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[Baffler]

I know I have a mental list of people and news organizations that I consider biased in one way or another, and some that just aren't worth reading.

Spoiler: I think this is off-topic so I spoilered it (click to show/hide)

For instance, I ignore the wall street journal and I have forgotten why (probably the hard server-side paywall). Breitbart basically only writes propaganda, so I ignore it. Fox spins everything to appeal to a specific demographic while trying to manipulate them (e.g. also propaganda). George Will only writes idiocy (I don't know if he honestly believes what he's writing but I get that impression). Krauthammer I read sometimes, and usually disagree with, but sometimes he writes something I end up agreeing with. I think Ann Coulter is either a nutjob or playing a character, and I sometimes read what she writes for a laugh.

Mother Jones is pretty obviously biased in the other direction. Rawstory presents news through a confrontational anti-conservative (or anti-fox) POV. They don't say that, but you can see the framing. I don't usually watch network news, or CNN, or MSNBC, but I didn't notice any bias in NBC news when I watched them. The Washington Post and New York Times are almost certainly progressive, although I think that's a good thing - they investigate injustices and the like that should outrage anyone, and report on them.

One example difference: Where Donald Trump thinks that illegals need to be thrown out (and Mitt Romney called for "self-deportation"), progressives worry that they're being exploited (NYT expose from last year about nail salon workers - you may have seen it already), for example.

The problem with this approach is that, although they may present it in a biased way, Breitbart, RT, Mother Jones, and other "propaganda" outlets have the reputation they have not because they're outright making shit up, but because of selective reporting. Some outlets are more brazen than others, making shit up still happens, and they all do it to some degree (the BBC for example is usually trotted out as an example of unbiased reporting but they sure as shit took a side when Scotland was having their independence referendum) but it's usually possible to dig up a primary source if you're patient, or find where they got the information.

Most major outlets are worth reading, but I can't name a single one that deserves to be trusted as a matter of course.

[SalmonGod]

Obviously it's different on this forum

Of course it is

But seriously, I don't think the internet is having one uniform effect on tribalism.  I think it's re-drawing the boundaries of tribalism on ideology and common interests, and severely weakening all boundaries it was founded on previously. 

Not that I think tribalism is as deep as most people say it is.  I think it only works when people are fed and accept information that de-humanizes others outside their group, and throughout the history of civilization, this has been most pointedly done by powerful groups at the top of hierarchies that wanted the people under them to harm another group for their personal gain.  Sure, you can see people acting cliqueish and stuff in your daily life, but the really large scale and vicious examples always seem to be intentionally cultivated by powerful people.

SalmonGod: You know, we (humans) actually regrew the forests of New England after deforesting the whole place. Maybe Europe should give that a try. I assume Europe is still forestless. Not that regrowing the forests will stop climate change or anything. OFF TOPIC STILL SORRY.

Yeah, but it will be a very long time before those forests fully regain the ecological function of a true old-growth forest.  Not that it's central to my political point, but the common mentality that forest preservation is just about maintaining a certain total number of trees is a pet peeve of mine.

Also: I would suggest reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for an example of an anarchist/libertarian society that works, but ... it only works in the book, of course. It relies on the existing Lunar colony culture, which is drastically different from any culture on Earth. I think IRL you'd likely end up with something more like The Expanse.

I think I read that book in my early teens.  I don't remember being impressed.  Heinlein, right?.... Yup... Heinlein.  Not that I was grokking the politics of the work at that age.  But it doesn't matter.  Libertarian (in the American terminology) is pretty much the opposite of what I am.

[Solifuge]

Oof, I need to go to bed, but I have a bit of a beef with "Tribal" being used synonymously with "Pre-Industrial" or "Xenophobic" or "Willfully Ignorant Of Ideas That Don't Agree With Preconceptions Held By Their Clique", despite understanding why people use "Tribal" to mean these things. The same goes for how people seem to be talking in kneejerk reflex reactions to the word "anarchy/anarchism", as though it meant martial law or uber-libertarian throwing people to the wolves. I think crossed definitions are conflating these ideas unnecessarily, and is undermining some good points that the idea of the Tribe-as-a-Society or that Pre-Governmental and Non-Centralized-Governmental Societies make within this discussion.

RE the Tribe:
It's easy to conflate the fact that decentralized or pre-governmental societies predated industry with them being somehow innately preindustrial, technophobic, or somehow incapable of science or complex manufacturing. But dude, tribes didn't just not invent or improve on technologies, medicine, language, tools, manufacturing processes, military strategy, philosophy and other intellectual pursuits, etc. Ditto for tribes being thought of as a Xenophobic or Cliquish thing; this was a product of a time period, and not a social structure, and it's common to many empires, city-states, and tribes alike; having existed in an era when people lacked common language to communicate appreciably, a sufficiently detailed or well-informed history to look back and infer from, and other abilities to see the humanity in the other groups of Humans in the world leads people to reject them and their ways due to their alienness and lack of an understandable reason why they are or do things that way. Note: We're not immune to this even now.

