I agree entirely that automation would make it possible for everyone to live free from concerns about basic necessities; the point I was trying to get at, and what the people nominally opposing automation really should be getting at, is that when some people control all that automated power, they will have little incentive to just give it to everybody, even though it would cost them nothing, because that economic power differential gives them social power -- they can make people live the way they want them to live, do and say and maybe even think what they want them to think, because at that point the owners will own the entire economy, capital and (automated) labor all in one, and not need the former laborers for anything at all, putting the latter entirely at the former's whim.
So in order to actually get the utopia that automation promises, we have to make sure that some people don't get to withhold it from everyone else just for their own petty power plays.
I see your two possible scenarios breaking down into at least four possible scenarios. From worst to best, with the middle two the most likely:
1. We keep doing things as we are now. Wealth concentrates further in the hands of the wealthy and the great majority of people become progressively poorer and poorer. Eventually, you have a teeming mass of desperate destitute people who, reasonable or not, will stop giving a fuck about any existing social order which has obviously not served them at all, will steal anything they want from anyone who still has it, and will probably wreak widespread damage just out of spite even if it doesn't get them anything. Massive, unprecedented social upheaval ensues, but by now it's too late, the poor have already lost their opportunity to overthrow the rich, who now have an unbeatable upper hand. The rich kill off all the rioting poor in the resulting war, or just shelter themselves and let the masses die out on their own with nothing to live on. In the aftermath, the surviving rich live in a post-scarcity utopia where everyone is rich, and mankind slowly regrows from the small pool of (now self-sufficient thanks to automation) rich into a larger pool of their inheritors and so on into a bright future, but at a great and terrible cost.
2. Alternately, the rich do as you describe in most of your second scenario, and forestall the revolution, making themselves look and feel good in the process and giving them someone to lord over, by taking basic care of the poor, at no cost to themselves since they are masters of a free automated labor force and own all the capital. Everyone will enjoy the material benefits of a post-scarcity utopia, but a tiny group of people will be in control of the whole thing and can deny anyone those benefits if they don't toe the line for the wealthy. We all achieve freedom from want, but at the cost of all other freedom; we become slaves living in gilded cages, totally beholden to the whims of the owning class, lest we be banished from our gilded cages to die in the streets with nothing.
3. Alternately, as you seem to imply in your first scenario, the poor don't let it get to the point where the rich have either of the above options, and seize public control of the means of production while there is still opportunity to do so. In doing so, everyone gets to share in the benefits of the post-scarcity economy, and nobody is beholden to any special ruling minority; but now everybody is beholden to the whim of the majority, or their appointed bureaucracy, and still we all now face the same threat of doing whatever our owners, the state, want us to do, or being thrown from our gilded cages to die in the streets with nothing. Probably more people will be more satisfied with what is required to avoid that than in the scenario above, because the state is controlled by a majority instead of a minority, so I put this on the "better" end of the spectrum than the above, but a dictatorship of the proletariat is still a dictatorship and in this scenario freedom is still dead.
4. Or finally, we may do away with capitalism without doing away with a free market or private property, preserving freedom without allowing wealth to concentrate in the hands of the wealthy or leaving a huge teeming mass of desperate destitute poor raring to revolt unless they're placated or killed first. The problem with capitalism, as G.K. Chesterton famously put it, is not too many capitalists, but too few. I argue that the solution is to ensure that the means of production, while still privately held by individuals, is distributed more or less evenly across all individuals; and I argue further that the right way to do this is not to take property from the rich and give it to the poor, but rather to eliminate the mechanisms by which being rich becomes a means to getting richer, at the expense of keeping the poor poor. If we eliminate the mechanisms that cause wealth to concentrate where there is already wealth, the natural flow of wealth from will be from those who have more of
Just as there is the underclass you mention, what Marx called the lumpenproletariat, there is also what he called the petit-bourgeoisie, which corresponds to what is normally thought of as "middle class". Both are in fact working class when it comes to the fundamental class distinction: do you profit from owning capital and allowing other people to labor with it, or do you profit from your laboring using capital that other people own?
The middle class is sometimes analogized as the officers who command the armies who serve the nobles, the latter being the upper-class, the capitalists. To extend that analogy, the working poor are of course the grunts in the army, and the underclass are all those who lie dying across the battlefield. But when it comes down to it, the destitute, the working poor, and the middle-class professionals are all actually out there fighting the fight, while the upper-class capitalists sit back in their manors and wait for the spoils to be delivered.
The one thing left out of this analysis however, but Marx (I think unfairly) lumps in with the petit-bourgeoisie, are those who own just enough capital to labor on it themselves, and do so. Self-employed individuals, otherwise known as "small business owners". They are living the life we would all live in a classless society, having a small piece of the world to call their own and making their living from it, neither exploiting nor being exploited, and I consider them the true middle-class and the solution to the class conflict.
If machines become good at everything, it doesn't mean we all become destitute because there are no jobs. It means that everything can be had with minimal effort.
...by those who own the machines, and all the other capital needed to make any kind of living in the world. The rest of the people, who own nothing of any importance and only get to use the owners' things in exchange for their labor, will be SOL when their labor is no longer needed.
The solution to the problem of course is to fix the underlying problem where only a small set of people own the world, and the rest of us rent it from them. When we're all shareholders in the means of production, then the savings provided by automation will actually benefit us all. Until then, it only benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
But, I see you get to that in the end anyway:
A world without jobs is an awesome world. Getting the super wealthy to share with the less wealthy is an entirely different problem that can maybe be solved with threats of revolution and guillotines, but slowing the advance of technology, and diminishing the total potential pool of wealth is a step in the wrong direction.
