6 ms·

> Every selective admissions process has the potential (probably history) for bigotry. University/school admission, mortgage approval, job hiring. Does that mea

> Every selective admissions process has the potential (probably history) for bigotry. University/school admission, mortgage approval, job hiring. Does that mean selective hiring needs to end? There's a very big difference between being rejected from a university, and being expelled from your home because your neighbors dislike you. I don't see how you make the comparison — the problem we're pointing out is being evicted, not selective admission as you're reframing it to be.

netcan 5y ago
As I said, I think in the current context of a handful of eco villages, evictions are probably very rare. Admissions OTOH, aren't rare. Meanwhile, this also corresponds to reality. In places where planned communities of various sorts exist, there is occasional tension around racism or other bigotry in admission. Almost never around eviction. I realise that the possibility of eviction is uneasy for some. If so, don't live there. Meanwhile, 99.9% of actual evictions are in rental context. Sometimes this can happen gated communities. For some reason, the commune context especially terrifies people. As to which is worse... housing, education and employment are all pretty important.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  > racism or other bigotry in admission. Almost never around eviction. Could that be because the victims of eviction are individuals without the political power of a whole race and its supporters behind them? Obviously evictees are not happy being evicted or they would have left voluntarily. > For some reason, the commune context especially terrifies people. My guess is it's the lack of personal freedom and and lack of accountability for those who can control your life. Slavery sounds scary too even if it involved the same practical lifestyle as conventional work. Prison sounds scary, yet many people spend all day just sitting at home doing nothing more than they would do in prison anyway. The feeling of freedom is often more important than actually exercising that freedom.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    >> For some reason, the commune context especially terrifies people. > My guess is it's the lack of personal freedom and and lack of accountability for those who can control your life Usually, building a free commune is precisely a practical attempt at tackling these issues and not having someone "who can control your life" but collective decision making to empower everyone to the extent possible. Practical example: some people live a noisy lifestyle, others can't bear noise. You seem to suggest that in a free commune one individual's freedom to make noise would outweigh others' expectations of calm, or the opposite. In practice, a commune would gather feedback from its members and propose to rearrange the disposition of housing so that everyone is happy and comfortable. Liberal society rests upon the idea that one's individual freedom competes (and stops) with another one's. Anarchist society considers that freedom is not a scarce resource, and one's freedom is complemented by another's. If we take time to study issues as a collective, we can find better solutions for everyone involved. Collective intelligence is a thing. For example the french government started a "citizens council on ecology" (or whatever would be the translation) where ordinary people spent time with researchers to come up with solutions. And they've come up with a platform for ecology more advanced than even the Green party would dream of. Of course, the government then flushed all those good ideas down the toilet because they're just puppets of the industrial capitalists.
    - exporectomy 5y ago
      > You seem to suggest that in a free commune one individual's freedom to make noise would outweigh others' expectations of calm, or the opposite. Try to find a realistic interpretation of what I said instead of something so transparently ridiculous. In other words, argue in good faith. There's no point engaging with someone if you try to misunderstand them.
strainer 5y ago
> expelled from your home because your neighbors dislike you The cause of being expelled, would be that everybody thinks you should be expelled - not that no one 'likes' you. Framing the judgement as resting on private preferences, on likeability, diminishes common humanity which should be generally at large and is crucial to the persistence of any group. A viable community group will include members with tolerance and good judgement who would deny a consensus to expel without good cause. If such qualities are absent (completely so! to enable bad consensus) no amount of individual rights will make up for their absence.
- stale2002 5y ago
  > no amount of individual rights will make up for their absence. Of course they will. My neighbors can't get me kicked out of my apartment complex, because of my race, no matter how much they want that to happen. And if my landlord attempts to do that, I might be able to get a big monetary settlement out of it, depending on how many mistakes they make, while going about that.
  - strainer 5y ago
    If every one of your neighbors is prepared to make you leave - for any wrong reason, you are then isolated among them. A capacity to remain there may help somewhat, but doesn't make up for the unfortunate circumstance, that you are surrounded by people who rightly or wrongly reject you.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > My neighbors can't get me kicked out of my apartment complex, because of my race, no matter how much they want that to happen. The same is true in any self-organized community i know of. If anything, it would probably generate an invitation for the complaining neighbors to try and find some better suited place for them to live. That is because the only communities i've visited were very much antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist. And despite all the instances of racism i've seen with my eyes (we are after all, all chidren of one of the most racist countries on earth), i've never seen in a community the kind of racial segregation and hatred i've seen on the streets of big french cities. I mean, i could imagine some white supremacists setting up a community. But they would not let the rest of us in in the first place, and certainly wouldn't require a consensus to cause harm (whether psychological or physical) to their enemies. In a barbaric society where prison or death sentence are supposed forms of justice, it can appear that excluding someone from a community is simply a matter of personal preferences or bigotry. However, having to part ways with someone because they're harming your community and there doesn't appear to be ways to resolve the problem, is a serious concern that you may have to deal with sooner or later whether you like it or not. But proposing to exclude someone for a trivial matter would instantly raise red flags as an authoritarian manipulation scheme. Life in a commune is not comparable to life under a nation-state in most regards. Your neighbors in a commune are not just people who happen to live nearby, they're people you live with. And certainly there's no landlord to deal with who have unreasonable power over others :)
tibbon 5y ago
Lots of condo co Ops have selective admission

