> The law is not there to rehabilitate, it's there to punish and thereby deter.
Technically, it's neither. The law is there to state what ought to be. Even putting that aside, it's prescribed punishment's goal is to remediate and prevent violations of the law, so it has three simultaneous means: to restitute, to deter and to rehabilitate. The balance between the three is predicated on each's ability to satisfy the original goal of remediation and prevention, all the while not violating other laws and rights.
> We put people in jail as a result of them breaking the law, regardless.
A core principle of the rule of law is the principle of proportionality, which states that only the most legal amount of force is the materially sufficient enough to prevent a crime. If lower measures are sufficient to prevent a crime, jailing should not be prescribed, not only to respect the law but also to make good use of scarce resources, as prison overcrowding may not only reduce their effectiveness, but also open the door for downstream right violations.
For your example to be trivially valid, the farmer would need to be entitled to the sun, but the sun is not property of aynone as of yet. There might be an argument to this (especially if more context is given), but, in this general case, I find it unlikely.
Still, even we accept your example as valid, what would be the equivalent to "sunlight"? Labor, maybe? But labor isn't something that is owned nor it's a persistent property of material resources, it's human-derived transformation. It's inconcrete by itself, even more so than light, more akin to work (in the technical physics sense). It just so happens that it "produces" a material outcome.
> The reason private property exists is not because land (for instance) can't be copied.
Both things can be true at the same time. Land being economically scarce necessarily means that whatever use is thrusted onto it will produce private exclusion. Today, we give this relationship of private exclusion the name of "property" or "private property", but that doesn't mean you have to formally recognized private ownership in law to suffer its effects - socialists regimes stand as a testament to that. Thus...
> They're both made up social constructs. One isn't more fundamental than the other.
The first sentence is reductive, while the second is innacurate, if not outright wrong. Physical property is primarily predicated on real scarcity, while intellectual property is purely predicated on social control, which, when analyzed more closely, lays claims (even if partially) of ownership over other resources, including peoples' bodies and mind. It's fair to say that one is more fundamental than the other.
> The fantasy is that an economic system predicated on infinite growth can be made compatible with finite resources.
Good thing that's just degrowth propaganda.
> This economic system is extremely terrible at meeting base human needs.
Except in comparison to all others. Crop failures and famines were common in feudalisms. Planned socialism is known for food insecurity. The system today might not be best possible, but it's, by no means, terrible.
> This is an absurd strawman.
Need to read more degrowth fiction then.
> What degrowth advocates for is taking as our first priority meeting human needs and living sustainably (which can be made compatible with most of the technology we have today in some form)
The problem here is the "human needs" part, which are famously infinite.
> ...than the ideology of growth for growth's sake, which mainly results in massive amounts of wasted resources and funnelling wealth into the hands of a few.
Also degrowth propaganda. No one "grows" for the sake of "growing", lest they have a need for it. All choosing actors act towards fulfilling their needs, regardless of whether anyone find them "fundamental" or not.
It isn't a cope. They are pointing out the fact that the state has been used against the opposition multiple times in the past by authoritarians, by both the US (this goes beyond DT's gov too) and socialist governments (although they often use the term "reactionaries" instead).
Who did Obama sick the DOJ on? Who did Biden? How? Did his lackies at the FCC bully media companies, threaten to take them off the air for what their comedians did? What noblogs.org did they go after? Did they tell everyone the un-cities were violent overrun places that needed that national guard sent in? Did Obama's personal lawyer get to run the DOJ?
The left/"socialists", generally, these days, seem to believe pretty strongly in individuals liberty. They aren't the same rank hypocrites who crow and cry foul every chance they get, only to violate those same principles as soon as it's convenient.
> The left/"socialists", generally, these days, seem to believe pretty strongly in individuals liberty.
The “left” as a whole, whether you mean left ultras or left-liberals, generally do not respect individual freedoms in my experience. They redefine liberty to exclude rights they don’t believe in (the right does as well).
Polls have shown that the public as a whole, including the left, is becoming more hostile towards many individual liberties, especially freedom of speech. Even more concerning, support for political violence is gradually climbing.
Socialists are a mixed bag. In my experience, the more educated they are, the more they publicly espouse support for individual liberties, at least during academic discussions. But there’s a disturbing trend of “joking” about rights violations in casual conversation, mirroring the same trend on the right. Still, the DSA (for instance) seems to be gradually improving its official stances, although there is still work to do.
Everyone knows that the right is terrible on civil liberties, but that’s no reason to excuse the left.
"In late September 2017, an exhaustive report by the Treasury Department's inspector general found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny, blunting claims that the issue had been an Obama-era partisan scandal.[1][2] The 115-page report confirmed the findings of the prior 2013 report that some conservative organizations had been unfairly targeted, but also found that the pattern of misconduct had been ongoing since 2004 and was non-partisan in nature."
Other comments have pointed out this: how are you going to stop the "warrior narcissist" if you disarmed/de-weaponized the peace-makers? Even if de-weaponize after you erase all the current "warrior narcissists", how will you prevent new ones from rising up and re-weaponizing? Surely, you know that war is not the default state, so this isn't a theoretical.
Also, I think your description of "warrior narcissists" as a shallow description of the spirit of these people. You mentioned something about "identity" in later comments, and I cannot help but wonder what do you mean by that. I don't think Putin's main motive is his self-image, nor do I think Israel's leadership is murdering Palestine's populace to appear heroic.
