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The punishment as described by Molyneux would be very effective: if you refuse to comply with a DRO they just legalize your torture/rape/murder/what-have-you, and ban you from buying necessities like food, water etc by threatening the same punishment for anyone who sells anything to you. This is also the punishment for loving the wrong person, refusing to allow corporate surveillance in your home, being poor, etc
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Jun 4, 2018 23:10
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VitalSigns posted:The punishment as described by Molyneux would be very effective: if you refuse to comply with a DRO they just legalize your torture/rape/murder/what-have-you, and ban you from buying necessities like food, water etc by threatening the same punishment for anyone who sells anything to you. wow weird, we can call these people "outlaws" because they are "outside" the "law" this is a new concept that has never been thought about or existed before
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Jun 4, 2018 23:30
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Jazerus posted:wow weird, we can call these people "outlaws" because they are "outside" the "law" It's not new, but it's generally considered unjust and inhumane and vigilantism is rightly illegal. Of course Libertarians love the idea because they imagine people who agree with them on everything will be the ones deciding whom it's legal to enslave/hunt/rape/murder (the poor, loose women who won't gently caress them, etc)
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Jun 4, 2018 23:33
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VitalSigns posted:It's not new, but it's generally considered unjust and inhumane and vigilantism is rightly illegal. my point was that it's just one more way that DROs are not actually an untested type of societal organization; they're just feudalism in a suit.
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Jun 4, 2018 23:37
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Most people who hate the government are actually power-mad, and they want the government to go away because it's the only organisation strong enough to stop them and they resent it. For an example, see anyone whose last name is Koch. Those are the type of people who cannot stand having any power imposed upon them, but they desperately want to have power over everyone and everything else - the prime ingredients of genuine sociopathy. These are the type of people who don't want bad things done to them, but only them. These are the sorts of people who, even if you showed them terrible suffering from which they are insulated or actually inflicted any on them, they would still use their power to hurt other people because they simply have no ability to feel what other people feel, yet we applaud people like that and are expected to admire and emulate them, which is insulting. I've come to the point that whenever I see a "successful" person (a.k.a. anyone with far too much money), I don't see a rich person... I see the many, many people who are poor because of that person. On the other hand, you have people who don't want horrible things done to them but don't want those same things done to people either... they have actual empathy. They know how it feels to suffer and they don't want to inflict it on anyone; I fancy that that would be true for most of the people contributing in this thread. I think that most of us have realised that wealth is power and that concentrating wealth makes for terrible power imbalances that inevitably lead to misery. What corporations have done, and it's devilishly clever, is that they have convinced the world that the government is the big bogey man even though government is the only thing powerful enough to reign in, even a little, corporate greed and indifference. I'm reminded of that great quote by Charles Baudelaire: “La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas" - I think that you recognise that one without me translating it. Despite mounting evidence, people are still appallingly greedy and they buy into the narrative that the government is stopping them from being rich and powerful instead of, well, the rich and powerful; the classic Steinbeck "disenfranchised millionaires" rhetoric. The government is doing gently caress all apart from insisting on naughty taxes, but the huge corporation that has all the market share and uses its lobbying power to foster anti-competitive behaviour wants nothing more than to crush you under its jack boots. Yet big corporations control the medias and, consequently, the narrative. The latter paragraph is why I hold out no real hope of a peaceful transition from cut-throat capitalism to utilitarianism: a combination of overly-centralised wealth and power combined with horrifying human selfishness. The only possible way that corporations will give up all that they have taken is if the government forces them, and that will only happen if the people force the government and we are nowhere near that point. I am also convinced that, even if we could provide everyone with what they need to live well, people are desperate to find ways to feel superior to others. I feel that racial/gender/etc bias is a product of social conditioning, but selfishness is encoded in the human condition and all of the improvements in race relations have not made people any less greedy. Economic discrimination is the modern, socially accepted form of "bigotry", and I just don't see a way around it because change would require sacrifice, which is counterpoint to human nature and capitalist indoctrination.
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Jun 4, 2018 23:39
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Jazerus posted:my point was that it's just one more way that DROs are not actually an untested type of societal organization; they're just feudalism in a suit. The important part to the Libertarians is that the suit matches theirs. Feudalism is the explicit end-state of their desired society.
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Jun 4, 2018 23:55
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VitalSigns posted:The punishment as described by Molyneux would be very effective: if you refuse to comply with a DRO they just legalize your torture/rape/murder/what-have-you, and ban you from buying necessities like food, water etc by threatening the same punishment for anyone who sells anything to you. You have slighted your DRO by failing to pay your
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Jun 5, 2018 00:52
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Libertarians are hypocrites, so if it happened to them they'd say it violates their rights but if the exact same thing happened to someone else they'd cheer the warboys on.
