Context was the idea of a government banning certain popular foods

  • AmidFuror
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    966 days ago

    Unregulated anarchy vs nanny state. There’s a wide spectrum in between we can argue about, but let’s not get too far toward either extreme.

    • @[email protected]
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      316 days ago

      Kinder eggs should NOT be banned, and Americans have an inferior product because of it.

      …but also I agree with the banning of Red dye #3.

      • @[email protected]
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        206 days ago

        It’s banned in the US because we’re sue-crazy. Companies can’t rely on the common sense of their customers here. Even if the egg comes with a blinking neon sign that says there’s a non edible toy inside, someone would sue (and win!) claiming that it’s not enough and the toy shouldn’t be there in the first place.

        • @[email protected]
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          46 days ago

          Even if they don’t win the case, court cases in general can be extremely costly. So companies will try to avoid getting sued as much as they try to avoid doing things that would actually lose them a lawsuit.

      • ElectricMachman
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        66 days ago

        I was about to protest, but grog calls for red dye #2, so we’re all good.

        • @[email protected]
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          206 days ago

          I live in a place where kinder eggs arent banned and i dont often find rocks inside cheap brownies. Theres a way to have both lol

        • @[email protected]
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          96 days ago

          Without a warning, sure. But they aren’t trying to hide that there is something inedible in there. It’s not even a “hey, there is a prize inside one of the brownies in this box.” It’s, “there is something inside this thin chocolate shell. Break it to see what it is.”

        • Cethin
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          15 days ago

          Most fruit have inedible seeds inside, yet those aren’t really an issue. Yes, these are marketed specifically towards children, which could be part of the issue, but it’s a bit ridiculous.

    • Cethin
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      45 days ago

      As a (social) anarchist, yeah there’s a wide range. The government shouldn’t tell people what they’re allowed to eat, in my opinion, but they should protect them from dangers and exploitation. We don’t usually have the tools, or the time, to test all our food to ensure safety. We need government oversight for that. However, they shouldn’t go too far beyond that and force us to eat particular things.

    • @[email protected]
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      -86 days ago

      In a right wing “anarchy”, dangerous foods will appear in the markets all the time.

      In a left wing anarchist society, the community would consult their experts on food safety then band together and colletively stop making such foods, and stop importing those from other communities.

      • AmidFuror
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        46 days ago

        I have to admit I never really understood how anarchist societies were supposed to work. Now that you’ve pointed out they are just people banding together to make collective decisions based on expert information, I can’t fathom why I ever thought they could go wrong.

        • MolochAlter
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          6 days ago

          Simple: they wouldn’t work that way.

          Left anarchism, like everything left, only works on paper.

          Here’s a few holes:

          • Who decides who is and isn’t an expert? Jim Jones was considered an expert by the Jonestown people, RFK is considered one by maga.

          • Assuming we find a way to establish an “expert” category of citizens, that’s already hierarchical. You now have a ruling class since these people get more of a say than the average person by virtue of their role, and don’t have a completely flat anarchist society anymore but instead a sort of representative technocracy.

          • Moreover anarchist societies are supposed to not employ coercion, so even if you had experts whose opinion dictates norms, how are you going to enforce them?

          Anarchists (left and right) reinvent the state, just shittier, less consistent, and without founding principles, every time they are put in front of the practical needs of a society where not everyone agrees with them.

          Some go as far as inventing authoritarian oligarchies, just ones they happen to agree with and thus support.

            • MolochAlter
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              36 days ago

              Oh god you have no idea how many believe this in earnest (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

          • @[email protected]
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            56 days ago

            Some go as far as inventing authoritarian oligarchies

            tankies are authoritarian, their “leftism” is just a disguise to obtain power

            • MolochAlter
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              56 days ago

              They are authoritarian and marxist leftists, they are not mutually exclusive, if anything they are more likely bedfellows than not, by necessity.

              You can’t have a free economy without decentralised price controls (i.e. a market) and you can’t have a market without ownership, so you will eventually end up having a control economy if you remove private ownership from the equation, and control economies are fundamentally authoritarian.

              The ultimate means of production is the person, and you don’t get to own it exclusively, even if it’s yourself.

              • @[email protected]
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                16 days ago

                I think some market-based leftists have proposed various solutions for this problem, like mandating that all companies be run as coops. But I’m still skeptical of these for a number of reasons.

                • MolochAlter
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                  16 days ago

                  That’s also a non-solution, all it does is make scaling a company a huge mess, and contractorship basically mandatory for any kind of expansion.

                  I.e. I don’t hire anyone cause they would need to buy into the co-op, or they’d have their surplus value taken and thus be exploited, so instead everyone makes self-employed ““co-ops”” and hires eachother as contracting businesses.

                  It’s literally just capitalism with really stupid centralist extra steps.