Libertarians: You fire fighter lovers sure are good at debate!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Libertarians: You fire fighter lovers sure are good at debate!

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VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Phyzzle posted:

To put it in perspective, the 13 billion used to discover the Higgs boson could have taken 100 newborns, raised them up, put them through grad school for Ph.D.s in electrical engineering, and given them million dollar grants to work on whatever the Hell they wanted every year for the rest of their careers. You'd think a few useful computer chips might have come out of that, too.

There are also a lot of engineering Ph.D.s commong out of the high energy projects. I personally know several EE PHDs who got their thesis funded by DESY.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2014 23:01

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 18:21

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

jrodefeld posted:

In the first place, let's not get into the "you're probably a racist" smearing. On the market where workers accept job offers voluntarily with employers there is no exploitation...

Does that mean that you also want an unconditional basic income? Because there is no other way to ensure that the negotiations between workers and employers are truly free.

Also, I can not understand how someone who thinks that a free market will be good for everyone can be strongly against minimum wage.
You assume that in a true free market everyone who labors will be paid enough for a reasonable live.
But this is not the case right now, so clearly the market is not free.
Minimum wage moves us from the current conditions toward to what would happen if the markets were free. It might be worse then attacking whatever you call the root cause* directly, but it should be a step in the right direction also from a libertarian view.

*I know what a leftwinger would blame as the root cause, what do you blame?

# ¿ Sep 30, 2014 10:27

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

wateroverfire posted:

Except in the most contrived of cases this is not a thing that employers can do, though. Employers offer as much money as it takes to get acceptable people. That is pretty much the end of it at the low end of the wage distribution. There are too many employers with too many positions for them to be leveraging much of anything and a worker's risk of starvation or whatever is both 100% unknown to the potential employer and 100% out of his or her control.

What do you mean by contrived. The classic "company town" type of extortion/economic coercion is very common in both current and historic places with no regulations (like most of the 19th century) or effectively extremely pro-employer(like in parts of china) regulations.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2014 20:54

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

jrodefeld posted:

In the first place you would of course have to reject Euclidian Geometry as an invalid system of mathematics. Why? Because the teachers in high school classrooms teach things like the Pythagorean Theorem. They teach this rule without insisting that all students go out in nature and start measured triangles. They don't accept the Pythagorean Theorem as a hypothesis, something that is subject to falsifiability at any time based on new information or more data. Rather they establish that, as long as certain criteria are met in particular that a triangle has a perfect right angle on one of its three corners, that A squared plus B squared equals C squared. Based on those established definitions the Pythagorean Theorem is a law of mathematics and will forever be valid.

Mathemathics is not a science, and never has been. The only people who say differently are people who are trying to bolster support in an unrelated field by confusing the definition of science.

jrodefeld posted:

Scientific law established by the Austrian method, for example, proves that, all things being equal, that if you raise the price of a good less of it will be sold. This is not a hypothesis that requires constant testing. It is a necessary and logical implication of the fundamental axioms of human action. Now, empirical testing can and does bolster this reality, but it cannot falsify it. For example, suppose someone ran a test on a group of people and found that, on one occasion, that raising the price of a good actually increased sales. Would this invalidate that law? Of course not. It would be clear that some other factor was not adequately accounted for and controlled in the study. Either some other factor had indeed changed, or the study was undertaken for too brief a time period.

There are indeed studies that indeed indicate that Griffen goods and Velben goods exist. And there are indeed arguments about their validity. Those arguments are vague enough to make their basic law of supply and demand and thus the Austrian school unfalsifiable.

jrodefeld posted:

The Austrian would immediately understand that when you increase the cost of something, the demand for that good or service goes down, lowering sales. This is as true of the purchase of labor services on the market as it is of computers at Best Buy.

The exception to a monotone supply vs. demand curves are somewhat questionable in the field of normal goods. But when you include labor as a good the empiric evidence for refusing the basic law of supply and demand is almost incontrovertible.

When means that if you accept labor as a good, Austrian economics has been falsified.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2014 11:22

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

wateroverfire posted:

What? No. That's dumb. Workers form the labor supply and employers form the labor demand. That framework is fine.

