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Saying that the state has a monopoly on violence, first of all, isnt true in the way you are implying - it has final say over which violence is allowed and legitimate, yes, but disallowed violence still happens all the the time and theres plenty of violence the state allows but does not engage in itself. Your quotes even back this up, narrowing it down with several qualifiers. I am not arguing with a foundation of political theory, I am arguing with the purpose to which you attempting to apply it. Thats like saying the state has a monopoly on corporations, because a corporation can't exist without the states approval. The state has an exclusive right to recognize corporations as legitimate but its not the same thing as what you are implying nor does it mean everything the government does is corporate. But even if that was all true, it doesnt mean that every act the state engages in is a violent act. The existence of violence in the toolbox does not render every other tool and every activity done with them violent by association. ANY kind of enforcement eventually comes down to violence, state or otherwise. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Dec 30, 2017 |
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Dec 30, 2017 17:01
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GlyphGryph posted:Saying that the state has a monopoly on violence, first of all, isnt true - it has final say over which violence is allowed and legitimate, but disallowed violence still happens all the the time and theres plenty of violence the state allows but does not engage in itself. Theoretically sure -- handing out food stamps isn't directly violent -- but the taxes that funded those food stamps were compelled via a threat of violence. I mean this cuts both ways. In the same sense that taxation is violence, so is the refusal to fund public welfare, or the property rights that allow the Walton family to own as much property by themselves as the bottom 40% of American families, while simultaneously paying Wal-Mart workers sub-subsistence wages. It's all violence in every direction. It's a war of all against all, lightly regulated.
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Dec 30, 2017 17:08
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You have expanded the definition of violence so far I dont know what communicative purpose it could serve any longer. It seems to just be "things are" It certainly doesnt seen to bear much relation to the way most people would interpret it.
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Dec 30, 2017 17:11
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GlyphGryph posted:ANY kind of enforcement eventually comes down to violence, state or otherwise. Yes, that's the point. You either recognise every such act is violent or you can't invoke the spectre of violence. So when libertarians or capitalists complain that the state taking a thing is violent, their position has no legs because all the alternatives are also violent once we acknowledge the violence in the act they're complaining about.
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Dec 30, 2017 17:12
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Futuresight posted:Yes, that's the point. You either recognise every such act is violent or you can't invoke the spectre of violence. So when libertarians or capitalists complain that the state taking a thing is violent, their position has no legs because all the alternatives are also violent once we acknowledge the violence in the act they're complaining about. Yeah but "libertarians are wrong" and calling taxation violence a deceptive attempt to mislead is a perfectly valid aternative. You are just pointing out WHY their use of the word is incoherent and deceptive since they dont actually the pillars that underpin it and thus have hypocritical limitations on the use of the word.
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Dec 30, 2017 17:15
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GlyphGryph posted:You have expanded the definition of violence so far I dont know what communicative purpose it could serve any longer. It's a technical political science definition sure but I'd argue it's the appropriate definition for this kind of theoretical discussion. Like, it's a real precept of political thought. It's not just crazy libertarian bullshit, it's an academic standard principle. I mean, yes, it's abstracted, but so is "property is theft."
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Dec 30, 2017 17:17
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If your argument starts with "libertarians say this thing for rhetorical purposes" and comes to a conclusion other than "libertarians are wrong about it being true" I think you are giving them too much credit.
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Dec 30, 2017 17:17
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I mean, hell, Mao functionally said the same thing with "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
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Dec 30, 2017 17:20
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Condiv posted:erica garner is dead This loving stinks 
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Dec 30, 2017 17:22
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GlyphGryph posted:Yeah but "libertarians are wrong" and calling taxation violence a deceptive attempt to mislead is a perfectly valid aternative. You are just pointing out WHY their use of the word is incoherent and deceptive since they dont actually the pillars that underpin it and thus have hypocritical limitations on the use of the word. It's useful for any argument against political violence not just the ones libertarians use.
