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The idea, I think, is that you make the appeal to moral nature, shake your head sadly, and grimly accept that since Humanity is Fallen, it will be important to continue having the police keep the riff raff off your estate. But if only we could all agree to respect the non-aggression principle...
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Sep 11, 2020 09:18
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But even then, if everyone voluntarily did what we need the police to do, you would still have a society where the wealthy get to dictate terms to everyone else. Capitalism functioning ideally still works that way, it would be a society where jeff bezos says "I want you to work for starvation wages" and everyone else says "yes OK whatever you say, doing anything else would be breaking the non aggression principle".
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Sep 11, 2020 09:25
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Working for starvation wages is a form of aggression and me and my voluntarily affiliated union of tradespeople are invoking our lawful right to resist it with a bunch of weapons.
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Sep 11, 2020 10:12
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OwlFancier posted:But even then, if everyone voluntarily did what we need the police to do, you would still have a society where the wealthy get to dictate terms to everyone else. Capitalism functioning ideally still works that way, it would be a society where jeff bezos says "I want you to work for starvation wages" and everyone else says "yes OK whatever you say, doing anything else would be breaking the non aggression principle". There's always a Renegade Cut video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6JmsBsdPhA
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Sep 11, 2020 11:15
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OwlFancier posted:But even then, if everyone voluntarily did what we need the police to do, you would still have a society where the wealthy get to dictate terms to everyone else. Capitalism functioning ideally still works that way, it would be a society where jeff bezos says "I want you to work for starvation wages" and everyone else says "yes OK whatever you say, doing anything else would be breaking the non aggression principle". Yeah, take the libertarian theory of the federal reserve: it's all a plot by billionaires to force us to accept their paper scrip so they can print as much as they want and give it to themselves. But the only reason they needed to do that was because the US constitution says only the federal government can print money. Previous schemes where capitalists paid workers in scrip that the boss controlled were ruled illegal by the courts. Without the US constitution and laws against company scrip why wouldn't capitalists go right back to paying us in that. They own all the land and the mines and the factories and the shops. Do you really think Amazon employees could demand wages in gold from Bezos, jrod? If they had that power they wouldn't be wrecking their joints for starvation wages now.
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Sep 11, 2020 14:25
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Which really gets to the whole fundamental conflict of libertarianism. They know that some people will be slaving away for starvation wages in company scrip, but the idea is those people deserve it, and without the state guaranteeing them workers' rights and a minimum wage their will be more room for homo economicus superior to make a fortune in gold and silver bullion. But in that case, doesn't the fact that Jamie Simon and Jeff Bezos are clever enough to hoodwink all of us and convince us to vote for pro federal reserve politicians prove their superior fitness over the rest of the species? They own all the wealth, we could vote it all away from them tomorrow but they've convinced us not to, and in fact jrod keeps telling me it would be immoral to take their capital away from them. So what's the problem, the 1% have all the wealth, as they deserve for outsmarting us.
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Sep 11, 2020 14:37
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The Divine Right of 𝖕𝖊𝖔𝖕𝖑𝖊 𝖔𝖋 𝖒𝖊𝖆𝖓𝖘
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Sep 11, 2020 14:41
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The existence of corporations in the first place instead of just a bunch of independent artisans and tradesmen is due to the natural human tendency to cooperate, and it's totally reasonable to try doing some kind of organization of society as a whole instead of just shrugging and letting corporations with no democratic mandate or oversight consolidate to have the bulk of the population under their power.
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Sep 11, 2020 15:59
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I can't imagine how a Libertarian justifies art and artists. It takes years to hone the craft and it has almost no economic benefit whatsoever. Even if you assume that employment can be gained because you develop the skill, the work produced is inherently "worthless". You'll probably be designing ads which does not actually materially contribute to society. In fact, many create art with the knowledge without the profit motive at all. also, #neverforget the day that jrod came back to us and was immediately probed by an IK of a different thread. It's 9-11 all over again.