That is what I was saying. If you say workers supply and employes demand labor like any other good then it also has to act like any other good.
Which means that if your laws of supply and demand forbid the backwards bend in labor supply they have been proven wrong.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2014 13:38

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

wateroverfire posted:

We tend to talk about supply and demand in very 101 terms because it's easy and it's what most people know about econ (including us, mostly) but all sorts of shapes are permissible. The framework is more complex than we usually have to get into.

Jrodefeld specifically said that that the supply vs. demand curve being monotonic is a "necessary and logical implication" of the Austrian method.
I totally agree that better methods can permit other shapes.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2014 14:25

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Kiwi Ghost Chips posted:

That isn't caused by labor being unique, it's caused by the supplier also having a demand for leisure time. I'm sure you'd see the same thing for crap being sold on Etsy.

Indeed.
But the state of empirical verification is a lot stronger for labor then for other goods.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2014 15:22

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

I don't see any reason how the Austrian explanation of business cycles makes more sense then the Marxist explanation.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2014 10:36

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

jrodefeld posted:

Yes intellectual property should be eliminated. See Stephen Kinsella on this subject. Intellectual "Property" is not really property, it is more correctly described as monopoly privilege. If I voluntarily share an idea with the world, you all can use that idea without taking that idea away from me. If you duplicate a movie and give it out, you don't remove MY copy of the movie. If you want your ideas protected, don't share them with others. If you DO share your ideas, then you cannot use force to keep them from using those ideas in practice.

See "Against Intellectual Property" by Stefan Kinsella:

http://mises.org/document/3582/Against-Intellectual-Property

Here is a lecture given by Kinsella on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZgLJkj6m0A

The arguments he makes against the property rights based justification of IP can be equally well applied against absentee-landlordism. Thus the Mises group and you clearly agree with Marx in that the private ownership of the means of production should be abolished.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2014 12:07

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

jrodefeld posted:

Providing that it can be irrefutably proven that your grandparents murdered the former property owners and stole that property, then I think the descendant should be entitled to the property that was stolen. It has to be proven incontrovertibly that the ancestors who were murdered had a legitimate claim to the property, or at least a superior claim to your grandparents.

If these things can be proven in a court, then you will have to forfeit your property because you are occupying stolen land. It is unfortunate since you didn't personally commit the theft and you surely deserve some sympathy but the fact remains that your claim to private property is not valid if the person who gave it to you didn't have a rightful claim to ownership. The earlier user of a resource has a better claim to ownership than a later user unless the earlier user voluntarily gives up ownership through sale, gift or abandonment.

Suppose someone steals a Rolex watch from you and then sells it to me on the street. I don't know the watch was stolen so I buy it. Now you take me to court over the watch and you can prove that the watch is yours and it was stolen. Even though I personally didn't steal it, you have the property right in the watch and I don't. I have been conned and I would be out the money I paid for the watch, but the watch still belongs to you.

Now if it were proven that your grandparents stole the property from someone but no descendants can be found or come forward to claim ownership of the property, you don't have to renounce your current ownership. It is hard to prove old theft like this and cases like this would probably be uncommon.

Does this make sense to you or do you think that you deserve the property title in the land even though it was proven that your grandparents murdered the original owner, stole the property and a descendant is now claiming ownership?

While it can not be easily shown which Native community owned the land that most Americans live on, the following owner of most of the eastern US was the royal family of England. The land was claimed in their name. And it is fairly incontrovertible that it was removed from their ownership using violence.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2014 11:47

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

jrodefeld posted:

Yes, but the question is not who claims ownership of land but rather who actually homesteaded and legitimately acquired the property right in that land. States can never legitimately own anything because a "State" is an abstraction. States don't homestead anything. A State is a collection of people who claim the right to forcefully dominate others and expropriate and steal homesteaded and legitimate property.

We don't have to respect the royal family of England's claim of property ownership since it is incoherent and contrary to the principle of original appropriation.

This would mean that all absentee property is in fact owned by the current users. This is literally the basics of Marxism.

