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That’s the point of government: the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.
That’s from “Politics as a Vocation” by Max Weber. It’s also why the population needs to beat back if that violence isn’t legitimate (i.e. it’s abusing the population in the first place).
Or dissolve the government and realise offloading societal obligations to use violence to a hierarchical organisation is not the solution.
If there must be violence, let it come from the people for the people.
Vigilantism is not a suitable replacement. The general population is shit at properly investigating things.
Just look at how Reddit responded to who they incorrectly thought was the Boston Marathon bomber. A lot of innocent people will die to mob justice.
Community defences is a suitable replacement.
I can point to millions of examples of cops and courts getting it wrong and innocent people suffering and dying, yet that’s not an argument against the system for you so why should it be against community management?
As there are millions of examples of them finding culprits and getting it right. I may not agree with the punishments, but I think your argument breaks down outside of a very small close knit community of people who practice consensus decision making.
You can’t just plop down community management without the culture to make it work. These tools are missing from most communities and would lead to as many negative results if not more.
We don’t even need to create hypothetical examples of this because we already have many historical examples of community management gone wrong like the Salem Witch trials.
I think you need to seriously address this before you can shout community management as a panacea.
You can’t just plop down community management without the culture to make it work. These tools are missing from most communities and would lead to as many negative results if not more.
Well of course. Nothing will work right away if people aren’t educated and empowered. But the tools are missing precisely because we have given them to the state. Thus to see this change, they must be returned to the community who can relearn to practice them.
We also have examples of community management going right, such as in Rojava or Chiaps where the people are the ones patrolling their streets, deciding on how to right wrongs collectively, and generally showing much better results than we have in the West.
Herein lies the problem, without community management taking over naturally it would be thrust artificially onto communities. You can’t reasonably expect these skills to be learned naturally, this would require external education which would then require a lot of social capital to be successful.
Who is going to dismantle the state and remember that it has to be a slow gradual learning process for communities?
Also, community management almost has to take place in a vacuum because when it bumps up against a state it quickly dissolves losing its power such as what happened in Rojava in the start of 2026 leading it to being incorporated into the Syrian state.
I’m not disagreeing with any argument against the current system, I’m just saying that putting the power in the hands of the people isn’t a suitable replacement.
Professional, highly educated and properly trained law enforcement with robust civilian oversight is the solution.
Law enforcement itself is a problem, it cannot be regulated or trained to anything but the tool of state oppression.
People with a direct stake in the wellbeing of a community are the only people who can properly care for the community.
It’s cute how absolutely wrong you are.
have you read the sidebar here or for this instance?
and innocent people die at the hands of police. i’m willing to take my chances with my neighbors.
I can guarantee you that mob justice would be worse.
It used to be commonplace for innocent black people to be hung because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and a bunch of pissed off white people wanted to kill someone.
The state making that a crime and enforcing it is what stopped it from being commonplace.
I can guarantee you that mob justice would be worse.
i don’t see how. do you have a crystal ball?
You don’t need a crystal ball to observe history.
the past isn’t the future
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No crystal ball, but history repeats itself. That shit isn’t even in the distant past.
Do you honestly think that groups of people with no experience in criminal investigations will get it right more often than people who dedicated their lives to it?
i think that the systems that govern us are unjust in a myriad of ways. i’m willing to tolerate some level of injustice in dealing with antisocial behavior, since i get that already, if it means we can throw off all the rest of the oppression we face from being governed.
Government is like money. Get rid of it and people will create it again to fill the function they need it to fill, so let’s have it do what we need and help instead of harm
There is still a point, though, when a government gets so bad that you just have to throw it away even if you know a new one would eventually rise to replace it.
Yup. People are social animals, and governments are just formalized outgrowths of the social structures they form. Fun bit, the research they’ve done shows that not just people but all primates fall back into all of the same social structures they are used to whenever there is a vacancy.
you’re making that up
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if you’re going to just make things up, you should start off by letting everyone know so tehy don’t waste their time on your storytelling.
