Perfect Moderate
2005.08.03 3:11

When someone holds conservative opinions in politics, and liberal opinions in economy, conservative and liberal make just moderate opinion.
I mean it's you -one of my best friends -Marxist Hacker 42
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For the most part yes(Score:2)
by Marxist Hacker 42 (638312) * <seebert@seeberfamily.org> on 2005.08.03 4:03 (#13224186) (http://www.informationr.us/ Last Journal: 2005.09.28 6:49)
Save for the fact that, on the Meyers-Briggs personality profile, I scored INFP- which claimed that I have an obsession with the extremes in society- an obsession with the Holy and the Profane. And yet I often find myself fighting with extremeists on both sides of the fence.--Two chances to become a Dictator- and Bush blew them both!
INTP(Score:2)
by Morosoph (693565) on 2005.08.04 2:14 (#13231849) (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tim.wesson/ Last Journal: 2005.09.17 20:46)
Is anticommunitarianism [slashdot.org] a reasonable political stance?--Why you Should use 'Viral' Licenses [slashdot.org] [ Parent ]
Re:INTP(Score:2)
by Marxist Hacker 42 (638312) * <seebert@seeberfamily.org> on 2005.08.04 2:31 (#13231989) (http://www.informationr.us/ Last Journal: 2005.09.28 6:49)
I personally don't think so- though the neo* cultists on both sides (neoliberals and neoconservatives) obviously do. Most modern anticommunitarianism is about moving power from the political sphere to the economic- and from there concentrating it in the "virtuous" oligarchy of the rich (under which the highest virtue is greed, and the most greed serving good one can do is make a profit, regardless of who gets stepped on and hurt in the process). Even with this- I tend towards the center. I want the separation of business and government- and to have both relatively powerfull still. If I'm a communitarian at all, it's that I think that small, local populations have the right to form their own government based on democracy- one that is stronger than the state and federal governments. In that, you might call me an anti-federalist, in that I don't really support the concept of the modern nation state. Small local populations should have rights of tariff, border, and immigration control to me- big government, small package, and if you really want to live in a corporate controlled free trade situation, all you need to do is move to where others of your kind are.--Two chances to become a Dictator- and Bush blew them both! [ Parent ]
Re:INTP(Score:2)
by Morosoph (693565) on 2005.08.04 2:50 (#13232195) (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tim.wesson/ Last Journal: 2005.09.17 20:46)
Well, here's my take:
It's Blair's 'Communitarianism'. Since it's impossible to ask a body what it, as an emergent form, 'thinks', you need to nominate leaders. That communitariansm exists in partial opposition to individualism tends to blind adherents to the intrinsic problem of listening to such usually self-selected minorities. Consultation for the purpose of making workable policies and laws gives way to 'group rights': a big mistake, considering that the group's interests may not be shared by any of their members, let alone anyone else. Integration with mutual respect has to be the best way, but neoLabour naturally wish to make it into something more...I've no problem with a sophisticated balance of interests, but to give power to society itself is, to my mind, the beginnings of fascism. A community's interests, in short, can easily be opposed to the interests of the bulk or all of its members - and even the bulk of outsiders' interests! As such, it is simply an alternative corporatism. If you follow the linked thread [slashdot.org], you'll see that I argue that Communitarianism is worse than the old large-scale giving power to large society, since consensus on the small scale is that much stronger, and accordingly more repressive.--Why you Should use 'Viral' Licenses [slashdot.org] [ Parent ]
Re:INTP(Score:2)
by Marxist Hacker 42 (638312) * <seebert@seeberfamily.org> on 2005.08.04 3:07 (#13232415) (http://www.informationr.us/ Last Journal: 2005.09.28 6:49)
Since it's impossible to ask a body what it, as an emergent form, 'thinks', you need to nominate leaders. This, in and of itself, is incorrect- most likely because it has become technologically outdated in the last 10 years or so. Neo* philosophies are built upon this being true- and thus fail as true communitarian philosophies.I've no problem with a sophisticated balance of interests, but to give power to society itself is, to my mind, the beginnings of fascism. A community's interests, in short, can easily be opposed to the interests of the bulk or all of its members - and even the bulk of outsiders' interests! Not possible if it's based on truly large scale (as in every eligible voter) polls on every topic. This statement is based on the last one, which is no longer true. It is now technically possible to gather the opinions of every member of society very rapidly.As such, it is simply an alternative corporatism. The difference being, at least on the small scale I'm talking about, the faceless nature of the corporation. The corporation or the government doesn't become the enemy of the people merely because of the system or the structure- it becomes the enemy of the people because it is large, and the people don't have the time to get to know each other.If you follow the linked thread, you'll see that I argue that Communitarianism is worse than the old large-scale giving power to large society, since consensus on the small scale is that much stronger, and accordingly more repressive. But where does more freedom get you? In the end, it only gets you made into a slave to some faceless corporate entity. At least on the small scale you have a choice to either fight or flee. On the large scale, you don't have that choice at all- you must instead surrender to the will of the minority.--Two chances to become a Dictator- and Bush blew them both! [ Parent ]
Communitarianism(Score:2)
by Morosoph (693565) on 2005.08.04 4:01 (#13232991) (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tim.wesson/ Last Journal: 2005.09.17 20:46)
I don't think that any of the pure philosophies get it right, but communitarianism is about community power, not democracy. In fact it is styled in opposition to liberalism.
I agree with you that corporate power is bad, but the group is no better: the dilution of responsibility that being part of the group involves means that democracy cannot be considered a reasonable ideal. Anarchy (no enforcement of property rights either) is better, although there are different flaws there.
Community will is not the right thing to enforce, and neither is corporate will. Both right and left are correct in criticising the other! A healthy community, like a healthy business, is one that serves the people; to hand power over to either outright without accountability is a mistake. Witch hunts of some form or other would be just around the corner...
Democracy is an important part of balancing people's interests, but the rare or unusual is an important part of the social dynamic. A healthy society would be one where the individual and society work symbiotically. Communitarianism isn't this: the reason why is in the name. Symbiosis is not the community finding a role; it is the community and the individual evolving together. What's more, this symbiosis is better optimised for the general benefit, not the abstract that is the community.
People may need democratic regulation, but democratic outright rule is oppressive: the people as a whole are no more enlightened than an individual; giving the power to the group solves no problems at all.--Why you Should use 'Viral' Licenses [slashdot.org] [ Parent ]
Re:Communitarianism(Score:2)
by Marxist Hacker 42 (638312) * <seebert@seeberfamily.org> on 2005.08.04 4:26 (#13233289) (http://www.informationr.us/ Last Journal: 2005.09.28 6:49)
I don't think that any of the pure philosophies get it right, but communitarianism is about community power, not democracy. In fact it is styled in opposition to liberalism. Pure democracy IS community power. I'm not sure what you consider liberalism to be- but I consider it to be using governmental power to help people. I think what you really mean is that it is opposed to libertarianism.I agree with you that corporate power is bad, but the group is no better: the dilution of responsibility that being part of the group involves means that democracy cannot be considered a reasonable ideal. Anarchy (no enforcement of property rights either) is better, although there are different flaws there. The main one being that anarchy will always devolve into the authority of the man with the most firepower. That's the problem with Anarchist/libertarian concepts- they assume that human independance is possible. It was at one time, but ever since we passed about 2 billion human beings on this planet, your actions affect me and my actions affect you, even though we might physically be many thousands of miles apart. Due to that reality, we need some system of regulation and government. That system can either be progressive or regressive- it can either be designed to give maximum freedom and self rule to the most people possible, or it can be designed to deliver power to a small subset of representatives.Community will is not the right thing to enforce, and neither is corporate will. Both right and left are correct in criticising the other! A healthy community, like a healthy business, is one that serves the people; to hand power over to either outright without accountability is a mistake. Witch hunts of some form or other would be just around the corner... Witch hunts are actually good from time to time- if say the Islamic community had done a witch hunt back in the 1940s, we wouldn't have Islamic terrorism today. Diversity becomes a burden when large numbers of people have to live together.Democracy is an important part of balancing people's interests, but the rare or unusual is an important part of the social dynamic. A healthy society would be one where the individual and society work symbiotically. Unfortuneately human beings can't be trusted to work symbiotically. They will always try to gain an advantage over their neighbors if allowed.Communitarianism isn't this: the reason why is in the name. Symbiosis is not the community finding a role; it is the community and the individual evolving together. What's more, this symbiosis is better optimised for the general benefit, not the abstract that is the community. The community is no longer an abstract with modern communication technology. It used to be, it's natural form is an abstract, but now that we're able to count votes for populations of more than 500 in a given day, the community itself has become a very concrete entity. It has become very easy to see what is in the general benefit and what is beneficial only to the individual; and while you're right that these are two different things, they are no longer unquantifiable.We can either use this technology for government or for business- but the technology WILL be used regardless. Wal*Mart, for instance, owes about 12% of their profit margin to knowing exactly how much of which product will be sold in a given store on a given day- based on a historical database recording the "dollar votes" of every customer in their now world wide network. They do it with sales- there's no reason why a small town or city couldn't do it with *nightly* elections.People may need democratic regulation, but democratic outright rule is oppressive: the people as a whole are no more enlightened than an individual; giving the power to the group solves no problems at all. Unless, of course, the group is kept small. The real question isn't between democratic regulation and democratic rule- it's between oligarchial rule and democratic rule, or between representative democracies and local small democracies. Certainly, just to use an example from my own state, a group of ranchers in Fossil, OR knows far more about their local economy and their local ecology than the state government in Salem, OR- over 300 miles away, or than the federal government in Washington, DC does 2700 miles away from Fossil.Here's what I'd like to see for a Communitarian government: each CITY has it's own voting computer and nightly, online city council meetings. The city council is made up of every citizen of that city. The city government controls three main powers: 1. Who can become a citizen. 2. Local sales tax in retail businesses. 3. Who gets a business license or a home building permit.In many places in the United States, we already have this power- but it's done through representative government instead of direct democracy. And we grant rights to "minorities" that nobody wants- sex offenders, illegal immigrants, etc can't be discriminated against, so they multiply out of control. This is NOT a good thing, despite what the multiculturalists say. I say, give it back to the cities and towns to do this locally, and you'll still have diversity- in the places where diversity is valuable- while preserving the basic right of people to live in a homogenous community.--Two chances to become a Dictator- and Bush blew them both! [ Parent ]
Re:Communitarianism(Score:2)
by Morosoph (693565) on 2005.08.04 8:50 (#13236133) (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tim.wesson/ Last Journal: 2005.09.17 20:46)
Pure democracy IS community power. I'm not sure what you consider liberalism to be- but I consider it to be using governmental power to help people. I think what you really mean is that it is opposed to libertarianism.No, pure democracy, or any other form of governance (including anarchic governance) regulates the community, just as it regulates every member. Community is emergent from the people, and has an identity of its own. Because that identity need not be a healthy one, sometimes the emergent form needs to be regulated, albeit indirectly via the community's members. Democracy might be an ideal of community power, but the community has many possible structures, of which democracy is only one.
