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@Mesmer
I am arguing that 'behavioral trait', in this instance, doesn't have to be voluntary. Unless 'behavioral trait' is in every circumstance 'involuntary' (even your source doesn't agree with you: "In humans, behavioral traits are often learned rather than instinctive" (i.e. often means not always)), then you can't make this absolutist argument.
An instinctive action is not the same as an automatic biological process - such as growing hair or the beating of the heart. It is not controversial that the skin of different races has different biological traits.
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@Mesmer
Therefore, the "behavioral trait" of sweating allows African-Americans to be superior to Koreans in one way (two groups that are divided phenotypically, of which manifests in different "physical appearance[s]"), in regards to living in hotter environments. For "racism" to denote this scientific fact as negative should be considered malicious.
Sweating is not a behavioral trait, it is an involuntary physical reaction.
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@bmdrocks21
However, that is quite clearly false. While poor blacks and whites have a few similarities in culture, their overall cultures are quite distinct. Biology and group identity are big factors affecting culture.
We could hypothesise that, in a pure experiment in which the conditions were identical, different groups would display different behaviours under the same conditions, because of differences in, say brain shape. However, this is a mere hypothesis, no reproducible empirical experiment has yet demonstrated to what degree variance in actual outcomes can be attributed to this. To bring in biology is to hypothesise an extraneous, unproven and theoretical causal factor to explain something for which a plethora of known contributing factors already exist. The null hypothesis states that group differences should be assumed to be due to chance unless significant positive evidence exists to show that some variable plays a causal role.
When any negative racial disparity for a non-white group is blamed on "white supremacy" or "structural racism" or whatever other jibberish term they choose to use, they are proving that they believe that all groups will achieve the same outcomes if there isn't some evil system preventing that from happening.
My argument is that the particular differences in outcomes currently seen between social groups is primarily determined neither by racism, nor biology. This is the false dichotomy: if a difference in group outcomes isn't determined by biology, then it must be explained by the personal prejudice of a mass of people, and vice versa. Instead of being caused by personal prejudice of individuals, or directly determined by biology, differences in group outcomes emerge from the structure of the state in which they are formed. This is I believe what people who use terms like "structural racism" are getting at, however I think it is misleading to use the word "racism" because it denotes personal prejudice. I am talking about the ethnic content of the structures upon which states are formed.
since you don't consider any group difference as an explanatory factor.
I just don't see what is useful about bringing in biology when discussing sociology or politics. Ultimately, we are all biological creatures. However, we are also physical beings, but it would not be useful to try to build an understanding of political outcomes using physics. The science is not developed enough to connect the two domains in any rigorous way, so the attempt is more likely to obfuscate the issues, rather than clarifying them.
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@oromagi
Given its frequent re-alignments, I think I could successfully argue that Libertarianism is far more ambivalent a concept than Liberalism.
By talking about the ambiguity of liberalism, I am referring to a kind of 'inside-outside' distinction which is integral to the structure of liberalism and to the states founded upon it. Domenico Losurdo refers to this as the "community of the free" - by which the "universal rights" championed by liberalism are always implicitly delimited. The universal rights of liberalism are universal to the community of the free - and insofar as they are consolidated the opposition between inside and outside is deepened - and it is this opposition which organises all liberal discourse.
Slavery is not something that persisted despite the success of the three liberal revolutions. On the contrary, it experienced its maximum development during that success [...] Contributing decisively to the rise of an institution synonymous with the absolute power of man over man was the liberal world. [...] To a greater or lesser extent, there survived in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies 'ancillary slavery', which is to be distinguished from 'systemic slavery, linked to plantations and commodity production'. And it was the latter type of slavery, established above all in the eighteenth century (starting from the liberal revolution of 1688 89) and clearly predominant in the British colonies, which most consummately expressed the de humanization of those who were now mere instruments of labour and chattels, subject to regular sale on the market.This did not even involve a return to the slavery peculiar to classical antiquity. Certainly, chattel slavery had been widespread in Rome. Yet the slave could reasonably hope that, if not he himself, then his children or grandchildren would be able to achieve freedom and even an eminent social position. Now, by contrast, his fate increasingly took the form of a cage from which it was impossible to escape.
- Losurdo, Liberalism, a Counter-History p. 36
Liberalism and the nation-sate model are co-extensive with the identitarian models of hierarchical organisation which they claim to oppose. Racialised slavery was established on the basis of liberal principles, of limitation of the absolute power of governments, as well as the spirit of even-handedness and pragmatism.
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@badger
So what do you envision besides state or capitalism?
