London is burning...

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^^^Characterize it as you will. From my point of view, it seems the world has bankrupted itself bailing out sleazy banksters in the hopes that it would avert economic disaster.

Instead, the banksters took the money and ran, leaving the world economy in shambles.

Now, the banksters and richfolk are insisting that all will be well if only the countries that bankrupted themselves can balance the books…

The problem is they’re refusing to help out and they expect the books to be balanced with the blood and sweat of the working class…

The working class did not crash the economy and they shouldn’t have to pay for it.
If the upper classes don’t do the right thing, the streets will eventually run red with blue-blood.

It happened in France, it happened in Russia, it happened in China and it will happen in the west too.

The peasants will put up with a lot of crap, but when they can’t feed their families anymore… well that’s when it’s time to hoist the black flag and start slitting throats.

Do you actually read your posts back to yourself before hitting the "submit" button? I do, and if my reaction is "wow, I sounded stone cold crazy there", I go back to the drawing board. You may be right about things (I don't think you are, but for arguments sake), but when you present yourself in this way you essentially flush your credibility the second the death threats and torture talk come out, it doesn't speak to a sound mind. It also doesn't help when it sounds like you're personally looking forward to said bloodshed, it doesn't exactly enhance your rationality factor if you know what I mean. If you don't want to be called a nut, don't say nutty things, pretty simple really.

Look, I don't want this to happen, but it has happened in societies where economic disparity becomes too great, and it could happen here.

Dismiss me as a nut if it makes you feel better, but this is the stuff of revolutions.

We are in the second Guilded Age.

Unfortunately this time around there are no nouveau riche house wives with well developed morals or statesman with patriarchal tendencies to recognize and root out the evil in society...

These days reform is a dirty word. The progressive ideals that did away with child labor and sweatshops is demonized... Dirty socialist bastards--big government obstructing children's rights to work in dangerous factories!

This time all that societal evil and injustice is just going to fester and swell to bursting--metastasizing into violent revolt.

It doesn't have to be this way, but if people don't relearn the secret of American society--that freedom, democracy and prosperity depend on virtue (and selfishness is not one of them)--flags will be hoisted and throats will be slit.


(where's the tinfoil hat emoticon?)

PS

Just to be clear, I don't plan on slitting any throats! But, if an angry, bloodthirsty mob happens by I might point them in the RIGHT direction.

It seems that most of the people advocating vigilantee riots in this thread are targeting bankers. While I condemn vigilantism in all it's form, lets just remember that the Financial Collapse was caused due to a grand amount of corporate fraud which wasn't prosecuted, the culture of white collar crime was systemic. AceOfSpades has said that he supports killing people like Bernie Madeoff, so it's only a logical extension of his own pro-Death Penalty ideology that all the bankers should be executed and the few "good apples" who might be wrongful executed are "acceptable causalities" in a war on crime (he used that phrase when describing people wrongfully convicted of the murder in the USA).

There really isn't that much of a gap between the Pro-Death Penalty ideology of AceOfSpades and teh Pro-Death Pentalty against bankers ideology of ValetineWiggim.

Last edited by Master_Pedant on 10 Aug 2011, 3:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I personally believe in violent revolution. Bakunin realized that "the state" would NEVER go away unless it was completely and violently SMASHED. That said the London rioters should be burning down Parliament, Buckingham Palace, and the banks in the City of London rather than little shops in their own neighborhoods. It's an unfortunate reality that rioters are always burning down the wrong things. I hope that Americans are smarter than that, and burn down the government and banks rather than strip malls. I would also like to see us burn the bankers and politicians alive, and smash and destroy all of their wealth.

The good thing in all of this is that we are being given vital clues as to how to organize the future society. Anarchism has always suffered from an implementation problem. Without some way of having direct democracy, any revolutionaries were inevitably forced into the easily corrupted representative model of govt.

We now have the tools to implement the age old dream of anarchists everywhere, via smart phones and social media! We can now have "flash governing", with people gathering to debate the issues of the day at a moment's notice, and voting via smart phone. With everyone's voice being heard, and majority rule, people can no longer complain that "our representatives don't represent us". The representative form of govt is now obsolete. To get there from here, we will likely need a new French Revolution, to root out the elite and their sycophants. I say, bring it on!

This comment has given me an insight. The strong "gun culture" in America - to the point where you can buy machine guns from pawnshops (or so I've been told be a relative who recently visited South Dakota) - really indicates a fundamental breakdown of civil society or at least a deep distrust of the police. When the police can't keep law and order, as is the case in parts of America where there's only a single cop car in a county, the demand for vigiliantism rises. Vigiliantism is the first sign of the breakdown of civil order.

