Message from @Bookworm
Discord ID: 546808078826471454
I would say, do tell. But We got a troll on board. So maybe some other time or something.
I am heading to bed. Good night Pratel.
I think ya neanderthals have a better shot at talking about beating off
Night, Khan.
So what do you beat off to?
My Bitcoin account.
OK guys, how would you rate trump's new taxes
Go to politic free for all. This channel dead cause 30 second timer. Also varies state to state on the tax question.
wow
taxation is slavery
No u
Taxation is rape. #metoo
Taxation is not slavery, but taking from both ends (income and sales) is unfair and evil.
Taxation is obviously not slavery, but are you implying it's still bad? And regardless, what makes it more unfair or more evil simply because of this combination of sales and income taxation methods?
Taxes are an exchange of goods and services for universally flat rates, just included as part of the same deal that comprises citizenship.
government only helps the rich
and makes everyone else poorer through taxation
Can the exercise of political authority be understood as a form of violence?
yes
It's indirect violence; a form of coercion, since political authority can ultimately be backed up by law enforcement, a.k.a. men with guns. Taxes meets this same criteria, but it's not yet effectively enforced, as there are large numbers of people (44% of Americans) who don't pay taxes.
Source: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/81-million-americans-wont-pay-any-federal-income-taxes-this-year-heres-why-2018-04-16
They don't all get away with it, but that's a large number of people to have to track down and hold accountable, and the IRS tends to prioritize the people who try to keep more money for themselves, meaning the average person who ignores tax law won't see a gun forcing them to pay anytime soon.
Is it unethical? Yes, but the American constitution lists "promote the general welfare" as one of its purposes, and a welfare state is likely going to be ineffectual if its funding is entirely voluntary. Maybe it would have been better for the government to remain handicapped in its ability to obtain taxation, that way freedom would have been maximized, but I think the choice to make and enforce revenue laws was done more for practical reasons than anything sinister.
Personally, I would rather be taxed under the current rates and have a large military protecting American liberty than avoid taxation and rely on PMCs to protect my "right" to liberty as a citizen.
Hm... my impulse is to say yes, but only technically. I see the practicality of exercising political authority, but I think authority is most ethical when it's backed up by reason and not supported by force. I think there are a lot of good reasons for people to do what authority urges them to do, but currently the worldwide standard is to have a gun backing up the governance rather than a sophisticated compendium of good reasons and logical arguments.
I realize it's a bit utopian, which I why I have no problem complying with the current standard, but I would ultimately like to see humanity harness the power of the spoken word to hold people accountable rather than have people be physically arrested and imprisoned.
So, even the act of voting then becomes immoral? Voting is an exercise of political authority, after all.
Currrently, I would say it is, but only **because** the political authority exercised after the vote is backed up by force, but I have some degree of flexibility and nuance when it comes to these things. Just because I would prefer the political authority to be backed up by reason doesn't mean I prefer a system without any vote at all.
On a small scale, I would prefer me and my friends voting on a place to eat without the threat of violence to enforce the results of the vote to a situation where one of us has a gun and tells all of us "Okay, we decided to eat at KFC, and if anyone tries to do otherwise I'm locking you in the basement." But then I might prefer that absurd scenario to a scenario in which the friend with the gun picks the place and none of us get a say in the matter.
I guess access to clean water isn't established as a "right" per se, but the preamble to the constitution has that whole "promote the general welfare" clause, so at the very least there's a failing of government to fulfill one of its purposes. Not sure where the blame is specifically, but between the state and the fed there should be a relief effort to solve this problem. Very calloused words on the part of the state government if that's really their attitude toward the problem.
Not sure if it's relevant to pin this on AnCaps though, since the government responsible for this position is not Anarchist, nor is there any evidence to suggest that this situation is the result of Capitalism itself.
Yeah, that would probably open up too big a can of worms.
