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u/IntheDepthofMyEgo · 3 pointsr/DebateAnarchism

I think the Occult can be explained scientifically, eventually, just the same as somebody will eventually figure out where we fucked up in physics. The Higgs has proven either everything we know is wrong or as some scientists whisper the universe is designed for life i.e. non-natural.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/complications-in-physics-lend-support-to-multiverse-hypothesis-20130524

Now you can dress that up in a multi-verse theory if you like, a religious concept based on no evidence other than some loose math and a few acid trips, or (Occam's razor here) the universe is primed and built to produce existence.

How? I don't know, but I do know the military has accepted the idea of a sixth sense and is training troops for it: http://time.com/4721715/phenomena-annie-jacobsen/

From the article:

"In 2014, the Office of Naval Research embarked on a four-year, $3.85 million research program to explore the phenomena it calls premonition and intuition, or “Spidey sense,” for sailors and Marines.

“We have to understand what gives rise to this so-called ‘sixth sense,’ says Peter Squire, a program officer in ONR’s Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare and Combating Terrorism department. Today’s Navy scientists place less emphasis on trying to understand the phenomena theoretically and more on using technology to examine the mysterious process, which Navy scientists assure the public is not based on superstition. “If the researchers understand the process, there may be ways to accelerate it — and possibly spread the powers of intuition throughout military units,” says Dr. Squire...

Active-duty Marines are being taught to hone precognitive skills in order to “preempt snipers, IED emplacers and other irregular assaults [using] advanced perceptual competences that have not been well studied.” Because of the stigma of ESP and PK, the nomenclature has changed, allowing the Defense Department to distance itself from its remote-viewing past. Under the Perceptual Training Systems and Tools banner, extrasensory perception has a new name in the modern era: “sensemaking.”"

Don't forget the actual data of successful Remote Viewing experiments:
http://www.remoteviewed.com/remote_viewing_history_military_b.htm

I get into this argument alot with people in the scientific community, and what they don't realize is the layer of "truth" in the lab(coughminus the whole replication crisescough) is not the same bar everywhere.

For the military it's about something working, less about how or why; in the law it's pushing something past a reasonable doubt.

I see a universe with parts we don't understand, I see military outfits training people to pick things up from sense they aren't aware of, and at the same time I'm getting results when I burn certain candles on a money jar?

Good enough for me.

If you want a truly, TRULY scientific run at this go get this book: https://www.amazon.com/Trickster-Paranormal-George-P-Hansen/dp/1401000827

"Which is very interesting, and very true, but how is your specific outlook different than say Marx's dialectical materialism or that of psychology?"

None in the sense that the Black Peace Stones in South Central LA seizing more territory from the local Latin Kings outfit is I suppose.

Marx's dialectic can just as easily be called Will to Power. As for psychology it absolutely could be called that I guess.

Jungian psychology that is.

u/Asropenis · 1 pointr/DebateAnarchism

It's neither necessary nor desirable.
James C. Scott has a good critique of this kind of stuff in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed , are you familiar with it?

It mainly focuses mainly on agricultural societies, so it doesn' directly address capitalism, although it has this nugget in the Preface:

“…as I make clear in examining scientific farming, industrial agriculture, and capitalist markets in general, large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay. A market necessarily reduces quality to quantity via the price mechanism and promotes standardization; in markets, money talks, not people.
…Put bluntly, my bill of particulars against a certain kind of state is by no means a case for politically unfettered market coordination as urged by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. As we shall see, the conclusions that can be drawn from the failures of modern projects of social engineering are as applicable to market-driven standardization as they are to bureaucratic homogeneity.”

If you want a follow-up to that, that addresses capitalism, and the exitsing attempts to go beyond it, I recommend Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid by Andrej Grubačić and Denis O'Hearn.

Since you're to be against bureaucracy, Graeber's The Utopia of Rules is a good critique of bureaucracy: https://libcom.org/files/David_Graeber-The_Utopia_of_Rules_On_Technology_St.pdf

There's also this one on "democracy": https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-west

u/secretlyaplant · 2 pointsr/DebateAnarchism

> What did he mean by "Jews"?

This is important. A huge amount of antisemitism in the West is "strategic" and not "structural" - in other words, whether Proudhoun chose to utilize antisemitism as a rhetorical tactic or relied on it as a fundamental basis for his views.

