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You agree, through your use of this service, that you will not use this forum to post any material which is:
- abusive
- vulgar
- hateful
- harassing
- personal attacks
- obscene
You also may not:
- post images that are too large (max is 500*500px)
- post any copyrighted material unless the copyright is owned by you or cited properly.
- post in UPPER CASE, which is considered yelling
- post messages which insult the Armenians, Armenian culture, traditions, etc
- post racist or other intentionally insensitive material that insults or attacks another culture (including Turks)
The Ankap thread is excluded from the strict rules because that place is more relaxed and you can vent and engage in light insults and humor. Notice it's not a blank ticket, but just a place to vent. If you go into the Ankap thread, you enter at your own risk of being clowned on.
What you PROBABLY SHOULD NOT post...
Do not post information that you will regret putting out in public. This site comes up on Google, is cached, and all of that, so be aware of that as you post. Do not ask the staff to go through and delete things that you regret making available on the web for all to see because we will not do it. Think before you post!
2] Use descriptive subject lines & research your post. This means use the SEARCH.
This reduces the chances of double-posting and it also makes it easier for people to see what they do/don't want to read. Using the search function will identify existing threads on the topic so we do not have multiple threads on the same topic.
3] Keep the focus.
Each forum has a focus on a certain topic. Questions outside the scope of a certain forum will either be moved to the appropriate forum, closed, or simply be deleted. Please post your topic in the most appropriate forum. Users that keep doing this will be warned, then banned.
4] Behave as you would in a public location.
This forum is no different than a public place. Behave yourself and act like a decent human being (i.e. be respectful). If you're unable to do so, you're not welcome here and will be made to leave.
5] Respect the authority of moderators/admins.
Public discussions of moderator/admin actions are not allowed on the forum. It is also prohibited to protest moderator actions in titles, avatars, and signatures. If you don't like something that a moderator did, PM or email the moderator and try your best to resolve the problem or difference in private.
6] Promotion of sites or products is not permitted.
Advertisements are not allowed in this venue. No blatant advertising or solicitations of or for business is prohibited.
This includes, but not limited to, personal resumes and links to products or
services with which the poster is affiliated, whether or not a fee is charged
for the product or service. Spamming, in which a user posts the same message repeatedly, is also prohibited.
7] We retain the right to remove any posts and/or Members for any reason, without prior notice.
- PLEASE READ -
Members are welcome to read posts and though we encourage your active participation in the forum, it is not required. If you do participate by posting, however, we expect that on the whole you contribute something to the forum. This means that the bulk of your posts should not be in "fun" threads (e.g. Ankap, Keep & Kill, This or That, etc.). Further, while occasionally it is appropriate to simply voice your agreement or approval, not all of your posts should be of this variety: "LOL Member213!" "I agree."
If it is evident that a member is simply posting for the sake of posting, they will be removed.
8] These Rules & Guidelines may be amended at any time. (last update September 17, 2009)
If you believe an individual is repeatedly breaking the rules, please report to admin/moderator.
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What is Anarchy?
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We Need the State… Otherwise, Something Bad Might Happen!
by Gene Callahan
I have noticed that people often attempt to justify the existence of the State by bringing up some place or some activity where there was little or no government at work and pointing out that, at some point, something bad happened. For example, in reviewing The Outlaw Sea by William Langewiesche, in Sunday's (5/16/2004) NY Times, Nathaniel Philbrick offers a couple of examples of such "reasoning." He describes the sea as a zone of "anarchy" with "almost no regulation" by governments. Then he describes two severe mishaps suffered by ocean-going vessels, one of which "released 26,000 tons of molasses into the Bay of Biscay." (Can you imagine how much trouble those fish had getting their mouths unstuck?) "There you are," the reader is clearly supposed to conclude, "not enough government involvement, and next thing you know, something bad happened."
