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<\/p>\nOkay, so ClintJCL posted a reply to my last entry, which I’m going to take one point at a time.<\/p>\n
Clint: I don\u2019t need to subjugate worlds, there\u2019s plenty of evidence of how things work here in the real world.<\/p>\n
There’s evidence for all sorts of things here in the ‘real world’. If the latter phrase has any meaning.<\/p>\n
Later in your reply you suggest that I’m unable to use logic in considering the way the world will behave. I don’t think that’s true – I just think we start with a different set of beliefs, from which different conclusions logically follow. One of my beliefs is that there is no objective ‘real world’ – that there are in fact a whole series of subjective ‘real worlds’ occuring individually inside the minds of each of us. There’s more data coming at us than we can possibly absorb and the dataset that we choose to experience, and believe, and call our own is driven by our beliefs.<\/p>\n
Clint: You can\u2019t just \u201cstop funding\u201d for NARAL. They are free people free to collect money from other free people. People don\u2019t just magically do your bidding – or indeed you\u2019d be able to subjugate this world.<\/p>\n
I wasn’t suggesting we ‘stop funding’ in the sense of officially declaring ‘No more NARAL’. I was suggesting that we as individual free people start spending our money and energy in more efficient ways than continually funding a equally balanced debate over whether we should or shouldn’t publicly fund abortions. Basically, saying those who are pro-choice provide funding for abortions. I understand that your view is if there were no longer pro-abortion activist groups funded by pro-abortion people then anti-abortion people would quickly act to make abortion illegal. My counterargument is that perhaps the anti-abortion people are taking a extremist stance because they are emotionally upset by the fact that their dollars are going to fund abortions, and they might take a more moderate stance if that was not the case. Essentually, I’m suggesting that both sides disarm since it doesn’t seem likely that either side is going away, and we agree that anti-abortion people don’t have to fund abortions in exchange for anti-abortion people agreeing not to try and make abortions unobtainable. I don’t know whether this would work – it probably depends on what the motivation of anti-abortion people is. If they are just upset that their resources are going to kill people, they should be willing to come to some agreement. If they see themselves as guardians of the public morals, then they may be unable to disarm whatever the cost. I think that laws to legislate morality are sick and wrong, and maybe what we should be doing instead of taking them all on a case by case basis is banding together to try and convince people in general that legislating morality (as opposed to laws to reduce harm) is a bad idea.<\/p>\n
Clint: Furthermore, if you limit the funding of some activity only for those who believe in it, then activity is not determined by what is right, but by who is rich. If only 1% of people support something, and they are poor, it doesn\u2019t get funded. What you are basically asking for as a tyranny of the majority run by aristocracy. There\u2019s not simply a magical amoutn of money available for what a group of people want or need.<\/p>\n
Well, right now, what we have is a system where activity is determined not by what is right, but by who is both rich and inclined to grab power. I’m suggesting that we should remove the second part of the equation. Ultimately, I’m not a big believer in money – a system that tries to represent all types of value in a single variable is inherently flawed, because among other things, there are different types of value and they don’t play on the same field. Some things become more valuable when more of them are made (i.e. a fax machine) while others become less valuable (i.e. a scarce resource). Some things gain value when they are copied (i.e. music that becomes a cultural rosetta stone, video games that support multiplayer modes) while other things do not. Some types of value are eternal (i.e. a song, once found, is ours forever) while others do not (physical resources like gold and oil get used up, and can only be used once). Abstracting all these things to a single variable seems likely to cause problems.<\/p>\n
Clint: Hell, if you only had people who believed in vaccinations pay for them (instead of funding research through compulsory taxes) \u2014 between the antivax crowd, and religious people who don\u2019t want to fund science, our vax tech would probably be 100 years behind, and you\u2019d probably already be dead from measles.<\/p>\n
I don’t know that. Why I don’t know that would be a subject for another, much longer debate.<\/p>\n
Clint: Except you\u2019d probably have never been born because we\u2019d be speaking Germany or Japanese, because if things were your way, only people who believed in war would fund the army, and we would end up defenseless and unable to magically conjure up an army by the snap of our fingers after Pearl Harbor.<\/p>\n
