bit-anarchist

> The law is not there to rehabilitate, it's there to punish and thereby deter.

Technically, it's neither. The law is there to state what ought to be. Even putting that aside, it's prescribed punishment's goal is to remediate and prevent violations of the law, so it has three simultaneous means: to restitute, to deter and to rehabilitate. The balance between the three is predicated on each's ability to satisfy the original goal of remediation and prevention, all the while not violating other laws and rights.

> We put people in jail as a result of them breaking the law, regardless.

A core principle of the rule of law is the principle of proportionality, which states that only the most legal amount of force is the materially sufficient enough to prevent a crime. If lower measures are sufficient to prevent a crime, jailing should not be prescribed, not only to respect the law but also to make good use of scarce resources, as prison overcrowding may not only reduce their effectiveness, but also open the door for downstream right violations.

What's the transgression here, though?

For your example to be trivially valid, the farmer would need to be entitled to the sun, but the sun is not property of aynone as of yet. There might be an argument to this (especially if more context is given), but, in this general case, I find it unlikely.

Still, even we accept your example as valid, what would be the equivalent to "sunlight"? Labor, maybe? But labor isn't something that is owned nor it's a persistent property of material resources, it's human-derived transformation. It's inconcrete by itself, even more so than light, more akin to work (in the technical physics sense). It just so happens that it "produces" a material outcome.

> The reason private property exists is not because land (for instance) can't be copied.

Both things can be true at the same time. Land being economically scarce necessarily means that whatever use is thrusted onto it will produce private exclusion. Today, we give this relationship of private exclusion the name of "property" or "private property", but that doesn't mean you have to formally recognized private ownership in law to suffer its effects - socialists regimes stand as a testament to that. Thus...

> They're both made up social constructs. One isn't more fundamental than the other.

The first sentence is reductive, while the second is innacurate, if not outright wrong. Physical property is primarily predicated on real scarcity, while intellectual property is purely predicated on social control, which, when analyzed more closely, lays claims (even if partially) of ownership over other resources, including peoples' bodies and mind. It's fair to say that one is more fundamental than the other.

> The fantasy is that an economic system predicated on infinite growth can be made compatible with finite resources.

Good thing that's just degrowth propaganda.

> This economic system is extremely terrible at meeting base human needs.

Except in comparison to all others. Crop failures and famines were common in feudalisms. Planned socialism is known for food insecurity. The system today might not be best possible, but it's, by no means, terrible.

> This is an absurd strawman.

Need to read more degrowth fiction then.

> What degrowth advocates for is taking as our first priority meeting human needs and living sustainably (which can be made compatible with most of the technology we have today in some form)

The problem here is the "human needs" part, which are famously infinite.

> ...than the ideology of growth for growth's sake, which mainly results in massive amounts of wasted resources and funnelling wealth into the hands of a few.

Also degrowth propaganda. No one "grows" for the sake of "growing", lest they have a need for it. All choosing actors act towards fulfilling their needs, regardless of whether anyone find them "fundamental" or not.

It isn't a cope. They are pointing out the fact that the state has been used against the opposition multiple times in the past by authoritarians, by both the US (this goes beyond DT's gov too) and socialist governments (although they often use the term "reactionaries" instead).

Other comments have pointed out this: how are you going to stop the "warrior narcissist" if you disarmed/de-weaponized the peace-makers? Even if de-weaponize after you erase all the current "warrior narcissists", how will you prevent new ones from rising up and re-weaponizing? Surely, you know that war is not the default state, so this isn't a theoretical.

Also, I think your description of "warrior narcissists" as a shallow description of the spirit of these people. You mentioned something about "identity" in later comments, and I cannot help but wonder what do you mean by that. I don't think Putin's main motive is his self-image, nor do I think Israel's leadership is murdering Palestine's populace to appear heroic.

It would also help to not assume the motives of people criticizing your ideas by presuming them to be "warrior narcissists" themselves. Elevate the discussion, not downgrade it.

I'll always appreciate the spirit of pacifism and collaboration, but your comments seem quixotic, and not in a good way.

On the other hand, subsidies do cause actors to make otherwise unsustainable decisions. In this case, excessive consumerism.

> You write as if there is only one smoothly homogeneous "Capitalism" and that it's actually practiced.

You'd be mistaken, as that better describes OP. All I mentioned is that the push for open competition began in capitalism (or, more appropriately, liberal capitalism) undermining the prior more nepotism-based system of dominance.

