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These men should be publicly executed. It's the only way to make life safe for strong, stunning and brave women everywhere.

Vitamin D, Zinc, and if you're really worried a little HCQ. Dr. Rhonda Patrick noted that 95% of hospitalized COVID-19 sufferers had a Vitamin D deficiency according to some study. This is corroborated by the greater impact among black people, whose melanin blocks UV rays that would be converted to Vitamin D.

Every good is a form of profit (depending on whether your definition of profit must include a trade), but if you created the value with pure labor then we can say there was no capital involved. So no, not everything above subsistence is capital--only that which contributes to the production of value.

To differentiate between capital and ordinary property is arbitrary because only after something has created value in the form of profit can you say it is truly capital. But to create value always takes human effort, so how do you separate the two? Your own person could be considered capital by this standard. Your food and house are necessities for the upkeep of this capital. The reason for classifying some goods as capital and others not is that they should be treated differently, presumably, by the State. So if there is no non-arbitrary definition of capital (it's always based on the assumption that something will be profitable), this is necessarily going to distort the market. I'm not against using the word, but as a formal concept that supports a ton of weight in economic theories, it's not solid.

This thread is going to be disjointed and not meant to focus on a single topic, but to examine multiple fundamental errors that lead to leftist ideology (and perhaps others, but that's not the purpose of this thread). This is something I remember feeling myself when I was younger and I think is a common error that leftists make. This is not a cognitive error so much as it is a learned characteristic, but it is cured through cognition--which is in fact possible if the cure is more or less identification of the error. The result of this error is blatant hypocrisy: the cognitive dissonance that allows one to buy another new iPhone while publicly railing against capitalism. It is the practical belief that what you do is insignificant compared to the collective, and therefore it is not worth the cost of improving oneself before improving the collective. The cornerstone of leftist ethics is: after you. "Once the majority have rejected the benefits of capitalism, then, happily, I will too." What precisely is the error, though? The error is not placing proper importance on your own perspective. What you do may in fact not be significant from the perspective of society, but from your own perspective there is nothing more important. Another error I've been interested in is the floating abstraction. This is the abstraction that fills a role, deductively, but is not connected to anything in reality. This is ubiquitous in leftist thought. What made me think about this recently is how convoluted prominent economic theory is compared to the Austrian school. One error Rothbard has pointed out, and probably others, is the concept of capital. Capital is a fundamental concept at the foundation of popular economics, but it is a floating abstraction. Capital is anything, aside from labor, that produces value. But this quality can only be attributed post hoc. There is no physical quality that makes something capital rather than ordinary property. One example Rothbard used was a chair from your home when moved into a hotel room suddenly becomes capital. The Marxist definition of capital is not the means of production, but the money used to buy those means. But this does not factor in the risk or the labor involved in minimizing that risk. This is the problem with this post hoc quality: if the money is spent with the intention of producing profit, but fails, suddenly it's not capital. This is just a specific example (another obvious one in economics is inflation--which prices matter?), but I believe there are floating abstractions at the foundation of all the monstrous, convoluted leftist theories. Feel free to add to the list without forcing the thread down a specific path.

Is this true? I heard that this is a myth based on a documented discussion where the option of using this tactic was verbalized. Edit: From History.com

The Instagram video above is somewhat satisfying to watch, but it's also one stage of escalation. I think the far left will step it up a notch, and they're definitely not going to stop until at least 2021.

The rest of this year is going to be fucked...

Here's the most recent example of what you're talking about: "Science is constantly changing due to new research and data." Oh, that's right, science changes every few months because they find answers to mysteries like the porousness of fabrics.

It's amazing how the MSM audience hears what Trump said and takes it at face value. People commenting literally thought Trump was sweet talking her so she wouldn't incriminate him... I hope people saying the MSM is basically irrelevant now are correct.

I think people who value order should allocate and concentrate wherever makes sense and leave the anarchists and their enablers unopposed. Staying safe is the best thing good people can do right now (aside from those on the front lines potentially saving lives).

I'll continue adding to the topic: there is an implicit threat of violence all around us, regardless of the greater power structure. Our nature dictates that disagreeing with the mob is potentially life threatening. So there is influence in numbers, even if there is no reasonable suspicion of potential violence. Another problem to work through is the precariousness of power, or mass influence. A dictator does not directly influence the populace, mostly it is the populace that influence each other. Like in most aspects of society, there are positive feedback loops. Being able to influence one person makes it easier to influence a second, because the trust garnered from the first is observed by the second. Now you can gain influence not as an individual, but as the head of a collective. Now it is not just an issue of trusting you, but of trusting the collective; as well as fearing the collective, rather than just fearing you. So sociopolitical power is best thought of not as the power of an individual, but the power of a representative of a collective. In a democracy, the majority represent the collective, in a dictatorship the dictator does. This is not necessarily the end of the line, though, as power can be derived from a more primary representative to a higher order representative. From the majority to the press, for example. The press has power because it appears to represent the people. The universities represent the people too. Both these representative roles have been established through a pattern of public approval. Once the pattern is demonstrated--the correlation between what the press prints, the universities teach, and what the public believes--the representative status is attained and the methods for demonstrating the pattern can be replaced with methods for steering the ship.

But you know/knew that wasn't my point... I hope...

