Collectivism only works if you are with a group of people who agree to the terms.
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Is your boingboing account an open collective with no boundaries? Can I have the password to post some stuff? Or are you too attached to it?
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That seems like a good question. If @popobawa4u believes that theft is a fictitious crime because private ownership is an evil, I wonder how s/he would feel about the theft of his bbs identity. And further, the revelation of his or her irl identity, since presumably, that identity and the ability to hide it is an unwarranted form of ownership, being private and all.
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DUN dit dun dun, DUN dit dun.
Thank you. My inner cynic thought it was alone there.
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âI bet the San Francisco police officers responding to this call were pretty entertained.â
They must be doubly entertained when they tell people every day that they cannot track their iPhones because it is not worth their time.
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The same could be said of individualism as well. There is no practical way to require a person to have money, territory, or property. Ironically, many default to faux-collectivism to explain that away, because âthatâs our culture, everybody does itâ.
My account here is a somewhat uneasy compromise with their TOS. By participating here, I am agreeing to abide the conditions of that TOS.
I donât think that private property is âevilâ, more that it is unrealistic. Partly because personal identity is not very reliable, itâs only a feeling of continuity between many different impressions and memories which changes over time. Any identity I have is only an idealised construct.
I agree that feelings of identity do seem to have strong correlations with ownership of private property. Such as notions of owning oneâs opinions or feelings. It can be a useful frame of reference, but is still completely transitory, like water or sand between your fingers. Several organisms can be one âselfâ, like a marriage, band, or company. One organism can have several âselvesâ such as analytical, nonverbal, athletic, etc.
A sophistry to watch out for I think is to apply this only as a special case. Many people actually do not understand the response when they ask something like: âOK, so if your property is not real, can I have it?â, because their a priori frame that we each must be assumed to own and be capable of owning ultimately defines the situation. So explaining that I donât have any to give them, and that they only imagine that they possess anything comes completely outside their frame of reference. This functions the same way with identity. There really isnât one for me publicize. A bunch of text on the BBS here is as much the âreal meâ as anything else is. Is it transferrable? I donât know, that is IMO an impractical philosophical question. If somebody else types what I type, are they me? If I type something and forget it, is it still me who typed it? It does not seem worth worrying about.
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That circos plot you use as a graphic really captures the way your arguments ping pong inside your own reality. I just want to put you in a room with a member of the sovereign citizen movement. Magic!
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Do you really need to dump this shit in every thread?
Last I checked, even enlightened ascetics such as yourself still need food and shelter, which can be hard to get if you lose your job because you canât get to work because your car was stolen.
I know this all seems like harmless rumination to you, but you need to understand that you are accusing people of being âpossessiveâ because theyâre concerned about their livelihood and their ability to provide for their family, and that makes you an asshole. I am somehow still willing to believe that you are actually so disconnected that you donât realize how callous youâre being, but weâd all really appreciate it if youâd take a few minutes to consider what your vague utopian ramblings will sound like before you hit that Reply button.
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A little less stupid than trying to steal a car from in front of the US Capitol Police station next to the US Capitol. Turns out that not only were all the guys going to and fro in uniforms cops, a good number of the people not in uniform were as well. The criminal mastermind didnât even get the slim jim engaged before he was apprehendedâŚ
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One suspects that one person said that they had no concept of REAL property* and somebody else misunderstood that statement. Not an unreasonable assumption when talking about nomadsâŚ
- as in real estate, ie land as property.
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That seems odd, since we didnât get into any involved discussion or debate about it. I was trying to offer only enough explanation to provide context for my first post in the topic, as somebody seemed to perhaps imply that I was driving trollies.
It took a few seconds for me to notice that that gif is running backwards, with them putting the popcorn from their mouth into the bucket. XD
I can sort of understand where âsovereign citizensâ are coming from. The Enlightenment-era nation state depends upon some weird shared fictions to allow representative democracy and citizenship to more-or-less function. I think that it was easy to seriously posit a one-size-fits-all âsocial contractâ because they could conveniently assume that white Christian male European property owners did share certain goals, values, ideals, etc. So it was hardly controversial and sounded in the abstract far more progressive than nobility and feudalism. The sovereign citizen movement does at least rightly point out that things are more justly negotiated between people rather than taken for granted.
What if you are NOT a white Christian male European property owner? Can you then really expect any sort of meaningful representation at all? If not, the other end of the social contract is arguably not being fulfilled. So what are the citizenâs social and civic obligations then? It is not supposed to happen, because those goals, values, and ideals have been touted as being âuniversalâ despite the fact that they demonstrably arenât. Hence the push even in democracies for hegemony, conformity, etc which seem to be at odds with its principles. Personally, I think that delegation is far more fair and effective than representation. It is more hands-on, allows people to fire those politicians who donât keep their promises, and is more resistant to entrenched power. And governments need to be far, far smaller. The SCM people were only some of the earlier ones to voice their alienation, since no government of hundreds of millions (or even thousands) can realistically claim to be inclusive. Much of Western individualism has been a lie, but I prefer to progress beyond it rather than roll back to what we had before.
