promethea.incorporated

zeteticelench:

jeysiec:

shieldfoss:

jeysiec:

shieldfoss:

jeysiec:

shieldfoss:

jeysiec:

shieldfoss:

jeysiec:

shieldfoss:

jeysiec:

argumate:

shieldfoss:

Principled stances on taxation:

• “Taking property is theft!” (Anarcho-Capitalism)
  
• “Claiming you own property is theft” (Anarcho-Communism)
  
• “Taking property is theft, but acceptable for the Greater Good” (Various consequentialists)
  

Unprincipled stances on taxation:

• “You CAN own property but taking it isn’t theft because of a Social Contract that you never agreed to.” (Unprincipled capitalists, e.g. most modern ideologies)
  
• “Claiming you own property is theft, but if you use the car that Comrade Iosef drives, the police will get you even though it isn’t Comrade Iosef’s car” (Unprincipled communists, i.e: “communists.”)
  

Surely you can’t define theft without a concept of property, thus you can’t define property in terms of or in opposition to theft.

If you accept a consequentialist position on taxation then the debate is over:

“People would prefer to hang on to things, but there are reasons why we have to take things away from them, for the greater good”.

In practice most of the social contract viewpoint comes back to this anyway, as people wouldn’t defend a social contract if they thought it gave bad outcomes.

I prefer the rational, factual, logical stance on taxation:

Taxation isn’t theft because you’re paying the government for resources or services you voluntarily chose to use by not changing your lifestyle to not use those resources/services. Because there is literally no moral difference between paying the government to provide those resources/services and paying a private company to provide those resources/services. And if you choose to live a lifestyle which uses those resources/services, you’d just be paying a private company to provide them if the government didn’t do so.

So it’s got nothing to do with the Greater Good or a social contract. It’s just business. The business where if you want/need something, you’re expected to pay the person who is providing it to you if they choose to be paid for it, which does not magically change when the person providing it that chooses to be paid has a government title.

Now, people are certainly free to try to argue that nobody should have to pay for things they want/need and/or nobody should be allowed to expect payment for the resources/services they provide, but those ideas would have to apply to literally everyone, not only to people in the public sector.

(Also money is not property anyway, money is a medium of exchange of property, but an exploration of that fact is outside the scope of this particular topic.)

No. No. This is exactly, exactly, the unprincipled stance of the social contract, even if you say that it isn’t.

I already proved it’s not via explaining how reality actually works. Reality doesn’t magically stop being reality just because you don’t like it. *shrug*

John is not chosing to use the service “Get shot by the police,” so any argument that it’s not theft because he chose to use that service and has to pay for it is super skeevy.

So why are you making that argument, then?

You cannot equip a large mass of people with guns, explicitly charge them to hurt you if you don’t do what they say, then hurt you anyway, then claim that it’s a service you have to pay for. What the actual

So why are you making that claim, then?

[1] I already proved it’s not via explaining how reality actually works. 

[2] So why are you making that argument, then?

[1] You really really didn’t.

I really, really did.

[2] … so why are you making that argument then?

Post with that argument has your username on it as the author, dude. If you honestly think that I am you, you might want to go see a shrink about that.

1: “Prove” is a word. Words mean things.

Indeed they do. And I proved my point. Still waiting for you to prove yours.

Otherwise, whenever you say nothing but “you really didn’t” I will respond with nothing but “I really did”. Ball’s in your court.

2: That literally never happened, unless you are referring to the part where I was enumerating unprincipled ideas.

So you’re saying this post never happened? Or that it was somehow magically written by me even though it has your name as the author? We got a live one here, folks.

… did you miss the “not” in that post that makes it mean the exact opposite of what you’re trying to engage with?

Oh, no, I got that you think the idea that “equip a large mass of people with guns, explicitly charge them to hurt you if you don’t do what they say, then hurt you anyway ” is a service, is skeevy.

What I’m wondering is why you’re saying that’s a service if you already know it’s skeevy to say that’s a service.

And then you went totally off the rails to ask me why I made a point that you were actually the one making, and now I’m honestly confused. Like, I don’t fucking know why you think “equip a large mass of people with guns, explicitly charge them to hurt you if you don’t do what they say, then hurt you anyway“ is a service. You’re the one who said it, you tell me why you think it’s a service.

I’m wondering why you’re implying it’s a service.

I can’t explain something I didn’t do, sorry.

You may have forgotten. It was here:

Taxation isn’t theft because you’re paying the government for resources or services you voluntarily chose to use by not changing your lifestyle to not use those resources/services.

That’s the skeevy bit. The bit where you said taxation isn’t theft because the things taxes pay for, like being shot by the police, are services.

