But A's second statement is not just a different way of putting the first statement. If A is fully aware of the issues, they know that the word "woman" is about gender, or about both sex and gender, or is at least ambiguous and controversial; whereas the second statement is explicitly about biological sex and thus represents a retreat. The first statement is a categorical proposition that relies on an equivocation and therefore cannot stand up to scrutiny.

But as @Mikie pointed out, (A) might not in fact be aware of all that. The reason I chose the example is precisely because under a certain light it's not crystal clear who is in the wrong and why.

They probably knew that the word “woman” is defined as “an adult female person”, which is about biological sex. The meaning is probably shifting these days due to misuse, so a little leeway ought to be expected, but B was insinuating that A was doing something wrong, namely bigotry. So I think A’s natural response is to be defensive because such accusations could mean ostracism and violence, and I don’t think he’s retreating as if B had the better argument.

The second statement of A seems more of a response to the appeal to emotion of B and not necessarily a retreat of any sort. B is where the fallacy is.

I don’t think rephrasing an argument into terms that are less crippling for some brains is unwarranted.

It sounds like guesswork. I suppose we can confirm whether we were being ethical, whether we should or should not have had a child, by asking our offspring if he would have wanted to be born or not were he able to choose. I don’t know; it’s just all too confusing for me.

The child has no say because it is not born. There is no child. So how can we behave ethically towards what amounts to a thought?

In the same vein, would it not be an imposition to deny the spermatozoa and the ovum the purpose of their existence?

It's fine that you think that way, but this is obviously what is up for debate, so simply saying it is reasonable isn't really partaking in the discussion.

The argument presented seems rather slippery.

When I enjoy something and wish for others to enjoy it too, can I just impose it on them?

That doesn't seem to hold up anywhere else in ethics or life in general, biological processes or no.

It’s just difficult to believe that feeding, educating, clothing, housing, playing, and caring for someone for the better part of their life is a burden or imposition on the child, when it is the parent who is spending the time, resources, and energy to do so.

Either way, we’re assuming the initial point, which is that life is a burden and birth is an imposition. It’s just not convincing. Procreation suggests that a child is created, and not taken against his will and forced into some realm not of his choosing. It’s like saying planting an acorn is an imposition on an oak, and we shouldn’t burden it by watering it. At any rate the narrative just doesn’t square with the world as far as ethics is concerned.

So much to unpack knowing your political stance regarding non-interference and impositions...

But first off, does the outcome matter when considering whether it's permissible to violate someone's autonomy and puts someone else at risk? Let's say that you knew that the activity was going to cause some harm. It wasn't even doubtful?

There is legitimate and illegitimate authority. Parents are a legitimate authority, meaning they can justify it, whereas political and government authority cannot. So there is not much to unpack.

As a child I had no problem submitting my autonomy to their superior knowledge, strength, and experience.

Sporting and play and exploration often have some burdens to them. I remember being taken rafting, hunting, sailing, surfing, hiking, fishing, all while surrounded by many dangers, often without wanting to, and I wouldn’t trade any of it for the minor comfort of non-harm.

Though I would use different terms, and stress the difference, I think that’s a good assessment.

In the case of Clinton, his adopting of deregulation and small government was largely political triangulation rather than principle, meaning he used the rhetoric to syphon votes from his opponents as an act of opportunism. His finishing touch was to “put a human face on the economy”, I guess by continually biting his own lip.

But it’s interesting to watch the transition from the ideas of the 80’s into the ideas of the 90’s, as it was explained by the most powerful people on the earth at the time: Bill Clinton and a Tony Blair. If you ever have the time to waste, watch their Third Way conference in the below c-span video and you can witness the shift in real time between what you might call right and left-wing neoliberalism. It seems to me it was more a matter of being associated with the Old Left, than anything to do with liberal principle.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?122788-1/progressive-governance-21st-century

I probably wouldn’t connect neoliberalism to post-modernism, but only because many on the conservative side of the bench think liberalism is a 1-to-1 ratio with modernity, like in the philosophy of Alexander Dugin. He holds some ultra conservative, ethnocentric, and anti-liberal ideas, seeing the collapse of liberalism as the perfect breeding ground for a resurgent new right. Since he conflates modernism itself with liberalism, Dugin is explicitly post-modern and illiberal. He is a vociferous critic of neoliberalism and globalism because the individualism of it all dissolves his favorite collective, the “ethnos”.

