MillardJMelnyk
No bio...
User ID: 3663
MillardJMelnyk
2d ago
Don't talk to me about poverty as defined by governments and NGOs. Talk to me about a living wage. Only 40% of adults in the US earn more than a bare minimum to survive. Why do they set the "poverty line" so low? To make arguments like you just did.
MillardJMelnyk
2d ago
Well I can't speak for others, let alone the majority, nor for viewpoints that I don't hold, and there are plenty of them out there.
If you're interested in continuing, I'm game. But not here. Too difficult to navigate and pick up from where we loft off. Plus, from the admins tone, I'm not long for the motte, anyway. I've enjoyed our conversation so far. millardjmelnyk@gmail.com
MillardJMelnyk
2d ago
Sure, "poverty". Let's talk living wage. Do you know how many adults in the US earn less than a living wage? Over 60%. But you're OK with that, if you even knew it. Only 40% of adults make more than bare minimum of what it takes to stay alive. That is a human poverty line, not the inhuman line of about half that much (which is actually the extreme poverty line.)
Anyone can be an Olympian if you lower the bar to 2", man. Get real.
MillardJMelnyk
2d ago
You're confused. I spoke plainly. You volunteered killing. That's got nothing to do with my clarity. Obviously obvious to you, but you don't speak for me or anyone else. The point isn't that I wasn't clear and you had to guess. The point is that when you guessed, you leapt to killing. Got nothing to do with me or how I think. All I did was hold that mirror up to you.
MillardJMelnyk
2d ago
I think you misunderstood my last.
If you're interested in continuing, I'm game. But not here. Too difficult to navigate and pick up from where we loft off. Plus, from the admins tone, I'm not long for the motte, anyway. I've enjoyed our conversation so far. millardjmelnyk@gmail.com
MillardJMelnyk
2d ago
If you're interested in continuing, I'm game. But not here. Too difficult to navigate and pick up from where we loft off. Plus, from the admins tone, I'm not long for the motte, anyway. I've enjoyed our conversation so far. millardjmelnyk@gmail.com
MillardJMelnyk
2d ago
If you're interested in continuing, I'm game. But not here. Too difficult to navigate and pick up from where we loft off. Plus, from the admins tone, I'm not long for the motte, anyway. I've enjoyed our conversation so far. millardjmelnyk@gmail.com
MillardJMelnyk
3d ago
PS. A couple of people indicated they'd like to keep discussing, and there were many replies that I just didn't have time to get to. In case anyone has the inclination, I'm easy to find online, Millard J Melnyk, millardjmelnyk@gmail.com. All are welcome, even snarky, belligerent, condescending ones! 😁
MillardJMelnyk
3d ago
That's OK. You can't be clear and specific about your prohibitions. I would have been pleasantly surprised if you'd responded directly and honestly. You refuse to get specific because it would put your own standards for snark, belligerence, and condescension on the table, open to discussion. Yes, I definitely know exactly what I'm doing -- and I definitely know exactly what you're doing. That gives me a leg up, because what I'm doing isn't remotely what you've characterized it to be. But no matter.
I'm here for the ideas. You're here to maintain and expand the reach of the site. Basic conflict of interests. Your work is to make sure people don't get pissed off. My work is to piss people off so that they start fucking thinking for themselves. You could care less about that. We're not a good fit. Like you've said more than once (in more polite terms), you don't give a shit about the ideas -- neither mine nor anyone else's. Your job is to take care of egos. Fuck ego -- mine, yours, and everyone else's. You, me, they really don't matter two toots compared to the effects of what we do and say that will go on forever. I'm looking to that. In light of that, narcissistic butt-hurt means precisely squat.
I came back to the post today to say "thanks and good luck" anyway. The post served my purposes well, and I'm back to work on my book. I really appreciate all the responses I got, even the snarky, condescending ones. (I don't run to Papa Admin when people get behavioral with me -- I just put them in their place, and then they go running to him. 😆 Not my first rodeo, dude.)
