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New I'd say not
Your really awful people - much like our really awful people - don't tend to export themselves elsewhere, and don't tend to have much visibility in non-domestic news and media.

Only people with a particularly active interest in US domestic politics are more than vaguely aware of them.

We (that's the royal Euro-"we") are generally amused by the religiosity of US society, and the US propensity for flag worship is bemusing. Working for a US company I find that there is a deference to hierarchy that resonates with the class system over here, only without the sly insolence and lack of respect.

The kinds of Americans one is likely to encounter in Europe are generally the kinds of Americans one would like to encounter, even if they do have some quaint ideas about guns, healthcare, and "muh prarberdee"*.

(Aside 1: we do think your 1st amendment is a fucking good idea, mind)

(Aside 2: I don't think it's unreasonable to say that many regular, nice Americans are, to some degree, guileless, and that this is both a blessing and a curse when dealing with a bunch of sarcastic, deliberately-understating Brits, for whom every other utterance is an ironic double entendre, issued in a variety of opaque and confusing accents. I know I certainly have to adopt a different approach depending on which conference calls I'm on, based largely on the dominant nationality.)

tl;dr: your deplorables are mostly invisible, like ours.
*It's ironic that Americans (in the general sense) are so up-tight about their property rights, when it's almost all 100% straight-up stolen (from the Indians) in the first place.
Expand Edited by pwhysall Nov. 12, 2018, 10:40:37 AM EST
New Thanks.
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New Re: stealing land from the indians
They had a much saner (IMnshO) view that land isn't something that can be owned, but just a thing you happen to live on while you're here. Thinking through what this could possibly mean for property law is left as an exercise for the student. Not to mention how their view would have changed once they started building domiciles with more permanent foundations.
--

Drew
New Us Commie types have always recognized the folly of "personal property". ;0)
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New It's not all the same
Off the top of my head, I think there are at least 4 categories of property:

1) Ephemeral - Front row seat at a concert. You can't share it, you can't store it, it's only good for a specific period of time then it doesn't exist any more.

2) Perishable - Food. You can't share it, only one person can ever use it. Once it's used it doesn't exist any more.

3) Transferable - A car. Only one person can have it at a time. You can use it, save it, sell it, pass it on.

4) Eternal - Land. It's fixed, it doesn't change because of who is using it,* it will be there after the current user is gone.
* The stuff you build on the land is different from the land itself.

It seems reasonable to me that different rules would apply to different types of property. If we thought about property rights this granularly, and understood that the rules are different for different classes, I'd have less of a problem with the concept of intellectual property.

Instead, we call all these things "property" and apply rules that make sense for one class to the different classes in inconsistent ways.
--

Drew
New Still, we can hope Mar-a-Lago will be under water! :)
Reclaimed by nature.
Alex

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

-- Isaac Asimov
New Neat analysis; as to intellectual 'property'..
Methinks that (alone) is a category which underscores the (now necessity for) actually incorporating a version of your list + its consequences: and Revising [the entire *pseudo-science of the law.] Soon. /fat. chance. that.

* Fred Rodell, chief honcho of Yale Law decades ago oft referred to "the pseudo-science of the law' (from whence I stole it) ..a man thus both prescient and wise re the tissue of suppositions around that hoary word 'LAW' (in science at least, there IS a distinction 'twixt Law and Theory), etc. [Nothing! is ever 'simple'. qed]
New How, exactly, does your (3) differ from (4)?
(1) assumes there are class divisions not dissimilar from "Coach, Business Class, First Class" flight tickets. Totally artificial. You can't share your seat at the venue? Exchange places with another? And it's a really specious argument to say you "own the seat," albeit transiently.

You can't share food? I believe every parent of every child has done that a time or two.

The point is, nothing is ever truly yours. In fact, whatever you think you own will be redistributed moments after your death. That which is not consumed is always transferred in one way or another. This obsession with "private property" derives almost exclusively from a capitalist theocracy that essentially negates all notions of community. And that must be taught. It isn't natural.
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New Answers
1) Ticket "classes" are a red herring. Any particular seat, anywhere in the venue, can only have one ass in it. Planes are actually a better example than a concert, because no, you can't share it or exchange it (after take-off). If there are 10 seats, only 10 people can board. Tickets determine who those 10 people are.

2) I should have called this "consumable" instead of "perishable". Yes, you can share food with someone else, but you can't share that particular bite of food that you just swallowed. Whatever portion you consume can't be shared. Only one person gets to consume it.


