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jrodefeld posted:No, property is not protected by initiating violence. It is protected by the use of defensive violence if necessary. This only seems reasonable because you define the violence that created and maintains the property status of the property as nonviolence.
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Aug 9, 2014 12:30
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Johnnie5 posted:I think this is the dumbest part of libertarianism. The government does not "steal" part of your income. Some of the dollar (or yen or whatever) amount of your pay is spent maintaining the society whose existence allowed you to earn that money. This is incoherent. It is not the green pieces of paper that is being stolen by the State, but it is the actual labor of the citizen. The average upper middle class citizen works four to five months to pay their accumulated State, local and Federal taxes. What is being stolen is all the goods and services that these abstract symbols called "money" would have purchased had they not been expropriated by the IRS. Speaking about "society" in the way that you do is just ridiculous. I give back to society every time I voluntarily exchange goods for money at the grocery store. I am paying the farmers for their effort to grow food and ship it to the store shelves. I pay for each service that other entrepreneurs provide in the division of labor whenever I pay for anything. I would love nothing more than to opt out of all government services.
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Aug 9, 2014 12:35
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jrodefeld posted:As for more concrete examples of property use that might block a view, or lower property value but not directly use aggression against the property of another, I would say that those property owners are within their rights. It might be selfish and inconsiderate to use your property in certain ways. So it's a question of degree, then? Not an objective universal truth? By what metric is building something large enough to simply spitefully block the sun conceptually different from lowering someone's property values, devaluing the labour they have mixed with the land and, by extension, violating their property? jrodefeld posted:But I would suggest that people use peaceful means to deal with it. I think that voluntary communities that develop in the libertarian society could and would have certain standards that people would agree to when they move in. Sort of a voluntary building code. There is no reason why a peaceful solution cannot be devised to deal with these inconveniences. And if someone bought land and didn't voluntarily decide to abide by the building code? What then? jrodefeld posted:I don't accept your characterization. I think you are attributing racist motivations to people who are not racist. I support nullification and secession because I believe in decentralization and in weakening the State. I think the State has been especially vicious to minorities and they would stand to benefit most from its abolition. Stating this does not make it true. jrodefeld posted:I don't accept moral relativism. There are certain ways that humans interact that can be considered "moral" and certain ways that are "immoral". Except that you have, in this very post, stated that what constitutes an act of aggression is relative, and does not have an objective definition. jrodefeld posted:No, property is not protected by initiating violence. It is protected by the use of defensive violence if necessary. If you are trespassing on my land and you don't pose any direct threat to me or my property (i.e. you are not attempting to steal anything) I can't just shoot you. I can't come up to you and start punching you in the face. I can ask you to leave. If you refuse to leave then I can have you physically removed by calling the police. If I use excessive force against someone who was absent-mindedly wandering across my property, then I become the aggressor and he can press charges against me. Defensive violence has to be proportional. So wait, property isn't simply what you have "mixed your labour with," it's what you are able to defend? Can you actually keep your own arguments straight before attempting to critique the position of others?
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Aug 9, 2014 12:36
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Waaaah the Christians are out to get me
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jrodefeld posted:This is incoherent. It is not the green pieces of paper that is being stolen by the State, but it is the actual labor of the citizen. The average upper middle class citizen works four to five months to pay their accumulated State, local and Federal taxes. What is being stolen is all the goods and services that these abstract symbols called "money" would have purchased had they not been expropriated by the IRS. Except those goods and services are only even being produced because of the system maintained by the state to ensure that people have a market for those goods. You don't seem to realise that markets are not natural, and that markets involving a universally-accepted store of value that ensures all goods are ultimately fungible are an especially artificial construct. jrodefeld posted:Speaking about "society" in the way that you do is just ridiculous. I give back to society every time I voluntarily exchange goods for money at the grocery store. I am paying the farmers for their effort to grow food and ship it to the store shelves. I pay for each service that other entrepreneurs provide in the division of labor whenever I pay for anything. And you pay them with a universally-accepted, interchangeable denotation of value that only exists because of a central authority. The States had a period of time without a centralised currency, when private banks would issue their own currencies that would change region-to-region. It was terrible for business.
