Spain's Communist Village Is Making The Rest Of The World Look Bad - Polidicks

I'm asking, if the US system is so snafu, how does the European parliamentarian system work instead? We've been using the byzantine and strange US as a Representative of Democracy when in actuality, Parliamentarian Democracies out number the US System. So it'd be far easier to work with that. [editline]11th December 2013[/editline] [QUOTE=yawmwen;43143247]48% according to wikipedia. huffpost said 36% but i think it was a blog source.[/QUOTE] I read it from a study, I'd try to find it but its 0100.

[QUOTE=Swilly;43143250]I'm asking, if the US system is so snafu, how does the European parliamentarian system work instead? We've been using the byzantine and strange US as a Representative of Democracy when in actuality, Parliamentarian Democracies out number the US System. So it'd be far easier to work with that.[/QUOTE] that can be a stepping stone towards a more participatory system.

How much money is a single vote - my vote - worth to someone who's running is what I'd like to know.

[QUOTE=Swilly;43143250] I read it from a study, I'd try to find it but its 0100.[/QUOTE] there are also many methods of determining voter turnout. is voter turnout the % of people who vote who are registered? is voter turnout the % of technically eligible voters who register and vote? is voter turnout % of total population? you get different numbers each time but i think the usa is consistently one of the lowest ranking.

[QUOTE=yawmwen;43143255]that can be a stepping stone towards a more participatory system.[/QUOTE] Here's a challenge then, in your system, would everyone care about everything? Because I'd bet that less than half the population would vote on more nuanced things like energy policy, which has a big effect on the economy. [editline]11th December 2013[/editline] [QUOTE=yawmwen;43143263]there are also many methods of determining voter turnout. is voter turnout the % of people who vote who are registered? is voter turnout the % of technically eligible voters who register and vote? is voter turnout % of total population? you get different numbers each time but i think the usa is consistently one of the lowest ranking.[/QUOTE] Depends, if you're counting nations with known voter fraud, that can really dent numbers. [editline]11th December 2013[/editline] [QUOTE=Kaiwren-;43143257]How much money is a single vote - my vote - worth to someone who's running is what I'd like to know.[/QUOTE] In the US system, very little because voter fraud is taken very seriously over here. Now in Russia.... [editline]11th December 2013[/editline] I'm off to sleep....I'll grab that study later today for ya.

[QUOTE=lolwutdude;43142999]but who decides that authority is legitimate? what if i say that authority isn't legitimate to me and have nothing on me?[/QUOTE] the collective as a whole i guess, and i mean, it's voluntary society, yes you can decide the authority isn't legitimate and refuse to be a part of that society

[QUOTE=Swilly;43143264]Here's a challenge then, in your system, would everyone care about everything? Because I'd bet that less than half the population would vote on more nuanced things like energy policy, which has a big effect on the economy.[/quote] it's hard to say. people would vote on the issues that affect them most and that they have most passion in. it would also be something of the responsibility of workplaces to figure out more sustainable methods of energy usage and it would be the responsibility of engineers and scientists to devise more sustainable energy generation technologies.

[QUOTE=Kaiwren-;43143005]"[I]even[/I] fascism" I dunno, Mussolini's pre-war Italy wasn't actually that bad, and received international praise for how things were being run there. Fascism is only perceived as a bad thing because people are told in schools that the Nazis were fascists (they weren't - authoritarianism != fascism) and anything associated with Nazism is automatically absolutely terrible.[/QUOTE] Fascist Italy was a contemptible hell-hole which maintained the illusion of mass support through coercive measures. Welfare was given on the basis you were a member of a fascist union, membership of which was up to whoever ran it. If they didn't like you, too bad, you didn't get welfare. Nor could you work for that matter, since you needed to be part of a fascist union to receive work. The actual wages and living standards of the Italian people decreased in many areas of Italy under Mussolini's regime, the north suffering the most. To call it not bad is a blatant lie.

