The factions of chaos running the US now
The factions of chaos running the US now
A quick guide to all the insanity behind the Trump administration
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wtf is a right wing anarchist?
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An oxymoron.
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Basically this:
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him.
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Goddamnit, I tried to give a more matter of fact definition... completely forgot this existed.
Thanks for giving me a good laugh =D
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The less-funny, more realistic counterpoint to this:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/nlpd-non-libertarian-police-department/360224/
I was just finishing up my shift by having sex with a prostitute when I got a call about an opportunity for overtime. A no-knock raid was going down across town.
"You're trying to have your salary spike this year to game the pension system, right?" my buddy told me. "Well, we're raiding a house where an informant says there's marijuana, and it's going to be awesome—we've got a $283,000 military-grade armored SWAT truck and the kind of flash grenades that literally scared that one guy to death." -
I love this copy pasta. Thanks for letting me read it again
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"I shot the mailbox again" is so funny
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They are anarcho-capitalists, ancaps, in the vein of the Mises Institute / Austrian Economics crowd.
A fundamental part of their ideology is praxeology, which basically is anti-empiricist, it doesn't actually respect or react to evidence, it is wholly based on complex thought expieriments and finangling over definitions of terms.
Basically, they believe that no government or state can be legitimate... that is shared or similar with many other actual anarchists...
But they believe it should be replaced with either giant megacorporations, or somehow, something would cause a 'free market' for competing over public goods and utilities, some even believe in competing theoretical private legal systems that would ... somehow interface and interperet 'the law', even though there is no 'the law'.
It is an internally inconsistent and often easily empirically proven false worldview... but they don't respect empirical evidence.
They only call it 'anarcho' because it wants to destroy the state.
They appropriated the term anarchism.
But other than that, it shares basically nothing else in common with any other notable thinker or group that has called themselves anarchist.
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Fictitious. Hierarchy is THE defining feature of the right wing. The further right you go, the more concentrated the wealth and power becomes, until at the terminus there is a single person who has all of it.
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The guy from Bioshock that built Rapture. You are free to do anything as long as you have the money to do so.
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It’s not a thing, excepting people who don’t know the meaning of the word.
Anarchism is about deconstruction of social hierarchies. This is completely incompatible with all right-wing movements which are fundamentally about strengthening some or all of them.
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Have you never heard of the US Libertarian party? lol
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I’ve heard of them, they’re just not anarchists. Especially the MAGA ones.
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They want to more or less end the government, what else would you call them? Sorry, but anarchists come in a variety of flavors
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They want to replace the government with capitalist business. That is not anarchy; it's a different form of hierarchy. Those two words are opposites.
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First, no, actually most right-libertarians do not oppose the existence of the nation-state, they just think it should be more limited than it currently is—often in favor of strong state government, which anarchists also oppose.
But again, anarchism is about opposition to all social hierarchies, not just the state. So this includes racial hierarchies, patriarchy, class stratification, and most importantly for this discussion, capitalism. Right-libertarians are pro-capitalist, and they are generally not opposed to several of the other hierarchies I mentioned.
Beyond both being at least somewhat skeptical of state power, there is little agreement between the two ideologies.
Also, I would argue that MAGA’s emphasis on executive power is incompatible with even right-libertarians, so it’s not really possible to support trump and be a libertarian unless you are profoundly ignorant or your commitment to libertarianism is completely performative.
So the bottom part of this meme just doesn’t make any sense at all.
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Agree 100% but wanna add that some right wing libertarians like to glob on to the A because they fashion themselves as chaotic or watched V for Vendetta one time and now have Batman complexes. Obviously they are completely ignorant of anarchist philosophy. I think the OP is similarly ignorant here (sorry OP, not meaning that as a slight against you -- most people think anarchy just means no government or chaos or whatever)
Edit: oh yeah, as others have mentioned there are also ancaps, which are oxymoronic but I'm sure they don't really care
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Yeah I get that there are right-wing people who call themselves anarchists, and some who are called this by others like OP.
The problem is that none of these people are educated at all on the history or principles of anarchism, so they are using the word incorrectly. They are no more anarchist than North Korea is democratic.
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I agree but also I think you're getting at a broader issue of the cooption/reclaimation of words, and the problem of language being fluid.
Unfortunately for anarchism, its been an uphill battle. In Plato's The Republic, Socrates refers to anarchy in the negative context we mostly see it used today, similar to just pure chaos.
The term was reclaimed by Proudhon in the 19th century as he developed anarchist philosophy, but I'm not sure the term ever really got divorced from the negative connotation it had. And so I think we still see people use anarchism to refer to any anti state belief, or chaos, in general. Are they wrong or right? Eh. Id like to say they're wrong because I was really moved when I read Kropotkin and Graeber and whatever. But then again, I'm not gonna really get mad when someone uses "gentleman" for a polite man instead of a member of the landed gentry or whatever the term "gentleman" used to mean.
This is all me being an armchair linguist though and kinda talking outta my ass so take that for what you will
Edit: I just read your objection about the mischaracterization of anarchism as a movement because of all this -- and yeah that is a problem for sure. It does make it difficult to describe to people, "I'm not talking about anarchism like you normally think, like pure chaos. I'm talking about anarchism as a political philosophy. See, in the 19th century there were these dudes..." Yeah, that gets pretty old. But idk my opinion is conflicted on this because my personal philosophy around language tends liberal due to their fluid nature
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Yeah that’s all fair, although I will note that Aristotle was not writing in English, so the implication that this is the same word seems a little questionable.
Sometimes I wish that there was a different and better word to describe the movement, but that’s the one early theorists chose. I think their ideas remain foundational to the movement, and the linguistic connection remains important. Feminism sometimes suffers from a similar if less severe version of this issue.
There is libertarian socialism which is not exactly the same but could be used instead. But it’s a mouthful and those words have their own baggage, some of which has already come up in this thread.
Ultimately, the point of words is to communicate clearly and be understood by as many people as possible. There might be other solutions or ways to communicate but with all this in mind I still feel the best solution is asking people to use the word only for the movement and not these other ideas. But I’m happy to hear if anyone has an alternative.
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Think of this way, I'm specifically speaking about the ones who don't understand it yet claim it.
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I knew what you meant but as an anarchist I have to object because you are contributing to this widespread misunderstanding of our movement and what we’re actually advocating for. The Trump administration is a perfect example of the abuses that the state empowers, so I think it’s a crucial time for people to learn about alternatives. This is difficult if people think anarchist just means some violent anti-government mass-shooter type. It is a specific, historical political tradition with lots of deep, insightful thinkers and practical solutions to a wide variety of today’s problems.
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Wiggler, please see my reply to your first post
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Yeah yeah, I gotchu. Overall, great meme
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Anti-statists.
Anarchism is explicitly anti-capitalist.
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Ending federal government != ending hierarchy or the state. As you said yourself, they're radical libertarians, not anarchists.
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They stole ‘libertarian’ too, used to mean anarchist.
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An-caps. They're not really anarchists in any legitimate sense of the word, but they have very good branding people. Very big in certain parts of the U.S., lotta Sov-Cits and Libertarians that fall under the umbrella supporting Trump.
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Maybe they should have written anarcho-capitalist accelerationists…?
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I'll give CNN some credit for including zero mention of anarchism.
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