And hawks. There have been posters all over my neighborhood for a missing cat and they keep putting them up. I’ve seen those hawks in action and nothing they can catch stands a chance.

I think a lot of people are neglecting to think of Biden’s lifetime record in public office. The United States is the nation on Earth with the greatest proportion of its own citizens imprisoned and we have Biden’s 1994 crime bill in large part to thank for that. Unfortunately it wasn’t terribly shocking when he went on to be more supportive of the Palestinian genocide than any other president in US history other than Trump.

Empiricism. We need to acknowledge that not everyone considers evidence when determining truth and encourage it way more than we do.

The most central characteristic of whiteness is a belief in racism. It feels disingenuous because there is no white race other than what we’ve constructed socially for political purposes. English culture exists, Latvian culture exists, Russian culture exists, many American cultures exist, and white culture doesn’t exist and never has.

I wish. You’re giving right-wingers way too much credit. Most of those craven idiots do it for free for the opportunity to lose themselves in a gaggle of other morons. They are vulnerable in a way that is easy to exploit for people who know how to do it.

Also, a point of note for my Hitler example. I do not think that Hitler was a monster or particularly unique. I think Hitler was a man similar to millions of people who exist on Earth today. Some of these individuals capable of what Hitler did have chosen instead to behave differently, while many who desire to emulate Hitler are unable to do so because of the state of their societies. I don’t think Hitler was a special being who single-handedly enthralled an entire nation and forced them to do things they didn’t want to do. I think there were many elements in their society which contributed to Hitler’s rise and continued support despite his absurd statements and atrocities. While we can never live in a world totally free of people like Hitler or people who want a leader like Hitler, I think a world where people like Hitler can’t access the power to do great evil is possible.

Sure, I’ll consider psychopathy as a disability rather than an illness. Regardless, it’s pathological.

I think your point about proper support and monitoring is key. Why do we have the problem of psychopaths masking their lack of empathy creating success for themselves in a way that doesn’t involve human connection? What if they didn’t have to mask their personalities or tendencies at all? If I met someone and understood they were a psychopath incapable of empathy but trying to live a peaceful stable life for their own self-interest, which includes not risking that stability by causing grave harm, I would engage with that person until such a point that they expressed a contemptible opinion or did something unsavory. This is the same metric I would use with anyone. Of course I would understand that because the psychopath lacks empathy there are bad things they might be more likely to do, but in a society which is equipped for psychopaths hopefully they would also understand the greater risks for themselves due to their pathology.

I don’t think there are natural born killers even if I do understand that some pathologies, whether inborn or trauma-induced, would make the act of killing unburdonsome to that person. Personally, I can come up with a very long list of why I shouldn’t kill a person other than that I would feel bad about it. I don’t think all people who wouldn’t feel bad about it are unaware of the myriad other consequences which come with causing such grave harm of this or other kinds. If someone truly doesn’t understand in any way why they shouldn’t kill someone and then go on to kill someone, I think that is much more of a problem of the society. That would indicate a severe lack of education and support in addition to their pathology.

To clarify, I am not anti-judgement. I think people’s behaviors should be judged good or bad regardless of whether anyone would judge that individual or their group to be good or bad. Also, I can pass character judgment on the dead because there are no longer unknown variables. I can condemn Hitler as an evil person because as he exists right now as an idea, he is pure evil. The historical human Hitler I can condemn worse because even though he was fully capable of good and fully capable of not doing what he did, he chose to do evil consistently. I condemn historical human Hitler not because I believe he was an evil being incapable of doing good, but that he was capable of both good and evil and chose to do evil. In my mind this is a harsher judgement than excusing bad behavior because of their corrupt soul or any such nonsense.

I’m saying we should take sociopathic tendencies a bit more seriously and address them directly with trained professionals rather than waiting for them to cause damage. That would require judging people’s character.

This is where we agree. If every narcissist, sociopath, psychopath, pedophile, etc could be open about their tendencies and receive specialized assistance and accommodation before they commit a crime due to mismanaged illness it would be ideal. The only thing I disagree about is that these are not representations of internal character but are illnesses. For example, the pedophile who gets accommodation and doesn’t go near children is doing less evil and probably has a better character than a preacher who uses his position to abuse young boys because he likes the feeling of power but isn’t a pedophile (this happens).

