AnonymousIRC leaks hundreds of docs from Arizona law enforcement (3rd time)
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I hear Somalia is nice this time of year.
Don't spread the glib ignorant idea that Somalia is some sort of anarchist heaven. That just makes you sound like another silly westerner. It's a former state carved into several other competing states with their own separate order.
Or, you know, anarchy. Current lack of a permanent winner does not imply that no one is playing the game.
I'm not sure that anarchism can be as stable as government, but I think it's certainly possible. In any case, history doesn't appear to show that there's any system which is stable in the long term -- the Roman Republic didn't remain one. Considering only longevity and stability, monarchy may be the standout government type.
your free to think anything you want, but with no empirical data or any substantial evidence to support your opinion...why share them here?
It is by definition not an anarchy.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy#Lists_of_ungoverned_com...
I'm not sure you get the original concept concept of anarchy. Anarchy is a society mode where there is no designed leader that has power over everyone and where law is substituted by social standard that people follow (no written rule). It's basically NOT having a government.
Somalia has government in the sense of different states have governments that view themselves as independent from the rest. They collect taxes, have an armed security force, and generally do all the normal things a state would do anywhere else in the world. The only difference is that the only officially recognized govt by the world is the TFG in Mogadishu, which actually has less control and actual governance than your average HOA in Podunk, Kansas. Couple this with high corruption, lack of effective governance in large swaths of the country, constant war for power everywhere, pirates with cameras shining on them on the high seas, complete enmity between the major states, and constant meddling by too many outsiders to count and you have the reason why there is no central government that rules over Somalia proper till now, more than 20 years after Barre's fall.
I guess adding "seems to prove" means you can make up anything you want, and you're protected.
A las barricadas!
Even if you end up completely, 100% in total disagreement with everything the Spanish partisans built, represented and fought for, you will still have read an extraordinary book by an absolutely fantastic writer.
On the other hand, Somalia is doing poorly compared to developed nations, but better than a lot of countries with (corrupt) Government and police in Africa. At least in Somalia/TFG they aren't powerful enough to do any harm. E.g. they have the fastest and cheaper cell phone and Internet providers in Africa.
somalia is very obviously not an anarchist society, for that would require the majority of the population to be philosophically anarchist and organized in an anarchist manner. it is a collection of statist factions, each attempting to impose a state.
personally, i believe that capitalism is inherently statist. a state is simply an entity with a large amount of land capital.
Just because most anarchists dislike anarcho-capitalism, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist as an ideology. Look at the Wikipedia article.
> personally, i believe that capitalism is inherently statist
Maybe its name it's unfortunate. Some people call it free-market anarchism, but that includes other kinds like mutualism, agorism, etc.
> a state is simply an entity with a large amount of land capital.
Land and capital are not the same thing. You can have any of them independently of the other. Are you aware of geolibertarianism?
Also you're blending together capitalism (and its crony state) as a system with capitalism as a free market ideology. And I hope you don't confuse free market with taxing the poor and subsidizing the rich as crony governments do.
Last but not least, please read about panarchism. All flavors of anarchism can coexist with each other, because they aren't really that different.
While on the other hand you have somewhere like Somaliland that has actually organized real, transparent, democratic elections, a functioning government that actually has confidence amongst its citizenry and yet isn't recognized by anyone and is basically ignored. Forget the fact that it's innovating in the mobile banking space at a faster pace than most other African nations, a booming renewable energy sector, and plenty of opportunities for outside investment. Sure, it has plenty of problems to deal with itself, is in active conflict with its neighbor Puntland, and still has a problem with corruption, tribalism, and nepotism...yet it is one of the few signs of progress in that nation.
When people say anarcho-capitalist society and things like that, they picture homesteaders or other idealistic groups of people living off the land with no rulers and loose confederations at best. Think Spain[2] in the 20th century. Somalia is quite unlike that.
[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/9/9f/2...
May they both never get what they want.
Well, you could make a decent argument that in a direct democracy like Switzerland the politicians are largely figureheads similar to the queen of England.
In other words, that's almost like being free of politicians, but Switzerland certainly has no shortage of police.
But then again, they also don't have nearly as many non-violent drug offender in prison as the US does.
If we can take as given the notion that power leads inevitably to corruption, and that corruption currently exists, it strikes me that the most straightforward way to minimize the potential for ongoing corruption is to compromise the secrecy it requires.
Further, if we agree that law enforcement may serve as an agent of corruption, its large surface area makes it an interesting target. If the arm of the corrupt is bound by watchful eyes, the damage that arm can do is minimized. Further, if the corrupt are using law enforcement in the advancement of their own dubious agenda, there may be useful evidence laying around.
To bring this back to something more concrete: Arizona politicians are using bullshit fear to advance an agenda and immigration laws are a lever they're trying to pull. Who can guess how law enforcement activities are implicated in such a strategy? It seems a reasonable tree to shake.
This is not to say that I necessary endorse – or condemn – the actions described here. I'm pretty conflicted. But if you're going to batman this kind of thing, you could do a lot worse than starting with law enforcement. There's no direct route to the end boss of corrupt power. You'd need to build a Rube Goldberg machine – and this strikes me as decent cog in such a device.
A good example is the drug-busts of medical marijuana dispensaries in California. Federal law enforcement ran the busts, but they got help from California state troopers & city police, even though the Californian policeman should be upholding California law and the 10th Amendment. They were choosing to misapply the law. I hoped they would have defended the dispensaries-- and at the least, I was hoping that they would be a neutral force.