Because of this, so the argument goes, the government can step in and levy a “price on carbon” — in the form of a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program — to cause the relevant players to “internalize the externality” and take full account of the consequences of their actions.
I realize you are just characterizing someone else’s argument, and not making this argument yourself, but in any case, the argument in question sounds flawed. Unless the carbon tax funds are specifically set aside in a fund to help victims of fossil fuel violence (people with poisoned wellwater, poisoned farmland, etc.), and that fund is managed in a democratic way that gives victims of fossil fuel violence a full voice, the government officials risk incentivizing themselves to protect the immorality, perhaps putting down protests or engaging in other acts of repression, in order to keep receiving the carbon tax money. Essentially, the officials are taking a share of the blood money.
It’s kind of like how, if a person was to knowingly accept Mafia money, and didn’t make a commitment to himself or herself to only spend that money helping Mafia victims, that person would be incentivizing himself or herself to assist Mafia violence. (It is also possible the Mafia might pressure the person to help, e.g. “hey, you accepted our money, now you have to do something for us.”)
Another flaw in the argument in question is that no tax is sufficient to make fossil fuel companies “take full account of the consequences of their actions”. (Did anyone actually claim this? But in any case….) The fossil fuel companies are getting away with mass assault and battery and mass murder. No amount of money can bring the dead back to life, and it is doubtful whether any amount of money can heal those made sick by their actions.
For information about how the fossil fuel industry gest away with mass robbery in the United States, please see the documentary “Split Estate”.
For information about how the fossil fuel industry gets away with mass assault and battery (and probably mass murder) in the United States, please see the documentaries “Gasland” and “Gasland 2”.
And for information about how fracking is linked to rape against women, please see this article:
grist [dot] org/living/fracking-linked-to-rape-meth-addiction-and-stds/
Also, I realize your article was primarily about carbon tax, not cap and trade, you did at least briefly mention cap and trade, and there’s an article hear which links a carbon offset program (presumably the sort incentivized by cap and trade) to an extremely violent mass land theft in Uganda.
“My land was taken by the New Forests Company. People from New Forests came with other security forces and started destroying crops and demolishing houses and they ordered us to leave. They beat people up, especially those who could not run. We ran in a group, my children, my grandchildren, my wife and me. It was such a painful time because the eviction was so forceful and violent.”
For context, see this comment, and the one before it:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/lse-climate-economics-expert-liar-or-stupid.html#comment-2031158
Thanks, I watched it. I’m in agreement that corruption has crept into pretty much the entire “Climate Change” industry from the science to the government funding and the programs that solve a non-existent problem using central planning.
The saying is that foreign aid means taking money from poor people in rich countries, then giving the money to rich people in poor countries. The aid recipients inevitably buy guns and hire soldiers because they understand that being wealthy necessitates being able to defend one’s wealth. In Kenya the wealth is mostly from tourism and those tourists already have an idea of what they think Africa should look like, with parks and wildlife and their romantic version of “The Environment (TM)” so that’s what the government of Kenya is expected to deliver.
Who is the real environmentalist? The villagers with their huts and animals claim they are the rightful custodians of the forest … while the government parks officials with their wardens and their police claim that the law of Kenya applies and you need whatever fiddly permit they want to issue or not issue. Both sides claim the same thing, which is ownership of the land … who adjudicates? The rich first-world tourists also come along claiming to be real environmentalists, paying their saved up money to see an elephant or a lion or some big, exciting wild animal like that … they don’t want to see goat herders in mud huts.
Anyhow, thanks for the video, I will keep the link and pass it around a bit … at least it does illustrate the problem.
By the way, I’ve been in the tech industry for a long time and I’ve seen a lot of people who thought they had a good stable income find themselves “evicted” in the sense that what they used to have they don’t have anymore. Some guy invents a word processor and all the typists lose their wages. Another guy upgrades that to desktop publishing and all the typesetters and lino-printers lose their wages. Elon Musk thinks he is going to invent a self driving robot and then all the truck drivers and bus drivers are screwed … I don’t think he is genuinely smart enough to achieve that, but sooner or later someone will do.
The reason the African governments can be bribed by wealthy Europeans and Americans (rather than the other way around) is because Europeans and Americans invented a lot of extraordinary knacky things … including a lot of highly efficient weapons. Some guy invents a rifle (Benjamin Robins, “New Principles of Gunnery” ground breaking book, he was a student of none other than Isaac Newton), and now rifles exist, the people with only bows and arrows are suddenly in a lot of trouble. Another guy invents an F-15 and now if you want to keep your property you are also gonna want something at least as good as that F-15.
See what I’m getting at here? The world changes, and after that you are no longer living in the old reality, you are living in the new reality … and you might still have the same property rights, or you might not. Quite often not.
I don’t really have an answer to it … ask a priest or something. So the CO2 level goes up and now the plants grow faster, which is good for people who ultimately derive their food from plants (that’s all of us) but it’s probably also bad for someone, somewhere who might lose a bit of land to rising sea levels. New farmland will probably become arable in Siberia … while they are telling us that farms will dry out in Australia (although it has not happened yet, Australia gets plenty of rain, I was sitting trapped by floods a few months back, and now I’m sitting trapped by soldiers and police … having tried both I would choose the flood for sure).
Now we have environmentalists telling us they decided the world should never change, unless it’s to their liking. Yeah OK, whatever you say Mr Environmentalist, whoever you are.
I don’t really have an answer to it … ask a priest or something.
If you want an answer to another human rights problem (not this one specifically), in particular, a human rights problem in Liberia where both government soldiers and rebel soldiers were running around raping and murdering the people, then the documentary you should watch is “Pray the Devil Back to Hell”. It describes how a bunch of pacifist women defeated both the raping, murdering government troops and the raping, murdering rebel troops and won the Liberian Civil War, and can be watched for free online on Vimeo.
Disclaimer: Please understand that I mean pacifist in Machiavellian terms, not strict Tolstoyan terms.
I find it a very uplifting documentary about a lot of very brave pacifist women who accomplished something that many would say was impossible. However, obviously, it if they achieved it, it wasn’t impossible; the people in question were merely incorrect in their estimation of what is possible.
(For an example of someone who would probably judge what the pacifist women in Liberia achieved to be impossible, see Kathleen Parker, who wrote on the Chicago Tribune that, “Pacifism is nice, but war doesn’t care” and “Fighting back in this case is an act of purest logic: Kill or be killed. It doesn’t get any clearer than that.”)
chicagotribune [dot] com/news/ct-xpm-2001-11-28-0111280061-story.html
Tel wrote,
Thanks, I watched it. I’m in agreement that corruption has crept into pretty much the entire “Climate Change” industry from the science to the government funding and the programs that solve a non-existent problem using central planning.
Yeah… grassroots activists are often good people, but industry and bureaucratic government organizations have a tendency to corrupt ideas from the grassroots.
Also, a lot of university/college trained “scientists” seem to be a bunch of paternalists — I think that’s the word for someone who claims to know what’s good for oppressed people better than they do? Anyway, assuming by use of the word “paternalist” is correct… the paternalism of Western, college/university-educated “scientists” has long been used to rationalise atrocities. (E.g. the forced labor regime and forced medical experimentation in the Belgian Congo.
Maryinez Lyons writes in “The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire” (note: Zaire is the name that Mobutu gave to the Congo),
Belgian colonials produced much rhetoric on the subject of their ‘civilising mission’ in Africa and they often rationalised, even justified, their presence in the Congo by referring to their duty to instill and nurture in Africans the European, bourgeois values of education, hard work, moral duty, selflessness, courage and patriotism. These values were not only to be taught in the abstract in schools but were to be acquired by Africans in the process of practical works. Congolese would become civilised by labouring for Europeans. But it was often to prove difficult to obtain African labour, the supply of which remained a major issue during the entire colonial experience. This was an enormous problem as the mise en valeur, or economic exploitation, of the Congo in the early decades of its existence depended almost entirely upon obtaining sufficient numbers of African labourers. The earliest instructions to state agents had stressed the significance of labour as the pivot of the Belgian ‘civilising mission’. 1
As we have seen, the conquest of the northern Belgian Congo was protracted and costly for African societies, but military conquest was only the beginning of many decades of real stress for many people. Administrative policies strained societies in ways which for some populations culminated in famine, disease and death. State demands for labour and tax were particularly onerous and began almost immediately upon establishment of each state post. The relationship between labour recruitment and deployment and the overall upheaval experienced by northern Congolese, especially before 1920, is crucial to an understanding of outbreaks of sleeping sickness.
Maryinez discusses the forced medical experimentation eslewhere in the book… basically, in the name of the paternalistic “civilizing mission”, Western academics defended a system of ensl*vement, murder, rape, forced famine, an forced disease.
Essentially, paternalist Western academics who ignore the wishes and wisdom of the people affected by their recommended policies should not be taken seriously.
Tel wrote,
Who is the real environmentalist? The villagers with their huts and animals claim they are the rightful custodians of the forest … while the government parks officials with their wardens and their police claim that the law of Kenya applies and you need whatever fiddly permit they want to issue or not issue. Both sides claim the same thing, which is ownership of the land … who adjudicates?
In my opinion, the villagers with their huts are the real environmentalists.
Also, the villagers might technically be claiming stewardship, not ownership. I don’t know for sure in this particular case, but a lot of indigenous people seem to claim stewardship rather than ownership, if informed about the distinction between the words.
See for example, “In the Indigenous world view, we do not own the land. We are stewards of the land, our Mother Earth. How can we own our Mother? Rather, we respect and protect our Mother.”
ualberta [dot] ca/newtrail/ideas/understanding-treaties-is-essential-to-understanding.html?fb_comment_id=3797300540307001_3881210741915980
My interpretation of such statements is that many indigenous people believe that they have some but not all of the rights generally associated with the Western concept of “ownership”. Specifically, they believe they have those rights which are not in conflict with natural law. (Please note this is my interpretation; I am saying what that quote means to me. It is possible that the author might not agree with my interpretation.) I more or less agree with this, although I also realize that different people may have different interpretations of natural law.
And example of how an idea of stewardship varies from an idea of ownership, consider the fictional characters Calvin and Darren.
Calvin: I planted this strawberry patch; therefore, I have the right to pick the strawberry’s and enjoy the fruits of my labor.
Darren: I built this house, therefore I have the right to beat my wife and children. My house my rules.
Calvin: No… beating your wife and children is wrong. You have the right to the peaceful enjoyment of your house, but not to beat your wife and children.
Alright, so Darren is taking a rather extremist idea of property rights; most people of European origin in 2021 do not support wife-beating… at least not openly. Presumably, since there are some men who beat their wives still, there is dissent on this matter, however, most dissenters seem embarrassed to admit their dissent publicly. (However, historically, many European cultures favored wife beating. Presumably, a lot of women disagreed, but history mostly records the views of the powerful.)
However, a lot of people of European origin do still support child beating.
To cite one example, a person wrote on twitter, in response to another tweet saying, “Smacking kids is still illegal: Con Court maintains ruling on parental chastisement of children”
My House my rules, that ruling will never work in my house. I wonder what type of a society is this con court trying to build. The need to learn that every action has its own consequences. That judgment will work somewhere else not in my house. My house my rules, my laws
Alright, so you can see that this person cites house ownership (“my house my rules”) as justification for child beating.
According to News24, there were a number of parents who had this reaction — this wasn’t some lone person with an obscure viewpoint.
news24 [dot] com/parent/Family/Parenting/my-house-my-rules-case-closed-parents-react-to-no-smacking-ruling-20190920
Contrast to this statement from Luther Standing Bear’s “My Indian Boyhood”,
Of course, we tried to obey our parents when they called to us in the morning and we were supposed to get up at the first call. Not all Sioux boys, however, were obedient. Some were lazy and would not heed their father’s or mother’s voice. When it became necessary for a parent to punish a disobedient child, it was not done in a harsh manner. The worst thing a Sioux parent did was to pour cold water on a child’s face. This would awaken sleepy boys and girls, and they would be ashamed of themselves. We were never whipped nor severely punished, for Sioux parents did not believe in whipping and beating children.
This, I think, is a key difference between a culture that believes in “land ownership” and a culture that believes in “land stewardship”. In “land ownership”, the owner has the right to make rules, no matter how ridiculous, and enforce them by violence. In land stewardship, what the steward can do is limited by local perceptions of natural law, so if the local culture believes that whipping and beating children is against natural law, then it is socially unacceptable for the land steward to whip or beat children. (I think there’s a spectrum… relatively few people in 2021 would try to use land ownership as an excuse for murder, for example, but if carried to it’s most extreme logical conclusion, land ownership would be used to justify murder.)
This also has environmental implications… a person who sees himself or herself as a steward might believe that certain acts of environmental destruction are immoral, and the result is a very well cared for forest or other natural environment where such people live. Moral reasoning behind this might include noting the importance of the plants, animals, and water to the sustenance of human life.
I believe that, barring a major dispute over natural law, local stewards should be respected. (A major dispute over natural law would be like, if a culture was still practicing sl*very, I think it would be appropriate for abolitionists to talk to them and attempt to explain why sl*very is wrong, and attempt to help the ensl*ved people gain freedom.) People should not be evicted from their land just because they did such a good job at stewardship that their land is actually still in pristine condition.
Tel wrote,
Anyhow, thanks for the video, I will keep the link and pass it around a bit … at least it does illustrate the problem.
Glad you liked it. 🙂
Tel wrote,
The rich first-world tourists also come along claiming to be real environmentalists, paying their saved up money to see an elephant or a lion or some big, exciting wild animal like that … they don’t want to see goat herders in mud huts.
I had to look this up, and the example I found was in Tanzania, not Kenya. (It could also happen in Kenya; Tanzania is just the example I found a reference for.)
This sweep of low hills and savannah is just one of many tracts of land that the dollar-hungry Tanzanian government has pawned to foreign investors. The country’s “development strategy” says there must be a million tourists by 2010 – and it seems that officials will do anything necessary to make that happen. One quarter of the country has been earmarked for “conservation”. Generally this means development for safari tourism, with the people who live on the land in question often forcibly excluded by the government.
…
Very few benefits of tourism have flowed to the people who own the land. No management job in the Ngorongoro conservation area has ever gone to a Masai. But they may sell beads, and dance for the tourists at the Serena. Today, 70% of the people live below the poverty line, and 15% of children do not survive to the age of five. But a third of a million tourists visit their land every year, earning the government-run park authority $10m.
