Topic: Intellectual Property - In All Fairness! - page 75. (Read 105893 times)

Present your facts, or they didn't happen.

This from a completely un-biased view, lacking any preconceptions about what libertarianism is, what it represents or who might best represent it; of course.

Okay, now we are getting somewhere.  So human powered melee weapons are valid, whether they are small enough to hide on one's own person or not?  And human powered projectile weapons are questionable, but what about the pump-type pellet rifles? Is there a limit to the size of a human pumped air rifle?  What is the principle that you make this determination upon, or is it simply an arbitrary decision based upon your own opinons?  I assume that a saber or a foil would be acceptable?  What about a hand cranked taser?

Regrettably I'm going to have to bow out of this debate for a while - it's taking up too much of my time.  It's great fun and I'd love to continue, but I'm satisfied that, at least as b2c and Fred present it, libertarianism is fundamentally flawed.  For example, in liberty-land:

1. Any person may use mortal violence to defend from any perceived mortal threat, or injurious violence from any perceived injurious threat; and any person may carry mortal weapons at any time.  One person's right gives another the right to kill him.  You might be doing something perfectly legitimate, and yet another can legitimately kill you for doing it.

2. You must make irrational economic decisions based on some arbitrary morality which other people may or may not adhere to.

3. To enjoy a reasonable level of safety in your own property, your only choice is to pay a security tax to some private police force and hope they keep a watch on fertiliser producers all over the world, making sure they do background checks on all their clients (though they are not obliged to do so), then checking all produce and people travelling near your territory to see if anyone has a bomb.  And if they *do* have a bomb, well, whaddyaknow, they are free to do so, so the security team has to follow them day and night and just wait until they stop merely *holding* the bomb and actually start "threatening" with it - whatever that might mean, bearing in mind that the interval between starting to threaten and actually detonating could be far far far far far less than the reaction time of the security company.

4. There is no limit to permissible behaviour - anything arbitrarily dangerous is permitted, as long as there is no intentional menace to others.  Competence, mental stability, physical ability, are of no consequence as long as the buyer can convince the seller that he intends no harm.  You could juggle live grenades in the street as long as the street owner didn't think of prohibiting that and, of course, as long as you don't intend to *deliberately* drop any.  You could randomly shoot your gun while blindfolded in the street with impunity as long as you don't deliberately intend to hit anyone.

5. Any justice, any justice at all, will always be bought.  The enforcement of that justice will be bought as well.  The wealthier (=strongest) members of society will have access to more powerful justice.  Poorer members can only hope that the wealthy do not use abuse their greater power to subjugate them.

6. There will be no stability to one's life; when the terms&conditions of neighbouring property changes in such a way as to become intolerable to you, you must sell and move elsewhere.

7. There is no guaranteed minimum access to healthcare, other than what an individual can fully pay for.  You could join a 'healthcare cooperative' of some kind, and hope that it honours its contract with you.  If not, paid justice will prevail.

8. There is no guaranteed level of safety anywhere, other than what the owner of a property is willing to offer.  Even then, there is no way to be certain that he will follow the code.  Even in cases where he proclaims membership of some paid private-standards group, it is not known if he actually follows the stated code or even if he actually is a member of the standards group at all.

Well, history has clearly shown that pre-emptive regulation of fertiliser sales saves lives.  Is it not logical that the greatest power in the land would be the most effective at regulating the trade?  And if that force is nation-wide, then the regulation will be nation-wide too.


A regulation cannot admit anything other than complete regulation.  Sure - there are more *options* available, e.g. regulation, partial regulation, non-regulation, deregulation, etc.... but if you choose the first option you cannot permit any of the others, while if you choose one of the others, you may or may not permit others.  So I would say, the options are: "regulated" or "less than fully regulated" and nothing else.


I read this, and it's almost written in legalese -- there are some sentences I don't understand.  But let's start with this:
So, suppose you get your liberty-land.  Because there is no taxation, there would be no standing army.  Now suppose a foreign power invades, eliminates you and yours, uses the experience to learns and establishes a new colony.  Is that progress?

