No joke, I was honestly wondering how you’d accomplish this sort of thing, and pardon me for saying so but the Zapatista government hasn’t exactly done much for their citizenry: little secondary schooling, no public infrastructure, no medical services, etc.
Lets focus on the US for the time being, if you don’t mind. Our government is corrupt, and I don’t have any answers that don’t involve some terrible armed uprisings. What do you have?
FWIW, As a libertarian I would like to applaud Mr. Holder for a step in the right direction.
Now, the article states:
I would much rather that read:
In a surprise move, the US Attorney General has ordered police
departments to cease the practice of civil forfeiture (basically, stealing stuff and selling it) unless the forfeiture is related to a conviction
Suspicion, warranted or not, should not be sufficient cause to expropriate the property of the accused.
Now, freezing assets until a criminal matter is resolved… I’m on the fence. Criminals should not be able to use their ill gotten gains to fund their defense… but how do you administer that?
Non-violent uprising, general strike until we get a new constitution?
Sorry! My cynicism was showing! The ideal of western liberal democracy has always been at odds with traditional statecraft. Nation-states are basically, by definition, a monopoly on violence which exists to control a population and a geographical area. The foundation is uncivilized from the start.
The whole point of direct democracy is that there is no government to blame. The government is the citizenry. If they lack these things it’s probably because not many wanted them, or they have no resources to work with. It warrants research into surrounding communities, to see how they do with regards to such things.
Start your own. There has never been any such thing as a one-size-fits-all government which can be fair and address the concerns of many millions of people. Much of the population is “taken for a ride” no matter how fair they try to be. Modern communications technologies are fast and ubiquitous enough for people to actually see, They Live-style, how much influence they have.
The key is to break things up and start small. Instead of “dropping out” of the US, “drop in” to your own group(s). Network with people. Make a charter which requires fair participation - and then use your authority to enable other new groups, such as new businesses, marriages, etc. Work only with other independent units instead of the old countries. Keep your own vital records (births, deaths, etc)
What this does is wholly positive, it does not require attacking the original country or social structures. What it does attack is their jurisdiction, which they would probably say is worse! There might be some conflict, although the main obstacle is probably not this but rather inconvenience. But if people stick with it long enough, the friction becomes less.
What I think will help is to make a network which keeps track of the many autonomous groups. People can use it to join countries which suit their goals and values by subscribing to them, not unlike a BBS. Countries can have affinities and exclusions to specify others which are/aren’t compatible. And a limitation of maximum membership to keep things fair - the most population a direct democracy can handle is probably a few thousand people. People can easily draft any sort of group, ranging from a business, to a marriage/household.
The only condition to being on the network is that you minimize coercion. Trying to persuade, cheat, or assimilate other groups worsens your score - and if it gets bad enough your group charter dissolves. So everybody has the right to make whatever sort of group they choose - on the condition that everybody else is also.
was that a semantic slip or do you live in a world where one becomes a criminal independent of, or prior to actually being convicted of a crime? if it truly is the latter, what seems to be the officer problem?
Wouldn’t you say that someone who steals your car or burns down your house is a criminal, whether they’re tried and convicted or not? I suppose it depends on how you define criminal and whether it has any meaning separate from a formal, state-run “criminal justice” system.
They’re not legally criminals until after their defense.
So, you’re in favor of lynchings?
I have to step in here.
Yes, a monopoly on violence is one of the properties of a nation state. But I have to contradict your statement that this foundation is uncivilized from the start.
Rather, I will say that some sort of monopoly on violence is a necessary condition for a civilized society.
The “western liberal democracy”, far from being at odds with that foundation, is a particular set of ideas on how that monopoly on violence should be administered.
Dictatorships, Monarchies and direct democracies are different ideas.
I’m not really aware of an alternative; if you want to have a law on a matter, there has to be one institution that is able to enforce a decision; if you have more than one entity that can enforce their decision, you have either civil war or rule by the most powerful thug. And having no entity that can enforce a decision on everyone does not mean that there will be more freedom, because it also means freedom for people to take away other people’s freedom. You will have smaller self-appointed entities that manage to force their decisions on just some of the people, some of the time. Greetings to Somalia.