Hereâs the point that I am stuck at with your posts. You assume that all of us only choose to live in individual homes, consider things our exclusive property, etc., because of historical inertia established in law. I really donât think that is entirely the case. Animals want things for themselves and our society reflects a compromise between letting individuals possessing those things in a relatively orderly fashion and straight up violence. If you want to live a communal life, there is nothing stopping you from doing that today. Plenty of religious groups like the Amish are out there and live with a different set of community rules. There are also plenty of failed communities from the 19th and 20th century that had concepts of property as you profess. I donât think you are going to win over anyone bringing up your philosophy in every thread. I certainly like having my things and very clearly do not want anybody else in my house, eating my food, etc. You should feel free to go live your life as you see fit. There are plenty of ways to do it if you look around. Heck, we have a walled, communal neighborhood in my town that shares property among the folks inside it. Not for me.
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Wow, thatâs harsh. Itâs not unreasonable, but if you think that I should take personal responsibility for advocating a lack of attachment, then do others who advocate families prostituting themselves into wage slavery also take personal responsibility for that? Are people who confront me literally every few seconds with the importance of possessing people, things, money, land, etc all assholes for being âconfrontationalâ? Arenât they laying it on rather strong? Or is it somehow automatically âOKâ for them because they are in a special club?
Making it personal as you are doing does seem to work as singling me out for having an unpopular opinion. Maybe you are cynical for trying to make life in a modern technological culture into a quaint opportunistic exercise in survival anxiety. Wouldnât that be callous? Or, more likely, you probably donât see it that way - even if you wait a few minutes. There are many ways to live, and I am not sure that either you or I personally are responsible for whether or not other people can abide the decisions they make. Is that not for each personâs conscience?
I am not interested in my explaining a comment mushrooming out into a protracted thing, so I will leave you to your own utopian hijinx.
Perhaps thatâs an expression of extreme frustration borne out of the fact that most of us donât get to live in some nebulous, ideal state of being.
Most of us reside on a plane of existence where life is often a painful and ongoing struggle just to get by, regardless to whether we are Spartan-like minimalists or hedonistic materialists.
If thatâs somehow not your reality, thatâs just peachy; but the lyrics to Lennonâs âImagineâ are not a viable solution to all the problems facing the world that people like myself inhabit.
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Anyone disputing the philosophical notion of âproperty ownershipâ in here in a way leading up to someone being able to take away property for themselves has a fundamental logical flaw in their reasoning.
You know why I never have biscuits and cakes with Anarchists? Because they think proper-tea is a crime.
The problem with all these Marxists is that they have no class.*
/RIP Chris, the author of that joke as far as I know.
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Ah, so youâre going to post your home address so we can have free access to all the stuff you donât really possess?
Iâm assuming that your post was #sarcasm
Already anticipated, and coveredâŚ
It seems safer that way, yes? No, I do not have a regular home now, only temporary accommodations. My squats have had open-door policies. I am not a trustafarian or James Altucher style entrepreneur. I help people, and they help me. My experience tells me that what is really risky is not having minimal resources - it is that worrying about having minimal resources can be predictably used to induce people to make hasty decisions which allow them to be exploited. Selling all of their cultural capital short for the hope of an unreliable promise of bogus security. After all, if my work is really âworth somethingâ, why would I even need to be paid? Isnât it worth having me around to do what I do? Or would I be more respectable if I got a labor-pimp to make it official? Not worrying about âwhereâs the money going to come from?â keeps me healthy, and maintain a clear head for real-world problems. Eventually, I will die, but that was going to happen anyway. The key is to be less concerned with how long I live, and instead concern myself with how I live while I am alive. So all I have to give is myself, my help. We can work out, solve problems, scavenge and make things, grow food, spar, debate - whatever. The only âtransactionâ is what we actually do.
If it helps, consider that what appear to be things function merely as shorthand for processes. Solid matter is just knots in energy. So rather than a thing which collects and acts upon other things, perhaps try thinking of yourself as a network of processes, and see the things around you as processes which you can participate in. It can offer a different perspective - and might even be more accurate!
Now if I can only stop myself from returning to topics when I think people are getting me OT, Iâll be getting somewhere!
EDIT - a couple of misconceptions which get directed at me:
- That living by my wits (such as they are!) is somehow an easy, whimsical affair. It is not. Sometimes I have starved, been uncomfortable, etc.
- That since signing your authority over to others and creating the same asymmetrical power relationships is a ânormâ, that it is relatively secure and free of risk. It isnât! But thatâs what the ad copy says.
I suspect that fee has an agenda that outweighs its pretensions to scholarly neutrality.
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