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I'm also not sure I'd say explicit calls for ethnic cleansing, mob violence, and executive control of the press are "bog-standard populism".
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Apr 8, 2016 20:59
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GunnerJ posted:An alternate possible conclusion is that libertarians need to stop trying to hide or obfuscate the racist implications of their ideas and make them central. This is disturbing, and possibly right. Doing the Atwater two-step may serve you if you are already a big established political force needing to deal with a shifting cultural/political landscape, but when you are growing your brand, so to speak, hemming and hawing won't really help. People who are not down with the racist content will see through it and feel disgusted. People who are all about the racial 'realism' and consider coddling minorities the big problem with society will want it out and proud in your campaign and will equate you with the mealy-mouthed liberals and bureaucrats if you don't grab a megaphone. People who don't really have a strong opinion on the issue will 1-)Eventually see through the act and feel fooled and angry or 2-)Get confused when accused of supporting racist policies and turned off regarding politics in general or possibly 3-) Get mad at being called racist over stuff they don't think is racist and make the full leap into overt racism, making the cover moot. Not saying we'd see it reach 30+% of the people go for it, but it might reach a full 10-15% of the people and become more than a billionaire hobby party. ((Also, scheduled dentist for tomorrow. It'll be a white bread and baloney month, but...yeah.))
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Apr 8, 2016 21:29
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DeusExMachinima posted:e: still not clear on how preventing people from selling potatoes to Ireland indicts capitalism whereas reeducating the counterrevolutionaries isn't a deal killer for communism. Hahaha you're the mirror image of the Nork defenders in that other thread, confronted with a massacre done by people who follow an ideology you like, you jump to "but what about those other guys who did something bad" even though I never defended gulags and I'm not even a communist, just a boring milquetoast social democrat. Cingulate posted:Different issue. This is about intentionality mattering or not. Yeah I'm still not clear why this is important, why it should matter to a dead child whether the person who starved him did it because he hates Jews or because he loves money. You've said it's important for this discussion because we don't need to worry about mass killers whose only motive is profit, for if we take the profit out massacring people then they won't do it anymore. But this thread is about Libertarianism: a political philosophy that's fundamentally opposed to governments ever taking the profit out of anything. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 03:27
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And if the Irish don't do it for you then surely what was done to the Native Americans does? Surely! That's an extended series of slaughters and forced relocations that was pretty explicitly capitalist pretty much all of the time.
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Apr 9, 2016 03:43
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paragon1 posted:And if the Irish don't do it for you then surely what was done to the Native Americans does? Surely!
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Apr 9, 2016 04:02
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_Nation_v._Georgia And then there's all the treaties that got broken because people thought there might be gold on various native lands and treaty reservations.
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Apr 9, 2016 04:20
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And then there's slavery in pretty much all of the Americas, with most European colonies full of private property owners literally working people to death to create an export for sale. The only complaint capitalists had to make about the situation was the sale of sugar and coffee being limited to the home country. And the slave trade itself of course.
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Apr 9, 2016 04:22
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Mornacale posted:I'm also not sure I'd say explicit calls for ethnic cleansing, mob violence, and executive control of the press are "bog-standard populism". They kind of are, though. You've used harsher language than what Trump's platform actually deserves, but "use force to take back the future that was stolen from you by the parasites, tear down the press that supports those parasites, and then expel those parasites from the country" is populist as hell in conservative circles.
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Apr 9, 2016 05:53
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As Caro returned, so too shall jrodefeld be returned to us
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Apr 9, 2016 05:55
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SedanChair posted:As Caro returned, so too shall jrodefeld be returned to us A broken man with cripping mental issues?
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Apr 9, 2016 07:40
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Cingulate posted:I boldly stand up for remaining unconvinced of any positive point. Rand and Objectivism is a strange choice for this because... Ayn Rand posted:ow, I don't care to discuss the alleged complaints American Indians have against this country. I believe, with good reason, the most unsympathetic Hollywood portrayal of Indians and what they did to the white man. They had no right to a country merely because they were born here and then acted like savages. The white man did not conquer this country. And you're a racist if you object, because it means you believe that certain men are entitled to something because of their race. You believe that if someone is born in a magnificent country and doesn't know what to do with it, he still has a property right to it. He does not. Since the Indians did not have the concept of property or property rights--they didn't have a settled society, they had predominantly nomadic tribal "cultures"--they didn't have rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights that they had not conceived of and were not using. It's wrong to attack a country that respects (or even tries to respect) individual rights. If you do, you're an aggressor and are morally wrong. But if a "country" does not protect rights--if a group of tribesmen are the slaves of their tribal chief--why should you respect the "rights" that they don't have or respect? The same is true for a dictatorship. The citizens in it have individual rights, but the country has no rights and so anyone has the right to invade it, because rights are not recognized in that country; and no individual or country can have its cake and eat it too--that is, you can't claim one should respect the "rights" of Indians, when they had no concept of rights and no respect for rights. But let's suppose they were all beautifully innocent savages--which they certainly were not. What were they fighting for, in opposing the white man on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existnece; for their "right" to keep part of the earth untouched--to keep everybody out so they could live like animals or cavemen. Any European who brought with him an element of civilization had the right to take over this continent, and it's great that some of them did. The racist Indians today--those who condemn America--do not respect individual rights. ...genocide isn't even optional according to Rand, assuming you have a superior military, it's an ethical imperative to exterminate any non-white indigenous peoples. It's more like your Nazi/Jew example earlier where the only way to prevent the genocide is an indigenous military victory. Because even if they adopt the European social order and property rights that ostensibly grant them human rights in Objectivist thought, the orthodox Objectivist position is to just pretend they didn't and deliberately seek out the most negative fictional portrayals around to justify ethnic cleansing them anyway. I know your thought experiment is "what if you did Objectivism without the genocide" but I don't even know how you'd do that because it's central to her will-to-power philosophy. The climax of Atlas Shrugged involves the heroine cold-bloodedly executing an unarmed unresisting victim as she at last triumphantly realizes that only supermen industrialists are true human beings and everyone else is lower than an animal.
