n0us [none/use name]

Why have you chosen to trick me by soliciting questions, but not promising an answer?

Hoe do you reconcile the libertarian ideals of limited state power and the suspicion of central authority with the practical reality that central authority will be necessary and long lasting to establish a classless state?

I'm just a conservative person by disposition, and hold many reactionary views as a consquence of skepticism on the viability of most progressive projects. I'm rather cynical about humans as a whole, so I don't have much hope for the optimisitc projections of many leftist projects. I dislike the centeralization of power necessary for them, as well, even democratically driven centralization, because of the potential for misuse.

I'm just a stodgy person. I prefer conservative social norms to libertine ones. White picket fence with a monogamous couple vs polyamory and free love aspirations. Gay space communism seems to me as about as realistic as Norman Rockwell depictions of the 50s. Seen a lot of friends flame out on the whole polyamory thing -- left me with a great deal of anecdotally based distrust on the matter. I don't like sexual liberation movements because I think they overempahize hedonism in a way that's bad for you. I read too much Plato as an impressionable college student, basically. I'm just one of the grumpy faux-tradcath hermits that want to be surrounded by carbon copies of people exactly like them, to steal a Chapoism from one of their Rod reading series. When it comes to living with them, anyway. The discussions would be dreadfully boring.

I like being here because I think it's healthy to pay attention to people that have radically different views. Most people aren't crazy, and believe things for genuine and good reasons. So it's good to hear from people who have wildly different assumptions about the Good than I do. Keeps me healthy, on my toes, and always thinking about why I believe the things that I do. If I watch Ben Shaprio, I always know what he's going to say. He also has awful ads. The Chapos, on the other hand, are funny and fresh and novel most of the time. It's good to get a disagreeable breeze to air out the crypt in my brain before it gets too stuffy.

Frankly, I'm just a better educated and self aware version of the marble-bust-twitter-guy, so I'm sure there's plenty for us to disagree about if we ever argued.

But all that is aside when I see someone hurting because they've found themself in a situation they find deeply alienating. I've been there, and I know how it feels. I would embrace the most rabid communist if it meant comforting them in a moment of sucidal thoughts. You're worth more than you know, and I wish everyone could see that fact about themselves. We failsons have to stick with eachother, because we already fucked up by being alone, so we might as well be kings together. 🤴

Look, man, as the scion NEET failson of a oil industry millionaire I am absolutely with you in feeling like a miserable, useless piece of shit basically all the time. But it isn't about where you start my man, it's about where you end up. You have many years ahead of you to start a fire; and once you get the ball rolling on something you like doing -- be it political, social, or whatever -- inertia kicks in and life gets easier. I too think about suicide on the daily, but I think that it would be a wasteful thing to do, given that I have so much time left in the world to do something good.

It's easy to look at the state of the world and be depressed. But, my man, the world has always been depressing. Imperalism, subsistence agriculture, war; the world is always going through a struggle and it's up to us to make the best of things. You have to take the good with the bad.

Some things are within your control, and others are not. Look first to that which you can affect and it will make you happier. Hang in there, and contemplate a plan forward, even if it is just hopeful thinking. Maybe it will play a role in where you end up.

I am not really a leftist, politically speaking, and I imagine that there is much we would disagree on philosophically, but I can offer you some solidarity on the misery of weighty expectations and self-doubt. We have to carry that weight together. There are certainly heavier weights, but this was the one given to you and I wish you all the strength in the world. Stay strong brother, you have a great deal in life to experience.

To distract from the vast and yawning abyss, utterly devoid of objective meaning, one must keep the hands busy and do what the mind says is useful. People enjoy the feeling of being productive; to feel useful and needed and tell themselves that they're making the lives of others better and easier by existing. Work is, in this manner, productive! So this feeling of value and goodness becomes inextricably linked with the idea of work itself, and not the products thereof. It's not necessarily wrong, though, either -- after all helping people necessarily involves effort and work.

Building things, cleaning, making measurable, observable changes in their environment -- these are the kinds of things that allow people to tell themselves that there is meaning in life. They are building something; leaving something that will last into the future.

Us enlightened types? We can read and laugh and whittle away the hours with our hobbies that make us happy while we wait for the end to come. Helping people should only done optimally, rationally, and without obfuscating feelings of anxiety or a need to prove self-worth -- an outlook and ideology that very few people on this planet share.