It is very possible that everyone is a conservative, and the various ideologies are like projections, or shadows on a cave wall, reflecting the various sides of the state-form they arose within. However, we can see concretely that the very concept of territory is coming under question today, and in a much more radical way that cannot so easily be papered over by the abstractions of classical liberalism. As I mentioned in the OP, we can gauge this by the way that attempts to overcome or elude this problem require extreme measures. For example, Zionism, the Nordic model, paleoconservatism. These are all attempts to construct "healthy communities," tightening the social fabric by one again re-aligning legal jurisdiction with the political territory of that community.
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@bmdrocks21
The issue is this liberal egalitarian fever dream that has infected most Western societies. If the idea is that everybody and every group are exactly the same or will succeed and do things at the same rates in the same societies, then every disparity must be blamed on somebody. If more women are nurses, it must be because some societal force is forcing them to do that. If more blacks live in poverty than Hispanics and Asians, it must be because of oppression, not any group difference in language, culture, etc.
Language and culture are shaped by "societal forces," and the fact that "more blacks live in poverty" shapes their culture as well. Unless you are going to rely fully on biological determinism I don't know how you can get around the fact that "societal forces" contribute to social outcomes. Also I am not a liberal egalitarian, but I don't think liberals or egalitarians claim that "everybody and every group are exactly the same."
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@oromagi
You skipped a lot of my direct questions but I think I have some sense of your subject now- a kind of utopian global anarchy. Are you promoting a specific ism or just keeping it super vague?
Libertarianism
in what way?
I have in mind concepts like "meritocracy" or "general intelligence" -- these concepts do not translate well to states prior to the 17th century, because status was tied to some idea of one's given role, perhaps like "virtue" but not a purely mechanical concept of competence. Really it wasn't until the 19th century that such structures of generalised knowledge and models of intelligence were starting to be properly formulated. Today, they are used as ideological props to the legitimacy of the class structure characteristic of the nation-state. They do not really have meaning or use outside of that context.
Gould argues that the primary assumption underlying biological determinism is that, "worth can be assigned to individuals and groups by measuring intelligence as a single quantity". Biological determinism is analyzed in discussions of craniometry and psychological testing, the two principal methods used to measure intelligence as a single quantity. According to Gould, these methods possess two deep fallacies. The first fallacy is reification, which is "our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities".[3] Examples of reification include the intelligence quotient (IQ) and the general intelligence factor (g factor), which have been the cornerstones of much research into human intelligence. The second fallacy is that of "ranking", which is the "propensity for ordering complex variation as a gradual ascending scale".
Unity seems to be the trick and I agree that borders and militaries are obstacles to that unity but I don't buy that societies survive long or well without some government.
It seems that your main contention is that I do not directly identify these tendencies toward unification with classical liberal texts. In fact, the classical liberal position was much more ambivalent - it is characterised essentially by a kind of hypocrisy, in the sense of a tension between its implicit and its explicit tenets. My main contention is that nationality and ethnicity are closely intertwined concepts, and that is what I mean by the fact that the idea of a nation-state built on a foundation of universality and blindness to race, is contradictory and abstract.
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@badger
The nation state is a class system enforced by armies. Dispense with it and I'm pretty sure capitalism isn't a thing anymore. Capitalism relies on inequality in mobilising the masses.
I agree entirely - it's not a term I'm married to. In fact, much like "neoliberalism" I think it obscures more than it clarifies. As you correctly pointed out, the class structure of economics is held in place by the class structure of the state, and not the other way around - which is exactly what terms like capitalism and neoliberalism exist to conceal.
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@oromagi
Competence precedes the nation-state necessarily. Merit precedes the nation-state necessarily. There were noble kings and competent generals long before the Treaty of Westphalia.
Nobles or generals may have been seen as superior, or even had certain training as part of their position, but this is different from the modern concept of competence.
The Declaration of Independence asserts that nations may be formed artificially- that all government really just exists by the consent of the governed and that dissatisfied people may dissolve all prior allegiance to kings and countries and choose instead to pledge our lives, honor, and fortunes to one another.
Regardless of what is asserted in liberal documents, any arbitrary mass of people today cannot simply dissolve and form new countries or nations at will, by force of assertion. On what territory would they do so, and by whose authority?
These documents and the American people's expansive allegiance to all comers so inclined
Are you implying that the US has open borders?
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@fauxlaw
The structure of the United States, at least, is the Constitution.
If a nation-state were to take literally and absolutely the principles of liberalism, as its sole foundations - that men have equal rights and ought to be equal under the law - then it would no longer be a nation, since it could not distinguish between who did or did not belong to it - between citizen and non-citizen.
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@Sum1hugme
I'm not sure I understand your point in the OP.I'd argue that the state is a natural step in the evolution of society. Chimps establish sovereign borders. And we have included many nations in the UN, which is a solid step towards a unified humanity.
