Political Atheism

paximperium said:
So you are not able to justify your claim? Fair enough.
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Wasn't my claim.

Yes. That measure is objective but how we weigh each measure itself is relative and changes with each society. It is for this reason that memes are so important.

Actually it is completely possible to quantify the benefit and harm to each employee, city, state etc. with each decision. It is the measure of how we weigh these benefits or harm that is completely subjective.
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That's exactly my point, you may be able to measure something, but without an objective standard for comparison the measurement is meaningless. I have two sticks, one of them is 3 long and the other 5. You can't know which one is longer without knowing the units each was measured in. Utilitarianism can get you the number, but not the unit.
 
adamruth said:
Exactly. Of all of the competing factions wanting to make the rules, it's the one with the most might that end up making the rules.
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If that one faction represents the majority of the population, then yes. I wouldn't use the word "might" though, I'd use "support". I know it doesn't sound as fascist, but it's more accurate.
 
phantomb said:
If that one faction represents the majority of the population, then yes. I wouldn't use the word "might" though, I'd use "support". I know it doesn't sound as fascist, but it's more accurate.
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It sounds less fascist, but more Orwellian.
 
adamruth said:
It sounds less fascist, but more Orwellian.
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No, not really. There's nothing Orwellian about a group of people getting together and deciding on what they think people should and should not be able to do if they choose to come and live among them.
 
phantomb said:
No, not really. There's nothing Orwellian about a group of people getting together and deciding on what they think people should and should not be able to do if they choose to come and live among them.
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Calling it support instead of might sounds Orwellian, like an example of newspeak.
 
adamruth said:
Violent monopolistic agreement.
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Indeed :)

By the way, I disagree with your proposition that all current governments are violent and monopolistic. This time last year I might have described the Australian government in those terms (unlikely, but possible...) but after the election our government is more hands-off than even our Liberal Party (our equivalent of the American Republicans - don't ask!) was when they were in power.

To sum up. A certain amount of government is necessary to ensure a smooth-running society that is of benefit to a majority of its citizens.
 
arthwollipot said:
By the way, I disagree with your proposition that all current governments are violent and monopolistic. This time last year I might have described the Australian government in those terms (unlikely, but possible...) but after the election our government is more hands-off than even our Liberal Party (our equivalent of the American Republicans - don't ask!) was when they were in power.

To sum up. A certain amount of government is necessary to ensure a smooth-running society that is of benefit to a majority of its citizens.
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I think it may be more accurate to say that a smooth running society requires the institutions provided by the government. Government is merely a delivery mechanism for those institutions. What's at issue is whether government is the best or only way to deliver them. Only the truly insane anarchists (more insane than I, if you can believe that) think that those institutions aren't necessary. I think that's the cause of most confusion about anarchy, even for anarchists institutions matter.

The way a government provides those institutions differs from the market in that the government creates them as monopolies and then forces everyone to deal exclusively with their monopoly. There's not much doubt that monopolies tend to have some very negative effects, not the least of which are higher costs and lower quality. Governments try various measures to minimise these down sides, with varying results.

Statists believe either that the service can only be provided as a monopoly or that the government provides other benefits (such as being more egalitarian) that make the monopoly downsides necessary evils. Anarchists believe either that the services would work better outside of a monopoly, or that the negative effects of the government's enforcement outweigh any other down sides.

This is why I think that all current governments are violent and monopolistic. There aren't any that don't maintain a monopoly over several institutions, and those monopolies are in all cases maintained by threats of imprisonment (which is inherently violent). Governments such as Australia don't often need to make good on their threats, which is a good thing, but they occasionally do. For most, the level of threats and violence is tolerable, but that's just because they aren't anarchists yet :D
 
arthwollipot said:
Would you outsource law enforcement?
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I outsource it now.

But I don't think that's exactly what you're asking. I assume you're asking if I think that law enforcement should be in the "private" sector. I guess so, since I think that there should only be a private sector.