What exactly am I making up?
every line of that comment.
your gif broke. but i foundi t, and it’s just an appeal to ridicule, not evidence for your claim.
i thought you were making a joke (one i liked, too) that i said people create things. no worries, it’s hard to communicate tone over text.
straight up mott and bailey. retreat from your specific, unjustified claim to one very broad and easy to defend.
And other shit liberals tell themselves to never attempt change.
call me when you’ve built a single homeless shelter. just one. then you can lecture me on anything.
you just sit behind your keyboard. Some of us (not you) actually live it.
I would be arrested for doing so, as I would not meet legal qualifications. I volunteer preparing and serving food to the community, houseless or not.
But that has nothing to do with your ridiculous argument that people would simply recreate the same systems of oppression as if it were a natural biological trait of all people and not a social construct.
so it sounds like even though you’re fond of citing dunbar you’ve never actually read his research. CURIOUS.
When have I cited Dunbar?
Weber did mean to legitimize the state but his reasoning can easily be turned from prescriptive to descriptive: we define the state as merely the entity with monopoly on violence over an area. Who decides what is “legitimate” violence? Why, the state, of course: by definition, it has the means to impose its views.
The Weberian idea is there are legitimate non-violent politics that the state offers itself to, which therefore allow the state to use violence against unlegitimate politics that don’t “play by the rules”. However since the state itself decides what is legitimate or not, and since any illegitimate political group will turn illegal else disappear when faced with the violence of the state, we just land back where we started: the state has a monopoly on violence and that is what decides what is “legitimate” politics, and therefore what is legitimate violence. The state calls its own violence “law”, but that of others “crime”.
The current labelling of political opponents as terrorists by the US government is illustrative of that. Some Weberians have you believe that is all legitimate since after all there indeed was an election
Criminal law is basically self interest fully encoded. “Well I don’t want bad things to happen to me, so lets codify them all and make it illegal to do any of them.”
Similarly, a politician can abuse kids with impunity, but you can go to prison for seeing pictures of him doing it (or of others doing the same).
I’m not saying that possession of CSAM shouldn’t be illegal, but if we’re not prosecuting the crimes they depict, then is what they depict the crime or is it the knowledge it’s happening and who’s doing it?
As far as I know CSPAN comes with most cable packages.
You just need to familiarize yourself with the concept of blackwhite. Do you know much newspeak?
It’s easy to get away with crime, though.
Step 1: have parents who are billionaires
Step two, pick victims who are socially disadvantaged
Step 3: Pit them against each other to distract them while you run out the back carrying all the money, leaving them with crumbs.
The news media is pushing the narrative that it was a fake school. Fake art supplies etc. Its REALLY fucking evil. Of course everyone will believe that now.
Who cares about the school. Were the children also fake?
Oh, children don’t look like children on camera you have to paint capybaras.
what is this in reference to?
US tomahawking 200 kids at girl school in Iran recently.
didn’t they also double tap to kill the responders and survivors
I just assume the evil sumbitches are doing that on all the bombings now
Only to people who believe the media, who are already quite lost.
Of course, morality itself is a social construct, no? Even the foundation itself is shaky.
Morality is not a social construct, it’s part and parcel of the social contract.
And the social contract is some divine thing, or what?
It’s not, nor is it fixed.
Depends? Morality like “don’t steal” is partially a consequence of game theory. Game theory is math.
Is math a social construct - obviously not completely.
The biggest fault of Game theory is that it is biased towards instant utility and short-term rewards. It does not model for scenarios where reduced short-term rewards can lead to greater gains in the long-term.
In short, decisions made for singular benefit typically have worse long-term results than decisions accounting for collective benefit.
That’s a failure of that specific model. It just needs more creative mathematicians/theorists
Game theory does model for that. For example an iterated prisoner’s dilemma.
