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Cpt_Obvious posted:To me, it always seemed like the obvious conclusion of Liberalism, including the entire ideology existing as justification for authoritarianism.
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Aug 27, 2020 20:12
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Not force : -Anything involving employment. Working for someone is a completely voluntary endeavor and they don't seem to see any coercion whatsoever. The problem will always lie with the employee, much like blaming a domestic violence victim for having terrible taste in men. If you have a crappy job, get a better one or start your own business. If you think about it, they treat workers much like they treat property. Nobody should be forced to have to treat workers equally to their employer, a terrible employer never needs to change, and an employer never needs to be held as accountable as a worker. Landlords also fall under this category too, it's all voluntary, you're using their property (and chillingly, by being a tenant you are an extension of their property ). -By extension, submitting surplus labor is always seen as voluntary. Taxation is theft but pretty much any other method of labor or wealth extraction is voluntary. This makes it easy for them to ignore other problems, like wage theft. -Poverty is seen as completely voluntary. Libertarians talk a big game about self determination and independence but are hilariously conformist as to what that entails. Poverty and success are narrowly defined which makes it convenient for them to cherry pick for their own narrative. Taxation is theft but most don't suggest the reason people are homeless is that they couldn't keep up with property /income tax debt. It's selective ignorance, being forced to pay taxes is bad even though that's not what makes people destitute, societal factors perpetuating actual poverty however are always self inflicted. -Voluntaryism is King. Some Libertarians will muddy the waters with leftists by insisting that yeah, things like mutual aid, providing food and medical care to the needy, and keeping streets and environment clean are good things. They just don't want to be forced to do it. Which makes the whole effort seem like a bad faith gesture. If I wanted to try to undermine environmentalists, I might make a big show of sweeping up garbage in the wake of their marches and protests. I would try and signal boost that message, not to more serious and organized activists, but to people that are opposed to environmentalism, so that chuds could point to me and say "see? This Millennial gets it!". That's what I see with libertarians and Voluntaryism. It never feels like doing a good thing for its own sake but to advance a narrative to undermine mutual aid by focusing the dialogue about how our money should never be FORCED to keep people housed, the people who care enough will take it upon themselves to do it on their own.
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Aug 27, 2020 20:13
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force is when the government lets a black person exist near you
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Aug 27, 2020 20:17
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I mean the whole concept of voluntaryism is kinda daft. At least as an absolute principle. Because human life isn't voluntary, like you literally start out being involuntarily brought into existence and are dumped into an environment you didn't ask for and relationships that go on to form your entire concept of relationships they are so dominant in your life, and by the time you're old enough to have views about it on your own you're already involved with a place and people and a society that you can't just opt out of. You can work to make some aspects of society more voluntary but the fundamentals of human existence are not voluntary, so trying to draw weird absolutist lines around it is gonna be insane.
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Aug 27, 2020 20:18
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Cpt_Obvious posted:To me, it always seemed like the obvious conclusion of Liberalism, including the entire ideology existing as justification for authoritarianism. So it's full on projection? They try to frame their beliefs as 'everyone should mind their own business' and started using a porcupine? as a newer mascot. I hear libertarians treat leftists as authoritarians, because they support a big government and want to force people to pay taxes and not be racist. OwlFancier posted:I mean it makes perfect sense if you just look at it as "things I don't like are terrifying statist and/or socialist fascism" This is true. Some Libertarians are more pragmatic than others. Like I demonstrated, some will not be opposed to the existence of aid and services so long as they aren't on the hook for it. But sometimes I do wonder how true that really is too. Like imagine some Twilight Zone episode where a libertarian got transported to a Full Gay Space Communist America. In this fever dream he was never forced to pay taxes or even contribute at all ;he could Tiger King it up on his own little mud pit while everyone else engaged in mutual aid and worked collectively. Would he be happy that they left him alone? Is it REALLY about "Force" for Libertarians?
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Aug 27, 2020 20:24
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OwlFancier posted:I mean the whole concept of voluntaryism is kinda daft. At least as an absolute principle. Because human life isn't voluntary, like you literally start out being involuntarily brought into existence and are dumped into an environment you didn't ask for and relationships that go on to form your entire concept of relationships they are so dominant in your life, and by the time you're old enough to have views about it on your own you're already involved with a place and people and a society that you can't just opt out of.
