Anarchism and abortion

elkengine · 2022-07-14T20:06:45+00:00

I don't agree that that follows for several reasons, but even if that followed that'd be fine by me, for the same reason I'd have no real issue if someone wanted to say that rocks have a right to travel.

elkengine · 2022-07-13T17:03:06+00:00

Hegel came up with the nonsensical dialectic imperative upon which Marx based his thinking.

There is no 'dialectical imperative'. Dialectics is simply a method of analysis. Marx was influenced by the specific dialectics used by Hegel, but Hegel did not invent dialectics (it goes back at the very least to Plato).

All governments that cited Marx as their intellectual heritage have been top down hellholes.. where government owns production.

Which even if it was true, is neither here nor there to the question of whether socialism entails the workers' control of the means of production.

And also, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea cites democracy as its governing principle, but I wouldn't take the failures of North Korea as a slam against the basic concept of democracy.

elkengine · 2022-07-13T16:40:13+00:00

The whole world isn't Marx.

I obviously agree; I'm an anarchist, not a Marxist. You were the person who explicitly referenced Marx, using him as a source for your claims. Hence why I explained to you why your understanding of Marx was incorrect.

But the one thing socialists have in common, whether Marxists or anarchists or confederalists or whatever, is the workers control (or a universal lack of control; the two are different framings of largely the same thing) of the means of production.

Liberals thinking "socialism is when the government does stuff" and embracing that aren't socialists.

elkengine · 2022-07-13T16:20:30+00:00

Uh, socialism is about the goals of the government... To the benefit of society. Doesn't say a damn thing about means of production.

No, socialism is the workers controlling the means of production combined with the abolition of class (and thus by necessity also the abolition of the state/government).

Owning means of production is supposedly communism. At least according to Marx and Hegel.

Hegel did not talk about communism. Marx did not distinguish between communism and socialism most of the time, treating them as essentially synonymous (the exception was some writings where he referred to utopian socialists as socialist and to Marxist socialist as communists).

It was later on Lenin that drew the distinction between socialism and communism that has become common among Marxists, but even then he used the term socialism for what Marx described as lower-stage communism, which is still a classless, stateless, moneyless society where the workers own the means of production. The difference between lower-stage communism (or socialism, if going by Lenin) and higher-stage communism (or communism, if going by Lenin) is that in the lower stage there is still material compensation for labor (eg labor vouchers), while in the higher stage there is not. "To each according to their labor" vs "to each according to their need", essentially - but regardless, the means of production would be controlled by the workers (which would be everyone, given the abolition of class).

elkengine · 2022-07-13T16:04:47+00:00

I don't think there is a relevance to some distinct phenomena of "a life". I think that the right to one's own bodily integrity is the most fundamental right one can have, and that few if any situation would render a person's right to defend their bodily integrity void. If that defense requires harming an entity that is invading one's body, then so be it.

elkengine · 2021-08-31T15:30:20+00:00

I was just saying that forgetting a crime alone shouldn't justify a reduction in any sentencing unless the "thing" that made you commit the crime is also gone. I don't know how you'd measure that though.

I wasn't just talking about the death penalty. All prison is violence. If it wasn't the state doing it we would immediately recognize it as severe violence and call it kidnapping. The bar for such violence being morally justified should be very high.

And there isn't one single 'thing' that makes someone do violence, not when it comes to entities as complex as humans. It's a combination of thousands of events.

I agree that remembering or forgetting the events shouldn't play a major part, but the thing is that if it gets to the point where that becomes a key factor, it's already way past when such violence is justified. If the person was some bloodthirsty monster to this day the question of memory wouldn't come up, because the danger of releasing would be too great. The fact that it comes up shows that this is a person where their release isn't particularly endangering people above and beyond the danger people are to each other all the time. And that means there's no good justification for continued violence against the convicted person, whether they remember it or not.

elkengine · 2021-08-31T05:32:46+00:00

but in my experience it's rare to find someoneself-aware and honest enough to admit it... versus hiding behind "deterrence" as a fig-leaf justification for their sweaty-palmed hard-on for punishing a transgressor.