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Jun 5, 2018 01:01
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JustJeff88 posted:Most people who hate the government are actually power-mad, and they want the government to go away because it's the only organisation strong enough to stop them and they resent it. For an example, see anyone whose last name is Koch. Those are the type of people who cannot stand having any power imposed upon them, but they desperately want to have power over everyone and everything else - the prime ingredients of genuine sociopathy. These are the type of people who don't want bad things done to them, but only them. These are the sorts of people who, even if you showed them terrible suffering from which they are insulated or actually inflicted any on them, they would still use their power to hurt other people because they simply have no ability to feel what other people feel, yet we applaud people like that and are expected to admire and emulate them, which is insulting. I've come to the point that whenever I see a "successful" person (a.k.a. anyone with far too much money), I don't see a rich person... I see the many, many people who are poor because of that person. There's a fantastic essay by China Miellville in which he describes libertarianism (more specifically its sea-steading variation) as attracting capitalist losers. The big and powerful capitalists love the system because it works well for them while providing a mostly stable society in which they can enjoy their immense wealth, whereas libertarians resent it as they're too small and dumb to get themselves written advantageously into the tax code and power structure.
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Jun 5, 2018 01:07
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Captain_Maclaine posted:There's a fantastic essay by China Miellville in which he describes libertarianism (more specifically its sea-steading variation) as attracting capitalist losers. The big and powerful capitalists love the system because it works well for them while providing a mostly stable society in which they can enjoy their immense wealth, whereas libertarians resent it as they're too small and dumb to get themselves written advantageously into the tax code and power structure. http://inthesetimes.com/article/3328/floating_utopias quote:Utopianism has always had two, usually though not always contradictory, aesthetic and avant-gardist gravitational pulls: toward a hallucinatory baroque or, alternately, a post-Corbusier functionalism. In seasteading, these iterations are represented by Tsui’s hallucinatory organicism on one hand and Buckminster Fuller’s extraordinary, floating, ziggurat-like Triton City on the other. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Jun 5, 2018 |
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Jun 5, 2018 01:10
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On the other hand, lolbertarians' attempts to set up seasteads are so hilariously inept and fun to watch that I encourage every such group to go for it.
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Jun 5, 2018 01:27
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Another one of my favourite libertarian lines is how taxation is theft. I find this hilarious for two reasons: Firstly, your employer steals more from you than the government ever will, they just aren't polite enough to write it down for you or give you anything in return for taking from your labour. Also, if you don't like the tax in a country, YOU CAN LEAVE. Unless you are a felon/tax evader, you can pack up your poo poo, renounce your citizenship (which was given to you for free) and gently caress off somewhere else. Rich people have been hiding their ill-gotten gains in tax shelters for years, and we know that they are all great! Here's what else is fun... if you don't make any money, you don't have to pay any taxes and the government will steal send police to protect you, fireman to put out your blazing house, educate your children and, in countries that aren't poo poo, look after your health. You can be born in a country, grow up to be the age of adulthood without ever having had a job and never having paid tuppence in tax and gently caress off somewhere else... and they won't ask a thin dime of you. I know that a libertard would say that it's very hard to emigrate and that the government of, let's choose a somewhat less dumb country, Canada will aggress upon you if you try to live there without permission. I, of course, would respond that they have invested their time and labour in the land and you can't just use it without their say-so. My point is, despite making fun of the incredibly stupid for my own giggles, is that you cannot convince people of anything if they disagree with you on principle. It doesn't matter if it's a fiscal issue or a social issue, a secular issue or a religious issue.... if people dislike something because it suspends their sensibilities, you can't win because any attempt to reason with them will just make them dig their heels in harder. This isn't a conservative/liberal thing or a capitalist/communist thing; when someone holds an idea up as sacred, nothing is going to shift it apart from a blow to the head. This may be interpreted in either the metaphoric or literal sense.
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Jun 5, 2018 01:49
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Captain_Maclaine posted:There's a fantastic essay by China Miellville in which he describes libertarianism (more specifically its sea-steading variation) as attracting capitalist losers. The big and powerful capitalists love the system because it works well for them while providing a mostly stable society in which they can enjoy their immense wealth, whereas libertarians resent it as they're too small and dumb to get themselves written advantageously into the tax code and power structure.
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Jun 5, 2018 02:00
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JustJeff88 posted:Also, if you don't like the tax in a country, YOU CAN LEAVE. I don't think this is really meaningfully true for most people who aren't wealthy, to be fair. But it's not like it comes up.
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Jun 5, 2018 02:07
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Disinterested posted:I don't think this is really meaningfully true for most people who aren't wealthy, to be fair. But it's not like it comes up. And it's not like the "benefits" of lolbertarianism are meaningfully true for most people
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Jun 5, 2018 02:11
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NGDBSS posted:Of course Mieville wrote an essay about why libertarian seastanding is comically doomed. It's almost like he wrote a book involving the real-world issues of such a place and how it's not an instant utopia in anyone's hands. The best thing about seasteading is that a common plan was to live on ocean liners in international shores off of San Francisco then work tech jobs there so they wouldn't have to pay taxes. It's like "hey let's abandon society by only abandoning taxes while still using the benefits of America." It's like...uh hey guys that isn't how it works.
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Jun 5, 2018 02:32
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"An Orange County of the soul" has to be one of the more biting indictments ever levied at libertarian dreams.
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Jun 5, 2018 02:32
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CommieGIR posted:Guess who is in the news, and not in a good light? ToxicSlurpee posted:The best thing about seasteading is that a common plan was to live on ocean liners in international shores off of San Francisco then work tech jobs there so they wouldn't have to pay taxes.  #blessed #blueseed
Blueseed is now on hold due to insufficient funding[11] and the founders are working on different projects." 11. "Quick facts". Retrieved April 7, 2013.
45. "What taxes will I have to pay?". Blueseed FAQ. Retrieved 2012-05-10. Captain_Maclaine posted:"An Orange County of the soul" has to be one of the more biting indictments ever levied at libertarian dreams.  
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Jun 5, 2018 03:29
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JustJeff88 posted:The latter paragraph is why I hold out no real hope of a peaceful transition from cut-throat capitalism to utilitarianism: a combination of overly-centralised wealth and power combined with horrifying human selfishness. The only possible way that corporations will give up all that they have taken is if the government forces them, and that will only happen if the people force the government and we are nowhere near that point. I am also convinced that, even if we could provide everyone with what they need to live well, people are desperate to find ways to feel superior to others. I feel that racial/gender/etc bias is a product of social conditioning, but selfishness is encoded in the human condition and all of the improvements in race relations have not made people any less greedy. Economic discrimination is the modern, socially accepted form of "bigotry", and I just don't see a way around it because change would require sacrifice, which is counterpoint to human nature and capitalist indoctrination. Just gotta have a top level
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Jun 5, 2018 05:00
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JustJeff88 posted:Another one of my favourite libertarian lines is how taxation is theft. I find this hilarious for two reasons: Firstly, your employer steals more from you than the government ever will, they just aren't polite enough to write it down for you or give you anything in return for taking from your labour. Also, if you don't like the tax in a country, YOU CAN LEAVE. Unless you are a felon/tax evader, you can pack up your poo poo, renounce your citizenship (which was given to you for free) and gently caress off somewhere else. Rich people have been hiding their ill-gotten gains in tax shelters for years, and we know that they are all great! Yeah, the hard part that stops most of the lolbertarian whiners is that nobody else wants them either. They could renounce their citizenship in the US... but to a man, none of them are rich enough for the other western states to accept them despite their utter lack of desirable credentials.
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Jun 5, 2018 05:14
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Liquid Communism posted:Yeah, the hard part that stops most of the lolbertarian whiners is that nobody else wants them either. They could renounce their citizenship in the US... but to a man, none of them are rich enough for the other western states to accept them despite their utter lack of desirable credentials. Exactly. The ones that are rich have no desire to go anywhere because why would you leave a place where you are grossly overprivileged? I will say that the criteria to immigrate have become brutal. I only have the right to live and work in Canada because I was born there, which I admit sounds like saying "I only have the right to eat this bread because I grew the wheat, made the dough and baked it", but the point is that I was lucky - nobody chooses their country of birth and neither of my parents are Canadian. Otherwise, I would have no chance. In order to immigrate to Canada, at least from the US, the government requires a college degree and at least 150k in savings; there may be other requirements that I am forgetting. If you have that much saved up, why the gently caress move? People emigrate and start over elsewhere because they need a new lease on life. If one has 150 grand kicking around, I would say that you already drew the long straw. Nevvy Z posted:Just gotta have a top level Not being flip; I genuinely have no idea what this means.
