Economic Competition Has Also Intensified To The Point Where Shitty Work Conditions Can Happen Without

But prisons ARE a solution to interpersonal harm. The whole point of prisons is to give victims (and society at large) a choice between "murder" and "do nothing". There are some actually-existing prison systems that maximize the safety and welfare of prisoners while also accomplishing the basic purpose of prison- neutralizing the ability of its inhabitants to inflict suffering on other citizens without recourse. The US does not have one of these systems, sadly, but better prison systems are not just a fantasy. They could be achieved in a short time.

Also, "who decides who is an abuser? What about false accusations?" These questions can be answered by the court system and the rule of law. Again, very few countries (if any) have a truly fair and democratic justice system in practice, but it is possible to minimize false prosecution whilst ensuring that people who commit terrible crimes are disincentivized to do so again.

Prison abolition isn’t a solution to interpersonal harm. It’s meant to be a solution for the violence of prisons.

While the ML's/3rd worldists are correct that the US enjoys imperial privileges, there's so much that the US could do to improve the quality of life for its citizens that would be entirely domestic in nature, or even beneficial to foreign workers. For example, taxing the domestic wealthy to fund a higher minimum wage and safer workplaces would be a massive benefit to both American and Mexican workers. Not everything is zero-sum, and I think that a lot of ML's claim otherwise as a way of rationalizing the lack of leftist policy achievements in the US; like the only reason that California can't have zoning reform is because it's somehow mutually exclusive with stationing carriers in Okinawa and thus The Powers That Be would never allow it, rather than it being a difficult and politically unpopular fight that no one really wants to wage.

It's so funny to see a lot of western leftists who are so disgusted by the idea of marxism-leninism that all they can conceive of is like... so long as we can have a high minimum wage here and free healthcare and affordable housing everything will be fine, as if that is all that matters because these people don't actually care about the global south and the fact that those benefits are imperial in nature lol

@collapsedsquid:

That's part of it but I see radicals echo's Marx's classic "I'm not gonna provide a recipe" comment

Maybe more leftists should provide recipes, not only to guide governments in power but to also provide insurance just in case those governments start making bad decisions-”they didn’t provide fair trials/demolish the nuclear arsenal/etc so we’re no longer responsible for their sins”. The writers of the US Constitution and the Magna Carta certainly felt the need to provide blueprints for their new societies, even if the results failed to live up to the written promises or if they deviated wildly from what was planned.

New recipes would also help people get on board; I can't tell you how many people in my life seem attracted to basic ideas of socialism but ask questions like, “How will movies get made?” or “How will religion work?” These are important questions and I think they should be addressed early on so that people know what they’re signing up for and are eager to fight for it. Marx refused to leave a recipe and now every failed state and genocide perpetrated in the name of Communism are used to smear his name. Jesus left a recipe and he can now be used as moral yardstick to shame his followers who fail to live up to his explicit teachings.

"Faced with devastating declines in government services, many have stepped in to provide basic social services and natural disaster training. This is particularly notable in rural counties in states like Oregon, where the combination of long-term collapse in timber revenue and dwindling federal subsidies has all but emptied the coffers of local governments.

In this situation, the Oath Keepers began to offer basic “community preparedness” and “disaster response” courses, and encouraged the formation of community watches and full-blown militias as parallel government structures.

While filling in the holes left by underfunded law enforcement in Josephine County, for example, Patriot-affiliated politicians were also leading the opposition to new property tax measures that would have allowed the hiring of more deputies.

By providing material incentives that guarantee stability, combined with threats of coercion for those who oppose them, such groups become capable of making the population complicit in their rise, regardless of ideological positions...often many in a population can’t be said to have any deep-seated ideological commitment in the first place. Instead, support follows strength, and ideology follows support."

-Phil Neel, Hinterland

Boots on the Ground

Anti-government organizations are filling a disaster-response gap — and using it to spread their message.

For nearly a decade, the Oath Keepers — which formed in 2009 in the wake of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency — have responded to disasters like hurricanes and floods by administering rescue operations, serving hot meals, and doing construction work. Disasters provide the Oath Keepers with opportunities to fundraise and gain the trust of people who might not otherwise be sympathetic to their anti-government cause. By arriving to crisis zones before federal agencies do, the Oath Keepers take advantage of bureaucratic weaknesses, holding a hand out to people in desperate circumstances.

