181–190 of 200 posts
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> But I don't think the Gore camp felt they had legitimately lost at all. My memory may be false or incomplete, but I thought Gore ultimately said he’d lost and that Bush has won?
Yes he conceeded after the court case "for the good of democracy" but his supporters felt the case decision had holes.
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A third scenario (if cooperative globalism doesn't work out) is currently democratic countries gradually converting into totalitarian states in order to compete with China, who seem to be clearly demonstrating that Totalitarianism Done Right >> Democracy (and yes, with this approach comes greater systemic risk, but such risks can and are routinely ignored). A fourth (ideal) way is a true New Enlightenment - true as o…
"China, who seem to be clearly demonstrating that Totalitarianism Done Right >> Democracy" I wish that was not the main take-away people had. China has a very unique economic system that does not require totalitarianism: free-market capitalism with many public actors especially in finance. China could be democratic and maintain such a system. I'd like to see it tried somewhere else.
And what about their ability to rapidly implement strategic policy initiatives, including displacing massive numbers of people against their will? Unfortunate for the individuals, but incredibly beneficial for the group, compounding over time.
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I recall a rather amazing paper a while back arguing that markets cannot be perfectly efficient unless P=NP. There are too many brutal NP-hard optimizations involved. I suspect the same would hold for any attempt at central planning. If these things were possible we would live in a utopia.
> I suspect the same would hold for any attempt at central planning. It would be worse for central planning, because in addition to the problem you mention, central planning has the problem of getting the necessary information to the central planner, which in the general case is impossible: the information goes up as the exponential of the population size, but the bandwidth of information channels to the central plan…
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Would you mind referring to some articles as examples of the fallacies you're describing? Or is it the case that you simply don't like the content and therefore you dismiss it using whatever excuses you find convenient?
Well the one you linked to is a good example. If property rights are derived by the ability to argue then babies can't own property. But they can... If the argument is that someone else does the argument on behalf of the baby then anything can use that argument. We see other numerous counter examples - court cases on behalf of animal rights, collectively owned property etc. It's a simple circular argument disguised i…
You missed the point about the ability of performing arguments. Babies and children might not be able to argument at the moment, but they are capable of argumentation. Therefore, for as long as they don't achieve maturity, tutors can act in the interest of the child.
Animals, on the other hand, can't argument at all, therefore are not capable of holding negative property rights.
Bear in mind that positive rights can't be reasoned without failing at Hume's razor, for the simple reason one can't have rights over other people's property. Collective property can't be reasoned either. In any case, I invite you to try to reason about said "rights" without resorting to positive law.
Which other articles didn't you like and that you claim are "nonsensical"?
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I'd say it stands to reason that in these quotes the word "democracy" is used as a stand in for "(centralised) representative democracy".
Yes, but he does not explicit that, equaling if with "democracy", something he proposes to reject altogether. The words "democracy" "vote" "majority" appear nowhere else in his proposal.
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>The end justifies the means? Well, yes. For all the popularity of the phrase "the end never justifies the means", I have never met someone who actually believes it. Just to begin with, almost everyone agrees with state sanctioned violence as means to maintain a social order, even if they find the action itself horrible. I found the phrase itself more commonly used as a way to dismiss certain ends on the grounds of P…
I have never met someone who actually believes it. I've definitely met people who agree that choice and liberty is so important that it's better people lead shorter, less healthy and more miserable lives through their own choices, than be tricked or forced into prosperity, health and happiness.
Each it's own ideals, but as mentioned, I believe the phrase is just used to quickly dismiss ends that people are if not against, not so invested in.