I have indeed been the innocent victim of narcissistic abuse. It would indeed have been much better if my parents worked through their trauma before me or during my childhood rather than never. Narcissistic tendencies weren’t considered dangerous when they were young though, as evidenced by almost the entire boomer generation. If we were living in stronger communities cooperating with one another instead of competing, I think those narcissistic tendencies either never would have existed to begin with or would have been recognized and counterbalanced by other community members. I do not think I would have been better off if they were punished, but it’s likely it would have made my situation worse. At this point I’m more concerned with my own well-being than getting retribution.

I think evil behavior should be denounced and everyone should be encouraged in every way on every level to do good rather than evil to one another. I want to be clear that I am expressing that no one has the excuse of their poor internal nature to do evil things. Everyone is capable of both good and evil and everyone regardless of their condition is fully responsible for their behavior. There’s no obfuscating evil in my arguments. I am arguing that the social structure supporting instead of preventing and/or condemning these evil behaviors is the problem rather than some people being good and others being evil.

Yes, our system is cutrently built for that. An optimal system wouldn’t allow for it. We have obviously not discovered the optimal system yet but we can identify the fundamental issues of our present systems. Prison is another fundamentally flawed system which causes a lot of its own problems. I would prefer a victim focused restorative model to imprisoning groups of people based on diagnostic critera written by people who think you need to imprison groups of people based on diagnostic critera.

Fortunately in your example, the general can still serve the general as anti-social personality disorders will always be in the minority especially if that society functions properly for the general welfare of its people. As for doing it naturally, we naturally live in hunter-gatherer bands. Society is fully socially constructed and requires all of us to resist many aspects of our natures for it to function in a way that benefits us.

What I am arguing for is that these individuals are honestly acknowledged for their tendencies and deficits so that they can get the help they need while serving in a capacity which limits their ability to harm others due to their negligence and benefits others by utilizing their strengths. A psychopath can understand that it is in their self-interest to live in a stable friendly society. Honestly I don’t personally know to integrate a full-blown narcissist, but I expect it’s possible. I don’t think it’s possible or advisable to make any effort to remove all psychopaths and narcissists from society since eugenic thinking is responsible for many of the worst atrocities in human history.

Being a narcissistic psychopath is a circumstance, not an expression of internal evil. Narcissistic psychopaths are also capable of doing the right things for the right reasons as well as for the wrong reasons. The reason I advocate against guessing people’s internal morality is mainly practical for my own relationships, but also is to encourage people to fix systemic problems instead of pretending some malicious force of evil is omnipresently working against the interests of mankind as many religious people believe. In a better system, narcissistic psychopaths could get what they want without harming others for their ends.

In what way?

I think it’s dangerous to consider anyone to be a fundamentally good person or a fundamentally bad person. It’s impossible to know what someone is internally and I am not a believer in determinism. Every person is complex and capable of good and evil acts depending on their circumstances.

Especially when you live in a cutthroat competitive culture in which what little to win is jealously guarded by narcissistic psychopaths, many people understand at least on some level that public behavior is a performance intended to reap rewards rather than an honest presentation of oneself. Good and evil is inapplicable here. Our system is amoral, and we human animals are just going to do what we consider to be a good idea at a time and only a few of us really consider the ethics of what we’re going to do before we do it, and the few of us capable of that only do it some of the time.

Someone can do the right thing for the right reasons, the right thing for the wrong reasons, the wrong thing for the right reasons, or the wrong things for the wrong reasons. I can never know their internal part, just base my expectations on how their behavior effects me and others. I wouldn’t trust anyone until I consider them to be trustworthy, though I can’t expect to always be right about that either.

I went to college and learned that not only was pretty much everything I was raised to believe as a young conservative a lie, but they were obvious lies that didn’t bear any scrutiny whatsoever. I learned everything that made me really uncomfortable when I was young was because I was surrounded by people living their entire lives in bad faith while I was genuinely curious about investigating things and learning why people thought what they did. The other cultists recognized I did not belong in the cult before I did, though my parents still emphatically try to get me to reintegrate because they are absolutely certain that their evidence-free belief system is in my best interests. I was never really integrated in the first place so I didn’t lose much other than a lot of very evil shit.

Most right wing conservatives I’ve talked to are concerned with family, security, economic stability and freedom. They don’t care if you live in a commune or if you want to run a redistribution fund so long as no one is being compelled to contribute. Further more for any public project they are very interested in how it’s going to be paid for and who it will be paid for by. These are admittedly important questions.

I don’t think most reasonable people need to be compelled to support their community, and as I mentioned above scrutiny is necessary. However, I think plutocrats are unreasonable because they were never made to grow beyond the stage most of us do when we learn not everything belongs to us. They should be compelled to first be treated for their maladaptive development and then to join us in society when they understand why they should.