So, thanks everyone, there were some great points made, good insights, good questions in there amidst all the chaff. I've benefitted. Hope you did, too. ttfn
MillardJMelnyk
3d ago
Sorry, just can't deal with all the presumptions, projections, and straw men. You've asked some good questions and raised some good points, but sorry. Won't be responding. Speculate all you like about my motivations, agenda, subtext, etc. Got nothing to do with me. Be well.
MillardJMelnyk
3d ago
Sorry, your basic mistake is not realizing that property must be available and seized before any question of deprivation is relevant. Sex is not a commodity, it's an activity. My body is not property, it's integral and indissociable from me, the individual. Sex requires access to me which, without my permission, is rape. I'm not depriving others of property I acquired called "sex", because its default state isn't lying on the beach to be picked up, buried in a mountain to be mined, mixed in creek sand to be panned for, or in any way a "resource" to be extracted. You're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
MillardJMelnyk
3d ago
I'm retired, full-time research, theory, and writing since 2009, formerly 50/50 residential construction and corporate I.T. (consultant, Boeing, Group Health Cooperative, King County Metro (WA), Dynacraft, and others). Lifelong social scientist (philosophy, religion, education, economics, politics). I fly very, very high.
I agree, things like relative cost/benefit, outcomes, etc., are crucial. The problem is that we're in no position to determine any of that intelligently until we've actually studied an alternative experimentally. To do that requires a good job of understanding it theoretically. To do that requires being agreement capable in order to think it through constructively. How many comments on this post would you say indicate agreement capability? If brainstorming is hobbled by notions of "realism" and "viability" and "morality" -- which by definition all hail from a collective knowledge base that's conservatively biased against the most novel alternatives without actually understanding them, you're guaranteed to miss the good stuff. How can you understand an alternative if you bat the spoon away when someone says, "Here, just taste it" ??
I think a lot of the frustration you're seeing in response here is that the ball seems to be in your court on this topic but you refuse to acknowledge that and instead insist that the ball is in our court. You're proposing some pretty radical interpretations of society and then refusing to elaborate in anything but vagueness.
That's the codependence talking. The ball is ALWAYS in your court unless you've given up your game to play someone else's. Let's just say it turns out I'm onto something here, and within the next ten years it will become common knowledge. Tomorrow I'm going to bike into town to food shop. Let's say I get hit and killed by a car, and you never hear from me again. Where is the "ball" then?
Sure, this is a pretty important thing. If you're proposing we collapse all of society and return to monkey or whatever I'd like to say straight up that I have no interest in giving up modern conveniences.
This points out a basic difference between us. I'm not "proposing we collapse all of society". That's ridiculous -- not because collapsing society is ridiculous, but because pretending that I or you or the two of us together could do fuckall to collapse it. It's like people think that these discussions have significant, possibly direct bearing on what happens in the world. It's a fantastic assumption. I don't participate in that.
I'm as realistic a person as you could find. Totally fact-based. If you show me facts that contradict what I think, I adjust what I think. I'm doing what I do not only because I know I can have an effect, but because I've already had an effect. We could argue whether I'm riding the wave or am part of the wave -- I'm not interested. What I know is that I could see where things are going 10 - 15 years ago, and now we're there. My only serious fault (even still) is that I always underestimate how fast and how far and how deeply/seriously. I knew in the spring of 2019 that something (which turned out to be COVID) was coming. I had no clue it would come in a mere year. I would never have guessed how destructive it would be and how deeply and far it would shift collective consciousness (sociological sense). So, my personal challenge is to push myself further into radicalness, because my history has consistently proven that I never go nearly far enough.