When you say stuff like this it makes me wonder just how much you're not picking up on. I used your definition a couple times, but saying you didn't make that point was concerning the standards you imposed on proper thinking: human nature, all perspectives. You didn't point to an error and then compare it to your definition. You just said, "There's an error here!" without even identifying it. Depends on how it comes across. Was it violent enough? What about heads on pikes to scare away warring tribes? How accurate is the word "force" in these situations? Physically there is force involved, but socially? It all depends on people's perception. I say this, and you respond: "Conceptually, an event involves the acts and perspectives of all parties, not just the perspective of one. " What does that mean in the context of a critique of what I said? "Forcing someone to do/endure shit they don't want to," apparently considers all perspectives, but what I said above only considers one. Lay that out. To me, I see two perspectives in your definition. The person forcing and the person not wanting to do/endure. "Depends on how it comes across" means it depends on what it looked like and what the people watching think about what they just saw--are they afraid? There could be any number of factors involved in this... This is just horrendous. You need to lay off a bit on analyzing people. It's not working. I read your definition when you posted it, and I kept it in mind. I do NOT find it a solid foundation, because you've got a mystery component, being "force." Here's the most relevant definition of force from a Google result: "make (someone) do something against their will." They could have included "endure" or "experience." This makes your definition circular. Ready to build? Building is not the goal, anyway. Building is just a way to test the conceptual element before reverse engineering existing structures. I've stated many times now the target of this deconstruction is ultimately the media and universities in their positions relative the greater society. The point of using many cases is not to validate my definition, it's to carve it out from different angles. I'm looking at WHERE power is, first, then trying to find out WHAT it is, on the condition that the WHAT must be consistent across all of these cases. Your definition is not consistent if we consider WHERE to be a world leader. He isn't using force. Another reason your definition doesn't work is that power doesn't usually involve two parties. This is a question of WHERE, not WHAT. Even if one person has power, the physical force will not come from him. So instead of metaphors about building and foundations, why don't you just contradict the idea that a general has power? If you want to say a dictator doesn't have power, then we can agree we are talking about different concepts.

Opposed to them just talking/publishing?

My next sentence: "...the purpose of me forming a working definition is to trace the roots of power in what we would call powerful institutions." It means if a concept is related to other concepts, like sex to procreation, or power to powerful institutions, your definition shouldn't preclude that relationship. If power is forcing people to do/endure things they don't want to, and influence is not force, then not only are the institutions that are most predictive of arbitrary (not dependent on any objective reality the public can verify) social change not powerful, but even the institutions that are powerful (forceful) are not lead by powerful people. Are the people with power in the military the ones with the guns in the barracks, or the ones in the pentagon? But not only that, you go from calling my definition too inclusive, then flipping all of a sudden to say it's too exclusive. You act like I'm the slippery one... I make a point, but you don't challenge it. You might quote a sentence fragment and go off on a tangent. Then you'll tell me "what I'm doing" and it will be unrecognizable. You use tactics, instead of just saying what you mean. This, and this: is another thing you do. You make disconnected critiques that don't point anywhere. "Forcing someone to do/endure shit they don't want to," includes all perspectives, not just one, and it says a lot about human nature. Oh, you didn't make that point?

This was just posted.

Sex and foreplay can be the same thing if you're not trying to deduce who the father is... I'm done debating this, because the purpose of me forming a working definition is to trace the roots of power in what we would call powerful institutions. If your definition doesn't work for that, then we are not identifying the same thing. I might work on a full essay on this, but for now I just wanted to say something that is relevant to the woke revolution going on as well as this topic. And that is the potential for the centers of woke power to cut off their own roots. I was just listening to a discussion with James Lindsay who mentioned university students wanting to rename parts of their schools after empowering symbols--specifically Wakanda. He brought up Yale being a slave owner, and how it would be funny if they renamed Yale to Wakanda. This is not actually that far off... This is a liability for the left, being that they don't even know how much power they have, and therefore do not know where their power comes from. The left has not built their position, they've corrupted, or infected, a previously established position. If they try to stand on their own, with just their naked ideology, and completely disassociate themselves from their once objectively productive hosts, I think it would be disastrous for their cause.

It's amazing how many people STILL have no idea this is going on.

Physical force, or physical power, is what you use to open a stuck door. The threat of physical force--let's say violence--is extremely persuasive, but certainly not 100% reliable. Now if you mean to say that I equate threatening violence with all forms of influence, which would include persuasion, that would be like saying I equate getting squirted by a water pistol with getting blasted by a fire hose. Yes, I think in both instances you are getting hit with water. No, I said social power is synonymous with influence. Persuasion is a subset of influence; persuasion is deliberate. Does tone of voice count as a component of persuasion? How about physicality? Posture? Can you persuade someone that the gun is loaded? Maybe they're not persuaded that you will use it. Depends on how it comes across. Was it violent enough? What about heads on pikes to scare away warring tribes? How accurate is the word "force" in these situations? Physically there is force involved, but socially? It all depends on people's perception. This is why I say it's all influence. In some cases you could call it extreme persuasion.

No? I mean one person being in a position to somewhat predictably determine the volitional action of another. It's only a blob if you don't refine your definition so that you can trace what's happening. I don't see a blob, I see a network of individuals influencing each other, mostly in one direction.

It's not nitpicking. You took an example with clear implications and tried to turn it into something else... for what reason?

I said psychologist, not psychiatrist.

I don't know what this means. Okay? Social power?

I also have to add that the idea of "political power" does nothing to answer "who" has power? The police officer? Does he have political power? Or is it the politicians--you know, the ones not holding any guns? This is just sloppy thinking. It's an attempt to draw a straight line back from a roughly correct conclusion to a starting point. Political power usually leads to bad things, economic power often leads to good things. I see why Rand would want to differentiate between the two.