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Apr 9, 2016 10:18
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I mean, this does explain a lot of their fear of any kind of minority rights, probably out of an expectation that the minorities would in fact rise up and crush them for the evils they have done. You could try to resolve or de-escalate matters, of course, but that requires effort and might interfere with the full enjoyment and pleasure of Property.
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Apr 9, 2016 10:58
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Okay Caros, I think all of these are good points, I'm highlighting the differences here, some of which are mostly of a quantitative rather than categorical nature.Caros posted:Genghis Khan had a body count of roughly forty million people and I don't think anyone can argue with a straight face that he had "A lot of state". But you are correct: what I said only works for violence towards ones own citizens. Of course, nothing about restricting the state's right to interfere with the lives of its own citizens will do anything about an invasion by somebody else. I've honestly never thought about this, but it seems to me most medieval societies had states much more powerful than what we have today. For example, I am sure the Khans had some way to coerce their men into being warriors. Caros posted:A lot of military, certainly, but there is absolutely nothing about libertarianism apart from pearl clutching appeals to the NAP that excludes the idea of one man or a group of men gathering a large amount of military power and using it against their neighbours [...] Empirically speaking, in our recent wars, more authoritarian regimes have waged more cruel wars - in some proportion to how authoritarian they were. I am saying, we have seen a few times what happens when you rally men under the banner of constructing a socialist utopia. We have not seen what would happen when people rally under Road to Serfdom or Atlas Shrugged. Caros posted:You are comparing two different things. What Trump is doing is bog standard populism that isn't all that distinct from the Reaganism in the 1980's, or any other political movement in normal american politics for that matter. Riling up a bunch of middle class folks to vote for a primary candidate is in no way similar to suggesting that those same people would support the sort of radical upheaval of basic social norms that would be required to bring libertarianism into being, or that they would be successful in the face of overwhelming negative opinion if they tried.
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Apr 9, 2016 12:28
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Goon Danton posted:Looking into it, you're probably right. Standard dictatorship that farmed their economic policy out to some dude. Puts them on the same level as Dollfuss, so I'm going to update my stance to "there have never been explicitly libertarian governments." And commie hatred has again and again shown itself to be within an order of magnitude as bad of a motive as trying to construct a socialist state. DeusExMachinima posted:One-party rule and putting intellectuals in camps are not inherent to revolutions. Communist revolutions, on the other hand, consistently do such a thing and it's ridiculous to say ideals aren't involved in deciding what tactics and methods will be used. QuarkJets posted:As an example of this, see the "Ron Paul Revolution" of 2012 and 2008, which completely flubbed despite basically doing what Donald Trump is doing, but with libertarianism. Libertarianism is unpopular. GunnerJ posted:I only noticed that afterward because it wasn't in response to me, and edited my post accordingly: I am not sugar-coating what reeducation consists of, but it's also not a clear cipher for things other than reeducation, because reeducation is something actually practiced. If that's not what you meant, you shouldn't have used that term. Mornacale posted:I'm also not sure I'd say explicit calls for ethnic cleansing, mob violence, and executive control of the press are "bog-standard populism". (Note how this one and the one above flow together. I have no idea what to make of that.) Sephyr posted:Not saying we'd see it reach 30+% of the people go for it, but it might reach a full 10-15% of the people and become more than a billionaire hobby party. Cingulate fucked around with this message at 13:11 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 13:07
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VitalSigns posted:Yeah I'm still not clear why this is important, why it should matter to a dead child whether the person who starved him did it because he hates Jews or because he loves money. VitalSigns posted:You've said it's important for this discussion because we don't need to worry about mass killers whose only motive is profit, for if we take the profit out massacring people then they won't do it anymore. VitalSigns posted:But this thread is about Libertarianism: a political philosophy that's fundamentally opposed to governments ever taking the profit out of anything. VitalSigns posted:I know your thought experiment is "what if you did Objectivism without the genocide"
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Apr 9, 2016 13:10
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VitalSigns posted:I know your thought experiment is "what if you did Objectivism without the genocide" but I don't even know how you'd do that because it's central to her will-to-power philosophy. The climax of Atlas Shrugged involves the heroine cold-bloodedly executing an unarmed unresisting victim as she at last triumphantly realizes that only supermen industrialists are true human beings and everyone else is lower than an animal. There might be an argument to be made that the native genocide thing was more about defending the U.S. because she was a huge fangirl of it as "the first nation founded on reason" or something. It was already fait accompli, she just rehearsed well-worn justifications for it. But you're 100% right that "will to power" is central to her ideology. On a broader level, the plot of Atlas Shrugged treats it as a good thing for a bunch of accelerationist capitalist supermen to orchestrate the downfall of civilization so that they