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UK : fucks up
America : fucks up
France : rejects Voldemort as president
France : *looks at the camera like on The Office* oh yeah baby
i never understood fundamentalist Christians hatred of harry potter until u people started trying to describe all geopolitical events using references from that cursed children’s book
Let me put it this way.
According to Anarcho-Capitalism, my life is not worth even the smallest sliver of involuntary suffering by the wealthy. It’s worth nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
Under Anarcho-Capitalism, it is impermissible for me to perform even the smallest violation to the point that I could be on a garden world owned by one man, take a loaf of bread that he doesn’t even consciously know exists, for my own survival, and it’s a total violation.
It’s very difficult for me not to take that as personally insulting, especially as someone who has experienced how deeply biological (and thus relatively arbitrarily distributed) executive functioning is.
Private charity is never going to hit 30-40% of GDP, even if the state were abolished, unless it isn’t really voluntary.
And let’s not even pretend that AnCap would turn out Consequentialist in practice. It won’t. That is not how people work, that is not how businesses work, that is not how land works, that is not how pollution works, and so on. If people were that scrupulous, Communism would not have been such a disaster.
Various Consequentialisms do not think my life has zero value. They may say that I can’t steal the bread because there isn’t enough bread and it would collapse the economy. They may say the same thing about taxes and medical operations. But it’s trading for something of greater value than “lol I don’t want to and property is absolute”.
And that is far, far more acceptable to me. Especially because executive functioning and everything else was never distributed fairly at the very start.
I find none of this convincing, but it isn’t worth my time to argue it.
And to be honest, I have an emotional loathing for Anarcho-Capitalism.
This isn’t to say that my opposition is fundamentally emotional, but whenever I interact with it, I find it highly annoying, as well as what I consider to be the extremely unrealistic projections of AnCaps on how it would turn out.
I’d rather the Invisible Fist than the Actual Boot, tbh.
It’s a joke name dude. My Communism tag is “The Red Hammer”, which should not be interpreted in the benign sense of the word. More in the sense of “the nail that sticks up gets hammered” and, well, red as in blood.
I should make a joke tag so folks know when I’m not being overly serious, I think. :P
“#The Actual Boot” would be a great tag for tankie posts, tbh.
And sure, you can dispute if using evil to do good is evil all you want, but that debate is not a winning one for the “advocating evil” side, quotes around evil or not. Its why we have to go through so many lengths to obfuscate certain actions, and why folks, if you pitch them the same idea but sans obfuscation, will recoil in horror at the implication
The “evils,” under AnCap ideas of what counts as evil, of a typical modern state, have fairly broad public support. So yeah, it actually can be a winning one, relative to some standards of evil.
I’m curious what categories you are specifically thinking of though, and actually potential solutions that cannot be achieved under anarcho-capitalist structures.
Population control, that will likely require some involuntary non-action that will have to be enforced, depending on conditions on the planet, once life-extension capabilities hit. Under AnCap this is effectively impossible unless you cheat/exploit the AnCap rules by doing things like physically trapping people.
Actually caring for the poor at a sufficient rate. Now I know you think this is unwinnable because “then the state becomes something to fight over too,” but just because a perfect solution has not yet been found does not mean that a good solution does not exist. The AnCap answer is a non-answer and the actually-charitable will likely be outcompeted in the brutality of the market.
Environmentalism, since you have to resolve whether emitting carbon dioxide, or indeed any substance, violates the NAP, and if so what the appropriate level of response is, and people will necessarily disagree on this issue - they may even disagree on the facts without even just doing so out of being greedy. (Edit: In fact, whether emitting carbon dioxide is a problem is defined by whether other people are emitting carbon dioxide, and if so, how much.)
Malthusian conditions are actually bad, and I won’t be persuaded into not even trying to prevent them because of AnCap principles I don’t even agree with.
Plus most of those random things Argumate keeps bringing up that bleed a little too much detail for your perfect axioms - which a well-designed Consequentialism can decide on IFF it actually matters to someone, but which your axioms cannot.
Except whether using “evil” to do good is “evil” is one of the matters in dispute, and AnCap does not have a way to say those categories of suffering are bad - only people within AnCap do and only by using theories which are not part of AnCap even if they aren’t incompatible with it. For my part I still consider the concept of self-ownership at the AnCap level invalid. As a being with imperfect executive functioning I will never accept an infinite liability morality of that class.
I’d rather the Invisible Fist than the Actual Boot, tbh.
It’s a joke name dude. My Communism tag is “The Red Hammer”, which should not be interpreted in the benign sense of the word. More in the sense of “the nail that sticks up gets hammered” and, well, red as in blood.
