A big difference is that incest can span all sexual preferences while homosexuality cannot. This is because incest isn’t a mere proclivity. It operates at a different level, like bestiality or masochism, at best a kink, at worst an abomination or abuse.

If you make one you’ll find out.

Collectives cannot make goals. Each node within its boundaries has its own goal, and since each node is different, so is each goal.

Living almost always involves work (at least maintenance) and certainly suffering.

But it involves a great deal more. It seems to me the rest should be included among what it is you are preventing.

I am not sure what you are asking. You can prevent work and suffering by not procreating. Once born, it is an inevitable (what I call) evil or form of suffering. Certainly, an implication is you shouldn't assume for another that they should go through this and all is good because you don't mind it (at the time of the decision at least).

Again, when I look at what act or object or process it is you are preventing, I can only ever see that you’re preventing fertilization, and nothing besides. I have nothing beyond your word to turn to that shows me, yes, he really is preventing suffering.

It’s true, one shouldn’t assume for another that they should live, but ought the corollary hold, one shouldn’t assume the opposite? We cannot get consent from the unborn in any case, so the idea of consent seems ridiculous, but might you wonder if in fact your future lives would prefer to be born?

All power is illegitimate until it can prove itself legitimate. When a father leads his child across a street his authority need not be questioned. The relationship, the motivations, the behavior—all of it can prove the father’s authority over his child to be legitimate. When this principle is applied to the state, however, one can hardly find any reason why such an institution should reign over any individual, let alone to dictate his life and activities.

From where, then, does the state gain its authority? Assuming that, like money, the state has no power of its own, it goes to follow that we in the West, with our nobles and parliaments and congresses, willingly and obsequiously furnish it power each time we head to the ballot-box to select which mammalian “representatives” should have the right to our thraldom. Where one may on some days think it absurd to choose others to run his life, come election time he falls in line seeking suffrage, only to receive a perversion of it. It is in this act, the vote, that we participate in the state’s aggrandizement, never our own. And no matter whether our guy or their guy sits upon the throne, the throne itself, perched parasitically upon the wealth, land and bodies of the people who live there, remains long after he has left it. This is because the transient power of our so-called representatives is always offset, if not negated, by the absolute power of the institution. Furthermore, if the body of legislations, prohibitions, and regulations increase far quicker than their repeal, as they always do, state power must grow in inverse proportion to our own. It’s statism all the way down.

If one cannot justify state authority, if he believes with William Morris that no man is good enough to be another’s master, perhaps refusing to participate in the state’s aggrandizement is a first step to conscientious objection. But unless everyone refuses to vote this is not enough. One must, in a sense, vote through means not available in marking a slip of paper: with his influence, his voice, and his activity.

In his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Etienne de la Boétie provides the only means of escape from this relationship without descending into another kind of tyranny, which is to simply refuse to obey.

“Everyone knows that the fire from a little spark will increase and blaze ever higher as long as it finds wood to burn; yet without being quenched by water, but merely by finding no more fuel to feed on, it consumes itself, dies down, and is no longer a flame. Similarly, the more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields to them, and obeys them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies.”

Remember Shelley: “Ye are many—they are few!"

Boétie’s sentiment precedes the civil disobedience of Thoreau and Satyagraha of Gandhi by centuries, but it is an idea seemingly unvanquished by state power and propaganda. At this point refusing to obey, and the many actions and reactions such a choice may entail, is all we have left.

I made this argument:

“In order to prevent work and suffering one must prevent someone else’s or his own work and suffering. [The anti-natalist] is preventing no one’s work and suffering.”

I don’t remember if I said “he isn’t harming anyone” years ago, but the argument above is not analogous to the ones you listed. Maybe we’re getting our discussion mixed up. Perhaps you can help and explain why the one above does not work.

I am well aware of the “having children is a bad thing” argument, but I am more interested in the OP’s argument that he can prevent work and suffering by doing something other than procreating.

I get it, but I keep stumbling. I cannot conceive of living as work and suffering, in any case, but in order to prevent work and suffering one must prevent someone else’s or his own work and suffering. You’re preventing no one’s work and suffering. I can’t get past that fact.

While it is immoral to throw someone from a cliff, it does not follow that other behaviors—twiddling the thumbs, walking, or just standing there—must be moral because they don’t involve throwing people from cliffs. Even if I did believe procreation was immoral, I cannot see how doing something else, whether using birth control or burping the worm, must therefor be moral.

Your integrity and devotion to your principles could be seen as moral, and I do see it that way, but that’s as far as I can extend it. It doesn’t involve any one else, let alone their suffering, and I am unable to pretend you are preventing anything beyond fertilization.

