Etymologically, "normal" doesn't mean anything like "average". "Normal" means "correct" (and in fact both of those words have a deeper geometric sense of "straight" or "upright", those two words in turn sharing the same root as "correct", which is also the root of "right" as in "normative").
It is only by the relativist assumption that whatever most people are doing must be correct that "normal" came to mean "common", "typical", or "average".
So at its root, "abnormal" means, very literally, "wrong". Not just "uncommon" or "unusual". "Wrong". "Bad". "Incorrect".
While I can't speak for everyone, when I say I'm proud to be a geek, I mean it in the sense that I think it is better to be a geek than to not be a geek. More people should be geeks. It's not only not a bad thing, it's a good thing. If you're not a geek, you ought to be one.
Hopefully people who are "proud" of their orientation (or gender or race or anyone else) don't mean it in that same sense, but just misuse the word to mean "not ashamed", which is not all it means. I'm not ashamed to be white, but neither am I proud of it; it just doesn't really matter to me, as it shouldn't to anyone.
And before anyone gives me the you're-not-part-of-that-demographic-you-don't-get-a-say-in-the-matter speech, I'm pansexual — call it bisexual if you want, I don't really care — and also don't give a fuck about that. Most people have no idea because I'm a very private person and most people know very little about me that isn't immediately visible, but I'm also not afraid of anyone finding out. If life were fiction, the Bi The Way trope would apply to me. And I think ideally that would be true of everyone's orientation.
Please note that I'm not criticizing Tim Cook for anything here. (Though I am surprised at this announcement; I thought this was general common knowledge already).
Maybe because there are fewer highly skilled individuals than there are mediocre ones... although, now that I think about it, there are also fewer terrible unskilled individuals than there are mediocre ones, assuming a normal distribution.
That raises an interesting question. Confidence decreases with competence (so dumb people think they're smart and smart people think they're dumb), but where do the two curves intersect? At what level of competence do people statistically have accurate confidence? I'd venture a guess that that point is beyond the median competence level, in which case, the domain where confidence exceeds competence would be larger than the domain where competence exceeds confidence: we'd have a lot more overconfident idiots than we would underconfident geniuses. So of course the overconfident idiots would be the more notable consequence of the D-K effect, and the underconfident geniuses would be more-often neglected.
I would like to see some kind of study involving confidence in light of knowledge of the D-K effect and both subjective and objective third-party competency assessments.
When I was a kid, I initially thought I was of average intelligence, and just surrounded by idiots (who I assumed must all be below average, not understanding back then how averages work). But then over years of teachers and such telling me that I scored far above average on all objective competency tests, I adjusted my perception and realized that all of the "idiots" were in fact just average people, and I was the unusual one, above average. By college and throughout college, I had internalized that enough that I no longer thought of average people as "idiots" at all; they were just ordinary people with their ordinary intellectual difficulties that I was fortunate not to be burdened with. After college however, meeting with prolonged failure at endeavors outside academics, I began to perceive myself as in fact below average, and questioned the objectivity of the competency tests from my youth (or rather, questioned whether they tested actual competency rather than just some useless test-taking ability). But in the years since then, friends and colleagues and even employers continue to tell me in their subjective opinion how above average I am. And still I sometimes looks at others struggling to understand things that seem so simple and easy to me, not things I have more experience with but just things that seem like they would be obvious to any newcomer.
So now I have no idea what to think about my own competency. I have contradictory "gut feelings" both that others seem dumb for not seeing things that are so obvious, and that I must be dumb for failing at things that so many others are succeeding at. I then doubt both of those feelings due to knowledge of the D-K effect; maybe I feel smarter than others because I don't even know how dumb I am, and maybe I feel like I'm failing only because I see how much more room for success there is. On the whole, weighing those two against each other, my reflexive (self-referential) gut feeling is that I probably just think other people are dumb because I'm too dumb to even know what smart is, and that that's probably why I'm failing at things so many others are succeeding at. But then I remember all those objective competency tests claiming I'm far above average, and how everybody else's subjective assessment of me is that I am above average too, and I wonder again if maybe I only think I'm a failure because I'm aware of how much better I could be doing?
And when I look at objective measures of success, I see that I am doing about as well as average, and wonder, do all the conflicting factors cancel out and I'm really just average in the end? Except then, there are conflicting factors about whether I am doing as well as average too; everyone I personally know in meatspace thinks I'm doing phenomenally well, way better than average, but the normative standard I see in the media and hear people talk about on the internet seems almost u
Your analogy is bad (obligatory "and you should feel bad", but not really).
If speech were expressed with paint on canvas, cruel speech would be painting goatse or the like.
Harassment would be following someone around with your painting of goatse. Or any painting of anything they object to. It's the "following them around" part that makes it harassing.
The verbal analogue of throwing paint on someone would be yelling at them through a megaphone set at painfully high volume.
Every instance of speech is also an action and every action is also an instance of speech, and the distinction between a speech-act as speech and a speech-act as action is whether you're talking about the information content (the speech part) or the physical method of delivering that content (the action part).
Throwing paint or blaring painfully loudly through a megaphone are harmful actions, assault and battery in fact, regardless of the color of the paint you throw or the noises you make through the megaphone.
Following someone around and exposing them to images or sounds they don't like is harassment, regardless of the images or sounds; it's the following-them-around part that makes it harassing.
