"I'd rather have everyone fed, clothed, housed and medically taken care of than having a low chance of "winning"."

I think this is creating a false dichotomy by implying that it's a foregone conclusion that a soup kitchen style of government would be able to support everyone.

"How can I enjoy a steak without thinking about whether or not this animal had a good life? It died so i may eat it, but why did it live in the first place? Just to be eaten?"

First, buy local from small producers. You can see how the animals live.

Are we not born to toil and die? Why should we be born? It seems we serve some minor purpose at best, under the control of some government, and then die thinking that we left some grand legacy simply for having children to continue on.

> I think this is creating a false dichotomy by implying that it's a foregone conclusion that a soup kitchen style of government would be able to support everyone.

uh, soup kitchen style of government?

how about no government at all?

just to clarify: for me communism is the antiauthoritarian leftism that is in the bottom left of the political compass.

top left?: stalinism&maoism,

top right?: nazigermany,

quarter-to-the-bottom&full-right?: USofA

exaggerated? perhaps.

> First, buy local from small producers. You can see how the animals live.

good point, if you live in an area with local, small producers.

I cannot speak for my miserable parents, but I definetly did not have children for them to just toil and die. I just want everyone to have a good time.

Distancing ourselfs from eachother by using money to measure the value of every interaction is definetly not The Way for everyone to have a good one.

But we understand that life is full of struggle and death, yet we have children.

"Distancing ourselfs from eachother by using money to measure the value of every interaction... "

That's a choice. One can always volunteer. It seems human nature will always find some way to measure value transfer, or at least determine if someone is worthy of the "free" service. I think we see this in libertarian communities - most people contribute, but freeloaders could be labeled as such.

> But we understand that life is full of struggle and death, yet we have children.

yeah, because life is also full of beauty.

As to that choice: Sure, you just don't see many banks in volunteering in letting go of a debtor ;)

If I had the time, I would.

And it was the debtor's choice to get involved in those transactions. Many businesses, including banks, make charitable donations.

> I'd rather have everyone fed, clothed, housed and medically taken care of than having a low chance of "winning"

Where do you believe the food, clothing, housing, and medical care/technology will come from in this hypothetical?

Where do you believe the food, clothing, housing, and medical care/technology is coming from in the current world?

Same people, except in my hypothetical the workforce would be a tad bigger: Bezos, Musk and Gates, like the Kennedies, Rothschilds and Murdochs would (like everyone else on the planet) put in their own ~4 hours of daily work (4 out of 7 days should be plenty) towards feeding/clothing/housing/caring-for the People.

Who needs military if the whole world was one? All those poor souls "defending" your freedom? Would work the fields or whatever. Who needs newspapers that only print what their owner wants to be printed? Who needs X privately owned space programs if the whole world would profit the most from a single public one?

Yes, competition can drive innovation but we have arrived at a time where we innovate solely to: - dazzle others we call users into spending more of their precious time and money on our shit-websites... - improve surveilance tech - improve weaponry - improve schemes to extract value from our workforce

And competition by cooperation is by far better anyways than competition led by self-interest: If your idea is better than whatever is being already produced, since everyone is a worker and cooperating, there would be little to no friction to improve stuff. Actually, improvements would be shared freely rather than kept as a secret.

Money and Power are keeping us so busy we barely look up to see if what we are doing is hurting the planet... and thus have to go. And designs/blueprints/recipees and other similar (not art) intelectual property should be in some sort of commons.

I dont know about art, it's important, but how to reimburse for it? idk. but you cant ask for money in return, since it was already deprecated... so i guess it also goes into the commons, and rightfully so: we produce for everyone to enjoy.

If you want everyone to give up wealth you will have to do it at gun point.

not strictly necessary. laws could ve passed that 0.001% is taken over each year. this would be sslowerrl, but would have lower resistance.

I believe you want to demolish the casino. I don't believe you want to build a soup kitchen. I don't even believe you volunteer at a soup kitchen now, because I've met people who volunteer at soup kitchens and you sound nothing like them.

As to what I'd do if I 'won', it's funny you ask since I spent this morning thinking about just that. For one, I think that a lot of contaminated land, including spent mining sites, could be slowly rehabilitated by growing the right plants and fungi on them, possibly even harvesting some of the leftover valuable minerals and rendering harmless the toxic ones, providing inexpensive housing to people acting as a caretaker, producing rejuvenation in an expanding network of locations. For another, a lot of energy is being put into cleaning plastic out of the oceans but there is still not a lot of thought being put into what to do with the result. I believe that with the right templates, it would be possible to clean plastic out of the ocean and build large rafts for seasteading-style projects. With the proper designs I suspect it would even be possible to make these rafts a suitable habitat for marine life, increasing local biodiversity and saving the expense of hauling waste plastic from the ocean to a landfill on a continent.

