faceh
7hr ago
And also most people (like me, and I think, in practice, you too) would just close their fist, despite the gangster not having to put much more effort into it than you would - which violates your principle of "I own my body, and I can exclude you from control of it, as a pure matter of fact, for all practical purposes."
Yes you've proven that if someone is willing to use their control of their body to enact violence on yours, you can 'lose' control of your body.
On the other hand, the gangster can't very well object if I pull out a gun and use my body to enact violence on his, thereby maintaining control of my own.
Willingness to do violence to defend your own body is a helluva deterrent.
There are a lot of non-silly situations where someone is just, on an intuitive level, "controlling their body", and in doing so causing harm to society:
This gets to why having a framework of ownership, and via ownership exclusion is useful!
Nudists can have spaces where they are nude all day and they can exclude prudes who would be upset by this. Everyone else can have spaces where they exclude nudists.
We've already seen that its possible to exclude people on basis of vaccination status.
Likewise, you can exclude people with 'ugly' tattoos or require them to cover up (but now you've smuggled in the topic of aesthetics which, hoo boy).
"Society" can be built on a framework of people agreeing to respect property boundaries and agreeing to abide by rules set by the owners under penalty of exclusion.
And this is strictly superior to the scenario where everyone fights constantly over every single matter because there is no set framework for delineating boundaries for who controls what.
faceh
8hr ago
If you accept "self-ownership of my body" as a founding principal, and someone else also accepts it, you have a shared axiom upon which to build further frameworks.
If people are capable of building such agreed frameworks, then everything follows pretty directly.
If people aren't capable of building such agreed frameworks, then its a fruitless exercise/question regardless of your position.
They could be a very powerful dictator or gangster, with an established history of extreme and brutal violence, and just order you to do it, or else.
Yes, threats could in theory make me close my fist against my own will.
Or, if I'm particularly brave or foolhardy, they don't.
Then what.
Seems obvious that this all comes down to having to physically interfere with 'my' body to make the thing happen, if I don't want it to happen. I'm the only one that has the actual 'entanglement' with the matter that composes my body that lets me control it with nerve impulses alone.
You can of course claim this is a distinction without a difference if defined properly. "The Universe" makes no distinction between "me" and "you."
But isn't it just WAY SIMPLER for us to agree "yeah I control my body, you control yours" without overphilosophizing it.
but I'm not sure one's body is the best concept to illustrate it.
That's just the most convenient way to demonstrate since people usually have their body present when you're discussing things with them.
Indeed there are many people whether imprisoned, disabled or otherwise incapacitated that don't really own their own body in a meaningful sense.
I mean, I see the point. But if there's any 'person' left in the brain, unless they're the poor sucker from Johnny Got His Gun, the brain is still in control of 'something.'
And the only way people can take that control is by directly and physically interfering. Which is to say, by exercising control of their bodies and using that to incarcerate you, restrain you, or damage you.
The strongest refutation of 'self-ownership' I can think of that actually exists are the cases of conjoined twins. We've got entangled nervous systems where maybe neither person really 'controls' the parts they share. But its still way more convenient for them to agree to coexist.
Otherwise, unless there's some entity out there that can unilaterally override your brain's functions and direct how your body is used regardless of your own will and wishes (hence: a hivemind species), it seems to me there's no way to overcome the conclusion "I own myself" because any actions taken to refute it would inherently prove it true.
Are you?
If I don't want you to make my fingers start moving, what do you think happens next?
Anything that happens in between those two events is just an implementation detail.
If I have fewer 'steps' to take between the signal I send and the event that occurs, you're surely going to agree that I have 'more' control over that event, no?
If he uses his body to 'attack' you (I presume I don't have to define the term, but I can) then on what possible grounds could he object to somebody also 'attacking' him to take those possessions from him?
Everyone could use their bodies to take resources from others all the time, denying that any superior claim exists, but then they can't very well assert a superior claim when somebody else comes along.
Your 'claim' to the resources is that you got them 'first.' His claim is he beat you up and took them or snatched them when you weren't looking.
