Topic: Intellectual Property - In All Fairness! - page 83. (Read 105893 times)

So we are in agreement that we have the right to decide who has the power to kill us.  The specific details over under what circumstances its OK to possess a nuke are implementation issues.  The important thing is that we already have the capacity to control how many people have that power to kill and now you and I are agreed there are circumstances where it is OK to use that capacity.

Yes? Though if I own nukes for the purpose of mining or launching things into space, and you mistakenly believed my purpose was to harm you and came to stop me, wouldn't I also have the right to stop you too, either by diplomatic of forceful means?


Is the question about the amount of power that the person has? I have the power to decide if someone lives every time I get behind the wheel of my car...

I grew up in an Irish country town.  Shooting foxes for fur was a tidy earner

With respect, if you have a gun held to my face, I am entitled to stop you as there is no reason why I should allow you to have the decision about whether I live or die.  IF you have a nuke and I am within range, again I am entitled to stop you for the exact same reason.  

I'm sure you agree with that.

It doesn't really matter to me whether the means of stopping you are wearing a state or a private badge or no badge at all.  What counts is that the person who has assumed the power to decide if I live or die has that power taken off him.

Does that strike you as fair?

I live in a big socialist city, and am rather far from American Wild West culture. I don't know the answer to this. Would that guy have survived if his actions were considered wildly inappropriate, and everyone else was armed as well?

If I want to buy something from a second party that they rightfully own, third parties have no right to interfere.

I don't know where you live but I started shooting when I was 11.  Fergalish questions are spot on.  I've had a guy hold a gun to my chest after a few drinks and believe me the fact that he should know better and that he had no hostile intention was no comfort at all.

That's true, but that is practically the only outcome I can see in a fully privitized society. At the least, you still have a choice if your security options, have some recourse should they screw up, and may still have the freedom to own dangerous materials like nukes if you need them. That's not an option with government.

Fergalish, I think your problem is that you are assuming your questions are security-based, when they are much more cultural in nature. If we lived in a different culture , where carrying a gun and defending oneself is to be expected, people would be taught how to behave themselves accordingly from a young age, and the two questions you asked wouldn't even be relevant.

What you have done is say "If its dangerous, the private security companies should regulate nukes."  There is no real difference between that and saying "If its dangerous, the state security services should regulate nukes."   If the power to control access to nukes is there, private or state is just a distinction between badges.

So a mad crackpot umbrella maker *can* bring his raindrop-triggered nuclear device into a crowded city.  In fact, any *arbitrarily* dangerous item can now be freely handled by any *arbitrarily* incompetent person, as long as they do not intend to use it, or to threaten to use it.  Is that so?

You didn't answer my hypothesis of a child pointing his toy gun at you.  Would you like to try?  Here's the link.


Once again, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PERSONAL LIBERTY EXCEPT INSOFAR AS THOSE AROUND YOU PERMIT IT.  You have been proposed simple problems to solve, and you cannot solve them with your idealogy.  Just in case you've fogotten, here they are again:
CAN YOU RESOLVE THESE PROBLEMS OR NOT?

It's not like we're giving you complicated problems to solve.  If you make any problem complicated enough, then no political philosophy will solve it.  But THESE ARE PROBLEMS THAT CONCERN THE VERY FOUNDATION STONES OF LIBERTARIANISM ITSELF.  To wit: your liberty and my liberty ARE NOT COMPATIBLE, and I'm using the word 'liberty' in your sense of the word; that is, something I define for me, you for you, Hawker for Hawker, and so on.  How can you "build on top" of something that is fundamentally flawed?

If you cannot or will not solve those simple problems, then answer this: should your ideology be capable of solving real-world problems that real people face, or is it only for imaginary problems faced by imaginary ideal people in imaginary ideal worlds?

Thats fine.

We are human and we have the ability work together as a society to protect ourselves.  In this case, we have got together and saved 1000s of lives in one small country by regulating bomb making materials.  You feel this is not legitimate.  Do you feel you have a right to stop us?  If yes, what is the basis of that right?

Here's my train of thought on private ownership of nukes in a libertarian society:

When you own land, you will likely also have a contract with a private security company. That company will make to keep the territories under its contract safe, and will likely either directly own, or contract out, an insurance policy for your property as a service. That way they will both cover you should you get robbed or have your house burn down, and have an incentive to make sure that never happens to you in the first place, since insurance costs money.
Should some nutcase manage to sneak in and detonate a nuke on one of the properties protected by this company, the company will get have its reputation severely damaged, and will lose a lot of money paying for insurance claims and litigation (lawsuits). If nukes blowing up is something that is considered a serious problem in that area, the security company will likely step up to create methods and technologies to help prevent that from happening.
Other security companies may also exist that to allow the ownership of nukes, though they will very likely require you to show that you have a good reason for owning it (likely industreal one only), will very likely require you to pay much higher insurance fees on it, and will probably register you on a publically shared list as a nuke owner. Now, if someone does manage to get one in secret and blow it up somewhere, it again goes back to the security company being accused of failing to monitor for nukes and nutcases, resulting in litigation against the company, and the company trying to find the culprit to either sue them in turn or at least bring them to justice.
As for what if someone decides to not have security company contract? That will mean that the person's property is practically defenseless, and they have no recourse against anything that happens to it, so will likely be considered as a very stupid thing to do.


