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I think the Occult can be explained scientifically, eventually, just the same as somebody will eventually figure out where we fucked up in physics. The Higgs has proven either everything we know is wrong or as some scientists whisper the universe is designed for life i.e. non-natural.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/complications-in-physics-lend-support-to-multiverse-hypothesis-20130524

Now you can dress that up in a multi-verse theory if you like, a religious concept based on no evidence other than some loose math and a few acid trips, or (Occam's razor here) the universe is primed and built to produce existence.

How? I don't know, but I do know the military has accepted the idea of a sixth sense and is training troops for it: http://time.com/4721715/phenomena-annie-jacobsen/

From the article:

"In 2014, the Office of Naval Research embarked on a four-year, $3.85 million research program to explore the phenomena it calls premonition and intuition, or “Spidey sense,” for sailors and Marines.

“We have to understand what gives rise to this so-called ‘sixth sense,’ says Peter Squire, a program officer in ONR’s Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare and Combating Terrorism department. Today’s Navy scientists place less emphasis on trying to understand the phenomena theoretically and more on using technology to examine the mysterious process, which Navy scientists assure the public is not based on superstition. “If the researchers understand the process, there may be ways to accelerate it — and possibly spread the powers of intuition throughout military units,” says Dr. Squire...

Active-duty Marines are being taught to hone precognitive skills in order to “preempt snipers, IED emplacers and other irregular assaults [using] advanced perceptual competences that have not been well studied.” Because of the stigma of ESP and PK, the nomenclature has changed, allowing the Defense Department to distance itself from its remote-viewing past. Under the Perceptual Training Systems and Tools banner, extrasensory perception has a new name in the modern era: “sensemaking.”"

Don't forget the actual data of successful Remote Viewing experiments:
http://www.remoteviewed.com/remote_viewing_history_military_b.htm

I get into this argument alot with people in the scientific community, and what they don't realize is the layer of "truth" in the lab(coughminus the whole replication crisescough) is not the same bar everywhere.

For the military it's about something working, less about how or why; in the law it's pushing something past a reasonable doubt.

I see a universe with parts we don't understand, I see military outfits training people to pick things up from sense they aren't aware of, and at the same time I'm getting results when I burn certain candles on a money jar?

Good enough for me.

If you want a truly, TRULY scientific run at this go get this book: https://www.amazon.com/Trickster-Paranormal-George-P-Hansen/dp/1401000827

"Which is very interesting, and very true, but how is your specific outlook different than say Marx's dialectical materialism or that of psychology?"

None in the sense that the Black Peace Stones in South Central LA seizing more territory from the local Latin Kings outfit is I suppose.

Marx's dialectic can just as easily be called Will to Power. As for psychology it absolutely could be called that I guess.

Jungian psychology that is.

It's neither necessary nor desirable.
James C. Scott has a good critique of this kind of stuff in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed , are you familiar with it?

It mainly focuses mainly on agricultural societies, so it doesn' directly address capitalism, although it has this nugget in the Preface:

“…as I make clear in examining scientific farming, industrial agriculture, and capitalist markets in general, large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay. A market necessarily reduces quality to quantity via the price mechanism and promotes standardization; in markets, money talks, not people.
…Put bluntly, my bill of particulars against a certain kind of state is by no means a case for politically unfettered market coordination as urged by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. As we shall see, the conclusions that can be drawn from the failures of modern projects of social engineering are as applicable to market-driven standardization as they are to bureaucratic homogeneity.”

If you want a follow-up to that, that addresses capitalism, and the exitsing attempts to go beyond it, I recommend Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid by Andrej Grubačić and Denis O'Hearn.

Since you're to be against bureaucracy, Graeber's The Utopia of Rules is a good critique of bureaucracy: https://libcom.org/files/David_Graeber-The_Utopia_of_Rules_On_Technology_St.pdf

There's also this one on "democracy": https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-west

I recently read the collection of essays published by AK Press on the topic of 'Anarchist Economics', and some of them raised interesting ways of analysing certain things.

One of the essays, discussing the effectiveness of certain protest and civil disobedience movements, used a Power theory of value which disagrees with certain Marxian precepts.