In other words, I am pointing to the signs that we are toward the end of a phase in which the boundaries between political "territories" coincide with the boundaries between ethnic groups.
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@badger
But so what's your politics around it? None?
Libertarian politics - open borders, decentralisation.
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@Lemming
Never bought one of my self help books myself, but if they help some individuals try to improve their lives, or succeed in improving their lives, what's so bad about that?
They encourage a philosophy of "minimalism" which leads people to "shut out distractions" and "simplify" their lives, to become more "productive" - turning their lives into more of a closed system. People perceive the self-help books as helping them improve their lives, because the self-help books encourage them to focus monomaniacally on small, incremental improvements rather than big-picture thinking, and on their own lives rather than the broader culture - so that they gain a sense of righteousness and self-satisfaction in the small mundane tasks which they were going to do anyway. In terms of relationships, they emphasise the differences between groups by promoting cliches, therefore deepening cultural divides. I actually think it makes people dumber and more neurotic by reading those books.
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@badger
I still don't get what the nation-state has to do with it. I guess we draw lines through our grievances by it, but the rest seems natural enough.
For example take the example of "civic nationalism" - a talking point often used to say that nationality is a totally separate concept from race. This is an ideological abstraction layered on top of reality to obscure the fact that the concepts of nation and ethnicity are closely tied together. The current state-form cannot be independent of ethnicity by its structure.
Anthropologists and historians, [...] see nations and nationalism as developing with the rise of the modern state system in the 17th century. They culminated in the rise of "nation-states" in which the presumptive boundaries of the nation coincided (or ideally coincided) with state boundaries. Thus, in the West, the notion of ethnicity, like race and nation, developed in the context of European colonial expansion, when mercantilism and capitalism were promoting global movements of populations at the same time state boundaries were being more clearly and rigidly defined.
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@badger
they're not based in anything logical instead a measure of selfishness.
I agree, and I would point specifically to the concepts of "merit" and "competence" as ideological phrases often used to muddy those discussions.
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@Sum1hugme
Please define "nation-state form."
The nation-state as the basic unit of modern geopolitics. Essentially, it is the system in which each state is sovereign, and the territory of each state marks an inviolable border so that after the Westphalian Peace, man is no longer part of an empire ruled by God, but part of a delineated sovereign state, and the international system is in a state of anarchy.
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@sadolite
Repeats a very standard centre-right "cultural conservative" script cloaked in the impressively dramatic performance of a dark mysterious professor deeply wrestling with new, dangerous ideas. All while serving a steady stream of intellectual junk food - the same group of conservative think-tank personalities interviewing each other over and over, evasive rhetoric about being apolitical, and worst of all, self-help books. The kind of sludge dumped onto the internet every day by people like Peterson is what makes it such a boring and repetitive place for those actually interested in discussing ideas, as opposed to "advertainment".
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Debates about things like CRT are only grasping at secondary phenomena. For example, the debates about whether the US is fundamentally based upon oppression, slavery or racism. Whether the disparities between various demographics are natural, or cultural - equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. These debates can never be resolved, because both sides hold an assumption in common. The very idea of "merit" or "competence" is really a measure of one's propensity to rise to the top of a system of social cohesion whose centre is really maintained by the stability of the nation-state form. What is supposed as "natural" is really the nation-state form, which is supposed as historically immutable. In fact, in the scale of historical time it is relatively recent, and the circle of social structures organised in its image is already quickly receding. Within a few hundred years, the idea that humanity organised its economic systems by bundling groups of people according to hereditary lineages will be a distant memory, and new methods of determining social cohesion will have been formulated. When we ask if various problems are caused by nature, by culture, or by "neoliberalism" or "capitalism" - really these are the problems of an age of transition. The nation-state as the organising principle of geopolitics is breaking up, and is slowly being replaced by a new paradigm. The breakup of the concept of the nation-state will be the deconstruction of the very concepts of race, gender, and class. These tendencies cannot be pinned to any conspiracy of revolutionary college students, greedy capitalists, or any other group - it is a tendency inherent in our social structures, and the attempt to circumvent or avoid it requires increasingly extreme measures, since it is against the fundamental tendency of progress.
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@Singularity
Yes, that is the claim I am making.
That is an extraordinary claim: even during the great depression, suicide was the main cause of death, and life expectancy actually rose. There is no evidence that deaths by starvation per year ever reached above a few hundred. Economic changes can be correlated with health, well-being and happiness, but not generally with mortality.