Of course, there are more intricacies but, given that OP's comment was shallow, I didn't feel the need of going deep into the many forms of what people may call "capitalism". We can get into it if you'd like.

Comparing with the alternatives, capitalism did already enable open competition and undermined nepotism.

Also, "more money = better than" is not a capitalist thing. It's just the nature of money being a physical replacement for social credits.

The person who is prohibited from having guns in any space has less freedom. The freedom of knowing guns aren't allowed isn't a freedom of its own, but a constraint on actions. Constraints provide security to do certain actions, improving their viability (hence why EU people may think it does more harm than good), but they don't increase the pool of legal actions, only reduce it.

Also, EU people would be wrong to assume that their countries are gun free. Focusing only on countries with a general ban, the are still a notable category of people who are allowed to bear arms: some government officials. So the security of "no guns" is already compromised. There also some downstream structural effects on building societies on such constraint. But I'd say this is besides the point.

I'm also not commenting on whether some freedom should be curtailed or not, as that's also besides the point.

In the end, given the laws of USA, its citizens do have more freedom than PRC's, even outside of politics. I've heard, for instance, that PRC's citizens have the "freedom to easy housing", but they don't. They, at best, have an promise of easy housing supply from the CCP. Given that housing supply depends on material conditions, it's not a formal guarantee. On the other hand, expressing the wrong opinion online in mainland China may net you arrest.

It's not just an American belief. USA has no MSS equivalent for starters. They don't have a Great Firewall. One can make their own independent party in the US (winning is a different story, tho). And so on.

And that's just in recent times, the PRC had it worse then.

What are other private corps going to do when their main government just uses its military might to seize their assets?

Then we don't live in this Capitalism either. Corporations and governments cooperate, but most of the final power is on the government still.

> The free market is deliberately engineered to push down price to cost of production

The free market is not deliberately engineered for any particular goal, except the free trade between parties. Fundamentally, it's a trading and information system.

Technically speaking, market prices only seek an equilibrium point between supplier and consumers. While, due to human ambitions, there's an empirical pressure for commodities' prices to go down, human labour is different. In case of commodities, you can scale all aspects of productions as long as there are enough. Whereas commodities are constrained by environment, human labour is constrained by the environment and ethics, as you can't just produce people, a hard requirement for human labour. As such, I find that the only cases in which people will be paid subsitance wages are when there's a oversupply of workers and an undersupply of businesses.

> So I am not sure how you imagine free market for labor to help workers unless you assume a market failure of some sort.

Because restricting worker/employer relations only makes it harder for switching firms, which empirically favors the more scarce side, which normally is the employers. Making these firms coops doesn't prevent lack of control, as elaborated bellow.

> The individual share of worker within a coop might be low, but it's still better than 0 under a private (capitalist owned) company.

The thing is, shares on their own are not ownership proper (the same applies to publicly traded companies, BTW) as it's exclusive. A share is percentage of influence over a corporate process that determines the final allocation of the corporately-owned resources. While the share division might be quasi-continuous, the final decisions are discrete and made by the corporation, for the corporation. In the context of a direct democratic governance, everyone will get a vote, but this vote will only translate into control if it falls in the required majority of a decision. In practical terms, having 1% share doesn't mean you have 1% control over the resources of the company: if a worker consistently fall under minority over all elections, they have effectively 0 control. Alternatively, they might find themself having their way in all elections. Despite having the same shares, two worker may have different levels of influence over the corporation. And that's just direct democracy. Indirect democracy, seem in large worker coops, make this distribution of control even messier. Ultimately, this is all to say that worker coops are still private corporations in the sense that they both alienate individual workers. The details of this alienation may be different from traditional individually owned private corps, but this is not the path for worker freedom. For disenfranchised workers, their only option is to find another corporation that better aligns with their values and goals.

Also, value getting redistributed to workers isn't exclusive of worker coops. Stock options, ESOPs, etc. aren't exactly rare in other private corp formats.

> Free market of labor is more than just a free choice of job, it also means that people who are not involved in the job itself might dictate the conditions of production

How so? In a free market, the only ones actually dictating the conditions is the supplier (the worker) and the consumer (the employer). The employer is the one providing the job, so they are involved by definition. The market often informs the employer in their decisions, but this influence is always consented, not forced. (Also, one cannot consent to their own death, no need for labor laws to state that.)