Unless you are saying that this is a special property of states, to which I will say that medieval Kings don't fulfill any relevant definition of Government.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2014 12:35

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Nolanar posted:

Libertarian dislike of IP is strange to me because it seems like their promise of an endless frontier to homestead kind of relies on it. I mean, if I want to Mix my Labor with the Soil, I can't exactly travel west and build a cabin on some ~~native tribe's~~ unoccupied land anymore. Pretty much every scrap of property that isn't on Antarctica or the Moon is already owned by somebody, so unless we're getting into the weeds of reclaiming abandoned land / genocide again, intellectual property seems like the only place for someone to go to make something new and profit from it. If we're discounting that, we're stuck back at the work-on-another's-property-or-die cryptostatism that we keep running into.

The most realistic reason is that most famous libertarian "philosophers" lived before copyright & co were rebranded as property.The just didn't think of it as property.

The most hilarious reason for their dislike is that Marx' old "Property is theft" argument seems a lot more obvious with IP. So you end up with jrod quoting Marx in support of his arguments.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 22:33

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

asdf32 posted:

Or it can't really exist without a state to enforce it. Therefore it must be bad/not necessary just like everything else the state does and post hoc arguments are created to try and explain why this is so.

That is true of Marxian Property in general not only of IP.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2014 00:31

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

asdf32 posted:

There are lots of ways to protect and maintain possession of physical goods without a state. Crime syndicates provide a pretty good model actually. The state makes it tolerable.

Crime syndicates provide some of the services that a Government does. Which is why they thrive in all the libertarian paradises.

Physical goods are generally not Property in the Marxist sense of the word. But there is an extra thread for that.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2014 15:23

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Remember when the Pirate Party looked almost relevant?
Their actual radical demands for IP reforms only lowered copyright terms to the length of a patent. And they never demanded any changes to trademark law.

QuarkJets posted:

The issue with "artists can just sell their own music in an IP-less world" is that consumers don't want to track down their favorite artist's website and buy the music there. People are lazy. They want to use an all-in-one music source like iTunes or Spotify because it's easy. Without IP, only altruism and public image prevent these services from offering nothing to artists. But these two motives are insufficient: the corporate world is not at all altruistic and paying a pittance to the most popular artists would be sufficient to curtail most public resentment. People would be able to feel satisfied that they gave something back to the artists that they like but without having to put in any effort.

I don't believe that this system would be superior to what we have today. Instead of record labels leeching off of talented artists you'd just have huge digital music services doing the same thing. A change is needed, but "repeal all music IP laws" is not a move that favors artists.

If abolishing copyright totally doesn't make things worse for musicians it would be an absolutely good idea. Because most of the damages that current IP laws cause the economy come from patents or copyright based barriers to research and other parts of IP that have nothing to do with entertainment or art.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2015 23:42

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Mavric posted:

Agreed. However abolishing copyright will do nothing to protect artists. Especially in the age of digital content that can be reproduced so easily. Unless it's ones opinion that someone should be able to profit off of others content (again without adding any creative elements) then I don't know what to tell you.

Any use of copyright to "funnel profits into corporations" is a product of corporate control over the industry and legislation. With the rise of the internet and social media this control is slipping because the industry is no longer the exclusive gateway for content.

Like Idk how you can be against an artists right to earn a living off their work and not have it copied and profited on by others. You are basically saying because this item is digital you are hosed.

Idk how you can be for artists destroying the economy in order to gain a minor increase in their profits.
Personally I think that IP (even copyright) should focus on benefiting the economy, the public good, the progress of science, and the progress of art in general. The profits of individual artist should be a side effect. I know that has become an uncommon opinion in the last half century.

Artists existed before copyright became damaging to the general economy. They existed before copyright became a right instead of a privilege. They even existed before copyright was ever invented.
Artists will live on even in the digital age. In the worst case we go back to a system where an Artist is paid for a work while he creates it instead of after he created it.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2015 00:52

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

polymathy posted:

How many of you identify as left-anarchists?

bla bla

I am a anarchist socialist on the occasions where I have to identify with a specific political label.

And those resistance to large shifts in industrial demographics is only a problem if you insist on sustaining the "cult of labor".
If a person's well-being and social status is not tied to their career then they would have no problem going back to school when their specific skills become weaker. This is admittedly hard to imagine as it goes against current social indoctrination.

An alternative answer is found in the more agrarian syndicalism, like neo-zapatism. They simply keep those changes slow enough that everybody can move on in peace. And if that is really slow then so be it.