Name me one successful stateless society.

Perhaps. It's used in places where the police/the justice system are either ineffective in dealing with scum or absent. Unfortunately, vigilantism brings its own problems.

Somaliland?

I said "successful", not "anarcho-capitalist dystopia".

Not Somalia, Somaliland. Seems to be much more successful than Somalia at any rate. They at least have a semblance of law and order there that is absent in Somalia proper.

And I, nor anyone apart from its director, would never hold up tribal warlordism of any kind as anything to do with anarcho capitalism.

I wouldn't call Somaliland "stateless". They have their own stable government even if it isn't recognized by the rest of the world. Puntland is also relatively stable as well compared to their neighbors in Mogadishu in the south. Somalia is a very interesting place tho as I have mentioned in a few other posts. They're better off(politically and economically and pretty much everything else) without a strong central government compared to their immediate neighbors who do and from before when they were a communist state.(Somalia actually had the largest military in Africa during this time)

It's also not fair to compare Somalia's "statelessness" to any possible statelessness in other parts of the world. You can only compare them to their immediate neighbors. Statelessness in Somalia won't look anything like statelessness in America or Canada.

The machinegun thing is totally incorrect, or at least very misleading if we take the usual definition of pawn shop at face value. Automatic weapons are heavily restricted in the US, many states ban them outright, and even in those where their ownership is allowed they're subject to strict federal laws. Merely obtaining the license to deal in them is a lengthy and expensive undertaking, and then the weapons themselves start in the mid 4 figures, as importation and manufacture was barred after 1986 and scarcity has really driven prices through the roof. What your relative likely saw MP was a look a like weapon like an AR15 or a semi-auto AK at a pawnshop with an FFL, it's an easy mistake to make if you don't know exactly what you're looking at.

Also, I think you're mistaken in equating self defense with vigilantism; self defense means protecting yourself from harm while vigilantism means taking the justice system into your own hands, very different things. Deciding independent of the legal system that someone is guilty of a crime, especially one that isn't on the books, and then passing a sentence and carrying it out unilaterally is vigilantism; shooting someone intent on harming you and yours is self defense. See the difference?

well, failing to see the difference, and justifying it in the grounds of self-defense shouldn't be surprising.

Pawn shops are required to have a dealer's license, and that version is not valid for the purchase or sales of machine guns even for law enforcement. Just because it looks like a machine gun does not mean it is. Semi-auto only versions of automatic weapons are legal here. Legally owning a machine gun is possible in some states but it's really expensive and complicated, and they have to be bought through a special dealer. Ownership of firearms, including machine guns, is no measure of the civility or lack thereof of a society. In fact, if a society is truly civil, even the widespread public availability of heavier weapons would not matter because people would not be inclined to use them against each other.

I've heard Canadian officials criticize calls for more victim-friendly self-defense laws as vigilantism. It would seem that Canadians have a different idea of what that means than most Americans. And you are right, there is a distrust of the police because they cannot always maintain law and order, cannot always be there when you need them in time to help you, and 30 years ago the courts ruled police have no legal obligation to protect individuals but only the best interest of the public at large. That ruling came as the result of a case where 3 female housemates were gang raped for hours during a home invasion robbery, the D.C. police didn't check it out, and the courts ruled they had no legal obligation to. If that's not a good reason to own guns (and that's a case where public order is being maintained), I don't know what is! That doesn't even consider civil unrest and natural disasters. If you live in a giant s**thole like Los Angeles and the roads are impassable, emergency responders and hospitals are unavailable and possibly destroyed, and help isn't going to be there for a week or two, what do you think is going to happen in the meantime and do you really want to put your faith in the police then? At least in extremely rural places the culture is about as far from that passes for "culture" in Los Angeles and people there tend to be much more civil, they have a lot of animals to alert them to someone coming, and it takes a whole lot of effort to go start crap out there in the first place. They need to be prepared to deal with sick/injured animals, wild animals, and the unlikely but possible wild human. It's not really fair to call it vigilantism when it takes an hour by truck, or a helicopter or bush plane is required to reach your residence. Vigilantism implies a desire to take the law into their own hands. In such extremely rural places there is no law enforcement to handle matters for you. In such cases it's more like natural selection than vigilantism because criminals would going through a whole lot of trouble to start crap they can't finish.