can conquer it in the chaos and remake the world in their image. Historians may argue whether the Marxist conception of bourgeois revolution accurately describes anything, but Rand wanted to make it happen. Sorry in advance, I'm just going to ramble a bit about Rand and totalitarianism for a while in a way that is only tangentially related to your point. The original title for the novel was The Strike, with the premise of presenting what would happen if the "men of the mind" (mostly capitalists; a bunch of other people Rand considered "critical" like artists and intellectuals who agree with her come along, but only scientific discoveries and engineering trade secrets made in the Gulch are the developments the strikers aren't permitted to share with the outside world... more on this later) went on strike instead of a bunch of dumbass workers. You could say, if it's OK for workers to withhold their labor in order to force an outcome in their favor, why can't capitalists? The thing is that a strike is a negotiation tactic. You do it to bring your opponent to the bargaining table. The heroes of Atlas Shrugged do not believe that their opponents are capable of enough reason for negotiation to be possible. This is a fairly disturbing and revealing aspect of her philosophy: she considered opposition to it to be inherently unreasonable and in bad faith. Thus the "strike of the men of the mind" could have no other goal but the destruction of Old Regime (of creeping socialism) and its reconquest by the rightful aristocracy of the Earth. A common element of many of these revolutions we observe turning authoritarian, without going into much depth about the causes involved, is exactly this unwillingness or inability to treat dissent as anything other than evidence of bad intentions. This unwillingness to credit an opposition would be disturbing enough if it were limited to questions like "should capitalists have any limit on their business practices?" but Rand has a much more "total vision" for humanity. If you really want to understand Atlas Shrugged, I'd say, you need to structurally compare it to The Turner Diaries, as they both seem to follow a similar pattern. The latter is the racist dystopian novel that nonetheless contains within it a utopian vision of white supremacy triumphant. It sharply contrasts wandering in the wilderness of racial tolerance and the absurdities and oppression inherent to it with the uplifting feelings of living in a pure, sane, white man's world. The plot begins with a search for this uptopia as the world collapses into forced racial integration and multiculturalism, and then a brief experience of its glory before being sent back into the now thoroughly hosed outside world, with an ending that implies a white reconquest of the world after the chaos. This is, absent any overt racial component, roughly Dagny's journey in Atlas Shrugged: through a world collapsing into socialism, with a brief tour of the wonders of Galt's Gulch, and then a return to the chaos outside. Her time within the Gulch is quite revealing, though. At least The Turner Diaries expressed no more complex ideological vision than "whites only by any means necessary." If we can call totalitarianism a cult of personality write large, we can fairly call the Gulch the seed of a totalitarian order in the form of a cult of the person of John Galt. Again, note that it's not really just captains of industry going on strike: it's also artists, musicians, teachers, philosophers, basically representatives of every creative or intellectual profession, all of whom are necessary for the proper function of the world because, essentially, they agree with Rand. The tour through the Gulch is just a series of people explaining why their way of doing things - their poetry, their acting, their theories of society - were spurned by the outside world that needed them because they were right. The world's rejection of these ideas is why it's acceptable for it to burn and for the overmen of the mind to remake it, and the "best" part is, the moochers and looters outside did it to themselves. We can say that in the universe of the novel, there is a cult of John Galt in the Gulch because of its name and because he's an inconsistent source of authority, claiming both that there are no rules but also a series of convenient rules he seems to spin up as needed. His symbolism is also everywhere, stamped on everything. He is the Dear Leader who started this little cult and drew all his adherents away from their old lives. But the missing totalitarian element is his personal vision of the world being enforced on everyone else. This is because everyone else there is only there because they already agree with him. The real personality cult (as incipient totalitarian state) here is of Rand herself by proxy, because it's her vision for all aspects of human society - from industry to art, from science to philosophy - that is both 100% correct and 100% necessary for the world to function. This puts a lot we already know about Rand's real-life personality cult in a more disturbing light. It isn't just a central dogmatic assertion that Rand was always right, it's the number of things she was right about, the number of things she considered both correct and mandatory in her ideal world, that tells me that the only thing that stopped her from building a totalitarian regime rivaling the one she fled is lack of opportunity. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Apr 10, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 13:25
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Cingulate posted:And my point is that we don't know how bad libertarianism will be, although we can guess it probably wouldn't be quite as bad as some of the things we've seen. quote:No, it's not, and I have no idea where you're taking any of that from. I quoted Ayn Rand to you, and you "don't know where I'm getting any of that from"? From the mouth of Ayn Rand. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 13:25
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Cingulate posted:What I take from this is that it's bad to forcefully try and convince people that they should want a different thing than what they currently want. Um, OK, thanks for this weird pseudo-reply to a point in a different conversation I guess?