I agree completely, but think that the anti-automators needs to be responded to first and foremost by pointing out that while they are absolutely right that there is a problem, the real problem is ownership disparity ("income" per se doesn't really matter, if your income comes entirely from labor and we're talking about eliminating the need for that labor). People afraid of automation have a very valid concern, but it's not really with automation, and their concern needs to be pointedly redirected to the real problem: that they don't own the automatons.
I'd much prefer a legal system where the prosecutor is charged with finding the truth, not just stringing together enough facts to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
It sounds like you would prefer the inquisitorial systems used in many civil law countries, instead of the adversarial systems more widely used in common law countries like the US.
I've sometimes wished for a hybrid system where there is both a supposed-to-be-neutral party whose job it is to simply find the truth, and two adversarial parties each doing anything they can to win. That way you get the adversarial advantage of not being completely beholden to whatever the inquisitorial party deems in their best opinion to be the truth without anybody on your side trying to stand up for you, and the inquisitorial advantage of having a party interested in seeing true justice prevail (whether that means conviction or acquittal), rather than just winning no matter the cost.
Existing adversarial systems could be retrofitted to implement this simply by having a third lawyer present who represents neither prosecution nor the defense (and has to be mutually acceptable as a neutral party to both of them), whose job is simply to question everything either side says and look for any evidence or argument that would be relevant at all. The rest of the process of convincing a judge and jury go on just as they normally do. You could likewise retrofit an existing inquisitorial system simply by having two people work for the inquisitor being explicitly responsible for finding evidence either for or against the accused, and the rest of that system would work as it does already.
I've often thought that an interesting form of (barely) religious anarchism -- interesting in the sense I might write a story featuring a culture that uses it, not in that I would try to implement it anywhere in particular in the real world -- would be an agnostic theocracy. There would be a throne room temple with a big prominent throne where the only legitimate authority, God, sits. Nobody is allowed to sit in that chair, as that would be the highest of heresies, assuming God's authority to oneself. Whatever the closest thing to a government council (parliament, congress, etc) this society had would sit in a circle on the floor in front of the throne as they discussed matters, as a constant reminder that none of us here is fit to rule over the rest of us, as we are all mere fallible humans. But God is not here right now, or at least he's not taking physical form, sitting there on that throne, and issuing orders from it. And until he does, we're stuck trying to figure out how best to get by without an omniscient omnibenevolent omnipotent authority to abolish all evil for us. But while we do that, we sit around next to his empty chair as a reminder that none of us is him and none of us gets to act like we are.
I've long since considered free will and morality closely related and both connected to the same reflexivity that constitutes consciousness. In short, it is when you are capable of looking at yourself "in the third person" so to speak, and ask whether what you are doing is what a person should do and praise/blame yourself to deter or reinforce your own behavior as necessary, that you both capable of independent moral judgement and in possession of a proper will beyond just unreflective desires.
Your discussion of people being more likely to behave ethically when they are being watched made me reflect that I behave ethically because I am always imagining someone reading the story of my life from the future and judging me based on that, and I want my actions to be right "for the record". Except that in many cases, when I am unobserved, the only person who would be "reading this story" is future me, remembering it.
So in effect, I do act ethically because someone is watching. It's just that that someone is me, and it doesn't have to be someone else watching for it to be effective. I might even argue that the "someone is watching you" effect is only effective because when someone else is watching you it makes you think about what they would be thinking about you and in doing so forces you into the reflexivity from which moral judgement and willful action derive.
I don't understand how the unspoken, presumed statement can be taken to be an insult. He is claiming that the King is on what he considered to be the right side of a debate. Isn't that a compliment, if anything?
Let's say, to exaggerate an analogy for clarity, that at an anti-pedophile rally, if there were such a thing, someone were to name several prominent people who are, like the speaker presumably is, outspoken against pedophiles. He's saying "Pedophiles are bad people, and should be disapproved of. I disapprove of them. And these other prominent people also disapprove of them! Good on them for doing so!" How would the people named be insulted by that?
Likewise, this Thai guy is saying "The government administration are bad people, and should be disapproved of. I disapprove of them. These other prominent people, and even the King himself, disapprove of them. Good on them for doing so!" How is that an insult to the king?
GP's point was that etymologically "man" means human, male or female, and the "wom" prefix indicates a specifically female human; the counterpart "werman" would indicate a specifically male human, except nobody today would understand that because people don't know their etymology.
There is a distortion of language due to sexism, but it is not in using a male term to refer to all humans; it is in assuming that human, without further qualification, is male, and letting the term for "human" come to mean "male human". Nobody ever set out to speak of "mankind" to the exclusion of women; what they did wrong was assume that if you're talking about a member of mankind, a man, then unless otherwise specified they are male.
If we were to reverse that sexist erroneous assumption and make language non-sexist, we would drop the term "woman" entirely except where identifying a person's sex is really important (in which situations we would also use "weman" when we need to indicate males), and call everybody a "man" without assuming that that meant a male.
Point you're trying to make about corruption aside, this illustrates the difference between republic-or-not and democracy-or-not perfectly. You are making a point that the US government does not operate democratically, but rather plutocratically or the like. But whether or not that is the case, when the government does something -- whether it's what the people want, or what the biggest campaign contributors want -- it does so officially on behalf of The People, in their name, claiming its authority to derive from there.
The important distinction is between "where does claimed power derive from", and "who directs the use of that power". A republic is a "people-powered" state; one where, formally, authority rests originally with the people, and is delegated by them to the government, which may then be controlled by the people or by some other means. A monarchy, in contrast, is a "crown-powered" state; one where, formally, authority rests originally with the monarch, and is delegated by him or her to the government, which may then be controlled by the people or by some other means.
