= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Luke_A_Somers comments on New censorship: against hypothetical violence against identifiable people - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (457)
To call either gun control or taxation violence is stretching matters beyond reasonable limits. The only sense in which they are is the sense in which any public policy is - that it is backed by the government. If anything to do with the government has to be considered as 'about violence'... bah.
Of course all laws enforced by governments are enforced with the threat of violence, and actual violence against violators. The law itself may not be violent, but violence will be used if necessary to enforce it.
Violence is not necessarily bad; it is a tool that may be the right one to use. Just as government and laws are not bad in themselves. If you object to saying government uses violence, you must be disagreeing with me over the meaning of the word "violence".
Sufficiently proximate to the point that simply talking about government is in fact a derail advocating violence? I think not.
Of course simply talking about government, or any particular government policy, is not about violence. And so it's not a derail that needs to be moderated.
But violence is an essential part of government. That's all I was saying.
Compare: simply talking about cryonics is not about quantum mechanics. If discussion of quantum mechanics were counterfactually forbidden, talking about cryonics would not be forbidden thereby. But cryonics, like all physical systems, is "implemented" or backed by quantum mechanics; you can't have one without the other.
I don't think it's silly, and based on the LW survey results, neither do approximately 30.3% of LW users.
But aside from that, OP said "More generally: Posts or comments advocating or 'asking about' violation of laws that are actually enforced against middle-class people". Gun control (though not taxation) clearly falls under this illegality clause, without resort to classifying it as "violence".
'Libertarian' does not mean 'believes all government action is violence'.
I identify as libertarian and have been objectivist, but calling taxation theft (and other similar claims) is almost always sneaking in connotations.
True, but that doesn't change the fact that the wording of the proposed policy is heavily subject to interpretation, which is the point I was trying to make.