You’re literally the only one in this convo who has said getting shot by the police is a service. It’s kind of fucked up that you think that, but you seem to know it’s fucked up to think that, which makes me just thoroughly confused that you’re saying stuff you know is fucked up.

But hey, I guess that it’s perfectly acceptable for you to try to put your arguments in my mouth and I’m a “troll” for pointing out that I’m not the one who said those things, because lol intellectual honesty, what’s that, lol.

I suspect the actual service is supposed to be “discouraging people from breaking laws and punishing those who do, because (insert rationalisation here)”, and because of the fucked-up police militarisation/God-given right to own firearms thing the US has, that service translates into a risk of getting shot by the police.

So:

I am a convicted criminal. The state has decided that I may not decide for myself whether or not I use estrogen, instead it has appointed someone who is not me to make those decisions. That person decided that I would not use estrogen. I used estrogen anyway. The state found out. I got convicted.

@jeysiec, I cannot choose to live a different lifestyle. If I tried, I’d die. Furthermore, this “service” is not a service I would ever buy from a private company. The state forces lots of such nonconsensual “services” down my throat because it can. Because I get shot if I resist too hard.

And I cannot change the location of my lifestyle either, because turns out essentially every place has a state or a similar bunch of bandits. If I tried to start my own state, I’d get shot. The services are not only bundled with lots of unwanted bloatware and malware, but they are also monopolized. Competition is not allowed, and thus the services are way shittier than they would otherwise be, and the prices way higher.

If preventing monopolies is an important service of the state, why doesn’t it prevent its own monopoly?

Even if I were to grant the assumption that I owe the state for the services I’ve used because they are artificially subsidized and thus I haven’t had a genuine choice; what moral justification can you give for the rest? Perhaps I might owe the state 10 000€ in taxes, but what right does it have to take 20 000€ instead? The only justification I see is that it has guns, and I don’t, and thus the state gets to decide.

1 month ago · 133 notes · source: shieldfoss · .permalink

thetransintransgenic:

socialjusticemunchkin:

collapsedsquid:

socialjusticemunchkin:

mhd-hbd:

shieldfoss:

argumate:

shieldfoss:

Principled stances on taxation:

• “Taking property is theft!” (Anarcho-Capitalism)
  
• “Claiming you own property is theft” (Anarcho-Communism)
  
• “Taking property is theft, but acceptable for the Greater Good” (Various consequentialists)
  

Unprincipled stances on taxation:

• “You CAN own property but taking it isn’t theft because of a Social Contract that you never agreed to.” (Unprincipled capitalists, e.g. most modern ideologies)
  
• “Claiming you own property is theft, but if you use the car that Comrade Iosef drives, the police will get you even though it isn’t Comrade Iosef’s car” (Unprincipled communists, i.e: “communists.”)
  

Surely you can’t define theft without a concept of property, thus you can’t define property in terms of or in opposition to theft.

If you accept a consequentialist position on taxation then the debate is over:

“People would prefer to hang on to things, but there are reasons why we have to take things away from them, for the greater good”.

In practice most of the social contract viewpoint comes back to this anyway, as people wouldn’t defend a social contract if they thought it gave bad outcomes.

“The claim that I am not allowed to drive this car due to metaphysical constraints is a claim that belongs to the category of claims that I will punish according to a legal code that is written beneath the char[5] ‘theft’ “

Incidentally, initializing a fixed-buffer non-w charstring is treason.

(Also there is a real difference between “I am taking this from you because somebody else needs it” and “I am taking this from you, as you have agreed to, so don’t welsh on that agreement.” In tumblr parlance, one of these is gaslighting.)

Citizenship is gaslighting.

The Police is Mobsters.

Following you, @shieldfoss, was the right decision.

There’s a reason for it:

The parallels between libertarian and feminist insights are striking. “The state is male in the feminist sense,” MacKinnon argues, in that “the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women” (MacKinnon 1989, Chapter 8 ¶ 11). The libertarian completion of this thought is that the state sees and treats everybody—though not in equal degree—the way men see and treat women. The ideal of a woman’s willing surrender to a benevolent male protector both feeds and is fed by the ideal of the citizenry’s willing surrender to a benevolent governmental protector. “We are not among wild beasts; from whom, then, does woman need protection? From her protectors,” Ezra Heywood remarked (McElroy 1991, p. 227); in the same way, libertarians have often described the state as an entity that protects people primarily from harms caused or exacerbated by the state in the first place. Just as, under patriarchy, forced sex is not recognized as real or fully serious rape unless the perpetrator is a stranger rather than one’s husband or boyfriend, so, under statism, governmental coercion is not recognized as real or fully serious tyranny unless it happens under a non-democratic government, a “dictatorship.” The marriage vow, as a rape license, has its parallel in the electoral ballot, as a tyranny license. Those who seek to withhold consent from their country’s governmental apparatus altogether get asked the same question that battered women get asked: “If you don’t like it, why don’t you leave?” — the man’s rightful jurisdiction over the home, and the state’s over the country, being taken for granted. It’s always the woman, not the abusive man, who needs to vacate the home (to go where?); it’s likewise the citizen, not the abusive state, that needs to vacate the territory (to go where?).