I have other visions of a better world, but if I achieve even one of these I'll consider mine a life well lived. The thing is, I'm not naive as to how unrealistic these visions sound or how difficult they would be to realise. If the decision were made by reasonable bureaucrats in a world where their mandate is minimal starvation, I might as well give up. There is exactly one human being on earth insane enough to think these visions are worth pursuing. THAT is why I'm invested in winning. THAT is what you want to take away from me, and from everyone else who's ever had an insane vision of a better future.

You say you want to see the world burn. That sounds to me like the mindset of a man in a warband, and warbands get resources by taking them from their neighbours. It's always the farmers and craftspeople who suffer most when that way of thinking takes over, and I consider myself a small producer, so it should come as no surprise that I'm hostile to your way of thinking. I truly believe that if you burned the world as you imagine, you'd have taken over my house and the small food forest my family has grown, and either shot or enslaved me, long before you ever made a dent in the barricades of the billionaires that justify your rhetoric. I believe that because that's been what happened historically, and because if your goal was really to build a soup kitchen you wouldn't feel the need to set the world on fire first.

I'd like to close with an appeal to your humanity, because despite my belief that a small producer like myself is always the first target of warbands and warband-thinking, I don't begrudge the instinct or its necessity to the human spirit. If you believe in anarchist-socialism and want to fight, there is an experiment with that kind of government happening right now in Rojava, the Kurdish autonomous zone in Northern Syria. They are actively looking for people to join their cause, and from what I know of their system it seems like it could actually succeed without devolving into Stalinism. If you lent your effort to that, it would be an alignment of what your intellectual, moral, and instinctive stances seem to be. Please just consider it, and if the answer is 'no' then it would be worth aligning the reasons why with what you want for your immediate sphere.

Thank you for this, I appreciated reading it. It's depressing to see how many people's vision of the world is fundamentally negative and opposed to letting human beings live freely and flourish according to their own hopes and dreams.

That being said, I think the problem is that the pro-freedom side hasn't put forth a sufficiently convincing argument. Ridiculous Elon Musk fanboys should not be the representatives for freedom. We shouldn't be noted for contradictorily turning a blind eye to bailouts and rebates with expropriated money, as well as to police violence towards minorities, and for seemingly being more concerned with taking the last scraps of support from the poor rather than opposing the kleptarchic defence contractors and so forth.

We need to make the case that a freer society would mean less money taken from the poor and given to the rich, and less opportunity to get rich on monopolies enforced by state power, such as inappropriately excessive patent rights and copyrights, which are not just intuitively morally unfair but also antithetical to the principle that a competitive market provides a selection pressure for better ideas. If we can't put forward a convincing argument and be consistent in our principles, it's our own damn fault and we should quit whining about it.

Why thank you! I am testing out pro-freedom arguments when the opportunity arises, "This is my vision, who are you to say I have no right to pursue it?" does seem to be working somewhat. Asking for alternatives similarly, though I think I'll need to pick up a copy of 'doughnut economics' to get the most out of the ensuing conversations.

But taking a wider view, comparing our current situation to any time except Postwar America seems like it should be argument enough. I think the issue is that freedom means freedom to make bad choices if it means anything, and we're currently in a situation of having to deal with the consequences of some bad choices. How that resolves I can't begin to guess.

Edit: It occurred to me, maybe acknowledging that freedom allowed bad choices to be made and that we need to deal with the consequences of those choices would be another way to approach the same argument.

I said: I want to see the (capitalist) world burn.

Well, why would you misquote me?

I wonder. You make me sound like some madman indeed. Personally, I would even consider a UBI to be "setting the world ablaze", but probably the only way forwards.

No, I do not volunteer in a soup kitchen, do you? Of course you do. Do you want to read how I don't have the time to volunteer? Of course not.

Does it matter that you are concretizing an abstraction to make me look like a lazy loudmouthed fool? Of course not.

As to that Syrian experiment, pardon my mistrust, but is it safe enough that you would send your own daughter there?

If I would be a gambler, I would bet that experiment whiped off the earth in 5 - 10 years if they haven't disbanded by then already due to ???

Nah, I have dug myself in here pretty solidly, even if I wanted to: I couldn't just up and leave on a whim. Besides, your plea for me to consider going off into the desert reads like that meme with that dude stating "how curious, yet you participate in a society" to some peasant complaining about the state of the world.

Instead of going someplace that could be droned to peace for being a threat to even mildly authoritarean regimes, or, just as likely, where I could be stoned to death for just existing (am trans and gay): I'll rather wait for the nuclear holocaust to bring anarchy to my doorstep, kthxbye