I'm not here to discuss radical ideas for the jollies. I can only do so much as the one-man-show I've been for 15 years. We're never going to figure this shit out by deferring it to people strongly incentized to make sure it never gets figured out. My experience after 15 years: 90% of people are agreement incapable; 99.9% range from merely open to supportive but don't actively engage and contribute (lurkers, more or less), and I can count on one hand the number of people I can bounce things off of or mull them over with, but none of them have committed to pushing the fucking stone over the fucking mountain. They just don't want or can't go as radical as it's going to need to get, yet. And here I see I've never been radical enough. What do you think I should do?
Also, "proposing we collapse society" is based on huge, factless assumptions. One, like I said, that we actually could collapse it. Two, that if society radically changed, it would be catastrophic. But most important and factless of all, that for society to avoid collapse, it would need to resemble what it currently is to some degree. That's absolutely false in all practical respects. No one knows that. No one has any evidence at all that indicates that. Societies have collapsed, of course, but give me just one example, just one, that collapsed as the result of a failed experiment in radical change. Read social science and history experts and their explanations for the collapse of a society -- Greek, Roman, any other -- and you'll see detailed description of how their collapses were inevitable due to the nature of their own structure, ethos, and design -- NOT because they radically departed from them.
As far as Black, I promote him in the interest of expanding minds, not endorsing his views/"solutions". I don't think he has any solutions. He's an anarchist, we've corresponded, I've tried to engage him, but he demurs. That's basically when I realized I've gone far beyond anarchism.
I think I understand intuitively what you're trying to get at - e.g. why not let a billionaire share his summer house with homeless people? (Is this the kind of scenario you have in mind?)
No. What I want is for mutual decency and care to eliminate the insanity of wanting to be a billionaire.
Are you trying to propose a system where people are obligated to share stuff they aren't using? (so in the system, I don't have to "share" my computer, coffee mug, or charger, since I'm using them now - but I should share my electric cooker with someone else because I'm not using it now)
I'm not proposing: I'm trying to get people to fucking think. How can we propose a system when our heads are cemented into a paradigm which history shows has not worked and is resistant to change? Who says what we need is a system? If we need a system, who says that any of us or all of us together are smart enough to design it? What if the fundamental problem is the codependence that compels us to demand that others design a system for us? What if it turns out that we can systematize on the fly and adapt to changing circumstances rather than this obsession for one-size-fits-all? Or at least let's all put our heads together and come up with something far better than what we've got.
If so, do you not think there's value in having "right of access" 24/7 for various items? In my case, I like the fact that my books, my bed, my crockery, etc are all "on retainer" to be used whenever I want. Whereas if I had to share them all the time, it would cost me utility.
Yes, of course, and excellent point. But I don't subscribe to "have to share" or "have to" anything at all. If a person is broken and twisted so that they want to do dysfunctional, harmful things, the answer isn't "There oughta be a law!", it's to help fix them. If they're resistant, there are ways to deal with that, too, that don't amount to erasing them socially like "convict" does. We were so brainwashed with "have to"-think we don't even know it's not necessary. If a person is relatively whole and human, they don't need to be prevented from walking into my cabin and acting like they own the place. I don't need "ownership". How would ownership prevent me from invading your house and breaking or taking your stuff if you're a renter? The owner would? What if the owner is my twin brother and doesn't like you very much? We've been trained to think in ruts and get impugned or punished for trying to break out of them. To wit: the knee-jerk arguments in response to the invitation on this post. Ownership is exactly one of those ruts.
MillardJMelnyk
3d ago
Yes, that's an alternative.
MillardJMelnyk
3d ago
No, and I showed as much by offering post-scarcity as another way of thinking.
Where? I just looked. Unless you're referring to "gay luxury space communism" which I took as sardonic. I responded to it, though, even so, and I acknowledged it. Obviously, I wasn't referring to that but to your first two paragraphs, which seems clear you think are far more realistic.
However scarcity along with defectors and adversaries are perennial elements that don't go away through wishing it were so.