“We miss Ngorongoro. If they told us we could go back, we would now. We could work there. We could grow food. Please tell everyone that if we stay here we will die.”
I would say that in this example, the tourist are not real environmentalists. The evicted Masai were the real environmentalists. Ethical tourists have a duty to report on and discourage human rights abuses — not to encourage human rights abuses to happen for their comfort.
Tel wrote,
By the way, I’ve been in the tech industry for a long time and I’ve seen a lot of people who thought they had a good stable income find themselves “evicted” in the sense that what they used to have they don’t have anymore. Some guy invents a word processor and all the typists lose their wages. Another guy upgrades that to desktop publishing and all the typesetters and lino-printers lose their wages. Elon Musk thinks he is going to invent a self driving robot and then all the truck drivers and bus drivers are screwed … I don’t think he is genuinely smart enough to achieve that, but sooner or later someone will do.
I believe that the origin of these problems is that in mainstream Western culture, the right of human beings to land is not recognized.
Mainstream Western culture does recognize that people have a right to air. Strangling a person or otherwise denying them the right to breath is considered murder. But for some reason, even though land is necessary to life, just as air is, it is considered acceptable to deny people access to land. People have to pay absurdly high land taxes to be allowed to stay in their homes. (For many, these land taxes are included in their rent.) Even empty plots of land carry a hefty price tag.
If everyone had a recognized right to a small plot of land, enough to farm at least, and to stay there without paying taxes or other fees, I think that it would not be such a problem if someone invented a word processor. Unemployment, in my view, is only an issue because the right of people to land is not respected. I think that if, suddenly, 100% of the world’s population had a recognized right to at least enough land for farming, people wouldn’t be making computers or word processors anyway. Whatever small minority of the world’s population is actually happy with the status quo and their current jobs would likely find that most of said jobs are no longer possible, due to other people in jobs such as computer manufacturing having quit said jobs.
I don’t expect any such thing to happen within the next hundred years, of course, maybe not even within the next thousand years; my point is that the whole structure is based on violence.
Tel wrote,
The reason the African governments can be bribed by wealthy Europeans and Americans (rather than the other way around) is because Europeans and Americans invented a lot of extraordinary knacky things … including a lot of highly efficient weapons. Some guy invents a rifle (Benjamin Robins, “New Principles of Gunnery” ground breaking book, he was a student of none other than Isaac Newton), and now rifles exist, the people with only bows and arrows are suddenly in a lot of trouble. Another guy invents an F-15 and now if you want to keep your property you are also gonna want something at least as good as that F-15.
This reminds me of something I read in Transformations in Sl*very by Paul Lovejoy.
Improvements in military technology were also closely connected to external trade. The import of breeding horses across the Sahara strengthened the savanna cavalry states. Chain mail and muskets strengthened them still further. Along the coast, firearms, swords, and knives had a comparable impact, with the effect that has sometimes been called the ‘ gun-sl*ve cycle ’ . The simple formulation of this theory holds that guns were sold to Africans in order to encourage ensl*vement. While some Europeans may have understood the connection between gun sales and sl*ves, it would be wrong to attribute the sl*ve trade to such manipulation. 50 The correlation between the quantity of imported guns and the volume of the sl*ve trade more accurately reflected the economic and political choices of African rulers and merchants who acted in their own best interests.
My interpretation of this is that by trading guns for captives, the Europeans changed the balance of power in Africa, putting the most immoral Africans in power. People who wanted to defend themselves, and were on the fence about morality, would have been incentivized to choose immorality, so that they could acquire the guns needed for defense. Good people would have suffered in this regime of immoral people armed with guns.
Sometimes I ask people, who press really heavily on the “Africans were sold by other Africans” point, how they would feel if an alien species came and offered superweapons to the Mafia in exchange for the Mafia ensl*ving other people in their country. And with the alien superweapons, the Mafia were able to just take over and become the new government.
Apparently, the strategy of bribing African governments / chiefs has often been accompanied by first placing a bribable dictator in power. One example was the assassination of Lumumba (by the Belgians, but after the CIA removed him from power), and Lumumba’s replacement with Mobutu, who ruled with CIA-assistance for about 30 years.
Maertens, as quoted by Jules Marchal in Forced Labor in the Gold and Copper Mines, gives the following example from the time of the Belgian Congo:
Imagine the suffering of these unhappy fellows. They are sold by their chief, a shadowy authority figure installed by us the better to serve our purposes, and whom we use like Judas. In 75 cases out of 100 he is not the natives ’ choice. Laborers are snatched from their huts and villages, and marched to the mines with ropes round their necks, like criminals, under an escort of utterly ignorant ‘ soldiers ’ with no idea whatsoever of discipline, with no respect for orders received. Delivered by their chief, who grows fat off the gifts he receives in exchange for his venality, these recruits, from the moment they leave their villages, are obsessed with the idea of escape ….
Alright, so, in Maerten’s estimation, 75 percent of the chiefs in the Belgian Congo who collaborated with Belgian oppression and delivered their people to forced labor, were not chiefs selected by the natives, but rather, ones imposed on them by the Belgians. (Imagine if some invading culture, say, the Russians, replaced the democratically elected mayors of Australia with ones of their choice, and then the Russian-chosen mayors started sending Australian people off to forced labor camps.)
Tel wrote,
So the CO2 level goes up and now the plants grow faster, which is good for people who ultimately derive their food from plants (that’s all of us) but it’s probably also bad for someone, somewhere who might lose a bit of land to rising sea levels. New farmland will probably become arable in Siberia … while they are telling us that farms will dry out in Australia (although it has not happened yet, Australia gets plenty of rain, I was sitting trapped by floods a few months back, and now I’m sitting trapped by soldiers and police … having tried both I would choose the flood for sure).
I would also prefer being trapped by floods over being trapped by soldiers and police.
I think it’s a lot more complicated than Co2 simply making plants grow faster. Even aside from climate change, a lot of cropland is being destroyed by fossil fuel extraction. See, for example, the Poison Fire documentary I linked below, in which Nigerians talk about how Shell’s activities are poisoning their farms, killing them, etc. With respect to climate change, a lot of domesticated crops are dependent on having a fairly stable climate, and so if climate change destabilizes that climate, as many have predicted, we can expect a lot of domesticated crops to fail. So-called weeds, on the other hand, have a lot more genetic diversity, and many of them seem more resilient against climate change. So, one would expect the so-called “weeds” of today to become the food of the future. The transition is likely to cause some famines, I think, because rapid changes in food ecology can be hard on people. Heavily taxed or otherwise exploited people are likely to suffer worse, since exploitation can make it hard for people to adapt to changing environmental conditions. E.g. during the so-called Irish potato famine, Ireland was actually producing plenty of food to feed the people. However, most of that food was escorted out of the country at gunpoint. It apparently took 67 of Britians 130 regiments at the time to starve the Irish people, according to Chris Fogarty. This was done to enforce the “property rights” of the English landlords, who had won the land by conquest. There was no natural reason why the Irish — some of whom would have been my ancestors — could not adapt to a failure of the potato crop. They produced enough food. The failure of the potato crop was only a serious issue because the rest of the food was being robbed from them. Likewise, climate-changed induced crop failures are likely to be more deadly to heavily exploited peoples.
One food that appears to have some climate change resistance potential is the jackfruit.
theguardian [dot] com/environment/2014/apr/23/jackfruit-miracle-crop-climate-change-food-security
Tel wrote,
Now we have environmentalists telling us they decided the world should never change, unless it’s to their liking. Yeah OK, whatever you say Mr Environmentalist, whoever you are.
I haven’t heard this claim, but I also probably don’t watch the same news programs you do. Did anyone in particular say this?
“I haven’t heard this claim, but I also probably don’t watch the same news programs you do. Did anyone in particular say this?”
You poo-poo’d Ayn Rand for saying it was wrong to believe that the world should never change.
I don’t know how you do that without, yourself, holding the position she said was wrong:
BMS ep 170: Bob Dissects the Shopping Cart Critique of Self-Governance
[www]https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2020/12/bms-ep-170-bob-dissects-the-shopping-cart-critique-of-self-governance.html#comment-2014565
[@”random person”]:
“To quote the Salon article I mentioned earlier in my discussion with Tel,
““Let’s suppose they were all beautifully innocent savages, which they certainly were not,” Rand persisted. “What was it that they were fighting for, if they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their right to keep part of the earth untouched, unused, and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal?” she asked.”
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
Because Guest is continuing to reply to my comments even though I have made it repeatedly clear I am no longer interested in debating a REMORSELESS STRAWMANNER like him, I am updating my standardized response to list five times when GUEST BLATANTLY STRAWMANNED ME.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 1
I gave an example from the book “Blood and Earth” by Kevin Bales, a real example (Kevin Bales travelled around the planet, to multiple continents, to find real examples) in which a farmer homesteaded a piece of land, planting crops on it, and then a thieving capitalist came along, claimed to own the land that the farmer had homesteaded, and said the farmer could work as a wage laborer for the thieving capitalist. I explained how this form of exploitation was not itself sl*very, but it made the farmer more vulnerable to sl*very, and he did indeed end up in sl*very later in the story.
It was in this comment:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040606
Guest then blatantly strawmanned me.
Since, as an employee, you’re not producing something on your own, and since you’ve obviously decided that you don’t want to plant a garden and make your own clothes when it costs you less in terms of opportunities foregone to go work for a business owner, then that means you have *voluntarily* chosen to work for a wage. That is not exploitation.
I was not able to read the strawman initially, since there was a delay before the comment was approved to be viewed publicly.
When I did finally read it, after it was approved so I could actually read it, I replied:
The fact that you’re writing this tells me that you didn’t bother reading the example I provided. In the example I provided, the employee is producing something on his own without any assistance from the employer, and he DID IN FACT PLANT A GARDEN. The depraved employer in the example given did absolutely nothing other than to claim to own the products of the employee’s labor by virtue of an alleged legal title (which was never actually proven), i.e. the employer was simply a thief.
And I drew Guest’s attention to said reply here:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042671
Even after I caught Guest’s strawman and managed to point out to him that I caught it, he displayed extreme entitlement, claiming that his point, even though he had built his argument on a strawman, was the one that mattered, as if strawman arguments ought to take precedent over real ones.
You can’t blame wage-labor for the theft that occurs in your example. That’s the point.
Guest explained the blatant strawmanning in this case by admitting that he didn’t bother reading many of my comments properly,
Dude, you write a lot of stuff. I come back and there’s often four responses. I’m not going to read through them all because I have other things I’d like to do with my time.
This is one of the reasons I do not consider it worth it to read and write specific replies to Guest’s comments anymore: it’s a COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO TRY TO EXPLAIN MY VIEWS TO SOMEONE WHO CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO READ THEM BEFORE WRITING A REPLY. Instead of taking the time to actually read what I write, Guest would rather imagine what he thinks I wrote, and reply to that instead. By not spending time reading my replies, and instead taking the shortcut of imagining what he thinks I wrote, GUEST IS ABLE TO SPEW OUT LIES FAR FASTER THAN I CAN HOPE TO CORRECT THEM.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER TWO
Guest made the following strawman argument, demonstrating that he doesn’t know what socialism even is,
There is no possible version of a “new socialist man” where humans do not have unique preferences and aptitudes.
I assumed this was a misunderstanding, probably caused by a load of propaganda that misrepresents what socialism is, and attempted to correct it,
The goal is not to stop humans from having unique preferences and aptitudes. The goal… or at least my main goal, and I suspect a lot of other people would at least partially agree with me … is to stop maniacs like King Leopold II from enforcing their preferences on others by means of extreme brutality. (Not that I hope to single-handedly accomplish such a thing. But at least, that is an optimistic future I am capable of vaguely envisioning, and if it happens to come even partially true, that will make me happy.)
However, rather than accepting that he had simply misunderstood, like a normal human being at least attempting to understand the person he is debating, Guest deliberately and blatantly continued to strawman me, going so far as to accuse me of “misleading” him about my own views, acting as if he is some kind of telepath who knows what I think even better than I do.
Guest quoted me and wrote,
“The goal is not to stop humans from having unique preferences and aptitudes. The goal… or at least my main goal, and I suspect a lot of other people would at least partially agree with me … is to stop maniacs like King Leopold II from enforcing their preferences on others by means of extreme brutality.”
First of all, as a socialist your use of clear moral atrocities to make a point is misleading, since you *don’t* believe that it’s necessary to commit these kinds of atrocities – you actually believe that non-equitable outcomes are evil in and of themselves.
Second, if you try to prevent people from expressing their unique preferences and aptitudes, then you are fighting what it means to be human; Yet, if you permit the expression of unique preferences and aptitudes, then you logically allow unequitable outcomes, because differences create arbitrage opportunities that are logically available to some and not to others.
Thus, even when Guest does actually bother reading my attempts to his strawmans, it’s pointless. He has no qualms about pretending to be a telepath and accusing me of misleading him about my own views. It’s not like I’m even a powerful person like King Leopold II, and there is any example of my using power for hypocritical ends, since again, I’m not a powerful person: Guest is simply pretending like he is a telepath. IT IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO TRY TO EXPLAIN MY VIEWS TO SOMEONE WHO JUST ACCUSES ME OF “MISLEADING” HIM ABOUT MY OWN VIEWS. I believe this extreme level of strawmanning overlaps with gaslighting.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 3
Since Guest clearly didn’t have a clue what socialism was, I tried to explain,
A socialist is simply a person who believes that workers deserve human rights. If you agree with the statement, “Employers should not hit their employees,” then you are probably at least a little bit of a socialist. Now, since different people have different ideas of what human rights are, and about what should be done to fight for human rights, there are many different kinds of socialists.
However, since even a minimal definition of human rights should include the right to not be murdered without at least a trial by jury (or similiar procedure), committing mass murder is, by definition, not socialist, just as ens***ing millions of Africans is, by definition, not abolitionist. I have no doubt that there are mass murderers who have claimed to be socialists, just as King Leopold II claimed to be an abolitionist, but that does not mean they were actually socialists, it just means either they were liars or other liars had them so confused that they didn’t know what the term meant.
