its only derogatory if you intended it that way.

I would see it being common if someone was chosen to take the communities decisions to others, but no to make them for them

Ah. Well, either way, it sounds to me like international relations. How is this not international relations?

oh, i was merely commenting on the language.

nations do not exist in an anarchist state.
and I mean state as in 'state of being' not as in 'head of state'

you are correct, nations do not exist in an anarchist state, but in diplomacy every country is an INDIVIDUAL actor with no rules imposed on them except for the rules they impose on themsleves when they interact with eachother. that is the definition of anarchy. This is why the board game diplomacy is considered by political scientists and international relation scholars to be based on the realist, anarchical view of IR.

keep in mind that in this game there are no nations of people making rational decisions and forming governments, it's one dude controlling one country. Thats why it's considered anarchy.

I'd say that's more like a monstrous, autocratic dictatorship.

i guess, but i dont think you can call it a dictatorship when each country has a population of one. it's a game, one country, one actor.

Getting back to the original subject of the thread, I think we can take it that the story about Trotsky's ashes is 100% bullshit. It has still failed to appear on one major news site as far as I can see.

They must have been terrible cookies.....

Not really, given that they didn't actually contain any ashes, since the whole story is obviously bollocks.

I see no reason to beleive so strongly that it didnt happen.

I'm in the middle.

! stands for not and it is != (not equals).

@Sicarus: If there was any serious evidence this had happened, it would be major news all across the world. Give me just one example of a major news media website covering this story.

Sicarius, I don't think you quite understand capitalism. Anarchy and capitalism are not mutually exclusive and in many ways very complementary. If you leave people to do what they will with no oppressive forces, capitalism is ultimately what results. It doesn't have to be monetary, and you can call it a "gift" economy, but it will always be capitalism. I can understand that you think authority is inherently exploitative and oppressive, but capitalism is not inherently exploitative and oppressive. What sort of economy do you think would arise in an anarchy if not capitalism? Surely any redistribution plan is indicative of authority.

"Capitalism in the sense of wealth accumulation as a result of oppressive and exploitative wage slavery must be abandoned. The enormous differences between the wealthy and the poor do not only cause tensions in society or personal harm to those exploited, but is essentially unjust. Most, if not all, property of today is generated and amassed through the use of force. This cannot be accepted, and no anarchists accept this state of inequality and injustice. As a matter of fact, anarcho-capitalists share this view with other anarchists. Murray N. Rothbard, one of the great philosophers of anarcho-capitalism, used a lot of time and effort to define legitimate property and the generation of value, based upon a notion of “natural rights” (see Murray N. Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty). The starting point of Rothbard’s argumentation is every man’s sovereign and full right to himself and his labor. This is the position of property creation shared by both socialists and classical liberals, and is also the shared position of anarchists of different colors. Even the statist capitalist libertarian Robert Nozick claimed contemporary property was unjustly accrued and that a free society, to him a “minimalist state,” needs to make up with this injustice (see Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, Utopia”). Thus it seems anarcho-capitalists agree with Proudhon in that “property is theft,” where it is acquired in an illegitimate manner. But they also agree with Proudhon in that “property is liberty” (See Albert Meltzer’s short analysis of Proudhon’s “property is liberty” in Anarchism: Arguments For and Against, p. 12-13) in the sense that without property, i.e. being robbed of the fruits of one’s actions, one is a slave. Anarcho-capitalists thus advocate the freedom of a stateless society, where each individual has the sovereign right to his body and labor and through this right can pursue his or her own definition of happiness." - Per Bylund, Anarcho-capitalist

By that definition, wouldn't that mean that theft is liberty?

democracy and capitalism are not synonamous

you see chris, for anarchists, freedom means both "freedom from" and "freedom to." "Freedom from" signifies not being subject to domination, exploitation, coercive authority, repression, or other forms of degradation and humiliation. "Freedom to" means being able to develop and express one's abilities, talents, and potentials to the fullest possible extent compatible with the maximum freedom of others. Both kinds of freedom imply the need for self-management, responsibility, and independence, which basically means that people have a say in the decisions that affect their lives. And since individuals do not exist in a social vacuum, it also means that freedom must take on a collective aspect, with the associations that individuals form with each other (e.g. communities, work groups, social groups) being run in a manner which allows the individual to participate in the decisions that the group makes. Thus freedom for anarchists requires participatory democracy, which means face-to-face discussion and voting on issues by the people affected by them.

