OwlFancier posted:

Even if we accept the idea that there are super smart IQ guys who should be given preferential power over people who are not that, who's gonna decide who they are? Clearly the common plebs can not understand who is and isn't a big brain boy. So all the big brain boys will have to decide among themselves who is suitable to make decisions.

And wouldn't you know it, if you went out and asked the people in charge today whether or not they are the best people for the job, they'd tell you "yes I am"

So how does a supposed "hierarchy of competence" not simply become a political hierarchy? Because the people in charge of deciding what the hierarchy is are the people at the top of it and they're going to make decisions based on whatever they think is best and there is no way to check whether they are right, that's how a hierarchy works. That's literally how you're saying it should work because you explicitly say that people at the top of the hierarchy should be making the decisions over the people who aren't at the top of it.

OwlFancier posted:

Even if we accept the idea that there are super smart IQ guys who should be given preferential power over people who are not that, who's gonna decide who they are? Clearly the common plebs can not understand who is and isn't a big brain boy. So all the big brain boys will have to decide among themselves who is suitable to make decisions.

And wouldn't you know it, if you went out and asked the people in charge today whether or not they are the best people for the job, they'd tell you "yes I am"

So how does a supposed "hierarchy of competence" not simply become a political hierarchy? Because the people in charge of deciding what the hierarchy is are the people at the top of it and they're going to make decisions based on whatever they think is best and there is no way to check whether they are right, that's how a hierarchy works. That's literally how you're saying it should work because you explicitly say that people at the top of the hierarchy should be making the decisions over the people who aren't at the top of it.

hooman posted:

Have you ever worked in a business? Business is *nothing* like a school group project. In a business everyone has skills and are assigned to the tasks that suit those skills. The average worker may not want a management role, in a co-op they would likely assign that role to a management specialist.

polymathy posted:

Let me explain my conception of a free society and I want to get your reaction to it.

[...]

I'm envisioning a society where co-ops are commonplace and the barriers to entrepreneurship are low or nonexistent. Even in such a society, would you deny both the worker and entrepreneur the choice of a traditional employment arrangement? If so, how do you justify this?

polymathy posted:

The clear point Laurence Vance is making is that we should be questioning what the gently caress our ships are doing in the Black Sea instead of insinuating Russian aggression because a Russian jet happened to be in the same area.

Is this really so unreasonable?

Caros posted:

Because they are the same thing. You're just trying to obfuscate that fact.


True. It is even possible that if they had chosen to do so in a measured, organized fashion rather than responding to a free and fair election by taking their slaves and going home, that they might have avoided war. They didn't. They chose immediate (and illegal) secession, formed an army and began seizing federal property. In particular, Fort Sumter was very explicitly the property of the federal government, having been ceded to the federal government decades earlier. So it isn't just a matter of 'Well gently caress it, we're out', so much as it was 'gently caress it, we're out, also we're claiming a bunch of military assets that don't belong to us, you don't mind right?

To blame the north here, given the behavior of the south, is revisionist garbage.


Your DiLorenzo is showing, because we both know that is where you get your stupid loving ideas about the civil war from.

That first quote is, as you say, from Lincoln's inaugural address. No loving poo poo that man isn't going to go up on stage and say the states have the right to suck it. Four of the eleven confederate states had yet to secede, and there were slave states that stayed with the union that might very well have tipped the balance to the confederacy if his first act as president was to try and abolish slavery.

Your second quote is somehow even more infuriating, because idiots like you always leave out the context of the goddamn letter. The letter was sent to Horace Greely, editor of the New York Tribune in response to an editorial called the Prayer of Twenty Millions in which Greely scolded Lincoln for not enforcing the confiscation acts that allowed for the freeing of confederate slaves. Here is the main part of the quote, with the context:

"I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free."

The letter you are quoting is Lincoln responding to a friend who publicly chided him by saying "This is my loving job as president, I can't be as blatant about my personal views as a newspaper editor".

And most importantly, he wrote that letter while also having a copy of the soon to be issued emancipation proclamation in his loving desk. The letter you're quoting is Lincoln attempting to spin the upcoming proclamation as something done to 'save the union' rather than humanitarian reasons, because he knew that wanting to save the union would be taken as a much better justification by slave owning northern states than simply choosing to end slavery.


This is such an asinine thing to say. The south stole war material in the leadup to the war, captured federal land, killed federal troops, but somehow it was on Lincoln to pre-emptively surrender?


Buuuuuulshit. Of the lower states (the ones who seceded before sumter) 36.7% of families owned slaves. Of the middle south (the ones who left after) the number was 'merely' a quarter. Of those, most owned more than one, with over 50% owning at least five human beings.

1/3rd of your population isn't 'the elites' by any honest measure. Moreover, when 1/3rd of your population owns slaves, you're a slave state. Slavery is tied up in the very fabric of your society, to the point where even men who don't own slaves typically aspire to own slaves, where slaves are such a fixture of your economy that the removal of them could very easily devastate your existing way of life.