Liberalism is about the fine balancing of freedoms, liberty, not self-defined interests. Both the left and right oversimplify society into a battle of power, with property as the standard of the right. Communitarianism doesn't get close to starting with liberty. It starts with community; if it happens to promote liberty, that is entirely accidental.
The main one being that anarchy will always devolve into the authority of the man with the most firepower. That's the problem with Anarchist/libertarian concepts- they assume that human independance is possible. It was at one time, but ever since we passed about 2 billion human beings on this planet, your actions affect me and my actions affect you, even though we might physically be many thousands of miles apart. Due to that reality, we need some system of regulation and government. That system can either be progressive or regressive- it can either be designed to give maximum freedom and self rule to the most people possible, or it can be designed to deliver power to a small subset of representatives.What you're saying is that anarchy isn't sustainable. I agree. It is my ideal, but as it cannot be sustained, compromise is necessary.
Witch hunts are actually good from time to time- if say the Islamic community had done a witch hunt back in the 1940s, we wouldn't have Islamic terrorism today. Diversity becomes a burden when large numbers of people have to live together.If you really believe that witch hunts are good, I doubt that we can reach agreement. A witch hunt is by definition one where imagined fears overwhelm real risk, and context is lost. The cost of a witch hunt is felt for generations to come. Besides, who exactly would have been eliminated in your Islamic witch-hunt? The real witch hunts were initiated by those who'd just learnt to read "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." [blueletterbible.org]; hardly reasonable moderates.
Democracy is an important part of balancing people's interests, but the rare or unusual is an important part of the social dynamic. A healthy society would be one where the individual and society work symbiotically.Unfortuneately human beings can't be trusted to work symbiotically. They will always try to gain an advantage over their neighbors if allowed.I was referring to society as the other party, rather than their immediate neighbours. And people do form symbiotic relationships with society; they seek work, do conventional things; generally don't rock the boat. This isn't through calculation of personal advantage, but rather the seeking of a healthy life through copying others, and meeting expectations. The biggest problem that we have now is that these expectations are getting seriously warped, but we need to ask ourselves how to put society on the right track, not how to give society, half-broken as it is, still more power.
The community is no longer an abstract with modern communication technology. It used to be, it's natural form is an abstract, but now that we're able to count votes for populations of more than 500 in a given day, the community itself has become a very concrete entity. It has become very easy to see what is in the general benefit and what is beneficial only to the individual; and while you're right that these are two different things, they are no longer unquantifiable.Community is unequal to votes. Community is made up of a dense web of personal relationships of all kinds, and a kind of emergent consensus that emerges from that. If you believe that you can get the community's will by counting votes, you don't really know what community is. The concreteness that you perceive is only won by measuring the wrong thing.
This is quite apart from the question of whether democracy is a worthy ideal.
We can either use this technology for government or for business- but the technology WILL be used regardless. Wal*Mart, for instance, owes about 12% of their profit margin to knowing exactly how much of which product will be sold in a given store on a given day- based on a historical database recording the "dollar votes" of every customer in their now world wide network. They do it with sales- there's no reason why a small town or city couldn't do it with *nightly* elections.But would it be desireable? Democracy at this level would lead us to continuously oppress one another. So many laws seem like a good idea, but they accumulate, so we will simply end up with too many. They will need to be enforced with much discretion, leading to something much worse than what you call anarchy: major arbitariness and inconsistency, and a massive grant of power to those who interpret such laws, with absolutely no flow of natural action.
Unless, of course, the group is kept small. The real question isn't between democratic regulation and democratic rule- it's between oligarchial rule and democratic rule, or between representative democracies and local small democracies. Certainly, just to use an example from my own state, a group of ranchers in Fossil, OR knows far more about their local economy and their local ecology than the state government in Salem, OR- over 300 miles away, or than the federal government in Washington, DC does 2700 miles away from Fossil.Maybe so, but by increadible coincidence, they also interact and trade almost exclusively with people within the group, so that the emergent form is optimised around those criteria without neglecting legitimate factors that come into play from 'abroad'.
Isn't it better to limit property, as Locke originally envisaged [google.com], than create complex structures of governance, so that we can all be oppressed fairly?
[ . . . ]
In many places in the United States, we already have this power- but it's done through representative government instead of direct democracy. And we grant rights to "minorities" that nobody wants- sex offenders, illegal immigrants, etc can't be discriminated against, so they multiply out of control. This is NOT a good thing, despite what the multiculturalists say. I say, give it back to the cities and towns to do this locally, and you'll still have diversity- in the places where diversity is valuable- while preserving the basic right of people to live in a homogenous community.Democracy is a good thing, if it's difficult enough to be self limiting. So: propositions that require 'n' signaturies are good. A public right to veto could also be good. Strong accountability [electionmethods.org] for politicians is good. But direct democracy of the type you envisage is ridiculous and extremely dangerous. It would not yield a good result.--Why you Should use 'Viral' Licenses [slashdot.org] [ Parent ]
Re:Communitarianism(Score:2)
by Marxist Hacker 42 (638312) * <seebert@seeberfamily.org> on 2005.08.05 4:30 (#13243327) (http://www.informationr.us/ Last Journal: 2005.09.28 6:49)
No, pure democracy, or any other form of governance (including anarchic governance) regulates the community, just as it regulates every member. Community is emergent from the people, and has an identity of its own. Because that identity need not be a healthy one, sometimes the emergent form needs to be regulated, albeit indirectly via the community's members. Democracy might be an ideal of community power, but the community has many possible structures, of which democracy is only one. True enough- though I'd point out that any method OTHER than direct democracy by necessity removes information from the public debate- and thus, by definition is NOT taking into account the true emergent form at all, but rather a distorted picture of it, skewed towards special interests as opposed to the common good.Liberalism is about the fine balancing of freedoms, liberty, not self-defined interests. Both the left and right oversimplify society into a battle of power, with property as the standard of the right. Communitarianism doesn't get close to starting with liberty. It starts with community; if it happens to promote liberty, that is entirely accidental. However, liberty itself is about self-defined interests- and that's where community is vital in defining what liberty is and should be.What you're saying is that anarchy isn't sustainable. I agree. It is my ideal, but as it cannot be sustained, compromise is necessary. Where it is NOT my ideal- because to me, individualism itself is a myth. We are not independant- we are INTERdependant as human beings, and need to find ways to make those people we are dependant upon more responsive to our needs.If you really believe that witch hunts are good, I doubt that we can reach agreement. A witch hunt is by definition one where imagined fears overwhelm real risk, and context is lost. The cost of a witch hunt is felt for generations to come. Besides, who exactly would have been eliminated in your Islamic witch-hunt? Actually, the Islamic Witch Hunt is finally beginning- 7 decades too late, but at least it's starting. In the last two weeks, massive confederations of Islamic Mosques have prounounced fatwas on terrorism- banning violent speech from the temples. Here in Oregon, 1200 Muslims joined in a protest against terrorism- and have started turning over names of preachers to the FBI.The real witch hunts were initiated by those who'd just learnt to read "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." ; hardly reasonable moderates. There really isn't any such thing as a "reasonable moderate" when it comes to religion- only levels of toleration of sinfull behavior. But you're right- it's those who have just learned to read who start witch hunts- in this case, those who have either just figured out or are finally speaking up about the fact that the 72 virgins in heaven for suicide bombing martyrs cannot be found anywhere in the Koran.I was referring to society as the other party, rather than their immediate neighbours. It's impossible for human beings to work symbiotically with people they don't know- that is the reason Representative Democracy doesn't work to begin with.And people do form symbiotic relationships with society; they seek work, do conventional things; generally don't rock the boat. And in return, because they don't personally know the people whose lives are affected by their work, we get everything bad in society- from the profit motive on up.This isn't through calculation of personal advantage, but rather the seeking of a healthy life through copying others, and meeting expectations. Wrong- the SINGLE reason to work in a job where you don't personally know your customers is to seek personal advantage. If it wasn't about gaining personal advantage, most people wouldn't bother. Or at least, that's the story I get when I try to talk distributism with capitalists- they claim that a baker whose business is not allowed to expand will simply shut his doors, leaving the village without a local bakary.The biggest problem that we have now is that these expectations are getting seriously warped, but we need to ask ourselves how to put society on the right track, not how to give society, half-broken as it is, still more power. The real problem is that society doesn't include the entire population- if it did, it wouldn't be half broken. Distribute the power to smaller units, keep the larger units from having power.Community is unequal to votes. Community is made up of a dense web of personal relationships of all