"If we substitute the word indifference for the word liberty, we shall come much closer to the real intention that lies behind the classic argument. Liberty is to be permitted where differences are of no great moment. It is this definition which has generally guided practice. In times when men feel themselves secure, heresy is cultivated as the spice of life. During a war liberty disappears as the as the community fe…
I really loved and got a lot from his early books like Liberty and the News –about how democracy needs good journalism–and Public Opinion –about how public opinion was manipulated in WW1, and many other things. I've read it many times, one of my favourites. A Preface to Morals was the first Lippmann book I read, decades ago, and have read many times since. It's about..philosophy/spirituality and the deep needs of civ…
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Well the one you linked to is a good example. If property rights are derived by the ability to argue then babies can't own property. But they can... If the argument is that someone else does the argument on behalf of the baby then anything can use that argument. We see other numerous counter examples - court cases on behalf of animal rights, collectively owned property etc. It's a simple circular argument disguised i…
That's only if you didn't bother reading it carefully. You missed the point about the ability of performing arguments. Babies and children might not be able to argument at the moment, but they are capable of argumentation. Therefore, for as long as they don't achieve maturity, tutors can act in the interest of the child . Animals, on the other hand, can't argument at all, therefore are not capable of holding negative…
This is the "shifting sands" technique that was previously mentioned.
Counterexamples are simple to find: a baby with a terminal disease, a mature person in a vegetative state.
Animals, on the other hand, can't argument at all, therefore are not capable of holding negative property rights.
So you say. And yet animal cruelty rules are a good counterexample.
Bear in mind that positive rights can't be reasoned without failing at Hume's razor, for the simple reason one can't have rights over other people's property.
Of course they can. Building code rights are a good example. Appealing to Hume's razor is another example of the technique on that site - it makes it sound like something is factual whereas actually it is completely non-obvious that it applies at all.
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That's only if you didn't bother reading it carefully. You missed the point about the ability of performing arguments. Babies and children might not be able to argument at the moment, but they are capable of argumentation. Therefore, for as long as they don't achieve maturity, tutors can act in the interest of the child . Animals, on the other hand, can't argument at all, therefore are not capable of holding negative…
Babies and children might not be able to argument at the moment, but they are capable of argumentation. This is the "shifting sands" technique that was previously mentioned. Counterexamples are simple to find: a baby with a terminal disease, a mature person in a vegetative state. Animals, on the other hand, can't argument at all, therefore are not capable of holding negative property rights. So you say. And yet anima…
It seems that you believe that positive law (meaning: law that you "think" is right and want to impose on others) is perfectly reasonable.
The deal with argumentative ethics is that it derives natural law through logic reasoning. You may not like it, you may hate the conclusions it achieves, but it's only way you can build an ethical system that allows for the pacific co-existence of individuals in a way that is perennial in time and space that we can possibly agree on (but not necessarily will). Once you start removing constraints (eg. no need to allow for pacific co-existence, or no need for being perennial), then pretty much anything goes, and we're in the authoritarian/totalitarian land we live with today.
In any case, it really doesn't matter what I think or what you think, as decentralization removes the ability states and governments to exist, law will be progressively handled by the free market. How do you believe that law will be handled in a competitive environment, with no government, no "constitution" and Kelsen's pyramid for people to bow to?
In the end the only thing we can possibly agree on is that we hold negative rights on other people's properties. Even if someone doesn't agree on that, the market will find a way to record that person's actions against other's property in a distributed database, which can make the life of that person a living nightmare in a fully technologically decentralized society. We are not there though, so let's have authoritarian ideas pushed right and left while we can.
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Anarchists generally criticize representative democracy, not democracy in general. Makno's own experiments in the territory that his forces controlled were basically a form of very distributed and localized council democracy.
Having read the proposals he made after his defeat, his "Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists" [1] I disagree. He just talks about democracy, indeed talking mostly about representative democracy, but the system he proposes has no voting of any sort. Actually, reading it reminded me of another such book I had read a while ago. Qaddafi's Green Book, where he lays down his ideal system, the Jamahir…
Qaddafi's green book is just a rehash of the council democracy. But yes, it can certainly be implemented differently - just as you can have a multi-party representative democracy on paper that is a totalitarian dictatorship in practice, as in e.g. DPRK.
I think better examples of functional democracy along these lines can be seen in the Zapatista-controlled areas in Mexico, and especially in Rojava/AANES. Rojava is interesting because they have an actual written social contract that captures the details of the electoral system, which is not very typical for such forms of governance: https://www.scribd.com/document/441234886/Social-Contract-of...