The suffering is 100.. By adding another person, it becomes 120 let's say.. You have prevented that 20 addition that would have been suffered by someone So you HAVE done something. To ignore this fact would be to ignore future conditionals.. Then I would think you were making a playground of how we think of "could statements" to suit your argument.

I’m not ignoring future conditionals. I’m well aware that the opposite of your state of affairs is also possible, and have previously stated that, just as you claim to prevent suffering, I could blame you for preventing joy, love, and forgiveness.

What I mean is, your behavior does not prevent or alleviate extant suffering. Therefor it does not prevent or alleviate suffering. If I stand on the street and refuse to punch 100 people, I cannot say my behavior was ethical because I prevented 100 bloody noses, when in fact I did nothing at all. Again, all you’ve prevented is yourself having a child.

For me it does not follow that refusing to have a child prevents work and suffering any more than refusing to buy a car prevents a flat tire and busted tail-light. It’s not so much a problem with the proposition, but with my own thinking: the consequences of your behavior and the beings they are applied to cannot be empirically observed and measured. The sum total of suffering in the world remains. You haven’t prevented, eased or done anything about it.

At best I can say you are preventing yourself from having children. That’s it; you have prevented nothing else. And given that this behavior is entirely self-involved, that’s as far I can stretch the ethics in your behavior, and even then it’s pretty threadbare. In other words, it isn’t ethical at all.

To expect adulation and praise for what isn’t ethical behavior, though, is unethical behavior. I suppose that’s the man reason for my pushback.

Sorry, he was arrested for skipping bail. He is now facing extradition in the same cell. Now that’s a corrupt maneuver.

Assange is in jail for skipping bail. But that’s ok. You’re allowed to spread falsities. We make mistakes; we get the wrong information; we believe stupid shit. And the fact that we are fallible is enough reason to oppose anyone having the power to determine what is or isn’t true in the first place.

The same institution after Assange is the same one now pressuring social media companies to enforce state truth. I don’t care if people start believing the moon is made out of cheese, no one should have the power to govern what is or isn’t true, especially a government like the United States.

Why is it stupid?

Unconscious doesn’t have to mean automatic and split off from consciousness. Enactive, embodied approaches to cognition reveal the body as integrated with mind in a complex and inseparable fashion. Each subsystem of the body is reciprocally interconnected with all the others , so that the person operates as a functional unity. What this means for the idea of the unconscious ia that what is outside of awareness is not necessarily cut off from it. Rather, the unconscious is a kind of implicit consciousness. One can think of this in terms of levels of awareness rather than functionally independent chambers as Freud’s psychodynamic theory had it.

The reason that subliminal
advertising was such a dismal failure is that what is not important enough for me to be consciously aware of it cannot influence me at an unconscious level

I like the idea that the unconscious is a kind of implicit consciousness. We are probably more conscious than we care to admit. In the driving example, something pays attention to driving even when one believes he is not, and that something is the very same person who believes he is not paying attention to driving. How could we create antibodies if we weren’t in a sense conscious of the disease? And so on.

I would say that the person is abusing his dog instead of using his property, and I would stop him from doing so. To relegate a dog to the status of property alone and to excuse its abuse so that a man may gratifying himself seems to me to be a utilitarian position rather than a libertarian one. We don’t steal the dog because it is his property, but we prohibit it’s abuse because it is a sentient being.

But the point is that you would have to ground the moral difference - that is, the vast difference in moral value between a corpse and a person - in those biological differences. But that's already been shown to be implausible, for all those differences are sensible differences. I mean, corpses smell in a way that living persons do not, but it would be implausible to ground the moral difference in that olfactory difference. I am morally valuable irrespective of my smell. And so on for any sensible- and thus any biological - feature.

I think the moral difference between a fully functioning human being and a corpse is quite profound. The physical differences and biology might not be apparent upon immediate inspection, sure, but the absence of physical and biological activity is. Minding is but one of these activities, but it is no less a function of the material constitution and its array of activities as a living whole. In any case, I cannot see or find any other thing or substance upon which to place value.

Yeah, fair enough. I wasn’t trying to convince you of anything anyways. You asked, I thought I’d help. Cheers.

I didn't claim otherwise. Treating free speech as an object of adoration is fetishising it. Now go re-read the OP, and replies, and note the way free speech is treated.

Assange.

I’ve read the OP and replies and do not see how one can make the association. I’ve also read you in many threads on censorship and free speech pooh-poohing the topic, so maybe it’s more of a pet-peeve than a fetish. Assange.

I just though you might wish to peruse some information on the topic. It’s all a rhetorical ploy and a language game about a fetish, anyways. Nothing to see here.