Despite these parallels, however, many libertarians — libertarian feminists definitely included — seems surprisingly unsympathetic to most of what feminists have to say. (…)

Libertarians are often unimpressed by feminist worries about social norms that disable anything a woman says from counting as declining consent to sexual access, but they are indignant at theories of tacit or hypothetical consent that disable anything a citizen says from counting as declining consent to governmental authority.1 Libertarians often conclude that gender roles must not be oppressive since many women accept them; but they do not analogously treat the fact that most citizens accept the legitimacy of governmental compulsion as a reason to question its oppressive character; on the contrary, they see their task as one of consciousness-raising and demystification, or, in the Marxian phrase, plucking the flowers from the chains to expose their character as chains.

When radical feminists say that male supremacy rests in large part on the fact of rape—as when Susan Brownmiller characterizes rape as “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (Against Our Will, p. 15)—libertarians often dismiss this on the grounds that not all men are literal rapists and not all women are literally raped. But when their own Ludwig von Mises says that “government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action,” that it rests “in the last resort” on “the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen,” and that its “essential feature” is “the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning” [HA VI.27.2], libertarians applaud this as a welcome demystification of the state. Libertarians rightly recognize that legally enacted violence is the means by which all rulers keep all citizens in a state of fear, even though not all government functionaries personally beat, kill, or imprison anybody, and even though not all citizens are beaten, killed, or imprisoned; the same interpretive charity towards the radical feminist analysis of rape is not too much to ask.

http://charleswjohnson.name/essays/libertarian-feminism/

Do you want the “Property is theft, violent coercion, and nonvoluntary“ shpiel? Because that is how you get the shpiel.

Cause I sure as hell don’t remember agreeing that most of the world was off-limits to me on threat of violence.  You wanna go pure non-coercion, you gotta abolish property.(that’s why I don’t go pure non-coercion )

Property is theft, just like taxation.

All Practical Moral Systems are messy.

If you try to look for a single principle underlying any aspect of a moral system involving any more than something less than $monkeysphere individuals, then duh you’re going to get contradictions.

Property and the legitimacy of taxation are both polite fictions that people subscribe to because they make society as we have it work, that most people agree to, and for the relatively few people who don’t voluntarily subscribe to them then the remaining majority of the people have agreed that they should be violently coerced. Is that consequationalism? Is that a principled hybrid of different options? Is that hypocrisy? Are these the wrong questions?

Like yes you can criticize parts of that (maybe “they should offer the option of sending the few people away, in addition to violent coercion”? But that requires resources, which is then those requiring those many people to unwillingly give those few people property… this is complicated…), but just “it’s not ideologically pure for any ideology” is a DUMB and halfway USELESS criticism.

This is the same bad reasoning that made people think Lojban was a useful idea. Your human is problematic. I am Legion, I contain Multitudes. Stop trying to make things pure.

(via thetransintransgenic)

1 month ago · tagged #tumblr needs a git merge implementation in discussion branches · 133 notes · source: shieldfoss · .permalink

shieldfoss:

Do you want the “Property is theft, violent coercion, and nonvoluntary“ shpiel? Because that is how you get the shpiel.

Cause I sure as hell don’t remember agreeing that most of the world was off-limits to me on threat of violence.  You wanna go pure non-coercion, you gotta abolish property.(that’s why I don’t go pure non-coercion )

Oh absolutely. Anarcho-Capitalists are so very for the Non-Aggression Principle, but they pull a classic DARVO and claim that when they claim land and you subsequently walk on it, you are aggressing against them. One of the reasons I am not an Anarcho-Capitalist.

My principled approach to property is “check c4ss because someone there has probably thought about the issue deeper and better than I have”, and turns out that this is indeed the case:

The foundation of property shouldn’t hinge on what rocks you’ve poked some point in the past or even what you’ve chosen to extend your cybernetic nervous system into, but what best satiates your desires or aspirations in balance with everyone else’s. This is after all what markets at their best promise: The notion that everyone’s subjective preferences will be satiated more efficiently than would be possible attempting to talk them out in a global consensus meeting.

If markets have a hard time resolving something then they shouldn’t complain if the answer turns out to be to extend the dynamics of markets deeper, to make the very foundations of the economic sphere more organic. And oh, whoops, now no one condemns me for driving off with one of Bill Gates’s cars.

