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Zanzibar Ham posted:Reminds me of the kinds of thoughts I had when I was really depressed. Yeah, I've wondered what Benatar is like. It's hard for me to imagine thinking that an infinity of good is outweighed by a single morsel of bad, or that an absence of pleasure is not a negative. That seems like the sort of thing someone who is so depressed they can't even remember what happiness was would propose.
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Jan 26, 2016 23:06
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Nolanar posted:It's partially just a slur and partially a strawman. When JRod and Mises use the term "statism," they appear to be talking about an ideology diametrically opposed to libertarianism: one that seeks to increase the power of the state as an end in itself. Statism is a philosophy that favors universal healthcare, public schools, and food safety regulations solely as ways to increase the government's influence over people's lives. So it's basically Libertarianism's analogue to Satanism; nobody actually believes the ideas they're worried about, and nobody identifies with the label they give it except as a way to piss them off. This reminds me of jrod's kick about how public education indoctrinates children with "Statist" propaganda. He even had a very specific meaning for this: teaching that the state is good and necessary and we owe politicians our money, etc. But when you look at battles over education, there are all sorts of ideological divides that have nothing to do with "whether the state ought to exist." The only way in which this conspiracy theory makes sense is by default: social studies curricula treat states as a part of social reality and impart various understandings of what that means, how states ought to behave, what our relationship to the state is, etc. It never raises the subject of anarcho-capitalism as a worthwhile idea in contrast to "Statism," thus it implicitly "indoctrinates" children into thinking of the state as a necessity because it doesn't teach them about any alternatives. Looked at this way, it's just sour grapes that anarcho-capitalism isn't important enough to be worth taking seriously as a threat. Otherwise it would get the same treatment in history books that Communism does. In that case there might be a more complicated question of ideological agenda in education with respect to "Statism," but they have to get a seat at the adults' table first.
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Jan 26, 2016 23:07
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Muscle Tracer posted:Yeah, I've wondered what Benatar is like. It's hard for me to imagine thinking that an infinity of good is outweighed by a single morsel of bad, or that an absence of pleasure is not a negative. That seems like the sort of thing someone who is so depressed they can't even remember what happiness was would propose. It's set out in what you quoted, the idea is that pain is always bad, and absence of pain is always good. Pleasure is always good, but absence of pleasure is only bad if you know you're missing it. It sort of hinges on the idea that pleasure itself doesn't really have a point, it's just that if you're alive, it's good for you to have it, but there's nothing inherently constructive about it that justifies creating lots of people to experience it. While conversely, pain is always destructive, it takes whatever value you might ascribe to life and destroys it, so it's always something to be avoided.
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Jan 26, 2016 23:12
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OwlFancier posted:It's set out in what you quoted, the idea is that pain is always bad, and absence of pain is always good. Pleasure is always good, but absence of pleasure is only bad if you know you're missing it. Yes, I understand logic of the points he's laid out. I just don't understand how you could agree with his premise.
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Jan 26, 2016 23:13
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Muscle Tracer posted:Yes, I understand logic of the points he's laid out. I just don't understand how you could agree with his premise. *shrug* I guess I don't see anything obviously incorrect about it? If you don't know what you're missing you don't feel bad about it. Human society sort of runs on that premise otherwise we'd have overthrown capitalism by now.
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Jan 26, 2016 23:16
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OwlFancier posted:*shrug* I guess I don't see anything obviously incorrect about it? If you don't know what you're missing you don't feel bad about it. Human society sort of runs on that premise otherwise we'd have overthrown capitalism by now. ...have you ever watched an advertisement? Capitalism is fundamentally based on fear of missing out on potential pleasures, otherwise nobody would ever buy or try anything new at all. That's also not what Benatar is saying. He specifies that a lack of pleasure is only no loss if no deprived person exists, according to bullet 4. Lack of pleasure is bad to him, but only if there is a person to lack it. But moreover, any pain at all trumps any amount of pleasure. That is the premise I am contesting, which seems patently ridiculous to me, as many people risk pain, or even voluntarily undergo pain, in order to experience pleasure later—dating, plastic surgery, tattoos and piercing, even childbirth itself. To push the theory to its extremes, Benatar's argument is that a universe totally devoid of life would be an ethically preferable world to a universe filled to the brim with unbridled pleasures for trillions of beings, except that one of them stubbed his toe once. You don't see an issue with that?