If the rise of the European Right is an indication, what comes after “neoliberalism” will be anti-liberal, while all that neo-stuff remains intact.

Here’s an article by a self-proclaimed neoliberal, the American Charles Peters, who wrote “The Neo-Liberal Mafnifesto” back in 1983. He also edited “New Road for America: The Neoliberal Movement”.

I’ll just quote the few paragraphs that distill his neoliberalism.

Our primary concerns are community, democracy, and prosperity. Of them, economic growth is most important now, because it is essential to almost everything else we want to achieve. Our hero is the risk-taking entrepreneur who creates new jobs and better products. "Americans," says Bradley, "have to begin to treat risk more as an opportunity and not as a threat."

We want to encourage the entrepreneur not with Reaganite policies that simply make the rich richer, but with laws designed to help attract investors and customers. For example, Hart is proposing a "new capacity" stock, a class of stock issued "for the explicit purpose of investment in new plants and equipment." The stock would be exempt from capital gains tax on its first resale. This would give investors the incentive they now lack to target their investment on new plants and equipment instead of simply trading old issues, which is what almost all the activity on Wall Street is about today.

We also favor freeing the entrepreneur from the kind of economic regulation that discourages healthy competition. But on matters of health and safety, we know there must be vigorous regulation, because the same capitalism that can give us economic vitality can also sell us Pintos, maim employes, and pollute our skies and streams.

Our support for workers on health and safety issues does not mean support for unions that demand wage increases without regard to productivity increases. That such wage increases have been a substantial factor in this country's economic decline is beyond reasonable doubt. But -- and this is a thought much more likely to occur to neo-liberals like Lester Thurow than to neo-conservatives -- so have ridiculously high salaries for managements that show the same disregard for performance. The recently resigned president of International Harvester was being paid $1.4 million a year as he led his company to the brink of disaster.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1982/09/05/a-neo-liberals-manifesto/21cf41ca-e60e-404e-9a66-124592c9f70d/

He also favours the draft and makes an argument for it in the same article. His affinity is with the Democrat politicians whom he names. He rejects Reaganism.

I wonder why I never hear of this version of neoliberalism, both the nominal and actual kind, but am told of the kind of neoliberalism of Nixon and Milton Friedman, both of whom abolished the draft.

It seems more an ideology concerned with how to pull a people from of the successive failures of the centrally-planned and mercantilist past, the ruins in which we are still living.

Some trade in cryptocurrency, gold, or other contraband, I’m sure. Either way, government is not a necessary component to any space or system where goods and services are exchanged.

I mean from my perspective there's no such thing as a market without state intervention. Markets are instantiated by states.

Like the grey or black market? They arise not because of state intervention, but in spite of it. Markets are considered spontaneous just as much as they are considered planned.

Of course, I would never actually use the phrase “Neosocialism” or “neoliberalism”, unless it was a term of abuse.

Philosophically, Michel Foucault’s idea of Biopolitics and “Left Governmentality” are worth checking out. Some say he was flirting with neoliberalism in those lectures.

As far as I know hardly anyone uses the phrase to describe their own politics or ideology, which is telling, so often it is little more than a term of opprobrium.

To me the theory of neoliberalism’s global ascendancy is overblown. I have trouble believing Reaganomics and Thatcherism extended beyond Reagan and Thatcher. The author of the so-called "Washington Consensus", for example, which is often panned as a neoliberal manifesto, consciously excluded neoliberal ideology like capital account liberalization, monetarism, supply-side economics, or a minimal state.

