Topic: This is the thread where you discuss free market, americans and libertarianism - page 49. (Read 33901 times)

i see no question mark after your first statement. and i don't understand your second...

And if those rules said that I owned you, completely?

So if I was sitting in my home, minding my own business, and then someone burst in and said, "GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONEY OR YOU WILL GO TO JAIL, AND IF YOU RESIST I WILL KILL YOU"

It's okay if it's a law.  So how's the box working out for ya?

but you have, by not following the rules.

I'm still not hearing "No, statists are not sociopathic proxy killers, because:"

Stop dancing around the issue.  Do you, or do you not, agree that you or I need to die to make sure everyone plays to the same rules?  This is the very core of the state, that gooey chocolaty center.  I don't want to talk about "Well this issue with corporatism" or "We're not really slaves because such and such."  I want to hear you say, "I understand the state, this is what it does, and upon understanding that violence is not only encouraged, but vital, for the state to exist, I have determined that I agree with/disagree with the state and its course of action."  Until we make this point absolutely clear, we cannot proceed to nit-pick at individual issues.  Let's zoom out and figure this very basic part out first.

Are you okay with violence being used against me, even when I have not provoked it?

Tragedy of the commons is only a problem if there is a commons.

No, no. That's far too absolute a statement for you. You can't know that because you've claimed that objectivity is illusory, remember? You have no way of knowing whether or not humans actually exist, much less what they would be made of, and even less what it would be like to be one. You just think they exist. You can't even be sure that you're actually human. Maybe you're a predator brain in a vat that just thinks it's human? Heck, you could be a sentient ham sandwich. Maybe.

if you accept this "fact", you must accept that humans are too. humans are only a really complex one, but both me and the robot are build from atoms.

I'm quite confused: a dominating, murdering, immoral empire is a side-effect of libertarian attitudes?  Or are you making the case that Americans are not libertarian (because I could believe that.0


You left Mike's quoted point untouched.

(I came here for the Bitcoin, and I stayed because I liked the posts like this.)

Actually there's extensive literature explaining how private justice works.  A good example is the Libertarian Manifesto by Rothbard.  But most people who want to argue on forums aren't interested in familiarizing themselves with the opposition's educated representatives and their lines of thought.[/list]

I repeat my request that all support for the state be confined to one sticky thread.  This ought to go both ways, after all.

And personally I don't care about evangelizing anybody.  I simply ask that people withdraw their support for any force used to curtain my liberties, just as you would not support a cop who would arrest Rosa Parks for sitting in the whites only section of a bus or (hopefully) would not cheer a cop for arresting someone for marijuana possession or homosexual activity.

Okay, fair enough. It's not really a big deal anyway.

That's just a fancy way of waiting....

Edit:
And come to think of it, if time is simply a measure of space stretching, it makes sense that gravity would slow it down.

Hawking has something to say about that, here.

Apparently, gravity also has an effect on time; if you could spin around a supermassive black hole for a while, time would actually slow down considerably.  But as he's shown, time cannot go backwards at all; that test where if you invite a person in the future who figured out time travel to a party, and then he never shows up. 

I think you misunderstand time. I don't pretend to understand it fully, either, but time is not a dimension in the same way that the three commonly accepted spacial ones are. You cannot travel back in time, and the only way to travel forward is to wait. Time is more like a measure of the stretching of space. It's an effect that we feel because of increased entropy. We're getting pretty deep into the physics of reality, and it's entirely possible we're over both of our heads, but suffice it to say that though many things are deterministic, I don't consider conscious decision to be one of those things.

Well, there's the wrench in your argument, right there. 

If time and space are intertwined, then I most certainly do have a reason to believe that the future is just as set as the past, because it's all part of one fabric which we're slowly moving across the surface of. Regardless of your perception of it, everything you would ever do came into existence the "moment" (for a lack of a better term) that the universe appeared from the void. Because one aspect of our universe is the totality of the piece of fabric that we recognize as spacetime. You have no reason to believe that the future doesn't already exist, and every reason to believe that it does. Unless you think that essentially half of the universe doesn't exist until you happen to experience it. (Which is a rather subjectivist view to take.) When time happened, it happened. And everything that happened in time happened. There was nothing that happened that hasn't already happened.




Your actions in time logically pre-existed your decision to take those actions. They cannot be changed, because you will always follow them. You always have. You're doing it right now. The particular pattern which the universe somehow managed to take when it came into existence determined it for you. You're just moving along the pattern like water follows the path of least resistance. Just doing things. Sometimes not knowing why. Sometimes thinking you know why. Sometimes wearing a fake mustache and a top hat. Though that last part might just be me. I really need a monocle and a new cane. (My last one broke, long story.)

That doesn't make our personhood or decisions in time any less real, or any less us. Absolute freedom was never the basis of that. We've never had absolute freedom. So if that's the standard, the freedom to determine the future ourselves, then... Well, I guess we're just a bunch of robots after all, as you rhetorically insisted earlier?