Property laws aren’t based on their owners having created them though. Ted Turner is not in the land reclamation business, and if I go down a disused quarry owned by another and build myself a table, I don’t gain ownership of the marble. All defenses of actually existing property rights are answers to the question “how do we encourage people to manage resources sensibly”.
Mercy
Karma: 254
This is the common wisdom at the moment but it’s far too short-termist. All theories are provisional and eventually your enlightened dictator will find themselves on the wrong side of history and need to be removed. Of course you can build a democracy which can’t do that and a dictatorship which can but I suspect the “moves like molasses” aspect moves with this quality and not the voting ritual.
I often get the impression, from young american consequentialist libertarians, that they would be socialists in any other country. Certainly they don’t resemble right-libertarians elsewhere, or older american libertarians. And conversely your socialist organisations are missing their usual complement of precocious hippy cynics
They are better, did they do better? You need to control for the empire’s choice of targets! India accounted for a quarter of world GDP at the time of conquest- by independence it was barely one percent.
Which the New Guinea quote is a sarcastic parody of. It’s a “one could just as easily say” gambit. I don’t have much time for GG&S, but you have to be willfully misreading that passage- or deaf to tone and context- to interpret it as a paen to the New Guinean master race.
Yes, this is the precise complaint! To frame an argument as politically incorrect is to imply that all arguments against it are based on squeamishness. It’s a transparent attempt to exploit the mechanism you describe, one so beloved of tabloid hacks that practically any right of centre* talking point can be described as politically incorrect (“you can’t say [thing I’m saying right now on prime-time television] any more” and so on).
Why declarations of politically incorrectness are taken any more seriously than claims to be totally mad/random or the life of the party I shall never know.
*am I being, ah what’s the equivalent here—unserious perhaps? populist? - if I suggest that this trick is mostly limited to the right? That political correctness just means any non-socialist leftwing opinion, with the added implication that the opinion is both hegemonic and baseless. When left wing commentators trip over themselves to avoid criticising america or soldiers, or rush to condemn protests at the first sign of a black mask, nobody talks about political correctness. Despite all the talk about how OWS has made it acceptable to moral issues in ways that were previously beyond the pale, nobody calls it an anti-PC movement.
Perhaps we should have a separate term to describe this phenomenon, if we are going to keep going on about political correctness, and pretending we aren’t talking about politics? Since otherwise we reach a point where commentators are unable to call people fascists, for being so PC is decidedly politically incorrect.
Curious, one of the top entries in my primed cache of “idiotic things people might say in support of libertarianism” is “we aren’t causing shitloads of global warming”. It’s the one of the most popular topics among libertarian columnists, beating out smoking, PC at the BBC, Europe and Laurie Penny. True, American Libertarians generally seem to be more contrarian than the sort we get in the UK, but I seem to remember both Bryan Caplan and Will Wilkinson making similar observations about the other side of the pond.
This would seem to hinge on the definition of “exploited”. And the question doesn’t specify who is exploiting the Third Worlders: the companies in question, or the capitalist First World system in general. Perhaps a socialist might argue that they are being exploited because we haven’t compensated them properly for the sins of colonialism, therefore putting them in the position where they have to work in sweatshops to make ends meet. Again it is not inevitable that any intelligent individual would accept that this statement is blatantly false, even after having that “fact” pointed out to him.
More than that, a socialist would almost certainly argue that they are being exploited by the landowner, by the recipient of any fee they have to pay (for instance, for intellectual property) their own government if they pay taxes, and so on. The socialist definition of exploitation is extremely broad but roughly isomorphic to rent. It’s also to my knowledge the only remotely rigorous definition of exploitation that would make sense in that context. So the question is pretty much explicitly asking “are you a socialist” and taking yes as being wrong about economics. Since the author’s of the study disagree with socialists about economics that seems entirely fair, though obviously as an argument that socialists don’t understand economics it’s circular. Still it would be clearer if they said “demonstrably being exploited”, but I think they are assuming that people who think exploited is vague default to no.
Sorry I missed this reply before, note sure if it’s worth replying but briefly yes, narrow-band pesticides take care of the most distantly related weeds so your biggest problems are “volunteers” from the previous crop rotation, and wild relatives of whatever crops you are planting. That’s why you have to modify the crop, rather than the pesticide.
