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SedanChair posted:As Caro returned, so too shall jrodefeld be returned to us I love how every thread I read is buzzing about this. The return of a legend, thought lost to the aged (and a Syrian death camp)
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Apr 9, 2016 16:34
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Sedge and Bee posted: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 true Sedge and Bee posted:... 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
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Apr 9, 2016 16:35
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Cingulate posted:Oh, and can you highlight where ITT vanguardism was discussed? As a Popperian, I'm of course somewhat sensitized to the topic ... GunnerJ posted:But on the subject of "managing to convince the masses to support their revolution," let's talk about Lenin. You keep hedging about Leninist influence in 20th century Communist countries: They all "explicitly refer to Marx, and most to Lenin." Most? What's the counterexample? As far as I know all (I'm willing to be more confident about "nearly all") the Communist regimes of the 20th century had an ideology that descended from Leninism, which was an adaptation of Marx to making revolution in a country where the people supposedly aren't politically conscious enough to support a revolution without the example of a dedicated cadre of professional revolutionaries leading as a party. Do you suppose there is any significance to this? In terms of how these Communist revolutions played out? Especially when the other Marxist road led to labor parties and social democracy? Considering all the other conceptual cribbing of Marxism and radical socialism libertarians get up to, it is not hard to conceive of a vanguard libertarian revolutionary ideology.
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Apr 9, 2016 16:36
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Cingulate posted:Oh, and can you highlight where ITT vanguardism was discussed? As a Popperian, I'm of course somewhat sensitized to the topic ... I can already see that I've been beaten to the punch here, but it was "discussed" in direct reply to your discomfort at identifying the influence of Leninism in 20th century Communism.
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Apr 9, 2016 16:38
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Cingulate posted:Sorry, I can't parse this. What do you mean? Pretty untrue. Edited post, see above Cingulate posted:Sorry, I can't parse this. What do you mean? But you makes assertions that assume libertarian inspired reformers like Hayek would be safer that socialist inspired ones. Above you just declared Bernie Sanders no true socialist, despite him explicitly calling himself that. You completely ignore the socialist elements in your beloved liberal social democracy. Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 16:48
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Sedge and Bee posted: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. This is a good point. Libertarians are very sensitive to the excesses of state power, but completely unable to acknowledge the possibility of unjust non-state power so long as certain forms of contractual consent are observed. In this, we do have models of what libertarianism would look like in practice: in as much as it would entail a complete lack of any regulation of business, we can look to the history of capitalism when a regulatory regime similar to what they want prevailed. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 16:53
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Sorry for this being such a messy post GunnerJ. I basically think you're making good points and I'm only pointing out where I am skeptical. However, you're still somehow reading me as somebody who's in favour of a libertarian system, which continues to confuse me. GunnerJ posted: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. And it's always much easier to say what does not work. We can see what really sucks. GunnerJ posted: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. GunnerJ posted:1. Libertarian theorists have not necessarily been right about socialism/"more state" in anything but the most broad terms. I'm not making a point much deeper than 1984 here. GunnerJ posted: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. Again, as far as very trivial points go: the truth seems to be somewhere in the middle. GunnerJ posted: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. GunnerJ posted: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. Next, quantities matter. Pinochet was bad, but he was not particularly bad as far as dictators go. You could probably place him somewhere on the same level as Castro on the Tyrant Mass Murders scale, that is, on the lowest rungs. This is an important data point, and we must not think categorically, but in quantities. GunnerJ posted: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. Cingulate fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 16:55
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Cingulate posted: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. Cingulate posted:I wouldn't want to put all socialists into the same box, even when excluding people called socialist in the US, like Sanders, who are clearly not socialist by most standards. Apparently the "something" it means is that you're allowed to say that No True Socialist would be anything but a huge dick?
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Apr 9, 2016 16:55
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Cingulate posted:Sorry for this being such a messy post GunnerJ. Dude, I loving put numbers in for easy reference. Jesus Christ. I'm being pithy because I don't have time to deal with this but please consider using the numbers. 