Are these conditions of freedom met in the capitalist system? Obviously not. Despite all their rhetoric about "democracy," most of the "advanced" capitalist states remain only superficially democratic -- and this because the majority of their citizens are employees who spend about half their waking hours under the thumb of capitalist dictators (bosses) who allow them no voice in the crucial economic decisions that affect their lives most profoundly and require them to work under conditions inimical to independent thinking. If the most basic freedom, namely freedom to think for oneself, is denied, then freedom itself is denied.

Nice job plagiarizing someone.

it's called copy-left friendo

Plagiarism focuses attention on content and away from incidental issues, by making the genuine origins of the material impossible to ascertain. Besides, it could be argued that the genuine origins of the contents of most inspirations and propositions are impossible to determine anyway. By signing a new name, or no name at all, to a text, the plagiarizer puts the material in an entirely new context, and this may generate new perspectives and new thinking about the subject that have not appeared before. Plagiarism also makes it possible to combine the best or most relevant parts of a number of texts, thus creating a new text with many of the virtues of the older ones—and some new virtues, as well, since the combination of material from different sources is bound to result in unforeseeable effects and might well result in the unlocking of hidden meanings or possibilities that have been dormant in the texts for years. Finally, above all, plagiarism is the reappropriation of ideas: when an individual plagiarizes a text which those who believe in intellectual property would have held "sacred," she denies that there is a difference in rank between herself and the thinker she takes from. She takes the thinker's ideas for herself, to express them as she sees fit, rather than treating the thinker as an authority whose work she is duty-bound to preserve as he intended. She denies, in fact, that there is a fundamental difference between the thinker and the rest of humanity, by appropriating the thinker's material as the property of humanity.

Did you just plagiarize a defense of plagiarism?

indeed I did.

quite appropriate I think

have you read endgame yet invictus

On the plus side, at least we can pretty much always tell when Sicarious is plagiarizing or "borrowing" things... even if he refuses to give the sources for them.

(Incidently Sicariouis, I honestly think citing sources would actually strengthen your position rather than weaken it, and might lead to someone actually reading some real serious thinking on these subjects rather than simply getting annoyed with you but you seem to think otherwise.)

Citing sources doesn't matter too much. It's all ideas, and someone was bound to think of it sometime. So long as an argument is well-worded and convincing, that should be all that matters.

The point of citing things is both to give credit for someone's phrasing and ideas, and perhaps more importantly to allow the reader to check the source them self, see the context for it, an potentially see what else that thinker has said.

I see the point you and Sic are making and I see there is perhaps something to it, but I'm still not convinced that it's not better to cite sources when you quote someone.

Plagiarism is theft. The product of someone's mind is their property just as much as the product of their hands is, and masking their ideas as your own is dishonest and wrong.

you seem unfamiliar with another anarchist saying,
"property is theft"

have you read endgame yet

I'm familiar and it's wrong. Property is liberty.

No, I have not had time.

Ah, back on the topic of Sic's verbal borrowings. Just my two cents: my main argument against this practice of his is that it more often than not leads the conversation astray because he's not actually grappling with what is being said by the opposing side. The world of ideas in debate is not a one-size-fits-all scenario so one cannot simply reach into ones bag of quotable bits of verbiage and expect to find something that fits in the conversation as well as simply taking the time to think and write ON YOUR OWN. When he falls back on this device too frequently, it makes the rest of us feel righfully cheated... we thought we were communicating with a person when in fact we were only communicating with a parrot! I do believe that we will more eagerly forgive your slight blunders and misspellings if it means that what you contribute acutally came from your own head.

Sicarius, I never said that capitalism was the same as democracy. Where did you even get the idea that I even said that? You're not even arguing with me, you're arguing with some figment that is supposed to be me. I absolutely agree with you because capitalism is an economic view while democracy is a political view. I'm not even sure I agree a true democracy is the best way to run things because it is often the case that the majority oppresses the minority.

And I'm not talking about the capitalism we have now. This is a frustrating thing to get across to you, because the economic system of the Western world is mixed, and not capitalistic in any libertarian or anarcho-capitalist fashion. I'm referring to laissez-faire free market capitalism in which there is no government intervention, hell no government if it's anarcho-capitalism.

Sicarius, apparently you didn't actually read my post because just a few posts later you say "property is theft" with no address to the quotation I posted which counters that property is theft when acquired by illegitimate means, but property is liberty when acquired through legitimate means because property represents the fruits of your labour, and to be robbed of your hard work is to be a slave.