From a European perspective, you can see that the police will get worse if you have
But the woke USA tumblr response could just be “You have fewer black people for the police to be racist at“.
“Movies will be free after the revolution!”
Movies take the work of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people. How will we decide where to allocate our resources for the best results?
Centralized committee!
Yes! The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television smiles upon you!
glarthir asked:
quoms answered:
obviously yes there are differences, but if what you’re asking is are those differences categorical then basically no, states and mafias are (or can be) more or less divergent versions of the same type of system
i would point to scale as a significant factor here. when something is the size of most states it doesn’t make sense to run it like a mafia anymore; states that operate on the same basis of personal relationships, patronage, and rent extraction as mafias do (lacking, in effect, the professional bureaucracy and rule of law characteristic of modern states) tend not to be regarded as especially well-functioning
conversely, however, mafias tend to be very good at providing passable ‘state’ services on the local level, either in communities that have slipped through the cracks of the state or where the state has ceased to exist altogether (as in a civil war context)
I’d endorse this, my feeling is generally that a mafia is just a government that hasn’t achieved hegemony, there’s been some decent theorizing of this under Olson’s notion of governments as “stationary bandits” if you’re interested
I think debating “is this ‘government’” as a noun can get into all sorts of weird edge cases - is a “government in exile” with an intact structure that doesn’t particularly govern anything at the moment still a “government”? In a feudal situation where lords, guilds, merchant families, and a church are all understood to have the ability to extract resources and dictate social terms backed by violence by men bearing their symbols, which of these are governments?
Is a tribal council less “government” than a Westphalian state? Does the answer depend on formal mechanisms of power and succession? Does it depend on continuity across generations? Does it depend on the ability to project power beyond its boundaries? Does “government” have to correspond to “boundaries” in the first place?
But as a verb, yeah, states and mafias govern with the same tools and dynamics
I tend to object to the question, as generally the purpose is not to achieve a clearer understanding, but as a form of objection from Anarchists who cannot adequately defend territory, hoping to undermine state power.
As such, it tends to make things less rather than more clear, in my opinion.
All holding of territory depends on the ability to wield force, as does, effectively, all property. Anarchists tend to start arguing “the state are just glorified bandits!” in an attempt to legitimize their proposed alternatives, but their proposed alternatives either will not function (due to lack of force), or have most of the same “issues” they complain about.
The Libertarians and AnCaps have it backwards. Property is something you implement on top of a framework of force and security, it does not precede that framework. (I’ve seen one try to get around this by arguing absolute causal ownership of the self, but anyone with human experience should be able to tell you that’s bullshit.)
And the Anarcho-Communists are willing to use all the tools of state-like violence they claim to be against, ignore the side-effects of their policies, and so on, so long as it’s informal. Give the power to the mob, and you haven’t eliminated the state. You’ve just made a mob-state.
I know it seems absurd to a lot of the people within Liberalism and on Tumblr, that anyone could be against allowing the football players to kneel for the national anthem.
The performative flag-wavers surely are just using this as an opportunity to cover up racism, and “how dare they?” And so on.
However, the thing about performative flag-waving tribalistic Nationalism is that it has an intuitive basis.
It is necessary to maintain sufficient loyalty to maintain a coherent polity. For any ideology to exist in this world, it must be backed by those who are willing to kill or to die. In some states, voluntary military recruitment has fallen so low, relative to geopolitical necessity, that they are now reinstating conscription.
Fighting over the national anthem at football games spends an intangible resource.
America has a large reserve of this national will, larger than many other countries, so the cost seems small. However, it is always being chipped away at in small amounts from multiple directions at once.
And the thing is, the opposition has many people that are opposed to the existence of nation-states in general, and America as a political entity in particular.
Since there is no reason for the performative flag-wavers to believe that granting this concession will do anything but accelerate the demands for the next one, it’s incentivized for them to fight it rather than give in, even though it’s otherwise rational.
Also, what Scott said in his Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments posts. It isn’t really about the issue itself, it’s about symbol-power.
Anonymous asked:
You say this, but what happened to those without states capable of enacting powerful force? They were, in general, destroyed.
It is neither the bludgeon, nor the sword, but the armored hand that wields them. The power of the knight, the army, and the sovereign. The power of command, backed by violence. Something we wear or put on.
The state is not so constrained in its capabilities as a sword or bludgeon would imply, but neither is it so gentle, nor does it exist in such a softer world, as an ordinary hand would imply.
But yes, for new readers wondering why there’s a “#the iron hand” tag, it’s because my visual metaphor for state power is literally a steel gauntlet.
