Michael Huemer

Ah, another apt time to mention one of my favorite papers, Michael Huemer's In Praise of Passivity. https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm Basically it argues the most moral thing in a democracy is to do nothing at all. You simply can never make a truly well informed decision over such a complex system, not even with several lifetimes of dedicated work towards it. Generally speaking I don't take anyone's political opinion seriously unless they have read and have a cogent response to this paper. I'll gladly just let them yap away and think I agree with them, regardless of my actual views. It's sort of like not taking philosophers seriously unless they've considered the question of solipsism first.

For introductions, my favorite is Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy. It's a fascinating subject but be prepared to be utterly confused the deeper you dive. I've concluded, like philosopher Michael Huemer, that few philosophical principles can be uncontroversially concluded. Excerpt from The Problem of Political Authority [1]: "Questions of this kind are notoriously difficult. How should we approach them? One approach would be to start from some comprehensive moral theory–say, utilitarianism or Kantian deontology–and attempt to deduce the appropriate conclusions about political rights and obligations. I, unfortunately, cannot do this. I do not know the correct general moral theory, and I don’t think anyone else does either. The reasons for my skepticism are difficult to communicate, but they derive from reflection on the problems of moral philosophy and on the complex, confusing, and constantly disputed literature about those problems. It is a literature in which one theory after another runs into a morass of puzzles and problems that becomes ever more complicated as more philosophers work on it. I cannot fully communicate the situation here; the best way of appreciating my skepticism about moral theory is to delve into that literature yourself. Here, I shall simply announce that I will not assume any comprehensive moral theory, and I think we should be very skeptical of any attempt to arrive at sound conclusions in political philosophy by starting from such…

Sort of like, "As a white person, white people are more important to me."? Do you think it is permissible for your town to pass a law that requires your neighborhood coffee shop to preferentially hire a barista from your town? Let me quote the parable of Sam and Marvin by the philosopher Michael Huemer to explain why I don't think your reasoning works. Excerpted from - http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/immigration.htm "Sam coercively prevented Marvin from reaching the local marketplace, on the grounds that doing so was necessary to prevent his daughter from having to pay a higher than normal price for her bread. This action seems unjustified. Would Sam succeed in defending his behavior if he pointed out that, as a father, he has special obligations to his daughter, and that these imply that he must give greater weight to her interests than to the interests of non-family members? Certainly the premise is true—if anything, parents have even stronger and clearer duties to protect the interests of their offspring than a government has to protect its citizens’ interests. But this does not negate the rights of non-family members not to be subjected to harmful coercion. One’s special duties to one’s offspring imply that, if one must choose between giving food to one’s own child and giving food to a non-family member, one should generally give the food to one’s own child. But they do not imply that one may use force to stop non-family members from obtaining food, in order to…

It has no basis in psychological discourse, politics is by nature illogical. So creating logic games from arbitrary metaphors (what politics is based in and especially when each side is calling the other with the same arbitrary label) is like creating a card game that only let's the house win. https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/irrationality.htm

> The author isn't a rando! This is a tenured professor of philosophy at a major university. You know, writing like a high school sophomore on a message board. Man, that's disappointing. I like Prof. Huemer's writings on free will and philosophy of mind [1] a lot ("Existence Is Evidence of Immortality" is a fun one). I was unaware of his blog up until now—reading it makes me think significantly less of him. [1]: https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers.htm

Need more complexity: https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/trolley.htm

Here is a link to the first bit of the book.[1] His arguments are tough to sum up, becasue he responds to each justification for the authority of the state, and describes many details. The second link is something approaching a summary.[2] [1] http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/Contents.pdf [2] http://www.cato-unbound.org/2013/03/04/michael-huemer/problem-authorit…

Look, all you need to know about the government is that they take our money by force. If the masses benefited from having a government, they wouldn't need to do that. No seriously. Think about it. It really is as simple as that. Apple doesn't have to force people to buy their devices. People aren't extorted for their benefit, but the extorter's, even if the extortion is shrouded in brainwashing, propaganda, rituals and so on. So once you accept that taxation is extortion and politicians are psychopaths, you'll start being able to make sense of the insanity of the world. This book thoroughly destroys most of the pro-state arguments people have come up with: http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/Contents.pdf Are you uncomfortable with reading that? -Well why might that be? What sense does it make? Keep going anyway.

That's a very interesting section. There's a citation on "There are three reasons why I disagree with this explanation. The first is that value questions are objective, and moral anti-realism is completely unjustified" which cites http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/objectiv.htm A page which does not, at present, exist - The requested URL /~huemer/objectiv.htm was not found on this server. Apache Server at spot.colorado.edu Port 80

No, because government. The problem of political authority: http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/1.htm

It's unfortunate that NPR isn't aware that there are ranked-choice voting methods other than IRV, which is what they describe in this article.† Australia, for example, uses a variant of Hare-Clark STV, which is a much better ranked-choice voting method than IRV (though it reduces to IRV in single-winner elections), and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method is a ranked-choice voting method used by many organizations which guarantees that the Condorcet winner, if any, wins—a property STV lacks. All these methods are vulnerable to Arrow's paradox, but many of them would produce better results in practice than IRV or especially the antiquated first-past-the-post method normally used in the US. In general, though, you can't expect democratic elections to produce results of higher quality than the voters, and the last year and a half of covid response has made it clear that the voters are of very low quality—not just in New York, but worldwide. As long as your healthcare, retirement, and policing are run by people who believe in astrology, creationism, witchcraft, Holocaust denial, vaccine-caused autism, and global-warming denial, they aren't going to be run well. Democracy is much less bad than the alternatives, but even democratic governments are spectacularly incompetent. Putting them in charge of anything important is like giving a machete to a chimpanzee. https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/09/30/why-should-we-care-what-people-… (25%…

> We vote these people into office. We have the power. That's exactly the way they want you to think. To imagine you can affect "policy" through writing something on a piece of paper and dropping it in a box. See how absurd that idea sounds when put like that? -But that's exactly how it's supposed to work. You realize that a piece of paper with text on it doesn't actually compel any politician to do anything for you or anyone else. They're still very much free to break all their campaign promises, which they invariably do, and they'll be doing whatever they want until it's time to tell you what you want to hear again. Elections are a sham. A distraction meant to give us the illusion that we have a say in anything. Again, the real and only solution is to stop believing that anyone has the right to rule over anyone else. In other words, stop believing in "political authority": http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/book3.htm

>> There's a large body of literature that attempts to justify centralization of power Of course there is. We've lived under centralized power for hundreds or thousands of years, after all. Why would The Powers That Be suddenly cease wanting to Be? But centralized power cannot be justified, it can only be rationalized. If you think about the idea of the social contract for a moment, you should realize that it's not a contract at all, but merely a shackle for our minds, to keep us from finding a way out of the maze of our brainwashing. For starters, you were never even asked, you never had a chance not to participate, and you can't just opt out of the system either. You're either inside a country, or you're freezing to death in Antarctica. It's not much of a choice, but a voluntary choice is necessary for any contract to be binding. Read this: http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/book3.htm