"Population health did not decline and indeed generally improved during the 4 years of the Great Depression, 1930–1933, with mortality decreasing for almost all ages, and life expectancy increasing by several years in males, females, whites, and nonwhites. For most age groups, mortality tended to peak during years of strong economic expansion (such as 1923, 1926, 1929, and 1936–1937). In contrast, the recessions of 1921, 1930–1933, and 1938 coincided with declines in mortality and gains in life expectancy."
Or is this like a sliding scale, Like some risk is of infecting others is okay but not above a certain level? If so how do you quantify it specifically, and what is the precise amount of risk after it is able to be quantified should be allowed? More importantly though, how do you back up what level of risk is acceptable in an intelligent way? Like how would scientists know the specific level of risk that is acceptable?
It is not simply a sliding scale of risk that applies unilaterally. People drive cars every day, and that system has a built in level of risk, and causes a tragic yet predictable number of deaths each year. A pandemic is a unique situation, and it requires a change in our daily habits by its nature - that change is subject to scientific authorities and democratic arbitration. You don't have a right to continue as usual during a pandemic any more than you have a right to drive on the wrong side of the road.
Isn't part of living in a free society the willingness to accept the increased risk of living as free? We take the risk of more murderers going free because we want the freedom of the police not searching our house every single day to make sure fugitives have no place to hide. We accept the risk that more 9-11s will happen because we don't want the government listening to our calls or reading our emails. Freedom directly correlates to having less security.
I agree with your sentiment here, but not as it applies to this subject. Responding to an unprecedented pandemic by enforcing a new social norm by which people must stay inside or socially distance is not an intrusion unique to the state. It is fundamentally different from something like warrantless wiretapping or gun control.
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@Singularity
So are you claiming that taking precautions to avoid the spread of COVID would lead to an economic depression that would cause more than 200 thousand people to starve to death?
Let's not forget that this also violates our freedoms. People died in wars to protect our freedom, and now we have young people sacrificing our freedom so they don't get the flu.
You don't have the freedom put someone else at risk, or to infect someone with a disease, just the same way you shouldn't have the freedom to pollute the air or play loud music above a certain volume. However, I agree with many of your concerns about government overreach. Times of emergency are when governments are most liable to encroach upon private liberties, so it's important for people to remain vigilant especially around the issue of surveillance.
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@Singularity
Keeping people home for a few months might slow the stock market, but it doesn't need to result in people starving in the streets. There are more than enough resources in society to withstand a temporary pause in the economy and keep everyone fed, avoiding any unnecessary deaths. There is no reason to prioritize efficiency over human lives.
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@Greyparrot
So 200K COVID deaths are a travesty but 500k flu deaths are acceptable. Got it.
Even taking your numbers, the fact that a new disease could emerge and add 50% to the global death toll of the flu in under a year represents a truly dangerous level of exponential growth. If some new, extremist terrorist group planted a bomb and killed 500 people, we wouldn't just dismiss the danger because more people die from shark attacks or drunk driving accidents every year. I really think you are failing to recognize the unique character of something like COVID.
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@Singularity
A newly emerged virus that has infected over 3 million worldwide and killed over 200 thousand is clearly a travesty. By anyone's definition it is a pandemic since it has spread throughout the entire world in a short period of time. What exactly is the purpose of downplaying the importance of a firm reaction to this danger? It strikes me as reactionary and callous to accept unnecessary deaths and illnesses in the name of avoiding interruptions to the economy.
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@Vader
Education shouldn't be a profit and when they take minorities because they make extra profit, it is a sign that the schools treat students unfairly. I am for making education free with certain requirements in order to receive this. Ofc, masters degrees are paid
Sounds like you are imposing a cost on people and burdening the productive capacity of the economy in the name of a totally arbitrary concept of education and fairness. Why should people be educated for a position to which they are not optimally suited?
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@Alec
The idea that some product or service should be free, or subsidised, if it involves an allocation of scarce resources, indicates a market failure or monopoly intervention. Price is not merely some economic friction that ought to be reduced as much as possible. The function of price is to allocate labour to where it can be best utilised. In education this is important above all, since it involves such a wide gap between investment of resources and payoff. If education is subsidised by some monopoly firm or political group, then the skills fostered in that labour pool will be dictated by the biases of that class instead of reflecting actual market dynamics.
In short, it is positively important that education costs money, and that this price is determined by the market, because this is what directs choices about what to study.
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We agree that monopolies and private companies colluding with government surveillance agencies is bad. That should all be rectified, but I have yet to see how essentially providing "reparations" will in any way help the problem.
This seems to be another example where you complain about the effect yet don't want to look at the cause. You believe that there can be a society in which there is a massive discrepancy in the distribution of resources and power, yet where employment is relatively evenly distributed to that the lower classes don't take welfare, and where those in power don't invade the rights or privacy of the lower classes. The laziness or incompetence of a particular group can't account for these problems, since as I said, general measures like competence don't vary by a factor of 125 billion. It is a category mistake to try to understand such broad structural disparities in terms of personality traits, just as it would be to attribute them to Bill Gates' personal vindictiveness or greed.