Images or sounds themselves, presented in a way that is not physically harmful to anyone (the way that loud sounds or a face full of paint would be), in a way that anyone can walk away from, are just speech, cannot harm anyone regardless of their content, and thus should not be regulated in any way regardless of their content.
I agree that the real problem is ultimately with human nature, but "not complicated" is not the same thing as "easy". Everybody being nice to each other and getting along is a very uncomplicated solution, sure, but getting people to do that is really, really hard, if not outright impossible.
Given the unfeasibility of getting everyone to just play nice with each other, the next best solution is for enough good-intentioned people to band together into some kind of social institution to keep the bad-intentioned people from doing bad things. That in turn requires that institution to decide just what it's going to consider "bad things". The bad-intentioned people are of course going to do everything they can to game whatever system the good-intentioned people come up with. Which begins an arms race where the bad-intentioned people try to figure out clever holes in the rules to exploit to do bad things without getting called out on it, and the good-intentioned people try to recognize those exploits and patch those holes. What I was doing here was calling attention to a hole in the stated rules that's being exploited, and suggesting a patch for it.
In the end it does still all hang on having enough good-intentioned people standing up to the bad-intentioned people to stop them from doing bad things, but it also hangs just as much on the good-intentioned people correctly identifying all and only the bad things the need to be stopping.
You're right, automation throws a wrench in the works of the self-correcting dynamics of my usury-free market system, by completely devaluing labor; and the only way to prevent that is to make sure that everybody ends up owning a piece of the automated means of production, preferably before complete automation occurs. I think basically every possible scenario will eventually end up with everyone who is still alive living for free off the labor of robots: the questions are, firstly, who of those alive when full automation is finally achieved will live through the transition to enjoy it; and secondly, who among them will own the automatons and thus control the world when it's all through. I can see four general possible scenarios:
A) The owning class secures their power with things like robotic security and such to the point that they no longer need the working class at all, all the workers get laid off, starve and go homeless, try futilely to riot but can't overthrow the owning class's secure position, and eventually die off entirely. The remaining owning class and their descendants live in a blissful labor-free utopia for all of time afterward, and the death of the working class is remembered as a tragedy of history that none of the survivors are personally responsible for.
B) The owning class secures their position of power, the working class becomes entirely unnecessary, but out of some little shred of humanity (or possible uncertainty in the security of their position), the owning class keep the working class around, but now wielding absolute power over them as the owners have absolutely no need for the non-owners and the non-owners are absolutely dependent on the owners for their "charity".
C) The revolution comes before the owning class can totally secure their position and the working class are able to overthrow the owning class, either violently or somehow through nonviolent political means. Some traditional form of state socialism is enacted to redistribute wealth, and everyone now lives on the welfare of the state and its robot armies, which in turn (its leadership that is) wields absolute power over the people as it has no need for them per se and they are entirely dependent upon it.
D) The revolution comes soon enough to succeed by whatever means it does, and a more distributivist, libertarian-socialist solution is enacted: divisions between owners and non-owners are dissolved, everyone personally and privately owning some of the automatons, without eradicating all personal liberty in the process.
I think B and C are probably the more likely options, but A is still a frightening possibility, and it depresses me that nobody even seems to consider the possibility of genuine solutions in category D. The best-case plausible scenario is likely to be B or C eventually transitioning into D.
For a B-to-D transition, once automation is so complete that it literally costs the owners nothing (but control) to give it away, even a small trickle of genuine social charity could distribute ownership of automatons to the dependent (no longer working) classes over time, finally giving them independence. Successive generations raised in such a post-scarcity society might see less and less reason not to give their poor automaton-less friends some automatons of their own, and those given automatons could in turn use them to rescue others in the same boat at themselves, accelerating the process.
For a C-to-D transition, the electorate could simply vote to devolve ownership of the automatons from the central control of the government to the people individually. I think pragmatically, aiming for a C outcome at first with an eye to eventually transitioning to D is probably the best strategy we can hope for: a straight D solution is too unlikely to gain traction until it's too late, and a C outcome is the easiest to transition to the ideal D solution afterward. It concerns me how similar to the "dictatorship of the proletariate" that strategy is though: for the interim we have a people's gov
Mind you, I'm not suggesting a direction of causality here. It could be that the nobly-intended increased state power came first and then attracted the big market players to seize it, or just as plausibly that the big market players seized control of government first and then gave it that power so they could use it to their advantage.
That's the Declaration of Independence you're quoting, which was not authored by precisely the same people, not subject to the approval of the same people, as those who wrote and ratified the Constitution, which was written 11 years later and wasn't even a document of the same type. Jefferson and those he presumed to speak for may well really have found it self-evident that all men were created equal, at least self-evident enough to pronounce the fact to the British while effectively declaring war against them. But that's a far cry from convincing a continental convention of representatives of legislatures of thirteen recently-sovereign states, legislatures elected by and representing, in part, wealthy land- and slave-owners, to enshrine such principle in the nigh-immutible supreme law of the lands in which said electorate lived.
In other words, it's one thing for a small handful of people to profess principles to their enemies; it's another thing entirely to get whole societies to agree to bind themselves to those principles. The fact that the professed principles of the founders were immediately ignored says nothing about the intent of those founders, and everything about our collective disrespect for principle in general when the rubber hits the road.
The older sense is "any interest at all". (Pre-Reformation, post-Roman Europe generally prohibited any interest at all, and used this sense; the Islamic world largely continues that tradition as well; though neither prohibited rent in general, just rent on money, and so strange arrangements involving combinations of rentals and insurances and loans all packaged together are used to work around the prohibition on interest in those places).