There are two sets of ultimate justifications for property and markets. One is rooted in an entitled tit-for-tat demand for 1-on-1 “fairness.” The other is grounded in a wider ethical lens, seeking only the betterment of all. It should be no surprise if the market structures ultimately promoted by either differ. We’ve already seen that this is the case with “intellectual property.” Libertarians and even state socialists have split hard internally on this issue, some demanding “but I put energy into this, I am due recompense, that’s what fairness is” while others aghast that anyone would even think of seeking to exclude or control what others can have when scarcity is no longer relevant. This poorly papered over chasm between selfish and selfless core perspectives deserves widening. I know what side I’m on.

Not sure if perfect, but at least better than what I’ve seen anyone else offer, as it’s basically able to absorb the good parts of anything while spitting out the bad.

(via shieldfoss)

1 month ago · 133 notes · source: shieldfoss · .permalink

shieldfoss:

jeysiec:

shieldfoss:

jeysiec:

shieldfoss:

jeysiec:

shieldfoss:

jeysiec:

shieldfoss:

jeysiec:

argumate:

shieldfoss:

Principled stances on taxation:

• “Taking property is theft!” (Anarcho-Capitalism)
  
• “Claiming you own property is theft” (Anarcho-Communism)
  
• “Taking property is theft, but acceptable for the Greater Good” (Various consequentialists)
  

Unprincipled stances on taxation:

• “You CAN own property but taking it isn’t theft because of a Social Contract that you never agreed to.” (Unprincipled capitalists, e.g. most modern ideologies)
  
• “Claiming you own property is theft, but if you use the car that Comrade Iosef drives, the police will get you even though it isn’t Comrade Iosef’s car” (Unprincipled communists, i.e: “communists.”)
  

Surely you can’t define theft without a concept of property, thus you can’t define property in terms of or in opposition to theft.

If you accept a consequentialist position on taxation then the debate is over:

“People would prefer to hang on to things, but there are reasons why we have to take things away from them, for the greater good”.

In practice most of the social contract viewpoint comes back to this anyway, as people wouldn’t defend a social contract if they thought it gave bad outcomes.

I prefer the rational, factual, logical stance on taxation:

Taxation isn’t theft because you’re paying the government for resources or services you voluntarily chose to use by not changing your lifestyle to not use those resources/services. Because there is literally no moral difference between paying the government to provide those resources/services and paying a private company to provide those resources/services. And if you choose to live a lifestyle which uses those resources/services, you’d just be paying a private company to provide them if the government didn’t do so.

So it’s got nothing to do with the Greater Good or a social contract. It’s just business. The business where if you want/need something, you’re expected to pay the person who is providing it to you if they choose to be paid for it, which does not magically change when the person providing it that chooses to be paid has a government title.

Now, people are certainly free to try to argue that nobody should have to pay for things they want/need and/or nobody should be allowed to expect payment for the resources/services they provide, but those ideas would have to apply to literally everyone, not only to people in the public sector.

(Also money is not property anyway, money is a medium of exchange of property, but an exploration of that fact is outside the scope of this particular topic.)

No. No. This is exactly, exactly, the unprincipled stance of the social contract, even if you say that it isn’t.

I already proved it’s not via explaining how reality actually works. Reality doesn’t magically stop being reality just because you don’t like it. *shrug*

John is not chosing to use the service “Get shot by the police,” so any argument that it’s not theft because he chose to use that service and has to pay for it is super skeevy.

So why are you making that argument, then?

You cannot equip a large mass of people with guns, explicitly charge them to hurt you if you don’t do what they say, then hurt you anyway, then claim that it’s a service you have to pay for. What the actual

So why are you making that claim, then?

[1] I already proved it’s not via explaining how reality actually works. 

[2] So why are you making that argument, then?

[1] You really really didn’t.

I really, really did.

[2] … so why are you making that argument then?

Post with that argument has your username on it as the author, dude. If you honestly think that I am you, you might want to go see a shrink about that.

1: “Prove” is a word. Words mean things.

Indeed they do. And I proved my point. Still waiting for you to prove yours.

Otherwise, whenever you say nothing but “you really didn’t” I will respond with nothing but “I really did”. Ball’s in your court.

2: That literally never happened, unless you are referring to the part where I was enumerating unprincipled ideas.

So you’re saying this post never happened? Or that it was somehow magically written by me even though it has your name as the author? We got a live one here, folks.

… did you miss the “not” in that post that makes it mean the exact opposite of what you’re trying to engage with?

Oh, no, I got that you think the idea that “equip a large mass of people with guns, explicitly charge them to hurt you if you don’t do what they say, then hurt you anyway ” is a service, is skeevy.