I am not sure I get your “networks” idea. Small, democratically organized organisation with voluntary participation are a good thing. But I get a feeling you’re not talking about my local scout troop or about the chess club. You seem to want to have these networks take over functions traditionally associated with the state.
And my problem is that I can’t think of many things where I would want that; what laws (or lack of laws) can meaningfully be decided by self-selected groups?
I see some Problems:
Boundaries of Jurisdiction: When you have different “laws” coexisting in the same physical place, it becomes much harder to keep track on who has jurisdiction, and, more importantly, it becomes much harder to avoid being affected by laws that you did not get to vote on.
My own group can’t be allowed to just legalize drunk driving, but I don’t trust any group that I’m not part of to set the penalty for drunk driving. I don’t want anyone to get executed for that (To be exact, I don’t want anyone to get executed, period).
Also, if I meet someone at a bar, I don’t want to have to check whether their jurisdiction places a fine on my denying God the Almighty in public, but I don’t want the other guy to be able to hit me in the face if their jurisdiction allows it.
Children: It is reasonable to assume that parents will decide for their children, at least while they are young. At what age do they get to switch to a group that does not allow parents to beat their children? Do I have to stand idly by while the child next door (different jurisdiction) gets beaten?
Public Health Insurance, Unemployment Insurance, any kind of wealth redistribution in general: I take it you’re opposed on principle? Because it just won’t work as an opt-in system. I, healthy, employed, financially slightly above average, keep voting for those “socialist” measures that take more money away from me than I gain, because I honestly like living in a country where they are in place. In an opt-in system, only poor, unemployed and sick people would be available for paying the insurance premiums.
Of course there are different philosophies and practices regarding ways to go about this. I love the idea of western liberal democracy, but not unlike the ideal of Marxist communism, IMO nobody has ever seriously tried to implement it for the running of a country. The whole reason why this outlook on life and government has been accepted I think is as a consequence of the idea of a “social contract” which assumed that a population of people in an area should - or actually do - somehow really “all want the same thing”. This is a pervasive and subtly colonial notion. It assumes and basically demands monoculture. That if we are all white Christian male property owners that we can be assumed to have interests, goals, and values largely in common with each other. Modern claims of promoting multiculturalism under an umbrella of western global capitalism are hollow and superficial for the same reason.
That’s not what I briefly outlined above at all. I mentioned a reputation-based system which supports the charter of an organization in proportion to its lack of social or environmental coercion. If you let other people live by their laws, yours remain intact. If you try forcing yours upon other people, or making them deal with your mess, very quickly your country would dissolve.
Do you actually trust membership in some huge, monolithic abstract “state” run mostly by and for people you don’t and never will know, more than your own real friends, family, and acquaintances? Such a large group exists only as an ideal - the only thing which allows it to function as “real” is that it’s actual praxis is small, based around few positions, filled from a pool of a small class of exclusive people. Any social group which is sufficiently large - company, country, club, whatever - functions as an imaginary community. Meaning that there are no actual direct social relationships holding it together, or providing any real unity or purpose to it. The result is that it gradually becomes run by an insular, hidden in-club. Besides, brushing up on functions like banking, record-keeping, and diplomacy which have traditionally been relegated to only certain exclusive classes of people might in practice be the responsible thing to do. Rather than hoping that somebody else will do it for you, and be fair this time.
This has been a result of people making the focus of law things instead of people. Even though there have been laws about objects and places - laws principally apply only to people. They are the requirements and protocols for membership within a given community. The examples you listed are cogent, but also mostly coercive, Not being affected by laws you didn’t vote on is very much the point!
Again, that wouldn’t survive a day. Compelling or beating children is coercive and is so incompatible with statehood in the first place.