Consider for analogy a business corporation. It has an administrative structure, some way of deciding who calls the shots and what shots get called. It may take a lot of input in from its employees, or it may have a more top-down administrative structure. This is like democracy vs alternatives. But in any case, there is a separate question: who owns the company? Is it employee-owned, is it a sole proprietorship owned by the CEO, is it owned by some external stockholders? That is like a republic vs alternatives. While it seems most natural that an employee-owned company would be administrated with lots of employee input, and a sole proprietorship would be administrated from the top down, you could have an employee-owned company where the employees are not all intimately involved in the day-to-day administration of it (ala a non-democratic republic), or a sole proprietorship which takes in lots of employee input (ala a non-republican democracy).
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that what defines a republic is representation.
A republic is a state where The People are sovereign; a "people's thing", res publica. In contrast to one in which, say, The Crown is sovereign. In either case, how the government (the administration of the state) operates, who constitutes it and how it passes laws, is a separate question.
The US and the UK are a great pair to highlight this difference. Both are representative democracies: both have governments composed of representatives elected by the people and accountable to them, who in turn legislate by voting among those representatives. But the parliament of the UK acts in the name of The Crown, and is in theory exercising The Crown's power; while the congress of the US acts in the name of The People, and is in theory exercising The People's power.
It's a much more subtle, theoretical and less practical distinction than that between a democracy and, say, an autocracy, but that's what it means. It has nothing to do with whether anybody is representing anybody.
Anarchism is nothing more than holding the government to the same standards as the people, recognizing that the government is nothing more than a bunch of people.
Good government is nothing more than a bunch of people banding together out of anarchy to keep others from abusing power, without in turn abusing their own power.
Anarchy is the mathematical limit of good government. The better a government is -- the more it wards off abuses of power without committing them itself -- the more like an ideal anarchy the resulting society looks. The worse a government -- the more it permits, or worse still commits, abuses of power -- the less like an ideal anarchy the resulting society looks.
Here in the US, the difference between a debit card and a credit card is that a debit card can only be used to spend money which is actually sitting in the attached bank account, and that money is immediately deducted from that bank account. You are not being loaned any money on credit, you are just spending money you already have. So if you have $2,000 in your account, you can spend up to $2,000 with your debit card, which will be deducted immediately, and then it will decline further transactions.
A credit card, on the other hand, is a kind of revolving loan. You can owe the issuing bank up to your credit limit at any one time and pay it back whenever you like -- though of course you will be charged interest for delaying payment beyond the monthly bill due date, and there is a (usually trivial) minimum amount you must pay toward your balance each month. So if you have $2,000 in your account, and a $20,000 credit line, you can spend up to $20,000 on the card before it declines transactions... and then, unless you have some windfall coming in before the next bill's due date, you will only be able to pay off at most $2,000 of it (since that's all the money you have sitting around), and will have to carry an $18,000 balance, which will accumulate interest.
Often times the two types of cards are issued by the same banks and accepted by the same locations (modern debit cards with e.g. Visa or MasterCard logos are accepted anywhere that takes a Visa or MasterCard credit card), and you can use a credit card much like a debit card, never spending more than you have in the bank and paying off the balance in full each month and thus accruing no interest. But the credit card gives you much more power and flexibility... and consequently a lot more rope to hang yourself with if you're not responsible with money.
A planet is basically just a very large space ship with no engines. At the extremes of scale planets face the same problems space ships do (look at the climate problem -- we're overtaxing our atmosphere reprocessors, putting out carbon faster than it can be scrubbed out of the air), and space ships can offer the same solutions planets do.
There's no good reason the law should require people to wear pants (or anything) in the first place. Religious excuses not required. In fact it's mostly for religious reasons that it was ever required at all.
I'm not sure how any of that connects to anything we were talking about. I'm not saying anything about people needing to be tough or not. I'm saying that our social conditions, being products solely of people's behavior and other people's reactions to it, are negatively influenced by people growing up conditioned to tolerate what should be intolerable abuses, and that they will be helped by people who grow up without that conditioning and so resist those abuses.
To stretch your tree analogy, it's like the ground the trees grow on is shaped by the trees that grow there. Trees that grow on cliffs learn to just grow sideways because that's how you survive life on a cliff, and in doing so they perpetuate the existence of those cliffs. Cliff-trees transplanted to flat ground will try to twist the ground to the crooked conditions they're used to living in, but if surrounded by healthy trees won't be able to do so. I'm saying we need more healthy trees, which grew up on flat ground, to keep the whole world from being turned into cliffs that future trees would just have to learn to live on.
But if you read adulthood without being forced into submission to that shit as a vulnerable child, when you encounter it in adulthood it will stand out to you as outrageous and not to be tolerated, rather than the norm and something just to bend over and take.
We need more people growing up to see how the world is with eyes unaccustomed to it, who go "WHAT THE FUCK?" and won't stand for it like it was normal.
Grandparent post is an Idiocracy quote, for all those apparently missing the joke. The protagonist, Joe, the "most average man in the military" and all-around ordinary guy, wakes up from an experiment 500 years in the future, and sees Dr. Lexus, MD, whose diagnosis of Joe's condition is this thread's title, but who gives him the assurance quoted in GPP's post.
If my housemates have a party and they decide that we're going to order pizza and we all have to chip in $5, and they say I have to chip in (even if I don't want pizza and would rather they not have a party at all because I have a headache and want to be left alone to peace and quiet in my room), and I can either hand it over or they will take it from me by force and if necessary lock me in the garage to keep me from stopping them or taking it back or ruining their party, is that not theft? If they said that I can either deal with that or move the fuck out of the house, which is just as much mine as theirs, does that make it OK?
