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ATTN, Von Zwietracht & other libertariantards

Started by The Good Reverend Roger, April 30, 2013, 02:25:17 AM

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The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: M. Nigel Salt on April 30, 2013, 05:11:57 PM
It seems like your problem is that you are seeking a single unflawed ideology instead of nasing your convictions on your own principles. As a result, you can find nothing that you feel adequately represents you, and therefore are adrift without convictions. The mistake you seem to be making is thinking that convictions and principles come from external sources, and that to have them you must join someone else's ideology.

To be fair, this is trained into people from about age 4.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

The Good Reverend Roger

I think the reason for the disconnect between "social structure" and "maximizing freedom" is the conflation with "property" and "taxes".  If someone insists that taxation is theft, then no society will ever meet their standards, outside of Somalia.

If, on the other hand, you equate "taxation" with "paying the bills", then suddenly things become a whole lot easier.

The really absurd part of this is that people who pay almost no taxes have been trained to squawk about taxes as if the government walked into their house, took 70% of everything they own, and then shat on the stove.  Add to that the fact that almost nobody understands how "progressive taxation" and "brackets" actually work, and you wind up with a population screaming to be raped with a "Fair Tax" or a "Flat Tax".

" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Bebek Sincap Ratatosk on April 30, 2013, 05:07:52 PM
I used to roll with the idea of Libertarianism as the least awful form of government, these days I've decided they're all equally crappy in one way or another. A non-crappy government would be one thata focused on maximum personal freedom and on providing a support structure for citizens that needed assistance. Sadly, I doubt something like thata would ever be implemented usefully in the US.

However, I have found a glimmer of hope. Some Psychologists/Psychiatrist claim that through their studies they find that most people are Good but passive, rather than Evil, Selfish etc. Additionally, through the study of 'social networks' (not Facebook, the actual human social network) an individuals behavior influences the behavior of their friends, their friends friends and their friends friends friends (3 degrees of influence). If we behave in a Good-Active way, it influences 3 degrees of the social network to behave in a more Good-Active way. So while there may never be a government that is actively good, if these theories and observations are correct, humans could influence each other so that society becomes more actively good.

Hell, its better than voting for the psychopaths at the top and hoping they fix something, or ranting about obviously failed political belief systems.

ETA: There an interesting documentary on the topic: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/i-am-fishead-are-corporate-leaders-psychopaths/

Psychologists (psychiatrists don't typically do behavioral research, as they are clinical doctors), and primarily the fellow who has been doing this research for over 40 years is Philip Zimbardo, who gave the TED talk I posted in another thread. He wrote an excellent book called The Lucifer Effect, and is now studying heroism, which he defines simply as resisting the influence of evil. Zimbardo, Milgram, Sapolsky, Cacioppo, and Cialdini are all great people to read up on if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Zimbardo has done a lot of work studying the situation at Abu Ghraib, and his conclusions are pretty chilling; essentially, he is convinced that evil isn't "a few bad apples" or "a bad barrel", but "bad-barrel-makers". Now he's working on understanding how we can influence the whole social-political-military system to mitigate the "bad-barrel-maker" effect.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on April 30, 2013, 05:19:11 PM
Quote from: M. Nigel Salt on April 30, 2013, 05:11:57 PM
It seems like your problem is that you are seeking a single unflawed ideology instead of nasing your convictions on your own principles. As a result, you can find nothing that you feel adequately represents you, and therefore are adrift without convictions. The mistake you seem to be making is thinking that convictions and principles come from external sources, and that to have them you must join someone else's ideology.

To be fair, this is trained into people from about age 4.

This is sad.

In my opinion, a functional set of convictions have internal consistency, and are open to revision in the event of new information. I want to argue with what other people believe on the off chance that they'll present convincing information that will change my perspective, not just for the sake of uselessly flapping my lips and making noise.

Unless I'm arguing with Pagans or other control freaks, in which case, I just want to get 'em all riled up and banning people for posting images of houseplants.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: M. Nigel Salt on April 30, 2013, 05:29:27 PM
In my opinion, a functional set of convictions have internal consistency, and are open to revision in the event of new information.

This is precisely correct.  Hanging onto bad signal isn't principle, it's baboonery.

" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Cain

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on April 30, 2013, 05:24:07 PM
I think the reason for the disconnect between "social structure" and "maximizing freedom" is the conflation with "property" and "taxes".  If someone insists that taxation is theft, then no society will ever meet their standards, outside of Somalia.

If, on the other hand, you equate "taxation" with "paying the bills", then suddenly things become a whole lot easier.

The really absurd part of this is that people who pay almost no taxes have been trained to squawk about taxes as if the government walked into their house, took 70% of everything they own, and then shat on the stove.  Add to that the fact that almost nobody understands how "progressive taxation" and "brackets" actually work, and you wind up with a population screaming to be raped with a "Fair Tax" or a "Flat Tax".

I believe at least part of it is historical amnesia, with a rose-tinted view of a "libertarian" American past (the link I posted before had to do with a discussion as to whether women had more liberty in the 19th century than today).  The belief seems to be that in the past there was minimal taxation, most of it local and thus to the direct benefit of the person paying the taxes, unlike today, where a vast and impersonal state extracts wealth and gives it to layabouts who spend it on steak and beer.

Of course, for most of the world, historically there were taxes.  And they were pretty fucking steep.  And the arrangement was far closer to a protection racket than anything else, so the benefits were minimal.  When states developed a bit more, they offered contracts for "tax farming", which was pretty brutal and horrifying, even by the standards of the time.

Bebek Sincap Ratatosk

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on April 30, 2013, 05:18:20 PM
Quote from: Bebek Sincap Ratatosk on April 30, 2013, 05:07:52 PM
A non-crappy government would be one thata focused on maximum personal freedom and on providing a support structure for citizens that needed assistance.

The big disconnect is the mistaken notion that these are mutually exclusive.

Of course, they're not mutually exclusive as soon as we rid ourselves of the absurd notion that personal freedom somehow equals "I GET TO KEEP ALL MY MONEY!!!"
- I don't see race. I just see cars going around in a circle.

"Back in my day, crazy meant something. Now everyone is crazy" - Charlie Manson

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Also, I always kinda thought that the whole point of Discordianism, inasmuch as there is one, is to build your own set of convictions.

I mean, we embrace cognitive dissonance as a tool whereby to learn, which helps us to develop and maintain internal consistency and to critically examine philosophies and convictions which we might hold that don't really fit in with our cohesive whole. The problem with external ideologies is that they may often have portions which are not compatible with a given individual's convictions... for example, the piece of neo-feminist ideology that says that "cishet men can't be feminists". That clashes with my whole set of convictions about taking people as people first, and placing their descriptive details farther down my ladder of priorities in terms of how I view them. As a feminist, I think that being sexist is wrong, regardless of who is being sexist toward whom. I reject that ideology, and as a result, neo-feminists may well reject me.

That is the double-edged sword to owning and adhering to your own convictions; in general, refusing to accept group ideology equals being rejected by the group. But, you gain internal consistency, and I think that's a worthy trade-off.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


LMNO

I tried to do a search, but nothing definitive came up for me:


Has a viable state ever existed that did not levy taxes?

The Good Reverend Roger

#24
Quote from: M. Nigel Salt on April 30, 2013, 05:39:39 PM
Also, I always kinda thought that the whole point of Discordianism, inasmuch as there is one, is to build your own set of convictions.

I mean, we embrace cognitive dissonance as a tool whereby to learn, which helps us to develop and maintain internal consistency and to critically examine philosophies and convictions which we might hold that don't really fit in with our cohesive whole. The problem with external ideologies is that they may often have portions which are not compatible with a given individual's convictions... for example, the piece of neo-feminist ideology that says that "cishet men can't be feminists". That clashes with my whole set of convictions about taking people as people first, and placing their descriptive details farther down my ladder of priorities in terms of how I view them. As a feminist, I think that being sexist is wrong, regardless of who is being sexist toward whom. I reject that ideology, and as a result, neo-feminists may well reject me.

That is the double-edged sword to owning and adhering to your own convictions; in general, refusing to accept group ideology equals being rejected by the group. But, you gain internal consistency, and I think that's a worthy trade-off.

Yep.  It's not the group that's looking back at you in the bathroom mirror in the morning, it's you.

Also, the problem with groups is that they become Causes, and the morals of the Causes inevitably drift towards the most radical elements in the group, and that radicalization becomes competitive as the pack-mentality of primates exerts itself over time.

And that leads to sitting under a blanket, huffing each other's farts, and rejecting all information that comes from outside of the blanket.  You can't tell anyone that, though, because to them, that's defined as "being committed".

So you get folks like Susan Brownmiller, or that ridiculous hipster in Garbo's vid, who insist that their hatred is justified by their fear, and that ALL men are rapists, ALL sex is rape, and/or MY hate is okay because I'm AFRAID. 

What's particularly hideous about the fear excuse is that it validates this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_panic_defense

But it's not just neo-feminism that does this.  Ron Paul fans are another good example.  So are many religions.  In fact, I can't think of a single human behavior that doesn't inspire this sort of shit.  The problem isn't the idea, it's the people, and the reason that people are the problem is - AGAIN - that they allow the collective values of the group to replace their personal values.  Because we're pack-oriented critters.  That's not an excuse for the individual, that's a reason for the behavior of the group we call "the human race".
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Bebek Sincap Ratatosk

Quote from: M. Nigel Salt on April 30, 2013, 05:25:59 PM
Quote from: Bebek Sincap Ratatosk on April 30, 2013, 05:07:52 PM
I used to roll with the idea of Libertarianism as the least awful form of government, these days I've decided they're all equally crappy in one way or another. A non-crappy government would be one thata focused on maximum personal freedom and on providing a support structure for citizens that needed assistance. Sadly, I doubt something like thata would ever be implemented usefully in the US.

However, I have found a glimmer of hope. Some Psychologists/Psychiatrist claim that through their studies they find that most people are Good but passive, rather than Evil, Selfish etc. Additionally, through the study of 'social networks' (not Facebook, the actual human social network) an individuals behavior influences the behavior of their friends, their friends friends and their friends friends friends (3 degrees of influence). If we behave in a Good-Active way, it influences 3 degrees of the social network to behave in a more Good-Active way. So while there may never be a government that is actively good, if these theories and observations are correct, humans could influence each other so that society becomes more actively good.

Hell, its better than voting for the psychopaths at the top and hoping they fix something, or ranting about obviously failed political belief systems.

ETA: There an interesting documentary on the topic: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/i-am-fishead-are-corporate-leaders-psychopaths/

Psychologists (psychiatrists don't typically do behavioral research, as they are clinical doctors), and primarily the fellow who has been doing this research for over 40 years is Philip Zimbardo, who gave the TED talk I posted in another thread. He wrote an excellent book called The Lucifer Effect, and is now studying heroism, which he defines simply as resisting the influence of evil. Zimbardo, Milgram, Sapolsky, Cacioppo, and Cialdini are all great people to read up on if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Zimbardo has done a lot of work studying the situation at Abu Ghraib, and his conclusions are pretty chilling; essentially, he is convinced that evil isn't "a few bad apples" or "a bad barrel", but "bad-barrel-makers". Now he's working on understanding how we can influence the whole social-political-military system to mitigate the "bad-barrel-maker" effect.

Thanks for the clarification, I thought a few of the people involved were psychiatrists  since they were discussing people they had done assessments of. One interesting thing on the Milgram experiment I had not known was that when people were shown videos of previous testers refusing to continue the electrical shock, the majority of subjects also refused to continue the shock, and that when people were shown videos of previous testers going all the way, they were more likely to go all the way. Says a lot about the examples we set in its effect of the 'social network'.

- I don't see race. I just see cars going around in a circle.

"Back in my day, crazy meant something. Now everyone is crazy" - Charlie Manson

The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: Bebek Sincap Ratatosk on April 30, 2013, 05:51:38 PM
Quote from: M. Nigel Salt on April 30, 2013, 05:25:59 PM
Quote from: Bebek Sincap Ratatosk on April 30, 2013, 05:07:52 PM
I used to roll with the idea of Libertarianism as the least awful form of government, these days I've decided they're all equally crappy in one way or another. A non-crappy government would be one thata focused on maximum personal freedom and on providing a support structure for citizens that needed assistance. Sadly, I doubt something like thata would ever be implemented usefully in the US.

However, I have found a glimmer of hope. Some Psychologists/Psychiatrist claim that through their studies they find that most people are Good but passive, rather than Evil, Selfish etc. Additionally, through the study of 'social networks' (not Facebook, the actual human social network) an individuals behavior influences the behavior of their friends, their friends friends and their friends friends friends (3 degrees of influence). If we behave in a Good-Active way, it influences 3 degrees of the social network to behave in a more Good-Active way. So while there may never be a government that is actively good, if these theories and observations are correct, humans could influence each other so that society becomes more actively good.

Hell, its better than voting for the psychopaths at the top and hoping they fix something, or ranting about obviously failed political belief systems.

ETA: There an interesting documentary on the topic: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/i-am-fishead-are-corporate-leaders-psychopaths/

Psychologists (psychiatrists don't typically do behavioral research, as they are clinical doctors), and primarily the fellow who has been doing this research for over 40 years is Philip Zimbardo, who gave the TED talk I posted in another thread. He wrote an excellent book called The Lucifer Effect, and is now studying heroism, which he defines simply as resisting the influence of evil. Zimbardo, Milgram, Sapolsky, Cacioppo, and Cialdini are all great people to read up on if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Zimbardo has done a lot of work studying the situation at Abu Ghraib, and his conclusions are pretty chilling; essentially, he is convinced that evil isn't "a few bad apples" or "a bad barrel", but "bad-barrel-makers". Now he's working on understanding how we can influence the whole social-political-military system to mitigate the "bad-barrel-maker" effect.

Thanks for the clarification, I thought a few of the people involved were psychiatrists  since they were discussing people they had done assessments of. One interesting thing on the Milgram experiment I had not known was that when people were shown videos of previous testers refusing to continue the electrical shock, the majority of subjects also refused to continue the shock, and that when people were shown videos of previous testers going all the way, they were more likely to go all the way. Says a lot about the examples we set in its effect of the 'social network'.

This is one reason I despise Facebook.  It is basically a gigantic funnel for validation of bad signal.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on April 30, 2013, 05:42:34 PM
I tried to do a search, but nothing definitive came up for me:


Has a viable state ever existed that did not levy taxes?

I can't quite imagine how they would be funded.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


LMNO

That's kind of what I was thinking.  People who complain about taxation = theft, have no real-world working model on how a state can exist without taxation.

The Good Reverend Roger

#29
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (life continues) on April 30, 2013, 06:18:35 PM
That's kind of what I was thinking.  People who complain about taxation = theft, have no real-world working model on how a state can exist without taxation.

This is when they start posting stupid things about how a community got together and fixed a bridge, etc...Which SOUNDS great, until you consider:

1.  While they were doing that, they weren't doing their own jobs.
2.  There's a hell of a lot of road that is absolutely necessary.  Which neighborhood is going to fix I-10 between Tucson and Alamagordo?  There are no communities there, and that is one of the two main traffic arteries from East to West.
3.  Untrained people repairing a load-bearing structure such as a bridge is generally not considered to be best practice.

So now you have all these yahoos in Texas refusing assistance after the fertilizer factory explosion.  They want to do it themselves.  Well, okay.  Enjoy your horrible liver degeneration, dumbasses.

So the answer is this:  You can't have a modern society without taxation.  And, as Cain points out, taxation is a hell of a lot less onerous today than it was historically.

ETA:  http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/29/17975192-after-texas-fertilizer-blast-victims-rely-on-each-other?lite
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.