161
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
161 points (88.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43781 readers
859 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
While I'm in board with the sentiment, I think there would be a lot of implementation problems with this. Just off the top of my head:
I'm a parent, and my kid isn't competent to make decisions about his own body. Given the right to do what he wanted with it, he would immediately eat ice cream until he threw up, then do that every day in between gaming sessions until he died from diabetes.
Existing laws being reviewed is a good idea, but I could see politicians with a slight majority holding fundamental laws hostage to extract concessions from other parties. You can work around this, but it could be difficult to avoid gotchas.
Do we include right to free movement in the sovereign territory point? Because we have a large prison population. I'm on board with dismantling most of that, but there will probably always be people that need to be restrained from harming others.
What counts as communication? Because if I can put a character on a shirt and sell them cheaper than the independent creator on patreon or wherever, most of their profits go away. I can subscribe and support them, then turn around and sell their work on the same website. I'm not a huge fan of copyright, but it did/does have a purpose beyond endless abuse by Disney.
As for the wealth tax thing, I don't care if it has implementation issues lol
In general my argument is that copyrights as they exist right now are a stifling force that mostly protects corporations while punishing both small creators and just... Regular individuals. For engaging in like. Human culture. Since I was suggesting lines for a constitution and a constitution is generally meant to be a sort of meta-law, like 'these are the intents of this state that we are forming, so the actual laws will reason on the practical application of it based on the intents', I didn't speak as to how this might be in practice. But to actually get into it --
I recently read the works of Lawrence Lessig, who is a bit of a stick in the mud and too much on the side of corporations for my liking, but when talking copyright the point he makes, which is a good point, is that at their root, copyright laws seek to regulate creativity as a commercial activity, I.e.: So you can't deprive creators of the money they might make from making stuff to sell by just waiting for them to make it and then reselling it. And that in the age of the internet where the line between "commercial creativity" and "just human culture being human culture" has become hopelessly blurred -- And that bad actors seek to keep that line blurry because it invests them with power. Power to use invasive DRM schemes. Power to charge for repeated viewings of something already purchased. Power to control what is even said about their product.
So if I were to make this into actual law, I'd make it so that every creative product would necessarily be copyrighted to a person or persons rather than a company. Because even bigass team projects are not made by a studio, but by the people that made them. Disney didn't make Aladdin 1991 -- It was written by Ron Clements, John Musker and Ted Elliot. So the story should belong to them. The amazing music was written by Tim Rice and Alan Menken, so it should be theirs, while the performances of said music in the movie should belong to the performers, the animation? It'd collectively belong to the people that made the drawings.
It's more overhead than saying "THIS CORPO OWNS IT ALL BECAUSE THEY WERE WORKING WITH THIS CORPO" but it is ultimately needed, because this in itself would already do a lot to cull what, to me, is the biggest abuse within the copyright system. If something belongs to a person, that person will eventually die, and at that point the whole "you are denying this person the fruit of their own creation" argument dies with them. A corporation is an immortal abstract entity and should never be allowed to own -- Anything really.
I would also ensure the text of the law specifically protects creators against people profiteering off their creation without them being duly compensated -- So like, selling copies of someone else's art? Crime. Showing other people the art with no commercial intent? Not a crime, can never be one.
I like the copyright idea described above. I'm not sure how well it would work in practice, because I've never heard of anything like that being implemented, and new solutions almost always have problems. It's interesting though.
Regarding the kids making their own decisions thing- my example was intended to be a little funny, so I may not have picked the best one. Instead of the ice cream example, what about sex with adults? Sex changes? General amputation? Living on their own? Cigarettes? Harder drugs?
These are all things that kids can have opinions about, all things are mostly changes to their own body or bodily freedom, all things that can have terrible long term consequences. Should we prevent parents from controlling their kids, and allow the children to decide whether they want to do any of these?
Sometimes the finding-out part of the fuck-around-and-find-out experience is an irreversible addiction that there's no coming back from. Parents aren't always better, obviously, but they probably avoid more permanent harms for their kids than the kids would in their own.
Eeeeh, I can concede on the general premise of 'sometimes find out is something you don't come back from', although I am also skeptical of parents having childrens' best interests in mind when it comes to things like gender-affirming care because [gestures vaguely at the literally everywhere]
Yeah, fair. My parents were painfully religious and harassed me unmercifully because I wasn't, so I'm not saying it's all sunshine and roses. But leaving kids free to do whatever they want seems like it would have an attrition rate similar to turtles running for the ocean.