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Dec 30, 2017 17:26
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Futuresight posted:It's useful for any argument against political violence not just the ones libertarians use. In this case its being used to try and argue against someone who is claiming taxation is NOT violence though, and there you arent doing the libertarian thing of taking their premises and drawing them to the logical conclusions, but the far less relevant tactic of saying their premises are wrong and they should instead adopt these absurd premises which lead to an absurd conclusion and uh thats pretty dumb.
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Dec 30, 2017 17:37
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When someone's premises are wrong I try to point it out, that's all. Motivated reasoning is bad. In this instance the guy I was responding to was trying to get to the right place the wrong way. As above, "government is monopoly on force" is not some weird libertarian bullshit, it's a commonly accepted axiom of political theory. The mistake people seem to be making is confusing "all government action is backed by violence" with "all violence is bad," and that second statement is false, some violence is good.
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Dec 30, 2017 17:43
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:When someone's premises are wrong I try to point it out, that's all. Motivated reasoning is bad. A set of premises leading to an absurd conclusion, like your "life is literally synonymous with violence and so the word is useless" is usually evidence one of the premises are wrong. Arguing that a set of premises is wrong and your own is right because your own leads to an absurd conclusion is some pretty next level argumentation and I am not sure how its supposed to work GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Dec 30, 2017 |
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Dec 30, 2017 17:54
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It's not a particularly abnormal assertion that violence is a consequence of existence.
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Dec 30, 2017 17:57
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BrandorKP posted:It's not a particularly abnormal assertion that violence is a consequence of existence. maybe, but this us a pretty abnormal way to go about making such a claim. Normally you start with the other persons premise and build them out to that as a logical conclusion, you dont usually start with "your premises are wrong, here are mine and the absurd conclusion they come to"
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Dec 30, 2017 17:59
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Ehh depends on how one was trained to think.
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Dec 30, 2017 18:01
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BrandorKP posted:Ehh depends on how one was trained to think. Generally when introducing a competing set of premises you dont just assert them, you give a reason to adopt them. HA has literally provided nothing accept reasons not to accept them, and appeals to authority. Maybe the premises are right and the conclusion is correct. Maybe the conclusion is correct but the premises are wrong. Either way he is doing a pretty poor job making the case that anyone should adopt the premise that life is violence instead of going with the far more useful seeming definition we started with (which seems to have roughly been: Violence is an intentional attempt to directly harm another person, and later expanded to include the act of threatening to do that harm athough frankly that expansion already seems like a poor decision to me) that relied on different ones. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Dec 30, 2017 |
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Dec 30, 2017 18:05
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It's neither useless nor absurd, though. Recognizing that politics is fundamentally violent and that things like taxation and redistribution are violent is important and worthwhile, because it puts the debate on an even footing. There's a tendency in political thinking to differentiate between "violent" and "non violent" repression, and to legitimize passive state-endorsed violence while demonizing violence "outside the monopoly"; this is part of why, for example, the DOJ can get away with prosecuting inauguration-day protestors . A few protesters out of hundreds broke a few windows, so they were "violent," but somehow the government's prosecution isn't, because the government is following the written rules and a small fraction of the protesters weren't. In reality, of course, the government's actions are exponentially more violent than the protester's. Extend this out, and you start seeing why things like the Ferguson protests happened: the police were systematically repressing the black population of Ferguson, often in ways that were not explicitly or directly violent, like via court fines, parking tickets, etc. It's extremely important to recognize that the state does violence too, often passively, often inconsiderately, often indirectly, but still consequentially. To pretend that the bank who forecloses on a home is somehow not being violent, while the protester who smashes a bank window is, is to accept and legitimize the bank's violence while demonizing the protester. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Dec 30, 2017 |
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Dec 30, 2017 18:09
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The concept goes back to at least Hobbes. I'm honestly surprised it's seeing much pushback.
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Dec 30, 2017 18:15
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Futuresight posted:I think you'll find it difficult to pinpoint a society where there exists massive accumulation of wealth without a state-like entity. Actual formal states, sure, but there's always some system of enforcement. The system of enforcement takes the place of hired / loyal thugs beating the poo poo out of you when you get in a dispute with your landlord or burning your house down because you disagreed with your boss. =P Society protects the powerless from the powerful as well as the reverse (even though, of course, the rich and powerful are better able to use society to their own advantage). Only in some kind of adolescent fantasy can you remove those protections for one side and think they're not going to be removed from the other. Futuresight posted:EDIT: You know what, I'll just explicitly move the goalposts: accumulation of wealth requires violence so there is nothing wrong with using violence to undo it. Ah ok now I get it.