You are applying these assumptions from a frame of reference of traditional capitalist society - which is designed to place some consensus of “wealth” within a small circle of winners of some competition. Why would more egalitarian people agree to live by those terms in the first place? If people want to live in competition, then they need to live by the terms of it. Those who don’t won’t bother. People can make their own economies based on what they value, and may not even use money as you know it,
I didn’t take a position on the punishment phase.
No. But I trust the democratic processes in that abstract state a lot more than the real friends, family and acquaintances of all the people I do not know.
I think I just don’t get your proposed method of cutting the “problem” down to “managable dimensions” yet; I live in Austria, and around here, everything is either a mountain or too populated to be just among family and friends. Also, I’m a city person, so I pick my friends among people who I meet before they become my friends; I need some abstract and non-personal way of organizing society so that I can happily coexist with people who will only become my trusted friends after I get to know them.
I don’t get that. How are laws about people not a problem when the people involved belong to different jurisdictions rather than having a common framework for deciding the law? (such as ‘some huge, monolithic abstract “state”’)
The problem is that there is no natural coercion-free state of society.
Either you compel/coerce parents to not beat their children, or some parents will. So either we agree to make some traditional means of child-raising illegal, and enforce that law, or we don’t. Either way, not everyone gets what they want. And while I am strongly against using physical violence on children, when a ten-year-old announces a plan to take his parents’ car for a joyride through the city center (think European city, pedestrian areas!) and see whether it will do 200 km/h, I really hope someone will coerce him to change his plans.
Also, to what extend do parents get to compel their ten-year-old and that nice stranger who offered him some candy not to have sex?
Sometimes, you win at a competition before you notice that there was a competition. Why should the people who are winning voluntarily live by more egalitarian rules, while others keep winning? I believe the same basic ideas are applicable everywhere people “have” anything at all; as soon as you’ve got more than a small tribal community, you will have some people who amass more and more power/wealth/whatever (capitalism), unless you use some form of coercion to limit (socialism) or eliminate (communism) the disparities. And even then you’ll have people who game the system and become “more equal” than the others.
(EDIT: accidentally hit “send” early at this point)
But I still need more details on your ideas - I feel you’re too vague exactly in the areas where I think your ideas don’t work:
Please explain again how your “statehood” idea works - who gets to decide which ideas are worthy of it and which aren’t? A lot of coercion is applied in order to prevent other coercion, so the choice won’t always be logically obvious to everyone involved.
Example: either the other guy is coerced to refrain from smoking in the restaurant, or I am coerced to go elsewhere to enjoy my meal. There is no coercion-free alternative.
If smaller groups of people decide their own laws, what laws govern the interaction between those smaller groups? How does the interaction between me and my former group work when I decide to leave my group?
Or do you want to spread out the groups in a way that they don’t interact any more?
Or it would be helpful if you gave an example of what you would do in “your” ideal group, and what a different group might do instead.
If you and they don’t know each other, why assume that what laws or frameworks you live by will be relevant to each other?
Part of this sounds like not being accustomed to government being less geographical. Consider the bOING bOING BBS, for example - there might be users who you are more or less familiar with. Perhaps a few you email and are on more intimate terms with. Perhaps some you might feel better or worse than neutral about. Some who you may not even be aware of. Yet we participate here under a shared identity and focus of bOING bOING.
Like any real group, the laws are relevant to others in the group, that’s why they are members. Membership equals jurisdiction,
That is an obvious either/or as things have been. What I propose instead is making that non-coercion the foundation of people’s authority to create such groups in the first place. The less coercive their feedback is, the more cohesive their organization is. If people complain that they are experiencing or witnessing coercion, then their feedback suffers and the charter of their organization is at risk. This makes not creating problems for other people the law of the land, so occurrences such as your examples of drunk driving, speeding, punishment, and others such as pollution would be disincentivized.
In all probability, their ten-year-old would either share similar values to the parents, or have too much fun having sex with other ten-year-olds to care what some creepy geezer wants! Predation is nearly impossible when things are open.
Only if it was completely informal - in which case one could also argue that there was no such thing organized in the first place.