The problem is more dramatic in architecture. The latter is the point where the crisis of modern art moves from a bugbear of the chattering classes to a genuine problem. If someone insists that you just need to learn to appreciate some ear destroying extended technique violin piece, you have a difference of opinion. If someone insists that the solution to the residents of the new brutalist tower block wanting to kill themselves is to educate them on the finer points of architectural theory, then you have a civic problem. (Incidentally, are there any other forms of art that require the destruction of old pieces?)
With food though, “just learn to like it” is absolutely good advice as, a childish aversion to, say, cabbage is an unnecessary barrier to eating arrangements that could be solved with a few meals. And because food is such a flexible art form, learning to appreciate new elements dramatically increases your enjoyment. Though I suppose these are really two sides of the same coin, like the OPs definition of art snobbery as insisting that art should not contain certain features that indicate the wrong culture: perspective, raw meat, any consideration for the surrounding space whatsoever, etc, etc.
The problem is that artists generally like to focus on reducing the number of features, partly because it makes it easier to compose but mostly, I suspect, because it makes it easier for other people to compare your compositions. This is most obvious in fashion (take one accessory off, even after accounting for the fact that you were going to have one accessory too many) but compare any home recipe to any cooks recipe, the former will have all sorts of pinches of this and that and the other added in which make it taste muddier, which is not necessarily worse but harder to analyses.
This is the blockbuster problem basically: if you want to appeal to a lot of people you have to do a lot of things, and then the quality of your work will just be an average of how each person thought you did on the stuff they cared about. So you insist that dance scenes aren’t serious and a real director doesn’t put dance scenes in their movie, and gradually the quality improves (from the artists POV) even as the appeal narrows.
There’s probably an economic paper treating this like a market with artist surplus and consumer surplus, with the artistic surplus narrowing to nothing as you reduce barriers to entry for artists.
In my experience most people who hate modern art hate it because it’s more-or-less uniformly absolutely awful.
Ah no but you see, modern art is good. Your move.
Seriously though, would I be right in saying you come from a background where most people can be expected to have an educated opinion on art? Because that’s the only way I can imagine you’ve never met someone who claimed to hate modern art but folded completely after waiting to meet someone inside the Tate Modern, or catching a documentary one day. It’s just too common in my experience, and yet I’ve never seen or heard of anyone doing the same thing with modern academic music or painting. I’m left to assume that they are genuinely lacking in the qualities which make naive audiences enjoy them and their reputation is reliable for everyone.
That just won’t fly though for modern art, which was frequently very popular. Rather I think that what’s happened is that the Young British Artists were not even trying to be good, especially as the bubble went on, and their output was as much confirmation as people needed to assume that they are also part of the down to earth sensible people who only like “representative art”, when frequently they aren’t.
Doesn’t it already? Presumably it depends on the level of exposure to the “awesome” cluster of tropes, but I think comics are the ground zero of the trend and the backlash is well underway. What passes for tastemakers in that medium are pretty down on the cluster—if you describe a Grant Morrison or Tsutomu Nihei piece as awesome they’ll say they see where you are coming from, but it’s a good comic too! And to dismiss a work as “awesome” is to suggest it’s written for the blurb. Relevant
Doesn’t it already? Well presumably it depends on the level of exposure to the “awesome” cluster of tropes. I think comics are the ground zero of the trend, and what passes for tastemakers in that medium are pretty down on that cluster—if you describe a Grant Morrison or Tsutomu Nihei piece as awesome they’ll say they see where you are coming from, but it’s a good comic too! To dismiss a work as “awesome” is to suggest it’s written for the blurb. Relevant
I think worries about status seeking false preference formation start to break down when you apply them to comedy. For one thing laughter is involuntary, so you should know if you are faking in the teenager pretending to like spirits sense- you can’t half convince yourself you find something funny if you don’t.
For another the social aspect is often inherent to the form. Saying that you don’t really like Steptoe and Son because you wouldn’t find it funny if there wasn’t a laugh track, or you didn’t really like that Stewart Lee because if you were the only person in the room you wouldn’t have laughed, doesn’t to my mind make any more sense than saying you don’t like dance music because you wouldn’t listen to it on your own or you “only” like a song because of a happy memory associated with it.
