Ah - so that’s the part you failed to/chose to misapprehend.

If you had actually read and considered what I actually said rather than just scanning for out-of-context quotes to colorably affirm your cherished preconceptions, you potentially would’ve grasped that I’m actually blaming the set of mechanisms and presumptions under which people cede authority to others, which authority is inevitably abused by the relatively small number of people who come to possess it.

Certainly those people deserve some blame as well, but they were never my focus, since, without the authority by which they carry out their abuses, they’d just be garden-variety noxious assholes.

In much the same way that without the authority that has defined it, implemented it and continued to protect it, capitalism could not exist.

The people are the actors and the systems are the tools, but the institutionalization of authority is the thing that makes it all possible. And that was and remains my point.

What?

I see no connection at all between that phrase and anything I said.

I appreciate the author’s fervor, and they are at least right about not stopping at healthcare and instead recognizing the not-coincidentally similar harm that’s done to many (all?) systems and institutions, but they make the all-too-common mistake of placing the blame for that harm on a set of tools used by the people who do that harm rather than on the people themselves, and much more broadly and to the point, on the mechanisms and presumptions by which some relatively small number of people can and inevitably do accumulate enough authority that they can, using whatever tools might be available to them, further their own shallow self-interest by bringing harm to others.

As long as we continue to simply swap out one set of people or one set of tools for another while leaving all of those mechanisms and presumptions in place, we’ll continue duplicating the overarching problem, with the only meaningful distinctions between one instance and another being the specific people involved and the specific tools used.

To get out of that trap, we have to revisit - and reshape - the mechanisms and presumptions by which we make it possible, and thus inevitable, that some will gain the power by which to act to further their own shallow self-interest by harming others.

To borrow the author’s analogy, the process doesn’t go wrong when the person who comes into your house starts beating people, but the instant they presume the right to come into your house in the first place. More precisely, the process goes wrong because we as a species nearly universally simply presume that someone should or even must be granted that (figurative) right and the authority to exercise it, then we foolishly and obviously irrationally believe that they’ll choose to exercise it for our own and society’s benefit rather than their own, and/or that we’ll be able to prevent them from choosing otherwise.

Or much more simply and directly - the real problem is the entire concept of institutionalized authority - not simply who happens to hold that authority in a given time and place or which tools they use when they inevitably abuse it.

There’s a mistake in this headline.

It should read:

“Alabama profits off prisoners who work at McDonald’s, therefore deems them too dangerous for parole.”

What an hysterical little crybaby.

It’s really very simple:

On one side, there’s integrity and convictions and serving the interests of the American people.

And on the other side, there’s a handful of corporations and wealthy individuals who will give them money in exchange for protecting their privilege.

And the Democrats have chosen the money

This reeks of astroturf.

This particular tactic in which a rival social media service gains ground then hand-wringing articles trying to stoke fears that it’s not “up to the task of moderation” start to appear has become so standard that it could have its own name, like a chess opening.

No shit?

He collected kickbacks in exchange for sending kids to for profit jails. If anything, 17 1/2 years was too light a sentence - it should’ve been life withour parole. Let the motherfucker rot in one of those prisons himself - it’d serve him right.

Or more precisely, Meta bought shares of Trump.

If the United States was a family, Missouri would be the creepy bachelor uncle who drives a pickup with flags, won’t set foot out of the house without a gun and has a computer with a Don’t Tread on Me wallpaper and a D drive full of bondage porn.

Meta: The whole tone of this article is weird.

It’s as if it’s written explicitly by and for some entirely separate social group that’s sort of condescendingly viewing the quaint folkways of members of a “primitive tribe.”

Which is likely pretty close to the truth, in a way.

No war but class war.

Mace actually sort of fascinates me.

Her hateful bigot piece of shit act is a bit too over-the-top, and I just don’t entirely buy it. I keep thinking at least some part of it is that she’s actually more of a greedy unethical piece of shit, and has figured out that hateful bigoted piece of shit is a profitable role to play, and she’s playing it to the hilt.

