Philosphorous

I just love this argument--especially from somebody who keeps paying taxes that fund all that violence you preach against and then makes a lot of excuses why he shouldn't. Also, according to Stefan, the free market as he's existed has never existed, and I don't see any big ancap movement to make that happen rather than bitching on the Internet. So, not only do you keep paying your taxes, but you keep participating in the civilization bloodbath and blaming the state for doing so. Believe it or not, you not moving out to the woods to live off the grid is exactly as hypocritical as you're accusing me of being, since out there, you would have to trade freely and you wouldn't have to pay taxes. Get cracking! I know. All leftists are anti-civilization. Nobody on this board has any valid arguments except character attacks. "Why should I if you aren't?" That's really all you've got? Besides the fact that the capitalists own every inch of the Earth so I'd be arrested (as people are now as I posted above), this is a great way for you to dodge any and all criticism of the civilizatin bloodbath you support. I guess if it helps you snooze at night it helps. People do care as I've gotten a few dozen new subscribers of people who want the information I'm putting forward. That is the only reason I am using a computer.

This whole saving capitalism thing seems like a terrible idea. I know "freedom" and all that, but I really don't care to have businessmen running around where people live. We should be very afraid of them as a species and there are damn good reasons for it. Particularly since those businessmen are finding new ways to destroy the planet every day. Some idiot decided to invent something called the "free market" to justify humans shitting in their own mouths for profit, which is only encouraging new businesses that consider the world for sale. They see everything as dollar signs, which is a much LARGER problem than any wolve could possibly be.

Or, humans can get the hell out of the way rather than feeling like they need to manage the planet. Nature doesn't need our help. It needs us to leave it be. This is the main problem with ancaps. TRUE anarchy is not feeling like everything needs to be managed--especially the planet. What an incredibly arrogant sentiment. For you and everyone else wondering why I am not off living in the woods, it's because I'm not allowed to. Here are some details:

Same old nonsense. To answer this pointless character attack, I invite you to watch this video:

When someone slides their premises past you, they've got you. I find Stefan brushing off the "primitive" way of life whenever he brings up examples. In other words, he speaks about it in a negative way but doesn't thoroughly address it.Most people feel that industrial civilization is a given. When they ask something like, "How can we stop polution?", what they're asking is, "How can we stop pollution while keeping civilization--which is largely responsible for pollution--in place?" Does Stefan? I'm not sure, but it seems so.By the way--"primitive" is borderline racist. I hate the term. It implies that "modern" is better. Anyone who believes that has the significant task of explaining why there are 43 known hunter-gatherer tribes still on Earth. Are they incapable of doing what the rest of the planet is doing? I don't think so. I think they feel their way of life is good for them.Here is more information: http://www.huntercourse.com/blog/2011/05/amazing-hunter-gatherer-societies-still-in-existence/Unfortunately, I am having trouble coming up with another term that is as recognizable. Maybe Luddite? Anti-civ? Here is an instance where Stefan takes modern civilization as better and as a given:http://youtu.be/XG2bKiRu48Y?t=4m20sHere are my comments--and keep in mind this is not exhaustive:1) "We desperately want things to become easier..."Agriculture and domesticating animals is back breaking work. Since humans have pretty much destroyed the Earth's top soil and its ability of the planet to freely provide food (apples can't grow out of shopping malls), we are forced to work much harder."But what about machines?" Those require metal. Have you ever tried mining? Nothing is easy about that. Every step of agriculture requires manual labor and "energy slaves" mostly in the form of fossil fuels.Do you have a job you don't like? Is that easy?Our ancestors may have had an impetus such as a food shortages that caused them to become stationary, but anyone who has done manual labor for a living (I do part-time) knows that none of this is easy. It's brutal.For more on why our forebearers began to attempt to control nature see "The origins of agriculture: a biological perspective and a new hypothesis": http://www.ranprieur.com/readings/origins.html2) "That's one of the reasons we don't live in caves anymore."Not all primitive people lived in caves. Ever heard of a tipi? How about a mud hut?"That's why we don't live in caves" implies that living in houses is better. Living in houses is tremendously destructive to the environment:"8,000 lbs of waste are typically thrown into the landfill during the construction of a 2,000 square foot home."Source: http://constructionwaste.sustainablesources.com/Our ancestors didn't feel that destroying forests to live in stationary houses was the best idea. Doing so is not better.2) "...so we have lighters instead of having to rub two sticks together."Lighters have caused a giant pile of garbage but that's beside the point.Fire is arguably humanity's first attempt at controlling nature. Here, Stefan implies that it is good, and starting fires easier and faster is good.This is complete speculation, but John Livingston, in his book "Rogue Primate", hinted that it all went bad once humans created fire. Is fire really good? Look at the damage humans have done with it. For example, without fire, humans could not smelt, which means they couldn't create bombs, bullets, and prison bars.This theory goes against the general anti-civ belief that agriculture was the beginning of our current unsustainable culture. I am certainly open to the possibility.Thanks for reading. There are other comments Stefan has made that I will get to later on.