imagine if anyone had the power to disagree and stop a decision from taking place god damn would that be slow and frustrating. like congress except magnitudes bigger [editline]11th December 2013[/editline] or if facepunch was in charge of making important decisions

[QUOTE=lolwutdude;43143012]no please dont please[/QUOTE] There's big differences between fascisms and national socialism. In a lot of ways the main tenet of fascism was, everything is the state. Which in itself doesn't have to be a bad thing. It usually endss up being bad, but that's about it. The fact that neo-fascists are usually more neonazis is another matter. [QUOTE=yawmwen;43143295]it's hard to say. people would vote on the issues that affect them most and that they have most passion in. it would also be something of the responsibility of workplaces to figure out more sustainable methods of energy usage and it would be the responsibility of engineers and scientists to devise more sustainable energy generation technologies.[/QUOTE] Except you still run into huge issues of things which have a huge impact on everyone but are potentially not incredibly visible. In a lot of ways you're looking at worse problems than capitalism. Because capitalism is actually in many ways closer to anarchism than most social forms. And you see it - the moment industries get public interest driven, you get the most lucrative things getting pushed ahead of potentially more important ones which though are as important for a lot of people.

-snip - double post -

There wont be an anarchist future anytime soon

[QUOTE=yawmwen;43142699]mediation prolly[/QUOTE] [QUOTE=yawmwen;43142723][url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice[/url] [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediation[/url] please acquaint yourself with these two ideas because they would prove necessary in an anarchist system where conventional courts and legal systems are not in place.[/QUOTE] Honestly man, what you're suggesting is looking less 'here's an alternative system nobody has done that would work better' and more 'let's all go back to agrarian pre-industrial society and try really hard not to progress'. People made laws by choice, because knowing the standards of conduct and having them objective makes it easier to punish bad behavior and recognize bad behavior before it occurs. People gave authority to individuals in the enforcement of laws by choice, so that people very familiar with the laws could understand and apply them rather than require everyone to be serving as jury over even the slightest infraction, and to avoid mob mentality from overreacting. For all your talk about overcoming social ills that you blame on capitalism, your proposed society makes it trivially easy for those same ills to be ingrained into de facto laws governed by an uncaring majority. When a simple majority decides issues, then there's no recourse for an oppressed minority. Or worse, if your system requires consensus, the result is long deadlock wasting valuable time every time a contentious issue comes up. And even at its most basic level, the idea that consensus or a majority makes a decision [i]is a law[/i]. That is a rule. If you really wanted a society with no rules whatsoever, then the instant I am of a minority opinion I'll probably just enforce my will by force. What you have isn't decision-making system, it's might-makes-right until someone gets the bright idea to work together and start drafting standards of conduct, at which point you have laws again. Even something as abstract as 'don't burn down the village or we'll kill you' is a constructed rule meant to inform behavior before it occurs. We use what you describe as power structures because they make society work beyond the scale of an extended family. Direct democracy (itself a power structure in that it dictates who is right) is too slow and individualistic to be effective when applied to a large scale. Simple agrarian society may have been better in some ways but you have to be seriously out of touch to think that working 16hrs a day 7 days a week on a farm and then dying of dysentery before your 18th birthday would be a better experience than the modern world.

I've recently been reading Alexis De Tocqueville's Democracy in America and his description of the very early township system in the New England Colonies seem to be the closest, realistic, representation of what Yawmwen would want. It consisted of smallish (averaging around 2,000) groups of people forming self-running townships that worked based on democratically elected 'selectmen' and other functionaries who then had to present every action, beyond the basic functions of the office, to vote at a town meeting. This led to very different sets of laws and regulations from town to town based on the ideas and desires of the individuals in that town. De Tocqueville specifically talks about how the large amounts of influence every citizen had created a certain fervor within individuals for the common weal of the community. For example, these towns almost all had laws protecting and caring for the poor, public education for children, etc. without any external force being applied to them.