Not that it matters - she’s a piece of shit either way. It’s just an idea that wanders through my mind, a bit more solidly every time, whenever she sleazes her way into the headlines.

I’ve been posting on internet forums for almost 30 years now. It’s just a thing I like doing.

I’m here now because it’s the best place I know of at the moment.

This is an issue that’s really only made complicated by people competing to try to ensure that the concept accommodates their prejudices.

The simple reality is that the only way in which people are fixedly and simplistically one or the other is in the arrangement of their plumbing, and that’s really only relevant to things like a nurse charged with installing a catheter.

All the rest is an enormously complex combination of chemistry, environment, socialization and self-image that includes everything from the plumbing of one paired with full identification with that one to the plumbing of one with full identification with the other and includes every possible combination between the two, so insisting on absolutism is foolish at best.

Funny… this is actually a different account than I was originally posting from - I switched to it because the entire thread has vanished from fedia.io.

And pretty much the first thing I see here is this response, which I didn’t even know existed before.

Not a good look for fedia.io.

Anyway…

Do you believe ayn rand believed in rational self-interest?

I think she probably thought she did, but I also think she obviously didn’t even begin to understand it.

If so, why was she against all forms of welfare and socialism?

The glib answer would be because she didn’t even begin to understand rational self-interest.

The more likely answer, which somehow manages to be even more shallow, is because the USSR was nominally communist and she hated the USSR.

If not, isn’t she the inventor of the concept and thus the arbiter of what it should mean?

No.

Even if she was in fact the inventor of the concept, which she most assuredly is not, she still wouldn’t be the arbiter of its meaning.

Though she was such an egotistical authoritarian that if she were alive today, she’d undoubtedly be insisting that she was.

Doesn’t that mean you’re changing the definition to suit your needs?

Kind of.

While I really couldn’t care less what Rand envisioned, so certainly feel no desire to hew to her conception, I haven’t changed it to suit my “needs” per se. I’ve changed it as necessary so that it actually is, as far as I can see, what it appears to refer to - “rational” “self-interest.”

I think it’s a sound concept, and that Rand, blinded as she was by her emotions, her authoritarian habits and her gargantuan ego, didn’t grasp it.

Thanks for the response.

Oog - my little brother.

He’s a walking stereotype of a tech libertarian (which is to say, a shallow, bigoted, reactionary, right-wing IT guy who for some inexplicablec reason seems to think that all that’s necessary to count as “libertarian” is to rail against “the woke mob.”)

The first time I heard the term “mansplaining,” I knew exactly what it meant, because it’s his customary mode of communication. I already know that by about the third time I hear him say, " Well, what you have to understand is that…" I’m going to have to leave the room.

He likely won’t bring up politics directly - not surprisingly, he’s generally ignorant of both the philosophical side of it and the practical side of it. Instead, he’ll bloviate about whatever the right-wing/tech media bubble is bloviating about, so essentially political issues without the complication of political context.

It’s invariably awful, and it’s always a matter not of if but merely of when I’m going to have to leave the room because the only alternative is going to be a messy verbal explosion. And I presume it’s going to be worse than ever this year, since he’ll undoubtedly want to mansplain the mindless dogma he’s been fed about Trump and Musk and Ukraine and tariffs and immigrants and trans athletes and so on…

Ah, the irony.

I don’t get it.

Was this meant to be ironic?

I wonder what the catch is.

There’s just no way at this point in our history that pretty much any state, and especially Texas, is going to freely offer anything of any value whatsoever to poor people without some strings attached or some sort of hidden agenda.

Saying the quiet part out loud again.

They believe that us not being forced to do what they want simply because they want it is a “privilege,” and one that they can and will just arbitrarily decree to be null and void.

That says pretty much everything you meed to know about what they really think about everyone other than themselves.

And ironically enough, what they think is that they themselves are privileged.