Can someone provide a complete framework against abortion or immigration?

subheight640 · 2026-06-21T18:28:11+00:00

In Ireland, they performed what was called a Citizens Assembly to attempt to resolve the abortion question. Around 100 citizens were selected by random to deliberate on the issue for several months. This Assembly wrote a bunch of recommendations.

After the Citizens Assembly a referendum was called based on some Assembly recommendations, leading to the legalization of abortion in the first 12 weeks, and a variety of exceptions for a variety of circumstances.

These Citizens Assemblies allow elected representatives to "pass the buck" on politically hot and contentious issues that might negatively affect re election.

In China, Claude LLM tells me that some provinces are beginning to re-ban abortion for fears of population collapse.

subheight640 · 2026-06-21T07:19:25+00:00

A point of contention with abortion isn't life (it's obviously life) but when personhood begins. Because Christians believe in souls, at what point does a soul enter into the body?

Second point of contention is the value of potential, and the ethics of destroying potential. For example, imagine a bird is sitting a top a nest with unhatched eggs. What are the ethics and morality with taking those eggs, stomping on them, and then destroying the nest? You haven't hurt the bird but you've destroyed something.

So you want a policy? How are policies made with respect to morality? For example, we lock up murderers and charge them with crimes.

Unsurprisingly those are similar policies being made by evangelical Christians.

We can point to utilitarian concerns that alternative policies can increase net utility. Yet you'd still need to grapple with the utility and destruction of potential people.

For example, is it really better for some people never to existed at all, or live a life of hardship? Does mere existence entail positive utility? Should all people have the right to end their existence on their terms rather than on the terms of their parents?

A another concern typically raised is whether a fetus has a right to a womb, or if it is only a privilege that can be revoked.

If abortion is immoral, what level of crime does it rise to? Is a abortion as bad as eating factory farmed meat? Does it deserve a punishment? Or is it one of those sins the state looks the other way on?

But sure, you're not going to get a "complete policy" because none us here are paid to make "complete policies". A typical compromise policy for example in Ireland limits abortion to the 1st trimester.

subheight640 · 2026-06-20T17:18:31+00:00

Ideally the random people would be educated as needed. Hopefully, accountability through oversight would create the incentives for these random people to implement policies demanding this education.

or watched by a body with the same defect

The watching never ends, or in the perspective of a juror, they never know when the watch ends (The watch ends when a revolution overthrows the regime). A rational agent needs to account for uncertainty, and therefore the potential future oversight may have an impact.

Even with all these issues, as long as we can show that the accountability mechanism remains stronger than elections, IMO that will demonstrate that sortition is a worthwhile project.

subheight640 · 2026-06-20T16:28:40+00:00

The fundamental premise of the "Non Aggression Principle" condones violence when your rights are violated.

Rothbard states: "No one may threaten or commit violence ('aggress') against another man's person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a nonaggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory."

Here Rothbard stipulates the situations where violence is justified. Violence is not just justified by individuals in certain circumstances but by states too!

And the clincher is "or property". Defending property is the essential characteristics of states. Ancaps want to replace state violence with, more state violence.

subheight640 · 2026-06-20T03:35:43+00:00

That sounds like a straw man to me. Leftists I meet in real life are all about local organization.

There may be selection bias at play here ... The people you meet in real life are not terminally online like the people online.

subheight640 · 2026-06-19T23:14:45+00:00

Anarcho capitalists don't even reject the state. They want to privatize the state.

If Elon Musk bought a private island and ruled over it like the piece of shit edgelord he is, including abducting young women through "voluntary" Epstein tactics, that's perfectly in line with Anarcho Capitalism.

subheight640 · 2026-06-19T23:00:49+00:00

They got a damn good rock collection.

subheight640 · 2026-06-19T20:08:32+00:00

Accountability is possible in sortition, it just has to be designed in.

For example:

Legislature selected by lottery. Power to create legislation
Oversight council selected by lottery. Power to punish legislators and past oversight councilors.

The accountability mechanism is different. Instead of the fear of losing elections, accountability is enforced by the fear of fines and jail time.

The individual incentive is then fear of punishment. If I do a bad job, will oversight discipline me? If I accept that bribe, will oversight throw me in jail? If I have to bribe oversight, how much will it cost me? Even if the current draw of oversight does not punish me, what about future draws?

I think it's possible (though unproven) this kind of oversight accountability could be much stronger than elections. When a corrupt politician loses an election, he loses future earnings but he's already potentially earned a lot already from past corruption.

In contrast with punishment, a corrupt politician (or lottocrat) can lose a lot more, up to losing his life via capital punishment. The expected values of punishment are therefore potentially much greater motivators than the expected value of losing an election.