What difference does it make if it's a lot more "housemates" in a much bigger "house"? I was born here like all the rest of them, I have every right to be here, it's my "house" too, I don't have to gtfo, I don't even have to stay in my "room" because I have just as much right to "halls" and "living room" as they do and they have no more right to exclude me from them than I do them, and they have no right to demand I chip in for a "party" I'd rather they not throw in the first place.
Now mind you, in the same breath as I argue that taxation is morally unjustifiable theft, I will also argue that it is pragmatically justifiable as a temporary means of preventing even greater theft and other crime. I'll even argue that specifically because taxes are a necessarily evil, that progressive taxation is morally obligatory as a way of mitigating the harm thereby done. But none of that makes it morally acceptable. It's a problem we've got to put up with at the moment because we don't know of a better way, but we had damn well acknowledge that it is a problem and start looking for a better way. (A way to prevent injustices, and maybe even do other goods, without committing further injustices ourselves).
To call taxes "stealing," when the government is elected by the people, is disgusting and unpatriotic.
Only if by "the people" you mean ALL the people, unanimously. Otherwise, it's some of the people stealing from some other people.
I, for instance, have no interest in buying expensive weapons from Haliburton to blow up people on the other side of the world, and consider being forced to make that purchase against my will (my money is being taken to pay for that), under threat of force, disgusting and unpatriotic.
There was no suspected credit card theft in his example. There was a suspected presence at a prohibited location. A perfectly legitimate credit card transaction conducted there was simply possible evidence of that presence. The requested to confirm that that was really the suspect's card was not because the card was suspected of being stolen, but to see if that was really the suspect at that location.
Of course, the suspect could defend himself against that allegation by claiming his card had been stolen and thus even though it was used there, he wasn't there. But that wasn't mentioned in the example.
In the analogy: Charge = post Location = website Credit card = username
A person has been prohibited from being at a {location / website}. There is an otherwise perfectly legal {charge / post} made at that {location / website}, apparently from said person's {credit card / username}. The court wants to confirm that that was really that person's {credit card / username}, not because there's anything wrong with the {charge / post}, but because if it was then that's evidence that the person was at the {location / website} he wasn't supposed to be at. Of course said person could counter-claim that someone else was using their {credit card / username}, but that's not the issue in dispute.
The United States is a Republic, a collection of 50 individual and fully sovereign states.
Not that this undermines your overall point, but though those are both true statements, they are not connected as you seem to suggest. Many of the individual states are themselves republics, and there are unitary republics not composed of individually sovereign states all over the world. I think the word you're looking for is "Federation".
Actually if you are living with the bulk of the populations in a non-swing state. Voting 3rd party gives you more power. Yes your candidate will not win. But with more people voting third party, It gives that party more strength, as well their views gets more credit.
Yes, a million times this!
If you live in a swing state, the "vote the lesser of the two evils with a chance of winning" thing makes strategic sense. You don't have enough influence to really make the changes you might want, but you have enough influence to help cut your losses at least, so it makes more sense to try for the mediocre possibility than the impossible ideal.
But if you don't live in a swing state, you're lucky! Your powerlessness gives you the freedom that could actually make a nationwide difference in the long game, because since either the lesser or greater of the two mainstream "evils" is a shoe-in in your state, there's no point in wasting your vote supporting or opposing something that's statistically inevitable. Instead, your best strategic vote is to vote for whichever third party you would really prefer, or at least, the one you hate the least. This has numerous benefits:
- Obviously, it increases the support for that third party, and for third parties in general, nudging the country a tiny step closer to a healthy spread of options in our elections.
- Whichever party you statistically would otherwise have voted for will adapt to mimic the party you did vote for, in order to try to bring you back into the fold, e.g. Republicans will adopt Libertarian and Constitution party policies and Democrats will adopt Green and Justice party policies.
But the really promising benefits are bigger, if also riskier:
- If you would have otherwise voted for the shoe-in, then many people following this strategy (e.g. California liberals voting Green instead of the shoe-in Democrat) will make your state into a swing state and give your vote more influence in future elections. The down side to this is now the side you would otherwise support is no longer a shoe-in and you may have to strategically vote for the "lesser evil" again; though this may be counterbalanced by the following effect...
- If you would have otherwise voted against the shoe-in, then a bloc of like-minded people following this strategy (e.g. California conservatives voting Libertarian instead of the doomed Republican) can be very aggressive at "spoiling" the "lesser evil", since they'd have lost anyway, and can go on to try to outright supplant the "lesser evil" with someone they actually consider good, without risking making things any worse (since they were already as bad as they can get, with the "greater evil" a shoe-in).
So, continuing the California example, if people followed this strategy we could go from Democrats being shoe-ins, Republicans being a close second, and minor third parties not having much influence, to anything from a diminished but still slightly dominant Greenish Democrat party having lost a large bloc to the ascending Green party, who are still not spoiling their (otherwise-Democrat) vote because the Libertarian party has eaten a large chunk of the Republican part; to a close race between Greenish Democrats and Libertarians, with a strong Green presence rising and a lingering Libertarianish Republican presence.
If this happened in every state, then you end up with every state a swing state, with currently "third" parties now major parties in some states, and all third parties more prominent nationwide; all without anyone ever risking spoiling anything and letting the greater evil win. With more prominent third parties we might even see debate and campaign reform getting them more air time; and maybe, if just one third party, any third party, can get into power for just one term, then we might even see electoral reform that would make it plausible for third parties to continue to win thereafter. All major third parties support electoral reform, so
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I agree entirely that automation would make it possible for everyone to live free from concerns about basic necessities; the point I was trying to get at, and what the people nominally opposing automation really should be getting at, is that when some people control all that automated power, they will have little incentive to just give it to everybody, even though it would cost them nothing, because that economic power differential gives them social power -- they can make people live the way they want them to live, do and say and maybe even think what they want them to think, because at that point the owners will own the entire economy, capital and (automated) labor all in one, and not need the former laborers for anything at all, putting the latter entirely at the former's whim.
