Seasteading

So okay: slavery is horrible, and illegal (by law) in a lot of places. But not in Mali, where hundreds of thousands of people are either indentured servants, or quite literally slaves.

15th century England. The royal houses, and most of the entire landed aristocracy, were encouraged to murder and steal from each other regularly. Those who exercised and demonstrated the most power, the greatest capacity for violence, were promoted. That's how we picked kings.

"By the grace of god", a phrase in many constitutional documents to this day, isn't a beam of light. Victory in battle was evidence of divine approval. It means that God picked your side in whatever war was fought to put your family on the throne. Violence was the core of society then and, arguably, remains so in constitutional monarchies today. (Canada, UK, Australia etc).

But if you re looking for a similar example take the armies. They all have lawful license to murder they just disagree on who to kill.

Technically, "sandbox" an area of safe experiment cordorned from the rest of the system. Seasteading would have real, permanent consequences considering the agenda involves recruiting a large number of people.

It's been shown that the primary thing that keeps many people in perpetual poverty is rules, it's the founding principle behind the concept of charter cities.

This claim is dubious in the extreme. In the areas of the world with little poverty, you generally find well developed rule system. Similarly, areas with great, squalid levels of poverty often have few-to-no rules.

As soon as one person's actions can affect another person a system arises for resolving their inevitable conflicts and facilitating cooperation if required. What do you call that system? Many would call that "government." That does seem appropriate if the definition of government is:

> the political system by which a country or a community is administered and regulated.

Of course, "government" as manifested in multi-million person nations is significantly evolved from it's abstract underpinnings both etymologically and philosophically. Same is true of the notions of political, community, administered, and regulated. But all that evolution (both its pros and cons) falls out logically from the foundational relationship of two beings with agency trying to figure out how and if to restrain that agency when it conflicts with the other's.

EDIT: I see from a sibling you're referring to "Anarchism." That doesn't free anyone for the reality of government it just changes where the restraining lines get drawn. In practice, the lines predictably get drawn in favor of the powerful just as they do in more mainstream systems of government.

A GAAR (which lots of countries have these days) goes roughly like this:

If you do something that only makes sense because it reduces your liability to taxation, that doesn't work, and tax is due as if you hadn't done it.

The UK's version uses a "double reasonableness" test, which tells a jury that the way to assess the rule is not just to decide whether they, ostensibly reasonable people, think the accused did something that makes no sense except to avoid tax, but that they should imagine whether _any_ hypothetical reasonable person could have thought it was reasonable to do this. That's a deliberately high bar for the tax authorities.

I don't think having an Irish subsidiary with four employees that supposedly sells all your products produced in China under direction of staff mostly based in Swindon seems reasonable if not for the tax benefit, but somebody else might reasonably think so, and so I concede that a "double reasonableness" test would allow you to keep claiming the tax benefits of doing that.

On the other hand, if you pay hardly any taxes because you claim to be a "second hand car dealer" but it turns out you never saw any of these cars you were supposedly dealing in, know nothing about cars, and had arranged in advance for the cars to be bought and sold at a calculated loss so as to avoid taxation, now I struggle to imagine how any reasonable person could not see that for what it is, and so (sure enough) real celebrities who tried such a scheme ended up having to pay their taxes (and for the lawyers they'd hired to try to argue this was fine).

Another fun element of GAAR is to require people who sell avoidance schemes to tell you about them. The requirement goes like this. If you sell somebody a tax avoidance scheme that doesn't work you're in hot water _unless_ you told the tax authorities about this scheme first. This way the authorities know what's coming, and the people who dream up schemes keep their income, the only downside is if you're a grifter hoping to avoid taxes it might be less likely to work now. Boo hoo.

Anarchism was overwhelmingly a socialist movement, contemporary with Marxism and communism. Many anarchists debated the ideal forms of socialism vigorously at congresses held by groups like the First International. Historically, Marxism and communism won the most mindshare, with rare exceptions like the Spanish Civil War.

Leading 19th c. anarchist thinkers, like Bakunin and Kropotkin, would have laughed you out of the room if you had claimed anarchism was in any way not a leftist movement.

This conception is from a much later argument of economist Murray Rothbard from the mid-20th c., and owes more to the Austrian school of economics then any strain of anarchist thinking. Rothbard drew upon some individualist anarchist writers, but tossed out all the economic parts he disagreed with, and called it anarcho-capitalism. Claiming anarcho-capitalism as a form of anarchism reveals a complete misreading of, or disdain for, the overwhelming majority of anarchist thought.

Now for an interesting follow-up: the term "libertarian" underwent the same change in America, but even more thoroughly, to the point that only historians recall its leftist origins. (Outside America, "libertarian" is more synonymous with anarchism.)

To quote Rothbard above: "One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy... 'Libertarians'... had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over..."

I'd call myself an "anarcho-pragmatist" now. That's based on not wasting breath or effort on stuff that's almost guaranteed not to work. My current recommendations to like-minded individuals are to support labor unions (or invent some other institution that counters plutocratic trends), and to oppose consolidation of broadcast media. I have long ago abandoned the non-aggression principle as being too dependent on people arguing over the meaning of "aggression".

Anarcho-communism is contrasted by anarcho-syndicalism, which argued for unions/industries being the organizing principle rather than communes/towns.

https://www.newsweek.com/how-russias-fsb-colonized-abkhazia-...

If (say) Tibet declared independence, there is absolutely no chance that China would nuke it. They would simply send in a whole lot of tanks and people with guns.

>> He ended up steering the ship right into the eye of a hurricane.

I know. I've read the NTSB report. And the bridge transcript. Most harrowing thing I've ever read.

I got the feeling though that there was fault with the land crew who tied down the cars in the holds inappropriately. If I remember correctly, first there was water in the holds, possibly from a burst pipe hit by a car moving about freely; then the cars started slipping around on the wet floor; then they started listing to port; then the oil pump gave up; then the captain turned his port to the wind to counter the list; then they lost power; and by that time they were in the eye wall of the hurricane and they were lost. Perhaps, if it hadn't been an old ship and if the cargo had been secured properly, we wouldn't know there ever was a ship with that name. Despite the captain's mistakes.

Thank you