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Dec 30, 2017 18:16
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:To pretend that the bank who forecloses on a home is somehow not being violent, while the protester who smashes a bank window is, is to accept and legitimize the bank's violence while demonizing the protester. In the case of the bank foreclosing, as much as it is unpopular to acknowledge it, the first act of violence would have been committed by the person who took out the mortgage and stopped paying.
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Dec 30, 2017 18:20
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wateroverfire posted:In the case of the bank foreclosing, as much as it is unpopular to acknowledge it, the first act of violence would have been committed by the person who took out the mortgage and stopped paying. It's a cycle of violence! In a just system sure, but of course in America sometimes Bank just fucks you. quote:If you're foreclosing on somebody's house, you are required by law to have a collection of paperwork showing the journey of that mortgage note from the moment of issuance to the present. You should see the originating lender (a firm like Countrywide) selling the loan to the next entity in the chain (perhaps Goldman Sachs) to the next (maybe JP Morgan), with the actual note being transferred each time. But in fact, almost no bank currently foreclosing on homeowners has a reliable record of who owns the loan; in some cases, they have even intentionally shredded the actual mortgage notes. That's where the robo-signers come in. To create the appearance of paperwork where none exists, the banks drag in these pimply entry-level types — an infamous example is GMAC's notorious robo-signer Jeffrey Stephan, who appears online looking like an age-advanced photo of Beavis or Butt-Head — and get them to sign thousands of documents a month attesting to the banks' proper ownership of the mortgages. quote:
(I picked the example of a foreclosing bank for precisely this reason: not all bank foreclosures are legitimate). Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Dec 30, 2017 |
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Dec 30, 2017 18:23
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GlyphGryph posted:Generally when introducing a competing set of premises you dont just assert them, you give a reason to adopt them. Generally mature internally coherent disciplines stop giving a poo poo. It's like stating a fact at a certain point. And it's not like one has to commit oneself to thinking in a particular way all the time.
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Dec 30, 2017 18:24
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Falstaff posted:The concept goes back to at least Hobbes. I'm honestly surprised it's seeing much pushback. I am quite familiar with the concept and its history, and am tired of people acting as if the reasons for my disagreement with the things they are doing and saying (and not event the concepts themselves) are the result of some astounding ignorance on my part. Theres lots of philosphy that goes back as far as hobbes while being worthless or bullshit or heavily jargonized and misused or only relevant within specific contexts or which rely on fundamental premises that most people dont hold.
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Dec 30, 2017 18:26
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wateroverfire posted:In the case of the bank foreclosing, as much as it is unpopular to acknowledge it, the first act of violence would have been committed by the person who took out the mortgage and stopped paying. If you want to get to the root of the cycle, then the first act of violence would have been "This land now only belongs to me and not to anyone else." This goes double in an American context.
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Dec 30, 2017 18:26
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BrandorKP posted:Generally mature internally coherent disciplines stop giving a poo poo. It's like stating a fact at a certain point. And it's not like one has to commit oneself to thinking in a particular way all the time. Coming from you, this unbelievably ironic.
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Dec 30, 2017 18:27
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Falstaff posted:If you want to get to the root of the cycle, then the first act of violence would have been "This land now only belongs to me and not to anyone else." This goes double in an American context. I am sure you can go back further than that if you really wanted to, honestly. Was that violence in itself not just as likely to be a response to someone else wanting to commit a kind of violence and thus the person in question responding by trying to obtain a buff of exclusion?
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Dec 30, 2017 18:29
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GlyphGryph posted:I am quite familiar with the concept and its history, and am tired of people acting as if the reasons for my disagreement with the things they are doing and saying (and not event the concepts themselves) are the result of some astounding ignorance on my part. Wasn't trying to throw shade on you, dude, just expressing my surprise. Sorry if it came across that way.
