ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
I don't see anything in here about the question of the uniqueness of government rule enforcement being with violence/kidnapping. Mayyyybe this:
Equals in rank or station within civilized society have a fundamentally different relationship and method of conflict resolution, one which specifically prohibits or codifies the escalation to a state of war.
But it doesn't actually discuss rule enforcement. How do you do rule enforcement? Like, any example of rule enforcement? I've given two example scenarios. You can give others. How do you do it in the case of maximal-opposition?
ControlsFreak
1d ago
The only regress of grievances offered is one that exists at the pleasure of the sovereign and can be abolished at will.
Let's again go back to the analogy. If a parent with a maximally-oppositional child or a board game master with a maximally-oppositional player decides to press with their rule, what redress of grievances is available other than their pleasure? Yes, they can at will decide to give up on enforcement of the rule. There are tons of examples of that happening with the government, too. Moreover, there are many overlapping methods of petition for redress of grievances in a system like what the US has. That was kind of an important part of the founding movement. One might not like them; one might not think they are working in the way that they "should", but that is a separate matter from the mere question of what is required to state that all government rules are uniquely enforced by violence/kidnapping. You need to posit other things like maximal-opposition. In fact, if you ask someone who makes such a claim how they end up in such a situation, they almost by necessity appeal to maximal-opposition. "This rule seems to be enforced by a $5 fine, not violence/kidnapping." "Well, what if you don't pay that fine?" "The next step is X." "What happens if they refuse to comply with X?" "The next step is Y." "...what happens if they refuse to comply with Y?" And so on and so forth until you get to the point where violence/kidnapping occurs. There may be offramps along the way, but they all tend to be ignored in such reasoning. I'm simply pointing out that if we apply the same reasoning to essentially any other rule in the world, you either have to posit an offramp occurring, or you still end up in violence/kidnapping. Fewer people are quite as willing to think about this and apply the same reasoning to any other rule in the world.
There is a bit of a Clauswitzian feel to this reasoning. Any time you're trying to enforce any rule, either someone backs down, comes to an agreement or something, or escalates further. If we take any conflict over anything that seems like 'rule enforcement', if parties are willing to escalate and go further in their maximal opposition, you end up in warfare/violence. Politics is just one form of conflict management, but just as sure as war is politics by other means, violence in general is conflict management/"rule enforcement" by other means. Just take almost any example of a rule you want to enforce and walk through the exact same steps of, "Well, what if they're maximally-oppositional?"
Finally, to be completely clear, this is not an argument "against libertarianism". It is simply bringing clarity to the nature of one particular type of argument.
Thanks all! Lotta dirty vehicles on TheMotte! ...I'll go back to considering whether I should hand wash mine slightly less often now...
(I'm currently scheduled to wash it every 6 weeks. Wax once a year. I do the jambs maybe every second or third wash; dirty jambs really annoy me. Nice weather here, garage at home, but getting driven even more now; pretty much daily.)
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Even if it turns out net positive in the end, it needs to be anticipated and planned for in order to mitigate the damaging side-effects of the disruption itself.
Not really. There's a large timescale separation. The dynamics of economic/political/etc systems are significantly faster. I know it's a technical term, and it mostly only applies neatly to second-order systems, but there's a concept of "natural frequency" in dynamics, and it gives you some sense of it. What I'd like to observe about this term is that it is, in a sense, "natural" to the system, itself. It is not something that we need to really plan for in a feedforward fashion. The 'inner' loop is a wayyyyy faster optimization process; it won't be all that affected by a slow parametric change.
Possibly so, but then I think the source of the matter does not begin (or end) with a proposition that it seems somewhat unique to government that rules are enforced by violence/kidnapping. I think something else has to be doing the work.
EDIT: I meant to also mention that it's not just child/parent relations. It's genuinely all rules ever. You're playing a board game, and you want to make a 'house rule'? Well, what if someone just refuses to play by it? Escalate? Eventually kick them out of your house? ...we start running into the 'exile' problem again, supposing they become maximally-oppositional. I don't think most people would start off saying, "You should consider whether or not it's worth using violence/kidnapping to enforce a house rule for a board game," even if that is a conceivable end state in the maximally-oppositional case.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
If only I had three further paragraphs.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
Government rules are enforced through violence and kidnapping.
This is missing some steps. There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.
If such a proposition holds, it should hold in other domains as well. Let's consider household/family rules. At different stages for children, some household/family rules are directly enforced via spanking or timeouts or whatever (violence/kidnapping). For others, you can often find a similar escalatory process if you posit a sufficiently oppositional child. Another end state may be 'exile', kicking someone out of your house. Of course, if we assume a maximally-oppositional child, what might it take to actually enforce kicking them out of your house? If they just refuse to go? Violence? Kidnapping? Calling the state... to use violence/kidnapping?
