A disturbing paper, but very interesting. I never knew of the opt-out system.

I have to object from the get-go because there is no justification as to why the state, medical system, or any other organization should have sole property rights over brain-dead human beings.

So I’m stuck with a questions. How do brain-dead human beings become the exclusive and legitimate holdings of this organization?

This thread has turned out to be a nice little compendium of the presumption of guilt and its propaganda. 6 years of hoax, fake news, and nothingburgers.

Oh you mean the "opponents" that run to the state for bailouts and subsidies at every turn? Those statists and socialists?

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were neoliberals. Obvious from their policies. The rest is your own strange semantic contortions and residual Cold-War era fear of communism, apparently.

I’m speaking of those in the state who give bailouts and subsidies. Milton Friedman said we don’t need central banks, that if it was up to him he would have abolished the Federal Reserve and the IMF, and was against conditional loans for their undemocratic character. The Washington Consensus was not a consensus, was short-lived, and the author left out supply-side economics, monetarism and small state policies that someone like Friedman seemed to prefer. So it beggars belief that all roads lead back to someone like Friedman or Hayek or… Pat Buchanan?. Politicians like Reagan and Thatcher appear as exceptions to the rule.

Not only that, but most of it disguises the failures of Keynesianism, of Marxist-Leninism, of socialism and social democracy, of Labour, as if these had nothing to do with the political triangulation of left-wing politicians, who needed to abandon some core tenets and adopt the principles of their enemies in order to regain power.

It was not so much window-dressing as it was an attempt to climb out of a number of ideological failures: the failure of state socialism, the failure of social democracy, and the popularity of the opposition parties. So while it tried to steal the idea of free markets from their opponents, it retained the collectivism and statism, and that’s where we’re at today.

Neosocialism? Neo-social democracy?

The big mistake about the neoliberalism theory is that it puts people like Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Obama, and Biden among its ranks. But these people explicitly rejected neoliberalism and pushed “modern social democracy”, a communitarian “third way”. Blair explained it to the International Socialist Congress here:



At the turn of the century, politicians subscribing to the Third Way governed five out of the G7 and headed 12 of 15 EU nations.

Here is an illuminating discussion about the third way according to some of its greatest advocates at the time.

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

I appreciate it.

The availability of guns certainly contributes to the use of them. There is no question about that. But gun control laws have steadily increased over time, not receded. The only arguable step backwards on gun control I can find is the Firearms Owners' Protection Act of 1986, which nonetheless banned the sale of machine guns to civilians. Oddly enough a number of laws making schools a gun free zone came into effect in the early nineties, right before the modern phenomenon of school shootings rose precipitously.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-Free_School_Zones_Act_of_1990

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-Free_Schools_Act_of_1994

As for the record of neoliberalism, the first gun-control in California was signed into law by Ronald Reagan, the Milford act. He was for the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban.

I cannot see that deregulation has occurred, much less by any avatars of neoliberalism.

There is a perfectly good thread here. Our interlocutors have every right to share their own opinion, as well.

I’ve just want to know of a single neoliberal policy that has led to a single death of despair, which for some odd reason includes mass shootings.

Let’s hear it.

Note, the connection cannot be made. He fails his own test.

So you, as a cop, are fully justified to exercise extra caution when you see a Christian when compared to a Muslim.

It appears to me that one ought to be equally cautious because the religious denomination has yet to prove itself to be any sort of mitigating factor in the criminality. It’s too arbitrary of a distinction.

Yeah, it’s a complete mystery that we have more school shootings than any country on earth. Nothing to do with policies. Maybe it’s ectoplasm.

Go back to sleep.

It should be easy to name one neoliberal policy that contributed to just one school schooling.

Ask the families whose kids died in one of the many school shootings we have.

Deregulation is a policy and a choice. It’s the choice to let industry do whatever they like, with obvious outcomes.

No neoliberal policy or lack thereof put a gun in anyone’s hand, I’m afraid. The Swiss government, on the other hand, does offer guns to every conscript and subsidizes ammo at shooting ranges, with no “obvious outcomes”.

