cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
19hr ago
As the other commentor pointed out even the nearby tragedy doesn't have any kind of particular flavor. The bully that committed suicide is something I already mentioned.
The other nearby tragedies don't have a flavor other than "random".
A classmate killed on her way to SATs by a truck driver running a red light.
An older swim team friend dying in a car accident.
A swim team coach dying of a sudden heart attack on deck at a swim meet.
A student a few years older burned himself alive outside the school due to bullying.
A friend in his mid thirties dying of a sudden heart attack.
A cousin losing their boyfriend to cancer.
Tragedy has been around, but it's not very violent. And it's definitely not anyone's fault.
I have heard of the civilizational fraying, but I haven't really personally seen it. I don't even disbelieve you or anything. It's just accepting some of your conclusions or policy advice would run heavily counter to my own personal experiences. I don't even have a good way of resolving this dissonance. 5 years ago pre COVID I might have suggested trusting expert opinion and statistics on the topic. Now I'm pretty doubtful on the usefulness of that approach.
cjet79
19hr ago
Yeah that's a good description. Tragedy hasn't impacted me or the people around me.
cjet79
1d ago
I do think you have had a uniquely bad experience. I'd maybe have similar views if my experience was at all like yours.
I've generally had a very different experience, and I'll share since you did.
Lived in the suburbs of St Louis for a while where inner city bussing policies made sure that there was at least one or two black kids in each class that were uncontrollable by the teachers and would mercilessly bully everyone else.
At the time I lived in a neighborhood with few kids my age, they were at youngest two years older like my brother, so he had a bunch of friends. I only managed to make friends in school with a nice Indian boy and his immigrant parents had me over for sleepovers.
We then moved to Charlottesville. And I went to a school that was semi infamous for being one of the last holdouts on segregation. That was decades before. By the time I was there it was still mainly two types of people liberals that had left a city and wanted a 'quiet' life in the country. Or rednecks that had been there for dozen generations and couldn't throw a rock on the playground without hitting someone they were related to.
Some of the rednecks bullied me. I made friends with the nerdy liberal's kids. The worst bully that I remember took his dad's gun in middle school and blew his own brains out.
When I was in middle school things didn't change much except I went to the school that was in the suburbs rather than the one that served the rural areas. So the bullies switched to being white jocks and rednecks were a minority, but I'd learned how to have friends at that point and I was no longer the one being bullied. One kid I remember getting bullied was a happy Mexican boy that lived next door in one of the apartment complexes. He eventually punched one of the kids in the nose after the kid took his backpack and that seemed to resolve things.
There were ESL classes in all of my elementary/middle/high schools and they were full and I never knew a single one of these kids.
Most of my friends in middle and highschool were white, because that was about 80-90% of the population. I was on friendly terms with the very few Muslims, Indians, and East Asians that were actually in our school. I teamed up with an Asian kid to represent the libertarians at a school wide political debate.
When I got to college things became way more diverse. I went to George Mason University because they had a reputation for a libertarian friendly economics department. My best friend became a 2nd generation Indian Immigrant. For two years my roommate was a Hispanic of some kind. I made a habit of intentionally forgetting and confusing him with Mexican origins because it annoyed him. He might have been Cuban. His parents were doctors, he eventually became a doctor too.
I graduated college and went to work at a company founded by an Indian entrepreneur. Met my white wife there and we have three beautiful blue eyed daughters.
I still live in Northern Virginia. I live in a predominantly white neighborhood my main encounters with immigrants is when they come to mow my lawn. There has been a homeless problem in the area lately, the worst of them look like drugged out old white people.
Overall my life has been awesome and not filled with much tragedy. My encounters with immigrants have been almost entirely positive. The race and ethnicity of people I've known has rarely provided me much insight into whether I will like them, get along with them, or find them totally odious. Usually the people that like or dislike me for my race are the people I get along with the least well.
I'm not ashamed of my race or heritage, I'm currently serving on a board for a family heritage organization. They've been here since the 1620's. We often field requests from people looking for more information on slaves that my ancestors once owned.
cjet79
4d ago
Depends on the restaurant. Chick-fil-A feels the opposite. There are also some local Burger joints that seem to be all English as a first language teenagers, but naming them would dox me.
cjet79
6d ago
That application you are working on does sound interesting.
I've been wanting to skip the middleman for a while and just have AI write the stories based on simple prompts.
I have an existing 300 page story I'd love to just feed to an AI and have it finish the story for me, or at least fix it up.
Back when I fed the first chapter to chatGPT it just told me that my story was offensive and refused to help me, which was when I stopped using it altogether and a few months later switched to grok.
Progression fantasy : Epics :: sex : love
And anything with a modern setting is just unbelievably boring or depressing.
cjet79
8d ago
I've thought about this a decent amount. I rebelled against the norms around me in highschool and became a libertarian, but I often wondered if I was just an accidental encounter away from going the other direction and becoming communist or something.
Its easy to notice that many young men rebel against the norms around them, and it seems to drive their political, social, and cultural views. But this "rebellion narrative" has a glaring set of problems: it assigns little or no agency to the individuals involved, it ignores the power of ideas, and thus it lacks any explanatory power for why people rebel into a particular set of ideas.
Instead I think it is just that failures that are happening in the here and now are easier to notice than all of the successes happening, or the bad things that aren't happening. A political entity that is clearly in charge gets blamed for all those problems. People go looking for answers. Since we are in a two party system they often just go to the other side. But not always! The two party system isn't a rule of reality, just a quirk of how our system is arranged so people can and do find their ways elsewhere.
cjet79
9d ago
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.
cjet79
10d ago
I immediately wondered if the FBI was involved. They do seem way better geared than I would have expected.
cjet79
10d 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
10d 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
13d 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
14d 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
15d 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
15d 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
15d 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
16d 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
16d 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
16d ago
If you define property rights as a social project, sure I guess that follows.
cjet79
16d 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
16d 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
16d 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
17d 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
17d 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.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Try Timberborn next if you want to mess around with water
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