Maximizing profits in no way inherently a bad thing. It can lead to bad results. Insurance companies in their states essentially have monopolies over large regions, which is why the incentive to profit is going unchecked and leading to bad results. If there was competition, they would have to rely on getting more customers to gain a larger market share. How do you steal market share from competitors? You either lower prices or raise the quality of your product/service. So, in terms of monopolies, profit maximization can be bad. In a competitive market, it is an amazing incentive that works for consumers.
I don't see where we disagree here - decreasing the portion of the economy controlled by powerful monopolies and increasing competition. These seem to go hand in hand with a more widely distributed allocation of power and influence, rather than it being centralised in the hands of a small number of people.
It is just that, generally speaking, those with higher IQ's will be able to take on more difficult tasks that pay more because of the value they create.
When there is a power disparity in the society, it decreases the extent to which people's ability to rise in status correlates with ability, because of the bias imposed by the people already in power.
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@bmdrocks21
In what world is it a good idea to force companies to license out their intellectual property?
In the world in which they formed a monopoly and then cooperated with domestic surveillance programs to use that property to invade the privacy of users against their will.
Sorry, bro, but banks are part of the market.
It would be missing a big part of the picture to say "banks are part of the market" and therefore equate deliberations by banks as equivalent to purchasing decisions subject to the normal supply and demand fluctuations which would occur in other markets. Sure, even states are "part of the market" in a sense, but their decisions are not subject to market forces in the same way as an independent private firm or individual. The position of banks in the market is largely determined by state intervention.
Insurance companies are "part of the market" too, but would you argue that their incentives to maximise profits are well aligned with the best interests of their customers?
You are very unlikely to end up in poverty if you: finish high school, have kids AFTER marriage, and you have a full-time job. If you cannot do those three easy things for yourself, no amount of stealing from the rich and redistributing wealth could ever fix your predicament. My point isn't that we shouldn't attempt to help these people's positions. We should work to bring jobs that give them the ability to climb out of their position. I don't think that giving them blank checks that they didn't earn is a good way to do that.
It is ironic that you don't see these as related: you resent those who would take welfare, yet you defend the same system that produces welfare dependency in the first place. In other words, you defend the majority of jobs being reduced to rote tasks under the employment of some supposed genius CEO - jobs that are easily automated or replaced subject to the judgments of management. You say in the same paragraph that they should "do those things for themselves" yet also imply that the jobs don't exist for them to "climb" into.
So, you think that Google and Facebook are just able to manipulate people into buying their products? People aren't capable of shopping around and buy anything they see an ad for? Sure there are plenty of dumb people, but to make such a broad statement is quite foolish.
It's not just that they hypnotise people into randomly buying their product. Rather, they invest heavily into data harvesting which allows them to precisely target users and gain an edge which is almost impossible for the competition to overcome. They then share this information with whatever government agencies request it.
For example:
And I mentioned other measures such as ambition and creativity. As soon as you realize that not everyone who paints a lot can be the next Michelangelo and every computer geek cannot become Bill Gates simply because not everyone is that intelligent and market savy, you will understand how untenable your position really is.
If you were to argue that differences in wealth should be only proportionally as wide as differences in measures of competence such as IQ, this gap would be orders of magnitude smaller than the gap between today's elite and the majority of ordinary people. Even the highest IQ genius is not 125 billion times more competent and capable of discerning innovative, good ideas, than the average person.
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@Alec
No. It supplies everyone with $10,000 extra dollars if they are lucky enough. Why do people say income inequality is bad? If John has $1 and Mike has $3, that's better off than if both people had 50 cents because there is more overall wealth.
If John and Mike were the only two people in the world, then inflation would make the 50c as valuable as the dollar.
I'm pretty sure poor people don't want money to get more influence and power in society. They want to survive.
This is another example of the effects of being poor. If a poor person is employed by a more powerful company, then their wellbeing and decisions are predicated upon the judgment of that company. Then they need constantly to worry about survival and cannot make decisions for themselves.
I don't see this happening. Poor people still value their lives. Everyone who is not suicidal values their lives.
If everything you contribute to the world is dictated by someone else, and all you can focus on is survival, would that not feel like a pretty meaningless life?
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@bmdrocks21
So, you want to steal money from people that earned it in order to subsidize their competition?
