MAGIC SOOUULLLSSSS Libertarian

[DSMatticus]

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.

This thread is basically a reference to/continuation of the thread Frank mentions in the thread's second post. That thread is, itself, a split from another thread about political leaks. There's a whole lot of history here, and I don't fault you for needing brought up to speed.

The summary is that infected slut princess is a hardcore libertarian. Or possibly full-blown anarchist. I can't remember which. He believes that property rights objectively exist or can be deduced from some valid, non-arbitrary framework, and that we (individuals, private institutions, and public institutions) have an obligation to respect those rights.

A bunch of people who are not infected slut princess called him crazy, and told him that rights only exist when they are respected and enforced, and that the right to property exists solely because individuals come together to form public institutions (i.e. governments) with the inclination and ability to guarantee the right to private property.

This is an important distinction, because for ISP the simple matter of taxation is an unethical violation of your property rights. Meanwhile, in the world of people who aren't batshit insane, nobody thinks that the government forcing you to help pay for public utilities and services like police and roads is unethical.

[Maxus]

We also found out that ISP calls roving gangs in Nigeria and Somalia "mini-governments", which proved....illuminating.

[erik]

In rereading this thread I have the sudden urge to play backgammon or some other board game and then throw down a Yu-Gi-Oh trap card for the win. I could have used that when I lost horribly at Carcasonne last weekend.

This will require me to buy some Yu-Gi-Oh cards unfortunately, which may set me down a dark road.

[DSMatticus]

I'm pretty sure throwing down the queen of spades and pretending it's a Yu-Gi-Oh trap card fits just as well with the original message of "what the fuck are you doing?"

[Koumei]

After declaring they activated your trap card, announce "Checkmate, motherfucker." As long as you're not actually playing Chess.

[Mistborn]

After declaring they activated your trap card, announce "Checkmate, motherfucker." As long as you're not actually playing Chess.

[Koumei]

You didn't let me down.

[Occluded Sun]

Hmm... in this context, 'right' usually refers both to interests and the protection of said interests. The protection becomes ambiguous outside of a social covenant, but the interest doesn't.

When discussing what a government may and may not do, the concept of 'rights' is usually used to communicate that the validity of the government's power cannot extend to acting against said interest. Sadly, the US has slowly been regressing to the global mean, adopting stances more in line with the view of the majority of humanity that governments can do pretty much anything and restrained only by custom.

[DSMatticus]

Hmm... in this context, 'right' usually refers both to interests and the protection of said interests. The protection becomes ambiguous outside of a social covenant, but the interest doesn't.

Rights don't stem from interests. A man who owns a factory and has a river running through his land has an interest in using the river to dispose of his waste, but the man whose home is downstream has an interest in not having the river pollute his property. Both of those are interests, but it is literally impossible for society to guarantee both of those as rights. Society has to pick one to implicitly or explicitly enforce, and through that enforcement it becomes a right. Nothing more, nothing less.

People do argue about what rights should be. For example: I'm certain you have an opinion on the above example, and I'm certain you have an explanation for why your opinion is what it is. I am similarly certain that at the core of it, it comes down to an arbitrary value judgment where X is more important to you than Y just because, which is fine, because that is how such things always work.

Sadly, the US has slowly been regressing to the global mean, adopting stances more in line with the view of the majority of humanity that governments can do pretty much anything and restrained only by custom.

I don't think you really know what you're talking about. Here are a few things a majority of Americans support:
[*]Taking an axe to the NSA's domestic surveillance (bipartisan).
[*]Legalizing marijuana (not bipartisan; Republicans opposed, despite their libertarian leanings).
[*]A minimum wage hike (bipartisan, Republicans included despite their libertarian leanings).
[*]Tighter regulations on banking, particularly loans (bipartisan).
[*]Absolutely radical campaign finance reform (bipartisanship depending on how extreme you go).

Ultimately, the American public is in support of a government that gets the fuck out of their lives while protecting them from the massive, predatory oligopolies that control the world's modern economy. It's a pretty strong pro-personal liberty stance, with a call for minimal government interference in the markets and getting wealth out of politics.

The problem is not how Americans feel about these things. The problem is that there is so much money and corruption in politics that Americans barely fucking matter. Republican politicians will never support a minimum wage hike, because they are being paid not to. Then the Koch brothers will go to their countless think tanks and pay them to churn out anti-minimum wage pseudo-studies, and then Fox News will pick up those studies and "report" on them as unassailable truth in an effort to crush the opinions of their own base under a torrent of bullshit.

