If I had to sum up what I consider to be the message of anarchism, (and I've only been comfortable calling myself one fairly recently, though I've been studying it for over a year) it would be "The best way to build a society is by empowering individuals through understanding, cooperation, and support."

> I usually just hear unfocused discontent.

Yeah, this is the exact problem I'm talking about. It's absolutely true, there's a lot of that going around. A large part of the 'why' is that if you're an anarchist, you probably care about politics a lot. And you feel like you have answers. And then you see things like the absolute robbery of the American people via the bank bailout, and the most you see... is some harsh words. Nobody's even upset. A single dollar lost is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. It's easy to become angry when you have very strong feelings, feel that you have answers, and then are totally ignored by most people, while you watch them make the exact mistakes you were trying to warn them about.

Not that any of that is an excuse; it's exactly why anarchism has continued to be marginalized. It's something that we'll have to collectively get over in order to move forward, and frankly, I'm not sure if it'll happen any time soon.

> thinking up scalable alternatives to government.

I think that one of the conclusion that you come to if you follow the anarchist line of thinking is that there is no _scalable_ alternative to government. Once you start building huge communities, the human element of humans is lost. To use the same saying twice in one post, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic; humans simply can't care for large numbers of other humans. Their humanity disappears. So the only way to move forward is to build a decentralized network of smaller communities, rather than yet bigger ones. The British empire fell because it was growing too large; the American one is following suit. I don't think, for example, nationalized health care can possibly work at the levels of population that America currently has. We're not only significantly larger, but much more spread out, which makes it even harder to care about what happens to those crazy people on the other coast.

> fun for them, but what's there to discuss?

It's true, there's not a lot to discuss amongst the rational, educated opponent, but here, where 'socialism' means 'The government takes my money and gives it to the black people,' we have a lot of educating to do. And once you get past the terminology, there are a lot of implementation questions. Since there have been relatively few anarchist societies[1], there are a lot of unanswered questions about how they'd be run. Then again, there's a lot of possible ways that a community could be built, and they're not all mutually exclusive. Just like different states have different laws, there are a lot of options for an anarchist community.

> The second category is laudible but still offers almost nothing in the way of big-picture political solutions.

True. I think that I've already covered that the bigger picture is a smaller picture, though.

1: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_anarc...