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RE: Trump's Immigrant Agenda

in FreeSpeech5 days ago

Undermining the idea of governmental legitimacy is the way we address the rest. Government relies entirely on public acceptance of this veneer of legitimacy.

Your questions about COVID are avoiding the root question, but if you must know, I never got the jab, and I worked for a small enough organization in a suitably less-authoritarian area that there were no mandates and no firings, but I had already taken precautions if that were to occur. Stored food, tools, departure plans, etc.

The 'Deep State' is the inevitable consequence of a territorial monopoly in violence which must maintain an illusion of legitimacy to secure public acceptance. Even before Woodrow Wilson really kicked off American technocracy, there were insiders and influencers in the shadows. Power draws the corrupt like moths to a flame. Representative democracy is a myth, and constitutional republics are papier-mache walls against overreach.

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My question about the plandemic just made clear that there is no unanimity between people within a society. Btw, thanks for giving me an answer.
I did not talk about democracy but about government (or governance). Since large numbers of settled people must govern to keep things in order. Can you agree on the premise, that things do not sort themselves out just so?

I asked you about a different concept, about range and radius, for example. So far, the answer I perceive is that you are saying "everyone on his own" (thinking that you have a gun and a place to retreat when shit hits the fan). Now, while that may be a concept for some, it's a non option for others.

In a group of people in every day life you are always faced with those, who cannot defend themselves and with others who take advantage of that.
Do you agree that to govern such reality means that you organize police, courts and other institutions?
In oder to do that, do you agree that you need people who act as such and who in turn, need to be corrected and checked upon? You need an organization?

"Everyone on their own”, I see as a concept of survival, not a concept of living and governing together.

Obviously you and I are not in favor of how power is currently exercised, but as far as I can tell, this form of abuse of power needs to be met on an equal footing. Those are big pockets, currently the only means to get to the places of power and influence them. Since it is reasonable to assume that you don't have a pocket in which you keep billions of cash, at least I don't, the only chance is to change the system to one that has bugs only and is not the very function.
Unless, one favors that the powerful need to be destroyed and murdered through violence (instead of using milder means), for which you'd need the command over the military or organize an army with equal forces - which is not what I would call a success. Or, you favor a reset, which is even more drastic (total destruction).

This view - to change the system from feature to bug - needs all the support it can get. But when people - amongst themselves and outwards through media and social media - complain and whine all day long, want the cake and eat it, too, cannot wait, change daily their minds, formulate never ending demands etc., those who might be willing to reduce the system to some bugs, might shrug off the populace voices and continue to do what is the most convenient.

Corruption is by no means a characteristic of the powerful. It is found at the bottom to the same extent as it is found at the top. As long as a population is unable to behave within the smallest natural unit - the family - according to rules that benefit it instead of disturbing it, destroying it, it cannot absolve itself of mistakes such as envy, greed and corruption, etc. If a populace wants a savior instead of wanting to mind their business, this society might fail in its undertaking to subvert the abuse of power.

We are always in the middle of a story and the outcomes are not certain.

First, you seem to conflate two distinct ideas. Government is a group of people who claim a territorial monopoly in violence, and this is consistent with even maonstream political science definitions. I would define governance as voluntary, consensual agreements between people to organize cooperation, economic exchange, and dispute resolution. The latter does not require the former. In fact, I argue that society operates through a web of decentralized organizing forces of interwoven consenting structures today, not because of government, but in spite of it.

Second, you persist in mischaracterizing my rejection of government as rejection of society. Individualism in its rejection of government coercion is not rejection of society any more than abolitionists rejecting chattel slavery were rejecting economic production. Your range and radius concept is completely irrelevant. To make another analogy, it's like asking how large a church parish should be. We have overlapping religions, denominations, and congregations interspersed with nonbelievers now in spite of the pervasive belief in the need for a single dominant religion even in Europe a couple centuries ago. If you can see why England does not need to enforce Anglicanism or Spain does not need to enforce Catholicism for society to function, then you can perhaps also see how that applies to other aspects of society, too.

You mention police and courts as essential, but you are ignoring the rampant corruption and abuse in government monopolization of these services now, the already widespread use of alternatives today, and the possibilities we could have. I can direct you to theorists and arguments in more detail if you like. As it stands, your position is no different from, "but without slavery, who would pick the cotton?"

Youu assume we need to resist government on their terms with money and power. Again, my tactic is to undermine it. That means discussing ideas with statists such as yourself in an effort to persuade you peacefully in contrast to the political method of coercion, and build alternatives to government systems. Cryptocurrency is one example of the latter now that governments have monopolized money. We overcome the state by building better options, not by seizing control of the established order. We need abolition of slavery, not kinder slavemasters.

Stating complaints and decribing problems with the systems around us is not "whining." That's a lazy cop-out to avoid the problem instead of discussing it. The Internet today is the equivalent of broadsheets and pamphlets 200+ years ago when people were discussing the problems of monarchy and empire. Would you have been a royalist or a liberal then? Would you have accused people of whining and rejecting society if they dared question the divine right of kings?

Corruption is absolutely characteristic of power. Lord Acton's famous quote states, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority." Many other thinkers have echoed the same sentiment as well, and their reasons for reaching that conclusion are based on simple observation and historical analysis alike. Biblically, we are told David, the "man after God's own heart," even had a man killed so he could take that man's wife as his own purely because he could. We also have numerous psychological studies on the nature of authoroty and its destructive effects. The Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment are the most famous, but not the only examples.

When I switch from my phone to my computer, I can provide links to other sources and additional evidence if you would like. I know my conclusions fall outside the mainstream, but I arrived at them only after wrestling with a lot of preconceptions.

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