Some advice on strategy from Darian Worden:
Advocating anarchy is more practical than advocating minimal government.
To say that government should only be involved in matters of force gives off the perception that you want to use government only as a club, and never as a crutch – to hurt people, not to help them. You’ll be seen not as a principled individual, but as someone who wants to make oppression run more efficiently and cares most about keeping people in line. …
The military, police, and court-prison systems are actually the worst offenders of government and support the rest of its crimes. They should be delegitimized to stop authority’s attacks on freedom.
Read the entire piroh.
While we’re on the subject of perilous forms of social organization, Professor Robert Paul Wolff, author of “In Defense of Anarchism” has an interesting development over at his blog which could be quite relevant to anarchist thought and possible reconciliation: http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2010/08/proposal-for-conversation.html
Just throwing it out there.
You’ll be seen not as a principled individual[…]
Sure. By those anarchists who can’t imagine government as a necessary shell in which the new society will grow. Why can’t you boneheads see this as a tag team? You guys get to do the fun work of building the new society. My guys will do the dirty work of holding off the people who want to cripple the government for the sake of corporate interests. It’s really not that hard to figure out. You just have to hold two ideas in your head at the same time. So quit projecting and put down the club.
But if my guys are right, then it’s impossible to “cripple the government for the sake of corporate interests,” and your guys will only end up serving corporate interests by throwing them in the briar patch.
[…I]t’s impossible to “cripple the government for the sake of corporate interests[…]”
That’s an a priori argument against something with no a priori existence.
I don’t think it’s a purely a priori argument. I don’t think the a priori / a posteriori distinction lines up with the necessary /contingent distinction. (“I exist”: a priori but contingent. “Lead is heavier than cork”: a posteriori but necessary.)
Here, here. You start out arguing that police and military are the only legitimate function of government and pretty soon you are arguing that spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined, and locking up a staggering proportion of the citizenry somehow makes sense. This is called becoming a Republican.