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Apr 9, 2016 13:26
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VitalSigns posted:I quoted Ayn Rand to you, and you "don't know where I'm getting any of that from"? From the mouth of Ayn Rand. It really feels to me as if you're either out of laziness or willfully ignore what I'm actually going for. I absolutely don't see you responding to what I'm specifically saying, but to a strange caricature, where "contrast somebody inspired by Rand who is really careful and skeptical and full of self doubts with one that has absolute conviction with a full-on Randroid" becomes "I suggest we should 'do objectivism without the genocide'". paragon1 posted:And then there's slavery in pretty much all of the Americas, with most European colonies full of private property owners literally working people to death Comanches were a terrifying slave torture death cult, who, much like, but with bit less cognitive dissonance than the colonialists, thought they were doing the people they were torturing to death a favour. Goon Danton posted:I'm going to go ahead and take the bold stance that democracy is, in fact, good. Team Rawls Over the course of the last few years, I've been really split between Rawls and Popper (originally having read up on Rawls because of having researched Nozick). Now their outcomes isn't so much different, right? "Liberal democracy". But the reasons totally are. In their most important points, 1. Rawls notes we want a society that, regardless of by what measures, achieves that the least bad off people are as well off as possible, 2. Popper argues we want a society where the people can change course if we notice the current course sucks, because we can never, for any measure, tell what it will lead to in advance. And with that, while their hearts both fell in for basically the same kind of society, Popper directly inspired the libertarians and neo - liberals to pick him up as their forefather, whereas Rawls inspired Nozick to write a serious philosophical defense of the minimal state. Totally different responses. Yet, I'm siding with Popper here. Not so much because I'm convinced by Nozick. In fact, I'm entirely with Rawls on the notion of desert. I think desert is a bad concept. Nobody fundamentally deserves anything for what they did. As Rawls makes clear, if you're lazy, and don't work, then it's unjust to argue you don't deserve food, whereas those who're diligent and smart, and work, and get everything, also don't deserve their spoils; this is because you're born or made lazy, or smart and hard-working. So you can thank nobody but your genes and society for what you are. With that, I see nothing in the libertarian idea that we have some fundamental desert regarding our property. Private property isn't even a thing, it's an artificial construct that only exists because we have laws to such extent - private property only exists in states. But on the other hand, while all of this intuitively and logically makes sense, I'm very hesitant to build a politics on top of it, because historically, we know that such philosophies, making the most sense intuitively and logically, and promising social justice, have lead to the worst outcomes. In a sense, and I understand he's building a lot of (perhaps shaky) constructions to advert that, Rawls is putting up a bit of an ends-justify-means thing here. Society should be evaluated by which is best for the worst-off, is his point. But we never know that in advance. And in fact, building social justice top-down has again and again lead us into Gulags. So I think the first priority should be dealing with that fact - by, as the first, and most important, step, building in safeguards against this happening again. Which is why my sympathies are with "liberal democracy" in the sense of a state which is primarily defined in a negative sense - as not being authoritarian.
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Apr 9, 2016 13:32
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Cingulate posted:Yeah but I did not talk about Objectivism, and I didn't say "without genocide", I contrasted with and without strong conviction. No I understand the words you're saying but I don't understand what kind of " inspired by Rand" philosophy you're describing, if you're just going to dismiss Rand's actual egoist philosophy of industrialist supermen whose innate talents give them the moral right to crush the masses underfoot. It seems to me you're being intentionally vague about what this hypothetical person's philosophy is besides somehow Rand-inspired so you can make an empty claim about how harmless it would be. But you can say that about anything, someone "inspired by Stalin/Hitler/Beezlebub who is really careful and skeptical and full of self-doubts and has contingencies to stop his experiment if it starts turning out badly" would probably not do anything too bad either. So what.
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Apr 9, 2016 13:40
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Cingulate posted:And my point is that we don't know how bad libertarianism will be, although we can guess it probably wouldn't be quite as bad as some of the things we've seen. Nobody is actually confused about this. What you seem confused by is how an argument over whether your guess is correct has to proceed. You can't keep appealing to the unknown because we "know" what happens when people try to do socialism (we actually know no such thing because you continually identify all movements for socialism with Leninist vanguard revolutionary movements, but whatevs) but don't know what happens when we try to build libertarianism. At some point you have to actually engage with the reason people are arguing that movements for libertarianism have the same potential, and "But real world communism  " isn't actually engaging with it. Since no libertarian order actually exists or has existed, 20th century Communist states are a dead point of comparison. We know that was bad. Why should we believe that libertarianism wouldn't be worse? This is an inherently speculative argument, it requires looking at motivating ideals and the sorts of things libertarians get up to in pursuit of their goals. That Pinochet's Chile wasn't as bad as North Korea or whatever doesn't matter. The willingness of libertarian movement leaders to engage in the same sorts of justifications for the authoritarian use of power does. For gently caress's sake, deal with that already.
GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 14:00 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 13:49
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VitalSigns posted:No I understand the words you're saying but I don't understand what kind of " inspired by Rand" philosophy you're describing, if you're just going to dismiss Rand's actual egoist philosophy of industrialist supermen whose innate talents give them the moral right to crush the masses underfoot. If you are displeased with how little I am confident about : yeah, me too. But don't disrespect me by confusing this with being cowardly. As should be clear to you, I have no hesitations saying stuff that will make people angry at me (from behind the safety of an anonymous web forum, of course). My point was that we don't know what being inspired by a philosophy actually results in. Every work of political philosophy is full of words about how good and free and just and full of general welfare the society resulting this would be. This goes even for actual fascists. What I am saying is: for some books, we have seen what actually happens when political ideals are processed by humans and put into practice in the context of real societies. For many, the results are, often consistently, not pretty. And what we know about history is more informative than what we feel we can deduce from a book using logic and reason. VitalSigns posted:But you can say that about anything, someone "inspired by Stalin/Hitler/Beezlebub who is really careful and skeptical and full of self-doubts and has contingencies to stop his experiment if it starts turning out badly" would probably not do anything too bad either. So what.
