metagorgon:
@osberend:
No, the subset of my tax dollars used for legitimate purposes are the price of my citizenship in society. The rest is stolen property, taken at gunpoint.
Please define ‘legitimate purposes’ in a way that doesn’t mean ‘only things that I approve of’.
An easy way to start would be “things that would not leave the world better off if the money was just burned instead of being spent on super-bad thing X” (my guess would be that a lot of super-long prison sentences for victimless crimes fail here).
If one wants to be more ambitious, “things that wouldn’t leave the world better off if the money was not collected in the first place” (this is the point where more ordinary ridiculous things such as spending all the money collected from corporate taxes on corporate welfare (Finland says hi!) become unjustifiable).
For a quite stringent category of legitimacy, try “things that wouldn’t leave the world better off if the money was just distributed evenly to the citizens as a UBI”, which leaves the properly beneficial stuff that doesn’t destroy value, such as effective, targeted programs for people that can be actually significantly helped by them (a very small subset of existing programs), and gives a reasonably good theory of justifiable governance when combined with the previous criterion.
(via metagorgon)
2 months ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #vulgar libertarianism · 168 notes · source: fierceawakening · .permalink
ilzolende:
In “ridiculous overregulation”:
SF requires a license for fortune-telling, removing curses, and so on. (See Article 17.1 of the San Francisco Police Code.
It shall be unlawful for any person to advertise or offer or engage in the activity, enterprise, profession, trade, or undertaking of fortunetelling with the object of gain, benefit or advantage, whether direct or indirect, without a valid permit issued by the San Francisco Police Department. Gain, benefit or advantage includes but is not limited to economic remuneration of any kind, including authorization to use credit issued to another, use of another’s property or assets, loans, or the provision of tangible items.
Opponents of corporate personhood may appreciate that “Persons as used in Sections 1300 to 1321 shall mean an individual. Corporations and other legal entities shall not be entitled to a fortunetelling permit.”
Unfortunately, all would-be for-profit fortune-tellers must disclose their “full true name” to get a license, which may be a problem for all you mages out there.
If you’re wondering what fortune-telling is:
(a) Fortunetelling shall mean the telling of fortunes, forecasting of futures, or reading the past, by means of any occult, psychic power, faculty, force, clairvoyance, cartomancy, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, tea leaves, tarot cards, scrying, coins, sticks, dice, sand, coffee grounds, crystal gazing or other such reading, or through mediumship, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mindreading, telepathy or other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized article or substance, or by any such similar thing or act. It shall also include effecting spells, charms, or incantations, or placing, or removing curses or advising the taking or administering of what are commonly called love powders or potions in order, for example, to get or recover property, stop bad luck, give good luck, put bad luck on a person or animal, stop or injure the business or health of a person or shorten a person’s life, obtain success in business, enterprise, speculation and games of chance, win the affection of a person, make one person marry or divorce another, induce a person to make or alter a will, tell where money or other property is hidden, make a person to dispose of property in favor of another, or other such similar activity.
(b) Fortunetelling shall also include pretending to perform these actions.
(h/t Lowering the Bar)
original post
That’s probably related to mystic-religious scams where the con artist identifies a sufficiently vulnerable person and fucks with their mind and offers to remove the curse of “having any money or mental health at all”. Which is pretty clearly blatant fraud and thus my libertarian instincts aren’t as excessively offended by this as they would be if something without such a track record of massively harmful anti-consumer activities was regulated in the same way.
It’s still obscenely ridiculous but I can’t immediately think of an obviously better alternative for achieving the intended goal of making “that asshole who stole $200,000 and ran” identifiable, and “promethea can’t instantly invent a better way of doing it” a pretty damn high bar for any actually existing regulation.
The purpose of this legislation is to regulate fortunetellers, psychics, and other similar businesses so that the City and County of San Francisco can efficiently and thoroughly investigate fraud and deception, protect the public by preventing people who have been charged with deceptive practices from having easy access to persons who may be vulnerable to fraud or confidence games, to ensure that consumers are provided with information regarding services, rates, and complaint procedures
Of course, it’s also a barrier to entry which artificially hurts poor people, but fortune-telling isn’t the same kind of a legitimate business as hair-braiding, drug-dealing or sex work, and the criteria are basically “we want to know who you are in case you start scamming people because a lot of you guys are going to start scamming people” instead of “pay an imperial fuckton of money to favored special interests for lessons completely unrelated to your job” so, as far as goverment regulations go, this is fucking excellent and comparatively non-burdensome. And there’s a case to be made that fortune-telling basically in itself involves misrepresenting the nature of the service sold, or at least belongs in the general category of things that should be in Banned Product Stores. When If I were to become the dictator, this wouldn’t be the first regulation I abolish. Not saying I’d keep it, just saying that it wouldn’t be the first one on the chopping block.