We can devolve everything to the 'might makes right' rules, that is also a consistent position, but the only persons who are 'better off' are those who happen to be the strongest at the time, and even THEY have to constantly risk physical harm to maintain their claims.
Isn't it much, much easier on everyone involved if we can mutually agree "you keep what you have, I keep what I have, and we can exchange things consensually as needed" then build out a system for tracking ownership, for resolving conflicts, and for minimizing transaction costs from that agreement?
Which is actually 'proving too much' because you've just demonstrated that you have to use a physical intervention to make the thing happen.
If you don't control your body, then how could you use a taser in the first place?
Same logic if you, for example, pull out a gun and threaten me to make me close my hand.
Or tell your buddy to come over and force my hand closed.
It all presumes your own control over your body. You might be able use 'your' body to exert control over mine or someone else's, but only by actively maintaining control over your own. Demonstrating control of your own body doesn't refute "everyone has control of their own body."
By comparison, I just have my brain send a signal down my arm and the fingers start moving. Its the simplest existence proof possible.
faceh
9hr ago
Same.
I do wish we had more lefty commenters, but it really does seem like ardent lefties have to discard a lot of fundamental fairly obvious facts about baseline reality to maintain their ideological commitments.
Its definitely the one place where the average response doesn't drastically misinterpret a person's post and respond to the persons' hallucinated point rather than the plain words they said.
That's what drives me away from other forums, meanwhile here I don't have to constantly say "No, that is not what I meant, please read the words I actually wrote and I'll happily explain myself further if needed."
faceh
9hr ago
I have a fairly simple exercise that gets to the reason why 'ownership' is an easy, fundamental, universal concept:
If I hold out my open palm in front of you, can you make my fingers close and form a fist?
I'll give you a few minutes to try, just holding out my palm.
Then after a few minutes, I'll just announce my intention to close my hand, then easily make my fingers close into the fist.
The point of this demonstration:
"I" am in control of the matter that composes my body. You are not. And vice versa.
If we can agree on that basic premise (and avoid debating what "I" am, I'll stipulate that I'm just a brain which is itself composed of matter, I'll exclude the concept of souls for this conversation), then we can say that I own my body, and I can exclude you from control of it, as a pure matter of fact, for all practical purposes.
And everything else can build out quite naturally from that basic point.
I use 'my' body to extract resources from the world, and because I own my body, I likewise have a claim to resources I gained control of using my body, and my claim is inherently stronger than any 'second-comers.'
These facts about the world are easy to observe and thus a solid foundation upon which to build the 'social construct' of private property.
We don't have to get philosophical to agree "I can exclude YOU from my body, and you can exclude me from yours."
Humans are not a hivemind species. We can talk about egregores and social dynamics, but every human is, fundamentally, identifiable as an individual unit that 'controls' their actions. So 'control' of one's own body is something most of us can accept as a premise.
Ownership and Control are mostly coextensive as concepts. If we grant that 'control' of our bodies grants something resembling 'ownership,' then that's like 80% of the argument right there.
Can you explain why people don't 'own' their own bodies, or can you present an answer to my exercise that defeats the idea that I control my body?
Can you think of any cases whatsoever where a court overruled a President/executive agency's finding of fact or application of law when that finding was related to the executive's power to set foreign policy?
Taking a look at the "Muslim Travel bans" from Trump 1 is possibly instructive here.
faceh
3d ago
Mmhmm.
So which branch of government is tasked with DECIDING if the government of Venezuela is attempting an invasion or predatory incursion.
And what if, for example, the FBI issued a finding that Venezuela is intentionally releasing gang members to the U.S. to undermine public safety?
Are courts authorized to overrule that finding?
There's a trick in the question.
Is using the Alien Enemies Act, for example, to immediately deport a members of a particular 'foreign' gang an "Expansion" of Presidential powers?
The AEA has been used by Presidents before, and its existed for almost as long as the Presidency has existed.
But Trump may be using it in a 'novel' way to perform an act that was not originally anticipated by Congress or explicitly approved by the courts...