The work they based their work off is:http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0415496802/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=3JTW6VOOWABRN&coliid=IQVU8M224WQ70

Though I can't say whether the authors of that book are anarchists, it seems like it might offer an interesting method for Anarchist economic analysis.

Well, we took responsibility for the units, the land, and the water and septic system. We paid the electric bill and kept the roads clear. Neither cheap, nor easy. We were providing an honest service.

This community is the rare case where they can squat and build with the blessing of the community. Here's a book about it. And here's a corny ass show about it.

We definitely gave everybody the freedom they wanted. Hell, if they wanted to remodel their trailer into a full blown house we would have paid for the materials. But they almost never took us up on it.

He's probably just there to play court jester on these issues. The effect could be positive in piquing the curiosity of those who would otherwise overlook these matters. But negative in that less discerning folks would just react dismissively towards him. Ultimately, if he is drawing more attention to these issues we should jump in and take over from there.

Amazon.com - Revolution by Russell Brand

If any of you already have an amazon account, you could add to the comments in order to counter any trolls or inform the genuinely curious or interested.

>I don't see any reason to believe that abolishing safety nets, government funded medical research, roads, telecom stability, many utilities that are government-based, etc... would yield a net positive result for humanity. It would certainly result in disaster in the short term. Many people would die terribly.

Anarchists don't wish to "abolish" any of those things. Anarchists in general are well aware that medical research, roads, telecom and utilities are good and need to be maintained. What we happen to want is to organize them differently, just because we believe government shouldn't provide those things doesn't mean we think those things shouldn't be provided at all.

Look into the concept of a commons or the concept of distributed infrastructure.

>Also for Anarchy to succeed in this way, the inability for people to form communities, nations, and states is crucial.

Anarchists propose to form communities in larger scales through the practices of self-managed organization and unions of these organizations in libertarian federations. The principle of federation as the anarchist reply to organizational issues has been developed by anarchists for well over a century now.

>Communities will have hierarchical power structures inevitably in my view, it's part of our biological imperative.

Claims like these are used against anarchists for a long time, but there is absolutely no evidence that there is such a "biological imperative" that makes us rely on hierarchical power structures all. In fact there is plenty of evidence against it, such as the various examples of non-hierarchical societies from the Piaroa to the Vezo to myriad of stateless peoples in the region of Zomia, and even inside the capitalist economy we live in there are occasional examples of self-managed non-hierarchical organization (such as the company Gore Associates in Delaware) and distributed, self-managed networks (such as guifi.net in Spain).

I recommend you give further study to anarchist theory (start off with a book like Anarchy Works! or An Anarchist FAQ) before trying to tackle it as a whole.

I am currently working through "Studies in Mutualist Political Economy" by Kevin Carson, it is a fantastic read and is a direct answer from an LTV point of view to the "what about subjective value?" question.

Check it out. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005HM8KI0/ref=oh_d__o03_details_o03__i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

> That's a fact of life. I

that's a fact of urban design predating A/C adoption.

Where is this "my computer or my phone"? I am not afforded any luxuries to expect straight-outta-the-hydroelectric-plant socket.

That's not this works. That's not how any of this works.

to get you started, I might recommend watching this movie. I'm looking for it and haven't found it yet.

Because anyone can whine about loss implying that it's wasteful.

It's another to get legislative clearance or an ethical engineer to say "Go right ahead and make things more efficient" for free, no doubt.

or read this book to understand flow capacity and risk of outages.

>I also have a lot of reservations about Hakim Bey

Yeah....me too. I think that's pretty wise!

>OOO

Cool. I'm glad you find it interesting enough for further consideration. I know I've said this before, but I think it's all about what can be done with the theory, because as it is currently it's sort of weak politically.

Harman wrote these books (http://www.amazon.com/Immaterialism-Objects-Social-Graham-Harman/dp/1509500979/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1458827356&sr=8-2&keywords=graham+harman and http://www.amazon.com/Bruno-Latour-Reassembling-Political-European/dp/0745333990/ref=sr_1_21?ie=UTF8&qid=1458827387&sr=8-21&keywords=graham+harman) on politics and social theory, but I'm not really crazy about them! but it's a place to start maybe.

