winston_smith

> The "well-regulated economy" usually implies raising the taxes for top earners

A well regulated economy usually implies that people can count on stable laws, enforceable contracts, and markets that aren't distorted by the abuse of power.

Taxation usually implies people "paying their fair share" to keep the government working, although the folks to the right often note that for the folks on the left, this usually does seem to mean always wanting to raise the taxes for top earners (and vice versa).

You've constructed a false irreducibility here. Freedom and captivity are opposed, and it's important to be able to say "this would be less free than that", even if that distinction isn't always clear cut.

That only works if the alternatives to EMH are better heuristics than it is.

Then the people who decide what the politicians are allowed to say would themselves be politicians.

The objection you and others are making to TFA is that you can't choose to be apolitical, because everything is political. Your contribution is to propose that people might claim things are apolitical to prevent people from realizing the truth about how political they actually are.

Your appeal to newspeak is pretty pointless, as it applies only inasmuch as it does to anyone who might claim that something is its opposite, for example the slogans "the personal is political" and "silence is violence".

Sure, if you accept lies like that, you may lose the ability to think about the true nature of those things.

But you haven't really contributed anything to the conversation. You're just saying "ah, but what if they're /lying/! To /trick us/!"

The opposite strategy is to talk about politics constantly, so that it's painfully obvious who's in the minority.

Which is better for a gay man in Saudi Arabia? A company where people only talk about work, or a company where everybody is expected to take a stance on homosexuality?

> mentally compartmentalize it and go about the rest of your business. There are many people whose lives are not like that, and it's unreasonable to expect them to treat politics as a game separate from real life.

I bet the closeted gay folks in countries where that's a death sentence would MUCH rather have their coworkers compartmentalize their views.

> A functional definition of privilege is that politics doesn't matter that much to you

You're even more privileged if you're so confident in your job security and the popularity of your political views that you can spend your working hours advocating them without worrying that it'll affect your ability to feed your family.

The reason the word 'political' exists is that some things are very political and many things aren't. To be political in your example would be to base your decision to call an ambulance on whether the victim is wearing a maga hat or blm shirt. To be apolitical is to set aside your and their views of government and focus on the thing at hand that has very little to do with government, which is that someone is dying and you can save them with a phone call.

If I followed you around at work all day pestering you about obscure political issues irrelevant to your job, you wouldn't be able to get any work done.

That's a good analogy, and explains how we ended up with banana republics. They were just hostile takeovers of competing companies in Central America, leveraging our superior military assets. When you phrase it in those terms, Jeff Bezos looks much more like David than Goliath.

And it's why I want government to use its monopoly on violence to stick to keeping the peace, and create an environment where actual companies can compete without violence.

Because when the men with bombs also own the means of production, they do whatever they want, and you get mountains of skulls.

Seriously! Replace "government" with "Donald J. Trump" and all of a sudden it doesn't seem to appealing to have government in charge of healthcare, education, and Chuck Feeney's fortune, at least to a lot of the people making the argument.

> People criticize billionaires. Full stop. Criticism of their philanthropy is not selective...

And Scott's point is that non-selective criticism is dumb. If you don't want your dog to chew the carpet, criticizing your dog, full stop, as you say, is a terrible strategy.

If you're opposed to dogs or people richer than you in principle, then you can make that claim too I guess. But you won't get much sympathy if you do it when they're doing their most praiseworthy things.

Just out of curiosity, do you just think that billionaires are evil, or does that also extend to people in rich countries making six figure salaries in tech, who are also ridiculously richer than most of the rest of the world?

> The only reason they started paying was because it was codified into law.

Aye, there's the rub. The greatest evils are when the billionaires team up with the government. Shifting money from the villains with money to the villains in the legislature doesn't solve that problem, and the villains in the legislature already spend close to half the GDP.

> then people in general (through democracy) can decide what causes are valuable.

Conveniently, we can already see what causes we think are valuable, because the US government already spends about 40% of the entire GDP, $8 trillion per year.

Apparently we've decided that Donald J. Trump should manage it, and that $1 trillion per year should go to the defense industry (that's 600 Chuck Feeneys), with another $500B (300 Feeneys) to interest on the national debt.