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Aug 27, 2020 20:26
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OwlFancier posted:I mean the whole concept of voluntaryism is kinda daft. At least as an absolute principle. Because human life isn't voluntary, like you literally start out being involuntarily brought into existence and are dumped into an environment you didn't ask for and relationships that go on to form your entire concept of relationships they are so dominant in your life, and by the time you're old enough to have views about it on your own you're already involved with a place and people and a society that you can't just opt out of. Voluntaryism in this context is giving to charity vs paying taxes for the same thing. Libertarians insinuate the compulsory nature of it is unecessary and counterproductive.
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Aug 27, 2020 20:27
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Bearing in mind, of course, that the glorious voluntary crony-free capitalism they love so much was created by stealing common land and enclosing it for some elite crony's private use. When this factors into their thinking at all, they construct bizarre arguments that the land wasn't properly owned or properly developed, so it was ethical to kill the people living there and take their land. (They are, of course, horrified by historical examples of governments taking undeveloped private land and returning it to the community from which it was stolen.)
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Aug 27, 2020 20:28
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Guavanaut posted:That's one of the many things completely ignored, because it breaks the system. I've even heard "I wouldn't mind moving to [country with universal healthcare] because I'd be choosing to move there, but I wouldn't want it imposed upon me" as if nobody was ever born there. I think that ties in with the whole 'right of exit' idea that anything that isn't a state (like a voluntary group or a business) can impose any bullshit that it wants because you can always leave. It ties in well with the hyperindividualism because the only way the worldview makes any sense is if everyone can just think themselves into an orb and drift off into space to sustain themselves entirely on hot takes. But for some reason they think it's actually the optimal method for structuring a society of angry apes with guns that all have to live near each other and depend on each other's labour. Maybe that's why it has so much crossover with newspaper columnists, who are the closest thing to an orb person kleptovore.
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Aug 27, 2020 20:30
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I was going to say, hasn't Brendan O'Neill already tried that.
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Aug 27, 2020 20:34
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1. Taxation is rape and slavery 2. Rape and slavery don't exist and they're good actually
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Aug 27, 2020 20:42
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divabot posted:1. Taxation is rape and slavery This is the area where the madness truly grips hold and the ideology falls apart. If you talk to any Libertarian, they'll go on and on about coercion and state violence and how communism is just slavery. But if you mention that capitalism in this country was founded by actual slavers, all of a sudden slavery wasn't so bad and actually it turned out better for them in the pleasekillmenow
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Aug 27, 2020 20:46
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In one of my last discussions on mises.org's forums, I took them to task on the "Non-aggression Principle" applying to fraud. Essentially: * If I sign an agreement that I will fulfill a contractual obligation; * And, important, I intend to do this; * But, there is an accident and I fall into a coma... They argued that I was committing an act of aggression by failing to fulfill the contract. That I, in a coma, was somehow aggressing. So yeah. It's absolutely useless.
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Aug 27, 2020 21:03
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Golbez posted:In one of my last discussions on mises.org's forums, I took them to task on the "Non-aggression Principle" applying to fraud. Essentially: Well yeah you're poor. If you're rich and you sign a contract to pay pension benefits, or to return a foreign "guest worker's" passport at the end of the contract, that's totally optional. If you can't afford to pay pensions or you need to enslave your "guest workers" to make a healthy profit whoopsie! That's just business, you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders!
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Aug 27, 2020 21:39
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Panfilo posted:Can we talk about how inconsistent Libertarians are about the concept of 'force'? The very basic contradiction in Libertarians' definition of force is the existence of private property itself. It takes a tremendous amount of force for one guy to own vast tracts of land and keep other people off of it or take a portion of what they produce if he allows them on it. They define moving onto someone else's land without permission as "force" even though it requires zero violence, and therefore the massive violent response is justified "retaliatory force", but it's not clear how one guy gets to own so much land in the first place. They have come up with this myth about land becoming yours when you mix your labor with it, but that doesn't explain how one person came to own, say, a huge cotton plantation. This contradiction goes all the way back to Locke, who asserts labor that a servant or a slave mixes with the land creates property rights that accrue to the master, somehow. But why would a servant agree to clear land and plant a farm only for it to belong to his master, when he could just claim that land ownership for himself? Well, it's because the myth of homesteading is just that, a myth, in reality private property was created by military force, by royal armies enclosing common land in Europe or by colonial armies subjugating, enslaving, driving off, or exterminating the indigenous population. So the king drove everyone off the land, gave you a deed, then you hired some servants to work it, then Locke comes along and says "see he earned the right to that land when his servants worked it, just forget about all that stuff that happened before not important!" But even if this myth did happen, if a new continent rose out of the ocean tomorrow big enough and rich enough that every living human could grab as much of it as she could personally work, the next generation will be born into a world where all the land is already owned. Some of them will inherit 10 tracts of land from their parents who were more successful and bought up other people's claims. Some of them will be born with nothing and will have to sell their labor to the landowner class. So somehow the next generation is inherently less free than their parents. This contradiction also goes back to Locke, who just assumes that there's so much unowned land out there that there will always be "as much and as good" free land for the next guy no matter how much is taken and privatized.
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Aug 27, 2020 21:42
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VitalSigns posted:The very basic contradiction in Libertarians' definition of force is the existence of private property itself. It takes a tremendous amount of force for one guy to own vast tracts of land and keep other people off of it or take a portion of what they produce if he allows them on it. Basically all Libertarian thought starts from the extremely Just World position of the current state of affairs being the natural state of affairs, and almost all of its logic exists to explain why the current state of affairs is good and just and now the only thing that needs to happen is for taxation to cease and it'll all be fine
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Aug 27, 2020 21:45
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Never knew john locke was a flat earther, owing to the fact that the earth is infinitely large and therefore necessarily flat.
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Aug 27, 2020 21:51
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Somfin posted:Basically all Libertarian thought starts from the extremely Just World position of the current state of affairs being the natural state of affairs, and almost all of its logic exists to explain why the current state of affairs is good and just and now the only thing that needs to happen is for taxation to cease and it'll all be fine It’s this. It’s 1000% this. Again, I would point out that this is also true of Liberalism.
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Aug 27, 2020 21:53
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Again, I would point out that this is also true of Liberalism. Big-L Liberalism is basically the same except for its approach to pain (cops, military, starvation, what have you). Libertarianism acknowledges pain is bad and tries to pretend that pain is a current byproduct of government doing anything beyond that particular Libertarian's view of what the government should do, while Liberalism tries to pretend that pain is always good and right and a necessary component of existence
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Aug 27, 2020 21:59
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Who wants to get heckin mad at an insane libertarian landlord? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBOxrHdTKE0
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Aug 28, 2020 17:52
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OwlFancier posted:Who wants to get heckin mad at an insane libertarian landlord? "It's so unfair, society and the law always come down against us owners. By the way, if you don't pay me, I can simply engage the mighty omnipresent power of the state (which I'm totally against, I swear!) to throw you out on the street!" It's a wonder these people's skulls don't cave in from the vacuum inside. Then again, if I was a mediocre failson whose only deal is having inherited property that I now rent out, I'd likely try to spin a way that makes me seem like an entrepreneur, too.
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Aug 28, 2020 23:24
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I can't begin to imagine why that guy's tenants don't tell him he's a loving rear end in a top hat all the time. Though it is staggering (if understandable, given the emotional incentive he has) that he actually believes it's because he's such a good guy doing them a favour. A whole society full of people who think they're charming people persons because the other people they're pointing a loaded gun at are so positively chirpy and accomodating.
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Aug 28, 2020 23:32
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OwlFancier posted:I can't begin to imagine why that guy's tenants don't tell him he's a loving rear end in a top hat all the time. Though it is staggering (if understandable, given the emotional incentive he has) that he actually believes it's because he's such a good guy doing them a favour. 
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Aug 29, 2020 00:15
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Very unfair. Actual leeches have platelet aggregation inhibition properties and shouldn't be compared to landlords, who only inhibit fair land distribution.
