Following the most recent Sean Swain update to @news, a particularly awful troll made some comments, which Sean eventually saw and decided to respond to. Check out the original comments here.

I’d like to weigh in, if I’m not too late. Hopefully someone can post this for me. I’m Sean Swain, by the way.
A friend sent a chunk of a debate. In it, Post-Biceps lamented my lack of writings on a world after prisons don’t exist. Fact is, I attempt to avoid prescribing how things ought to be after… My reason is, I know how I wish to live after, but I can in no way construct a model of living and conflict resolution strategies to make 7 billion people happy. I suspect in the “after,” i.e., after THIS collapses or unravels, there will be MILLIONS of localized varieties on how to solve problems.
I do not have the big, big brain to conceive of all of them.
In previous epochs, if you were to tell people, for instance, that a new epoch is coming and the Catholic Church will no longer be all-powerful, or that kings and queens would be reduced to figureheads, and you were to ask them what they imagine the future will LOOK LIKE, 99% of the people would fuck up 99% of what they would present.
We don’t know what comes next. We don’t control it. But we know there is a next, and it’s coming, and it gets closer every day, and it ain’t THIS. I think all life will be localized and that means we can predict that certain principles of organizing and relating, contrary to the present system, will be present. But how that works out in details may differ from one social grouping to the next.
The future is like a flavor of ice cream we haven’t tasted yet, but I bet it’s better than the toxic sludge-flavored cone I’m being force-fed now…
About my case, and indigenist methods for resolving conflict and debt. We have to be careful of overgeneralizations. The offering of gifts or apologies from someone who has offended another makes sense in a kind of tribal setting, where group cohesion is key and everyone is interdependent. We need to hunt the buffalo, and we need to work together, so you better make amends after you got drunk and peed in my canteen. Continue reading →