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Jan 26, 2016 23:32
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Libertarian ideology is similar to proposing that it's unnecessary and illegitimate for cars to have round wheels and we should reinvent the car to have, say, square wheels or no wheels at all. It just immediately strikes one as being so dumb and ignorant of the evolution of society in getting to where we are today as to be mind-boggling. It's literally regressing political thought to the time before Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hobbes, and etc as if we never invented the idea of the Social Contract. That's what you get for constantly slashing education budgets, I guess.
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Jan 26, 2016 23:52
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Capitalism is also based on people not finding out just how much money and cool poo poo they could get if they told the wealthy to get hosed. It's a very specific degree of comprehension you're looking for. It doesn't work without making people aware of the potential pleasure of participating and it also requires people to not be aware of the potential pleasure of annihilating it. w/r/t Benatar I get why it's not intuitive, and certainly if you believe there is some objective value in experiencing pleasure then it won't make sense. He's arguing that the absence of pain is in itself a good thing, and so pleasure and pain being equal in a life (I would dispute this as overly simplistic, but possibly in the opposite direction to how you would) it's still better to simply not live at all, because then you have an overall good, rather than a zero sum state.
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Jan 26, 2016 23:56
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So I guess he killed himself painlessly right after he figured that out?
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Jan 27, 2016 00:37
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Depends on whether he's good enough at logic to overcome his survival reflex, I guess. He might also consider that if he can get more people to not have kids he will be preventing more pain than if he just offs himself.
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Jan 27, 2016 00:55
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Logically we should exterminate the human race. Oh not me, you need me around, I'm the ideas man!
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Jan 27, 2016 01:21
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VitalSigns posted:So I guess he killed himself painlessly right after he figured that out? Benetar makes a distinction between enterprises not worth beginning and enterprises worth ending once already started. He thinks human life falls into the former, not the latter category. In other words, 'better not to have been born' does not entail 'better to die.'
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Jan 27, 2016 01:31
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VitalSigns posted:Logically we should exterminate the human race. If killing everyone is your goal you do logically have to leave yourself till last. And it's not like he would have a choice either way.
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Jan 27, 2016 01:33
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Juffo-Wup posted:Benetar makes a distinction between enterprises not worth beginning and enterprises worth ending once already started. He thinks human life falls into the former, not the latter category. In other words, 'better not to have been born' does not entail 'better to die.' I don't see how this follows. Killing yourself immediately avoids all the pain you'll have in your life which outweighs any pleasure from living so that's obviously a win. Plus the longer you live the more people you meet that will be sad if you die so better to end it now rather than begin all the new enterprises of meeting new people and possibly hurting them. OwlFancier posted:If killing everyone is your goal you do logically have to leave yourself till last. And it's not like he would have a choice either way. No it's actually self-servingly inconsistent. I could argue that maybe my pregnant neighbor's baby might be more successful than Benetar at convincing us to off ourselves. If we're going to say "well I might avert more pain than I cause so I should live" then this could apply to everyone contemplating having a kid which destroys his original logic that it's always immoral to have a kid because they will inevitably be hurt/hurt someone.
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Jan 27, 2016 02:17
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Why should pain have any objective good or bad measure associated to it is pleasure doesn't. Why should human sensation mean anything at all.
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Jan 27, 2016 02:21
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Because I have sadbrains and obviously I'm so much smarter than all those foolish happy people out there that it must be because I'm the unique snowflake who sees the objective truth and not because my broken brain chemistry fixates on every little disappointment to the exclusion of all else.
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Jan 27, 2016 02:27
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I know you mean it jokingly but sometimes I get really tired of meaning, and the attribution of it to things. Meaning is a human fabrication to organize the world, especially when we're talking philosophy, ethics and metaphysics. Like libertarians and freedom, but going beyond that to every other ideology or social theory. Who cares what you think is important, it doesn't have any truth to it. It almost always hypocritical too when talking about these type of theories. They can write about moral imperatives to sell books, but don't follow through with the logical consequences of their beliefs.
Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Jan 27, 2016 |
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Jan 27, 2016 02:34
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In general I take a pretty skeptical view of people who propose radical ideas with horrific consequences that everyone should follow but that just-so-happen to not affect them. For example, anarcho-primitivists who want us to give up all technology and go back to hunting and gathering as 6 billion people die, but in the meantime I need my internet connection to publish my ideas and my factory medicine to stay alive to spread my ideas. Imagine what would happen to the last generation of humans if everyone suddenly agreed with Benetar and didn't have kids. As everyone ages and can no longer keep society running. No one to maintain infrastructure, run power plants, care for the sick, grow the food, and extinction comes after mass suffering as the last tens of millions of people lose the ability to care for themselves and there's no one to care for them. Oh but conveniently, Benetar doesn't have to worry about that because his logic exempts himself and everyone already living so he's assured of another 40 or 50 years of functioning society and younger caregivers. Sucks to be you, babies who were just born, have fun starving to death in a pool of your own poo poo, it's for the best really.
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Jan 27, 2016 02:48
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Sedge and Bee posted:I know you mean it jokingly but sometimes I get really tired of meaning, and the attribution of it to things. Meaning is a human fabrication to organize the world, especially when we're talking philosophy, ethics and metaphysics. Like libertarians and freedom, but going beyond that to every other ideology or social theory. Who cares what you think is important, it doesn't have any truth to it. It almost always hypocritical too when talking about these type of theories. They can write about moral imperatives to sell books, but don't follow through with the logical consequences of their beliefs. Chicago is also a human fabrication to organize the world, but nobody has serious ontological disagreements with city planners. VitalSigns posted:I don't see how this follows. Killing yourself immediately avoids all the pain you'll have in your life which outweighs any pleasure from living so that's obviously a win. Plus the longer you live the more people you meet that will be sad if you die so better to end it now rather than begin all the new enterprises of meeting new people and possibly hurting them. Well, that's fair. It's not apparent how it follows because I didn't give Benatar's argument (I don't remember it and I don't care enough to go look it up again). I was just pointing out that his book directly addressed a criticism that you seem to have thought had entirely eluded him.
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Jan 27, 2016 03:03
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Juffo-Wup posted:Well, that's fair. It's not apparent how it follows because I didn't give Benatar's argument (I don't remember it and I don't care enough to go look it up again). I was just pointing out that his book directly addressed a criticism that you seem to have thought had entirely eluded him. Oh no I knew he'd thought of that I just didn't accept his reasoning. His argument is that preventing pain is the most important moral good that dwarfs every other consideration therefore it's always immoral to have a kid. But the logical conclusion of that is to euthanize yourself as soon as possible because unless you are unexpectedly vaporized in an atomic attack then your eventual death is guaranteed to involve more pain and more dread as well as more hurt to more people as well as all the other pain you'll have between now and then. So to avoid this he inexplicably raises "continuing an existing life" to a more important position which undercuts his own argument that avoiding pain is the only possible moral goal. As well, there are some other horrific logical conclusions that follow from his original argument. For example, if you could painlessly murder someone no one cared about by total surprise then that would be good because it would certainly reduce the total pain in the world. Or if you had a button that would instantly vaporize every human you should press it. And bizarrely he's pro-corporal punishment of children, so apparently giving birth is immoral because the child might get hurt one day but once the kid's there beating it is just fine! VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Jan 27, 2016 |
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Jan 27, 2016 03:33
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VitalSigns posted:Oh no I knew he'd thought of that I just didn't accept his reasoning. His argument is that preventing pain is the most important moral good that dwarfs every other consideration therefore it's always immoral to have a kid. But the logical conclusion of that is to euthanize yourself as soon as possible because unless you are unexpectedly vaporized in an atomic attack then your eventual death is guaranteed to involve more pain and more dread as well as more hurt to more people as well as all the other pain you'll have between now and then. So to avoid this he inexplicably raises "continuing an existing life" to a more important position which undercuts his own argument that avoiding pain is the only possible moral goal. Generally when people are talking about Benatar's anti-natalism, they're