With respect, this is not something we need to debate.  It worked.  Immediately.  The bombers didn't go away and when Libya sent supplies of Semtex they were a nightmare again.  But fertiliser based bombs were dealt with. 

It demeans your logic when you try to ignore facts.  Just saying....

Then determined bombers will make deals with like-minded farmers, or organize a group of like-minded persons to buy smaller quantites across many vendors and time periods so as to avoid raising the red flags.  It is a fatal conceit to assume that this is the reason that car bombs have reduced in the UK.  It may, or may not, be a contributing factor.  Much more likely is that the effectiveness of UK police in undercover operations has identified those who would pursue such tactics and delt with them already or that the grievences against the UK have either been resolved (in the case of the Irish independence movement) or overshadowed by the grievences against the US and Israel. (as might be the case of Islamic motives)  Or just simply that the population of would be bombers still free and alive to do such things has been reduced.  Most likely a combination of all these factors, but corrolation is not causation.

Actually people do like it.  Being bombed isn't fun.  Really, your ideas ignore the fact that having a bomb tear your town apart is really really unpleasant.  Its also unpleasant that you feel that people should not regulate things that are being used to kill them.  Admittedly its not important as no-one will die for your ideas.

Its a logical fallacy to compare regulating the sale of fertiliser with forced lobotomies.  At least you haven't started comparing it to slavery    You already know that so why bother raising a silly distraction.

But a gun doesn't put anyone on equal footing with a gang of armed thugs.

So, we'll allow automatic pistols.  An automatic pistol might put you on an equal footing with a gang of armed thugs.

But not with a gang of automatic-pistol-armed thugs.

So we'll allow machine guns.  dot dot dot

As long as the gang can arm itself the same as you, your gun does not put you on an equal footing.

If it's just physical strength, a strong person can only threaten one person at a time, and cannot menace a group.  With weapons, any person can menace many people simultaneously.

You asked where we should stop.  If I had to draw the line, I would permit only human-powered weapons.  Anyone's ability to menace would be only in a small area around them (as wide as the biggest stick they could carry, for example).  Bows-and-arrows and crossbows would be a grey area - they're not close-combat weapons, but they are still human powered.


No.  They wouldn't.  I looked for their comments on this, but it was taking too long.  If you don't believe me, search for it or ask them again.

Finally something sensible.  We have the power to decide these things.  We choose to use it to save lives.  That's the "is" and your assertion that we ought not to use the power we have is the "ought."

My puzzle with you has been whether your "ought" is important enough that we can ignore the reality that we don't like being bombed.  So far, is a "no" I'm afraid.  Being bombed is mighty unpleasant and I feel that if we as a society fail to protect ourselves from bombs, life will be nasty, brutish and short.

You continually draw conclusions from very narrowly defined axioms, assuming them, for the most part, to be the only option available, and if I disagree, I must be wrong and you are right. I disagree. It can be proven that there is more than "to regulate" or "not to regulate".

I get the fact that wielding force is convenient for you. However, nobody likes to be on the receiving end of your "big stick". You say it saves lives. It does to some extent, but then so do lobotomies. I hear you become very docile after one of those. I suggest doing neither.

Its hard to make general rules.  It will vary by what is practical.  Regulating fertiliser sales means that if you buy over a certain amount of fertiliser, it gets recorded.  Farmers and gardeners suffer no inconvenience - they don't have to prove they intend to use it for legit purposes.  Whereas if you were to buy several tons of ammonium nitrate fertiliser and not have a farm, you'd have the anti-terror police checking you out very quickly.  

The good thing about this is we know it works.  Instead of being daily events, car bombs because once every few years events.

What evidence do you have that my desire to buy a half ton of fertilizer will lead to any other result than a beautiful fall harvest?  Who are you to increase my costs, or restrict my options in my persuit of legitimate uses of my funds.  Why must I prove to you that I'm a gardener and not a terrorist? 