It would also help to not assume the motives of people criticizing your ideas by presuming them to be "warrior narcissists" themselves. Elevate the discussion, not downgrade it.
I'll always appreciate the spirit of pacifism and collaboration, but your comments seem quixotic, and not in a good way.
The police state exists entirely to maintain its own identity - and thus control - over that of its subjects. It is a warrior - controlling the lives of others or killing them - and it is doing it narcissistically, to maintain its own image of itself.
All current war theaters are the result of a police state and these police states only function because of technology.
The subject is de-weaponization of technology.
First, you separate the technology from the person using it correctly - i.e. not to create a police state.
Then, the person using it incorrectly in a police state.
In this case, the person you don't want to have using technology to murder/do harm/violate the actual human rights of others, is the warrior narcissist.
So, as a technologist, I do not let my technology be used by someone who is only going to use it on others, for actual war-fighting/warrior purposes, for the purposes of protecting or promoting their identity over the life of others.
Because that is what good technology is - something which gives all users, equal rights. An equal, new identity, with each new form of technology.
So, de-weaponization means, disconnecting the user from using technology in destructive ways.
Constructive ways are easier, such as I demonstrated with extreme prejudice, such as the notion of the pink F35, dropping cluster medical supplies, water desalination pods instead of child-maiming fertilizer bombs, or indeed - fertilizer in the right place, with emergency seed-bombs for a 3 month re-supply of the landscape, food-wise, etc.
All current war theaters are the result of a police state and these police states only function because of technology.
These are parables I'm dramatizing, with intent. I do know there is no chance in hell of turning off all the weapons - I for sure know that there is a way to use technology to make sure a police state doesn't happen in the first place. (Because I've been doing exactly that with technology for decades.)
Putin is an identity of someone you don't actually know, but yet, you think you know the warrior narcissism in Putin - but it is actually the identity, not the individual, that I am talking about. I rate Putin among all the other war criminals of the world - they are there, because they have the technological might of their people - or indeed the ignorance of their people in spite of this might, or indeed even collective agreement on scale, to perpetuate that identity.
And lest it not be clear, I find that in order to be a good pacifist, you have to allow for new identity, always. It is the use of technological power to gain mass identity and exploit it for war, which I am specifically calling the playground of the warrior narcissist. Those who would murder to maintain their own identity.
Drop books not bombs, is legitimately the simplest pacifist view I can express. I see far, far more peace to be had in the world with the concept of dropping a complete archive.org gardening section from the pink F35, you know .. "turning the pistol into a pump" ...
>It would also help to not assume the motives of people criticizing your ideas by presuming them to be "warrior narcissists" themselves. Elevate the discussion, not downgrade it.
Apropos quixotic.
You might notice that I am manifesting the very thing I am resisting.
That is by design. For every excuse for murdering 'those people over there', I have and can spot a greedy instance of technological mis-use. There is no longer any good, legitimate reason for war - technologically. It happens, because technologists don't confront the warriors.
So I'm targeting warrior narcissism intentionally, and yes in a way guaranteed to create a cloud of smoke on the horizon, because .. after all .. dang himself, could prove the value of my point by switching me off right now.
> You write as if there is only one smoothly homogeneous "Capitalism" and that it's actually practiced.
You'd be mistaken, as that better describes OP. All I mentioned is that the push for open competition began in capitalism (or, more appropriately, liberal capitalism) undermining the prior more nepotism-based system of dominance.
Of course, there are more intricacies but, given that OP's comment was shallow, I didn't feel the need of going deep into the many forms of what people may call "capitalism". We can get into it if you'd like.
It's not just an American belief. USA has no MSS equivalent for starters. They don't have a Great Firewall. One can make their own independent party in the US (winning is a different story, tho). And so on.
And that's just in recent times, the PRC had it worse then.
But you are cheery picking a few things while ignoring others.
In the US, you are free to buy a gun and walk around with it. In the EU you can't But if you ask a person from the EU, they will think that this "freedom to bear arms" does more harm than good in their eyes.
So who has more freedom here? The person who walks around with the gun or the person who can walk the streets with the freedom of knowing that guns are not allowed here.
Freedom is a sliding scale not a binary thing. Should you be free to marry your first cousin or children? Some freedom absolutist will tel you that governments shouldn't be able to tell you who you can marry but we can all agree that some freedoms need to be curtailed for the good of society.
Now you can argue that China is less free when it comes to political matters and that would be fine except the problem in this case is that the author simply expressed a very broad opinion which makes it impossible to falsify.
Technically, it's neither. The law is there to state what ought to be. Even putting that aside, it's prescribed punishment's goal is to remediate and prevent violations of the law, so it has three simultaneous means: to restitute, to deter and to rehabilitate. The balance between the three is predicated on each's ability to satisfy the original goal of remediation and prevention, all the while not violating other laws and rights.
> We put people in jail as a result of them breaking the law, regardless.
A core principle of the rule of law is the principle of proportionality, which states that only the most legal amount of force is the materially sufficient enough to prevent a crime. If lower measures are sufficient to prevent a crime, jailing should not be prescribed, not only to respect the law but also to make good use of scarce resources, as prison overcrowding may not only reduce their effectiveness, but also open the door for downstream right violations.
reply