I would prefer 1 to 2. Then again I’m not sure what kind of security I risk losing. The hypothetical seems to me to make no sense because the two are not mutually exclusive and one doesn’t necessarily rise and fall in inverse proportion to the other.

Thanks for writing that.

Not unlike your own experiences, Justice Holmes used the “fire in a crowded theater” theory to justify jailing dissidents who were protesting the draft. This goes to my point that censors will use the promise of future damage to justify present censorship. In his words, if speech represents a “clear and present danger”, it isn’t protected, even if there is nothing clear nor present about what might happen. When will this danger occur? How will it manifest? This is basically why Holme’s dictum was overturned years later.

I’m still doubtful that speech causes the activity that people claim they do, or that upon hearing certain guttural sounds in certain combinations it will animate their body into performing this or that act. For example, when Mill suggests that speech and placards shown to an excited mob ought to be silenced because they lead to the harm of the corn dealer, violating the Harm Principle, I fail to see how the one necessarily leads to the other. It seems to me that the causes of any harms are the excited mob.

But then again maybe there is some sort of biological mechanism in some people that allows speech to push them around in some way, like sorcery. Who knows?

I think you’re right. The overlap of rights causes a sort of schism. My belief in property rights, for example, suggests that people can restrict another’s free speech rights wherever speech occurs in their domain. In a way, it’s their free speech right to censor whomever they wish.

But no, I would prefer 100% free speech to 100% security. In my mind censorship threatens my security more so than another’s speech, and I have a hard time seeing how words can threaten security.

Joe Biden may have inadvertently funded his son’s procurement of Russian prostitutes, who may or may not have been involved in human trafficking.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/hunter-biden-russian-escorts-joe-payments

Biden was given no subpoena. He voluntarily disclosed them, but after taking them and possessing them and doing god-knows-what with them for a number of years. And this was long after the national archives dismissed as false and misleading the complaint that the Obama administration was in possession of such documents. At least Trump’s were locked up and the chain of custody is accounted for.

Last year there was a case not unlike Biden’s, and she was sentenced to 3 months and fined. Biden’s snafu more comparable to this case and not Trump’s.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-hi/pr/honolulu-woman-receives-three-months-prison-removal-and-retention-classified-material

Since the Biden Center where the documents were found wasn’t built until 2018, it means these documents were taken and moved more than once, and potentially handled by movers and staff, all of whom do not have security clearance. Also, Biden used private counsel and not the FBI or security officers to search for and handle more documents, so now we can only trust their word, which no doubt serves to protect Biden’s interests instead of the public’s.

Of course Biden’s personal counsel will argue it was “inadvertent negligence”, because they are paid to protect Biden. And we’ll probably never know if the documents were opened, viewed, mishandled, because Biden’s counsel was tasked with searching and handling said documents, away from the prying eyes of the government and the public they are meant to serve.

I wonder if he’ll pardon himself.

I was speaking of politics, collectivism as the principle of giving the group priority over the individual, and individualism as the principle of giving the individual priority over the group. It’s where we give political primacy or rights or freedoms or protections to one or the other opposing political unit, the individual or the group.

One approach has to, by necessity, consider the wills of each individual involved. As far as abstractions go “the individual” is universal. The other isn’t. It considers at best some general will, at worst the will of a faction or of one man while excluding the rest.

But your point that there are different collectivisms and individualisms is true; these are protean terms and I will not argue that there can only be one definition or application. If by individualism we’re considering only the will of one man, then you are right, he’s being exclusive. I appreciate the objections.

Feel better?

Well, you’re not getting any swings in, that’s for sure. You’re not fighting anything. You’re staring at a screen reading words. Is this really the extent of your moral behavior, your deep caring?

Sorry; this isn’t fighting, and frothing on the internet is no display of moral behavior. What we can do is talk about these ideas.

