What is in a number? How many wrong doings do we justify based upon a number?
Some of you that have been following me know I have a big problem with the term "collateral damage". For me "collateral damage" should be "We made a mistake, and we're going to make changes to make sure it doesn't happen again". Yet in reality it is used as an excuse with no effort made to see that it doesn't happen again. They might as well throw in a shrug while they use that label. This is another example of what I would call evil. Casual and callous disregard for life as long as the objective was achieved.
That was not to be the focus of this particular post, but I do think it is a good intro for the same type of thinking that lead me to this post.
At what number of murders does a person become a really bad person?
I wrote a post about Communism today and I mentioned how Stalin and Mao killed more of their own people than Hitler by a large margin, but people call Hitler evil and rarely mention Stalin or Mao. If it were a video game it'd be like the high score board (you young people may not know these) having Stalin and Mao in 1st and 2nd place and instead everyone is talking about the 3rd player. It's a little strange.
Now one person did come back with an argument I've heard before and it actually inspired this post. He stated that Stalin and Mao actually only killed hundreds of thousands of people and that the other millions of deaths were due to stupid actions by people that lead to things like starvation. Okay, I've heard this before.
Yet that kind of kicked in the "collateral damage" type thinking. Let's say what he said was true. So those hundreds of thousands of their own people killed to implement their version of "communism" is not noteworthy?
At what number of deaths does it become noteworthy and significant?
Now this isn't the only thing that lead me to the point of this post. It was just the latest along this type of thinking.
Socialism
I have a problem with socialism as well. Why? I am a voluntaryist. I don't believe in being able to FORCE people to support your favorite charity, or program. I see that as stealing so the government can turn around and mismanage the money they stole from you.
I've asked people simply this. If you see a person a couple blocks over that has a struggling family and you give him $100, or if you push for a government program to help him that takes $100 in taxes which do you think would actually get more money to the person needing it? I consider that a no brainer. $100 from my hand to his, or $100 that goes through the government bureaucracy and he'll be lucky if he sees $20 of it... yet even that is me digressing from the point.
I don't believe the government should be able to force you to support socialist programs.
This is where the NUMBER questions come in.
At what number does theft stop being theft?
If I come and take money from you against your will and then do things with it that is theft right? I believe the answer is yes.
If my entire house full of people comes and takes money from you against your will that is still theft right? As far as I know it is still yes.
We can go up to my entire neighborhood and I still think it is theft.
How about my entire town? I still think yes.
Yet somewhere there must be some magic number that suddenly makes it okay for people to take your money against your will to spend on things you may not even support because some NUMBER of people voted for it.
So somehow voting makes it not theft? As far as I know it still is.
Yet if the government does it, it is not. I think it still is. They just use force and threat of force much like mafia and extortion rackets that we don't have any way to resist.
I know my tax money is spent on many things I am very much against and would never support in my life. So I can only view it as theft.
Anyway that concept of NUMBER making the difference between right and wrong, good and evil was the gist of this post.
As to socialism. A lot of people will justify the taxation and creation of services as though it is a compassionate thing. Some people would call this virtue signalling this day and age, and initially I disliked that term because it is used too heavily, but it is starting to grow on me.
If you are forced to do something and the end result is that it helped someone that has ZERO to do with compassion. You had to make no decision to help them, it was done for you. A robot is compassionate too by that logic, and a computer that was used.
Compassion occurs when a person chooses to do something voluntarily as a choice in a situation where they did not need to, and were under no threat or coercive force.
Socialism is not compassionate. Create a crowd sourcing movement for your neighborhood rather than giving the taxes to the government and you'd likely actually help more people, and the funds wouldn't end up being spent on things you do not support.
Socialism is about force. OH THERE IS A PROBLEM. "Great let's create a program to help solve the problem and steal money from all of the people to fund it".
Asking the government for help and granting them more powers is NOT a good thing. It is certainly not a compassionate thing.
Everything boils down force. Whoever has the most force gets to decide what does and doesn't get done. Who decides how much we will "contribute" in our money so they can achieve their goals? The people with the guns and laws on their side. They write the laws, they decide how much they are taking from us and they decide how our money is going to be spent. We are lucky they leave us anything.
That is an interesting way of looking at Socialism , I hadn't really thought about it like that before. And I agree that anything done by force won't really have good results in the end. It's human nature to resist and/or resent anything that one is forced to do yes?