Difference between 3 & 4: A car is made, sold, re-sold, donated, destroyed. It is "owned" by someone while it exists, and at some point it no longer exists, but until then "ownership" is how we define who is allowed to use it, or assign permission to use it.

The land bounded by points A B C & D existed before man. We may build it up, or dig down into it. We may mine it, or flood it, or fence it off. When we "sell" that land, we are defining who has permission to do all those things to it. We already recognize that we can assign permission to build a house on it to one person, permission to mine under it to a second, and permission to fly over it to a third. What no one can do is make it no longer exist.

You seem to be defining ownership as something that transcends death so that you can refute it. For the rest of us it's simply shorthand for who gets to make decisions about a limited resource.

"Limited resource" is the key point in what I view as "property". If I sit in the seat, you can't. If I eat the sandwich, you can't. If I drive the car, you can't. If I'm allowed to build a house on the land, you aren't. This is why I have an issue with "intellectual property". It's not because, as you insist - via expanding the definition of "own" - no one can own anything. Rather it's because there's no limitation on all of us having it at the same time.

One last thing:
This obsession with "private property" derives almost exclusively from a capitalist theocracy that essentially negates all notions of community. And that must be taught. It isn't natural.

If you've ever seen toddlers fight over toys you know that isn't true. Sharing is the thing we have to teach.
--

Drew
New Nice try.
>> Difference between 3 & 4: A car is made, sold, re-sold, donated, destroyed. ...

Where do I go to claim my piece of Pangea?

>> Sharing is the thing we have to teach.

Um, no. They come out of the womb with an innate desire to share. Take a baby a ball. If s/he's old enough to roll it, they'll roll it to you. Then you roll it back (showing them the same desire to share that they possess). Anyone whose ever spent an afternoon (or longer) playing "pass the baby doll back and forth" knows that. You know how we treat them sharing is bad? "Go to your room." "Don't touch that! That's daddy's." "Don't play with that! That belongs to your sister." And so on until they've fully embraced the notion of private property.

I'll never forget the day my daughter first said, "Meyes". We'd never used mine, yours or hers at our house. Everything was "ours." Even when she fed the VCR a peanut butter sandwich because she thought it was hungry, it was still our VCR and together we cleaned it so that "we" could continue to use it. "Meyes" she learned at the day-care center. It was only after proper indoctrination at the day care center on the virtues of Capitalist private property that she became concerned with what belonged to her and what belonged to her sister. I almost wept.
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New Back atchya
We'd never used mine, yours or hers at our house. Everything was "ours."
When getting dressed and you told her to put on shoes, did you say, "Put on our shoes"?
If she couldn't find "our" shoes, did you tell her, "They're in our bedroom"?
Do all of you share "our" toothbrush?

Possessive pronouns aren't indoctrination, they're description. The house I grew up in was "my" house, even though my parents' names were on the deed. The woman I sleep with is "my" wife, even though clearly no one owns her.

Oh wait, I just realized you're even more full of shit than that.
We'd never used mine, yours or hers at our house. Everything was "ours."
You do use possessive pronouns. I guess your family is allowed to own things then? Or can anyone just walk in to your house the house you live in and walk out with "our" VCR?
--

Drew
New snarky LRPD sez
It me, your father. ...

Ruductio ab absurdum aka cha. cha. cha. is often fun; nevertheless I rather doubt--when the tyke(s) have grown a bit beyond er, Dick & Jane Learn Personal Pronouns--that Mike will forsake perspicuity unto pecksniffery ..via such as, 'our' tampon/jock-strap etc. as clearly 'belong' to the appropriate Individual-homo-sap concerned.. right?

Further (I merely presume, having never lived there/then) that in the USSR, there existed mores such that folks would not/could not be expected to wander into a nearby household and grab the radio/TV-set? with a perfunctory, "We borrow back Our BBC-short-wave radio set now" ... and like that.



But then my POV on that and similar issues has always been: for Communism to be both practical and copacetic, homo-sap would have to have evolved Way-smarter than the current dis-US multiple-tribes. Could Happen, but not with any Trumpists (or brain-damaged Others). Future generations ..if there are any left.

