Get political in the free retro platformer 'Super Bernie World' out now

Meh, it's a fun retro game and the turtles look a bit like Mitch McConnell, so...

They are called "Mitch troopas", or "Mitch paratroopas" for the flying ones. True story. See the credits :D

I repeat it's not a democracy, for fuck's sake please stop calling these governments the same name when they have nothing in common. In a democracy you vote for the laws directly, you and evrybody DO the politics, you don't vote for someone to do politics for you.

Prepositions exist in sanfran and look at what rent control and zoning laws did for them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V7lKGrjO1M


What's the point of voting when you believe the initiation of force is NEVER justified (defence isn't initiation) and you can't get 51% of the people to agree with you?

Well, yes. And what did you think would instantly happen the moment a region was government-less?

I don't know, it hasn't happened in a western culture in contemporary age.

It's obvious. Most people would try their best to get by, hampered by the lack of collective goods. But some people would say hey, nobody can stop me if I decide to take people's stuff! They would notice that individual victims were often armed, so they would get together in groups (or rich thuggish people would hire other thuggish people to form groups). The groups would rob and terrorize people and gradually come into competition. There would be gang warfare; some groups would win and grow, others would lose; gradually the groups would be fewer and larger. Eventually somebody would win and the whole territory would be ruled by one gang of thugs.
Eventually the gang of thugs might realize that you can get more stuff out of the inhabitants if you use some of the money to build the place up, at which point you'd have a (dictatorial) state.

Zero taxation means near-zero social organization, which means savagery.

You act like that doesn't happen with cops today.

I do not act like that. Sure it does, in the US. Americans always seem to think their experience is universal. You don't get that in, say, Denmark. But the US experience is based on a combination of imperial status, where its militarism infects a ton of other stuff about the culture, and its fairly authoritarian, unaccountable social structure. Read again my rankings of what's better than what. The United States is currently about as low as you can get on the "how good a state can be" rankings without actually being a dictatorship.
But in any case, the cops don't have much to do with whether a situation is "savagery". Something police-like is probably necessary to civilization, does help avoid the scenario above, but it's a minor element.

Your weed farmer would never eat a banana again, or post nonsense on the internet, or travel more than 100 miles. No roads, no internet, almost no education or health care, no plumbing, no movies, few books, little electricity, bits of technology might exist in small enclaves but would be unable to spread or combine with the other bits. And, of course, widespread banditry and violence.

You act like demand for those services like roads and internet and medicine and security wouldn't exist in absence of a monopoly on arbitration.

You can demand something all you want, but if you have no mechanisms to arrange it, it won't happen. Collective services and infrastructure require collective organization and collective resources. That is, some form of taxation. Otherwise you don't have "demand" in the capitalist sense of actual ability to buy a thing. Libertarian imaginings that market fairy dust would provide such things are fantasies. Markets themselves depend on social provision of infrastructure and enforcement of rules. Every time government breaks down somewhere, we see the same thing: Those collective services and infrastructure break down as well.

We tried big Gooberment in the West, it was called Germany and East-Germany. We also tried direct-democracy in places Sanfran, they have propositions and look at their homeless populations and banning of plastic straws.

Oh, lord. We're still trying Big "Gooberment" in the West, it's called all the most prosperous countries with the least poverty and highest happiness. Scandinavia, northwestern Europe more broadly, New Zealand, to some extent Canada. In all those cases, they abandon the more useful functions of government and instead funnel money to the wealthy precisely to the extent that they abandon effective democracy in favour of rule by elite groups.
And no, San Francisco is not and has never been in any significant sense a direct democracy. Their homeless populations are created by the oligarchic power of very rich Silicon Valley types. And banning plastic straws is a good thing; small and silly compared to the crises it relates to, but still good in its little way. They did it where I live and I was amazed how instantly other options replaced them, from old school paper straws to reusable ones of various sorts (not to mention what I usually prefer, "drinking from the glass").


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 11 March 2020 at 7:07 pm UTC

You can demand something all you want, but if you have no mechanisms to arrange it, it won't happen. Collective services and infrastructure require collective organization and collective resources.

Groups happen even without involvement of a monopoly on arbitration. If Spontaneous order didn't exist, Free Software wouldn't exist, Schools of Fish wouldn't exist.

If I trusted central planers that controlled everything, I would buy a Mac and go to a website called "Gaming On Mac". You can't be anti-centralization and support government.

Meh, it's a fun retro game and the turtles look a bit like Mitch McConnell, so...

They are called "Mitch troopas", or "Mitch paratroopas" for the flying ones. True story. See the credits :D

Seems fair. I'd forgotten who he was, but I recognized the face when I looked him up . . . he kind of looks like a turtle.

You can demand something all you want, but if you have no mechanisms to arrange it, it won't happen. Collective services and infrastructure require collective organization and collective resources.

Groups happen even without involvement of a monopoly on arbitration. If Spontaneous order didn't exist, Free Software wouldn't exist, Schools of Fish wouldn't exist.

If I trusted central planers that controlled everything, I would buy a Mac and go to a website called "Gaming On Mac". You can't be anti-centralization and support government.

Certainly you can be anti-centralization and support government. Large collective endeavours don't need to be commanded from a centre, they can be agreed on co-operatively by large collective groups. But they will need to be able to command resources and avoid free-ridership. That is, the collectives need to be able to access the fruits of taxation, or of something which, when you analyze how it works, adds up to taxation.