Did every man in the south fight to preserve slavery? Probably not, definitely not in fact, because I can think of a few who fought who didn't give a solitary gently caress about the institution. But this gets into Germans who join the Wehrmacht sort of argument. Were they all responsible for the abuses of nazi germany? Probably not. But is that a distinction that somehow washes away the illegitimate nature of the war, or the overall crimes of the german people? gently caress no, you're goddamn nazis.


This isn't the loving argument, though. No one is arguing about whether or not Jim Bob was fighting for slavery, they're arguing about whether the secession and subsequent civil war were caused by slavery, which of course they loving were.

polymathy posted:

Golbez posted:

Because it's allowed. We were [presumably] in Turkish waters, in accordance with international law. We were not threatening anyone, unless you're implying that carrying a gun is a threat, in which case, when are you in favor of gun control?

Edit: I'm not sure if any part of the Black Sea counts as international water, so I'm confining it to Turkish. Either way, the US ship had the right to enter.

polymathy posted:

Alright, forget DiLorenzo.

Allow me to introduce the late Lincoln scholar Lerone Bennett Jr. He's no libertarian and certainly no apologist for the Confederacy or any "lost-cause" nonsense. He happens to be a black man and former editor of Ebony magazine, which should be sufficient to protect him from accusations of being in favor of slavery or white supremacy.

A book of his I highly recommend is "Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream":

https://www.amazon.com/Forced-into-Glory-Abraham-Lincolns/dp/0874850851


His scholarship very much backs up my assessments of Lincoln and my understanding of Civil War history.

Here's a talk he gave in the year 2000:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XWq0_P_hI


You can respond to this if you like, but I'd rather we set aside the Civil War discussion because there are much more relevant and important things worth discussing.

loving wikipedia jrod, WIKIPEDIA posted:

In a 2009 review of three newly published books on Lincoln, historian Brian Dirck referred to Bennett's 2000 work and linked him with Thomas DiLorenzo, another critic of Lincoln. He wrote that "Few Civil War scholars take Bennett and DiLorenzo seriously, pointing to their narrow political agenda and faulty research."

Alhazred posted:

I don't think you ever managed to explain how New Zealand was libertarian.

polymathy posted:

All I had to do to win my case was demonstrate that there were actors in the civil war who were motivated by factors other than slavery. This is inarguable, and you've really conceded as much.

Halloween Jack posted:

So does each individual soldier in both armies count as an "actor" or what are your goalposts here

polymathy posted:

...Nikola Tesla's "IQ scores range from 160 to 310 by different measures".

Meanwhile, the average IQ of the general population is between 90 and 110. Do you honestly expect us to believe that each worker in a large company would be equally competent to judge the value of all of Tesla's ideas or inventions?

Somfin posted:

You do know why the "average IQ of the general population is between 90 and 110," right? Do you know why that measure puts the average person there?

Somfin posted:

You do know why the "average IQ of the general population is between 90 and 110," right? Do you know why that measure puts the average person there?

Billy Gnosis posted:

No he doesn't .

I also like how searching for 310 IQ just brings up people dunking on the idea that Tesla had it.

OwlFancier posted:

Do people not know that 100IQ is definitionally average in tyool 2020?

OwlFancier posted:

Do people not know that 100IQ is definitionally average in tyool 2020?

Somfin posted:

Modern humans taking older IQ tests usually score higher than 100, because the average person is smarter than they used to be

Hello Sailor posted:

What I'm getting from this is that the first IQ tests probably had questions along the lines of the sort on SNL's Celebrity Jeopardy skits. Edison would've been Sean Connery.

Somfin posted:

Not really? Like, the urge behind trying to figure out what IQ actually measures is fairly benign, and a bunch of folks are genuinely convinced that g exists in a completely spherical cow way.

The problem with libertarians is that they want g to both justify their beliefs and influence policy, and they want their online test's 240 IQ score to be taken as proof that their belief in right-wing ideology must be smart. Really they just want validation.

JRod watch the video

Guavanaut posted:

Free market obsessives are not good at averages.

polymathy posted:

Therefore I consider libertarian theory more accommodating in that all people would have the free option of choosing either co-ops where they would indeed have "a say in how their workplace operates", and a traditional worker role where they agree to the terms of an employment contract but give up certain control and say in their workplace environment. And of course every person also would have the option to become an entrepreneur themselves.

polymathy posted:

Consider the following hypothetical:

I offer a person a job at $20 an hour, with the understanding that I assume the risk for profits and loses, and that my business is a hierarchical one in which decisions are delegating from the top down, and this person freely agrees to the employment contract, how is that exploitation?

The answer I will inevitably get back is that this is not a legitimate contract because the worker doesn't have comparable bargaining power and their choice is really "take this job or starve".

Do you think it's possible to envision a society where a worker has enough options or bargaining power that a traditional employment contract where an entrepreneur will be able to make a profit, is not coercive but in fact a free and legitimate choice?

theshim posted:

What is your obsession with people being Fully Rational Actors when it flies directly in the face of observable reality and all of recorded history?

Weatherman posted:

Did he ever address the question "what happens when your local warlord captain of industry buys all the land around your lot, then charges you $infinity to cross it?"