kinds, and a kind of emergent consensus that emerges from that. If you believe that you can get the community's will by counting votes, you don't really know what community is. The concreteness that you perceive is only won by measuring the wrong thing. It's not JUST counting votes- it's having online debates to get to what to vote on. And yes, it's a dense web of interpersonal relationships- but we have the technology, right here in front of you, to gather every last bit of information from those interpersonal relationships. We do it every day on slashdot.This is quite apart from the question of whether democracy is a worthy ideal. It actually becomes the ONLY worthy ideal- all others lead only to small groups of small minded men being allowed to make deicisions for other people.But would it be desireable? Democracy at this level would lead us to continuously oppress one another. Or rather, it would lead us to form new communities where oppression is not neccessary because the community is homogenous in it's opinions to begin with.So many laws seem like a good idea, but they accumulate, so we will simply end up with too many. They will need to be enforced with much discretion, leading to something much worse than what you call anarchy: major arbitariness and inconsistency, and a massive grant of power to those who interpret such laws, with absolutely no flow of natural action. But, of course, the people who interpret the laws wouldn't have the right to do anything other than chase the lawbreaker out of the community- and the lawbreaker has the right to move to a community where what he did isn't against the law. Of course, this means that no two communities have unified monetary and debt systems- but so what? Bankers shouldn't be allowed to charge usury to begin with.Maybe so, but by increadible coincidence, they also interact and trade almost exclusively with people within the group, so that the emergent form is optimised around those criteria without neglecting legitimate factors that come into play from 'abroad'. There is no such thing as a legitimate factor that comes into play from abroad- by definition, the people abroad's decisions are illegitimate for the local area because they don't live there.Isn't it better to limit property, as Locke originally envisaged, than create complex structures of governance, so that we can all be oppressed fairly? Locke's limitation of property ownership cannot rightfully be reached without first having some form of local control over property rights. What makes sense for the inner city as a limitation on property rights (currently less than a quarter acre per house and falling in Portland, OR) does not make sense for an outlying town (the average ranch in Fossil is over 500 acres- that is what is needed to make a living in the Eastern Oregon high desert). Laws about predator control that make sense for Portland (dog hunting of cougars is forbidden, besides, you can always call an animal control officer) means loss of human life elsewhere in the state (In Klamath Falls it means that three year olds are no longer allowed in public parks- any human being under 30 pounds makes a nice snack for the cougars. Dog hunting can control this, but of course, thanks to the EcoNazis in Portland, dog hunting is not allowed in the state any longer). The larger the governmental unit, the more chance there is that people will not know their representatives personally, and stupid laws that make no sense for the local area will get passed. Direct democracy in small units elimitates this possibility entirely.Democracy is a good thing, if it's difficult enough to be self limiting. So: propositions that require 'n' signaturies are good. A public right to veto could also be good. Strong accountability for politicians is good. But direct democracy of the type you envisage is ridiculous and extremely dangerous. It would not yield a good result. Dangerous to whom is the question. It's not dangerous to the grand majority of Americans- who already choose to live in homogenous communities. It's not dangerous to the commons- neighbors who help neighbors will find their businesses supported. It's not dangerous to your hypothetical symbiotic human community- for if they're truly symbiotic, what is good for the host is good for the parasite, and successfull good symbiotic parasites know it. Who it's bad for is carnivores- those people who prey on their neighbors to gain personal advantage over them- for doing so will get them "voted out" of the community, thus making the community even more homogenous. Eventually, of course, you no longer have to actually count votes- the proposal itself will be obvious whether it will pass or not, because everybody will *believe the same*.You, for instance, could realize your dream of anarchy- merely by gathering other anarchists to yourself, buying some land, and declaring in your constitution that nobody has the right to be a lawmaker.That's the true dream of communitarianism- not to give the CURRENT society more power, but to steal power from society for NEW communities.--Two chances to become a Dictator- and Bush blew them both! [ Parent ]
Re:Communitarianism(Score:2)
by Morosoph (693565) on 2005.08.06 1:24 (#13250750) (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tim.wesson/ Last Journal: 2005.09.17 20:46)
True enough- though I'd point out that any method OTHER than direct democracy by necessity removes information from the public debate- and thus, by definition is NOT taking into account the true emergent form at all, but rather a distorted picture of it, skewed towards special interests as opposed to the common good."Special interests" here means local interaction. Are you aware of the True Scotsman [wikipedia.org] fallacy? For community-wide considerations to overwhelm local considerations at every turn is not necessarily a good thing. Information is in fact likely to remain hidden in any case, as some interests might not be aired at all. Consider the interests of a gay or S&M couple, for example.
The information that will be made available will be different, and whether it is superior is a value judgement that people will disagree upon.
Apart from what some might consider to be "dirty little secrets", there is the problem of limited debating time, and prioritisation. Some things will be part of everyday life, and hardly ever discussed. Communication on the local scale keeps these implicit contracts going. The sheer number of these means that they cannot all be addressed, and that which is quantifiable overwhelms the many things of which we cannot think of every example. The very local and small is simply underrepresented.
Liberalism is about the fine balancing of freedoms, liberty, not self-defined interests. Both
the left and right oversimplify society into a battle of power, with property as the standard of the right. Communitarianism doesn't get close to starting with liberty. It starts with community; if it happens to promote liberty, that is entirely accidental.However, liberty itself is about self-defined interests- and that's where community is vital in defining what liberty is and should be.You make my point very well indeed! Liberty is about potential, not its realisation. Interests are things that we value today. They need not be selfish [slashdot.org], but the question of interests is a much narrower one than that of freedom. From the perspective of freedom, all the things that you could have done, but didn't are important. From the persective of interests, they are irrelevent. Making this confusion renders it far easier for those who have particular interests in mind to act to limit the freedom of the rest of us. Also, just as we cannot cover all of the things that we do on the small scale in the democratic process, we certainly cannot cover all the things that we could have done! There needs to be a bias against regulation, and weekly meetings is the opposite: it encourages regulation for lack of anything better to do in the meeting.
Masses of meetings are a waste of time where they are tried. Read Paul Graham's essay [paulgraham.com], in particular the section on Workplaces for some idea why. Some are important, but the role of the meeting in the modern company is no proof of its efficiency: it's work for managers. "Getting on with the job" is analogous with the exercise of special interests on the small scale; "Having meetings" means inturrupting, and sometimes preventing things which aren't a problem for anyone, but become something to regulate the second that they are raised in a setting where we're all judged for our political correctness.
What you're saying is that anarchy isn't sustainable. I agree. It is my ideal, but as it cannot be sustained, compromise is necessary.Where it is NOT my ideal- because to me, individualism itself is a myth. We are not independant- we are INTERdependant as human beings, and need to find ways to make those people we are dependant upon more responsive to our needs.Of course we're interdependent, and this is why the individual is not a unit of mere self-optimisation, but carries others too. A functioning anarchy is a state of society which needs no regulation, meaning that is does not degenerate into the rule of the strong. The rule of the strong is the opposite of anarchy, so attempting to paint me as an advocate of selfish individualism is unfair. I have already conceeded that anarchy is unsustainable, hence the need to compromise. Accordingly your references to anarchism in the rest of your reply are irrelevent.
Actually, the Islamic Witch Hunt is finally beginning- 7 decades too late, but at least it's starting. In the last two weeks, massive confederations of Islamic Mosques have prounounced fatwas on terrorism- banning violent speech from the temples. Here in Oregon, 1200 Muslims joined in a protest against terrorism- and have started turning over names of preachers to the FBI.You're exaggerating. Turning over names for the due process of law isn't a witch hunt. Witch hunts involve kangaroo courts, show trials, and such like. When people are falsely accused, and are locked up for dissent, rather than preaching hatred, then we would have a witch hunt.
In any case, even if some witch hunts might have an worthwhile outcome by utilitarian standards, you do not get to decide the terms of that hunt. Nor does community or society in aggregate when it is anywhere near sane: it decides when it is sufferring from severe hysteria.
[ . . . ]
It's impossible for human beings to work symbiotically with people they don't know- that is the reason Representative Democracy doesn't work to begin with.Symbiosis is about unconscious flow. And we do this suprisingly well. Despite its imperfections, and relative lack of regulation, we have many of our needs met for real by a near anarchic system of free exchange. It might not be the best of all possible worlds, but to say that symbiosis doesn't work is manifestly false.
And in return, because they don't personally know the people whose lives are affected by their work, we get everything bad in society- from the profit motive on up.Symbiosis isn't always good; it is a near synonym for "reciprocity", not perfection. I think that it would be a lot better if people did act more freely, but the fact that they don't is proof of social symbiosis.
