The Babypuke

Woah now let's not get nutty. That would require work.

I don't know if anyone's suggested this before but maybe Stef should start printing NAA / "Not an argument" T-shirts so I don't have to keep repeating the phrase. I'm lazy and it's easier to point to my shirt.

I guess I don't feel like I KNOW that they are only interested in welfare and not fleeing violence. Maybe I have more research to do. I wonder what the anarcho-communists that I torture myself talking to would say if I said "okay, let em come, but no welfare, no government benefits". Not that it would happen, interesting thought though to see if the number of incoming people would change.

I fully understand that, but being the broken record and constantly stating to the people I know: "you know we wouldn't have to deal with this shit if we were all anarchists" is not a helpful way to communicate in this situation. Well, that helps somewhat. I have kind of been trying to stress that point so far. The point being that regardless of the fact of my being willing to live next door to a refugee family if need be- I do not have the right to make that choice for the other tax slaves of my society. I've been trying to say that the politicians don't have the right subject us to those risks either, or invoke more unfunded liabilities and instead have been suggesting that if people really want to help, engage voluntarily, donate money or travel or do whatever you need to do to feel like you're helping if that's really what you want for these people, rather than tugging on the pant leg of the government to deal with the issue. Sometimes I feel like a dick though, that's probably normal when talking to a mostly left crowd though.

Is there a sensible voluntaryist position in regards to how to handle the refugee situation? Government must be used to pay for the support of refugees and put society at risk to the enemies that it (the gov't, not society necessarily) has made. Short-term what does a voluntaryist say? No, don't let them in? Sorry but it's going to sink the ship of the west faster? Or yes, we're responsible for stirring shit up (except the we is really our parents and grandparents, or at least the politicians they elected), we should fix it? I'm five. Literally I feel like I'm five.

Thanks, helps some. I did mention the fact that neither he nor I could really know what kinds of solutions would arise, and did point out that humans are only naturally violent if you raise them to be that way, the peaceful parenting stuff is really hard to get people my age to understand. It works when I'm expressing the concerns to older parents a bit better. Well I didn't think I could use that argument because we were speaking in terms of "if the government had dissolved" at that point I would only expect private organizations to be trading with other countries, since there would be no further inter-gov't relations without a government here. I guess if we reported that we were being attacked that maybe some foreign government might try to help, but it wouldn't be because we were "allies" so to speak. Maybe they would do it to protect us as a trade partner and therefore protecting a great source of imports for themselves or something though, hadn't thought of that before.

So I was talking with a military guy who hit me with the argument (after I expressed my reasoning for being a voluntaryist, and explained what that meant), that the only way anarchism would 'work' is if it happened globally all at once. What he meant as he explained was that if lets say just the US became a voluntaryist society and dissolved it's centralized organization and military, that China or some other still statist world power would come over and invade because we would have all these unguarded resources. I argued that they wouldn't because it wouldn't be worth the money to try and invade us with no infrastructure to take over and that people here would probably be armed and that security agencies would exist but he said they could never be as organized as a government and I don't really have enough specific knowledge about military organization to argue against that. He also said they wouldn't care about whether or not we had infrastructure to take over, just that we had unguarded resources which were enough to "merit" the tradeoff. Merit was a word he used a lot when I tried to ask him to explain why current day countries without standing militias don't just get invaded and robbed, he said those things don't happen to smaller countries because they don't have the resources to "merit" an invasion. I then argued well couldn't these world powers just send a smaller less expensive invasion force then and save money that way? To which he replied yes but then the world would be cued to their willingness to invade undefended countries and he made the whole allied countries would come to their defense argument. Again I really don't have a lot of knowledge regarding military takeover tactics and stuff like that so I couldn't say much against it. Is the argument I should be making basically "that's a risk I'm willing to take"? I did say that in a free society we should theoretically be experiencing far more rapid technological growth that would allow us to compete with big governments but that wasn't really good enough for him. Was I just arguing with an idiot or is it feasible to assume that world powers would seriously try and possibly succeed in harassing us on a large scale without "organized" military might as opposed to segmented security forces? Eventually I had to go so I gave a cheesy answer and just said "well let's make it a global movement and dismantle all governments once everyone understands then" haha, the more voluntaryism the better.