So question becomes:
Has the President ALWAYS had the authority to do this under the AEA, and Trump was just the first one to receive an electoral mandate to use this authority...
or
Is Trump CREATING the power to do this via utterly novel interpretation and application of the law, and possibly thumbing his nose a 'traditional' boundaries on Presidential power... and he thinks he can get away with it?
I really think its the former. Trump saw a particular law that granted a particular power, sitting there dusty and unused in the warehouse of executive authority, and reached over and pulled the lever to activate it. But it has always been sitting there, he didn't invent it or wrest it from Congress or the Courts.
So ask that question about most of his actions. Is he 'expanding' power to take the particular actions he's taken, or do most, or even ALL of the powers he's wielding have established precedent in previous administrations, he's just one of the first to wield ALL of them this aggressively, so it looks like a scary expansion of power.
My personal view, as a guy that voted for Ron Paul in 2012, is that Trump is literally just flexing the full set of powers and authority that Congress has ceded to the President and that the Courts have permitted to continue for decades and decades.
I'm STILL mad about the PATRIOT Act, and that's 24 years old now. Congress has delegated even more power to the president since then. They could try to take it back at any time, but they don't. So they're tacitly approving of the executive's current exercise of authority.
I dunno, The Imperial Presidency was published in 1973 and lamented the expansion of the President's war powers. Congress has delegated much of their rulemaking authority to the executive since then in thousands and thousands of pages of laws creating various agencies. Its the logical outcome of about a century of SCOTUS precedent.
If you're scared of what the Presidency has become only because Trump is the guy wielding all that authority, well, I'm going to feel impotently smug once again. Or maybe smugly impotent. The problem has always been that the power is too broad and lacks any effective checks, if you were counting on the goodness of the man occupying the seat of power to keep the office limited, you're basically praying that God doesn't put madman on the throne.
The previous problem was having literally thousands of people murdered on a yearly basis.
Having literally thousands of people murdered is bad.
And probably worse than torture-prisons, since the people doing the murdering had even less accountability.
Convince me that moving from "unnaccountable warlords murdering innocents" to "warlords and their subordinates [and probably some innocents] getting tortured in a hellish prision" is actually NOT an improvement in pure utilitarian terms.
Yes.
I keep poking around for any indication that there's real repression of opposing parties or resistance to his regime from actually aggrieved groups. I come up empty. Happy to read firsthand accounts of abuse, but I really want to know if the country is doing 'better' or not in the aggregate.
The Wikipedia page for his most recent election doesn't even suggest that he had to fudge numbers to win overwhelmingly. There were active protests against him that didn't get arrested or repressed. No political opponents were arrested.
I don't know what 'side effects' you're suggesting came downstream of the crackdown, ESPECIALLY with regard to the average citizen's daily experience in the country.
And as stated, the U.S. has its own black spot in Gitmo, and the left has virtually stopped even mentioning these days.
I would accuse them of very, VERY selective criticism on this point.
On a purely practical basis, if your choices are between a 'tyrannical' gang that kills 4000+ people per year, or a 'tyrannical' president who imprisons the guys who were doing the killing, even if it sweeps up some folks who probably don't deserve it, what is the OBVIOUS choice for the citizen who has been terrorized by the former for years?
"oh no El Presidente might abuse all this power he's being handed, better to let the completely unaccountable and aggressively violent gang continue operating than risk a dictator!"
Am I suggesting that there's no in-between options? Nah.
I am suggesting that liberals have failed to present such a workable option and it is not surprising that the El Salvadorans have been delighted to have the gang problem solved.
faceh
14d ago
"I got pig iron, I got pig iron, I got ALL pig iron" pops up occasionally despite making no sense in almost any context.
faceh
15d ago
If that's the position, careful about admitting that a human-rights-violating hellhole run by a dictator strongman can actually fix a country's crime problem with minimal side impacts.
And of course, the U.S. will negotiate the release of its citizens from Russia itself while Russia is public enemy numero uno, the Soviet example falls kind of flat.
