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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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Anyone want to brainstorm a viable alternative to "ownership"?

Only if you've stopped stealing from other people.

If ownership is deprivation of others, then that deprivation is theft. After all, to deprive is to deny someone the possession or use of something. If this is supposed to be an immoral characteristic ('paranoid,' 'not sharing,' 'psychopathy), then the moral state is for it to not be deprived. The immoral deprivation of personal or even public goods is understood to be theft.

However, you are posting here. On the internet. A medium that requires a computer of some sort that could be not-deprived to someone else. Moreover, you repeatedly responded to others. This entails further use of time depriving the device to others. It also implies a surplus of time, and thus material resources you are depriving others of, that enable the hobby rather than sharing like a non-paranoid should. These resources are deprived from benefiting other possible beneficiaries and potential users by virtue (or sin) of your use. Your use and expected ability to use is demonstrating a de facto, even if not de jure, ownership.

It's generally understood that it is fair to judge people by their own standards, even if it's not fair to do so by your own. So be it. A priest who declares any who disagrees with their message is damned to hell will be a damned priest by their own hypocrisies. A revolutionary who declares it an act of cowardliness to not participate in a protest is a coward for not participating. You are someone who deprives others by exercising ownership and mutually exclusive use of limited resources.

Why should anyone brainstorm alternative ownership with a thief in the middle of a robbery?

I mean... I don't agree with the OP but isn't your comment just this meme?

The difference between the meme and hoisting someone by their own petard is that a petard must be provided by the owner and initial user.

The nature of the meme is that the counter-argument strawman figure is claiming 'gotcha' moments, despite not actually addressing any position presented. The person on the iphone criticizing Apple's pay of employees is arguing from a position that Apple could be paying the employees more with what has been provided, not that Apple should be boycotted for not paying people more. The car seatbelt person is not a hypocrite for saying there should be seatbelts, because they have not made a standard that such an expression would be hypocritical by. Society-peasant's panel isn't even about a choice of action, which is the punchline against the strawman's degeneration. The strawman is not actually using anyone else's standards, not least because they provided no standard of 'right' by which they violated. The strawman has to invent a standard they did not claim in order to condemn them.

Arguments made from a position of morality can be challenged on their own terms because they provided a standard that the arguer can be judged by. They present an argument of right or wrong that applicable examples can be compared to. The use of moral connotation language indicates what the arguer views as correct / incorrect behaviors. Pejorative language is a framing device- no one calls a reasonable decision 'paranoid' because paranoia is by its nature unjustified/unwarranted/irrational. When personal actions are subject to condemnation under a paradigm, the paradigm-provider can be judged under the same.

The OP chose to offer a definition to judge others by. They used emotive and condemnatory language to indicate their own judgement. Having established the standard and a moralist framing, they can be judged by it in turn.

I apologize, I should have been more clear. The "we should improve society somewhat" meme only refers to this panel, not entire the comic in which it originated.

I still find it problematic that a person can't criticize any fundamental pillars of a society while "benefiting" from them. Like, how can we expect the OP to not "take advantage" of personal property ownership by your standard and still be able to function in a capitalistic society? Are we supposed to disregard any criticism they have because they themselves are forced to participate in the society as it is currently structured?

With respect to his complaints, OP is not forced to participate in society as it currently exists. There are successful communes based on communitarian and egalitarian principles functioning in America right now that he could seek to join, or he could look into starting his own with like-minded people.

Ignoring the total incoherence of his arguments, if he has been studying this for fifteen years as he says, it seems plausible to me that he has had the opportunity to go somewhere that would allow him to test and experience his theories in a real-world environment.

The problem is that communes, and his ideas more broadly, are most generously interpreted as not scaleable, even with the best will in the world.

I do think it is somewhat likely that the OP currently lives in a communal-type environment, just based on what he’s said before, so I am willing to give him some credit for living his beliefs.

I agree broadly but if the following is the standard to judge hypocrisy, then clearly just living in a communal-type environment doesn't absolve the OP of his sins, so to speak.

However, you are posting here. On the internet. A medium that requires a computer of some sort that could be not-deprived to someone else. Moreover, you repeatedly responded to others. This entails further use of time depriving the device to others. It also implies a surplus of time, and thus material resources you are depriving others of, that enable the hobby rather than sharing like a non-paranoid should. These resources are deprived from benefiting other possible beneficiaries and potential users by virtue (or sin) of your use. Your use and expected ability to use is demonstrating a de facto, even if not de jure, ownership.

He's not just saying 'I think society should be improved' he's making moral judgements about owning things like "A preemptive right to universally deprive is obviously psychopathic". But if he thinks it's psychopathic he is either using that term in a way nobody else on earth does or being extremely hyperbolic for the purposes of rhetoric. But whenever anyone asks him about it he goes (paraphrased) "lol, lmao, roflmao, I mean psychopathic". Ok, well then he's a psychopath stealing from everyone right?

he's making moral judgements about owning things like "A preemptive right to universally deprive is obviously psychopathic".

Sorry, my friend, psychopathy has nothing to do with morality, except to moralizers. I'm not making "judgments" either, unless you construe researched findings as "judgments" -- but that would be on you, not me. I'm speaking strictly psychologically, simply, and generically: pathology of the psyche. The fact that a strong (and futile) attempt has been made to isolate "psychopathy" to an extreme end of the scale (it's a spectrum, not an is/isn't) so that the rest of us can feel cozy that "we're not like them" means nothing in the long run. A preemptive right to universally deprive is psychopathic because the framing and the motivations are delusional. Happy to discuss.

Sorry, my friend, psychopathy has nothing to do with morality, except to moralizers.

You’re using it moralistically. Rights and concepts can’t be literally psychopathic, only people can be psychopaths. It’s a psychopathology characterized by, among many things, the congenital inability to empathize with others. Applying the idea to a legal right is like saying the first amendment has a fever.

So the only way your statement can have meaning is if you’re using the word metaphorically to make a point. The obvious interpretation is that you’re making a moral claim, that the right to deprive is the kind of thing someone without empathy would have come up with, and that’s bad because it’s wrong to lack empathy. You claim here that you mean to say the right is delusional, which is a terrible metaphor because psychopaths do not typically suffer from delusions.