BS. A socialist is someone who believes that workers are logically exploited by employers because socialists believe that labor is the foundation of value – in effect, socialists believe they have rights to other people’s stuff.
Note that, if Guest really believed that his definition of socialism was the correct one, and mine was wrong, he should have, at a bare minimum, accepted that my definition of socialism was at least valid for my self-identity, and subsequently concluded that, although I self-identify as a socialist using my own definition, I do not meet his definition of a socialist. However, as is apparently from the other strawmanning examples, this is not what he did: instead, he tried to pretend that his definition of socialism was an accurate description of my beliefs, and that’s what makes raises this to the level of a strawman, rather than a simple disagreement over definitions.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 4
In a way, this was a continuation of strawman example number one. Even after I caught him not reading the example I gave, and subsequently writing a strawman response as if I’d given a completely different response, and even after he admitted to not bothering to read much of what I write, Guest continued to insist his strawman argument was accurate.
Socialists *do* think wage-labor *as such* is exploitive with or without someone stealing from a homesteader, and I’m correcting *that* misunderstanding.
Marx and certain other socialists have gone to great length to show how, in every instance they investigated, wage labor and other forms of exploitation was preceded by mass theft from peasant proprietors, or, if you prefer, homesteaders. If you don’t acknowledge that because you don’t have time to read, you aren’t correcting a misunderstanding, you’re fighting a strawman.
Note the difference between the real argument:
So far the empirical observations of myself and certain other socialists extend, wage labor is always preceded by mass theft from peasant proprietors. A social relation that only occurs in such unfree conditions is exploitation, and, so far as our empirical observations observe, wage labor only occurs under such unfree conditions. Therefore, wage labor can empirically be considered exploitative. Potential counter evidence would be if someone presented an example of wage labor occuring under genuinely free conditions, not preceded by mass theft.
And the strawman argument:
Socialist consider wage labor exploitative even if no one steals from a homesteader.
There is a different between believing that wage labor is exploitative even if no one steals from a homesteader, and believing that wage labor never occurs in the first place without theft from homesteaders.
Rather than accept my explanation, Guest continued strawmanning me, repeatedly attacking me with a quote-mining strawman, in spite of being corrected repeatedly.
Quote mining is when you quote someone out of context, in order to change the meaning of the quote.
I corrected Guest here:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042802
Here, in spite of repeatedly demonstrating THAT HE HAS NO INTENTION OF ACCURATELY REPRESENTING WHAT MY VIEWS EVEN ARE, Guest accused my world view of murdering tends and hundreds of thousands of people,
Your world view ends up murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of people all because you guys don’t understand that correlation doesn’t equal causation?!
Your worldview isn’t moral. It’s childish and insane.
I believe that, before you accuse someone of having a view that murders “tens and hundreds of thousands of people”, you should make sure that you accurately describe what a person’s view even is. However, Guest clearly has no intention of even trying to do that. However, this makes it apparent what Guest’s motive is for repeatedly STRAWMANNING me: he wishes to scapegoat me for tens of thousands of murders I had nothing to do with. Guest is engaged in a witch hunt, not a legitimate debate. He has no respect whatsoever for truth or justice.
Here, guest continued to quote me out of context, and even blatantly lied and claimed that he wasn’t doing so. It’s not like he didn’t read my correction. Having read it, he simply continued strawmanming me, showing that he is addicted to lying.
consultingbyrpm. [dot] om/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042838
And here I corrected him again here, and explained why deleting some of my words as he did served his strawman.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042847
Here guest blatantly lied and said that he wasn’t strawmanning me, even though he was and I had just caught him.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042853
And I explained yet again why is argument was a strawman:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042927
Guest’s repeated insistance that he wasn’t strawmanning me, even when I repeatedly explained to him that he was, shows that IT IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO CONTINUE DEBATING HIM. HIS EXTREME, REPEATED, PREMEDIDATED STRAWMANS RISE TO THE LEVEL OF GASLIGHTING. HE IS TRYING TO LIE TO ME REPEATEDLY ABOUT MY OWN OPINIONS.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 5:
Here, I wrote about how conqueror-landlords caused the Irish famine:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045597
Note that my comment says nothing at all about free markets. It’s about theft, and how mass theft caused a famine, not about free markets. If you click the link I provided, the link says nothing about free markets either.
Guest replied,
Once again, it was government intervention, not free markets, that was responsible for poverty and famine.
I never claimed that free markets caused the poverty and famine. I said that mass theft caused the poverty and famine, and went into detail on the form of mass theft in question. I didn’t say anything at all, one way or the other, about free markets.
Guest then proceeded to quote something that even seemed to agree with me a little bit, in so far as it referred to the Irish peasants as “landless serfs”, which I interpet to mean the author agreed with me that the Irish were being robbed, but which for the most part was not an actual reply to what I had written — although the author appeared to agree with me that the Irish were being robbed, at least in the quote given, he was primarily interested in discussing other aspects of the famine than the aspects I had discussed.
I explained here that Guest’s accusation that I was blaming the famine on free markets was a strawman:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html?replytocom=2045622#respond
And I explained here that this was the sort of strawman that Guest likes to make repeatedly,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045626
Essentially, it seems Guest really appears to argue with me over “free markets” or “free trade”. I didn’t want to argue on this topic, even before I got tired of reading his comments, because I consider the terms ambiguous, meaning too many different things to too many different people. Since I haven’t really expressed an opinion on “free markets” or “free trade” other than that the terms mean very different things to different people, but Guest really wants to debate me on them anyway, he simply fabricates a strawman position – namely, he claims I am against them, even when I am talking about something completely different, like mass theft. Essentially, he’s using a strawman argument to try to argue with me about a topic I don’t want to argue about, because I have little opinion about it, other than that it’s too ambiguous to be a good topic for debate.
One time, I did briefly assume that maybe Guest was using Edmund Dene Morel’s definition of a free market, but he quoted mined that disclaimer out of my quote when replying to me.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045690
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045694
Guest continued to reply with a strawman on the same theme,
You, yourself, literally believe that it’s a good thing for there to be central planning over an economy because you think that markets, left to themselves, cause poverty.
I explained here that this was a strawman, considering that “central planning” was a term that Guest and I could not even agree on a definiton for.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045699
And after thinking about that for a little bit, I decided I was tired of reading Guest’s comments anymore.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
I am tired of debating with someone who writes things like, “You, yourself, literally believe” following by a completely fabricated strawman. I am tired of debating with someone who can’t be bothered to read much of what I write before replying to it, and would rather imagine what I wrote than read what I wrote. I am tired of debating with someone who strawmans me to the point of gaslighting, pretending to be a telapath and accusing me of misleading him about my own beliefs. I am tired of debating with someone who quotes me out of context on purpose and refuses to be corrected even when I repeatedly point out that he quoted me out of context. I am tired of debating someone’s whose strawman arguments arise not from simple misunderstanding, but from a deliberate effort to gaslight me about my own beliefs. I do not have the time or the energy to continue to waste on this nonsense.
Tvtropes gives the following example of quote mining,
Suppose Bob, a famous critic, says that Tropers: The Movie “had the potential to be a great work of art in different hands, but the lead actor is a drug addict and the director had no idea what he was doing.” In the commercial, however, we hear that Bob has called the movie “[…] a great work of art[.]”
At the next Convention on Biological Diversity summit, world leaders plan to agree turning 30% of the Earth into “Protected Areas” by 2030.
Big conservation NGOs say this will mitigate climate change, reduce wildlife loss, enhance biodiversity and so save our environment. They are wrong.
Protected Areas will not save our planet. On the contrary, they will increase human suffering and so accelerate the destruction of the spaces they claim to protect because local opposition to them will grow. They have no effect on climate change at all, and have been shown to be generally poor at preventing wildlife loss.
It is vital that real solutions are put forward to address these urgent problems and that the real cause – exploitation of natural resources for profit and growing overconsumption, driven by the Global North – is properly acknowledged and discussed. But this is unlikely to happen because there are too many vested interests that depend on existing consumption patterns continuing.
Who will suffer if 30% of Earth is “protected”? It won’t be those who have overwhelmingly caused the climate crisis, but rather indigenous and other local people in the Global South who play little or no part in the environment’s destruction. Kicking them off their land to create Protected Areas won’t help the climate: Indigenous peoples are the best guardians of the natural world and an essential part of human diversity that is a key to protecting biodiversity.
We must stop the push for 30%.
The implication being that “Big Green” isn’t the same as “real green”.
“The implication being that “Big Green” isn’t the same as “real green”.”
If “real green” means believing in “clean energy”, then they are pretty much the same.
Every lefty needs to watch the entirely lefty documentary “Planet of the Humans”, then come back to the table so we can correct their horrendously flawed conclusion that increased populations and population growth is economically destructive.
Lefties will not walk away from this documentary thinking that “green energy” is a solution to anything.
Planet Of The Humans | Full Movie
[www]https://www.bitchute.com/video/KQnVEMOOYuJd/
Youtube censorship removes Michael Moore’s documentary – But film is now available to watch on Bitchute
[www]https://www.climatedepot.com/2020/05/27/youtube-censorship-removes-michael-moores-documentary-but-film-is-now-moved-to-bitchute/
“Among the environmental champions leading the charge against Planet of the Humans has been Josh Fox, the Oscar-nominated director of Gasland.”
“Gasland” being one of @”random person”‘s favorite documentaries to post in trying to poo-poo free markets.
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
Because Guest is continuing to reply to my comments even though I have made it repeatedly clear I am no longer interested in debating a REMORSELESS STRAWMANNER like him, I am updating my standardized response to list five times when GUEST BLATANTLY STRAWMANNED ME.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 1
I gave an example from the book “Blood and Earth” by Kevin Bales, a real example (Kevin Bales travelled around the planet, to multiple continents, to find real examples) in which a farmer homesteaded a piece of land, planting crops on it, and then a thieving capitalist came along, claimed to own the land that the farmer had homesteaded, and said the farmer could work as a wage laborer for the thieving capitalist. I explained how this form of exploitation was not itself sl*very, but it made the farmer more vulnerable to sl*very, and he did indeed end up in sl*very later in the story.
It was in this comment:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040606
Guest then blatantly strawmanned me.
Since, as an employee, you’re not producing something on your own, and since you’ve obviously decided that you don’t want to plant a garden and make your own clothes when it costs you less in terms of opportunities foregone to go work for a business owner, then that means you have *voluntarily* chosen to work for a wage. That is not exploitation.
I was not able to read the strawman initially, since there was a delay before the comment was approved to be viewed publicly.
When I did finally read it, after it was approved so I could actually read it, I replied:
The fact that you’re writing this tells me that you didn’t bother reading the example I provided. In the example I provided, the employee is producing something on his own without any assistance from the employer, and he DID IN FACT PLANT A GARDEN. The depraved employer in the example given did absolutely nothing other than to claim to own the products of the employee’s labor by virtue of an alleged legal title (which was never actually proven), i.e. the employer was simply a thief.
And I drew Guest’s attention to said reply here:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042671
Even after I caught Guest’s strawman and managed to point out to him that I caught it, he displayed extreme entitlement, claiming that his point, even though he had built his argument on a strawman, was the one that mattered, as if strawman arguments ought to take precedent over real ones.
You can’t blame wage-labor for the theft that occurs in your example. That’s the point.
Guest explained the blatant strawmanning in this case by admitting that he didn’t bother reading many of my comments properly,
Dude, you write a lot of stuff. I come back and there’s often four responses. I’m not going to read through them all because I have other things I’d like to do with my time.
This is one of the reasons I do not consider it worth it to read and write specific replies to Guest’s comments anymore: it’s a COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO TRY TO EXPLAIN MY VIEWS TO SOMEONE WHO CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO READ THEM BEFORE WRITING A REPLY. Instead of taking the time to actually read what I write, Guest would rather imagine what he thinks I wrote, and reply to that instead. By not spending time reading my replies, and instead taking the shortcut of imagining what he thinks I wrote, GUEST IS ABLE TO SPEW OUT LIES FAR FASTER THAN I CAN HOPE TO CORRECT THEM.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER TWO
Guest made the following strawman argument, demonstrating that he doesn’t know what socialism even is,
There is no possible version of a “new socialist man” where humans do not have unique preferences and aptitudes.
I assumed this was a misunderstanding, probably caused by a load of propaganda that misrepresents what socialism is, and attempted to correct it,
The goal is not to stop humans from having unique preferences and aptitudes. The goal… or at least my main goal, and I suspect a lot of other people would at least partially agree with me … is to stop maniacs like King Leopold II from enforcing their preferences on others by means of extreme brutality. (Not that I hope to single-handedly accomplish such a thing. But at least, that is an optimistic future I am capable of vaguely envisioning, and if it happens to come even partially true, that will make me happy.)
However, rather than accepting that he had simply misunderstood, like a normal human being at least attempting to understand the person he is debating, Guest deliberately and blatantly continued to strawman me, going so far as to accuse me of “misleading” him about my own views, acting as if he is some kind of telepath who knows what I think even better than I do.
Guest quoted me and wrote,
“The goal is not to stop humans from having unique preferences and aptitudes. The goal… or at least my main goal, and I suspect a lot of other people would at least partially agree with me … is to stop maniacs like King Leopold II from enforcing their preferences on others by means of extreme brutality.”
First of all, as a socialist your use of clear moral atrocities to make a point is misleading, since you *don’t* believe that it’s necessary to commit these kinds of atrocities – you actually believe that non-equitable outcomes are evil in and of themselves.
Second, if you try to prevent people from expressing their unique preferences and aptitudes, then you are fighting what it means to be human; Yet, if you permit the expression of unique preferences and aptitudes, then you logically allow unequitable outcomes, because differences create arbitrage opportunities that are logically available to some and not to others.
Thus, even when Guest does actually bother reading my attempts to his strawmans, it’s pointless. He has no qualms about pretending to be a telepath and accusing me of misleading him about my own views. It’s not like I’m even a powerful person like King Leopold II, and there is any example of my using power for hypocritical ends, since again, I’m not a powerful person: Guest is simply pretending like he is a telepath. IT IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO TRY TO EXPLAIN MY VIEWS TO SOMEONE WHO JUST ACCUSES ME OF “MISLEADING” HIM ABOUT MY OWN VIEWS. I believe this extreme level of strawmanning overlaps with gaslighting.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 3
Since Guest clearly didn’t have a clue what socialism was, I tried to explain,
A socialist is simply a person who believes that workers deserve human rights. If you agree with the statement, “Employers should not hit their employees,” then you are probably at least a little bit of a socialist. Now, since different people have different ideas of what human rights are, and about what should be done to fight for human rights, there are many different kinds of socialists.