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Apr 9, 2016 13:56
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GunnerJ posted:Nobody is actually confused about this. What you seem confused by is how an argument over whether your guess is correct has to proceed. You can't keep appealing to the unknown because we "know" what happens when people try to do socialism (we actually know no such thing because you continually identify all movements for socialism with Leninist vanguard revolutionary movements, but whatevs) but don't know what happens when we try to build libertarianism. At some point you have to actually engage with the reason people are arguing that movements libertarianism have the same potential, and "But real world communism
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Apr 9, 2016 13:59
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Cingulate posted:First, one question, I'll gladly respond to the rest afterwards: do you understand me as saying socialist societies have been tested and shown to be disastrous (whereas libertarian ones are untested)? I have to fill in many blanks because you seem vague on what you really mean sometimes. Here I'm responding to you saying, "...we can guess [libertarianism] probably wouldn't be quite as bad as some of the things we've seen," and from context I have to assume that the "things we've seen" that you're talking about are the Communist states of the 20th century which you are considering as attempts at building socialism. My context is this explication by you of your point: Cingulate posted:"What's at the moment salient to me is that while there has probably never been a large-scale, stable, by-the-book socialist/communist or libertarian society, we can see (not to speak for now of fascist) multiple attempts at creating the former - people who, we have all reason to believe, were truly trying to create a socialist utopia - with well-known results. And we don't really have that with libertarian societies for some reason." You appear, by the plain meaning of your words, to be arguing that attempts at building socialism tend towards tyrannical disaster, that the societies that result are hellholes dominated by a ruthless and brutal authoritarian state (again, this is an inference from context* about what you mean by "well-known results," feel free to clarify), but that libertarianism for "some reason" (another point of vagueness where I can only infer that the reason is because socialism bad) is free of this taint. I am not sure why you find this interesting to argue; I can make more inferences, but ultimately I don't care. What I want to make clear is that I don't think anyone, and certainly not I, is confused that you believe that libertarianism would not be as bad. My reply is that you can't really compare something that has happened with something that hasn't except by speculation, and your speculation has to come from somewhere, and my speculation is based on what libertarians say they believe and how they act in pursuit of their beliefs. Because that's all that I can actually go on. What is the basis for your "guess," anyway? *Editing to add what I feel is the context, in a post I actually forgot was addressed to me! Cingulate posted:I guess you could say Hoover and the Great Depression was something like that, and if I was a libertarian, I'd actually like if people swallowed that, because Hoover and the Great Depression was bad, but not Great Terror or Holodomor bad. But then, I doubt actual libertarians would call Hoover a libertarian. If you don't mean to argue that "socialist societies have been tested and shown to be disastrous (whereas libertarian ones are untested)," maybe you should clarify your point a bit more. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Apr 11, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 14:13
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GunnerJ posted:There might be an argument to be made that the native genocide thing was more about defending the U.S. because she was a huge fangirl of it as "the first nation founded on reason" or something. It was already fait accompli, she just rehearsed well-worn justifications for it. Interesting. However she supported Israel's right to drive out the Arab "savages" and colonize all of mandatory Palestine (or maybe the Middle East) because they were bringing technology and industry. So she was pro contemporary genocide by countries that aren't America as well. The rest of your post was good reading.
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Apr 9, 2016 14:17
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VitalSigns posted:Interesting. However she supported Israel's right to drive out the Arab "savages" and colonize all of mandatory Palestine (or maybe the Middle East) because they were bringing technology and industry. So she was pro contemporary genocide by countries that aren't America as well. Forgot about that. Fair enough! And thanks. 
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Apr 9, 2016 14:20
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Cingulate posted:I am intentionally vague about nothing. I am saying precisely what I am intellectually confident about, regardless of how much I like it, or think anyone else might like it. If there is ever anything where you feel I am beating around the bush, point it out, ask for clarification, I will do so. If you somehow feel I am advocating genocide or a gold standard, don't be childish about it, just ask. My intent isn't to accuse you of supporting genocide or libertarianism at all, I know you're not a Randian, I'm just discussing the problems I see with your hypothetical. I promise I'm not trying to personally attack you, and I am sorry if I've inadvertently given that impression.
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Apr 9, 2016 14:29
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GunnerJ posted:I have to fill in many blanks because you seem vague on what you really mean sometimes. Here I'm responding to you saying, "...we can guess [libertarianism] probably wouldn't be quite as bad as some of the things we've seen," and from context I have to assume that the "things we've seen" that you're talking about are the Communist states of the 20th century which you are considering as attempts at building socialism. My context is this explication by you of your point: Where I'm labelling the former as "what happens when people are inspired by Marx", the latter "communist societies", which has never existed. Cingulate fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 14:31
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VitalSigns posted:My intent isn't to accuse you of supporting genocide or libertarianism at all, I know you're not a Randian, I'm just discussing the problems I see with your hypothetical. I totally see how somebody who actually has opinions like "colonialism wasn't so bad" or "a libertarian society should be implemented", but didn't dare to say so openly, would write very similar to me. Therefore it's become important to me to make sure I am not hiding anything behind vagueness; instead, I'm very concerned with epistemological limits, and thus I'm professing genuine ignorance where others would already condemn. (No need to apologize, I just think it would be unproductive to talk past each other. We do probably have genuine points of disagreement.)
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Apr 9, 2016 14:35
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Cingulate posted:Okay, just one more thing to really get us on one level regarding my question - you do see that I clearly delineate between "real existing socialism", Stalinist we'll-be-there-at-the-end-of-the-next-5-year-plan countries, basically anything that has actually existed on one hand, and actual communism in the sense of a society confirming to what Marx (or earlier communists) have described, on the other? How about you just clarify what you actually mean since I am admitting that a lot of what I am arguing about are my inferences of your point.