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Aug 9, 2014 12:39
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Caros posted:I have to sleep. Why won't you let me sleep!? I KNOW that about Gabriel Kolko. He is a Marxist, not a libertarian. However, he wrote very important revisionist historical work documenting the fact that the truth about the Progressive Era was precisely the opposite of what modern social democrats would want you to believe. It is important and indispensable work. So what if Rothbard thought that this work helped buttress the libertarian position? Did you not notice when I prefaced Kolko's name with the label "radical leftist"?
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Aug 9, 2014 12:45
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Oh my god, I've never seen the process by which you get dozens of pages behind so early in the thread before.
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Aug 9, 2014 12:48
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jrodefeld posted:I would love nothing more than to opt out of all government services. I hear there are uninhabited islands in the pacific that would suit you just fine. Somalia should also prove uniquely accommodating, provided you have the money. Good! Problem solved.
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Aug 9, 2014 12:50
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It's a personal pet peeve of mine when anyone mentions waiting lists as an advantage of a free market approach compared to UHC. Let's pretend for a moment that this hasn't been thoroughly rebuffed and there is actually shorter wait times in a private system. What god drat difference does it make? Healthcare isn't something that you suddenly need or not need depending on your financial situation, people who are waiting in the clinic, private or public, aren't there for kicks or the free coffee, they're there because their sick. Making the system private doesn't suddenly drive down demand, wait times exist because people need to use the service and it's such a ridiculous red herring to talk about the elimination of wait times under a private system as some sort of goal. Look at it another way, if I had a public clinic with an average wait time of 2h and then, overnight, I started charging a fee per use and the wait time the next day declined to 30min, would you call that a success? What do you suppose the people who formally sat in that queue are doing instead? Every time anyone mentions wait times as a benefit of a private system needs, this point needs to be challenged because it's stupid and distracting.
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Aug 9, 2014 12:55
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Serrath posted:Look at it another way, if I had a public clinic with an average wait time of 2h and then, overnight, I started charging a fee per use and the wait time the next day declined to 30min, would you call that a success? What do you suppose the people who formally sat in that queue are doing instead? Well, they still need the service, they're just waiting until they can afford to pay for it. I guess that makes their wait time infinite, doesn't it? 
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Aug 9, 2014 13:00
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jrodefeld posted:No, property is not protected by initiating violence. It is protected by the use of defensive violence if necessary. If you are trespassing on my land and you don't pose any direct threat to me or my property (i.e. you are not attempting to steal anything) I can't just shoot you. I can't come up to you and start punching you in the face. I can ask you to leave. If you refuse to leave then I can have you physically removed by calling the police. If I use excessive force against someone who was absent-mindedly wandering across my property, then I become the aggressor and he can press charges against me. Defensive violence has to be proportional. If the Kool-Aid Man busts through my wall am I allowed to shoot him?
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Aug 9, 2014 13:11
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Serrath posted:Look at it another way, if I had a public clinic with an average wait time of 2h and then, overnight, I started charging a fee per use and the wait time the next day declined to 30min, would you call that a success? What do you suppose the people who formally sat in that queue are doing instead? You act like making the wait time short specifically for people with money isn't the intended outcome? I always assumed triage-based wait times were a big bother to people who are used to getting their way immediately Where I'm from, people are always bitching that people with private insurance get appointments with doctors faster (generally true), but at least my state mandated mediocre insurance loving functions and if I have real urgent problems, I'll be treated ASAP anyway. Not saying Germany's healthcare system is super amazing (I am uneducated in how it compares) but it's done right by my family, since we're poorish and my mother especially takes meds that would cost over a thousand bucks a month to just buy. I expect US-type healthcare would have loving ruined this family years ago, since we're really really lower middle class at best anyway. I thought Caros made some good arguments and I am looking forward to the original poster getting to the ones he hasn't glibly discarded yet. I am generally confused by the argumentative thrust I notice in these libertarian arguments that claim needs would be fulfilled by non-State factors because clearly