Carrion: the lions eat first, the smaller species dine on the leftovers. So if homo-sap persists in its now-undereducated (ever underfunded to the masses), heading towards --> more of the same: carrion will be what the brutes dine on and ... forget fancy social theories that techno/science can ever save the unEducables from themselves, I wot.
New It's about lawyers
There's a specific way property law is just like nutrition and drug labeling. When done well, it's a way to remove lawyers from day-to-day transactions. I'll explain. (It takes a minute, but comes back around at the end.)

Some people vehemently oppose any kind of nutrition labeling.* Their argument is that as long as they accurately describe what's in the package, it's up to the consumer to decide whether they want to consume it.

Of course none of us has time to independently research everything we could possibly put in our bodies, so we rely on third parties to do the testing for us. And since that research is expensive, the only people with a motivation to do it are the same people with a motivation to lie if they don't like the results. This applies both to health claims for the ingredients, as well as verification that the ingredients actually are as listed.

We go through our daily lives reading labels and trusting that things are generally as stated, because a government agency somewhere is acting on our behalf to ensure that's true. If we couldn't rely on that every purchase would require independent investigation, and if the contents of a package don't match the ingredients it would be up to individual consumers to sue the manufacturers for redress, which is the official stated preference of libertarian-leaning Republicans.

If they get their way, there will be only two ways to trust you're getting what you pay for:
1) Have a fleet of lawyers on retainer, standing by to enforce your rights.
2) Only barter with people you personally know and trust.

So, how is this like property law?

Forget about philosophical "ownership" that transcends death and just answer this question: Who gets to decide who can drive the car parked in the driveway next to where I live? Who controls that car? I think it's me, because I "own" that car. Most of society agrees with me.

But let's do away with private property. Now who controls it? "The community." Okay, fine. But now I need to go to work. Today I get in "my" car and I go. If "the community" controls it, who has the keys? How do I get permission to take the keys? How far in advance do I need to reserve it?

I suspect "the community" will organize itself into various levels of administration. You'll need a lawyer to negotiate every request to use the car.

As long as there are scarce resources, you need a way to allocate them. You can either do that once, via policy - AKA property law - or you can do it at the point of every transaction.

Property law, done well, would mean it's clear who controls a resource, and that control is at an appropriate level. It doesn't make sense for "the community" to control my car, just as it doesn't make sense for a single person to control what can be dumped into a lake.


* "Nutritional supplements" already fall into a black hole, where they routinely make medical-sounding claims but aren't classified as drugs, so they fall under neither nutrition labeling laws nor efficacy standards. Yes, plenty of money went into building this dodge.
--

Drew
New Thanks! Interesting parallels ..and your Example more revealing than you might know..
"Libertarian-leaning" ...

Early-on as the nascent-IWeThey was coalescing from the cosmic dust, I exchanged a couple e-mails with Bill Patient, naturally curious about his (somewhat reminiscent of certain 'tics' of My Gramma?) er, political POV. He used that exact phrase preceded by "somewhat". (I believe that my ripostes to some of his posts here were 'coloured'-by that revelatory statement) both ways: clarifying por moi/giving some insight into why I instinctively despised self-avowed 'Libertytarians'--for their nihilism--and all along wondering how such a generous 'generally Nice-guy' [cf. those of you who attended his fine Bashes] could simultaneously-hold Two such contrary personal attributes (!) er "successfully".

(That said, I mean no disrespect to Bill's rep or character.) It is I who still hasn't a clue how he managed to preach-what-he-preached and putatively remain sane; that's about my comprehension--not [he. be. *Rong.] and other cha. cha. cha. RIP.
* er as the phrase, "wrongly decided" via which the likes of KKKavanagh et al premeditatedly-LIE via scripted Language-murther, First Class--fooling all the credulous Yokels extant.



PS: maybe also too your "shitty lawyers as Mephistophelian basket cases" is the most cogent of all reasons to generally despise the (whatever few?) Ones ever encountered: or just to remember the ^pinnacle of bastards^ --> Drumpf's fucking-Mentor! Roy Fucking-Cohn! he who dispensed ricin-grade cha. cha. cha. to the doddering Repos AND Dems of HUAC, back in-the-sordid-daze ..which I lived through umm, lividly. It takes All Bloody Kinds to fuck-up a %Huge of 330 million people-perps to the extent We now See every hour ..y'Know? We Win {though} The Internet of Looosers for the day, the month and the Century.
New It's epidemic among computer geeks
We're used to being the smartest person in the room. When regulation looks like "protecting people from themselves" we like to think, "Get your nanny state away from me, I'm too smart for that."