Finally, not sure why you just freely mentioned Hayek without elaborating. I also would like a citation, for the only reference I got was:

> There are, undeniably, occasions when the condition of employment creates an opportunity for true coercion. In periods of acute unemployment, the threat of dismissal may be used to enforce actions other than those originally contracted for. And in conditions such as those in a mining town the manager may well exercise an entirely arbitrary and capricious tyranny over a man to whom he has taken a dislike. But such conditions, though not impossible, would, at the worst, be rare exceptions in a prosperous competitive society. (Hayek 2013: 204)

It should be noted that Hayek would consider such dismissal coercive if the action was to result in the unemployed's ruin. As such, wouldn't call this a defense of mining towns.

In regards to socialist/communist confusion, OP primarily refers using the term "socialism", except at the end where they use "socialist communist countries", likely referring to the self-proclaimed socialist countries that strive/strived towards communism. (I'm not sure FEATTATEATTN means here)

> There is, for example, no free market for nuclear bombs or for human children, and for a good reason.

Reasons that don't contradict OP's: "Free markets typically stop being opinionated beyond the concept of enforcing contracts/consent." Nuclear bombs only current purpose is indiscriminate eradication of human life and child trafficking is well... child trafficking. They all break consent. The same can be said about slavery, but not labour.

Which brings to the core of this discussion: the free market of labour. The addition of the free market of labour cannot, on its own, result in loss of self-control by either party. Removing it, however, rewards those who benefit the most from the current arrangement, which is most likely to be the employers.

While commodities, and other conventional properties, indeed do not have a will of their own; once appropriated, they become an extension of the will of their owner. With this in mind, labour, capital and commodities aren't different: neither the human actions applied to make bread, nor the machines needed to make bread nor the bread itself care about their prices or how they are used, but their owners do. In both cases, the same human freedoms are being affected in the same way. Slavery is special because the traded resource in question is another human being, someone capable of self-ownership, and the slaver isn't simply dictating on, for sake of simplicity, non-essential part of their body as with labour and commodities, but the slave's whole body and life, thus violating the consent part.

Which segways to your final paragraph. When I mentioned "worker-ownership", I was specifically alluding to worker coops. They not only do not prove what I said untrue, they, both theoretically and empirically (but mostly theoretically, yet), prove it true. One empirical part is the fact that Mondragon's increasing reliance on contractors, for instance. But, more interestingly, is the fact that, presuming that all ~70,000 Mondragon employees are members (they aren't), each would have around 0,0014% share. Given that Mondragon works under indirect democracy, this share doesn't even translate to direct influence. Is this painting the image of worker emancipation? Notice how the corporate power over the individual is still strong - sure smells like capitalism, as defined as "control by those who own capital", except "those" here is a corporation, which is not that different from today.

Given that you brought the slavery, likely for the analogy with wage-slavery - trying to fix workers by making their employers democratic is like solving slavery by making their slavers republics. The proper solution is to give direct private ownership over the means of production to all, but that's likely economically infeasible (but who knows, society where everyone is a capitalist like this would be neat). However, we can fix the issue with coops previously by keeping them small, but to handle the large contingency of workers and their diversity, a lot more coops would need to exist. Furthermore, these coops would need to be able triage workers that fit into their culture, and worker would need to be able to chose coops that satifify them. That implies a free market of labour. It points to the issue being more located in the concentration of power on people, not individuals, which means socialism can't do anything to fix this, specially if it implies getting rid of the free market of labour. Perhaps pushing for coops can help prevent corporate power concentration, but a healthy free market of labour is critical.

I don't think it's a tool for sowing division. There is a significant group of self-proclaimed socialists who proudly stan the Soviet Union and Mao's China, so I think it's more of a case of ideologies being more messy than they seem.

Personally, I don't care as much about the label themselves as I do about the relationships they describe behind.

Not sure why this comment is downvoted. In the context of Marxian Socialism and Command Economies, it's very much true that socialism is incompatible with free markets.

Going even further, without a free market for labour, there's no true worker emancipation. Even with "worker-ownership" (read corporate-ownership under a democratic governance), each worker's power is still diluted by the governing body (which, funnily enough, means socialism strengthens capitalism as "control by those who own capital" while weakening capitalism as "free markets").

USD includes cash. In fact, cash is the preferred payment method for criminal things, contending with Monero, so complaining about its inclusion is certainly something.

Going even further, cryptcurrencies, being distrusted ledgers, still fulfill the ability to test for someone "social trust" within a transaction, anonymous or not. Also, it's not like we, as the whole society, have access to your transaction history at all times with USD (which we do with Bitcoin, funnily enough).

