I expect disappointment.

I hope to be pleasantly surprised, but I'm not holding my breath.

Thus there is no such thing as a society that is both maximal liberty and maximal hierarchy (which I suppose you meant as economic hierarchy). — Garth

I didn’t mean to limit it to just economic but I did mean to include that, yeah.

Also :up: in general.

Although all systems have their issues, most of the inadequacies the welfare state addresses are not capitalism's fault. It is the political system that creates templates that are destined to failure, e.g., a corporate legal structure that ensures eventual serf-status for the majority.

The political system need only protect property rights and discourage the tendency towards consolidation. Competition is the key to what keeps the ship of capitalism righted and, as well, what capitalists fight (tooth and nail) to destroy. — synthesis

Capitalism is a product of (if not wholly a part of) a political system.

Discouraging the tendency toward consolidation would be precisely fighting against capitalism, because capitalism just is that consolidation; which is why, just as you say, capitalists fight so hard to destroy the competition that threatens it. Competition is only possible among peers, which is to say, people who are roughly equals.

My personal pick for the big bad behind capitalism is rent, including rent on money i.e. interest, precisely because that creates a tendency toward consolidation. If those who have more thereby have leverage to extract even more from those who have less (because those who own more than they're using can lend the excess out at profit and those who own less than they need to use must pay to borrow it), then the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and over time wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

Get rid of things like that, so that wealth naturally flows from the idle rich to the working poor and doesn't just flow right back up again, so that there is a natural center-ward pressure in wealth distribution, and in time (as the wealth equalizes) you've got socialism, but still a free market. People aren't going to end up all exactly equal in wealth, but that's fine when the remaining inequalities due to some people working more and consuming less are so trivial, and so easily overcome, compared to the free ride vs sisyphean struggle dichotomy we have under capitalism.

Top-down economics (like top-down everything else) is a disaster — synthesis

Which is an argument against capitalism, because capitalism organizes things in a top-down fashion: the owners are the top, the people who live on and work with the capital that they own are at the bottom. To eliminate that top-down hierarchy would be to devolve ownership equally to the people at the bottom, which would be socialism.

Capitalism isn't just any old free market, capitalism is the concentration of wealth into few hands, and the consequent division of the people into those who own and those who don't. A free market where ownership was widely and evenly distributed would not be capitalist, but libertarian-socialist.

Let's remember that capitalism is private ownership of trade and industry while the classic definition of socialism is ownership of these by the community. Modern social democracy doesn't strive for that anymore, just to "curb the excesses of a market economy", hence just to regulate capitalism, in my view. — ssu

If that private ownership were truly considered complete and sacrosanct, then the taxes that fund the social programs of a welfare state would rightly be considered theft. If the laws of the land hold it justified and right for the state to confiscate some of the wealth of those private owners for the benefit of all of society, that is in effect saying that the people as a whole, represented by their democratic state, have some rights in that wealth, i.e. a stake in it, a bit of ownership of it.

If I can rightfully take something that's "yours" -- not just get away with it, but if there's actually nothing wrong with me doing so -- then to that extent is it partly "mine" as well, because your claims to it do not rightfully exclude my claims to it. So if a state of and by the people can rightfully take from "privately owned" industry -- and it's not theft, but something they're fully justified in doing -- then to that extent that industry is partly "theirs", because the private claims to it do not rightfully exclude the people's claims to it.

Consider the extreme scenario, where 100% of "private profit" rightfully belonged to a democratic state for use in social welfare. Would that not be a form of state socialism? Would that not amount to a claim of ownership by the state to all of that "private industry"?

If capitalism would be so all encompassing greed, how do you explain then that even with capitalism many countries do have a lot of social cohesion and are just fine with things like the welfare state. — ssu

A welfare state is a counterbalance to capitalism, keeping its excesses in check. Without one capitalism would eat itself alive. It's thus prudent, for smart capitalists, to allow one, to keep capitalism otherwise rolling along longer, avoiding the crisis Marx predicted at its end... by slowly becoming more socialist.*

That's what "heterogenous economics" means, I suspect: a mixed economy, one with a mix of capitalist and socialist policies. Unless Benkei actually meant "heterodox economics" instead.