These are products of endless self-awareness and ironic reflection cultivated through countless hours of obsession over ideas and expression. Posting is a convenient medium to create the self-image that allows us to look down on the rubes who waste their time in pointless, displeasurable toil. After all, wasting time pleasurably is by far the superior option.

Epistemology is a bit overrated. The current state of things in academic philosophy is needlessly... obtuse. I love philosophy and even I find it difficult to get into -- lots of smart people picking holes in eachother until there's practically nothing to stand on. Ironic, given the subject matter, but ultimately you just have to pick a schema that you like and go with it. Ultimately, whether you can know anything for certain or not is a bit of a meme -- you have to believe in things regardless.

I'll give it a look, it sounds rather fun. Read the synopisis and I think I'll grab it when I get home.

Plato at the Googleplex is another fun, casual philosophy read! I found it a bit boring because I spent most of undergrad as a history of philosophy person, so I've already spent more time than any person reasonably should thinking about Plato/Socratic stuff and how it relates to the modern world. People who have already sone deep dives on the primary sources may find it a bit of a re-hash. But it's a great introduction to Plato and applies his thoughts to modern problems in an extremely fun style of prose! I was nearly brought to tears by one of Plato's expressions of how much he loved his teacher and mentor.

If anyone here wants to give themselves a bit of bougie cultured lingo to impress your PMC friends, give it a read. Otherwise, it's a decent overview of Plato that makes the primary sources more accessible to someone who isn't willing to dump a hundred grand on college.

It depends on what you mean by epistemology. Like, hardcore philosophical epistemology re: Gettier Problems; or scientific epistemology problems like 'use a replictable methology in your study'?

Re-reading Plato's Republic. There's an excellent foreword that succinctly and elegantly explains that Plato's conception of philosophy and statesmanship are only at odds while society has improper virtues -- greed, fear, and pride. The Gorgias takes a dismal tone and suggests that good leadership is impossible because those who best exemplify the bad virtues will prevail in rhetoric and statemanship while the vice-filled society cheers them on and those people the philosophers, who try to figure out and to attain good virtues -- whatever they may be -- will always be put aside. Plato desperately wanted to not be black-pilled, and so he spent a long time in his life trying to solve this apparent paradox of society rewarding bad people.

The Republic supposes the need for philsophers, and not, mind you, only academic wierdos, but anyone who enjoys thinking about how to go about living a good life. It encourages, even calls for them, to try and take positions in society so as to reform it into a virtuous place. Seeing politics reward the most corrupt scumbags, though, is very disheartening. I think Plato may have been right in the Gorgias and that it's practically impossible for society to ever format itself into a better place because of how easily bad people can comandeer it and how much hoi polloi are swayed to support it.

no one laughs at me now anyway, but regardless. soon I'll be emptying my chamberpot on their roof as I roam the skies in my flying wizard tower

The word comes from Ancient Greek ἀόριστος aóristos "indefinite",[1] as the aorist was the unmarked (default) form of the verb, and thus did not have the implications of the imperfective aspect, which referred to an ongoing or repeated situation, or the perfect, which referred to a situation with a continuing relevance; instead it described an action "pure and simple".

I'm going to be honest, I hate grammar. The mere thought of the 'perfective' aspect of a word makes me want to backflip off of my chair onto my neck. When I learned about the aorist tense, I considered forgoing society to join a monastery w/ a vow of silence.

Well, wouldn't this be better phrased as "...must necessarily continue to exist..."?

Because, logically, what currently does exist also necessarily exists.... because that's what existence is. That doesn't mean it has to keep existing, or that it's existence is somehow morally justified by referencing it's own persistence.

I mean, I get that this is nitpicking, but I think that it's an important point to undermine the notion of tradition being self-justifying. I get that it's entirely possible to read 'necessarily exists' broadly enough to encompass the point being made, but I don't think adding 'continue' makes it less of a snappy phrase.

Thanks for reading this 45 seconds of pedantry.

It's an interesting question, but I'll have to start from the theory before I get into the practical realities of the U.S. system of Common Law.

