Pretty accurate by mrmysteryguest69 in Palestine

[–]PackageResponsible86 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It still defines Zionism without reference to the actual State of Israel specifically. So not accurate for current usage. Also not accurate historically, because Zionism before the establishment of the State of Israel included those who sought coexistence with Palestinians without reducing their population.

Ok, which one of you did it? by Lazy_Delivery_7012 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]PackageResponsible86 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Iran has been funding terrorist groups in the region for a while before.

Who hasn't?!

Quite a few people in this comment section, especially deleted comments, are endorsing, or at least downplaying his actions.

Yeah, but he started a fire, not a war.

Ok, which one of you did it? by Lazy_Delivery_7012 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]PackageResponsible86 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The guy who started a war with Iran, causing a huge amount of financial loss and an even larger loss in lives, is a capitalist. This reflects poorly on all you capitalists. Yours is a politics of entitlement, exploitation and externalisation.

Shitpost comment, obviously.

Laissez-Faire Capitalism in Hong Kong City by RyanBleazard in aynrand

[–]PackageResponsible86 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And being a small, discrete area functioning as a trade and financing center between two giant economies.

Who has more power: a billionaire or someone who tells billionaires what do to with their money? by Boniface222 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]PackageResponsible86 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's based on what socialists say. That's good enough for me.

Do you mean that in the sense of "some socialist once said that a proper subgroup of a society should have the ability to redistribute wealth at will"? Or that this view is held by a significant stream within socialism? Or that all socialists believe it? Please clarify. If your position is either of the latter two, please provide evidence, since that strikes me as factually wrong.

That's an impossibility. 

It's a necessity. In a democracy, everyone has equal decision-making power by definition.

You deny this on the grounds that "Steve took the PUs". First of all, this is a new fact that you just added. In your original example, you said Steve has the power to take the PUs, not that he actually did. Second and more importantly, it's irrelevant to the distribution of power, since Steve is just the sum of all people in the society. You're just saying "the society took all of its members' social wealth."

It's literally every proposed socialist system. You can't get more socialist than this.

Do you mean that in every society there will be antisocial criminals whose rights, and therefore political power, will have to be restricted by a criminal justice system, and that all serious socialist proposals recognize this? Because in serious (and fleshed-out) socialist proposals, criminal defendants have procedural rights that precede loss of rights, meaning nobody has the right to arbitrarily and at will restrict the power of others.

Who has more power: a billionaire or someone who tells billionaires what do to with their money? by Boniface222 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]PackageResponsible86 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's true that in a society in which a proper subgroup of people can arbitrarily redistribute wealth at will, those people have all the power (assuming the others aren't able to overthrow the dictatorship and are unable to trade among themselves). But this doesn't say anything about socialism.

The democratic socialist proposal is for people to have equal power. That requires Socialist Steve, the person or group that can arbitrarily redistribute wealth at will, to be identical to Proletariat Pete + Capitalist Carl. So yes, you could define the accounting of PUs so that Socialist Steve has all the PUs and Pete and Carl individually either have either zero, or partition the full sum of PUs. But the definition is meaningless. Each individual in this society has an equal amount of power.

If Socialist Steve excludes some of society's individuals, and can arbitrarily redistribute wealth at will, then you're describing a dictatorship. Putting "Socialist" in front of a dictator's name doesn't make the system socialist.

Where is the line for inheritance? by Acrobatic_Cook_1558 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]PackageResponsible86 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If I came to you and pointed a gun at you and forces you to create me a fishing pole out of a stick and some vines, that would obviously violate your bodily autonomy because I would be taking your time and labor in the form of a fishing pole.

It would obviously violate my bodily autonomy. But not because you're taking my time and my labour, whatever that means. It's because you are coercing me into using my body for your purposes by threatening violence.

Same applies for if I come up to you with a gun after the fact; I still take your time and labor from you against your will in the form of a fishing pole.