Wrong- the SINGLE reason to work in a job where you don't personally know your customers is to seek personal advantage. If it wasn't about gaining personal advantage, most people wouldn't bother. Or at least, that's the story I get when I try to talk distributism with capitalists- they claim that a baker whose business is not allowed to expand will simply shut his doors, leaving the village without a local bakary.I disagree. People are really afraid to act unconventionally. That is the biggest reason. The wages that we can for conventional work do not justify it from a selfish perspective. Breaking free of norms is extremely difficult, and so we venerate some who do it whilst cursing others. Western "individualism" is no such thing. It is conformity dressed up in patriotic affiliation to an ideology of freedom.
People do not even act selfishly. They act stupid.
You can argue by turning around normal capitalist belief to show the "contradiction within capitalism", but to do so is to ignore the possibility of a different analysis than that of the traditional worship of selfishness. In fact, by arguing like this, you make it easy for me to dismiss both your argument and that of unsophisticated capitalists on the basis that neither of you accurately reflect human nature.
A meme-based analysis has some value here: although selfish behaviour can spread extremely effectively, so can much stupid behaviour. If something is normal, it's simply harder to consider doing something that is different. The path of least resistance is a better predictor than that of selfish gain. And the capitalists are wrong, so it's invalid to turn their analysis around, since as the assumptions don't hold, nor does the reverse implication.
[ . . . ]
It's not JUST counting votes- it's having online debates to get to what to vote on. And yes, it's a dense web of interpersonal relationships- but we have the technology, right here in front of you, to gather every last bit of information from those interpersonal relationships. We do it every day on slashdot.I believe that I have addressed this above. The small-scale isn't addressed. Also, haven't you heard the term "slashbot"? The rule of trendy opinion is not the structure of a society or community that I wish to be a member of.
This is quite apart from the question of whether democracy is a worthy ideal.It actually becomes the ONLY worthy ideal- all others lead only to small groups of small minded men being allowed to make deicisions for other people.You are assuming that power is zero-sum. There are many ways in which the totality of power can be reduced, such as (amoungst others) competition is the market place, which clearly not only redistributes power, but also reduces it. Democracy as a check is another.
Not every void is automatically filled, and your ideal democracy would create new power. To be oppressed by the many is no better than being oppressed by the few. In fact it is worse: there is no escape.
Or rather, it would lead us to form new communities where oppression is not neccessary because the community is homogenous in it's opinions to begin with.So you'd take a viable anarchy, and transform it into a small society overweight is rules and regulations? If you've already got consensus, why centralise the rule of community? Decentralisation makes for a far more adaptive system that can deal with special cases in a way that democracy cannot. Consensus might threaten no-ones interests, but it does threaten freedom, for one's potential is limited by lack of imagination. I repeat that potential here does not have to mean self-advancement, but could mean the creation of something of value to many, perhaps as yet unforseen.
But, of course, the people who interpret the laws wouldn't have the right to do anything other than chase the lawbreaker out of the community- and the lawbreaker has the right to move to a community where what he did isn't against the law. Of course, this means that no two communities have unified monetary and debt systems- but so what? Bankers shouldn't be allowed to charge usury to begin with.Well, that's not as bad as I first feared, but if the community by its structure has too many laws, that's bad for all of its members, not just those who are chased out. With weekly meetings, the sheer quantity of law will be such that ever more arbitary restrictions upon allowable activities will be devised.
The flip side of not charging usury is that some good ideas will never get off the ground, but I accept that you can reasonably judge the cost/benefit ratio to come out against the charging of interest. I simply wish that fewer people would choose to get into debt! It seems to me to involve quite a loss of freedom for the advancement of particular interests. Proof that people don't weigh that which they cannot think of in their decision making, BTW.
There is no such thing as a legitimate factor that comes into play from abroad- by definition, the people abroad's decisions are illegitimate for the local area because they don't live there.I have friends and family who don't live in my home town. Also, I constantly make use of natural and human resources from elsewhere, and although this could be reduced, I doubt that it could be eliminated. To do so would be to create small non-interacting worlds, and would certainly make us all a lot poorer. I don't think that that would be a pleasant state of society, so our needs necessarily involve others who live elsewhere, thus these people are far from irrelevant to the decision-making process.
Locke's limitation of property ownership cannot rightfully be reached without first having some form of local control over property rights."Rightfully" adds colour to your argument, but it can be reached, "rightfully" or not within the current system. The law would simply not protect someone who's wealth was more than they could barter or make use of. Only if the property is useful to them does it get to be protected. This is not a judgement upon relative utility: that the local population can find better use for it is outweighed by the gain of having some kind of system of property that one can plan and rely upon, but if they have a surplus; say too mauch land, then it is reasonable for someone else to simply make use of that surplus.
This principle is already recognised in law to an extent: if one makes continuous use of a passageway or route, then that route ceases to be their exclusive property after a while.
Note that such a statement of law recognises that they can have some things protected even whilst the rest is not, so that something in continuous use, or something that would reasonably be seen as having 'sentimental' value is protected.
What makes sense for the inner city as a limitation on property rights (currently less than a quarter acre per house and falling in Portland, OR) does not make sense for an outlying town (the average ranch in Fossil is over 500 acres- that is what is needed to make a living in the Eastern Oregon high desert).Locke's criterion does not refer to the utility that others could gain from the property, only that it is more than one oneself needs. The idea isn't to prevent people from having more than their fair share, but to prevent someone from wielding monopoly power in a region. Merely being wealthy isn't prevented.
Having said that, I realise that 'ones needs' are not a cut-off concept, so that very roughly, utility can be seen as related to log wealth [slashdot.org], rather than linearly with wealth. Accordingly, stealing $1000 from a millionaire would be treated as one would treat the theft of a dollar from someone who themselves has $1000.
Laws about predator control that make sense for Portland (dog hunting of cougars is forbidden, besides, you can always call an animal control officer) means loss of human life elsewhere in the state (In Klamath Falls it means that three year olds are no longer allowed in public parks- any human being under 30 pounds makes a nice snack for the cougars. Dog hunting can control this, but of course, thanks to the EcoNazis in Portland, dog hunting is not allowed in the state any longer). The larger the governmental unit, the more chance there is that people will not know their representatives personally, and stupid laws that make no sense for the local area will get passed. Direct democracy in small units elimitates this possibility entirely.Alternatively, less regulation could reach the same end without the same kind of idiocy occurring at a still smaller scale.
Dangerous to whom is the question. It's not dangerous to the grand majority of Americans- who already choose to live in homogenous communities. It's not dangerous to the commons- neighbors who help neighbors will find their businesses supported. It's not dangerous to your hypothetical symbiotic human community- for if they're truly symbiotic, what is good for the host is good for the parasite, and successfull good symbiotic parasites know it. Who it's bad for is carnivores- those people who prey on their neighbors to gain personal advantage over them- for doing so will get them "voted out" of the community, thus making the community even more homogenous. Eventually, of course, you no longer have to actually count votes- the proposal itself will be obvious whether it will pass or not, because everybody will *believe the same*.It's dangerous because views are not as homogenous as they appear, because trendy rules aren't necessarily good ones, an becasue the very local is systematically underrepresented. Also, too much regulation is a bad thing even if most of it could be reasonably without the contect of the rest of the regulation being in place.
You, for instance, could realize your dream of anarchy- merely by gathering other anarchists to yourself, buying some land, and declaring in your constitution that nobody has the right to be a lawmaker.Sadly, I don't think that anarchy would work. My ideal society might be anarchic, but I realise that I have to make do with a liberal society. I like liberalism. It suits me.
