It would have been really bad but I would have been briefly ecstatic if like all the key Republicans were just rounded up and shot for being traitors.

Probably be better off overall.

I am skeptical of things that sound too good to be true, and also I feel like the current US government would fuck it up, but maybe things won’t be terrible forever.

It’s like the “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this” skit with the guy in the hotdog suit and the hotdog car.

I remember talking to a coworker at a tech startup once. He was leaving to go work for some like military intelligence spy company. I was like, “But what if they have you work on something fucked up, like spying on innocent people, or sending drones to kill people?” He was like, big shrug, the pay is good.

Some people just don’t care about other people. He was nice to people he knew, when it didn’t really cost him anything.

Our society isn’t really set up to discourage that kind of worldview. That kind of selfish person typically thrives.

This is a deeply off topic whataboutism that only serves to distract from how horrible the trump administration is. You are benefitting the conservatives.

I read this and the other linked article about how bad musk is at poker and I’m so mad now. He’s such a fucking fool.

Even if they all stupided themselves to death today, it would take years to repair the damage. Some of the damage can’t be repaired. And we’d still be behind where we could have been if we had had competent leadership to begin with. Or even just less bad leadership.

We should never forgive the Republicans. Every one of them should be a pariah.

All the people who were mad about Clinton’s email that aren’t furious about this are hypocrits that should never be taken seriously again.

If you think ‘voluntary’ is acceptable for anything important you want corporations to do, you have no business making decisions about real life. If it’s voluntary, they’ll only do it if it benefits them.

You’d revive that program over the bloody corpses of many conservatives. Which, actually, yeah let’s do that. A lot of other problems go away if the right wing bleeds out.

Labor hasn’t organized enough to say “Fuck this shit” and demand a livable wage in exchange for their labor.

Meanwhile, management is salivating at the idea of firing most people and replacing them with AI.

The ownership class needs to go. Workers need to at the very least unionize, but should also take things further and seize control of what they’ve built.

I was just saying the other day that shit might escalate to car bombs. I don’t really want to live in a world where I have to worry about that, but I do want musk and friends to explosively die.

If those Internet duds that get mad about black people in video games spent like half that energy being mad about, like, wage theft, we’d be so much better off.

And is it logical for that to change based on whether it’s a protest or advocacy?

…yes? Context matters. My go to example is “cutting someone open and taking out an organ is fucked up and a crime, unless you’re like a doctor doing surgery in a hospital”

I feel like sometimes people try to handle human situations like they need to write a perfect algorithm that can run in BASIC.

Why would Alex listen to the other arbiter? Why not shoot them, too? Why not get a bunch of your friends, and fight your enemies until you establish yourself as a local warlord? That’s what these security companies would be positioned to do, and that’s going to bring out the worst of humanity.

Meanwhile, what if Bob was behind on his payments? Is this going to be like The Purge, where you can just do crimes to anyone who can’t afford private security? That’s going to extra suck for groups that are historically economically disadvantaged (women, children, descendants of slaves, chronically ill, to name a few)

And again, there’s not really a reason for these different entities to compete when they can instead form a cooperative trust. That’s sort of the history of the gilded age in the US. it sucked for most people.

It sounds like it’s going to devolve into the rule of might-makes-right, where whoever has the most guns and willing soldiers gets to say what’s what. Real life has at least some thin wrappers around might-makes-right, with rights enumerated in the constitution

Once the trust gets big enough, they can run other competitors into the ground even without doing violence.

You kind of see this with food stores in the US. You have some small shops, and then a mega corp like Walmart or whatever moves into the neighborhood. They can undercut the small shops due to scale, or even by operating at a loss. They can operate at a loss longer than the smaller companies can stay solvent. When all the small shops close up (or get acquired), the big company can then raise prices.

Behavior like that is just emergent from “free markets”.

That’s not even touching on the idea that they could just do violence to secure their position. Like old union busting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the_United_States might be worth a read, even though it’s not exactly on this topic.

As to whether these security companies could use violence. I think that would have to be on a case-by-case basis where violence would not be used in most cases unless there is active aggression occurring or imminent upon somebody they are to protect. In which case the use of force would be retaliatory and not aggression.

Who decides on the case by case? If anyone can form their own private security company, and can unilaterally decide that lethal force is authorized, that’s a recipe for disaster. Alex hates his neighbor Bob. Alex forms a security company of his own. Bob comes home and walks over the flowerbed again, so Alex confronts him. Bob raises his voice. Alex decides this is imminent aggression, and shoots him dead.

If a security company thinks that another security company is using unjustifiable force, then it could always be taken to an arbitrator or outed in the media.

Who is the arbitrator? Why does anyone listen to them? What is their enforcement mechanism? Are you reinventing a court system?

You’re kind of reinventing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism still, which has a lot of problems.

Why would the different companies compete when they could form a Trust instead?

Do private companies have the right to use violence? If so, you’ve kind of invented Cyberpunk2077 / Shadowrun, which notably are dystopias

Are you certain they wouldn’t try to profit from victimless crimes? What’s going to stop them?

And what happens if someone just doesn’t have security? Or it’s like private health insurance in the US, where it’s a huge mess and your claims get rejected?

Stuff like marijuana laws should definitely be changed. The war on drugs is racist nonsense.

I really don’t think anarcho-capitalism is the way to go.

This sounds like it would devolve into monopolies or cartels, which are famously bad for end users.

Also what happens if someone doesn’t have private security? Are they just unprotected?

You’re kind of describing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism which isn’t taken seriously by many people because it has a lot of big problems.

You might also enjoy “A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear”, which you can read about https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling , or probably get a copy at your local library (if it hasn’t been defunded and shut down)

I appreciate you taking the time to find the video you found compelling, but right this moment I can’t watch a 23 minute video in entirety. I usually prefer transcripts, personally.

That’s a pretty big claim that like all of philosophy is the “approved” narrative. I don’t have a degree in history or philosophy, but maybe read up on like Hobbes and Kant?

You didn’t respond to my part in the middle asking if you’re just cherry-picking laws.

(Also I have to go get dinner and such, so I’m going to stop responding in a bit. This has been interesting.)

If they thought about things and came to good conclusions afterwards, they probably wouldn’t be driving this kind of car to begin with. The people who are driving it are probably not good thinkers.