The socialist on the other hand seems to dismiss individual liberties in favor of the community. And in here lies the problem. It’s not about profit. It’s about consent. Look even if you got the most giving community minded individualists together the sticking point would still be consent. Did they choose to give you their money. Even if they support the project and ideals behind it. A conservative and a liberal both believe in supporting families but the conservative wants to keep their money to donate to a local charity whereas the liberal thinks it should be taxed and redistributed into a welfare fund. They both believe in the same thing but have different economic policies about how to achieve them.

There’s a balance. We are individuals and also members of the human race making us social by nature. I think all individual freedoms should be protected to the extent that they don’t cause harm to others. I don’t consider offending personal sensibilities to be a harm, either. It makes sense to reasonable people to be part of a community and I personally believe tolerance is a community sustaining value. In a healthy society, there shouldn’t be a need for compulsion. There are steps to be taken from an unhealthy society to make it healthy and those steps should be carefully considered, but are necessary to prevent degradation. Doing something and doing nothing are both risks.

How would you codify redistribution and public ownership without licensing agreements or by utilizing violence? Really I’m not sure how you get around private ownership without violence. Copyleft licensing is based on copyright and parenting and is based on the notion that he who creates owns, and therefore he that creates can also give it away. But you wouldn’t have patents and copyright without private ownership.

Violence from whom? So much of liberal capitalism is completely constructed and depends entirely on participation of members who have faith in that system. A massive general strike could bring the entire system down very quickly, and I would bet that in this case every liberal government in the world would immediately act to compel the labor which isn’t being offered by any means necessary. Trump sure as hell would. If we stopped doing this and started doing something else, it could be done peacefully but the established order would not peacefully allow that to happen.

And if there is no private ownership, say of land or water or natural resources, then what then? Can anyone utilize anything? Why own anything or pay taxes if you don’t own anything? And we’re back to the gift economy issue again. Contribute vs accrue. So why not start with making it voluntary to begin with?

Anarchists like to say, “Anarchism doesn’t mean no rules, it means no rulers.” If a village is living in freedom, would they respect the freedom of one villager to start burning down houses, even without a leader to tell them whether it’s allowed? Of course not. People generally aren’t that stupid. A community can manage resources and a network of communities could theoretically manage resources on a larger scale. I can’t tell you exactly what the final answer would be, but it doesn’t sound impossible to me for people to govern themselves democratically in the absence of kings or executives.

Also please explain to me if all capitalism is right wing how a communist country like China is a capitalist powerhouse. Is China left wing or right wing from your perspective?

I’m still trying to figure out why anyone would consider China a communist country if they’re arguing in good faith. Their government is an interesting experiment with many socialist oriented accomplishments such as minimum standards of living, full employment, and relative stability contrasting our boom bust cycles. That being said having a non-democratic government run by the upper class, especially when the government of exclusively upper class people determine who becomes upper class, is far from my ideal. Having a government as powerful as theirs does appear to keep Capitalism in check better than we can, though. I’ve heard serious arguments that it’s a decent transitional government to a communist government, but honestly it looks like the establishment over there like it how it is and would rather grow their power and wealth than transition to communism. Rather than an authoritarian government keeping capitalism in check, I would rather a democratic government with universal ownership and investment by the whole people. No despots publicly or privately is what I personally prefer.

This was much longer than I expected. I’ll reply to your next post some time soon.

Now a GIFT economy is completely different. Honoring people for giving stuff away is not only a totally voluntary system but also changes the cultural dynamic from honoring people for having lots of stuff. It changes the focus from accumulation to contribution.

This sounds pretty socialist to me. I’m completely with you when it comes to changing structures in our society to incentive pro-social behavior rather than the selfish behavior as our system does. I don’t think anyone appreciates that being a ruthless competitor to the detriment of ones neighbors is often rewarded in our systems. If such ruthless people pursued their selfish desires in a system which accommodates their nature and rewards them for having a pro-social effect, I think they would be extremely beneficial rather than a danger as they are now.

Both left and right can get behind open source software. Both can support the concept of gifting. Where I see the conflict is when it comes to using compulsion. No the common good does not outweigh individual liberty because what you do to the individual you do to the whole. Sacrificing individual liberty for the greater good is a myth. You can’t have taxation without sacrificing privacy and security of the collective. If you sacrifice freedom of speech for the sake of avoiding public offense then you sacrifice public discourse and the values of democracy. If rewrite history to exclude unpleasant truths then you risk repeating it.