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Sep 11, 2020 16:50
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art criticizes society and the existing power structure and is therefore degenerate and communist artists should be funneled into productive pursuits like drawing happy families all wearing Old Navy jeans or filming videos showing cops embracing black people and cracking open a six pack of Pepsi together, we know those are productive because Old Navy and Pepsi make bigger profits. If you can't slap your art on a lunchbox and sell it, it's objectively worthless. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Sep 11, 2020 |
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Sep 11, 2020 16:58
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Or we can go back to much of the early modern motivations to patronize artists. Rich people with serious worries about their popularity and/or legitimacy fund massive public artworks to prove that they are better than the common masses and better than those other slightly less rich jerks in the city over there. How will everyone know that you are the best if you don't donate a massive cathedral filled with the finest sculptures while plastering your name all over it? How will those drat millennial remember your name if you don't have massive college dormitories named after yourself? Alternatively, look at old money during the gilded age. When old money couldn't keep up with the new robber barons it terms of raw wealthy, they flaunted their privilege by acting more cultured than their nouveau riche rivals. A mere mega-millionaire can keep up their sense of superiority against a tech billionaire by insisting he is more cultured and refined than those crass startup code monkey billionaires. golden bubble fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Sep 11, 2020 |
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Sep 11, 2020 18:14
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golden bubble posted:Or we can go back to much of the early modern motivations to patronize artists. Rich people with serious worries about their popularity and/or legitimacy fund massive public artworks to prove that they are better than the common masses and better than those other slightly less rich jerks in the city over there. How will everyone know that you are the best if you don't donate a massive cathedral filled with the finest sculptures while plastering your name all over it? How will those drat millennial remember your name if you don't have massive college dormitories named after yourself? Omg if the wealthy try to toe the "refined" angle immediately following the Trump presidency I will die laughing.
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Sep 11, 2020 18:30
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I don't really know what you're on about, there's been plenty of profitable art out there, even if there's also a lot of art that eschews profit. And even if just selling art wasn't profitable, there's plenty of reasons why the wealthy would want to cultivate artists to pay for their services. That's the core of what advertising is.
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Sep 11, 2020 18:49
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I suppose it depends on whether libertarianism can explain the value of a thing that has no inherent value. Which you would think it would given capitalism relies on that but on the other hand they hate fiat money so who even loving knows. (watch jrod come back and engage with this and ignore everything else)
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Sep 11, 2020 18:55
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OwlFancier posted:I suppose it depends on whether libertarianism can explain the value of a thing that has no inherent value. They're all about gold though. I think you're thinking about utilitarians or something. Some libertarians even justify social services when provided by voluntary charity just on the same sort of individual freedom basis of the people who they don't understand that somehow enjoy giving to others for no self-gain.
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Sep 11, 2020 19:05
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Well yeah but they seem to think gold does have inherent value or something? I don't actually understand libertarian concepts of value because like everything they seem to complain about something while calling it statist and then stan the same thing five minutes later.
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Sep 11, 2020 19:11
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Gold is inherently valuable because it takes labor power to dig it out of the earth. Paper money is worthless because you can just run off limitlessly large-numbered bills without any significant additional labor. The labor required to produce any commodity confers value upon it. Wait, noooooooo!
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Sep 11, 2020 19:17
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polymathy posted:My starting point is that the State can never be morally justified, both because it necessarily commits aggression So you think aggression is bad. Define aggression. Can I commit an act of aggression by not acting? Por ejemplo: If I sign a contract with you, and - through no fault of my own - cannot complete it, have I aggressed against you?
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Sep 11, 2020 19:55
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SlothfulCobra posted:They're all about gold though. Yeah, that was kind of my point. How does a libertarian square the concept of art which normally has no value in a market. I tossed out the idea that some art can be used in trade, but even advertisements are inherently worthless. Like, they do not increase the value of anything, they simply create a desire to obtain it ...unless value is derived from human desire, in which case does advertisement count as cheating?