See you guys debating violence as a form of enforcement. This guy explains it best. Sources included. https://youtu.be/bCAUmh99hMI
I don't like his definitions at all. He mentions nothing about hierachies in his definition of anarchy, which is what the "archy" in anarchy actually is. Anarchy is a lack of hierachy. His definition of power is loaded so as to associate power with a specific application of power, and then his definition of violence is further loaded so that he can imply by the definitions he used that anarchy is resisting violence.
You cannot have praxis without some form of power, even if that power is merely self-determination, but he danced around this so that he could use his loaded definition of power and avoid the notion that anarchists may also be acting to seek power.
He is against class structure. He might also be a communist.
In either case he does cite his references. Violence is essential to enforce any order.
I definitely think he's anarcho-communist. He implies that Marxists are among anarchists, but then by his own definitions he should be troubled by that notion considering Marx called for a dictatorship of the proletariat.
If you can have a dictatorship in any form, much less a dictatorship imposed by a class of people, and not use any sort of power or violence to keep that class-based structure in place, I'd be impressed.
Violence is essentially an admission of imperfection, but we live in an imperfect world.
His definition work https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anarchism/
I agree. It's my hope, based on trends in human culture, that we're approaching an eventual (way past my lifetime) state of affairs which is not enforced violently, but in the mean time I don't mind violence being a part of reality... at least not too much. Death kinda sucks, but the drama of violence makes the story of reality interesting.
(And I suspect our reality is a form of entertainment for interdimentional beings.)
It's not an entirely inaccurate in definition, it's just selective, and for that reason I don't like it. I'd need to read that whole... what is that? An essay? I'd need to read the whole Stanford entry to be able to criticize it further.
A lot of the sources in this article appear to be left-wing. I can't say for certain it's untrue, but the way it discusses science as being flawed because of the rules it follows, and how it implies "anti-LGBTTQIA" and "ageism" "smacks of hierarchy, domination, centralization, and unjustified authority" leads me to believe that whoever wrote this is far too left-leaning for me to fully appreciate.
It has some points I like, such as how ordinary human relationships tend to be anarchistic. All in all, though, this article may adequately summarize modern (or perhaps post-modern?) anarchist schools of thought. It's just I don't agree with the direction a lot of modern philosophers have taken the idea of anarchism. Their obsession with identity politics as a means to achieve global socialism and rejection of objectivity in relation to truth leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.
ID pol seems like identitarianism just with a larger collective formed by minority groups instead of the collective majority groups, and then both sides of the far-right and far-left seem comfortable rejecting science when it doesn't agree with their agenda, only one side calls their denial of science objectivity and the other simply calls objectivity bad because it excludes the value of personal experience.
Anarchism as a whole is false. The problem is that inevitably, some group or some person is going to be ever so slightly better and gain power. While small interactions tend towards anarchism, as the population increases it rapidly begins to form hierarchies.
The Identity politics is the form that the hierarchy would take once the current "authority" is removed and also the mobilizing element to overthrow the current order.
That's what I tend to think about anarchism. I don't know that it's necessarily false, but I know that hierachies of power naturally arise and I think this natural tendency is best harnessed by structuring the order of society such that power ends up in the hands of whoever does the best job of using the power to benefit people.
I'd be interested to see how mobilizing ID Pol works in the long run, though I may not survive to see that. I figure the culture war is basically over whether or not 1984 or Brave New World is more disturbing and that in the end we'll get some dystopian amalgamation of both.
When I say mobilizing, I mean it's how the far left gets it's activists to stand out in the rain and yell and intimidate people into toeing the party line. It's how you get into institutions and organizations and turn them into your mouthpieces. It's how you inspire your activists to viciously attack anyone who might oppose your orthodoxy.
In the long run, identity politics is almost certainly going to tear everyone apart into separate feuding nations or groups or impose a new hierarchy within the western world based on race, sex and religion. Judging how it works with issues like trans rights and how it is treats the sciences, I'm very certain that identity politics will tend to rapid authoritarianism in imposing the will of the most intolerant (in the sense of the loudest, and most unified) minority.
Obviously, this is very bad. Pretty much everyone agree racism is bad, so why would we want to impose it via legal scripture (*a la* Affirmative Action)?