For example, there is Article 32A which defines poker, 11 for miniature golf alone, 9 regulates what water may legally be used for (how about just making people pay for the water they use), 24 regulates street artists and I can’t even tell which parts of it are repealed or not, 40 mandates employers to be like “drugs are bad mmmkay” to their workers, there’s some weird ad hoc patch of rent control from the 70′s, and every other article seems to include something in the vein of:
- Sex work is banned.
- Not calling it sex work is not enough to make in un-banned.
- Sneaky ways of trying to do sex work are still banned.
- That clever hack you just thought of? It’s called sex work, we know of it, and it’s banned.
- Seriously, why is it so hard for you guys to accept that consenting adults won’t be allowed to make a honest living this way? It’s fucking banned.
- This may be San Francisco but our government is still a bunch of prudes who will only allow exchange of sexual favors for material favors to occur within marriage.
- Showing tits between 2:00 and 6:00 is regulated unless the person showing them is a “he”. Not showing tits counts as showing tits if we can’t tell the difference easily enough.
- We have no idea people other than “he” or “she” exist.
And of course sleeping in cars is prohibited because in a city where rents are as high as the mean citizen, even with cannabis georg not counted because he’s an outlier, the last thing it needs is poor people having affordable places to sleep in that are not the streets. Also, MINORS ARE SUBJECTED TO A CURFEW AND MAY NOT BUY OR POSSESS THICK SHARPIES WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS POLICE STATE BULLSHIT
3 months ago · tagged #vulgar libertarianism #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #drugs cw #regulation cw #ageism cw · 57 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink
rusalkii:
socialjusticemunchkin:
I seem to have accidentally caused quite a shitstorm overnight, so I want to make it extremely clear that SUPERVILLAIN STUFF IS NOT TO BE TAKEN AT FACE VALUE. IT IS A COMEDIC EXAGGERATION OF MY ACTUAL BELIEFS FOR THE SAKE OF A FICTIONAL PERSONA AIMED TO SIMULTANEOUSLY IMFORM AND AMUSE THOSE PEOPLE WHO AREN’T DISTRESSED BY SUCH THINGS. I apologize for the confusion.
So what are my actual beliefs on the matter? I do think that various interesting ways of deviating from the norm are less common presently than I’d like to see. I do not endorse exposing people to hormonal medications against their informed consent. If given the choice between two possible people, I would prioritize the one which is more different from other people unless there is substantial incompatibility in terminal values etc.
I consider this a natural consequence of a computationalist model of identity. If one runs a bit-perfect copy of me, the world gains no extra value at all. If one runs an otherwise perfect copy of me with just a few small changes, the world gains very little extra value because there is no magical limit where persons turn discrete. Thus given a fixed amount of instances of persons, value is maximized by having them be spread across as wide an area of mutually-compatible-person-space as possible. Furthermore, adding a new source of diversity not only introduces such people to the universe, but also introduces other people to such people as well, making their experiences more different from experiences previously had. Also, if diversity has value, enough diversity outweighs some quality of life, and other such concerns, further matching my moral intuitions that creating an autistic person who posts about strange things on tumblr is as okay as creating a neurotypical person, but creating a person suffering from extreme depression is less desirable than creating a less suffering person.
The expression “magical gender creatures” was a reference to a comment on Yud’s facebook post on the suspected “20% rate of women”, on the observed massive gender diversity in the region. No implications about trans people being inherently magical or whatever intended. The part about clones was intended in a more literal fashion: it would be a dramatic loss of value if people converged on the most normative pattern even if it did increase hedons. I can see how the context wasn’t optimally expressed and could be taken as judgement of the readers’ life choices and I’m sorry for not being more careful to make it clear enough in the first place so such things could’ve been avoided.
If given the choice between two possible people, I would prioritize the one which is more different from other people unless there is substantial incompatibility in terminal values etc.
If you don’t mind me poking at this a bit, a few questions:
I assume that, given the chance to save, from whatever contrived thought-experiment fate you like, either a pair of identical twins or one of the twins and a third, unrelated person, you would pick the second option. How far does this preference extend? Would your answer be any different if the twins had radically different life experiences? If the third person was different from the twins in a way you found personally unappealing, but not morally wrong? If the third person could be considered to have a lower quality of life?