talking about his asymmetry argument, which doesn't go quite how you've rendered it. He says that the presence of pain is bad and its absence is good, and that the presence of pleasure is good but it's absence altogether without value.. The intuition is supposed to be that someone is not being harmed in measure of the amount of pleasure they're not experiencing. When talking about bringing someone into existence we have to consider the presence of pleasure, or of pain, against their absences. So by causing someone to exist, we harm them because the presence of pain is worse than its absence. But the presence of pleasure is not better than its absence, because the value of the absence of pleasure is just the empty set, and therefore not comparable to anything. Whereas when considering a course of action, we compare the hedonistic value that accrues to each option, and so in that case we can weigh quantities of pleasure against those of pain. Ultimately, I'm not on board with his argument, but that's because I think it runs into problems with the non-identity problem, and because his arguments for his value theory are a little thin. But I don't think the reductio is really relevant here. I think he does at one point argue that our lives are, on the balance, bad, and that I think probably does recommend suicide, but that argument is not as interesting as the one above. VitalSigns posted:As well, there are some other horrific logical conclusions that follow from his original argument. For example, if you could painlessly murder someone no one cared about by total surprise then that would be good because it would certainly reduce the total pain in the world. Or if you had a button that would instantly vaporize every human you should press it. Well, yeah, but horrific conclusions seem to be a dime a dozen in applied ethics. Utilitarianism also has trouble accounting for the badness of death, and the repugnant conclusion and whatnot. Not to say we shouldn't press on these things, just that they're not unique to anti-natalism. VitalSigns posted:And bizarrely he's pro-corporal punishment of children, so apparently giving birth is immoral because the child might get hurt one day but once the kid's there beating it is just fine! Yeah, he's a weird dude. He probably shouldn't be in charge of any kids.
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Jan 27, 2016 04:01
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Juffo-Wup posted:Generally when people are talking about Benatar's anti-natalism, they're talking about his asymmetry argument, which doesn't go quite how you've rendered it. He says that the presence of pain is bad and its absence is good, and that the presence of pleasure is good but it's absence altogether without value.. The intuition is supposed to be that someone is not being harmed in measure of the amount of pleasure they're not experiencing. When talking about bringing someone into existence we have to consider the presence of pleasure, or of pain, against their absences. So by causing someone to exist, we harm them because the presence of pain is worse than its absence. But the presence of pleasure is not better than its absence, because the value of the absence of pleasure is just the empty set, and therefore not comparable to anything. Whereas when considering a course of action, we compare the hedonistic value that accrues to each option, and so in that case we can weigh quantities of pleasure against those of pain. That works when you're weighing "is it worth going through the pain of lifting weights to get laid later" sure because you exist in both cases. But if the question is whether you should painlessly euthanize yourself, then in one case you don't exist to care about the absence of pleasure in the future but you would exist to experience pain so the calculus is the same. Except he doesn't want it to be because he doesn't like the consequences of his reasoning when they're applied to him. There's no meaningful difference between asking whether a potential unborn child's life might be worth living and whether the rest of my life is worth living. "Well I'm already here so" is just a way to weasel out of the unavoidable conclusions of his bad premises. E: My suspicion is that his anti-natalism has a lot more to do with some kind of dislike of children considering how quickly he pivots from "don't make an innocent little baby suffer by bringing it into the world, you monster" to "hey is that child annoying you? beat that kid, there's only a little evidence that it causes long-term damage pfffffft" VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Jan 27, 2016 |
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Jan 27, 2016 04:34
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No ontological arguments? gently caress you statist, for pretending that government decrees have any meaning or validity. Like that's literally a common libertarian argument. There's no such thing as society, so certainly a city would have no validity as a discreet unit of conception.
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Jan 27, 2016 04:50
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Yes, but that is because libertarians are ridiculous. Anyway, it was stupid of me to get involved in an argument about anti- natalism. I regret it, and I'm sorry.
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Jan 27, 2016 05:12
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OwlFancier posted:if you believe there is some objective value in experiencing pleasure. Yes, that's literally exactly what I was saying. Congrats!