*(I think that there is a general pattern of that in all social systems, analogous to the evolution of parasitic organisms: if you kill your host then you die off with it, so there's selection pressure to evolve toward symbiosis rather than parasitism, mutual benefit instead of winning at another's expense. Thus social systems that destroy their societies to not memetically reproduce as efficiently as those that produce more stable and flourishing societies do.)

You may think it doesn't limit social interactions once they're already rolling; and for that I cite you the countless (I stopped counting earnestly after this happened with 15 separate people/social events) times someone has wanted to add me on Facebook, instead I offer them my email or phonenumber or Whatsapp, and the person immediately stops talking to me or never contacts me again using my suggested media. The intuition: what kind of weirdo exempts themselves from society like this? — fdrake

That has happened to me too and my takeaway was that this person isn’t actually interested in me personally so it’s no loss to not stay connected with them.

When I was a kid I never had a lot of friends because I didn’t understand how to make friends. As a young adult I intentionally figured out how and was then immensely popular and socially connected for about a decade. Until I realized how much effort I was spending being “connected” with people who didn’t really matter to me, to whom I didn’t really matter. So I just stopped putting in that effort, and none of them made an effort that stay in touch with me either, so my social life died... and nothing of value was lost.

The kind of people who will only “keep in touch” by adding you on facebook are precisely the kind of people it’s not worth the effort of keeping in touch with.

:up:

Mackie et al’s problem is in conflating “objective” with “descriptive”. Though to be fair “robust” moral realists do the same thing, so Mackie is right that their view is weird. But that says nothing against “minimal” moral “realism”, i.e. moral universalism, which doesn’t require that moral claims be descriptive and so can escape the problem into a nondescriptive cognitivism.

That or try some melatonin. — Outlander

Worked miracles for me. Wish I’d tried it 20 years earlier.

No reason to come in blind and expect a warm welcome to a discussion on ideas — Judaka

Politics completely aside, I think this is probably true of any ideas whatsoever. Most of my OPs haven't been about politics at all, but more about the "metaphysical" side of philosophy -- ontology, mind, epistemology, language, etc -- and I've felt an overwhelmingly hostile response to those too.

I get the feeling that many people only respond to anything when they disagree. I've seen very little in the way of people saying they like other people's ideas or adding further to them.

Parler was shut down by another private service that they were using, though.

Push comes to shove, Trump can always (ask whoever runs his website to) host his own listserv and anyone who wants to subscribe to his newsletter can literally do that. Or they can put up a web forum, like this one. Or any of numerous other alternatives to using these big corporate-controlled platforms.

To be clear, I don’t like when online communities are controlled by a central party rather than letting end-users control moderation from their end-view alone, especially when that central control is heavy-handed. But nobody has to use those kinds of communities, so I largely just don’t. Anyone else who agrees with us about that is free to do likewise, and if enough people do likewise then there goes the network effect that attracts people to those services in the first place.

I guess the thing is that Trump voters aren't after betterment of the lives of the poor because that would include poor black people, poor hispanic people, poor women, poor gay people, poor Muslims, poor atheists... The Capitol coup was incredibly WHITE considering it wasn't a race issue. I wonder if it's not just that poor people have some Nietzchean resentment toward the projected ideal, but these white people in particular believe that they are owed it, and decades of attempted social reform followed by attempted regression have left them feeling they've been owed it for a very long time, entire lifetimes of generations passing on the IOU. Meanwhile their out-groups have seemed to receive increases: civil rights, feminism, gay rights, trans rights. These people are trying to get to where white men are at but white men see it as a concession: we are losing and those are gaining. — Kenosha Kid

I think that’s pretty on the mark.

I’m a white man, more or less , and both my grandfathers were insanely better-off than I am, even though one of them was an orphan adopted by (European) immigrants. Almost any black person or woman of their era would probably have been much worse off in many ways compared to black people and women of my generation. So if I were the kind of person who thought that pirates prevented global warming (i.e. a person who doesn’t understand the difference between correlation and causation), I could see jumping to the conclusion that my losses compared to my grandparents are because of their gains compared to their grandparents. In truth I know they’re two unrelated trends that happened at the same time, but that’s too subtle for many people I guess.

And th usual “left or right” poll would be better?

Because that’s the kind of bias that was accused in the other thread.