I think this reasoning about maximal-opposition holds for essentially every rule ever, government or not. That is, under the hypothesis of maximal-opposition, essentially every rule ever is either ultimately enforced via violence/kidnapping or... well, at some point, it just goes unenforced, as efforts are dropped in the face of maximal-opposition. Of course, one might think that choosing to present maximal-opposition is, itself, a rule that is chosen by someone.
That is, there doesn't seem to be anything unique to government rules here. Yet, I don't think that most people are willing to apply this same standard to the entire set of rules in the universe.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
How often does everyone here wash their cars? What conditions are they put through? (Garage/outside, daily driver/weekend fun, extreme conditions, salty winters...) Do you hand wash or car wash? Do you find a sense of ritual/peace in doing it, or is it a chore?
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Ok, so, like, not like buying fruit legally at the supermarket, as if it's just a regular Tuesday grocery day. There appear to be significant differences in the types of enforcement schemes that could conceivably be implemented.
What I'm trying to say here is that the potency of marijuana doesn't depend as much as you seem to think on the strain.
What does it depend on?
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Sort of to repeat my question... where did you legally get those seeds? What potency are you expecting this product to have? Why do you reasonably expect said potency from those seeds?
ControlsFreak
7d ago
"female plants that were triggered to produce buds"
That barely narrows down the range at all, so I don't think it's a good distinguisher from "roadside trash grass".
Also seconding @ArjinFerman. The classic version of this, in context of "relatively easy to make at home" and "I left some fruit (that I'm legally allowed to buy and have) in the cabinet for too long."... and, uh, the actual history of how things went down during prohibition, is wine.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
Please elaborate on what you mean by "decent alcohol" and "good weed". I think there are some shenanigans with quality/potency/etc.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
It's much harder to explain how you legally acquired said seeds. Especially with the effort that it takes to get the kind of cannabis people want (not talking any bullshit about roadside trash grass).
ControlsFreak
8d ago
Anyway, socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class. It's weary writing and thinking about politics when even the best laid plans seem to inevitably just get ground down by the dumbest things. I can completely understand why young folks want to just socialize everything.
This seems like the opposite of a fair response. If we put a guy on the fry station at McDonald's, and he just constantly screws it up over and over again, in the dumbest ways possible, it doesn't seem like a reasonable response to say, "How about we just put this guy in charge of the entire store?"
ControlsFreak
8d ago
It's pretty hard to beat, "I left some fruit (that I'm legally allowed to buy and have) in the cabinet for too long."
ControlsFreak
12d ago
The only historical precedent which has to do with natural children is the legal presumption that a woman's husband is the father of her children, absent other evidence.
What do you make of prohibitions on marriage between sufficiently close relatives? ...what do you make of exceptions to those prohibitions when one of the two individuals could demonstrate that they were sterile?
ControlsFreak
12d ago
Can I say the line? I kinda want to say the line. Ok, I'm going to try saying the line now.
What did you think 'let's destroy marriage and the family' meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
The solution that allows women to set a “price floor” for relationships, in spite of both those factors, is to use social technology to align their interests. In this case, that technology would be “slut-shaming”.
"The" is an incorrect use of the definite article. There is another solution, another technology. Even Beyoncé knows of this technology, though she, like the author you cite, clearly lacks comprehension of what it's for and how it is to be used. It is the humble ring. It goes on a finger. There are many others which superficially look like it, but one is a special piece of social technology.
ControlsFreak
12d ago
Society doesn't seem to be paying attention to the claimed harms
We conveniently got a new top-level comment a couple hours ago.
ControlsFreak
13d ago
I wrote here:
It just so happens to be that we don't see a world where the lack of slavery is causing all sorts of real world problems for individuals and societies. Plus all the good moral arguments and everything. Funny that, both those factors cut the other way for the instant question.
Perhaps see also this chain of comments by @FCfromSSC. He focused on porn in the last comment, but also:
...Conservative Christians no longer need to argue what might happen if the other side gets their way, but rather what has happened, and what results the other side is accountable for. Christians can now operate as a genuine counter-culture, offering a cogent critique of the conditions we are all living in every minute of every day. We can offer meaningful answers to the myriad discontents created by our present society, and through those answers coordinate the systematic withdrawal from and dismantling of that society.
But instead, you seem to want some specific predictions of specific mechanisms that are headline-style events. Things like:
If I wanted to argue that America could become communist, maybe I predict that AOC will finally wrest control of the rudderless Democratic Party.
These are kind of silly. "I predict that [POLITICIAN] will ascend and promote [THING]." Like, okay? Swap someone/something in there. I'm again not particularly interested in playing that silly game.
ControlsFreak
13d ago
Scalia's concurrence in that case, relying on the Necessary and Proper Clause, made a lot more sense than the majority opinion.
ControlsFreak
14d ago
I mean, if we had a clean EPC opinion, you might have a case. (Of course, Skrmetti is already casting doubt on whether there's support to push the (often claimed dubious) Bostock reasoning in Title VII into EPC.) But we didn't get that opinion. We got the cluster that is Obergefell. It should be pretty high on the list of people who are pro-SSM-from-a-policy-perspective for "opinions where I agree with the outcome, but disagree with the reasoning".
