Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"You're either being extraordinarily disingenuous or ignorant if you're trying to claim that socialism and anarchism haven't historically been aligned with each other. "

I find it amazing that you're using a strawman- something I've never said, and don't believe-- as an excuse to call me names.

Anarchism is incompatible with socialism and communism. That is what I pointed out. You can't enslave people and make them act against their nature without a central government, and if you have a central government, you have no anarchism.

"is probably due to a misunderstanding of "

You're projecting on me....

" was rather classless"

... and characterizing me based on YOUR characterization: "offhand dismissal " and then you outright lie: "to ignore cited factual statements" (two lies by my count there) is used as an excuse to rationalize more ad hominem: " leads me to believe you don't want to see anything that doesn't confirm your conceptions"

Why is it, so often, people refuse to argue to the points and instead insist on arguing to the person?

I made my points in my original comment. All of these references to history of socialism are completely irrelevant to my point, I wasn't even talking about socialism, I was talking about libertarianism.

You two are bringing it up as an opportunity to manufacture rationalizations to engage in ad hominam, nothing more.

You can't enslave people and make them act against their nature without a central government

Uh, of course you can. Slave owners of yore relied on paid guards and bounty hunters to keep their slaves. Sure, they were legally protected by the state, but they didn't need its actual interference. In fact, even after the importation of slaves from Africa was illegalized in the US, thousands continued to be imported just because the ban wasn't enforced.

Even in modern times and in countries were slavery was abolished, this is still true. For example, the Brazilian government had to free 4500 slaves just in 2008: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/03/brazil-slavery-p...

There's also the hundreds or thousands of women who are forced to marry in their teens by their own parents and husbands-to-be, without the government doing anything except letting it be. It's a major problem in India, Pakistan and even in Britain.

> Slave owners of yore relied on paid guards and bounty hunters to keep their slaves.

I think an Anarchist would call this a kind of de-facto government. It certainly had a monopoly on the use of force.

Look, I'm not trying to attack you personally, I'm trying to say that the way you are arguing is detrimental to discussion. This includes things like making controversial statements ("I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists") without expanding on them, dismissing other peoples' attempts to refer to outside sources ("[wikipedia] is not authoritative, and it is often quite biased...") without providing any of your own, changing your definition of what you are arguing (you say "I think this is just an example of socialists attempting to coopt another movement", and later claim that "I wasn't even talking about socialism")and getting overly defensive and refusing to engage with people because of perceived insults.

Any discussion about something important is going to get a little hot, taking your ball and going home anytime someone says something sharp is not going to be conducive to convincing others of your position or learning something yourself, dorkburlger.

> This includes things like making controversial statements ("I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists") without expanding on them

The phrase you cite is "endlessly amusing" because it is a contradiction in terms; communism/socialism is predicated on the presence of a government, and anarchism is predicated on the lack of one. If you need that explained, I'm not sure why you're participating in this thread.

> communism/socialism is predicated on the presence of a government

It's really not. Socialism is about collective ownership of property, state socialism is only a subset of socialism. But perhaps you could explain why prominent anarchists like Bakunin aligned themselves with socialists when their ideals were so diametrically opposed? It seems like you're using rather ahistorical definitions of anarchism and socialism.

All communism or socialism directly imply is that the means of production is not held privately, but by some kind of collective communal or social entity. This is often the state, but was often imagine to be some kind of community council or representative entity.

The distinguishment between that hypothetical entity and the 'state' as we know it is certainly up to debate, but I wouldn't therefore say that anarchism and communism or socialism are therefore contradictory.

> The distinguishment between that hypothetical entity and the 'state' as we know it is certainly up to debate, but I wouldn't therefore say that anarchism and communism or socialism are therefore contradictory.

How can we debate the necessity of the existence of government when we can't even decide what a government is?

We can't, really! But we try anyway. That's the nature of political and social problems: there's no specification that we can refer to to clarify our terms.

Anarchism is not predicated on the lack of government. Anarchism only requires non-hierarchy. It is entirely possible that a government be composed in a non-hierarchical way.

> It is entirely possible that a government be composed in a non-hierarchical way.

A government can only exist when it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in most situations. How can that, where only one group can use violence without being punished for it, possibly fail to impose a hierarchy?

Well what if we say that government is the means by which a people organize their business and a state is that entity which maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force?

We can have a government because we can set expectations and behavior. Only when we have police and a state apparatus do we then become a society whose mode of governance is via the state.

> Well what if we say that government is the means by which a people organize their business and a state is that entity which maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force?

I'd say that 'government' would be nothing more than a debating society, like the League of Nations, and just about as useful in preventing, say, homicide as the League of Nations was at preventing WWII.

>dorkburlger.

I don't engage with people who are begin dishonest, as you are, or people whose only form of "debate" is to characterize their opponent, or call them names, as you have.

Elsewhere several people have disagreed with me, attempted to show contradictions in my position, and surprisingly enough, they didn't need to resort to ad hominem or dishonesty to do it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com