That’s the region where things become complicated. On difference alone the unrelated person would be tie-breaker, assuming they also have an equally close person who would suffer from their death as much as the living twin. On the other hand identical twins are rare and thus would get priority even if they resemble each other a bit more. And it’s not very strong on this level because people are individually different from each other; the aggregate of thousands to millions of experiences is where I start considering such things relevant.
Personally unappealing shouldn’t matter as long as they don’t impose their unappealingness upon others because I prefer people to be operating on a meta-rule that we don’t discriminate on that. But if they do materially impose their values on others I get uncomfortable because on one hand the meta-rule of no discrimination on political beliefs, on the other hand the world needs more people who stick to their own business and less people who coercively restrict bodily autonomy etc.
Getting to less vague territory this suggests I should value a neo-nazi who doesn’t vote, do political advocacy, or have kids, over a moderate who similarly abstains from them, and it feels really weird but is also a bullet I’m perfectly willing to bite.
I don’t want to be the judge of people’s quality of life and whether theirs is worth living (I know mine would fairly be considered lower than that of many, but it also feels eudaimonic in a way that kind of resembles Dark Souls; I may not be in bliss as much as many others but I feel much more alive than I think I would in a more conventionally happy and easy life), so I’d go on the priors of what I know about their preferences and err on the side of equality.
This kind of ethics is really hard and very least-convenient-worldy. In practice my value for diversity mostly manifests in very enthusiastically defending people’s independence from normativities, morphological freedom, consensualism, and advocating for the awesomeness of abnormal existence, and the sort of libertarianism which is basically “don’t hurt others, and we really should make sure everyone has the basic things they need and there are no obscene hierarchies where I throw more money on what’s basically a toy than millions can afford to spend in an entire year, and we need to figure out the problem with kids, but other than that feel free to be as disgusting as you want as long as I can opt out from being subjected to it (yes, I tentatively support LGBTQ- or immigrant- or judaism- or islam-free small communities as long as they don’t begin to dominate society and the problem with innocent children born into them is sorted out)”. I don’t get distressed over the existence of people with such kinks as long as they only do it with other consenting adults and don’t form conspiracies that begin monopolizing opportunities. All I ask for return is that I get to do the same; I can even agree to credible mechanisms for ensuring my freaky transhumanism genuinely doesn’t threaten their continued existence. Diversity isn’t a one-way street and having some consensually traditional conformist people is good as long as we can mutually honor each other’s desire to not be assimilated.
3 months ago · tagged #vulgar libertarianism #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #death cw #nazis cw · 12 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink
shlevy:
genderfluid-ranma:
shlevy:
I often worry about what Drew Summit calls the “bourgeoisification” of socially liberal activism, wherein some policy or social shift is justified by emphasizing how normal and uncontroversial it is, often while explicitly throwing more “extreme” acts/people/situations under the bus. Gay people want to settle down, be monogamous, have 2.5 kids and a dog and a white picket fence just like you! Marijuana is really safe, safer than alcohol, and has some medicinal benefits too, it’s not like it’s *heroin* or anything!
On the one hand, the things this kind of activism focuses on are true. And they do address some of the concerns of people who would otherwise be opposed. And there’s a plausible case that over time this kind of strategy can lay the groundwork for the more weird cases to be accepted too (though I’d love to see concrete historical analysis here), and that even if they remain outside of the realm of the socially acceptable/legal they are at least not really much worse off for the change that’s being pushed.
On the other… These issues are totally besides the point. Marijuana should be legal even if it destroys your brain and kills you in 10 years. Gay people should be able to make arrangements about child care, shared finances, medical decisionmaking, etc. even if they’re living lives of constant drug-fueled sex parties in broken-down tenement homes. And not everyone can pass for normal, and not everyone wants to, and their legal rights shouldn’t depend on that.
I don’t have a solution here. I don’t know that this worry is justified; it may be that this kind of incremental change is exactly the right way to go. It feels like betraying my principles and letting values I don’t hold set the terms of the discussion, but feelings aren’t conclusions.
Marijuana absolutely should not be legal if it destroys your brain and kills you in 10 years. One of the key reasons for a government’s existence is to protect people from irrational choices.
Re: gay marriage: prima facie the objection people have is “gay people are hypersexual fetishistic degenerates and thus tolerance for gay people is tolerance for moral decay”. Factually, “being gay” and “being a hypersexual fetishist” are orthogonal for the most part, which is what’s important here, because “actually hypersexual fetishistic degeneracy is great unlike your puritan morals which are based filthy lies that must be destroyed” is a discussion for a different day and a terrible objection to raise if you’re trying to make gay marriage legal.
It’s kind of like communism.