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Sep 11, 2020 20:04
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The effectiveness of advertising is one of those amusing little foibles in Libertarian philosophy where they (sometimes, when it's convenient for their argument) acknowledge a real problem that exists, but then support all the systems that create that problem in the first place If you ask jrod how the ultrarich are able to hoodwink us with their federal reserve fiat money and their plandemics, he'll tell you that the ruling class oligarchs like Bezos use government brainwashing centers known as public schools as well as their ownership stakes in the Jew-run media to bombard everyone with misinformation. So the solution then is to take the Washington Post away from scheming handrubbing cosmopolitans like Bezos and put it under democratic control so the people run it, have full transparency on their sources, etc right? And as for schools we should put more power in the hands of popularly elected school boards right? Oh heavens no! What are you, a communist? Actually we need to cut Bezos' taxes to zero and abolish anti-trust legislation so he can buy up every media outlet in the country if he wants to. And also all the schools should be privatized and sold off to Bezos and his billionaire friends as well! VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Sep 11, 2020 |
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Sep 11, 2020 22:43
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polymathy posted:Furthermore, the statistics we are being told about the death count from COVID-19 are very inflated due to the categorization of people who die WITH Covid as opposed to FROM Covid as simply "COVID-19 deaths". I'm not a conspiracy theorist about this stuff. I think it is a nasty virus that we should take some precautions about. Other people have already hammered you on how loving stupid this is, but I want to drive really hard at the section I've bolded, because you absolutely are a conspiracy theorist. How many debunked conspiracy theories have you bought into over the course of your time posting on SA? I know you posted about how the DNC hack actually came from the inside (which means you probably at least flirt with the idea of Seth Rich being assassinated). You've defended Anti-Vaxx nonsense in the past. You've bought into mercury filling crap (which you've been roundly mocked for) and at least a couple more that I can't remember off the top of my head. At this point I wouldn't be remotely surprised to hear that you believe the moon landing was fake, or that Bernie Sanders shot JFK (he totally did). Oh hey, I looked and one of your first posts under your new nickname was laying bullshit about how Assad didn't use chemical weapons and it was all a false flag. Or how Gary Johnson was given a town hall in order to hurt Trump. Hey, remember in march when you said the rona was being massively overhyped by the media? You are credulous to dumb ideas to a frankly absurd degree, which in retrospect explains a lot of your problems with libertarianism. You buy into just about anything if someone tells you the state is bad.
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Sep 12, 2020 00:15
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I liked Ghosty. Ghosty come talk to Jrod for a while!
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Sep 12, 2020 00:27
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Caros posted:or that Bernie Sanders shot JFK (he totally did). reported for mistaking Bernie Sanders for Ted Cruz's father
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Sep 12, 2020 00:58
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I didn't want to mention this due to possible stigma, but I am so filled with bile right now I cannot help it. I am going to restrain my wrath because, even though there's nothing in this world so awful that Jrod doesn't deserve it, I know how the mods are. Jrod, I am a COVID survivor who has almost certainly suffered permanent cardiopulmonary damage because of it. I live in one of the worst regional hot spots for the virus in the worst country in the world for it, due to a system that you adore that both ignores human suffering in the name of more profit and kneecaps government from doing anything about it. I want to tell you that I hate you more than any other human being I have ever interacted with. I cannot possible overstate how much I loathe you and everyone like you. You remind me of this plague in two ways: you cause me terrible pain with every breath and I want with all my being that you be wiped out to the very last micro-organism.
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Sep 12, 2020 01:28
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Grace Baiting posted:reported for mistaking Bernie Sanders for Ted Cruz's father Reported for not listening to every episode of behind the bastards.
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Sep 12, 2020 02:06
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JustJeff88 posted:I didn't want to mention this due to possible stigma, but I am so filled with bile right now I cannot help it. I am going to restrain my wrath because, even though there's nothing in this world so awful that Jrod doesn't deserve it, I know how the mods are. get a load of this sheep who can't tell the difference between suffering permanent cardiopulmonary damage FROM covid, and suffering permanent cardiopulomary damage WITH covid 
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Sep 12, 2020 02:12
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JustJeff88 posted:I didn't want to mention this due to possible stigma, but I am so filled with bile right now I cannot help it. I am going to restrain my wrath because, even though there's nothing in this world so awful that Jrod doesn't deserve it, I know how the mods are. jrod doesn't think in terms of systems, man polymathy posted:I don't think this way. I don't think in terms of "systems". We're going to get into a semantic dispute over the definition of terms like "capitalism" or "collective action". Put another way, they don't think in a way that allows them to perceive cause and effect
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Sep 12, 2020 02:48
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polymathy posted:I don't think We know, it’s obvious from the word salad nonsense you spout every time you pop back in to indulge your humiliation fetish
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Sep 12, 2020 05:13
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Somfin posted:Good to see you again bub, please don't shy away from this now. Answer this polymaty, you coward.