[QUOTE=catbarf;43150761]Honestly man, what you're suggesting is looking less 'here's an alternative system nobody has done that would work better' and more 'let's all go back to agrarian pre-industrial society and try really hard not to progress'. People made laws by choice, because knowing the standards of conduct and having them objective makes it easier to punish bad behavior and recognize bad behavior before it occurs. People gave authority to individuals in the enforcement of laws by choice, so that people very familiar with the laws could understand and apply them rather than require everyone to be serving as jury over even the slightest infraction, and to avoid mob mentality from overreacting. For all your talk about overcoming social ills that you blame on capitalism, your proposed society makes it trivially easy for those same ills to be ingrained into de facto laws governed by an uncaring majority. When a simple majority decides issues, then there's no recourse for an oppressed minority. Or worse, if your system requires consensus, the result is long deadlock wasting valuable time every time a contentious issue comes up. And even at its most basic level, the idea that consensus or a majority makes a decision [i]is a law[/i]. That is a rule. If you really wanted a society with no rules whatsoever, then the instant I am of a minority opinion I'll probably just enforce my will by force. What you have isn't decision-making system, it's might-makes-right until someone gets the bright idea to work together and start drafting standards of conduct, at which point you have laws again. Even something as abstract as 'don't burn down the village or we'll kill you' is a constructed rule meant to inform behavior before it occurs. We use what you describe as power structures because they make society work beyond the scale of an extended family. Direct democracy (itself a power structure in that it dictates who is right) is too slow and individualistic to be effective when applied to a large scale. Simple agrarian society may have been better in some ways but you have to be seriously out of touch to think that working 16hrs a day 7 days a week on a farm and then dying of dysentery before your 18th birthday would be a better experience than the modern world.[/QUOTE] i want a society with no laws. that has nothing to do with rules. your own ignorance and inability for critical thinking conflate the idea of rule and law when really the two share little in common. catbarf's "logic" "our society works this way, anything else is a return to the hunter gatherer lifestyle." your post is a spew of half thoughts with no actual relevance to what i've even said. what does any of what you just said have to do with mediation or restorative justice? [editline]12th December 2013[/editline] idk how anyone can even rate you "agree" when your post bears NO relevance to anything said and is instead some reactionary garbage.

[QUOTE=yawmwen;43153047]i want a society with no laws. that has nothing to do with rules. your own ignorance and inability for critical thinking conflate the idea of rule and law when really the two share little in common. [/QUOTE] Rules are laws. They serve the same purpose. And his response isn't wrong. You have this infatuation that somehow, if we were to learn from back before we were farmers that maybe everything would go away, you are nostalgic for pre-civilization humanity.

[QUOTE=Swilly;43153225]Rules are laws. They serve the same purpose. And his response isn't wrong. You have this infatuation that somehow, if we were to learn from back before we were farmers that maybe everything would go away, you are nostalgic for pre-civilization humanity.[/QUOTE] "The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror." and do you think that there is nothing to learn from pre-agricultural society? [editline]12th December 2013[/editline] just because something serves the same purpose, it doesn't make it the same as something else. for example a train and car serve the same purpose(to transport someone from one point to another), but it would be ridiculous to suggest that a car is equal to a train. [editline]12th December 2013[/editline] "The difference is that the "order of custom" would prevail rather than the "rule of law". Custom is a body of living institutions that enjoys the support of the body politic, whereas law is a codified (read dead) body of institutions that separates social control from moral force. This, as anyone observing modern Western society can testify, alienates everyone. A just outcome is the predictable, but not necessarily the inevitable, outcome of interpersonal conflict because in an anarchistic society people are trusted to do it themselves. Anarchists think people have to grow up in a social environment free from the confusions generated by a fundamental discrepancy between morality, and social control, to fully appreciate the implications. However, the essential ingredient is the investment of trust, by the community, in people to come up with functional solutions to interpersonal conflict. This stands in sharp contrast with the present situation of people being infantilised by the state through a constant bombardment of fixed social structures removing all possibility of people developing their own unique solutions."

