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+3 votes
In an ideal world, persuasion and discussion would settle all things, but my ideal world has no room for ten hour consensus meeting more than maybe once per lifetime. Lump on to that that my ideal world is one of many, and they don't all fit together like a nice jigsaw puzzle of anarchyland.

If we are assuming that the dirty grit of the real world in the here and now will be present in whatever other realities we create (meaning that they are non-utopic), where does coercion come in to play? At what point does it cross the line in to domination?
by (22.1k points)
edited by
question edited to allow more room for those who might dispute the framing I initially used as limiting and thus coercive. Also, typos.

1 Answer

+1 vote
i'm not sure that i wouldn't put discussion outside of the category of coercion. depends on the situation.
the line between persuasion and coercion is a lot murkier than it seems to be, once one starts questioning things like why some people's skill sets are more highly valued than others (talking over fist fighting, for example). i have seen plenty of verbal arguments finished where one person was just more stubborn than the other, not that either had been convinced (or convincing)...
to me, as a working premise, domination is a question of scale and reification. if one person always argues circles around me and i don't want to or can't beat them up, then i will just try to avoid them, or have someone else deal with them. if i cannot do that because there is a whole apparatus in place (like the police, to be simplistic), then i think that can be called domination, especially if the apparatus is always composed of the same people, or the same kind of people (whatever "kind" might mean in a given situation).

edit: to be clearer - i think 10 hour meetings are absolutely coercive. you have to continue talking to people in a specific format (meeting procedures) in order to make decisions that impact your life? or risk having things come up that effect you without having any input? HEL no.
signed, someone who has been in too dam many meetings, marathon and otherwise.
by (53.1k points)
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