The background of neoliberalism's supposed rise, I think, is important. It comes at a time when we were witnessing the spectacular collapse of socialist countries on the world stage, the spectacular failure of Keynesian economics, while Thatcher and Reagan were seemingly pulling their countries out of the ruins of statist ideology.

This presented a problem for disaffected socialists after the collapse of the Soviet Union, both ideologically and politically. They could no longer deny that central planning was a failure, and that their popularity was waning. This led critics of the "neoliberalism" of Reagan and Thatcher, and newly disaffected socialists and social democrats like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerd Schröder, to re-brand as free market progressives. They tried to push it as a global movement. It's odd; though they were explicitly critical of the supply-side economics of Reagan and Thatcher, they are somehow considered in the same pantheon as Reagan and Thatcher, with neoliberalism flowing through them.

Personally, I take a different approach. I would call their agenda and the period since Thatcher and Reagan (and perhaps Bush Sr.) "neosocialism", because it better represents the spirit of its architects and reflects their turn away from the Old Left socialism into what Bill Clinton called the New Democrats, or what Blair called New Labour. This political triangulation flows right into "compassionate conservatism" of Bush Jr. and David Cameron. Tony Blair stood in front of the International Socialist Congress in ‘97 and pleaded for a "modernized social democracy", and this modernized social democracy prevails.

One carrier would destroy the entire Royal Navy at the height of the empire. Anyways, it was besides the point.

The idea that a politician can represent me is an obsequious one, especially if they’ve never met me or considered my concerns. So I don’t look at it as someone representing me as if he was carrying out my will.

Here the leader of the most powerful nation the world has ever seen cannot even face a reporter’s questions without a cheat sheet and a public relations team. It’s all a scripted show. I prefer reality television.

Bernie-bro extra salty. His new man needs his questions curated for him.

Don Lemon, do you like that your president needs instructions on how to enter a room and say hello?

Biden carries with him “cheat sheets” that provide advance knowledge of a reporter’s question, whom to call upon, etc.

One hilarious example shows Biden needs guidance for even the most basic of tasks.

“YOU enter the Roosevelt Room and say hello to participants,” the note read, then immediately directed the oldest-ever president, “YOU take YOUR seat.”

Just like his last campaign the whole presidency is a complete sham. The man is not under control.

https://nypost.com/2023/04/26/biden-cheat-sheet-shows-he-had-advance-knowledge-of-journalists-question/amp/

If citizens do not choose to support the state, but only do so out of coercion, it is on shakey ground. And certainly, with the advent of Trump, I would say that the Republican party has embraced a new vision of freedom that is defined overwhelmingly as negative freedom, i.e., freedom from constraint, particularly government constraint. This view of freedom is, at its core, philosophically anathema to a successful state, though thankfully not all traces of a consideration of reflexive or social freedom has been purged from the GOP, just the "Trumpist" component.

It’s true, I believe. On the whole of it, the liberal tradition of negative freedom has hardly made any inroads into the public domain until relatively recently.

Rather, it was the republican tradition of freedom as a mix of the rule of law and the independence from arbitrary will that has always been the core of it, from Madison and Jefferson and Adams on downward. This view makes the state central to the achievement of individual freedom, perhaps ironically.

It doesn’t help that most of the tenets were pure wind. Class consciousness, class struggle, historicism, dictatorship of the proletariat, the withering of the state, the labor theory of value…all of it was snake oil sold to a weary public, who mostly had little choice in the matter anyways. Had Marx argued the phrase “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” as a normative principle rather than some teleological end-game, we might be well into communist living right now. But the normative principles were revolution and violence, leading to murder and theft and oppression on a mass scale.

Communism was a kind of ideological colonialism that has lad some countries, like China or Russia, to sever its own history and adopt a European myth in its place. If it had tried to be normative rather than scientific, had led by example rather than violence, it might have become a sort of religion, like the Amish, where it’s adherents are looked upon fondly as they go around working together and sharing the fruits of their labor.