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Sep 12, 2020 06:59
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OwlFancier posted:But even then, if everyone voluntarily did what we need the police to do, you would still have a society where the wealthy get to dictate terms to everyone else. Capitalism functioning ideally still works that way, it would be a society where jeff bezos says "I want you to work for starvation wages" and everyone else says "yes OK whatever you say, doing anything else would be breaking the non aggression principle". Even today, with capitalism certainly NOT functioning "ideally", businesses are unable to arbitrarily pay workers below the market value of their labor. They don't have the ability to pay whatever they want, they face a bargaining process whereby they need to negotiate with workers and compete with other businesses to hire workers. If a particular company pushes wages below the market rate for services, a competitor will bid away the services of those workers by offering them a higher salary. If businesses are as powerful as you claim, why do they ever pay any worker a cent more than the minimum they are legally required to pay?
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Sep 12, 2020 07:00
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Alhazred posted:Answer this polymaty, you coward. Answer the question that has been asked of you for months now. The entire NZpol thread is looking forward to laughing at you.
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Sep 12, 2020 07:18
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Can a mod red text polymaty until he responds kthnx? (Ain’t giving lowtax any cash)
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Sep 12, 2020 07:22
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Caros posted:Other people have already hammered you on how loving stupid this is, but I want to drive really hard at the section I've bolded, because you absolutely are a conspiracy theorist. If you want to bring up the DNC hack, you should remember that one of the biggest conspiracy theories of my lifetime was the Russiagate hoax that has been thoroughly discredited. I said it was a hoax at the time and events since have vindicated me. The idea that the DNC emails weren't hacked but were leaked by an insider is not my idea, but it comes from Bill Binney, Ray McGovern and the Veteran Intelligence Professionals For Sanity and the forensic investigations they did around the event. I never said it was Seth Rich. I only said that this theory is what THEY said, and I consider Bill Binney to be quite credible. He's not a silly person, he's widely acknowledged to be quite brilliant with the inside knowledge he has as a former intelligence official with the NSA. If I recall, you were the one attacking me for debunking the conspiracy theory of Russiagate, whereas you seemed to buy into it. It's pretty rich that anyone would call ME a conspiracy theorist who ever bought into the stupidest, most fact-free conspiracy theory in recent memory. Yes, the chemical attack at Douma was likely fake. See the OPCW whistle-blowers that exposed the shenanigans taking place at that organization: "In testimony before the United Nations Security Council, former OPCW inspection team leader and engineering expert Ian Henderson stated that their investigation in Douma, Syria suggested no chemical attack took place. But their findings were suppressed." https://thegrayzone.com/2020/01/22/ian-henderson-opcw-whistleblower-un-no-chemical-attack-douma-syria/ https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/12/opcw-whistleblower-mistreatment-douma-investigators/ Why would someone on the "left" such as yourself be defending literal war-propaganda whose sole purpose is to provoke and justify a US attack on Syria?
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Sep 12, 2020 07:24
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polymathy posted:Even today, with capitalism certainly NOT functioning "ideally", businesses are unable to arbitrarily pay workers below the market value of their labor. They don't have the ability to pay whatever they want, they face a bargaining process whereby they need to negotiate with workers and compete with other businesses to hire workers. If a particular company pushes wages below the market rate for services, a competitor will bid away the services of those workers by offering them a higher salary. the market isn't capitalism. the market is an economic phenomenon that existed before capitalism and might well continue to exist after it's gone. the market is still sort of functional, capitalism hasn't destroyed it yet but it sure is making a go at it. the entire economy isn't so monopolized that businesses can just pay everyone minimum wage, but certainly the value of an employee is generally far more than the market rate in the deeply distorted market we see today
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Sep 12, 2020 07:35
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JustJeff88 posted:I didn't want to mention this due to possible stigma, but I am so filled with bile right now I cannot help it. I am going to restrain my wrath because, even though there's nothing in this world so awful that Jrod doesn't deserve it, I know how the mods are. And I am somehow to blame for that?! I know people who have suffered from COVID and I think it is a very real and dangerous disease. I am only suggesting that the government response to this disease has caused a lot of harm as well and we may have pursued policies that were better calibrated to cause less harm overall. And we should certainly be concerned about our government taking advantage of a crisis. I agree with Edward Snowden's concerns that he expressed in a VICE interview: Snowden Warns Governments Are Using Coronavirus to Build ‘the Architecture of Oppression’ https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvge5q/snowden-warns-governments-are-using-coronavirus-to-build-the-architecture-of-oppression Also, claiming that the United States represents a "system I adore" is so insane I don't know where to begin. If you are so intent on hating me with the passion you seem to be, shouldn't you at least make an attempt to understand what I'm saying first?