And of course of course, the U.S. had its own secret impenetrable dictator prison for foreign nationals in Gitmo, so we should be showing just as much objection there, no?
Yep.
I still remain a bit confused as to why the onus remains on the U.S. to seek his release.
Even if a U.S. Judge asserts jurisdiction and El Salvador chooses to humor this, a non-U.S. citizen being held by a non-U.S. country is not something we'd expect U.S. Judges to devote resources towards without some strong U.S. interests at stake.
The actual basis on and circumstances under which he was arrested and removed might bear scrutiny, but let us say that the Judge does determine he was wrongfully removed. Seems like the remedy is to release him and he can find his own way from there.
If a foreign national is being held in an El Salvadoran prison, then their home country ought to be the one they're contacting to seek release.
The emotional component becomes clearer to me when I flip the script. Imagining some random U.S. citizen sneaks into, I dunno, Italy. They catch him but a judge rules he can't be removed for the time being, and he marries an Italian lady and has some young kids in the meantime, but never goes through the naturalization process.
Then the next Italian Prime Minister comes in and actively starts deporting migrants, but not necessarily to their home countries. If the U.S. Citizen ends up in an Albanian prison, do we actually expect him to cry to the Italian government to bring him back? Does anyone really feel like a U.S. citizen is entitled to activate the Italian Justice system to come to his rescue?
OR more absurdly if Italy ships him to the U.S. and has the U.S. agrees to hold him in prison, do we really, REALLY think he's going to succeed by asking Italian courts to intervene, rather than taking it up directly with the U.S. government to get himself released and, lets say, his wife and kids brought over here?
The weight of the argument in favor of bringing Abrego Garcia back seems to be
- The emotional argument that his wife and kids are suffering due to his removal;
- The emotional argument that he'd just be better off here because the U.S. is a better place to live, it would be cruel to 'make' him live elsewhere.
If we discard those arguments, if Garcia is released, only "LEGAL" positions (not really moral ones) that make sense are that he could try to return to the U.S. on his own dime and through legal channels, or he can return 'home' and bring his wife and kids with him to reunite the family.
faceh
26d ago
Ya know, I'd actually agree it would be nice to have clarity as to how these countries can respond to quickly get the tariffs dropped, the attempt at opacity seems odd.
But I ascribe that to the mix of goals Trump is pursuing, which is to say he needs flexibility so tying himself to an algorithm means he can't maneuver much.
That's maybe the concerning part, aside from Trump's temperament. He is trying to optimize along a few different dimensions instead of merely seeking one blunt policy outcome.
faceh
26d ago
Or potentially agree to grant access to your country's natural resources, or make investments directly in American manufacturing.
Like Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively.
https://apnews.com/article/taiwan-us-tsmc-chips-investment-71d3aeb2bc403a92ce8eccdd8c51c0c8)
Now I actually would NOT like an overly complex patchwork of trade deals.
I'd prefer the world where everyone drops tariffs to some agreed-upon maximum and signs on to a treaty to keep them there.
As I intimated upthread, if these countries do NOT come to the table to attempt negotiation, I will have to seriously rethink my model of the world at large.
faceh
26d ago
Ultimately, long term is 10+ years out, for me. But even 5 years is a pretty long time horizon given the massive pace of change going on in many sectors. We could have the beginnings of a Mars colony by then.
faceh
26d ago
The benefits of lower-skilled farm workers do not in fact accrue primarily to the upper and political classes; it makes food cheaper, which helps basically all consumers, and it helps the farm workers.
I also makes nannies cheaper, house cleaners, delivery drivers, etc. etc., but those services are definitely more keyed for the upper classes.
And it also places upward pressure on housing prices in specifically the areas where lower/middle class homebuyers would be looking. And if its true that migrants get more financial assistance to find housing than average citizens, they can actually outcompete those native citizens!
Migrants aren't buying large mansions in upscale areas, by and large, they're going for the same single-family homes that your average twenty-something couple might want, too. So they place upward pressure specifically on the housing that would be accessible to middle class and down, not the top quarter of the economic stack, who can afford to live in communities far from migrant populations.