My idea here was to suss out where people place themselves on various scales that have been associated with the “left-right” scale, to be LESS vague.

an abrupt halt to the auto/fossil fuel segment of the economy — Bitter Crank

One important thing to keep in mind here is that we don't have to put a bunch of car and energy companies out of business and their employees out of work with all the consequences that that would have. We just have to get them to change what kinds of cars and energy they sell. The auto industry is already swinging heavily into hybrid or full electric vehicles. "Oil companies" are already rebranding themselves "energy companies" and investing in alternatives. It's just the smart thing to do, since one way or another oil's days are numbered.

The election then was going to be rigged, remember? — ssu

"'Cause this whole system's rigged, and we all know the riggers!
For the past 8 years this country's been run by— [CAW]"
-Trump

"Don't get your fans stirred up in some sort of Twitter Civil War!"
-Lincoln

Like a lot of deep social problems, it seems like the only true solution to this one requires somehow convincing people in general to change.

There's nothing in principle wrong with someone hosting a private medium of discussion.

There's nothing in principle wrong with them deciding how to filter content on it.

But there's definitely something wrong with the effective public square of society being on such privately controlled media, of course.

Yet that privately controlled media became the effective public square because a bunch of people chose to use it.

Yes, because of advertising, and network effects, etc, but there's still an element of choice there. I don't use (and never have used) anything like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc, myself, and there's nothing at all that I feel like I'm missing in my life because of it, so it's clearly possible to choose not to.

There are still plenty of not-corporate-controlled platforms to communicate through. The old, decentralized internet is still there, behind all the corporate bullshit. It's just that people choose not to use it.

I don't know how to begin to convince people en masse that it would be better to use that than corporate media like Twitter, Facebook, etc.

I have a solution, and I know it's right. I can prove it right down to the philosophical roots. I can explain where we've gone wrong and how to put it right in the same terms. I am a philosopher. My core subject is how to save the world. And I know how. — counterpunch

So are you going to start a thread about that sometime?

"I suggest that what we are facing in biblical terms is very much a Tower of Babel situation, not apocalypse or judgement day; it's a breakdown of communication. I think it is a psychological defence; communication has become too fast, too universal and ego becomes swamped, and takes refuge from the engulfing mass of others in a fantasy world. — The Opposite

Joking aside we need to engage more with people like Brett @NOS4A2 and especially @counterpunch — The Opposite

I do actually agree with this in principle. If I had unlimited time and energy I would love to spend it trying to reach common ground with ideological "opponents". Problem is that doing so properly is time-consuming and exhausting and I really don't have that time or energy to spare, so neither can I blame anyone else who doesn't want to make the effort either.

I do not think things like this should be encouraged. — Philosophim

What, polls?

Someone else accused the forum of having a bias. I didn’t think that looked true, but I though, “let’s just check” and did a poll to see.

I answered Maximal to all of them, because that's what I am considered to the rest of the spectrum. Among those on the furthest left, there's another spectrum where you will find people who think I'm incrementalist or sympathetic to authoritarianism. Depending on what your stance is on things, people are going to define these parameters differently. — Saphsin

I intend for people to answer based on the framework that they themselves think in, but I must confess that I put “somewhat” libertarian and egalitarian and progressive for my answers because, even though I’m a moderate centrist in the way that I think of the political spectrum, I’m aware that most people are in the authoritarian-hierarchy quadrant of my spectrum, and so from their perspective I’m a radical libertarian socialist.

But it is what authority does, right? Make the laws, enforce them etc. — Echarmion

I suppose that’s true, and now that I think about this in juxtaposition with my response just above, it reminds me that that’s exactly why I’m not for maximal liberty in the spectrum as I construct it, even though I’m radically liberal from a conventional perspective. Because on my spectrum there are possible views that advocate for so much liberty, i.e. so little authority, that the preservation of liberty becomes unstable, e.g. when people have the liberty to hurt others and so to establish de facto authority over them.

I have a similar line of reasoning regarding equality, such that if everything belongs equally to everyone, nothing really belongs to anyone, e.g. if I can’t claim my toothbrush as mine and mine alone then I don’t really have a toothbrush at all, even if I nominally have as equal claim to it as anybody else.

