was a pretty significant and topical concern to disregard.

And even what you do address, is obtusely vague. “Have rules”, not what those rules are or how you enforce them. “Cooperate and make decisions by consensus”, not how that cooperative structure is organized, how it obstructs exploitation, or how such a functional structure differs substantially from existing “hierarchical” structures.

Nothing ever completely replaces everything.

That’s kind of my point. Anarchy is more an idealistic aspiration than a practical system. We’ll get to anarcho-communism eventually, it’s practically a certainty, but that’s probably a century or two in the future. We need a lot of fundamental cultural and material shifts before the average individual will embrace the concepts, and there aren’t any shortcuts in geopolitics.

Have you ever actually implemented a system that replaces an existing one?

A government? No.

I didn’t say a government, that was not the question I asked: a club function, a group project, a large event, a project team; any coordination of people for the purpose of performing some task or making some decision. The basic principles are similar to a government, though difficulties multiply with scale. But the difficulties intrinsic to organizing humans are present in some form at every scale. If you’ve ever organized humans, you’ll understand the difficulties I’m referring to. If you haven’t, this topic might be beyond your expertise.

So very frequently, the replacement is ambitious and idealistic, but it’s not until implementation that the flaws become apparent.

Which is why you need to build it.

Again, the hand-waving. “The answer is to just give it a shot!” That completely ignores the fact that politics is inherently social and emotional. A poorly implemented experiment will sour the public on the concept, and ultimately do more harm than good.

Any political strategy without an eye for optics and effective persuasion is useless. Action for action’s sake is literally one of Eco’s features of fascism. We didn’t need to fall for that trap. We are an experiment, we need a carefully constructed, detailed, tested plan to generate buy-in. Politics without buy-in is nothing but theory.

‘Jefferson went further, proposing that the nation adopt an entirely new charter every two decades. A constitution “naturally expires at the end of 19 years,” he wrote to James Madison in 1789. “If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.”’

A new charter, a new direction for the system, a new iteration of the system with revised mandates. I don’t think he would have anticipated total rejection of the basic model.

The implementation is probably the thing that’s debated most. The thing about the left is they mostly all agree on what they want, but they don’t agree on how. Some want a revolution, because they think that’ll create a better foundation. Some want gradual change to existing systems. Etc. You have an idea in your head that you want to be true, and you assume it must be true, but you don’t actually want to find any knowledge to (dis)prove it.

I agree that this is the general condition of the left, and a tad ironic for you to say. I’ve explored most of the clades of political theory, particularly on the left. I’ve read a lot, and agreed with a lot, but I have too much experience organizing people to accept the rose-colored glasses endemic to anarchist theory. Again, maybe in a century or two, but there’s too much intermediate growth as a species necessary to actually operate that way.

It just doesn’t offer much of substance which isn’t addressed more thoroughly elsewhere. Even the central concept of “hierarchy” is difficult to pin down. I’ve heard definitions so liberal that modern western democracies technically count as anarchic since representatives are voted in, and definitions so conservative that they couldn’t even convene a public works task force.

And that’s really the central point. With every logistical difficulty, anarchism either hand-waves “The people will agree cooperatively”, or introduces a provisional acceptable hierarchy that looks an awful lot like existing structures at scale. It’s just not a strong foundation at this stage of human civilization.

Even impoverished Americans have a relatively high standard of living, globally speaking. People are struggling, but they generally have a roof over their heads and don’t have to eat their pets. We’re not where we should be by any measure, but we’re also nowhere near the levels of desperation that push people to armed revolt.

Have you heard of Community Policing before?

I have. In actual implementation, it’s still hierarchical, it just encourages outreach and communication between law enforcement and the communities they serve.

Yes, not everyone can be involved with everything all the time. The key is accountability and cooperation. Our current democracies are largely missing both of these. In an ideal world, sure they’re accountable to voters, but power in that is unfairly controlled by the owner class.

We already have accountability and cooperation through democratic elections. If you think that’s insufficient, that’s a valid critique, but not in itself a replacement. That’s the sticking point, developing a replacement that doesn’t fall to the same problems of the current system.

You said you’re a systems person. Have you ever actually implemented a system that replaces an existing one? So very frequently, the replacement is ambitious and idealistic, but it’s not until implementation that the flaws become apparent. Building a stable system with effective checks and balances is much more difficult than anarchist literature suggests. And even if you do make a system that starts off stable, it’s only a matter of time before people figure out a way to exploit the system.

You can have a system that’s democratic, responsive, or just. But you can’t have all three, they are functionally at odds with one another. You can design a system that appears to be all three, but implementation will expose the design flaws sooner or later.

They thought we’d have torn it apart and built something better by now

I doubt it. I believe they expected we’d change the system they built, and I agree that we should, but the foundation is pretty difficult to improve upon. Not saying it’s perfect, but pragmatically it’s fairly practical. If anything, it suffers mostly from the charges we’ve made to it; capping the House and Citizens United have been particularly damaging changes.

It does not hand wave it away. You hand wave away the solutions and just say “oh, they haven’t actually considered it.”

I respectfully disagree. Sure, solutions are considered, but not really the implementation of those solutions, which is my contention. The solutions exist, but they’re not well developed. Again, they either assume greed and malice will spontaneously disappear, or kick the can down the road under the banner of “cooperation”.