This all serves to reinforce the militia members’ conviction that the government is fallible, negligent, and not to be trusted. And every time a new person sees the Oath Keepers as the helpers who respond when the government does not, it helps build the group’s fledgling brand.

[…]

“There’s a long-standing conspiracy theory among the far right that everything that FEMA does is dual use,” Jackson said. “It has this surface-level purpose of responding to emergencies and disasters and all that kind of stuff. But also it’s building up the infrastructure so that one day when martial law is declared, there are these huge detention camps and there are deployed resources to be used by troops who are enforcing martial law.”

Many Oath Keepers subscribe to that belief, but they’re not vocal about it. Publicly, Jackson said, they portray themselves as supplementing FEMA’s efforts and even working in tandem with the agency. It’s part and parcel of the group’s founding ethos — understand the system, work within the system, and be prepared to defeat the system when the time comes.

What is "corruption"?

Both liberals and libertarians believe that too many politicians serve "big business" or "crony interests" instead of the "public".

But look at from the perspective of a politician. One group of citizens may be the majority, but they have little way of influencing you outside of letters or collective actions, which are rare, and to be honest, their opinions are often uninformed and they have no control over major social organizations, so they don't matter to you all that much.

But a small minority of citizens are very important people, who direct the majority of economic activity and control the fate of your nation or- perhaps even more crucially-your home state, because they control land and resources and can choose where to invest them to create jobs. You're going to listen to what they have to say, especially since they can afford to send specialized lobbyists to wait in your office all day with lots of impressive documents and charts.

And they don't need to threaten or bribe you to get what they want; all they have to do is to make a convincing argument on why voting a certain way on a given law or regulation will benefit them (and by extensions, your constituency) or hurt them (and by extension, your constituency).

"The public may have good intentions in supporting this higher minimum wage law, or in their campaign to resist privatization," they argue, "but with all due respect to the public, they just don't know the facts. This bill will destroy jobs and hurt your state. Look, let us take you out to a nice dinner to discuss it. If you back us up on this, we'll support you come election season. Everybody wins."

"Corruption" is not the result of personal moral failing. It is the natural, inevitable symptom of a divided society, where a small percentage of owners who control almost all property and economic activity have interests that oppose that of the property-less majority. The only way to end "corruption" is to subordinate economic activity to the democratic will of society at large via the abolition of private property and the developmemt of communism.

What about direct-democratic planning, with or without the recommendations made by a committee or any individual?

Instead of subordinating our economic desires and the associated information to the anarchic market, why don't we discuss potential economic activity and share all perspectives and information?

I’m not sure what a socialist society should look like, but I’m pretty sure of this: factor markets should be replaced with national, regional and local planning

A quick Google would seem to indicate that Napoleon also:

-Forbid Jews from migrating within France

-Heavily restricted their ability to engage in moneylending

-Cancelled all debt owed to Jewish lenders

-Forced them to adopt surnames

-Conscripted them into the army

All of which are far more anti-Semitic than the modern policy of building a welfare state and offering people the choice to leave their religious communities.

Now I'll freely admit that I'm ignorant of Napoleon beyond some broad strokes. I would assume that, as a European gentile in the eighteenth century, he had antisemitic sentiments. But like, this seems insane:

Letting Jews out of the ghettos and removing the barriers to their participation in broader society is roughly the exact opposite of antisemitism, surely. If this is an accurate summary of Napoleon's policy towards the Jews then he was in fact a great champion of Jewish freedom, and a model for gentiles to follow rather than a cautionary tale.

I'm not a native to the rationalist part of the internet, but it seems like that idea's gotten a lot more popular since Scott Alexander created his idea of the Archipelago. It strikes me as the kind of "liberal defeatist" politics that a lot of rationalists seem to share: we should tolerate difference and let people choose their communities, but universal values don't exist or are impossible/not worth it to establish, so the best we can do is create as many cultural islands as possible and let God/Moloch/citizen choice sort it out.

OK, why do so many political and fiction writers seem enamored with this idea of breaking the world into little micro-statelets?  I think the idea is that it’s nice to have your own law shared with people who agree with you, it seems like a massive punt on the actual political problems of the day unless you live in total isolation from others.

I see this shit and I can’t help but wonder if these people think of law on purely an aesthetic level or something.