MAGIC SOOUULLLSSSS Libertarian

[fbmf]

"And, fuck you, you piece of shit moderator."

*golf clap*

Bwuh? If that was part of Doom's post, you should know he edited it out and now things are confusing and weird. If that wasn't part of Doom's post, things are still confusing and weird.

He edited it out and sent it via PM with an additional insult appended.

This is TGDMB, and I wasn't modding at the time, so, yeah...I don't know.

Game On,
fbmf

[Red Archon]

You're letting ISP off the hook, guys.

Man, I've had that thing he's having now. Not gonna lie. It's a special moment in a young man's life. It's when you've lost your argument on all fronts and it's a little bit scary, and you just scoff and back off and think "those guys are so stupid, they just don't understand my point," and then, you try to think about how you're right and they're wrong, just for a second, and your ears get flustered when you realise you've got nothing, and that's a lot scarier, and you sort of agree with yourself never to try to win that argument in your head again, and there'll always be a little sting when you see the people you were arguing with.

It's a precious thing, really. For me, after the first two or three times, I simply stopped making arguments I couldn't back up in any way or at least learned to admit when I'm wrong before I embarrass myself. I think we're witnessing a growth episode here.

But in case you're not experiencing such a delightful event, ISP, get your ass back here and tell us where rights come from and what protects them if not a government.

[tussock]

Can I try? Yes I can. People do sometimes have me on about being airy-faerie about rights and stuff, so I can take ISP's place. Except I'm not Libertarian, so ... eh.

So rights are a thing where people figured out that "if you're not guilty, you have nothing to fear" was bullshit, in that they placed themselves in that other person's shoes in their mind and easily noticed how there was ways you could be not guilty and have stuff to fear from the state.

They got there via mass literacy, basically. Where early mobile presses could regularly, reliably, and anonymously spread pamphleteered ideas quicker than officialdom could persecute people for holding them.


Which is to say, once common people had a genuine choice of which ideas they could have, the ones they regularly chose look a lot like what we now call basic human rights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaratio ... #Substance from the French revolution (and the Rights of Woman that followed close behind, because they seriously forgot, and it wasn't given universally for a long time, still only barely is).

The Bill of Rights in the US. The Levellers movement in the UK. Earlier on smaller classes of literate people took similar rights for their own social class, like Magna Carta in England.

I apologise for my Anglo- and Euro-centric view there, but that's my familiarity.


So I think, people inherently (shaded by cultural distribution of power) understand rights as ... well, I quite like the French one. Go read it if you're unfamiliar. Once people can hear that, they want it, at least for themselves and people like themselves if not outsiders or other classes. Classes of people who miss out and know about it immediately agitate to be included (even when that takes centuries to actually happen, people pretty consistently demand it).



And yes, it's pretty explicit in the original rights of man that you need an army to stop the neighbours stealing your rights away, and a government that can collect taxes to pay for the fucking thing. Turns out later that universal citizenship and education and things are also pretty keen and people eventually recognise things like even internet and cell phone access as a "right".

So it really just means stuff that everyone seems to want, and demands that everyone like them can have, as soon as they can know about it at all. Those are rights, and one of them is to have a representative government using the rule of law and a professional army to protect the rest.

But government's don't give people rights. Ever. People fucking claw and demand and fight and bleed and die for their rights, often for a very long time, and eventually the state complies or it get replaced with one that will recognise what people want. Give or take for the state's continued use of deadly force, in that people also want to have a good chance of living long enough to enjoy what they're fighting for.


Rights are, ultimately, what people universally demand their states give them all, once they have the concept and power to do so. This naturally excludes scarce materials and such, even if everyone individually would like more of such things.

[Red Archon]

So, popular demand determines a human right. That's hilariously fucked up. I'll let your imagination extrapolate.

As you are very kindly taking it into your hands to answer for the crazy people, is it possible for you to explain, then, how a brand of anarchism could protect those rights?

Let's take an obvious example. A large portion of Americans wants to be on TV, so I guess that's a human right now. But airtime is limited - who gets to be in the Big Brother house?

[OgreBattle]

How about using historic examples as evidence of why certain behavior is good?

[Username17]

How about using historic examples as evidence of why certain behavior is good?

By what metric? As I understand it, ancient Hebrews ate a lot less shellfish than modern day Jews do. That means they were more closely following the divine commands in their book in the past when they all lived in squalid poverty. Does that make it more good?

-Username17

[Maxus]

For ancient Hebrews in question? Possibly. I always understood the Levitican command against shellfish and meat with blood it in was because those things aren't safe unless you know what you're doing, and they didn't yet have the know-how and, apparently, couldn't imagine anyone getting it.