RE Anarchy:
Yes, laws are awesome at codifying predictable punishments to discourage specific behaviors, which is helpful in preventing those behaviors before they happen. Laws are the training wheels of pro-social behavior, and a codex for proper and ethical behavior, in a way nearly identical to how Religion functions; the main difference is that while one appeals to a cosmic authority or force that can hold you accountable in some superhuman way if you defy it's codified ethics, laws appeal to a realworld authority that can kill or imprison or exile you for the same.

Law, also much like religion, is just a codex of one or more persons' interpretation of this more-or-less shared Human Social Nature, interpreted into a set of rules to support it, and over time extended to deal with modern situations and increasingly specific cases. However, it's all still emergent from Human Nature; even the American Justice System with all it's codification and letter-of-the-law intent, hangs on a judge and jury of citizens deciding whether they liked something that someone did or not, and whether they seem trustworthy, innocent, repentant, etc. We're still counting on peer-to-peer ethical judgements to reform troublemakers or remove them from our given culture; the only difference is someone just designed a system to pick who does the ethical judgement on behalf of everyone else in their culture (because it's impractical with this population size to have every citizen weigh in on every legal case), and they enforce this with other people selected to hold dangerous weapons and imprison or execute them as necessary.

Order doesn't require law. It just requires tools like Communication that enable people to hold other people accountable for being antisocial, or working against the collective, whether that's a tribe, a nation, a culture, a species, or an entire planet full of various lifeforms. Law and Religion helped us codify and maintain order in a sustainable way, but in an era when we have the means to organize and communicate and share resources and know on a global scale, there's real room for us to adopt a decentralized approach to self-governance, or a modern brand of non-governmental egalitarianism.

[Shadowlord]

Oof, I need to go to bed, but I have a bit of a beef with "Tribal" being used synonymously with "Pre-Industrial" or "Xenophobic" or "Willfully Ignorant Of Ideas That Don't Agree With Preconceptions Held By Their Clique", despite understanding why people use "Tribal" to mean these things.

Huh? Personally, I wasn't saying anything about pre-industrial anything. Just tribalism. I can't speak for anyone else, of course, but...

Edit:

Order doesn't require law. It just requires tools like Communication that enable people to hold other people accountable for being antisocial, or working against the collective, whether that's a tribe, a nation, a culture, a species, or an entire planet full of various lifeforms. Law and Religion helped us codify and maintain order in a sustainable way, but in an era when we have the means to organize and communicate and share resources and know on a global scale, there's real room for us to adopt a decentralized approach to self-governance, or a modern brand of non-governmental egalitarianism.

Can you explain lynch mobs and witch hunts? Can you explain them happening in fairly modern countries like India? What about their absence in China? In anarchy, could you raise a militia to throw back an invading army? Would it be able to compete with a real army? Or would you have to organize some form of standing army?

[scriver]

edit: premature discharge, not enough time to try again now, let's wait a few hours

[Solifuge]

In a few words as I pass out, Lynch Mobs and Witch Hunts are about a critical lack of empathy, and about a failure not to Otherize someone else for X quality (race, religion, general town dislike masquerading as The Lords Work, etc.).

As for the rest, I am not in the business of analyzing or predicting human behavior on a mass scale, or on how the hell one prepares for a military operation. I can try, but first I need to absorb many Zs.

[Orange Wizard]

I'm not going to say anarchy is untenable (even though it is), but what Salmon is proposing basically sounds like a direct democracy with elected officials to organise the day-to-day management. It absolutely could work, but as with any democracy, decision making takes time. Too much time to react to a crisis, especially when weighed down with bureaucracy.
The more people involved, the more bureaucracy. The more bureaucracy, the longer and more expensive everything becomes. Eventually everything becomes inefficient to the point where a crisis can't be dealt with until months down the line. Look at the EU. A solid plan for dealing with migrants took the better part of year to implement, and that's with regular democracies and not a direct one.
Compounding this with lots of decentralisation is so inefficient I can't even.

The Roman Republic had a very simple solution, and that was electing a dictator. Giving one (or a small group) of people executive power is by far the most efficient way of dealing with problems when they arise.

During peacetime you can probably justify having such an inefficient democratic system. But then, what's the point? A (properly representative, not FPP or oligarchic like the US) democracy is mostly fair (very small minorities won't be represented, but in the case of actual oppression the rest of the population will generally be sympathetic), is more adaptable (smaller directory/legislative body = faster decision making), and costs much, much less.
Allowing people more personal freedom inside such a system is trivial. The average citizen in a modern democracy can do basically whatever they want. The restrictions are generally intended to protect people from other people (and are gradually being addressed where this is not the case). An organised body is better than a disorganised one when the wellbeing of its people is at stake.