And the oldest etymological sense, that I'm using for purposes of illustration, is "a fee for usage". Hence "usury", like "usage". Any rental payment is usury in that oldest sense. Any interest is rent on money and thus usury in that oldest sense.
Though since I am arguing that any rent or interest is "excessive", the modern sense does have a useful connotation in that way too.
That last point is debatable. The main argument against such contracts is that people don't have the physical capacity to hand over control of their own bodies to anyone else, and you can only enter into contracts which you can actually fulfill. Regardless, the "usury" contracts you're attempting to undermine have all the necessary properties of a valid contract: consideration, offer and acceptance, capable parties, mutual assent / "meeting of the minds". Their only failing, apparently, is that they don't meet with your approval. Enforcement of valid contracts (whether or not they are recognized as such by local law) is very much a condition for a free market. Arbitrary interference with voluntary contracts would undermine basic property rights and render the market non-free.
Contracts of any sort are in no way a "basic property right", nor necessary for a free market. The power to contract is not only a different right but an entirely different class of right than the claim rights that constitute ownership of property.
A claim right is a right to have someone else do or not do something -- such as the right against people doing things to your property against your will. A liberty right is a right to do or not do something, which is to say, the absence of claim rights against you. The second-order versions of those are respectively immunities, claims against people making changes to your first-order rights; and powers, liberties to change first-order rights.
To have a free market, all you strictly need are claims against anyone acting upon your property against your will (which is to say, private property), all liberties compatible with such claims (which is to say, general freedom), and at least the power to transfer ownership or your property to someone else (which is to say, the power to trade), consequently changing who has what claims and liberties to what.
Any other powers beyond that, or immunities against such powers, are open for debate without putting the freedom of the market in question. The power to contract is one such power beyond that, and what its limits should be is open to debate without putting the freedom of the market in question. I actually lean heavily toward the position that there should be no powers beyond that power to transfer ownership, maximizing immunity, just like there should be no claims beyond the claim against anyone acting upon your property against your will, maximizing liberty. I'm not arguing for that extreme here now, but I do have a deontological argument for it; however, I can also see consequential arguments against it that I'm still mulling over.
But there are very clear consequential arguments to at least limit the power to contract in a way that undermines rent and interest, though -- the ones I gave earlier in my first post you responded to -- and while we can argue about the strength of those arguments, it in no way would undermine the freedom of any market to have no power to contract at all, much less just no power to contract usury. It would undermine certain widespread institutes of capitalism, but that's not the same thing as undermining a free market, and that's the whole purpose here, to get rid or capitalism while keeping the free market. We can argue about whether the consequences of that would be good though, if you like... which it looks like you've already begun to do below.
I, for one, very much want to be able to enter into contracts which involve me paying rent or interest with the expectation that the terms will be enforceable in the event that I should default. The alternative is that I won't have access to loans.
I wonder, what do you think people with all that money will do with it if they suddenly can't get any use from it by lending it out at interest? Now they have useless piles of money doing them no good; certainly they'd like to find some other good use to put it do, what do yo
Yep. "Marginal utility" is the term you're looking for here: each additional dollar is worth less to you than the last one was.
I actually like to use marginal utility to argue from the conservative premise that taxes are bad to the progressive conclusion that progressive taxes are the best kind of taxes, so long as the premise is also granted that at least some taxes are necessary. We can argue about what level of taxation is necessary, but whatever the answer to that question is, the answer to who should bear the tax burden is the same.
1. Taking money from people (e.g. taxation) is harmful and bad. 2. Nevertheless we must take some money from people on pain of even greater harm. 3. The same loss of money harms someone with less money more than it harms someone with more money. Therefore: 4. We do the least harm to take the necessary money from those who have more of it more than we do from those who have less of it.
Et voila. Taxes are bad, therefore they must be progressive.
Not all contracts are legally valid, and they don't all need to be legally valid for a market to be free. You can't, for example, contract yourself into slavery.
Also, no exchanges "fail to meet my approval" as you put it. If you want to trade someone something for something else, I don't care what those somethings are, so long as they're actual, real things; who has what rights to what transfers along with who owns what things, and people can trade ownership of things between each other as they like as far as I care. It's only the creation and trade of certain abstract legal constructs I'm objecting to. Your ability to trade someone "the temporary right to use this property" in exchange for something else depends on the ability to create such tradable, temporary legal rights to things in the first place. You're free to allow people to use your property, and they're free to give you money for it, without any special legal rights-creation going on. But if you want to give someone the right to use your property, even against your will if you change your mind, that depends on the ability to create such rights out of nothing, and that's what I'm objecting to.
It's somewhat analogous to intellectual property, where you're not making and trading actual things, you're making and trading legal rights.
If we're going to be pedantic about words, we also need to distinguish a "free market" from "capitalism". Too often self-identified proponents of "capitalism" are really just proponents of free markets, and use "capitalism" as if all it means is "free market".
A free market an economic arrangement where all exchanges are made voluntarily, without coercion.
Capitalism is an economic arrangement where those who own capital can extract surplus value from the labor of those who don't own such capital.
Both contemporary opponents and proponents of either assume that each entails the other:that without some kind or coerced redistribution, those with more capital will exploit those with less, and the only choice is between those two evils. But in principle the two concepts can come apart. The hard question is how.