There is a very simple answer here: leave animals alone. Kill only enough to warrant your survival. Keeping animals prisoner (pets) in homes really shows how pitiful humans are. They need to imprison a creature for life to introduce joy? Animals are not property. They are not ours to use any more than children or other humans are property. If anyone believes they have a right to own animals because they are superior, please watch this in its entirety:

You asked me to watch a video series; I asked you to watch a video. Again, please watch it, as it shows more than I could ever put into words. Anyone who says they favor humans over animals really should watch it. (I'm not saying you said this, by the way.)

I've already addressed the credentialism argument again and again in other threads. But no, that is NOT a fair compromise. Fair to who? Humans? So until then--if it ever happens--humans can continue to kill and exploit animals in whatever capacity they see fit so long as they don't "torture" them--whatever that means? Why? Because animals and plants don't fight back? Tell me then--why doesn't the non-sadistic principle apply in the same way to children and mentally disabled adults? Why are they spared and gifted with the NAP instead? This is a BS human supremacy argument. This is the crux of why anarcho-capitalism is a cruel proposal. It takes capitalism as a given and... oh yeah; it would be great if we could be nice to all the non-humans if we can ever get around to it. And perhaps if there's clean air and water that would be good too. I have this challenge for anyone: if you can make it through this, you can then talk to me about the NSP and other non-human exceptions to NAP. Hell, if you can finsih an hour of it, then let's talk. You want me to watch a video series--you watch this. Post back with any questions. http://youtu.be/ce4DJh-L7Ys Good luck.

You have a moral crusade against government and taxes. You would be withdrawing from excess, so stop equivocating and stop consuming anything more than you need to survive.

I watched the videos. I tried reading the books but they're very wordy. Anarchy/NAP concerning humans is great if you're a human. How about literally everything else? Also, control over people is not always direct control. If a company builds a factory that destroys the landbase of humans who don't hold it as property (like primitives), those people are then forced to either leave or work for that company. He cited this laughable "non-sadistic principle" against animals. He also created a sustainability video that talked about cutting down trees since a business owns them. What about the animals that lived there and the trees themselves? What about people who might depend on that land? Where's the non-initiation of force in that scenario? This all takes control, security and propaganda, which requires some form of authoritarianism.