You’ve made a little caricature and premise your judgements on it. You poison your own well. Then you froth and seethe wherever I appear despite claiming you don’t care. Clearly you do.

I don’t see politicians as more than job holders. They certainly aren’t avatars of any one ideology. You’re just trying to make a last-ditch efforts to ascribe to me views I do not espouse and do not hold. If you want to know my real views, I’ll tell you, but unfortunately I’m faced with this weird posturing.

Nope. Most people are collectivists, I wager.

Apparently not. After all my rhetoric you haven’t figured out that I’m opposed to collectivism. All we have are these weird gymnastics.

I voted for Trump. You never Figured Trump as a collectivist. But somehow I voted for a collectivist. The weirdest contortions.

According to you and your imagination.

Proof positive.

Nice. So you're a proud fascist and collectivist. Yet you rail against the latter. :chin: I guess Freud was right.

You’re just making stuff up now. I invite you to grapple with the ideas, if you can. Let’s see an argument.

I’m glad I did vote for it. It achieved all I ever wanted and more.

There are plenty collectivist capitalists, conservatives, liberals, libertarians, anarchists. It’s the going rate.

It is questionable to what extent others can be viewed as objects, because it is partly about external reality. Even one's own body, or parts, such as hands can be regarded as objects in the sense of being able to view their existence in the outer, material world.

Part of the importance of viewing others as subjects rather than simply as objects is recognising their values and meanings. It is the issue of people being ends rather than being seen as means. I remember going to see a careers officer just after I left school and during discussion he said to me, 'By now you should have got to the stage of just seeing other people as objects, like chairs and tables'. I simply didn't know what to say, to a careers officer who had such a philosophy approach...

The brute fact is that we are objects, not unlike tables and chairs. Human history, I think, has yet to come to terms with this. We have continually refused to place any value on the object itself. It’s ugly, it excretes foul substances and smells, it engages in lewd and shameful activities, it ages and deteriorates. So we posit a subject, a soul, or some other thing untethered from all this so that we can easily find value in it. In so doing we have made holy everything we are not, at the expense and slander of everything we are.

So, rather than the importance of democratic participation, I'd say I'd emphasize the importance of class power and organization.

There is some great insight in what you wrote.

It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it. So long as the State makes the seizure and distribution of wealth a matter of legalized privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.

Whether it’s workers or owners who benefit from the State, it matters little; all we’ve done is shifted from one beneficiary of state power to another, from one exploited class to another, and so on. Class power and organization spent in the pursuit of State power and the privilege to seize and distribute wealth might be in that respect a lost cause, when it might be better spent regaining the opposite of state power, social power, so that each class and organization will have the opportunity to determine the path of their own lives. Until then, achieving the means of exploitation appears to be the only solution on offer.

Again, fascism is the direct result of you kind of politics. I wonder if you’ve thought any of this through.

Racism and slavery, fascism and communism, war and nationalism, were some of the worst products of collectivism. We’re still crawling from the rubble of these disasters. It’s not something to be proud of, that’s for sure.

My interpretation - the senses receive the material form - color, dimensions, texture, and so on - while the intellect "receives" the intelligible species which is the type, which allows us to know what it is. "Knowing what [x] is" is the point.

In my interpretation the intellect doesn’t receive it so much as it generates it, like a caricature, by including some properties and excluding others. It isn’t able to grasp the entirety nor the particularity of any one thing so it makes do with what little resources it can offer.

Why this resentment towards the most natural drive imaginable?

It’s pure, reactionary fanaticism. The idea that people aren’t living their lives according to the fanatic’s own ideology is repugnant to him. They must be brought, through force, to conform, so meddling becomes his idea of good and compassionate conduct while not meddling is the height of evil.

He willingly turned them in a decade later. What a hero!

Rousseau implies this point when he takes pain to differentiate between the “general will” and the “will of all”. His contrast between these two sets of interests serve well as a primary distinction between collectivism on the one hand and individualism on the other. Unlike the “will of all” the “general will” refuses to take into account the private and particular interests of all individuals involved. It excludes them. Instead, it takes account of something called the “common interest”.