This is probably an overly simplistic way of looking at it but I tend to think / believe that the form of system is only secondary and that any form of system can either work or not , it just all depends on who is running things. And sure some(or most if not all) forms favor one(some) group(s) over others , but I feel that if we had a benevolent group running things , that was truly looking out for everyone's best interest then things would at the very least be better. But unfortunately (IMHumbleO) , it seems we have just the opposite. And have had just the opposite for a long long time.
And about the 'collateral damage' . That made me think of the 'greater good' . I think , again (IMHO) , that a lot of people in power today , well it seems to me anyway that this is how these people think. No matter how much 'collateral damage' they cause , it's all for the greater good.(And everyone thinks they are right in their own mind, yes?) And I think that's where that old saying comes in ... That the road to hell is paved with ... well maybe we can change it to intentions of the greater good instead.
Greater good seems to be a smokescreen for evil the more I look at it. A play on words to get us to accept something bad.
Same with the Lesser of two evils. It's still evil.
They get us caught up with False Dichotomies and make us believe there are only two choices, when in reality there are usually quite a few choices.
By interesting way you mean an absolutely brain-dead way? I agree.
Well you see, nothing of what (I read here that) he said about socialism is part of how socialism functions.
In socialism, and communism, you're never forced to fund something you don't like, you're simply disallowed from enslaving other people and abusing them and stealing the value they generate.
If you want to be a disgusting cager and drive around in a metal death-trap, fine, fund yourself a new car or car advancements. But I, and most, aren't going to want some dirty polluting metal hunk to get stuck in traffic with and we're going to work towards public transit that actually works and bicycles.
As you can see above in that comparison picture, the only case you're stolen from is in capitalism.
That's where the force is. Not Socialism, and definitely not Communism.
You do know you can disagree without being a complete ass right?
:^^)
i have problem with steemit , i have problem with facebook , i have problem with socialism , communism , Racism in fact everything and everyone .
Heh... Talk about them. :)
Great post and and totally agree with your arguments. Governments, be it democratic, communism, socialism, and the likes have one common agenda, that is having control of their constituents. It only differs as to the ways they implement it. At least, that's how I see it.
I like the topics you talk about, but once again here I am playing the devil's advocate. After this crowd sourcing do you believe that when the person receives the money they will use the money properly? Also, when does compassion gets pushed to the limit and everyone begins to abuse it and wants a free ride? Should there be a limit on compassion or should it be boundless? Are you more for a capitalist approach or what is your political stance of governing a large population?
No guarantee, but the transparency is a lot more obvious. You can see how much crowd sourcing is paid, and you can find out fees if need be.
Ultimately: Anarcho-Capitalist though I think we need some things done about education, and people to learn to take responsibility for their own choices and actions again before anything like this would work.
Short Term: Libertarian... Socially Liberal in the classical sense + Free Market + as minimal a government as we can achieve.
Nice, great response! Very interesting take, I'll have to look into that and see the potential of it!
Best Article of the day
Very intellectually written
Highly Appreciated
Keep it up
It's so easy to look at an event such as an air strike and only seee the number, 13 dead. You forget that that was 13 people with 13 families. It's too easy to disassociate.
Our government is the mafia. In the past wars were fought over LESS than one of these Collateral Damage events that now occur with regularity in these "not wars".
The only reason they don't happen now is that our government the mafia has the biggest guns, tanks, ships, planes, etc and the people cower because they can't do much else and they cough up their extortion/protection fee.
@dwinblood not to worry, very little of our tax dollars are spent on these programs; the government takes in far less in taxes than it spends so our "contributions" amount to little more than a rounding error.
Very often, the government "compassion" that people clamor for results in far more pain and suffering than the problem it was meant to solve.
Case in point, that bad man in Iraq needs to go so that we can help all of the people he is oppressing.
Oops, a few million dead and displaced, but at least that bad man (that we gave WMD's to so he could use them against those other bad people, who's government we overthrew) isn't oppressing them anymore.
Why don't those ungrateful pieces of shit give us the love and respect we deserve?
Whew, we dodged a bullet there.
Who can we "help" next?
Keep speaking truth, some of us hear it.
you can see where this is all going!
anybody maybe have the different problem