Comment by bccdee

> Pinochet may have implemented neoliberal economic policy, but he did not support individual rights. [...] Violent suppression of your critics is hardly liberal.

America has often suppressed critics. Take McCarthyism. Take the killing of Fred Hampton. I dunno what to tell you. The touted ethics of liberalism are a flourish to disguise the underlying power structure of capitalism. I've been saying this all along.

> Right, American liberty did not extend to native populations. Those rights were reserved for white male citizens.

The striking minors who were shot at Blair Mountain were white men.

Here's my point: You claim that the ideology of the Soviet Union is inherently bad while the ideology of America is inherently good, but atrocities committed by America are always flaws in an inherently just attempt to aspire to a noble ideological goal, while atrocities committed by the Soviet Union always reveal the inherently ignoble underbelly of their ideology. What you fail to understand is that they are the same. Neither nation is/was an ideological project. They are pragmatic exercises in the management of power by a ruling class.

> In this whole discussion you've avoided the question: In your world of centralized authority targeting utilitarian interventions, who gets to choose the policy? Who gets to wield the power?

You think I'm arguing in favour of centralized authority, but that's backwards. I find that capitalism centralizes authority too much. It concentrates power in the hands of the wealthy. It's undemocratic.

Who do I think should wield power? The public, through democratic means, balanced between local and federal governments and trade unions and mass organizations, unhindered by the unilateral amassed power of wealthy capitalists and police-state dictators alike.

> I'm not claiming to pursue any greater good, only create an ecosystem where each person can pursue their own good in peace.

Then why have you tried to justify your ideology on the basis that it prevents atrocities? If you really don't care about the greater good, you should be able to say, "I don't care if atrocities happen. Preventing mass human suffering isn't my priority."

> Again, since the US state has less power the consequences of its poor choices are less impactful.

The US government cedes power to the private sector. The "death panels" which fearmongers claimed would result from public health care already exist in the form of private insurance assessors.

> The US government also does not have the power to limit the birth rate. Such a suggestion would be career-ending for any politician.

Do they have the power to send people to jail for having miscarriages as part of a push to ban abortion and raise the birth rate? Clearly they do, and Republican voters love it.

> As I've said, if it were just taxis a la 2000 I'd have bought a car.

It IS just taxis, only cheaper, because it was subsidized by VC money.

> Again China, where organs are harvested from Uyghur and Falun Gong routinely.

China is not "just fine." They ethnically cleansed their Uyghur population. They massively suppress political dissent. Authoritarianism is not beneficial to citizens, even if the supply of organs is slightly higher. Besides, murdering healthy people to give their organs to sick people doesn't exactly sound like a way to reduce mortality in your healthcare system.

> No it's "Oh, you think you know what's best for everyone? And you're willing to use force to get there?"

You're willing to use force to support your ideology too. Or do you not believe the use of police force to prevent property crimes is justified?

> how do you figure that there it's impossible to construe a policy which violates an individual's rights that may be a net utilitarian benefit?

I don't. I strongly support violating what you consider to be essential property rights in favour of reducing suffering. Rights are not a cornerstone of my ethics.

> How do you measure the harm that such policies cause?

How do you predict the impact of a policy? With political science, of course.

> The Nazis very nearly won the war, they were surely a functional society.

Nazi leadership was a hot mess. Their nation would have fractured very quickly even if they'd won. And when I say "just fine," I don't mean functional. I mean good. I've already argued through my China point that a functioning society is not necessarily a morally upstanding one.

> Again with the natural rights violations.

If you think disruption of the natural world in ways that harm human life are violations of rights that justify state intervention, surely you must support massive state intervention to stop climate change, right?

> Aye, but in all of those cases there are ways to opt out. I can refuse to sell you my non-toxic land. Offering people more choices is never a constraint.

Choices often take place in constraining ecosystems. Who's to say you have non-toxic land? Maybe you grew up here, and the rent is too high anywhere else to leave. This is how ghettos form. In theory, it's possible to leave the ghetto. In practice, it's so difficult that many people cannot.

> (How can you condemn a serial killer?) Based on his actions? The evil comes from violating consent.

But you said "each of our conceptions of good and evil are, absent an oracle, equally valid." In his conception, there's nothing wrong with violating consent. "What makes your idea of the good more valid than someone else's?"

If you take morality seriously, you have to privilege your own morality over other people's. Otherwise you have no standing to condemn and combat evil.

> Or maybe that oppressed people, longing to be free came to a new world unburdened by existing hierarchies, and created a system founded on their equality?

ahaha that's a good one

Yeah existing hierarchies never touched the new world. No indentured servants, no slaves, no poor or rich men. No women. No white or black or indigenous people. Come on.

> Capitalism has been practiced since the dawn of agriculture. If you go fishing and trade your fish for cloth you're practicing capitalism.

No, capitalism is not simply the existence of trade. Or rather, I guess you can define it that way, but then you lose any ability to understand how our society works and how it differs from the societies of centuries past.

In our society, capitalists constitute a ruling class. They derive their power from ownership of assets traded on capital markets. This distinguishes them from aristocratic ruling classes, which owned hereditary assets. Liberal ideology sprang up around the time the industrial revolution was shifting power from hereditary aristocrats to new-money capitalists, and it was created to justify this shift in power.

When I say "created," bear in mind that I don't mean the people who thought it up did so cynically. But all sorts of people come up with all sorts of ideas. The reason liberalism caught on was because it suited the interests of powerful people, and they used their power to magnify the idea. This mirrors how Eastern Bloc dictatorships used communist ideas as propaganda to justify their own legitimacy. Regardless of whether the people who originally thought up the ideas were acting in good faith, those ideas were then used as tools by the ruling classes of particular societies.

This pattern happens all throughout history. One big reason why Protestantism got big was because Martin Luther provided a religious justification for kings to oppose the authority of the pope. The birth of Anglicanism is the clearest example of this pattern, created by Henry VIII simply because he wanted to divorce his wife.

> All of this is possible only when power, however it derives legitimacy, is used to ensure this process can happen peacefully

The "legitimacy" of power is an interesting concept. All power considers itself legitimate. What happens when I declare the power of the American state to be illegitimate? Nothing. It would only matter if I had the firepower to overthrow the state. And at that point, the collapse of the state has nothing to do with legitimacy and everything to do with military might.

And what does "peacefully" mean? Are cops being peaceful when they beat and arrest a criminal?