For me it goes to “sourcehood”. Basically, the source of the action is that which willed it, decided it, governed it, chose it etc. Until anyone can show that an action is not self-generated, but begins at some other place and time, so-called libertarian free will is the only good answer to the question of free will.

A bunch of lawyers and politicians may be of secret societies, but no society I’m a part of. Truth is you and I do not make any laws, and since we are a part of society, society does not make laws.

So? It is not in our nature to agree on everything. That’s why I afford them the right to disagree.

Where do these 'natural rights' of human beings come from? What is 'justice'? In nature, the best adapted genetic material survives in offspring; some organisms find mutual protection in societies and evolve social orders. I do not believe 'justice' exists as anything but a social concept elaborated by humans. How else can it exist? As soon as a concept is defined in human terms, it ceases to be natural. Yet how can undefined concepts be secured?

They come from men. The idea is that given the evidence human nature provides, such is enough for a reasonable man to conclude what rights ought to be conferred on him. One needn’t examine a law to discover that man ought to have a right to life, for example. He can do that by considering his own nature and that of others.

As for justice, I’m not sure what it is, but I do know what it isn’t. Justice is the absence of injustice, which is discoverable wherever it is found and with the same evidence and reasoning. One doesn’t need a law or declaration of human rights to conclude that it is wrong to punish someone for something they didn’t do, for example. Children recognize unfairness at a very young age. And so on.

One of the oddest trends in the history of politics is the idea that man must create an institution which then confers rights and privileges upon man. I think it’s clear that those who have rejected the divine right of kings in name have adopted it in practice, affording the same sovereignty as the king to the government, allowing it any number of positive interventions in the lives and affairs of others as if it wasn’t run by men. It’s no wonder that beneath its self-aggrandizement the government is simply a mechanism for taking money from one person’s pockets and putting it in another.

In rejection of this, the state should be concerned with securing the natural rights of human beings and making justice accessible. Beyond that it should not go.

But one cannot say that the government should disappear. Where man has evolved for millennia to depend on himself and his fellows, he is now waist deep in the process of domestication, whereby he is trained to respond favorably to the government, even in its most evil capacities. By now people have become so dependant on the state, that there is a class of primates who were never weaned and are unprepared to live without the zookeepers embrace. I don’t think there is any turning back.

Though businessman is highly represented in the former occupations of reps and senators, so are lawyers, veterans, and professional politicians. So it isn’t quite the party of business that Chomsky claims.

https://www.brookings.edu/multi-chapter-report/vital-statistics-on-congress/amp/#datatables

It’s a two-party system, the Ins and the Outs. Those who are in and want to stay in; those who are out but want to get in. Bipartisanship is the problem.

It’s tax relief. The tax relief you get depends on the rate of tax you pay. You’re using money that is already taxed. If you do not earn enough money to pay tax, you probably won’t get tax relief on your donation.

I missed it. After having read it, it doesn’t appear that you’re avoiding or evading taxes at all. Availing oneself of the tax system is not the same as avoiding taxes in my eyes.

I favor the rule of the people; you favor the rule of a few. I favor democracy; you favor representative government. I favor sovereign persons; you favor the idea that people get to exercise their sovereignty at the ballot box one day every few years. Ironically, I am a democrat, you’re a republican.

Report a person or business you think is not paying enough tax or is committing another type of fraud against HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

This includes:

• running a business without telling HMRC
  
• not paying enough Income Tax or National Insurance
  
• making false claims for the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme
  
• making false claims for Child Benefit or Tax Credits
  
• not being registered for VAT when they should be
  
• not charging VAT or other taxes on goods or services they sell
  
• not paying VAT or other taxes on goods or services they buy
  
• hiding money, shares or other assets in an offshore bank account
  
• other types of tax avoidance or tax evasion
  

https://www.gov.uk/report-tax-fraud

According to the government, your words alone might make any scrupulous tax man report you to the authorities, submitting you to investigation, which is itself a punishment. I think you’re right to avoid taxes as much as possible, and am confident it is all above board, but I’d be careful because the government is forever set on closing the tax gap.