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Sep 12, 2020 07:41
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Somfin posted:Good to see you again bub, please don't shy away from this now. What were my actual words? Why don't you quote what I actually said? What I recall is that the context that I brought up New Zealand in was when I cited a few studies that ranked the countries of the world in their relative adherence to policies that libertarians support. New Zealand generally ranks fairly high in those sorts of studies. My contention is that a libertarian society is not only a moral society, but it will produce good results in terms of living standards for the masses and other metrics we care about. You're retort is that it would produce disastrous results. My only point in citing studies like these is to show that those societies that are relatively closer to the libertarian ideal are not disasters, but in actuality are pretty prosperous and nice places to live. On the contrary, societies that are farther away from the libertarian ideal, such as those with large central States, authoritarian dictatorships, central planning and communism, are generally very poor and are places none of us would want to live. Therefore, countries that make reforms toward more libertarian policies in terms of opening up markets, decentralized political power, protection of property rights and contracts and defense of civil liberties, generally experience improvements in all the metrics we care about. Since we don't have any ideal libertarian society, this is the empirical evidence we have to work with. I'm not ultimately a utilitarian, but I am concerned with utilitarian outcomes. Is this argument really so hard to comprehend?
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Sep 12, 2020 08:01
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Jazerus posted:the market isn't capitalism. the market is an economic phenomenon that existed before capitalism and might well continue to exist after it's gone. I don't generally use the term "capitalism" to describe what I'm for. I'm for markets and free enterprise. That's it. 19th century classical liberals didn't use the term "capitalism" to describe their preferred economic system either. The term was largely popularized by Karl Marx and was defined in such a way that I think is very confusing. If you're coming to this debate with Marx's understand of capitalism, and then assuming libertarians are the "ultra-capitalists" and you're the opponent of capitalism, you're operating from a bad conceptual framework and so you won't really understand libertarian ideology. I'm reminded of a book called "Markets Not Capitalism". It was written by Gary Chartier and a variety of other people. They mostly identify as left-libertarians but they make a good point. It is intellectually coherent to oppose capitalism as a libertarian, and a private property rights libertarian at that. Market forces break down monopolies and regulate business behavior if they are operating correctly.
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Sep 12, 2020 08:14
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polymathy posted:I know people who have suffered from COVID I mean, did you ascertain if they were suffering from COVID, or with COVID?
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Sep 12, 2020 08:18
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polymathy posted:If you want to bring up the DNC hack, you should remember that one of the biggest conspiracy theories of my lifetime was the Russiagate hoax that has been thoroughly discredited. I said it was a hoax at the time and events since have vindicated me. The idea that the DNC emails weren't hacked but were leaked by an insider is not my idea, but it comes from Bill Binney, Ray McGovern and the Veteran Intelligence Professionals For Sanity and the forensic investigations they did around the event. I never said it was Seth Rich. I only said that this theory is what THEY said, and I consider Bill Binney to be quite credible. He's not a silly person, he's widely acknowledged to be quite brilliant with the inside knowledge he has as a former intelligence official with the NSA. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a bipartisan report confirming that Russiagate was not a hoax, you stupid pile of turds. The list of evidence confirming Russiagate is long and pretty comprehensive but leave it to a libertarian to deny reality in the dumbest way possible
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Sep 12, 2020 08:21
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polymathy posted:And I am somehow to blame for that?! I know people who have suffered from COVID and I think it is a very real and dangerous disease. I am only suggesting that the government response to this disease has caused a lot of harm as well and we may have pursued policies that were better calibrated to cause less harm overall. And we should certainly be concerned about our government taking advantage of a crisis. I agree with Edward Snowden's concerns that he expressed in a VICE interview: This "I have some black friends" response is pretty weak when you're in the process of decrying the very policies that protected the public from this very real and dangerous disease right up until the point that a bunch of politicians decided that the public didn't need protection anymore. The choice was between squashing the virus with stringent public health measures versus pretending like the virus isn't as big a deal as epidemiologists everywhere were saying. A bunch of governors chose the latter and you're saying that the former causes more harm, because you're a buffoon.
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Sep 12, 2020 08:26
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