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Comment by anonym29 | Hacker News Reader

Just to be clear, you're preaching to the choir. My preference would be for the entire intelligence community along with the rest of the entirety of the US federal government being dismantled as swiftly as is peacefully possible.

That said, most people here do not agree with me, most are statists who fundamentally enjoy kissing a boot stamping on the face of human freedom, they just have the delusion that their tribe is the good one and they're engaged in a fundamentally righteous and just conquest to crush the evildoers in the other tribe.

So we'll keep playing this stupid game where each side takes turns whacking the other side with the stick of government power, rather than acknowledging that we'd all be better off if we grew up, acted like adults, threw the stick away, and stopped taking turns trying to injure the other with it.

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You might find your rhetorical success is improved if you, in general, say what you mean instead of what you don't mean.

This is a hopelessly naïve viewpoint. A strong, liberal federal government is the only guarantor of civil rights nationally. If you get rid of it, it won't be replaced by enlightened anarchism, it will be replaced by oligarchs like Peter Thiel and fundamentalist Christians who have no qualms about using violence to impose their morals on the rest of us.

The criminal justice system does not prevent crimes, they just investigate a small handful of crimes, arrest even fewer, and prosecute even fewer.

The federal government, further, has almost zero role in policing. Unless you live in DC, there is a >99% chance that any time you interact with a member of law enforcement, they are state/county/city.

The histrionics over fundamentalist Christians, who make up less than 15% of the country anyway (not some rabid majority trying to stamp out the rights of the minority - they are the minority; most Americans who call themselves "Christian" are closer to atheists in terms of church attendance than the tiny subset of fundamentalists), and are not some dangerous threat.

I grew up in a repressive, fundamentalist evangelical southern Baptist household as a non-hetereosexual. I'm very familiar with that world in the worst of ways, including the loosely regulated Christian boarding schools.

These people are a pain in the ass, but they're not a real danger. To insist otherwise is to critically misunderstand reality, crime rates, and really the general intent of that subset of the population.

Ah yeah, I recall the many famous times that fundamentalist Christians pushed for the abolition of the regimes of slavery, anti-miscegenation, Jim Crow and segregation.

What's that? It was the liberal Federal government who did those things? Well darn, I guess the theocrats are part of the problem.

The liberal Federal government was also the one who legalized those practices in the first place.

Slavery and racial segregation doesn't exist in nature, the legal practice of both only ever existed thanks to government having a monopopy on force.

The correction was good and overdue (thank you to all of the western countries who ended slavery long before the rest of the world did), but never forget that it was governments who created the original evil in the first place.

But I get it. You're fundamentally statist - no amount of state-sanctioned evil can ever convince you that the state is bad.

On a related note: Free Palestine.

No, it was colonial monarchies that legalized those practices in the first place. You know, Kings, ordained by God. Thats not to say liberals abolished it immediately - Thomas Jefferson holds a lot of blame there, but liberal governments are the ones that did abolish it, and they are the ones that achieved the highest levels of broad civil rights in the history of civilized humanity.

> But I get it. You're fundamentally statist - no amount of state-sanctioned evil can ever convince you that the state is bad.

Pretty odd assumption to make. Clearly I think some types of states are bad, I'm just pitching for one specific kind. Israeli theocrats are bad too, but I get it, leftism - history is a suggestion and nothing is ever good enough.

The specific kind of government you are pitching for is solely and directly responsible for the unjustifiable and cowardly mass murder of unarmed women and children with napalm bombs and hellfire missiles that occurred in the invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan; the "smaller" atrocities that occurred in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, and Syria; the Kent State massacre, the Jackson State massacre, the Orangeburg Massacre, the MOVE bombing, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, MKUltra, human radiation experiments, Guatemala STD experiments, downwinders, the agent orange epidemic, the flint water crisis, COINTELPRO, Japanese American internment, Ruby Ridge and Waco, and the ongoing widespread well-documented practice of police brutality against black and indigenous communities, and the war on drugs that has ended the lives and torn apart the families of millions of their own nonviolent citizens.

Support these monsters all you want, just do yourself a favor and don't delude yourself into thinking you're on the team of the "good guys". You're on the team of psychopathic mass murderers who will brag about what they've done with a smile and a laugh.

No amount of good governance can justify supporting institutions run by people who commit war crimes and grave moral atrocities with pleasure.

I never said it was a perfect system or that we are morally pure, but it is the best one we have come up with so far. It has improved the human condition greatly, albeit in fits and starts. Western liberal states broadly have greater civil rights and have reduced poverty more than any other type of system in history. Your ideal (I think, you aren't very clear) of enlightened anarchism doesn't exist in any human society. Any short period of anarchy that has happened has been a shit show (i.e. France throughout the 1790s) that gets resolved by the most power hungry and murderous psychopaths possible.