everyone is interested in it. This seems insane. People do not generally give a poo poo about the world around them. They just don't. This is why taxes and regulations exist in the first place! Does a libertarian society only work if you replace regular human beings with some weirdly utopian logic engine on two legs? Sure I can see people taking payment to provide services but I guess I don't see where the motivation comes in to not cut costs and not half-rear end whatever it is that needs doing. I don't know. I think in a libertarian society there are too many steps in any proceeding that pre-suppose everyone will care enough to pay for it to happen. Imagine somehow the groundwater in an area goes bad. Ok. 1) You need to probably figure out why and if it's ongoing. This costs money and the more distant to the problem you are, the less inclined you're to pitch in. 2) Environmental clean-up costs money. 3) What if some local company is somehow at fault? How do you seek justice? Almost certainly the company has a bigger budget than your neighborhood, which seems relevant when arbitration is presumably also a service that costs money, and so are lawyers. There already isn't enough pro-bono work being done today....because doing something necessary for no compensation is not super attractive. And this entire scenario consists of necessary steps that cost money! 4)Perhaps the company at fault is run by a bunch of cartoonish jackasses who know that there's no actual state above them, so they just start hiring thugs to shut up complainers. Yeah yeah, this ain't Shadowrun, but it seems more realistic than just assuming everyone just turns into rational, moral actors just because there is no longer a State. Now suddenly the victims in my scenario also need to have money to pay a security agency (in absence of state-sponsored police). Now, I'm bad at coherently arguing and I do apologize. I think what it boils down to is this: I do not understand how Liberatarianism/Removing the state would be advantageous to the poor and the disadvantaged or the chronically ill. It seems in fact that without even the rudimentary protection granted by the state, these people would, in fact, be MORE disadvantaged. If people were really so moral about the misfortune of others, half the scummy companies around today would have been boycotted out of business already. Can you present an argument why life would be so much more just for everyone (you specifically mention minorities) when it seems like people prefer their lifes to be expedient, and taking a stand on some reasonably abstract injustice is not expedient? I just haven't seen an explanation for this yet that isn't "The free market!" Psykmoe fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Aug 9, 2014 |
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Aug 9, 2014 13:22
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jrodefeld posted:I consider Argumentation Ethics to be persuasive but I recognize that not everyone agrees. There are plenty of arguments against it from within libertarian circles as well. I don't want to get sidetracked into a discussion of Argumentation Ethics right now. I might come back to that point though. A different libertarian poster brought up Argumentation Ethics before, and I'm going to again state that only a minority of Libertarians find AE at all persuasive, never mind the general population. Even people who actually do philosophy generally think it's weak poo poo. If you want to use Argumentation Ethics, by all means shoot yourself in the leg.
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Aug 9, 2014 13:30
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I guess I hadn't realized that jrod is a Hans-Herman Hitler fan.
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Aug 9, 2014 13:43
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The one thing I never understood about ancaps and their libertarian ilk and their over-reliance on property rights is how they expect society to solve disputes where both parties are arguing in good faith. What happens when there is a sliver of land between two properties where both deeds lay claim to that sliver? Btw this is something that happens quite often with old farm deeds where the original surveying done 100+ years ago was rather inaccurate. So now there are two farm deeds that legally claim the exact same section of land. Who gets to decide who the lawful owner is? Someone is going to lose in this legal fight and how is this decision going to be enforced on the losing party?
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Aug 9, 2014 13:45
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jrodefeld posted:No, property is not protected by initiating violence. It is protected by the use of defensive violence if necessary. If you are trespassing on my land and you don't pose any direct threat to me or my property (i.e. you are not attempting to steal anything) I can't just shoot you. I can't come up to you and start punching you in the face. I can ask you to leave. If you refuse to leave then I can have you physically removed by calling the police. If I use excessive force against someone who was absent-mindedly wandering across my property, then I become the aggressor and he can press charges against me. Defensive violence has to be proportional. Again, this rests on a theory of distributive justice. The question of who owns what precedes the question of who has violence initiated against them, whether this violence is 'defensive' and however proportional the violence may be. We must first settle the question of who owns what before we can say who is initiating force.