A huge amount of political discourse in the West for literally millennia has been constructed around fighting "imaginary Jews" who have nothing to do with actual Jews. David Nirenberg wrote a fantastic book about this rhetorical history (and its all-to-real violent effects) called Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. From the New York Review of Books' review of the book:

>>Nirenberg’s book is about those two millennia and their pedagogy. It isn’t a book about anti-Semitism; it isn’t a history of the Jewish experience of discrimination, persecution, and genocide; it isn’t an example of what the historian Salo Baron called the “lachrymose” account of Jewish life in exile; nor is it an indictment of contemporary anti-Zionism or a defense of the state of Israel. The book is not about Jews at all or, at least, not about real Jews; it deals extensively and almost exclusively with imaginary Jews.

>>What Nirenberg has written is an intellectual history of Western civilization, seen from a peculiar but frighteningly revealing perspective. It is focused on the role of anti-Judaism as a constitutive idea and an explanatory force in Christian and post-Christian thought—though it starts with Egyptian arguments against the Jews and includes a discussion of early Islam, whose writers echo, and apparently learned from, Christian polemics. Nirenberg comments intermittently about the effects of anti-Judaism on the life chances of actual Jews, but dealing with those effects in any sufficient way would require another, and a very different, book.

>>It isn’t Nirenberg’s claim that any of these philosophers were anti-Semites. Indeed, Hegel defended the rights of Jews in German universities and thought that anti-Semitic German nationalism was not “German-ness” but “German-stupid-ness.” Nor is Nirenberg arguing for any kind of intellectual determinism. He doesn’t believe that Goebbels’s attack on Jewish intellectualism was the necessary outcome of the German philosophical identification of Judaism with lifeless reason—any more than German idealism was the necessary outcome of Christian claims to supersede Pharasaic Judaism or of Lutheran claims to supersede the Judaizing Catholics. In all these cases, there were other possible outcomes. But philosophers like Hegel used the language of anti-Judaism to resolve “the ancient tension between the ideal and the real,” and their resolutions were enormously influential. The idea of Judaism as the enemy of “life” had a future.

u/nildicit · 3 pointsr/DebateAnarchism

For the uninitiated, here's a general rundown on Guy Standing's restructure of the classes in an effort to accommodate the effects of globalization:

>"At the top is an elite of billionaires and such like. Below them is a salariat, comfortable but limited in numbers, with employment security and an array of non-wage benefits. Then there is a growing body of what could be called proficians – professionals and technicians usually receiving high incomes, but without employment security. Below them in terms of income is the old, a shrinking industrial working class, not yet dead, but dying. Those in the core are fearful of dropping into the next and rapidly growing class fragment, what should be seen as the global precariat. Below the precariat are the chronically unemployed and a lumpenised minority of socially wretched people."

If this interests you, give his two books a read: The Precariat and A Precariat Charter.

>Are you a member of the precariat, or do you think someone you know is?

Yeah. Anecdotally, one thing I've noticed with people I know is that the idea of even being a wage-slave is becoming a much sought-after privilege. Neoliberal Capitalism is regressing us economically to the middle ages (much to our neoreactionary friends' delight) and it doesn't take an accelerationist to tell you that there's not much we can do to stop its effects at this point because we're already feeling it. Otherwise this new class wouldn't exist, the bourgeoisie wouldn't be dissolving and automation wouldn't be a talking point for every would-be leftist today. People's understanding of class struggle is only going to become even more warped as time goes on.

>How would you include this new class in the struggle for a better life?

The Precariat is defined by its global, highly connected nature. When Occupy happened, I can't think of any other social movement in history that indexed so many splinter groups across the world after the first week. Alter-Globalization and #EuroMayDay come to mind but I don't think they ever reached the level as Occupy has since the decade started. Unions have failed to respond to the needs and aspirations of the Precariat because they still think a corpse is worth fighting for. In my opinion, the formation of the Precariat is the biggest motivator to abolish work and further create automated systems to better utilize anarchist ideals - as soon there won't be any industrial workers of the world to unite in the first place.

u/TommyCfromMaghaberry · 1 pointr/DebateAnarchism

I recently read the collection of essays published by AK Press on the topic of 'Anarchist Economics', and some of them raised interesting ways of analysing certain things.

One of the essays, discussing the effectiveness of certain protest and civil disobedience movements, used a Power theory of value which disagrees with certain Marxian precepts.

The work they based their work off is:http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0415496802/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=3JTW6VOOWABRN&coliid=IQVU8M224WQ70

Though I can't say whether the authors of that book are anarchists, it seems like it might offer an interesting method for Anarchist economic analysis.

u/kirkisartist · 1 pointr/DebateAnarchism

Well, we took responsibility for the units, the land, and the water and septic system. We paid the electric bill and kept the roads clear. Neither cheap, nor easy. We were providing an honest service.

