Jack of Hearts posted:

Eh, I think whoever gave him that misunderstood the logic of D-K. It's more applicable to jrod than Cingulatus Taediosus imo.

Cingulate posted:

Fine with me.

As I just said: it seems to me Libertarianism in action is at worst comical. (And I guess, at best, too.)

WampaLord posted:

I guess the Triangle Shirt Factory disaster would be kinda funny if you put Benny Hill music over it.

Oh, and as someone lurking the thread, please stop posting. You're like a devil's advocate who doesn't want to admit that you're arguing just to argue.

QuarkJets posted:

Typically, libertarianism in action is a human rights disaster, an environmental catastrophe, and/or economically disastrous. There's nothing funny about that. I'd agree with your "at best", but throwing "at worst" in there implies that libertarianism is harmless, which is only true most of the time.

Cemetry Gator posted:

I feel like if practiced, libertarianism would collapse into some horrible State, since after all, what's to prevent someone from amassing power and just telling everyone to deal with it. If you're the top DRO, you have the guns, you have the people willing to fight for you, and frankly, why wouldn't they? Because of the NAP? Who's going to enforce the NAP?

I mean, really, that's the whole problem with Libertarian philosophy. It only works if you propose that human beings stop acting like human beings. That's one reason why there's never been a libertarian society.

Buried alive posted:

SeaStead has yet to even get off the ground (or I guess away from the ground, since the plan is to build a floating concrete island in international waters) but I have no doubt it will fail stupidly. Here's a choice quote from a supporter, taken from here.


"How will we handle self-defense? Why, we'll just buy stuff from arms dealers with all the fabulous wealth we'll have! The market will provide!"

That is it for Libertarianism. The market fixes everything. As to the building collapses, libertarianism considers building codes an intrusion by government on the rights of the property owner. Are they state failures? Sure, I suppose. They're also libertarian success stories.

People who are seriously gung-ho about libertarianism strike me as potentially being crackpots and at least being ignorant by definition in the same way that people who believe in an earth-centered model of the solar system would/do.

Cemetry Gator posted:

I feel like if practiced, libertarianism would collapse into some horrible State, since after all, what's to prevent someone from amassing power and just telling everyone to deal with it. If you're the top DRO, you have the guns, you have the people willing to fight for you, and frankly, why wouldn't they? Because of the NAP? Who's going to enforce the NAP?

I mean, really, that's the whole problem with Libertarian philosophy. It only works if you propose that human beings stop acting like human beings. That's one reason why there's never been a libertarian society.

Kthulhu5000 posted:

If those eight, year-old sex slaves

Captain_Maclaine posted:

If that comma placement was intentional, then and at the same time.

Cingulate posted:

So you can attack his theory of justice. Again:

A state D2 is just if it fulfills two conditions:
It originates from state D1 through the cyclic application of rules of just transfers, where
1. D1 is just,
2. just transfer is either
2a man ”mixing" his time and talent with nature,
2b people exchanging goods in a consensual manner

2a is probably uninteresting, 1 is totally up to you (Nozick allows, for the sake of the argument, a socialist society). So the key is 2b, or the lack of a 2c, both of which Nozick objects against on Kantian grounds.

VitalSigns posted:

... rules of acquisition ...

Kthulhu5000 posted:

Quantity is a quality in its own right, is it not?

But psychotic joke response to Cemetry Gator's post aside, I'd expect that to be some variant of a real libertarian response to Cemetry Gator's post (pedophilia...optional?). Basically, that the existence of authority and a state that exclusively encapsulates that authority within its bounds is just the machinations of envious and inadequate weaklings who refuse to recognize natural truths about human behavior and action, and thus work to stifle the able and strong so as to avoid being subject to those natural truths and the inferior position they would fit into should Atlas ever get himself free enough of their burdens and bindings to shrug.

And Atlas will, because humans want to be free, and it will be proven because an unnatural, mutant perversion of innate human nature (such as the state), managed by inferiors, will stagnate or collapse, and the superior individuals will be there to pick up the pieces, surviving and thriving in spite of the stifling pressures placed upon their existence. That's probably a Randian / Objectivist viewpoint, at least, but I have no doubt that you'll find some variant of it, because sneering and smug certainty in axiom, truths, and messianic awakening and revelation seems to be a core of dogmatic ideology. And libertarian ideology certainly seems as dogmatic as any other.

VitalSigns posted:

I don't know, 2a is pretty interesting to me? Let's do a thought experiment.

I'm the only survivor of a shipwreck, and I swim to an uninhabited island (state D1) which luckily enough is a verdant tropical paradise. I collect coconuts, I fish on the shore, I use wood and fire to build myself a shelter and fashion tools. The island is large enough to support a few dozen individuals, but not so large that I haven't in some way mixed my time and labor with every piece of it, so I claim ownership of it (state D2).

Then another ship wrecks off the coast and a survivor swims ashore.
"Go away" I say "this island is private property."
"I have nowhere to go," he replies, "can't I live here with you, this place has such plenty that I can eat my fill every day and you'll never even notice."
"No," I say, holding aloft my copy of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (the one prized possession which I managed to save during my escape from the wreck so many years ago), "I have properly applied the rules of acquisition herein, and this entire island belongs to me. By trespassing you are committing an unjust conversion of property, be gone or I'll stab you with this pointy spear."
"But I'll die out there! You can't send me out to die, you just can't!" he wails.
"You are proposing a violation of liberty in order to conform the world to a patterned principle that you prefer (namely, that you shouldn't have to resign yourself to drowning in the open sea just because I'm being a butt). But we've already proven that beginning from a justly-reached state, free decisions on both our parts can create a state that violates your cherished patterned principle, what you propose will require unending cycles of interference with liberty, ie a state of partial slavery. This I cannot permit, so get swimming."

(a) Is this situation just?
(b) Say the new arrival has a firearm, and he threatens to shoot me if I attempt to interfere with him coming ashore. He assures me that he will not interfere with my ability to support myself on the island because again there is such plenty that we can both have our fill. Are his actions unjust?

Cingulate posted:

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.

Cingulate posted:

lots of words about Nozick

Cingulate posted:

Same as in my post; also see Merriam-Webster or Wikipedia (with 7 further links) or Lenin's definition [of socialism] in State and Revolution.
Yours?

I'm mostly coming from having read a few words by Nozick. (I wrote a bad term paper on his criticism of Rand once, and actually went into his position on libertarianism for the sake of a D&D exchange a year or two ago.)

Like, I occasionally stumble across something Ron Paul or Ayn Rand or Herman Hoppe or Tea Party people or whoever wrote, and it always strikes me as various degrees of insanity. I don't find that at all interesting, intellectually speaking. But Nozick provides an IME conceptually very serious challenge to any redistributivist policy.

quote:

I also read post-WW2 anti-totalitarian writers - particularly Popper and Berlin - and while they're not particularly libertarian, they're close (e.g., Popper, Mises, Friedman and Hayek co-founding the Mont Pelerin Society, with Popper disengaging because he couldn't convince the others to also invite socialists for an actually open, critical debate).

quote:

That's for what I'm informed by. My understanding of libertarianism is, I don't really have one - it seems to be more of a heterogenous cluster concept than e.g. Marxism, which is rather well defined, or capitalism or democracy. E.g, Friedman supported a Basic Income, Nozick hated Rand and supported individual's and group's rights to sue firms over poisoning the environment. What we have in the real world right now seems on cursory glance more like a few loosely related cults than coherent political movements. I know there are people who somehow start at "property rights!" and end at "thus, racial segregation" or at least terrible scifi books, but again, while the existing political movement(s) may be somewhere between ridiculous and dumb, the philosophical foundation is not trivially ignored. Maybe one could cite Nozick's take on just distribution of goods here, which is a historical theory; distribution of goods is just only when every good is owned by somebody who has acquired it through a chain of just transactions. And that I would read mostly as a negative argument: that you have to argue on what philosophical grounds you dare deviating from it. So philosophical libertarianism would entail 1. a strict defense of individual rights, of negative over positive freedom, 2. a historical theory of justice.

Nessus posted:

Cingulate posted:

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.

GunnerJ posted:

I only noticed this reading Goon Danton's reply and I just gotta say that I love this lazy self-satisfied edgelord cynicism. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," huh? What's the road to heaven paved with, bad intentions? Or perhaps while a number of well meaning ideas have led to bad outcomes, we nonetheless shouldn't be reflexively suspicious of them unless we're willing to trust that actions with bad intentions or no intentions whatsoever are the most likely to have good outcomes? Perhaps also, if we're suspicious of "intuitive and logical" plans for just societies, we should be skeptical of, say, Popper's "intuitive and logical" claim that the best course is one that allows for self-correction?

This goes for "the ends justify the means" too. We all know the moral hazard of believing that the ends justify the means. But if we think about it, we can't be willing to completely discard this principle this because it'd be loving crazy because it's the basis of so much normal moral behavior that underlies a functioning society... when combined with other concepts. For example, how can we justify vaccination - which requires forcing a child to be stuck with needles and experience pain and distress - if the ends don't justify the means? Maybe there's a principle of proportionality here. And maybe we should be just as careful of the idea that the means justify the ends, because some of the most disturbing poo poo you see out of libertarians is their mock-begrudging insistence that unfortunately, total freedom requires permitting the possibility of voluntary slavery and segregation and baby markets and poo poo.

Avenging_Mikon posted:

Seriously, just put him on ignore. He used to spur interesting discussion

Jack of Hearts posted:

Cingulate, are you aware that "public" and "social" are not synonyms

Buried alive posted:

Hey Cingulate, can you respond to this? If it's plausible and productive

quote:

"How will we handle self-defense? Why, we'll just buy stuff from arms dealers with all the fabulous wealth we'll have! The market will provide!"

That is it for Libertarianism. The market fixes everything.

quote:

As to the building collapses, libertarianism considers building codes an intrusion by government on the rights of the property owner. Are they state failures? Sure, I suppose. They're also libertarian success stories.

quote:

People who are seriously gung-ho about libertarianism strike me as potentially being crackpots and at least being ignorant by definition in the same way that people who believe in an earth-centered model of the solar system would/do.

VitalSigns posted:

I don't know, 2a is pretty interesting to me? Let's do a thought experiment.

I'm the only survivor of a shipwreck, and I swim to an uninhabited island (state D1) which luckily enough is a verdant tropical paradise. I collect coconuts, I fish on the shore, I use wood and fire to build myself a shelter and fashion tools. The island is large enough to support a few dozen individuals, but not so large that I haven't in some way mixed my time and labor with every piece of it, so I claim ownership of it (state D2).

Then another ship wrecks off the coast and a survivor swims ashore.
"Go away" I say "this island is private property."
"I have nowhere to go," he replies, "can't I live here with you, this place has such plenty that I can eat my fill every day and you'll never even notice."
"No," I say, holding aloft my copy of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (the one prized possession which I managed to save during my escape from the wreck so many years ago), "I have properly applied the rules of acquisition herein, and this entire island belongs to me. By trespassing you are committing an unjust conversion of property, be gone or I'll stab you with this pointy spear."
"But I'll die out there! You can't send me out to die, you just can't!" he wails.
"You are proposing a violation of liberty in order to conform the world to a patterned principle that you prefer (namely, that you shouldn't have to resign yourself to drowning in the open sea just because I'm being a butt). But we've already proven that beginning from a justly-reached state, free decisions on both our parts can create a state that violates your cherished patterned principle, what you propose will require unending cycles of interference with liberty, ie a state of partial slavery. This I cannot permit, so get swimming."

(a) Is this situation just?
(b) Say the new arrival has a firearm, and he threatens to shoot me if I attempt to interfere with him coming ashore. He assures me that he will not interfere with my ability to support myself on the island because again there is such plenty that we can both have our fill. Are his actions unjust?

Cingulate posted:

... this is what you'll call people names over?
In the context of people arguing Sanders is a socialist, nonetheless? Like, I'll gladly concede I was a bit imprecise or incomplete with my 4-word definition that accurately captured the spirit of the issue, but this does strike me as bigoted.

Cingulate posted:

Take Rawls. Our principle of justice is: the most to the least well-off. We somehow observe the extreme case of having to decide between just two possible societies. In the usual format:

code:

Person    1   2   3   4   5   ... 99999999
Society A 1.1 1.1 1.1 1.1 1.1     1.1
Society B 1   2   2   2   2       2

In principle, the Rawlsian must prefer A.
To make matters worse, imagine person 1 is a lazy misogynist who sits on his couch all day watching reality shows and throwing beer bottles at his wife. His massively fat body is blocking the light to the solar collector. Society B is one where he is being told he will not get his Mincome check if he doesn't move his couch a bit to the left. "But I can't see the TV as well from a bit to the left, I'd be 10% less well off!" - "But if you move to the left, the solar collector will receive the sunlight necessary to run the nursery!" - Nope, Rawls says we must choose A.

Jack of Hearts posted:

When you state "x is not an element of A, by definition of A" and you choose a faulty (in this case, wholly ahistorical) definition, and then back it up by pointing at a dictionary and saying "yuh huh, this one line shows that my paper-thin understanding of the topic is actually very true and correct," yes, that calls for extensive mockery.

What definition of "bigoted" are you using, anyway? I think according to M-W you will find you are incorrect.

Cingulate posted:

but this does strike me as bigoted.

Jack of Hearts posted:

I cheerfully grant that I'm prejudiced against Cingulate, for continuing to masturbate onto my computer screen, in threads which are otherwise interesting.

paragon1 posted:

That's not prejudice that's just good ol' fashioned responding rationally to external stimuli.

Who What Now posted:

Taking an actual position and not your usual wishy-washy cowardly bullshit.

Cingulate posted:

(We can ask GoonDanton.)

quote:

Take Rawls. Our principle of justice is: the most to the least well-off. We somehow observe the extreme case of having to decide between just ttwo possible societies. In the usual format:

code:

Person    1   2   3   4   5   ... 99999999
Society A 1.1 1.1 1.1 1.1 1.1     1.1
Society B 1   2   2   2   2       2

In principle, the Rawlsian must prefer B.
To make matters worse, imagine person 1 is a lazy misogynist who sits on his couch all day watching reality shows and throwing beer bottles at his wife. His massively fat body is blocking the light to the solar collector. Society B is one where he is being told he will not get his Mincome check if he doesn't move his couch a bit to the left. "But I can't see the TV as well from a bit to the left, I'd be 10% less well off!" - "But if you move to the left, the solar collector will receive the sunlight necessary to run the nursery!" - Nope, Rawls says we must choose A.

Is this a good argument that would convince a Rawlsian that Rawls was wrong? Probably not. (We can ask GoonDanton.) It sounds like a lovely, contrived example that would convince nobody.
I have the intuition the libertarian is going to approach your example like that, too.

Goon Danton posted:

Cingulate posted:

I think we've had precisely this discussion before, albeit in the context of convincing libertarians, where I argued that I personally can't really imagine convincing anyone with these extreme examples. The Lil Wayne example is about how in a redistributivist setting, injustice arises not only in the extreme case of a genuine psychopath settling on the only island near a shipwreck with lots of survivors, but in every single work-related activity a person does. From this, you can easily come up with infinitely many infinitely worse extreme cases arising in a non-libertarian society.

Cingulate posted:

Like, seriously, do you believe you can't come up with such examples for any other way of defining justice? Take Rawls.

Cingulate posted:

...
I'll say, I didn't originally respond because I thought, yeah, I guess you basically got it. But I'll play devil's advocate instead now, trying to take the perspective Nozick might have taken, to my limited, but best understanding of his work. I think it can be very interesting to explore the implications of taking serious some of these ideas.

quote:

[lots of words and examples justifying a minimal state, however large that actually is]

quote:

Do you get the point I'm making? I'm saying, if genuinely cashed out, a libertarian philosophy might not lead to a libertarian policy. There is a lot of wiggle room and ambiguity, and political realities to explore.
Let's not too quickly dismiss the libertarian cause. What are the trade-offs? Maybe overall, across all of society, there is less pain even if in some aspects there is more. But more importantly, Nozick is not arguing that the just society is necessarily the most utilitarian. He is saying that taking such an utilitarian stance - allowing utilitarian arguments over personal liberty - necessarily leads one into highly undesirable states, because once you consider what philosophical step you would have to take to justify intrusion here, you're necessarily allowing all kinds of other, eventually fatal, insults to people..
...

TLM3101 posted:

Okay, since Cingulate brought it up offhand, let's talk about social democracy in Northern Europe and it's history.

Say hello to the man responsible for why my country is the way it is today, Einar Gerhardsen. Of things to note here, which the English version of the article doesn't go into, but which a new biography about Gerhardsen that I have been reading does, Gerhardsen wasn't just a communist, he was an out-and-out Stalinist, before he ended up breaking with that particular branch of communism before WW2.

This, however, did not change his underlying philosophy all that much!

Throughout his political career, he had ties to the USSR and the soviet communists, and he was an ardent socialist who remained heavily inspired by Marx. The policies his government instituted included the beginnings and development of our welfare-state, heavy state planning of the economy, state-ownership of companies in pretty much every market sector (power-generation, telecom, broadcasting, construction. mining, shipping, lumber, fishing, dairy, etc. etc. ). Nor were these ideas confined to Norway. Northern European social democracy is - at its most basic - built by communists who didn't fancy the purges and totalitarian methods Stalin employed and sought a different route towards a socialist society, informed by the idea that capitalism can be an alright thing, as long as it's heavily regulated and not allowed its usual excesses.

So for you, Cingulate, to hold up Northern Europe as some glorious example of capitalist supremacy is... quite ironic, given that our current governments are built on foundations that were explicitly anti-capitalist and in many cases out-and-out communist.

Make of that what you will.