I guess bottom line is, whether government or private, regulation will happen. Question is whether it will happen due to majority-rule imposed government legal sanctions, or through privately owned contract agreements.

Start shooting holes in my idea... now.

No regulations are legitimate. Only self-defense is legitimate. This is getting tedious.

Lets move from theoretical to something we both know works.

In Ireland and the UK, we regulate fertiliser sales to avoid the making of huge truck bombs.   I'm guessing the US does something similar after Oklahoma.  It has saved thousands of lives.  Empirically we know this works.

Do you feel that regulation is legitimate?

Nobody said nothing bad would happen in a Libertarian world. It's just the only ideology that has the fewest 'is-ought' constructs and logical incompatibilities. Your Socialist/Communist/Oligarchy/Fascist/Name-you-flavor-of-might-makes-right world isn't perfect either, in fact, far from it. I can point out more logical inconsistencies in your ideology than you can in mine. Libertarianism starts with the NAP and builds on that, yours is just majority rules, personal liberties be damned.

But of course you will say that libertarian ideas are too "simplistic" and we must "complicate" them because of the "real world", and due to these supposed "real world" problems, it's just easier to threaten violence upon your neighbor to achieve your goal, than envision some other way. There's more than one way to "skin a cat", and thus, not all means to an end should be justified. I know of one too many politicians, dictators, kings, princes, and thugs that espouse that sort of poppycock.

There is no hard and fast rule of what counts as a weapon. That's the point.


I've already addressed this. I guess you weren't paying attention. (See: this post) I'll go over it again though. It depends on what you mean by threat. If you simply mean that it's dangerous then no. If you mean that it's mere existence shows intent to cause you harm then you have the right to defend yourself. However, that's complete nonsense. The mere existence of a gun doesn't show intent to cause you harm. Pointing it at you does. Since you don't need to aim a nuclear bomb (for the most part) then it takes something else to show intent, some overt gesture.


That's the key word.

Exactly, so we're back to violence again.  There's no way around it.


You're right though.  If everyone in the world magically turned into perfect, god-like beings with ZERO variance in opinion, it would work.  And if everyone in the world grew wings we could fly.  But what do those idiotic fantasies have to do with discussing real-world issues?  They can't seem to see the irrelevance.

Fred, b2c and any other libertarian: do you dare to answer these questions?


edit:
And you have still to answer question 2 in the circumstances where possession of a gun is not addressed in the t&c, if any, of the room where we stand.

Not so.  My intent was merely to expose the flaws in your philosophy; I can't speak for Hawker but his posts have been reasonable, coherent and pertinent.  Unfortunately, the only way to expose those flaws was to escalate the discussion to hitherto unknown levels of absurdity (unregulated nuclear weapons, raindrop-triggered nuclear weapons etc).

Here is your philosophy in a nutshell if I may permit myself, and, by your own admission, it must be logical and coherent:

1. Do no violence except to defend from imminent perceived threats to life, health or property.
2. Do not threaten or damage the life, health or property of another.
3. Honour all your contractual obligations.

Is that more or less correct?  If not, please correct it.

Items (1) and (2) are in direct contradiction with one another where two conflicting parties do not identically interpret the words "violence", "defend", "threat", "life", "health", "property", "damage" AND where the parties are not governed by a comprehensive contract covering ALL possible scenarios.

So I'm not interested in annoying you - that's not the point of a good debate, in fact it would ruin a good debate.  But your reaction here very clearly *suggests to me* that you are unable to resolve the contradiction.  Therefore: your philosophy is flawed.  Defend it or I will *conclude* that you cannot resolve the contradiction, and I will feel entitled to follow your every pro-libertarian comment on this board with a link to this thread stating that your philosophy is flawed and and you are unable to defend the accusation that your libertarianism is inherently contradictory.


I agree with you, it is the nature of people and of the world; but try stretching your credulity to the point where, should my kid get hurt, and the owner doesn't pay, then the contractually specified court would convict the store owner and either the court-specified enforcement agency enforces the contract or, irrespective of the prices he offers, everybody stops shopping there because they don't trust the owner to safely operate a store and/or abide by his contractual obligations.

I mean, like that, it could work - I mean IF EVERY SINGLE PERSON THE WHOLE WORLD WIDE suddenly changed their nature and started behaving honestly, it might work.  Except in situations where an honest conflict arises because both parties honestly consider themselves in the right AND no mediator is specified, Fred & b2c have still not proposed an alternative to violence and therefore "MightMakesWinnerMakesRight".