So in order to actually get the utopia that automation promises, we have to make sure that some people don't get to withhold it from everyone else just for their own petty power plays.
I see your two possible scenarios breaking down into at least four possible scenarios. From worst to best, with the middle two the most likely:
1. We keep doing things as we are now. Wealth concentrates further in the hands of the wealthy and the great majority of people become progressively poorer and poorer. Eventually, you have a teeming mass of desperate destitute people who, reasonable or not, will stop giving a fuck about any existing social order which has obviously not served them at all, will steal anything they want from anyone who still has it, and will probably wreak widespread damage just out of spite even if it doesn't get them anything. Massive, unprecedented social upheaval ensues, but by now it's too late, the poor have already lost their opportunity to overthrow the rich, who now have an unbeatable upper hand. The rich kill off all the rioting poor in the resulting war, or just shelter themselves and let the masses die out on their own with nothing to live on. In the aftermath, the surviving rich live in a post-scarcity utopia where everyone is rich, and mankind slowly regrows from the small pool of (now self-sufficient thanks to automation) rich into a larger pool of their inheritors and so on into a bright future, but at a great and terrible cost.
2. Alternately, the rich do as you describe in most of your second scenario, and forestall the revolution, making themselves look and feel good in the process and giving them someone to lord over, by taking basic care of the poor, at no cost to themselves since they are masters of a free automated labor force and own all the capital. Everyone will enjoy the material benefits of a post-scarcity utopia, but a tiny group of people will be in control of the whole thing and can deny anyone those benefits if they don't toe the line for the wealthy. We all achieve freedom from want, but at the cost of all other freedom; we become slaves living in gilded cages, totally beholden to the whims of the owning class, lest we be banished from our gilded cages to die in the streets with nothing.
3. Alternately, as you seem to imply in your first scenario, the poor don't let it get to the point where the rich have either of the above options, and seize public control of the means of production while there is still opportunity to do so. In doing so, everyone gets to share in the benefits of the post-scarcity economy, and nobody is beholden to any special ruling minority; but now everybody is beholden to the whim of the majority, or their appointed bureaucracy, and still we all now face the same threat of doing whatever our owners, the state, want us to do, or being thrown from our gilded cages to die in the streets with nothing. Probably more people will be more satisfied with what is required to avoid that than in the scenario above, because the state is controlled by a majority instead of a minority, so I put this on the "better" end of the spectrum than the above, but a dictatorship of the proletariat is still a dictatorship and in this scenario freedom is still dead.
4. Or finally, we may do away with capitalism without doing away with a free market or private property, preserving freedom without allowing wealth to concentrate in the hands of the wealthy or leaving a huge teeming mass of desperate destitute poor raring to revolt unless they're placated or killed first. The problem with capitalism, as G.K. Chesterton famously put it, is not too many capitalists, but too few. I argue that the solution is to ensure that the means of production, while still privately held by individuals, is distributed more or less evenly across all individuals; and I argue further that the right way to do this is not to take property from the rich and give it to the poor, but rather to eliminate the mechanisms by which being rich becomes a means to getting richer, at the expense of keeping the poor poor. If we eliminate the mechanisms that cause wealth to concentrate where there is already wealth, the natural flow of wealth from will be from those who have more of
Just as there is the underclass you mention, what Marx called the lumpenproletariat, there is also what he called the petit-bourgeoisie, which corresponds to what is normally thought of as "middle class". Both are in fact working class when it comes to the fundamental class distinction: do you profit from owning capital and allowing other people to labor with it, or do you profit from your laboring using capital that other people own?
The middle class is sometimes analogized as the officers who command the armies who serve the nobles, the latter being the upper-class, the capitalists. To extend that analogy, the working poor are of course the grunts in the army, and the underclass are all those who lie dying across the battlefield. But when it comes down to it, the destitute, the working poor, and the middle-class professionals are all actually out there fighting the fight, while the upper-class capitalists sit back in their manors and wait for the spoils to be delivered.
The one thing left out of this analysis however, but Marx (I think unfairly) lumps in with the petit-bourgeoisie, are those who own just enough capital to labor on it themselves, and do so. Self-employed individuals, otherwise known as "small business owners". They are living the life we would all live in a classless society, having a small piece of the world to call their own and making their living from it, neither exploiting nor being exploited, and I consider them the true middle-class and the solution to the class conflict.
If machines become good at everything, it doesn't mean we all become destitute because there are no jobs. It means that everything can be had with minimal effort.
...by those who own the machines, and all the other capital needed to make any kind of living in the world. The rest of the people, who own nothing of any importance and only get to use the owners' things in exchange for their labor, will be SOL when their labor is no longer needed.
The solution to the problem of course is to fix the underlying problem where only a small set of people own the world, and the rest of us rent it from them. When we're all shareholders in the means of production, then the savings provided by automation will actually benefit us all. Until then, it only benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
But, I see you get to that in the end anyway:
A world without jobs is an awesome world. Getting the super wealthy to share with the less wealthy is an entirely different problem that can maybe be solved with threats of revolution and guillotines, but slowing the advance of technology, and diminishing the total potential pool of wealth is a step in the wrong direction.
I agree completely, but think that the anti-automators needs to be responded to first and foremost by pointing out that while they are absolutely right that there is a problem, the real problem is ownership disparity ("income" per se doesn't really matter, if your income comes entirely from labor and we're talking about eliminating the need for that labor). People afraid of automation have a very valid concern, but it's not really with automation, and their concern needs to be pointedly redirected to the real problem: that they don't own the automatons.