That's the true dream of communitarianism- not to give the CURRENT society more power, but to steal power from society for NEW communities.Intrinsic problems with the dynamics involved prevent it from working. I might wish for a functioning anarchy, but I recognise that it cannot be sustained in human culture. I would like to be wrong. I don't think that perfect democracy works either.--Why you Should use 'Viral' Licenses [slashdot.org] [ Parent ]
Re:Communitarianism(Score:2)
by Marxist Hacker 42 (638312) * <seebert@seeberfamily.org> on 2005.08.06 3:31 (#13252116) (http://www.informationr.us/ Last Journal: 2005.09.28 6:49)
"Special interests" here means local interaction. Are you aware of the True Scotsman fallacy? For community-wide considerations to overwhelm local considerations at every turn is not necessarily a good thing. Information is in fact likely to remain hidden in any case, as some interests might not be aired at all. Consider the interests of a gay or S&M couple, for example. You've got a MUCH different idea of what the word "local" means. You're trying to define "local" as "individual" where I'm defining "local" as "a group of people living in a small geographic area". A gay or S&M couple do not have a lifestyle well suited to, say, trying to build a family in an area with a limited gene pool. Just as a Christian monogamous heterosexual couple does not have a lifestyle well suited to living in the Northern Tundra- but your average Inuit Polygamist does.The information that will be made available will be different, and whether it is superior is a value judgement that people will disagree upon. It doesn't have to be "superior"- it merely has to be more suited to life in that geographical area.Apart from what some might consider to be "dirty little secrets", there is the problem of limited debating time, and prioritisation. Some things will be part of everyday life, and hardly ever discussed. Communication on the local scale keeps these implicit contracts going. The sheer number of these means that they cannot all be addressed, and that which is quantifiable overwhelms the many things of which we cannot think of every example. The very local and small is simply underrepresented. And all I want is to make it not only more represented, but the rule rather than the exception.You make my point very well indeed! Liberty is about potential, not its realisation. Interests are things that we value today. They need not be selfish, but the question of interests is a much narrower one than that of freedom. From the perspective of freedom, all the things that you could have done, but didn't are important. From the persective of interests, they are irrelevent. Making this confusion renders it far easier for those who have particular interests in mind to act to limit the freedom of the rest of us. Also, just as we cannot cover all of the things that we do on the small scale in the democratic process, we certainly cannot cover all the things that we could have done! There needs to be a bias against regulation, and weekly meetings is the opposite: it encourages regulation for lack of anything better to do in the meeting. That's one reason why I'm NOT suggesting weekly meetings- but rather a more asynchronous form of government, done by web boards such as this one as a hobby of people in a local area who are interested in local issues. In addition- it's true that markets don't have to be motivated by self-interest, but removing the self-intrest from the market means that it ceases to be CAPITALISM- which is based ENTIRELY on profits and costs for it's efficency. Don't fool yourself into thinking you can have your cake and eat it too.Masses of meetings are a waste of time where they are tried. Read Paul Graham's essay, in particular the section on Workplaces for some idea why. Some are important, but the role of the meeting in the modern company is no proof of its efficiency: it's work for managers. "Getting on with the job" is analogous with the exercise of special interests on the small scale; "Having meetings" means inturrupting, and sometimes preventing things which aren't a problem for anyone, but become something to regulate the second that they are raised in a setting where we're all judged for our political correctness. Absolutely true and agreed. Asynchronous forms of communication are far more effective to my way of thinking, as it allows people to get the more important work done first.Of course we're interdependent, and this is why the individual is not a unit of mere self-optimisation, but carries others too. A functioning anarchy is a state of society which needs no regulation, meaning that is does not degenerate into the rule of the strong. The rule of the strong is the opposite of anarchy, so attempting to paint me as an advocate of selfish individualism is unfair. I have already conceeded that anarchy is unsustainable, hence the need to compromise. Accordingly your references to anarchism in the rest of your reply are irrelevent. Works for me. But I just wanted to acknowledge that selfishness is very much a part of capitalism AND anarchy- so when we're talking non-selfish methods such as OSS or direct democracy or distributism or communitarianism, we're talking about a MAJOR paradigm shift, from the importance being placed on the selfish individual, to the importance of the commons.You're exaggerating. Turning over names for the due process of law isn't a witch hunt. Witch hunts involve kangaroo courts, show trials, and such like. When people are falsely accused, and are locked up for dissent, rather than preaching hatred, then we would have a witch hunt. Oh, that will happen- the start of a witch hunt is always lawfull. BTW, in Islam, preaching hatred IS a form of dissent- it's directly against the Koran, and it's nice to see some Islamics finally proclaiming that.In any case, even if some witch hunts might have an worthwhile outcome by utilitarian standards, you do not get to decide the terms of that hunt. Nor does community or society in aggregate when it is anywhere near sane: it decides when it is sufferring from severe hysteria. The point is, the very first "attack" on the Ummah should have inspired that severe hysteria- and it didn't. It took four obviously middle class young men in London blowing up morning commuters to create the hysteria. What we're seeing now is just the begining- moderate Islam IS awakening to the danger in it's midst, and is going to become hysterical- and that's a GOOD thing.Symbiosis is about unconscious flow. And we do this suprisingly well. Despite its imperfections, and relative lack of regulation, we have many of our needs met for real by a near anarchic system of free exchange. It might not be the best of all possible worlds, but to say that symbiosis doesn't work is manifestly false. YOU might. I and about 60 million other Americans simply don't- and haven't since the late 1960s. It used to be that taking advantage of higher education was somewhat of a shield against this- but in recent years even that has been destroyed. No- for a large number of people, the symbiosis does NOT provide basic needs anymore- and therefore is not truly symbiotic, for it takes more than it gives.Symbiosis isn't always good; it is a near synonym for "reciprocity", not perfection. I think that it would be a lot better if people did act more freely, but the fact that they don't is proof of social symbiosis. The problem is, in the last 25 years or so especially, but most likely in the last 40, the capitalistic market has NOT been anyplace close to reciprocity. Each American, on average, is spending $108 for every $100 earned, which adds up to billions of dollars of consumer debt. You mght indeed say that the difference is slight- but it's enough to prevent 60 million Americans from having their basic modern-world needs of food, clothing, shelter, clean water, and health care met.I disagree. People are really afraid to act unconventionally. That is the biggest reason. The wages that we can for conventional work do not justify it from a selfish perspective. Breaking free of norms is extremely difficult, and so we venerate some who do it whilst cursing others. Western "individualism" is no such thing. It is conformity dressed up in patriotic affiliation to an ideology of freedom. People in a local area who grew up locally are afraid for a VERY good reason- unconventional behavior isn't conducive to social evolution. In other words, unconventional behavior doesn't work, any more than the hypothetical Christian Monogamist trying to live in the northern tundra does. The reasons aren't readily apparent, and certainly aren't apparent in the short term, but in the long term, unconventional behavior fails because it simply isn't survival based.You can argue by turning around normal capitalist belief to show the "contradiction within capitalism", but to do so is to ignore the possibility of a different analysis than that of the traditional worship of selfishness. In fact, by arguing like this, you make it easy for me to dismiss both your argument and that of unsophisticated capitalists on the basis that neither of you accurately reflect human nature. Well, like you said, the whole concept of selfishness is completely irrelevant to the discussion of a paradigm shift to a society based on something else- and thus I'd end up agreeing with you on it.A meme-based analysis has some value here: although selfish behaviour can spread extremely effectively, so can much stupid behaviour. If something is normal, it's simply harder to consider doing something that is different. The path of least resistance is a better predictor than that of selfish gain. And the capitalists are wrong, so it's invalid to turn their analysis around, since as the assumptions don't hold, nor does the reverse implication. My original point was more that if you don't have direct knowledge of your customer's wants and needs, and instead have only the third- or forth-degree separation from them, it's kind of like playing telephone- the data you get about your customers needs is so irrelevant that the only data you're left with to make a rational descision is indeed your own selfish wants and desires. And THAT is what creates the stupidity- the path of least resistance is also the path of least data.I believe that I have addressed this above. The small-scale isn't addressed. Also, haven't you heard the term "slashbot"? The rule of trendy opinion is not the structure of a society or community that I wish to be a member of. Depends on whether you're smart enough to form your own community or not- and how well your community does at regulating to keep non-members OUT. Trendy opinion changes with the makeup of the community.You are assuming that power is zero-sum. There are many ways in which the totality of power can be reduced, such as (amoungst others) competition is the market place, which clearly not only redistributes power, but also reduces it. Democracy as a check is another. The laws of physics state that any power usage, electrical or political, is in the end analysis zero sum. Infinity only exists in vaccum. The only question is how large or how small you want to make your closed system. The smaller the closed system, the tighter the feedback loops are, and the more efficient the system runs.Not every void is automatically filled, and your ideal democracy would create new power. To be oppressed by the many is no better than being oppressed by the few. In fact it is worse: there is no escape. Ah, but there is an escape- move to a community of other people that believe the same as you do.Well, that's not as bad as I first feared, but if the community by its structure has too many laws, that's bad for all of its members, not just those who are chased out. With weekly meetings, the sheer quantity of law will be such that ever more arbitary restrictions upon allowable activities will be devised. And it also means that laws that don't fit the geographical realities of life in that area will get repealed- just like prohibition. Eventually, you'll reach zero state- when even the asynchronous meetings are no longer neccessary, because you'll have reached the ideal set of human laws for that geographical situation.The flip side of not charging usury is that some good ideas will never get off the ground, but I accept that you can reasonably judge the cost/benefit ratio to come out against the charging of interest. I simply wish that fewer people would choose to get into debt! It seems to me to involve quite a loss of freedom for the advancement of particular interests. Proof that people don't weigh that which they cannot think of in their decision making, BTW. Or it's proof that the system is gamed so that some socio-economic classes simply can no longer survive without debt. What people forget about classic economics is that men like Locke, Smith, and Ricardo were actively trying to bring about a revolution- one in which governmental power was ursurped by the merchant class. They succeeded quite well.I have friends and family who don't live in my home town. Also, I constantly make use of natural and human resources from elsewhere, and although this could be reduced, I doubt that it could be eliminated. To do so would be to create small non-interacting worlds, and would certainly make us all a lot poorer. I don't think that that would be a pleasant state of society, so our needs necessarily involve others who live elsewhere, thus these people are far from irrelevant to the decision-making process. I'm sorry you live in a place where you have no relations among your