I think most people agree that it’s a good thing to have a community of some kind. In that community it’s a good thing to help one another, or more specifically to trade favors. As a community can provide many services and infrastructure to all members of that community which no individual could provide for themselves on their own, I don’t think it’s out of the question that all able-bodied members of that community contribute to it. The people who receive from the community but don’t contribute to it when they could in my opinion are parasites. I’m not talking about the elderly and disabled who would if they could and deserve their dignity, of course, because that’s all our destiny. If someone takes from their community without giving back to it, I would have a problem with them and probably insist that they get off their ass or leave probably with other people who care about them and would rather they straighten up. I don’t think that kind of compulsion is unfair. When someone is sick or compromised, it is in the community’s interest to help that person back to health and provide them what they need to get better and there’s no need to compel that. This is essentially how humans have always lived until recently in some parts of the world.

No, I don’t think such lazy jerks should be imprisoned and forced to labor. Social pressure is enough. I respect their right to complain about having to work at all because if a society runs cooperatively, when we fix those problems we have less work to do and more time to live life with family and loved ones.

As above, so below, as within, so without. It applies to society, politics and economics as well.

I think my metaphor holds in these aspects as well.

I have no problem with distributing funds that are given freely. I have a problem with all property that is taken using violence. How is taxation different than colonialism? You have big guns, you see something you want and you abscond with it. How is that different than what any empire does? The fact you redistribute it is irrelevant if it’s done involuntarily.

In a lot of cases, taxation is colonialism. I do not appreciate my tax dollars being spent on international murders, and I don’t imagine most people would appreciate it either if they understood the extent of it. In any government using resources for oppression is intolerable. That being the case, not all tax dollars are used for the purposes of oppression. Taxes fund a multitude of necessary resources, services, and infrastructure in a way a profit-driven organization could not. One may not personally care about babies starving to death being prevented by a government program, but in situations that babies starve to death very negative consequences could arise that come around to affect them and others. In cases like these, I think it’s appropriate to extract taxes from stupid, ignorant, or outright psychopathic people for the social good even if they are individually unable to understand it’s not ok to allow babies to starve to death in a healthy society anywhere at any time. There is of course the matter of the effectiveness and cost of these programs which should of course be open to scrutiny and improvement on a democratic basis. (cont2)

Thanks for agreeing to a good faith conversation. If you’ve ever heard of “leftist infighting,” understand that the closest political label I can place on myself is “leftist infighter.” The second closest would be “Anarchist” which I can’t claim because I disagree that it can be suddenly achieved and believe it must be worked toward over an indefinite period of time. I do not represent anyone other than myself. I would not call myself a Marxist. I think his explanations of the problems with Capitalism are excellent, but I don’t consider him to be a demigod to be quoted similarly to scripture especially when it comes to his prescriptions which I find myself often disagreeing with.

The main thing to understand about Socialism is that it’s an ideal rather than a practical reality we already have a plan for. Socialism broadly is the desire for a system which allows every individual exactly as much autonomy, government influence, and ownership of their own labor as every other individual in that given society. This idea has existed long before Marx and is found throughout the world and even among historical Christians. However long this desire has existed, we have not yet figured out how to do this yet in a sustainable way. The societies that come closest haven’t been able defend themselves from piracy-based cultures which have raped and pillaged their way through the entire world since armies were made possible (today on a scale never before seen), and the socialist states based on defending themselves from that suffer from their military having too much influence on their societies causing undue authoritarianism (China is doing a weird other thing which I’ll touch on later). This being the case all governments since the advent of agriculture have been similarly experimental and almost all of them have failed or are failing in a kind of cycle depending on the proportion of credulous bootlickers around.

Since we haven’t generally figured out totally stable systems for humans yet, I support moving in a Socialist direction according to the ideal I described above. I won’t pretend to know the best way to do that because the world is far more complex than any of us could possibly conceive, so in my opinion the only thing we can do is experiment and learn from the results of our experiments. The experiment of Capitalism has yielded enough results for me to doubt it could last even if left undisturbed as the accumulation of wealth in few hands inherent to Capitalism has to be managed in some way while the full force of Capitalism is against managing it and has now overcome the traditionally more powerful nation states which dominated the last century. You may know some leftists and self-described socialists who do not desire total equality of autonomy, government influence, and ownership of their own labor. I can’t speak for them. I will work with them as far as they progress the ideal of socialism and oppose them wherever they do not. Any experiment with a socialist system should not be considered an end state until the ideal is achieved in my opinion.

Now that you have a better idea of where I’m personally coming from, I can answer your questions

Should one’s private property be seized and distributed among the masses?