How many dead children is "the best one we have come up with so far" worth?

>Western liberal states broadly have greater civil rights and have reduced poverty more than any other type of system in history

Except that of China, whom by embracing markets and capitalism, lifted more people out of poverty than the entire populations of the United States and Western Europe combined.

Make no mistake: Western liberalism isn't what lifts people out of poverty, capitalism does. It doesn't matter whether the capitalism is practiced by western liberal democracies or repressive authoritarian surveillance states - where capitalism goes, widespread increases in human wealth and quality of life follow.

That people could confuse this cause-effect relationship merely because western liberalism adopted capitalism earlier than the more authoritarian laggards only further proves "that government which governs least, governs best".

Less government = more freedom = less poverty.

More government = less freedom = more poverty.

Also, you're cherry-picking convenient examples while ignoring the inconvenient examples (Zapatistas, Rojava, various indigenous societies). The 1790s weren't even anarchist - they had revolutionary governments. The Terror was conducted BY a government, not in an absence of government.

Anarchist societies can maintain order and capitalism can create wealth under any political system. Individuals can murder, but states are the only entities to have ever committed genocide. The question isn't whether states do good things sometimes - it's whether any amount of good can justify establishing the prerequisite conditions for genocide to occur.

Is any amount of poverty reduction worth creating and maintaining the machinery that made Auschwitz possible, especially in a world where that poverty reduction doesn't actually require the existence of that machinery to begin with?

Keeping the state around for the stated purpose of reducing poverty is like keeping a loaded gun in a daycare to open juice boxes. Sure you can do it that way, but you also do not need the gun to do that, and having the gun there just introduces massive unnecessary risks.

You keep skating by the fact that anarchist societies don’t exist and can’t exist, so it’s hard to take the rest of your diatribe seriously.

I literally gave examples of functioning anarchist societies above. I'll offer them again, since you seemed to ignore them the first time I mentioned them: Zapatistas, Rojava, various indigenous societies.

Willfully ignoring them doesn't mean they don't exist.

Ok fair enough, I didn't read closely. Rojava and the Zapatistas both prove my point rather than refute it. The former is entirely dependent on US hegemony to keep them somewhat independent, otherwise they'd be absorbed by Turkey or Iran, and the Zapatistas exist within a much larger state as an insurgent paramilitary group. If the cartels disappeared tomorrow, the Mexican state would quickly reabsorb their territory and the Zapatistas would look more like FARC than an independent polity.

Given those examples, I think most people, myself included, would opt for the stability and moral ambiguity of the western liberal state.

First of all, I want to say thank you. I really appreciate that, for as different as our views may be, you're continuing to read and seriously consider the points I am raising, and respond in good faith, even after I allowed the heat of the moment to get to me when I called you a statist. Thank you for having the grace and civility to continue, and I'm sorry for allowing my emotions to provocatively shape my language towards you earlier. You're a good civil debate partner.

Back to the discussion at hand:

The main threat Rojava faced was ISIS, with Turkey becoming the primary threat after ISIS's defeat. But this only further strengthens my argument - these stateless societies exist under constant threat from states, not from internal collapse.

The Mexican state is essentially semi-complicit with, and deeply infiltrated by the cartels. There is nothing stopping either the cartels or the Mexican state from attempting to steamroll through Chiapas, besides the will of the people who live there to function autonomously (and the will to assert that right to peaceful existence through force, if necessary). The Zapatistas have maintained their autonomy for 30 years not through state protection but through community self-defense. If anything, they prove that people can resist both state and non-state violence without becoming a state themselves.

Your observation that these societies exist under threat from states actually reinforces my point. States don't tolerate alternatives because functioning anarchist societies expose the lie that states are necessary. Of course states and their allies try to crush them - the very existence of these functioning anarchist societies is a threat to state legitimacy

You're welcome to prefer a western liberal state, and I don't refute that most people would. That said, not everyone even has the luxury of choice in the first place. Many Zapatista communities have even seen dramatic improvements in healthcare, education, and women's rights compared to their state-governed neighbors. For these people, the comparison isn't between "the stability and moral ambiguity of the western liberal state" or not, it's between "state-governed oppression & poverty" and "relative prosperity through autonomy".

But I'm glad we can agree that functional, rights-respecting societies can exist without states. Once we acknowledge that, the question in my mind becomes: what level of genocide risk are we willing to accept across all states for the benefits you see some states providing? We can't cherry-pick Sweden while ignoring Syria - the collective sum of their outputs is the toll we pay for the existence of the state itself.

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