I'd much prefer a legal system where the prosecutor is charged with finding the truth, not just stringing together enough facts to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
It sounds like you would prefer the inquisitorial systems used in many civil law countries, instead of the adversarial systems more widely used in common law countries like the US.
I've sometimes wished for a hybrid system where there is both a supposed-to-be-neutral party whose job it is to simply find the truth, and two adversarial parties each doing anything they can to win. That way you get the adversarial advantage of not being completely beholden to whatever the inquisitorial party deems in their best opinion to be the truth without anybody on your side trying to stand up for you, and the inquisitorial advantage of having a party interested in seeing true justice prevail (whether that means conviction or acquittal), rather than just winning no matter the cost.
Existing adversarial systems could be retrofitted to implement this simply by having a third lawyer present who represents neither prosecution nor the defense (and has to be mutually acceptable as a neutral party to both of them), whose job is simply to question everything either side says and look for any evidence or argument that would be relevant at all. The rest of the process of convincing a judge and jury go on just as they normally do. You could likewise retrofit an existing inquisitorial system simply by having two people work for the inquisitor being explicitly responsible for finding evidence either for or against the accused, and the rest of that system would work as it does already.
I've often thought that an interesting form of (barely) religious anarchism -- interesting in the sense I might write a story featuring a culture that uses it, not in that I would try to implement it anywhere in particular in the real world -- would be an agnostic theocracy. There would be a throne room temple with a big prominent throne where the only legitimate authority, God, sits. Nobody is allowed to sit in that chair, as that would be the highest of heresies, assuming God's authority to oneself. Whatever the closest thing to a government council (parliament, congress, etc) this society had would sit in a circle on the floor in front of the throne as they discussed matters, as a constant reminder that none of us here is fit to rule over the rest of us, as we are all mere fallible humans. But God is not here right now, or at least he's not taking physical form, sitting there on that throne, and issuing orders from it. And until he does, we're stuck trying to figure out how best to get by without an omniscient omnibenevolent omnipotent authority to abolish all evil for us. But while we do that, we sit around next to his empty chair as a reminder that none of us is him and none of us gets to act like we are.
This makes me think of something interesting.
I've long since considered free will and morality closely related and both connected to the same reflexivity that constitutes consciousness. In short, it is when you are capable of looking at yourself "in the third person" so to speak, and ask whether what you are doing is what a person should do and praise/blame yourself to deter or reinforce your own behavior as necessary, that you both capable of independent moral judgement and in possession of a proper will beyond just unreflective desires.
Your discussion of people being more likely to behave ethically when they are being watched made me reflect that I behave ethically because I am always imagining someone reading the story of my life from the future and judging me based on that, and I want my actions to be right "for the record". Except that in many cases, when I am unobserved, the only person who would be "reading this story" is future me, remembering it.
So in effect, I do act ethically because someone is watching. It's just that that someone is me, and it doesn't have to be someone else watching for it to be effective. I might even argue that the "someone is watching you" effect is only effective because when someone else is watching you it makes you think about what they would be thinking about you and in doing so forces you into the reflexivity from which moral judgement and willful action derive.
I don't understand how the unspoken, presumed statement can be taken to be an insult. He is claiming that the King is on what he considered to be the right side of a debate. Isn't that a compliment, if anything?
Let's say, to exaggerate an analogy for clarity, that at an anti-pedophile rally, if there were such a thing, someone were to name several prominent people who are, like the speaker presumably is, outspoken against pedophiles. He's saying "Pedophiles are bad people, and should be disapproved of. I disapprove of them. And these other prominent people also disapprove of them! Good on them for doing so!" How would the people named be insulted by that?
Likewise, this Thai guy is saying "The government administration are bad people, and should be disapproved of. I disapprove of them. These other prominent people, and even the King himself, disapprove of them. Good on them for doing so!" How is that an insult to the king?
Woosh yourself.
GP's point was that etymologically "man" means human, male or female, and the "wom" prefix indicates a specifically female human; the counterpart "werman" would indicate a specifically male human, except nobody today would understand that because people don't know their etymology.
There is a distortion of language due to sexism, but it is not in using a male term to refer to all humans; it is in assuming that human, without further qualification, is male, and letting the term for "human" come to mean "male human". Nobody ever set out to speak of "mankind" to the exclusion of women; what they did wrong was assume that if you're talking about a member of mankind, a man, then unless otherwise specified they are male.
If we were to reverse that sexist erroneous assumption and make language non-sexist, we would drop the term "woman" entirely except where identifying a person's sex is really important (in which situations we would also use "weman" when we need to indicate males), and call everybody a "man" without assuming that that meant a male.
Point you're trying to make about corruption aside, this illustrates the difference between republic-or-not and democracy-or-not perfectly. You are making a point that the US government does not operate democratically, but rather plutocratically or the like. But whether or not that is the case, when the government does something -- whether it's what the people want, or what the biggest campaign contributors want -- it does so officially on behalf of The People, in their name, claiming its authority to derive from there.
The important distinction is between "where does claimed power derive from", and "who directs the use of that power". A republic is a "people-powered" state; one where, formally, authority rests originally with the people, and is delegated by them to the government, which may then be controlled by the people or by some other means. A monarchy, in contrast, is a "crown-powered" state; one where, formally, authority rests originally with the monarch, and is delegated by him or her to the government, which may then be controlled by the people or by some other means.