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Aug 9, 2014 13:49
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jrodefeld posted:No, property is not protected by initiating violence. It is protected by the use of defensive violence if necessary. If you are trespassing on my land and you don't pose any direct threat to me or my property (i.e. you are not attempting to steal anything) I can't just shoot you. I can't come up to you and start punching you in the face. I can ask you to leave. If you refuse to leave then I can have you physically removed by calling the police. This all looks rather evasive. In your OP you claimed we could only delegate rights to the police that we individually own, so bringing them in here is a red herring: you must think you have the right to physically remove someone from your land. That is initiating violence, unless some previous act of violence has been committed; and walking on your land is not violent, according to the normal use of the word. Of course you can redefine 'violent', so that it means 'infringe your property rights'; but then you can't justify property rights by appealing to the prohibition on violence, because that would be circular.
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Aug 9, 2014 13:54
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Oh dear me posted:This all looks rather evasive. In your OP you claimed we could only delegate rights to the police that we individually own, so bringing them in here is a red herring: you must think you have the right to physically remove someone from your land. That is initiating violence, unless some previous act of violence has been committed; and walking on your land is not violent, according to the normal use of the word. The neat thing about redefining all rights as property rights is that suddenly walking across somebody's lawn and torturing them to death become the same kind of act, only at different scales.
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Aug 9, 2014 14:20
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Should private individuals be allowed to build and own nuclear weapons? If a person or persons dump waste into a river and it damages my property down river, can I nuke them in retaliation?
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Aug 9, 2014 14:33
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I've made a helpful graph for this thread as a reminder of who you are arguing with
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Aug 9, 2014 14:47
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jrodefeld posted:In a market economy everyone is compensated for their work when an economic transactions takes place. Yeah this is so true. Companies would NEVER use their position of wealth and power to subject employees to unfair working conditions. I mean, why would they do that? The invisible hand is watching how could they possibly get away with it!?!?
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Aug 9, 2014 15:27
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:No Nothing Not the best example there, Captain not-so-glib.
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Aug 9, 2014 15:29
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jrodefeld posted:This is incoherent. It is not the green pieces of paper that is being stolen by the State, but it is the actual labor of the citizen. The average upper middle class citizen works four to five months to pay their accumulated State, local and Federal taxes. What is being stolen is all the goods and services that these abstract symbols called "money" would have purchased had they not been expropriated by the IRS. Even by paying for your groceries, you are using a government service. It's the state that prints bills that are protected from counterfeiting, tries to maintain its value roughly stable, replaces damaged legal tenders and punishes frauds trying to part you with your money. You are, however, free to stop using dollars and use Bitcoins. Of course, their price can fall in a single day, your recently earned virtual money can disappear because major pool operators decide to rollback their version of software and only God can help you if someone steals your hard drive along with your virtual wallet. For some reason, most goods and service providers prefer to use inferior state-backed fiat money, leaving Bitcoin to drug dealers, cooked GPU vendors and shady "investment" schemes.
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Aug 9, 2014 15:35
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Bloodyshinta1 posted:Yeah this is so true. Companies would NEVER use their position of wealth and power to subject employees to unfair working conditions. I mean, why would they do that? The invisible hand is watching how could they possibly get away with it!?!? I'd really want him to voice his stance about company towns, but he seems to have skipped my previous post for some reason.
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Aug 9, 2014 15:35
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The state is the original homesteader. It has built roads, developed resources, and tamed the wilds. Just as the example you made of raising cattle the state has raised people. Therefore tell violence of the state is it just exercising its property rights.
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Aug 9, 2014 15:51
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Aug 9, 2014 16:01
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Every moral/ethical system requires violence in order to be imposed. Your own system (were it ever to function) is just as 'aggressive' as the current system, it just uses that aggression for different ends (the protection of land-holders). Violence in the name of personal property is no more justified than violence in the name of the common good, you've just chosen to demonize any kind of social obligation. That's not a 'logical' choice, it's your own ideological preference: don't be surprised if very few other people share it.
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Aug 9, 2014 16:06
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This is the best picture. I don't even remember what its context is. Anyway I asked jrodefeld a bunch of questions about his worldview in previous threads that he never answered so gently caress it.
