Value is subjective, which is why free markets, voluntary exchange, and the ability to fail based around private property rights are so important for creating price signals. Are Bill and Shelley taking a lower salary than they could earn in the private sector, or are they overpaid for their output? Is a musician who can’t fill a local bar more valuable than Nike’s top designer? Who know...
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5d ago
"The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away"
But I doubt it, they built the propaganda into the name "public servant".
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8d ago
Usually skeptical of dog whistle claims but I would say this leans more Totenkopf than pirate:
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-871235
Granted he's a marine so I could buy he just legit thought it looked cool.
Or...
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Have people who agree with your ends smeared across powerful institutions: Jews
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Have key political constituents that are amenable to messaging around your ends: Zionist Evangelicals and Jews
See also past NRA.
Part of the original point is that we aren't discussing common conceptions of these concepts. The chain is not abstract, it is very direct. Violence is the foundation of political action. Political action is forcing others who disagree with you to take part in your ends. At best forcing them to fund your desires. This is the defining difference between political action and non-political action.
"Penguin Day">"paid government bureaucrats">"taxes">"violence"
Are you saying that is not the chain of events? Without the threat of violence that chain still exists?
I'm perfectly comfortable saying I'd be able to buy coffee today without colonialism.
Are you saying no taxpayer funding is involved in declaring National Penguin Day, or are you claiming that taxes aren't collected by threat of violence? Also if you wouldn't mind providing your definition of violence. I'm using the first one in Merriam-Webster
1 a: the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy
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15d ago
This is such a bizarre argument, particularly for one I've seen repeated again and again in different variations with negligible pushback.
It gets negligible pushback in places like The Motte because beyond a certain level of political-philosophical acumen, it becomes ubiquitously understood as true. Even doing a study, declaring National Northern Hemispheric Penguin Day, ordering lunch, done on taxpayer time with taxpayer-funded resources. And taxes are backed by threat of violence. Normies push back on this understanding because they attach normative baggage to violence. Virtually no one is a pacifist; we're all cool with violence. The actual debate is not around whether political action is backed by violence, it's when the violence is legitimate.
This seems to come from the libertarian view that "government is [a monopoly on] violence"
Do people consider Max Weber to be a libertarian? But yes I'm coming at it from the libertarian traditions. Hence the tag...
That said, while I think the libertarians have a mostly-self-coherent ethical view (which is more than many can say), I think some level of civilization is worth the trade off in terms of absolute freedoms.
In "defense" of my less radical brethren, the vast majority of libertarians agree. Ancaps are - or were - over represented in parts of the internet. There are far more minarchists and those are greatly eclipsed by just self-described libertarians who make all sorts of tradeoffs.
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16d ago
All political action is violence... or at least the threat of violence. We've put a nice facade over it and depending at what point in history the majority and even the vast majority do not think about this. In my more argumentative days I figured I'd pierce the facade and instead of people giving up violence for petty thing got more "Fine, I'm OK killing you". Since no one wants to be an anarch-capitalist be careful when piercing the facade with unstable people.
Tags: Libertarian "Gun in the Room", Nothing every happens
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23d ago
There's a million ways he could've implemented the ICE program, and he chose one with the greatest optics of cruelty.
Could have been maximally "gentle" and the cruelty would have been manufactured by the mainstream media. Under Biden the media used forced perspective to make it look like border patrol was whipping illegal aliens.
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24d ago
I don't think the imbalance for leftists in the justice system should be all the surprising. It's been decades of leftist having literal terrorists with tenure. Marxist and Communists with tenure outnumber Nazis and Fascists by about... what? 100x? 1,000x? 100,000x? All while calling the most milk toast Republicans like Romney fascists.
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24d ago
Alright, which specific people would you arrest.
J6 investigation was the largest investigation in DOJ history, I expect quite a bit from the warranted 10x larger investigation into BLM riots.
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24d ago
Exactly.
I am not virulently against the norm of shooting people and incarcerations in a situation like the Jan 6 riot. I am against what I perceive to be a massive double standard. For many on the left it’s super clear that Kyle Rittenhouse is a mass murderer, that all these police shootings are racist, and that it’s lives over property. But shooting Ashli Babbitt crawling through a window is a good shoot.
Norms need to be consistent, or they aren’t norms: Ashli Babbitt saw the left violently rioting, looting, committing arson, and occupying government buildings for months without getting shot. If we’re gonna play the game this way, fine, as long as everyone knows the rule: it’s legitimate to shoot you - even if you’re protesting - when you start breaking stuff that’s not yours or try to go places you’re not supposed to go. If you think Kyle Rittenhouse should have been convicted I don't care about your J6 opinion.