However, since even a minimal definition of human rights should include the right to not be murdered without at least a trial by jury (or similiar procedure), committing mass murder is, by definition, not socialist, just as ens***ing millions of Africans is, by definition, not abolitionist. I have no doubt that there are mass murderers who have claimed to be socialists, just as King Leopold II claimed to be an abolitionist, but that does not mean they were actually socialists, it just means either they were liars or other liars had them so confused that they didn’t know what the term meant.
BS. A socialist is someone who believes that workers are logically exploited by employers because socialists believe that labor is the foundation of value – in effect, socialists believe they have rights to other people’s stuff.
Note that, if Guest really believed that his definition of socialism was the correct one, and mine was wrong, he should have, at a bare minimum, accepted that my definition of socialism was at least valid for my self-identity, and subsequently concluded that, although I self-identify as a socialist using my own definition, I do not meet his definition of a socialist. However, as is apparently from the other strawmanning examples, this is not what he did: instead, he tried to pretend that his definition of socialism was an accurate description of my beliefs, and that’s what makes raises this to the level of a strawman, rather than a simple disagreement over definitions.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 4
In a way, this was a continuation of strawman example number one. Even after I caught him not reading the example I gave, and subsequently writing a strawman response as if I’d given a completely different response, and even after he admitted to not bothering to read much of what I write, Guest continued to insist his strawman argument was accurate.
Socialists *do* think wage-labor *as such* is exploitive with or without someone stealing from a homesteader, and I’m correcting *that* misunderstanding.
Marx and certain other socialists have gone to great length to show how, in every instance they investigated, wage labor and other forms of exploitation was preceded by mass theft from peasant proprietors, or, if you prefer, homesteaders. If you don’t acknowledge that because you don’t have time to read, you aren’t correcting a misunderstanding, you’re fighting a strawman.
Note the difference between the real argument:
So far the empirical observations of myself and certain other socialists extend, wage labor is always preceded by mass theft from peasant proprietors. A social relation that only occurs in such unfree conditions is exploitation, and, so far as our empirical observations observe, wage labor only occurs under such unfree conditions. Therefore, wage labor can empirically be considered exploitative. Potential counter evidence would be if someone presented an example of wage labor occuring under genuinely free conditions, not preceded by mass theft.
And the strawman argument:
Socialist consider wage labor exploitative even if no one steals from a homesteader.
There is a different between believing that wage labor is exploitative even if no one steals from a homesteader, and believing that wage labor never occurs in the first place without theft from homesteaders.
Rather than accept my explanation, Guest continued strawmanning me, repeatedly attacking me with a quote-mining strawman, in spite of being corrected repeatedly.
Quote mining is when you quote someone out of context, in order to change the meaning of the quote.
I corrected Guest here:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042802
Here, in spite of repeatedly demonstrating THAT HE HAS NO INTENTION OF ACCURATELY REPRESENTING WHAT MY VIEWS EVEN ARE, Guest accused my world view of murdering tends and hundreds of thousands of people,
Your world view ends up murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of people all because you guys don’t understand that correlation doesn’t equal causation?!
Your worldview isn’t moral. It’s childish and insane.
I believe that, before you accuse someone of having a view that murders “tens and hundreds of thousands of people”, you should make sure that you accurately describe what a person’s view even is. However, Guest clearly has no intention of even trying to do that. However, this makes it apparent what Guest’s motive is for repeatedly STRAWMANNING me: he wishes to scapegoat me for tens of thousands of murders I had nothing to do with. Guest is engaged in a witch hunt, not a legitimate debate. He has no respect whatsoever for truth or justice.
Here guest blatantly lied and said that he wasn’t strawmanning me, even though he was and I had just caught him.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042853
And I explained yet again why is argument was a strawman:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042927
Guest’s repeated insistance that he wasn’t strawmanning me, even when I repeatedly explained to him that he was, shows that IT IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO CONTINUE DEBATING HIM. HIS EXTREME, REPEATED, PREMEDIDATED STRAWMANS RISE TO THE LEVEL OF GASLIGHTING. HE IS TRYING TO LIE TO ME REPEATEDLY ABOUT MY OWN OPINIONS.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 5:
Here, I wrote about how conqueror-landlords caused the Irish famine:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045597
Note that my comment says nothing at all about free markets. It’s about theft, and how mass theft caused a famine, not about free markets. If you click the link I provided, the link says nothing about free markets either.
Guest replied,
Once again, it was government intervention, not free markets, that was responsible for poverty and famine.
I never claimed that free markets caused the poverty and famine. I said that mass theft caused the poverty and famine, and went into detail on the form of mass theft in question. I didn’t say anything at all, one way or the other, about free markets.
Guest then proceeded to quote something that even seemed to agree with me a little bit, in so far as it referred to the Irish peasants as “landless serfs”, which I interpet to mean the author agreed with me that the Irish were being robbed, but which for the most part was not an actual reply to what I had written — although the author appeared to agree with me that the Irish were being robbed, at least in the quote given, he was primarily interested in discussing other aspects of the famine than the aspects I had discussed.
I explained here that Guest’s accusation that I was blaming the famine on free markets was a strawman:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html?replytocom=2045622#respond
And I explained here that this was the sort of strawman that Guest likes to make repeatedly,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045626
Essentially, it seems Guest really appears to argue with me over “free markets” or “free trade”. I didn’t want to argue on this topic, even before I got tired of reading his comments, because I consider the terms ambiguous, meaning too many different things to too many different people. Since I haven’t really expressed an opinion on “free markets” or “free trade” other than that the terms mean very different things to different people, but Guest really wants to debate me on them anyway, he simply fabricates a strawman position – namely, he claims I am against them, even when I am talking about something completely different, like mass theft. Essentially, he’s using a strawman argument to try to argue with me about a topic I don’t want to argue about, because I have little opinion about it, other than that it’s too ambiguous to be a good topic for debate.
One time, I did briefly assume that maybe Guest was using Edmund Dene Morel’s definition of a free market, but he quoted mined that disclaimer out of my quote when replying to me.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045690
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045694
Guest continued to reply with a strawman on the same theme,
You, yourself, literally believe that it’s a good thing for there to be central planning over an economy because you think that markets, left to themselves, cause poverty.
I explained here that this was a strawman, considering that “central planning” was a term that Guest and I could not even agree on a definiton for.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045699
And after thinking about that for a little bit, I decided I was tired of reading Guest’s comments anymore.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
I am tired of debating with someone who writes things like, “You, yourself, literally believe” following by a completely fabricated strawman. I am tired of debating with someone who can’t be bothered to read much of what I write before replying to it, and would rather imagine what I wrote than read what I wrote. I am tired of debating with someone who strawmans me to the point of gaslighting, pretending to be a telapath and accusing me of misleading him about my own beliefs. I am tired of debating with someone who quotes me out of context on purpose and refuses to be corrected even when I repeatedly point out that he quoted me out of context. I am tired of debating someone’s whose strawman arguments arise not from simple misunderstanding, but from a deliberate effort to gaslight me about my own beliefs. I do not have the time or the energy to continue to waste on this nonsense.
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
Because Guest is continuing to reply to my comments even though I have made it repeatedly clear I am no longer interested in debating a REMORSELESS STRAWMANNER like him, I am updating my standardized response to list five times when GUEST BLATANTLY STRAWMANNED ME.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 1
I gave an example from the book “Blood and Earth” by Kevin Bales, a real example (Kevin Bales travelled around the planet, to multiple continents, to find real examples) in which a farmer homesteaded a piece of land, planting crops on it, and then a thieving capitalist came along, claimed to own the land that the farmer had homesteaded, and said the farmer could work as a wage laborer for the thieving capitalist. I explained how this form of exploitation was not itself sl*very, but it made the farmer more vulnerable to sl*very, and he did indeed end up in sl*very later in the story.
It was in this comment:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040606
Guest then blatantly strawmanned me.
Since, as an employee, you’re not producing something on your own, and since you’ve obviously decided that you don’t want to plant a garden and make your own clothes when it costs you less in terms of opportunities foregone to go work for a business owner, then that means you have *voluntarily* chosen to work for a wage. That is not exploitation.
I was not able to read the strawman initially, since there was a delay before the comment was approved to be viewed publicly.
When I did finally read it, after it was approved so I could actually read it, I replied:
The fact that you’re writing this tells me that you didn’t bother reading the example I provided. In the example I provided, the employee is producing something on his own without any assistance from the employer, and he DID IN FACT PLANT A GARDEN. The depraved employer in the example given did absolutely nothing other than to claim to own the products of the employee’s labor by virtue of an alleged legal title (which was never actually proven), i.e. the employer was simply a thief.
And I drew Guest’s attention to said reply here:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042671
Even after I caught Guest’s strawman and managed to point out to him that I caught it, he displayed extreme entitlement, claiming that his point, even though he had built his argument on a strawman, was the one that mattered, as if strawman arguments ought to take precedent over real ones.
You can’t blame wage-labor for the theft that occurs in your example. That’s the point.
Guest explained the blatant strawmanning in this case by admitting that he didn’t bother reading many of my comments properly,
Dude, you write a lot of stuff. I come back and there’s often four responses. I’m not going to read through them all because I have other things I’d like to do with my time.
This is one of the reasons I do not consider it worth it to read and write specific replies to Guest’s comments anymore: it’s a COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO TRY TO EXPLAIN MY VIEWS TO SOMEONE WHO CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO READ THEM BEFORE WRITING A REPLY. Instead of taking the time to actually read what I write, Guest would rather imagine what he thinks I wrote, and reply to that instead. By not spending time reading my replies, and instead taking the shortcut of imagining what he thinks I wrote, GUEST IS ABLE TO SPEW OUT LIES FAR FASTER THAN I CAN HOPE TO CORRECT THEM.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER TWO
Guest made the following strawman argument, demonstrating that he doesn’t know what socialism even is,
There is no possible version of a “new socialist man” where humans do not have unique preferences and aptitudes.
I assumed this was a misunderstanding, probably caused by a load of propaganda that misrepresents what socialism is, and attempted to correct it,
The goal is not to stop humans from having unique preferences and aptitudes. The goal… or at least my main goal, and I suspect a lot of other people would at least partially agree with me … is to stop maniacs like King Leopold II from enforcing their preferences on others by means of extreme brutality. (Not that I hope to single-handedly accomplish such a thing. But at least, that is an optimistic future I am capable of vaguely envisioning, and if it happens to come even partially true, that will make me happy.)
However, rather than accepting that he had simply misunderstood, like a normal human being at least attempting to understand the person he is debating, Guest deliberately and blatantly continued to strawman me, going so far as to accuse me of “misleading” him about my own views, acting as if he is some kind of telepath who knows what I think even better than I do.
Guest quoted me and wrote,
“The goal is not to stop humans from having unique preferences and aptitudes. The goal… or at least my main goal, and I suspect a lot of other people would at least partially agree with me … is to stop maniacs like King Leopold II from enforcing their preferences on others by means of extreme brutality.”
First of all, as a socialist your use of clear moral atrocities to make a point is misleading, since you *don’t* believe that it’s necessary to commit these kinds of atrocities – you actually believe that non-equitable outcomes are evil in and of themselves.
Second, if you try to prevent people from expressing their unique preferences and aptitudes, then you are fighting what it means to be human; Yet, if you permit the expression of unique preferences and aptitudes, then you logically allow unequitable outcomes, because differences create arbitrage opportunities that are logically available to some and not to others.
Thus, even when Guest does actually bother reading my attempts to his strawmans, it’s pointless. He has no qualms about pretending to be a telepath and accusing me of misleading him about my own views. It’s not like I’m even a powerful person like King Leopold II, and there is any example of my using power for hypocritical ends, since again, I’m not a powerful person: Guest is simply pretending like he is a telepath. IT IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO TRY TO EXPLAIN MY VIEWS TO SOMEONE WHO JUST ACCUSES ME OF “MISLEADING” HIM ABOUT MY OWN VIEWS. I believe this extreme level of strawmanning overlaps with gaslighting.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 3
Since Guest clearly didn’t have a clue what socialism was, I tried to explain,
A socialist is simply a person who believes that workers deserve human rights. If you agree with the statement, “Employers should not hit their employees,” then you are probably at least a little bit of a socialist. Now, since different people have different ideas of what human rights are, and about what should be done to fight for human rights, there are many different kinds of socialists.
However, since even a minimal definition of human rights should include the right to not be murdered without at least a trial by jury (or similiar procedure), committing mass murder is, by definition, not socialist, just as ens***ing millions of Africans is, by definition, not abolitionist. I have no doubt that there are mass murderers who have claimed to be socialists, just as King Leopold II claimed to be an abolitionist, but that does not mean they were actually socialists, it just means either they were liars or other liars had them so confused that they didn’t know what the term meant.
BS. A socialist is someone who believes that workers are logically exploited by employers because socialists believe that labor is the foundation of value – in effect, socialists believe they have rights to other people’s stuff.
Note that, if Guest really believed that his definition of socialism was the correct one, and mine was wrong, he should have, at a bare minimum, accepted that my definition of socialism was at least valid for my self-identity, and subsequently concluded that, although I self-identify as a socialist using my own definition, I do not meet his definition of a socialist. However, as is apparently from the other strawmanning examples, this is not what he did: instead, he tried to pretend that his definition of socialism was an accurate description of my beliefs, and that’s what makes raises this to the level of a strawman, rather than a simple disagreement over definitions.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 4
In a way, this was a continuation of strawman example number one. Even after I caught him not reading the example I gave, and subsequently writing a strawman response as if I’d given a completely different response, and even after he admitted to not bothering to read much of what I write, Guest continued to insist his strawman argument was accurate.
Socialists *do* think wage-labor *as such* is exploitive with or without someone stealing from a homesteader, and I’m correcting *that* misunderstanding.