Even the axiom of self-ownership isn’t so simple to pin down, and biological experimentation is only going to make it worse.
I literally could just amend “to you” to every post you make on the subject, at this point. :P
It’s pretty tough to define self-ownership given the existence of chimeras and conjoined twins, let alone psychological issues like split personalities and all the future weirdness that biotech is going to unleash.
Given that people have been arguing over the definition of “self” for thousands of years so far and it shows no sign of abating I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that there are still unresolved issues here.
So this post has helped me finally crystalize a recurring train of thought I am having when confronted with other people’s opinions. See, my first reaction to the post above is absolute terror.
Because my brain tends to very quickly and wildly extrapolate any given view to its most extreme consequences. And boy howdy can you extrapolate a lot of things from a negation of self-ownership. Existing terrible things, like the war on drugs (of course the actual historical reasons for the war on drugs are horrible and racist but in theory you can rederive it from one’s health being a public matter), or reproductive coercion; but also lots of speculative terrible things. So th thoughts short-circuit from ‘there are weird things going on in the margins’ to ‘Argumate wants use the fact that chimeras exist to be able to kill me and harvest my organs for the greater good, and I will not have any moral foundation to object to that’.
Of course this is a bizarre way of thinking because the majority of people argue for issues because they care for these specific issues and not some wild consequences that are conceptually related, and aren’t trying to use foot-in-the-door tactics (and those who do try to get a foot in your door can be identified pretty easily). And in the concrete example of this here conversation it’s not even a policy discussion, but rather a theoretical musing. So all that anxiety is completely unfounded. Alas.
And I think that most concepts are useful even if they’re fuzzy at the margins. Non-relativisitc moleds were wrong but still we’ve managed to come up with planes.
Personally I think that some kind of contractualism is a better approach for getting the outcome that you want.
I don’t want to have my organs harvested without my consent, and nor does anyone I know, and even though the veil of ignorance is not mandatory, in practice in a world of seven billion people it’s very difficult to make rules that say you can’t be a dick to anyone except barry specifically.
Negotiating the individual issues is always going to be necessary; simple axioms either imply too much or too little, and are best used as slogans and rallying points to guide the political process.
While I believe in self-ownership, that really means I support most of the positions associated with the concept of self-ownership, not that I think they can necessarily be derived from this single axiom nor that this axiom is necessarily the foundation for morality and politics.
The issue I have with this, my esteemed strigiform and self-employed pharmacist, is idea that someone can like the arguments and concepts that surround a thing (ie: self-ownership in the recent case, but broadly libertarian ideals in general seem to get caught up in this a lot) but then dislike or even reject the principles behind those arguments. In short, there is a lot of folks who seem to like the results of libertarian arguments but don’t like where they come from.
Which is sort of a running issue, because in many cases the principles the arguments are founded upon can lead to some unpalatable ends, at least to some people. Folks will seem to say they don’t want to throw out the baby with the bashwater and ditch the principles with the unfortunate implications for their wants and desires, and keep the results, but the problem is you can’t really do that.
Like, the arguments and the like that surround self-ownership, and the derived protections from it, cannot be defended by the merits of how you, or anyone else likes them. The issue is that far from being difficult to make rules that say you can’t be a dick to any of the seven plus billion people except Barry, it’s actually exceedingly easy to do so unless your moral and ethical foundations are in order, and are universal.
Because that’s the only way to avoid explicitly allowing arbitrary and subjective choices into the system of morals and ethics.
Like, yeah, you have to use negotiation and navigate the complex network of human interactions and any society is going to be heavy on contract, but you can’t build your ethical framework from the top down. It’s got to have a base to build up from. Folks like the results of the principles but hate the principles, and that is just a recipe for disaster.
In practical terms, people liking something enough to take up arms to force others to comply with it - like property in general for instance - is how a political theory is physically realized. So if everyone hates the principles, then it doesn’t matter how much you think they’re true, unless you have all the guns. And from what I’ve seen of actual human behavior and actual markets and not hypothetical spherical cow markets, AnCap/pure libertarianism’s consequences will ensure that it is never the most viral meme. Which, IMO, is good because it lacks the ability to recognize that entire categories of human suffering are bad.
40 years later, you return to this spot. You are much older and have made many decisions in your lifetime, but this is the only one that haunts you. It was an impossible situation, an unwinnable conundrum. Even though you tell yourself you made the right choice, you continue to wrestle with the decision. Perhaps, in another life, you would feel differently. But this is not another life, this is reality. The reality with the conclusion you chose.
“Is it possible to move on?” you ask yourself.