cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
16hr ago
I immediately wondered if the FBI was involved. They do seem way better geared than I would have expected.
cjet79
19hr ago
Can you just entirely skip the tutorial? I've owned the game for a long time, so I can't remember taking the tutorial, or it's possible it didn't exist when I first started playing.
The research tree progression acts as a pretty good tutorial. For most game content as long as you can figure out the basics.
cjet79
20hr ago
Video game thread
I've been playing Captains of Industry, and Len's Island lately.
The first is a kind of mix between factorio, a city sim, and a terrain flattening sim. The latter part doesn't sound fun, but is weirdly the most satisfying aspect of the game. If you ever wanted to dig a giant pit and dump it all into the ocean, this is the game for you.
Len's Island was described as an isometric Valheim in a review and that has mostly been true. Generally an enjoyable game if you like the genre, but nothing too ground breaking or unique.
cjet79
4d ago
Ya just a poster that comes through and always posts "oh look at these terrible Nazis and what they've done, how could they think these very specific things don't they know this is evil and wrong? Here is specific Nazi x y and z doing this new thing that barely anyone knows about. But now a Jewish newspaper has written about it."
cjet79
4d ago
I remember one of my old workplaces kind of avoided this due to the heroic efforts of a few very curmudgeonly and perhaps slightly autistic engineers that liked their environments and notifications in very particular ways. They would absolutely be the ones to say "no I don't care if this major product is down in production, I don't need to know about it because I work on this other unrelated minor product. You can't have an engineering team wide alert for your system going down.
cjet79
6d ago
Calling for collective action seems to have an abandonment of responsibility that I dislike.
I love the phrasing of your second paragraph because it illustrates the problem.
It's not "I want to throw you in a wood chipper for your annoying pedantry" it's 'someone should throw people like you into a wood chipper for their annoying pedantry '. The functional result on my end is the same, but you've dodged responsibility for directly calling for me to be killed.
cjet79
6d ago
Possibly it is one of the oldest and most successful social projects. I guess that would make me some kind of arch conservative.
cjet79
6d ago
I think the problem of petty tyrants crosses systems.
Breaking down life into multiple areas:
Family, Social, Market, and Government.
Of these areas I think petty tyrants are weakest and least effective when wielding the market against their victims. The word Tyrant literally comes from someones name in Greece who was wielding a government against people.
The other answer which I know people hate is that markets are going to reflect reality. And when reality is ugly markets will look ugly. But punching a mirror doesn't fix the ugly face staring back at you.
I don't think markets are the end all be all of all problems. There are certain classes of problems that they solve extremely well. And plenty of problems that they do very little about.
I do think governments are generally terrible at solving most problems, and often make things worse They can certainly supercharge petty tyrants.
cjet79
6d ago
I'll think about this. My sense is that the base relationship is what matters. The base social relationship is talking. The base family relationship is love/nurture. The base relationship with the state seems to be an imbalanced power dynamic in favor of the state.
cjet79
6d ago
There are some flavors of libertarians that derive a lot of stuff from contracts.
I suppose I see contracts as more of a good operating system, but the way violence is wielded and property rights are protected is more like having CPU and motherboard for your computer.
cjet79
6d ago
If you define property rights as a social project, sure I guess that follows.
cjet79
7d ago
You say in the first paragraph that libertarians are wrong and reductive to call government enforcement a form of violence.
You say in the second paragraph that obviously government is violence and it always has been, and only an idiot would think otherwise.
So which is it?
If it is the second paragraph that is true I don't disagree with you. If it's the first paragraph I do disagree with you.
And that threshold of necessary violence is decided by the people of the nation, not libertarians!
If you don't have that, you don't really have a society: only a collection of strangers in an economic zone.
The people of a nation are made up of individuals. You are one such individual. Where do you personally draw the line? What social projects do you think are necessary enough to be enforced with violence? I can't speak with "the people of the nation" I can only speak with individuals.
This vagueness of thrusting off responsibility for calling for the violence is also familiar.
cjet79
7d ago
Contracts can pre-agree to enforcement methods. One of them is to just piggy back off of state enforcement and say that one party now owns stuff.