If a company like Microsoft has cooperated with mass surveillance or any privacy breach of their customers, then some means may be needed that go beyond taxation. For something like Faceboook, legislation could force them to make their code fully open source, and their copyright ownership could be revoked. Also, to make the internet more equitable overall, peering connections could be made illegal for any firm connected in any way to the state.
Banks want to make money. They will loan money to people with good ideas that will likely make that money back. Also, you are completely ignoring the fact that not everyone can be Bill Gates.
It is a question what we trust more: the judgment of some individual, or the free market. An individual investor naturally has a bias against risk: a very different, innovative idea might have a higher potential payoff, but it is a riskier investment than a derivative, predictable idea. They also have a bias against any company which would directly compete with their own company, or those they are affiliated with.
If only they had some more money! They wouldn't waste it on the newest iPhone or a pair of Jordan's. Their bad saving habits and other bad life choices like not finishing high school obviously have nothing to do with their impoverished conditions, correct? It is those nasty, innovative entrepreneurs that offer cheaper, better products/services who are keeping them down!
First, it is a misconception to claim that, simply because someone's bad outcomes follow from their decisions, then we should not try to improve their condition. Much of the time, people under worse conditions will also make worse decisions. If you are deep in debt, you live in a bad neighbourhood, and so on, you will be more likely to be depressed, which will make you more likely to waste money, and so on. People's decisions are conditioned by their circumstances.
Second, the current economy is hardly characterised by an abundance of innovative entrepeneurship. The "cheaper" products and services (Facebook, Google etc) are often "free" on the surface, but are really paid for by the data they harvest, which allows them to funnel customers into a narrow range of products and services and solidify their monopolies.
No one is different from another person! Everyone has the exact same IQ/critical thinking abilities, creativity, and ambition! How could I have forgotten this?!?
IQ is generally only a useful measure of someone's ability to succeed in following pre-established (and culturally conditioned) rulesets, but does not very accurately predict innovation, creativity and entrepeneurship. For instance, an IQ test might establish how well someone will perform when hired to work for someone else at a conventional job, but it is not at all established to predict their ability to run their own business or work independently as an entrepeneur.
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@bmdrocks21
This is why we have banks: to loan entrepreneurs money. If you have a bad idea or bad credit history, you aren't likely to get money. Otherwise, you can. Also, those dastardly rich people you are complaining about engage in a nice little thing called venture capital, where they invest in startups. Middle class people cannot do that, but the rich can. If you get rid of the rich/big firms, which is obviously what you intend to do, venture capital may cease to exist.
This would mean that their ability to act on their ideas depends upon the bankers or investors who ultimately make the decision. This ultimately limits the range of companies which can be started versus if individuals had enough resources to invest in their own ideas.
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@bmdrocks21
If I can provide for my needs and some wants, why should I care that Bill Gates, a man much more innovative and ambitious than myself, is much more successful than me?
Because beyond mere survival, most of people's needs and wants are based on their ability to meaningfully contribute to and influence the society they live within. Maybe you had an idea for a tech product, but Microsoft has so much leverage in that industry that they can price you out of the market, even though their product is less innovative. So instead you need to get a job sweeping the floors of a building owned by Microsoft. Maybe you can still provide your needs and some wants, and maybe your life is even more stable and comfortable than it would have been as an entrepeneur, but your life would be much less meaningful.
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@Alec
If $10,000 went randomly out to 100 people, assuming no inflation, they are more likely to go to the poor than the rich.
I don't get it, if anything wouldn't giving $10,000 to 100 random people even out the wealth, rather than widening the gap?
The way to get rich isn't by making the rich poor. It's by getting the poor richer.
It's about how people feel meaning based upon how much influence and power they have in their own decisions and how socially valued they are. Many people would sleep in a less comfortable bed, eat less tasty food, and so on, if it meant they could live a more meaningful life. If a small group of billionaires have such an outsized influence that the ideas and decisions of the poorer group are ultimately inconsequential, then their lives will start to seem pointless whatever their absolute level of wealth is.
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If given the choice to:
- reduce the gap and make various groups in society have a more even amount of influence and wealth, or
- increase the absolute level of wealth in society,
It is better in my opinion to even out the gap rather than increasing the absolute level.
Even if someone's absolute level of comfort is quite high, their life will feel meaningless if they have no influence socially.
What do you think?
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No. Because outcomes are determined by more than wealth, influence, etc. Outcomes cannot be controlled, but opportunity can. This one of those illogical things liberals seem not to be able to comprehend are illogical.
So, are you saying that someone advocating for closing the wealth gap isn't actually advocating equality of outcomes? I'm confused as to what your definition is of outcomes.
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@ethang5
How is that a distinction? Neither one is totally possible, but we can move closer or further away from equality. If there is less of a gap in wealth, influence, etc, between various groups, then don't they have more equal outcomes?