ControlsFreak
14d ago
1855? 1850? 1845? ... 1776, when the Constitutional compromises were made? This seems like a silly exercise with only faux numerical justification.
ControlsFreak
14d ago
Sure. Obviously, that's a challenge. But it's sort of irrelevant to the original discussion? Unless you view this as a fully-general argument against any sort of minority view? Like, sure, any minority view on any topic has a hurdle of convincing enough of the public to join you in lobbying for it. That's not particularly novel or useful to discuss. Communists and libertarians and trans activists and neoluddites and... and... are all aware that they have minority views that they would like to promote more widely.
and
Duly noted and agreed that the predominant swing for several decades has been pro-premarital sex (and a variety of related issues). That was actually my point.
I think the biggest thing you've added is that, indeed, you do think that it's just a fully-general argument, including that you would have used it against slavery abolitionists in 1000 BC, 1000 AD, and in 1864. But yeah, I do listen to/read some libertarians, and I imagine if someone just kept popping up to say, "You're a minority opinion; you haven't convinced everyone yet; it's hard to convince people of things," they'd probably respond with, "No shit, Sherlock." But if you kept popping up to interrupt them to say that, I'd probably get tired of the annoyance pretty quickly.
ControlsFreak
15d ago
You cherry picked historical examples of cultural shifts to prove the possibility.
No. I just went through a wide variety of things, some which shifted, some which then didn't shift. We could keep generating a very very very long list, but I figured it was better to not have a 5k word comment that is just a silly list.
"Sometimes it's hard to tell" is a way to frame the discussion to throw out the need to discuss. It's similar to consensus-gathering but for an argument.
Frankly, this is bullshit. As evidenced by your statements:
People did argue that slavery was a societal good (if only because no one wants to be the villain). They argued that back in Africa black tribesman were either lazy or fighting each other, and over here they are productive and safe (so long as they don't provoke the master of course). If you could bring a southern man from the past here he'd probably look at urban black culture and tell you they were better off slaves.
If I had told a pro-slavery person, back when being pro-slavery was ascendant, that mayyyyyyybe they should be sliiiiiiightly open to the idea that it's poooossible that slavery won't stay ascendant forever, would you be there saying:
"Sometimes it's hard to tell" is a way to frame the discussion to throw out the need to discuss. It's similar to consensus-gathering but for an argument.
Would you be there saying:
You cherry picked historical examples of cultural shifts to prove the possibility. The theoretical possibility was never in doubt, the question was over whether the odds are high enough to be worth discussing. It's theoretically possible that in the future society decriminalizes murder, but I'm not about to make a writeup exploring the possibility.
?
no-fault divorce
???
What is "adversary-proof production"? What does it look like? What policies achieve that end state or detract from it?
This has been on my mind for a while. It comes up regularly in discussions concerning international trade, tariffs and other trade policy, manufacturing, agriculture, defense, and geopolitics. I've joked about it before:
I remarked in that comment that I was kind of joking, but only kind of. I think it really is that I just actually don't know what "adversary-proof production" actually means. I don't think I have a set of criteria to go check whether or to what extent a country's production is adversary-proof. Thus, I don't think I have a way of determining whether any particular policy proposal would or would not contribute toward that goal.
With this context, one of my various aggregators linked to this tweet:
The tweet includes a price chart. I checked reasonably quickly to make sure it wasn't totally off the wall and found articles like this. Apparently, there are a bunch of subsidies/market controls on the domestic production of rice in Japan. Moreover, there is only a very small amount of imported rice allowed without tariffs. The result is that the vast vast majority of Japanese-consumed rice is grown in Japan. There are very few companies that have established any sort of importation supply chain, no relations with international producers, no pre-existing options deals, no experience with the logistics of importing.
And thus, because of some supply (and possibly some demand) factors (one might quibble with the details here, and it seems like different authors point to similar buy slightly different details; I don't think it matters too much), the price of rice in Japan has skyrocketed. One might not worry too much, though. The government is here to help. They have a strategic stockpile of rice! (What a thing for a government to choose to do, have the expertise to manage, etc.) Which they've opened, and only slightly pushed prices a bit.
If you can't tell, I am sympathetic to the view of the tweet author. I don't think that what "adversary-proof production" means is that you shut out international trade, regulate production in order to make sure you preserve some sense of what you think the domestic market "should" look like, and have almost the entirety of your production be domestic.
...but that still leaves me wanting to know... what is "adversary-proof production"? What does it actually look like? I tried my typical strategy of hopping over to google scholar to see if I could find some academic writing on the topic, but perhaps they just use different key terminology, and I'm missing it. Can TheMotte help? Any academic work? Or even your home-grown (autarkic?) definition?
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