If you want agriculture, you first need to find an arable piece of land. If there are creatures on it, they will need to be killed or removed.To effectively work the Earth, you need metals.If you want metals, you have to have a mine. If you have a mine, you have to hire security to keep people away from it. (Look around; the police stand in front of everything somebody needs.) Mining is miserable work, so there will most likely be oppressed people doing it from land that the mine is on. Don't worry; they will be abundant since, after destroying their way of life via agriculture and domesticaiton, they will have no choice but to work. Bosses will keep them in line. Plus, in a few generations, they will forget that they were once independent and call their, "just the way it is".Agriculture means more food at first, so more people will have children. That means more agriculture, which means more metals. More smelters. More security. More houses built. Take more land to build those houses. Kill off nature or animals on those land. Cut down the trees. That requires more metal. More mining. More workers. More mines. If the people on the land with the new mine don't want to give it up, you'll have to "convince" them.More resources now available means more babies, which means people spread out, which requires more transportation, which needs more infrastructure. That requires more metal. More workers to do miserable work. More security to guard the infrastructure, agriculture, smelters, property and mines. More exploitaiton of nature. More death.Eventually you will run into more people and animals who don't want to give up their land. They will fight back. You now need an army. You need the strongest person with the most stuff keeping people in line. You don't want anyone not dependent. It will threaten your way of life. You need to create fictional justifications of why people are better off as domesticated under the new agriculture system. Call it "progress" and demonize the ancestors who lived under the old way. You'll need leaders to repeat this over and over again until people believe it. Tell them that they just have to be nice to people. Don't aggress. But nature is not people. It is here for us to use.You will encouter rough terrain. You need technology--chainsaws, ploughs, etc. More comes out of the Earth. The humans living on the land above the resources don't want to give it up. Send in the military. Create propaganda to justify it. Leaders emerge to tell the new generations that this is the way it should be. They hire security to keep people in line. Without that security, the system breaks down.More layers of control develop. People spread out. That means regional leaders. They want more land. More resources. That means more workers. The workers are now hopelessly dependent on the system that exploits them. Any that speak out need to be dealt with. That requires a miltiary and police, plus leaders to tell everyone why it is okay.The military makes capitalism possible. Without their guns, we wouldn't be able to get or transports the raw materials to make stuff that makes our way of life possible. And we wouldn't want to go back to how those savage idiots lived who didn't sell everything would we? The ones who created technology to preserve their land. That would be ridiculous. After all, then we wouldn't have smart phones, indoor plumbing or ice cream 24 hours/day. And everybody knows that is the only way to live.

You can pay far fewer taxes by living very simply. You do have a moral compunction about supporting a murderous regime, yet you aren't doing everything possible to stop it? My not using a computer would mean I withdraw, which is like protesting showers by not showering or telling anyone. That would sure be benficial, wouldn't it? I can't understand humans' obsession with machines. Watch this.

How do you justify paying your taxes? Or using your computer since fiat currency fueled the dot com bubble of the 90s that set up a lot of the infrastructure. Do you have a driver's license? State document. Figure out a way to not drive. Move to New Hampshire since they have no sales tax. Blah blah blah. Really--try to interject something useful, okay?