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Dec 30, 2017 18:30
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Falstaff posted:Wasn't trying to throw shade on you, dude, just expressing my surprise. Sorry if it came across that way. Sorry, I am having an exceptionally bad day and going through round however many of people in this thread intentionally misunderstanding me is exhausting. Just... pretty frustrated in general and I probably shouldnt have said poo poo to begin with. Sorry.
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Dec 30, 2017 18:33
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Falstaff posted:Wasn't trying to throw shade on you, dude, just expressing my surprise. Sorry if it came across that way. Yeah, I wasn't trying to throw shade at anyone but when I say something as generally accepted as "government is inherently violent" and it gets a lot of popular-definition pushback my first assumption is "ok, this guy must not realize I'm speaking technically." As to the substance of why that technical definition is important and useful I think I've addressed that above (in short, failing to define government action as violent inherently legitimizes government violence and delegitimizes protest).
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Dec 30, 2017 18:34
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GlyphGryph posted:Coming from you, this unbelievably ironic. What is it in Less than Nothing? The materialist talks about one thing. The idealist talks about many things. I'll dig it up later if I'm not swamped (I'm almost always swamped these days).
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Dec 30, 2017 18:56
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Glyph, what is a point you'd like readers of the thread to take away?
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Dec 30, 2017 19:16
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wateroverfire posted:In the case of the bank foreclosing, as much as it is unpopular to acknowledge it, the first act of violence would have been committed by the person who took out the mortgage and stopped paying. Not sure if this would count, since banks give loans under the understanding that it isn't guaranteed to be paid back; it's a risk they opt into, and the "punishment" is generally pretty clearly defined as the person who failed to pay taking a hit to their credit rating. In general it's really messed up when any creditor feels they have the right to enforce payment, since it was their responsibility to do due diligence before giving the loan. The situation becomes even more ethically questionable when you take into account that loans are often actively sold to people who can't afford them, often because the loan-giving institution doesn't plan on holding onto the loan in the first place (as in the financial crisis). The only exception to this might be a situation where the debtor lied when applying for the loan, and even then it's not entirely clear.
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Dec 31, 2017 09:22
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Ytlaya posted:Not sure if this would count, since banks give loans under the understanding that it isn't guaranteed to be paid back; it's a risk they opt into, and the "punishment" is generally pretty clearly defined as the person who failed to pay taking a hit to their credit rating. In general it's really messed up when any creditor feels they have the right to enforce payment, since it was their responsibility to do due diligence before giving the loan. The situation becomes even more ethically questionable when you take into account that loans are often actively sold to people who can't afford them, often because the loan-giving institution doesn't plan on holding onto the loan in the first place (as in the financial crisis). The only exception to this might be a situation where the debtor lied when applying for the loan, and even then it's not entirely clear.
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Dec 31, 2017 09:46
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If failing to pay back a loan is an act of violence, then the very imposition of property is as well. Especially if we conflate private property and capital, which is something nearly everyone does.
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Dec 31, 2017 10:18
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You can have my toothbrush when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Or, you could just wait until I'm done with it.
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Dec 31, 2017 10:25
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Kilroy posted:If failing to pay back a loan is an act of violence, then the very imposition of property is as well. Especially if we conflate private property and capital, which is something nearly everyone does. Yes, that's part of the theory. In a fundamental sense, all property rights are enforced by government via a threat of violence.
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Dec 31, 2017 14:39
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Oh poo poo, are the libertarians back? It's been a long decade, but we have plenty of ammo in peepaw's shed that still works if needed.
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Dec 31, 2017 16:56
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Condiv posted:erica garner is dead Regardless of what the cops did, Erica Garner died at least partially because of discrimination fostered by economic conditions and healthcare disparities. This death is as part of the tapestry of racism as Eric Garner’s.
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Dec 31, 2017 18:18
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Kilroy posted:You can have my toothbrush when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Or, you could just wait until I'm done with it. I personally support the private ownership of individual toothbrushes, because sharing toothbrushes would be nasty. 
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