Oceans Yet to Burn — Libertarian: let me try an economic...

anarchyinblack

Libertarian: let me try an economic argument
Statist: Efficiency isn't everything!
Libertarian: ok let me try a moral argument
Statist: Yeah, but how would that work in the real world?
Libertarian: ok let me try an ec
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Libertarian: Voluntary action will solve environmental problems.
Statist: It's already failing to solve environmental problems in China.
Libertarian: But the Chinese government is authoritarian and corrupt and is failing to solve environmental problems.
Statist: But it doesn't prohibit solving environmental problems through voluntary action, they lie about the smog levels being low so they would hardly stop you actually clearing the smog, and other countries have environmental problems managed through government. If voluntary action is enough, why isn't it already there and working?

Source: aquasquatch the yellow black snake the iron hand

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AnCaps acting as if we forgot about workers locked into burning factories, rivers so polluted they became fire hazards, meat packing plants so vile they contributed to more deaths of soldiers than enemy action, women licking radium paint, dumping PFOA in the water supply, and every other abuse by business. They would have us believe voluntary consumer action is sufficient to address all these and other problems, when it already isn’t sufficient now. They say that “well that isn’t worse than what states have done”, but that’s mostly because these companies do not have freely-operating military arms and are instead militarily subordinate to states. Even abolishing LLCs does not actually solve it, since it’s possible to set up alternate webs to escape liability, and it’s far easier and cheaper to cause damage than to fix it. People cheated at Commie rules. No reason they wouldn’t cheat at AnCap rules, too.

the iron hand the invisible fist the yellow black snake

But yes, for new readers wondering why there’s a “#the iron hand” tag, it’s because my visual metaphor for state power is literally a steel gauntlet.

It’s important to remember that state power is ultimately rooted in military strength, and that while state interference is powerful, it can ultimately be clumsy and inexact, and forceful.

And I say this as someone who is often in support of state interference.

politics the iron hand my tags

If this sounds like some bullshit they’d pull in Singapore, that’s not an accident.

Sovereignty is won by force. Every murder, every bombing, every acid attack undermines the legitimacy of the government. Why listen to the government when someone else could kill you just as easily?

The mighty iron hand of the Singaporean state would not let such a thing go so easily. It would seek to crush such opposition.

These behaviors can be stopped at the margins, if they are stopped now. Otherwise, this is the future you choose.

politics a previous era the iron hand

remedialaction

mitigatedchaos

I think those two things are intimately linked, though.

Look man, if you want a cynical explanation, might I suggest that clearly from my expectations I expect to suffer and maybe die under Anarcho-Capitalism, and that at some point I might need state assistance. Not guaranteed, but it’s been mentioned in various places that I don’t have perfect executive functioning.

Keep reading

Source: mitigatedchaos wasteful longpost the yellow black snake

remedialaction

mitigatedchaos

You can’t subdivide out entities that way, though, even if we distinguish them due to the complex interactions involved. The lack of a unified, detached ‘will’ animating our meat puppets doesn’t change the fact that at the core, it remains a single entity, a single actor. You are attempting to granulate things that don’t have any business being so granulated.

Actually, the effects of Ritalin prove that it IS so granulated. And I, myself, have taken it and am familiar with its effects. So yeah, actually I can subdivide entities out that way.

That is a thing, even if it’s one you don’t like.

You have created a false boundary that ignores causal distinctions and elevated it to full status, but reality is not so cleanly delineated, which is something I’ve tried to get at with you for a long time but which hasn’t gotten through to you.

Some kind of nihilistic type might object that a boat is just a collection of atoms that we have arbitrarily labeled as a boat, and that reality doesn’t care. (They’d likely also take your “but you just don’t like it” shtick, too.)

However, even though the natural categories are fuzzy (for instance, when is a skin cell a part of someone, and when isn’t it?), we can still define object boundaries - but we have to use causal bundling instead.

That is, the impact on the world. A “boat” is defined as a cluster of possibilities based on its effects on the world compared to alternative configurations of matter at the same time and place.

There are natural boundaries around people, but it is necessary to also consider the natural boundaries within them, rather than arbitrarily declaring them off limits for moral consideration. These are themselves real causal clusters with impacts on the state of the world.

I think you need to justify placing your causal cutoffs where you place them. Why is placing them at the total mind level valid, but both the sub-agent and incoming-causes levels are invalid?