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Aug 9, 2014 16:13
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Ayn Rand posted:[The Native Americans] didn't have any rights to the land and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using.... What was it they were fighting for, if they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their "right" to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or maybe a few caves above it. Any white person who brought the element of civilization had the right to take over this continent. So because I've not long been dealing with the subject matter, this quote is new to me. I suppose it partially answers my nagging question why legitimate land ownership only appears to start with libertarians and their immediate forebears. Going by Randian logic here, how much do you have to DO with your land to avoid accidentally ceding your rights to it? Cause this train of logic might make for fun with the home owner's organizations or whatever. Lawn not mowed in too long? Inherited a small piece of land and just letting it go wild around your house? How much glorious civilization do you have to have on your land for property rights to kick in? Does your ethnicity add a modifier to this minimum value? Can my neighbor just come in and chop down my trees or pick berries, or is untouched wilderness property when you're white and not a native american? Psykmoe fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Aug 9, 2014 |
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Aug 9, 2014 16:16
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You know what, I'm insulted. Caros started a new thread just for you, jrodefeld. He put your name in the title. He points this out to you and you don't even blush or crack a joke, you just humorlessly drone on about "I don't think I'm breaking the rules." You have got to be the most autistic person who has ever posted here and that is SUPER saying something. Do you even know what humor is jrodefeld? Since you like to post threads that you expect to be entirely about your own rear end, tell us what kind of comedy you enjoy. I've never seen you crack a joke or be responsive to one, ever. That's not the sort of person I will let be in charge of society. e: and you never answered my yurt question! Answer my yurt question. Do people get to squat on land that has been purchased but not used? woke wedding drone fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Aug 9, 2014 |
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Aug 9, 2014 16:26
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So An Cap ideas are really silly, but let me humor them for a moment: How exactly do An Caps try to get around the fact that a rather considerable amount of property was illegitimately obtained in the first place? Almost all the land in North America was forcibly seized by Europeans and that much of the United States wealth traces it's origins to labor of African slaves. Beyond that almost every company has benefited in some way from government involvement in the market. Are we just starting this whole An Cap thing now and declaring "no take backs"? Or should An Caps start seizing railroads, oil companies and corporate farms because they depended on the government to survive? If violence against property is the highest crime, and the product of someone's labor is their property, and punishments can be "an eye for an eye," does it follow that African-Americans can enslave white southerners who still benefit from the wealth their ancestors created? Because English wealth was accrued as a result of the enclosure movement, serfdom and tariffs are the English poor entitled to loot manor houses? If the wealthy who gained money illegitimately are allowed to keep their wealth what differentiates this system from feudalism?
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Aug 9, 2014 16:27
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Barlow posted:So An Cap ideas are really silly, but let me humor them for a moment: Here I'll save you time because it will take him until next week to respond. He has said that if native americans could produce a title saying the land is theirs then they should be able to have it back. Considering the difficulty of this he is essentially saying "Tough luck". AstheWorldWorlds fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Aug 9, 2014 |
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Aug 9, 2014 16:37
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The problem (haha no there are tons of problems) with anarcho-capitalism is that since it tries to justify everything from first principles, everything that has ever happened with a state involved can't actually have been right. That raises the question of how anarcho-capitalists would solve (or perhaps, leave the market to solve) various historical problems that were actually solved by state action. How would anarcho-capitalists have vaccinated much of the world against, for example, polio? How would anarcho-capitalists have won a large-scale war? How would anarcho-capitalists replicate the financial incentives for charity offered by our current tax code, given that there would be no official taxes? This is important, because charity would have much more work to do and thus require many more donations.
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Aug 9, 2014 16:40
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jrodefeld posted:The libertarian argues that the only just way to acquire property is through homesteading of previously unowned or unused natural resources, otherwise known as original appropriation. If you own your physical body, then if you mix your labor with natural land then that which you transformed becomes in essence an extension of yourself and becomes your property. If you are a frontiersman and you come across previously unowned and unused natural land and you build a house, build a fence, graze cattle and plant crops, then that which you altered through your labor becomes your property. Generally speaking palaeoanthropologists think that modern Homo sapiens first migrated out of Africa around 60,000 years ago. Others think it might have begun even earlier, maybe as much as 130,000 years ago. Estimates are that human beings had reached the Americas roughly 13,000 years ago, though again it could have been earlier than that. Either way, practically every desirable or population dense area of the planet has been continuously inhabited for over 5,000 years. So how exactly does this idea of original appropriation apply to anything that occurred within the span of recorded history? Every piece of land you'd care to live on has been conquered many times and then redistributed through violence. The wealth of the Americas was stolen from its previous inhabitants and cultivated using servile labour, largely in the form of slaves stolen from Africa or indentured servants unfairly coerced into working someone else's land. Since all wealth and land is tainted at the source how can anyone today be entitled to their property? It seems clear that the only logical way to set up a libertarian society would be to abolish all existing property and redistribute it perfectly equally to everyone on the face of the planet. If you failed to do this then you're simply perpetuating the violent and unjust appropriation of someone else's property.