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@ethang5
An equality of outcomes is a logical impossibility in the real world, and an equality of opportunity is the only fair way to run a society.
How is it logically possible for everyone to have identical opportunities in the real world, when better outcomes also grant people more opportunities?
People with more money and influence have more opportunities than people with less.
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@SirAnonymous
No. Modern-day progressives advocate for equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity.
This is a conservative meme and not a real distinction. People with better outcomes gain more opportunities too.
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@Alec
Thoughts on it?
If I'm understanding correctly, this would come under the banner of direct democracy, or a move in that direction. Maybe I should write a separate thing on this, but in general I think direct democracy is an inherently unstable system, since democracy itself rests on the representational split between the population and the state which acts on its behalf. If the state loses the authority to determine the legitimate will of the population, then the political system degenerates into direct action or might makes right. In other words, the degree to which a society under direct democracy would follow a set of orderly rules would be the extent that groups within its population could consolidate their power in a corporate entity. I would advocate a system whose rules cannot be subject to the will of any corporate group within its population - a libertarian system is democratic in that the laws characterising it would reflect the preferences of the aggregate will of the majority of its population, but this would be an indirect representation of their preferences, filtered through their concrete decisions (among fixed alternatives weighted according to supply and demand) in a market economy.
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@Alec
I'd want open borders along with banned welfare and a pie chart method to allow the conservatives to retain power in a country that would be 60% liberal.
What is the pie chart method??
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@SirAnonymous
I guess I am asking, in opposition to what? Aren't today's progressives basically arguing for the same thing? I.e. a nation-state founded upon abstract principles of universalism.The reason that it seems hard to distinguish is because the conservative position is very similar to what's known as classical liberalism. It actually is a liberal-minded viewpoint. However, it's from a conservative perspective of limited government. 21st century conservatism is based off 18th century liberalism.
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@bmdrocks21
Could you decode that a bit? What types of ethnic communities are you saying can live with limited government and personal freedom?
I am making a distinction between what classical liberals say explicitly and the total implications of what they say. This is outlined in Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History where he uses the term "community of the free." The founders, and the original writers of liberalism (Locke, de Tocqueville, etc.) may have made statements that, taken at face value, sounded universalist. But if we do take these statements at face value, we can't understand how those values were actually applied. No nation could ultimately be maintained upon purely universalist precepts - such as an abstract understanding of personal liberty deprived of any ethnic content. Instead, when classical liberals speak about the freedom of all men, they are implicitly saying that those values should be universal to the community of the free, not to all men in general.
To try to apply "limited government" with regard to the relation between whites and blacks in the founding of America would be a category mistake. It was a concept forged e.g. by Calhoun to make the distinction between the (tyrannical) numerical majority and the (constitutional) concurrent majority as state-forms as applied to the population of legitimate citizens of a nation.
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@SirAnonymous
I'm trying to conserve the ideals that the Founders had for this country. They famously wrote that all men are created equal and are entitled to the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, they didn't implement that perfectly, or anywhere close to it. However, that ideal is what I want to see happen in this country. I believe that everyone should have an equal opportunity to succeed without being discriminated against over their skin color, sex, or religion, and that their rights to say, write, and believe what they want should be protected. I also believe that the inherent human right to life should be protected.
This makes a lot of sense, but I don't see how this would distinguish a conservative view from a progressive, liberal, etc. As far as I can tell, even most leftists would agree with the sentiment behind what you said: basically universalism, liberty, and tolerance. The only exception would be abortion.
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@bmdrocks21
Conservatism is about traditional values and order. In America, those traditional values also include economic policies such as limited government intervention and essentially as much personal freedom as possible. That is what conservatism is trying to conserve
If we took only the content of what you listed there, America would be founded on a purely universalist message. However, it was always implicit in all those writers that such values only applied to a particular community. As de Tocqueville argued, liberty was only fit for those individuals who had the habits and dispositions which made them suitable for it, and if the politics of America were applied to other communities it would lead to anarchy. We can therefore decode the esoteric behind the exoteric doctrine of American classical liberalism: limited government, freedom of all men, and so on, really mean the freedom of a particular ethnic community. However, this part must remain somewhat indirect and flexible, to avoid the supposed liberal values collapsing upon the foundations upon which they are perceived as resting in practice.
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@ethang5
Where do they go? Death? Migration out? Interbreeding to oblivion?
They don't need to be killed or kicked out or whatever, that's just the most likely prediction projecting from current demographic trends.
So the evidence that you are right is that intelligent people think you're wrong?
Those conservatives pundits are making statements that fly in the face of reality. Preference for Trump was divided squarely along racial lines and was motivated by concerns about demographic transformation.