Source: mitigatedchaos the yellow black snake

remedialaction

mitigatedchaos

We’ve already had that talk? The short form is that we recognize ourselves as thinking entities, IE: I think, therefor I am as you’ve repeatedly stated. What follows is a recognition that our actions have effects upon the world, and those can be directly, due to being directed by our thinking minds, attributed consequentially to us. We ‘own’ the results of our actions, we are responsible for them. From this flows such necessary moral precepts such as the illegitimacy of initiating force against another thinking actor and the necessary fact that because are responsible for the results of our actions, we also own them, and that includes actions that mix with other material goods.

What follows is a recognition that our actions have effects upon the world, and those can be directly, due to being directed by our thinking minds, attributed consequentially to us. We ‘own’ the results of our actions, we are responsible for them.

This requires a kind of internal unity of agents/minds that I’ve already established does not exist. You want absolute moral liability, but people do not have absolute control over their minds and never did, which is why brain injuries, drugs, and mental illness can alter behavior.

For your position to make sense, the effectiveness of drugs such as Ritalin should be impossible. It shouldn’t be feasible to change someone’s level of alignment between their will and its execution through biochemical means if their will is absolute and unified.

And if will isn’t absolute, if it’s subject to all the limitations and complex complications of life in physical bodies in a physical world, then the result of binding liability (if we even accept that) is far, far lower.

Because of this lack of perfect unity, if we took your proposition seriously, then it should be possible to charge someone’s executive functioning capability with a crime (or just moral liability) independently of the other subcomponents of their mind.

Some sort of unification of limited moral binding based on limitations of execution, limitations of information, the default will, targeting of subcomponents of mind, does not, I think, move towards AnCap, but some new class of moral theory that has yet to be born, which is the first thing new/valuable I think I’ve actually gotten out of these discussions with you.

…though not entirely without precedent, but rather not formalized into a total system. See typical handling of limitations in many common courtrooms, and many laws.

Source: mitigatedchaos the yellow black snake

kaptainkulak

mitigatedchaos

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.

anarchyinblack

“I reject your self ownership because I lack self control.”

Holy fucking shit.

kaptainkulak

Can’t make this shit up, ladies and gentlemen.

mitigatedchaos

Hey man, if you want to let your drunk self sell your sober self into slavery and call that 100% upright and moral, well that’s your philosophy of infinite moral liability for finite lapses of judgment/attention by finite beings, not mine.

kaptainkulak

If the alternative is to be implicitly owned by outside forces from the beginning, then yes, I’ll take the first option.

mitigatedchaos

You always were. In practice, property is a product of the ability to exclude through force, not a metaphysical entity. With the purity of the world already broken, excluding infinite liability for finite mistakes is not actually shocking or ridiculous.

Source: argumate the yellow black snake

remedialaction

mitigatedchaos

I’ve already explained why your axiom does not make sense, I have violated its understanding of unified agents in several ways, I have repeatedly pointed out that “self-ownership” does not logically follow from its premises, I have pointed out that minds themselves precede ownership because ownership isn’t even meaningful in one-agent systems while the borders of minds still are, it’s just -

- ach, I was going to just leave the post and not read it because I know this discussion is pointless, but I wanted to see how you’d respond to the Delegate Organization Republic so I read it anyway. Or enough of it.

I’m never going to be convinced by your premises, because aside from the general worldview, intuition, and so on, for me, a morality system is about good things happening and bad things not happening, and any moral system that isn’t about that is, to me, pointless. As far as I am concerned, there is no other possible root, and it is bizarre that people say “no, these rules being followed is more important than outcomes” because why would you even bother having rules if not to seek outcomes. (So, logically, the ultimate system is the one that seeks the ultimate outcome.)

And as for your part, you seek a different kind of control that you don’t have. You want a system in which morality is far more fixed and far less dynamic, incapable of being redefined in its broad details according to who actually exists within the system, at a much more concrete/intermediate level than under a Consequentialist system, which the fixed core is at a higher level of abstraction.

You want a system in which a consent violation is always wrong, no matter what. That’s what makes you feel like you’re valued. Not having it makes you feel like you’re not in control. If a consent violation happens to you, it’s important that it be deemed wrong, no matter if it reduces consent violations elsewhere or prevents someone from involuntarily ceasing to exist.

But that dooms you into a framework in which terrible things can happen without even being considered regrettable/immoral by the system because it has no language to mark them as bad.

Source: mitigatedchaos the yellow black snake

@remedialaction

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.

the yellow black snake

ranma-official

theonion:
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Source: theonion queue

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

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