Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

I think it's sort of a mistake to try to come up with a "real" definition of private property. It's not a physical truth about the universe we can discover if we only try hard enough; it's an agreement we can make amongst ourselves. I mean, there are better and worse ways of defining it, but the goal should be "useful" (like, for social/legal purposes, such that it's fairly clear to everyone what IS considered theirs) rather than "philosophically airtight".

argumate answered:

Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.

[remedialaction]

“It’s not a physical truth about the universe.”

I 100% reject any attempt to appeal to something that is “useful” rather than “philosophically airtight.” That way lies utilitarianism, and a great horror that is.

[mitigatedchaos]

Well you know, we were having an argument about just how “philosophically airtight” this idea of property as a property of the universe is, and you stopped responding.

From what I can see, it isn’t philosophically airtight.  Also, if you find Utilitarianism horrifying, you may be doing it wrong.  

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

I think it's sort of a mistake to try to come up with a "real" definition of private property. It's not a physical truth about the universe we can discover if we only try hard enough; it's an agreement we can make amongst ourselves. I mean, there are better and worse ways of defining it, but the goal should be "useful" (like, for social/legal purposes, such that it's fairly clear to everyone what IS considered theirs) rather than "philosophically airtight".

argumate answered:

Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.

[mitigatedchaos]

Yeah, but if you acknowledge this then you can’t build a whole moral system starting with “self ownership” (even though that in itself doesn’t entirely make sense).

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

@remedialaction: Attempting to use property that is not yours is a violation, be it by seizure, trespass, violence, or the like.

is the radio spectrum property? how about the ionosphere? global fish stocks?

[remedialaction]

Can you contain and mix your labor with it?

[argumate]

this a perfect setup for the most epic your mum joke of all time

[enki2]

Property is like free will: no internally coherent model of it is possible, because it exists only in the form of a confusion of locally-meaningful but globally-incoherent arbitrary rules, but the various rules associated with the concept have been useful enough that we get rid of it entirely at our peril.

In this way, it also resembles your mom.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

really we need a cool name for the political ideology of “taking the democratic institutions that we have and reforming them in the direction of producing better outcomes and increasing the popular legitimacy of the system, probably via some form of basic income guarantee and more flexible way of expressing voting preferences but other options may also be worth investigating”.

[mitigatedchaos]

This isn’t exactly what I’m after, but it isn’t that far off.

I think we can improve the organizational technology and incentives of government itself, probably through a new sort of multidisciplinary behavioral game-theory-like field.

Also prediction markets, if we can fix the holes in them.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

@remedialaction: Attempting to use property that is not yours is a violation, be it by seizure, trespass, violence, or the like.

is the radio spectrum property? how about the ionosphere? global fish stocks?

[mitigatedchaos]

The oxygen in the air, water in the sea, rain from the sky?  Wild animals in nature, with migration patterns that cross multiple boundaries?

How is it claimed?  If part of something is disposed, do the atoms still belong to someone?  

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

my gut feeling is that ancapistan quickly reverts to a regular capitalist state or in the worst case feudalism, while the ancoms end up in an authoritarian state of the usual variety, although this may be avoided if the scale is very small; eg. most families, tribes, and villages are run on ancom principles already.

[mitigatedchaos]

I think most people have this gut feeling.  At least, most people who are aware these two ideologies exist.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

foreignpolicy.com

Surprise Findings: China’s Youth Are Getting Less Nationalistic, Not More

Harvard and Peking University researchers just upended conventional wisdom.

[collapsedsquid]

Since 2002, the survey has also asked questions designed to tease out respondents’ nationalism, including the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with the following standard measures of nationalist sentiment: “Even if I could choose any other country in the world, I would prefer to be a citizen of China than any other country”; “In general, China is a better country than most others”; and “Everyone should support their government even when it is wrong.”

The paper’s headline result suggests that nationalism among Beijing’s residents has not increased over time. On the contrary, the proportion of survey respondents strongly agreeing with the first and third statements decreased sharply from 2002 to 2015, while the number of those who agreed “somewhat” rose. Those strongly agreeing with the second statement, about China being “a better country,” did increase slightly — perhaps an understandable finding given that personal incomes and infrastructure in Beijing both improved significantly over the survey period.

The results not only show a drop in sentiment resembling nationalism; they strongly suggest that Chinese youth, at least those in China’s capital, are less nationalistic than their elders, belying notions of growing numbers of internet-addled youngsters ready to take the government to task for any perceived failure to defend the national honor. In each instance of the survey since 2002, respondents born after 1978 were markedly less likely to “strongly agree” with any of the nationalist survey prompts than were their older peers. Perhaps most striking, by 2015, the proportion of older Chinese strongly agreeing to support their country “even when it is wrong” was more than twice the proportion of youth who felt that way.

While it often looks like nationalism is ascendant now, sometimes it looks like it’s a last desperate gasp of a vanishing way of thinking.  Can nationalism survive a population that grew up in a globally connected world?

[mitigatedchaos]

As a Nationalist, a last, desperate gasp isn’t the way I’d put it.  But then, I wouldn’t call it ascendant, either.  Nationalism will fall in and out of favor as the consequences of Anti-Nationalism become apparent and then wane.

For China’s case, though, you have to consider that the PRC is incompetent, corrupt, and authoritarian.  In the presence of international information, it’s going to be more difficult to cultivate Nationalism when the state, which is a key organ of Nationalism, is so highly at odds with the needs of the people.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

blue-rondo said: This anon thinks that Marxist leftists aren’t also subverted by the CIA lol. Wait til these people discover who funded and backed Marx to begin with.

please don’t tell me the Soviet Union was a CIA plot to conquer Europe

[mitigatedchaos]

For a short while, I and a few friends of mine joked that Communism was a Western plot to destroy Asia.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[immanentizingeschatons]

The left is terrible, the right is terrible, libertarianism is terrible

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitoticcephalopod]

I’m really confused that the animosity between ancoms and ancaps. I feel like we all agree on the most important thing: that the state is bad. We just disagree on the economic system we should use after the state is removed. tbh I really don’t feel like that’s worth spending so much time arguing about when the real enemy is the statists.

[collapsedsquid]

One answer to this is that for ancoms any entity with the power to define and enforce property rights is a “state.“  Regardless of whether it’s a subscription or taxes , if It walks like state, quacks like a state, and enforces property rights like a state it will have to solve the same problems as a state and will crack heads like a state.

[mitigatedchaos]

Many state policies can be replicated in Anarcho-Capitalism by adjusting who has the property at the start, only without the recourse to democracy to blunt the effects of the worst ones. I’m not even an Anarcho-Communist and it seems obvious to me why they shouldn’t be friends.

[argumate]

don’t ancoms need a way to “unenforce” property rights? why is that less powerful than a state?

[mitigatedchaos]

The vibe I got was that this would be done by The Community somehow. …which basically means it is the state, only power will be more evenly distributed or something and it will dissolve afterwards when not needed?

Of course there’s a reason I’m a Nationalist not any kind of Anarchist. Naturally I don’t expect that to work. At least it’s better than Tankies though.