The Quote

[Surlethe]

That's an interesting, and probably widely accepted, view. I cannot say that I agree, though.

[Thanas]

That's an interesting, and probably widely accepted, view. I cannot say that I agree, though.

Why not? How else do you define freedom than abscence of force?

[Ziggy Stardust]

He was an atheist to the other religions, and believed in his own. One doesn't have to believe in a creator god or an afterlife to be a mystic.

What the fuck are you blathering on about? Point to any example of Freud's mysticism, I fucking dare you. Hint: it doesn't exist.

Freud invented random models that sounded good to him.

You really are a moron, aren't you? Just because subsequent scientific thought has invalidated some of Freud's claims doesn't mean that his models were all random shit he pulled out of his ass. Hell, I bet you don't even know a god-damned thing about Freud and his scientific beliefs, just like this thread has shown you don't know a god-damned thing about communism, socialism, or any other topic that's been brought up. There's a reason that, even with all of the psychoanalytic stuff being broadly dismissed, that Freud's science is still influential in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy.

[Surlethe]

From what I've thought about it, it seems better to define freedom as something like "options available (without dying)" than simply "options where force doesn't exist." I'm free to choose not to go to work, there's nothing about that option that kills me.

[Formless]

Question, Surlethe: are people in prison less free than the rest of society? I mean, that is how our government forces people to follow its formal norms-- throwing them in jail. Only a small subset of criminals are really at risk of death for their crimes. How does that fit with your definition of "free"?

Basically, I think you are being obtuse, and I don't know why. That coercion limits freedom does not seem like a hard concept for most people to grasp.

[Surlethe]

They are indeed less free than people not in prison. Why? Not because they are being coerced, but because they have many fewer options. Speaking of obtuse, observe that I am not arguing that coercion does not limit freedom. I'm arguing to define freedom more broadly than "absence of force."

[Formless]

Except that from where I am sitting, it seems like your definition is worded such that it excludes any kind of force or coercion except threat of death. When applied to law enforcement and criminal law, it appears to break down. After all, why do convicts have fewer options, if not because of coercion and force options avaliable to the jailkeepers? They are the ones preventing prisoners from digging their way out with a spoon, or otherwise escaping that situation. And why does coercion seem to work on so many people even before they have actually been thrown in jail? Most people don't commit crimes, despite the personal gain to be had.

We could also apply this to extra-governmental coercion, and it also seems to break down in practice. Why does blackmail work so well at coercing people into misbehaving? How come people so often choose to pay ransom to kidnappers when they personally are not at threat of being killed?

It just seems that in practice, saying that freedom is "options available that won't get you killed" is missing a key limitation or aspect of human behavior-- that we don't weigh all options as being equally viable, because of coercive forces that most of the time aren't life threatening (but sometimes are).

[Formless]

Ghetto edit: tie this in with what Thanas is saying, getting fired may not be a threat of death, but once you have gone into that contract with an employer, it is one of those forces that effectively limits the perceived viability of certain options available to you. If the practical consequence is that few people will be foolish enough as to do something they know will get them fired, I would say it obviously limits the freedom of people in a given profession.

[Surlethe]

After all, why do convicts have fewer options, if not because of coercion and force options avaliable to the jailkeepers?

This is correct. My definition is broader for two reasons: I permit limitations of freedom beside coercion and I recognize that coercion in a particular direction limits freedom because it increases the relative cost of alternative courses of action.

[Formless]

Well, alls I'm say'n is, non-lethal coercion doesn't appear to be a factor in the definition you gave as it is worded, and it still doesn't. I'll allow the concession, however, for what it is and is worth.

[Surlethe]

Definition: Freedom is "options" (whatever that means). When a person coerces you, they impose higher costs on some courses of action. This reduces the options available to you. Hence coercion reduces freedom.

[Thanas]

Definition: Freedom is "options" (whatever that means). When a person coerces you, they impose higher costs on some courses of action. This reduces the options available to you. Hence coercion reduces freedom.

So you are not free, for your employer coerces you to work under threat of firing. In the end, your definition seems to come to the same conclusion as mine. Also, what is the difference between your definition than mine? Replace coercion with force and you get the same.

[K. A. Pital]

From what I've thought about it, it seems better to define freedom as something like "options available (without dying)"

That is not really voluntary, though. Easy to demonstrate: substitute prolonged torture for one of the options. You have it, without dying. Is that "voluntary"?