Also, your argument against worker ownership is also an argument against large scale public stock ownership. By your theory a board representing millions of small shareholders should be worse then a board representing thousands of workers.

Also, there is a difference between worker co-ops (the workers run the factory), democratic ownership of the MoP ( all people run the factory), state ownership (the state runs the factory) and syndicalist ownership ( the local city owns the factory). Though that difference is not really directly applicable to your specific argument.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2019 01:07

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Are you just randomly posting talking points, or have you actually thought about the things you are talking about?

All you assumptions are factually wrong.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2019 01:22

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Removing a fetus from the mother's provision of shelter and nutrition by abortion is just like removing a worker from his employer's provision of shelter and nutrition by firing him.

In true libertopia the fetus will be able to find a new live support from a different mother or start supporting themself. Just like a fired worker does.

Anybody who doubts that this endeavor is entirely effortless is not a true libertarian.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2019 11:48

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Omobono posted:

Serious question, how is it that Jrod only comes out as marginally less of a strawman than this latest parody troll?

Because if we go by postcount instead of wordcount they take the same time to go from statement to self-contradiction.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2019 12:20

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Filipino posted:

I have a problem with being forced by the government to do anything. I have a problem with the nanny state.

Then become an anarchocommunist instead of an authoritarian communist. It is the superior choice anyways.

Not that there are any ancaps who have reasonable definitions of "government" or "force" anyways.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2019 15:34

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

The even crazier thing is how specifically libertarian that "age of consent" stuff is.
You can get a room full of euro-ancaps arguing for legalization of childporn or respect for pedophilia as mental illness, but nobody of them would ever consider arguing for lowering the age of consent. Don't ask me how I know.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2019 17:56

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

ianmacdo posted:

How do libertarians deal with enclosure? Like in libertarian country there is a specific house or town some one doesn't like, and they just buy up a strip of land all around it and then charge an unplayable toll to cross over?

The last time I managed to bring one to answer, they said that there is no need to answer the question unless the hypothetical brings proof that the owner of the enclosure is a "legitimate" owner. Without defining what "legitimate" means.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2019 23:07

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

SlothfulCobra posted:

The New Hamshire Libertarian Party has chosen its candidate.

Thread, your comment?

quote:

....These choices were bad enough because they propagate the mistaken idea that libertarians are somehow right-wing.
...
In 2016, NH and VT�s libertarian parties were the only ones in the whole United States to back presidential candidates who actually were worth nominating, like Darryl W Perry and John McAfee.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2020 01:21

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

polymathy posted:

As a Leftist, Progressive, or whatever label you apply to yourself, would you be willing to form an anti-war coalition with Pat Buchanan and the paleo-conservatives if it meant that we had a good chance at ending the wars, bringing all the troops home and shutting down the US Empire?

All countries with coalition based voting systems have had libertarian parties. All the libertarian parties have declared themselves to be anti-war. All the libertarian parties have voted for war whenever their votes had any chance of making a difference. Because they value their alliance with the conservatives and fascists and the profits of the arms industry over the anti-war idea.

But if there was a way to magically enforce the promises made by the libertarian parties, I would enter in a coalition with them.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2020 16:37

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

polymathy posted:

If libertarians vote for aggressive war, then they are not libertarians. I'm all for having a big tent, but at bare minimum you have to be anti-war to call yourself a libertarian.

So, you are saying that every libertarian who ever was in any position of influence or ever will get into any position of influence isn't a libertarian by your definition?

Or do you go all the way and say that there are no libertarians anywhere in the world?

# ¿ Mar 10, 2020 18:43

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

polymathy posted:

No, it's not a fully voluntary society because the method of property acquisition is clearly unjust. Libertarian theory says there are only two ways of legitimate property acquisition: homesteading unowned virgin land or contractual exchange.

In the situation you're describing, putting aside the fact that humanity could never survive for any length of time if one person owned all land, we know for a fact that the presumed "owner" of the land is illegitimate. I would immediately declare the property title to that land null and void, and announce that all land is subject to homesteading. Then all the ex-slaves would be free to go out and build houses, put up fences, and mix their labor with the land thereby establishing ownership over their portion of it.