neighbors. That's a very sad state of affairs- and it's destructive to what I call the tie to the land. Myself, I see how destructive outside influence has been on Cascadia- and how peacefull life was before, when the closest think the Kwakiutal had to warfare was raids in the extreme south and the potlach. For 40,000 years, they lived this way- who are you to say that outside influence has resulted in anything other than making some people richer and others poorer?"Rightfully" adds colour to your argument, but it can be reached, "rightfully" or not within the current system. The current system includes rather draconian controls over physical property- to the extent that the people don't really own what they've paid for and must pay the government rent for it.The law would simply not protect someone who's wealth was more than they could barter or make use of. Only if the property is useful to them does it get to be protected. This is not a judgement upon relative utility: that the local population can find better use for it is outweighed by the gain of having some kind of system of property that one can plan and rely upon, but if they have a surplus; say too mauch land, then it is reasonable for someone else to simply make use of that surplus. Ok, that's better than what I understood you saying before, that no regulation was neccessary. The current system actually has too much regulation, I agree- but the real point is people from the outside shouldn't be imposing the regulation at all, how much is too much can only truly be decided at the extreme local level.This principle is already recognised in law to an extent: if one makes continuous use of a passageway or route, then that route ceases to be their exclusive property after a while. As well as the law of eminent domain. Yes, it's already recognized in current law- but current law is rather repressive on the subject of private property.Note that such a statement of law recognises that they can have some things protected even whilst the rest is not, so that something in continuous use, or something that would reasonably be seen as having 'sentimental' value is protected. All except for the last- there's quite a bit of case law in this country allowing the government to take what they damned well please whenever they damned well please, as long as they pay market value for it- and they define what market value is. I consider Cascadia to be occupied territory for this very reason.Locke's criterion does not refer to the utility that others could gain from the property, only that it is more than one oneself needs. The idea isn't to prevent people from having more than their fair share, but to prevent someone from wielding monopoly power in a region. Merely being wealthy isn't prevented. And thus, in reality, can go too far in some cases and not far enough in others- because different ways of life require different levels of property to survive.Having said that, I realise that 'ones needs' are not a cut-off concept, so that very roughly, utility can be seen as related to log wealth, rather than linearly with wealth. Accordingly, stealing $1000 from a millionaire would be treated as one would treat the theft of a dollar from someone who themselves has $1000. But because the small scale is underrepresented in the current status quo, the problem is far worse than that- some people require $500 worth of property to make $20,000 a year, others require $5,000,000 worth of property to make the same $20,000/year. You'd call the second a millionaire by his assets alone- when in reality both are equally able to provide for their needs.Alternatively, less regulation could reach the same end without the same kind of idiocy occurring at a still smaller scale. How? How does less regulation help reach the same end as small scale, local social evolution reached democratically? I'd say it reaches a dramatically different end- one where the laws are tuned to individual good instead of social good.It's dangerous because views are not as homogenous as they appear, because trendy rules aren't necessarily good ones, an becasue the very local is systematically underrepresented. Also, too much regulation is a bad thing even if most of it could be reasonably without the contect of the rest of the regulation being in place. Only if you replace "local" with "selfish individual". And I hope you mean context- the only thing that should govern the context of the regulation should be "what do people need to survive and thrive in this geological climate", not "what can I get away with to take advantage of my neighbors".Sadly, I don't think that anarchy would work. My ideal society might be anarchic, but I realise that I have to make do with a liberal society. I like liberalism. It suits me. So move to Eugene, OR- where you're surrounded by other liberals and can make and repeal whatever laws best suit your lifestyle. It's all the same thing in the end- by giving local people local control over their own business, and only allowing in outside businesses and resources as needed under control of the local population, everybody has the ultimate liberal right to as much freedom as they want. Or as much regulation as they want.Intrinsic problems with the dynamics involved prevent it from working. I might wish for a functioning anarchy, but I recognise that it cannot be sustained in human culture. I would like to be wrong. I don't think that perfect democracy works either. The difference is- perfect democracy in small amounts allows you to get some friends together and try. Federalism, large scale governmental regulation, keeps you from doing what needs to be done to survive, let alone have freedom.--Two chances to become a Dictator- and Bush blew them both! [ Parent ]
Re:Communitarianism(Score:2)
by Morosoph (693565) on 2005.08.09 1:39 (#13270547) (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tim.wesson/ Last Journal: 2005.09.17 20:46)
This is getting a little too long, so I will select quotations. If I miss anything important, feel free to bring it up again. I don't want to exhaust myself, though, so I will attempt to address the major points, and may let some things slip.
You've got a MUCH different idea of what the word "local" means. You're trying to define "local" as "individual" where I'm defining "local" as "a group of people living in a small geographic area". A gay or S&M couple do not have a lifestyle well suited to, say, trying to build a family in an area with a limited gene pool. Just as a Christian monogamous heterosexual couple does not have a lifestyle well suited to living in the Northern Tundra- but your average Inuit Polygamist does.Local relative to the frame of reference. The frame of reference is the community, therefore 'local' refers to the small scale given that frame of reference. It is larger than the individual, for it includes family and friends for a start. This example refers to a couple, which is a larger scale than the individual.
By focusing upon fixing the meaning of local at a larger scale, you have missed my point: there is information in the system that is underrepresented within the democratic decision-making process. Not only is there information missing, but there is also systematic distortion: group dynamics create bias that prevent variation that would be harmless to others, or even beneficial to the subset of other to whom it would matter.
I agree that there are some communities that a gay or S&M relationship would be inappropriate, if you feel that 'community ethic' is that important, so as to override fredom-based concerns. However, I'm dealing with the fact that not everything is properly taken into account, rather than that once one has taken everything into account, it might, on the balance of interests, be undesireable. The system can easily misoptimise through this bias so as to achieve the wrong outcome, simply because some information is systematically underweighted.
That's one reason why I'm NOT suggesting weekly meetings- but rather a more asynchronous form of government, done by web boards such as this one as a hobby of people in a local area who are interested in local issues. In addition- it's true that markets don't have to be motivated by self-interest, but removing the self-intrest from the market means that it ceases to be CAPITALISM- which is based ENTIRELY on profits and costs for it's efficency. Don't fool yourself into thinking you can have your cake and eat it too.I do believe that local government, in general, needs to be stronger. I was reacting against the original impression that I got of what you were putting forward. Thus I am less opposed than I was, but I am still opposed, but this is mostly a matter of degree.
If capitalism is entirely based upon profits and costs, then we don't have it. People act for a number of reasons, which are not entirely selfish. I take 'capitalism' to mean to doctorine of property right ("capital"). A strong advocate of property rights is thus a capitalist; they don't also need to be selfish. It is possible to be a weak advocate of property rights and a free-marketeer, which is roughly my position.
An efficient outcome in economics is one where all interests are reflected in the result; those interests need not be selfish interests, and so efficiency does not require self-interest. In fact, if the represented interests are selectively chosen, for example: only the interests that you would regard as selfish are represented; then the result is not efficient, for it has failed to account for unselfish interests in the process of finding the optimum.
I agree that the correct measure of democracy will help us move nearer an efficient solution, but too much, and very local (as opposed to regional) interests, selfish or not, will be underrepresented. There is a balance to be struck.
I would disagree with you about where the proper balance lies; for a start, my approximate criteria are "the greatest freedom of the greatest number", whereas you appear to favour something closer to "the greatest 'good' of the greatest number". My problem with the latter measure being the it overemphasises current interests over potential.
Works for me. But I just wanted to acknowledge that selfishness is very much a part of capitalism AND anarchy- so when we're talking non-selfish methods such as OSS or direct democracy or distributism or communitarianism, we're talking about a MAJOR paradigm shift, from the importance being placed on the selfish individual, to the importance of the commons.The commons isn't the only legitimate unselfish interest. For example: someone might study some archane branch of philosophy, furthering human knowledge and understanding by doing so. The immediate community might even be opposed (consider a biologist studying a rare insect for insight into evolution in a fundamentalist 'Christian' community); this doesn't make the activity selfish, and in fact can make it less selfish, for the biologist is putting themselves at risk by performing this research (note that I put "Christian" in quotes: I'm not talking about non-judgemental folk who are inclined to forgive, here).
The point is, the very first "attack" on the Ummah should have inspired that severe hysteria- and it didn't. It took four obviously middle class young men in London blowing up morning commuters to create the hysteria. What we're seeing now is just the begining- moderate Islam IS awakening to the danger in it's midst, and is going to become hysterical- and that's a GOOD thing.Strong statements of opposition and deliberate action to marginalise extremists isn't hysteria: it's measured, strong, but careful action. One issue that causes an issue for muslems, for example, is that in Islam, there is no such thing as excommunication: only Allah has that right. In the witch hunts, by comparison, the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" was ignored, as was the instruction not to judge, and to forgive.
Hysteria is not a measured interpretation of written texts; it is rather the loss of a central frame of referrence. A group sufferring from hysteria has lost touch with reality.
Symbiosis is about unconscious flow. And we do this suprisingly well. Despite its imperfections, and relative lack of regulation, we have many of our needs met for real by a near anarchic system of free exchange. It might not be the best of all possible worlds, but to say that symbiosis doesn't work is manifestly false.YOU might. I and about 60 million other Americans simply don't- and haven't since the late 1960s. It used to be that taking advantage of higher education was somewhat of a shield against this- but in recent years even that has been destroyed. No- for a large number of people, the symbiosis does NOT provide basic needs anymore- and therefore is not truly symbiotic, for it takes more than it gives.Ah. A different meaning of the word "works". Symbiosis does not meet everyones needs as fully as perhaps possible under another system. When I said "works suprisingly well", I did not mean that the market yields a perfect result, rather: spontaneous pairings combined with the selective power of competition delivers a lot more than one would naïvely expect. I think that it is also true that deliberate action and regulation scuppers more than one expects. This does not mean that the optimum is zero regulation, but it does mean that a consciously constructed system, or one where the tendency of political activists to build power bases biases the system, or one where consensus (ie. that which the average person can understand) is overweighed, is going to yield too much regulation.