One of the incidents cited by Philbrick occurred in 1994, the other in 2001. I suppose the reader should be imagining that they were two of the, oh, ten or twenty ships to venture out to sea during that period. And surely, while absorbing Philbrick's sage lesson, he is not supposed to think of transportation by motor vehicle, an arena where the government builds and maintains the roads, regulates the construction of the vehicles, licenses the operators, creates tomes of laws as to how the activity is to be conducted, and sends out swarms of its agents to ensure its dictates are followed, but that is characterized by daily carnage, horrible traffic snarls, terrible road conditions, and frequent, unanticipated delays costing travelers many hours.
Philbrick also warns of "the notion that terrorists are learning to exploit the opportunities offered by the sea." In 2001, he mentions, it was suspected "that a ship containing a large chemical bomb was on its way to London." Nothing happened and no such ship was tracked down, so here we have a case where there was not enough government involvement, and something bad might have happened. Again, I assume we aren't supposed to recall that when something really, really bad did happen, it involved the extensively regulated airline industry.
But Philbrick is hardly alone in forwarding such arguments. When I mentioned to a friend of mine that I am an anarchist, he brought up the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911, which killed 146 women: not enough government, and something bad happened. Certainly it was a horrible event, making any of the tragedies caused by governments, such as the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian famine, the rape of Nanking, the Bataan death march, the Holocaust, the fire-bombing of Dresden, the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, and the killing fields of Cambodia, pale in comparison. The logic is flawless: when a private business accidentally kills 146 people, we need to increase the power of the government, an entity that deliberately kills millions.
I have sometimes encountered a variation on the "something bad might happen" argument that is even more puzzling than the standard form: the government was involved in some events, and something bad happened, so we need the government or else that bad thing might happen. You might think that no one could even formulate such an obvious absurdity, so I will give you two real examples.
The first one came up when a friend of mine mentioned that he was skeptical that the American entry into World War II was justified. The person to whom he said that sputtered in response: "And what? We were supposed to just let six million Jews die?" My friend was stopped dead in his tracks, utterly unable to grapple with a line of reasoning that seemed to run: "The US government entered World War II, and six million Jews died, so the US government had to enter the war, or else six million Jews would have died, who did die anyway."
Similarly, when I told a person with whom I was conversing that I believe government is unnecessary, he asked me, "Well, would you rather have governments or terrorists?" He really seemed to believe he had presented me with a stark alternative: do away with government, as I was suggesting, and we'll have a world where people fly airplanes into skyscrapers, bring down large buildings with car bombs, and strap explosives to their bodies, then blow themselves up on a bus, killing scores of innocent passengers. Jeez, when you put it that way, I guess we'd really better keep government around, so we can live in a nice, safe world where none of those things ever happen.
The fact that otherwise intelligent people put forward such nonsense demonstrates just how thoroughly the State has done its job of brainwashing – oops, I mean educating – its subjects as to the dire consequences they will face should they try getting along without it.Achkerov kute.
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Originally posted by duskenI would like to him to describe his vision of what things would be like. All he did was break down the logic of analogies; that is not support for a position.
Achkerov kute.
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Originally posted by AnonymouseWhat do you mean by "his vision"? You are stating the same problem you did initially. I refer you to the article on page 5.
http://forum.armenianclub.com/showth...2&page=5&pp=15
I am not stating anything I had before; I am responding directly to this article and am not stating any of my opinions on anarchy. This article does nothing more than show that those specific arguments by those specific individuals were not enough to support the idea of government. But you cannot win support for a position by merely saying why someone elses single argument or analogy is logically fallible. I completely agree with him in that the individuals who posed those arguments were not correct in doing so. This does not mean I will immediately support anarchy.
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Originally posted by duskenBy "his vision" I mean how he feels the world would be without government and why it would be better.
I am not stating anything I had before; I am responding directly to this article and am not stating any of my opinions on anarchy. This article does nothing more than show that those specific arguments by those specific individuals were not enough to support the idea of government. But you cannot win support for a position by merely saying why someone elses single argument or analogy is logically fallible. I completely agree with him in that the individuals who posed those arguments were not correct in doing so. This does not mean I will immediately support anarchy.Achkerov kute.
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