What I’m wondering is why you’re saying that’s a service if you already know it’s skeevy to say that’s a service.

And then you went totally off the rails to ask me why I made a point that you were actually the one making, and now I’m honestly confused. Like, I don’t fucking know why you think “equip a large mass of people with guns, explicitly charge them to hurt you if you don’t do what they say, then hurt you anyway“ is a service. You’re the one who said it, you tell me why you think it’s a service.

I’m wondering why you’re implying it’s a service.

You may have forgotten. It was here:

Taxation isn’t theft because you’re paying the government for resources or services you voluntarily chose to use by not changing your lifestyle to not use those resources/services.

That’s the skeevy bit. The bit where you said taxation isn’t theft because the things taxes pay for, like being shot by the police, are services.

“Segregation enforced by cops funded by taxes is not oppression because you’re paying the government for resources or services you voluntarily chose to use by not changing your lifestyle to not use the ‘whites only’ drinking fountain…”

(via shieldfoss)

1 month ago · tagged #racism cw #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 133 notes · source: shieldfoss · .permalink

ilzolende:

socialjusticemunchkin:

argumate:

disexplications:

argumate:

rendakuenthusiast:

argumate:

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a badder guy with a gun.

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a bad guy with a bigger gun.

The only thing that can stop a nice guy with a gun is the friend zone, apparently.

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is agents of the state monopoly on legitimate violence, who have legitimate-violence-guns.

If guns are outlawed by the state asserting a monopoly on the use of force, then only outlaws and agents of the state whose sworn duty is to oppose outlaws will have guns.

If states are outlawed, only outlaws will have states

who’s going to stop ‘em tho

I’m here to ask you a question. What can stop a bad guy with a gun?

“A good gal with a gun,” say the constitutionally gender-balanced pair of spokespersons from Al-Qamishli, “and the fact that she is not alone, as everyone else too has been trained in enforcing the maintenance of a positive social order so that they don’t need a specific class of agents of the state to do it for them and also rob them because nobody can stop the agents of the state.”

“The fact that the existence of institutions to solve that problem is economically efficient and thus the institutions will exist,” says the man from Santa Clara. “In addition, the existence of institutions to solve the free-rider problem one would naively expect in the previous institutions is also economically efficient and thus such institutions will also exist.”

“A welfare society,” says the woman from Stockholm. “Early intervention into the factors that make people bad in the first place, because extremely few people are actually born bad, and most badness is actually the product of environmental conditions pulling people’s levers in a way that makes them act destructively, and thus acting early to stop the process and redirect people into more pro-social paths is far more productive than trying to figure out what to do when the guy has become bad and obtained a gun.”

“A well-regulated militia,” says the man from Philadelphia, “being necessary to the security of a free State…”

“Pro-social” is a phrase which is probably supposed to sound more unambiguously good than what it represents, which has warped around to it sounding more arbitrary and bad to me than what it represents.

Looking at the Wikipedia page, it seems to mix “not violently assaulting people at random” with “driving on the side of the road everyone else drives on” and “playing Cheese/four-square during lunch because that’s what 12-year-old girls do in this school”. And maybe this is a useful category, but I think “not doing stuff that’s obviously regardless of societal conditions” and “following everyone else’s choice regardless of arbitrariness when coordination matters a lot” are more natural a category than “those things, plus also conformity in general”.

(Also, “don’t mess with other people” is one thing, “you are obligated to devote some share of resources to helping people, but nobody said you had to like it, and also there are multiple ways to fulfill this duty” is another thing, and “you have to be a nice person, not just in the sense of ‘vaguely wanting people to have nice things’ but also in the sense of personally liking most people, which should ideally be shown by your willingness to do random favors and not see this as difficult or a burden” is completely unreasonable and I feel like it is required by pro-sociality.)

Okay, so there’s three kinds of pro-sociality

One is “not messing with people” and basically obligatory

One is “sacrificing from one’s own to help others” which is commendable and praiseworthy and I’d really like people to do it but don’t want to force them to do it, nor do I want to create an atmosphere where people feel excessive social pressure to sacrifice too much (too much being “anything negative-sum” and “certain very very important things I’m willing to sacrifice utilitarianism for, instead of vice versa” such as not voting on promethea’s body even if it would increase utility)

One is “surrendering to the rule of the mob” which is tragic and I want to help people to become stronger so they can resist it and reduce the power of mobs so they cannot impose their arbitrary harms upon non-consenting people

(via ilzolende)

1 month ago · 59 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

argumate:

It seems easy enough for a perfect Libertarian state to evolve/devolve into something very similar to what we have now without any non-Libertarian actions being taken along the way, if that makes sense.

If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.