...

Okay, that was kinda ranty and rambly.

TL;DR: an anarchic society relies far too much on the goodwill of individuals to not take advantage of the power vacuum. All it takes is one guy to get some friends together and ruin everything while everyone else faffs about trying to work out the most democratic way of deciding how they're going to work out the best method of dealing with the new dictator.

[Helgoland]

Quick question: Isn't parliamentary democracy (in its ideal form, not in the cruddy current implementation we see in the US) pretty much a form of anarchy? The whole system relies on no-one actually ruling, but being kept in check by other parts of the system. It's an-archic in that sense of the word at least.


Also, specifically to SG: While I agree that a lot of tribalism is encouraged and even created by folks with vested interests, I do think there's a natural tendency in humans to create barriers between 'us' and 'them', especially when there's an economic conflict. What mechanisms do you propose to keep down this tendency?

(Also please note that I'm actually trying to understand anarchism better, not to refute what you're saying. I don't like this whole 'An argument is about winning' paradigm at all.)

[Reelya]

Take a look at a specific corporation: Semco in Brazil. The owner of that implemented decentralized decision making, starting from the typical command-based authoritarian company he inherited from his father. In the quest for efficiency, they ended up with governing structures notably similar to anarcho-syndicalism. The same thing happened with local councils/cooperatives in Venezuela. They tried it based on traditional socialist ideas, it fucked up bad, then they reformed that to prevent the issues, and ended up with something virtually identical anarcho-syndicalism. So you have both capitalists and socialists trying to solve problems with their organizations, and they both accidentally end up at the same place: anarcho-syndicalism. These ideas keep popping up in diverse economic sectors, because they work.

The results for Semco was that turnaround on processing manufacturing orders went down from about 6 weeks to a few days. Company revenue went from $4 million to $200 million. The trick here is flat structures rather that heirarchical structures. The problem with EU is that it just adds more layers to a pyramid organization structure. It's not decentralized whatsoever, it's the opposite. So the failings of the EU can't be used to indict political anarchism, because that makes no more sense than blaming Christianity for the atomic bomb or something. It's just not cogent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Spain
An historical example is the Spanish Civil War. It was the only real example of widespread anarchism implemented. And the effect was in fact massive increases in agricultural and industrial output, with big decreases in the amount of bureaucracy. The problems for them were not internal organization, it's that they were directly sabotaged by the Fascists, NAZIs, Soviets AND capitalists at the same time. Note that Fascism, Soviet Communism and Capitalism are all centralized systems. They are the natural enemies of decentralized systems. They all have powerful central rulers over mass populations. Each of these "statist" systems has a deep abhorrence to any sort of grass-roots organization. But they fill that gap through sanctioned and limited local organizations.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/05/13/cooperatives-co-op-leadership-citizenship-ethisphere.html
And here is data, suggesting that 1/5th of the US GDP is produced by "cooperatives" (another way of saying the same thing anarchism says), yet they only employ 850,000 people to do that. So they are damned efficient. "cooperatives" is just a "less communistic" way of saying that they are "collectives", which is the core principle of anarchism. Historically, the corporate sector has been actively hostile to the rise of cooperative enterprises: they're seen as communistic, and a threat to corporate hegemony. This has included direct sabotage and blocking of supply (e.g. major corporations refusing to sell needed parts to collective corporations, so that they fail and can then be bought out).

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A cooperative is a democratically run business whose members are also its owners. Co-ops aren’t just for alternative groceries. There are some 29,000 of them in all sectors of the American economy, a recent study by the University of Wisconsin found. They have revenues that exceed $3 trillion and employ 856,000 people. Household names among them include Ace Hardware, Ocean Spray, the Associated Press and Sunkist.

[Solifuge]

Interesting how this overlaps with a discussion on the Ameripol thread about hostility toward unionization.

What do folks think; does someone feel up to starting a new thread to discuss this stuff? I think we're migrating from the topic here, but it's a discussion I think it's worth having.

Unless of course, this has officially become the "What made you dissatisfied with the state of your culture and governance today?" Thread. :3

[Shadowlord]

Yeah, we're way off topic at this point.

[TheBiggerFish]

We should start a new thread, yeah.

[Shadowlord]

Maybe if we put the thread in reverse, we can get it back on the rails?

[smirk]

Re-railing the thread with a appropriately horrible news story: Even being white and complying with officers won't save you anymore. If they want you dead, you dead. (Yeah, I know; Buzzfeed. The official police report is here; pages 6 and 7 cover the actual shooting. They're an infuriating read.)

[Rolan7]

Nobody wants to get shot.  Asking the police not to shoot has nothing to do with compliance...  Just makes for a popular headline.

Besides, they already ruled the death unlawful and the officer is getting charged with second-degree murder.  So the system worked, I guess.