Adults can't be allowed to do whatever they want either, so it's not really a good idea to establish a hierarchy based on age. There are few things specific to kids that don't also apply to adults.
Actually the junk food example is a perfect example of this. Adults get diabetes from eating too much of it just as kids do, so everyone needs to cut down on their sugar intake.
And doing that doesn't require authoritarian intervention, just reclaiming of the means of production and restructuring them so food production no longer puts fucking sugar into everything.
This life doesn't have to be hard. Balancing health and freedom don't have to be hard. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
I would bet that the obesity rate among children if they didn't have parents deliberately trying to get them into sports and making them meals at home would be almost 100%. You're saying "this affects everyone" which is technically correct but ignores that it almost certainly affects one group much more.
Yet most kids don't, and most kids aren't obese from it.
You can't simply force people to be healthy either. People, including kids, have the right to be unhealthy, and that's just something you have to accept if you want a free society.
If you don't accept it, that just means you don't want a free society, that's all.
And if you don't, you can advocate for it in the thread. As I said, I want people's honest opinions. But you can't have it both ways.
You're asserting that they have a right to make all of their own decisions, then asserting that I don't believe in a free society unless I agree. Neither of these things is obviously true- it's possible to support children having some decisions made for them without supporting totalitarianism.
See my other reply for examples of kids making their own decisions. Do you support all of those?
That's actually a strawman. I asserted all people, kids and adults, have the right to be unhealthy, and they do.
What a kid eats is between their parents and them, and no one else, not you or the rest of the community, has the right to simply stick your oar in like that because you think you have the right to keep kids under your thumb like that. You don't. To assert otherwise is authoritarian.
You might not like being called authoritarian, but it's the truth, and it doesn't change because you think all people should eat is fucking rabbit food. 🤦
If you want an authoritarian country, just say so instead of playing word gams with me. I'm not gonna give you the fight that you want.
Honestly.
Where did I say that I wanted a say? We were talking about whether kids should be free to make all of their own decisions. I'm using bad decisions with food as an example, and you're accusing me of trying to tell other people what to do, then calling me an authoritarian.
I'm not fighting, I'm just checking out of the conversation. Go fuck yourself.
You said you wanted a say when you advocated for that policy in the first place. To have that policy, you need that say, therefore you want it.
People of all ages make bad decisions with food and it is therefore something you'd have to enforce on people throughout life if you wanted to do it properly. That's all I and the others were trying to tell you. What you want is authoritarian, controlling food is a hallmark of an authoritarian country, and I'll say it for the third time, if that's what you want, just be honest about it.
You can say "I want an authoritarian country that controls the nutrition of its constituents for the health and betterment of all" and that would be consistent.
You can't say "I want a country that controls families to the point where we dictate what the kids can and can't eat, even against the parents' will, and still calls itself a free country" because it is not.
Getting mad at me because I want consistency and the others who rejected you outright is just silly. I have many ideas for a new country that I know for a fact will be universally rejected but I still advocate for them because I know they're ultimately better for everyone and I don't get bent out of shape when people do. Heavens above. 🤦
...I just gave them the fight that they wanted. FML
What policy? Go find the thing that I said that you think is me advocating for overriding the will of kids and their parents, and just quote it at me.
When you advocated having a government with a constitutional policy to regulate what children eat, overriding the autonomy of families.
I don't get what you don't get about that. Why are you unwilling to see your own policy for what it is?
Quote where I said that.
Most of those problems go away simply by banning capitalism, having direct democracy, abolishing the prison system and accepting that people have the right to be unhealthy and that includes kids.
Or one could advocate an authoritarian society where junk food is largely banned or made unavailable, rights are arbitrarily denied individuals when they are convicted of a crime, having AIs run everything politically and having the state own all corporations and all profits.
I was intending to make a more general point about the ability of children to make their own decisions. Obviously, I think the idea of punishing people for being unhealthy is ridiculous.
Also, I appreciate the optimism, but I don't think capitalism would go away if you banned it.
The former is a debate worthy of its own separate thread, I think.
A simple ban on capitalism alone wouldn't work, I agree with you on that. I'm of the opinion that the government and workers' unions ought to own the means of production and, when they do, they need to fully automate said means so money isn't necessary anymore, and when that happens, capitalism will go into the dustbin of history where it honestly belongs.
I probably come down more in the side of coops and unions than government, but yeah, that's probably more doable than an attempt at a ban.