There are so many things that I want to say but dang I hardly know where to start.
I remember the day Googling "SteveA" and seeing the 3rd listing was my profile page on this site *Puffs chest and pats self on back*
and even though I don't have an e-mail account anymore it's great to see I was still able to log into the site.
Skiiping a lot of detail, a few recent epiphanies could be:
a) Does the existence of Government mean that people are required (by law etc.) to impose violence against someone else (i.e. "Sorry, it's not me, it's the law") - basically the problem with Government is that there's an implied requirement/obligation to harm people even if there's no desire or motive to do so.
Think of the perspective of feeling obligated to enforce daft laws - trying to enforce others to similarly enforce others to similarly coerce/fight/threaten harm etc. others even if potentially none of those "combatants" have any grievance, or even know or have interacted with those "enemies" ... to me that sounds like something close to hell.
Some good news:b) We don't necessarily need to change "how it is". (i.e. "Government" is
ALSO constrained by reality.) A couple recent epiphanies caused me to post here, one was after seeing a video where someone effectively said that Government is another entity in the 'marketplace' (in other words,
ALSO dictated by reality and "the economy") as well as reading a comment on this forum mentioning Agorism and those ideas struck me as being very real and true.
Life is fundamentally anarchic. That's "how it is" and things labelled "Government" aren't exempt. At the end of the day, whatever needs a meal to eat and a place to sleep etc. needs that and we can argue all day long (or however long anyone wants and is able to) but it remains the same (until it doesn't and then we'll simply deal with that as it comes along) - police officers, communists, socialists and yes, even capialists still need what they need and, for example, police could put everyone in jail but then they'd have no farmers to feed them, noone to build, repair or fuel their cars, maintain their firearms or build and maintain jails etc.
In other words, if someone wants to live in this world, there are certain constraints to be considered and "bad guys" aren't excluded from that (my apologies to anyone who feels they've undeservedly fallen into the "bad guy" category).
c) Life is free and noone needs feel any obligation to harm anyone else. (i.e. a "law" saying you're drafted and must fight against somebody/something/someplace else ... is, as any other decision in life ... optional, yep!).
d) It doesn't matter what the propoganda is, "Government", as also constrained by "Nature/Time/God/The Universe/Whatever" etc. and when you understand that ... there actually isn't much to fight against - it's mostly paper tigers.
As Jason Sorens said a long time ago, we're not likely to fight a civil war again, and in fact most the disagreements now are simply liguistic/verbal disputes. One of the epiphanies that hit me recently is that almost noone truly wants to fight anymore and mostly people are simply trying to understand how things truly are (probably not gonna happen anytime soon
) and that most of the political disputes are simply over translations (i.e. communists want to protect workers from having their labor/energy from being exploited/stolen etc. and capitalists want basically the same thing - it's just the details where disagreements occur).
Interestingly enough,
I think many of us aren't really here to change anything at all! 
We've simply been here living life (and quite a while for some) while trying to find a 'language' where we not only have little physical conflicts (already largely true for me and I assume many others), but we even speak a common "political language" with few arguments! (Pretty amazing in many ways) As an example many anachocommunists think that anarchocapitalism means that people want slave operated factories with smokestacks polluting a dead and barren treeless landscape while some anarchocapitalists may think of anarchocommunists as desiring to have mobs of desperate thieves roaming house to house pillaging whatever it takes to survive until they find another unlooted home. I seriously don't think either of these "ideals"
is truly what anyone wants.
In both the above cases the commonality is Anarchy - now assume that's already how life is. I believe the differences between the various "flavors" of it that people desire are simply varients of what type of friends and neighbors they'd consider desirable to be around.
Now, here's a "bonus challenge"
- imagine that we're ultimately going to live largely as we want (FYI the "paper tigers" are self destructing)... you (and I, of course
) may want to consider how that actually pans out.
Be careful what you wish for
"SteveA"
P.S. Don't worry. I think we've got (potentially a LOT of) time to figure out the details. Wheeww! *wipes sweat from forehead*
"Build it and they will come." (I'd like to give credit to the originator of that but sorry, I don't exactly remember where I heard that expression).
Good luck guys. I'm happy the FSP is still going and though I don't want to discount a lot of efforts, I
DO believe part of what's making the change is that "the old" is simply running out of steam and if there's "a new", well "the old" won't be determining it.
Again, I think we're going to "win" this (and in hindsight maybe it wasn't a question of
if but instead
when)... it might be worth considering the position of being in "now that we've won ... what now?". Thanks to many of you for having provided a lot of ideas to start with.
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Topic: Wow, ~14 years since my last post. Great to see you guys are still around. (Read 2639 times)