Marx and certain other socialists have gone to great length to show how, in every instance they investigated, wage labor and other forms of exploitation was preceded by mass theft from peasant proprietors, or, if you prefer, homesteaders. If you don’t acknowledge that because you don’t have time to read, you aren’t correcting a misunderstanding, you’re fighting a strawman.
Note the difference between the real argument:
So far the empirical observations of myself and certain other socialists extend, wage labor is always preceded by mass theft from peasant proprietors. A social relation that only occurs in such unfree conditions is exploitation, and, so far as our empirical observations observe, wage labor only occurs under such unfree conditions. Therefore, wage labor can empirically be considered exploitative. Potential counter evidence would be if someone presented an example of wage labor occuring under genuinely free conditions, not preceded by mass theft.
And the strawman argument:
Socialist consider wage labor exploitative even if no one steals from a homesteader.
There is a different between believing that wage labor is exploitative even if no one steals from a homesteader, and believing that wage labor never occurs in the first place without theft from homesteaders.
Rather than accept my explanation, Guest continued strawmanning me, repeatedly attacking me with a quote-mining strawman, in spite of being corrected repeatedly.
Quote mining is when you quote someone out of context, in order to change the meaning of the quote.
I corrected Guest here:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042802
Here, in spite of repeatedly demonstrating THAT HE HAS NO INTENTION OF ACCURATELY REPRESENTING WHAT MY VIEWS EVEN ARE, Guest accused my world view of murdering tends and hundreds of thousands of people,
Your world view ends up murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of people all because you guys don’t understand that correlation doesn’t equal causation?!
Your worldview isn’t moral. It’s childish and insane.
I believe that, before you accuse someone of having a view that murders “tens and hundreds of thousands of people”, you should make sure that you accurately describe what a person’s view even is. However, Guest clearly has no intention of even trying to do that. However, this makes it apparent what Guest’s motive is for repeatedly STRAWMANNING me: he wishes to scapegoat me for tens of thousands of murders I had nothing to do with. Guest is engaged in a witch hunt, not a legitimate debate. He has no respect whatsoever for truth or justice.
Here, guest continued to quote me out of context, and even blatantly lied and claimed that he wasn’t doing so. It’s not like he didn’t read my correction. Having read it, he simply continued strawmanming me, showing that he is addicted to lying.
consultingbyrpm. [dot] om/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042838
And here I corrected him again here, and explained why deleting some of my words as he did served his strawman.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042847
Here guest blatantly lied and said that he wasn’t strawmanning me, even though he was and I had just caught him.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042853
And I explained yet again why is argument was a strawman:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042927
Guest’s repeated insistance that he wasn’t strawmanning me, even when I repeatedly explained to him that he was, shows that IT IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO CONTINUE DEBATING HIM. HIS EXTREME, REPEATED, PREMEDIDATED STRAWMANS RISE TO THE LEVEL OF GASLIGHTING. HE IS TRYING TO LIE TO ME REPEATEDLY ABOUT MY OWN OPINIONS.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 5:
Here, I wrote about how conqueror-landlords caused the Irish famine:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045597
Note that my comment says nothing at all about free markets. It’s about theft, and how mass theft caused a famine, not about free markets. If you click the link I provided, the link says nothing about free markets either.
Guest replied,
Once again, it was government intervention, not free markets, that was responsible for poverty and famine.
I never claimed that free markets caused the poverty and famine. I said that mass theft caused the poverty and famine, and went into detail on the form of mass theft in question. I didn’t say anything at all, one way or the other, about free markets.
Guest then proceeded to quote something that even seemed to agree with me a little bit, in so far as it referred to the Irish peasants as “landless serfs”, which I interpet to mean the author agreed with me that the Irish were being robbed, but which for the most part was not an actual reply to what I had written — although the author appeared to agree with me that the Irish were being robbed, at least in the quote given, he was primarily interested in discussing other aspects of the famine than the aspects I had discussed.
I explained here that Guest’s accusation that I was blaming the famine on free markets was a strawman:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html?replytocom=2045622#respond
And I explained here that this was the sort of strawman that Guest likes to make repeatedly,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045626
Essentially, it seems Guest really appears to argue with me over “free markets” or “free trade”. I didn’t want to argue on this topic, even before I got tired of reading his comments, because I consider the terms ambiguous, meaning too many different things to too many different people. Since I haven’t really expressed an opinion on “free markets” or “free trade” other than that the terms mean very different things to different people, but Guest really wants to debate me on them anyway, he simply fabricates a strawman position – namely, he claims I am against them, even when I am talking about something completely different, like mass theft. Essentially, he’s using a strawman argument to try to argue with me about a topic I don’t want to argue about, because I have little opinion about it, other than that it’s too ambiguous to be a good topic for debate.
One time, I did briefly assume that maybe Guest was using Edmund Dene Morel’s definition of a free market, but he quoted mined that disclaimer out of my quote when replying to me.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045690
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045694
Guest continued to reply with a strawman on the same theme,
You, yourself, literally believe that it’s a good thing for there to be central planning over an economy because you think that markets, left to themselves, cause poverty.
I explained here that this was a strawman, considering that “central planning” was a term that Guest and I could not even agree on a definiton for.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045699
And after thinking about that for a little bit, I decided I was tired of reading Guest’s comments anymore.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
I am tired of debating with someone who writes things like, “You, yourself, literally believe” following by a completely fabricated strawman. I am tired of debating with someone who can’t be bothered to read much of what I write before replying to it, and would rather imagine what I wrote than read what I wrote. I am tired of debating with someone who strawmans me to the point of gaslighting, pretending to be a telapath and accusing me of misleading him about my own beliefs. I am tired of debating with someone who quotes me out of context on purpose and refuses to be corrected even when I repeatedly point out that he quoted me out of context. I am tired of debating someone’s whose strawman arguments arise not from simple misunderstanding, but from a deliberate effort to gaslight me about my own beliefs. I do not have the time or the energy to continue to waste on this nonsense.
In contrast, if a few experts working for the federal government try to dictate the specific operations that need to be changed, it will force the whole system to rely on the limited knowledge of a handful of people. Moreover, the incentives won’t be the same, as federal officials don’t worry about a company’s profitability as much as its shareholders do.
I think maybe you should have put “experts” in quotation marks. You seem to acknowledge that they aren’t real experts when you speak of “the limited knowledge of a handful of people” later in the sentence.
But I don’t think the shareholders are real experts either.
I think probably the real experts are the people getting robbed, assaulted, battered, and murdered by the fossil fuel companies.
Interestingly, in the Poison Fire documentary, a Nigerian court ordered Shell to stop its murderous gas flaring, and Shell blamed the Nigerian government for not giving it subsidies, to explain why it was unable to follow the court’s instructions and stop gas flaring. Note that since the Nigerian court is apparently completely separate from the Nigerian military, and the Nigerian military, or at least part of it, apparently works for Shell, the Nigerian court has no actual way to enforce its ruling. I guess it’s basically an anarchist court, going against the will of the military!
This shows a severe misunderstanding of responsibility for mass murder on the part of the Shell representative. No one has any responsibility to pay Shell to stop committing mass murder. Shell has the responsibility to stop committing mass murder (and also to pay reparations, and also to instruct the individuals responsible for the mass murder to turn themselves over to the families and tribes of the murder victims for judgement… but, firstly, to cease and desist committing mass murder).
I AM A WEALTHY NIGERIAN BUSINESSMAN WITH POWERFUL CONTACTS IN ROYAL DUTCH SHELL AND ALSO THE UNITED NATIONS. DESPITE BEING EXTREMELY SUCCESSFUL, FOR INEXPLICABLE REASONS I NEED TO SEND THE SUM OF ONE MILLION US DOLLARS ($1,000,000) TO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT, EVEN THOUGH I HAVE NEVER MET YOU.
THIS IS NOT CORRUPTION, I SWEAR IT, AND EVEN IF PERHAPS IT COULD BE A TINY BIT SHIFTY, YOU CAN DO THE RIGHT THING AND KEEP QUIET ABOUT IT, MKAY?
DON’T LISTEN TO THE GUARDIAN ABOUT WHO OWNS THE OIL, WE BEAT THE BIAFRANS FAIR AND SQUARE! NOR AM I IN ANY WAY A STOOGE OF THE OIL COMPANIES. I RUN A VERY PROFITABLE AND FULLY LEGITIMATE EMAIL MARKETING BUSINESS. THE MAIN EXPORT INDUSTRY OF NIGERIA IS EMAILS.
Bob Murphy wrote,
I realize you are just characterizing someone else’s argument, and not making this argument yourself, but in any case, the argument in question sounds flawed. Unless the carbon tax funds are specifically set aside in a fund to help victims of fossil fuel violence (people with poisoned wellwater, poisoned farmland, etc.), and that fund is managed in a democratic way that gives victims of fossil fuel violence a full voice, the government officials risk incentivizing themselves to protect the immorality, perhaps putting down protests or engaging in other acts of repression, in order to keep receiving the carbon tax money. Essentially, the officials are taking a share of the blood money.
It’s kind of like how, if a person was to knowingly accept Mafia money, and didn’t make a commitment to himself or herself to only spend that money helping Mafia victims, that person would be incentivizing himself or herself to assist Mafia violence. (It is also possible the Mafia might pressure the person to help, e.g. “hey, you accepted our money, now you have to do something for us.”)
Another flaw in the argument in question is that no tax is sufficient to make fossil fuel companies “take full account of the consequences of their actions”. (Did anyone actually claim this? But in any case….) The fossil fuel companies are getting away with mass assault and battery and mass murder. No amount of money can bring the dead back to life, and it is doubtful whether any amount of money can heal those made sick by their actions.
For information about how the oil industry gets away with mass murder in Nigeria, please see:
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/poison-fire/
For information about how the fossil fuel industry gest away with mass robbery in the United States, please see the documentary “Split Estate”.
For information about how the fossil fuel industry gets away with mass assault and battery (and probably mass murder) in the United States, please see the documentaries “Gasland” and “Gasland 2”.
And for information about how fracking is linked to rape against women, please see this article:
grist [dot] org/living/fracking-linked-to-rape-meth-addiction-and-stds/
Also, I realize your article was primarily about carbon tax, not cap and trade, you did at least briefly mention cap and trade, and there’s an article hear which links a carbon offset program (presumably the sort incentivized by cap and trade) to an extremely violent mass land theft in Uganda.
https://redd-monitor.org/2011/09/23/ugandan-farmers-kicked-off-their-land-for-new-forests-companys-carbon-project/
If Tel reads this, there’s a short 5-minute-ish video here in which some Sengwer environmentalists get to talk, and I think they know what they are talking about much more than than the so-called “environmentalists” favored by Australian media:
https://redd-monitor.org/2020/10/01/eu-scraps-us35-million-conservation-and-climate-change-programme-in-kenya-over-forced-evictions/
For context, see this comment, and the one before it:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/lse-climate-economics-expert-liar-or-stupid.html#comment-2031158
Thanks, I watched it. I’m in agreement that corruption has crept into pretty much the entire “Climate Change” industry from the science to the government funding and the programs that solve a non-existent problem using central planning.
The saying is that foreign aid means taking money from poor people in rich countries, then giving the money to rich people in poor countries. The aid recipients inevitably buy guns and hire soldiers because they understand that being wealthy necessitates being able to defend one’s wealth. In Kenya the wealth is mostly from tourism and those tourists already have an idea of what they think Africa should look like, with parks and wildlife and their romantic version of “The Environment (TM)” so that’s what the government of Kenya is expected to deliver.
Who is the real environmentalist? The villagers with their huts and animals claim they are the rightful custodians of the forest … while the government parks officials with their wardens and their police claim that the law of Kenya applies and you need whatever fiddly permit they want to issue or not issue. Both sides claim the same thing, which is ownership of the land … who adjudicates? The rich first-world tourists also come along claiming to be real environmentalists, paying their saved up money to see an elephant or a lion or some big, exciting wild animal like that … they don’t want to see goat herders in mud huts.
Anyhow, thanks for the video, I will keep the link and pass it around a bit … at least it does illustrate the problem.
By the way, I’ve been in the tech industry for a long time and I’ve seen a lot of people who thought they had a good stable income find themselves “evicted” in the sense that what they used to have they don’t have anymore. Some guy invents a word processor and all the typists lose their wages. Another guy upgrades that to desktop publishing and all the typesetters and lino-printers lose their wages. Elon Musk thinks he is going to invent a self driving robot and then all the truck drivers and bus drivers are screwed … I don’t think he is genuinely smart enough to achieve that, but sooner or later someone will do.
The reason the African governments can be bribed by wealthy Europeans and Americans (rather than the other way around) is because Europeans and Americans invented a lot of extraordinary knacky things … including a lot of highly efficient weapons. Some guy invents a rifle (Benjamin Robins, “New Principles of Gunnery” ground breaking book, he was a student of none other than Isaac Newton), and now rifles exist, the people with only bows and arrows are suddenly in a lot of trouble. Another guy invents an F-15 and now if you want to keep your property you are also gonna want something at least as good as that F-15.
See what I’m getting at here? The world changes, and after that you are no longer living in the old reality, you are living in the new reality … and you might still have the same property rights, or you might not. Quite often not.
I don’t really have an answer to it … ask a priest or something. So the CO2 level goes up and now the plants grow faster, which is good for people who ultimately derive their food from plants (that’s all of us) but it’s probably also bad for someone, somewhere who might lose a bit of land to rising sea levels. New farmland will probably become arable in Siberia … while they are telling us that farms will dry out in Australia (although it has not happened yet, Australia gets plenty of rain, I was sitting trapped by floods a few months back, and now I’m sitting trapped by soldiers and police … having tried both I would choose the flood for sure).
Now we have environmentalists telling us they decided the world should never change, unless it’s to their liking. Yeah OK, whatever you say Mr Environmentalist, whoever you are.
Just leaving this to acknowledge that I read your comment, but am taking my time composing a reply.
Tel wrote,
If you want an answer to another human rights problem (not this one specifically), in particular, a human rights problem in Liberia where both government soldiers and rebel soldiers were running around raping and murdering the people, then the documentary you should watch is “Pray the Devil Back to Hell”. It describes how a bunch of pacifist women defeated both the raping, murdering government troops and the raping, murdering rebel troops and won the Liberian Civil War, and can be watched for free online on Vimeo.
https://vimeo.com/188872289
Disclaimer: Please understand that I mean pacifist in Machiavellian terms, not strict Tolstoyan terms.