It sounds like you are still working from the assumption that the same values, goals, and rules need to be shared by everyone. What I am talking about is simply the means to associate with who you choose. So people who choose to compete with each other are welcome to do so - provided that they don’t make it anyone elses problem. The traditional systems encouraged people to increase control of resources and people alike because this has been empowering. It has made a disaster not only of human agency but also of ecology. So a node-based network of groups where authority is reenforced by having minimal influence upon others and minimal impact upon environment with the return of otherwise total autonomy shifts the focus from a captive audience, towards wealth which is actually what people want, and how they choose to live. The main reason why people would need to “game a system” is because, by default, they could not create their own system before.
What a group can consist of is determined for and by the participants. The only condition to this is that everybody are likewise free to create or or join their own groups as well. A mechanism to reduce coercion is to use a dynamic reputation-based system to determine how successful they are. Also it keeps track of “conditionals” for the members. For instance, if I was a member of a group which agreed to no marriage, and I decided to marry, I would need to resolve the conflict. I can choose as I like, but groups I am a member of are not obliged to accommodate my choices, so I could choose myself out of a group. In practice, I suspect that like modern social networks, most people would belong to many kinds of groups simultaneously anyway. Some might not be members of any, but they would not get their benefits either. No coercion, no impact - is not a realistic ideal to work towards. Rather, it is a dynamic assessment of a workable minimum. So, putting out a fire in someone’s house could be allowed as having less impact than letting a village burn down. Polluting an area would invoke a penalty, and need to be fixed, otherwise a state or companies charter would lapse. After all, the very charter they were founded upon was authorized upon the basis of minimizing their impact.
The balance of the charter authority / reputation scheme is what regulates the interactions between smaller groups. Along with their conditionals. For instance, if one group requires members to do a thing, and another forbids members from doing that same thing - one would need to choose. Otherwise, your membership might dissolve on the basis of not participating in good faith. But this doesn’t stop one from joining a different group, or devising whatever other system they can.
Ok, this has gotten a bit verbose! Anybody know how to fork this stuff off to another topic?
We could just start a new topic in the “wrath” category (it’s for politics, religion, and cycling, or so I hear) and post a link here for the one or two people who were still following our little discussion :-).
Not today though, it’s past midnight here.
Hello all,
Under the principles of federalism, the federal attorney general cannot “order” state law enforcement agencies to cease engaging in civil asset forfeiture. Full stop. The attorney general’s policy directive is a great step, but the main effect it will have is on civil asset forfeitures by federal agencies. My suspicious is that asset forfeiture by state law enforcement will still rake in huge sums of money.
Also of note, different states have different controls on civil asset forfeiture. California (where I practice) has fairly good (relatively speaking) protections those from whom the police are attempting to seize items.
If it is wrong today, it was wrong yesterday. Force them to give back what they stole.
Well I hope they can escape from the vacuum you’ve created for your point to stand.
If we don’t have to think about inflicting the punishment, then we can be a lot less lenient and a lot less personally responsible, too.
Well, since we are vying for the coveted pendant badge, they’re not legally criminals until after their conviction. 
Right, hence my question.
The thing that would make a change to your political landscape would be to fix your voting system. It favours 2 party. If you vote for anyone else, you can easily throw your vote away (Or, at least, that is how it is perceived!)
But something simple like a ‘preferential system’. Be allowed to number your votes. 1 - x (Where x can be a defined value of whatever). If your preferred party doesn’t get over the line, then your number 2 comes in. Gives some of the power back to voters. You can chop and change this as necessary. eg “If a party does not get 2% of votes, then it anyone who marked 1 for this party will have their number 2 counted”.
If you feel you could vote for whoever, but still have your vote counted for one of the big parties, would you be more willing to vote for some of the smaller parties?
This post is obviously very rough around the edges, and it would need refinement. But it comes down to voting. If you can get rid of “Safe Seat” and Incumbants, you can really stir up politics. If your position is dependant on keeping voters happy rather than corporations…
