Anyone else get memed into reading this guy's take on ethics? My cousin is a huge fanboy and bought it for me since I'm the most educated in the family and he figured I'd love it. I knew Molyneaux was a cult leader but holy shit do you have to be deluded to take him seriously.
he tries to 'solve' ethics with UPB in 150 pages, just lol. that isn't even getting into his arguments which are abysmal, and that even if he had good arguments he just makes a shitty copy of Kant's approach that is vulnerable to the same criticism.
>>7821884
He's regarded by the majority of people as a joke at best and a cult-leader at worst, just ignore him and move on.
Apparently he won't even try to defend UPB now on his call-in show because there's just too many holes in it and it's really shitty in general.
He has some really fucking retarded views as well so probably worth trying to get your cousin away from such societally caustic people.
try to get your cousin to read some more intelligent right-wing libertarians and ween him off the likes of molyneux and (i assume) austrian economics
>>7821912
The kid doesn't read, he listens to summaries of books on youtube and tries to talk about them. He's like 16.
The only people in the family who actually read shit other than genre fic, romance, pop science and self help are my grandfather and I, and he's 89 and in the grips of senility at this point.
Tell me more about what's wrong with Molyneux. I follow his YouTube channel semi-regularly and am curious as to why I should not.
>>7821964
His whole philosophy is based on traumatic experiences he had with his mother when he was a child. So you can't really blame him for what he says, but you shouldn't follow him neither. There are plenty of articles that explain why he is nuts. Just google a little and you'll find enough.
>>7821964
He's a pseudo-intellectual who failed in academia, blamed the system and started his own radio program. His ego is ridiculously inflated (he has said that perhaps Aristotle is the only philosopher who would be within his rights to talk down to him) and virtually everything he has written is god awful and full of holes.
Look at his podcast on forgiveness to get a glimpse into how fucked up this guy is. He believes that you should forgive a stranger who provides compensation, but if a friend wrongs you he must pay extra, must pay a time tariff, and do all of these things. He says that an apology is a form of aggression and that forgiving a friend who has wronged you without paying this super-restitution is an act of self hatred and instead you should write them out of your life.
His practice of defooing is fucking insane as well, very standard cult leader philosophy though. His understanding of child rearing is misinformed at best and his understanding of economics is severely malformed by his ideological leanings. UPB shows up exactly how much he knows about philosophy, which is he probably read summaries of Kant and Aristotle then called it good.
The funny thing is he's a self aggrandizer who makes a big fuss over having the biggest following of any youtube philosopher, but whenever he's acknowledged or draws any attention from the academic world it's universally negative and usually completely focused on his poorly formed ideology masquerading as philosophy, economics, or whatever he pretends to be an expert on during that particular rant. Even Mises doesn't publish flattering reviews of his work.
He's a pseud of the highest degree.
His "Truth About" videos are alright, haven't gone much into his philosophy but he's a blogger so I would imagine it's pretty shit
I don't get the cult meme, can someone explain it to me? I've watched a lot of his videos, I don't really agree with a lot of them but I still can't understand the cult thing.
>>7822163
This is essentially what I'm wondering as well.
>>7821925
I remember being sixteen and a radical libertarian. I would listen to Adam kokesh and read Rothbard. Don't worry, if your cousin is anything like me he'll just grow up to be politically apathetic yet lean libertarian.
>>7822163
He encourages children to cut people, who don't agree with anarcho-capitalism, out of their lives.
>>7822163
He advocates cutting yourself off from your birth family if they do not meet a certain number of criteria. Also observe the dislikes and comments on any video contradicting him and notice that most academics who criticize him end up deleting the criticism because his cultists attack the unbeliever.
You have to go to his forums to really observe his cult in action though, one minute they'll be praising the virtues of someone then the moment Stefan declares them a heretic, they will turn on them and claim they always hated them.
>>7822201
i wish 'austrians' - if they have to exist, would just read hayek and friedman(yeah i know he's not an austrian, but plenty would be sympathetic) rather than trash like rothbard and mises
maybe then they can read some rawls and actually study some economics beyond 101 and be normal
>>7822211
It's really amazing when he takes on another cult ideology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Yp1jUtcX8
>>7822232
wait what was the point of talking about the European GDP in 1870? Am I retarded or did he not really make any point about it?
>>7822245
It's a big, specific number and people who use big, specific numbers have to be smart.
>>7822211
>He advocates cutting yourself off from your birth family if they do not meet a certain number of criteria.
