This is exactly the argument that I have used on this forum over the span of many years, and not once has it been accepted.
I want to keep using it, but it seems like since it undermines the contemporary political categorisations people simply cannot handle it. Highly frustrating.
Free-market laissez faire will result in consolidation of power lest the people make for themselves a government to stop it.
Governments themselves can cause consolidations of power by dictatorian/authoritarian rule.
Exactly. We’re torn between the knowledge that laissez faire in the economy tends towards consolidation of power, and that any institution put in place to prevent this will have to be as powerful or more powerful and will therefore be susceptible to the same problem and simply be replacing the equivalent of one dictator for another. The elegance of the “Classical Liberal” ideal for Capitalism is that in some sense it has in-built mechanisms to counter this, which is the point at which pro-Capitalists stop thinking, but in practice consolidated power can easily bypass them to enough of an extent that the tendency is not prevented but merely stalled. One thing that I am working on is a better system for preventing the centralisation of power. To me, that easily places me into the “left wing” with fidelity to the term’s origin because I am seeking change to the system. Due to what Noam is saying, however, I can barely even say so without causing complete confusion. It’s a significant problem in my opinion.
I was talking about social rules, pc type behavioral rules, the humility to the group goals in the more traditional communist/socialist goals, and the like. Not economics.
For sure, I didn’t mean to imply you were, I just brought up economics as a contrast to the social side of things. Not doing so has the potential to lead people to think that since I’m a hippie when it comes to social things, I must think in the same way about all things, when I don’t. And I don’t mean to imply that this applies to you, I’m just explaining why I brought up economics. If the topic were economics and I argued against laissez faire as I do, this has the potential to lead people to lumping me in with “the left” who are authoritarian in all respects. Simplistic people like to think that the left flatly don’t believe in private property, when for example I do believe in private property when said property isn’t a means of production (capital). When it comes to the means of production, I bring private property into question (which is not to say I don’t see the value of it whatsoever). Apologies for the over-explain, I’m sure it’s not necessary for yourself, but I have encountered far too many black-and-white thinkers here.
Sure, but even those lefties who understood the problems with the USSR and China, still ran meetings, social events, conversations, with similar (though vastly less dangerousn and pernicious ideas). Sacrifice to the greater good of society or the proletariat. A kind of humility. Seeing many behaviors as either bougeois or too individualistic. IOW you could be against gulags and dictatorships, but still have a pc culture that had a lot of stated and unstated rules. And I often found it unpleasant, even if my politics might be similar on many issues.
Sure. I understand the sympathy towards “pc culture” but I think free speech is more important. Like you were saying, everyone has “rules” when it comes to social interaction - many of them fascinatingly tacit and layered. I support this insofar as it seems to combat the inevitable difference between different peoples’ points of view, and a certain etiquette is necessary in order to bridge this divide. Certain albeit minimal rules are necessary to make communication between different people possible and productive. PC culture is legitimately seen by many to overdo these social conventions because too much sacrifice is incurred by the individual in favour of enabling the group to get along. Cooperation? Absolutely, but not without sufficient competitive challenge. I would probably be in the same boat as you in finding such social events, meetings and conventions uncomfortable. I still consider myself to be as left as these people in very many respects, just as your politics might be similar to theirs on many issues.
I find it utterly ridiculous how liberals get caste as radical lefties, when nearly every liberal politician is what would have been considered far to the right on economics these days. Nixon’s policies, many of them, would be viewed as communist now. The neocons have been successfully pushing things to the right economically for decades. Liberal politicians make lefty noises but they are corporate puppets just like the right wing ones.
Absolutely. This brings me back to what I was saying above about what Serendipper was saying.
If you were honest for a change. But then, if you were the kind of person who is honest, all those things would be much less likely to apply to you in the first place.
Honest like honestly and freely admitting that what you said was true? The only reason I didn’t say what you said is because commentary on myself was irrelevant at the time to a point about violence in general. Would you prefer if I qualified every point I make about things in general with how they apply to me? Would that make me honest enough for your standards?
I think you are unnecessarily presumptuous here, and also with the suggestion that I either have a naive idea of what violence is, or assume that you have a naive idea of what violence is.
This is not helpful.
I am in fact not assuming anything, I am only making guesses as to how you are referring to violence from what little I know of you and from what little I have read of your words. Forgive me for not yet knowing exactly how you’re speaking of violence, barely knowing you as I do, and not being able to read your mind. Is that fair of me to point out? I guessed that you would have little sympathy for some ““leftist”” (in double quotation marks) views on what constitutes violence, such as seeing anything remotely suggestive of even consensual sexual intention as “rape” or whatever other ridiculous extremes you hear about in the media. So I resorted to initially addressing your idea of violence as significantly less broad - by all means correct me without impatience.
However, on the other hand you are suggesting that all strengths and weakness “are all ultimately linked to violence”, which at least sounds like you’ve reached a similarly radical breadth on what constitutes violence as the radical leftists, but in a different way and by different means. Perhaps I am misreading you. For my part at least, I don’t think everything is ultimately linked to violence. Conflict is not constant, it is ubiquitous, sure, but not incessant - it’s the exception if anything. In between violence is where many strengths lie and getting to these points is a result of strengths. To use the analogy of fighting, a fitting one for the subject of violence, the vast majority of fighting is the evasion of attacks - this is not violence. The cliché but truth of martial arts is that you are not meant to use them to cause violence, or even to defend yourself from violence whenever possible because in doing so you are too dangerous a weapon. They are instead used as a form of self-knowing and personal health on many levels. Still, these are often the people with the highest capacities for violence since weapons are something of an equaliser, and military strategists and weapons manufacturers are not violent at all without a force to use their contributions. Fighters like in MMA don’t need this assistance to have a high capacity for violence, and yet given the power of the most advanced weaponry they are next to as useless as the next person. Whoever has the highest capacity for violence these days is completely situational - how are you proposing to determined who is to be compensated for what they’re giving up when the weakest infant can accidentally kill the most powerful military leader if it’s playing with the gun.
I don’t know, I’m just playing around with what I think you’ve been saying. I just think it’s cowardly to bring a gun to a knife-fight just as it is to bring a fighter jet to a boxing match or a nuke to a meditation class, and it’s not cowardly when it’s your job to bring a gun to neutralise a gunfight in order to work towards not needing to do so in the future.