Jesus Christ.
Edit: The full debate is here. I highly recommend listening to it.
Yaron Brook is the chair of the Ayn Rand Institute - he's very well spoken, has very good debate skills, and is highly intelligent. I can easily see how he would run circles around most people. But this is where Sam Seder's brilliance shines through. He is also well spoken, has good debate skills, and is intelligent. He was able to counter each point Brook made and further the conversation till the natural end.
The debate was civil and w/o any insults while still being challenging and intellectually stimulating. So completely unlike the usual online debate-bros. One of the things I tried to do while listening was pause it and try to form a counter to Brook on my own w/o listening to what Seder said. I needed to take far more time than Sam did and my answers were nowhere near as precise or well-articulated or counterattacking.
Personal responsibility rhetoric is literally "I just held out my fist and she ran into it" yet somehow millions of adults buy into it
Honestly, their view of personal responsibility is just selfish.
Does a parent not have a personal responsibility to care for their child? Do doctors not have personal responsibility to provide the right treatment? No one is an island. We need each other to live and assuring that is the biggest responsibility we can have.
I'm going to lie to you and it's your fault if you believe me. I'm going to rip you off and it's your fault if you take the deal. I'm going to make it look like my building isn't about to collapse and it's your fault if you die when it falls on you.
But you dare not renege on a contract. Or take away my property rights. Those are sacrosanct.
Honestly, their view of personal responsibility is just selfish.
Sam got him to outright say this, that basically he thinks everyone has a right to be selfish and not help others.
That is what was so beautiful about this debate. Like, by the end everyone sane/neutral knew exactly where the Randian was coming from and just how deranged of a position it was. Maybe it won't convince those who're in too deep, but it will certainly show some the errors of libertarianism.
I'm not justifying the building collapsing and their deaths.
Yes, YES YOU ARE!
He realized that his logic was unraveling in front of thousands of people and literally ran away. I doubt he'd be back soon.
We don't need no government involved in making sure people don't die from our ruthless pursuit of never-ending profit!
"I didn't murder that guy, he was simply suffering the consequences of standing in my direct line of fire."
If you didn't want to die, then you should've been immortal. Take some personal responsibility.
Yeah it's simple, who do you identify with: the gun owner or the victim?
I know my answer! :stalin-gun-1: :ancap-good:
Smart Enough to Grift is the standard for Highly Intelligent among Americans, it seems.
Libertarians want ‘freedom’ but their conception of freedom begins and ends with themselves.
Basically a bunch of kids with main character syndrome want to be responsible for public policy.
Nothing makes that clearer than watching an Ayn Rand "scholar" argue their points. Literally the philosophy of selfishness.
Truly. I think the end of this debate shows that better than anything else. Libertarians, Randians etc. have a fundamentally different perspective on the world. Completely unhinged at best and actively malevolent in general. But a lot of young people get sucked into it and never discover the true, hideous nature of the beast.
Worse, some know explicitly that's the mental construction that justifies selfishness so they go along with it even more
Yeah, some want a justification for their selfish and harmful behavior.
I think that every debate between a leftist and a libertarian should have a glass of unregulated "freedom" water for the libertarian debater.
Bit idea: Have a debate with a libertarian where they get a market choice between visibly murky water and clean water that they don't know has been dosed with LSD.
Libertarians will generally side with whatever has more power so long as that power isn't in the form of state, but even then it's wishywashy. There are those who act and those acted upon. If you're acted upon, then you're already morally compromised by being the lesser being in the situation. If you're acted upon by a government regulation, then it's lesser beings trying to restrict your brilliance. It's genuinely the worst moral outlook possible and it should say something that the most powerful figures in business do not subscribe to libertarian thought whatsoever because they're aware it does them no favors.
It’s always young people who also seem to treat rules and laws as physics. Just absolute and set in stone.
I feel like video games lead to randian views as games have rules that ARE physics. You can’t really cheat in videogames in the traditional sense. I think that lens leads to this survival of the fittest mindset.
They're ricardians who were driven insane by the 20th century, a malformed ideological artifact that's maintained its usefulness because of it's anti-welfare statism
Love how this guy equivocated “building owners knew the extent of the damge” with “everyone who lived inside the building are completely aware of the appraised conditions of the structure they live in”
This is where neoliberal ideology bleeds into Randian ultraliberalism. Neoliberals assume everyone is a perfectly rational actor on the free market with unfettered access to all the information and resources they need to make the most rational decision. If they don't, it's never the result of systemic biases against them or - God forbid - market failure or other structural forces of capitalism, but rather whatever individual moral failing led them to fail to consult the available resources.