Consider for analogy a business corporation. It has an administrative structure, some way of deciding who calls the shots and what shots get called. It may take a lot of input in from its employees, or it may have a more top-down administrative structure. This is like democracy vs alternatives. But in any case, there is a separate question: who owns the company? Is it employee-owned, is it a sole proprietorship owned by the CEO, is it owned by some external stockholders? That is like a republic vs alternatives. While it seems most natural that an employee-owned company would be administrated with lots of employee input, and a sole proprietorship would be administrated from the top down, you could have an employee-owned company where the employees are not all intimately involved in the day-to-day administration of it (ala a non-democratic republic), or a sole proprietorship which takes in lots of employee input (ala a non-republican democracy).
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that what defines a republic is representation.
A republic is a state where The People are sovereign; a "people's thing", res publica. In contrast to one in which, say, The Crown is sovereign. In either case, how the government (the administration of the state) operates, who constitutes it and how it passes laws, is a separate question.
The US and the UK are a great pair to highlight this difference. Both are representative democracies: both have governments composed of representatives elected by the people and accountable to them, who in turn legislate by voting among those representatives. But the parliament of the UK acts in the name of The Crown, and is in theory exercising The Crown's power; while the congress of the US acts in the name of The People, and is in theory exercising The People's power.
It's a much more subtle, theoretical and less practical distinction than that between a democracy and, say, an autocracy, but that's what it means. It has nothing to do with whether anybody is representing anybody.
Anarchism is nothing more than holding the government to the same standards as the people, recognizing that the government is nothing more than a bunch of people.
Good government is nothing more than a bunch of people banding together out of anarchy to keep others from abusing power, without in turn abusing their own power.
Anarchy is the mathematical limit of good government. The better a government is -- the more it wards off abuses of power without committing them itself -- the more like an ideal anarchy the resulting society looks. The worse a government -- the more it permits, or worse still commits, abuses of power -- the less like an ideal anarchy the resulting society looks.
Here in the US, the difference between a debit card and a credit card is that a debit card can only be used to spend money which is actually sitting in the attached bank account, and that money is immediately deducted from that bank account. You are not being loaned any money on credit, you are just spending money you already have. So if you have $2,000 in your account, you can spend up to $2,000 with your debit card, which will be deducted immediately, and then it will decline further transactions.
A credit card, on the other hand, is a kind of revolving loan. You can owe the issuing bank up to your credit limit at any one time and pay it back whenever you like -- though of course you will be charged interest for delaying payment beyond the monthly bill due date, and there is a (usually trivial) minimum amount you must pay toward your balance each month. So if you have $2,000 in your account, and a $20,000 credit line, you can spend up to $20,000 on the card before it declines transactions... and then, unless you have some windfall coming in before the next bill's due date, you will only be able to pay off at most $2,000 of it (since that's all the money you have sitting around), and will have to carry an $18,000 balance, which will accumulate interest.
Often times the two types of cards are issued by the same banks and accepted by the same locations (modern debit cards with e.g. Visa or MasterCard logos are accepted anywhere that takes a Visa or MasterCard credit card), and you can use a credit card much like a debit card, never spending more than you have in the bank and paying off the balance in full each month and thus accruing no interest. But the credit card gives you much more power and flexibility... and consequently a lot more rope to hang yourself with if you're not responsible with money.
A planet is basically just a very large space ship with no engines. At the extremes of scale planets face the same problems space ships do (look at the climate problem -- we're overtaxing our atmosphere reprocessors, putting out carbon faster than it can be scrubbed out of the air), and space ships can offer the same solutions planets do.
Now replace "a badge" with "pants".
There's no good reason the law should require people to wear pants (or anything) in the first place. Religious excuses not required. In fact it's mostly for religious reasons that it was ever required at all.
I'm not sure how any of that connects to anything we were talking about. I'm not saying anything about people needing to be tough or not. I'm saying that our social conditions, being products solely of people's behavior and other people's reactions to it, are negatively influenced by people growing up conditioned to tolerate what should be intolerable abuses, and that they will be helped by people who grow up without that conditioning and so resist those abuses.
To stretch your tree analogy, it's like the ground the trees grow on is shaped by the trees that grow there. Trees that grow on cliffs learn to just grow sideways because that's how you survive life on a cliff, and in doing so they perpetuate the existence of those cliffs. Cliff-trees transplanted to flat ground will try to twist the ground to the crooked conditions they're used to living in, but if surrounded by healthy trees won't be able to do so. I'm saying we need more healthy trees, which grew up on flat ground, to keep the whole world from being turned into cliffs that future trees would just have to learn to live on.
But if you read adulthood without being forced into submission to that shit as a vulnerable child, when you encounter it in adulthood it will stand out to you as outrageous and not to be tolerated, rather than the norm and something just to bend over and take.
We need more people growing up to see how the world is with eyes unaccustomed to it, who go "WHAT THE FUCK?" and won't stand for it like it was normal.
Grandparent post is an Idiocracy quote, for all those apparently missing the joke. The protagonist, Joe, the "most average man in the military" and all-around ordinary guy, wakes up from an experiment 500 years in the future, and sees Dr. Lexus, MD, whose diagnosis of Joe's condition is this thread's title, but who gives him the assurance quoted in GPP's post.
I'm only worried about ones in the heel. Anywhere else I could just shrug it off, but that one tendon is my Achilles heel...
If my housemates have a party and they decide that we're going to order pizza and we all have to chip in $5, and they say I have to chip in (even if I don't want pizza and would rather they not have a party at all because I have a headache and want to be left alone to peace and quiet in my room), and I can either hand it over or they will take it from me by force and if necessary lock me in the garage to keep me from stopping them or taking it back or ruining their party, is that not theft? If they said that I can either deal with that or move the fuck out of the house, which is just as much mine as theirs, does that make it OK?