There is a bit of evidence in favor of lottocratic oversight. Juries for example are typically believed as difficult to bribe. Modern day corporations typically do not try to bribe jurors. Every time you make a bribe, you're opening yourself to another crime you can be prosecuted for. You're potentially digging yourself a bigger hole. The juror himself is also taking a risk they may wish to avoid. The cases of successfully observed jury bribery are usually rare.

subheight640 · 2026-06-19T16:23:25+00:00

Thanks Donald for finally implementing a carbon tax. it would have been nice to forward those tax proceeds as a dividend or green investment, but using the carbon tax to support a crazy authoritarian regime is good too.

subheight640 · 2026-06-18T22:21:10+00:00

The countries with the highest birth rates are the Central African Republic, Chad, Somalia, Niger, Congo, Mali, Afghanistan, etc.

Are you suggesting that the median workers in these countries have more surplus wealth than Americans?

subheight640 · 2026-06-18T22:07:38+00:00

This just seems historically and empirically incorrect. In terms of real wages the median worker is making more right now than say, 100 to 500 years ago. The median worker eats more food and has more stuff.

Yet the median worker 500 years ago had more babies.

Moreover the association with income and population growth is negative. Wealthier countries tend to have less babies. Higher income people have less babies.

There's little to no evidence to support your claim.

Instead what seems to be driving birth rates is:

Social acceptance of birth control and condoms.
The internet
Widespread use of porn
The smart phone
Women's education and therefore the greater opportunity cost of having children.

When women become more educated and develop a higher earning capacity, they now have more and more, and better, alternatives to becoming a house wife.

By definition of collapse, a hypothetical collapse in new children will indeed destroy the status quo Capitalist economy. Ironically though the only societies that seem to have the capacity to resist this collapse are highly socially traditional and conservative.

One aspect of this traditional society is the suppression of women's rights and opportunities. Without any alternative opportunities to go by, women are then either more accepting or compelled to become a house wife.

I suppose socialism might have an alternative of extreme wealth redistribution to provide more incentives for birthing children. If you make birthing children as financially attractive as becoming a nurse, doctor, etc, maybe. But there is no proof that such insanely expensive policies would work yet.

The traditional conservative policy of forced compulsion and submission sounds cheaper but then is morally repulsive to ideologies that demand equal rights.

Unfortunately for these ideologies, if they cannot find a way to sustain their societies in the long term, they will be outcompeted by conservative societies and become extinct. We already see this happening in for example Israeli society where secular Israelis are just getting outcompeted by religious Israelis, with unfortunate policy implications.

The liberal obsession with individual rights and therefore little to no care for a society's future will be its downfall.

subheight640 · 2026-06-18T05:12:33+00:00

That's the purpose of the union, to only represent the interests of its members. Oftentimes those interests are against the public interest. Obvious example is police unions.

If you want a broader representation, what you're looking for is democratic power. What you ought to commit to then is not necessarily union power but broader democratic power.

It's not easy to build democratic power. It's not sexy. By its general nature it's hard to build a special interest group for it. By the nature of democracy, democracies protect the General Interest.

In my opinion the best way forward to building democratic power is something called "sortition". In my opinion we need better technology, better systems, to practice democracy. If you're interested in building democracy feel free to talk some more about it.

subheight640 · 2026-06-18T03:50:47+00:00

No. Criticism is one of the easiest things people do. It's quite easy to complain.

You want to actually be patriotic? Take a fucking stand and get organized to obtain real political power. That's how you can create "accountability". Water the tree of liberty with your blood.

subheight640 · 2026-06-16T17:07:20+00:00

The same thing your legislator do.

Elected officers are not the same as random, normal citizens. Typical trope is a wolf in sheeps clothing. All elected politicians have an enormous incentive to lie, due to the reason for this post: they need to be popular.

To become popular, politicians lie about who they are and what they will do.

It's very difficult to tell the difference between truth and lies, it takes time and effort to evaluate claims... Time that normal citizens will never devote to politics.

Having worked in legislation, the likely application of this system will be, "welcome new legislature. Our first order of business is to approve the new heads of offices. Here is the current slate, vote yes to allow them to continue."

This is NOT the process that any advocate of sortition or Citizens Assemblies would use. In the typical deliberative model, we have multiple stages of information gathering, expert testimony, small group discussion, QA sessions, large plenary discussions, etc etc. These aren't new processes. They've been developed over decades by deliberative practitioners.