I’d still have been born, just born into a different world. Whether it would be better or worse is not something we’re equipped to predict, because of emergant behaviors. Also, I think a lot of people believed in WWII being a necessary thing, and where you have a bunch of people believing in something, you are going to get results pretty quickly. Consider how quickly the Apollo system – the biggest machine ever built by man, and a much more complicated animal than, for example, a atomic bomb – was designed, built, and deployed. I believe in war to protect against insanity. I don’t believe in war over resources, or political or economic idealogy. I think the majority of people would believe it was necessary to ramp up military technology and assemble a army to fight in WWII – and Germany and Japan weren’t really equipped to attack mainland U.S. and by the time they had been, we’d have built some things to fight back. I also think that if you just had those who believed we needed to be ready for war now fund war tech, the results would still be a much larger army than we need to protect us against the current level of threat.<\/p>\n
Clint: Then again, we might not have even colonized America, because columbus was funded by the king – and if the king only got money from people who believed there should be a king\u2026.<\/p>\n
I believe there will always be people who believe in exploration, because curiosity is a fundamental part of intelligent life.<\/p>\n
Clint: Then there\u2019s the whole national health care vs american health care. We\u2019re the only industrialized nation where you basically only pay into health care if you believe in paying for it.. (Of course, lots can\u2019t afford it, which speaks to my aristocracy points above.)<\/p>\n
I see your point – and I believe that health care is a much better thing to be funded by the government than extreme levels of military tech.\u00a0 I think the majority of people want access to health care. I also think that insurance is something that, when run for profit, tends to slide towards corruption. The problem with *any* for-profit insurance is that the company has motivations to try and cheat the insured, in order to maximize profit. I also think that hospitals are vastly overbilling because they can get away with it – they’re a industry that is not required to submit a quote prior to work, a industry where you often can’t easily hop over to the competition.<\/p>\n
Clint: You\u2019re such an impressively logical person on the computer. I have a hard time comprehending why your excellent mental abilities only seem to work inside the computer case, but not outside. It\u2019s damn confusing to me. At least it\u2019s interesting. <\/p>\n
I think that we start from different precepts. It’s not that I’m not using logic, it’s just that I’m using that logic on a very different set of views than you have.<\/p>\n
Clint: BTW – politics is truth, and affect everything. Every breath you take, the quality of air, every bite of food that goes into your body, the flame retardant chemicals in all of our bodies, every time you poop, your sewage, your computer usage – it\u2019s all governed by politics. Politics is simply the administration of reality. To ignore it is to basically ignore a large portion of how the real world works. It\u2019s good for stress (physical effects of stress on the body<\/a>), but poor for fostering a proper understanding of the real world systems that actually govern us.<\/p>\n I don’t really agree with this statement at all.<\/p>\n Clint: Of course, if only people who believed in funding computer research paid for it – we probably wouldn\u2019t be talking online right now. Compulsory military taxes made the research and implementation of the internet possible.<\/p>\n Definitely don’t agree with this statement. We as consumers loved computers, bought them by the droves. Computer networks were inevitable. And, I think that if the military hadn’t built the ARPAnet, someone else would have. There were a number of other, competing network designs – ARPA just happened to be the first people who chose a big enough address space and implemented it enough places.<\/p>\n Clint: Just call me secretary of keepin\u2019 it real.<\/p>\n Well, start out by defining what the world ‘real’ means to you. Are you a objectivist? Do you believe in the quantum observer effect, and if so, what effect on the system does having me as a observer have, given that I don’t believe the system I see in front of me is the only reality, and I believe that the flaws I see in it are reflections of the flaws in me? Is it more important to be firmly grounded in the sickness that is all-american ‘reality’ than to be happy? If so, why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Okay, so ClintJCL posted a reply to my last entry, which I’m going to take one point at a time. Clint: I don\u2019t need to subjugate worlds, there\u2019s plenty of evidence of how things work here in the real world. There’s evidence for all sorts of things here in the ‘real world’. If the latter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2202"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2594,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202\/revisions\/2594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}