Really, though, there already is only a private sector. The public sector is the name that's been given to the property that is owned by the government. It's just that modern democracies happen to pretty good at picking administrators who willingly turn over ownership peacefully (for the most part).

So, to take the long way round to answer your question: I would support whatever works. It would be up to the organisation that most closely resembles a government to choose to take on the law enforcement role, or leave it up to the market within its jurisdiction. I can't say which would work best.

There could even be overlapping jurisdictions each with their own law enforcement. That may seem impossible to us, but a lot of things we take for granted today would seem like unworkable messes if explained to someone who hasn't seen them work.
 
Well, given that we've got a number of societies on the planet right now, some of them democratic and some of them non-democratic, which do you think works best?
 
arthwollipot said:
Well, given that we've got a number of societies on the planet right now, some of them democratic and some of them non-democratic, which do you think works best?
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The democratic ones, without a doubt. Democracy does a reasonable job of preserving freedom, compared to other forms of government. The main reason (in my opinion) being that it slows corruption down by flattening the power base. But looking over history of democracy in Rome and Athens seems to show a tendency for power to slowly centralise. It would seem that it's this centralisation, all for seemingly rational reasons, that eventually brings democracy down. Looking at recent history in America and Australia (my two homes) shows, to me anyway, the same centralisation.

All that said, I actually like democracy very much. It's *electoral* democracy that I don't like. Elections are a very ham-fisted way to measure the will of people, and the nature of elections drives voters *away* and not towards rationality. I look to the market, and voting with feet and money, as the best form of democracy.
 
Voting with money isn't hamfisted, but voting through an electoral college is?

You're just choosing who gets the base of power... and those supported by money have a tendency to help those that make money, which takes the power entirely from those that don't have an economic foundation.

It already creates, from its very onset, a significant power gap, that will only get wider.

I find it curious why people want to take us back to the 1800's, when businesses had almost all the power, and left their mark in history.
 
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What we need here is a detailed definition of anarchist, atheist, conspiracy theory, NWO theory, Fundamentalist Christian, Christian Apologist, Penn's libertarian philosophy, and last but certainly not the least--reality. Ummm, otherwise the thread might gradually deteriorate into issues of semantics.
 
As if there's something wrong with that? :D

Anyway, we don't have a true democracy. Neither in the US or in Australia, or in fact in any modern democracy. What we have is an elected oligarchy. The people don't make the decisions. The people choose who will make the decisions.

As Winston Churchill said: "Democracy is the worst form of government - except for all those others that have been tried from time to time."
 
arthwollipot said:
As if there's something wrong with that? :D

Anyway, we don't have a true democracy. Neither in the US or in Australia, or in fact in any modern democracy. What we have is an elected oligarchy. The people don't make the decisions. The people choose who will make the decisions.

As Winston Churchill said: "Democracy is the worst form of government - except for all those others that have been tried from time to time."
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Not strictly true, as certain decisions are made through the popular vote as well.

It's a mix of oligarchy, dictatorship, and democracy (popular voting). The idea was to balance the power between the three parties, and not give any one of them too much power. Too much power to a single person is a dictatorship. Too much power to a group of people is an oligarchy. Too much power to the masses is mob rule.

What we have are three different official bodies playing off one another (executive, single person, legislative, and judiciary), and the people themselves (who influence things through voting in local or national politics, or voting for various new laws).

To say that it's an oligarchy is to simplify it and ignore the overall structure.

An elected oligarchy is close, I guess. But it seems to suggest that the popular vote is never used, except in elections. That's not strictly true.
 
That may be the case in the USA, but in Australia we use a modified Westminster system, and we don't have the three branches that you have. There's the occasional referendum, but in general, the Parliament makes the decisions, and the people elect who the members of Parliament will be.

I agree that my statement was an oversimplification of the American congressional system and I am grateful for Lonewulf's clarifications.
 
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