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
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.
If they’re so competent, when are we going to hear plans for ＷＡＧＥ ＳＵＢＳＩＤＩＥＳ instead of a minimum wage hike?
(But yes, Paul Ryan is trash and may outright sink the Trump Presidency.)
Anonymous asked:
diarrheaworldstarhiphop answered:
i legitimately dont know, because it seems any democratic option is instantly suppressed
maybe a mass uprising like in tunisia or egypt demanding politicians step down or make reform.
but reform to what?
“Suck less” isn’t a good option, since the people will disagree dramatically on just what, exactly, that means and how to accomplish it.
However, the system will produce the candidates that the incentives within the system make possible, so it seems to me that a new system, something beyond liberal democracy, that hasn’t been invented yet, is necessary for something lasting and good.
Even in my damaged state, cruising with multiple engines non-functional, I’ve been pondering a system in which the legislature is replaced with think tanks that voters delegate their votes to across multiple categories, funded by public funding according to their votes and percentile standing in a prediction market based on the outcomes of the legislation. (Edit: After all, we can conceive of political policy having two axes - values and effectiveness - and many policies that suck have okay values but are ineffective.)
But the question then becomes, who prevents the prediction market and the state’s instruments of measure for outcomes from being sabotaged by political operators, who notoriously don’t care for empiricism?
To put the culture post another way: Muslim countries get Muslim laws.
This isn’t just under democracy, but also dependent on raw ability to wield force, which is also impacted by how big and willing to fight the dominant cultural group is.
If you want a Liberal country, with Liberal laws, then either you need to have a Liberal culture, or someone strong enough and with enough backing to impose Liberal laws.
If an imported culture gains ground until it replaces the dominant culture, then it will replace the dominant culture’s laws.
Anonymous asked:
argumate answered:
Current representative democracy doesn’t give voters any direct influence over specific policy questions, literal direct democracy makes them vote on every issue, and most people suggest a sensible hybrid where everyone votes on every issue but you can delegate your vote to representatives at varying levels of pickiness.
Scrap the existing legislature and replace it with a legislature of think-tanks to whom voters delegate votes across twelve categories.
The existence of immune system overreactions does not mean that immune systems are a bad thing.
I mean, I agree, but also “immune systems” are bad wrt nationalism. A country is not an organism. A body needs to keep the body safe; a culture does not need to keep itself safe, rather it needs to keep the people in it safe.
The culture doesn’t need to be preserved if “culture” is just hot dogs vs sushi, ballet vs rap, basketball vs rugby. In other words, if it’s just aesthetics. Falling below a certain level of Nationalism makes it infeasible to field an army - but fielding an army to defend sushi would indeed be overkill. However…
Ultimately, culture is not actually individual and not actually escapable at the national level. To keep the people safe, it is actually necessary to keep the culture some level of safe, particularly if that culture involves not becoming Venezuela or Saudi Arabia.
Anonymous asked:
argumate answered:
I’m not sure if it makes sense to talk about communities having fatal flaws, and I’m not actually involved in this community, so I couldn’t really say.
Argumate’s too polite, but I’ll give you a flaw, Anon. Right as I’m about to sleep.
There’s sort of a “can’t see the forest for the trees” thing, where they aren’t always modelling the collective effects of individual behavior.
1. Polygamy. A lot of them identify as polyamorous. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them support legalizing polygamy. However, the effect of a bunch of weird nerds doing this, many of whom are literally some degree of autistic, is very different from what happens if it become normalized at the level of society. Effects like child brides and poor mental health outcomes for women and children.
2. FGM. FGM isn’t the only one like this. The effects of immigration are non-linear, and depend on the cohesiveness and size of the group. If you have no community, you must integrate. That changes at n=2, n=4, n=20, n=150, etc. So it becomes possible for a practice like FGM to reach the US and have an underground ring.
Whatever error is responsible for both of these, that’s the fatal flaw.
This is bad. Le Pen was supposed to be leverage to get the rest of these people to wake up and fix the giant holes in Liberalism. Instead, honor killings, FGM, and burkhas will be politically unremovable in France in 30 years or, left to boil over with no real solution, FN will be back after winning more mayorships for a showdown.