Some of it certainly should be. I may draw the line differently than others, but broadly I would be totally for immediately abolishing all rent-seekers who produce nothing and leech off of others only by “owning” their means of basic survival such as hedge-fund managed housing for example. “Natural Monopolies” make absolutely zero sense to be private enterprises even according to the logic of Capitalism which benefits the consumer only when there is competition. As far as seizing and redistributing I think there are some examples which would cause minimal disruption and would be ultimately good even for a liberal society. Those are easy ones. More gray area is in massive private institutions have the ownership changed over to the employees. The businesses themselves could run essentially the same as they did before because the owner or owners typically don’t work in businesses on that scale. This would immediately destroy a massive amount of “wealth” which never existed in the first place though which could cause any number of consequences so it would have to be done carefully.

How much water, food, territory, can one accrue before one has to fear the public utilizing violence against them?

How would an individual accrue these things? If this individual accrued these necessities of life, thus prohibiting others from accessing those necessities of life, wouldn’t violence be the inevitable consequence of that from starving people who have lost all rationality from hunger? As far as territory, how would an individual accrue territory and by what means would that individual maintain their claim? How would it benefit them to maintain it so, unless they plan on creating a family cult system?

Arguably the poorest person on welfare in a first world country is a king compared to someone living in a third world country. If you have access to a grocery store, electricity, running water and some kind of medical care regardless of how shitty or expensive it might be then you’re better off than thousands of people the world over. Then factor in things like health standards. Do you have to boil your water to make sure it’s clean to drink? Do you have to put up with insect or rat infestations? Do you have a working stove and fridge? And the. What if THOSE huddled masses wanted to take your riches away and redistribute then?

This is touching on an extremely important dynamic. Why do Westerners live in such privilege while the people living in their colonies do not? The answer here is not to redistribute, it’s to end the exploitation. I think Westerners are competent enough to sustain themselves and their cultures without the need to bleed people from across the world. I believe it’s possible that minimum standards of health greater than what even I have access to now (racketeers are between me and healthcare in my country) are achievable in every part of the world in a fairer system.

Look I’m not saying that having more money than one can spend is healthy personally or culturally. Honestly if I had a couple thousand dollars I’d be set. A million and I probably wouldn’t know what to do with it all. But that’s not the issue as I see it. Where is the cut off point if we sanction forced redistribution?

We agree here. As far as where the cut off point should be, I think that could have a definite answer depending on the individual circumstances of any given place. (cont)

Since it took a while for you to respond to me long after anyone would be looking, it seems like you’re interested in a legitimate conversation with me concerning my leftist values. It looks like you’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’m willing to engage with you in good faith and explain my personal thinking.

One thing that is very important to have a productive conversation is to agree on the definition of terms. I wasn’t being dismissive when I was offering sources from the Encyclopedia Britannica. One thing that makes many conversations completely impossible is different understandings of the same words, causing the parties involved to be arguing completely different points often without realizing. The reason I bring this up is specifically in regards to “Private Property,” which is a bit more nuanced than encompassing all individual items “owned” by any given individual. There are no serious leftists advocating for confiscating handtools, computers, furniture, or other such pieces of individual property from the entire population and redistributing them equally. Although the definition can be construed this way, no one is arguing for that. For a better understanding of what is meant my “Private Proptery” in a more common politcal context, below is quoted Marx’s view in Capital:

Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals are labourers or not labourers, private property has a different character. The numberless shades, that it at first sight presents, correspond to the intermediate stages lying between these two extremes. The private property of the labourer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the labourer himself. Of course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical form, only where the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso…

From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organisation fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualised and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital…

Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent labouring individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour of others, i.e., on wage labour…

The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. (Chapter 32)

Edit: If you’re willing to engage in good faith and clarify what we mean by the words we use, I would be more than happy to address your points and answer your questions.

Sure, I’ll agree with that. Liberalism, despite being fundamentally right wing, is definitely not the furthest right economic system or social philosophy. The only thing about it is that many of those countries existing in that state (or were made into countries at all) exist in the context of global white supremacist capitalist hegemony (AKA “The West” or “The Global North”) and would not exist in their current forms without the West installing figureheads and funding conflicts to loot their natural resources, so I would argue that many of these neo-colonies are still capitalist without any of the benefits of hosting the capitalists.

For example, whatever government existed in India under the British Mandate, they existed in a Capitalist system which exclusively benefitted the British. Millions died of famine not because of India, but because of Britain.

I can’t see how the left wing being oriented to progress and equality would mean that capitalism and oligarchy would fit that. Could you explain your thinking?