No wonder the Levitican code swore God would smite you with illness if you didn't follow it, eat enough undercooked meat or some bad oysters. You'd shit yourself inside out and your neighbors would go, "Mmmhmm, didn't follow the Code, did you? THAT'S WHAT YOU GET."

But it's not good in the sense that blindly following religious commands isn't a good thing. I mean, the same section of the text advocating killing people who work on Sunday (or possibly Saturday), gays, kids who backtalk to their parents, and them damn furriners.

[Username17]

Some people have tried to spin the Levitican code as early public health measures. But the truth is that the reasoning behind a lot of the rules is just out and out bullshit. Mixing milk and meat is forbidden just because someone thought it was gross, no actual harm is prevented by eating them separately. Mixing fabric types is forbidden just because neighboring tribes happened to do that, and what are you? Some kind of foreigner? You're forbidden from eating insects that crawl on four legs because whoever wrote down that rule couldn't fucking count.

But the bottom line is that nearly half the people on Earth formally believe that it is more important whether or not you have said the correct magic words at the appropriate times than whether or not you have raped a child to death. Now, very few of them exclusively believe that. Indeed, the vast majority of people will reject the proposition as monstrous when put in those terms. However, cognitive dissonance being what it is, probably most of those people do in fact believe that proposition at some level and can be made to admit that they believe it if asked the correct leading questions.

This makes discussions of moral right and wrong extremely difficult. A plurality, and possibly a majority of humans are basically insane and believe in moral frameworks that they themselves would admit are wicked beyond reason or measure if confronted with them shorn of their tribal trappings of belonging.

-Username17

[nockermensch]

Some stuff from leviticus is obviously health-related advice, as understood by bronze age people through tradition or empirical means, put in a religious frame for easy memetic propagation. Stuff like separating people with skin diseases (and giving them repeated baths), avoiding shellfish and keeping things clean can only be health advice given by people who don't know what germs are. Other stuff, like having to sacrifice unblemished animals every year, look retarded, but could incentivise people to breed better animals: the social prestige associated with being the owner of perfect to sacrifice cows is never directly mentioned but seems impossible to ignore.

Some other stuff like which day is holy, bans against mixing clothes, certain kinds of jewellery and similar stuff, are certainly there just to build tribal identity, which again, was reasonable given the cultural advancement at the times.

The thing is, I don't think the Torah is particularly vile for what it is: A bronze age nation-building text. When saw compared with similarly aged texts, it's not particularly genocidal or insane. The completely fucked up part is the idea that the Bible is transcendent Revealed Truth that should still be relevant today.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The thing is, I don't think the Torah is particularly vile for what it is:

First Commandment.

Also: http://www.bricktestament.com/the_law/

[Maj]

In my studies, it was hypothesized that the laws were designed to set the Hebrews apart from the other civilizations in the area. That way, you could recognize them as God's chosen.

[nockermensch]

The thing is, I don't think the Torah is particularly vile for what it is:

First Commandment.

It still isn't particularly vile for what it is. You can denounce monotheism all you want, but in the practice, it out-competed polytheism from the ideas' marketplace. Probably having to do with being more merciless (no other gods to appeal to if you pissed off the single one) and by winning "my god can beat your god" fanfics almost by default (having only one real god => that god has all the power => that god beats any god that has to divide conceptual space with others).

As a meme, monotheism was simply stronger than the alternative, and this is a point where arguing against the evil course history took under its yoke sounds similar to ISP's teenaged "but states are EVIL, man!" rants.

I think it's enough to attack the insane people that insist to use the Bible for anything but a historical text today. Attack the document itself and you'll suddenly have to argue against anthropologists and historians that will point that Bible dickery was more or less par for the course dickery for that time and place, and that's not a fight we should be having.

TL;DR: Telling us that bronze age cattle herders came with stupid ideas and recorded them in a scroll is like picking on retarded kids.

[Lago PARANOIA]

and this is a point where arguing against the evil course history took under its yoke sounds similar to ISP's teenaged "but states are EVIL, man!" rants.

Now you're just fucking whining. I'm not comparing monotheistic religions against some hypothetical strawman, I'm comparing them to other religions of the time. Both in creed and how they actually behaved. Even allowing for the violence perpetrated by non-monotheistic religions (like the Aztecs and Buddhists) Abrahamic-derived ones were especially shitty.

The ball's back in your court now. Because Abrahamic-derived religions have been definitionally and empirically shown to be shittier than their contemporaries, you need to come up with some heretofore unknown factor as to why they ended up being more vile and hurtful which wouldn't have changed if they had switched to polytheism.


http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=49 ... c&start=50

I'm not a catholic church apologist or anything, nor have I studied the period closely, but: What was the better altenative at the time?

