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Hmm, that's pretty much what I was thinking but Garbage-In-Garbage-Out is a much more elegant way of putting it than I did.

So pretty controversial: Dred Scott was not actually a bad Supreme Court Decision. Don't get me wrong, slavery is awful and shouldn't have happened. But the Supreme Court could not rule that slavery wasn't constitutional, it was literally baked into the constitution at that point. When you...

So for a non-Nazi one: I don't think Floridaman is any crazier than people from other states. From what I've been able to determine, the reason you see so much crazy Floridaman news is because Florida has much laxer rules on their media allowing stories to be published that would be killed in...

Might as well throw out one of my hot takes, the Conquistadors weren't so bad for conquerors. Yeah, I realize that's damning with faint praise and not being bad by the standards of colonizing invaders is like not being ugly by the standards of internal parasites. In popular media Spain tends...

Note that the 200,000 tons figure is extremely vague and towards the low end. Estimates on the total amount of gold in the world vary from 160,000 tons all the way up to the Gold Standard Institute estimating it at 2.5 million tons. We frankly don't have a clue due to how much secrecy there...

If money was wealth, you could make everybody in the world wealthy by having the money printing machine go brrrr. Quite evidently it doesn't work that way. OTOH, if you gave every last human on earth an empty building, and provided every person with food for a lifetime, you could actually...

I think the answer to that depends on what you're calling "apparatus" because I've yet to see news of the Drug Cartels building roads, minting currency, or establishing embassies. But I'd like to know what you're referring to and what the apparatus is in your description.

Reasonable but the modern interpretation of the followers of Weber leads to some extremely stupid places. Like arguing that Mexico's Drug Cartels need to be recognized as the actual government because they have a monopoly on force in some areas, which under Weber's theory automatically makes...

Yeah, that's kinda my beef with it, the use of the word "legitimate" and the self-reference to government being defined by using legitimate force and legitimate force being defined as used by the government. That's a much better system that the theory of Legitimate Force we've been discussing...

Community is not part of the definition of legitimate force. If everybody in the community is wearing a steel collar and chains as slaves to Lord Asshat of the Evil Empire of Asshatness, that's still legitimate force according to the theory. If community was actually included I'd be more...

That's... not present at all in a supermajority of Robin Hood stories. It's certainly not an important element of his legend. You might as well claim that having a token Muslim is important to Robin Hood when in reality it was a brief fad in the late 80s and early 90s that vanished after. The...

Naw, see their reasoning ins that in this case, legalizing self defense just means that the said force has become legitimate. Everybody in the world who isn't being pursued as a criminal is part of the government in some way so their force is legal. It's very circular, again, any force that...

Yes, but if the bandits take over, they suddenly become legitimate and their force retroactively was legitimate all along, hence the issue that the entire concept is circular. It amounts to "crime is illegal" with the extra caveat "unless you get away with it, then it wasn't ever crime in the...

Yes, I've seen the arguments many times. The problem is that by the time you make that argument, you've established that just about the entire population is part of the government since the retinue of retinues tends to trickle all the way down to the mayor of Nowheresville: population 12 humans...

Yeah, monopoly on force is a fairly nonsensical modern definition that seems to me to be the modern version of China's Mandate of Heaven. The Mandate of Heaven meant that the Emperor was placed on his throne by the gods themselves and no rebellion could succeed, so if a rebellion did succeed...

So granted as I work in the industry, this is somewhat personal but here's my hot take: The success of the Royal Navy can be attributed directly to watchmakers, not the British simply being naturally superior seamen. The invention of the sea-clock is a lengthy but interesting one. As the...