Of course, they provide labor to build more housing, so I'm willing to accept that it might be a wash in that regard.
I find it hard to believe Martha's Vinyard couldn't absorb 50 migrants if they were willing to put them to work (probably under the table)
They presumably wanted to avoid any APPEARANCE that migrants would be welcome to move in there, lest it attract a larger crowd. I agree they probably have tons of them employed in the area, maybe some that even live in it, but that state of affairs persists only if they can control the flow.
faceh
26d ago
Offer access to your country's natural resources, like was proposed with Ukraine?
Make direct investments into American manufacturing like Taiwan?
I expect that the deals reached by each country will look different, with the outcomes being the result of some creative horse-trading.
Now, I'm also concerned that this will result in an overly complex patchwork of trade deals and potentially contradictory obligations between various countries, when the simplest outcome would just be everyone drops tariffs to some agreed-upon maximum and signs on to a treaty to keep them there.
But this is not some historically unprecedented diplomatic endeavor.
On this basis literally anything Trump does can be explained as a brilliant negotiating tactic.
Yes.
He wrote a book on this. To the extent you believe the words on the page, you can use it to make insights into his mind and his preferred strategies. He's not some completely mysterious, inscrutable chaos demon, but when people react to his actions with such alarm, its easy for him to build a reputation as one.
We can make judgments based on his behavior during his first term, which so many people seem to treat like ancient forgotten history.
I AGREE that you can't pretend every Trump move is a 4-D chess move that will inevitably result in whatever his desired outcome is. I prefer to model him as a shark, with finely-honed instincts for survival in his cutthroat environment.
But it would be stupid to assume he does things without some goal or strategy in mind, after all he's successfully outmaneuvered many experienced political actors and avoided a multi-pronged attempt to send him to prison to win a national election. Twice. (maybe three times, but that argument isn't worth rehashing). Other than him just being the favorite of the Gods, the best explanation is he is more canny than his opponents want to give him credit for, or his opponents are genuinely that incompetent.
Here's a question: can you point out any actions he took in the foreign relations arena, from his first term, where he straight up 'lost?' i.e. where he capitulated with absolutely nothing to show for it or maybe even gave something up?
Because he racked up some actual wins. People said moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem would trigger chaos and reprisals from the Muslim world. Instead it went smoothly, and many Arab countries lined up shortly thereafter to improve diplomacy with the U.S. and Isreal!
I mean, the Middle East did eventually fall back into increased chaos... during Biden's term.
Oh, and remember when he Went to North Korea, the FIRST President to do so, and got them to at least verbally agree to denuclearization talks?, and NK has been substantially less uppity since then?
Apparently that's still their stated intention!
Look man, I'm trying my best to disentangle my feeling about Trump's persona and actually look at his actions and their outcomes, and end of the day, the guy usually brings home some kind of bacon when he's locked in, no matter how distasteful you find his tactics.
So we could just pretend that THIS time he's acting completely out of pocket and flailing around randomly or see where it actually goes. Yes, there's some cause for concern! Trump can be temperamental! But I'm also modelling the other countries in this situation, and it seems obvious they almost all have good reasons to reach some kind of deal in the very near future, and failure to even try to do so would be irrational on their part! I don't think they're irrational, so I think the pressure from Trump will get them to the table, at least.
Its probably a top 3 pet peeve of internet discourse for me.
Its the "So you hate Waffles?" issue.
People will aggressively impute thoughts and motives to the speaker and then draw conclusions about their words that wildly diverge from the simplest interpretation of the sentences.
Then attack them on that basis, which instantly derails any communication that might have been possible.
I spent a LONG time learning how to write as directly and clearly as possible (within the constraints of the English language) and it still happens to me.
That said, in day-to-day communications, reading between the lines or recognizing when someone IS motivated to manipulate you is a useful skill, so its not like its 'wrong' to try to parse someone's words like that.
More options
Context Copy link