[QUOTE=yawmwen;43153047]i want a society with no laws. that has nothing to do with rules. your own ignorance and inability for critical thinking conflate the idea of rule and law when really the two share little in common. [/QUOTE] Because you keep backpedaling like crazy every time someone raises a valid criticism of your society, and then in order to make it function you have to start adding back in the structures that you claim to be against in the first place. 'I want a society with no laws' Well then how do you resolve conflict between people? 'you mediate with a vote' Oh. So you [I]vote[/I]. So there's this agreement, this [I]rule[/I], this [I]law[/I] that when you have a disagreement, it's settled with a vote. What if it's a small conflict that isn't worth the attention of everyone else? 'you use a mediator' So you use a person who fulfills the [I]specific function[/I] of determining the outcome to a conflict. And that mediator [I]alone[/I] makes the decision. Sure sounds like he has power over these people in the exact same way as a judge in the real world does. More, in fact, since this hypothetical society hasn't developed a legal system specifically designed to limit power, separating the finding of guilt from the punishment. Instead, in this one case, one person decides who lives and who dies. So here's the bottom line: Either we're back to hunter-gatherer times where you can kill or fuck anything in sight without any repercussions (and you'd have to be a [I]loon[/I] to think that that's an ideal state of being) or we start building laws, implicit or explicit, that set limits on human behavior for the good of the whole. Because no matter how good you think people might be, how much you think we can twist human nature to make people altruistic, there will [I]always[/I] be people who reject the good of the whole in favor of short-sighted self-interest, there will [I]always[/I] be irrational or deluded or insane or psychopathic or downright homicidal people, and [B]you need a system, even if it's informal and never put in writing, to deal with them[/B]. There is no escaping this.

[QUOTE=catbarf;43153450]Either we're back to hunter-gatherer times where you can kill or fuck anything in sight without any repercussions (and you'd have to be a [I]loon[/I] to think that that's an ideal state of being) or we start building laws, implicit or explicit, that set limits on human behavior for the good of the whole.[/QUOTE] false dichotomy [editline]12th December 2013[/editline] address something i say for once instead of going on reactionary rants i wanna see if you actually know how to form relevant thoughts in your brain.

[QUOTE=yawmwen;43153465]false dichotomy[/QUOTE] Oh for fuck's sake. Either you have a system, agreement, consensus, whatever you want to call it in place to deal with people who actively harm others, to resolve disagreements, and to guide the society for the good of all, or you don't have a society, you have a bunch of individuals doing whatever the hell they want and it'd have to be a miracle for every single one to decide to act altruistically without ever having any conflict or disagreement whatsoever. You described putting contentious questions to a vote. The idea that disagreements are resolved with votes [i]is implicitly a power structure[/i].

[QUOTE=catbarf;43153496]You described putting contentious questions to a vote. The idea that disagreements are resolved with votes [i]is implicitly a power structure[/i].[/QUOTE] but it's not a legal structure. [editline]12th December 2013[/editline] you can have a system without it being hierarchical. you can have governance without government.

[QUOTE=yawmwen;43153515]but it's not a legal structure.[/QUOTE] Why not? Because it's not on paper? Because you choose to call it something else? If there is an understood, implicit rule of 'we settle these problems with votes and if you refuse the answer we'll run you out of town', then it's a de facto law. You don't need lawyers or paper to have a law, just a [I]generally understood rule with consequences for disobedience[/I] and the capacity to enforce it. And that's a power structure, because it now confers decision-making power to whoever controls a majority vote and denies all autonomy to individuals who form a dissenting minority. And it's being enforced. How is that [I]not[/I] government?

