Re: Take Back Your Time Day

Constantinople wrote:

>
>
> Your rhetoric (using ultimate terms of opprobrium for the condition of
> inoffensively minding one's own business) is an old style of rhetoric
> that has historically led to heinous outcomes, and so you need to be
> called on it. It's true that we in the US are (most of us) merely
> slightly annoyed by the state and not entirely enslaved. But te reason
> we in the US merely have to put up with things like regulations about
> gasoline and are not actually carted off to labor camps is not that your
> rhetoric does not lead all the way to labor camps; it's that the
> rhetoric in all its implications hasn't been allowed to run its full
> course, because in a society like the US there are other considerations
> that are still very strong. One is that we still care about individual
> freedom. Another is that we all have easy access to guns.

wow.

I wonder...
how did we ever survive in europe after ww2 without those guns....



>
>
> > Do you see the analogy with feeding the poor, or does it just go past
> > you?
>
> You want people to feed the poor - fine, tell them to feed the poor, say
> what a shame it is, exert whatever social pressure you like. But you
> didn't distinguish between stuff that you think is a moral failing, a
> failure to sufficiently follow in the footsteps of Jesus, and real evil.

things considered just fine in the middle ages are totally forbidden today
and sanctioned severely.


things considered just fine today will hopefully be forbidden in the future,

and sanctioned severely as a preventive measure


you enjoy the fruits of this, one of which is your "american" freedom.

pragmatic and rationally this makes sense for real people in the real world
however much you'd want to point at philosophical problems with making
people behave more and more rationally towards each other.


>
>
> Getting down to concrete facts, I do think there are culprits who are to
> blame for hunger, for disease, and for poverty. For example, people who
> steal supplies, who murder aid workers, who murder the poor who try to
> help themselves. Real evil. And that's why it hasn't been done.
>
> >>>There's a whole branch of economics devoted to externalities and the
> >>>way in which systematic actions, though individually innocuous, can
> >>>have significant effects.
> >
> >