A system whereby your neighbor can report you to the authorities for avoiding taxes is just another layer of threat among the rest of them. That you are arbitrarily subject to their whims is unavoidable. What you do today may be a crime tomorrow.

But, but but,... is not tax only possible if there is private property? And therefore a feature of non-communist regimes?

Taxes are necessary for any regime that cannot generate its own revenue. The exploitation of both the labor and finances and the property of its citizens is inherent in a communist regime, but not exclusive to it.

Tax evasion and tax fraud aren’t crimes in the UK?

You also disclosed that you profit from tax collection insofar as you draw from the government’s finances.

The problem with the argument @Tzeentch and @NOS4A2 are putting forward (as I believe we've discussed before) is that property rights are not intrinsically connected to violence.

The government could, quite easily, simply take what it believes is its property without any violence at all. I could just remove the money from you bank account. It could rock up to your house whilst you're out, break in, and take your stuff. Or, it could do so whilst you're in (since the same proscription applies to you - you can't use violence against them to make the stop).

It sounds like you can base it on non-violence, but it still revolves around property rights, when it comes to taxes.

States have certainly streamlined the activity of taking people’s money to the point where violence isn’t necessary. But tax evasion and tax fraud is still punishable by law and carries with it a range of life-altering penalties, from fines to prison sentences.

So though people may have been convinced that paying taxes is some sort sacrificial duty to a higher power, at bottom the threat of being kidnapped and imprisoned against one’s will still remains.

With the monopoly on violence comes the monopoly on crime. If any one, or any group, were to engage in any of the activities of government, including collecting taxes, they’d be imprisoned as criminals. Does that not say anything about the nature of their behavior?

Somehow and at some point people were convinced that voting was tantamount to democracy, that marking a piece of paper every few years constitutes the rule of the people. This is not any kind of rule of the people that I can employ in any seriousness, so I refuse to believe that since a man was nominally voted into power he has any legitimate authority over other people.

By bureaucracy I mean the state machinery and its employees, dependant as they are through the appropriation of other people’s labor and money. And we can agree that the appointment of these people will not make everyone happy.

There is a difference between a legitimate and an illegitimate authority. One's status as an official, or employment within a bureaucracy, is not good enough to justify the legitimacy of their own authority. It is for this reason that their job is thankless.

Society should be vigilant but delegating that vigilance to some job-holding bureaucrat, subject to the whims of a political class, is to be the opposite of vigilant.

All state systems are capitalist, the socialist ones included. I don't think the existence of one precludes the existence of others because any state that does not consider the production and management of capital is unimaginable. I avoid using that term as mucn as possible because it was a term of abuse invented by socialists and in its common use is essentially incoherent. But the increasing interventions into the social affairs of human beings proves to me that the state has a "social" rather than a "liberal" or "individualistic" tendency, and therefor socialism is the reigning ideology.

The state has never manifested as the liberal night-watchman, as far as I know, preferring to exploit and monopolize rather than protect. Instead, it increasingly expands its scope and power until finally it intervenes in all human activity. Communists promised us the state would just wither away but it became more and more totalitarian under their rule, as it invariably does. The teleology of each state is to capture society until both society and the state are indistinguishable. Notice how some can't help but conflate society and government as if they were one and the same.

One can search the entire website for the phrase “abolish the state” and find out that Mikie is the only one who ever drones on about it, hilariously enough.

So he made a choice: comply with the laws of one country - at least until he can use the legislative process to change them, move to another country, or stop doing business.
You have the same choice.

And people have the choice not to exploit their fellow man. Stop taking another’s stuff. Quit forcing another to labor for you. Find other means to satisfy your wants that do not involve exploiting others.

If you want to delegate your responsibilities to your fellow human beings to someone else, go for it. But I don’t think that favoring a piece of legislation—in other words sitting around and doing nothing—is any sign that you’re helping anyone but yourself. Until I see you out there feeding people or giving them housing, your sanctimony falls on deaf ears.