crime is a spook
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And the social contract is some divine thing, or what?
It’s not, nor is it fixed.
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As there are millions of examples of them finding culprits and getting it right. I may not agree with the punishments, but I think your argument breaks down outside of a very small close knit community of people who practice consensus decision making.
You can’t just plop down community management without the culture to make it work. These tools are missing from most communities and would lead to as many negative results if not more.
We don’t even need to create hypothetical examples of this because we already have many historical examples of community management gone wrong like the Salem Witch trials.
I think you need to seriously address this before you can shout community management as a panacea.
You can’t just plop down community management without the culture to make it work. These tools are missing from most communities and would lead to as many negative results if not more.
Well of course. Nothing will work right away if people aren’t educated and empowered. But the tools are missing precisely because we have given them to the state. Thus to see this change, they must be returned to the community who can relearn to practice them.
We also have examples of community management going right, such as in Rojava or Chiaps where the people are the ones patrolling their streets, deciding on how to right wrongs collectively, and generally showing much better results than we have in the West.
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That’s the point of government: the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.
That’s from “Politics as a Vocation” by Max Weber. It’s also why the population needs to beat back if that violence isn’t legitimate (i.e. it’s abusing the population in the first place).
Weber did mean to legitimize the state but his reasoning can easily be turned from prescriptive to descriptive: we define the state as merely the entity with monopoly on violence over an area. Who decides what is “legitimate” violence? Why, the state, of course: by definition, it has the means to impose its views.
The Weberian idea is there are legitimate non-violent politics that the state offers itself to, which therefore allow the state to use violence against unlegitimate politics that don’t “play by the rules”. However since the state itself decides what is legitimate or not, and since any illegitimate political group will turn illegal else disappear when faced with the violence of the state, we just land back where we started: the state has a monopoly on violence and that is what decides what is “legitimate” politics, and therefore what is legitimate violence. The state calls its own violence “law”, but that of others “crime”.
The current labelling of political opponents as terrorists by the US government is illustrative of that. Some Weberians have you believe that is all legitimate since after all there indeed was an election
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You can’t just plop down community management without the culture to make it work. These tools are missing from most communities and would lead to as many negative results if not more.
Well of course. Nothing will work right away if people aren’t educated and empowered. But the tools are missing precisely because we have given them to the state. Thus to see this change, they must be returned to the community who can relearn to practice them.
We also have examples of community management going right, such as in Rojava or Chiaps where the people are the ones patrolling their streets, deciding on how to right wrongs collectively, and generally showing much better results than we have in the West.
Herein lies the problem, without community management taking over naturally it would be thrust artificially onto communities. You can’t reasonably expect these skills to be learned naturally, this would require external education which would then require a lot of social capital to be successful.
Who is going to dismantle the state and remember that it has to be a slow gradual learning process for communities?
Also, community management almost has to take place in a vacuum because when it bumps up against a state it quickly dissolves losing its power such as what happened in Rojava in the start of 2026 leading it to being incorporated into the Syrian state.
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Government is like money. Get rid of it and people will create it again to fill the function they need it to fill, so let’s have it do what we need and help instead of harm
There is still a point, though, when a government gets so bad that you just have to throw it away even if you know a new one would eventually rise to replace it.
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It’s not, nor is it fixed.
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I would be arrested for doing so, as I would not meet legal qualifications. I volunteer preparing and serving food to the community, houseless or not.
But that has nothing to do with your ridiculous argument that people would simply recreate the same systems of oppression as if it were a natural biological trait of all people and not a social construct.
so it sounds like even though you’re fond of citing dunbar you’ve never actually read his research. CURIOUS.
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You don’t need a crystal ball to observe history.
the past isn’t the future
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the past isn’t the future
No shit, but looking at past results is how we make informed decisions about literally everything. What the fuck is your point?
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No shit, but looking at past results is how we make informed decisions about literally everything. What the fuck is your point?
they don’t know what a future looks like without the state or capital.
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they don’t know what a future looks like without the state or capital.
We can cross that bridge when we get there. Until then, using actual data is more useful than wishful thinking.
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We can cross that bridge when we get there. Until then, using actual data is more useful than wishful thinking.
to be clear, you don’t know the future
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to be clear, you don’t know the future
No shit. Again, what’s your fucking point? Stop being vague and obtuse and just say what you’re getting at.
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No shit. Again, what’s your fucking point? Stop being vague and obtuse and just say what you’re getting at.
any claim about the future is dubious, and theirs to a great degree
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any claim about the future is dubious, and theirs to a great degree
Using the past to make an informed decision on how to proceed is not making dubious claims about the future. The only one making dubious claims about the future is you. Please explain to me how disolving the state would somehow make vigilante justice more effective, considering that vigilante justice is already outside the purview of the state?
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so it sounds like even though you’re fond of citing dunbar you’ve never actually read his research. CURIOUS.
When have I cited Dunbar?
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Using the past to make an informed decision on how to proceed is not making dubious claims about the future. The only one making dubious claims about the future is you. Please explain to me how disolving the state would somehow make vigilante justice more effective, considering that vigilante justice is already outside the purview of the state?
I never said vigilante justice would be more effective. you’re arguing with a strawman.
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I never said vigilante justice would be more effective. you’re arguing with a strawman.
You very clearly advocated for vigilante justice and then doubled down when u/village604 said that history shows its objectively worse. You’re splitting hairs and I’m blocking your disingenuous ass now.
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You very clearly advocated for vigilante justice and then doubled down when u/village604 said that history shows its objectively worse. You’re splitting hairs and I’m blocking your disingenuous ass now.
I’m blocking your disingenuous ass now.
oh thank God
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There is still a point, though, when a government gets so bad that you just have to throw it away even if you know a new one would eventually rise to replace it.
Yup. People are social animals, and governments are just formalized outgrowths of the social structures they form. Fun bit, the research they’ve done shows that not just people but all primates fall back into all of the same social structures they are used to whenever there is a vacancy.