Freedom is the ability to choose options without the fear of any outside repercursions whatsoever. If I don't go to work and yet absolutely nothing happens to me, that's a free act and I am certainly working voluntarily. If at any point there's a possibility I might suffer due to the choice, a degree of coercion is introduced.

One can think of marriages as mutually coercive systems, for example.

[Surlethe]

I'm not free to fly, for example. But gravity isn't coercing me.

Maybe I should amend my definition to remove "without dying." Coercion is just the imposition of extra costs on some possible futures, and death is a possible cost.

[Purple]

I'm not free to fly, for example. But gravity isn't coercing me.

But gravity is not another human. It's an objective law of reality. It's the same as you are not free to sleep in the forest all alone either because of the wolves. Coercion by definition is a social mechanism. As such the only ones capable of coercing anyone to anything are other humans or social constructs (say states, corporations etc.)

[Surlethe]

Exactly my point.

[HMS Conqueror]

IMHO, it only goes too far if you're looking principally at the outcome rather than the intent. You could make a case that Marx should have been able to foresee that attempts to implement his system wouldn't lead to the result he desired. It is possible to criticize his approach: the functionality of his socioeconomic model, and the expected outcome of its implementation - not his actual intentions to increase freedom.

The intent is really clearly stated - create an omnipotent state that controls everything. Marx believes people would learn to like it, but that's all. We would not apply such an unfairly favourable standard to any other ideology. Say, naziism. Once all the disfavoured races ("rebels and emigres") are gone, everyone will be happy to live under naziism since it's so great -- so we have no reason to believe its creators didn't honestly believe. But that hardly makes naziism not authoritarian, or the intent of its creators not authoritarian. You're mixing up "authoritarian" with "bad" and "liberal" with "good". I believe Marx honestly thought his ideas would make the world better, but they would do this by making it more authoritarian in a particular way.

He was an atheist to the other religions, and believed in his own. One doesn't have to believe in a creator god or an afterlife to be a mystic.

What the fuck are you blathering on about? Point to any example of Freud's mysticism, I fucking dare you. Hint: it doesn't exist.

All of his beliefs about psychology.

Freud invented random models that sounded good to him.

You really are a moron, aren't you? Just because subsequent scientific thought has invalidated some of Freud's claims doesn't mean that his models were all random shit he pulled out of his ass. Hell, I bet you don't even know a god-damned thing about Freud and his scientific beliefs, just like this thread has shown you don't know a god-damned thing about communism, socialism, or any other topic that's been brought up. There's a reason that, even with all of the psychoanalytic stuff being broadly dismissed, that Freud's science is still influential in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy.

The fact they were random shit is what made them random shit. If they had worked it would still have been random shit, just lucky random shit.

To give one example, I don't understand how one comes from any observation to "All boys want to fuck their mother and murder their father". Even if such a thing were true - and by introspection I can tell you it isn't - and give that there is no observed spate of mother-fuckings or father-murderings, who would admit to such thoughts?

Anything with negative consequences as dictated by an outside, man-made force, yes.

This is a crazy broad definition. For instance, under your definition the employer is equally unfree, because he is being coerced to pay you a salary in order to retain your labour.

I would define it something more like "Application of unprovoked physical violence".

[Akhlut]

In the modern US, less than 0.7% of the economy is devoted to farming, i.e., production of subsistence. That is, agriculture makes up less than $350 per person, every year. Even at minimum wage, that amounts to just a little more than 45 minutes per week. It's even less at median or average incomes. So we spend maybe half an hour, maybe fifteen minutes a week on the equivalent of subsistence living.

Except that just because someone else farms doesn't mean that the impoverished person doesn't have to do something to acquire food.

Impoverished people in the US, for instance (ie, those making $10k-14k a year) spend nearly $5,000 a year on food, which, if one is making minimum wage ($7.25/hr for federal min. wage) and assuming roughly 10% taken off the top for FICA and other assorted payroll taxes, would take ~765 hours to make, which breaks down to 14.71 hours a week merely to afford food.

However, the hunter-gatherer was often in a superior position, as they eat/ate much healthier food than the impoverished people in the US, and didn't have to spend as much time for ancillary tools for food (ie, they don't have to work so they can get to work, whereas a lot of impoverished people in the US need to spend money on a car note, gas, car repairs, or public transportation {which, if their job is 40 miles away, might necessitate spending 4-6 hours commuting daily, meaning an additional 20-30 hours a week of simple travel to get earn their food; why shouldn't THAT count towards the grand total used to sustain themselves via food?}).

Hunter-gatherers also had it better because, seemingly for most of them, work WAS play, not the soul-destroying labor that modern minimum wage work (and so much more work) is.