>You have yet to justify that just because you control your body means you ought to have exclusivity over it

I forget exactly how it was put, but I heard it described one time that we typically recognize ownership based on people's willingness to defend their preferences. So if I prefer to own my body so much that I'm willing to go to extreme lengths to exclude its use by others, and others don't want to risk as much to take control of it, then the aggregation of the calculations that take place in people's heads tend to align themselves with a 'right to self-ownership'.

I think I heard it from David Friedman, and then a similar thing described by Michael Huemer in his book Ethical Intuitionism.

Please read

>Do you have a source for this number?

Yes I do.

>9 million if you count foreseeable deaths caused by unrelated policies[1].

Your source accounts for Stalin, Don't you think this is a bit dishonest? And my source is actually reputable, and not just someone's opinion piece on the matter. It seems to me that you're trying to pass off sources like this in order to fool people who aren't read up on the subject.

>And libertarian regimes have caused death and suffering too.

In what way are these people libertarian. Oh, was this some sort of half baked smear?

>"Everybody created his own justice and administered it himself (...) it was justice administered directly by the people in the complete absence of the regular judicial bodies."

Do you know what libertarianism is, because I don't think you do.

> First, what are your major critiques of the USSR?

My major criticisms would be the Party's inability to stop opportunists to use something like the purges for selfish gain, this is what led to the Great Purges^([1]) (I'm sorry I couldn't find a free version of this publication). My second largest problem would be the revisionism, probably caused by the aforementioned corruption, that took power after Stalin's death.

> And second, in your opinion, what are the biggest misconceptions about the USSR?

There are three I can think of right now.

1. The Soviet Union was undemocratic and totalitarian. The links and statements I made above quoting Robert Thurston's work"Reassessing the History of Soviet Workers^([2])" would be the response to that.
   
2. That Stalin ruled through terror. Works like "The Road to Terror^([1]) " (again, sorry) and "Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia^([2])" show how the purges were a result of corruption outside of Stalin's decision making.
   
3. That the Soviet Union was "State-capitalist". Again, the arguments above quoting Thurston would be my response to that statement.

Read Carl Schmitt's critique of liberalism Political Theology. The short answer is yes.

The long answer is that political struggle against actors which seek to overthrow the state/prevailing order not only does not follow the ordinary rules of ethics but that it is an empirical reality that it cannot follow the ordinary rules of ethics because the stability of the state/prevailing order is an essential predicate for determining ordinary ethical behaviour. Political actors which seek to undermine that stability are necessarily beyond the scope of the ordinary and therefore fall in the scope of the exception.

As far as it being equally fine for police to attack revolutionary leftists: yes, it is must necessarily be "fine" from the point of view of the state. The most important thing that you have to understand about Schmitt's theory of the state is that it he is being descriptive, not prescriptive. This means he is merely describing how things actual play out in material reality, and not suggesting how they ought to be.

This is why committed revolutionaries who are not liberals LARPing as anarchists understand that when they attack the state they can expect no mercy or justice from it, and so they'd better be serious as death about the consequences of their actions and be prepared deal with the fallout when it doesn't go their way.

This is because power in the state doesn't come from mythical abstractions like "divine right" or "the constitution", but from living people who make decisions about how to wield their power to direct the claim of monopoly of violence that a state has. If the state ever fails to fully excercise its monopoly of violence to whatever extent is necessary in order to ensure its own existence, then the state will collapse. This is a neutral empirical fact, not a theoretical moral claim -it is a simple description of the nature of what is state actually is.

What Schmitt does here is to utterly destroy the bourgeois myth that the chattering-classes can settle all political issues by yakking it out, because the very existence of political actors who reject that premise refutes that possibility. The fact is that we have real political enemies, not just "strangers whose stories we heard yet", and that states always, without exception, violate their own moral and legal principles in order to ensure their continued existence or collapse and give way to chaos and then a new order.

So if you're going to attack the state of your political adversaries then you'd better have a serious plan for how to escape retribution or how implement a new order in its place, and be prepared to face consequences of your actions because by its very nature the closed-system of the state is justified in going beyond the law in order to squelch threats to its sovereignty. Likewise, the revolutionary socialist and anarchist is justified by the historical nature of class struggle to go beyond the law in order to overcome class oppression. It's a contradiction which can only be resolved by strength of will and demonstration of force, and no resort to fanciful abstract ideals can alter that fundamental material reality.