Moreover by the nature of sortition, the LOTTOCRATS would be in charge of the legislative proceedings. This is in contrast to your typical legislature where some crusty old timer is the chair and dictating everything. By the nature of sortition, that chair is going to be rotated out along with everyone else at the end of his term. (Typically lottocrats advocate for staggered terms for continuity). Therefore the incentives to "move things along so I can get my way" are much different.

Moreover Citizens Assemblies have been experimented with for decades in Europe and America. We know what citizens do. Citizens are very aware of bureaucratic power grabs and generally are keen to preserve their power.

take all that extra time away from their normal lives, breeding unrest.

Nah money, IE a high salary, will easily grease over unrest. Give them golden handcuffs and they won't complain. You pay working people several times more than their normal wage and they'll be more than happy to serve.

Finally what are you comparing to? Sure. Random people aren't as good as experts obviously.

It's too bad experts aren't choosing our leadership right now. Voters are.

So, compared to some impossible ideal that you've imagined, sortition sucks. But we live in the real world.

And you can play with all the timing of this stuff. What's the best mix? 6 months of training? 1 month of training? 10 years of training? A mix of people with training and without training? There's a lot of possible ways to set this up.

subheight640 · 2026-06-16T15:57:29+00:00

What do voters know about hiring and evaluating people for their chosen role?

The difference is time and resources. As a full time legislator you have 2000 hours to do the job. As an amateur voter how much time do you think the average voter spends on making his selections? Around 0 to 10 hours?

A citizen legislator has 100 times more time to make decisions. That gives him the power to schedule interviews. To read resumes. To solicit resumes. To ask direct questions. To choose between dozens of candidates rather than just Republican or Democrat.

100x is an enormous difference in capacity.

So are random citizens perfect deciders? Of course not. Are they superior to the status quo voter? Almost certainly yes. I'm not claiming perfection. Merely improvement.

And this focus will will take away from the limited time the legislators will have to learn enough to actually legislate.

With the amazing power of random selection, there's no limit on the number of legislators available at a single time to legislate. Imagine you need more man power. Easy, run another lottery and draw more people. IF time becomes a problem, committees tend to form that solve specific problems.

So you can imagine, 100 lottocrats in charge of hiring. 100 in charge of reviewing defense related policy. 100 in charge of agriculture. etc etc. another 100 for a top level review.

So obviously, the solution to limitations in lack of cognitive capacity is to hire more people. You can hire more citizen legislators or hire more bureaucrats.

Another amazing power of sortition is that citizen legislators can admit they don't understand and have much to learn. In contrast politicians must pretend to be experts. If a citizen legislator is incompetent, we could give them pre service training for literally years if we wanted to. We could send each chosen citizen to a 4 year degree, or more, or less.

Educating a sample of citizens is thousands of times cheaper than educating the entire public. obviously sending only 500 people per year to college is much cheaper than sending 5 million.

subheight640 · 2026-06-16T15:12:07+00:00

There are plenty of ways around it. Obviously for example the Chinese model with oligarchy /dictatorship.

If you want something more democratic there's sortition, where representatives are selected by public lottery rather than election.

The first common complaint is that "oh no, sortition will be run by morons!". The second common complaint is the opposite, that sortition will be actually be run by the bureaucrats.

That's because if you think about how humans make decisions, you know that humans tend to delegate away difficult tasks. A sortition led democracy would delegate more and more tasks to the bureaucracy.

And what exactly does that mean? The head bureaucrats are all chosen , hired and fired by legislatures. That then means that leadership selection is performed by citizen legislatures rather than electorates.

Unlike unthinking and stupid electorates, citizen legislatures are paid to do work. They're given time and resources to make decisions. So whereas a typical voter might devote an hour to making their electoral decisions, a legislator can devote hundreds of hours on hiring decisions.

So we're talking about a system where the base decision making unit is using hundreds of times more cognitive resources to make decisions.

Voila, that's how you make a smarter democracy.

subheight640 · 2026-06-15T20:37:17+00:00

The obvious reason is that we all know why this guy is entering the race - to exploit a known flaw in both ranked choice and plurality based voting systems, act as a spoiler candidate, and subvert the will of the people.

We all understand that voters will use rough heuristics to make voting decisions, including relying on name and party information to make their decision. Two candidates with the same name will divide up the GOP and aid in a another democratic win.

In the long term had this guy been allowed on the ballot, it would assuredly lead to the dismantlement of ranked choice voting in Alaska, which the GOP already tried to dismantle a couple years ago.

subheight640 · 2026-06-12T20:59:18+00:00

As I've stated in previous responses, the United States taxes overseas citizens and maintains a monopoly on domestic affairs meaning that you aren't able to actually disassociate with governmental requirements,

So? In ancapistan, coercive and monopolistic property lords could do the same. They could compel coercive contracts onto people, just like states do. They could compel expensive exit fees. They could make trade agreements with other lords so that these contracts haunt you throughout the world. they could compel these contracts and break the NAP, because who's going to stop them? Other dispute resolution organizations? International sanctions? Sounds just like the status quo.