Playing the "what about this or that possible bad thing in the future" is like saying "why stop the government? There might be fewer roads" or something like that. Let's worry about it in a few thousand years. Cocnerning food--there aren't reserves year round. There are more hungry people on Earth today than ever. I understand that farm subsidies have a lot to do with it, but it takes a vast amount of unnatural stuff like petroleum (~2 gallons of gas per bag of fertilizer) to grow this stuff, plus the environmental destruction it takes to do it. It takes a lot of work to keep animals and undesirable plants off of "your" land. Don't you think a world where food grew rather than people forcing it to grow would be more ideal? Mass starvation (almost a billion hungry today) was far less in primitive times. The stereotype you're talking about is from Hobbes, who put forward that uncivilized life was brutal and short. Of course, he had his own agenda--you know, owning land, keeping people down for his profit, etc. He was part of the ruling class, and it was to his advantage to have people dependent on people like him in order to live. We can't have those "savages" being independent, can we? Then we can't control them. (That's the biggest problem I have with modern society: we are pathetically domesticated. We'd die in days without technology. Primitivie children were far more capable than 99.999% of us.) When you ask about disease: well, what about cancer? AIDS? Amputations? H1N1? Legionaires? That and the TON of modern day diseases related to stress and obesity. Plus the large number of people who die from hospital infections and doctor malpractice. You can't tell me these would all go away if the state were abolished. With the free market--how do we know a guy isn't recommending a kidney removal to pay for his yacht? NAP or not, people get really funny when it comes to getting ahead. Modern medicine is great for treating a guy who got run over by a car, but a huge amount of diseases are prevented with proper eating, exercise, low stress, etc. This issue, again, is a "what if" and I would need you to tell me how people without insurance or having to deal with being fat stressed over money and jobs in the future would deal with it. When people discuss primitivism and medical care, I think they put a little too much faith in modern medicine. It deals with the problems modern civilization causes for the most part. I mean, it's great that it can possibly treat (not cure as with most things) radiation sickness, but that wouldn't be an issue in a future primitive. A shift to a future primitive is millions of acts. It's not as if people will wake up and the system will come down. Tell me something though: if our Western lives were destroyed (artificially cheap food, artificially cheap energy, throw away society, etc.), how do you think the rest of the world would get on? Something like 1.5 billion people already live without electricity: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTENERGY2/0,,contentMDK:22855502~pagePK:210058~piPK:210062~theSitePK:4114200,00.html The vast majority of the world would be far better off if the "the system" went down. Abolishing the state might stop the military, but there's still that problem of far too few having much too much and far too many having much too little. If everyone lived like we do we'd need a few more planets: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/05/16/wwf-warns-that-we-will-need-two-earths-by-2030_n_1520449.html <--imagine the incredible damage to nature! This is clearly unsustainable. 60+ hunter-gatherer tribes still live on the Earth. There isn't some disease plague or starvation epidemic. Evidence gathered from around fire pits and caves from primitives shows that they were largely egalitarian. There were equal shares, not one big pile for the chief. (That happened with the introduction of agriculture almost immediately; the guy with the most grain had the biggest house, and then of course, you have all those mental problems from inequality.) Primitives took care of each other. It wasn't, "well, I did more work today so you don't get food." That is how a cripple, blind, etc. person would be handled. (I'm just assuming.) Let me ask you--if you witnessed the changed to anprim today, and you came across a crippled person, would you just leave him to rot? Ancaps argue that without money... well, that guy can pretty much go screw. "He should've bought insurance" or "he should've been nicer to people" or something. Try thinking of survival as a collective rather than "might is right" or piggybacking a future primitive on today's standards. Just because people treat each other like trash today (and will treat each other based on how much money they have in an ancap future) doesn't mean that will happen in every scenario. Is anprim perfect? By no means. But it's far better than what we have today. It looks at the Earth as something to respect and protect, and other creatures as equals, rather than putting a price tag on everything and dominating the weak so we can pee indoors on heated toilet seats. He won't. He likes to debate in his comfort zone, and discussing how people can kill but not torture (whatever that means) non-humans would reveal a little sociopathy. In order for ancap to work one has to admit that humans own and can do as they please with the Earth. To protect themselves they invented the NAP, but everything else is expendable. I mean--"Does Spaking Violate The Non-Aggression Princple?" Seriously? This thread has almost 15k views so obviously people are interested, but it's easier to deal with people who already basically agree with you and argue the equivalent of "egg shell or white?".

To answer one of your questions, I asked the father of the movement; I think it's a good answer. http://youtu.be/w5QBvrUV71I