In contemporary America, and the entire world for that matter, there has been a lot of illegitimate property acquisition. The trouble is that there is no way to rectify all the past injustices if there's no way to determine how to redistribute land. Which land was stolen from whom, and to who does it belong?

When you can determine these things, then redistribution is justified.

Lastly I'll just ask why you think people who are fortunate enough to own some property would cynically weaponize that ownership to terrorize and enslave their fellow man? The idea that only a few people will own property and the masses will own none, and thus be forced to be slaves to those who do is simply not how the world works. Concepts like community, religion, charity, and civil society bind men together in groups with the goal of looking out for each other and providing mutual aid.

As is usually the case, it is the State and the Cronies who benefit from the State that are the great violators of property and who continually redistribute wealth except they usually redistribute it to the top.

So you are saying Mao was correct in killing all the landlords?
Because he caused enough chaos that it is impossible to find a heir of the previous owners the current ownership is now legitimate?

Thanks for telling us how to make a land redistribution campaign legitimate for libertarian purposes.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2020 13:24

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Panfilo posted:

Libertarian concepts pop up a lot in science fiction, and I'm curious about the reasons why. My own best guess is that their fantasies about small governnent and free markets are so far fetched they have to come up with this fictional premise to allow such a system to actually work.

I think it is mostly from a historical correlation. The kind of people who are interested in sf (speculative fiction in general) are also the primary demographic for libertarianism. Outside of the cold war west, libertarianism is actually not that common in sf.

There is also the thing that sf-pulp is in part defined by its crypto racism, sexism and other bigotry that made the readers feel superiour to the open bigotry in non-sh pulp. And libertarianism is all about pretending that non-obvious discrimination is impossible.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2020 19:24

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Panfilo posted:

Maybe I'm generalizing too much then. But I thought a lot of SF authors like Heinlein and Orson Scott Card had a rather Libertarian bent to their stories.

The other thing I realized is there's a lot of overlap between people that claim to be Libertarian and yet are pretty okay with a big opressive government that directs its violence against other people (as long as they don't have to pay taxes). So maybe some of what I'm thinking isn't so much Libertarian as just right wing. A goon mentioned how in Lucifers Hammer feminism and liberals are the first things to go extinct in society, and it basically seems to act like the protagonist is the only Adult in the room. A lot of these stories seem to suggest that leftist ideals are impractical in the 'real world' or that problems exist solely because of them.

Libertarians are a subset of Liberals, and we live in a liberal --even borderline neo-liberal-- society. That makes a lot of them centrists. And centrists are fine with everything that preserves the status quo. Especially violence and oppression that preserves the status quo by keeping the "outsiders" down.

There is also the lineage of "enlightened" supermen like Robinson Crusoe, who are utterly superior to anybody "less enlightened" they encounter. And that is also an attitude that was primarily inherited by the libertarian crowd. It also gave us the obnoxious atheists, which are also generally libertarian adjacent.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2020 21:56

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

It has been a long time since I read any of his books, but I remember Heinlein as changing his political opinions several times during his life in all directions. Not exactly a good example for a majority of any opinion within SF.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2020 13:17

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

If you want to classify an anarchist idea of justice with your system of classification you need to find out how you would classify the system of justice used in "among us". Pretty much all of utopian anarchism deal with trying to scale up decision structures without introducing additional downsides, generally concluding that using the same system at all problem sizes is a mistake. Though most anarchist theory is anti-utopian for various reasons.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2020 16:34

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

E-Tank posted:

reductio ad absurdum. You are using a game where there is a win/loss state whereas life is not a game and there is no win/loss state other than that which we dictate for ourselves. You might as well say that since we play checkers and if a piece reaches the opposite side of the board, becoming a 'king' whenever we play checkers we are becoming stalwart monarchists.

I literally don't get which part of my statement you are even disagreeing with? Actually, Reducio ad absurdum is not generally considered a fallacy. Are you stating that you are exaggerating my statement into absurdity? I think you are turning it into a fallacy here.

Games can easily be examples of organisations and they can represent structures that exist outside of the game. Do you seriously consider that fact questioned by your exaggeration that any depiction must always strongly brainwash people into agreeing with them?

