You’re hallucinating. I didn’t ask for praise. I responded to the only statement you made that was discussable. Your upshot was that I wasn’t very nice to ownership because I said negative things about it that, according to you, don’t apply. That’s so vague it’s worthless. Your comment as a whole serves the claim that there’s nothing worth discussing here, which just raises the question in my mind why you commented at all. “Nothing to see here folks!” Well, enough that it moved you to state the obvious, supposedly. So, naw, there’s definitely something to see here. But you’d like to dismiss it as nothing, apparently.
MillardJMelnyk
Karma: −36
Yes, responded as you did. You can’t intelligently question what you’ve got near-zero familiarity with. And again, it was an invitation. No obligation.
Wow, do you habitually make shit up off the top of your head and pretend it’s real? Seems pathological.
Have you read Utopia? I have. The problems with More’s thinking are the same assumptions that corrupt most thinking on the topic of the structure and operation of society: supremacism and authoritarianism. “Power corrupts” because it’s corrupt itself, embodying supremacism and authoritarianism and using violence as its chief tool.
Discussion is in no way blocked if you’re interested in discussing. I’m not trying to prove anything. The reactions people have to these ideas prove that they’re potent enough. Proof isn’t needed.
Your #1 is an example of an almost universal reaction I get once a person sees that there’s something to what I’m saying: they want me to tell them how it’s going to work. One, that’s not my job, but it would be dope to find people who want to explore that together. Two, the question whether you or I or all of us together have the information and understanding at this point to “make it work” is completely irrelevant to the question whether ownership is what I’ve said it is. If it is, it is—and our ability or incapability to “make it work” is neither here nor there in that regard. There are far more important and foundational questions to deal with first:
Why haven’t we noticed that we’ve been trying to achieve fairness and prosperity on the basis of such a perverse principle?
How could we be so naive as to think that we can make anything work until we figure out what went wrong with our thinking?
What repulses us from the idea of a society founded on the principle of provide-first? The repulsion certainly isn’t an intelligent reaction, because we’ve never even made the attempt to find out what it’s like and how it would work, let alone experimented with it long enough to obtain reliable data from which to derive any intelligent conclusions or make any non-BS pronouncements.
There is a deeply enculturated bias against merely entertaining the possibility that there could be something deeply perverse and dysfunctional about ownership. It expresses itself forcefully and smugly whenever I bring the topic up. If you can’t even get people to think about an idea rationally, openly, and honestly, how the heck are they ever going to experiment with it properly to gain an intelligent basis for answering the “make it work” question?
To your #3, I don’t think it will help the discussion to complicate it or bring everything but the kitchen sink in for consideration. The kind of ownership I’m talking about is obvious and ubiquitous: the kind recognized in a court of law. It’s enough to start with that and focus on that. Let’s talk about the camel, not its fleas.
Excellent question!
Like I said in the post, I’ve been at this particular point for over a decade, as I see from looking back on my notes. My research MO, aside from the obvious, is to educate myself, write up my thinking, expose it for criticism to the most intelligent people I can find, (blogs, social media, the occasional “expert” who’ll take the time), endless hours of discussion, and see what comes up in the process. This post is an example of my method. Over the last 1-2 years, I’ve made heavy use of AIs, lately DeepSeek and Claude. I do the same with them: present my ideas, deal with their criticisms and objections—whether to correct them or take correction myself—until we’re agreed or the AI starts looping or hallucinating.
So, when I say I have yet to hear, after all this time, credible, convincing arguments to the contrary, it’s after having spent the time and done the work that most people don’t even attempt.
The question I started with was, “Why are things so fucked up and almost nothing makes sense?” That was in my teen age, when I stopped asking my parents for answers because what they insisted on made no fucking sense. I worked my way up through the educational route until I finally got so frustrated and repulsed by the attitudes in academia, I dropped out just credits short of my BA in Philosophy. Since then, I’ve been self-educated.
So, I got “here”—a career in construction as a business owner, a career in IT at major corporations, currently a writing career, and six grown sons later—covering a helluvalot more ground than just the nature of ownership, by listening to every non-absurd theory I could, and even some that were absurd, too, trying to make them work (something almost no one these days seems to have the balls to do,) accepting and incorporating what did work and discarding the rest, rinse, repeat. What I have now is what I’m left with, and none of it is sacrosanct. It’s all provisional, open to question, discussable, criticizable, correctable, debatable (although I’d much rather discuss than debate), and rejectable whenever good reason for doing so appears.
Thanks for asking.
Yes, by that definition, a person has a right to deprive others of sexual access to their body. But that would imply that they are not their body, but that their body is an object they have absolute rights over, like a car. An owner breaks no law by taking their brand-new 2025 AMG GT 63 SE to the wrecking yard and having it crushed. So, then, if we own our bodies, why is suicide frowned on, outlawed, and a sin in many religions?
I happen to find objectifying myself and my body that way to be disgusting, because it’s dehumanizing.
Btw, the post is an invitation to discuss. It’s completely fiine to decline an invitation. But the fact that you responded as you did makes me wonder why you felt you couldn’t just gracefully decline.
I’m not sure what precisely some of your statements relate to what I posted, nor even what you intend them to mean. I’m left guessing.
Maybe you’re referring to my lack of mention of other rights often associated with ownership: access, use, disposition, transfer, destruction. However, not only do none of those, or all of them together, constitute ownership—none of them are necessary to constitute ownership.
”Necessary but not sufficient” doesn’t even apply here, because the only necessary right that constitutes ownership is the right to deprive others from the access to, use of, disposition of, transfer of, or destruction of a desirable whether the owner accesses, uses, dispositions, transfers, or destroys the desirable or not. An owner can have completely forgotten about a piece of property for 50 years, has not accessed, used, dispositioned, transferred, or destroyed it in all that time—but if their deprivation of the property from all humankind is violated, it will be considered illegal or even immoral.
The post contains discussable ideas, if you’re interested in discussing them. I’m happy to dive in with you. Your request for examples makes no sense to me. I defined what I mean by “ownership”, there’s no hidden subtext here. Examples are any case in which a person claims the right to deprive others of a desirable.
No, dude. You’re thinking backwards. If you can’t answer foundational questions, you literally don’t know what “it” is, so how are you going to make “it” work? If you can’t deal with an idea conceptually, what makes you think you’ve got the competence to deal with it practically?
I’m not ignoring anything. Focusing on first steps first doesn’t mean you deny there are more steps...
But back your claim. You claim that the foundational questions “depend” on whether we can make it work. Explain that dependency. “You can’t just ignore that there’s no way to make it work...” So, you’ve already decided there’s no way to make it work. How did you do that? What stops it from working?
Your last paragraph was interesting, though. There you allow that “impossible to make it work” is an “if”. For every “if” there’s a counter-if: if it’s possible to make it work, then the answer to, “What repulses us from the idea of a society founded on the principle of provide-first?” is: because we’re delusionally paranoid.
But your statement fails, because you can’t determine if it’s possible to make “it” work until AFTER:
1. You understand what “it” is.
2. You have answers to foundational questions about “it”.
3. You understand “it” well enough to actually try to make “it” work.
4. You actually try very hard, in every which way you can think of, over and over, to make it work but fail to make “it” work—at which point you are justified in saying, “We couldn’t make it work,” but no one is ever justified in saying, “It cannot be made to work.”
So, you’re really making claims without any rational/evidential basis here.