To me this makes Libertarianism relatively uninteresting except as a reminder not to micromanage things and that centralisation has costs and should be employed sparingly.

Why not follow the 19^th-century libertarians, who neither denied the existence and importance of private discrimination, nor assimilated it to legal compulsion? There is nothing inconsistent or un-libertarian in holding that women’s choices under patriarchal social structures can be sufficiently “voluntary,” in the libertarian sense, to be entitled to immunity from coercive legislative interference, while at the same time being sufficiently “involuntary,” in a broader sense, to be recognized as morally problematic and as a legitimate target of social activism.

1 month ago · 40 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

collapsedsquid:

socialjusticemunchkin:

mhd-hbd:

shieldfoss:

argumate:

shieldfoss:

Principled stances on taxation:

• “Taking property is theft!” (Anarcho-Capitalism)
  
• “Claiming you own property is theft” (Anarcho-Communism)
  
• “Taking property is theft, but acceptable for the Greater Good” (Various consequentialists)
  

Unprincipled stances on taxation:

• “You CAN own property but taking it isn’t theft because of a Social Contract that you never agreed to.” (Unprincipled capitalists, e.g. most modern ideologies)
  
• “Claiming you own property is theft, but if you use the car that Comrade Iosef drives, the police will get you even though it isn’t Comrade Iosef’s car” (Unprincipled communists, i.e: “communists.”)
  

Surely you can’t define theft without a concept of property, thus you can’t define property in terms of or in opposition to theft.

If you accept a consequentialist position on taxation then the debate is over:

“People would prefer to hang on to things, but there are reasons why we have to take things away from them, for the greater good”.

In practice most of the social contract viewpoint comes back to this anyway, as people wouldn’t defend a social contract if they thought it gave bad outcomes.

“The claim that I am not allowed to drive this car due to metaphysical constraints is a claim that belongs to the category of claims that I will punish according to a legal code that is written beneath the char[5] ‘theft’ “

Incidentally, initializing a fixed-buffer non-w charstring is treason.

(Also there is a real difference between “I am taking this from you because somebody else needs it” and “I am taking this from you, as you have agreed to, so don’t welsh on that agreement.” In tumblr parlance, one of these is gaslighting.)

Citizenship is gaslighting.

The Police is Mobsters.

Following you, @shieldfoss, was the right decision.

There’s a reason for it:

The parallels between libertarian and feminist insights are striking. “The state is male in the feminist sense,” MacKinnon argues, in that “the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women” (MacKinnon 1989, Chapter 8 ¶ 11). The libertarian completion of this thought is that the state sees and treats everybody—though not in equal degree—the way men see and treat women. The ideal of a woman’s willing surrender to a benevolent male protector both feeds and is fed by the ideal of the citizenry’s willing surrender to a benevolent governmental protector. “We are not among wild beasts; from whom, then, does woman need protection? From her protectors,” Ezra Heywood remarked (McElroy 1991, p. 227); in the same way, libertarians have often described the state as an entity that protects people primarily from harms caused or exacerbated by the state in the first place. Just as, under patriarchy, forced sex is not recognized as real or fully serious rape unless the perpetrator is a stranger rather than one’s husband or boyfriend, so, under statism, governmental coercion is not recognized as real or fully serious tyranny unless it happens under a non-democratic government, a “dictatorship.” The marriage vow, as a rape license, has its parallel in the electoral ballot, as a tyranny license. Those who seek to withhold consent from their country’s governmental apparatus altogether get asked the same question that battered women get asked: “If you don’t like it, why don’t you leave?” — the man’s rightful jurisdiction over the home, and the state’s over the country, being taken for granted. It’s always the woman, not the abusive man, who needs to vacate the home (to go where?); it’s likewise the citizen, not the abusive state, that needs to vacate the territory (to go where?).

Despite these parallels, however, many libertarians — libertarian feminists definitely included — seems surprisingly unsympathetic to most of what feminists have to say. (…)

Libertarians are often unimpressed by feminist worries about social norms that disable anything a woman says from counting as declining consent to sexual access, but they are indignant at theories of tacit or hypothetical consent that disable anything a citizen says from counting as declining consent to governmental authority.1 Libertarians often conclude that gender roles must not be oppressive since many women accept them; but they do not analogously treat the fact that most citizens accept the legitimacy of governmental compulsion as a reason to question its oppressive character; on the contrary, they see their task as one of consciousness-raising and demystification, or, in the Marxian phrase, plucking the flowers from the chains to expose their character as chains.

