Some quick napkin math tells me a Boeing 767 gets about 7.8 miles per gallon. This is for longer flights thay can spend more time at cruising speed and altitude, short flights are way worse. Travel over 1500 miles (2500km) is a big efficiency jump. Compares favorably to a cross-country road trip.

It’s still far worse than ground-based mass transit but the time factor is hard to ignore. The world needs more high-speed rail.

Anything that showed up on Family Guy is a certified normie meme.

And it’s a great album to this day.

I meant Vault, it was essentially Mountain Dew with 50% more caffeine.

Smartest? When did Elmo stop being the Muppet equivalent of a kindergartener?

We also had Vault.

But there’s no reason to avoid them. Flouride in water is safe at the regulated levels and has a measurable impact on dental health, just like enriched milk safely reduced the incidence of rickets in children. If you need pure water you can buy distilled gallons but clean, healthful tap water is a modern marvel.

Because it’s easy. We enrich lots of stuff for public health. Breakfast cereals have tons of extra nutrients, vitamin d is put in milk, white rice and flour are supplemented to offset the loss compared to whole-grain. It’s mostly done in response to lots of children in poverty getting sick.

Or Vitamin D in milk. Make Black Kids Get Rickets Again!

A lazy ideology, appeal to Eurosupremacy, and factual incorrectness all at once!

Andrew Johnson would like a word.

The good parts of this country are weighed down by the catastrophically shit parts.

East rural, Really East rural, Coast rural, or South rural?

What’s subjective about supporting an authoritarian dictatorship, sexual assault, or believing someone is of lesser value because of their demographic?

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done.”

No they don’t. It’s just a very broad political viewpoint with a ton a varied opinions within it. No two anarchists will believe the same thing, and that’s true for all political beliefs, which is why they’re all like this and hard to define specifically.

Then my interpretation is as valid as yours.

Mutual cooperation and direct democracy are ways to come up with agreed upon rules. Not everyone will agree with all of them, but it will be agreed that the majority want something. There will still be a need for enforcement, yes. That doesn’t require a hierarchy. Everyone will be equal in voting and equal in how it’s enforced.

This process creates a hierarchy, a majority in-group that gets their way and a minority out-group that does not.

No, because everyone will be equal in its creation and decisions. A flat plane is not a hierarchy.

And a rich man is equally not allowed to steal bread or sleep under a bridge. Starting from a level playing field does not mean that things remain equal through the process.

No. People who don’t engage in good faith will be removed by the cooperation of everyone else. Just like the" Paradox of tolerance" is not a Paradox, because it’s based on a social contract and breaking it means you’re no longer protected by it. The same applies here. If you break the social contract then punishment must be applied.

If it only works by removing people you disagree with then it requires buy-in, you’re just removing everyone who isn’t engaging in good faith so you don’t have to count them. This does not refute my initial claim. There is nothing intrinsic to anarchism that defends against bad-faith actors from hijacking the process, there are no checks against greedy thugs with lots of friends.

You are coming to this conversation with prior assumptions, not an open mind. I’m not an expert on Anarchism, but there is plenty of information out there that can answer your questions better than I can.

I went through this half a lifetime ago and ultimately decided anarchism didn’t make sense to me. I think something akin to a Leninist vanguard party is a necessary evil, and I think some kind of rigid law-and-order structure will always be necessary.

I would recommend being open to the idea that your beliefs of what Anarchism are are wrong or what’s the point?

If I wasn’t open to it I wouldn’t have gotten this far. I think you’re earnest even if I disagree with some of your assertions and I’m sorry that I’m sometimes a dick. It’s rare that someone outside the big three lefty domains will engage like this.

It’s not bad faith I’m just not taking you very seriously because you aren’t saying anything. “I’ll take ruined fun over ruined lives” is a noncommittal platitude that avoids having an actual stance or argument, it’s vague enough to let you fill in post-facto whatever context helps you while being morally untouchable because obviously nobody is on the side of ruined lives. It’s intellectually lazy at best.

So I pushed, and you stayed noncommittal and only addressed the first part of my response instead of the part about the role of government in this thread about the role of government in regulation.

So I pushed again, and instead of having a thought when pushed you went right into accusing me of engaging in bad-faith. I am reading the text and there’s nothing there so I’m trying to provide you with anything to grab onto. “How much of that danger should be blocked by the state and how much left to the individual to manage?” was not a rhetorical question, it was a natural continuation of the dialogue within context.

Alright, I’m at an actual computer now so I’m to go through bit by bit and you can tell me where my apparent misunderstanding is.

Your sources do a lot of dancing to avoid defining their principle ideas, and mutual understanding of concepts is integral to constructive discourse, so I’m going to do my best here: Anarchy opposes coercion, authority, and hierarchy, particularly that which comes from a state.

It’s a lack of hierarchy, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have government, rules, and protections.

Right away we have problems. The concept of free-association does mean there are no rules or protections. Not real ones anyway. Rules and regulations require an enforcement authority or else they are merely suggestions. You are free to make a rule and someone else is free to ignore it. What gives you the right to enforce your rule?

If something does grant you the right or ability then that thing, whatever it is, is a hierarchy of power.

Government is heirarchy [sic]

It is not. It can be, but it is not a fundamental aspect of it.

Government is a tricky thing to nail down because it covers a wide range of scales and intents. At its most basic the idea of governance is the codification and/or centralization of rules and processes. This can be the bylaws of a small cooperative or the many branches and layers of a nation. The single common thread is that the body exists to do something in lieu of or at the behest of a greater population, it is an alternative to direct democracy. This means that the government body has the authority, granted or taken, to represent its constituents.

Compare this with a think-tank, where the group exists to make recommendations but has no power to create policy or enforce on their own. This is not a government.

People can cooperate without the need for a hierarchy.

Yes, this is what I mean when I said "Anarchy [is] only possible if everyone engages in good faith.

They can agree that some actions are bad and to punish people without an elite doing so.

So they grant themselves the right to enforce their will on others, and you say this isn’t “authority”? This not a hierarchy of power, an organized group coercing behavior through violence? What of the consent of the governed?

I like the ideals, and I support them inasmuch as this kind of cooperative and stateless utopia is the theoretical goal of classic Marxist Communism, but this freedom requires a much higher level of trust and knowledge than I think humanity is capable of. Opposing all forms of authority now, when we’re facing the existential threats of climate change and broad resource mismanagement, is a mistake. Now we need people with the means to reverse course, with the power to enforce policy, and with the speed and focus to work before it’s too late.

Government is heirarchy, it is the step of organization beyond a cooperative where people are making decisions in lieu of the whole. An elected representative has de facto authority. If someone can opt out of being governed in this way then there are no rules, just suggestions.

You don’t need an “elite” for there to be a heirarchy. I know what anarchism is I just disagree that it’s an effective ideology for post-industrial humanity. The world is too complex, our choices have too many consequences, for individuals to make good decisions without ceding some responsibility of knowledge to specialists. This means regulatory bodies, lobbyists, and ideally a democratic means of appointing people to these bodies without being at the short-sighted whims of whoever is suddenly mad that they aren’t allowed to fill in a bunch of marshes to build a commune.

I don’t think heirarchy intrinsically means class divide, which is the part I see as important. Full disclosure: I most identify with authoritarian-leftism with sympathies to anarchism as a utopian ideal. My education in ecology taught me that people are not to be trusted without strong regulatory agencies, as much as I’d like to believe that individuals generally want to do right.