- owning media - lobbying the government - owning the means of production
It could take that dire situation and make it drastically worse. I mean, in theory.
Who should own media? Private people, or the state?
> lobbying the government
If lobbying the government is effective, it's either because the lobbying was correcting a wrong, or the government is allowing itself to be corrupted.
> owning the means of production
The "means of production" was barely relevant when Marx found out what a factory was from his factory-owning mate. A plumber owns "the means of production" when he owns his own tools. It's far too low resolution a phrase to be useful, except for anyone who finds it useful to teach people to hate another group of people.
I mean of course — who should own media.. we have precisely two choices, and no possibility to imagine anything else! What you’ve put forward is known as a false dichotomy. That is a situation where you present two options as if they are the only options.
Oh wow — in your response Re government you have literally stated a dichotomy. Alright. I feel bad now. I have to let you know that there are more than two options (your preferred and a horrible alternative) in just about every situation in life. Please my friend - go out into the world and seek out the alternatives - they are infinite. This false dichotomy business is harmful to everyone around you.
I agree that we should move beyond Marxist thought .. but I think we should be post Marxist not pre.
https://hellgatenyc.com/about-us
We could also restrict ownership by audience size. So any one person or non-media organization cannot own or control multiple media organizations if their total audience size is above X people. Audience size would be prorated for partial ownership or control (i.e., owning 1% of a newspaper that serves 100K people would count 1K people towards one's total). This is an off-the-cuff alternative, so assume the regulations would be written by actual lawyers who consider edge cases.
Agree. That would be private people owning it, though.
This is wrong by definition. There is an actual "true" dichotomy between public ownership and non-public ownership. Two criteria:
- "jointly exhaustive": the two subsets contain all possible scenarios
- "mutually exclusive": the two subsets do not share any possible scenarios
These criteria are met with the subsets of "the state" (meaning "public") and "private people" (meaning "non-public").
To be clear - the two options you’ve presented are not actual options that anyone is arguing for. So presenting a single alternative would be to fall into an obvious trap. I ought not to have replied to disingenuous debate in the first place I get that.
But perhaps someone else can - in future - spot a false dichotomy and say “oh - avoid this nonsense.”
I am giving a true dichotomy here, either:
1. You believe there are precisely two options
2. You do not believe there are precisely two options.
Which is it?
E.g. this could have gone:
LeonB: what about businesses owned by many people?
robertlagrant: ah, yes - what I was saying would put them in the "private ownership" bucket.
Or whatever it is that you're actually thinking of, but are reluctant to say.
The irony of you determinedly pinning me down, when I'm happy to converse, while you will do anything but answer what I was asking, is hopefully not lost on you.
Your question was:
>Who should own media? Private people, or the state?
The reason why no one ought to answer a question like that is because it is presented in a format identical to a “bad faith” question.
You may have meant it genuinely but it looks like the old “Have you stopped beating your wife?” lawyer trap.
I chose not to answer the question because it was recognisable as a “false dichotomy”. Then I explained my reasoning and so on.
I wasn’t “doing anything but answer”ing what you were ostensibly asking. Avoiding it was easy. Trying to inform you and anyone else reading of why such a question is never worth answering, is what took a lot of effort. That’s just par for the course if one chooses to respond to a question that has the format of a bad faith argument. I don’t mind.
So (to carry on your schtick) apparently you feel that if “the undeserving rich” are, as I suggested, in any way restricted from owning media, the only other bucket is state controlled media. Well I’m sorry you feel that way. Perhaps a democracy could have some laws or something, without turning into a fascist state. Seriously - the general category of “functional democracy” provides millions of shades “between” oligarchy and totalitarianism - but even saying “between” is giving too much credence to a bad faith preposition.
I’ll go through it for you again if you wish.
Over here at a specific extreme we have a totalitarian regime controlling all the media. Over here at a different extreme we have a small number of rich people owning everything including control of media.
Now we can construct a 1 dimensional line and say that these are two extremes on a single axis. And we can go even further and say, as you have, that all possibilities fall into these two buckets.
Consider though that this world we live in and the world of political possibilities is not a one dimensional world. Nor is it two dimensional or three dimensional. It is “n” dimensional for some inconceivably large “n”. There are many different ways that power can be distributed, channeled and many more ways in which benefits and taxation can be organised - and or other mechanisms and feedback systems other than these. A functional democracy can avoid being either of those two specific buckets. That one dimensional line and those two specific buckets are not in any way inevitable.
> Your question was:
> >Who should own media? Private people, or the state?
Well, no. My question was: can you give a third option?
> Then I explained my reasoning and so on.
You didn't explain your reasoning. You reiterated that it was too obvious to need to explain your reasoning, and left it as a claim.
Ad hominem.
It’s also snarky.
Ad hominem includes many types attacks on a person that aren’t about the person but how they presented the argument. Ie mocking how slow someone spoke, or in this case how many words they used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
> Nowadays, except within specialized philosophical usages, the usage of the term ad hominem signifies a straight attack at the character and ethos of a person, in an attempt to refute their argument.
I personally would have apologized a while ago, but you do you.
Well, it does if I'm being a bit snarky, and not using that snark as a way of dismissing a claim. I'm saying there is no justification for the claim, and that it's taken far more words to claim the thing than it would be to supply a simple disproving example.