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30d ago
I would never lead that operation. But, if you are evil enough to think the US military should be used for such a thing I want you to shout from the rooftops "I am willing to kill every single Iraqi if that's what it takes to get the oil."
This is a more correct reading, but I was being bombastic and did reference nukes and killing "everyone". I completely deny the comparisons to disciplining children. The military breaks things until whatever the state wants to happen happens. Deploying the military should involve wailing and gnashing of teeth as we beg God for forgiveness for what we may do.
Er, are you advocating that the US should only do nothing or destroy its enemies utterly? And if the standard for utter destruction is astronomically high, doesn't that imply that most of the time the US should do nothing?
Errr... um...errr.... ummm....uuuuur... Correct. Time for the midwit poly-sci majors playing games "inadvertently" getting half a million people killed, with no moral accountability to be out of work. Let your yes be yes and your no be no.
Do we need to either cut the baby's head off, or let the baby act out for as long as it likes?
I'm talking about military action not disciplining babies.
I agree rules of engagement are for pussies. The United States should stop with this half ass shit. The US can destroy civilizations with the power of suns. If the US decides that you are deserving of its wrath there is no resistance, there is capitulation or everyone dies. Of course, the standard for such attention should be astronomically high.
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1mo ago
It also helped that feds seemingly cut back on killing right wing women and children.
They've seen a YouTube video and don't understand. To actually pull it off you have to be on time of your game and people don't realize that 1st Amendment auditors often orchestrate the interaction from the start. They are purposefully being belligerent to try to illicit a lawsuit. The am am 'I being detained?' is an important demarcation point where they will alter their behavior. They will get very physically compliant and often verbally compliant once the words are said.
Never going to convince anyone in these measuring contests. The heuristic I use that strongly indicates that society is institutions are bent to the left is the ration of self-identified Marxist/communist professors vs Nazi professor. Communists have practically infinitely more power and influence in this country than Nazi. When a fascist terrorist get's tenure maybe I'll change my view of the world.
Can’t quite pinpoint it - maybe a preference cascade or something more. The online left can’t imagine it, but for a non-negligible chunk - maybe even most - of the Professional Managerial Class, Charlie Kirk wasn’t beyond the pale. Justifying his murder as a “Nazi/fascist/white supremacist”? PMCs paused: “Wait, Kirk’s fine. I like him, or someone I know respects him. You’re okay with us getting brutally murdered?” It’s not exactly what Kimmel said, but the smear’s are everywhere. Kimmel spread an obvious lie. PMCs bought into the “motte” of woke, but now they see hundreds of thousands cheering the brutal murder of a normal family man. “The right lied about the election to steal it? These freaks lie to justify killing.” I’ve been preaching here and in real life: This isn’t the fight. Normies run on vibes, and the vibes are against the left on this one.
The state removes them from the country under threat of violence. Are you a pacifist? I'm sure you know this: Political action is about desires we want enforced with violence. The debate is over the bounds of legitimate violence, in this case what "normies" see as justified. They don’t think in those terms, so they’re wildly inconsistent, driven by vibes. That’s why horror-movie levels of blood hits hard. Few normies think it’s okay to start stacking bodies over calling illegal immigrants “invaders.”
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1mo ago
I don't generally like using emotive language but I'm going to in this to try to make some points.
This gets into the almost impossible "measuring contest" of who commits the most violence. The recent shooting directly challenges the narrative. How many Republicans, conservatives, or right-wingers support killing Black or Latino people just for being Black or Latino? Or, to make a fairer comparison, how many would say anything close to, "I'm against killing Blacks in a grocery store, but..."? The left has branded Charlie Kirk a "Nazi white supremacist" for citing crime statistics. As far as I know, he's never hinted at genetic causes; he uses standard boomer-con it's about culture, claiming intact families would reduce crime and that affirmative action places some Black women in roles they're not qualified for. That's why you can't make the right eat Crusius and Gendron. @Stellula. Any right-winger who said, "...but despite making up 13% of the population, Blacks commit 50% of violent crimes," would be shit-canned before they could take their next shit.
What making the left eat this is after a man with a young, beautiful family had his throat blown open, with so much blood gushing out that if it wasn't real people would have thought it was slasher-horror film excess - not just random nuts, but professors and teachers - said, "...but."
That's Fudd lore. Perhaps it's generally a wise sentiment to hold but it's in the same vein as Dave Ramsey: "never use credit cards" of trying to keep low impulse control people from doing low impulse control things.
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