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Apr 9, 2016 16:57
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GunnerJ posted:Dude, I loving put numbers in for easy reference. Jesus Christ. I'm being pithy because I don't have time to deal with this but please consider using the numbers. Sedge and Bee posted:But you makes assertions that assume libertarian inspired reformers like Hayek would be safer that socialist inspired ones. Above you just declared Bernie Sanders no true socialist, despite him explicitly calling himself that. You completely ignore the socialist elements in your beloved liberal social democracy. Is it my beloved liberal social democracy because only I love it and with this, you're telling me you disagree, and that we should not be conservative about moving away from something like Sweden? GunnerJ posted:Apparently the "something" it means is that you're allowed to say that No True Socialist would be anything but a huge dick? Sanders doesn't strike me as revolutionary. He'd move the US a bit to the European center I guess? (I'd probably vote for Clinton, but only because I'm more afraid of Trump than excited for Sanders.) Cingulate fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 17:00
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Cingulate posted:Okay, sorry. I'll clean it up and ping you when it's done, but that'll take a day or so - contrary to all indications, I do have a semblance of a life occasionally. I was joking, man. I'm in the same boat.
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Apr 9, 2016 17:40
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Argh I think I just understood one misunderstanding. There seems to be the perception that I'm reluctant to call Sanders a socialist, even though he himself proudly wears that label, because I'm somehow trying to avoid admitting that there aren't exclusively murderous revolutionaries on the left - that I'm reluctant to apply that label because I'm trying to avoid giving socialism some deserved credit. That's not what I'm going for. Instead, I'm reluctant to call him a socialist because he is not, by the definition of the word, one; in the sense that he does not call for public ownership of the means of production. The right likes to paint this picture of there on the left being exclusively murderous revolutionaries - like, Pussy Riot and China and Sanders and the gays are all united in being Cultural Marxists and socialists. As if, if you elect Obama, next thing you have reeducation camps because left = socialist = Stalinist. But no. I'm simply not calling him a socialist because he's not, but rather a social democrat, and social democracy is not socialism; they're similar, but different in important aspects. (And in case that's still unclear, I'm of course not trying to say socialism = Stalinism, or socialism = murderous revolutions. I'm simply trying to be a little bit precise in my wordings.) GunnerJ posted:I was joking, man. I'm in the same boat.
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Apr 9, 2016 17:46
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Saw the thread had 53 new replies and thought Jrod was back. But nope, still just Cingulate simultaneously claiming it's impossible to know anything but also that he knows for sure that Libertarianism is better than Socialism.
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Apr 9, 2016 18:25
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No what I'm saying is that your hypothetical libertarian social organizer who is calm and measured in his recommendations versus revolutionary socialism is an unfair comparison, and that socialism moderated by pragmatism exists everywhere. Your contention that a revolutionary libertarian movement would not engage in monstrous acts is very unfounded, especially since so many of their prominent thinkers expouse the idea of ethnic cleansing and exclusion of social undesirables as actual good things. Similarly, while all left wing movements are not socialist, things like socialized medicine undoubtedly are, as (I would argue) are calls for domestic industry and production in a globalized world, something that earlier eras of socialism didn't content with nearly to the same degree. If your definition of socialist is only someone who advocates for the total collective ownership of the means of production, I don't think you are using it in the same way most people are. It's not a definition of socialist that exists within modern society, apart again from explicitly revolutionary movements that seek to overthrow and supplant an existing social order and force a populace to comply, which is not something that Marx ever talks about. That comes from Lenin and Mao. I would say there's an ontological problem with grouping both the US and Sweden into "liberal capitalist social democracy". That term send incredibly vague and allows far too much difference in examples. If capitalism includes all societies where private ownership of the means of production dominated, then is includes societies with horrific death tolls, including many authoritarian movements. If you will argue that libertarianism is not capitalist, you'll have to abandon most of the major libertarian thinkers as unrepresentative, since they argue for an explicitly capitalist version of property rights. There are also plenty of cultures that have social ownership systems that don't explicitly come from Marx, so if how you define socialism is simply those directly inspired by Marx, that's also a very reductive sample compared to what you allow for with capitalism. These ideas are all tied together but you seem to try to separate them into to distinct categories: socialist = statism inspired by Marx and advocating for collective ownership, and libertarian = anti-statism inspired by figures like Rothbart but apparently not necessarily capitalist in their division of property. That's a ridiculous division, especially since, again, groups like the Zapatistas are Marxist but anti-state, and in fact anti-statism and Marxism have coexisted quite often (just not in Leninism or its descendant movements), and Rothbart and Hayek are explicitly capitalist in their arguments. You can make the argument that libertarianism is untested, unlike Marxism, so we can't compare them directly on terms of merit, but can be skeptical of calls for Marx-inspired revolutionary socialism based on experience. You cannot then also state that you believe that an implementation of revolutionary libertarianism would be more benign, because anti-statist ideas are less prone to purges. Treating socialism and libertarianism as stand-ins for pro-state and anti-state is totally false. Socialism is not synonymous with a strong or autocratic central government, or a planned economy (and the idea that you would credit modern Sweden with capitalist liberalism alone is ridiculous). In the same vein, the pro-capitalist with little or no control stance of libertarian arguments definitely has existed in some forms in the past, so you can't claim it's untested purely because no movements exist directly using a chosen text as inspiration for social reorganization, but then claim to extrapolate from general anti-statism, without broadening your definition of examples of socialism a lot. You're not being consistent in what is or what is not included in these definitions. Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 18:28
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Cingulate posted:Including before the arrival of Europeans, even! This is a small detail but I think it is worth addressing because it is factually incorrect. The Comanche were initially part of the Shoshone in Wyoming, and they emerged as a distinct group by breaking away and moving south in the late 17th to early 18th century. The Spanish had been established in this Texas/New Mexico region for about a hundred years by this time. Features of Comanche martial culture that allowed them to dominate a large area of the Southwest, like cavalry raiding tactics and the use of firearms, clearly result directly from contact with Europeans. The Comanche may even have developed their distinctive brutality as a response to or an imitation of the Spanish soldiers they encountered, whose behavior towards indigenous people in the New World generally and the Southwest particularly is well documented. Outrages committed by Francisco de Coronado and Juan de Oñate took place significantly earlier, in 1540 and 1598 respectively, but New Mexico was restive and difficult to colonize so the process was still ongoing. At the same time Comanches were arriving in the area, the Spanish were suppressing a revolt by the Pueblo and Hopi people, characterized by summary execution of men and mass enslavement of women and children. It would be impossible to show conclusively that the Comanche, so to speak, "learned it from watching you, dad". But on the other hand the other Shoshone peoples, who had much more limited contact with Europeans until much later, conducted their military affairs rather differently. This is not to say that Native Americans were somehow an innocent race, because they had about the same aptitude for cruelty as human beings in any part of the world and various peoples had their own traditions of slavery, torture, massacre, and so on. It's just that your example of the Comanche was poorly chosen. It's more usual to cite the Aztec or Maya as examples of pre-Columbian indigenous atrocities, and those cases would have had the benefit of being factually correct. I'm actually sort of wondering why you hit on the Comanche first, and the only thing I can think of is that the Daily Mail and some other reactionary publications (plus Stormfront) ran articles about "the real Comanche" in response to the Johnny Depp remake of the Lone Ranger.
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Apr 9, 2016 19:33
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Cingulate posted:... In the sense that for most of history pro business seems to equal pro atrocity, yes. I'm concerned about that. At this point I'm going to echo others and just say I'm not entirely sure what your overall point is. It seems to breakdown like this: Real for-realsies socialist socialism has historically led to tyrants. It's bad. Real for-realsies liberty libertarianism has never been tried. It's an unknown. Which..is true enough, I guess? But then you've got this: Cingulate posted:I would say we have plenty of reason to be super conservative about deviating away from the best societies we see today: northern Europe, the US north east/California, Australia (plus perhaps Japan/Korea and places like Singapore). Do you disagree? I don't know details, but I'm pretty sure those places are explicitly way more socialist (socialist-like?) than most of the world today, except for China and..I guess Russia? I don't really know wtf is going on with Russia these days. So it sounds like you're saying most of the world could stand to have a decent more bit of socialism in the mix, but not so much that you go into full on tyrant-mode. If that's your primary point then fine, if not then I'm just  Actually, even if that is your primary point then I'm still because libertarianism argues specifically against doing that, so what the hell are you up to in this thread?
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Apr 9, 2016 20:00
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I'd like to point out again that autocratic rule tends to be the natural outcome of revolution, not just communist/socialist revolution. Cingulate posted:... thought they were doing the people they were torturing to death a favour. This is a great description of modern popular capitalism
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Apr 9, 2016 20:20
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Cingulate posted:Yes, I generally think libertarians rather dogmatically ignore the obvious evidence that the best societies have a lot more state than their theories would predict, that there doesn't seem to be a strict trend in the sense of less state = better. More accurately, the truth is that there is no ideal amount of state, whatever that even means.
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Apr 9, 2016 20:21
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Look at this awful formatting I am forced to adopt, much as I struggled to avoid it.Cingulate posted:However, you're still somehow reading me as somebody who's in favour of a libertarian system, No, I'm not. I reading you as someone making a comparative argument about such a system. I would like to know what I said which gave this impression, that I think you're in favor of libertarianism, but it isn't what I believe and is not what the basis for my argument. quote:Nope. We can't know anything. History will never predict the future. But it's a less awful predictor of the future than reason and theory, which is particularly terrible, sadly. What is this distinction accomplishing? What have we moved forward with it? I can reword everything I wrote to be in terms of degrees of certainty rather than binary understanding-or-not and nothing about my argument would change, except that I wouldn't make it then because I could just reiterate my prior point that if deduction from theory is less informative than learning from history, it is nonetheless informative lacking any historical example. This is boring and tedious. quote:In a way, yes - but also, that's not too bad. This is more of your weird vague style here that makes it really difficult to actually engage with your arguments. "Not too bad" isn't a particularly strong or interesting evaluation and it doesn't become meaningful or more worth paying attention to by putting it in italics except by insinuation. Who cares? Was I even arguing that they did poorly? I may have said that about Hayek, but what I was arguing was that Hayek, as an example you raised and which I am familiar with, was not good enough at analyzing communism to support your argument. (And by the way, since he's one of your go-to examples of how they got it right, I think you don't get to just write off his ideologically complex defense of military dictators as just some personal oopsie. His defenses of Pinochet descended from his ideals.) So, sure, let's call it not too bad. Was it good enough? Because from where I am sitting he looks like a broken clock. quote:Okay, yes, but two things. First, we should never actually begin to make the theory we get out of that into a dogma. Say we have a theory of how societies become totalitarian, and thus, how to prevent that, and we want to do the next revolution under that banner. We still need to always ensure there is a road back, and a road left, and a road right - that there is an option to correct mistakes as we go along. What does this mean? It has nothing to do with my argument. I am not arguing anything more than that you're not looking at this poo poo with enough nuance to get anywhere interesting. There's no implicit gameplan here. This is about analyzing ideologies that haven't been put into practice according to how much their adherents resemble, in their plans and concepts, those of ideologies which have been put into practice. quote:Next, quantities matter. Pinochet was bad, but he was not particularly bad as far as dictators go... Who gives a poo poo? What do I have to do to convince you that I'm not comparing Pinochet to anyone else? My only point is that Hayek's defenses of the Pinochet regime are of interest for what they say about Hayek, someone you are using as an exemplar of libertarian ideology. Quantities do not matter for that. quote:And I would say how comparatively good the world is right now - that is, bad, but much better than anything else we've seen so far - shows that society having really taken in the other lesson was extremely good. Look, I don't want to sound like an rear end in a top hat but there's no non-rear end in a top hat way of saying this: if you're so interested in the lessons of history, maybe you should educate yourself a bit more on the history of the subjects you're interested in here. Because the vague social-democratic model we agree is pretty good was not a result of "learning the lessons of Communism." Social democracy as a project predates the Russian Revolution. It developed out of (and in opposition to) a different methodology for pursuing socialism, the mass labor party, which united the interests of various diverse labor unions into a political force that could make change through electoral politics. There's a pretty good argument to be made that the 20th century successes of social democracy in Europe and welfare state policies in the U.S. were not the result so much of learning lessons from Communist failure but of capitalist panic at a Communist threat making these policies palatable as a way of placating any revolutionary impulse. This is also something that has 19th century roots in Bismark. If anything, the world has learned the exact wrong lesson from the collapse of Communism, similar to the stuff you're peddling here: that because communism was bad, pure capitalism, as its opposite, is good. That is why this social-democratic model is actually under threat today and anyone still defending it is cast as a neo-Bolshevik radical. I can't really speak well to what the deal is with Jeremy Corbyn in the UK (based on some of the spelling you use, I'm pretty sure you have a better picture of that than I do), but over here, the party of the New Deal and Social Security and Medicare is busy calling Bernie Sanders a radical dreamer for supporting policies that have worked for decades in Europe. It wasn't the Republicans who gutted welfare in the 1990s, and Obama didn't turn back Bush's market-oriented education reforms. This argument is strange in that I can't really tell what your actual agenda is, just on the level of what's at stake for you, so I'll put out there what's at stake for me: I can't take this very solemn caution from you about revolutionary socialism seriously because the example you're pointing to, Communism of the 20th century, is loving dead. Has been for years. In the gap it left behind we do not find a practical and useful set of middle ground policies, we find a resurgent ideological capitalism that seeks to undo any middle ground between itself and socialism in the name of efficiency, "austerity," innovation, and willing to paint any opposition from the left in bright red. When it comes to libertarianism, I don't expect to see them actually getting together and implementing their ideology. They are useful idiots for the actual power players with a much more serious ideological program, but it is worth noting the seeds of a latent authoritarianism within them, because useful idiots can be useful for a great may more things than vague moral support for lower taxes. Speaking of Sanders, Cingulate posted:Argh I think I just understood one misunderstanding. Why does "the definition of the word" suddenly matter so much to you? All this crap started when I made a point that we can't let "No True Scotsman" be an excuse for evaluating terms based on the actions of whoever self-applies them, because we need to be able to actually define terms in order to use them and not all things which have the term as a label really qualify. You found it very important at that time to note that "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," which "means something" (this was important enough for you to note despite not actually knowing what it means). But now when it comes to good old Uncle Bernie, weeellllll he's not technically a socialist, for u see, the definition of the word...! What motivates this about-face on the subject of whether we should just let anything that calls itself socialism reflect on socialism? If it "means something" that people you admit aren't actually socialists nonetheless do awful things in its name, why can't it "mean something" that Sanders calls himself a socialist despite not fitting some definition and yet does not really seem prone to usher in revolutionary atrocities? Make up your mind. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Apr 10, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 22:02
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Cingulate posted:There seems to be the perception that I'm reluctant to call Sanders a socialist, even though he himself proudly wears that label, because I'm somehow trying to avoid admitting that there aren't exclusively murderous revolutionaries on the left - that I'm reluctant to apply that label because I'm trying to avoid giving socialism some deserved credit. That's not what I'm going for. Instead, I'm reluctant to call him a socialist because he is not, by the definition of the word, one; in the sense that he does not call for public ownership of the means of production. It's true that Sanders is a social democrat and not a socialist, but that's a terrible definition you've chosen, which makes me think you don't understand the topic at all.
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Apr 9, 2016 22:18
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Jack of Hearts posted:It's true that Sanders is a social democrat and not a socialist, but that's a terrible definition you've chosen, which makes me think you don't understand the topic at all. That's been my conclusion as well, yeah.
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Apr 9, 2016 22:25
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I think we're giving too much of a pass to the claim there there has never been a "libertarian-inspired" nation. Not only am I quite comfortable calling at least the last 30 years of genocidal US oligarchy libertarian-inspired, but Cingulate's framing also ignores the fact that libertarian ideology is itself created to justify past atrocities. This is the real reason that a True Libertarian country will never arise: there is no such thing as true libertarianism. If you want to take a look at a libertarian country, either gaze back to feudalism (for the DRO fetishists) or to the pre-Emancipation USA/CSA (for the extreme white supremacists) or to the Gilded Age (for the Koch types). These are the societies that libertarianism is created to propagandize for, and I'll take the USSR over them 100% of the time. It's also worth pointing out that the threat of revolution gave us most of the things that make the modern US less of a hellscape than it was 100 years ago. If you want to throw out the USSR then the New Deal goes with it, etc.
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Apr 9, 2016 22:52
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=?x5nrspbLGcI So this is a thing. Walter Block thinks Donald Trump should be the libertarian nominee, because of course he does. The latter half is also good and contains gems such as blocks opinion that age of consent laws should be determined by private courts (what could go wrong) and a new concept for him called 'precluding'. Precluding is apparently his solution to the idea of someone wrapping their land around an enormous bit of virgin(he says Virgin a lot. It is creepy.) land and preventing others from accessing it. Block argues that this should be a crime in a libertarian society, since you haven't jammed your dick into that soil and thus shouldn't have control over it. It is worth mentioning that at no point doe he actually explain why that is wrong. If I happen to have a bit of unclaimed land in the middle of my property that is unfortunate but there is no reason I should have to allow people to cross my land. It is literally him just declaring by fiat without logical argument which is awesome. In addition none of this covers encirclement, Wherein I circle your land with mine and blackmail you to leave, but I'm sure that is just illegal on his say so as well. The icing on the cake however is why he brings up preclusion. You see, toward a the end he brings up babies and the rothbard 'do I have to feed this' conundrum. Under his idiot view of negative only rights there is no necessity to feed the child, but because of this magical new concept of preclusion (which he made up and does not follow from his other arguments) you are required to bring the baby to the police/hospital/orphanariam/etc. You are required to do this because you are clearly not homesteading the baby and are thus Precluding others for doing so. 
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Apr 9, 2016 23:41
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So under these libertarian theories, if General Zod showed up he'd just get the whole planet fair and square, right? Or would the planet be considered Superman's property by right of first arrival? I ask because even the whitest of Aryans would be as nothing compared to the power of a Kryptonian underneath the light of a yellow sun.
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Apr 9, 2016 23:49
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Caros posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=?x5nrspbLGcI See, this is a good illustration of why a Libertarian society would be among the worst societies we've ever had at best. "You can't let this baby die! It's needed to work in the salt mines!"
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Apr 9, 2016 23:49
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Yeah, that's some morality alright. "Now, I could just let this baby starve on my lawn as is only just and right, but I'd possibly be aggressing against Hoppe's Child Labor Emporium demand for tiny oilers for steel-folding machines. Guess I'll give it a ride to the workhouse out of the goodness of my heart...wonder if that qualifies me as a charity, in fact!"
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Apr 10, 2016 00:00
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No, that's stupid. Stop misrepresentating libertarianism Since you found a baby on your property, it's now your property. You're free to raise it as your own, use it for food, sell it to the HHH salt mines, etc. You certainly don't have to remove it from your land for no profit; doing so would only encourage more infants to wander onto your property looking for free rides
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Apr 10, 2016 00:08
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Sedge and Bee posted:No what I'm saying is that your hypothetical libertarian social organizer who is calm and measured in his recommendations versus revolutionary socialism is an unfair comparison EvanSchenck posted:I'm actually sort of wondering why you hit on the Comanche first, and the only thing I can think of is that the Daily Mail and some other reactionary publications (plus Stormfront) ran articles about "the real Comanche" in response to the Johnny Depp remake of the Lone Ranger.  ), I came upon the topic in the context of I think Blood Meridian or Empire of the Summer Moon, and then read a few old reports on it. I was in fact always a bit worried about the accuracy of said reports, considering the reporters had every reason to make the Comanche look as bad as possible, but it seems even you are not arguing they weren't bad - just that they were bad due to colonialist influence. Hopefully without opening another can of worms: everyone has a reason for how they are. That doesn't mean everything one is can be blamed on that reason (to the extent that anything can be blamed).I appreciate your historical input though. Buried alive posted:In the sense that for most of history pro business seems to equal pro atrocity, yes. I'm concerned about that. At this point I'm going to echo others and just say I'm not entirely sure what your overall point is. It seems to breakdown like this: I'm not in this thread to make any super controversial points, e.g., about how I have a totally cool novel argument for why libertarianism is the bomb and we should totally kill all the unionists. Can I be in this thread without whenever I say something really quite trivial and banal, people flip out? I also have some actually controversial opinions and would totally be willing to share them though!!! Jack of Hearts posted:It's true that Sanders is a social democrat and not a socialist, but that's a terrible definition you've chosen, which makes me think you don't understand the topic at all. Mornacale posted:I think we're giving too much of a pass to the claim there there has never been a "libertarian-inspired" nation. Not only am I quite comfortable calling at least the last 30 years of genocidal US oligarchy libertarian-inspired, but Cingulate's framing also ignores the fact that libertarian ideology is itself created to justify past atrocities. This is the real reason that a True Libertarian country will never arise: there is no such thing as true libertarianism. If you want to take a look at a libertarian country, either gaze back to feudalism (for the DRO fetishists) or to the pre-Emancipation USA/CSA (for the extreme white supremacists) or to the Gilded Age (for the Koch types). These are the societies that libertarianism is created to propagandize for, and I'll take the USSR over them 100% of the time.
