Gah. I meant al-Ghazali. I blame sleep deprivation.
4,002 karma · joined February 4, 2010
Yes, Western governments have their problems. But honestly what alternative is there?
Chinese "communism" (really Fascism)?
Russian dictatorship / oligarchy?
African tribalism and anarchy?
Middle Eastern theocracies?
There are a lot of things I'd change about Western states. Making them truer to the Western values of reason, individualism, justice, peace and voluntarism would be a good start :)
But really, the only reason we're not living in the dark ages is those same Western principles. (Which we might now refer to as Eastern, had not Ibn Battuta and others rolled back the Islamic renaissance, plunging the world back into darkness until the Europeans caught up. What might have been, etc.)
One question - under what circumstances would you entertain the idea of supporting the military with your labour?
I mean, imagine you lived somewhere like Switzerland. Neutral, with a military that genuinely exists as a "defence force". Would that be okay?
Coming back to the Objectivist angle, there's a great passage from Atlas Shrugged that covers this:
=====
"Then what on earth do you know about Rearden Metal?"
"That it's the greatest thing ever put on the market."
"Why?"
"Because it's tougher than steel, cheaper than steel and will outlast any hunk of metal in existence."
"But who says so?"
"Jim, I studied engineering in college. When I see things, I see them."
"What did you see?"
"Rearden's formula and the tests he showed me."
"Well, if it were any good, somebody would have used it, and nobody has." He saw the flash of anger, and went on nervously: "How can you know it's good? How can you be sure? How can you decide?"
"Somebody decides such things, Jim. Who?"
"Well, I don't see why we have to be the first ones. I don't see it at all."
"Do you want to save the Rio Norte Line or not?" He did not answer, "If the road could afford it, I would scrap every piece of rail over the whole system and replace it with Rearden Metal. All of it needs replacing. None of it will last much longer. But we can't afford it. We have to get out of a bad hole, first. Do you want us to pull through or not?"
"We're still the best railroad in the country. The others are doing much worse."
====
In general this feels like a class of logical fallacy, of the form "no-one has attempted to achieve X, so X must be undesirable" but I can't find it in any lists.
edit: To make it clearer, take your post, and substitute slavery for coercive taxation. Your argument immediately appears specious, because with the benefit of hindsight we know that large, complex, modern societies did just fine after abandoning slavery. But people argued against emancipation in just that way at the time.
Also, many people have proposed alternatives for funding legitimate Government functions without coercion, and relying on charity for the rest (like education) in cases where people can't afford them.
They're a consequence of compulsory taxation.
Mine is happily running; it's a 464 w/ green phosphor monitor. I'm on the lookout for a reasonably priced colour monitor but they're rare as hen's teeth in Australia.
I still remember when the idea of running a free software stack was considered deeply weird.
My point, perhaps snarkily made, was that we are only now getting the hang of this, after decades of work.
Unless I'm missing something, we're not going to be approaching anything like 10% error bars for planets for which we have far less data.
Things are finally settling down to the point where models match independent data, e.g. the recent research into sea level changes as measured by satellite.
So now, finally, we can start making informed policy choices based on cost benefit analysis. (Actually, no, who am I kidding - Greens worldwide will keep hating on industry and capitalism, and everyone else will keep pretending AGW isn't real. But at least we could start forming rational policies if we wanted.)
Back on topic, to assume that we can make any kind of predictions about the climate of life bearing exoplanets seems like the height of arrogance given the state of the art in climate modelling.
... which is politics in a nutshell. That's partly why I support the complete privatisation of education, at all levels.
https://mises.org/library/what-if-public-schools-were-abolis...
... if the people you're trying to make a point to are also all assholes, because the assholes are in charge, and have exclusively promoted assholes to leadership roles.
Agreed that declarations of war can just be declarations of war, no amendments required. It strikes me as odd that Congresscritters would be okay invading a country, but not okay with declaring war against them.
As far as I can tell, this is because Constitutional amendments are hard to enact (in the case of the EPA and Obamacare) and for reasons I don't understand, Congress doesn't seem to want to declare war any more.
Is that a fair assessment, or am I getting only part of the picture?
But on the whole you can practically guarantee both of those methods will be primarily PR mechanisms, and / or used for the advancement of those who control them.
Universities used to be, but they are becoming increasingly politicized again.
I've known several amateur fighters, and they all report that the decision to actually attack their opponent in anger is the hardest step for most people making the transition from training for fitness to actual competitive fighting.
Two of those people were exceptions, though: one was a junior lawyer whose approach to her first fight earned her the nickname "Basher", and the second a cleaned-up ex-gang member who used to fight for fun in bars.
I've often wondered whether Basher was merely applying the same mindset she learned as a lawyer to the ring.
If you think we have problems with back doors in systems now, just imagine how that would go in a world of injectable RNA memories.
"So did you learn Chinese?"
"Yeah it was great!"
"Cool, let's go finish that Tor guide for oppressed Chinese citizens!"
"No, you know what, that project makes me feel really uncomfortable now, for reasons I can't quite define. I'm off now, gonna go sell my iPhone on eBay and buy a Huawei. Cya!"
A good rule of thumb is that a "consultative process" is a smokescreen unless the people being consulted have voting rights amongst those doing the consulting.
I really love fine craft beer. But can still sit down happily in a cheap pub and drink a jug of Victoria Bitter. It helps greatly to have entirely distinct mental categories in such cases.
1. Useful $THING gets mentioned in the news (mindfulness, AI, cryptocurrency, ...)
2. $THING gets hyped into orbit ($THING consultants, $THING apps, $THING books, $THING as a way of life, ...)
3. We start seeing articles like "$THING has been over-hyped" or "$THING results not replicated".
4. $THING drops out of the limelight, sometimes into a worse position than it started in because of the 'negative' press.
5. A new $THING emerges ...
Edited: not trying to be snarky here (see below for the actual term I was looking for). It's just that this is a pattern I've seen repeated so many times, in tech. and elsewhere.
For example - homosexual men are statistically more likely to belong to larger families. Evolutionary biologists believe that this is due to the presence of childless gay men benefiting the children of their siblings,thus genes that at first blush seem to be "for" non reproduction survive in the pool. (Someone should notify the Boy Scouts that they've got it exactly backwards).
What you can't do is generalise about individuals from their group membership (unless that membership is voluntary, and even that is fraught).
http://www.freedomkeys.com/ar-racism.htm
But yeah, looking at history, it really does seem like a lot of people, across racial, religious and cultural boundaries, loved war.