10 thoughts on “02.0×017”

  1. You’d think these guys could just build a new city instead of trying to rebuild one that’s full of people who, presumably, would object to having their houses destroyed.

    Less stress that way. And if their ideas for a better city works, they’ll know it because people would want to move there.

      1. I’m still confused about the part where they are apparently stealing property. They have paperwork, if they’re accepting people as tenants. What’s the issue? Is grey water recycling against the law or something?

        1. What they are doing is exercising the legal concept of “Adverse Possession” meaning they are camping in the buildings for a long stretch of time in an open, hostile and notorious manner. If the owner or their agent does not step in to claim the property during the time limit for adverse possession (usually 10 years, though it’s often less, depending on the state) then the squatter can take possession as a matter of right. They will have to take the land “as-is”, meaning they take it with all the liens on the property intact and if the owner comes by and asserts their interest in the property during that “open, hostile and notorious” squatting time (by kicking them out, etc.) then they have to move back in and start the waiting process all over again. You usually see this in old abandoned buildings where the owner has died and the property is in probate, or other situations where the owner hasn’t really asserted his or her interest in years. The point of it is to encourage individuals to assert claims on land that has been effectively abandoned.

          What this means for Rec is that once they have waited out Templar’s time limit, they can file for ownership of any building they squat in and never pay the original owners a dime for the property. Then, I’m guessing they’re a registered 501(c)(3) charity, so they will likely not even have to pay taxes on the buildings they’re making into homes for the homeless. It’s not a bad way of going about things, but it’s bound to make enemies of the people who own buildings and don’t use them. ESPECIALLY if Templar has a really short time limit on adverse possession (some states are as little as 3-5 years!)

  2. Ech. Not sure who I dislike more, communists or fascists. Both are all about the enslavement of one group to support another.

  3. Communism is not about the enslavement of one group to support another, it is about freeing people from enslavement. However, because of the greed of people, communism in practice ends up being different from what communism is supposed to be. You should read The Manifesto of the Communists Party or Capital Volume 1 by Karl Marx to see what communism is supposed to be and how it should work.

  4. You are confusing the Anarchist Communism of Marx and Engels with the totalitarian states that called themselves “Communist” under despots like Stalin and Mao. They were caricatures of what the Communist Manifesto meant.

    1. Marx was pro-violence and pro-domination and therefore anti-anarchist. There’s far less disconnect between him and Stalin, Mao, etc. than people seem to want to believe. But yeah, true anarcho-communism is entirely different from everybody’s knee-jerk associations with that word.

  5. Actually, no, they are the same thing: what you’ve seen in the 20th century is what Communism in real life ever did and ever will look like. The problem with any utopia is not that it’s unattainable, it’s that it would start disintegrating the instant it would somehow miraculously come into being – not one considers the implications of basic human nature, which are just as impossible to elude as the law of gravity. Communism is no different. You can’t just wish everybody to start getting along and actually expect it to happen. That doesn’t work, and neither does Communism, no matter how you’d try to implement it. Sure, you CAN make everybody get along just nicely if you have the biggest stick, but that’s all that every Communist state just demonstrated so far.

    Actually, Stanislaw Lem sums this up much better (and funnier) in his Cyberiad (“Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius” – the second tale). I heard the whole thing is online on scribd.com, and yes, you should read it anyway, it’s tons of fun.

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