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I believe you want to demolish the casino. I don't believe you want to build a soup kitchen. I don't even believe you volunteer at a soup kitchen now, because I

I believe you want to demolish the casino. I don't believe you want to build a soup kitchen. I don't even believe you volunteer at a soup kitchen now, because I've met people who volunteer at soup kitchens and you sound nothing like them. As to what I'd do if I 'won', it's funny you ask since I spent this morning thinking about just that. For one, I think that a lot of contaminated land, including spent mining sites, could be slowly rehabilitated by growing the right plants and fungi on them, possibly even harvesting some of the leftover valuable minerals and rendering harmless the toxic ones, providing inexpensive housing to people acting as a caretaker, producing rejuvenation in an expanding network of locations. For another, a lot of energy is being put into cleaning plastic out of the oceans but there is still not a lot of thought being put into what to do with the result. I believe that with the right templates, it would be possible to clean plastic out of the ocean and build large rafts for seasteading-style projects. With the proper designs I suspect it would even be possible to make these rafts a suitable habitat for marine life, increasing local biodiversity and saving the expense of hauling waste plastic from the ocean to a landfill on a continent. I have other visions of a better world, but if I achieve even one of these I'll consider mine a life well lived. The thing is, I'm not naive as to how unrealistic these visions sound or how difficult they would be to realise. If the decision were made by reasonable bureaucrats in a world where their mandate is minimal starvation, I might as well give up. There is exactly one human being on earth insane enough to think these visions are worth pursuing. THAT is why I'm invested in winning. THAT is what you want to take away from me, and from everyone else who's ever had an insane vision of a better future. You say you want to see the world burn. That sounds to me like the mindset of a man in a warband, and warbands get resources by taking them from their neighbours. It's always the farmers and craftspeople who suffer most when that way of thinking takes over, and I consider myself a small producer, so it should come as no surprise that I'm hostile to your way of thinking. I truly believe that if you burned the world as you imagine, you'd have taken over my house and the small food forest my family has grown, and either shot or enslaved me, long before you ever made a dent in the barricades of the billionaires that justify your rhetoric. I believe that because that's been what happened historically, and because if your goal was really to build a soup kitchen you wouldn't feel the need to set the world on fire first. I'd like to close with an appeal to your humanity, because despite my belief that a small producer like myself is always the first target of warbands and warband-thinking, I don't begrudge the instinct or its necessity to the human spirit. If you believe in anarchist-socialism and want to fight, there is an experiment with that kind of government happening right now in Rojava, the Kurdish autonomous zone in Northern Syria. They are actively looking for people to join their cause, and from what I know of their system it seems like it could actually succeed without devolving into Stalinism. If you lent your effort to that, it would be an alignment of what your intellectual, moral, and instinctive stances seem to be. Please just consider it, and if the answer is 'no' then it would be worth aligning the reasons why with what you want for your immediate sphere.

samhw 5y ago
Thank you for this, I appreciated reading it. It's depressing to see how many people's vision of the world is fundamentally negative and opposed to letting human beings live freely and flourish according to their own hopes and dreams. That being said, I think the problem is that the pro-freedom side hasn't put forth a sufficiently convincing argument. Ridiculous Elon Musk fanboys should not be the representatives for freedom. We shouldn't be noted for contradictorily turning a blind eye to bailouts and rebates with expropriated money, as well as to police violence towards minorities, and for seemingly being more concerned with taking the last scraps of support from the poor rather than opposing the kleptarchic defence contractors and so forth. We need to make the case that a freer society would mean less money taken from the poor and given to the rich, and less opportunity to get rich on monopolies enforced by state power, such as inappropriately excessive patent rights and copyrights, which are not just intuitively morally unfair but also antithetical to the principle that a competitive market provides a selection pressure for better ideas. If we can't put forward a convincing argument and be consistent in our principles, it's our own damn fault and we should quit whining about it.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  Why thank you! I am testing out pro-freedom arguments when the opportunity arises, "This is my vision, who are you to say I have no right to pursue it?" does seem to be working somewhat. Asking for alternatives similarly, though I think I'll need to pick up a copy of 'doughnut economics' to get the most out of the ensuing conversations. But taking a wider view, comparing our current situation to any time except Postwar America seems like it should be argument enough. I think the issue is that freedom means freedom to make bad choices if it means anything, and we're currently in a situation of having to deal with the consequences of some bad choices. How that resolves I can't begin to guess. Edit: It occurred to me, maybe acknowledging that freedom allowed bad choices to be made and that we need to deal with the consequences of those choices would be another way to approach the same argument.
mlatu 5y ago
I said: I want to see the (capitalist) world burn. Well, why would you misquote me? I wonder. You make me sound like some madman indeed. Personally, I would even consider a UBI to be "setting the world ablaze", but probably the only way forwards. No, I do not volunteer in a soup kitchen, do you? Of course you do. Do you want to read how I don't have the time to volunteer? Of course not. Does it matter that you are concretizing an abstraction to make me look like a lazy loudmouthed fool? Of course not. As to that Syrian experiment, pardon my mistrust, but is it safe enough that you would send your own daughter there? If I would be a gambler, I would bet that experiment whiped off the earth in 5 - 10 years if they haven't disbanded by then already due to ??? Nah, I have dug myself in here pretty solidly, even if I wanted to: I couldn't just up and leave on a whim. Besides, your plea for me to consider going off into the desert reads like that meme with that dude stating "how curious, yet you participate in a society" to some peasant complaining about the state of the world. Instead of going someplace that could be droned to peace for being a threat to even mildly authoritarean regimes, or, just as likely, where I could be stoned to death for just existing (am trans and gay): I'll rather wait for the nuclear holocaust to bring anarchy to my doorstep, kthxbye