My proposed answer is that what allows a free market (good) to become capitalism (bad) is the legal enforcement of any contract where someone allows the temporary use of their capital in exchange for a permanent transfer of some other capital. In other words, rent, including the rent on money that we call "interest", or in general, to use a more archaic but etymologically illustrative term, "usury": the charging of a fee for usage. Such contracts allow those who have more capital than they need for their personal use, who can thus afford to lend it out, to extract value from those who need to use more capital than they have, who thus have to borrow it. This creates an "uphill" flow of wealth from those who already have less of it to those who already have more of it.
In the absence of such contracts of usury, the only way someone with more wealth than is personally useful to them to get some value for it would be to sell it off. And, as is already the case, the only thing that those without enough wealth can trade for anything of value is their labor. The natural effect you would expect, in a free market without usury, would be that those with more capital would benefit from it by trading it for labor from others, gaining luxury (not needing to labor themselves) at the cost of their capital; and the laborers, in turn, would gradually accrue capital in exchange for their labor, and this free trade of capital for labor would gradually equalize the capitalists and the laborers, until each had enough capital for their own use, and had to labor upon it themselves. Some natural variation in wealth would still exist due to the natural differences in productivity of different people, but there would be no run-away concentration of wealth independent of productive activity that we have now.
Introduce usury into that system though, as we have now, and suddenly those with more wealth can lend their excess to those with less wealth, for a fee, which fee they can then use to pay for the labor of those who have less, who in turn are having to trade their labor to pay the fees for the use of the wealth of those who have more. In this way, usury creates an "upward" flow of wealth canceling the natural "downward" flow that a free market would be expected to have, and allowing those with more wealth to live perpetually off the labor of those with less wealth, without ever having to actually lose any wealth in exchange. It's not an insurmountable effect, it is still possible for the poor to accrue wealth or the rich to lose it all, but you have to be exceptionally competent or exceptionally incompetent to do each, respectively. For an average person, having wealth makes it easy to keep and gain wealth, and lacking it makes that exceedingly difficult. And I think we have usury — rent and interest — to blame for that. Without it, free markets would be inherently "socialist", as in for the public good, as one would naturally expect.
Then you need to get rid of NOR and NAND (as each by itself can emulate anything) and either NOT or both OR and AND (as either of those plus NOT can emulate either a NOR or a NAND and thus anything), and IF, ONLY-IF, and IFF (as they can be nested cleverly to emulate NANDs or NORs and thus anything).
So yeah basically we'd have to ban logic entirely. Which may be the true purpose...
If you ask the people who call themselves Orthodox Christians (yes I know you intentionally didn't capitalize it), neither are Catholics or any denomination of Protestants. If you ask Catholics, the so-called "Orthodox" Christians are unorthodox, and of course all the Protestant denominations as well. Both Catholics and Orthodox consider the other an unorthodox heresy which they excommunicated from their one true holy and apostolic church. Protestants meanwhile consider the Catholicism from which they descend to be a corruption of the original teachings of Christ and thus not truly Christianity at all, and it's very common (and just as annoying to me as GP's "Mormons and Christians" comment) to hear some denominations of Protestants speak of "Christians" and "Catholics" like they are non-intersecting sets.
And all those groups (and subgroups within them) dispute all many of points of theology, including some of the ones you list. Take for example the doctrine of the trinity: to copy from Wikipedia for ease, "Modern nontrinitarian groups or denominations include Christadelphians, Christian Scientists, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Dawn Bible Students, Friends General Conference, Iglesia ni Cristo, Jehovah's Witnesses, Living Church of God, Oneness Pentecostals, Members Church of God International, Unitarian Universalist Christians, the United Church of God and the Church of God (Seventh Day)."
We have had plenty of speculation on the possibility of inorganic life, but to my knowledge (link me if I'm wrong here) there has been no scientific treatise on how a form of life could exist without carbon. It's one thing to say "maybe it's possible", and another thing to say "this is how it would work", and yet another entirely to say "look, here it is!", and without at least one example of the third or a complete explanation of the second, we still just in "maybe" territory, and science treats "maybe" as "assume not until shown otherwise".
The scientific community would LOVE to discover proof of inorganic life. It would be a huge new field for biologists to explore! Right now we assume life will be carbon-based because that's the only kind of life we know is possible; we haven't yet conceived of how inorganic life might be possible, and we haven't seen empirical evidence that it is, so in absence of that we proceed as though it's not. But if we found empirical evidence that it was, scientists would jump at the research opportunities to figure out how it was. Science hates to be anthropomorphized, but it loves radical new observations that force us to rebuild all new models from scratch, because that's where all the fun is!
Mormonism is a form of Christianity, so I assume you meant "Neither is any other form of Christianity". Otherwise that's like saying "Cats don't photosynthesize. Neither do mammals."
Imagine yourself as a native American 500-some years ago, being suddenly greeted by strange-looking beings from a world beyond the horizon, who somehow managed to cross the unfathomable breadth of the entire ocean alive... and they've got a religion they'd like to tell you about.
Slashdot Mirror
Etymologically, "normal" doesn't mean anything like "average". "Normal" means "correct" (and in fact both of those words have a deeper geometric sense of "straight" or "upright", those two words in turn sharing the same root as "correct", which is also the root of "right" as in "normative").
It is only by the relativist assumption that whatever most people are doing must be correct that "normal" came to mean "common", "typical", or "average".