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Jun 5, 2018 05:35
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Liquid Communism posted:Yeah, the hard part that stops most of the lolbertarian whiners is that nobody else wants them either. They could renounce their citizenship in the US... but to a man, none of them are rich enough for the other western states to accept them despite their utter lack of desirable credentials. One of my favorite examples of this are those bitcoiners who think they're clever by renouncing their US citizenship (a lengthy and onerous process) to duck taxes, only to end up supremely hosed as stateless citizens who then in a panic try to get the nearest US embassy to restore their citizenship only for the staff to go, "well you did sign off on the many forms saying that you knew what you were getting into and presented multiple attestations that you were of sound enough mind to do this, so not really a lot we can do chief," no doubt while suppressing laughter. More specifically, I always crack a grin when I remember how Roger Ver renounced his citizenship and then ended up having to pay all his back taxes anyway in an attempt to get a visa to visit the US for some bitcoiner conference, only to have the state department block him anyway as too great a risk of overstaying.
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Jun 5, 2018 13:08
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Disinterested posted:I don't think this is really meaningfully true for most people who aren't wealthy, to be fair. But it's not like it comes up. But it's the precise same argument they give for if you don't like your rent, or your job: Leave. You have Freedom to choose another way! Yet they'll discard this because governments aren't "legitimate" controllers of land, whereas property owners are rightful kings.
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Jun 5, 2018 15:12
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Captain_Maclaine posted:More specifically, I always crack a grin when I remember how Roger Ver renounced his citizenship and then ended up having to pay all his back taxes anyway in an attempt to get a visa to visit the US for some bitcoiner conference, only to have the state department block him anyway as too great a risk of overstaying. Jazerus posted:my point was that it's just one more way that DROs are not actually an untested type of societal organization; they're just feudalism in a suit. If it weren't for all the innocent non Libertarian-idjits it would hurt, it would be funny to see it in practice, and hear the Libertarian übermenschen wail about crony capitalism as they effectively became serfs of ThaneDRO. "I was supposed to be dictating the terms of the contracts and deciding who was property"
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Jun 5, 2018 15:18
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VitalSigns posted:That was great. What made it even better was that he was never promised it in writing and paid it anyway. I can't remember the specifics, though. Was he just given a verbal promise, or was it just a "It can't hurt your chances"?
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Jun 5, 2018 15:20
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Golbez posted:Yet they'll discard this because governments aren't "legitimate" controllers of land, whereas property owners are rightful kings. Or turn them all into anarchists calling for the return of the commons.
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Jun 5, 2018 15:22
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mojo1701a posted:What made it even better was that he was never promised it in writing and paid it anyway. If I remember right it was the latter, something like "you cannot be approved as long as you owe back taxes" but there was no guarantee.
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Jun 5, 2018 15:30
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mojo1701a posted:What made it even better was that he was never promised it in writing and paid it anyway. They refused to even consider his application until he paid the back taxes. Then when he paid, they rejected the application on the grounds that he was a convicted felon in the US and only had a passport from St Kitts, where he owns no property other than the citizenship he bought.
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Jun 5, 2018 15:34
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the dude got a visa in the end, from another embassy
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Jun 5, 2018 16:46
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VitalSigns posted:If I remember right it was the latter, something like "you cannot be approved as long as you owe back taxes" but there was no guarantee. Strawman posted:They refused to even consider his application until he paid the back taxes. Then when he paid, they rejected the application on the grounds that he was a convicted felon in the US and only had a passport from St Kitts, where he owns no property other than the citizenship he bought. Amazing. For the amount of money he owed, I sure as poo poo would've hired a lawyer to make sure it was all done properly.
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Jun 5, 2018 16:49
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mojo1701a posted:Amazing. For the amount of money he owed, I sure as poo poo would've hired a lawyer to make sure it was all done properly. And that sort of old-fashioned, non-disruptive thinking is why you'll never be Roger Verified. large adult son posted:the dude got a visa in the end, from another embassy But not in time for the conference in question, which he hilariously attended remotely via a stick-mounted Ipad attached to a small motorized set of wheels.
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Jun 5, 2018 17:04
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Captain_Maclaine posted:But not in time for the conference in question, which he hilariously attended remotely via a stick-mounted Ipad attached to a small motorized set of wheels. ahaha, this is even better
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Jun 5, 2018 17:36
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large adult son posted:ahaha, this is even better He's a prick on a stick.
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Jun 5, 2018 17:39
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large adult son posted:the dude got a visa in the end, from another embassy What? You can do that?