But those possibilities are so radically libertarian and egalitarian that they’re obviously absurd and nobody ever even considers that there is that side of the spectrum, and the “extreme” libertarian / egalitarian positions are moderate in comparison.

Are you asking me which poll answers would reflect your opinion as described here?

Mostly just :up: to you.

median savings for people 55-64 is $15,000. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That must be excluding illiquid assets like home equity, right?

The idea that the median Trump voter is a poor blue collar white worker simply doesn't line up with data. That is branding. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I wonder how many of them are people who think that they are poor blue collar workers and have no idea how rich they are. I see a lot of “rednecks” in my neighborhood with big expensive trucks and boats and RVs in the driveways of their expensive real houses, and so apparently a lot more money than “classy” well-educated “liberal elite” trailer-trash like me.

I'm here to discuss philosophy — counterpunch

I haven't been paying attention enough to tell how much of a racist you actually are or aren't, just skimming some comments that accuse you of it, but I would be interested or at least amused to see an attempted justification of whatever it is you think that's being called racist in terms of deep philosophical principles.

E.g. I can formulate an argument directly to anti-racism from a deep abstract and general philosophical principle like "every meaningful question has a universally correct answer". I'd be interested to see if you can do likewise.

I was attracted to the forum because I am the most significant philosophical thinker of this, or any other generation - and I'm duty bound to share my uniquely enlightened thoughts, and shepard humankind into a prosperous and sustainable future — counterpunch

Please tell me this is sarcasm.

You're arguing against a strawman there. You're free to think that equality is impossible without authority, but you're not accurately describing the people who disagree with that, who I referenced earlier. You're describing people who agree with you about that dichotomy existing, and disagree with you on which side of it to choose. I was pointing out that there's people who disagree that there is any such dichotomy at all. You can think they're wrong, but they exist.

I think all of these axes are way too vague. — khaled

Broad or general, yes, that is the point.

I think the other thread you're referring to was started by a poster unhappy about comments being made in the Trump thread, in my opinion. — Wayfarer

I think so too.

The scale of equality and heirarchy struck me as odd, as it implies that equal societies do not favor strong heirarchical structures. — Tzeentch

They definitionally do not. If everyone is on the same level, nobody is above of below anyone else.

After all, use of authority is required to enforce equality, as it will not arise naturally. — Tzeentch

That is your opinion that you're free to have (I did ask for people's opinions on that after all), but be aware that it's not an uncontroversial one (which is why I asked for opinions on it). There are plenty of people who think that equality is the natural way of things in a free society, and inequality only arises through the exercise of authority.

Also the scale between change and stasis did not make sense to me, as these things are, in my opinion, not goals in themselves and whether I would favor one or the other is entirely dependent on circumstances. — Tzeentch

The idea there is whether you favor one or the other, in general, in our present circumstances. This is my way of asking about certain senses of "progressive" and "conservative" without using those words, as they literally mean for or against change, but often have other connotations as well.

I always have a problem with the liberty vs. authority angle. In my mind, authority can preserve liberty as much as endanger it. Authority is a tool, not a form of leadership. I'd say the opposite of liberty would be something like teleology. There is either a pre-determined goal for the society, or the goal is to allow everyone to pursue their own goals. — Echarmion

I think I agree that there is a complex issue regarding sometimes using force to stop other people from using force in order to maximize liberty, e.g. that "excessive liberty" can become self-defeating in a way and actually be less free than "restrained liberty" (e.g. the freedom to punch other people in the face is also the power to limit others' freedom by threatening to punch them in the face if they disobey you, so limiting that freedom increases freedom in a way). But that's not what I mean by "authority" here, and using "authority" to mean that sounds strange to my ear.

I mean something much more like what you're calling "teleology". Liberty is people getting to pursue their own goals, authority is some people getting to impose their goals on others. In loose language, doing what you want to do vs being told what to do.

Tough to say [whether the status quo one of liberty or authority, equality or hierarchy] without any reference point. — Echarmion

Within the reference frame of the political spectrum as you see it, please.

Both left and right are a bit split, but I associate authority and hierarchy with the right, and equality with the left. Both sides will claim liberty, though with very different definitions. — Echarmion

Which side do you think has the correct definition of liberty?