> or more importantly prevent what you said from both being a logical fallacy
No, something being not ad hominem doesn't prevent it from being a logical fallacy, but that's not how reason works. You disprove. You don't say, "Well this criticism failed but that doesn't prove it's valid!"
> I personally would have apologized a while ago, but you do you.
But... this is also rude. More so than a little bit of snark.
Start again. What are you trying to achieve here?
No, being snarky in no way changes what’s going on.
> a simple disproving example
Which I provided an hour ago and you haven’t responded, thus disproving your argument here with an example.
> is also rude.
If you acknowledge you’ve been rude then apology is appropriate. Simply ignoring rudeness is poor manors as otherwise people can’t improve. Instead proper manors is to bring up the mistake and offer a minor correction. In person subtle body language is useful, but in text the only option is to be more explicit though still indirect. Thus what I said was quite literally the opposite of being rude.
You were very patient.
That’s an “ad hominem” attack because it is against me.
Please refrain from doing that to people, whether me or others.
Please quote where I claimed that.
Its a fallacy but its not ad hominem. (Its non sequitur, but than most fallacies are specialized forms of non sequitur, so that doesn’t really narrow it down much beyond saying it is fallacious.) There's not, AFAIK, a common catchy name specifically for “argument to the peripheral stylistic features of the opponent’s argument”, though there maybe should be, because in practice its a common fallacy.
That’s why it was. Ad hominem is based on what is being attacked not how.
Attacking the person not the argument is deeper than simply dismissing something because of their political party, race, or educational history. When you attack stylistic elements of an argument you’re attacking the person as someone who made an argument in that form.
No, you aren’t.
“This argument is false because ofn the way it is presented” is fallacious, but it does not rely on the reader rearranging it into “This argument is wrong because anyone who would present an argument this way is a bad person whose arguments should be dismissed”.
Its definitely a non sequitur, but calling it ad hominem is interpolating things that aren't there.
A website isn’t literally a person, but what’s being attacked is the thing making the argument. It kind of break down because this isn’t directly equivalent to two people debating before the Roman senate, but western philosophy really didn’t care much about such superficial differences.
I can’t think of the phrase but there is the platonic ideal of an argument and individual who voiced it. Something about after an argument has been spoken it, as in the argument, needs to be addressed directly not the person who said it.
PS: Similar idea in a different context don’t judge a book by its cover. Not directly relevant, but I find it fascinating how often the idea of superficial as unimportant is used while people focus on it so much. Sort of a humanity has changed less than you might think in the last several thousand years kind of thing.
(1) Government ownership, (2) ownership by a single rich person, (3) ownership by a nonprofit, (4) ownership by the employees, (5) ownership by the readers…
However, suggesting just one additional options focuses excessive attention to that specific option. Mentioning how much Twitter has changed going from a public company to a private one owned by a single wealthy person is only barely related to the underlying argument here. Namely, that you need to consider many options and their individual tradeoffs not just 2 bad options.
You can have private ownership without the owners automatically being rich. Further the owners could be rich without qualifying as undeserving rich by whatever metric the post’s author had in mind.
That said, thanks for providing my point ;-)
This whole conversation has been about my "false dichotomy" of state and private ownership.
E.g. from LeonB:
> I mean of course — who should own media.. we have precisely two choices, and no possibility to imagine anything else! What you’ve put forward is known as a false dichotomy. That is a situation where you present two options as if they are the only options.
That’s not equivalent to all forms of non governmental ownership in that context. Charities are not owned by private people quite literally as they can’t liquidate assets etc. You can be convinced of Theft if you take assets from a charity you set up.
If you want to now redefine your point as all forms of non government ownership then that’s simply a strawman arguemnt in terms of the person you where replying to.
The danger in media control is not the public/private axis, but the monopoly/ plurality axis and the truth/falsehood axis.
> If lobbying the government is effective, it's either because the lobbying was correcting a wrong, or the government is allowing itself to be corrupted.
This seems like "correcting a wrong" or "not correcting a wrong and therefore the government is allowing itself to be corrupted". The second part has an argument that effective lobbying which does not correct a wrong is necessarily government corruption. There seems to be a regular old dichotomy here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichotomy). Not all dichotomies are false.
But I also want to highlight a part of the comment:
> Please my friend - go out into the world and seek out the alternatives - they are infinite.
If these alternatives are so infinite, it should be easy to name one. That is something that is yet to be provided in this thread, seemingly despite your confidence that this dichotomy is false.
Both plumbers and factory owners do indeed have opportunities to exploit people. But my plumber friend can only exploit one customer at a time, where as a factory owner multiplies that ability. Multiplication is a powerful operator.
A plumber can exploit a customer by charging an exorbitantly high rate for work. They can choose to exploit their position of power as a supplier of services where a customer has an urgent need.
Exploitation is not charging a high rate for work. It is charging a higher rate when a customer is not in a position to shop around.
It's hard to know where to start with things like this. How does the plumber exploit employees? Why are you assuming anyone exploits anyone by default?
Customers don’t get exploited in this way. They generally are also employees of some company that does exploit them, but that is a separate relationship.
A plumber owns a fraction of the means of production so small it’s not worth mentioning. How much of the means of production is owned by megacorps? A sizeable amount.
How much of the means of production is owned by singular entities in the context of local economies? Sometimes over 90%.
At the end of the day if some guy owns a fabulous machine and will pay you a non living wage to press a button on it while he reaps the rewards you will grow resentful. Especially if the shittier prior machine required more skilled interactions and higher wages.