[Occluded Sun]

Society has to pick one to implicitly or explicitly enforce, and through that enforcement it becomes a right. Nothing more, nothing less.

"We hold these rights to be self-evident:"

Your argument doesn't disprove the statement you're trying to disprove. Not all interests transmute to rights, yet all rights are ultimately derived from interests.

If rights derived from what governments decided upon, then people wouldn't get upset when the government decided not to honor certain interests. But they do.

I don't think you really know what you're talking about. Here are a few things a majority of Americans support:
[*]Taking an axe to the NSA's domestic surveillance (bipartisan).

Speaking of not knowing what you're talking about... ay oy! Do you have any idea for how long the NSA existed before it was officially recognized? Do you really think they would let themselves be subject to public scrutiny if they had the slightest fear they could be shut down?

They don't even care about restrictions on watching US citizens. They'll just ask another country's security apparatus to share.

The US has been curtailing private freedoms and increasing political powers for more than a hundred and fifty years now; it never really stops, but its speed increases every once in a while.

[Kaelik]

Your argument doesn't disprove the statement you're trying to disprove. Not all interests transmute to rights, yet all rights are ultimately derived from interests.

You are an idiot.

Not all real numbers transmute to the constant of gravity, yet all constants of gravity are real numbers.

Therefore it is true to say that the constant of gravity is a real number. It is also completely unilluminating and does not in any way help anyone figure out how fast something will fall.

Saying that all rights derive by some mystical vague process from interests is completely unhelpful and does not actually distinguish rights from anything at all.

[DSMatticus]

Your argument doesn't disprove the statement you're trying to disprove. Not all interests transmute to rights, yet all rights are ultimately derived from interests.

Already covered, but I think it bears repeating: "every car has wheels" and "everything that has wheels is a car" are different statements. They are obviously different statements. They are so radically different statements that this is the part of conversation where anyone in your shoes with the vaguest hint of sense would smack themself in the forehead and declare mea culpa.

The fact that every right has a corresponding interest is completely uninteresting, because a lot of things are interests that don't have a corresponding right. And that means that you need some additional criteria, and it is those criteria that will determine what interests are and are not rights, and talking about how all rights have a corresponding interest tells us absolutely nothing about what is and is not a right.

If rights derived from what governments decided upon, then people wouldn't get upset when the government decided not to honor certain interests.

Do you realize how stupid this is? The rules of professional football are derived from what the NFL says they are. If the NFL declared that field goals were worth a billion points, people would get upset. Not because the rules of football are written into the very fabric of the universe, but because they have completely arbitrary values about what they personally want out of a game of football and that rule change is incompatible with that they want.

The inability to make objectively valid statements about what ought to be does not imply the inability to make statements about what ought to be. People make decisions from arbitrary value judgments all the time. Literally all the time. There's no other way to do it. Logic is descriptive, not prescriptive - it can only tell you what follows, not what to aim for.

The US has been curtailing private freedoms and increasing political powers for more than a hundred and fifty years now; it never really stops, but its speed increases every once in a while.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_ra ... y_1990s.29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_law ... ted_States

It was legal (in parts of the United States) to rape your wife until 1993. It was illegal (in parts of the United States) for a man to have sex with another man until 2003. Married women and homosexuals have freedoms today that they did not have when I was born. Yes, a surge of nationalism in the wake of 9/11 let a deeply corrupt administration push through a powergrab with bipartisan support. That was total bullshit. But it didn't happen in a vacuum, and you don't get to ignore the things you don't care about to make sweeping generalizations.

Beyond that: the current situation in the U.S. is not the conclusion of a 200+ year slide into corruption. It's a trend that starts in the 60's with the rise of neoconservatism, and hits full steam in the 2000's under the second Bush. Massive, institutionalized corruption isn't new to America - we've been in similar states before and smacked them the fuck down. This is just the latest shit tsunami, which we may or may not successfully weather.

[Mistborn]

The US has been curtailing private freedoms and increasing political powers for more than a hundred and fifty years now; it never really stops, but its speed increases every once in a while.

Wow, I know DSM already called you out for this one but still, this is both stupid and really fucking offensive, you should be ashamed of yourself for writing it. 150 years ago there were still fucking slaves. There are words for people who consider the 13th amendment a "curtailing of private freedoms", they are not nice words.