When radical feminists say that male supremacy rests in large part on the fact of rape—as when Susan Brownmiller characterizes rape as “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (Against Our Will, p. 15)—libertarians often dismiss this on the grounds that not all men are literal rapists and not all women are literally raped. But when their own Ludwig von Mises says that “government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action,” that it rests “in the last resort” on “the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen,” and that its “essential feature” is “the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning” [HA VI.27.2], libertarians applaud this as a welcome demystification of the state. Libertarians rightly recognize that legally enacted violence is the means by which all rulers keep all citizens in a state of fear, even though not all government functionaries personally beat, kill, or imprison anybody, and even though not all citizens are beaten, killed, or imprisoned; the same interpretive charity towards the radical feminist analysis of rape is not too much to ask.

http://charleswjohnson.name/essays/libertarian-feminism/

Do you want the “Property is theft, violent coercion, and nonvoluntary“ shpiel? Because that is how you get the shpiel.

Cause I sure as hell don’t remember agreeing that most of the world was off-limits to me on threat of violence.  You wanna go pure non-coercion, you gotta abolish property.(that’s why I don’t go pure non-coercion )

Property is theft, just like taxation.

1 month ago · 133 notes · source: shieldfoss · .permalink

mhd-hbd:

shieldfoss:

argumate:

shieldfoss:

Principled stances on taxation:

• “Taking property is theft!” (Anarcho-Capitalism)
  
• “Claiming you own property is theft” (Anarcho-Communism)
  
• “Taking property is theft, but acceptable for the Greater Good” (Various consequentialists)
  

Unprincipled stances on taxation:

• “You CAN own property but taking it isn’t theft because of a Social Contract that you never agreed to.” (Unprincipled capitalists, e.g. most modern ideologies)
  
• “Claiming you own property is theft, but if you use the car that Comrade Iosef drives, the police will get you even though it isn’t Comrade Iosef’s car” (Unprincipled communists, i.e: “communists.”)
  

Surely you can’t define theft without a concept of property, thus you can’t define property in terms of or in opposition to theft.

If you accept a consequentialist position on taxation then the debate is over:

“People would prefer to hang on to things, but there are reasons why we have to take things away from them, for the greater good”.

In practice most of the social contract viewpoint comes back to this anyway, as people wouldn’t defend a social contract if they thought it gave bad outcomes.

“The claim that I am not allowed to drive this car due to metaphysical constraints is a claim that belongs to the category of claims that I will punish according to a legal code that is written beneath the char[5] ‘theft’ “

Incidentally, initializing a fixed-buffer non-w charstring is treason.

(Also there is a real difference between “I am taking this from you because somebody else needs it” and “I am taking this from you, as you have agreed to, so don’t welsh on that agreement.” In tumblr parlance, one of these is gaslighting.)

Citizenship is gaslighting.

The Police is Mobsters.

Following you, @shieldfoss, was the right decision.

There’s a reason for it:

The parallels between libertarian and feminist insights are striking. “The state is male in the feminist sense,” MacKinnon argues, in that “the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women” (MacKinnon 1989, Chapter 8 ¶ 11). The libertarian completion of this thought is that the state sees and treats everybody—though not in equal degree—the way men see and treat women. The ideal of a woman’s willing surrender to a benevolent male protector both feeds and is fed by the ideal of the citizenry’s willing surrender to a benevolent governmental protector. “We are not among wild beasts; from whom, then, does woman need protection? From her protectors,” Ezra Heywood remarked (McElroy 1991, p. 227); in the same way, libertarians have often described the state as an entity that protects people primarily from harms caused or exacerbated by the state in the first place. Just as, under patriarchy, forced sex is not recognized as real or fully serious rape unless the perpetrator is a stranger rather than one’s husband or boyfriend, so, under statism, governmental coercion is not recognized as real or fully serious tyranny unless it happens under a non-democratic government, a “dictatorship.” The marriage vow, as a rape license, has its parallel in the electoral ballot, as a tyranny license. Those who seek to withhold consent from their country’s governmental apparatus altogether get asked the same question that battered women get asked: “If you don’t like it, why don’t you leave?” — the man’s rightful jurisdiction over the home, and the state’s over the country, being taken for granted. It’s always the woman, not the abusive man, who needs to vacate the home (to go where?); it’s likewise the citizen, not the abusive state, that needs to vacate the territory (to go where?).

Despite these parallels, however, many libertarians — libertarian feminists definitely included — seems surprisingly unsympathetic to most of what feminists have to say. (…)

Libertarians are often unimpressed by feminist worries about social norms that disable anything a woman says from counting as declining consent to sexual access, but they are indignant at theories of tacit or hypothetical consent that disable anything a citizen says from counting as declining consent to governmental authority.1 Libertarians often conclude that gender roles must not be oppressive since many women accept them; but they do not analogously treat the fact that most citizens accept the legitimacy of governmental compulsion as a reason to question its oppressive character; on the contrary, they see their task as one of consciousness-raising and demystification, or, in the Marxian phrase, plucking the flowers from the chains to expose their character as chains.