You have it backwards, most cryptocurrencies transactions are, at best, pseudononymous, where, by contrast, cash transactions are anonymous by default.

> What has society gained in return?

A currency technology that doesn't rely on central authority, slavery nor imperialism to exist.

It bears reminding that omission of a policy is a policy of its own. If the anti-abortion side is categorically proven to be the rational one after the pro-abortion side was implemented, it means that democracy wasn't leveraged to prevent harmful policies, it was employed to enforce harmful policies.

Same to you. Yeah, it's pretty difficult to find a good faith discussion of these topics, so I take any opportunity I can get.

Thanks for this one.

I also must disagree.

Holding the "a permanently comatose human is not a person" and a "a fetus could be a person" aren't incompatible. The first statement presumes a definitive state to body where as the second statement holds a potential.

A significant portion of the population might agree, but it isn't all. If it isn't all, there's disagreement. It bears reminding, witch hunting was consensus at some point. I think this serves as a sufficient counterproof for majority consensus as a source of objective truth.

I'd like to press on this unnaceptable callousness: if it's objectively proven that newborns lack sufficient potential for personhood, why would there be an issue with post-birth abortion? It's not like the "conservative" approach here is victimless, the guardians of the newborn will have to bear a responsabily they have no duty to, infringing on their right to live. And infringing on this right is as unacceptable as it can get. Of course, this is presume an extreme pro-choice position is true, which I personally find unlikely.

In the end, I find that the majority of pro-choicers (not saying this includes you) aren't much better than religious pro-lifers. Most of the time, there isn't a deeper consideration beyond "my body, my rules" or "the law says humans with at least X age are people". Sometimes, it's even "evil misogynists want to enslave woman into baby factories." At least, the religious pro-lifers are transparent about being about their creed. These pro-choicers stiffle discussion under the pretense of legal consensus, which makes discussion harder.

But, because question of abortion, as you have stated before, is directly related to when personhood emerges, it's also related to the origin of personhood and, going further, human rights themselves. As such, I think there's less consensus on this topic, most just haven't given the proper consideration - we can kind of see it already: not every pro-lifer is against abortion in cases of rape/possibility of mother's death, and some pro-choicers are very strict: a fetus only becomes a person after being born.

The point is that we don't need to increase 0.11% back to 10%. Specially when the base numbers have significantly increased.

Except it is. In fact, the difference between alive and personhood and the point of transition are, fundamentally, the same issue: if the point of transition is considered the embryo, then the distinction doesn't really exist.

While there's legal consensus based on practicality, that doesn't mean people agree with it. Until a properly formal and objective ethical answer can be found, this disagreement will remain.

What I understood their point to be is that the only reason they are "false beliefs" is your own biases. If they aren't actual "false beliefs", then the restrictions on bodily autonomy are as justified as when dealing with killings, and your argument degenerates into pro-authoritarism.

Given what OP said, probably not:

> There is no clear discrete point, other than insemination where it is not murder vs murder.

Will you actually address this point?

Tbf, communism is indeed more broad than Hitler's Nazism, from pre-marxists to Proudhon ancoms (although a similar comment may be made about the common sense definition of Fascism), hence I changed scope towards traditional Marxist-Leninists.

Thanks for restating what OP said.

Do they? Are you sure the high management knows who is a rapist or not? If so, I would like to see some evidence.

I have to disagree on fascism being this insidious bogeyman. While I agree that they ought to be fought against, IMO this is reaching into red scare territory (which is fitting, given that both share a really close ideological root).

I also disagree that merely keeping a Nazi in your establishment is support for Nazism. Simply not removing a Nazi is no more than not removing a person, it doesn't speak whether the ideology will actually take root.

The paradox of intolerance, in its original form written by Karl Popper, is about discussions. In this context, intolerants are people who forego argumentation. Kicking a person, Nazi or not, who has been acting peacefully and has been engaging in argumentation isn't "intolerance against intolerance", it's intolerance proper. You may argue that you are trying to prevent a future situation with this, but unless it is a 100% guaranteed (which I argue it isn't), it's just plain intolerance.

Finally, bear in mind that there are more equivalences in beliefs than you think. Mein Kampf didn't speak anything about Jew mass murder (and it still happened), and most (as in, the ones you see "marxist-leninist" in their profile) socialists admit that a nonviolent approach is basically impossible. In the end, both ideologies share the willingness to dehumanize and murder their opposition (and for similar reasons, Nazi-brand racial hatred derives from the same core idea).