I find it a very uplifting documentary about a lot of very brave pacifist women who accomplished something that many would say was impossible. However, obviously, it if they achieved it, it wasn’t impossible; the people in question were merely incorrect in their estimation of what is possible.
(For an example of someone who would probably judge what the pacifist women in Liberia achieved to be impossible, see Kathleen Parker, who wrote on the Chicago Tribune that, “Pacifism is nice, but war doesn’t care” and “Fighting back in this case is an act of purest logic: Kill or be killed. It doesn’t get any clearer than that.”)
chicagotribune [dot] com/news/ct-xpm-2001-11-28-0111280061-story.html
Tel wrote,
Yeah… grassroots activists are often good people, but industry and bureaucratic government organizations have a tendency to corrupt ideas from the grassroots.
Also, a lot of university/college trained “scientists” seem to be a bunch of paternalists — I think that’s the word for someone who claims to know what’s good for oppressed people better than they do? Anyway, assuming by use of the word “paternalist” is correct… the paternalism of Western, college/university-educated “scientists” has long been used to rationalise atrocities. (E.g. the forced labor regime and forced medical experimentation in the Belgian Congo.
Maryinez Lyons writes in “The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire” (note: Zaire is the name that Mobutu gave to the Congo),
Maryinez discusses the forced medical experimentation eslewhere in the book… basically, in the name of the paternalistic “civilizing mission”, Western academics defended a system of ensl*vement, murder, rape, forced famine, an forced disease.
Essentially, paternalist Western academics who ignore the wishes and wisdom of the people affected by their recommended policies should not be taken seriously.
Tel wrote,
In my opinion, the villagers with their huts are the real environmentalists.
Also, the villagers might technically be claiming stewardship, not ownership. I don’t know for sure in this particular case, but a lot of indigenous people seem to claim stewardship rather than ownership, if informed about the distinction between the words.
See for example, “In the Indigenous world view, we do not own the land. We are stewards of the land, our Mother Earth. How can we own our Mother? Rather, we respect and protect our Mother.”
ualberta [dot] ca/newtrail/ideas/understanding-treaties-is-essential-to-understanding.html?fb_comment_id=3797300540307001_3881210741915980
My interpretation of such statements is that many indigenous people believe that they have some but not all of the rights generally associated with the Western concept of “ownership”. Specifically, they believe they have those rights which are not in conflict with natural law. (Please note this is my interpretation; I am saying what that quote means to me. It is possible that the author might not agree with my interpretation.) I more or less agree with this, although I also realize that different people may have different interpretations of natural law.
And example of how an idea of stewardship varies from an idea of ownership, consider the fictional characters Calvin and Darren.
Calvin: I planted this strawberry patch; therefore, I have the right to pick the strawberry’s and enjoy the fruits of my labor.
Darren: I built this house, therefore I have the right to beat my wife and children. My house my rules.
Calvin: No… beating your wife and children is wrong. You have the right to the peaceful enjoyment of your house, but not to beat your wife and children.
Alright, so Darren is taking a rather extremist idea of property rights; most people of European origin in 2021 do not support wife-beating… at least not openly. Presumably, since there are some men who beat their wives still, there is dissent on this matter, however, most dissenters seem embarrassed to admit their dissent publicly. (However, historically, many European cultures favored wife beating. Presumably, a lot of women disagreed, but history mostly records the views of the powerful.)
However, a lot of people of European origin do still support child beating.
To cite one example, a person wrote on twitter, in response to another tweet saying, “Smacking kids is still illegal: Con Court maintains ruling on parental chastisement of children”
twitter [dot] com/Mantshitla/status/1174448172019736576?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Alright, so you can see that this person cites house ownership (“my house my rules”) as justification for child beating.
According to News24, there were a number of parents who had this reaction — this wasn’t some lone person with an obscure viewpoint.
news24 [dot] com/parent/Family/Parenting/my-house-my-rules-case-closed-parents-react-to-no-smacking-ruling-20190920
Contrast to this statement from Luther Standing Bear’s “My Indian Boyhood”,
This, I think, is a key difference between a culture that believes in “land ownership” and a culture that believes in “land stewardship”. In “land ownership”, the owner has the right to make rules, no matter how ridiculous, and enforce them by violence. In land stewardship, what the steward can do is limited by local perceptions of natural law, so if the local culture believes that whipping and beating children is against natural law, then it is socially unacceptable for the land steward to whip or beat children. (I think there’s a spectrum… relatively few people in 2021 would try to use land ownership as an excuse for murder, for example, but if carried to it’s most extreme logical conclusion, land ownership would be used to justify murder.)
This also has environmental implications… a person who sees himself or herself as a steward might believe that certain acts of environmental destruction are immoral, and the result is a very well cared for forest or other natural environment where such people live. Moral reasoning behind this might include noting the importance of the plants, animals, and water to the sustenance of human life.
I believe that, barring a major dispute over natural law, local stewards should be respected. (A major dispute over natural law would be like, if a culture was still practicing sl*very, I think it would be appropriate for abolitionists to talk to them and attempt to explain why sl*very is wrong, and attempt to help the ensl*ved people gain freedom.) People should not be evicted from their land just because they did such a good job at stewardship that their land is actually still in pristine condition.
Tel wrote,
Glad you liked it. 🙂
Tel wrote,
I had to look this up, and the example I found was in Tanzania, not Kenya. (It could also happen in Kenya; Tanzania is just the example I found a reference for.)
theguardian [dot] com/world/2009/sep/06/masai-tribesman-tanzania-tourism
I would say that in this example, the tourist are not real environmentalists. The evicted Masai were the real environmentalists. Ethical tourists have a duty to report on and discourage human rights abuses — not to encourage human rights abuses to happen for their comfort.
Tel wrote,
I believe that the origin of these problems is that in mainstream Western culture, the right of human beings to land is not recognized.
Mainstream Western culture does recognize that people have a right to air. Strangling a person or otherwise denying them the right to breath is considered murder. But for some reason, even though land is necessary to life, just as air is, it is considered acceptable to deny people access to land. People have to pay absurdly high land taxes to be allowed to stay in their homes. (For many, these land taxes are included in their rent.) Even empty plots of land carry a hefty price tag.
If everyone had a recognized right to a small plot of land, enough to farm at least, and to stay there without paying taxes or other fees, I think that it would not be such a problem if someone invented a word processor. Unemployment, in my view, is only an issue because the right of people to land is not respected. I think that if, suddenly, 100% of the world’s population had a recognized right to at least enough land for farming, people wouldn’t be making computers or word processors anyway. Whatever small minority of the world’s population is actually happy with the status quo and their current jobs would likely find that most of said jobs are no longer possible, due to other people in jobs such as computer manufacturing having quit said jobs.
I don’t expect any such thing to happen within the next hundred years, of course, maybe not even within the next thousand years; my point is that the whole structure is based on violence.
Tel wrote,
This reminds me of something I read in Transformations in Sl*very by Paul Lovejoy.
My interpretation of this is that by trading guns for captives, the Europeans changed the balance of power in Africa, putting the most immoral Africans in power. People who wanted to defend themselves, and were on the fence about morality, would have been incentivized to choose immorality, so that they could acquire the guns needed for defense. Good people would have suffered in this regime of immoral people armed with guns.
Sometimes I ask people, who press really heavily on the “Africans were sold by other Africans” point, how they would feel if an alien species came and offered superweapons to the Mafia in exchange for the Mafia ensl*ving other people in their country. And with the alien superweapons, the Mafia were able to just take over and become the new government.
Apparently, the strategy of bribing African governments / chiefs has often been accompanied by first placing a bribable dictator in power. One example was the assassination of Lumumba (by the Belgians, but after the CIA removed him from power), and Lumumba’s replacement with Mobutu, who ruled with CIA-assistance for about 30 years.
Maertens, as quoted by Jules Marchal in Forced Labor in the Gold and Copper Mines, gives the following example from the time of the Belgian Congo:
Alright, so, in Maerten’s estimation, 75 percent of the chiefs in the Belgian Congo who collaborated with Belgian oppression and delivered their people to forced labor, were not chiefs selected by the natives, but rather, ones imposed on them by the Belgians. (Imagine if some invading culture, say, the Russians, replaced the democratically elected mayors of Australia with ones of their choice, and then the Russian-chosen mayors started sending Australian people off to forced labor camps.)
Tel wrote,
I would also prefer being trapped by floods over being trapped by soldiers and police.
I think it’s a lot more complicated than Co2 simply making plants grow faster. Even aside from climate change, a lot of cropland is being destroyed by fossil fuel extraction. See, for example, the Poison Fire documentary I linked below, in which Nigerians talk about how Shell’s activities are poisoning their farms, killing them, etc. With respect to climate change, a lot of domesticated crops are dependent on having a fairly stable climate, and so if climate change destabilizes that climate, as many have predicted, we can expect a lot of domesticated crops to fail. So-called weeds, on the other hand, have a lot more genetic diversity, and many of them seem more resilient against climate change. So, one would expect the so-called “weeds” of today to become the food of the future. The transition is likely to cause some famines, I think, because rapid changes in food ecology can be hard on people. Heavily taxed or otherwise exploited people are likely to suffer worse, since exploitation can make it hard for people to adapt to changing environmental conditions. E.g. during the so-called Irish potato famine, Ireland was actually producing plenty of food to feed the people. However, most of that food was escorted out of the country at gunpoint. It apparently took 67 of Britians 130 regiments at the time to starve the Irish people, according to Chris Fogarty. This was done to enforce the “property rights” of the English landlords, who had won the land by conquest. There was no natural reason why the Irish — some of whom would have been my ancestors — could not adapt to a failure of the potato crop. They produced enough food. The failure of the potato crop was only a serious issue because the rest of the food was being robbed from them. Likewise, climate-changed induced crop failures are likely to be more deadly to heavily exploited peoples.
tlio [dot] org [dot] uk/land/land-rights-history/irish-holocaust-the-mass-graves-of-ireland/
One food that appears to have some climate change resistance potential is the jackfruit.
theguardian [dot] com/environment/2014/apr/23/jackfruit-miracle-crop-climate-change-food-security
Tel wrote,
I haven’t heard this claim, but I also probably don’t watch the same news programs you do. Did anyone in particular say this?
“I haven’t heard this claim, but I also probably don’t watch the same news programs you do. Did anyone in particular say this?”
You poo-poo’d Ayn Rand for saying it was wrong to believe that the world should never change.
I don’t know how you do that without, yourself, holding the position she said was wrong:
BMS ep 170: Bob Dissects the Shopping Cart Critique of Self-Governance
[www]https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2020/12/bms-ep-170-bob-dissects-the-shopping-cart-critique-of-self-governance.html#comment-2014565
[@”random person”]:
“To quote the Salon article I mentioned earlier in my discussion with Tel,
““Let’s suppose they were all beautifully innocent savages, which they certainly were not,” Rand persisted. “What was it that they were fighting for, if they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their right to keep part of the earth untouched, unused, and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal?” she asked.”
(Also, no one is strawmanning you.)
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
Because Guest is continuing to reply to my comments even though I have made it repeatedly clear I am no longer interested in debating a REMORSELESS STRAWMANNER like him, I am updating my standardized response to list five times when GUEST BLATANTLY STRAWMANNED ME.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 1
I gave an example from the book “Blood and Earth” by Kevin Bales, a real example (Kevin Bales travelled around the planet, to multiple continents, to find real examples) in which a farmer homesteaded a piece of land, planting crops on it, and then a thieving capitalist came along, claimed to own the land that the farmer had homesteaded, and said the farmer could work as a wage laborer for the thieving capitalist. I explained how this form of exploitation was not itself sl*very, but it made the farmer more vulnerable to sl*very, and he did indeed end up in sl*very later in the story.
It was in this comment:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040606
Guest then blatantly strawmanned me.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040702
I was not able to read the strawman initially, since there was a delay before the comment was approved to be viewed publicly.
When I did finally read it, after it was approved so I could actually read it, I replied:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2041639
And I drew Guest’s attention to said reply here:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042671
Even after I caught Guest’s strawman and managed to point out to him that I caught it, he displayed extreme entitlement, claiming that his point, even though he had built his argument on a strawman, was the one that mattered, as if strawman arguments ought to take precedent over real ones.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042703
Guest explained the blatant strawmanning in this case by admitting that he didn’t bother reading many of my comments properly,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042775
This is one of the reasons I do not consider it worth it to read and write specific replies to Guest’s comments anymore: it’s a COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO TRY TO EXPLAIN MY VIEWS TO SOMEONE WHO CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO READ THEM BEFORE WRITING A REPLY. Instead of taking the time to actually read what I write, Guest would rather imagine what he thinks I wrote, and reply to that instead. By not spending time reading my replies, and instead taking the shortcut of imagining what he thinks I wrote, GUEST IS ABLE TO SPEW OUT LIES FAR FASTER THAN I CAN HOPE TO CORRECT THEM.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER TWO
Guest made the following strawman argument, demonstrating that he doesn’t know what socialism even is,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040576
I assumed this was a misunderstanding, probably caused by a load of propaganda that misrepresents what socialism is, and attempted to correct it,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040606
However, rather than accepting that he had simply misunderstood, like a normal human being at least attempting to understand the person he is debating, Guest deliberately and blatantly continued to strawman me, going so far as to accuse me of “misleading” him about my own views, acting as if he is some kind of telepath who knows what I think even better than I do.
