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absolutely delightful thread

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Oct 19, 2022

I was talking to a friend the other day and suggested that if you want to understand how an argument in political philosophy reads to someone with (radical) libertarian priors, you should imagine that whenever it talks about the state, it's instead talking about Tony Soprano. 1/8

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4:48 AM · Oct 20, 2022

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this also applies to every anarchist

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Reminds me of the old "pirates and emperors" faux-schoolhouse rocks.

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This analogy only works if you’ve never seen the Sopranos and haven’t thought about how government works since your C- in high school civics

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Wonderful

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The mob lacks features that states have, like democratic accountability and a monopoly on force, so it's a bad comparison. We need an entity with a monopoly on force to prevent chaos, and because such an entity must exist we should make it as democratically accountable as we can.

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Obviously. And that is why people would choose to support competent mafia instead of failing state.

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I still don't understand how you have property rights without the state. Two men meet on an island one has a basket of fruit. The other is much larger. Now he has basket of fruit.

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only interesting because it’s so biased, flawed and fitting the guys narrative imho. Some counter arguments in te comments are more realistic

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Without a Tony to enforce the rights of liberty, another Tony by a different name will rise up and enforce order instead. Huh, checks out.

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This is exactly backwards. Given there are multiple occurrences of Tony, what establishes resiliency in the face of that? Like gangsters/mobs/mafias occur as a cross cultural phenomenon.