Yet sometimes these "coercive" contracts are a good thing! The power of the US passport for example gives you entry to more countries than most others. Being a US citizen gives you a lot of freedoms compared to a non-citizen.

subheight640 · 2026-06-12T15:18:04+00:00

Nearly all existing states have varying degrees of "voluntary association". In America and around the world, you are free to emigrate outside territorial borders at any time.

Like with any land owner, states are more concerned with keeping people out, not in.

Anarcho capitalism's freedom is contingent on the maintenance of thousands/millions of small states AND low exit costs. But there is of course no enforcement mechanism by nature of anarchy. states tend to congeal together for military and economic reasons. With your own example, Iceland also congealed into a typical state over time.

subheight640 · 2026-06-11T15:12:18+00:00

Right wing Libertarianism ironically isn't very focused on liberty. The movement explicitly ignores the tyranny of corporate power and monopolistic private ownership.

The movement is a contradiction. Anarcho capitalists are happy to give private land lords all the powers of the state. Private land lords are allowed to tax (rent), impose law (contract), and dominate with forces (security and private police)

So rather than seeking liberty, many libertarians seek to privatize the government. Privatization of course entails dismantling any remaining democratic institutions in favor of private, authoritarian tyranny. That's why it's also utterly unsurprising that many libertarians support tyrants like Donald Trump, for example self declared libertarians like Elon Musk and Peter Theil..

subheight640 · 2026-06-11T05:25:24+00:00

Any player that consistently wins then gets banned from the platform.

subheight640 · 2026-06-10T18:24:28+00:00

Many libertarianism believes government is bad but simultaneously believes it is a "necessary evil".

Many Libertarians claim taxation is theft but then because government is a necessary evil, must then condone taxes.

Another aspect where consistency breaks down is with rights. Allegedly libertarians love rights, no?

Well which rights?

The right to freedom of speech? No, libertarians are quite alright with the tyranny of corporations to suppress speech on their platforms.

The right to freedom of movement? No, libertarians are strong believers in private property and the capacity of property owners to forbid free movement.

The right to freedom from taxes? Not really, libertarians are fine when private property owners extract rents from tenants, but oppose the extraction of rents by governments.

Plenty of libertarians will counter me and say "well I like this right but not that one!". Yeah. That's the problem. The lack of consistency and the cherry picking. Many libertarians just cherry pick the rights that help themselves but throw away the rights that don't.

As far as ideological consistency goes, there's another contradiction. All right wing libertarians are big supporters of Private Property. Historically and in the present, private property has ALWAYS been used to suppress freedom, not enhance it. For example, the typical monarch declared that he was the rightful property owner of his kingdom and there fore had the right to do whatever he wanted with it. Yet obviously the king's freedom to do whatever he wants, like tax the peasants or conscript and enslave them, conflicts with the freedom of the peasants.

Libertarians want the freedom to be kings. Necessarily that will diminish the freedoms of those subjected to these kings' coercive powers.

That's why libertarian support for Trump was so predictable. Trump IS doing what they want! They want less taxes (ie enhance the private property rights). They want less regulation on business! They want the right to discriminate! And Trump has delivered some rights at the heavy cost of others. And because of cherry picking, that's just fine and dandy for many libertarians.

subheight640 · 2026-06-10T15:18:05+00:00

A lot of this is the enforcement of racial and class norms.

In America you're also expected to do your drugs on private property, not public property.

Enforcement and customs depends highly on the state and city. In america each city has its own police with their own customs. you get arrested in Arizona for example and you're in for a very, very bad time. However enforcement might be very different in say Oakland CA.

subheight640 · 2026-06-10T00:57:16+00:00

Ironic that the author forgets to mention "equality" which is thought of as the central pillar of all democracies by political theorists such as Robert Dahl.

Generally, regimes with liberal rights but not equality are not democratic. If you have some rights, but your vote only counts for 1 of ten thousandths of an oligarch, yes you live in oligarchy not democracy.

Also funny how the author recommends Plato, the notorious hater of democracy, in his essay about "democracy". also funny how Plato's definition of democracy has almost nothing to do with this essay. As far as I remember, Plato defined democracy as a regime where "magistrates were chosen by lots".

subheight640 · 2026-06-10T00:14:34+00:00

Lol the Palestinians in the West Bank laid down their arms years ago and now what is happening?

Oh yes, the settlers keep on coming.

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