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Jan 27, 2016 06:20
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Baronjutter posted:Can we actually give libertarians some patch of desert somewhere and ship them there if they don't want to consent to the "contract' that being a citizen entails, then don't let them re-join society until they sign that they agree to pay taxes and follow the laws of the land in exchange for all the benefits of living in a non-mad max society ? Sometimes libertarians actually get together and try and do this, often by pooling money and trying to buy a plot of land somewhere, but 99% of the time the person organizing it takes the money and runs. The last one I heard about was a year or so ago; they were going to buy a bunch of land in Chile, claimed to have a bunch of ins with the Chilean government and were all "they're ready to sign an agreement where they'll let us be sovereign on this little patch of land, it's got water wells and fertile land and everything! Send your deposits *here*" and then bam, turns out it was all bullshit and now everyone's money is gone. Juffo-Wup posted:Generally when people are talking about Benatar's anti-natalism, they're talking about his asymmetry argument, which doesn't go quite how you've rendered it. He says that the presence of pain is bad and its absence is good, and that the presence of pleasure is good but it's absence altogether without value.. The intuition is supposed to be that someone is not being harmed in measure of the amount of pleasure they're not experiencing. When talking about bringing someone into existence we have to consider the presence of pleasure, or of pain, against their absences. So by causing someone to exist, we harm them because the presence of pain is worse than its absence. But the presence of pleasure is not better than its absence, because the value of the absence of pleasure is just the empty set, and therefore not comparable to anything. Whereas when considering a course of action, we compare the hedonistic value that accrues to each option, and so in that case we can weigh quantities of pleasure against those of pain. That's astoundingly idiotic and sounds like something written by a person who has never felt pain or pleasure
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Jan 27, 2016 07:16
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QuarkJets posted:That's astoundingly idiotic and sounds like something written by a person who has never felt pain or pleasure Well if you're not even allowed to beat your kids anymore, what's the point of letting them out of the womb in the first place? And the New South Africa won't even let us indulge in life's greatest pleasures like keeping blacks out of our universities, so it's clear Benatar has nothing to live for and it's time to quit this whole human race experiment. Not to mention, every child has a 52% chance of being a male and therefore a victim of sexist discrimination by the matriarchy, why would you take that chance. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Jan 27, 2016 |
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Jan 27, 2016 08:28
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NOBODY puts baby in a cage!WaPo posted:
Eerily relevant to the current conversation.
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Jan 27, 2016 19:46
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As a bird lover, I'm glad they shot the bastard.
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Jan 27, 2016 19:56
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So tell me about the links between the ancaps and the 'alt-right'/'race realists'/literal neonazi fascists. I'm in the mood to be entertained
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Jan 27, 2016 23:00
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icantfindaname posted:So tell me about the links between the ancaps and the 'alt-right'/'race realists'/literal neonazi fascists. I'm in the mood to be entertained imagine a venn diagram that is indistinguishable from a perfect circle libertarianism works the same way
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Jan 27, 2016 23:04
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yes hello did someone ask about racist libertariansHans Hermann Hoppe posted:Private property capitalism and egalitarian multiculturalism are as unlikely a combination as socialism and cultural conservatism. And in trying to combine what cannot be combined, much of the modern libertarian movement actually contributed to the further erosion of private property rights (just as much of contemporary conservatism contributed to the erosion of families and traditional morals). What the countercultural libertarians failed to recognize, and what true libertarians cannot emphasize enough, is that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic increase in social “discrimination” and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the multicultural-egalitarian life style experiments so close to the heart of left libertarians. In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives. Hans Hermann Hoppe posted:In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one's own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order. Hans Hermann Hoppe posted:In every society, a few individuals acquire the status of an elite through talent. Due to superior achievements of wealth, wisdom, and bravery, these individuals come to possess natural authority, and their opinions and judgments enjoy wide-spread respect. Moreover, because of selective mating, marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, positions of natural authority are likely to be passed on within a few noble families. It is to the heads of these families with long-established records of superior achievement, farsightedness, and exemplary personal conduct that men turn to with their conflicts and complaints against each other. These leaders of the natural elite act as judges and peacemakers, often free of charge out of a sense of duty expected of a person of authority or out of concern for civil justice as a privately produced "public good." Hans Hermann Hoppe posted:Thereby, in order to illustrate one's theoretical conclusions, every attempt should be made to