Guest quoted me and wrote,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040702
Thus, even when Guest does actually bother reading my attempts to his strawmans, it’s pointless. He has no qualms about pretending to be a telepath and accusing me of misleading him about my own views. It’s not like I’m even a powerful person like King Leopold II, and there is any example of my using power for hypocritical ends, since again, I’m not a powerful person: Guest is simply pretending like he is a telepath. IT IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO TRY TO EXPLAIN MY VIEWS TO SOMEONE WHO JUST ACCUSES ME OF “MISLEADING” HIM ABOUT MY OWN VIEWS. I believe this extreme level of strawmanning overlaps with gaslighting.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 3
Since Guest clearly didn’t have a clue what socialism was, I tried to explain,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040606
Guest refused to be enlightened by this.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040702
Note that, if Guest really believed that his definition of socialism was the correct one, and mine was wrong, he should have, at a bare minimum, accepted that my definition of socialism was at least valid for my self-identity, and subsequently concluded that, although I self-identify as a socialist using my own definition, I do not meet his definition of a socialist. However, as is apparently from the other strawmanning examples, this is not what he did: instead, he tried to pretend that his definition of socialism was an accurate description of my beliefs, and that’s what makes raises this to the level of a strawman, rather than a simple disagreement over definitions.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 4
In a way, this was a continuation of strawman example number one. Even after I caught him not reading the example I gave, and subsequently writing a strawman response as if I’d given a completely different response, and even after he admitted to not bothering to read much of what I write, Guest continued to insist his strawman argument was accurate.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042775
To which I replied,
Note the difference between the real argument:
So far the empirical observations of myself and certain other socialists extend, wage labor is always preceded by mass theft from peasant proprietors. A social relation that only occurs in such unfree conditions is exploitation, and, so far as our empirical observations observe, wage labor only occurs under such unfree conditions. Therefore, wage labor can empirically be considered exploitative. Potential counter evidence would be if someone presented an example of wage labor occuring under genuinely free conditions, not preceded by mass theft.
And the strawman argument:
Socialist consider wage labor exploitative even if no one steals from a homesteader.
There is a different between believing that wage labor is exploitative even if no one steals from a homesteader, and believing that wage labor never occurs in the first place without theft from homesteaders.
Rather than accept my explanation, Guest continued strawmanning me, repeatedly attacking me with a quote-mining strawman, in spite of being corrected repeatedly.
Quote mining is when you quote someone out of context, in order to change the meaning of the quote.
Quote mining attack here:
consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042797
I corrected Guest here:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042802
Here, in spite of repeatedly demonstrating THAT HE HAS NO INTENTION OF ACCURATELY REPRESENTING WHAT MY VIEWS EVEN ARE, Guest accused my world view of murdering tends and hundreds of thousands of people,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042807
I believe that, before you accuse someone of having a view that murders “tens and hundreds of thousands of people”, you should make sure that you accurately describe what a person’s view even is. However, Guest clearly has no intention of even trying to do that. However, this makes it apparent what Guest’s motive is for repeatedly STRAWMANNING me: he wishes to scapegoat me for tens of thousands of murders I had nothing to do with. Guest is engaged in a witch hunt, not a legitimate debate. He has no respect whatsoever for truth or justice.
Here, guest continued to quote me out of context, and even blatantly lied and claimed that he wasn’t doing so. It’s not like he didn’t read my correction. Having read it, he simply continued strawmanming me, showing that he is addicted to lying.
consultingbyrpm. [dot] om/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042838
And here I corrected him again here, and explained why deleting some of my words as he did served his strawman.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042847
Here guest blatantly lied and said that he wasn’t strawmanning me, even though he was and I had just caught him.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042853
And I explained yet again why is argument was a strawman:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042927
Guest’s repeated insistance that he wasn’t strawmanning me, even when I repeatedly explained to him that he was, shows that IT IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO CONTINUE DEBATING HIM. HIS EXTREME, REPEATED, PREMEDIDATED STRAWMANS RISE TO THE LEVEL OF GASLIGHTING. HE IS TRYING TO LIE TO ME REPEATEDLY ABOUT MY OWN OPINIONS.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 5:
Here, I wrote about how conqueror-landlords caused the Irish famine:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045597
Note that my comment says nothing at all about free markets. It’s about theft, and how mass theft caused a famine, not about free markets. If you click the link I provided, the link says nothing about free markets either.
Guest replied,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045620
I never claimed that free markets caused the poverty and famine. I said that mass theft caused the poverty and famine, and went into detail on the form of mass theft in question. I didn’t say anything at all, one way or the other, about free markets.
Guest then proceeded to quote something that even seemed to agree with me a little bit, in so far as it referred to the Irish peasants as “landless serfs”, which I interpet to mean the author agreed with me that the Irish were being robbed, but which for the most part was not an actual reply to what I had written — although the author appeared to agree with me that the Irish were being robbed, at least in the quote given, he was primarily interested in discussing other aspects of the famine than the aspects I had discussed.
I explained here that Guest’s accusation that I was blaming the famine on free markets was a strawman:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html?replytocom=2045622#respond
And I explained here that this was the sort of strawman that Guest likes to make repeatedly,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045626
Essentially, it seems Guest really appears to argue with me over “free markets” or “free trade”. I didn’t want to argue on this topic, even before I got tired of reading his comments, because I consider the terms ambiguous, meaning too many different things to too many different people. Since I haven’t really expressed an opinion on “free markets” or “free trade” other than that the terms mean very different things to different people, but Guest really wants to debate me on them anyway, he simply fabricates a strawman position – namely, he claims I am against them, even when I am talking about something completely different, like mass theft. Essentially, he’s using a strawman argument to try to argue with me about a topic I don’t want to argue about, because I have little opinion about it, other than that it’s too ambiguous to be a good topic for debate.
One time, I did briefly assume that maybe Guest was using Edmund Dene Morel’s definition of a free market, but he quoted mined that disclaimer out of my quote when replying to me.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045690
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045694
Guest continued to reply with a strawman on the same theme,
I explained here that this was a strawman, considering that “central planning” was a term that Guest and I could not even agree on a definiton for.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045699
And after thinking about that for a little bit, I decided I was tired of reading Guest’s comments anymore.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
I am tired of debating with someone who writes things like, “You, yourself, literally believe” following by a completely fabricated strawman. I am tired of debating with someone who can’t be bothered to read much of what I write before replying to it, and would rather imagine what I wrote than read what I wrote. I am tired of debating with someone who strawmans me to the point of gaslighting, pretending to be a telapath and accusing me of misleading him about my own beliefs. I am tired of debating with someone who quotes me out of context on purpose and refuses to be corrected even when I repeatedly point out that he quoted me out of context. I am tired of debating someone’s whose strawman arguments arise not from simple misunderstanding, but from a deliberate effort to gaslight me about my own beliefs. I do not have the time or the energy to continue to waste on this nonsense.
Tvtropes gives the following example of quote mining,
tvtropes [dot] org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/QuoteMine
Also of interest, “The Big Green Lie” by Survival International
https://www.survivalinternational.org/campaigns/biggreenlie
The implication being that “Big Green” isn’t the same as “real green”.
“The implication being that “Big Green” isn’t the same as “real green”.”
If “real green” means believing in “clean energy”, then they are pretty much the same.
Every lefty needs to watch the entirely lefty documentary “Planet of the Humans”, then come back to the table so we can correct their horrendously flawed conclusion that increased populations and population growth is economically destructive.
Lefties will not walk away from this documentary thinking that “green energy” is a solution to anything.
Planet Of The Humans | Full Movie
[www]https://www.bitchute.com/video/KQnVEMOOYuJd/
“Planet of the Humans, the full movie by Michael Moore. Taken down by Youtube because of “© violations”. The movie is about the lies and hypocrisy of green energy and biomass.”
Also this:
Youtube censorship removes Michael Moore’s documentary – But film is now available to watch on Bitchute
[www]https://www.climatedepot.com/2020/05/27/youtube-censorship-removes-michael-moores-documentary-but-film-is-now-moved-to-bitchute/
“Among the environmental champions leading the charge against Planet of the Humans has been Josh Fox, the Oscar-nominated director of Gasland.”
“Gasland” being one of @”random person”‘s favorite documentaries to post in trying to poo-poo free markets.
Uh-oh.
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
For further details, see:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
as well as the comment right after it.
Because Guest is continuing to reply to my comments even though I have made it repeatedly clear I am no longer interested in debating a REMORSELESS STRAWMANNER like him, I am updating my standardized response to list five times when GUEST BLATANTLY STRAWMANNED ME.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 1
I gave an example from the book “Blood and Earth” by Kevin Bales, a real example (Kevin Bales travelled around the planet, to multiple continents, to find real examples) in which a farmer homesteaded a piece of land, planting crops on it, and then a thieving capitalist came along, claimed to own the land that the farmer had homesteaded, and said the farmer could work as a wage laborer for the thieving capitalist. I explained how this form of exploitation was not itself sl*very, but it made the farmer more vulnerable to sl*very, and he did indeed end up in sl*very later in the story.
It was in this comment:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040606
Guest then blatantly strawmanned me.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040702
I was not able to read the strawman initially, since there was a delay before the comment was approved to be viewed publicly.
When I did finally read it, after it was approved so I could actually read it, I replied:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2041639
And I drew Guest’s attention to said reply here:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042671
Even after I caught Guest’s strawman and managed to point out to him that I caught it, he displayed extreme entitlement, claiming that his point, even though he had built his argument on a strawman, was the one that mattered, as if strawman arguments ought to take precedent over real ones.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042703
Guest explained the blatant strawmanning in this case by admitting that he didn’t bother reading many of my comments properly,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042775
This is one of the reasons I do not consider it worth it to read and write specific replies to Guest’s comments anymore: it’s a COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO TRY TO EXPLAIN MY VIEWS TO SOMEONE WHO CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO READ THEM BEFORE WRITING A REPLY. Instead of taking the time to actually read what I write, Guest would rather imagine what he thinks I wrote, and reply to that instead. By not spending time reading my replies, and instead taking the shortcut of imagining what he thinks I wrote, GUEST IS ABLE TO SPEW OUT LIES FAR FASTER THAN I CAN HOPE TO CORRECT THEM.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER TWO
Guest made the following strawman argument, demonstrating that he doesn’t know what socialism even is,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040576
I assumed this was a misunderstanding, probably caused by a load of propaganda that misrepresents what socialism is, and attempted to correct it,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040606
However, rather than accepting that he had simply misunderstood, like a normal human being at least attempting to understand the person he is debating, Guest deliberately and blatantly continued to strawman me, going so far as to accuse me of “misleading” him about my own views, acting as if he is some kind of telepath who knows what I think even better than I do.
Guest quoted me and wrote,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040702
Thus, even when Guest does actually bother reading my attempts to his strawmans, it’s pointless. He has no qualms about pretending to be a telepath and accusing me of misleading him about my own views. It’s not like I’m even a powerful person like King Leopold II, and there is any example of my using power for hypocritical ends, since again, I’m not a powerful person: Guest is simply pretending like he is a telepath. IT IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO TRY TO EXPLAIN MY VIEWS TO SOMEONE WHO JUST ACCUSES ME OF “MISLEADING” HIM ABOUT MY OWN VIEWS. I believe this extreme level of strawmanning overlaps with gaslighting.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 3
Since Guest clearly didn’t have a clue what socialism was, I tried to explain,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040606
Guest refused to be enlightened by this.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040702
Note that, if Guest really believed that his definition of socialism was the correct one, and mine was wrong, he should have, at a bare minimum, accepted that my definition of socialism was at least valid for my self-identity, and subsequently concluded that, although I self-identify as a socialist using my own definition, I do not meet his definition of a socialist. However, as is apparently from the other strawmanning examples, this is not what he did: instead, he tried to pretend that his definition of socialism was an accurate description of my beliefs, and that’s what makes raises this to the level of a strawman, rather than a simple disagreement over definitions.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 4
In a way, this was a continuation of strawman example number one. Even after I caught him not reading the example I gave, and subsequently writing a strawman response as if I’d given a completely different response, and even after he admitted to not bothering to read much of what I write, Guest continued to insist his strawman argument was accurate.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042775
To which I replied,
Note the difference between the real argument:
So far the empirical observations of myself and certain other socialists extend, wage labor is always preceded by mass theft from peasant proprietors. A social relation that only occurs in such unfree conditions is exploitation, and, so far as our empirical observations observe, wage labor only occurs under such unfree conditions. Therefore, wage labor can empirically be considered exploitative. Potential counter evidence would be if someone presented an example of wage labor occuring under genuinely free conditions, not preceded by mass theft.
And the strawman argument:
Socialist consider wage labor exploitative even if no one steals from a homesteader.
There is a different between believing that wage labor is exploitative even if no one steals from a homesteader, and believing that wage labor never occurs in the first place without theft from homesteaders.
Rather than accept my explanation, Guest continued strawmanning me, repeatedly attacking me with a quote-mining strawman, in spite of being corrected repeatedly.
Quote mining is when you quote someone out of context, in order to change the meaning of the quote.
Quote mining attack here:
consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042797
I corrected Guest here:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042802
Here, in spite of repeatedly demonstrating THAT HE HAS NO INTENTION OF ACCURATELY REPRESENTING WHAT MY VIEWS EVEN ARE, Guest accused my world view of murdering tends and hundreds of thousands of people,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042807
I believe that, before you accuse someone of having a view that murders “tens and hundreds of thousands of people”, you should make sure that you accurately describe what a person’s view even is. However, Guest clearly has no intention of even trying to do that. However, this makes it apparent what Guest’s motive is for repeatedly STRAWMANNING me: he wishes to scapegoat me for tens of thousands of murders I had nothing to do with. Guest is engaged in a witch hunt, not a legitimate debate. He has no respect whatsoever for truth or justice.
Here, guest continued to quote me out of context, and even blatantly lied and claimed that he wasn’t doing so. It’s not like he didn’t read my correction. Having read it, he simply continued strawmanming me, showing that he is addicted to lying.
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042838
And here I corrected him again here, and explained why deleting some of my words as he did served his strawman.
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042847
Here guest blatantly lied and said that he wasn’t strawmanning me, even though he was and I had just caught him.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042853
And I explained yet again why is argument was a strawman:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042927
Guest’s repeated insistance that he wasn’t strawmanning me, even when I repeatedly explained to him that he was, shows that IT IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO CONTINUE DEBATING HIM. HIS EXTREME, REPEATED, PREMEDIDATED STRAWMANS RISE TO THE LEVEL OF GASLIGHTING. HE IS TRYING TO LIE TO ME REPEATEDLY ABOUT MY OWN OPINIONS.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 5:
Here, I wrote about how conqueror-landlords caused the Irish famine:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045597
Note that my comment says nothing at all about free markets. It’s about theft, and how mass theft caused a famine, not about free markets. If you click the link I provided, the link says nothing about free markets either.
Guest replied,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045620
I never claimed that free markets caused the poverty and famine. I said that mass theft caused the poverty and famine, and went into detail on the form of mass theft in question. I didn’t say anything at all, one way or the other, about free markets.