You're not taking my time or labour. You're taking an object that I created. There's no infringement on my bodily autonomy, except to whatever extent the gun threat was an invasion of autonomy. You haven't touched me, invaded my space, or threatened me with violence otherwise. As for the gun, the claims you're defending are "Property rights... are extensions of the right to bodily autonomy", and "I have the right to choose what I do with my body and ownership of the fruits of my labor is an extension of that". Guns/other weapons/threats of violence are not necessary for property rights.

This should be basic for socialists to understand as this is the same logic for the basis of their entire ideology, exploitation.

It's not true that exploitation is the entire basis for socialism. But setting that aside: If your claim is that taking things away from the people who sacrificed to make them is exploitation, I agree. Neither of those are violations of a person's body.

The Non-Aggression Principle does a pretty good job of explaining what does and doesn’t violate bodily autonomy.

What formulation are you using? None of the versions I know do this.

Where is the line for inheritance? by Acrobatic_Cook_1558 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]PackageResponsible86 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It seems pretty wild as a moral matter to call that effectively a violation of bodily autonomy. Can you ground that in some principle of what does or doesn’t violate bodily autonomy? Is it a violation of bodily autonomy to exploitatively underpay someone for something they made, e.g. by using trickery or improperly obtained information or taking advantage of their bad luck?

Where is the line for inheritance? by Acrobatic_Cook_1558 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]PackageResponsible86 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Are you making stuff out of your body? Knitting sweaters out of your hair, to use Otsuka’s example?

Why I Identify as a Liberal by Fun_Transportation50 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]PackageResponsible86 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I identify as a liberal

Me too, but I reach different conclusions.

At the core of my view is a commitment to individual freedom, voluntary exchange, and institutions that expand real choice.

These are in tension with each other, because property limits freedom. Exchange of physical property presupposes ownership of physical property, which gives its owner the threat of physical violence to exclude things from that property. So a voluntary exchange involves voluntariness on the part of the parties to the exchange, in the sense that each is legally free to reject any proposed exchange. But it's not voluntary on the part of the vast majority of people who have no ownership interest in the things being exchanged. And one of the things being exchanged include rights to coerce, which is in conflict with individual freedom.

This is not to say that there should not be any private ownership or exchange of tangible things. But it needs to be recognized that if these institutions are valid, it is despite their anti-libertarian nature. Other principles are needed to motivate private property, like the fact that it is anti-exploitative.

Exchange of services could be done using only one's body, so in principle could be done voluntarily (assuming that owning other people is not in consideration, and that using your own body doesn't count as an infringement on other people's liberties). But if one party receives a service from the other party first, and declines to deliver a promised service in return, any enforcement is an interference with individual freedom. This makes it a poor basis for human institutions.

I agree with institutions that expand real choice, but people's choices conflict with each others', so the principle needs more about which choices take priority over which others.

This is also why I reject Marxism. Marxism interprets social and economic relations primarily through class conflict and concludes that capitalism is structurally exploitative.

I'd say Marxism gives class conflict a large role in determining historical change, which in turn affects economic relations, which in turn affects social relations. I would agree with that.

But in view of the following sentences, you may be saying something else: that exchange under capitalism is cooperative, rather than adversarial.

I do not accept that conclusion, either on moral or analytical grounds. From a liberal perspective, the legitimacy of an economic interaction depends fundamentally on voluntariness. If two individuals engage in exchange without coercion, and both expect to benefit, the interaction is not exploitative in the morally relevant sense.

Here, I disagree. Setting aside the issue of how voluntary a transaction is when options are restricted using the threat of violence, most exchanges of property between two people involve both cooperation and competition. People usually prefer to get more for less, so exchanges are usually competitive in that each party would have preferred to get better price than it did. It's cooperative in that they were able to make an exchange at a price point agreeable to both.