Did you know that people are pretty receptive to workers’ rights as long as you don’t mention Marx? “For each according to his ability, to each according to his need” sounds almost like a politically neutral phrase. People’s opposition to communism is mostly about, like, gulags and revolutions. Which is why internet marxists say “well, the bourgeoise must be of course slaughtered when we come to power. Join us now, and maybe we won’t kill you later.”
Respectability politics is the only reason anything ever gets done.
First, on the object level issues: I think that, possibly modulo some uncertain concerns about age and mental capacity, you have the right to do whatever you want to your own body. I also think you have the right to delegate financial, medical, childcare (modulo uncertain concerns about child abuse etc.), etc. concerns however you wish, regardless of the specific nature of your relationship with the person/people you delegate to. If you disagree with those things, fine, but this is not the post for you then.
Second, I think there’s a difference between incremental progress/aiming for low-hanging fruit and what I’m talking about here. You could look at the situation in, say, 2008 and say “hey, we’re pretty close with gay marriage, let’s focus our efforts on this” without specifically emphasizing “they’re normal, they fit into our existing social and economic system just fine, don’t worry this isn’t a gateway to polyamory or anything” etc. You could say “gay people are just as entitled to make decisions about their lives as anyone else, the legal institution of marriage is currently how our society mediates certain decisions people make about their lives, so as long as that’s the case gay people should be extended the right” and not simultaneously distance them from more extreme cases.
Finally, I acknowledged in the OP that it may in fact be the case that this is the best way to do things (though I am still interested in detailed analysis here). I acknowledged that this is just a feeling, and is not something that should guide decisionmaking. There is no reason to shove the last two paragraphs in my face like they are somehow news to me. But, if I were a communist and I believed the bourgeoise would need to be slaughtered when we came to power, it would at the very least be fundamentally disappointing that my so-called allies recoiled at that idea and it wouldn’t be completely illegitimate for the working class to consider me a traitor. OK,that analogy is so far from my actual views as to be unhelpful, so let me go to an actual stance: It is fundamentally disappointing that my so-called allies in the fight for drug legalization don’t actually care about bodily autonomy, they just don’t think pot is worth the government forcing us about, and to the extent I emphasize those reasons instead of the autonomy ones I could very well be considered an enemy of those whose drug use falls outside that range. Again, to reemphasize, it may be that this is the best we can do, and once the pot battle is behind us we can move on to the next step, but it feels off.
That argument about hypothetical super-harmful marijuana is way too broad. Any kind of an unpopular and stigmatized choice can be constructed as an “irrationality” that people must be protected from if the powers that be so desire. Gays? Oh no, they’ll be bullied and catch AIDS, we must therapize them straight. Trans people? Oh no, they’ll kill themselves, we must do everything we can to prevent children from expressing gender non-comformity. Suffragettes? Oh no, don’t they know politics will ruin a woman’s uterus, won’t somebody think of the children because these mothers-to-be certainly don’t. Transhumanists? Don’t they know death is a blessing in disguise, we must throw a million bioethicists at them to force them to die against their will.
Autonomy is the only option that can’t be co-opted by oppressors so easily (even then there’s childrens’ vs. parents’ autonomy etc. but at least it breaks less often than paternalism). Anything that can be used to actually prevent people from doing ‘scientifically irrational thing X’ can, and all too often will be used to destroy you and people you care about (pigovian taxes notwithstanding; they still impose a burden but at least it’s not completely insurmountable and/or violent in the same way legal prohibitions are, so if you want to reduce irrational thing X don’t ban it, just tax it (but not so much that you create profitable black markets that are hard to eradicate non-violently)). For example, trans people have spent something like half a century fighting against gatekeeping imposed on us because the establishment wanted to protect us from irrational choices and was, and mostly still is, unable to recognize the harm from doing so. Transhumanists are right now subjected to ridiculous biopolicing to protect the sanctity of repugnance or whatever it is cishumanists fetishize.
It’s obscene that often a doctor can’t do the thing I specifically ask and pay for, to my own body with my own informed consent, because “primum non nocere”; but governments are completely unbound by such rules and violent men with guns will definitely force all sorts of reckless things upon a non-consenting populace because some people think they know better than others and can cook up studies supporting them.
Bans are serious fucking business, they should be reserved for things actually worth using the state apparatus of violence on. Eradicating measles? Possibly worth it if the alternatives don’t work. Preventing people from frying their own brains in ten years? Fuck no.
3 months ago · tagged #primum non nocere: the first principle of responsible government #death cw #suicide cw #homophobia cw #transphobia cw #deathism cw #vulgar libertarianism #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 71 notes · source: shlevy · .permalink