Bucky disagreed, and that was a long time ago before we have the tech we have today. He disagreed that there was any non-human factor that has ever necessitated scarcity. Scarcity would be a thing of the past forever and ever if there were any desire to end it on the part of those with the means, or if there were any desire to end it on the part of those who could compel those with the means to stop being such murderous assholes.
I recognize that people can be perverse, greedy, willful, and psychopathic. All of those are remediable. How are we going to change that and stop them from depriving others? Your answer seems to be, well, just deprive first. My answer is: stop glorifying it and worshiping predators, for a start. Or even a smaller baby step: start being honest that we've glorified it and worshiped predators. Let's try that and see what happens.
Yeah --appeals to humanity only work with the human. That's why rights are a scam. The only people against whom rights could protect us are the very ones who couldn't give a shit about them. Arguing with the devil whose only interest in reason is how he can use it against you.
The most potent force I've found against liars, bullshitters, psychopaths, etc., is honesty: aggressive, no-holds-barred honesty. Won't change a psychopath, but it definitely changes their followers. And what are they without followers?
MillardJMelnyk
3d ago
won't change the basic fact that "this pile of stuff is mine and no you can't have it, or take it, or claim it by right of necessity" is what everyone feels from the time they're two years old onwards.
So true. But why stop there? Are you denying that we can't overcome instinct and learn beyond it? That we're incapable of doing otherwise? That infantile possessiveness is as good as it gets? We can't learn to share? We can't learn to rise above narcissism and survivalism? Not sure what you're saying there, cuz how it reads is kinda ridiculous.
If you're just going "it's not my job to educate you" about any possible insight you might have had around "how can we do this differently?", then I'm going to suggest you did not, in fact, have any useful insight and thus we can all ignore your shower thoughts.
Right you are, it's absolutely not my job to educate you. And that seems to have gotten your goat. That's not my problem. BTW, suggest all you like. You'd be wrong. Ignore me at will, be my guest. I didn't twist your arm and force you to opine. Methinks you protest too much for shower thoughts.
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
Nice thinking, thanks!
Because I really don't think you can have a system free of deprivation.
In situations of scarcity, deprivation becomes relevant. In situations of abundance, it's moot. In scarcity, the question isn't, "Must someone be deprived?" Scarcity dictates that someone will be deprived of what a less scarce/more abundant situation would enable. The far more important question is two-fold: 1) How do we share the deprivation; or 2) Are some going to force disparity in deprivation on the rest?
In starvation circumstances, it can get down to "Someone's gonna die or we're all gonna die: what's it gonna be?" The question then is how you're going to answer the question: mutually or by dominance/force?
I'm afraid it is not sticking me in particular in the nose and would appreciate a more explicit spelling it out. If you want to say communism or whatever you can just come out and say it. We entertain much more fringe positions here from time to time even if there are those who jeer rightly or wrongly you'll usually find some interlocutors willing to approach in good faith so long as you're clear and not too unpleasant about it.
Yeah, I had my reasons for not wanting to answer my own question for a time. Sharing is sticking us all in the nose. We all know how. We all know we like it better when we're on the receiving end. Refusing to share demonstrates the opposite of fairness and parity. Psychologically, it indicates either egocentric bias or full-on incapacity to exercise theory of mind.
Sharing isn't the alternative I'd put forward though. When I think stuff like this through, I go for the furthest I can find the least bit credible, then ratchet back from there if necessary. In my experience not only is it not usually necessary, but I look back later and realize the biggest leap I managed to take look in retrospect like a trembling baby step.
So, I go for the extreme opposite: the opposite of deprivation is provision.
What would things look like if we predicated our dealings on preemptive principled provision?
This is a really unsatisfying answer to people who have to actually live in any of these proposed worlds. It actually matters quite a bit if you don't have an alternative because we rely on ownership as a foundation to this very complex world full of wonders that we have built.