There's a variety of philosophies regarding what the 'law' ought to be. I'll be brief and say that there are two that are taken the most seriously: Positivism & 'Natural Law' -- both have a variety of subgenres, but they both provide two of the instincts as to what the law ought to be. 'Positivism' follows the idea that the law needs to be -- first and foremost -- entirely predictable & clear to the people who are in it's jurisdiction. To this end, you want to either have extensive, but plainly written legal codes which account for a variety of situations and clearly establish liability in various cases. It would also, necessarily, strongly prefer rules established by 'precedent' -- so that when new legal area is charted because the current rules weren't clear enough, everyone can cite this new ruling as a reliable source of information about how the law will be going forward. Positivism makes few claims to ethical or moral superiority -- laws are explicitly not moral guidelines, ever -- under Positivism, and ethically there's usally just the overarching impression that it's important for any society to have maximally clear & reliable laws so that people can know what obligations & duties they have to each other. If that clarity reveals facts that the citizens dislike, Positivism's parting gift is that the rules for changing the law ought to be clear as well.

'Natural Law' on the other hand, is a much more explicitly moral system, and it's certainly reserved for moral realists (as opposed to moral anti-realists, people who think that 'moral facts' don't exist). It's a whole big thing in ethical philosophy, but I'll confined my comments to philosophy of Law. Natural Law theorists believe that the point of the Law is to conform as closely to rules of morality as possible, whether those rules were laid down by God, Reason, or whatever their moral philosophy says concretizes abstract moral facts into the material fiber of our reality. To that end, if a Law is demonstrably unjust, then it has no place in the system and ought to be discarded as rapidly as possible. When laws are drafted and put into practice, it's always with the goal of shaping society/the Law into a form that conforms to morality. One idea that gets thrown around a lot is that "Law is the Perfection of Morality" -- with that lovely 17th century capitalization -- and that as our understanding of moral reality grows, so to does our approach to the law have to grow and change. This makes notions of 'precedent' a bit hazier, because relying on the law at a time when it was morally wrong would obviously not be valid. there are plenty of in-built protections for, say, not holding people liable for doigns things that they didn't know were crimes when the law changed, but the thrust of this theory is that the Law should never tolerate immorality & grows with our understanding of what ought to be. So, Judges, or whoever is responsible for clearing legal matters, would have an obligation to the 'the right thing' rather than be bound by precedent or procedure. Of course, as always, it's all a balancing test , because to some extent people do like clarity and procedure. It's not like this theory imagines we'll be having a bunch of Judge Dredds running around and forcing ships to adopt radio technology in the thirties.

But now we can wrap around to your original point -- why Common Law? The answer is because it lends itself to predictability and clarity. Common Law, broadly, refers to codifying legal matters as they were practiced by the people, as well as respecting legal precedent. So when a bunch of English peasants thought that both sides needed to trade valuables for a contract to be valid, the idea of 'consideration' was born and blah blah 700 years later we now have the Uniform Business Code that very clearly lays out exactly what you need to do a bunch of business stuff -- some of which derives from these old legal concepts. For all that it sucks to be beholden to old ideas -- the advantage is that you know exactly what magic words you need to utter or write down to make the courts do what you want them to do. You can look up what prior courts have done and force courts to agree with you based on precedent! So you can think of the Common Law system of favoring positivism over natural law -- although, obviously, a system this large is going to have hybrid urges. Furthermore, at least in the U.S., there's plenty of legal codes and legislation that are wholly new and totally override 'old' legal concepts. It also depends a great deal on the field you're in. Laws surrounding real property are by far the most 'feudal' and cling to a lot of old concepts -- but something like insurance law or even the Criminal Code? That's all a creature of modern legislation, although 'modern' stretches back to the 1940s sometimes.

I'm not sure if your problem is primarily with relying on 'precedent' generally, or if you think that over-reliance has allowed concepts that are unfit for a modern society to creep in from older times. I think that's an important distinction to make, because precedent on a whole is profoundly important to a functioning legal system. The king changing his mind day by day and giving different rulings to the same problems? Not that's some feudal stuff. Having a Worker's Council that will tackle problems differently depending on the mood of the participants that day might be objectionable to the people who are bound in their jurisdiction.

That's really all Common Law is -- precedent. While some concepts from Ye Olde Englishe Lawe have been retained, most of the particularly objectionable ones have been filtered out by almost a thousand years of people arguing with each other. If you have some particular disagreement with a stupid remnant of tradition that has lodged itself in the legal system, then I might be able to explain it in a way that makes it seem less stupid.

Source: am a lawyer, and I want to kill myself every day (but that's because of the shitty people I work with, and not because the law is fundamentally flawed)

edit: Check mrhellblazer's post about the good that can be done with common law and precedent for a more detailed defense of the concept