Asklemmy

43945 readers

624 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

283

ELI5 why is anarchy not "the guy with the bigger stick" making the rules? (lemmy.giftedmc.com)

submitted 10 months ago by haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

209 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm politically agnostic and have moved from a slightly conservative stance to a vastly more progressive stance (european). i still dont get the more niche things like tankies and anarchists at this point but I would like to, without spending 10 hours reading endless manifests (which do have merit, no doubt, but still).

Can someone explain to me why anarchy isnt the guy (or gal, or gang, or entity) with the bigger stick making the rules?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] cozycosmic@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Elections and representatives are "representative democracy", not a true democracy. Voting on issues is democracy. Democracy literally means "the people have the power"

[–] OwenEverbinde@lemmy.myserv.one 4 points 10 months ago

Hmm... so an approach that would have gotten Rodeo's point across better might have been to say,

"so anarchy is just another name for the purest form of democracy."

Because democracy is such a broad word that it is occasionally applied to the United States, despite the CIA's history of coups and the FBI's history of extrajudicial assassinations of citizens.

[–] BiteSizedZeitGeist@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

I'm talking about the level of organization. There's a difference between saying "the best way to resolve this conversation is to ask everyone present for a vote" and "there's going to be another cyclical election soon, these will be the matters we're going to vote on." Counting ayes and nays doesn't make things a capital-D Democracy, it's the institutionalization of these practices.