samhw 5y ago

Thank you for this, I appreciated reading it. It's depressing to see how many people's vision of the world is fundamentally negative and opposed to letting human beings live freely and flourish according to their own hopes and dreams. That being said, I think the problem is that the pro-freedom side hasn't put forth a sufficiently convincing argument. Ridiculous Elon Musk fanboys should not be the representatives for freedom. We shouldn't be noted for contradictorily turning a blind eye to bailouts and rebates with expropriated money, as well as to police violence towards minorities, and for seemingly being more concerned with taking the last scraps of support from the poor rather than opposing the kleptarchic defence contractors and so forth. We need to make the case that a freer society would mean less money taken from the poor and given to the rich, and less opportunity to get rich on monopolies enforced by state power, such as inappropriately excessive patent rights and copyrights, which are not just intuitively morally unfair but also antithetical to the principle that a competitive market provides a selection pressure for better ideas. If we can't put forward a convincing argument and be consistent in our principles, it's our own damn fault and we should quit whining about it.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
Why thank you! I am testing out pro-freedom arguments when the opportunity arises, "This is my vision, who are you to say I have no right to pursue it?" does seem to be working somewhat. Asking for alternatives similarly, though I think I'll need to pick up a copy of 'doughnut economics' to get the most out of the ensuing conversations. But taking a wider view, comparing our current situation to any time except Postwar America seems like it should be argument enough. I think the issue is that freedom means freedom to make bad choices if it means anything, and we're currently in a situation of having to deal with the consequences of some bad choices. How that resolves I can't begin to guess. Edit: It occurred to me, maybe acknowledging that freedom allowed bad choices to be made and that we need to deal with the consequences of those choices would be another way to approach the same argument.

mlatu 5y ago

I said: I want to see the (capitalist) world burn. Well, why would you misquote me? I wonder. You make me sound like some madman indeed. Personally, I would even consider a UBI to be "setting the world ablaze", but probably the only way forwards. No, I do not volunteer in a soup kitchen, do you? Of course you do. Do you want to read how I don't have the time to volunteer? Of course not. Does it matter that you are concretizing an abstraction to make me look like a lazy loudmouthed fool? Of course not. As to that Syrian experiment, pardon my mistrust, but is it safe enough that you would send your own daughter there? If I would be a gambler, I would bet that experiment whiped off the earth in 5 - 10 years if they haven't disbanded by then already due to ??? Nah, I have dug myself in here pretty solidly, even if I wanted to: I couldn't just up and leave on a whim. Besides, your plea for me to consider going off into the desert reads like that meme with that dude stating "how curious, yet you participate in a society" to some peasant complaining about the state of the world. Instead of going someplace that could be droned to peace for being a threat to even mildly authoritarean regimes, or, just as likely, where I could be stoned to death for just existing (am trans and gay): I'll rather wait for the nuclear holocaust to bring anarchy to my doorstep, kthxbye