(*edit: assuming 1 Feeney = $1.5B)

> extreme concentrations of wealth should already be heavily and unavoidably taxed

Unfortunately, government is already the most extreme concentration of wealth in the history of mankind, spending $8 trillion dollars a year in the USA alone, of which $1 trillion (that's 1,000 billionaire fortunes, or bankrupting Jeff Bezos 5x over, every year) goes straight to the military.

Because most people in society, across all wealth levels, refuse to live within their means. I was quite disappointed when I discovered this, because I thought that if I made enough money, I'd be able to support all my family. But then I started noticing that the people who were broke generally had newer cars and computers than I did, and that families with multiple six-figure incomes were spending their way into bankruptcy. And the government does it too, accumulating ever more debt.

OP said "change the constitution and give the govt more power". It's clear that OP's point is to oppose things that erode freedom, not that the constitution represents perfection.

You're splitting hairs. Their "score" just becomes whatever function the university uses to decide, and if they use it then their score would indeed be altered by the "adversity" score.

Of course they're comparable, and you just compared them. Like all pairs of things, they have similarities and differences. You're claiming that they're very different, which is fine, but you're dressing it up in language that suggests it's not even possible to disagree, which is silly.

Better yet, all 50 US states have government-run newborn heel prick programs, and they keep the blood. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-biobank-dna-babies-w...

It's cartoonishly evil. The government literally takes and stores the blood of all newborn infants.

There's a good thing they do with it, which is screening for genetic diseases, and some epidemiology. But there's nothing preventing them doing all that without tying it to each newborn's identity.

The doctors are stupid about it, but very few are going to forcibly take a blood sample from an infant while you protest and film it with your phone. And they'll give you horror stories and guilt trips about all the awful diseases your infant might have if you skip the test.

But fortunately the Mayo Clinic Labs have a test they can mail to your doctor that you can use instead: https://www.mayocliniclabs.com/test-info/newborn/index.html

Better plan it in advance though, and don't let the doctors put you off. Because once baby arrives, you'll be tired and the doctors will use all kinds of time pressure on you.

All 50 states have screening programs, so you'd have to go international. But you can refuse the test, and in fact the Mayo Clinic Labs have a test they can mail to your doctor that you can use instead: https://www.mayocliniclabs.com/test-info/newborn/index.html

Better plan it in advance though.

That doesn't tell us much without knowing what standard of living you think everyone deserves, and for what level of effort. And if I'm more kindhearted than you and think that everyone deserves a standard of living twice as high for half as many hours, what then?

"False equivalency" is a nonsense phrase. Analogies aren't true or false.

"X is political because it is a corporate entity defined in law." is a fully general argument that every company ever "is political", which is the dilution into meaningless I mentioned earlier.

And for all the things you mention, I support making them less political rather than more, and so should you. Finding an example of a politicized aspect of a thing is not an argument that it should become more politicized.

Listing the outrage du jour is not a good counterargument. The principle of "keep politics where it belongs" is a critical part of your ability to effect political change on issues like yours.

If you abandon it, then it gets much easier to silence unpopular voices -- the cab driver won't take you to the protest march, your ISP shuts down your advocacy domain, facebook bans your support group, all because your politics conflicts with theirs. Total political war is bad for everyone, especially those who are already unpopular.

No, this attitude is harmful. First, because it dilutes the meaning of the word "politics", which describes something much more specific than "everything". And second, because as you point out in your last sentence, politics is something that can and should be kept separate from many aspects of life.

Inviting politics where it does not belong particularly harms vulnerable populations, because politics is about the use of power and force. We agree to leave our politics at home in many realms of life, and this allows us to band together regardless of our political differences to prevent greedy and powerful people from exploiting those realms.

Been a while since I read it, but I believe he actually advocated for that. First he tried to establish that the sexes have some differences, then said we should see if we can make the workplace culture less biased toward the male-friendly characteristics.

> The limit to tolerance is being tolerant of intolerance.

This is nonsensical. Tolerance is the region between what you like and what you fight. There are lots of obviously bad things you shouldn't tolerate (like murder), and lots of mildly distasteful things you should.

Someone else being less tolerant of something than we think they should be isn't some special category of evil. As with anything else, you have to decide whether a particular case is bad enough that you must fight it, or ambiguous enough that it isn't worth the conflict.

By that logic you couldn't argue against anything in our current system, since it all played a part in creating the life you live.