"No one who has honestly analysed survey data on individuals - the gold standard for public opinion research - can deny that white majority concern over immigration is the main cause of the rise of the populist right in the West. This is primarily explained by concern over identity, not economic threat." - Eric Kaufmann (expert on political demography)
You mean open borders and no tariffs. Lol, you're close enough to liberal in my book RB.
Libertarianism and liberalism are similar in many ways, yes.
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@SirAnonymous
This conservative isn't.
Then how do you define conservatism if it is independent of ethnicity? What are you trying to conserve?
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@ethang5
The erosion of what? Social forms? Is it unknown to anyone that broad financial success in a society erodes latent-isms?
Maybe not unknown, but in my view the conservative response belies a deeper cognitive dissonance about the issue. See: Andrew Yang, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson etc all trying to claim that Trump's win is due to religious, "cultural," spiritual, economic reasons, and so on, and not a conservative reaction against ethnic transformation.
Do you have a timeframe on when it collapses?
Over the next 20 to 30 years the ethnic majority in the US is projected to dwindle, which is what is fueling the populist backlashes.
How do you classify yourself politically?
Libertarian, in that I support free movement and open markets.
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@ethang5
Your question was rigged either knowingly or unknowingly to carry a liberal bias within it, to subtly cast conservatives as being motivated by racism.
To be clear, I don't think conservatives are motivated primarily by racism, in the sense of a personal contempt for individuals of a particular race, or a fear of the out-group. However, they are guided by a view of an implicitly ethnic sense of social cohesion and heritage, and I believe that these sedimented social forms are inevitably going to become increasingly untenable due to the erosion caused by the market.
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@ethang5
Conservatives themselves cover the entire range of ethnicities, with ethnic people often being the most conservative.
Individuals of other ethnicities can participate in a social group which is nevertheless percieved as tied to a specific ethnic tradition.
In none of it's history has America been an ethno-state. And a close examination of actual history shows that conservative opposition to immigration has never been based on ethnicity (code for "race" with liberals) but on other practical factors.
A nation does not need to be an ethno-state, or have race embedded explicity into its laws, for its (perceived) social cohesion to be tied to ethnicity. I think to conservatives, in fact, a certain amount of liberalism, pluralism, and idealism (thus "not focusing on race") is itself viewed implicitly as part of a broader ethnic tradition. So strictly racial ethno-states would be viewed as a foreign political form and would offend their (ethnically based) sensibilities.
Your question was rigged either knowingly or unknowingly to carry a liberal bias within it, to subtly cast conservatives as being motivated by racism.
I was focusing on the tension between social groups oriented primarily by their ethnic traditions and the effects of the market. If there is a deeper implication behind the question, I think it is that both the welfare state as advocated by progressives, and the conservative focus on law and order, are basically guided by (reactionary) ethnic presuppositions, despite the explicit intentions of their advocates. For example, many of the Nordic countries which serve as models for current progressives, forged their welfare model while pioneering eugenics policies of mass sterilisation, trying to curtail what were perceived as dysgenic tendencies in their population. These were viewed under the auspices of a general improvement of the health and harmony of the society, guided by the state.
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@ethang5
This is false. Nationality is not equivalent to ethnicity. The decision of conservatives on immigration are not based on ethnicity but based on nationality and legality.
You are right that nationality and ethnicity are not strictly equivalent, but historically and practically they are closely associated. While conservatives may not subjectively acknowledge this association, its consequences are clearly visible in the deepening ethnic divisions caused by nationalism in practice. The distinction between law and politics (and history) is crucial here. The idea that e.g. American nationalism can be totally disconnected from ethnicity often functions as an empty, ideological abstraction caused by the illusion that simply because two concepts can be semantically distinguished, they must therefore function independently in reality.
"In older texts the word nationality, rather than ethnicity, is often used to refer to an ethnic group (a group of people who share a common ethnic identity, language, culture, lineage, history, and so forth)." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationality
"A nation is a stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, history, ethnicity, or psychological make-up manifested in a common culture. A nation is more overtly political than an ethnic group; it has been described as "a fully mobilized or institutionalized ethnic group". Some nations are ethnic groups (see ethnic nationalism) and some are not (see civic nationalism and multiculturalism)." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation
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If you had to choose only one of these outcomes, which would you pick?
- Opening up immigration to allow more people in, or
- Increasing government spending on welfare programs?
On the one hand, many progressives claim to value open immigration, but I wonder what they would choose if increased immigration meant more pressure on the welfare state.
On the other hand, many conservatives claim to value the free market and the exchange of ideas, but advocate social policies which would further isolate distinct social groups based upon ethnicity, which seems antithetical to an open market.
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