[Username17]

Yeah... 150 years is a particularly inauspicious number to throw around while claiming that civil liberties have been in decline. One hundred and fifty years ago, black people were owned property and women couldn't vote.

If you don't want to come off like a creep and you want to complain about the erosion of freedom, you need to pick a much more recent date. Preferably one after black people and white people gained the right to marry each other in 1967.

Although honestly, considering the number of civil liberties that have been extended to homosexuals in the last six years, the whole "freedom is endlessly being taken away" narrative makes you sound a little dickish even for short time frames.

-Username17

[tussock]

I think what's changed recently is there's the internet now, so rather than seeing the ills of government filtered through "liberal" publications like the NY Times, you can just read upvoted quotes sorted from millions of people bitching about them every single day.

When the CIA took over Egypt to keep down Islam recently, they hardly killed anyone. They've come a long way from the South American death squads of the 80's when they were keeping down Socialism by murdering catholic nuns, with money they made selling heroin into the US. Ukraine's a bloody mess, but much less so that Afghanistan 13 years back, or Afghanistan in the 80's where the abhorrent medievalists attacking the puppet government where just an arm of the CIA acting against the Soviets.

Because Afghanistan in the 50's basically looked like America in the 50's. The women wore a headscarf instead of big hats. And the CIA destroyed that because ... well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

It's like how religious conservatives have been horrible people for ... at least 2600 years with the local book, they just spent most of that time murdering anyone who noticed, quite happy to commit genocide against people who believed slightly different things about their imaginary friends. But now they post stuff on the internet and you can just read it yourself. Even though they're less bad than they were even ten years ago, they're a lot louder with it if you choose to listen.

Crazy Republicans too. There's been divisions and splinter groups and crazy presidents starting bullshit wars for no discernible reason (Manifest Destiny, don't you know) for as long as the US existed.

And the country itself is a consequence of the British colonialist bullshit in the first place. Where Europe got so rich that they figured they should just kill off everyone else in the whole world and replace them with British or Spanish or French or Portuguese or Belgians or Dutch or Germans depending on whose particular state-supported private armies got there first. /history.

[fectin]

When the CIA took over Egypt to keep down Islam recently,

[Kaelik]

Not sure why you picked that one fragment when the entire paragraph is filled with crazy.

[fectin]

Only because that's the bit which caught my eye.

[Username17]

I have to admit that particular piece of crazy stood out a bit for me too.

-Username17

[Maxus]

My mental image of tussock is this guy I had some college classes with back in '08. Dude was a Ron Paul supporter and would stare at your ear while saying Ron Paul wants to shut down the Federal Reserve which steals half of your money every ten years by making inflation happen.

[tussock]

What? It's speculative and evidence-free (and a bit of a troll, oh well), but it fits past patterns of things over the last 60 years that would have also been speculative and evidence-free for a long time and are now just "well, duh, of course".

The US intelligence community has a 50 billion dollar per annum budget, and they don't do healthcare or education 12 billion of that is CIA "operations". They're in the business of making governments that the US doesn't like fall over and be replaced with more cooperative types, often brutally repressive military dictatorships. They've been doing that pretty regularly since they were formed.

So when there's a government that the US is officially in dislike of, and you notice it get replaced by a military dictatorship kinda out of the blue, that can just be the CIA. The thing in Libya had more to do with the French, Egypt is traditionally an MI6 concern, and Syria is just part of the surprisingly ongoing cold war between NATO and various other nations, so it can also just not be the CIA.

But an educated guess is all we have for now, and this troll is also tremendously off-topic.

[erik]

What? It's speculative and evidence-free (and a bit of a troll, oh well)

...

But an educated guess is all we have for now, and this troll is also tremendously off-topic.

Evidence free education.

[hyzmarca]

The CIA isn't particularly good at the whole coup thing. Case in point, Bay of Pigs.

[Mistborn]

The CIA isn't particularly good at the whole coup thing. Case in point, Bay of Pigs.

Yeah the idea that the CIA are the all powerful shadowy puppeteers behind global events is sort of undermined when you remember that these are the people who tried and failed to assassinate Fidel Castro with and exploding cigar.

[Cynic]

The exploding cigar is a gag but trying to kill Castro with acne swimwear has always been my personal favorite.