Why rise against something you yourself built?

A sheltered life must be nice. But even the biggest recluse can stay up on current events.

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/03/04/future-choices/charting-equitable-exit-covid-19-pandemic

https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-report/2020/democracy-under-lockdown

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/03/how-authoritarians-are-exploiting-covid-19-crisis-grab-power

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/16/future-government-powers-coronavirus-pandemic/

https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/un_policy_brief_on_human_rights_and_covid_23_april_2020.pdf

Racism is a form of laziness insofar as a racist deduces from flimsy and superficial generalizations and does so without verification. Unfortunately, this species of thinking manifests in racists and so-called anti-racists alike.

Governments around the entire world have seized unprecedented control over the daily lives of their citizens. The restriction of movement, border closures, economic intervention, lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, police checkpoints, curfews—all of this has been occurring for quite some time now. I thought it was common knowledge at this point.

I don’t get the question.

There are other countries in the world, and conservative, liberal and socialist politicians employed the same authoritarianism. The only place I can think of that didn’t was Sweden, and they aren’t exactly the most right-leaning government on Earth. I’m not really sure what you’re getting at, in any case.

Well, we have a special situation where politicians tried to use a public health crisis as a political football. So, now we have a group whose political identity is tied to the denial of a pandemic. So, the suppression, if it can be called that, of inaccurate medical information is intertwined with political positions. The ethics of public health out weigh the ethics of politically driven misinformation. They could probably be quite a bit stricter and still pass based on the exceptions for Police Power to the ends of public health.

And I disagree. If the censorship is "not effective" then one isn't being censored; are they?

When politicians and their health officials can shut down entire industries, control the free flow of information, and rule by decree, it necessarily becomes a political issue. Authoritarianism isn’t the only way to educate and prepare the public for threats to public health, but our so-called liberal democracies have proven that they are willing to resort to such tactics.

Corpses are much different than living bodies, biologically speaking, so no one needs to insert a mind into the equation in order to discern a difference between one and the other. Though the debate about when the moment of death occurs is ongoing and challenging, the “organismal integration” of a living human organism displays activity and functions not present in its corpse state. So materially speaking it’s not because there is no mind that we cremate corpses, but because there is no organismal function and we require a way to dispose of the decaying organic material. Corpses aren’t obviously bad, but the infectious hazards and smells are more than enough reason to dispose of them in such a manner.

I do not think there is any reason to posit an immaterial substance or object when we already have a complex and dynamic organism to consider. Until we learn to value and sanctify that organism itself, evil will persist.

This is new territory, and it’s just as outrageous as the last.

Indeed. Hence fetish: an object believed to have special power to protect.

Free speech is not an object and no one believes it has magical powers, or at least you haven’t shown otherwise. At any rate, any argument against free speech is an argument for censorship, so maybe we can skip the word association and get right to arguing why speech ought to be censored.

Again, it was government that led to censorship on social media in the first place, so it makes little sense to me that only an act of legislation and some legal precedent can fix it.

We've always held that dangerous speech should be censored.

For a long time we thought some people should be slaves. The prevalence of the denial of some right is certainly not an argument against the right itself.

Do you think the government should have the power to inspect restaurants and shut them down if it finds them operating contrary to the public interest?

No, I don’t think so and for the same reason I stated. I don’t know of any solution, but there has to be a better alternative than aggrandizing the state.

It was government posturing and regulations that led to censorship on social media in the first place.

I, for one, don’t want to live in such a society. I believe giving the state such power has the corresponding effect of diminishing social power.

Do you disagree with calling privately owned lunch counters public accommodations in order to force them to serve black customers? They're private companies too, and before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was perfectly legal for them to discriminate on the basis of race.

I do disagree.

I don’t think that. I just think that governments shouldn’t police someone’s speech and beliefs. Do you think they should?

Sure, perhaps he made it up.

The dictum “they are private companies” holds true. When the government forces a company such as Facebook to operate in an approved manner, it violates their free speech.

Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/12/biden-covid-vaccination-campaign-499278

Anyone can prove what they are by pointing to themselves. What do you point at when you point to yourself? What do you use to point? What points? In each case it’s the body.

Right, you said “the psych”, another phantom you could never reveal or prove even if you wanted to.

Are you not your body? So be it. You can always pretend and say you are not your body, but you will forever be unable to reveal your true self, in any case.

The problem is when you speak of a mind you tacitly speak of the body, or at least you are unable to produce or point to anything else called “mind”. One is left to wonder what it is exactly you are ascribing value to.

I am my body. So what else besides me commits these actions/reactions?