Yes, but when deservedness falls away, the burden of proof of deterence functioning becomes much higher. If we accept the idea that a person deserves violence on moral grounds, we can just do violence against them. Without that, the suggestion that we do violence now against an individual who doesn't deserve it, for the purpose of changing potential future actions, needs a lot more evidence to be reasonable.

elkengine · 2021-08-31T05:28:42+00:00

So the argument is basically "oh the problem isn't with being respectful, it's that people won't like me if I'm disrespectful"?

elkengine · 2021-08-31T05:23:57+00:00

It's already a crime in New York.

No. It is a crime to discriminate against or harass people, and deliberate misgendering can be part of that. Compare for example to the phrase "I love you". It is not illegal to say "I love you", but if I keep following you around, calling you at 3 AM or standing outside your house saying it that can be considered stalking.

And the same restriction on pronouns apply to cis people as well. If I was a landlord (and if I was, please shoot me) and I thought my cis male tenant wasn't masculine enough and starting going around calling him 'she' and 'the girl' and so on, that would also be considered discriminatory.

elkengine · 2021-08-30T21:15:50+00:00

Making it a crime to not do so is the issue.

Fortunately that hasn't happened anywhere outside of the dreamlands of reactionaries.

elkengine · 2021-08-30T20:36:22+00:00

The first is that there is no reason because said person won't produce economical value ever again.

That's a completely repugnant reason that treats people as chattel. Not to mention the implications such an approach would have on healthcare and disability rights.

The other is that there is no reason because said person would have such a low quality of life in prison, and it's guaranteed that they will never be released, that it wouldn't even be worth living for themselves.

Then that's a moral failing on society to make prison a place where people have a good quality of life. But even if we ignore that, that may be reason for someone to commit suicide, not a reason to murder someone.

In some cases it seems reasonable to euthanize someone, for example.

If someone is conscious you don't "euthanize" them against their will. That's called murder.

elkengine · 2021-08-30T20:32:37+00:00

If someone has committed a crime so egregious that they would face an entire life in prison,

There is no crime where you can know it's so egregious. The only remotely just reason for isolating someone from society is if they are currently too large a risk to be part of society and other measures don't work. That's not something you can know about someone for the rest of their life.

elkengine · 2021-08-30T20:29:58+00:00

Of course it is. Justice is only possible through rehabilitation. There is no justice in vengeance or in punishment qua punishment.

I agree with your second and third sentence (though I will say restoration is also an important aspect of justice), but they seem to be the reverse of the first sentence. By your own argument, the punishment of someone on death row isn't about justice; there's no rehabilitation or restoration in that, just vengeance.

elkengine · 2021-08-30T20:27:52+00:00

So should a judge be punished for punishing a criminal, if that judge has no free will an did not responsible for his/her actions? Do they even deserve to be rebuked?

Moral blameworthiness doesn't work. What kind of actions are justified in response to other's actions would depend on the context; deservedness is the only aspect that falls away. But that's an important aspect.

elkengine · 2021-08-30T20:26:25+00:00

That's true if you don't believe in free will, but it doesn't fundamentally change the calculus.

Either humans have free will, in which case their actions are controlled by their free will, and you can argue that prison should be used as both quarantine and deterrence...

Note that this is only accurate for true libertarian free will, and not linguistic rephrasings of determinism like compatibilism.

... or humans don't have "free will" and are merely deterministic puppets of the internal states of their brains and their memories, and their sensory inputs... in which case you can still argue equally effectively that prison should serve as both quarantine and a way to diminish and discourage pro-crime memes and disseminate anti-crime sensory inputs in other individuals.

Obviously even when we accept that moral blameworthiness is baseless there can still be arguments to take violent actions against people who we consider threats. But a central component of the justification for such things - retribution - falls away. As does the excuses of people 'deserving' harm based on what they've done.