netcan 5y ago

As I said, I think in the current context of a handful of eco villages, evictions are probably very rare. Admissions OTOH, aren't rare. Meanwhile, this also corresponds to reality. In places where planned communities of various sorts exist, there is occasional tension around racism or other bigotry in admission. Almost never around eviction. I realise that the possibility of eviction is uneasy for some. If so, don't live there. Meanwhile, 99.9% of actual evictions are in rental context. Sometimes this can happen gated communities. For some reason, the commune context especially terrifies people. As to which is worse... housing, education and employment are all pretty important.

exporectomy 5y ago
> racism or other bigotry in admission. Almost never around eviction. Could that be because the victims of eviction are individuals without the political power of a whole race and its supporters behind them? Obviously evictees are not happy being evicted or they would have left voluntarily. > For some reason, the commune context especially terrifies people. My guess is it's the lack of personal freedom and and lack of accountability for those who can control your life. Slavery sounds scary too even if it involved the same practical lifestyle as conventional work. Prison sounds scary, yet many people spend all day just sitting at home doing nothing more than they would do in prison anyway. The feeling of freedom is often more important than actually exercising that freedom.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  >> For some reason, the commune context especially terrifies people. > My guess is it's the lack of personal freedom and and lack of accountability for those who can control your life Usually, building a free commune is precisely a practical attempt at tackling these issues and not having someone "who can control your life" but collective decision making to empower everyone to the extent possible. Practical example: some people live a noisy lifestyle, others can't bear noise. You seem to suggest that in a free commune one individual's freedom to make noise would outweigh others' expectations of calm, or the opposite. In practice, a commune would gather feedback from its members and propose to rearrange the disposition of housing so that everyone is happy and comfortable. Liberal society rests upon the idea that one's individual freedom competes (and stops) with another one's. Anarchist society considers that freedom is not a scarce resource, and one's freedom is complemented by another's. If we take time to study issues as a collective, we can find better solutions for everyone involved. Collective intelligence is a thing. For example the french government started a "citizens council on ecology" (or whatever would be the translation) where ordinary people spent time with researchers to come up with solutions. And they've come up with a platform for ecology more advanced than even the Green party would dream of. Of course, the government then flushed all those good ideas down the toilet because they're just puppets of the industrial capitalists.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    > You seem to suggest that in a free commune one individual's freedom to make noise would outweigh others' expectations of calm, or the opposite. Try to find a realistic interpretation of what I said instead of something so transparently ridiculous. In other words, argue in good faith. There's no point engaging with someone if you try to misunderstand them.

strainer 5y ago

> expelled from your home because your neighbors dislike you The cause of being expelled, would be that everybody thinks you should be expelled - not that no one 'likes' you. Framing the judgement as resting on private preferences, on likeability, diminishes common humanity which should be generally at large and is crucial to the persistence of any group. A viable community group will include members with tolerance and good judgement who would deny a consensus to expel without good cause. If such qualities are absent (completely so! to enable bad consensus) no amount of individual rights will make up for their absence.

stale2002 5y ago
> no amount of individual rights will make up for their absence. Of course they will. My neighbors can't get me kicked out of my apartment complex, because of my race, no matter how much they want that to happen. And if my landlord attempts to do that, I might be able to get a big monetary settlement out of it, depending on how many mistakes they make, while going about that.
- strainer 5y ago
  If every one of your neighbors is prepared to make you leave - for any wrong reason, you are then isolated among them. A capacity to remain there may help somewhat, but doesn't make up for the unfortunate circumstance, that you are surrounded by people who rightly or wrongly reject you.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > My neighbors can't get me kicked out of my apartment complex, because of my race, no matter how much they want that to happen. The same is true in any self-organized community i know of. If anything, it would probably generate an invitation for the complaining neighbors to try and find some better suited place for them to live. That is because the only communities i've visited were very much antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist. And despite all the instances of racism i've seen with my eyes (we are after all, all chidren of one of the most racist countries on earth), i've never seen in a community the kind of racial segregation and hatred i've seen on the streets of big french cities. I mean, i could imagine some white supremacists setting up a community. But they would not let the rest of us in in the first place, and certainly wouldn't require a consensus to cause harm (whether psychological or physical) to their enemies. In a barbaric society where prison or death sentence are supposed forms of justice, it can appear that excluding someone from a community is simply a matter of personal preferences or bigotry. However, having to part ways with someone because they're harming your community and there doesn't appear to be ways to resolve the problem, is a serious concern that you may have to deal with sooner or later whether you like it or not. But proposing to exclude someone for a trivial matter would instantly raise red flags as an authoritarian manipulation scheme. Life in a commune is not comparable to life under a nation-state in most regards. Your neighbors in a commune are not just people who happen to live nearby, they're people you live with. And certainly there's no landlord to deal with who have unreasonable power over others :)

tibbon 5y ago

Lots of condo co Ops have selective admission