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An Anonymous Coward writes:
Found this interesting bit of history at the NY Times
George H. W. Bush: Hello, Mikhail.
Mikhail S. Gorbachev: George, my dear friend. It is good to hear your voice.
G.B.: I greet you on this momentous day, this historic day. I appreciate your calling me.
M.G.: Let me begin by saying something pleasant to you: Merry Christmas to you, Barbara and your family. I had been thinking about when to make my statement, Tuesday or today. I finally decided to do it today, at the end of the day. So let me say first Merry Christmas and very best wishes.
Well, let me say that in about two hours I will speak on Moscow TV and will make a short statement about my decision. I have sent a letter to you, George. I hope you will receive it shortly. I said in the letter a most important thing. And I would like to reaffirm to you that I greatly value what we did working together with you, first as vice president and then as president of the United States. I hope that all leaders of the commonwealth and, above all, Russia understand what kind of assets we have accrued between the leaders of our two countries. I hope they understand their responsibility to preserve and expand this important source of capital.
Gorbachev goes on to say that he is handing off control of the USSR's nukes to Russia in an organized fashion. Bush thanks him for that and then recalls the fun they had tossing horseshoes at Camp David.
With all the talk of Trump and Putin being business buddies, it looks like there is at least some precedent of the two cold war country leaders carrying on a civil conversation.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 03 2017, @06:47PM
So would you say your ideology is ultra-republican(note the lowercase r), where no substantial power, no matter how limited by the confines of laws, courts, checks, balances, and elections, should ever be placed in hands of an individual?
Because, as much as I'm a republican(again lowercase r, fuck Republicans), I feel like it's human nature to fall into bit of a hierarchical power structure when implementing complex tasks. I mean, I recognize that I'm an artifact of the society I live in, and have expectations built from families, schools, jobs, and governments that follow that structure. But... how would you design a republic so separated from delegation of power that no one, even temporarily, holds that much?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @07:12PM
Perhaps a version of the old Polish "Liberum Veto" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto/ [wikipedia.org] - where all decisions must be unanimous; any single person can voice an objection and stop the proceedings? That worked out so very well for them.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @07:24PM
I think your question is inherently wrong; if you base your society around the notion that it is acceptable for one particular organization to allocate resources through coercion (violence, or the threat of violence, etc.), then you'll never achieve anything but this kind of catastrophic distribution of power.
It must become a cultural norm that "the law" is simply the collection of all the contracts that exist between individuals—the law under which you live is different from the law under which I live, because each of us lives under a unique set of contracts (indeed, this is largely how much of "private" society already is, at least in the "west"). The key, though, is to realize that the contract-enforcement industry is not special; it does not require some blessed, ordained monopoly on violence granted by "The Creator" (or "The Will of the People", or whatever such nonsense); it's an industry like any other, and must also exist according to the continually negotiated contracts that define the rest of society's "law": As with any other sector of society, it is through competition within this market that society as a whole cooperates to find (through evolution by variation and selection) the most workable (if not the best) implementations of the intended service.
Let go of your statist religion. That one particular organization in your community is not special, regardless of its attempts to establish an exalted position through ceremonies, pageants, hymns, pledges of allegiance, and sacred symbols. It's just a bunch people who are as confused as anybody else.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 03 2017, @07:49PM
Oh, if I knew I was going to get an ancap reply I'd have saved my breath in trying to suss out some ideological depth. There's none to be found in this wading pool.
Your ideology is even less pragmatically possible than Marxist communism and would kill untold millions, while destroying the lives of billions, if ever seriously attempted. It would then be upended by the first violent group willing to band together for an authoritarian leader, rolling any "freedoms" you might value back centuries, and your contracts would not protect you. It would be lucky to survive long enough for the first completely uneducated generation rising to adulthood.
Your political ideology is one of the stupidest ever conceived of, and yes, that includes the out-and-out fascists I've also been decrying elsewhere. Their bullshit ideology is at least meta-stable. Yours requires a huge percentage of people to band together to defend not banding together to defend ideals.
It bothers to me to no end that you guys actually go as far as to understand the reality that states are fundamentally held together by the threat of collective violence against the individual, but never seem to have read any of the political philosophy on why that seems to be a natural state for larger, more complex societies to develop into. It also bothers me to no end that your recognize the immorality directing violence against people to get them to do what you want, but none of the literally millions of other ways people act immorally towards each other. You recognize that morality exists, and should be protected, but only in the context of what a state does to an individual.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @08:03PM
The shallowness is in your own thinking.
Nowhere do I propose instituting anything so abruptly as your analysis implies; only a statist such as yourself could possibly think in such primitive terms. What I describe must be evolved into existence, likely over a very long period of time indeed.
Your model of organization requires a mythical Intelligent Designer. My model of organization doesn't even require that people realize they are building solutions—it doesn't even require that they perceive any particular problem exists in the first place. That's how the human brain was built, and that's how civilization will ultimately be achieved.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 03 2017, @08:20PM
I have a rule of thumb for you: if your position on a subject relies on everyone who disagrees with you being brainwashed: you're totally wrong about that subject.
I'm not a "statist". I just don't think of "contracts" as magical deals with the devil that force people to keep their word through an invisible hand coming from fairy land.
I'd like to think that my views on the nature and even necessity of a state are fluid and open philosophical discussion. With different and better forms of humanity and society, where every individual is fully capable of understanding the humanity of every other person intuitively, and universally respecting that, no state of any sort is necessary, except perhaps as a tool for achieving grander designs.
We don't live in that world. No examination of human history or behavior or realistic economics suggests that the absence of a state is a positive for a society. It certainly doesn't address how you think "contracts" as you casually refer to them could even possibly be enforced, except as modeled by movie-style black market transactions guns constantly pointed at heads. Ancap life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, just like its proponents.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @08:44PM
Straw men and personal attacks. Nice.
Brainwashing? I'm not the one forcing children to make a daily pledge of a allegiance to a flag...
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 03 2017, @09:04PM
Ah, the misidentified logical fallacy, the first refuge of the bluster-fueled idiot who desperately wants to pretend to care about rational discourse.
Let's start with the general notion of what a logical fallacy is:
In the strictest sense, a logical fallacy is an argument that posits a claim that isn't necessarily true based on the supporting structure of the argument. In the former of the two you've invoked in your case, the strawman, comes from suggesting because of an artificially flawed version of a statement is false, a more robust version also must be false. This is noxious, because as far as I can tell, you've presented no arguments, just flatly stated ideology, without any sort of logical construction. Moreover I have to insist I was pretty direct in addressing exactly what you said and implied, such as in answer to the immorality of a state vis-a-vis violence as a means of control. Crying strawman without being specific marks you more as a whiner than seriously maligned.
This raises an important aside about logical fallacies: they're really only relevant when discussing logic. You've given me as many formal or informal syllogisms to analyze in my rebuttal as you've given serious critical analysis your ideological system: none. You might want to think about those nice glass walls you've got on your house before you tossing illogical stones.
The second fallacy you address, personal attacks aren't used in a fallacious way(i.e. you're wrong because you're short), but a jocular, mocking way, tying into the primary argument entirely as a throwaway aside. You know this perfectly well. If the worst you can say is that I hurt your feelings with an insincere witticism, then the most you can expect is a half-assed apology. I'm sorry.
*GASP* I'm not either. What a twist! It's almost like you cannot identify the differences between hundreds of different political ideologies because you had to invent a strawman label to throw everyone who disagrees with you under.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @09:06PM
OK
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday January 03 2017, @08:50PM
I have a rule of thumb for you: if your position on a subject relies on everyone who disagrees with you being brainwashed: you're totally wrong about that subject.
Okay, so you believe that ancap thinking is shallow, and everyone who disagrees with you is ... what, exactly?
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 03 2017, @09:25PM
I can give you a few different answers that all add up to radically different views, many of which I'd contest harshly, and even make assumptions about a person's character because of:
This is most obvious with highly religious people whose worldviews are informed first-and-foremost from their religion. If you believe, before you believe your own senses, that a certain book written sometime in the past is the absolute truth, for example, most views you derive from that belief are going to be different from mine There are other ways this same idea can apply, but the intuitiveness of how it can give rise to different beliefs is more obvious. I'm never going to think that eating pork is an important moral issue, no matter what the Koran, Bible, or Torah says about it.
Facts inform our worldview. It's unquestionable. Even people in the above group for whom a core ideology is more important. And some facts can be really telling. I've twice reformed my views on the fuel efficiency of giant container ships crossing the pacific and how that plays into global warming because I've read new things, once in an internet argument. I'll spare you the really boring details. My hope every time I engage someone is that I'll learn something and change my mind. I'm not usually so lucky
Yeah, okay, every time it's happened to me, and I've found out about it, it's been through reading my own words. And I can't cite a single time I think I "lost" an argument on logic alone. Probably confirmation bias there. But it does happen. Our brains are imperfect. Our reasoning prone to error.
As far as I can tell, this happens with conspiracy theorists, more than anyone else, and, like an ass, I always think I'm right. But the people who treat credible sources with standards with about the same amount of respect(if not less) than incredible sources are increasingly common, and I detest it.
There have been multiple times where I've knowingly gone into a soylent comment section, found someone to disagree with, and disagreed with their core argument, on whatever basis I could find. I can't help but think I'm not the only one to have done so
Of course people get to different systems of belief for loads of reasons. Doesn't mean I'm gonna put up with the shittiest ideas of the bunch going uncontested. I don't know if you were trying to highlight hypocrisy on my part or not, but I did my best to give a sincere and thorough answer to your question.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday January 03 2017, @10:09PM
I know it's off-topic, but I'd really like to hear your views on container ships. Would you please share?
(Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 03 2017, @10:28PM
Well, it goes like this. My original view was that pacific container ships were wasteful horrible things, running on nasty hugely inefficient(in terms of BTUs/tons of carbon). The stuff is even worse than diesel in that regard and just called "fuel oil" in the petrochemical industry, though it's pretty similar to kerosene. It also blackens the sky because international waters don't have any sort of general air protection laws.
Then I read about refinement and how those inefficient fuels are a necessary byproduct of the same refinement process we use to turn crude into jet fuel, gasoline, diesel, and plastics. So having learned that, and realizing that the alternative to using it would likely be dumping it, I had to reconsider my views on using it to fuel the big ships(though i continued to suspect they could do something about the massive pollution, a la power plants and high quality catalytic converters)
But then I raised that point in an argument on the subject with an actual chem-e. And they corrected me. The way crude separates depends heavily on which catalysts you cut the crude with in the separator tanks(and other more complex processes my primitive source didn't cover) and that it was likely the case that if two steps on the supply chain(the refinery and the container ships) were willing to spend an almost trivial amount more on cleaner fuels, the carbon:energy ratio would be way better. That the more nuanced reality I'd discovered before was really just a picture of what was cheapest, not necessarily what was best, and my attitude is now that we(the United States) need import tariffs to reflect the carbon costs of shipping in some way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @11:22PM
I'll be constructive here since I really do like ancap thinking, but I remain unconvinced that it could ever be practical. Do you have any recommended reading that can help me to become better informed?
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Wednesday January 04 2017, @01:30AM
Well I've got lots, but what would be useful for you would probably depend on what areas of concern you have with ancap thinking (and possibly on what you've already read). A very good recommendation, I think, is Murray Rothbard's book about money [mises.org]. It was an utter shock to me to learn that monetary systems could work with zero government involvement, and it was probably a big part of what made me finally conclude that everything could work without government involvement. If that subject interests you, there are other books about times private systems of money have arisen and worked well that I haven't gone on to read.
Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson [fee.org] isn't exactly anarcho-capitalist, but it's regarded as a classic, and it's hard to read the recurring pattern of "this would be better if the government wouldn't intervene" so often without tending towards concluding that it would always be better if there were no government intervening.
The Philosophy of Liberty [youtube.com] is an animated presentation that I think is very persuasive for the moral case for anarcho-capitalist thinking, that whatever it is we think we can't get without government force, it still doesn't become moral to get what we want at the expense of the freedom of others instead of by their voluntary participation.
None of these areas may interest you or have anything to do with your objections to ancap thinking, so these may not be useful, but maybe some of them will be.
For what it's worth I have never read any Ayn Rand. Everyone seems to regard her as indispensible or intolerable, but I've just simply never read her stuff. Apparently it's not indispensible, at least.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @12:56PM
Thanks!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @09:13PM
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, just like its proponents
Ancaps got no reason
Ancaps got no reason
Ancaps got no reason
To live
They got little hands
Little eyes
They walk around
Tellin' great big lies
They got little noses
And tiny little teeth
They wear platform shoes
On their nasty little feet
Well, I don't want no ancaps
Don't want no ancaps
Don't want no ancaps
`Round here
Ancaps are just the same
As you and I
(A fool such as I)
All men are brothers
Until the day they die
(It's a wonderful world)
Ancaps got nobody
Ancaps got nobody
Ancaps got nobody
To love
They got little baby legs
That stand so low
You got to pick em up
Just to say hello
They got little cars
That go beep, beep, beep
They got little voices
Goin' peep, peep, peep
They got grubby little fingers
And dirty little minds
They're gonna get you every time
Well, I don't want no ancaps
Don't want no ancaps
Don't want no ancaps
'Round here
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @11:10PM
I will grant you this: if men were angels, such a system would work. Heck, I'll even give a stretch that if the contract enforcers were angels, it could still work and be vastly better than what we currently have.................
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @11:20PM
One blessed, ordained monopoly on violence (a "government") is what requires men to be angels; in contrast, a market of competing service providers negates the need for such angels.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @01:01PM
Ah, ok, I'll just rob you at gunpoint then since violence will be democratized. There won't be anybody to stop me if I've convinced the whole village that there's just something wrong with you.
I mean, I guess you could take it up with my preferred contract enforcer who oddly enough always thinks I'm right. At least, I don't understand why I'd pay somebody to enforce contracts who thought I was in the wrong every now and then. The customer is always right!
(No, you're not allowed to weasel out of this criticism by saying but but but that's not ancap!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @03:05PM
You are still making remarks about centralized, blessed, ordained monopolies on violence.........
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday January 03 2017, @10:25PM
In fact medieval Iceland, for example, did exist, and it doesn't seem to have been all that bad a place. Even in its latter years when there was a perceived problem with violence which lead to the end of that system, the rate of violence was no worse than the US has experienced recently. And while Somalia is certainly not a nice place, it was much worse when it had a government. Somalia was the poorest country in the region under a normal government and the economy improved dramatically after it was sent packing. More recently they've found they can't defend themselves against advanced western nations bombing the crap out of them, it's true, but having a government in place wouldn't change that fact. Lebanon and Syria have vastly greater natural resources and expert help but even with that they are unable to control their airspace. So the best real-world examples we have definitely do not support your claims, particularly when we keep in mind that the comparison needs to be, not to some nirvana where nothing ever goes wrong, but to other political systems, none of which are perfect.
How about logic? If I do my best to fill in the holes in what you have written there is sort of a skeleton of a logical argument, tenuous as it is.
"Yours requires a huge percentage of people to band together to defend not banding together to defend ideals."
I don't know why you think 'ideals' need to be defended in this context. Do you think that the mainstream nation runs on ideals, or defends them? Virtually never. They run on money and self interest. Why do you suppose that will work for one yet not for the other?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday January 05 2017, @03:11PM
In fact medieval Iceland, for example, did exist, and it doesn't seem to have been all that bad a place.
You might want to read a couple Halldor Laxness novels [wikipedia.org] first, before putting such a claim forward.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 05 2017, @04:26PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by quietus on Saturday January 07 2017, @03:32PM
(Score: 1) by Arik on Saturday January 07 2017, @04:38PM
The roots of English common law lie back in the ancient customs of the germanic bands, so it's a close cousin to the Icelandic version. The low country is another area that shares that heritage, of course with a heavy influence from roman law afterwards.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?