This community is the rare case where they can squat and build with the blessing of the community. Here's a book about it. And here's a corny ass show about it.

We definitely gave everybody the freedom they wanted. Hell, if they wanted to remodel their trailer into a full blown house we would have paid for the materials. But they almost never took us up on it.

u/TheGoodNews01 · 1 pointr/DebateAnarchism

He's probably just there to play court jester on these issues. The effect could be positive in piquing the curiosity of those who would otherwise overlook these matters. But negative in that less discerning folks would just react dismissively towards him. Ultimately, if he is drawing more attention to these issues we should jump in and take over from there.

Amazon.com - Revolution by Russell Brand

If any of you already have an amazon account, you could add to the comments in order to counter any trolls or inform the genuinely curious or interested.

u/The_Old_Gentleman · 6 pointsr/DebateAnarchism

>I don't see any reason to believe that abolishing safety nets, government funded medical research, roads, telecom stability, many utilities that are government-based, etc... would yield a net positive result for humanity. It would certainly result in disaster in the short term. Many people would die terribly.

Anarchists don't wish to "abolish" any of those things. Anarchists in general are well aware that medical research, roads, telecom and utilities are good and need to be maintained. What we happen to want is to organize them differently, just because we believe government shouldn't provide those things doesn't mean we think those things shouldn't be provided at all.

Look into the concept of a commons or the concept of distributed infrastructure.

>Also for Anarchy to succeed in this way, the inability for people to form communities, nations, and states is crucial.

Anarchists propose to form communities in larger scales through the practices of self-managed organization and unions of these organizations in libertarian federations. The principle of federation as the anarchist reply to organizational issues has been developed by anarchists for well over a century now.

>Communities will have hierarchical power structures inevitably in my view, it's part of our biological imperative.

Claims like these are used against anarchists for a long time, but there is absolutely no evidence that there is such a "biological imperative" that makes us rely on hierarchical power structures all. In fact there is plenty of evidence against it, such as the various examples of non-hierarchical societies from the Piaroa to the Vezo to myriad of stateless peoples in the region of Zomia, and even inside the capitalist economy we live in there are occasional examples of self-managed non-hierarchical organization (such as the company Gore Associates in Delaware) and distributed, self-managed networks (such as guifi.net in Spain).

I recommend you give further study to anarchist theory (start off with a book like Anarchy Works! or An Anarchist FAQ) before trying to tackle it as a whole.

u/[deleted] · 10 pointsr/DebateAnarchism

> but there's several reasons why a militia would win over a large-scale state army.

I too have read a good deal on the subject of guerrilla warfare and I honestly feel this is playing down how difficult it is for the militia. It takes massive political support, something anarchism does not have right now, and an incredibly skilled leadership, which anarchism is also lacking. Also the opposition needs networks to communicate and spread propaganda and literature amongst the people. There has to be multiple channels being used simultaneously such as the internet, paper(s), etc. Unfortunately the internet won't be of much use if there is no power or supplies to repair the technology needed to access it and industrial printing presses are not only few and far between, but are also bourgeois/government owned. This isn't even taking into account the sheer amount of manpower and weaponry that is needed. The former of which anarchism lacks and the latter of which Americans do have in number, but not strength. The days of attacking enemy convoys and simply taking their weaponry is long pasted with the advent of modern technology and increasingly advanced counter insurgency tactics. That being said it is possible and I'd argue somewhat common for an insurgency to win a war, but it is far from as simple as your post makes it out to be and is most definitely not a sure thing. It also usually has an idea that everyone, read people other than simply anarchist, can really get behind, support, and even die for.

The main factor I left out is the use of land, which I suppose could be lumped under the skilled leadership criteria stated above. This issue is an extremely important one as the terrain used and knowing how to use said terrain has been known as the great equalizer of men. It makes irregular forces and regular forces equals when they otherwise wouldn't be. If anyone has any questions please send me a PM.

Also I suppose since I asked for the other users who posted on the subject of guerrilla warfare to post their sources I should include my main sources. These are the main and best ones I've read but there are many others.

Partisan Warfare by O Heilbrunn

Insurgency and Terrorism:From Revolution to Apocalypse by Bard E. O'Neill

War of the Flea:The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare by Robert Taber

On Guerrilla Warfare by Mao Tse-Tung. You can find this for free here.

Guerrilla Warfare by Che Guevara. You can find a part of this for free here.

>So you're right, this is something a lot more anarchists should consider.

Everyone of every ideology should. You never know when you will need to fight an organized army. Be it an invading one or your own.

Also if you don't mind me asking what books have you read on the subject? I'm looking for some new ones.

Edits: *