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Apr 9, 2016 14:37
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'Socialism' as such is an abstraction, and causally inert. When people say that a libertarian political order would lead to mass suffering, they have specific mechanisms in mind to do the causal work: wealth disparity leading to a coercion of no alternatives, for example. But so far the only argument Cingulate has offered to think that that future hypothetical socialist political orders will lead to bad results is that past ones have - and in the absence of even a vague explanation of what social/political mechanisms are at work in each case, it boils down to attributing causal powers to 'socialism' as such, which basically just amounts to a kind of category error.
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Apr 9, 2016 14:59
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That's something I noticed too. There's what I called an argument from coincidence before, where we just observe "socialist revolutions" going bad and so "therefore socialism bad." There's no real look at why this might be the case, whether there's more complex poo poo at play than just the ideology involved. My reply has been about the specific aspects of libertarianism that resemble the seeds of authoritarian rule and "but socialism bad" doesn't really work as a response to that.
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Apr 9, 2016 15:02
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GunnerJ posted:How about you just clarify what you actually mean since I am admitting that a lot of what I am arguing about are my inferences of your point. History should inform us more than reason when settling on politics. This is because data is never false, but theories are always false to some extent. History tells us that even, or just, the best ideals - e.g., socialism - can lead to the worst outcomes - e.g., gulags - if people just buy into them hard enough. History tells us next to nothing about libertarianism. What little it has told us is basically what you find as the basis of libertarian core texts like Road to Serfdom or Anarchie, State and Utopia; that it might be good to be more skeptical of too much state than of too little, and thus, that at least one road to disaster is not probable for libertarianism. That is, the abominations that were the totalitarian systems of the 20th century are just the core inspiration for them; e.g. Hayek particularly feared government intrusion, and he was very justified in doing that. That's about as little as I would confidently claim at this time. That's precious little, right? However, I see at least Juffo-Wup disagrees, so maybe it's not entirely uncontroversial. (For reference, my original words were: "But yeah, there's never been a True Scotsman, but there's multiple guys who say they were inspired by True Scotsmanism, and they're all huge dicks. And that means something. Not sure what, but definitely something.") I guess what you can take from this is that both socialists and libertarians should be modest, but in different ways. Libertarians (those following Nozick or Hayek, not so much those following Rand) should be modest because we have zero indication from history indicating their world would be any better than this; however, they can at least argue that one path to destruction they have put some thought to. Socialists however should show they have reflected a great deal on what went wrong the last few times, hopefully figured what happened the last few times, and what mechanisms they have come up with to ensure they'd not gently caress it up this time. Edit: I should probably admit that I know very little about Hayek. Edit 2: all of this is of course in the context of anybody arguing we should change to a totally different way of living from what we are doing right now - capitalism in the context of liberal social democracy - , and justifying that. Cingulate fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 15:07
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Cingulate posted:So my basic points are: You're acting like nobody has ever inquired into the causes of Soviet totalitarianism at a more fine-grained level than 'more government/less government,' which is simply false. Scholars of Russian history are rather more busy than that would imply. Also, data is always a little false; there is always some unexplainable error in any dataset. And if our highest level of granularity is to look at specific socialist governments and ask if they were good or bad, we have an N of, what, 4, maybe 5? What do you think those error bars will look like? Luckily, we're not bound to such a high-level analysis. We can talk about specific policies, specific causes, etc. Posters in the past few pages have already identified e.g. vanguardism as the thing they think was a bad idea. Isn't that an example of exactly the sort of intellectual humility you insist that socialists need to demonstrate?
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Apr 9, 2016 15:53
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Just going to toss this out there. While it's true there hasn't really been a libertarian state as such, what about libertarian driven projects? The Seasteading institute, Bitcoin, etc, etc. It could be that there's never really been a libertarian society not because there aren't enough adherents, but because any society is extremely vulnerable to Prisoner's Dilemma situations and they always wind up collapsing in on themselves before they even get off the ground.
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Apr 9, 2016 16:03
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Oh, yeah, I forgot about those. Especially this one, which is still pretty hilarious.