So at its root, "abnormal" means, very literally, "wrong". Not just "uncommon" or "unusual". "Wrong". "Bad". "Incorrect".
While I can't speak for everyone, when I say I'm proud to be a geek, I mean it in the sense that I think it is better to be a geek than to not be a geek. More people should be geeks. It's not only not a bad thing, it's a good thing. If you're not a geek, you ought to be one.
Hopefully people who are "proud" of their orientation (or gender or race or anyone else) don't mean it in that same sense, but just misuse the word to mean "not ashamed", which is not all it means. I'm not ashamed to be white, but neither am I proud of it; it just doesn't really matter to me, as it shouldn't to anyone.
And before anyone gives me the you're-not-part-of-that-demographic-you-don't-get-a-say-in-the-matter speech, I'm pansexual — call it bisexual if you want, I don't really care — and also don't give a fuck about that. Most people have no idea because I'm a very private person and most people know very little about me that isn't immediately visible, but I'm also not afraid of anyone finding out. If life were fiction, the Bi The Way trope would apply to me. And I think ideally that would be true of everyone's orientation.
Please note that I'm not criticizing Tim Cook for anything here. (Though I am surprised at this announcement; I thought this was general common knowledge already).
Glad to hear I'm not alone. :-)
From what I've seen, Christians generally do hate Scientologists.
Not for being religions wackjobs, mind you, but for being the wrong kind of religious wackjob.
Maybe because there are fewer highly skilled individuals than there are mediocre ones... although, now that I think about it, there are also fewer terrible unskilled individuals than there are mediocre ones, assuming a normal distribution.
That raises an interesting question. Confidence decreases with competence (so dumb people think they're smart and smart people think they're dumb), but where do the two curves intersect? At what level of competence do people statistically have accurate confidence? I'd venture a guess that that point is beyond the median competence level, in which case, the domain where confidence exceeds competence would be larger than the domain where competence exceeds confidence: we'd have a lot more overconfident idiots than we would underconfident geniuses. So of course the overconfident idiots would be the more notable consequence of the D-K effect, and the underconfident geniuses would be more-often neglected.
I would like to see some kind of study involving confidence in light of knowledge of the D-K effect and both subjective and objective third-party competency assessments.
When I was a kid, I initially thought I was of average intelligence, and just surrounded by idiots (who I assumed must all be below average, not understanding back then how averages work). But then over years of teachers and such telling me that I scored far above average on all objective competency tests, I adjusted my perception and realized that all of the "idiots" were in fact just average people, and I was the unusual one, above average. By college and throughout college, I had internalized that enough that I no longer thought of average people as "idiots" at all; they were just ordinary people with their ordinary intellectual difficulties that I was fortunate not to be burdened with. After college however, meeting with prolonged failure at endeavors outside academics, I began to perceive myself as in fact below average, and questioned the objectivity of the competency tests from my youth (or rather, questioned whether they tested actual competency rather than just some useless test-taking ability). But in the years since then, friends and colleagues and even employers continue to tell me in their subjective opinion how above average I am. And still I sometimes looks at others struggling to understand things that seem so simple and easy to me, not things I have more experience with but just things that seem like they would be obvious to any newcomer.
So now I have no idea what to think about my own competency. I have contradictory "gut feelings" both that others seem dumb for not seeing things that are so obvious, and that I must be dumb for failing at things that so many others are succeeding at. I then doubt both of those feelings due to knowledge of the D-K effect; maybe I feel smarter than others because I don't even know how dumb I am, and maybe I feel like I'm failing only because I see how much more room for success there is. On the whole, weighing those two against each other, my reflexive (self-referential) gut feeling is that I probably just think other people are dumb because I'm too dumb to even know what smart is, and that that's probably why I'm failing at things so many others are succeeding at. But then I remember all those objective competency tests claiming I'm far above average, and how everybody else's subjective assessment of me is that I am above average too, and I wonder again if maybe I only think I'm a failure because I'm aware of how much better I could be doing?
And when I look at objective measures of success, I see that I am doing about as well as average, and wonder, do all the conflicting factors cancel out and I'm really just average in the end? Except then, there are conflicting factors about whether I am doing as well as average too; everyone I personally know in meatspace thinks I'm doing phenomenally well, way better than average, but the normative standard I see in the media and hear people talk about on the internet seems almost u
Your analogy is bad (obligatory "and you should feel bad", but not really).
If speech were expressed with paint on canvas, cruel speech would be painting goatse or the like.
Harassment would be following someone around with your painting of goatse. Or any painting of anything they object to. It's the "following them around" part that makes it harassing.
The verbal analogue of throwing paint on someone would be yelling at them through a megaphone set at painfully high volume.
Every instance of speech is also an action and every action is also an instance of speech, and the distinction between a speech-act as speech and a speech-act as action is whether you're talking about the information content (the speech part) or the physical method of delivering that content (the action part).
Throwing paint or blaring painfully loudly through a megaphone are harmful actions, assault and battery in fact, regardless of the color of the paint you throw or the noises you make through the megaphone.
Following someone around and exposing them to images or sounds they don't like is harassment, regardless of the images or sounds; it's the following-them-around part that makes it harassing.
Images or sounds themselves, presented in a way that is not physically harmful to anyone (the way that loud sounds or a face full of paint would be), in a way that anyone can walk away from, are just speech, cannot harm anyone regardless of their content, and thus should not be regulated in any way regardless of their content.
