Comment by 👻 darkghost

I think the reason for the need for enforceable agreements is that not everyone is capable of getting along. We see it happen all the time. Shoddy workmanship or nightmare clients. Fly by night companies. Grifters and scammers. How does one solve a dispute? Government is the default arbitrator though private ones are possible. But without arbitration it can turn to violence since you get to the last resort more quickly without layers of alternatives. The handshake fails, appeal to reasonableness and common sense fails, what is next?

Then once violence is on the table it becomes who has the most people with the most guns. Pointing a gun at someone is "one weird trick" to make them very agreeable.

Sep 18 · 3 months ago

10 Later Comments ↓

@darkghost, you are correct. My ideal violence-free world obviously is just an ideal, and some kind of governance is necessary. Much more limited than what we have.

As an aside: I sign almost everything 'Under Duress', which looks a lot like my signature and no one looks anyway.

OK I actually laughed out loud at the signature.

there are single memory space operating systems, like oberon family of systems.

all programs run in the same address space and don't damage memory of each other.

normally our windows/macos/linux/bsd/android/ios systems have virtual address spaces, where programs live like animals in the zoo, in neparate cages, so that they don't eat each other.

that requires a lot of overhead, many wasted context switches between user/kernel space and time to calculate memory maps and accesses.

in single memory systems like oberon kernel/low level modules live in the same address space as programs. no context switches, and language doesn't allow address arithmethics so modules can't damage each other's memory.

i have read about german villages / towns in caucasus, in early 20th century.

they had good urbanism, beautiful buildings, paved roads, and importantly no borders in between those houses or lands that belong to different owners.

when asked how is that possible that neighbours don't steal from each other, town inhabitants were getting confused. why would anyone do that?

while these examples are beautiful, i am not sure they scale.

in oberon systems software was written by a small group of researchers or students under their supervision.

german towns were small, and everybody knew everybody in person.

but when we scale, we need to run a program on our computer that is written by someone we don't know and have no reason to trust.

therefore: virtual address spaces. kernel / user space separation. and even antiviruses!

i explain students that kernel is like municipality. you can't just take any land and build on it. it needs to look up and allocate for you.

real municipality has phone numbers and kernel has system call numbers.

in order to make a request in municipality you have to go there, look at the list of internal phone numbers on the wall and call to some department.

then you ask, and the person on the other side searches information in their books.

while they are searching you can't do anything, you are in an uninterruptible i/o wait.

in oberon systems system call is just a function call to a low level module. no need for heavy context switches.

but i digress.

the problem is how to scale?

If you are 'an activist' trying to 'get the government to do the right thing', stop and think. There is no right thing the government could possibly do to justify its evil existence. You may be the bad guy here.

The fact that this opinion is, in your mind, not only a valid one to have but one worthy of sharing in public is crystal-clear proof that you have never talked to an activist. Nobody knows the force of the state more than those who are currently beneath its boot. If you want to understand why many (though not all!) of these oppressed minorities are petitioning the government to do something, I really think you owe it to yourself to talk to them.

@manucum, if that sentence was somehow proof that I never talked to an activist, your idea of 'logic' makes further discussion impossible.

@stack: I'm open to being proven wrong. Who have you talked to? Have you talked to people who are actually doing activism, such as going to protests, talking to local politicians, or even doing direct action? Have you read the works of activists of the past? Or have you only talked to keyboard warriors on the site formerly known as Twitter?

My main issue with your comment is this assumption you seem to be taking that activists aren't aware of the government's evilness. When one listens to activists talk about their struggles, their awareness of the government's actions is obvious: it's all they can talk about. But if these people know damn well that the government is evil, how can you explain them trying to get that same government to do something? Have you also considered that there are some problems that ONLY the government COULD solve? Not out of some moral imperitive, but because they're the only ones with the capital to do so?

I'm going to refrain from writing an essay in the comments, but I want to leave you with an article talking about, among other topics pertaining reparations, the work the Contract Buyers League in Chicago did to fix the morally and practically abysmal contract housing situation common to many Black Chicagoans at the time (and to an extent the Black American population at large, then and now). In particular, after getting home contracts from Black and White homes, they sued the landlords that issued these devilish contracts: note the activists using government powers despite being aware of at minimum the government's complicity in this situation.

@manucom: thank you for the link I will take a look.

I think you are arguing this incorrectly. I am sorry if I stepped on a sore toe.

• I do not need to talk to an insurance salesman to have an opinion about insurance companies.

• Where does it say I am making assumptions of anyone's ignorance? I am meerly stating my opinion.

• Knowing you are feeding an evil machine in order to maybe improve someone else's life (or your own) at the expense of others -- is perhaps worse than doing so as an ignoramus.

I know many people who do good without involving authorities.

And I know many others who think they are doing good with serious blinders on.

I am often accused of not seeing the big picture, but I think it's the opposite.

Original Post

re: Stop pretending to be anti-violence — [gemini link] I agree with so many things, except one -- markets. Yes, government equals violence, in every 'solution' it offers. Yes, enforcement, especially selective enforcement of contracts is violence. And capitalism, especially in advances stages, is total violence -- like most --isms (government preferences) it is and -ism that gives preference to the rich. Free Market is not Capitalism It is the opposite of capitalism. Let me elaborate, because...