[QUOTE=catbarf;43153620]You don't need lawyers or paper to have a law, just a [I]generally understood rule with consequences for disobedience[/I] and the capacity to enforce it. [/QUOTE] no you need papers, courts, judges, and lawyers to have law. without those things, law becomes custom or a set of rules. [quote]And that's a power structure, because it now confers decision-making power to whoever controls a majority vote and denies all autonomy to individuals who form a dissenting minority. And it's being enforced. How is that [I]not[/I] government?[/quote] except it doesn't deny autonomy to anyone. it gives decision making power to everyone. it also isn't enforced in a traditional manner. it's enforced voluntarily whenever possible. it is informal and meant to merely facilitate group interactions. as the group changes, so do the customs and structures. this is a contrast to the normal power structures because these power structures are largely unchanging and have to be changed in a "top-down" fashion, rather than through the horizontal decision-making of anarchism.

[QUOTE=yawmwen;43153712]no you need papers, courts, judges, and lawyers to have law. without those things, law becomes custom or a set of rules.[/QUOTE] So anarchy isn't against societal rules with punishment for their violation, it's just against writing them on paper. And mediators are fine, but call them lawyers and suddenly it's bad. Gotcha. (those are completely useless, meaningless, nitpickingly bullshit distinctions) [QUOTE=yawmwen;43153712]it also isn't enforced in a traditional manner. it's enforced voluntarily whenever possible.[/QUOTE] So it's a decision-making process meant to take into account the will of all people that may have to be applied by force if people refuse to cooperate with the rules. Sure sounds like government to me.

[QUOTE=catbarf;43154051] (those are completely useless, meaningless, nitpickingly bullshit distinctions)[/quote] did you read the articles i linked? [quote]So it's a decision-making process meant to take into account the will of all people that may have to be applied by force if people refuse to cooperate with the rules.[/quote] no

you're missing the point catbarf, anarchism is voluntary society noone is forced to be apart of it [editline]12th December 2013[/editline] force is only legitimate in opposing oppression

[QUOTE=Lachz0r;43154091]you're missing the point catbarf, anarchism is voluntary society noone is forced to be apart of it[/QUOTE] Oh okay, so if I decide I'm not going to participate in your voluntary society, I can go on a murder-arson spree and kill the people and burn down their houses and nobody will lift a finger to stop me. Because if they do, then they are enforcing their will on me and my participation in this society is no longer optional. And that's bad, because in anarchy I should be able to do whatever I want whenever I want because there are no laws or criminals. Right?

[QUOTE=Lachz0r;43154091]you're missing the point catbarf, anarchism is voluntary society noone is forced to be apart of it [editline]12th December 2013[/editline] force is only legitimate in opposing oppression[/QUOTE] So what happens if the opposition is greater than the voluntary society? Or this voluntary society happens to be in an area in which there is a claim by a much larger entity? Heck, I don't see why anarchism in the sense of what Yawmwen is saying is too much different than a direct democracy with a veto or filibuster system of "this group doesn't agree with the majority so no action can proceed", everyone votes on decisions, but anyone can stop it within reason. If say 60% want something the other 40% do not want and the 40% is unwilling to budge about it what does the 60% do? Nothing because the minority doesn't like something? What if they are against it for the wrong reasons, like misinformation, a misunderstanding or simply they do not believe it is the correct way forward? See; nuclear energy.

[QUOTE=catbarf;43154388]Oh okay, so if I decide I'm not going to participate in your voluntary society, I can go on a murder-arson spree and kill the people and burn down their houses and nobody will lift a finger to stop me. Because if they do, then they are enforcing their will on me and my participation in this society is no longer optional. And that's bad, because in anarchy I should be able to do whatever I want whenever I want because there are no laws or criminals. Right?[/QUOTE] murder and arson are forms of oppression. man are you serious? this is your argument? lol

[QUOTE=catbarf;43154388]Oh okay, so if I decide I'm not going to participate in your voluntary society, I can go on a murder-arson spree and kill the people and burn down their houses and nobody will lift a finger to stop me. Because if they do, then they are enforcing their will on me and my participation in this society is no longer optional. And that's bad, because in anarchy I should be able to do whatever I want whenever I want because there are no laws or criminals. Right?[/QUOTE] But remember, crime is not a thing in this society!