And on a single instance of a single transaction, with enough time to go down the rabbit hole and build a point-by-point position, that might be true. The problem is we can't do that every time for every decision.

You're probably not going to know enough about cars to beat the professional car salesman. You're probably not going to know more than the epidemiologist about the latest in drug interactions. At some point you have to trust someone, or better yet, trust the system. That's why making a good system is so important, and attacking the system itself is worse than any single offense against the system.
--

Drew
New a lot of that is cultural, when I was in fargo there was an issue with somali refugees
in somalia if you didnt want something you would leave it outside of your dwelling, someone with need would recognised it was no longer inside your guarded dwelling it must be fair game. In fargo you dont leave your garage door open, its an invitation
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
New But they still recognize private property, and have a system to transfer it
--

Drew
New It is levels
About 15 years ago box posted a great description. Levels of caring.

Something like:
Me
Family
Tribe
Neighbors not in the tribe
Etc
Work your way out from genetics to social circles.
New Infants have no fear of falling, initially, either...
LiveScience:

As any parent knows, babies aren't born with a fear of heights. In fact, infants can act frighteningly bold around the edge of a bed or a changing table.

But at around 9 months, babies become more wary of such drop-offs. New research suggests infants build an avoidance of heights once they get more experience crawling and navigating the world on their own.

In one of their experiments, a group of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Doshisha University in Kyoto studied babies that had not yet begun to crawl. Over the course of 15 days, some of the infants were trained to use a motorized baby go-cart that they could control.

[...]


Arguing about the innate human condition from the behavior of infants/children at a particular point in time doesn't seem likely to be persuasive.

Cheers,
Scott.
New Agree.
I have often fallen into the trap of arguing about "innate human nature" as a reaction to goose stepping Capitalist neo-fascists when they begin spewing the pro-Capitalist propaganda that "humans have to be taught to share/have a sense of community" as I, regrettably, did here.
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New Excellent, clear exposition. Well done. Thanks.
New Re: It's not all the same
regarding number 4: "...after the current user is gone."



Reminds me of grave allocation in China (some have term limits):

"14. Disinterment and removal of human remains and ashes from exhumable lot on expiry of the term


(1) On the expiry of the term of an exhumable lot, the permittee of the lot must disinter the human remains and ashes buried in the lot and remove them from the lot.



https://www.elegislation.gov.hk/hk/cap1112A
     Donnie is making more friends - (scoenye) - (29)
         ..Including the whole state of California - (Ashton)
         Re: Donnie is making more friends - (lincoln)
         He is despised in Europe. - (pwhysall) - (24)
             Can you answer this? - (mmoffitt) - (23)
                 Look closer - (scoenye)
                 I'd say not - (pwhysall) - (21)
                     Thanks. -NT - (mmoffitt)
                     Re: stealing land from the indians - (drook) - (19)
                         Us Commie types have always recognized the folly of "personal property". ;0) -NT - (mmoffitt) - (18)
                             It's not all the same - (drook) - (17)
                                 Still, we can hope Mar-a-Lago will be under water! :) - (a6l6e6x)
                                 Neat analysis; as to intellectual 'property'.. - (Ashton)
                                 How, exactly, does your (3) differ from (4)? - (mmoffitt) - (13)
                                     Answers - (drook) - (12)
                                         Nice try. - (mmoffitt) - (10)
                                             Back atchya - (drook) - (7)
                                                 snarky LRPD sez - (Ashton) - (5)
                                                     It's about lawyers - (drook) - (2)
                                                         Thanks! Interesting parallels ..and your Example more revealing than you might know.. - (Ashton) - (1)
                                                             It's epidemic among computer geeks - (drook)
                                                     a lot of that is cultural, when I was in fargo there was an issue with somali refugees - (boxley) - (1)
                                                         But they still recognize private property, and have a system to transfer it -NT - (drook)
                                                 It is levels - (crazy)
                                             Infants have no fear of falling, initially, either... - (Another Scott) - (1)
                                                 Agree. - (mmoffitt)
                                         Excellent, clear exposition. Well done. Thanks. -NT - (Another Scott)
                                 Re: It's not all the same - (dmcarls)
         Quote in Comments section of C&L - (lincoln) - (1)
             The rain could potentially undo the ultra comb-over! :) -NT - (a6l6e6x)

And damn, but I wanted to get involved with a land war in Asia.
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