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Apr 9, 2016 16:07
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Cingulate posted:So my basic points are: Let me see if I am correctly distilling your argument: We can't know how things work out by deduction from theory; we can only know how things work by looking at how they have worked out historically. We do not know how libertarianism would work out in reality because it hasn't actually been put into practice historically. However, libertarian explanations for how socialism works out match up, in terms of the outcomes they predict, to what we observe historically about socialism. Therefore, we ought to not only accept their explanation (roughly reduced to "too much state bad"), but to infer from this that the alternative libertarians propose to socialism/"more state" would not work out poorly, or at least much less poorly than socialism/"more state." (eta: I'm aware that I am putting this in more absolutist terms - "can only know" vs. "informs us more" - than you are. This is because talking about more or less informative routes allows for deduction from theory to be at least somewhat useful in the absence of historical example, which has been my point for a while.) Some points (I'm numbering them for easy reference to avoid the tedium of formatting point-by-point quote blocks): 1. Libertarian theorists have not necessarily been right about socialism/"more state" in anything but the most broad terms. I can't comment on Anarchy, State, and Utopia, but I can say that the actual explanation for why socialism/"more state" is bad which Hayek presents in The Road to Serfdom is ahistorical nonsense. His theory is that once you start ceding power to plan the economy to the state, the actual complexity of the economy will result in your plans simply never working out, and that in order to make them work out, you need to install a strongman governor to just make things work or at least control the chaos you unleashed. Does this actually correspond to the ways in which historical Communist regimes came to power? No. What he describes is a gradualist ceding of economic planning to the government, not a revolutionary movement like those that actually put Communists into power. In this, the actual history of social democracy refutes him: European nations gradually developed interventionist welfare states which often managed and planned different aspects of the economy, and this did not inevitably lead to a dictatorship. Even with a less gradualist approach, neither FDR's state interventions for dealing with the Great Depression nor the nearly centrally-planned U.S. war economy resulted in dictatorship. Further, it's worth keeping in mind that Hayek's argument was against those who claimed that Nazism was an anti-communist movement, positing instead that it actually had resulted from efforts at central planning. This is, again, ahistorical nonsense. This matters because if you're staking your confidence in libertarian outcomes on libertarian historical explanations, you're on very shaky ground. If Hayek was at all right about socialism, it was essentially by accident. 2. Let us, however, assume for the sake of argument that Hayek's historical explanations were accurate. It does not actually follow that because libertarian theorists were right about socialism/"more state" historically, we can conclude that libertarianism/"less state" would not be as bad. One can aptly diagnose a problem without being correct about a speculated alternative. Given this, the idea that we can accept libertarian theories about how libertarianism/"less state" would work out on any basis contradicts your central premise that theory is no guide to reality, only history is. If history is no guide to how libertarianism works, then we can only conclude nothing about how libertarianism would work. 3. Even so, if we can only use history as a guide to political theory, then regardless of whether a libertarian polity/society has ever existed, we can look to the actual history of the actions of these libertarian theorists as a guide. From this, it is not at all clear that libertarian theorists are actually primarily concerned with "less state" as a model to follow. Hayek "feared government intrusion" and yet had a strange willingness to accommodate an authoritarian dictator who had overthrown by military force a democratically elected government and deprived his subjects of political rights under special circumstances. Here are some stand-out quotes: quote:[A]s long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power. As you will understand, it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally, I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking in liberalism. My personal impression. . . is that in Chile . . . we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government . . . during this transition it may be necessary to maintain certain dictatorial powers, not as something permanent, but as a temporary arrangement. Temporary dictatorship powers are OK as means of shepherding in a liberal future when democratic political rights are a threat to it. Hm. What does this sound like? He also said that there are "many instances of authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under many democracies." This is roughly how he viewed Pinochet's Chile: quote:In 1978 he wrote to the London Times that he had "not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende." I see in this shades of Grover Furr's inability to find any proof that Stalin committed any crimes. Perhaps anyone who would grumble about the unfreedom of the Pinochet regime had already been thrown out of airplanes into the ocean by then? Given that what Pinochet overthrew was a democratic socialist government, we do not need to guess too much about what "liberal government" and "personal freedom" meant for Hayek if he believes that a military dictator is not obtrusive to personal freedom. (Interestingly, in this he echoes the closest thing to an actual statist philosopher we know of, Hobbes.) He does not see political rights as personal freedoms. He does not see the suspension of these rights as an intrusion of government. He does see a country in which political rights resulted in electing a socialist as "less free" than this. His letter goes on to say: quote:If Mrs. Thatcher said that free choice is to be exercised more in the market place than in the ballot box, she has merely uttered the truism that the first is indispensable for individual freedom, while the second is not. Thatcher's response to Hayek's enthusiasm in seeing Chile as a fulfillment of her vision is quite interesting to me: quote:I was aware of the remarkable success of the Chilean economy in reducing the share of Government expenditure substantially over the decade of the 70s. The progression from Allende’s Socialism to the free enterprise capitalist economy of the 1980s is a striking example of economic reform from which we can learn many lessons. We don't actually know for sure what Thatcher was replying to here, but it seems to indicate that Hayek was impatient with even a gradual, democratically mediated transition from socialism to market policy. Dictatorship in service to this goal possibly was not simply a necessary evil to him. I would say that all this at the very least complicates any argument that libertarians are averse to "more state" and that a "statist" road to serfdom is something their plans would avoid. Perhaps they are only concerned about the state in as much as it interferes with property rights and the discretion of property holders to act as they see fit. Just going by history here, you understand. 4. Even if we do not have historical examples of libertarianism in practice, we should possibly think with a bit more depth and nuance about why revolutionary attempts at socialism turned out badly. We know that Hayek was full of poo poo about this, but if we have a model for the actual mechanisms by which totalitarian rule develops, we can fruitfully apply it to theory. If we see libertarians following the same kinds of patterns of thought - such as, say, an inability or unwillingness to credit opposition as anything but proof of bad intentions, or a belief that temporary dictatorships can be trusted to produce good ends, or a skepticism of the value of political rights - then we have a great deal to worry about in libertarianism. Here, history can be our guide, because we can see libertarians following a path that we know is dangerous from history, regardless of whether "more or less state" is involved. 5. "Less state" and "more state" are not actually particularly useful models because there's no clear way to quantify the state. The number of things the state is involved in does not suffice because it doesn't tell us "how much" involvement it has, for example. The only way I can think of is by revenue: it is unambiguously the case that a government spending more is doing more things. But this just reaffirms the uselessness of "more/less state" as a frame of analysis. Does it matter what, exactly, the state is spending money on? Say we have a totalitarian regime that spends 90% of its budget on a state apparatus of terror and suppression, a secret police or what have you. If they decide to re-route this funding into a space program, would the subjects of this state be significantly less free than if it instead just cut that funding and also the revenue stream supporting it (i.e., lowered taxes)? This is an incoherent model and I am not willing to trust speculation about how things might work in reality for a set of desired policies based on it. quote:(For reference, my original words were: "But yeah, there's never been a True Scotsman, but there's multiple guys who say they were inspired by True Scotsmanism, and they're all huge dicks. And that means something. Yeah and I'm not bothering to address them because they add up to nothing but hot air and vague hand-waving. When you have a clear idea of what it means, then we can talk. quote:I guess what you can take from this is that both socialists and libertarians should be modest, but in different ways. Libertarians (those following Nozick or Hayek, not so much those following Rand) should be modest because we have zero indication from history indicating their world would be any better than this; however, they can at least argue that one path to destruction they have put some thought to. Socialists however should show they have reflected a great deal on what went wrong the last few times, hopefully figured what happened the last few times, and what mechanisms they have come up with to ensure they'd not gently caress it up this time. Perhaps we can conclude, from the generally successful and at least not tyrannical gradual approaches to a more socialist economy that Hayek falsely predicted would lead to dictatorship, that one of these lessons is more needed for its students than the other. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 16:21
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Juffo-Wup posted:Oh, yeah, I forgot about those. Especially this one, which is still pretty hilarious. Haha, this went down in Chile.