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Aug 9, 2014 17:06
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AstheWorldWorlds posted:Here I'll save you time because it will take him until next week to respond. He has said that if native americans could produce a title saying the land is theirs then they should be able to have it back. Considering the difficulty of this he is essentially saying "Tough luck".
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Aug 9, 2014 17:10
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I identify with traditional anarchism which rejects private property and capitalism and here's something I wrote a while ago on "voluntarism" (another word for "anarcho-capitalism" or "right-market anarchism" or whatever you want to call it): First, about the "first appropriation" or "homesteading" principle, the idea that the justification for private property can be traced back to a person's choice to develop and make use of natural resources previously unused by humans: I don't think the burden is on the non-adherent to debunk the first appropriation principle. If someone claims the right to control a given resource and to prevent (with violence, if necessary) anyone else from using that resource, I think it's their responsibility to provide a convincing justification for that claim. I don't find the first appropriation principle convincing. First of all, it's useless as a principle that can provide some guidance to people in the current world. Much of the world's surface and the resources found on it has been appropriated, traded, stolen, inherited, abandoned, discovered, and developed many times over already. Justifying a particular person's right to control a particular part of it by tracing their appropriation back through transactions sanctioned by the "voluntarist" ideology until one arrives at some first, "pure" appropriation of land never before claimed by another human would be about as possible as tracing a given person's lineage back to Abraham. Second: An individual's control and use of resources almost always has effects on those around her or him. Pollution and other harmful effects on the natural environment (over-hunting, over-fishing, deforestation) are typical examples of this, but there are countless others. That's why it's generally a good idea for a society to have an agreed-upon mechanism for an individual (or specific group of individuals) who is using a given resources to have some dialogue with those affected by that use. If there isn't, the decisions about what constitutes appropriate use of a society's resources will typically be made by the individuals who happen to control those resources based on their own judgments of what will give them the best short-term benefits, often working at cross-purposes with others using resources in the same society, resulting in harm to the society as a whole. Also, failure to provide the kind of peaceful and agreed-upon societal mechanism discussed above will lead to violent conflicts between the users of resources and those affected by that use. It also leads to the "snowballing effect" referenced by another reply in this thread, where those who control resources can use their control to enable them to control more and more resources until power over the majority of people is held by a minority of "owners" who control the resources. "Voluntarism" does not account for this. Of course the individual "owner" can have such a dialogue if she or he wants in "voluntarism", but it is assumed that generally there will be no such dialogue and the individual "owner" will make decisions about her or his use based on the owner's judgment of what will benefit her or him individually and that, through the "invisible hand" of the market, such decisions in the aggregate will generally benefit society as a whole. The assumption of the invisible hand theory is a major problem of "voluntarist" philosophy. The traditional anarchist values of the rejection of coercion and the favoring of free agreement as the basis of societal decision making which seem to be in accord with "voluntarism" do not assume or entail the truth of the invisible hand theory, but it is essential to the "voluntarist" picture of the world. If the invisible hand theory isn't a realistic picture of the way humans behave (I don't think it is) or if it isn't correct about its supposed benefits to society as a whole (I don't think it is), then "voluntarism" is inherently flawed. Third: Since my second reason above kind of assumes utilitarian values, let me also say that I do not find it convincing that a hypothetical first appropriator has some moral right to control the resources she or he has appropriated. Where would such a moral justification come from? I don't find a moral code that for some reason so heavily rewards those who are successful at becoming "first appropriators" of resources, or those who are successful at convincing those first appropriators to relinquish control of resources to them through trade or gift intuitive or sensible. Why not reward need? Why not reward expertise? Why not reward the esteem or agreement of the community? Obviously there's no way to argue whether a given moral rule has intuitive appeal to you, but just ask yourself: does it in this case?