I mean, people do it anyways, with or without this guys advice.
You'll need more than that to label him a cult leader.
>>7822221
Unfortunate! Almost 5 similar digits!
ITT: no arguments
>>7822221
Why is Mises trash?
>>7822332
in short: lack of rigour, empiricism, so ideological he called hayek a communist, muh praxeology
slightly longer version by a relatively respected economist: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm
>>7822221
going beyond 101 micro would mean actually understanding keynes, which they are constitutionally incapable of as their entire political purpose is hating him
Is that the judge?
>>7823669
the funny thing is that Hayek fundamentally agreed with Keynes on the majority of things, their difference was mostly philosophical in nature, specifically the understanding of how much we know about how the economy works (Hayek was vindicated here, IMO).
>>7823776
I have a copy of "The Road to Serfdom" but I haven't actually read it - are you saying Hayek accepted effective demand theories of the macroeconomy but just opposed state investment on the philosophical principle of anti-statism in general? That would be...interesting.
>>7821884
How do you actually refute UPB?
>>7822004
>all that forgiveness stuff
Huh. What a bizarre worldview.
>>7823877
Not fully, he advocated for social security and universal healthcare, he just wasn't the anti-government zealot that the other Austrians became and some selective citations of him make him out to be.
ED and the question of how much we know are the two big things he doesn't like about Keynes, and he softened on ED later in life and accepted many of the Keynesian criticisms of his work on the great depression.
He fucking hated supply siders too.
>>7823895
UPB says nothing about the necessity or validity of the origins of the universal values it offers. He basically says that UPB is required. This stands as almost a maxim onto itself yet he has no God or anything other than the assumption that behavior is universally preferable to back this up. His morality has nothing to do with morality and provides us no reasons to follow it other than those one can generate with circular logic.
>>7822290
Are you trolling, or are you just an idiot?
>>7821964
So it begins with his belief about non-initiation of force, This sounds like a reasonable principle because only tyrants think it is acceptable to attack others.
However, moral principles can only be put into law if a group has the power to enforce them. So to prevent people from initiating force, you must initiate force first.
One possible way of getting around this, as proposed by some Libertarians, is to have a private security company. However if the law can only be enforced by those who have the finances to pay for it, then it is not applied universally.
Another idea is to just have people pay for a police force via taxes. But as soon as you make that concession you have already contradicted the moral principle you've based your society on, and opened the door to further increasing taxation to pay for other services.
Another issue is his philosophy is centred around politics, it should be possible to put it into practice if that is the case. But Molyneux's ideas fail disastrously in this regard: the Libertarian state is never going to exist. Apart from being unable to interact with other states, they would have no mechanism for purchasing the infrastructure of society. How do you privatise the sewers?
Recently I have been thinking that the idea we pay taxes by force doesn't really hold up to scrutiny: you pay taxes because you choose to participate in the economy. If you wish to be a homeless bum then you do not have to pay taxes, and the only extent the law will apply to you will be centred around the 'initiation of force' principles which Stefan agrees with.
>>7824060
There's a nuance between libertarian (in the North American contemporary context) and the kind of anarchism which Stefan advocates for, libertarians broadly tend to be okay with some of the more basic functions of statecraft and the state itself isn't.
Objectivists are also supportive of the state in certain roles. It's anarcho-capitalists who have this issue with their ideology being workable.
I'd also quibble with your toying idea that the state does not exert force in taxation. This is generally uncontroversial, even my highly progressive faculty adviser in my political science program accepted this to be true. If you hold this to be true, extortion and blackmail are not violence either.
The key to refuting the NAP is not narrowing the scope of violence, but broadening it. Imagine you are in a forest and you see a giant tree with a canopy so large that it allows nothing below it to grow. The saplings are starved from light and are never going to be able to grow at all. Is force being initiated on these saplings? I would argue yes, they are being crowded out of an open use resource by an incumbent entity. Does this mean we need to chop down the grand old tree? Not necessarily, but we might consider trimming the branches a bit so that the other trees might get a little light.
Violence is more or less implicit in any human interaction through the mechanics of power. Your behavior towards others is fundamentally altered by power dynamics and vice versa, free choice is often an illusion, 'coercion' is the default state of human interaction.
The fundamental problem with most libertarians is they generally think that the basic economics 101 provides a realistic model of human behavior. I would actually argue that Stefan probably does not have a much stronger grasp of econ than an introductory class would provide. He knows a good deal of history and a little bit from all of the other humanities.