He might be offended by the fact that he’d have to go to trial and plead guilty. There was a case over here of a guy who got tied up with his family for hours by burglars, who broke free and beat one of them into a coma with a cricket bat. He initially refused to plead guilty and received a fairly lengthy sentence- commuted on appeal once he actually had the sense to admit it and plead circumstances.
I don’t think this is true? Britain at least spends a smaller proportion of government revenue on healthcare than the US does, and I imagine France and Australia do as well. Or if you are comparing british style to french style, the trade off is price vs quality, not where you pay.
It’s probably worth considering taxes relative to whatever job you are applying for, and the gov’t services in line with all the other benefits.
I quoted the whole thing because the structure is central to the thesis. He’s comparing the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq and so on with the revolutions that took down Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. That South Africa and Rhodesia were taken down and the Vietcong were not is perfectly true. That this is evidence the American government spent more effort opposing Apartheid than the Vietcong is something else entirely—conspiracy theory. Not merely in that it proposes a conspiracy but in that it does not bother to argue for one, the state of the world is evidence for the existence of a body that wanted it that way- except where it isn’t, in the case of Israel.
That said, I quoted the whole thing to provide context, the claim I find impossible to grasp is that the US was not really opposed to the USSR and is not really allied with Israel. This requires either a definition of the US government that is separate from the people that actually run it, an assertion that the people who appear to be in charge don’t really run it, or that they secretly hate Israel and love communism.
Well the stuff you’ve detailed about Afghanistan being a rogue puppet state brought to heel is an untroubling version of history that contradicts the official variety in a leftward direction. I see Constant was quite right to ask what I objected to in the quote, but I thought it obvious which bits were novel—that Israel is an enemy of the US and the Vietcong were not. It’s not that these are troubling, I like being troubled by heterodoxy, but I like it for the opportunity to model their thought processes.
And I understand how someone can believe in the idea that the US is against Israel and for Communism, but I MM actually seems to think it’s true- he thinks the US funding of Israel is explicable in terms of wanting to see Israel destroyed, and the invasion of Vietnam in terms of curbing the anti-american tendencies of communism. And I can’t see what those explanations are.
Likewise, I can see someone interpreting America’s attitude towards Israel as being overly pro-Palestinian, but MM actually goes ahead and describes what the world would look like for this to be true—there would be a Palestinian lobby which dwarfs AIPAC and J-Street in size. And he doesn’t notice the world he’s describing isn’t our own.
Huh, I found the opposite, in the abstract he’s insightful but his descriptions of modern day reality seem to be coming from some bizarre counter-earth, for instance:
“The pretend enemies (such as the Communist countries in the Cold War, other Third World nationalist thugs, revolutionary Islamists, etc, etc) are actually best defined as partial clients. Unlike full clients such as the OECD democracies, their friendship is only with one side of the American political system (the left side, duh). If their “anti-Americanism” actually reaches the level of military combat, the war is a limited war and essentially a civil one. Right enemies include: Nazis and other fascists, of course; apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia; the Portuguese Estado Novo and Franquista Spain; the Greek colonels; and, of course, Israel. You might notice a property shared by all but one of the regimes on this list, which is that they don’t exist anymore. Sometimes there will be patron-client relationships on the right side of the equation, but they are always tenuous. Even in the last case, the “Israel lobby” is a piece of dental floss compared to the arm-thick steel cable that is the Palestine lobby. (You’ll notice that USG’s policy is that the war should end by Israel giving money and land to the Palestinians, not the other way around.)”
He’s perceptive and erudite enough that when he says something so gratuitously and obviously wrong I sit there for ages thinking hang on, is this just something I don’t want to believe- a politically correct myth I don’t want to let go of. It disturbs me how often the answer is no, but I genuinely cannot see a way to make passages like the above make sense.
Hang on a minute. This a prime hypothesis testing space! If you really think that anti-rape messaging makes post-rape experience worse, it surely follows that it must be worse for women than for men, this messaging being mostly aimed at women. So you can quite conveniently check your theory by comparing the incidence of ptsd, depression, etc in male and female rape survivors.
No need to keep this as a controversial suspicion or instinct, you’d be armed with real knowledge! Knowledge you can report back to us, and anyone else you may have discussed this issue with. Indeed I think you could cultivate a useful reputation for open mindedness and rationality if you went back to any place you’d seen this attitude expressed before, and shared your findings -positive or negative- with them.