I'm not going to spoil the debate but Sam did address that point. The entire debate is incredible to watch.
I’m not going to, i cant sit through the mad ramblings of a poisoned mind without some way to personally remedy the trapped worms living in that guys head.
Fair enough. I'd still recommend bookmarking it and watching it when you feel like it, though.
First of all, Sam Seder, lib as he may be, has an incredibly patient, gentle soul and he has such a great ability to get libertarians to admit the core of their ideology.
Secondly, how would anyone have time to do anything in Rand guy's free market universe? I'd have to hire my own private inspectors to constantly monitor where I live, inspect my food for poisons, monitor the weather for me, and basically keep me informed of all possible things in the universe at all times.
just subscribe to my totally legit, non astroturfed review magazine and i'll let you know if theyre any good
The libertarians inability to admit the state's role in skill formation and cost minimization for capitalist firms is probably the second-biggest contradiction in their fantastical ideology
I genuinely feel like a lot of their ideological shortcomings are a byproduct of reflecting the concerns of early American petite bourgeois settlers rather than the actual class interests of modern bourgeoisie. They only see society in terms of rapid formation of small businesses from readily accessible resources and land. It's also part of the reason for why modern libertarians don't seem to catch on to any modern social necessities like public infrastructure, education, or healthcare. In their minds it's still the late 18th century and there's a vast amount of land to plunder and everything an individual needs to survive is still there. Just go out west and build your own log cabin in the woods and start a fur trapping business. So they can only view poverty in terms of either state interference or a failure of personal responsibility to access these infinite resources.
Is the largest contradiction all the normal capitalist profit motive stuff?
Is the largest contradiction all the normal capitalist profit motive stuff?
Kinda, their biggest contradiction is their delusion that states aren't necessary to create and maintain complex markets, for them civil governance and contract law just pops out of the frontier fully formed and somehow without the coercion of state violence, they mistake fantasy world-building for history and political theory
Sam is not a bad guy at all and I have a lot of admiration for him to be able to do this debate stuff. I would just get mad and leave making myself look like an ass.
That moment when Sam just sits back and lets the guy keep talking because the shit he's saying is patently ridiculous :chefs-kiss:
Secondly, how would anyone have time to do anything in Rand guy’s free market universe? I’d have to hire my own private inspectors
You would most likely be someone else's private inspector. That would be the majority of your waking hours.
This guy made the decision to say something so stupid that I stabbed him, thats on HIM! :knifecat:
Honestly, the capitalists are asking for it... :gui:
If you didn't want your head chopped off, you shouldn't have stolen all that surplus value.
"If I walk into the street without looking, should the driver be limited?" My immediate thought was Uh yeah, of course? You're expected to stop/slow down to avoid any collision regardless of whose "fault" it would be if it is within your power to reasonably avoid. If you see a pedestrian walk out and you aren't paying attention to the road properly and failed to stop at what would be considered a reasonable distance to have noticed and completely stop that without any issues then yes that is your fault.
nope when someone j walks I take my chance to mow down a law breaker
Ayn Rand would have lavishly written a scene where a bunch of selfish but somehow not the right kind of selfish condo dwellers were crushed to death because they all tried to share their money instead of paying rent to a landlord or something.
If Ayn Rand didn't exist, capitalists would have invented her. Her entire purpose is to give capitalists a "moral" claim to their wealth like the Divine Right of Kings.
What's next Sam?!?!? We're just going to accept that pedestrians have the right of way?? What you want people who drive cars to be responsible for not hitting people with them you fucking pussy???!
The people who lived in that collapsed building made a bad choice! Which they were free to do! Freedoooooommmm :anglo-burn:
His example also is the opposite of what he’s saying.
If you walk into the street without looking, a driver is still expected to avoid hitting you.
Yeah but that's cuz of g o v e r n m e n t.
He also blames drug addicts for getting addicted so....
Pharmaceutical companies: lie to doctors about opioids.
Doctors: pass on lies to patients, along with prescriptions for opiods.
This jackass: "everybody knows opiods are addictive! They made a choice! Free market!"
