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[SalmonGod]

Also your point about regression to the proven dominant (unfortunately corrupt) state is valid as well.

Aqizzar nailed it right here...

Heck most of the blame for the banking explosion of the last decade can be blamed on the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act (enacted in the wake of whatever happened to banks in the late 1920s...) back in 1999.

But corruption doesn't shut down anything. That's the insidious part about it.

It shuts it down in the sense that it fails at its intended function.

Edit: Forgot to answer this.

Is it really anarchy with regulatory institutions?

Yes, so long as authority over those institutions isn't centralized.  Anarchy means "no rulers", not "no organization".

And I'm not sure what you mean by the "mesh" thing. Is your idea to break down the governing of these regulatory institutions into small independent jurisdictions?

Sort of.  Will address this more in my next post.


Writing a big response to Bauglir.  Will spoiler for courtesy when it's done

[Heron TSG]

Bank Transfer Day is supposedly not influenced by either OWS or Anonymous, but enjoys enormous support from both. (That's it's Facebook page.) The idea being that on the 5th of November (totally not Anonymous-related, just like the emblem!) they're trying to get as many people as possible to transfer all of their money from huge banks to local banks or credit unions.

Fuck you, Bank of America, I'm taking my $80 and leaving! I have a credit union lined up already... 

[Truean]

Also your point about regression to the proven dominant (unfortunately corrupt) state is valid as well.

Aqizzar nailed it right here...

Heck most of the blame for the banking explosion of the last decade can be blamed on the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act (enacted in the wake of whatever happened to banks in the late 1920s...) back in 1999.

But corruption doesn't shut down anything. That's the insidious part about it.

It shuts it down in the sense that it fails at its intended function.

Edit: Forgot to answer this.

Is it really anarchy with regulatory institutions?

Yes, so long as authority over those institutions isn't centralized.  Anarchy means "no rulers", not "no organization".

And I'm not sure what you mean by the "mesh" thing. Is your idea to break down the governing of these regulatory institutions into small independent jurisdictions?

Sort of.  Will address this more in my next post.


Writing a big response to Bauglir.  Will spoiler for courtesy when it's done

Basically yeah, I didn't wanna get into the history of financial regulation but that and Sarbanes-Oxley are good things, and naturally business is trying to kill them both and has somewhat succeeded.

[Levi]

Fuck you, Bank of America, I'm taking my $80 and leaving! I have a credit union lined up already... 

Nice!  I've been with a credit union for about 5 years now and I've had a much better time of it.

Frankly I wish more organizations would follow the credit union or co-op models.  I think society would be better off.

[Montague]

I never quite understood why anarchists tend to side with leftist ideologies, when anarchy is basically radical minarchism or libertarianism.

Also, decentralizing in governments always leads to less accountablity, less transparency and greater institutional corruption. Local munciple and city governments are notoriously corrupt, because the officials will always be in the local good-ol-boy networks. Keep in mind that its much, much easier to organize crime and maintain their secrecy on a local level. More centralized governments have tremendous scruity which keeps them more or less in check.

Anyways, credit unions are great. I'm not sure why more people don't bank with them, since the terms are almost always better for 90% of what customers need from a bank. Most of them don't use Chexsystems, which is nice as well.

[KaelGotDwarves]

I never quite understood why anarchists tend to side with leftist ideologies, when anarchy is basically radical minarchism or libertarianism.

Anarchy isn't on the classic left/right ideological scale. That scale fails on multiple levels.

For proper comparisons you need at least a 2D plane

like so. Note that "Libertarian" now has multiple meanings in common usage.

[ECrownofFire]

Anarchy is really the entire bottom edge, like many projections of a world map. Close to the same with... whatever the topmost edge would be. After all, zero personal freedom means zero economic freedom (and same with total freedom).

Libertarian most commonly (as I've seen it) refers to the bottom right, which is how you end up with things like "Left Libertarianism".

[SalmonGod]

Yeah, there is a very wide variety of anarchist schools of thought.  From the major ones I've spent any time reading into, I think I most identify with Anarcho-syndicalism/Social Libertarianism.  Coincidentally, I tend to find everything Noam Chomsky says to be dead on with the way I see things.  Last time I took a political test to place myself on that graph, I was almost at the very bottom and about halfway between middle and far-left.

There are some good thoughts in this.

[Tellemurius]

I never quite understood why anarchists tend to side with leftist ideologies, when anarchy is basically radical minarchism or libertarianism.

Anarchy isn't on the classic left/right ideological scale. That scale fails on multiple levels.

For proper comparisons you need at least a 2D plane

like so. Note that "Libertarian" now has multiple meanings in common usage.

i achieve (0,-0.2) on that chart.
For Denver's current protest, our people are freezing their asses off right now just so they can wake up and continue their rant of idiots running the country. bless them, least they are sacrificing something.

[SalmonGod]

Another good one from occupywriters.com

The infamous pepper sprayer is facing the loss of 10 vacation days after an internal investigation.

[mainiac]

The Nolan chart is a bunch of crap invented by a libertarian to expound out the libertarian world view.  I could just as easily come up with a chart that points out that a lot of south american dictatorships were "libertarian" while engaging in large scale terror measures against their population.  So if my left right axis were "Extremism to protect capitalism" and my top down axis were "Totalitarian government practices" we would find all those south american libertarians at the bottom left, right next to the fascists.  It would be a completely bullshit standard, but it would be just as valid as the Nolan chart, an arbitrary scale to make an ideology look good or bad.

IMHO the reason why anarchists are on the left is because libertarians tend to go AWOL when push comes to shove on protecting the poor and disenfranchised from the rich and the many.  Anarchists tend to exhibit a very strong desire to stand up for the poor and the disenfranchised.  Consider all that bra-burning, how anarchists accepted gays back when gays were considered dangerous crazies or how they perennially protest G8 summits.  With Libertarians we end up with things like Rand Paul saying that the Civil Right Act of 1964 was unnecessary and infringed on business owners rights to be racist and how his libertarianism magically disappears when abortion comes up.  Libertarians and anarchists tend not to be on the same side because when push comes to shove they want completely opposite things.  They just use the same language because everybody likes the sound of freedom.

[SalmonGod]

I've found that I cannot get along with libertarians in a political conversation for exactly those reasons.  They worship the supposed right to be selfish above all other things, including human life.  If a single person managed to purchase the entire planet and built a giant catapult to throw people into space to get them off his property, a libertarian would have no problem with this whatsoever.  If pressed on it, they'll only mumble something about how people are getting tossed into space because they weren't fiscally conservative or hard working enough.  When it comes their turn to step onto the catapult, they'll scream about how the government tampered with the market, which led to a monopoly on the planet.  Clearly if they'd just stop trying to regulate the guy, he'd stop catapulting people into space.

[KaelGotDwarves]

Ayn Randroids.

The sole reason why I can't say that I'm libertarian with a straight face.

[Leafsnail]

They just use the same language because everybody likes the sound of freedom.

This x1000.  I feel like ripping my ears off when two sides in a debate get into a "who can say the word freedom more frequently and with more emphasis" competition.

[mainiac]

Let freedom ring!