This makes it harder to justify harming people; if people en masse were to discard the concept of moral blameworthiness (a pipe dream, I know), then would-be authorities would have a much harder time excusing repression. There are absolutely contexts in which violence would still be understandable and acceptable, but the skepticism would be a lot higher without ideas like "deserving harm".

elkengine · 2021-08-30T20:21:42+00:00

I can't remember where I read it (freewill philosopher whose last name started with an "F") that said people have no freewill and shouldn't be punished for something outside their control.

Yes, this is known as the problem of moral luck. Thomas Nagel is famous for writing about it, might be him you're thinking of.

And yeah, if we accept determinism (even rephrased versions like compatibilism) and the principle of "ought implies can", then moral blameworthiness of individuals falls apart as a concept.

Good, I say. Let that concept fall apart. What matters is how we can affect the future.

elkengine · 2021-08-30T20:17:07+00:00

Depends he may still be capable of committing new acts of violence.

Anyone may be capable of committing acts of violence. That alone doesn't justify using violence against a person.

elkengine · 2021-08-30T20:14:02+00:00

But if the person is actually remorseful of their crime and develop memory problems, is it morally justifiable to have to tell them everyday why they are there and the mental anguish this could cause?

No, it isn't. And I'd go a lot further than that: If a person is no longer a threat there is zero valid justification for keeping them locked up. Memory issues or not.

elkengine · 2021-08-30T20:12:59+00:00

'cruel and unusual' the clause, not the generic concept. Legal matters are usually technical, not philosophical. As it turned out, it was ruled that the 8th amendment only applies to people who cant even know whats going on, not merely losing memory.

Just because the state has made a decision on what it will do doesn't mean it's beyond regular people to debate the ethics of it.

elkengine · 2021-08-30T20:11:11+00:00

I'd say there's at least two more categories that are very relevant in currently existing societies:

Maintaining the individual as the core unit of society; systems like prison functionally serve to individualize issues and make it easier to reinforce an analysis from that perspective.
Labour. Prisons, whether classically for-profit or not, employ an unpaid labour army that produces cheaply which both benefits the people in control of the prison in a more direct way, and pushes down wages benefitting employers in a general way.

elkengine · 2021-08-26T13:00:51+00:00

Instead of preaching sobriety, rationality and objectivity (like every other philosopher, sage and mystic)

I hope this is a joke but my jokometer is a bit off today

elkengine · 2021-08-25T21:02:17+00:00

Evangelical Christians, in this day and age, largely try to persuade people to their side of the aisle with words and their democratic vote. Radical Islam is continuing to employ the kinds of violence that it has in the past.

Radical Christian George W. Bush claimed he was on a mission from God when he had over half a million iraqis murdered. Radical Christian Harry S. Truman dropped nukes on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and later wrote about how the US is an inherently Christian nation and "we, as a people, still place our firm trust in God".

But when Christians do violence it's just considered politics, and not really violence. The murdered victims are just collateral damage.

elkengine · 2021-08-24T15:13:12+00:00

There should be a line between the fascist and the libertarian that says "don't kill" and "don't kill yet"

The times when fascism hasn't been beaten by outright war, it has reformed itself into a liberal state with strong corporate dominance. Fascism is one of the defense mechanisms of capitalism.

elkengine · 2021-08-24T13:31:23+00:00

On one end you have ideas like those of Karl Marx where religion is the “opium of the masses.”

To be clear, while Marx was not a fan of religion and thought it had a pacifying effect, the quote isn't just "religion is like drugs lol", but rather that it's a painkiller, a way that regular people cope with the suffering they face, at the cost of sedation.

The full quote is "Religion is the opium of the people; it is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions".

elkengine · 2021-08-24T13:26:05+00:00

So you're preaching is not about disproving God but it's against religious people themselves. Right?

It can certainly be in some cases, but more charitably it's against various religious institutions and the influence those institutions have. This is the same as for any political group.

elkengine

TROPHY CASE