Both intent and outcome matter. The results are matter of fact. Whether that outcome (the resultant) is right or wrong is what deontology addresses. They are 'is-ought' concerns.

Did you shoot me in the head by accident?  Or are you some kind of mentally challenged person that I was stupid enough to hand my shotgun?  Watch the straw burn, isn't it pretty.

If a four year old finds his dad's pistol, already loaded, and shoots his brother in the head, he wasn't agressing him.  It's tragic, and a terrible breech of adult responsibility; but no, it's not aggression.


Burn, baby burn.  Straw makes such a pretty glow.


You've been treading this line again, as of late.  Don't forget our prior conversations on this topic.  I will only suffer your breeches of civil speech for so long.


And you may be able to predict some outcomes, but you are not a prophet.  If I disagree with your rules that say that I can't have fertilizer because I might make a bomb, you lose the argument.  If there can be any dissent, you lose.  The real world isn't so black and white as your strawmen.

You are not wrong.  I, for one, have never harmed any living thing with thousands of fired rounds, excluding plantlife and the occasional earthworm in my target background.


You avoided the question completely.  Where does a civil society draw the line?  Is it arbitrary, or is there some kind of natural principle that defines the differences between a weapon such as a shotgun and a home defense system that involves lethal & automatic traps, such as a miltary grade anti-personnel mine?  If you say that bombs that are made for that purpose are prohibited, such as the above mine; what about materials that hold the potential to make make-shift bombs?   Can such things be reasonablely regulated?  Would doing so actually prevent bombmakers from obtaining said materials?  Has the prohibition on handguns in the UK actually prevented criminals in the UK from obtaining them?  Has it prevented criminals from committing violent crimes, or have those same criminals just switched to other weapons such as blugeons and knives?  Would a prohibition on (nitrogen based) fertilizer in the UK prevent car bombs, or just lead to their construction from other available materials?  Should high school chemistry (where anyone paying enough attention can learn how to make a bomb from many common materials) be prohibited?  Would it help?

Intent matters - and the intent to live matters a lot.  If you are going to take an action that facilitates the killing of people, those people might well feel that their intent to live matters more than your intent to ignore the consequences of your actions.  They are within their rights to stop you if that is that it takes to avoid being killed.

Or do you think people should simply wait for the killers to have their wicked way?

So if I shoot you in the head without the intent to kill you, it's not aggression.

If I detonate a nuke on my front lawn to make a hole for a koi pond, it doesn't matter that I killed 15 million people, it's not aggression.


What you do idiots don't seem to realize about deontology is that intent is not the ONLY thing that matters.  Drowning your kids because you think it'll make them all go to heaven (true story) is NOT ok just because you had good intentions.  Intent should be considered, but results are ultimately what determines whether the right thing or wrong thing was done.

Moonshadow you do like long posts  

Even in the hands of terrorists, firearms are essentially just a nuisance.  In the UK, they are banned and the main effect is that people who commit suicide use ropes.  In the US, you have guns and from what I hear, they do less harm than road traffic accidents.  Correct me if I am wrong.  In Ireland I had guns; here I don't; its not a big deal for me to be honest as there is almost no access to land to shoot on here unless you are really prepared to spend money.

Bombs are different as a bomber can plant his weapon, drive off and kill 20 or so people at a time.  Often you'll never know who planted it.  Look at the Omagh bombing - no-one has ever been jailed for killing 29 people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omagh_bombing

Bombs make trips to schools, churches, bars, hospitals and the like all into high risk locations.  So I'd prefer people not have access to bombs.  This applies with even greater force to nukes, biological weapons like smallpox and chemical weapons.

Only if you do something that is intended to result in deaths.  Intent matters.  It may, or may not, be predictable.  But if the person doing the action of opting out does not do it with the intent of causing harm, and does not agree with your opinion that people will be killed as a direct consequence, it's not aggression.