@djsumdog I have. My point is that you shouldn't have faith in ANY politician something that I didn't see in the article, but something I've talked about on my own site.

https://xianc78.codeberg.page/articles/save-yourself.html

I didn't know you have a site. Do you have an RSS feed I can add to my reader? .. didn't see one in the code.

I get what you're saying in your post. I think I felt that way for a long time. I've written some older posts like "Vote for Nobody" and "Does Voting make a Difference?" and I had this sign up in my lawn back in the early 2000s (it got stolen).

As I get older, I'm not anti-state. All states are corrurpt. But States are also the way societies organize to give us so much of the technology that we have today. I do think minimizing that corruption to as reasonable amount as possible is important.

I do appreciate America, as least with the foundation that has tried to allow for speaking out against that state. It hasn't always been held true. There have been judges who have sided against the 1st amendment. But in all the places I've lived, I still think it's held up better than a lot of other developed nations. We know Bush/Cheney et. al. blew up the towers and we can say that openly. In NZ, you distribute a video of the Christchurch shooting and it can be 7 years in prison. We don't even need to start with Canada recently...

I still respect people like James Corbett and Media Monarchy; people who are very anti-state and I think they have incredible analysis .. but as I get older, I see the benefit of a state, but also the need to keep that state in constant check.

@djsumdog I don't have RSS because I don't use a static-site generator or a CMS so I have to update it manually. I have a twtxt which is basically a minimalist RSS/microblog feed.

I also get what your saying, but I don't know how we can have a state without some shadow government forming. A lot of monarchists argue that their system is actually superior in the long run because it's harder to corporations and other organizations to lobby them, and good values are passed from generation to generation. There is also the fact that the king/queen has to fulfill their duty because they face the threat of being overthrown and facing the guillotine if they don't or turn out to be corrupt.

But if all states are corrupt the only other option is to create new ones. Either via seasteading or claiming no-man's land like what Liberland did in the Gornja Siga, but the only other no-man's lands are Bir Tawil and a chunk of Antarctica that I forgot the name of.

I mean, yea you’re always going to get people creating structures to try to put them ahead. That’s the nature of … everything. You see those structures forming and fighting with each other in nature. It’s kinda inevitable.

I can totally see where you’re coming from. It would be nice if we all joined small collectives that worked with each other .. but think about it … if one of those small collected started growing, certain people would rise to the top and try to move things gradually to benefit a smaller selectorate of supporters. (Animal Farm style)

I guess my concern is that small collectives wouldn’t scale to the sizes needed to be really efficient and give us so many of the benefits we have today (e.g. shooting communication machines into space).

You could make an argument, maybe we shouldn’t be in space and our technology is making us worse now. That’s valid, but it’s all a tradeoff. We live longer, and have all this great tech, but we’re getting more health problems and our tech is being used to control people. Everything is a tradeoff… what side humanity should be on is subjective to you values.