It's crazy. That's all you people have. Since you're so bent on discussing my life, let me ask you a few questions: 1) Are you using roads? Utilities? Eating articially cheap food? Living a relatively comfortable life? Well, you'd better stop since most of that was made possible with the ruling class and their military. Keep biting the hand that feeds you and you might not have that cheap fuel: http://www.iags.org/costofoil.html Every inch of your cheap Western lives are fueled by government cruelty. You think there's going to be some miraculous age of reasoning if the govt steps aside? There'll be food riots among other things. The laughable part is that you think people are going to play nice if this happens because somebody invented the NAP. So, until you stop paying your taxes (or minimize it by owning next to nothing and barely working), dedicate your life to spreading the message and then stop using all of the nice things the ruling class gives to you--stop talking about what I'm doing. 2) What is the moral difference between the state ruling you and you ruling nature? You have no say; nature has no say. Therefore, shut up. You think it's okay to uphold your bloated lifestyles on the body pile of the animals killed, maimed and displaced when capitalists steal resources to sell to you? So, I guess when the IRS steals your taxes, that's okay, since, you know, they can. You've got the chainsaws; they've got the guns. Tit for tat. The capitalist "might makes right" sure is convenient when it comes to nature but damn if you don't draw the line when it begins to affect you. In short, anyone questioning what I'm doing (since you don't actually know) needs to question the very nice lives the government has enabled them to live. Sure, it goes to war, but it brings back cheap oil for you. It invades third world countries and drives those poor bastards out of business (and often it kills them), but that makes smartphones really cheap for you. Sure, it destroys land all over the world and chops down rainforests at about a football field every four minutes, but it also brings home heavily subsidized, cheap meat for you. You have the really nice advantage of blaming the boogeyman government as if what you're living now would be possible without it. "The US is one big gated community and the military are the guards." --Derrick Jensen

Credentialism. Ad hominem. Non-arguments. The animals depending on those trees do feel pain. The consequences of cutting down trees are impossible to calculate. For example, the roots die, which makes soil and sediment get into rivers via erosion. That kills the animals in the rivers and anyone dependent on the water. This one sentence is all I really needed to see. Capitalism is selling life, which is sociopathic. There really isn't anything else to say. The coldness I've seen on this forum toward nature is very disturbing. Here's some good reading; Why the Maya Fell: Climate Change, Conflict—And a Trip to the Beach?http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/11/121109-maya-civilization-climate-change-belize-science/ I mean.. if I can't get the point across that we shouldn't be exploiting and selling life for trivial bullshit, I'm not dealing with rational people. The next step is to exploit weak humans, which of course is going to happen because it's great that people made up the non-aggression principle and property rights, but people raised in a competitive monetary society usually don't follow fictional guidelines. There's nothing else I care to say on this topic. You wouldn't want people exploiting you or your family, so why do you think it's okay to do it to other creatures--especially for money of all things? It's a cultural sickness and the contradictory dark side of capitalism. People obviously are interested in this topic. If you want to hear me discuss/debate Stef, please contact Michael at [email protected]. Last thing: all you capitalists trying to attack my behavior, take a look in the mirror. Do you pay taxes? You're a hypocrite. Do you go to all anti-government rallies? No? Maybe family obligations? Hypocrite. Do you live as simply as possible so you can dedicate your life to the fight? No? Hypocrite. I've already explained why I'm not in the woods. Among other things it would require 100% of my time. No, I'm not doing that now. But, since you're assuming I can and somehow primitivism is less of an argument because I'm not, the burden shifts to you why you aren't living an extremely simple life and spending the vast majority of it advocating for your beliefs--especially why you still pay taxes. Better get on that. Hypocrites.

Wow. Really? This isn't even worth a response. Read up a little on primitivism instead of throwing out stereotypes ("just like in primitive days") and we'll talk. This is some decent trolling. I'll give you that.

As an experiment, find out how much you could get for your blood. Then, for your hair. Then, for any other bodyparts. (You may have to go to the black market for this.) After you figure this out, have somebody kill you, chop you up, and then sell you. I'm sure your family can use the money, right? Maybe have them do it too and donate the funds to charity. This is what humans ask of the rest of the world. It happens to non-humans every day, all day, and will continue under "free" (for who?) market capitalism. Is it possible not to look at the world as dollar signs? Who would you trade with? HGs move around a lot. They only take what the Earth provides and then they move on. Staying put would probably mean death. Still, in this scenario, are you taking more than you need? Are you damaging the land base while hoarding wealth? If you are, chances are whoever lives there would stop you. How? I have no idea. In contrast, are you helping people without harming non-people? If so, then good. Continue on.

