Cerebralicious

wolfkazumaru:

Less snarkily: So… why state it at all, then? Beyond wanting to act smug?

Of course I want to act smug.

The entire argument here follows naturally from our ideologies. You’re a statist, which necessarily implies that you’re accepted the ethical legitimacy of imposing your ideas on people by means coercive and forcible.

I’m a libertarian, which doesn’t always but ought to necessarily imply that I consider doing that sort of thing to be the leper’s bell of the ethically dysfunctional.

Or in this specific case, a bunch of lowlives who ought to be tossed off the lower end of Manhattan Island into the bay in the name of Common Decency, the Principle of Non-Imposition, and everyone’s implicit right to go about their business in peace up until they themselves commit some actual, mala in se, rights-violating crime.

These protests, like most protests, are a golden opportunity to preen and polish my moral superiority to everyone who believes that the self-assumed nobility of their precious cause gives them the right to force themselves upon their fellow man. As an arrogant, superior asshole, what the heck else should I do with it?

wolfkazumaru:

“If the way you’ve chosen to get what you want in a dispute is to annoy and obstruct third parties until it’s given to you to make you shut up, go away, and stop being a nuisance, it’s almost certain that your cause sucks. And so do you. Not in a good way.”

—

Alistair’s (freshly coined and therefore out of order) 79th Law (via cerebralicious)

“obstruct third parties” Wall Street’s occupation is entirely within the law,

Legal positivism? Seriously? That’s the worst defense since “just obeying orders”.

and thus the sidewalk is not being obstructed by the protesters to such a point that it is impassable.

Predictably enough, other organizations reports seem to differ on that one, including plenty of places and things that aren’t just sidewalks. Like streets, bridges - in the middle of NYC traffic, ffs - and suchlike, including reports of a couple of their spinoffs attempting to occupy buildings. Not, obviously, their buildings.

And, of course, they pose something of a problem to every member of the public who wishes to use Zuccotti Park as a park.

More to the point, I’ve been to Manhattan and walked down Wall Street. It’s a fucking canyon, narrow as all hell. You can’t walk two abreast on the sidewalk without backing up pedestrians.

Holding any kind of protest there is to engage in wilful obstructionism unless you’re far stupider than I’m willing to debit any human being with being.

(Also, “not impassable” is a very low standard to meet. I can block five lanes of a six-lane highway and it will technically be “not impassable”. I would, however, be an absolute idiot to claim that the people in the twenty-mile tailback are therefore not being annoyed and obstructed, that I’m not engaging in reckless endangerment when emergency vehicles can’t move through it, or that the owners of the highway, even if they are the government, shouldn’t come and move me along with any necessary force.)

Furthermore, when you’re protesting the actions of employees of the financial sector, employees of the financial sector are hardly third parties.

I’m sure the uninvolved parts of the financial sector - but seeing as we’re talking about the humble workers here, also the people in tech support, the food service staff, building maintenance, and the guy who cleans the shitters in the Goldman Sachs building really appreciate being rolled into that particular homogeneous blob.

And I’m sure that that the post office, the commuters who use the ferry terminal at the bottom of Wall Street, the sandwich shop and coffee bar that just happen to be in the same rough area, the street food vendors, the residents of lower Manhattan, etc., etc., appreciate the honor of being made collateral damage in the traditional collectivist model. (Which is to say, either they’re with us - and are thus happy to put up with the disruption - or they’re against us - in which case, fuck ‘em and their desire to sleep without drumming and chanting into the midnight hours.)

Also, given their spectacularly lengthy and incoherent list of grievances, again, they’re either pursuing a third-party strategy against all the responsible parties mentioned who aren’t located in NYC’s financial district, or else… well, again, I mention that there’s a limit to how stupid I’m willing to believe people can be, and this exceeds it.

And “I don’t like the way you act, therefore your argument is wrong” is not even an argument. It’s not even like an argument. It’s just dumb.

And if that argument was what I presented, or even if I had presented an argument, you would be correct.

But it’s not an argument (you may have noted the “almost”?). It’s a heuristic. Those work differently.

Specifically, and to phrase it more correctly, “to enforce your conclusions by force and/or duress is implicitly to concede that reasonable people cannot be persuaded to agree with you; which is in turn to concede that your conclusions are not to be reached by a rational argument” is not, in fact, true by predicate logic, nor 100% true by fuzzy logic. It is, however, sufficiently truthy to form the basis for a useful heuristic.

(That someone who argues by coercion - except in the special cases of the insane, the irrational, and the non-sophont - is an appalling asshole, on the other hand, is entirely true by any logic.)