As far as human problems go, distribution severely pales in comparison to coordination and production.
Aggregating the amount of goods and the amount of people in need of them in a given area doesn't tell us how to get actual goods to actual people. "Give the homeless homes" or "give the hungry food" are empty aims in need of knowledge concerning the goods and people in question.
This emptiness becomes more apparent the more you increase the scale of the area in question and the diversity of the goods and people in question. "Homes" and "food" are not abstract platonic forms but particular objects existing in certain places and ways.
Plucking homeless people up out of wherever they are (regardless of their situation/family/friends/job) and shoving them into some existing home (regardless of its place, proximity to social/economic opportunities, access to water/affordable food, etc.) is not a real solution.
Trying to shove the existing set of homes and food at the homeless and hungry is not a viable solution to current (let alone future) homeless and hungriness. We need the continual creation of new homes and food that can be fit into the plans and projects of the homed and fed.
The emptiness of aims stressing distribution becomes that much more apparent when you consider the prospect of redistributing the resources of society 500 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 50 years ago, times whose cumulative amount of resources are a fraction of what exists now.
Noble egalitarian impulses become corrupted by short-term thinking. Society becomes a machine with different inputs and outputs to be mechanically controlled by benevolent technocrats (still haven't met any of those) instead of an evolving ecosystem of emergent institutions.
It's worth noting I have no problem with *redistribution* as such. I just view it as an effect rather than a cause. Surely any transition from the current neo-mercantilist military-banking-industrial complex to a free society would involve an ENORMOUS redistribution of wealth.
It would just be a redistribution of wealth from the extractors and gatekeepers to the creators and rightful owners. Trying to do that through the middle man of the state is counterproductive since the state is the primary mechanism of extracting and gatekeeping wealth.
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If you mean anarchism and fascism are our fundamental choices because they're the only conceptually stable ideologies (with everything else a confused centrist view), then yes.
But if you mean (as Rand mistakenly did) that anarchism and fascism are more alike than different, no.
This mistake is rooted in the idea that anarchism and fascism are united by opposition to rule of law, thereby endorsing rule of men. But anarchism promises the ultimate rule of law, the total abolition of the distinction between law-makers/enforcers and law-followers.
If fascism is the total embrace of power/total rejection of checks and balances, then liberal democracy is the moderate embrace of power/moderate embrace of checks and balances and anarchism is the total rejection of power/total embrace of checks and balances.
Both Jeff Tucker and Ed Stringham are gone from AIER. I was interviewed by a Buzzfeed reporter looking into Tucker's misconduct and while I've been told that story is being indefinitely put on hold, I have to imagine the whole of house of cards is starting to collapse.
I poured my heart out to this reporter for 30 minutes. About how this man who took me under his wing, published my writings, defended me during the open letter backlash, and generally supported me turned out to have been mistreating women (some of whom I knew) the whole time.
I love the time travel ending to the original Superman. It had to end that way, in a world-altering sci-fi climax forcing Superman to choose between his identities; between obeying his Kryptonian father Jor-El by never interfering in human history or rescuing his favorite human.
Another: that movie in some ways turned its back on a character created by two Jews partly as a response to the rising global fascism and antisemitism of their time by ushering in the Christianized Superman we are still stuck with today.
Another: while "Superman might be an alienated cynic" is far too plastic a conception of the character, "Superman is always forgiving and friendly" is too rigid. Siegel and Shuster's Superman didn't hesitate to dole out karmic justice.
Today is Milton (Bill) Finger's 107th birthday. He's the (until 2015, unaccredited) ghost writer/artist without whom Batman as we know him wouldn't exist. Thread:
Finger is solely responsible for many features of the Batman mythos, such as the hero's alter ego "Bruce Wayne."
Finger turned a mere vigilante into a scientist and detective.
Strong disagreements over the term "right" seem often riddled with miscommunication and misunderstanding. Fewer terms are subject to as much variation in meaning. You have moral rights, legal rights, natural rights, property rights, de jure rights, de facto rights, etc. etc.
In the sense that seems most common to political philosophy, which is a "morally enforceable claim" I think it makes sense to be a kind of monist and try to formulate compossible claims to free action rooted in both naturalistic and constructivist aspects of human society.
On this view I think there is really just a single right shared by all rational agents and which is compossibly realizable between them: the right not to be coerced i.e. the right to one's own sphere of justified free action that extends as far as their own autonomy.