In the running for one of the stupidest statements made on this forum.

So stupid is it that false analogies are your only recourse. How does a government impact your life without a policy?

And the absence of food does not cause starvation.

I suppose if one depends on the state as a child does on the nipple, the disappearance of one precludes the suffering of the other. Perhaps a process of weaning is in order.

The “real self” is already apparent. You are witness to it, conversing with it, and interacting with it. You need not traverse anything to find it. It does small talk and speaks of superficial things, as you, your real self, does in return.

There is a common notion that the content of one’s thoughts, his desires, urges, and instincts represents the “true self”, as if a man with suicidal tendencies is not being honest or authentic unless he has a self-inflicted gunshot wound. No; the true self is also the one that suppresses or sublimates such desires and instincts.

That’s a good point. A policy can only have impact if it forces someone to do something or act in a particular way. The repealing or absence of such a policy does not because nothing bears on no one. The absence of a gun control law, for instance, does not make people go out and shoot another any more than it makes them go out and not shoot another. So these kind of connections invariably try to connect an effect to a false cause, a common fallacy.

Note that no connection between “neoliberalism” and a single feeling of despair has been made, much less to any number of them—nor could it. So far, it appears the only instances of despair is found among its critics.

I guess it’s easy to attribute suicide, alcoholism, and drug addiction to economic conditions because one can avoid empirical analysis, which would take account of the expressed reasons for taking drugs, drinking alcohol, and committing suicide according to those who actually do it. An empirical analysis of “despair” might be useful here, too. Until then, the direct result thesis can be dismissed.

The idea of indirect culpability for these behaviours is just as specious. In order to push someone to addiction, alcoholism, or suicide, it’s safe to say one would have to actively interfere in his personal life, like a spouse, a bully, or tax man, which seems to me anathema to any species of liberalism. No doubt some self-proclaimed liberals do resort to such meddling and interventions. In recent years the government approach of actively interfering in the lives of people during a pandemic has proven itself culpable for indirectly pushing people to fear and despair, resulting in a compounding of the issue, but that wasn’t the policy of any one economic ideology, but of statism in general, where we sacrifice the freedoms of individuals to some notion of a common interest.

Wherever the right to life, speech, to hear, is violated to serve some distant end, the censor is engaging in morally wrong behavior. That’s why I added, and you removed, “ because violating his rights just in case is morally wrong”. If we’re going to quote out of context, can we at least leave in the entire sentence?

As for military secrets, I’m not sure violating one’s obligations to one’s employer, stealing their information, and giving it to their enemies constitutes an act of speech. We need to be careful to distinguish between conduct and speech.

You did phrase it as a utilitarian argument. Maybe you made a whoopsie. But I take the logic of your position as deontological not utilitarian, i.e. "It is wrong in principle, regardless of circumstances, to ever compromise on free speech." Another way of saying free speech is the greatest good. No need to dress it up.

We can quibble about one sentence quoted out of context but I think it remains pretty clear if the rest is considered.

By saying it? I might not know it to be true, but something being true doesn’t depend on me knowing it.

I don’t know that aliens exist, but I can say that they do and I might be right.

I’m wondering how the censor can know and be confident that his act of censorship was the right thing to do.

So? If you follow this up with “therefore it was wrong” then you’re a utilitarian. If you don’t follow it up with “therefore it was wrong” then it isn’t an argument in favour of free speech absolutism.

It was morally wrong to murder Socrates and morally right to leave him alive because murdering someone just in case is morally wrong, because violating his rights just in case is morally wrong, not because leaving him alive produces a greater good for a greater number.

This seems like an appeal to ignorance. I would say that something can be morally good even if we do not, or cannot, know that it is morally good.

You cannot say whether the act saved us or not from what you promised it would. Without this knowledge how can you say it was morally good?

Then why, in a defence of free speech, did you say “one can be confident that the loss of Socrates and his art is greater than whatever trappings had been gained by his silencing.” That seems a quite obvious utilitarian defence.