The problem is, in the last 25 years or so especially, but most likely in the last 40, the capitalistic market has NOT been anyplace close to reciprocity. Each American, on average, is spending $108 for every $100 earned, which adds up to billions of dollars of consumer debt. You mght indeed say that the difference is slight- but it's enough to prevent 60 million Americans from having their basic modern-world needs of food, clothing, shelter, clean water, and health care met.Symbiosis is a pairwise concept. It does not mean that the entire system is optimised.
You are assuming that power is zero-sum. There are many ways in which the totality of power can be reduced, such as (amoungst others) competition is the market place, which clearly not only redistributes power, but also reduces it. Democracy as a check is another.The laws of physics state that any power usage, electrical or political, is in the end analysis zero sum. Infinity only exists in vaccum. The only question is how large or how small you want to make your closed system. The smaller the closed system, the tighter the feedback loops are, and the more efficient the system runs.You're thinking of "energy". Power is rate of doing work in physics, which isn't zero-sum at all. Also, it is a fallacy to hold up 'zero interference' against 'zero sum', as if you need to pick one extreme or the other.
Not every void is automatically filled, and your ideal democracy would create new power. To be oppressed by the many is no better than being oppressed by the few. In fact it is worse: there is no escape.Ah, but there is an escape- move to a community of other people that believe the same as you do.This creates many communities, each of which have restricted freedom. True, you can move again, but you faces restrictions upon your freedom to the extent that you have local ties. Children in particular are stuck, and so, to a lesser extent, are adults with ties to families or friends. The community gains at the expense of the social network; the regional consensus over family and friends. There is a balance to be struck, but this is something that the average liberal democrat wouldn't object to. Communitarianism means more that that.
I grant you, "no escape" was too strong, but before one could make new friends and drop some old ones if necessary; now one has to drop almost all of one's friends to move. This is certainly a change in the power relationship, and there is certainly more power where there was less before.
And it also means that laws that don't fit the geographical realities of life in that area will get repealed- just like prohibition. Eventually, you'll reach zero state- when even the asynchronous meetings are no longer neccessary, because you'll have reached the ideal set of human laws for that geographical situation.That we're eventually saved from the extremes doesn't mean that you're saved from excess. Also, I believe that the equilibrium would be more regulatory than would be optimal (see above).
Or it's proof that the system is gamed so that some socio-economic classes simply can no longer survive without debt. What people forget about classic economics is that men like Locke, Smith, and Ricardo were actively trying to bring about a revolution- one in which governmental power was ursurped by the merchant class. They succeeded quite well.In Smith's time, monopolies were government favours towards particular merchants. Movement towards a more competitive system has frequently been opposed by entrenched business interests, often successfully. Since Smith and Locke wrote their works, other writers have put forward still more radical positions, essentially that the people could get hold of the reins of power from the old ruling classes. By suggesting that Smith, Ricardo et. al. stole power from the people, you are misrepresenting history.
The real question is what is the correct type and degree of regulation, together with the best system for bringing that about. I hold that your system systematically yields too much regulation practically everywhere, as nowhere is the very local properly weighted.
I have friends and family who don't live in my home town. Also, I constantly make use of natural and human resources from elsewhere, and although this could be reduced, I doubt that it could be eliminated. To do so would be to create small non-interacting worlds, and would certainly make us all a lot poorer. I don't think that that would be a pleasant state of society, so our needs necessarily involve others who live elsewhere, thus these people are far from irrelevant to the decision-making process.I'm sorry you live in a place where you have no relations among your neighbors. That's a very sad state of affairs- and it's destructive to what I call the tie to the land. Myself, I see how destructive outside influence has been on Cascadia- and how peacefull life was before, when the closest think the Kwakiutal had to warfare was raids in the extreme south and the potlach. For 40,000 years, they lived this way- who are you to say that outside influence has resulted in anything other than making some people richer and others poorer?Again you misrepresent what I am saying. I do not claim to have no relations amoung my neighbours; I claim to have relations beyond the local community. Warfare is not the only possible relation to the outside world, and in fact by deliberately excluding the needs of those outside the community, you are in fact making warfare more likely.
All except for the last- there's quite a bit of case law in this country allowing the government to take what they damned well please whenever they damned well please, as long as they pay market value for it- and they define what market value is. I consider Cascadia to be occupied territory for this very reason.Fair point. [slashdot.org]
And thus, in reality, can go too far in some cases and not far enough in others- because different ways of life require different levels of property to survive.That is taken account of in the phase "he can use"... If you need more to survive, then there's obviously more that you can make use of - to make a living!
But because the small scale is underrepresented in the current status quo, the problem is far worse than that- some people require $500 worth of property to make $20,000 a year, others require $5,000,000 worth of property to make the same $20,000/year. You'd call the second a millionaire by his assets alone- when in reality both are equally able to provide for their needs.My log scale applies "all other things being equal"; naturally, needing more or less to survive shifts the whole scale. The deeper idea is that for a particular individual, one dollar out of his last $1000 is to be treated as $1000 out of a million would be. Comparing one individual and another is a difficult business, but is forced, regardless of the system short of anarchy, anyway.
How? How does less regulation help reach the same end as small scale, local social evolution reached democratically? I'd say it reaches a dramatically different end- one where the laws are tuned to individual good instead of social good.I don't believe that a strongly democratic local community would attain the social good, because some information would be systematically underrepresented and occasionally supressed, preventing the social optimum from being attained.
It's dangerous because views are not as homogenous as they appear, because trendy rules aren't necessarily good ones, an becasue the very local is systematically underrepresented. Also, too much regulation is a bad thing even if most of it could be reasonably without the contect of the rest of the regulation being in place.Only if you replace "local" with "selfish individual". And I hope you mean context- the only thing that should govern the context of the regulation should be "what do people need to survive and thrive in this geological climate", not "what can I get away with to take advantage of my neighbors".By context, I mean the rest of the regulation. If one regulation says that you can't spend too long in the kitchen, you can live with that. Same with the loo and the garden. If you can't spend too long in the bedroom, you can sleep on the couch. However, if you can't spend too long in any room in the house, you can't live. It's a pretty simple concept, really.
So move to Eugene, OR- where you're surrounded by other liberals and can make and repeal whatever laws best suit your lifestyle. It's all the same thing in the end- by giving local people local control over their own business, and only allowing in outside businesses and resources as needed under control of the local population, everybody has the ultimate liberal right to as much freedom as they want. Or as much regulation as they want.I like Britain. And I have family and friends here. I'm glad that Britain has signed up to The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union [eu.int], especially since our common law in now eroding. By stripping out that protection (for the sake of localism), I am forced to tear from my family, if I can even find a place that I want to move to. Either way is far from ideal. My Uncle has in fact moved to South Africa to hang onto some of the freedoms that he values. The cost is that we hardly ever see him now. True, in his case he wanted to escape from some familiar issues too, but you can imagine if he didn't: neither choice would be good for him, and this is the position that I would be in.