Already addressed. Again: There are two issues here; the first is education. We were all raised within civilization, which has a vested interest in ensuring its children have as little independent survival value as possible. The civilized cultural system has adapted well — it reinforces itself memetically in precisely those areas where individuals are closest to self-sufficiency, creating a feeling of dependence even where little actual dependence exists. Regardless, most primitivists no more possess the skills of survival than your average suburbanite — skills every six year old “primitive” would have. Most primitivists are working to remedy that situation, but in the same way that you wouldn’t tell a !Kung man with dreams of brokering stock to just go to Wall Street already, but to learn a thing or two about the stock market first, so we are learning the skills we will need before hanging our lives on such skills. “Running off into the woods already” is a goal, ultimately, but one we must work towards, not one we can simply pick up and go with. If it were that easy, well, you wouldn’t be reading this, I can tell you that. Secondly, there is the issue of lands and laws--you know, the blessed property rights! Civilization has precluded “running off into the woods” as an option fairly well. Hunting regulations pose serious encumberments, to say nothing of the fact that some meager income must be maintained to pay for hunting and fishing licenses, as well as taxes on land. Ultimately, such a “micro-collapse” is impossible so long as civilization still exists — the pressing needs of ever-increasing complexity will lead to our re-absorption, by force if necessary. There is the essential problem; if civilization were willing to coexist with us, we would be happy to return the favor. But ultimately, civilization is incapable of letting anything but itself exist. We’re happy to live alongside anyone who’s willing to live alongside us — but civilization is not. “Running off into the woods,” so long as civilization remans, merely ensures our eventual, violent destruction at civilizaton’s hands. Here's an example for you: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-23529555 Credentialism. This is something Stef loves to do in order to sneak in an ad hominem attack rather than addressing the message. Try suddenly releasing a domesticated bird in the wild and see what happens. (Well, don't, but you get my drift.) Primitivism is without agriculture, hence hunter-gathering. Most of this has already been addressed, but as for the euthanasia charge, it comes from the Inuit, who were once slandered as leaving their elderly to die on ice floes. In fact, it was a rare custom, but a form of voluntary self-sacrifice that elders sometimes engaged in for the good of their bands, despite the pleading protestations of the rest of the band. The Inuit are full of such exceptions that prove the rule, because even for a forager, the arctic is a harsh and unforgiving place. The infant mortality has simply been completely misrepresented, though. Yes, infant mortality among foragers is high — but not for the reasons such a statement would seem to imply. It is not because of disease or malnutrition — quite the opposite, as these things are fairly peculiar to civilized societies. Rather, just as we argue whether life begins at conception or at birth, foragers believe that life does not begin until, usually, the age of two. Foragers look at infanticide much the same way we do abortion. Among the !Kung, a pregnant woman goes into labor, and walks off into the bush (I’m told that childbirth is significantly less an ordeal among those who are not malnourished — affluently or otherwise). Maybe she comes back with a child; maybe she doesn’t. Either way, no questions are asked. So, our calculations of forager lifespans are quite unfair — if we’re going to include their infanticide, then we must include our own abortions. To do otherwise would simply be ethnocentric. In fact, when we do that, we see that forager lifespans are as long as, and sometimes longer, than our own. The charge on medicine is common, but utterly anthropocentric. In the anthropology of medicine, one refers to “ethnomedicine” — whatever a given culture considers to be “medicine.” Given the overlap of food-as-medicine, this can be as arbitrary as how a culture divides up the color spectrum. Western biomedicine is our ethnomedicine. Every culture believes that their ethnomedicine is the only valuable one, and all others are naught but silly superstition. This is simply ethnocentrism. At the root of the claim that primitivism precludes medicine is precisely this ethnocentrism. In fact, when we look at the actual efficacy of the various ethnomedicines in the world, there’s very little variation. Most ethnomedicines are quite effective, just like ours; most have one or more area where they fail utterly (ours tries to ignore placebo rather than use it; shamanism is the opposite, but has no conept of surgery, etc.), and all end up being roughly interchangeable if one is only concerned with efficacy. So, by no means does primitivism require the end of medicine — it merely means a radically different, but equally effective, form of medicine. In fact, if we attempt a syncretic type of medicine that seeks to combine the best of several ethnomedicines, we may actually come up with one of the first medical systems that actually is more effective. Seriously--how many obesity, cancer, etc. civilization diseases would go away without this domesticating, expoitative system? Nobody has addressed two things: 1) Why pre-agriculture society worked for millions of years vs. this fantasy about capitalism that has never been in place and is untested (and most concerns about primitivism are based on stereotypes and misinformation), and 2) Why there are still 60+ HG tribes on the Earth today. Do you think they are stupid or something because they don't want to buy and sell life? I understand the capitalist allure. Keep all your toys and get more AND get the government out of the way! It's not plausible. And it's a pro-human, anti-nature philosophy. It encourages a little less death than today, but you'll still end up with mass graveyards--like that video said. You know, like this:

So how do you justify the billions that will die in the grinding progress to anarcho-capitalism? What with that glut of government jobs, subsidies and stimulus drying up? Didn't I already explain this? Humans can choose to live sustainably or the planet can choose for them. This has nothing to do with primitivism. If we dial it back, it can be a slow(er) transition and nobody has to die in this genocide you keep bringing up. Imagine, for example, if all of a sudden people found out about the Earth's actual carrying capacity. Don't you think more than a few of them, after learning about a future possibly filled with megadeath by their own doing, would choose not to have children? Or, at the very least, they would begin to dial back their consumption? A collapse is avoidable but not until people learn just how dire things are. How do you justify the billions that ARE dying under this system and will continue to do so in a free market--mostly non-humans? How do you justify the genocide humans are committing on nature under capitalism--a system that sees Earth as theirs to use? Under ancap, would the war against nature stop? In Stefan's Sustainability video, he casually talks about cutting down trees as the right of the highest bidder. That is sick--not even considering the living trees, the animals who live there and the ecosystem it would destroy. Talk about genocide! This is extremely applicable: "It was strangely like war. They attacked the forest as if it were an enemy to be pushed back from the beachheads, driven into the hills, broken into patches, and wiped out. Many operators thought they were not only making lumber but liberating the land from the trees. . ." from The Last Wilderness, by Murray Morgan, 1976 That's what you capitalists want? That along with the Ayn Rand philosophy of "greed is a virtue" should make for a bright future.

Nope; capitalists are on everything except humans. I seriously think it's laughable that ancaps feel that everybody will play nice once the state goes away. That because somebody says "non-aggression principle" and "property rights" that somehow that will stop people from getting ahead however possible. No way will the richest people get together and try to control people! Go ahead and make whatever assumptions you want about primitivism, but it was tried and it worked. It was best for the Earth. The "market" started free with agriculture and trade and then ended up the abomination we have today. With agriculture and money comes hierarchies, domination, etc. and of course, people are going to do that to humans too.

So... business as usual, right? Except, somehow, this fantasy free market will save us. See, the thing is, when a bath tub overflows, you shut off the tap. You don't filter the water, build acqueducts, etc. You shut off the the source of the problems. The problem with civilization is civilization. It is consuming the planet, and capitalism is right up there with the Venus Project in thinking more of the same will help. Both systems are basically asking the same question: "How can we solve all these problems while not stopping civlization, which is the source of the problem?" The solution is simple: go back to what worked for MILLIONS OF YEARS. Speak to the rest of the Earthlings. Ask them what they think of capitalism. Talk to the victims who would suffer and be for sale to implement that system so that humans don't have to give up their toys. They'll tell you the answer. Hey; it's "voluntary". It says it right in the title. You capitalists should love that.

I don't know. But, what will it look like if we just let it go and, say, oil runs out, or, as some predict, there are wars over clean water later this century? People can peacefully choose to live sustainably or the Earth can make them do it. The Earth will throw us all away if we wait too long.