It’s important to remember that state power is ultimately rooted in military strength, and that while state interference is powerful, it can ultimately be clumsy and inexact, and forceful.
And I say this as someone who is often in support of state interference.
You, a Neoconservative who unironically supported the Iraq War while complaining about “Liberals clamping down on our freedoms”:
Me, completely unapologetic about the existence of a progressive income tax, flirting with the reintroduction of corporal punishment as an alternative to lengthy prison sentences, plotting the introduction of mixed martial arts to high school curricula as part of national civil defense infrastructure, and planning the partial legalization of some soft drugs in order to disrupt the cartels:
mafia protection rackets are so infuriating, probably because all the incentives are to just pay up, which is how they work.
it’s so tempting to try and imagine impractical ways of breaking the system.
It always impresses me how these gangs can be “more powerful than the police” and operate with relative impunity even in first-world countries.
I mean, you’d think the way to beat them would be to tell the cops. And yet, the government, for all its power, is often not the biggest force, and not just in an “I can shoot you and they can get me afterwards but not stop me” sense.
And of course, the “people fled the country rather than testify” thing seems… Like something you have to have an answer to.
infuriating! I think it’s easier to stop drug smuggling than protection rackets, as that involves a physical object that has to be shipped around distributed and can be intercepted at various points in the process.
but protection rackets are just this diffuse cloud of seemingly unrelated activities; people talking to each other over here, money changing hands over there, the occasional shop burning down or dude getting whacked somewhere else.
since police can’t offer 24 hour protection for every single person in town, there is always going to be someone vulnerable to extortion, and the incentive is always going to be to pay a small fee rather than risk defying them.
maddening!
Secret police, but instead of enforcing ideological conformity to the Party, they attempt to catch politicians with kickbacks, investigate labor and environmental regulation violations, and crash protection rackets.
connard-cynique asked:
Alright, again setting aside that this is trolly bullshit,
All states use the implicit threat of violence.
All states. Also all Anarchists, so as to prevent the formation of new states.
That includes liberal states! It includes Democracies!
Anyhow.
If you decide to actually massacre millions in the name of “white protection,” the Liberals get to kill you.
What you’ve just said implies a great confusion about the availability and power of political will.
Extermination takes more political power than separatism. If you have enough power to attempt extermination, then you have enough power to do separatism without it getting watered down. If you have half the power required to enact extermination, you have enough power to do separatism without it getting watered down.
And if the idea that some people might change their minds and later invite others back in applies to separatism, then it also applies to extermination, assuming you don’t literally control all habitable areas of the world in order to attempt extermination completely.
It’s also about political power required per unit area, per political operative, number of political operatives, et cetera.
Making a white city-state requires the coordinated action of the population of a city-state. So let’s call it somewhere between 1-7 million. They all have to move into, and control, only a city-state’s worth of geographic area. Most of them don’t have to be Party Militia members, so your real hardcore force would only need 50,000-500,000. to attempt this.
The entire process can be legitimized through the use of democratic means and ideology of national self-determination. The desired area can attempt to secede through a vote, severely undermining the ability of democratic nations to respond.
On the other hand, a plot for extermination requires seizing control of the whole country, and maintaining that control. For a country like Britain, with a population of 65 million, it’s going to need support from at least, let’s say, 25% of the population. So around 15 million. And that probably isn’t anywhere near enough unless you also have near-total control of the army.
One of these might actually be possible in the 21st century without the context of an invasion by a foreign power, the global collapse of oil reserves, the government of the United States of America declaring bankruptcy, and so on. I’ll give you a hint - it’s not the one involving the mass murder of people who have, individually, not committed any crimes worse than a parking infraction.
And that’s disregarding the effect that CRISPR and similar technologies are going to have on race.
But of course, this assumes White Nationalists who are not too delusional and who are capable of pulling off something reasonably well-organized with a realistic and achievable goal. The kind of people that could somehow make White Singapore.
Which don’t really exist in numbers right now.
I’m hoping that Leftists will be restrained enough to prevent them from coming into existence.
Besides, you’re forgetting a key part of why the Left has been able to advance, socially. A price paid in blood is a price paid in your nation’s will to survive.
connard-cynique asked:
So again, taking this as serious for a moment…
Ethnic separatism isn’t a gentle “no thanks,” it’s the formation of a new, sovereign nation-state based on principles of ethnonationalism and ethnic exclusion.
Exclusion backed by the iron hand of a state, and its implicit threat of violence.
But this isn’t extermination, and it doesn’t require the will for extermination - which isn’t going to exist at the national level barring some pretty shocking unforeseen circumstances.
So assuming you actually believed this, it would be foolish to pick extermination over separatism.