I said it because I’m confident that the loss of Socrates and his art is greater than whatever had been gained by his silencing. We have the act itself, the murder of Socrates, and thus the loss of his creativity and production, so no chance of him conversing about virtue any longer. What we don’t have is any proof that his silencing led to the better world that the censor promised us. The censor was the utilitarian.

I’m not a utilitarian.

The argument was epistemological and ethical. We can never know if an act of censorship protected us from the ill effects we were told would befall us should no act of censorship occur. In the case of Socrates, we can never know if his censorship saved the youth from corruption after all. So we are unable to judge whether the act of censorship was morally good. What we do know is the act of censorship itself, in this case killing a man and violating his most basic rights, so we can judge that it was morally bad.

The interplay between euphemism and dysphemism is an interesting subject in rhetoric, worthy of analysis. To avoid either, one might try to substitute it with a neutral phrase, but then again such neutrality might disguise the feelings and intents of the author, which may or may not be of some interest as well.

I have no idea what this means. Truth is only useful as a concept if all misrepresentations count as the opposite of it. We do not possess a version of events beyond attempts to recount them. Reporting a false narrative is often done for the purpose of suppressing another.

The distortion of the truth, ie. lying, is different than the suppression of truth, ie. censorship. One can be straightened out while the other simply vanishes.

Irony, satire, myth, caricature, sarcasm, metaphor, hyperbole—deception is a function of language just like any other articulated sound from the mouth.

There is neither truth nor honesty without falsity and lies. You cannot find any of the former without reference to the latter. Should either be eradicated what would we hold the other against? What happens to trial and error? What happens to hypothesis? Art? All that’s left is dogma.

It sounds like you’re more of a social harmony absolutist, and I’d wager you would proffer lies so long as the group as a whole coordinated to your standards. So it is with collectivism.

Presupposing that man is fallible leads me to conclude that he should not have the power to determine and enforce what only the infallible ever could.

Both free speech and suppression will be abused, but it’s a question about what abuse is preferable. The distortion of truth is not the same as its suppression, and though free speech leaves room for the former it expressly denies the latter, whereas censorship has and will be put to the service of both.

My point is that it is unjust and illogical to deny the right to to receive and impart information to all people at all times when only some people at some times are prone to accept it. If some people at some times are prone to to accept it it is unjust and illogical to give some people at some times the power to deny such rights for everyone.

Nor does it follow that because a kind of information is unacceptable we must give someone the power to determine what is and isn’t acceptable, and to punish any deviation from it. Those who we task to protect us from disinformation and punish deviation from State Truth, Church Truth, Corporate Truth, are often the greatest progenitors of it.

Truth is really the only counter to falsity in every case. For this we need more information, more data, more debate, more education, more transparency, not less of it. The more and more people rely on a group of people to tell them what is true or false, like a government or corporation or church, the less and less they become able to figure it out for themselves, only compounding the problem to begin with.

When the NYT released the Pentagon papers the government argued that to release them was a threat to national security. It turns out this was hot air, as are most claims that violence and death will befall us should someone release top secret information. In most cases it leads to the embarrassment of those who sought to keep it hidden. So I’m not too worried.

You’re right on that. Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum is a precious principle to me.

It doesn’t follow that because someone reads something he invariably accepts it. It doesn’t follow that because a kind of information is unacceptable that we must give someone the power to determine what is and isn’t acceptable, and to punish any deviation from it. And those you task to protect you from disinformation and punish deviation from State Truth are often the greatest progenitors of it.

There are countless other solutions to misinformation that don’t involve the willy-nilly violation of rights as your solutions have, but censorship is still the go-to method. It makes no sense, in my opinion.

Do you accept everything you read? It doesn’t follow that because one reads something he invariably accepts it. It doesn’t follow that because a kind of information is unacceptable that we must give someone the power to determine what is and isn’t acceptable, and to and punish any deviation from it. That leads to State Truth.

