Journal Marxist Hacker 42's Journal: Distributism 30
I have never found distributism as well defended, as in this talk from the American Chesterton Society. I know I've done a bad job promoting distributism in this journal, so those of you who have criticized this third way in the past, please read this paper.
That is, if you haven't already abandoned slashdot for Google+.
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Reactionary (Score:2)
This is just a nostalgic sort of assumption that if we return to the old villages, then we would be alright. The problem is that we would lose so much of what we have accomplished by doing so.
Be happy living in your fantasy dream world though...
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What, pray tell, have we accomplished?
Accelerated entropy? Additional binkenlights?
Modern "civilisation" is a death-machine. A few (shrinking) percentage get to live in the relative comfort of dry-cleaning, Nike shoes and processed food-products, while the rest of humanity is tossed into th metaphorical wood-chopper to enable this.
The benefits are, by-and-large, a delusional fantasy, no more firmly grounded in the reality of the world than other cargo-cults.
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You're kidding, right? According to Wikipedia (because I'm too lazy to dig thru the UN stats), about 1.7 billion people live in absolute poverty today. Out of a population of 7 billion, that is less than 25% of the current population.
What other time in history has 75% of the world's population not lived in poverty at the utter whim of nature? NEVER.
Modern medicine, weather forecasting, infrastructure, food distribution, agriculture, etc.
Yes, much of the world is poor. However, 2,000 years ago ALL of the wor
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A longer life, even a more materially luxurious life, is not necessarily a happier life.
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See Bhutan. I understand.
More people now have the basics as opposed to just luxuries. Hobbes said it best with "And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."
That is what civilization fights against and I contend, we are winning against. Could it go faster? Most certainly. But the general direction, when looked at through the lens of history, is up.
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I suppose this answers the question of how you can live in such a fantasy world where you think this idea would actually work... namely: you don't think any of the progress we made is significant, and worth keeping.
I, for one, will happily keep my modern medicine, thank you very much.
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More, I think the progress could be made *without central planning*.
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More, I think the progress could be made *without central planning*.
What's this "central planning" bullshit? Do you think that penicillin was developed trough central planning? Do you think I live my life according to "central planning"?
Now, there are a number of details that have to be dealt with by a larger group of society, because ... you know... they only develop when you have larger societies. Like, who gets the rights to use the water in this river? Should the people near the source just say "fuck you all downstream", and use it all up? What if someone downstream has
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"Do you think that penicillin was developed trough central planning?"
Yes, in a way- Dr. Flemming was looking for an alternative to Carbonic Acid for treating Staph infections, and his research was funded by the government. But I'm sure it could have been done individually, without the central planning offered by capitalism or socialism.
"Do you think I live my life according to "central planning"?"
If you are in the United States, you do. The methods of control may be more subtle (advertising is the least i
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If you are in the United States, you do. The methods of control may be more subtle (advertising is the least invasive of all the brainwashing techniques), but it exists.
zOMGS!!! I NEED MY TIN FOIL HATSES!!!
God, you sound so over the top on this shit. Yes, society and culture impress certain mores and ideals upon me, which I am little able to control, but society and culture largely act in the very same decentralized matter that you seem to hoist upon high. Look at families where children are raised to be racist, and look at families where children are raised to be multicultural globalists. They can happen in the the same neighborhood, and even block. In fact, racist parent
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I see quite a bit of racism in multicultural globalism, so I don't understand your point- these are two sides of the same coin. Intolerance of Intolerance is still just unthinking bigotry.
But I'm talking strictly about economic control- which is basically turning into "The South Shall Rise Again". The only difference between a modern multinational corporation and a pre-civil war southern plantation is the scale and how far away massa lives from his slaves. And the rest of us are just the white trash.
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intolerance of intolerance is bigotry.
This is one of the stupidest lines I've ever read, fortunately, you're not the only person who has ever used it.
"Shooting someone is always wrong!" What if you're presented with a situation where you have the chance to shoot someone who himself is about to shoot 100 other people? Wouldn't the shooting be justified in this case?
So, when someone is being intolerant of intolerance, it is for a justified and valid reason, not because the person irrationally doesn't like intolerant people. If you have reason and
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Multicultural globalism is destructive of local culture *for no rational reason*, and thus is never justifiable.
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Multicultural globalism is destructive of local culture *for no rational reason*, and thus is never justifiable.