What difference does it make if it's a lot more "housemates" in a much bigger "house"? I was born here like all the rest of them, I have every right to be here, it's my "house" too, I don't have to gtfo, I don't even have to stay in my "room" because I have just as much right to "halls" and "living room" as they do and they have no more right to exclude me from them than I do them, and they have no right to demand I chip in for a "party" I'd rather they not throw in the first place.
Now mind you, in the same breath as I argue that taxation is morally unjustifiable theft, I will also argue that it is pragmatically justifiable as a temporary means of preventing even greater theft and other crime. I'll even argue that specifically because taxes are a necessarily evil, that progressive taxation is morally obligatory as a way of mitigating the harm thereby done. But none of that makes it morally acceptable. It's a problem we've got to put up with at the moment because we don't know of a better way, but we had damn well acknowledge that it is a problem and start looking for a better way. (A way to prevent injustices, and maybe even do other goods, without committing further injustices ourselves).
To call taxes "stealing," when the government is elected by the people, is disgusting and unpatriotic.
Only if by "the people" you mean ALL the people, unanimously. Otherwise, it's some of the people stealing from some other people.
I, for instance, have no interest in buying expensive weapons from Haliburton to blow up people on the other side of the world, and consider being forced to make that purchase against my will (my money is being taken to pay for that), under threat of force, disgusting and unpatriotic.
There was no suspected credit card theft in his example. There was a suspected presence at a prohibited location. A perfectly legitimate credit card transaction conducted there was simply possible evidence of that presence. The requested to confirm that that was really the suspect's card was not because the card was suspected of being stolen, but to see if that was really the suspect at that location.
Of course, the suspect could defend himself against that allegation by claiming his card had been stolen and thus even though it was used there, he wasn't there. But that wasn't mentioned in the example.
In the analogy:
Charge = post
Location = website
Credit card = username
A person has been prohibited from being at a {location / website}. There is an otherwise perfectly legal {charge / post} made at that {location / website}, apparently from said person's {credit card / username}. The court wants to confirm that that was really that person's {credit card / username}, not because there's anything wrong with the {charge / post}, but because if it was then that's evidence that the person was at the {location / website} he wasn't supposed to be at. Of course said person could counter-claim that someone else was using their {credit card / username}, but that's not the issue in dispute.
The United States is a Republic, a collection of 50 individual and fully sovereign states.
Not that this undermines your overall point, but though those are both true statements, they are not connected as you seem to suggest. Many of the individual states are themselves republics, and there are unitary republics not composed of individually sovereign states all over the world. I think the word you're looking for is "Federation".
Actually if you are living with the bulk of the populations in a non-swing state. Voting 3rd party gives you more power. Yes your candidate will not win. But with more people voting third party, It gives that party more strength, as well their views gets more credit.
Yes, a million times this!
If you live in a swing state, the "vote the lesser of the two evils with a chance of winning" thing makes strategic sense. You don't have enough influence to really make the changes you might want, but you have enough influence to help cut your losses at least, so it makes more sense to try for the mediocre possibility than the impossible ideal.
But if you don't live in a swing state, you're lucky! Your powerlessness gives you the freedom that could actually make a nationwide difference in the long game, because since either the lesser or greater of the two mainstream "evils" is a shoe-in in your state, there's no point in wasting your vote supporting or opposing something that's statistically inevitable. Instead, your best strategic vote is to vote for whichever third party you would really prefer, or at least, the one you hate the least. This has numerous benefits:
- Obviously, it increases the support for that third party, and for third parties in general, nudging the country a tiny step closer to a healthy spread of options in our elections.
- Whichever party you statistically would otherwise have voted for will adapt to mimic the party you did vote for, in order to try to bring you back into the fold, e.g. Republicans will adopt Libertarian and Constitution party policies and Democrats will adopt Green and Justice party policies.
But the really promising benefits are bigger, if also riskier:
- If you would have otherwise voted for the shoe-in, then many people following this strategy (e.g. California liberals voting Green instead of the shoe-in Democrat) will make your state into a swing state and give your vote more influence in future elections. The down side to this is now the side you would otherwise support is no longer a shoe-in and you may have to strategically vote for the "lesser evil" again; though this may be counterbalanced by the following effect...
- If you would have otherwise voted against the shoe-in, then a bloc of like-minded people following this strategy (e.g. California conservatives voting Libertarian instead of the doomed Republican) can be very aggressive at "spoiling" the "lesser evil", since they'd have lost anyway, and can go on to try to outright supplant the "lesser evil" with someone they actually consider good, without risking making things any worse (since they were already as bad as they can get, with the "greater evil" a shoe-in).
So, continuing the California example, if people followed this strategy we could go from Democrats being shoe-ins, Republicans being a close second, and minor third parties not having much influence, to anything from a diminished but still slightly dominant Greenish Democrat party having lost a large bloc to the ascending Green party, who are still not spoiling their (otherwise-Democrat) vote because the Libertarian party has eaten a large chunk of the Republican part; to a close race between Greenish Democrats and Libertarians, with a strong Green presence rising and a lingering Libertarianish Republican presence.
If this happened in every state, then you end up with every state a swing state, with currently "third" parties now major parties in some states, and all third parties more prominent nationwide; all without anyone ever risking spoiling anything and letting the greater evil win. With more prominent third parties we might even see debate and campaign reform getting them more air time; and maybe, if just one third party, any third party, can get into power for just one term, then we might even see electoral reform that would make it plausible for third parties to continue to win thereafter. All major third parties support electoral reform, so
It's well documented that a vast majority of journalists are registered Democrats
And their bosses -- the people who own the big media empires -- are registered Republicans.
Who do you think has the bigger influence, the boss or the peons who work for him?