The difference is- perfect democracy in small amounts allows you to get some friends together and try. Federalism, large scale governmental regulation, keeps you from doing what needs to be done to survive, let alone have freedom.I seriously think that local democracy would be worse. If we can protect ourselves more from the national and the local, so that the extent to which these levels regulate moves closer to optimal, then we'd have a better system. It would still be far from perfect, but I don't think that it is possible to combine the information in a completely undistorted way; we can only do our best.--Why you Should use 'Viral' Licenses [slashdot.org] [ Parent ]
Re:Communitarianism(Score:2)
by Marxist Hacker 42 (638312) * <seebert@seeberfamily.org> on 2005.08.09 4:42 (#13272542) (http://www.informationr.us/ Last Journal: 2005.09.28 6:49)
This is getting a little too long, so I will select quotations. If I miss anything important, feel free to bring it up again. I don't want to exhaust myself, though, so I will attempt to address the major points, and may let some things slip. And I'll do likewise- no problem. I agree we're getting very deep. But I think we're pretty close together in reality- the REAL difference is that your "community" is more virtual than mine- and because of that, you really don't have the same connections to your local community that I do.By focusing upon fixing the meaning of local at a larger scale, you have missed my point: there is information in the system that is underrepresented within the democratic decision-making process. Not only is there information missing, but there is also systematic distortion: group dynamics create bias that prevent variation that would be harmless to others, or even beneficial to the subset of other to whom it would matter. From my point of view, friends don't do that to each other- thus a community of friends would NOT ignore each other's opinions. That's why local rather than foreign control- to enable people to have those connections to begin with.Local relative to the frame of reference. The frame of reference is the community, therefore 'local' refers to the small scale given that frame of reference. It is larger than the individual, for it includes family and friends for a start. This example refers to a couple, which is a larger scale than the individual. If your family and friends are not in your community- then you're in the wrong community for a start. Part of this may be colored for me- parts of my family have been in Cascadia for 9000+ years, Kenewick Man may in fact be a distant relative of mine. In your case- your "community" is more distributed- your real community, those people you commune with, is more of a virtual community. You don't all live in the same spot. This is strange to me- all the people I commune with IRL live within about 40 miles. True, I have some relatives that live further out- but they aren't the people I commune with; I rarely if ever see them.If capitalism is entirely based upon profits and costs, then we don't have it. People act for a number of reasons, which are not entirely selfish. I take 'capitalism' to mean to doctorine of property right ("capital"). A strong advocate of property rights is thus a capitalist; they don't also need to be selfish. It is possible to be a weak advocate of property rights and a free-marketeer, which is roughly my position. Actually, capitalism is the belief that CAPITAL (as opposed to PRODUCTION) has the right to make the decisions in business. It isn't so much about property rights as about control- after all, the assets themselves, the means of production, may well be rented rather than owned. That is what makes capitalism "selfish"- profit and loss calculations rather than value judgements. As time goes on, capitalism can only become *more* selfish- corporations that make non-selfish value judgements will find themselves out competed and eventually put out of business by competitors who DO make selfish value judgements. There is no way for a corporation with lesser profit or no profit to survive in our economic system. Long before that happens, the stockholders will sue it into oblivion.An efficient outcome in economics is one where all interests are reflected in the result; those interests need not be selfish interests, and so efficiency does not require self-interest. In fact, if the represented interests are selectively chosen, for example: only the interests that you would regard as selfish are represented; then the result is not efficient, for it has failed to account for unselfish interests in the process of finding the optimum. That would be a better way of defining efficiency- but it denies the reality that businesses that focus on non-selfish interests die, where businesses that focus on selfish interests prosper (this, much as I hate the Randroids, is what Ayn Rand was talking about with "Enlightened Selfishness"). It just occured to me though that you were talking about Britain- which is different. You don't have a specific set of regulations or a Securities and Exchange Commission giving stockholders a huge amount of power over corporate governance. From an American point of view- England is a socialist nation, not capitalist at all. At least, except where the WTO affects local markets- or until China sues to force you to import like they have here. Unselfish reasons are simply illegal here- with a variety of less-than-jail punishments for being unselfish. And now "American" corporations are becoming multinational- selfishness included at great extra cost.I agree that the correct measure of democracy will help us move nearer an efficient solution, but too much, and very local (as opposed to regional) interests, selfish or not, will be underrepresented. There is a balance to be struck. At some point though- for very small values of local- there is a definite human wish to be connected. For the grand majority of human history, all of those connections you claim would be ruined by distributism were local. Very soon- they will be again when our energy crisis stops us from moving about the planet quite so quickly.I would disagree with you about where the proper balance lies; for a start, my approximate criteria are "the greatest freedom of the greatest number", whereas you appear to favour something closer to "the greatest 'good' of the greatest number". My problem with the latter measure being the it overemphasises current interests over potential. If your basic needs aren't being met, freedom for potentials very quickly becomes impossible. A good example is my life right now- I've got at least 3 basic projects waiting for me at home, but because I need to work 44 hours a week just to survive, and because I have no affordable health care to speak of, my life is spiraling downhill rather quickly. One of those projects (a losing battle with mildew and basic home repair in the bathrooms) makes my health worse- which makes it even harder to get anything done when I am home. That's what capitalism in the American form leads to for the grand majority.The commons isn't the only legitimate unselfish interest. For example: someone might study some archane branch of philosophy, furthering human knowledge and understanding by doing so. The immediate community might even be opposed (consider a biologist studying a rare insect for insight into evolution in a fundamentalist 'Christian' community); this doesn't make the activity selfish, and in fact can make it less selfish, for the biologist is putting themselves at risk by performing this research (note that I put "Christian" in quotes: I'm not talking about non-judgemental folk who are inclined to forgive, here). Rightly put that ought to be the commons as well- building knowledge for the public, or common, domain. But if the biologist doing this work means that the field doesn't get harvested and four families in the community starve the next winter- I'd have to say that from a common good standpoint, the insect research ought to be able to wait.Ah. A different meaning of the word "works". Symbiosis does not meet everyones needs as fully as perhaps possible under another system. When I said "works suprisingly well", I did not mean that the market yields a perfect result, rather: spontaneous pairings combined with the selective power of competition delivers a lot more than one would naïvely expect. I can agree with that- but I'd point out that it's not even yeilding a "good enough" result. Until EVERYBODY's needs are met, any freedom anybody appears to have is no more than illusion built on slavery.I think that it is also true that deliberate action and regulation scuppers more than one expects. This does not mean that the optimum is zero regulation, but it does mean that a consciously constructed system, or one where the tendency of political activists to build power bases biases the system, or one where consensus (ie. that which the average person can understand) is overweighed, is going to yield too much regulation. The fact of the matter is- no regulation yeild infinite regulation. If the government doesn't do it, the rich will to protect their own selfish interests. The free market isn't the natural state of affairs- it takes quite a bit of regulation to create it.Symbiosis is a pairwise concept. It does not mean that the entire system is optimised. Then it is NOT reciprocity, as much as it appears to be. Without there being EQUAL trade, there is no such thing as FAIR trade- and free trade is just an illusion of one greater power stealing from a lesser one.You're thinking of "energy". Power is rate of doing work in physics, which isn't zero-sum at all. It's in fact LESS than zero-sum; the very best of all possible worlds power=energy, but in most cases it's less than zero-sum in that the conversion of energy to work always has waste.Also, it is a fallacy to hold up 'zero interference' against 'zero sum', as if you need to pick one extreme or the other. The point is- you can never get any more out of the system than you put in- and if your feedback loops are too large, you will have MORE waste, not less. Regulation is just a feedback loop, nothing more.This creates many communities, each of which have restricted freedom. True, you can move again, but you faces restrictions upon your freedom to the extent that you have local ties. Children in particular are stuck, and so, to a lesser extent, are adults with ties to families or friends. The community gains at the expense of the social network; the regional consensus over family and friends. There is a balance to be struck, but this is something that the average liberal democrat wouldn't object to. Communitarianism means more that that. My point is that those who have local ties should have MORE say, than those without. That's how you build a community- a real community, not a virtual one. Family and friends should be a part of that regional consensus- because they should live regionally.I grant you, "no escape" was too strong, but before one could make new friends and drop some old ones if necessary; now one has to drop almost all of one's friends to move. This is certainly a change in the power relationship, and there is certainly more power where there was less before. If they're true friends, they feel like you do- and will want to move with you because the community will be oppressing them equally. Otherwise they're just acquaintences- and acquaintences come and go.In Smith's time, monopolies were government favours towards particular merchants. Movement towards a more competitive system has frequently been opposed by entrenched business interests, often successfully. Since Smith and Locke wrote their works, other writers have put forward still more radical positions, essentially that the people could get hold of the reins of power from the old ruling classes. By suggesting that Smith, Ricardo et. al. stole power from the people, you are misrepresenting history. What I should say is that Smith, Ricardo, et al stole power from the EVOLVED power structure. Which means that they took an optimal evolved system, and subplanted it with a less optimal, contrived power system.The real question is what is the correct type and degree of regulation, together with the best system for bringing that about. I hold that your system systematically yields too much regulation practically everywhere, as nowhere is the very local properly weighted. If so- then what my system does is gives the very local MORE power, not less- because it localizes family and friends connections, making the family and friends the majority in any given locality.Again you misrepresent what I am saying. I do not claim to have no relations amoung my neighbours; I claim to have relations beyond the local community. Warfare is not the only possible relation to the outside world, and in fact by deliberately excluding the needs of those outside the community, you are in fact making warfare more likely. What right does the outside world have to my local economy? Why can't they satisfy their own needs locally as well?That is taken account of in the phase "he can use"... If you need more to survive, then there's obviously more that you can make use of - to make a living! Though, the obvious end point of "he can use" is not just to make a living, but to make a profit- at which point he's stealing from his neighbors and employees.I don't believe that a strongly democratic local community would attain the social good, because some information would be systematically underrepresented and occasionally supressed, preventing the social optimum from being attained. Do your friends and family, those you commune with, supress your information? Why would a community made up exclusively of friends and family do this?By context, I mean the rest of the regulation. If one regulation says that you can't spend too long in the kitchen, you can live with that. Same with the loo and the garden. If you can't spend too long in the bedroom, you can sleep on the couch. However, if you can't spend too long in any room in the house, you can't live. It's a pretty simple concept, really. But regulation can be repealed as easily as it is created- and thus such infinite loops would not exist for very long before one part would be repealed. Evolutionary democracy- that which does not work, for the majority of people, is done away with.I like Britain. And I have family and friends here. I'm glad that Britain has signed up to The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, especially since our common law in now eroding. By stripping out that protection (for the sake of localism), I am forced to tear from my family, if I can even find a place that I want to move to. Either way is far from ideal. My Uncle has in fact moved to South Africa to hang onto some of the freedoms that he values. The cost is that we hardly ever see him now. True, in his case he wanted to escape from some familiar issues too, but you can imagine if he didn't: neither choice would be good for him, and this is the position that I would be in. There's plenty of land left in Nevada...but the point is if you have good family and good friends, the kind you WANT to commune with, you'll won't to live near them. You choose your friends- you can't choose your family but neither should you be talking to family you don't agree with.I seriously think that local democracy would be worse. If we can protect ourselves more from the national and the local, so that the extent to which these levels regulate moves closer to optimal, then we'd have a better system. It would still be far from perfect, but I don't think that it is possible to combine the information in a completely undistorted way; we can only do our best. You can never completely escape regulation- even zero regulation would just devolve into the regulation of the richest or the best armed. Same reason anarchy can't exist long term.--Two chances to become a Dictator- and Bush blew them both!