If a stable society needs some form of social enforcement that would pass my bar in the same way that property rights does. But I'm generally suspicious of such requests. Non government entities like religion have had more success and longevity enforcing such things through social means. After all violence is only one means for achieving social ends. You can try to convince people, pay them, or use negative social consequences. None of those things are what I'd consider "violence".
cjet79
7d ago
I specifically said that sometimes libertarians agree it is fine to use violence. Its just that they want a high threshold for deciding when to deploy state violence or collective violence. Your point about corporations turning into states is more relevant to anarchist strains of thought.
They are specifically willing to deploy that violence:
- In defense against random violence by others i.e. to prevent the Hobbesian war of all against all.
- To protect property rights because they don't think most of civilization can function without property rights.
- However they are unwilling to deploy it for social projects.
Point 1 puts them in disagreement with various anarchist strains of thought. Point 2 puts them in disagreement with various modern progressive strains of thought and most marxist/socialist strains. And point 3 puts them in disagreement with just about everyone.
Point 3 is simultaneously why most people dislike libertarian thought, and why most critiques of them suck. Its all just special pleading by each specific author on why their specific social project deserves an exception. "Yes, it is good when libertarians want to oppose the social projects of people I hate, but the idiots don't realize that they need to allow my social project or society will of course collapse". The pattern becomes obvious after reading the same type of critique a few times, but I've had the misfortune of reading the same damn thing over a hundred times.
cjet79
7d ago
Government rules are enforced through violence and kidnapping.
Libertarianism poses a simple question for any would be government bans: is the thing you are trying to ban worth killing and imprisoning people to reduce that thing?
For many libertarians there are things that definitely meet that criteria. Murder, kidnapping, serious bodily assault, etc.
They phrase it in the post as "who are you to ban that thing, why should we listen to you?" But really it is "who are you to say we get to kill people just because you think something is bad?"
There are a lot of things that are bad but less bad than killing and kidnapping people. And it sometimes feels like everyone is just playing signalling games when they say the government should ban something but can't affirmatively answer "yes it is worth killing people and imprisoning them in order to ban this thing" Meanwhile it feels like libertarians are one of the few groups acknowledging the on the ground enforcement costs of government actions.
cjet79
7d ago
Wish I hadn't seen the libertarian critique. It was bad like most critiques of libertarianism are bad. Scott still holds the record for the only good critique I've ever read.
Every other critique makes it sound like libertarianism is a group of scolds that just want to take away the toy that everyone calls government.
cjet79
10d ago
cjet79
12d ago
I'm not in favor of crazy people having guns, but I'm not sure I fully trust the system to draw the line on crazy people.
If the system was accurately drawing the line of crazy people I'd be fine with having them all institutionalized. If you are considered too dangerous to own a gun then you are a danger to society in general, after all knives, vehicles, and lighters are still easily accessible for these people.
cjet79
13d ago
I think if you are not allowed to ban something then you shouldn't be allowed to make access risky. All bans are is adding a risk component to a thing. You can at least pretend like onerous requirements serve a purpose. Where onerous crosses over into risky is where I'd prefer courts to draw a line and say "you are just banning the thing, so unless you are allowed to just straight up ban the thing, get rid of that requirement."
cjet79
13d ago
I feel like these burdens should get their own category. It's not really onerous. It's actually very easy to meet the requirement to upload a picture of my driver's license. It's just stupidly dangerous for my well being.
It would be like if airport security asked you to stick your hand into a wood chipper that sporadically turns on to get your fingerprints. There is a helpful little red and green light to tell you when it's safe, but damn I'd rather not trust my fingers to this machine run by minimum wage employees. And of course if my hand gets mulched I'm allowed to sue the judgement proof employees, or the shell company wood chipper manufacturer, but not the government that put the requirement in there in the first place.
cjet79
13d ago
Someone being reasonable and apolitical can definitely draw that line. It's just that it's too easy for bad actors to start being political.
My gaming tastes have changed so much now that I have kids. In many ways the shallowness of the game is a plus rather than a negative. It's just wrapping a bunch of game elements I've played dozens of times into an isometric action game that I haven't officially completed. And that's enough to occupy my brain in my few hours of off time, or during my partial off time when I need to drop the game at a moments notice to handle something happening.
The sailing and exploration is fun. I think I'm getting close to exploring just about every game mechanic it has. I'm not sure I want to grind out the fishing mini-game. It's similar to mining other resources, but with a failure option. I've always hated fishing in games. I'm still confused why devs bother adding it. (Dave the diver was great, but that is mostly spear fishing).
I'll play it for another week and then leave on vacation and forget it/drop it while I'm gone from my PC.
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