I sent anarchyagogo this quote:

“The individualist anarchism of the American Proudhonians finds, however, but little sympathy amongst the working masses. Those who profess it - they are chiefly ‘intellectuals’ - soon realize that the individualization they so highly praise is not attainable by individual efforts, and either abandon the ranks of the anarchists, and are driven into the liberal individualism of the classical economist or they retire into a sort of Epicurean amoralism, or superman theory, similar to that of Stirner”

In response to this quote I sent her, she responds with: “A wonderfully irrelevant quote by Kropotkin. Your point of sending me this was… what?”

Now, since her blog is mostly about anarchy, I don’t think submitting this refutational quote to her blog was “irrelevant” in any sense of the word. I think it was just a bitter, knee-jerk reaction to my submission. I think this knee-jerk reaction is typical of her sensationalist rhetoric and, in my opinion, sort-of unveils her misguided beliefs in utopia.

But, my first response (my inner monologue) was:

Hahaha. God damn I love it when I’m right.

But I digress….

First, utopians like her want to make all of society over in accordance with one detailed plan, formulated in advance and never before aproximated. They [“anarchists”] see as their objective a perfect society, and hence they describe a static and rigid society, with no opportunity or expectation of change or progress and no opportunity for the inhabitants of the society themselves to choose new patterns. (For if a change is a change for the better, then the previous state of the society, because surpassable, wasn’t perfect; and if a change is a change for the worse, the previous state of society, allowing deterioration, wasn’t perfect. And why make a change which is neutral?)

Second, utopians like her assume that the particular society they describe will operate without certain problems arising, that social mechanisms and institutions will function as they predict, and that people will not act from certain motives and interests. They blandly ignore certain obvious problems that anyone with any experience of the world would be struck by or make the most wildly optimistic assumptions about how these problems will be avoided or surmounted.

Stemming from the unknown, the only morally justifiable societal structure is of the minimal state.

For her to quote a page that says that minarchists are essentially statists, may be true, but not in the sense that she rebels against. It is simple blind allegiance to her sensationalist, idealistic, rather than realistic, political philosophy. Unfortunately, due to her admitted disregard for the state of economics in such a society, and her obvious lacking knowledge on the State of Nature Theory, I can just brush off her beliefs as a half-cocked hypothesis coming from a teenager wearing a mask.

October 11, 2011

From the page:

From time to time, Cop Block gets commenters or visitors who insist that certain police are great and wonderful and uphold the law, and that broad sweeping statements about police are unfair. The first obvious criticism of this drivel is that upholding the law is not moral, per se. The law is capable of being wrong. The law is capable of being evil. Thus, the claim that there are some upstanding officers out there because some of them follow the law to a T is naive and dull.

The second point to be made is that even if a patrol officer has saved lives or helped old ladies cross the street, a great bulk of his or her profession and daily job description involves extortion, in the common sense of the word.

So if you want to say that a particular officer is overall great because he has saved more lives in his career than he has destroyed from extortion, fine – but it cannot be  seriously disputed that patrol officers regularly engage in something that would be indistinguishable from extortion. The only difference from their form of extortion, and the illegal type is that they have arbitrarily been granted the legal right to engage in this blackmail.

Although this sounds like a significant or appreciable difference, it is not. Murder would not be any different, or any less repugnant if it one day were declared to be legal. You  would not feel any better about someone beating you to a bloody pulp, if you were told it was legal. If it became legal tomorrow for everyone to commit robbery at will, robbery would not suddenly be any less bad a behavior.

Extortion is generally defined as “The obtaining of property from another induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear, or under color of official right.” In California specifically, Penal Code 518 defines extortion as follows:

“Extortion is the obtaining of property from another, with his consent, or the obtaining of an official act of a public officer, induced by wrongful use of force or fear, or under color of official right.”

The page goes on further to describe and defend this point of view. So before you disagree, go read more at copblock.org