You misunderstood me, thanks to my failure to complete my own sentence! My point is that there is a process involves in thinking through alternatives. Issues that arise in the paradigm that created the problem aren't necessarily applicable to alternatives, especially not if they significantly alter or trigger replacement of the entire paradigm. Example: stagnant pond, no outlet, water is turning bad. I suggest digging an outlet. People argue that it will let all the water out or it won't help anyway (because they can't fathom the pond clearing because the requisite stretch of time is longer than they can wrap their mind around) before we've even tried it. It's been known since the 80s that the worst thing you can do in a brainstorming session is criticize the ideas that arise instead of accepting and exploring them. (de Bono's Serious Creativity is great on this point.) Bringing up all the "can't"-s in reaction to an unfamiliar idea is simply the wrong point in the process for it. That's the context for, "I really don't care how thousands of years of use has convinced us that ownership is useful or what "problems" it "solves"..." If I didn't care about solutions/having alternatives, why would I have asked for collaboration to come up with them? The other angle is that so many people pretend that problems should not be raised unless we already have a ready solution. I'm sure you see the silliness of that.
Yes, I have thought quite a bit about this kind of thing. My conclusion is that the ability to deprive is probably necessary for any social system that scales past around the Dunbar number and depending on how you operationalize "deprive" maybe far below that number.
Cool! Then notice that an ability is not a right, and let's keep them straight. I'm talking about a preemptive principled right to universally deprive. I can deprive every single person in the whole world of a $100 dollar bill by burning it to ash. Totally my right as an owner (ignoring the complication that money is not something we "own" strictly speaking) but impossible if I ain't got no matches. Right vs. ability.
I don't see us to be sinking in any meaningful way. Society is more prosperous than any time in history. So yes, I will need some kind of assurance that your plan to meddle with these fundamental axioms of society isn't going to be really really terrible before I sign on. It could be like slavery where we really are better off with it.
Here's the thing about "rising tide raises all boats" thinking. I don't argue that things are not better for most people now than they were 100 years ago. My issue is that it's a retrogressive approach. I call it the One Less Blow fallacy. Getting hit only 5 times today instead of the usual 6 doesn't make it a good day, nor does it excuse the 5, and the fact that one less blow is an improvement might serve as consolation, but it's no kind of progress I have any interest in. It indicates a strong conservatism bias (the cognitive bias) and takes little to no thought about solving root problems. It's simple. Is this the world you want to live in? Is this the world you want your loved ones and great- and great-great offspring to live in? Is this or something resembling it as good as you want it to get? My answers to those are resounding NO FUCKING WAY! Settling for better-than-worse to avoid the possibility that you might break something by attempting good-as-we-want has never made sense to me.
Genuinely just coming up with childish noble savage myths about how native Americans live in 90s era cartoons. Why are you so resistant to actually describing what you're after?
Nothing noble-savageish here. Why are you so insistent that I make a contribution? Why do I withhold? (Thanks for the compliment by assuming I have something!) I have lots of reasons, but I've already written enough this go. I just wanted to show you the same appreciation you show me in taking me seriously and responding directly, specifically. But what if my whole point here was to ask about something that I know almost no one -- including me -- has a clue about, just to prove the point because I freakin hate BS and denial? Not allowed? But I already spilled my beans above.
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
"¡Bienvenido a México, cabrón!" 😁
No worries, flip is definitely better than stodgy.
Sorry to contradict, but yes, I DO DON'T LIKE THAT! 😆 I REALLY DO REALLY REALLY DON'T LIKE THAT!
What makes you think I don't don't like that?
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
I've succeeded with a few. Otherwise, yeah -- no argument.
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
yeah, but there's a more important way to look at it: not if there's any incentive, but rather if there is more incentive and more creativity and improvement using one approach or method than there is with an alternative. You can't answer that more important question until you've actually tried the alternative and gathered data. Conversely, declaring the alternative stillborn before you give it a chance to live and breath and provide experience and data is evidentially baseless. Not even wrong.