As Koumei said, simply not invading other people and putting all those who refused to convert to the sword would have been better. Hell, there are real examples in history of empires that went in and conquered places and didn't go through and incinerate everyone they thought of as having wrong thoughts. There are examples of that going both ways. Rome conquered Asia (the province in Turkey, not the continent) and pretty much let people do whatever - which worked fine. Rome conquered Carthage and they dug holes which they filled with vicious fogs and then dragged all the civilians to those holes with hooks through their flesh and dumped them in - that wasn't cool at all.

(Yes, that statement was about the RCC, but the sentiment is the same.)

[Chamomile]

Abrahamic religions worse than the people who did actual human sacrifice? I'm gonna need to hear the logic behind that one.

[nockermensch]

and this is a point where arguing against the evil course history took under its yoke sounds similar to ISP's teenaged "but states are EVIL, man!" rants.

Now you're just fucking whining. I'm not comparing monotheistic religions against some hypothetical strawman, I'm comparing them to other religions of the time. Both in creed and how they actually behaved. Even allowing for the violence perpetrated by non-monotheistic religions (like the Aztecs and Buddhists) Abrahamic-derived ones were especially shitty.

The ball's back in your court now. Because Abrahamic-derived religions have been definitionally and empirically shown to be shittier than their contemporaries, you need to come up with some heretofore unknown factor as to why they ended up being more vile and hurtful which wouldn't have changed if they had switched to polytheism.

First, I believe that some ideas are more or less inevitable, from a memetic perspective. From the moment one of our ancestors decided to worship a river or lightning I think it was certain that somebody down the line would come with a great imaginary friend unification theory, and once that theory was out in the open, the religion business would be forever changed. If you're from a tribe that worships the painted rock, and a neighbour tribe now believes that not only the painted rock but every other god but a single god in the skies is false, the way you deal with your beliefs needs to adapt: Or you go with them, or you need a new and improved theory of painted rock to explain why it isn't that feeble compared to the all powerful sky god. And this kind of evolution of thought helped us down the line, including with the arguments to refute the sky-friends at once.

Second, where is this empirical evidence of extra-shitiness being tied to monotheism? Because besides Aztecs being a honest-to-goodness blood cult, you had the Assyrians and their cruelty, the vedic peoples with their Exalted-grade descriptions of carnage (each Mahabharata person of significance has a title meaning "equals to 10,000 men on battle", with the main protagonists having multiples of this), the romans quelling revolts by "executing every single involved person" and then the mongols, which set the atrocity bar so high that only in the XX century we could top them. Admittedly, the mongol religion was a mess, with elements of non-abrahamic monotheism, but with equally large elements of animism, shamanism and ancestor worship. Also: slavery was virtually widespread on old and new world, regardless of how many imaginary friends each civilisation prayed for. So from my position, what I see is that humans do shitty things to other humans, that abrahamic monotheism defeated polytheism by the virtue of being a more vicious meme and thanks to that, a lot, but by no means all the shit inflicted upon us for the last two millennia have been done by the hand of monotheists. This is a kind of shaky argument and again, reeks of teen angst: You (and me, and most of us) were personally bothered by abrahamic monotheists, instead of hindus or buddhists. They may even be the biggest problem today, thanks to their numbers. But from these two facts don't follow that they're "worse".

[name_here]

Abrahamic religions might have caused more total suffering than any given other religion, but only because they won. Actually, as Hinduism has its whole caste system deal and is really old, it might win that one. Saying they are worse than the Aztecs is laughable. The Aztecs were basically cartoon supervillains who literally waged wars of conquest to keep up their supplies of human sacrifices. Also, if you're talking Abrahamic religions as a whole, Muslims did in fact conquer regions and not purge members of other religions.

[Whipstitch]

Abrahamic religions worse than the people who did actual human sacrifice? I'm gonna need to hear the logic behind that one.

Due to a lack of research I don't really have a dog in this fight, but I will say that the difference between a sacrifice and a punishment or a holy war and a pogrom is often a matter of semantics. The Israelites may have had a prohibition against killing their own according to a yearly schedule but many bullshit offenses were punishable by death lest the tribe be subject to divine wrath. That's how you end up with stories of the Israelites warring up friendly tribes and killing every adult and every male child on the grounds that intermarriage and subsequent conversions were making God super pissed.

[OgreBattle]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/s ... tment.html

I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.