I agree that the real problem is ultimately with human nature, but "not complicated" is not the same thing as "easy". Everybody being nice to each other and getting along is a very uncomplicated solution, sure, but getting people to do that is really, really hard, if not outright impossible.
Given the unfeasibility of getting everyone to just play nice with each other, the next best solution is for enough good-intentioned people to band together into some kind of social institution to keep the bad-intentioned people from doing bad things. That in turn requires that institution to decide just what it's going to consider "bad things". The bad-intentioned people are of course going to do everything they can to game whatever system the good-intentioned people come up with. Which begins an arms race where the bad-intentioned people try to figure out clever holes in the rules to exploit to do bad things without getting called out on it, and the good-intentioned people try to recognize those exploits and patch those holes. What I was doing here was calling attention to a hole in the stated rules that's being exploited, and suggesting a patch for it.
In the end it does still all hang on having enough good-intentioned people standing up to the bad-intentioned people to stop them from doing bad things, but it also hangs just as much on the good-intentioned people correctly identifying all and only the bad things the need to be stopping.
You're right, automation throws a wrench in the works of the self-correcting dynamics of my usury-free market system, by completely devaluing labor; and the only way to prevent that is to make sure that everybody ends up owning a piece of the automated means of production, preferably before complete automation occurs. I think basically every possible scenario will eventually end up with everyone who is still alive living for free off the labor of robots: the questions are, firstly, who of those alive when full automation is finally achieved will live through the transition to enjoy it; and secondly, who among them will own the automatons and thus control the world when it's all through. I can see four general possible scenarios:
A) The owning class secures their power with things like robotic security and such to the point that they no longer need the working class at all, all the workers get laid off, starve and go homeless, try futilely to riot but can't overthrow the owning class's secure position, and eventually die off entirely. The remaining owning class and their descendants live in a blissful labor-free utopia for all of time afterward, and the death of the working class is remembered as a tragedy of history that none of the survivors are personally responsible for.
B) The owning class secures their position of power, the working class becomes entirely unnecessary, but out of some little shred of humanity (or possible uncertainty in the security of their position), the owning class keep the working class around, but now wielding absolute power over them as the owners have absolutely no need for the non-owners and the non-owners are absolutely dependent on the owners for their "charity".
C) The revolution comes before the owning class can totally secure their position and the working class are able to overthrow the owning class, either violently or somehow through nonviolent political means. Some traditional form of state socialism is enacted to redistribute wealth, and everyone now lives on the welfare of the state and its robot armies, which in turn (its leadership that is) wields absolute power over the people as it has no need for them per se and they are entirely dependent upon it.
D) The revolution comes soon enough to succeed by whatever means it does, and a more distributivist, libertarian-socialist solution is enacted: divisions between owners and non-owners are dissolved, everyone personally and privately owning some of the automatons, without eradicating all personal liberty in the process.
I think B and C are probably the more likely options, but A is still a frightening possibility, and it depresses me that nobody even seems to consider the possibility of genuine solutions in category D. The best-case plausible scenario is likely to be B or C eventually transitioning into D.
For a B-to-D transition, once automation is so complete that it literally costs the owners nothing (but control) to give it away, even a small trickle of genuine social charity could distribute ownership of automatons to the dependent (no longer working) classes over time, finally giving them independence. Successive generations raised in such a post-scarcity society might see less and less reason not to give their poor automaton-less friends some automatons of their own, and those given automatons could in turn use them to rescue others in the same boat at themselves, accelerating the process.
For a C-to-D transition, the electorate could simply vote to devolve ownership of the automatons from the central control of the government to the people individually. I think pragmatically, aiming for a C outcome at first with an eye to eventually transitioning to D is probably the best strategy we can hope for: a straight D solution is too unlikely to gain traction until it's too late, and a C outcome is the easiest to transition to the ideal D solution afterward. It concerns me how similar to the "dictatorship of the proletariate" that strategy is though: for the interim we have a people's gov
Mind you, I'm not suggesting a direction of causality here. It could be that the nobly-intended increased state power came first and then attracted the big market players to seize it, or just as plausibly that the big market players seized control of government first and then gave it that power so they could use it to their advantage.
We have never been further from state control over industry. What we have is industry control over state.
It can be, and plausibly is, both.
The state has more legal power to intervene in the market than before.
The bigger players in the market then have seized the reigns of that power to their own advantage.
That's the Declaration of Independence you're quoting, which was not authored by precisely the same people, not subject to the approval of the same people, as those who wrote and ratified the Constitution, which was written 11 years later and wasn't even a document of the same type. Jefferson and those he presumed to speak for may well really have found it self-evident that all men were created equal, at least self-evident enough to pronounce the fact to the British while effectively declaring war against them. But that's a far cry from convincing a continental convention of representatives of legislatures of thirteen recently-sovereign states, legislatures elected by and representing, in part, wealthy land- and slave-owners, to enshrine such principle in the nigh-immutible supreme law of the lands in which said electorate lived.
In other words, it's one thing for a small handful of people to profess principles to their enemies; it's another thing entirely to get whole societies to agree to bind themselves to those principles. The fact that the professed principles of the founders were immediately ignored says nothing about the intent of those founders, and everything about our collective disrespect for principle in general when the rubber hits the road.
usuary is defined as excessive interest.
That's only the modern sense.