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Aug 9, 2014 17:39
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Our species has existed, mostly unchanged, for something like 100,000-200,000 years. 'States' and 'government' and all that are a relatively new addition to our way of life and I think its no coincidence that technology, knowledge, and quality of life all started to explode at roughly the same time. If you go back 10 or 20 thousand years I imagine it must have been an an-cap paradise. Zero state involvement, a truly unrestricted free market, and fewer of those pesky population based resource constraints that cause so many problems. But we, as a species, pretty much squandered the first 90+% of our existence and accomplished almost exactly nothing. How can this possibly be when we were living in a virtual utopia, especially compared to today's statist environment? Acelerion fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Aug 9, 2014 |
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Aug 9, 2014 17:41
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jrodefeld posted:Can you explain when and under what circumstances aggression is morally justified? The greatest good for the greatest number.
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Aug 9, 2014 18:05
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Acelerion posted:Our species has existed, mostly unchanged, for something like 100,000-200,000 years. 'States' and 'government' and all that are a relatively new addition to our way of life and I think its no coincidence that technology, knowledge, and quality of life all started to explode at roughly the same time. What about trepanation, the ultimate natural cure "they" don't want you to know about
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Aug 9, 2014 18:08
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witch doctors hate him! one weird trick solves seizures, migrains and demonic possession
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Aug 9, 2014 18:29
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| # ? May 2, 2024 14:35 |
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Your definition of aggression and the initiation of force is incoherent. If I jump you and beat you up to take your wallet, then clearly I have initiated force. If I mug you at gunpoint instead? Well, unless I pull the trigger, I haven't initiated force, I've initiated the threat of force, which is not the same thing, yet probably exists under your definition of aggression. Let's get more abstract. What if I robbed you because last week you broke my window. Who initiated force? What if a six months prior to that I borrowed your lawnmower and broke it and never paid you back. Who initiated force? What if 10 years prior to that your dad killed my dad. Who initiated force? If I break into your home while you aren't there and steal your TV I haven't initiated force against you, I've initiated force against your property, and neither used nor threatened any violence against a human. It is your property not because you are currently holding or using it, or inherently because you personally have the ability to stop me and all other comers, but because nebulous laws say so, and those laws are based upon the credible threat of force to maintain your ownership of property. Now, let's say that instead of breaking into your home I simply enter through an unlocked door and steal your stuff. Is this force? I haven't used any violence or threats of violence against a person or even an inanimate object. What if instead of entering your home to steal, I simply enter your home and hang out, perhaps leaving you fair market price for whatever electricity and snacks I consume? Is it force because I entered an imaginary set of coordinates without your permission? Why do I need your permission? That coordinate range is merely yours by threat of force! What if you invited me in to your home, but then later I decided I didn't want to leave? What about if instead of crossing the cursed threshold at all, I simply steal something of yours that is not within the delineated confines of your home, such as a hose or a lawn flamingo? What about something not on your property, like your car parked on the street or your bicycle at the supermarket? Here's the big one: What about instead of your home, bike, lawn gnome, wallet, or whatever, we're talking about your factory. You do not physically hold that factory. It is not a part of your body. You barely spend any time in it anymore, certainly no more than any one of the 100 workers there. Without those workers it is just a big warehouse draining you of rent and utility money. (That's an interesting question, too. If you stop paying your rent, aren't the men from the bank/police who come to take it away the ones initiating force? All you did was totally passively and nonviolently stop mailing checks.) The workers decide that they want to strike and organize a sit-in. Aren't you initiating force in having them removed? What about if they decide they will simply cut you out of the process altogether, running the factory themselves and selling the products without your input or benefit? What will you do other than initiate force by calling the agents of state violence? The reason why these all sound like insane rules to bind vampires is because they are. Sometimes the initiation of force is good and sometimes it is not. Absolutism leads to absurdity. Tezzor fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Aug 9, 2014 |
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Aug 9, 2014 18:40
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