When radical feminists say that male supremacy rests in large part on the fact of rape—as when Susan Brownmiller characterizes rape as “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (Against Our Will, p. 15)—libertarians often dismiss this on the grounds that not all men are literal rapists and not all women are literally raped. But when their own Ludwig von Mises says that “government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action,” that it rests “in the last resort” on “the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen,” and that its “essential feature” is “the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning” [HA VI.27.2], libertarians applaud this as a welcome demystification of the state. Libertarians rightly recognize that legally enacted violence is the means by which all rulers keep all citizens in a state of fear, even though not all government functionaries personally beat, kill, or imprison anybody, and even though not all citizens are beaten, killed, or imprisoned; the same interpretive charity towards the radical feminist analysis of rape is not too much to ask.

http://charleswjohnson.name/essays/libertarian-feminism/

(via mhd-hbd)

1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #rape cw #steel feminism · 133 notes · source: shieldfoss · .permalink

laropasucia:

wirehead-wannabe:

laropasucia:

wirehead-wannabe:

towardsagentlerworld:

wirehead-wannabe:

ozymandias271:

ozymandias271:

ozymandias271:

Moral Foundations scores (most is five):

4.8 Harm 
3.2 Fairness 
2.3 Loyalty
1.0 Authority
0.0 Purity

Schwartz Values Scores (highest is 7):

4.6 Benevolence (helping people close to you)
4.2 Universalism (helping everyone)
4.0 Achievement (competence, success)
4.0 Hedonism (pleasure)
4.0 Self-direction (independence, choosing for yourself)
3.5 Conformity (restraint of actions that violate social norms or offend others)
2.0 Stimulation (excitement, novelty, challenge)
1.4 Security (stability, safety, harmony)
0.8 Tradition (traditional culture, religion)
-0.4 Power (dominating others)

I am confused about this one because I wasn’t sure whether to answer in an ideal world or in our current world. Achievement, hedonism, benevolence, and self-direction seems like a pretty good description of the eudaimoniacally ideal life; but we live in a world with tremendous suffering we can work to end, and that takes precedence over our individual self-development. 

I think it’s interesting I scored higher in benevolence than universalism. Wouldn’t have predicted that. 

Big Five scores (highest is 5):

4.7 Openness
1.4 Conscientiousness
2.2 Extraversion
4.4 Agreeableness
4.6 Neuroticism

Can we somehow get a group together to compare on these? I’d be really interested in seeing everyone side by side, rather than scattered throughout tumblr.

Done.

wirehead-wannabe, ozymandias271, eccentric-opinion, anyone else who wants to contribute 

(people should feel free to only fill out part of the form, if they don’t want to take all the tests but still want to report their results for some of them)

Reblogging again because we have some newcomers, and because people like @voximperatoris were asking about political quizzes.

Is there a specific set of surveys to complete?

They’re all from yourmorals.org (except the part about sortinghatchats obviously) and the columns should be labeled. Feel free to do as many or as few as you want.

All right then…

For the Big Five:

O: 4.5

C: 2.6

E: 2.2

A: 4.1

N: 4.4

For the Moral Foundations:

Harm: 3.5

Fairness: 3.3

Loyalty: 1.3

Authority: 1.2

Purity: 0.3

And the Schwartz Values

Power: 0.6

Achievement: 5.0

Hedonism: 4.0

Stimulation: 5.0

Self-Direction: 4.6

Universalism: 4.8

Benevolence: 4.6

Traditionalism: -0.2

Conformity: 3.2

Security: 3.4

Conclusion: I dunno, I figured out pretty quick which questions were measuring what sorts of traits, and given how vague some of them were, I found myself debating whether to try and pattern-match them imperfectly onto circumstances I could actually picture (which would skew the results away from what they were probably actually trying to measure), or whether to choose answers based on the results I assumed it was going to nudge me towards (which would have just been measuring what categories I like to think I’m in, rather than which categories I’m actually in). In the end I focused on avoiding those temptations to the point where I may have overcompensated in the other direction, which probably skewed my results the other way around.

Self-direction: 6.2
Achievement: 5.2
Stimulation: 5.0
Universalism: 3.6
Benevolence: 3.2
Hedonism: 3.0
Security: 2.2
Power: 0.2
Conformity: 0.0
Tradition: -0.6

O 4.7
C 2.4
E 2.8
A 3.6
N 2.6

Harm 2.7
Fairness 4.2
Loyalty 0.0
Authority 0.2
Purity 0.2

Also, my business ethics are…interesting

And sortinghatchats is triggering an identity crisis

1 month ago · 82 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink