Lastly, would you prefer to part with some of your wealth by choice or be parted with it (and maybe your life) by force when economic inequalities pass a tipping point? Regardless of morality and notions of property ownership and personal wealth, history has plenty of examples of violent revolution when the rich few neglect the many. So, rightly or wrongly, sharing the wealth may be a survival strategy, as it were.

What's perhaps even stranger is that physically we're hardwired to generally have the same emotional needs, though obviously with some variety, and that most ways of being are different strategies for meeting those emotional needs. This is a topic discussed in Nonviolent Communication and I rather appreciate it.

What I have seen a number of times is that there's a turning point once I see how someone is meeting a basic emotional need with a particular strategy, and the through-line to it. Without that through line, things can be a bit scary as they don't seem to follow causal rules from the outside, and we're all limited in our models.

I don't always stay in really close to people advocating for violence, for example, as that's not a culture I entirely prefer. I've come to a belief after a while that nearly everyone is an extremely rational agent in their decision-making, and that it's actually the information presented to the person inside their brain at the point of the decision-making that is oftentimes the culprit for the vast differences in behavior for certain people. I've seen it from traumagenic mental health disorders to even normal differences in political opinion. Realistically I can't quite get in to that place of reasoning to speak with that person always, and it's not even really my place to do that or maybe even try. But it is humanizing, and it has helped me keep my head on straight instead of writing someone off so I don't feel disturbed by an unknown unknown rolling around some proverbial emotional garden.

Daryl Davis is another person I really respect and like as well. I look up to a lot of how he handled those kinds of clashes, as the way it resolved for him always has been so strange and mysterious to me. Incredible story, tbh.

I'll leave off with this quote from him here. Of course the goal is not necessarily to convert someone always to a different belief system, but I think it can maybe then be reinterpreted here as finding a peaceable middle ground:

"When they see that you know about their organization, their belief system, they respect you. Whether they like you or not, they respect the fact that you've done your homework. Just like any good salesman, you want a return visit and they recognized that I'd done my homework, which allowed me to come back again.

That began to chip away at their ideology because when two enemies are talking, they're not fighting. It's when the talking ceases that the ground becomes fertile for violence. If you spend five minutes with your worst enemy — it doesn't have to be about race, it could be about anything...you will find that you both have something in common. As you build upon those commonalities, you're forming a relationship and as you build about that relationship, you're forming a friendship. That's what would happen. I didn't convert anybody. They saw the light and converted themselves."

What terrifies me more than the idea of brain scanning that works is the (IMO more likely) deployment of "brain scanning" that doesn't work (but is used anyway) and creating a 21st century witch hunt.

AI is very impressive, but people are getting so used to it performing magic that they believe it can do anything while preserving the veneer of objectivity that algorithms earned in the pre-ML days.

As long as the elite still need other lower-class humans, e.g. chauffeurs, nannies and cooks, or security, the revolution can still get to them.

If the chaos so many rich preppers are gearing for comes to pass - their wealth won't protect them. As this[0] article points out: in an apocalypse, there will be nothing stopping their armed ex-special-forces security guards from taking over their New Zealand compounds and throwing them out - or worse. Their status as elites is preserved by the very institutions they are undermining.

0. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...

There are only 1 million sworn LEO in the US, and they work for a paycheck, not loyalty to Jamie Dimon and company. You think those cops are going to bat for former oligarchs versus a population with 3 guns per adult at ready?

This is a very contentious definition and central to the question being asked. You can't pass it off as already decided without any debate.

Two situations for your definition, you tell me whether something is stolen:

1) You sell me a Ford Pinto that you know is likely to explode in a crash due to a design defect. I sue you after I'm burned up and win. I seize your private property by court judgement. Have I stolen from you?

2) A slave takes an apple from his master's orchard without permission and eats it. Has he stolen?

No private property in nature bud. The rules are what we decide they are.

You start from the premise that the property is yours, that it's belonging to you was granted via some divine right. It was granted by the state.

Edit: The only property you own is that which you can violently defend.

First, even where property rights are accepted, a well considered definition generally has a caveat is made that property can't be taken "arbitrarily" or "unlawfully" or through a "legally established public necessity" or so on. In practice, every society which has had a legal concept of private property has also simultaneously had the concept that the government could certainly seize said property under certain conditions, and this has generally been treated as legally legitimate and not illegal robbery so long as it serves some common good. If you don't have such caveats, you run into all manner of issues justifying things like:

>Eminent Domain

>Taxation

>Court ordered seizures

>Civil forfeiture

You can also just just straight up deny the right to private property exists altogether. And not even necessarily from the obvious left wing perspective, you can just say the entire realm belongs to the king, so the king taking things to redistribute as they see fit is not theft, since everything was the King's to begin with. People have even claimed that the very concept of property is a form of theft.

Beyond those arguments, the probably most crucial argument here is that the poor's private property was stolen to begin with through government corruption and unindemnified torts to end up with this status quo, and how is restoring private property to its rightful owner theft? It is the very essence of protecting the right to private property! Particularly when people are calling for this private property to be restored through legal reform or through government overthrow (legal reform through extraordinary means). Not through simple anarchistic robbing of people who exist nearby you.

As for why people don't simply roll over and say they're pro-robbery, if you robbed somebody, you are a criminal and what you possess is not your property and subject to restoration to its rightful owner. People want to go beyond robbery, they want it to be legally established that people have absolutely no legitimate right to what they currently possess. People also don't necessary want to claim that if they argue for redistribution of wealth, that they also support grandmothers being subject to purse snatching. There's many obvious reasons why people don't describe their actions as "robbery", and your entire argument mostly is based on an presumption about who truly has a legitimate right to whatever property, as well as these peoples absolute unconditional right to this property, and argues any attack on either this presumption or presumed right (which has never existed) is some sort of leftist sophistry.

You clearly have absolutely no understanding of how "rights" work in the real world. There is no divine force enforcing your god-given right. There's only power. The reason the current "rights" even exist, is because they are enforced through power - if I steal from you, police comes over to my place and beats the shit out of me. Remove the police (and all other forms of power) from the equation, and you can wipe your ass with your "rights".

Or in other words, deontology is just glorified astrology, a bunch of mumbo-jumbo poppycock.

> By your view of rights raping someone would be okay if enough people want to do it.

You're trying to reduce this argument to absurdity, but in many ancient civilizations, rape, in some contexts, was considered okay.

Bodily autonomy, I'll defend in all cases, no need to argue that one here.

Property, not so much. It's part of a bargain. If the people with an outsized share of the property don't exercise their control over surpluses to ensure some degree of decency for all (which they haven't) then they're in breach of the social contract, and is time for a discontinuity in property rights that gives us a different set of people to try out the same contact on.

And lest you claim that this is some kind of extreme communist take on it, here's Thomas Jefferson on the subject:

"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."