Disinformation is now being criminalized and leads directly to the jailing of journalists and dissidents and regular internet users, for instance in Greece, Egypt, Singapore, Malaysia. So the question, I guess, is already settled by the authorities. But we’re adults; each of us already has the ability to accept information or not, and we don’t need to censor anything in order to do so.

So if me arguing that everyone should have the same right as Article 19 of the UNDHR is a blind, question begging ideology, maybe someone can give me an argument why a government or some other group of people should have the right to determine what others can say and hear.

The utility of censorship and the benefit to those who practice it is without question. The government and its supporters no doubt benefit from the censorship of the press. The church and its acolytes no doubt benefit from the censorship of heretics and blasphemers. Pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders no doubt benefit from the censorship of criticism.

But I’m no utilitarian. In fact I am against it, at least wherever an individual is subject to unbridled calculations for the sake of another’s utility. I’d rather a minority does not suffer so that some arbitrary greater number might enjoy some vague and incalculable benefit at some point in the near or distant future.

So what? That's the question you keep dodging. Why do expect anyone to give a fuck about whether you miss out on a few non-pc jokes you might not have found offensive but others do?

I'm not arguing that anyone knows what you'll find offensive. I'm not arguing that the censor we choose will get it right all the time. I'm asking you why it matters.

Because we're neither children nor slaves. Such behavior is unjust and stupid.

I have given no such right because I do not know an answer to the question of who knows better than I do what I can or cannot read and write. Maybe you do, but one glance at popular opinion or any other authority shows to me that "virtually anyone" isn't a sufficient answer; it's an obsequious one.

What you find offensive says nothing about what I would find offensive. Your sentiments pertain to you and you only. "Most people" and other appeals to the populace are utterly unconvincing especially on the matter of who gets to decide what I can or cannot say and read. I find many things offensive but I do not violate everyone's basic human rights every time I secrete a little cortisol and start furrowing my brow.

I get it, though, if human rights are not a concern there are certainly more pressing issues.

The “spread of misinformation”…so fearful are we of such a spread that we will give the power to censor misinformation to those who are historically and empirically the greatest progenitors of it.

There is nothing empirical about counterfactual thinking, I’m afraid. But for the sake of argument, your intuition that the world would have been better had such-and-such speech been censored still involves the violation of countless rights, whereas education, counter-information, the truth etc. might have sufficed to make the world a better place instead. There are other means to achieve the same desired ends without resorting to tyranny, no matter how enlightened it pretends to be. So if justice and human rights is of any concern at all one might need to put in a little more effort.

“Measurable harms”? Like what?

I always face the insoluble problem of who I would give the right to decide what I can or cannot say and read, as if I was a child or student. I cannot come up with anyone or any group of people, dead or alive, who are fit for the task. So the Better Censorship would invariably be none at all.

Censorship always boils down to this: I don’t want you to say this-or-that and I don’t want others to hear it. It is the concern of an unwelcome and meddlesome third party who has neither the character nor knowledge to know what others can or cannot say, or what they can and cannot hear. All they possess is their own sentiment, and that counts for little in these matters.

Looks like the FBI found more classified documents, even after we are told Biden and his team have been forthcoming and returned everything willingly and voluntarily. Some of them were from his time as Senator, which began back in the mid-70’s. I guess it’s a good thing law enforcement got involved because apparently Biden’s team did a piss-poor job.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/22/justice-department-finds-more-classified-documents-at-joe-bidens-home

Take a look at the Index Librorum Prohibitorum to get a sense of the vandal’s project. Voltaire, Montesquieu, John Locke, Hume, Balzac—more than a few gems were subject to ban. Look at the works thrown into Nazi fires or destroyed by Commie censors. Luckily these days publishers can stay ahead of it and with smuggling some works can reach others. I imagine that wasn’t the case before the printing press. I can never know what Galileo or Bruno might have written if they were able to express themselves freely, but I guess we can be content enough with what was able to reach us.

The problem is in most cases we can never know what might have exised in that gaping hole. No matter what it is I’d prefer to know and decide on my own accord rather than remain ignorant about it and let someone else decide for me.