Plus, you seem to be forgetting that the world is more than the United States. Even if those Chinese slaves workers at Foxconn don't have to work as long to earn their food and board as a hunter-gatherer, I'm pretty sure they'd rather be living with Australian Aborigines or Papuan tribesmen rather than washing iPhone screens with xylene.

What do we do with the rest of our time? Seek sex, seek status, and seek personal fulfillment. How do we get sex or status, or much of personal fulfillment? We have to buy things to get those, and to buy things we need money, and to make money, we need to create things that other people value, i.e., that other people want to get sex, status, or personal fulfillment.

Whereas hunter-gatherers got that sort of thing through what was, essentially a lot of awesome playtime.

Man, we sure made the right decision as a species. :v

[HMS Conqueror]

Impoverished people in the US, for instance (ie, those making $10k-14k a year) spend nearly $5,000 a year on food, which

explains why they're all so damn fat.

[Akhlut]

Impoverished people in the US, for instance (ie, those making $10k-14k a year) spend nearly $5,000 a year on food, which

explains why they're all so damn fat.

That's $13 and change a day on food, jackass, often for a family of 2-4, meaning everyone's spending somewhere between $3-6 a day on food.

How about you spend two quid a day on food for a month and see how good you get at maximizing calories simply so you don't start starving to death. It's real fucking hard to eat fresh vegetables and organic meat when you'd blow your weekly food budget on just enough meat and vegetables for 2 whole days' worth of food.

[HMS Conqueror]

$13/day is a huge amount. I spend about £4/day on food, as a comfortably upper middle class person. If I actually needed to save money it could go down to £2. But then I cook for myself, don't drink cola, and have a normal BMI.

btw, leafy vegetables have next to no calorific content and "organic" is a marketing scam with minimal/no demonstrable health value.

Also, shifting goalposts. If this is now a family spend then it's $1,250 per person, which isn't much different to what he said when you factor supply chain costs.

[Akhlut]

$13/day is a huge amount. I spend about £4/day on food, as a comfortably upper middle class person. If I actually needed to save money it could go down to £2. But then I cook for myself, don't drink cola, and have a normal BMI.

That $13/day is for a family, usually of 2-4 people, often 1-3 of them children, who tend to require relatively large amounts of healthy (and therefore often more expensive) food.

Also, the way agricultural subsidies in the US work, healthier foods cost more than less healthy ones, because corn is subsidized to an absurd extent, and HFCS is found in nearly every unhealthy food on the market.

btw, leafy vegetables have next to no calorific content and "organic" is a marketing scam with minimal/no demonstrable health value.

Leafy vegetables contain a lot of non-calorific nutrients and beneficial antioxidants, while in the US, organic meats do not contain antibiotics (a huge problem in the US), and which aren't typically raised in a factory farm environment (which, due to philosophies of large factory farms in the US, typically lead to very unhealthy meat due to high fat content, large amounts of antibiotic usage, usage of growth hormones, and unsanitary conditions for the animals prior to death, to say nothing of larger environmental concerns and general animal welfare problems).

[HMS Conqueror]

That $13/day is for a family, usually of 2-4 people, often 1-3 of them children,

Again, shifting goalposts. The US poverty line is $10,890 for a single person, and $14,710 for a 2 person household (the range your quoted). A 4 or 5 person has poverty line of $22-25k. And this is total household income, not individual income.

The original claim was that a single person to feed himself would only have to work a couple of hours a week, which is much less than any time in the past. This is true.

who tend to require relatively large amounts of healthy (and therefore often more expensive) food.

Also, the way agricultural subsidies in the US work, healthier foods cost more than less healthy ones, because corn is subsidized to an absurd extent, and HFCS is found in nearly every unhealthy food on the market.

Children require less food, for obvious reason. Healthy food isn't more expensive, depending how you define that. The reason everyone is so fat in the US is because they eat too much food, not because they don't buy organic fair trade artichokes or whatever.

Leafy vegetables contain a lot of non-calorific nutrients and beneficial antioxidants, while in the US, organic meats do not contain antibiotics (a huge problem in the US), and which aren't typically raised in a factory farm environment (which, due to philosophies of large factory farms in the US, typically lead to very unhealthy meat due to high fat content, large amounts of antibiotic usage, usage of growth hormones, and unsanitary conditions for the animals prior to death, to say nothing of larger environmental concerns and general animal welfare problems).