I am not ignorant of the solutions, I’ve read a great deal of theory. I just didn’t find them compelling. I have made a sincere attempt, I am not confused. I just have too much experience implementing human systems to be convinced by the solutions provided.

Eh, bread and circuses. People are still relatively comfortable and complacent.

I’m not even specifically talking about systems of governance, just systems of decision and production.

It’s about creating systems that can solve these problems, but systems that listen to everyone’s voices.

How, tho? Once we get into the nitty gritty of implementation, how do you build that system? How do you defend that system from roving hooligans? From popular tyrants? When the people agree on basic laws, how are they enforced? Are they just supposed to meet in the town square to hunt down thieves and killers?

This is what I’m talking about. You either have to assume that in an anarchist utopia, greed and malice will somehow spontaneously disappear from all humanity, or you have to have to devise a way to handle that.

Logistically, getting the whole town together to make every decision just doesn’t work. There are too many little fiddly conflicts for total democracy, no one would have time to do any of the important stuff, they’d be in councils all day. So we assign representatives (legislators, judges, police, etc) with cumulative referred power to enforce the democratic will of the people. Follow that process a few steps and you wind up right at a modern liberal democracy.

The structures we have in place are flawed, but not by lack of trying. The founding fathers seemed to have made a sincere attempt at developing

systems that can solve these problems, but systems that listen to everyone’s voices. Yes, there will be disagreement on some things, but the solution with the most agreement will be enacted.

It turns out that getting parasocial apex predators to coexist peacefully is actually pretty difficult, and every system has to make compromises. I don’t see anarchism as a mature system that has taken these difficulties seriously. It hand-waves the difficult parts with “We’ll figure it out through cooperation”, without serious consideration given to how that cooperation manifests in implementation.

Well, technically it is immune to corruption. It isn’t immune to people being terrible and exploitative, but that’s technically not corruption. To be corrupt, you’d have to be given legitimate power, and then misuse it. The popular asshole created their power from scratch.

A system without legitimized power isn’t immune to bad people creating power, but it is technically immune to corruption since there’s nothing to corrupt.

I didn’t find anarchic rhetoric to be very compelling because it seems like endless layers of “Actually,”, not unlike libertarianism. We wind up reinventing the thing discarded.

I’m a systems guy. When I have conversations with politically idealistic individuals, I ask them questions about their proposed system. Every anarchist I talk to at length about infrastructure and industry either refuses to imagine that people wouldn’t spontaneously cooperate out of the goodness of their hearts, or winds up reinventing hierarchies. But different hierarchies, which aren’t the same things for some reason.

Disco Elysium was so stress free for me, I didn’t really think the day counter did anything.

It didn’t bother me at all, because I felt like I did about everything I could every day.

He conceded the Democratic nomination. He’s running in the general as an independent.

Who is making those new brown clouds? Who is making those clouds these days?

They rest in the boxes they came in.

Yeah. It got worse slower than the alternative, which is my point. If you’re losing primaries, you don’t have much of an active base. Primaries validate active bases.

Both. Vote your heart in the primary, head in the general. Whatever BS they put out is going to be better than the alternative, but if everyone shows up to primaries it might be actually decent.

This isn’t even time-specific advice. Strong primaries, everywhere, for everything, all the time should be the norm.

Me too

I think you might be ascribing more popularity and influence to lemmings than is justified. I certainly didn’t nominate Biden in 2020, but I voted for him because the alternative was worse.

Saying Biden was worse than Trump on Gaza is batshit. One of the very first things Trump did after being sworn in was release all the holds Biden placed on arms to Israel. Those were actual holds, objectively not bullshit. Trump was immediately objectively worse. As was predicted. One side told pro-Palestine protesters to wait their turn to talk, the other revoked their degrees and arrested them. Sure, both sides are bad, but one side is unquestionably worse, and no other candidate stood a chance of winning so their positions are entirely irrelevant.

Clever how you conveniently ignored the second part of “3rd party and protest non-voting”. The 3rd party voters have a share of the blame, but most of it falls on the abstainers. Those that showed up to hold their nose and vote Biden over Trump, but didn’t do the same for Harris. But really, that blame actually falls on the people that loudly disparaged the Democrats and declared voting for them to be complicit in genocide.

It’s time for the people to call the establishment to account, but it’s also time for the people to reject fascism and that’s a higher priority. I want the Democrats to be a right wing party; specifically, I want them to be the right wing party. Destroying the far-right is more urgent than building the far-left.

Not voting is stupid. Voting 3rd party right now is stupid. Vote lesser evil and encourage everyone to view less evil. If you want to back a leftist, have them infiltrate one of the parties so they can be part of the binary choice. Mamdani is the poster child of effective progressivism: get experience organizing, run for minor local office, run for major local office. Climb the ladder, don’t just jump onto the presidential ballot with zero government experience.

The people who backed Cuomo are better than the ones who back MAGA. If you have RCV, go ahead and vote your conscience. Everyone else needs to realize that for now it’s a binary choice, and that “everyone else” is the vast majority.

Lemmy is already radicalized. Save your criticisms for the general population.