Not sure how your 2nd question relates. I do know that treating children as slaves (literally, physically, and psychologically) continues to be a huge problem. Our children are not here for our sake, we're here for theirs.
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
No, I've looked into it, but every one quickly seemed kinda creepy and cultish. I've had enough cult in my life, thank you very much, lol. I considered going down to Chiapas and checking out the Zapatistas, but the whole lookie-loo gringo thing gave me pause, and the whole militant/militaristic aspect of the scene kinda puts me off.
People have tried alternatives, no argument. To presume that my thinking/ideas can be reduced to "nothing new" that hasn't "already been tried" is silly at this stage. No one on this thread knows that. It's been hard to find the kind of open, interested, curious discussion (here and elsewhere) that would inform and thereby qualify people to pass that judgment.
Humans are functionally incapable of "love and mutualism" beyond around 100 people.
False on two levels.
Level 1: Being incapable of the same level/degree/intensity of love and mutualism they participate in on small scales does not ipso facto mean they're completely incapable of any degree of love and mutualism at larger scales. It's not an on/off switch, it's a spectrum. And there are easy ways to compensate. Black/white thinking.
Level 2 (two parts): a) The tacit implication is that we have crucial needs that can't be met at small levels; and b) those needs require love and mutualism in ways and to degrees that we aren't capable of and can't compensate for. Have you thought that through? Which needs do we have that our small circle can't provide? Can we change that? If not, what needs are those and do they require the kind/level/degree of mutualism and love evident within our small circle? If they do require it, can we compensate? Etc.
I find that people simply don't take the time and effort to think questions like that through -- but the definitely make claims and pronouncements as if they had and is if they "know".
The best way I know to work through things like that is to take an credible, significant example and start thinking through how we would (instead of how we can't) do it. I'm game.
Keep in mind, though, that when we work examples through and end up stumped, it does not in any way mean there is no way, no how, merely because we got stumped this time. It's amazing to see that so many people are certain it means exactly that. Weird.
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
What points did I leave out? I didn't take yours point-by-point, but I can. My point was that you couched your points in an adversarial framing, as if "rivalry" is the only way to frame our interactions. Of course, that's not even close to true.
The existence of ownership doesn't preclude cooperation.
No one here said it did.
Coining a new term doesn't do anything about basic physical realities like "if I eat that apple, you can't."
What "new term"?
There's a difference between using/consuming the same thing at the same time, on one hand, and one person declaring their right to prevent any and all others from using/consuming it at any particular time or at all times. They're not the same. I'm talking about the latter. "If I eat the apple, you can't" is just physics. What's true and relevant to one isn't necessarily true or relevant about the other.
Please, put something forward. I'm not going to think your thoughts for you, especially since they're apparently inscrutable. All you've said so far said "property is a mental disorder" on repeat.
Nor am I going to think your thoughts for you. I invited collaboration on an alternative to "deprive-first, ask questions later or not at all" ownership. No shame in coming up dry. I came up dry for a long time. My thoughts aren't inscrutable, but neither are they subject to demand on command, lol. A couple of people have touched on sharing as the alternative. Most have given reasons why alternatives aren't workable. A couple have strongly claimed that no alternatives are available. For me, this is a revisit to a topic I broached years ago. I know the kinds of responses I got then, and now I know something about the kinds of responses I got this time. The differences are informative. A shift is in progress.
Besides, I didn't want to influence the responses by making a suggestion of my own. I'm happy to do so at this point, though:
What about provision as an alternative to deprivation? What would that look like?
MillardJMelnyk
4d ago
control, ownership, possession, gain, accumulation, and acquiring
Those are the prerequisites and, in part, the basis for deprivation -- not the opposite of deprivation.
If you're interested in continuing, I'm game. But not here. Too difficult to navigate and pick up from where we loft off. Plus, from the admins tone, I'm not long for the motte, anyway. I've enjoyed our conversation so far. millardjmelnyk@gmail.com
More options
Context Copy link