The most convincing argument against the commodification of sex is, in my opinion, that such intimacy holds a special enough place in human psychology that even an efficient sex market wouldn't make people happy.
I'm not sure if it's too linked with pair bonding to be its own thing, but that's certainly something to consider.
Still very much in the camp of legalization myself. If only because I can't fathom why the State gives itself the mandate to ban the exchange of this particular service in principle.
This is why I wouldn't blame it on socialism per se.
It was the stated goal of the socialist government however to get there. And I'd rather argue that this aim partly caused the outcome.
In fact I feel this is the main miscommunication that causes the "it wasn't real X" debate. People use the term X to refer both to the goal and the method of implementation.
And there is that meme again, people fail to understand what socialism is. Social policies or redistribution don't make a socialist state.
Norway is a liberal democracy. The workers don't own the means of production there.
And the Soviet Union was indeed a socialist state. Statism and socialism aren't mutually exclusive, and being both is exactly the point of a dictatorship of the proletariat. That it didn't bring what it promised is just one more tired argument. Scotsmen are never true socialists for some reason.
All in all, Venezuela's woes aren't all to blame on socialism, but you can't really help but point out that it's a direct application of the principles layed out in The Road to Serfdom. The State grew by violating private property to redistribute it, scared off any outside investment, consolidating into an all-in policy on oil. And that investment had to be controlled, which means loyalty became more important than competence to recruit oil industry officials. And the rest was just one market fluctuation away.
Pretty sure spying on people who just want to play a video game without telling them or letting them opt out ahead of time is not only a bit immoral but also very much illegal, at least in Europe.
I doubt the form they have on their website where you have to know your id to opt out of the spying would hold up in court.
We'd just be back to the time where the powers that be demonized the internet for what it was: something they couldn't control or sometimes even understand.
Email is a different beast, being private communication. But Usenet is exactly what you describe, a decentralized forum. And unsuprisingly it had both the best and the worst of humanity in there.
You get one guess as to which of those two got portrayed more in the media.
So I suppose my stance that the benefits of online voting for direct democracy largely outweight the complexity cost of a sufficiently secure solution are equivalent to the older type of objectivists who realize that free market isn't perfect but that it does lead to better outcomes in most cases.
That we can't produce secure voting software is just a testament to how much we suck at software engineering and making safe computers in general, because cryptographically this is a solved problem.
Hell I'd argue that modern implementations like Estonia's are pretty close to an acceptable standard of trustlessness. But that's thanks to open standards and public ledgers. The closed source voting machine was never a good idea, and never will be.
Given the ancap vibe of blockchain in general this is all a bit ironic isn't it?
You're arguing for the personal right to act a certain way as I understand it.
I'm arguing that such an action has terrible ramifications on a large enough scale.
These are not mutually exclusive. There's no reason that we can't construct places where public discourse of controversial ideas is possible yet people are not forced to engage in such.
It's certainly something we haven't succeeded at yet, and a hard problem altogether, but we do need it otherwise we're doomed to that one dystopia where "nobody is questioned yet nobody is right".
People misuse Popper a whole lot. The paradox has more to do with being firm on the application of the rule of law as it pertains to violence than a metapolitical discussion.
I know this is a joke (although only partly), but blocklists are honestly part of the problem.
People got to this ridiculous level of childlike annoyance at the mere existence of dissent through group effects alone, but compounding it by literally removing any form of conflict seems like the worst solution possible.
The solution to people acting terribly on the public square shouldn't be to remove it.
Certainly. But free speech is an inherently liberal position by definition, construction and history.
You're free to think that it's all bunk and tyranny of the majority is just fine. Many people do.
I'd just like it to be clear to everyone that such an opinion is being against free speech.
Because what greatly annoys me is when people try to claim that they advocate a "reasonable" version of free speech when they simply oppose it. Or indeed try to claim that their censorious position is a liberal one.
Which I am not at all accusing you of incidentally.
It's the good kind of nihilism I suppose: accepting that ultimate futility doesn't spare you from having to strive for meaning, but it does help you relativize your losses.
That said on the topic of conservation, or more accurately History, I don't think you can convincingly argue for forgetting things as a society. The cost of repeating errors are as great as the benefits of safekeeping knowledge.
Well more specifically it's one of the longstanding arguments against SaaS as a concept.
It's a tired tune to say that RMS was right, but he was. Letting people be controlled by software is not a good idea for pragmatic reasons that go beyond mere morality.
It is a core tenet of Liberalism (in the actual sense of the word) that yes, free speech does mean that you have a right for your ideas to be engaged.
Moreover people like Mill or Popper would argue people have a duty to engage every idea, because that's how the open society works.
The reduction of free speech to the first amendment and to State censorship is a modern american barbarism that is as absurd as it is baseless in either its historical roots or its application by any free judiciary, including the American one.
Telling people to shut up because their ideas are unpopular is and always will be illiberal.
I think the core assumption blockchain proponents make is that a lot of problems can be better solved if they rely on trustless sytems, and that this includes mainstream things.
I'm not sure if i agree with that, but there once was a time when the only people who would ever need a decentralized network were the military, and the benefits did generalize to everyone.