Free Software is great and I won't hear a word against it. I think some of the ideas around it are applicable far more widely. Nor do I have a problem with decentralization; indeed, direct democracy requires that decision-making be spread out, because there's no way in hell anyone, let alone everyone, can be involved in all the decisions being made. That's actually one of the Achilles' heels of representative government and many other hierarchies: People at the top trying to micromanage all the decisions and there are way too many decisions for them to have any idea about most of them.
But the workability of Free Software as a "spontaneous" (which it isn't really) phenomenon depends on the fact that the resources required to make it are already possessed by a mass of people; the "means of production" of software are a computer, plus a fairly common degree and type of education. Thus, to make Free Software you don't require resources except ones people already have. A railroad on the other hand requires masses of steel and wood and manufacturing faciliites and forms of expertise that are quite rare, not to mention a right of way. A railroad will not spontaneously, or even "spontaneously", just come together. The same is true for anything that requires physical resources and physical occupation of terrain ("property").
Free Software also has the advantage that once software is made . . . there it is. If completely abandoned it will eventually become useless, but it's not a huge problem if contribution waxes and wanes quite a lot. But most service-type infrastructure requires consistency. You can't run a health care system on whoever spontaneously feels like showing up that day. Voluntarism massively underprovides public goods. Charity does not stop people from going hungry; social programs do. You can say that doesn't matter as long as the starving people have Freedom! I would guess though that you're not one of the starving people.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 11 March 2020 at 8:28 pm UTC

I'm not engaging in political ideas, I'm not arguing economic systems, I'm outright saying that Bernie Sanders is almost certainly a criminal that needs to be investigated and prosecuted to the full extent of the relevant federal laws.

Pretty rich coming from a Trump supporter.

How so exactly? Trump has been investigated by multiple federal agencies for more than three years now. And nothing. Bernie has never been subjected to any level of law enforcement scrutiny at all, so I say it's his turn.

Democracy sucks, you're at the mercy of the 51%.[...]

I repeat it's not a democracy, for fuck's sake please stop calling these governments the same name when they have nothing in common. In a democracy you vote for the laws directly, you and evrybody DO the politics, you don't vote for someone to do politics for you.

There are multiple types of democracy, direct and indirect. In an indirect democracy you absolutely vote for a representative who will theoretically press for your interests. A direct democracy is the rule of the mob, where 51% can drag the other 49% wherever they want, but due to simple corruption an indirect democracy can do the much worse with a smaller percentage required.

Taxation is theft, it's being taken under threat of kidnapping and if you resist kidnapping via defending yourself instead of running away, they kill you. I don't care who you're stealing from, it's still theft. I think trusting central planners and a monopoly on arbitration not to be corrupt is utopian.

Awesome, this clarifies everything. Best wishes going forward.

Allow me to elaborate. If you don't pay the required tax, the bureaucracy sends armed men in costumes with shiny props called badges and very real guns to kidnap you. After they shoot your dog and lock you into metal bondage gear, they will deposit you into a gay dungeon, unless you resist, in which case they will simply execute you. Or you could pay them to not do that under duress. I hope this gives you the clarity you seek.

Democracy sucks, you're at the mercy of the 51%.[...]

I repeat it's not a democracy, for fuck's sake please stop calling these governments the same name when they have nothing in common. In a democracy you vote for the laws directly, you and evrybody DO the politics, you don't vote for someone to do politics for you.

There are multiple types of democracy, direct and indirect. In an indirect democracy you absolutely vote for a representative who will theoretically press for your interests. A direct democracy is the rule of the mob, where 51% can drag the other 49% wherever they want, but due to simple corruption an indirect democracy can do the much worse with a smaller percentage required.

No. A direct democracy is a democracy, an indirect democracy is not a democracy it's an intellectual rip off.
The kind of indirect democracy in the world today are mostly republic with some aspects here and there from democracy, that's all. It's just a lie that goes on and on...

But this is off topic I won't continue.

I'm not engaging in political ideas, I'm not arguing economic systems, I'm outright saying that Bernie Sanders is almost certainly a criminal that needs to be investigated and prosecuted to the full extent of the relevant federal laws.

Pretty rich coming from a Trump supporter.

How so exactly? Trump has been investigated by multiple federal agencies for more than three years now. And nothing. Bernie has never been subjected to any level of law enforcement scrutiny at all, so I say it's his turn.

Come now. The Democrats have busily spent their whole time investigating him for the one thing he's probably not guilty of (being some kind of Russian spy--like the Russians would be stupid enough to trust him), because it advances their New Cold War "It was the Russians' fault we lost the election" narrative. Fairly stupid politics on their part IMO.

But there are plenty of blatant violations of the law that he openly brags about and/or which are simply a matter of public record; the emoluments clause is clearly a dead letter to him. I don't presume to know for sure exactly why the Democratic honchos have refrained from going after him about that stuff, although what springs to mind is "they do that stuff too, if somewhat more subtly, so they'd prefer not to set any precedents that could be used against them". But the establishment Democrats, in their cowardly corruption, having refused to point out illegality does not make it legal. Just because, for instance, he acts like it's perfectly normal to go around appointing your close relatives to prominent government jobs, and nobody has the guts to say anything, does not mean it suddenly became all right to do that when Trump gained the presidency. The man's so blatant about using his office for personal gain he practically tweets the bribes he takes.

More broadly, the whole American system of campaign finance is, in most countries, considered bribery and corruption and is thoroughly illegal. It isn't illegal in the US simply because the agents of corruption bought enough laws and judicial decisions that they can now ply their trade in the open. In terms of morality, Sanders stands head and shoulders above nearly all other US politicos simply by choosing not to participate in that cesspool.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 12 March 2020 at 5:31 am UTC

I don't think we will have to debate Trump for much longer. His disastrous handling of the ongoing pandemic, and the plunging stock markets will make sure of that.