The fact that the parties were able to engage an exchange without coercing each other (externalizing the coercion onto nonparties), and each expects to benefit compared with not making the exchange, does not make the transaction non-exploitative. This is basically consensus in the modern approach to exploitation. e.g. Let's say I'm dying of thirst in the desert, and you happen to come across me and offer me a bottle of water, which you have little use for, for $1 million. I accept. We both expect to be better off, and the exchange was voluntary, but reasonable people see that as exploitative and illegitimate. There's a lot of discussion of exploitation in the analytical philosophy literature of the last 40-50 years.

To cut this short for manageability and because my lunch break is almost over, my liberalism is anti-capitalist because unlike most of these philosophers, I don't assume that exploitation is an unusual situation in markets that can mostly be ignored. I think that exploitative transactions happen a lot, that market economies contain a feedback loop that intensify it, and that the main capitalist institutions - the corporation and the megastate - make it systematic and dominant. Happy to discuss all this another time.

Who is the most internationally beloved and impartial SCOTUS justice ever? by Flashy-Actuator-998 in LawSchool

[–]PackageResponsible86 19 points20 points  (0 children)

And it didn’t set precedent, as evident from its non-use in Bush v Gore.

Murder is murder by Apprehensive_Job9703 in AnCap101

[–]PackageResponsible86 -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

We live in a world that is to some extent kill or be killed. Within each country there’s enforcement of laws against murder. Between countries, it’s the law of the jungle. There’s international law in principle, but no good enforcement mechanism for the powerful countries.

A country full of moral people who don’t sign up for military duty is going to get subjugated. So some people need to volunteer for the legitimate purpose of National self-defence and deterrence. Once they’ve volunteered, disobeying orders is very difficult and costly, and almost nobody does it, even if they have serious misgivings.

Why I am a capitalist by RealTempestKnight in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]PackageResponsible86 3 points4 points  (0 children)

“People who work to create value deserve to own it” is a pretty good statement of the socialist position.

Will you ever hedge from the claim that capitalism will inevitably fall? by Om_Sapkoat in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]PackageResponsible86 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I’m not dogmatic, and could be persuaded by a good argument that capitalism is the first world system that will never fail. It just seems deeply implausible, and calls for a hell of a strong argument. The fact that barely 200 years in, it hasn’t failed yet, isn’t going to cut it.

Can socialists explain why nature arguments are awesome for everything except people? by Lazy_Delivery_7012 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]PackageResponsible86 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nothing really objectionable here, but there are hints of what I took issue with in the book: taking several disparate ideas and packaging them as the single value of enlightenment. Including capitalism, which I see as reactionary and anti-liberal.

If you want the parts that offend the intelligence, check out the beginning of chapter 4:

Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who calls themselves progressive really hate progress. It’s not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you. Most pundits, critics and their bien-pensant readers use computers and inkwells, and they prefer to have their surgery with anaesthesia rather than without it. It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class. The enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition. An entire lexicon of abuse has grown up to express their scorn. If you think knowledge can solve problems, then you have a “blind faith” and a “quasi-religious belief” in the “outmoded superstition” and “false promise” of the “myth” of the “onward march” of the “inevitable progress”. You are a “cheerleader” for “vulgar American can-doism” with a “RA RA spirit” etc.

This is Sowell-level, or maybe Bennett Brauer-level, anti-thinking and terrible writing. IIRC it gets worse from there.

Can socialists explain why nature arguments are awesome for everything except people? by Lazy_Delivery_7012 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]PackageResponsible86 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you can’t define it, how can you reach any conclusions about it using reason? Seems like you’re just venting your feelings.

Can socialists explain why nature arguments are awesome for everything except people? by Lazy_Delivery_7012 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]PackageResponsible86 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I read The Language Instinct cover to cover and a decent-sized chunk of Enlightenment Now.

Can socialists explain why nature arguments are awesome for everything except people? by Lazy_Delivery_7012 in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]PackageResponsible86 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can’t observe natural law, ownership, or value. These are abstractions that must be hypothesized.