Yeah it's twinky health food and political stuff like that. No one ever starved to death for lack of antioxidants, and the impact on even long term mortality is scarcely detectable. Antibiotic use in industrial farming is thought to be bad by increasing disease resistance btw, not because meat produced using antibiotics is poisonous or something.

This stuff is aimed at the middle/upper middle class; poorer people have more practical worries.

[Akhlut]

That $13/day is for a family, usually of 2-4 people, often 1-3 of them children,

Again, shifting goalposts. The US poverty line is $10,890 for a single person, and $14,710 for a 2 person household (the range your quoted). A 4 or 5 person has poverty line of $22-25k. And this is total household income, not individual income.

That just makes your position look worse, as households within the $22k-$25k range only spend $16 and change a day on food (source), meaning proportionately even less is spent per person on food.

You also don't seem to understand nor care about how poverty limits access to cheaper sources of healthy food. A lot of impoverished people in urban environments usually can't afford (either due to time or monetary constraints) to go to real grocery stores and must contend with corner stores which don't sell fresh produce or much in the way of staple foods, and instead sell a lot of highly processed junk foods (chips, processed meats, ramen, etc.). Similarly, because a lot of those stores in urban areas aren't huge box stores, they don't get deals that are nearly as good on the food that they do get, meaning prices on the consumer are much, much higher than at the suburban WalMart or CostCo. Similarly, for the rural poor, they generally only have frequent access to local general stores, which have the same problems as urban areas.

These areas are called food deserts and are associated with unhealthy diets due to the fact that poor people need to spend money on whatever food's available.

The original claim was that a single person to feed himself would only have to work a couple of hours a week, which is much less than any time in the past. This is true.

Somewhere around 14 hours a week on food alone, not including time spent for maintaining a shelter, which is far, far higher in modern societies and doesn't include transportation (which is free for pre-agricultural peoples).

who tend to require relatively large amounts of healthy (and therefore often more expensive) food.

Also, the way agricultural subsidies in the US work, healthier foods cost more than less healthy ones, because corn is subsidized to an absurd extent, and HFCS is found in nearly every unhealthy food on the market.

Children require less food, for obvious reason. Healthy food isn't more expensive, depending how you define that. The reason everyone is so fat in the US is because they eat too much food, not because they don't buy organic fair trade artichokes or whatever.

Moderately active children require nearly as many calories as moderately active adults. A moderately active toddler requires between 50-75% as many calories as a moderately active adult. Moderately active pre-teen boys can eat more than moderately active adult women. And a highly active 7 year old boy can require MORE food than his middle-aged, sedentary mother.

So, no, it isn't "obvious" at all that children require less food; in scenarios that aren't preposterous at all, a 7 year old boy can require more food than his middle aged mother (if she's an office worker who doesn't work out and he's highly active and on a youth sports team). The only instances where an adult would require a great deal more food than a child would be a very active adult male versus a sedentary elementary school girl (3000 calories versus 1200 calories), whereas a moderately active parent generally only requires a little under half as much food as a moderately active child.

Leafy vegetables contain a lot of non-calorific nutrients and beneficial antioxidants, while in the US, organic meats do not contain antibiotics (a huge problem in the US), and which aren't typically raised in a factory farm environment (which, due to philosophies of large factory farms in the US, typically lead to very unhealthy meat due to high fat content, large amounts of antibiotic usage, usage of growth hormones, and unsanitary conditions for the animals prior to death, to say nothing of larger environmental concerns and general animal welfare problems).

Yeah it's twinky health food and political stuff like that. No one ever starved to death for lack of antioxidants, and the impact on even long term mortality is scarcely detectable. Antibiotic use in industrial farming is thought to be bad by increasing disease resistance btw, not because meat produced using antibiotics is poisonous or something.

Preventing resistance among zoonotic diseases is not a foolhardy idea, as many of the worst diseases on earth to humans are zoonosis.

This stuff is aimed at the middle/upper middle class; poorer people have more practical worries.

And you were complaining about how so much money being spent on food was making Americans fat; turns out the cheaper and more available foods are the least healthy.

Correlation? What's that?

[Thanas]

I'm not free to fly, for example. But gravity isn't coercing me.

Maybe I should amend my definition to remove "without dying." Coercion is just the imposition of extra costs on some possible futures, and death is a possible cost.

Torture does not result in death all the time.

And I find it disingenious how you say "gravity" in response to my definition of "absent man-made force". Last I checked, gravity is not man-made.

This is a crazy broad definition. For instance, under your definition the employer is equally unfree, because he is being coerced to pay you a salary in order to retain your labour.

Yes? So? What do you mean here?