[Koumei]

From the comments:

From recent police actions I'm not quite sure who would be against cops having to pay a quarter before they can shoot anyone.

Or, for that matter, arresting a central banker...

It rapidly goes downhill after that, but the article itself is golden.

[Username17]

Aztec human sacrifice is definitely disgusting stuff, but it's not really different from any other kind of war. The Aztecs went to war using less lethal weapons, took their defeated opponents home, and then performed last rites for their victims before killing them. That's really fucked up, because obviously once you've defeated your opponents and taken them as prisoners you don't have to kill them at all. But it's not actually any worse than killing them on the battlefield. And it's certainly less bad than just running amok in a city murdering all the civilians you can catch after you've breached the walls.

Within the Aztec paradigm, taking someone prisoner and then ritually murdering them on sacred ground was more humane than giving someone a lethal wound and letting them die of bleeding and infection. It's an insane viewpoint, but it's less insane and vile than the Christian idea that it was more humane to burn someone to death slowly so they had the maximum chance of asking Jesus for forgiveness before they died.

Wars have historically involved a lot of mass murder. The Aztec method of mass murder during war was really weird, but that doesn't make it worse inherently than any other form of mass murder. They were at least trying to make their war murders be less bad.

-Username17

[tussock]

So, popular demand determines a human right. That's hilariously fucked up. I'll let your imagination extrapolate.

That's roughly how it worked, in history. Human rights are just ideas, and the only thing they have in common is that basically everyone both wants them and can also have them at little real cost.

As you are very kindly taking it into your hands to answer for the crazy people, is it possible for you to explain, then, how a brand of anarchism could protect those rights?

You could randomly select a government who solely existed to protect your rights, by taxing everyone and providing courts and a professional military. The anarchist situation in Somalia produced courts based around local customary law within a few months, which was basically to save them solving every little thing with big guns. The anarchy in immediate post-invasion Iraq had plenty of private businessmen stepping up to provide basic services and keep the power and water on (until the US army arrested them for being baathists or some other stupid shit).

Anarchies aren't completely useless. There's still rich folk with businesses and they do have wants and needs. After all, a lot of what government does now is what those folk want and effectively what they pay for anyway.

If you'd suggest the homeless would have to rely on private charity for food, guess what: up until about the 1930's, that's how the whole world worked.

Let's take an obvious example. A large portion of Americans wants to be on TV, so I guess that's a human right now. But airtime is limited - who gets to be in the Big Brother house?

Random ballot covers it, but I specifically excluded scarce resources as a right.

[name_here]

Wars have historically involved a lot of mass murder. The Aztec method of mass murder during war was really weird, but that doesn't make it worse inherently than any other form of mass murder. They were at least trying to make their war murders be less bad.

-Username17

The thing is, the Aztecs actually went to war for the purpose of mass murder. You could say the same about the Crusades, but that isn't actually true. The primary purpose of the Crusades was sending the local crop of mass murderers way the hell over there so they'd stop killing local civilians and simultaneously patch up relations with Constantinople. Killing as many people as possible in Jerusalem was not actually in the mission statement.

[Username17]

I'm going to raise you the Albigensian Crusade, where the stated and actual goal was to commit mass murder. In that particular case, on the Cathars.

Now the Aztecs were batshit insane, and thought that there was an optimal number of murders to commit and jolly well started wars with their neighbors in order to keep hitting that quota. But I would submit that this is still not actually as bad as starting wars with your neighbors because you sincerely wish to murder all of them.

Now from a practical standpoint, what the Aztecs did worked out to pretty much exactly what the Romans or the Chinese or any other classical Empire did. Which is namely to be in a state of constant low-grade war, sending the army to go brutalize whichever tributary state seems most uppity at any given moment. The Aztecs claimed that this state of affairs was a requirement for the sun to keep rising in the morning, which is crazy, but the end results aren't particularly different from what other empires got up to.

Aztec religion being what it was, it's entirely possible that they would have kept on committing brutal atrocities even if their neighbors hadn't been continually attempting to free themselves from the empire. But for obvious reasons that never happened and we'll never know for sure.

-Username17.

[Occluded Sun]

My right to property is derived from people's recognition that we have an inherent interest in that sort of thing, manifested in legal protection from the government which derives its powers from said people.

I don't see what 'souls' have to do with anything.

[Mistborn]

My right to property is derived from people's recognition that we have an inherent interest in that sort of thing, manifested in legal protection from the government which derives its powers from said people.

I don't see what 'souls' have to do with anything.

The thing is that infected slut princess dosen't belive government should exist and his argument against government is that being governed violates his "rights". Which is obviously insane because "rights" do not exist in the absence of government.