I use among us as an example because everybody can participate or at least observe the decision making process. It is a process compatible with most branches of anarchism. I could have gone for an example of minimal scale democracy in small anarchist organisations.
But the anti-anarchist arguments state very clearly that the players need to agree on a hierarchical justice system in order to achieve anything at all. So in that weak sense, the game is arguing for anarchism. Compare that for example with ss13, where you do have a pre-established command structure.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2020 18:38

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Who What Now posted:

Hey what's that term for libertarians where they reject actual evidence as being inferior to pro-libertarian hypotheses?

libertarian

# ¿ Oct 7, 2020 18:38

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

E-Tank posted:

They can represent structures that exist outside of the game, but by cutting us off from being able to. . .investigate or temporarily corral suspicious people, the rules are once again forcing us into a binary 'Do we kill/Do we not kill' on the side of the non-imposters. My exaggeration was pointing out that if you are calling the voting process 'anarchism' then by that logic crowning a king in checkers is monarchism. Clearly I aimed too high.

Crowning a king in checkers is a simplified representation of monarchism. I admit that among us is so simplified that the voting process is a representation of all variants of direct democracy and not only anachism.

I do think that your?* initial argument that all ideas of justice can be reduced to a classification as adversarial or inquisitorial and so on is already excessively reductive. And so using a simplified example is perfectly justified. Especially as I still have no idea where direct democratic votes land in your classification, simplified or not.

?*are you even the same guy I was initially replying to?

# ¿ Oct 11, 2020 16:11

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

E-Tank posted:

I first butted in on the Among Us statement you made. Justice is ultimately the attempt to decide who 'deserves' what, which I have issues with because we have that little lizard brain in the back of our heads that gets enjoyment of people getting their 'just desserts', and has been used to otherize and dehumanize others multiple times, such as with convicts being considered lesser human beings because 'they did a crime once', and being discriminated against.

My personal belief regarding justice should be 'What is best for all involved, including the one who did the offense', with some understanding regarding what might have led to these circumstances. The 'law' such as it is currently is draconian in that if you do a crime is the end all, be all. Sometimes even simply being accused of a crime will haunt you, even if you're entirely exonerated.

I essentially agree with what you say here.

And it is actually part of why I brought up the analogy. Because it is a system where the accused gets a equal vote in the proceedings. Which goes against the tendency of dehumanization most official justice/enforcement systems.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2020 18:05

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Cpt_Obvious posted:

Wtf, no it's not. Not in any single possible way other than nomenclature. To claim otherwise is so unimaginably stupid that I cannot begin to describe how stupid it is. It would take a series of words that cannot be created by mortal man, an inspiration that is not only divine in nature but divine in it's construction as well.

OK. I bow to your superior expertise on the history of checkers.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2020 18:17

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Cpt_Obvious posted:

No, please, expound on how the stacking of chips in a board game in any way represents dynastic succession. I'd loving love to hear it.

Ok, I might be confusing it with a different game, which is a simplification of chess. And that I originally learned to play with chess figures instead of with chips, even.
And even though it lost the representation of the monarchic legend that the monarch is the only important part of the realm that is needed for it's survival, there is still an -- admittedly much weaker -- representation of the "king" as a measurably superior being compared to the peasants.

Actually the checkers->monarchism thing was brought up by someone else initially. You should ask them why they think checkers should represent monarchism instead of generic dictatorships.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2020 18:47

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

OwlFancier posted:

I mean the general idea of "if you walk to the other end of the board you get superpowers" doesn't seem... very much to do with any sort of governing system?

But, "if the king dies the realm is dead, everybody should die to protect him" does. It is the same king, just in a new fanfic.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2020 18:52

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

OwlFancier posted:

That.. isn't how checkers works as far as I know, or chess, you don't get more kings if you get to the other end, and crowned pieces don't make you lose the game they're just better.

Unless checkers is different from draughts?

I have no idea, I don't know how to play checkers or draughts.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2020 18:59

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 18:21

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

Cpt_Obvious posted:

If the king dies, his son inherits the throne. That is what dynastic rule means. "The king is dead, long live the king."

Arthur became "king" by drawing a sword from a stone and after his death nobody took over.
I see that Arthur or a chess king is not a king by your definition, I don't see this strict definition as relevant for any part of the argument that started this derail.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2020 19:05

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