compare societies which, apart from the theoretical distinction under consideration, are as similar as possible. It would be an error, for instance, to illustrate my theory of comparative government by contrasting European monarchies with African democracies or African monarchies with European democracies. Since Caucasians have, on the average, a significantly lower degree of time preference than Negroids, any such comparison would amount to a systematic distortion of the evidence. By contrasting European monarchies to African democracies, the theoretically predicted differences between monarchical and democratic rule would become systematically overstated, and by contrasting African monarchies with European democracies, the differences would become systematically understated. Murray Rothbard posted:Well, they finally got David Duke. But he sure scared the bejesus out of them. It took a massive campaign of hysteria, of fear and hate, orchestrated by all wings of the Ruling Elite, from Official right to left, from President Bush and the official Republican Party through the New York-Washington-run national media through the local elites and down to local left-wing activists. It took a massive scare campaign, not only invoking the old bogey images of the Klan and Hitler, but also, more concretely, a virtual threat to boycott Louisiana, to pull out tourists and conventions, to lose jobs by businesses leaving the state. It took a campaign of slander that resorted to questioning the sincerity of Duke's conversion to Christianity – even challenging him to name his "official church." Murray Rothbard, in that same article posted:A right-wing populist program, then, must concentrate on dismantling the crucial existing areas of State and elite rule, and on liberating the average American from the most flagrant and oppressive features of that rule. In short:
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Jan 28, 2016 00:38
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Oh judge dredd. You are truly the best libertarian. I do get a kick out of the idea that a smash and grab for $200 is less of a crime than insider training that milks a pension fund out of $20,000,000
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Jan 28, 2016 01:14
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Caros posted:Oh judge dredd. You are truly the best libertarian. But Mega City One is the exact opposite of libertarian paradise! Please don't use the name of Joe Dredd in vain
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Jan 28, 2016 01:25
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Nolanar posted:
Hmm yes quite, don't let's mix our elite farsighted superior-achieving exemplary blood with the commoners' 
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Jan 28, 2016 01:25
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VitalSigns posted:Hmm yes quite, don't let's mix our elite farsighted superior-achieving exemplary blood with the commoners' Hey, Charles 2's great great grandfather at least in theory considered the Native Americans fully equal to white Europeans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Laws It's not right to compare him to the sociopathic, racial supremacist fascists in the libertarian movement
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Jan 28, 2016 02:23
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Hey I didn't imply that anyone, neither Carlos II nor any of his family, was dumb enough to agree with all of Libertarianism. Hoppe's bizarre primitive eugenics just reminded me of the Habsburgs who at least had the excuse of living before gene theory was even thought of.
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Jan 28, 2016 02:39
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The house of Habsburg is literally what HHH wants. He wishes he lived in feudal Austria under Charles V.
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Jan 28, 2016 03:03
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The Austrian Habsburgs didn't even kill all Protestants for advocating ideas contrary to the goals of the community, as is typical of liberals who hurt the cause of liberty because they're not willing to do what it takes to protect freedom.
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Jan 28, 2016 03:12
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GunnerJ posted:This reminds me of jrod's kick about how public education indoctrinates children with "Statist" propaganda. He even had a very specific meaning for this: teaching that the state is good and necessary and we owe politicians our money, etc. But when you look at battles over education, there are all sorts of ideological divides that have nothing to do with "whether the state ought to exist." The only way in which this conspiracy theory makes sense is by default: social studies curricula treat states as a part of social reality and impart various understandings of what that means, how states ought to behave, what our relationship to the state is, etc. It never raises the subject of anarcho-capitalism as a worthwhile idea in contrast to "Statism," thus it implicitly "indoctrinates" children into thinking of the state as a necessity because it doesn't teach them about any alternatives. Looked at this way, it's just sour grapes that anarcho-capitalism isn't important enough to be worth taking seriously as a threat. Otherwise it would get the same treatment in history books that Communism does. In that case there might be a more complicated question of ideological agenda in education with respect to "Statism," but they have to get a seat at the adults' table first. My wife teaches elementary school, and even her kids could tell you why a state is preferable to a non-state, without being "indoctrinated." She asks them, "Can you think of some things that would be different if we didn't have a government?" And kids always write stuff like "Bad people wouldn't get in trouble," and "Nobody would be able to solve their problems except by fighting." And they're right. Enough people would get sick of the whole "no access to justice" thing and just start capping people when they had problems.
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Jan 28, 2016 04:18
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