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Jun 6, 2018 01:15
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I see that I'm too late, but...RealTalk posted:
The reason it's not hard for anyone else in the thread to believe, is because we are accustomed to a certain stripe of political "thinker" working from the assumption that their imagination is more credible than all of history or the presence or absence of real-life examples. RealTalk posted:Let me give you an example. Yeah, like that! In all fairness, I could understand, (but still  about why it's worth the energy to them) if someone would make an argument like this centered on "well what if they're 17 years and 364 days old  " but the apparent absence of any Mason-Dixon line reference in the text leads me to believe the author is sitting in an armchair imagining a drove of precocious and libertine 13-year-olds that are just absolutely crushed that they can't star in a Brazzers video.JustJeff88 posted:I would love to see some numbers with a reliable source on this; even I am very sceptical about this, and I'm as anti-capitalist as you come without actually being Karl Marx or maybe Gramsci. I did read an article about how a great deal of people, older ones specifically, who lived in former Soviet "republics" think that they were better off of under communism, but I lost the link. I've heard some people I know talk about living in satellite states in relatively neutral terms. There's a common refrain about deciphering the state-controlled newspapers. It was like a game to try and figure out what was really happening behind all the fog that comes from following Doctor Jordan B. Peterson, PhD's cardinal rule of life: "Don't say anything that makes you weak." I've gathered that the dominant value and expectation in Soviet life was stability, manifested in everyone being assigned their housing and employment, etc. I think someone from Romania or Lithuania or somewhere has said that back home they only had one or two kinds of pens available, and in America there's dozens and she gets choice paralysis and finds it ridiculous. So upon the fall of the Soviet empire, one day the appointed bureaucrats just stopped showing up to the offices, because there was no more Soviet-ing to do, and the stability disappeared. I guess the regional administrative areas and places of employment had to reconstitute themselves from scratch. I should probably read some books on this, come to think of it, because that's an open question to me how that worked. The point being in one sense, the fall of USSR opened a frontier of possibility and national political self-determination, but the floor was pulled away with the ceiling, so it was definitely going to be a net loss for a great deal of vulnerable people, just as the fall of monarchy was a net loss for many people who experienced the Russian and American Revolutions (including loss of life, limb, family, etc). I think that's a good case study for the concept of "creative destruction." It was probably better overall for most people in the 10-20 year term, but it was by its incarnation, in its backbone, a military regime, competing for imperial clout and deficient in openness and tolerance, and I'm not sure how far it could have taken itself with America making its own little DRO blockade against it. But again, I don't really know enough details to speak with conviction here, and the present regime in Russia proper isn't necessarily much better. And if you follow the Croatian thread in E/N at all, you'll recall how hard it is to take an employer to court for failure to pay wages in modern Croatia. So, yeah, thanks for bringing it up, gave me a lot to ponder. Or I could have noticed ToxicSlurpee's post, lol. Anyway, I'm listening to October on audiobook, too. It's very long and I keep forgetting who's who, but I do appreciate the depth and the stories here and there that make it really easy to put yourself in someone's shoes. Stinky_Pete fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Jun 6, 2018 |
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Jun 6, 2018 02:13
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and now for your daily presentation of a man with brainworms defending Jorp https://the-ivory-tower.com/pankaj-mishras-imaginary-fascist-review-review-jordan-peterson/
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Jun 6, 2018 02:30
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Mr Interweb posted:What? You can do that? If I remember right, he resubmitted through Japan (where he actually lives) rather than St. Kitts (where he's nominally a citizen via one of their shady investments-for-passports schemes) and it cleared the second time.
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Jun 6, 2018 02:33
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Jesus Christ, the about page on that Ivory Tower site
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Jun 6, 2018 02:38
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Discendo Vox posted:Jesus Christ, the about page on that Ivory Tower site its nothing but wormbrains all the way down quote:Nathaniel is a graduate in International Politics (Bsc. Econ.) from Aberystwyth University with an MA in Journalism from Bournemouth University. He considers himself a latter-day Pickwickian, who views the nuances of the world with a growing sense of bewilderment and a strong desire for more beer. With thinly veiled pugnacity, he tends to write from a Catholic, British High Tory perspective on a broad range of topics and fully embraces the last available position of the modern rebel: orthodoxy. Nathaniel’s interests include history, politics and poetry but he also dabbles in architectural critique and philosophy. fishception fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Jun 6, 2018 |
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Jun 6, 2018 02:57
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I’m phoneposting, but please, do the following: post and number all the biosketches 1,2,3 etc, then all the profile pics, labeled AB C etc, let’s have an impromptu matching quiz!
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Jun 6, 2018 03:36
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