The older sense is "any interest at all". (Pre-Reformation, post-Roman Europe generally prohibited any interest at all, and used this sense; the Islamic world largely continues that tradition as well; though neither prohibited rent in general, just rent on money, and so strange arrangements involving combinations of rentals and insurances and loans all packaged together are used to work around the prohibition on interest in those places).
And the oldest etymological sense, that I'm using for purposes of illustration, is "a fee for usage". Hence "usury", like "usage". Any rental payment is usury in that oldest sense. Any interest is rent on money and thus usury in that oldest sense.
Though since I am arguing that any rent or interest is "excessive", the modern sense does have a useful connotation in that way too.
That last point is debatable. The main argument against such contracts is that people don't have the physical capacity to hand over control of their own bodies to anyone else, and you can only enter into contracts which you can actually fulfill. Regardless, the "usury" contracts you're attempting to undermine have all the necessary properties of a valid contract: consideration, offer and acceptance, capable parties, mutual assent / "meeting of the minds". Their only failing, apparently, is that they don't meet with your approval. Enforcement of valid contracts (whether or not they are recognized as such by local law) is very much a condition for a free market. Arbitrary interference with voluntary contracts would undermine basic property rights and render the market non-free.
Contracts of any sort are in no way a "basic property right", nor necessary for a free market. The power to contract is not only a different right but an entirely different class of right than the claim rights that constitute ownership of property.
A claim right is a right to have someone else do or not do something -- such as the right against people doing things to your property against your will. A liberty right is a right to do or not do something, which is to say, the absence of claim rights against you. The second-order versions of those are respectively immunities, claims against people making changes to your first-order rights; and powers, liberties to change first-order rights.
To have a free market, all you strictly need are claims against anyone acting upon your property against your will (which is to say, private property), all liberties compatible with such claims (which is to say, general freedom), and at least the power to transfer ownership or your property to someone else (which is to say, the power to trade), consequently changing who has what claims and liberties to what.
Any other powers beyond that, or immunities against such powers, are open for debate without putting the freedom of the market in question. The power to contract is one such power beyond that, and what its limits should be is open to debate without putting the freedom of the market in question. I actually lean heavily toward the position that there should be no powers beyond that power to transfer ownership, maximizing immunity, just like there should be no claims beyond the claim against anyone acting upon your property against your will, maximizing liberty. I'm not arguing for that extreme here now, but I do have a deontological argument for it; however, I can also see consequential arguments against it that I'm still mulling over.
But there are very clear consequential arguments to at least limit the power to contract in a way that undermines rent and interest, though -- the ones I gave earlier in my first post you responded to -- and while we can argue about the strength of those arguments, it in no way would undermine the freedom of any market to have no power to contract at all, much less just no power to contract usury. It would undermine certain widespread institutes of capitalism, but that's not the same thing as undermining a free market, and that's the whole purpose here, to get rid or capitalism while keeping the free market. We can argue about whether the consequences of that would be good though, if you like... which it looks like you've already begun to do below.
I, for one, very much want to be able to enter into contracts which involve me paying rent or interest with the expectation that the terms will be enforceable in the event that I should default. The alternative is that I won't have access to loans.
I wonder, what do you think people with all that money will do with it if they suddenly can't get any use from it by lending it out at interest? Now they have useless piles of money doing them no good; certainly they'd like to find some other good use to put it do, what do yo
Yep. "Marginal utility" is the term you're looking for here: each additional dollar is worth less to you than the last one was.
I actually like to use marginal utility to argue from the conservative premise that taxes are bad to the progressive conclusion that progressive taxes are the best kind of taxes, so long as the premise is also granted that at least some taxes are necessary. We can argue about what level of taxation is necessary, but whatever the answer to that question is, the answer to who should bear the tax burden is the same.
1. Taking money from people (e.g. taxation) is harmful and bad.
2. Nevertheless we must take some money from people on pain of even greater harm.
3. The same loss of money harms someone with less money more than it harms someone with more money.
Therefore:
4. We do the least harm to take the necessary money from those who have more of it more than we do from those who have less of it.
Et voila. Taxes are bad, therefore they must be progressive.
Not all contracts are legally valid, and they don't all need to be legally valid for a market to be free. You can't, for example, contract yourself into slavery.
Also, no exchanges "fail to meet my approval" as you put it. If you want to trade someone something for something else, I don't care what those somethings are, so long as they're actual, real things; who has what rights to what transfers along with who owns what things, and people can trade ownership of things between each other as they like as far as I care. It's only the creation and trade of certain abstract legal constructs I'm objecting to. Your ability to trade someone "the temporary right to use this property" in exchange for something else depends on the ability to create such tradable, temporary legal rights to things in the first place. You're free to allow people to use your property, and they're free to give you money for it, without any special legal rights-creation going on. But if you want to give someone the right to use your property, even against your will if you change your mind, that depends on the ability to create such rights out of nothing, and that's what I'm objecting to.
It's somewhat analogous to intellectual property, where you're not making and trading actual things, you're making and trading legal rights.
If we're going to be pedantic about words, we also need to distinguish a "free market" from "capitalism". Too often self-identified proponents of "capitalism" are really just proponents of free markets, and use "capitalism" as if all it means is "free market".
A free market an economic arrangement where all exchanges are made voluntarily, without coercion.
Capitalism is an economic arrangement where those who own capital can extract surplus value from the labor of those who don't own such capital.