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Apr 10, 2016 00:30
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Cingulate posted:
Why did you even bring them up as a point at all, since the original context was pointing out deaths that can be directly attributed to capitalism and capitalistic motivations? paragon1 fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Apr 10, 2016 |
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Apr 10, 2016 00:46
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Cingulate posted:
Sensible for who? Plenty of groups in history have decided that the appropriate response to the lower classes getting uppity instead of quietly starving in poverty and working themselves to death for their betters is mass slaughter, and then gone on to succeed in that method's implementation.
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Apr 10, 2016 00:50
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paragon1 posted:Why did you even bring them up as a point at all, since the original context was pointing out deaths that can be directly attributed to capitalism and capitalistic motivations? Because IMO western civilization is much better than a lot of people give it credit for. Or alternatively, almost every other way of being is much worse than a lot of people give them credit for. paragon1 posted:Sensible for who? Plenty of groups in history have decided that the appropriate response to the lower classes getting uppity instead of quietly starving in poverty and working themselves to death for their betters is mass slaughter, and then gone on to succeed in that method's implementation.
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Apr 10, 2016 00:53
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Cingulate posted:Ah: controversial opinion time! So you think that indigenous people were uncultured savages that the white man did a favor by "uplifting"?
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Apr 10, 2016 00:57
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Cingulate posted:No, that's a 100% accurate summary. You have perfectly grasped and rephrased the essence of my position. (Maybe the dissonance you perceive would disappear once I could convince you that I am, contrary to public opinion, not in fact pro libertarian, but, as I have repeatedly stated, helplessly skeptic first and a social democrat second?) I'm gonna ask that you maybe do some introspection about whether you're really accurately able to gauge the "popular opinion" of your opinions because I don't see anyone here acting as if you are in favor of libertarianism. This is a subtle distinction to have to make, in fairness, because multiple people are responding to arguments of yours that offer a soft defense of libertarianism, which one can offer without being a proponent.
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Apr 10, 2016 00:59
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GunnerJ posted:I'm gonna ask that you maybe do some introspection about whether you're really accurately able to gauge the "popular opinion" of your opinions because I don't see anyone here acting as if you are in favor of libertarianism. This is a subtle distinction to have to make, in fairness, because multiple people are responding to arguments of yours that offer a soft defense of libertarianism, which one can offer without being a proponent.
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Apr 10, 2016 01:10
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Cingulate posted:Because IMO western civilization is much better than a lot of people give it credit for. Or alternatively, almost every other way of being is much worse than a lot of people give them credit for. Now you can certainly make a case that what you could call the liberal democratic consensus does seem to be, broadly speaking, the best method of social organization we've got thus far. This doesn't mean we'll never come up with another better, nor that there aren't spaces within that which we could move towards. What is galling too is when a mere motion towards social democratic ideas is treated as some inevitable dive towards Pol Pot, while of course any criticism of capitalism needs an exculpatory apology. Hardly fair play there.
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Apr 10, 2016 01:28
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Cingulate posted:
....alright, now I'm stumped. Pretty much every single libertarian author (really; there's no controversy on this issue) consider the New Deal toxic, and many claim that it CAUSED the Depression. Many more claim it extended the crisis and was worse than doing nothing and just allowing the Free Market to fix itself, which the big bad government prevented. What is your exposure to current libertarian figures, if I might ask?
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Apr 10, 2016 01:36
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Nessus posted:What is galling too is when a mere motion towards social democratic ideas is treated as some inevitable dive towards Pol Pot, while of course any criticism of capitalism needs an exculpatory apology. Hardly fair play there. This is an important point I think. Everyone engaging with Cingulate is under the impression that they are having some kind of discussion about political philosophy, but Cingulate isn't playing that game; the discussion C's trying to engage is something about the degree to which socialists should cringe and scrape when they discuss political philosophy. They're just fundamentally different conversations.
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Apr 10, 2016 01:41
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No, I'm aware of that.
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Apr 10, 2016 01:52
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Cingulate posted:I'm not good on US history, but wasn't the New Deal basically the only sensible response to the Great Depression? Consider the huge push for austerity in response to the 2008 depression. It's clear that the "only sensible response" the economic disasters is not always pursued without the ruling class having its hand forced. It's also a great example of how libertarian principles have been put into practiced and resulted in widespread poverty, misery, and death.
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Apr 10, 2016 02:01
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Cingulate posted:What definition would you prefer? Cingulate: A Socrates gone completely worthless. The "public ownership of the means of production" is not even implicit in socialism.
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Apr 10, 2016 02:23
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