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Aug 29, 2020 00:22
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Guavanaut posted:Very unfair. Actual leeches have platelet aggregation inhibition properties and shouldn't be compared to landlords, who only inhibit fair land distribution. Seconding this. Leeches have genuine, useful, medicinal properties - though I personally find them off-putting, that's a 'me' problem. Landlords thrive on, and benefit from, the threat of inflicting suffering on their fellow citizens and perpetuates their immiseration. While we're at it, could we please, please reconsider comparing the noble pig to police? Pigs are lovely, gregarious and highly intelligent animals when they're not mistreated and/or denied a proper environment to live in. ... what, I grew up on a farm, I like pigs, okay?
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Aug 29, 2020 11:29
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If I've understood correctly, calling cops pigs originated during the 60's civil rights protests, where calling them mother-fuckers and such were grounds for getting arrested (or at least beaten), but "pig" was a more neutral term that didn't carry criminal intent behind it. This might be one of those cultural things that are here to stay for awhile longer, no matter how bright actual pigs might be.
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Aug 29, 2020 11:59
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 Police were called pigs at least as far back as 1811. The earliest reference I know is from a British slang dictionary, so it was presumably a thing well before that. the Lexicon Balatronicum posted:Pig; A police officer. A China street pig; a Bow-street officer. Floor the pig and bolt; knock down the officer andd run away.
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Sep 2, 2020 10:42
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Thank you, I learned something today! Or unlearned some thing I maybe read somewhere once and took as gospel 
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Sep 2, 2020 11:01
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Panfilo posted:This is true. Some Libertarians are more pragmatic than others. Like I demonstrated, some will not be opposed to the existence of aid and services so long as they aren't on the hook for it. But sometimes I do wonder how true that really is too. Like imagine some Twilight Zone episode where a libertarian got transported to a Full Gay Space Communist America. In this fever dream he was never forced to pay taxes or even contribute at all ;he could Tiger King it up on his own little mud pit while everyone else engaged in mutual aid and worked collectively. Would he be happy that they left him alone? Is it REALLY about "Force" for Libertarians? Probably not. Mainly because they'd be ignored by the collective and they want to be noticed for how competent and correct they are. It's always about trying to catch some sort of idle, work-free deed holding power over others with these jerkoffs, whether they admit it or not. This is why they always fashion themselves as a captain rather than the guy that's simply trying to keep the irrigation system running so that the land produces the requisite number of calories to keep everyone alive. I think its mainly the lack of culture aspect...or rather lack of cultural...I wanna say 'engagement'? Cultural creativty? maybe?...that so many libertarians utterly lack for whatever reason. If there's one thing that seems to be iron clad with libertarian and objectivist dinguses is that they're utterly boring in most ways, which I think sort of pushes them to 'contracts above all' as a desperate play to be seen as a fully valid, expressive human. And this extends to some interesting mutations. I recently met a couple where the guy was this psychonaught, mushroom chomping libertarian space cadet who actively likes Trump because he represents the failure of the administrative state and...he's boring. Even drug usage cannot make these people lively or interesting. I think most of them know this and, in your example, looking from the outside in, it'd eat at them every day that the collective gave them everything they ever wanted and now they're utterly ignored and have nothing to offer, productive, cultural or otherwise.
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Sep 2, 2020 11:46
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TyroneGoldstein posted:I think its mainly the lack of culture aspect...or rather lack of cultural...I wanna say 'engagement'? Cultural creativty? maybe?...that so many libertarians utterly lack for whatever reason. If there's one thing that seems to be iron clad with libertarian and objectivist dinguses is that they're utterly boring in most ways, which I think sort of pushes them to 'contracts above all' as a desperate play to be seen as a fully valid, expressive human. Lewis Mumford posted:Not merely did the suburb keep the busier, dirtier, more productive enterprises at a distance, it likewise pushed away the creative activities of the city. Here life ceased to be a drama, full of unexpected challenges and tensions and dilemmas: it became a bland ritual of competitive spending...
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Sep 2, 2020 14:57
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First of all, how is everyone doing? I haven't posted on this thread since the very early stages of the coronavirus pandemic when very little was known about it. Since then the loving world seems to have burned to the ground. We've entered another economic depression, George Floyd was murdered by the police sparking protests in every major city, we've got a rapacious oligarchy who used this crisis to extract massive wealth from the middle class and working poor and we've got a presidential election where our choices are between a profoundly unqualified narcissist with the attention span of a 6 year old and a feeble 80 year old man with dementia. To top it off, California and Oregon are on fire. I'm now living in Portland, Oregon and the air quality is so bad you don't even want to leave your house. My father's best friend lives in Oregon and his entire home was burned to the ground with virtually everything he owned. He barely escaped. I've got cousins in the Bay Area who may well lose their home. They've had to evacuate. 2020 has been a goddamned nightmare. I'm bored as hell so I felt like talking about what the gently caress is going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, etc. I'd like to know what you think about this: Given what we know now, do you think the government response to COVID-19 in terms of the lockdowns was proportionate to the threat, or was it excessive? Do you think there are ulterior motives being pursued behind the scenes under the guise of a public health crisis?
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Sep 11, 2020 03:58
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I think 
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Sep 11, 2020 03:59
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polymathy posted:I'd like to know what you think about this: Given what we know now, do you think the government response to COVID-19 in terms of the lockdowns was proportionate to the threat, or was it excessive? Do you think there are ulterior motives being pursued behind the scenes under the guise of a public health crisis? More people in America have died than every single nuclear weapon has ever killed. So it wasn't an overreaction, or proportionate, it is an objective failure that served only to save stockholder profits at the expense of human lives. This virus will continue to spread and kill until we are ready to shut down the economy in order to stop it. And we will never be ready to shut down the economy until very rich people start getting sick and dying. Welcome back!
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Sep 11, 2020 04:08
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Not true, it might also spread and kill until about 1 in every 100 people is dead of it 
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Sep 11, 2020 04:09
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OwlFancier posted:I think I guess that's directed at me? It's funny how socialists often attribute examples of people being lovely to some inherent defect of the capitalist system, rather than an inherent defect of human nature. It's also extremely simplistic. You have a complex system of government power mandating lockdowns, preventing people from working who'd like to work, Corporate Oligarchs and Banks getting bailed out by elected officials and the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates at zero percent and flooding the economy with cheap money, with corruption at all levels and your only analysis is "well, that's Capitalism for you!" Hell, it's not like socialist societies ever produced rapacious oligarchs who manipulated State power for their own benefit at the expense of the common man. Oh wait...
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Sep 11, 2020 04:20
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Hey, Poly, I wanted a libertarian reaction to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGWOObrE_nk It's only a few minutes long, and it's done by a professor of economics.
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Sep 11, 2020 04:23
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polymathy posted:... Other countries locked down much harder than we did, and are doing better for it. The government response was neither proportionate, nor excessive. It was inadequate. I'm not sure what ulterior motives could be getting pursued behind the scenes at this point, given that the latest Republican covid relief bill includes immunity for businesses from lawsuits arising from Covid related injuries. Like, maybe they're trying to get more people to die as a way of making climate change less bad? Giving money to big business isn't ulterior and is not being pursued behind the scenes, so it can't be that. That's just the motive.
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Sep 11, 2020 04:28
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polymathy posted:Hell, it's not like socialist societies ever produced rapacious oligarchs who manipulated State power for their own benefit at the expense of the common man. Oh wait...
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Sep 11, 2020 04:30
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jrod, welcome back ol' buddy ol' pal! Global-warming-induced climate change and this here COVID-19 pandemic are both extremely bad, and they have been caused and/or exacerbated by the enormous insufficiency of our wealthy governmental response.OwlFancier posted:Not true, it might also spread and kill until about 1 in every 100 people is dead of it ...but what's ~78 million deaths between freedom-loving friends?? p.s.
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Sep 11, 2020 04:30
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polymathy posted:I guess that's directed at me? Capitalism is what forces people to work as much as they do, in the conditions that they do, capitalism is why people cannot keep themselves safe, because their work requires them to be dangerous, capitalism is why people must go homeless if they cannot work, capitalism demands that blood be shed to keep the engine going and the wealthy profiting from it, as the poor die. That is how it works, to bemoan those outcomes while defending the system is foolish, you should embrace them. Blood and suffering for the many makes profit, power, and protection for the few, isn't that wonderful? The perfectly evolved societal structure that creates both the glittering heights and gore soaked depths? If you're not into that sort of thing you're backing the wrong horse. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Sep 11, 2020 |
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Sep 11, 2020 04:32
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