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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Anarcho-capitalism ... meme ideologies.

You think Bryan Caplan, Michael Huemer, Jason Brennan, the Friedmans, etc. are memers?

By the above 4chan usage many of them would call it a meme ideology, yes. It has the distinctive unseriousness of having never held power and thus never having to make compromises with reality. It is generally justified based on a set of principles that are too strict to fail gracefully if they run into problems and that are major contributors to its appeal as abstract ideas. Some of those ideas have bizarre and meme-worthy implications, as seen in the anarcho-capitalism memes that tend to focus on the Non Aggression Principle. E.g. "My NAP-bot detects the neighbor's voluntarily-contracted child slave has stepped 0.4 inches past my property line onto my flower bed, responds to his aggression by dousing him in McNapalm." The McNuke meme actually predates its modern incarnation by decades, as a child I remember reading Vernor Vinge's The Ungoverned from 1985, and that's a story generally considered sympathetic to anarcho-capitalism. Or the general idea that it deeply matters whether a system of social organization is classified as a government or not. I remember anarcho-captitalists on the internet talking a lot about boycotts and refusal to provide service as an alternative to government, as something that would limit pollution for example. Experience with real-world examples of that sort of thing, like social media companies, payment processors, and even banks cracking down on those expressing the wrong opinions, paints a less idealized picture and has probably played a role in making such rhetoric less popular. By analogy Goat Simulator owed its popularity to a few strong ideas, but those ideas didn't have the depth and staying power to remain entertaining under closer and longer inspection, and it had bugs that were often funny in the abstract or the first time but not if you had to deal with them all the time

The Marc Laidlaw novel Dad's Nuke also had privately-owned nukes. (Though contra the Wikipedia article, I think the titular "nuke" referred to a reactor and not a bomb.)

It has the distinctive unseriousness of having never held power and thus never having to make compromises with reality.

I don't understand how a positive policy of restraint, of withdrawing or neutering power, is in any way inherently idealistic. Most Anarcho-capitalists, including me, argue that it is the very pragmatic, consequentialist strain in our thinking and in our politics that should drive us towards promoting voluntary interactions as much as possible and towards beating the swords of the State into plowshares. It is a very quick and, frankly, disingenuous oversimplification, merely a hand-wave, to treat the "ideology" as if it were utopian. It is most decidedly not.

Some of those ideas have bizarre and meme-worthy implications, as seen in the anarcho-capitalism memes that tend to focus on the Non Aggression Principle. E.g. "My NAP-bot detects the neighbor's voluntarily-contracted child slave has stepped 0.4 inches past my property line onto my flower bed, responds to his aggression by dousing him in McNapalm."

The existence of memes within communities that share an ideology says nothing beyond the fact that people like to make and share memes. It's certainly unrelated to any actual assessment of the ideas.

Experience with real-world examples of that sort of thing, like social media companies, payment processors, and even banks cracking down on those expressing the wrong opinions, paints a less idealized picture and has probably played a role in making such rhetoric less popular.

None of these examples are in any way dispositive since they are examples, first and foremost, of institutions wielding State power in various ways as their primary means of maintaining market share or even validity. Social disassociation is not an effective strategy against the State, especially the US behemoth. The idea is more apt for discussions about inter-personal and inter-group conflicts within truly private spheres.

In short I don't think you've engaged with anarcho-capitalist thought, but merely noticed some internet phenomena and come to some wry conclusions about some internet strangers.

I don't understand how a positive policy of restraint, of withdrawing or neutering power, is in any way inherently idealistic. Most Anarcho-capitalists, including me, argue that it is the very pragmatic, consequentialist strain in our thinking and in our politics that should drive us towards promoting voluntary interactions as much as possible and towards beating the swords of the State into plowshares. It is a very quick and, frankly, disingenuous oversimplification, merely a hand-wave, to treat the "ideology" as if it were utopian. It is most decidedly not.

I think the point of the quote you were responding to there wasn't about what AnCaps would do, but more the fact that AnCapitalism has never been tried and is unprepared for contact with the real world (see also: communism).

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