I guess we'll see where people fall on this complex of different issues in the results of my new poll thread:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/9952/a-poll-on-the-forums-political-biases

Please also share your thoughts on the relationship between these different axes.

Are liberty and equality (so likewise authority and hierarchy) two sides of the same coin, where you can't have one without the other? Or is each a threat to the other, where one must choose which is more important to them?

Is the status quo one of liberty or authority, equality or hierarchy?

Which of these values belong to the "left", and which belong to the "right"?

This forum really contains close to no actual right-wingers, if you actually look at the majority of political debates on this forum, it's moderate left vs further left. — Judaka

This forum contains plenty of pro-capitalists, who are part of the right. There are lots of religious social conservatives too, who are also part of the right. What it doesn't generally contain are vocally active racists, misogynists, and so on, because hate like that isn't actually philosophy and thankfully is against the rules here.

I don't think I've actually noticed any e.g. Marxist-Leninists, never mind Stalinists, or anything like that here. In addition to the capitalists and social conservatives above, there mostly seem to be centrists (a la the Democratic Party), and then libertarian socialists. The axis here seems to be between those who think the status quo, economically and socially, is mostly fine (which is the definition of conservative), and those who want more liberty, more equality, or both.

If you think the aforementioned centrists are "moderate left", that just shows how far right your own viewpoint is skewed, but then you're in good company with most Americans in that case, so it's hard to blame you.

It seems like the only two plausible outcomes are that Republicans let their party be completely consumed by insane Trumpers, or else the party splits. In either case the standard Republicans lose, but if they split the party the insane Trumpers lose too. I guess it comes down to whether it’s better to be effectively an undead zombie party ruining everything you might have once cared for, or just a dead party.

Thanks!

the best guess of modern science is that the physical universe -- the only one we have any experience with -- is not eternal, but emerged from an unknown background in a creation event that is usually referred to as the "Big Bang". — Gnomon

Scientists are usually careful not to claim that there's definitely nothing before the Big Bang, and the cutting edge theory of eternal inflation holds that the universe as a whole is, at the very least, much older (and MUCH bigger) than the part of it that stems from the Big Bang, quite plausibly eternal and infinite (though they're careful not to claim for sure that it's that either), with Big Bangs constantly happening all across space and time, each one being nothing more than a spontaneous local slow-down of the otherwise always-rapidly-inflating total universe.

PBS SpaceTime has a couple of great videos on it, including this one:

Wherefore President Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office, and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law. President Trump thus warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States. — CNN, Articles of Impeachment, Excerpt

@Wayfarer Is that the old articles of impeachment or a new one? Got a link?

I'm sorry about reality's well-known liberal bias. Feel free to hide from reality in a right-wing echo chamber if you really prefer.

is this the sociology version of philosophical idealism? — bert1

They are similar but I think not the same. Idealism says that what you perceive is what is real. Constructivism, as I understand it, is more like ontological relativism: what you believe is what is real.

It's analogous to the difference between hedonism and relativism in moral philosophy, I think. The former says that whatever feels good (hedonistically) is morally good, the latter says whatever people think is good is morally good. Likewise, idealism says whatever looks true (empirically) is really true, while constructivism says that whatever people think is true is really true.

Alice: "What is mereology the study of?"

Bob: "Oh you know, things and stuff."

I can't say for sure whether or not it was actually true (I have my doubts), but to be the best at something that most humans are historically pretty bad at, like being smart, or being benevolent, isn't all that high a bar. The US could have been (and definitely was) pretty dumb and malevolent and yet still been smarter and more benevolent than all the other dumb malevolent countries out there, at some time or another.

The so-called "Greatest Generation" mostly aren't alive anymore. The youngest of them would be about 100 years old now. It's their kids, the Boomers, who are the present nuisance.

How do we counter all this? — Xtrix

We need a freethinking system of public education, but that in turn requires that we have an enlightened discursive community to support it.

Edit: Michael beat me to it by seconds.

I don't actually know the specifics, but from all the news I've been seeing there seems to be a clear consensus that some crime was committed today, by the people storming the capitol. I would guess that at the very least bringing weapons into a government building like that is probably illegal, and even if not that, that there are restrictions on entry into at least some parts of that building if not the building as a whole, since I sincerely doubt it's lawful for just anyone to rummage through e.g. Pelosi's office.