That includes your settler colonial so-called "democracy".
That includes your settler colonial so-called "democracy".
Fuck governments and all their supporters.
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"The system" includes public hospitals, public libraries, public transit, public schools, waste collection, sewage & water treatment, public museums, public parks, as well as more abstract functions like standards organizations that ensure that when you plug an electrical device into a wall socket it doesn't burn your house down - plus all of the internal government infrastructure and staff required to make all of those services functional.
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It's a social infrastructure hostage situation.
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Sort of. If you actually spend time thinking about government infrastructure beyond the surface level, you look at how much extraordinary work is accomplished by organizations like NIST, or just your local county waste treatment facilities or hospitals, you recognize how much benefit you get from that every day, how many problems are solved for you before you even think about them (seriously, just try to wrap your head around what it means that you can just take any electrical device and plug it into a wall socket and it just gets power, and adding or removing devices at random doesn't bring down your local power grid or cause brownouts or safety hazards, and how complex the system behind that is) you realize how much staff and coordination is involved in keeping all of that working...
The reality is that "the system" is also "the people", and how can we escape from ourselves?
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Nobody here is complaining about the existence of infra-structure. OP is talking about who controls it. It's about power.
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In reality there's no practical difference. For instance, the head surgeon of a hospital's surgery department makes control decisions every day - what supplies to requisition and when and how much, what equipment to acquire, what staff to hire with what qualifications and how many... this is a position of power. But that head surgeon is also part of the surgical team, they're part of the infrastructure, they're part of the service. They are an essential part of the proper functioning and organization of the surgery department.
They are the buereacracy. They make decisions that directly affect the lives of patients, decisions which those patients have no say in. They are inseparable from the whole. Their decision-making cannot be replaced by a committee of unqualified individuals, it cannot be farmed out to a public vote, and it cannot be left to a government official no matter how well-intentioned. The authority for those decisions - the power - is necessarily concentrated in the hands of the person most qualified.
People in roles like that are "the system", or the control, or the power, or whatever you want to call it.
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No. Those are social services, not the system. "The system" specifically refers to economic and political power structures. Any modern society can and necessarily must have these things, so they're not an argument in favor of one system over another except in the sense of which system provides the best access to them. Bourgeoi democracy is clearly failing at like half of these, so yeah.
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Those are social services, not the system. "The system" specifically refers to economic and political power structures.
You do realize that there's no real separation between these thing, right? We assign terms to them so that we can talk about them, but in practice a logistics system is an economy and is also a governance organization (or requires one to maintain balance and adequate flow of resources from one place to another), and politics is inevitable when people are involved in complex administrative work. It doesn't matter if "the system" is capitalist or socialist or feudal or whatever, someone somewhere has to make decisions about which needs get met with which resources at what time and how to get them there, otherwise nothing happens.
Any modern society can and necessarily must have these things, so they're not an argument in favor of one system over another except in the sense of which system provides the best access to them.
I'm not arguing in favor of any particular system, I'm pointing out that there are real people's lives that are actively dependent on the current system and that changing the system will have a drastic human cost that most armchair rebels never think about. I'm pointing out that if you're actually serious about building a better society then you should start with figuring out the details of how to provide care for people who are unable to provide it for themselves.
If your plan doesn't account for the weakest, the poorest, the most vulnerable, people who are laying in hospital beds on life support, people who are going to the emergency room because they can't afford regular health care, children with cancer... from the outset, right now, before you even talk about tearing down the current system, then it will be just as bad as any other system that has come before, no matter what label you apply to it, because your priorities are completely fucked.
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OP seems like a 14 year old libertarian whose parents complain about paying taxes.
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Personally, I find it useful to distinguish between government and governance. All that infrastructure you describe would be impossible without systems of governance. Government (as most people understand it) isn't the only form of governance.
I'm not sure what a world without government would look like, but to me, that's the big challenge — how do governance (in a manner that's actually democratic without being overly bogged down in bureaucracy). I don't think it's impossible though, and even if we're unfathomably far away from actually getting to a point where we could do away with government, it's useful to ask the question.
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I would say it's ironic that someone was using a reference to an indigenous people who were fighting against a fascist colonial state as a username and arguing in favor of fascism, but actually nerds missing the fucking point with literature is the norm, not the exception.
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It's a "democracy" but it's mostly ruled by a handful of old guys coming from long-standing political families. Your vote is mostly there to justify the rule, not to change it.
AGAB (all governments are bastards).
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"Democracy" might just be the most abused word in modern history. Literally means rule by the people, "the people" assumed to be the general population. We almost all acknowledge that the country is controlled and run by a vanishingly small social class and yet we still insist on repeating this democracy myth.
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but some of the oligarchs wear blue! surely that makes them better than the red guys!
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Yesss, teto approved meme
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End Statism.
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generated pic ;(
Hey, appreciate you posting but this doesn't seem like a meme and more like agitprop, feel free to post in the sister com (link in sidebar)