We can figure out the common interest through a sort of calculation. It is the sum of the differences left over after we subtract from the wills of all “the pluses and minuses that cancel one another”. “The agreement of all interests is formed by opposition to that of each”.

Arguably, even with the most exhaustive census a calculation of such magnitude would not be impossible. So inevitably we get the factions Rousseau warns about.

That is the error of Mussolini, Mao, and Xtrix: they pretend that their good, their interests, are found at the end of this calculation, which they never make in any case.

I agree that individualism is a personal belief, but so is collectivism. And it is no collective decision if others accept either of these principles. These are personal, individual decisions made by real, flesh-and-blood human beings, not arbitrary and abstract groupings.

Any collection of people is a collection of individuals. Each of these individuals adopt beliefs and principles on their own accord, and not by any collective agreement.

It’s not true, I accept any individual to have his own beliefs and interests, and defend his right to have them, whether communist, fascist, theocratic, or any collectivist doctrine. What I do not accept is any individual to infringe on the rights of another individual, and this is the direct result of individualism, not collectivism.

You seem to be confusing empirical and absolute truth. Since thinking is only known to be practiced by (some) entities it is a plausible conclusion that wherever thinking is occuring there will be an entity doing it.

But this is a truth of dualistic thinking. Since entities are formal collective representations of dualistic thinking and since we can say that reality is not beholden to suvh thinking, from the 'perspective ' of non-duality there is no thinking and there are no entities.

I think from the perspective of non-duality the activity (thinking) and the entity (the thinker) are one in the same. There is no difference between a backflip and the one that performs it, for instance. The entity is the backflip. It's entity all the way down and any action is just the movements and contortions of that entity. So it is with consciousness.

Collectivism and individualism are protean political terms and are always subject to debate, so the notions of "true individualism" and "true collectivism" are not true in any sense. A collectivist interpretation of individualism are those that come from the mouths of collectivists, like Rousseau, Mao, and Mussolini, so we can take them at their word.

But if the individualist regards the individual as the primary unit of concern in any political society, he necessarily regards each individual in that way. He affords each individual primacy, rights, and as such a certain dignity. If the collectivist regards the individual as subordinate to the collective, he necessarily disregards the individual as the primary unit of concern, does not afford him rights, and denies him a certain dignity.

I’m not sure any sort of affirmative action is needed. The surest way to corrupt the youth with Communism would be for the government to outlaw it, and McCarthyism served that effect. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx appears more in university syllabi than any analytic works. Had McCarthy and his ilk left it all alone we might have been rid of it long ago.

You didn’t mention the length of time Biden had them for, and that Biden was only Vice President when he took the documents and did not have the sort of declassification powers Trump had. Biden’s history with others who took classified documents betrays his own actions with them.

https://theintercept.com/empire-politician/biden-and-jimmy-carters-cia-nominee/

I didn’t say I was unsure about the practice. I was unsure about the answer to your quibbling question.

Does “effective” entail being easily controlled?

So, for example, if you declare a particular universal right you are expressing your primacy? Wouldn’t everyone need to agree with whatever right that you declare and also agree to your primacy?

You are expressing every individual’s primacy. If you realize the primacy of the individual you afford him rights and defend those rights against infringement. I’m not sure everyone has to agree to that.

It’s true. I just don’t know the answer to that question for those particular arraignments.

Right, I’m curious how this works out in practice. Can you not give an example?

Any declaration of universal human rights.

Though I can can see a benefit in both, the question of what happens to those who do not wish to conform to those ideals remains a problem.

If everyone is an individual, and the individual is given primacy, it follows that no one is excluded.

Not to mention the wars on the First Nations, colonialism, manifest destiny. Collectivism, through and through.

I suspect through family and kinship.