Yes, certainly... because all that stuff that I've learned about German culture, Japanese culture and other various cultures around the world has totally destroyed the New Mexican Hispanic culture that I grew up in... oh wait, it hasn't. In fact, I'm more happy to share my culture with anyone who is willing to listen.
You're an idiot.
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Your "New Mexican Hispanic Culture" still include bead making and basket weaving? Or was that taken over by robots in Japan?
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Your "New Mexican Hispanic Culture" still include bead making and basket weaving? Or was that taken over by robots in Japan?
Holy shit! My culture evolved when we stopped using beads and baskets! Oh noes!!!
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Progress is not always for the best. That's the thing you have yet to learn, that makes liberalism a futile pursuit. Learning that you need other people is what makes libertarianism a futile pursuit.
Hippie Communes w/Christian Bent (Score:2)
Correct me if I'm not getting it. It sounds like it is heavily dependent on a small, agrarian society. It means locking yourself in to a 19th Century technology level, and that is unacceptable to the majority of American society.
Complex technology requires a complex society. At least for now. Once we move into Star Trek land with fusion power and nanobots, it'll be a different story.
The philosophy sounds like it was developed to address the perceived injustices of the time created by the Industrial Revoluti
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It means locking yourself in to a 19th Century technology level, and that is unacceptable to the majority of American society.
You know, I recall reading about this one nation, where the leader decided that they needed to return to an agrarian society, and forcefully made people move out of the cities and work in fields kind of like a distributist ideal... god, what was his name...
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Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge. The book and movie were titled The Killing Fields. The guy made Stalin look like an old softie.
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Yeah, I left the answer as a rhetorical implication rather than actually mentioning him by name. I realize implying a Goodwin's Law is just as bad as actually invoking it period, but yeah. That's what I did.
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I wasn't sure. :-) I figured you knew, but for the enlightenment of others who may have thought you meant Mao, I specified.
I believe Abimel Guzman of the Shining Path also had a similar idea in mind, but was less successful.
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The keyword being *forced*. Distributism just gives people the *opportunity* to escape the cities. Nothing is preventing that 18 year old from turning around within a week of the disbursement, selling that three acres and a cow, and putting down first and last month's rent on an apartment in the city.
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Yes. I'm not against it, as long as it is voluntary. It sounds like an interesting experiment and potentially sustainable with a rotating population.
Sort of like a Buddhist retreat or a monastery -- without the possible celibacy and silence requirements.
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Too bad Article I Section 8 & 10 entirely deny Americans the rights to do this. I even know a monastery that got in trouble with the IRS for becoming self-sufficient (in that they had purchased enough farmland around the monastery to raise all their own food, had added renewable energy, a phone system, a printing press, a well, and their own post office so that they could live almost completely cut off from the surrounding community).
We would need a constitutional amendment to allow city and county com
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The scale of the federal level is far too large, and the control they have over the economy is far too much of monopoly.
That's how piracy works, and pirates belong to no country, but own them all. They create and run the governments. The bureaucracy is theirs. And just like the old days, they'll only shoot you if you resist. All crime families operate in the exact same manner. Your 'governments' will always be all powerful. People accept that so they can have 'peace'. They will pay anybody just to leave th
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We would need a constitutional amendment to allow city and county communities to enact tariffs and estate taxes if we were going to move towards distributism.
BRILLIANT! Now, Oregon apples can be taxed before they come into Washington state, because WA doesn't want OR apples to compete with the price of their goods. Oh, and when you're driving across the border, welcome to customs check points, to make sure that you're not evading tariffs!
Oh wait, you're talking about CITY and COUNTY tariffs. Congratulations, welcome to the toll zone between your suburban house and your work. We just need to check you to make sure that you're not bringing any good across that hav
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All of that is perfectly fine to me. We have a large number of unemployed people who would then be employed in the toll booths. The only real difference between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution was *CENTRALIZATION* of the economy- no different than what the communists did in Russia.
I see no reason why a country should *ever* have more than a few thousand citizens. Maybe even as small as a thousand. Of course the rich hated it- they hated not being able to collect debt from people who l
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Oh, and the United States isn't one country- it's a union of 50 independent countries. Or that was at least the anti-federalist point of view.
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"Correct me if I'm not getting it. It sounds like it is heavily dependent on a small, agrarian society. It means locking yourself in to a 19th Century technology level, and that is unacceptable to the majority of American society."
Not quite. It means that every 18 year old gets to at least *start* with a 19th Century technology level, which is better than where a bunch of them are currently starting at. Want luxury beyond that? Up to a certain extent, work for it. Distributism admits that human beings a