Guest then proceeded to quote something that even seemed to agree with me a little bit, in so far as it referred to the Irish peasants as “landless serfs”, which I interpet to mean the author agreed with me that the Irish were being robbed, but which for the most part was not an actual reply to what I had written — although the author appeared to agree with me that the Irish were being robbed, at least in the quote given, he was primarily interested in discussing other aspects of the famine than the aspects I had discussed.
I explained here that Guest’s accusation that I was blaming the famine on free markets was a strawman:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html?replytocom=2045622#respond
And I explained here that this was the sort of strawman that Guest likes to make repeatedly,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045626
Essentially, it seems Guest really appears to argue with me over “free markets” or “free trade”. I didn’t want to argue on this topic, even before I got tired of reading his comments, because I consider the terms ambiguous, meaning too many different things to too many different people. Since I haven’t really expressed an opinion on “free markets” or “free trade” other than that the terms mean very different things to different people, but Guest really wants to debate me on them anyway, he simply fabricates a strawman position – namely, he claims I am against them, even when I am talking about something completely different, like mass theft. Essentially, he’s using a strawman argument to try to argue with me about a topic I don’t want to argue about, because I have little opinion about it, other than that it’s too ambiguous to be a good topic for debate.
One time, I did briefly assume that maybe Guest was using Edmund Dene Morel’s definition of a free market, but he quoted mined that disclaimer out of my quote when replying to me.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045690
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045694
Guest continued to reply with a strawman on the same theme,
I explained here that this was a strawman, considering that “central planning” was a term that Guest and I could not even agree on a definiton for.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045699
And after thinking about that for a little bit, I decided I was tired of reading Guest’s comments anymore.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
I am tired of debating with someone who writes things like, “You, yourself, literally believe” following by a completely fabricated strawman. I am tired of debating with someone who can’t be bothered to read much of what I write before replying to it, and would rather imagine what I wrote than read what I wrote. I am tired of debating with someone who strawmans me to the point of gaslighting, pretending to be a telapath and accusing me of misleading him about my own beliefs. I am tired of debating with someone who quotes me out of context on purpose and refuses to be corrected even when I repeatedly point out that he quoted me out of context. I am tired of debating someone’s whose strawman arguments arise not from simple misunderstanding, but from a deliberate effort to gaslight me about my own beliefs. I do not have the time or the energy to continue to waste on this nonsense.
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
For further details, see:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
as well as the comment right after it.
Because Guest is continuing to reply to my comments even though I have made it repeatedly clear I am no longer interested in debating a REMORSELESS STRAWMANNER like him, I am updating my standardized response to list five times when GUEST BLATANTLY STRAWMANNED ME.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 1
I gave an example from the book “Blood and Earth” by Kevin Bales, a real example (Kevin Bales travelled around the planet, to multiple continents, to find real examples) in which a farmer homesteaded a piece of land, planting crops on it, and then a thieving capitalist came along, claimed to own the land that the farmer had homesteaded, and said the farmer could work as a wage laborer for the thieving capitalist. I explained how this form of exploitation was not itself sl*very, but it made the farmer more vulnerable to sl*very, and he did indeed end up in sl*very later in the story.
It was in this comment:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040606
Guest then blatantly strawmanned me.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040702
I was not able to read the strawman initially, since there was a delay before the comment was approved to be viewed publicly.
When I did finally read it, after it was approved so I could actually read it, I replied:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2041639
And I drew Guest’s attention to said reply here:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042671
Even after I caught Guest’s strawman and managed to point out to him that I caught it, he displayed extreme entitlement, claiming that his point, even though he had built his argument on a strawman, was the one that mattered, as if strawman arguments ought to take precedent over real ones.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042703
Guest explained the blatant strawmanning in this case by admitting that he didn’t bother reading many of my comments properly,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042775
This is one of the reasons I do not consider it worth it to read and write specific replies to Guest’s comments anymore: it’s a COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO TRY TO EXPLAIN MY VIEWS TO SOMEONE WHO CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO READ THEM BEFORE WRITING A REPLY. Instead of taking the time to actually read what I write, Guest would rather imagine what he thinks I wrote, and reply to that instead. By not spending time reading my replies, and instead taking the shortcut of imagining what he thinks I wrote, GUEST IS ABLE TO SPEW OUT LIES FAR FASTER THAN I CAN HOPE TO CORRECT THEM.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER TWO
Guest made the following strawman argument, demonstrating that he doesn’t know what socialism even is,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040576
I assumed this was a misunderstanding, probably caused by a load of propaganda that misrepresents what socialism is, and attempted to correct it,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040606
However, rather than accepting that he had simply misunderstood, like a normal human being at least attempting to understand the person he is debating, Guest deliberately and blatantly continued to strawman me, going so far as to accuse me of “misleading” him about my own views, acting as if he is some kind of telepath who knows what I think even better than I do.
Guest quoted me and wrote,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040702
Thus, even when Guest does actually bother reading my attempts to his strawmans, it’s pointless. He has no qualms about pretending to be a telepath and accusing me of misleading him about my own views. It’s not like I’m even a powerful person like King Leopold II, and there is any example of my using power for hypocritical ends, since again, I’m not a powerful person: Guest is simply pretending like he is a telepath. IT IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO TRY TO EXPLAIN MY VIEWS TO SOMEONE WHO JUST ACCUSES ME OF “MISLEADING” HIM ABOUT MY OWN VIEWS. I believe this extreme level of strawmanning overlaps with gaslighting.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 3
Since Guest clearly didn’t have a clue what socialism was, I tried to explain,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040606
Guest refused to be enlightened by this.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040702
Note that, if Guest really believed that his definition of socialism was the correct one, and mine was wrong, he should have, at a bare minimum, accepted that my definition of socialism was at least valid for my self-identity, and subsequently concluded that, although I self-identify as a socialist using my own definition, I do not meet his definition of a socialist. However, as is apparently from the other strawmanning examples, this is not what he did: instead, he tried to pretend that his definition of socialism was an accurate description of my beliefs, and that’s what makes raises this to the level of a strawman, rather than a simple disagreement over definitions.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 4
In a way, this was a continuation of strawman example number one. Even after I caught him not reading the example I gave, and subsequently writing a strawman response as if I’d given a completely different response, and even after he admitted to not bothering to read much of what I write, Guest continued to insist his strawman argument was accurate.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042775
To which I replied,
Note the difference between the real argument:
So far the empirical observations of myself and certain other socialists extend, wage labor is always preceded by mass theft from peasant proprietors. A social relation that only occurs in such unfree conditions is exploitation, and, so far as our empirical observations observe, wage labor only occurs under such unfree conditions. Therefore, wage labor can empirically be considered exploitative. Potential counter evidence would be if someone presented an example of wage labor occuring under genuinely free conditions, not preceded by mass theft.
And the strawman argument:
Socialist consider wage labor exploitative even if no one steals from a homesteader.
There is a different between believing that wage labor is exploitative even if no one steals from a homesteader, and believing that wage labor never occurs in the first place without theft from homesteaders.
Rather than accept my explanation, Guest continued strawmanning me, repeatedly attacking me with a quote-mining strawman, in spite of being corrected repeatedly.
Quote mining is when you quote someone out of context, in order to change the meaning of the quote.
Quote mining attack here:
consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042797
I corrected Guest here:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042802
Here, in spite of repeatedly demonstrating THAT HE HAS NO INTENTION OF ACCURATELY REPRESENTING WHAT MY VIEWS EVEN ARE, Guest accused my world view of murdering tends and hundreds of thousands of people,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042807
I believe that, before you accuse someone of having a view that murders “tens and hundreds of thousands of people”, you should make sure that you accurately describe what a person’s view even is. However, Guest clearly has no intention of even trying to do that. However, this makes it apparent what Guest’s motive is for repeatedly STRAWMANNING me: he wishes to scapegoat me for tens of thousands of murders I had nothing to do with. Guest is engaged in a witch hunt, not a legitimate debate. He has no respect whatsoever for truth or justice.
Here, guest continued to quote me out of context, and even blatantly lied and claimed that he wasn’t doing so. It’s not like he didn’t read my correction. Having read it, he simply continued strawmanming me, showing that he is addicted to lying.
consultingbyrpm. [dot] om/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042838
And here I corrected him again here, and explained why deleting some of my words as he did served his strawman.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042847
Here guest blatantly lied and said that he wasn’t strawmanning me, even though he was and I had just caught him.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042853
And I explained yet again why is argument was a strawman:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042927
Guest’s repeated insistance that he wasn’t strawmanning me, even when I repeatedly explained to him that he was, shows that IT IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF MY TIME TO CONTINUE DEBATING HIM. HIS EXTREME, REPEATED, PREMEDIDATED STRAWMANS RISE TO THE LEVEL OF GASLIGHTING. HE IS TRYING TO LIE TO ME REPEATEDLY ABOUT MY OWN OPINIONS.
STRAWMAN EXAMPLE NUMBER 5:
Here, I wrote about how conqueror-landlords caused the Irish famine:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045597
Note that my comment says nothing at all about free markets. It’s about theft, and how mass theft caused a famine, not about free markets. If you click the link I provided, the link says nothing about free markets either.
Guest replied,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045620
I never claimed that free markets caused the poverty and famine. I said that mass theft caused the poverty and famine, and went into detail on the form of mass theft in question. I didn’t say anything at all, one way or the other, about free markets.
Guest then proceeded to quote something that even seemed to agree with me a little bit, in so far as it referred to the Irish peasants as “landless serfs”, which I interpet to mean the author agreed with me that the Irish were being robbed, but which for the most part was not an actual reply to what I had written — although the author appeared to agree with me that the Irish were being robbed, at least in the quote given, he was primarily interested in discussing other aspects of the famine than the aspects I had discussed.
I explained here that Guest’s accusation that I was blaming the famine on free markets was a strawman:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html?replytocom=2045622#respond
And I explained here that this was the sort of strawman that Guest likes to make repeatedly,
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045626
Essentially, it seems Guest really appears to argue with me over “free markets” or “free trade”. I didn’t want to argue on this topic, even before I got tired of reading his comments, because I consider the terms ambiguous, meaning too many different things to too many different people. Since I haven’t really expressed an opinion on “free markets” or “free trade” other than that the terms mean very different things to different people, but Guest really wants to debate me on them anyway, he simply fabricates a strawman position – namely, he claims I am against them, even when I am talking about something completely different, like mass theft. Essentially, he’s using a strawman argument to try to argue with me about a topic I don’t want to argue about, because I have little opinion about it, other than that it’s too ambiguous to be a good topic for debate.
One time, I did briefly assume that maybe Guest was using Edmund Dene Morel’s definition of a free market, but he quoted mined that disclaimer out of my quote when replying to me.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045690
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045694
Guest continued to reply with a strawman on the same theme,
I explained here that this was a strawman, considering that “central planning” was a term that Guest and I could not even agree on a definiton for.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045699
And after thinking about that for a little bit, I decided I was tired of reading Guest’s comments anymore.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
I am tired of debating with someone who writes things like, “You, yourself, literally believe” following by a completely fabricated strawman. I am tired of debating with someone who can’t be bothered to read much of what I write before replying to it, and would rather imagine what I wrote than read what I wrote. I am tired of debating with someone who strawmans me to the point of gaslighting, pretending to be a telapath and accusing me of misleading him about my own beliefs. I am tired of debating with someone who quotes me out of context on purpose and refuses to be corrected even when I repeatedly point out that he quoted me out of context. I am tired of debating someone’s whose strawman arguments arise not from simple misunderstanding, but from a deliberate effort to gaslight me about my own beliefs. I do not have the time or the energy to continue to waste on this nonsense.
Bob Murphy
I think maybe you should have put “experts” in quotation marks. You seem to acknowledge that they aren’t real experts when you speak of “the limited knowledge of a handful of people” later in the sentence.
But I don’t think the shareholders are real experts either.
I think probably the real experts are the people getting robbed, assaulted, battered, and murdered by the fossil fuel companies.
Interestingly, in the Poison Fire documentary, a Nigerian court ordered Shell to stop its murderous gas flaring, and Shell blamed the Nigerian government for not giving it subsidies, to explain why it was unable to follow the court’s instructions and stop gas flaring. Note that since the Nigerian court is apparently completely separate from the Nigerian military, and the Nigerian military, or at least part of it, apparently works for Shell, the Nigerian court has no actual way to enforce its ruling. I guess it’s basically an anarchist court, going against the will of the military!
This shows a severe misunderstanding of responsibility for mass murder on the part of the Shell representative. No one has any responsibility to pay Shell to stop committing mass murder. Shell has the responsibility to stop committing mass murder (and also to pay reparations, and also to instruct the individuals responsible for the mass murder to turn themselves over to the families and tribes of the murder victims for judgement… but, firstly, to cease and desist committing mass murder).
For information about how the Nigerian military, or at least part of it, apparently works for Shell, please see this Guardian article:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/03/shell-oil-paid-nigerian-military
I AM A WEALTHY NIGERIAN BUSINESSMAN WITH POWERFUL CONTACTS IN ROYAL DUTCH SHELL AND ALSO THE UNITED NATIONS. DESPITE BEING EXTREMELY SUCCESSFUL, FOR INEXPLICABLE REASONS I NEED TO SEND THE SUM OF ONE MILLION US DOLLARS ($1,000,000) TO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT, EVEN THOUGH I HAVE NEVER MET YOU.
THIS IS NOT CORRUPTION, I SWEAR IT, AND EVEN IF PERHAPS IT COULD BE A TINY BIT SHIFTY, YOU CAN DO THE RIGHT THING AND KEEP QUIET ABOUT IT, MKAY?
DON’T LISTEN TO THE GUARDIAN ABOUT WHO OWNS THE OIL, WE BEAT THE BIAFRANS FAIR AND SQUARE! NOR AM I IN ANY WAY A STOOGE OF THE OIL COMPANIES. I RUN A VERY PROFITABLE AND FULLY LEGITIMATE EMAIL MARKETING BUSINESS. THE MAIN EXPORT INDUSTRY OF NIGERIA IS EMAILS.
LOL.
You’re funny. 🙂
P.S. I just realized that I forgot to link the Poison Fire documentary above.
It’s a little under half an hour long, and includes a lot of testimony from Nigerians affected by Shell’s operations.
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/poison-fire/