Both contemporary opponents and proponents of either assume that each entails the other:that without some kind or coerced redistribution, those with more capital will exploit those with less, and the only choice is between those two evils. But in principle the two concepts can come apart. The hard question is how.
My proposed answer is that what allows a free market (good) to become capitalism (bad) is the legal enforcement of any contract where someone allows the temporary use of their capital in exchange for a permanent transfer of some other capital. In other words, rent, including the rent on money that we call "interest", or in general, to use a more archaic but etymologically illustrative term, "usury": the charging of a fee for usage. Such contracts allow those who have more capital than they need for their personal use, who can thus afford to lend it out, to extract value from those who need to use more capital than they have, who thus have to borrow it. This creates an "uphill" flow of wealth from those who already have less of it to those who already have more of it.
In the absence of such contracts of usury, the only way someone with more wealth than is personally useful to them to get some value for it would be to sell it off. And, as is already the case, the only thing that those without enough wealth can trade for anything of value is their labor. The natural effect you would expect, in a free market without usury, would be that those with more capital would benefit from it by trading it for labor from others, gaining luxury (not needing to labor themselves) at the cost of their capital; and the laborers, in turn, would gradually accrue capital in exchange for their labor, and this free trade of capital for labor would gradually equalize the capitalists and the laborers, until each had enough capital for their own use, and had to labor upon it themselves. Some natural variation in wealth would still exist due to the natural differences in productivity of different people, but there would be no run-away concentration of wealth independent of productive activity that we have now.
Introduce usury into that system though, as we have now, and suddenly those with more wealth can lend their excess to those with less wealth, for a fee, which fee they can then use to pay for the labor of those who have less, who in turn are having to trade their labor to pay the fees for the use of the wealth of those who have more. In this way, usury creates an "upward" flow of wealth canceling the natural "downward" flow that a free market would be expected to have, and allowing those with more wealth to live perpetually off the labor of those with less wealth, without ever having to actually lose any wealth in exchange. It's not an insurmountable effect, it is still possible for the poor to accrue wealth or the rich to lose it all, but you have to be exceptionally competent or exceptionally incompetent to do each, respectively. For an average person, having wealth makes it easy to keep and gain wealth, and lacking it makes that exceedingly difficult. And I think we have usury — rent and interest — to blame for that. Without it, free markets would be inherently "socialist", as in for the public good, as one would naturally expect.
Apparently people in your timestream are suffering an overabundance of ellipses now in compensation for the paragraph break shortage?
But if you're made of wood, then you float in water, and are therefore a witch. Duh.
Then you need to get rid of NOR and NAND (as each by itself can emulate anything) and either NOT or both OR and AND (as either of those plus NOT can emulate either a NOR or a NAND and thus anything), and IF, ONLY-IF, and IFF (as they can be nested cleverly to emulate NANDs or NORs and thus anything).
So yeah basically we'd have to ban logic entirely. Which may be the true purpose...
Mormonism isn't orthodox Christianity.
If you ask the people who call themselves Orthodox Christians (yes I know you intentionally didn't capitalize it), neither are Catholics or any denomination of Protestants. If you ask Catholics, the so-called "Orthodox" Christians are unorthodox, and of course all the Protestant denominations as well. Both Catholics and Orthodox consider the other an unorthodox heresy which they excommunicated from their one true holy and apostolic church. Protestants meanwhile consider the Catholicism from which they descend to be a corruption of the original teachings of Christ and thus not truly Christianity at all, and it's very common (and just as annoying to me as GP's "Mormons and Christians" comment) to hear some denominations of Protestants speak of "Christians" and "Catholics" like they are non-intersecting sets.
And all those groups (and subgroups within them) dispute all many of points of theology, including some of the ones you list. Take for example the doctrine of the trinity: to copy from Wikipedia for ease, "Modern nontrinitarian groups or denominations include Christadelphians, Christian Scientists, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Dawn Bible Students, Friends General Conference, Iglesia ni Cristo, Jehovah's Witnesses, Living Church of God, Oneness Pentecostals, Members Church of God International, Unitarian Universalist Christians, the United Church of God and the Church of God (Seventh Day)."
We have had plenty of speculation on the possibility of inorganic life, but to my knowledge (link me if I'm wrong here) there has been no scientific treatise on how a form of life could exist without carbon. It's one thing to say "maybe it's possible", and another thing to say "this is how it would work", and yet another entirely to say "look, here it is!", and without at least one example of the third or a complete explanation of the second, we still just in "maybe" territory, and science treats "maybe" as "assume not until shown otherwise".
The scientific community would LOVE to discover proof of inorganic life. It would be a huge new field for biologists to explore! Right now we assume life will be carbon-based because that's the only kind of life we know is possible; we haven't yet conceived of how inorganic life might be possible, and we haven't seen empirical evidence that it is, so in absence of that we proceed as though it's not. But if we found empirical evidence that it was, scientists would jump at the research opportunities to figure out how it was. Science hates to be anthropomorphized, but it loves radical new observations that force us to rebuild all new models from scratch, because that's where all the fun is!
Mormonism is a form of Christianity, so I assume you meant "Neither is any other form of Christianity". Otherwise that's like saying "Cats don't photosynthesize. Neither do mammals."
Imagine yourself as a native American 500-some years ago, being suddenly greeted by strange-looking beings from a world beyond the horizon, who somehow managed to cross the unfathomable breadth of the entire ocean alive... and they've got a religion they'd like to tell you about.
Via Lorentz contraction of electric fields in different frames of reference.