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Apr 9, 2016 16:22
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Cingulate, I appreciated your posting initially but the simplicity of the scale you place these ideologies on and your rather flippant syllogism of calls for economic or social justice from the government to societies inspired by Leninism* is pretty untrue and makes me doubt that any of your argument was in good faith, rather than just contorting to fit your preconceived notion, always offhandedly mentioned, that liberal capitalist democracy is the best society and that changing in for a more socialist model is dangerous. I think the most actually conclude from the 20th century is that attempting to start a socialist revolution in a country with large peasant class and enormous economic disparities doesn't actually produce a socialist outcome. Your analysis is shockingly shabby for someone who so gung-ho about sober self-awareness in debates like this. *(which I think was actually very bad at understanding what a truly just society would look like, and is really not reflective of modern Marxist scholarship at all) Buried alive posted:Just going to toss this out there. While it's true there hasn't really been a libertarian state as such, what about libertarian driven projects? The Seasteading institute, Bitcoin, etc, etc. It could be that there's never really been a libertarian society not because there aren't enough adherents, but because any society is extremely vulnerable to Prisoner's Dilemma situations and they always wind up collapsing in on themselves before they even get off the ground. I actually think this is closer to the reason we haven't seen a truly libertarian society more than anything else. A society truly inspired to revolutionary libertarianism, based on what I've read, isn't a society at all but a devolved group of tiny fiefdoms all composing micro-states. Maybe something like the Hanseatic league or the old swiss confederation at most, where different cities would have extremely different laws of conduct. There is an inherent paradox in pure libertarianism, where the desire not to be interfered with from above meets the desire to control your environment absolutely. How do you prevent micro societies from destructive attacks on freedom with no enforcement mechanism? Libetarian society is just he absence of society. It's like sociological satanism, it only makes sense existing in opposition to the dominant majority. If the "state" stopped existing (and the definition of what that constitutes seems to be broad enough to encompass any societies that form after the US government hypothetically vanished, for instance), some form of human organization would fill it's place, and if your definition of the mongol horde is that it constitutes a "state", then it is literally impossible to escape it. And remember, we're talking about libertarian revolution here. Cingualte, your argument abut a hypothetical sober, unideological libertarian inspired analyst who changes society very carefully versus Stalin or Pol Pot is bullshit. There have been plenty of socialist inspired reforms and movements all over the world that reflect exactly that approach, and indeed "liberal social democracy" wouldn;'t be what it is without them. The way you split up societies for comparison or come up with hypothetical societies is bullshit. For an example of a radically socialist society that exists today, look at the Zapatistas in Mexico, who have been at various time called minarchist socialists, or socialist libertarians. You can be anti-state and still know that the (American) libertarian insistence on inviolable private property is destructive. The idea that socialism exists on the opposite end of libertarisnism in a scale is incorrect. Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 16:25
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Juffo-Wup posted:You're acting like nobody has ever inquired into the causes of Soviet totalitarianism at a more fine-grained level than 'more government/less government,' which is simply false. Scholars of Russian history are rather more busy than that would imply. I agree the error bars would be fairly large. Probably too large to build a revolution on, though. (Consider that a large error bar entails that things could get even worse - much worse. Tremendously worse than Pol Pot worse.) And the more somebody displays being conscious of these facts, the less I'd be scared of them. (There is the inverse - that being scared of commies leads you into Korea, Vietnam, Pinochet, Iran etc. Okay. There is always more, and it is always worse.) I guess when pressed, I would be asking for quite a lot here. I might argue that a socialist's first and last sentence should be about how this time, there won't be Gulags. This includes their critiques of libertarianism. You can easily find faults in a philosophy, but I would claim if you look at somebody like Nozick, he was no fool - he knew what he was selling. He was not promising an utopia. He was arguing that considering there is no utopia, what sort of society can we defend as just? Oh, and can you highlight where ITT vanguardism was discussed? As a Popperian, I'm of course somewhat sensitized to the topic ... Buried alive posted:Just going to toss this out there. While it's true there hasn't really been a libertarian state as such, what about libertarian driven projects? The Seasteading institute, Bitcoin, etc, etc. It could be that there's never really been a libertarian society not because there aren't enough adherents, but because any society is extremely vulnerable to Prisoner's Dilemma situations and they always wind up collapsing in on themselves before they even get off the ground.
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Apr 9, 2016 16:31
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