Agalloch

"Eyal, you've gone full retard" He's not wrong...

Apologies for not responding sooner, and if I go over old ground in responing to such an early post. However, having read through the topic, it doesn't seem to have progressed. Remove Man B from the situation. Would Man A still choose the same starting location and bearing for this walk into dehydration? I doubt very much that Man A would thrust himself into the middle of nowhere with no idea in which direction his salvation lies (sp. lays?, lay?). Would he even consider acting out a comparable situation? Doubtful. I believe the secret to determining responsibility when other people are involved is to remove the other people and see how it modifies someone's behaviour. I also think it's worth considering what you mean by "responsible". I have assumed so far that it is synonymous with moral responsibility, or culpability. Man B clearly acts immorally in the first place, putting all further acts under moral consideration. At the core of morality, there is choice. If there is no choice, there is no moral analysis and heavily involved in defining choice is the oppertunity or faculty to gain knowledge about a situation. I don't believe someone has to have perfect knowledge for something to be a choice, but when the oppertunity to gain the information necessary to make an informed choice is forcefully removed, then choice is removed. In this situation, by placing Man A in the middle of nowhere, Man B has removed Man A's ability to determine the best direction in which to travel. "middle of nowhere" implies no prior knowedge of the area that he has been left in and therefore which direction he walks in isn't really a choice, it's a random occurence as a result of Man B's immoral choices. Also, to simplify. Man B also removed the choice of Man A to not travel in a desperate quest to save his life, his choice to do whatever he had planned for that time. Man A was unlikely to choose being in the middle of nowhere, so further choices seem unlikely to be his. Interestingly though, there are still areas of moral culpability for Man A. I don't think he can find the nearest town, and then engage in a killing spree, without holding some moral culpability fo his own. Of course, Man B would also be morally culpable for inserting this maniac near the town.

Man B is obviously responsible for anything that happens to Man A after he abondons him in a field far from civilisation without clothes, food, water or shelter. Where do you see ambiguity?

I'm blown away, that's such a meaningless comment. Not only is it wrong, but nothing I responded to restricted me to the realm of "economics as studied" in the first place. Specifically we were talking about whether wealth is a zero-sum game. If economics can't answer that, then we aren't discussing what you call economics, so what? We definitely weren't discussing the viability of getting a loan. Yet another level of absurdity and inaccuracy in your statement is that your comments about getting a loan are wrong. If it took money in a bank to get a loan, 1) people wouldn't get loadns and 2) they wouldn't need loans.

It doesn't take much effort to read the very next line in my post... If you want to understand how wealth isn't zero-sum, a better example would be. Agalloch (1 apple, which he doesn't like - 0£, 0 useful objects) - Sal9000 (0 apples, which he loves and is starving - 1£ that he can't eat, 0 useful objects) Agalloch (0 apples, which he didn't like anyway - 1£ which he can use to buy something he does like, 1 useful object) - Sal9000 (1 apple he can now eat - 0£, 1 useful object) Of course, wealth isn't really counted in "objects" either, it's not a numeric value. Plus, there are an infinite other variables related to the valuation of trade that I didn't include. No zero-sum game though.

I earn less than "minimum wage" and am below the "poverty line" - my point here being that I'm considered one of the poorer people in my country. I'll probably live until I'm around 70, surviving not only simple common causes of death from the 19th century but even most forms of cancer that meant much shorter life spans only 30 years ago; and I'll suffer all medical treatment much less than my forefathers who suffered more in basic dental work than I probably ever will in my medical life. I live in a fixed abode that provides me with warmth and shelter all year round, and has indoor amenities that couldn't be hoped for a centutry and a half ago. I can have almost any type of food I desire all year round. I have access to transport which can take me further than most people could go in their lives, without war, only a few centuries ago or in places that currently have totalitarian governments, and it can take me there in a single day and without causing me blisters, dehydration, suffering or to even break a sweat. My children will likely survive infancy, and be able to study in any area of thought they desire. I can learn more in a single day online than most people could from a lifetime of Victorian newspapers, and have access to more books than they could imagine. The list could go on forever. We are, so rich. What is zero from the sum of transactions? You seem to conflate the unnamed variable with wealth, but wealth is not a zero-sum game. Any voluntary trade increases wealth for both parties. If you're refering to the amount of money in the economy then, that is irrelevant. Money isn't a closed system, it is not traded for money, but also for other goods and services. The value on the front of money may not increase, but the wealth value it represents constantly increases due to the positive sum game of voluntary trade.

Steal, or starve to death, or work for the food, or borrow money for the food, or beg for the food, or go to a charity, or eat at a soup kitchen, or have food donated to him, or go to friends for food, or go to family for food, or get a job and then use the money earned to pay for the food, or go somewhere to hunt for, catch or forage for food. Wow, that false dichotomy fell apart fast.

NAP isn't a force, it's a moral conclusion. A monopolistic organisation that enforces the NAP is not immoral... Assuming, as is implied that this monopoly is not aggressive - which it can't be if it enforces the NAP - and is therefore a monopoly because it is Universally supported by all people. This is of course not a Government in case you thought otherwise.

Haha, you maybe missed the joke of that episode? Or are just continuing it? The Stig does tend to be a professional driver though, usually outside of Formula 1 with more experience driving a wider variety of cars in circumstances Formula 1 drivers would actually struggle to handle.

1. Universal - as used in the book UPB - doesn't mean relating to the entire Universe, it means "Including, relating to, or affecting all members of the class or group under consideration" (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/universal). If that entire class is human beings, it is refering to the fact that you can't arbitarily provide different moral rules for one set of humans and a different set to another set of humans. However, the book UPB doesn't actually limit itself to human beings, but to all moral actors; which is the entire Universe in terms of morality. 2. The problem here is your misunderstanding with the word Universal. You can't determine moral rules about an arbitarily defined subset of humanity for the same reason UPB doesn't arbitarily select human beings for analysis, but restricts itself to the entire superset of all moral actors. Any other sentient beings that were to evolve or contact humans would be equally bound. 3. Neither. The first would be Universally Prefered Behaviour, a description of what people prefer, UPB is a methedology for analysis rules that would be Universally Preferable - that is, whether a rule can be prefered by all involved moral actors simultaneously, or whether the rule violates internal consistency by not being preferable to all actors at once. I.e. the rule "Rape is UPB" is invalid because the victim cannot find the action preferable. The second option you provide is obviously incorrect, I don't believe UPB once refered to any external conscience. The word Perferable refers to internal consistency, not to opinion. 4. You don't seem to actually respond to Stef's argument here. The reason arguing about Universal Preferable Behaviour is an acceptance of it, is that you accept that the Universally Preferable way to express your opinion about UPB and to try and change peoples minds regarding it is to discuss it with us, and in Language we could understand at that. You didn't come at us with a Knife demanding we stop believing UPB because you understand that will not change our opinion, and you are not talking gibberish because we could not understand you. 5. I think what you are getting here is the disapointment some people feel for the disconnect between Age of Heroes and the Reality of morality. The State and Religion have often used positive moral obligations to control people and influence their behaviour, making them believe that certain positive actions - like ratting out your neighbours in Nazi Germany - are moral. In reality, morality is much more dull, morality tends to be a lack of action, a lack of evil, not doing bad. Being the most moral you can be consists purely of inaction unfortunately, and there is no moral reward or Universal rule that you've fulfilled for what you do above and beyond that; though it may have much aesthetic preference and your peers may reward you.

Do Americans seriously believe they don't live in an oppressive regime? The Government *does* control what you can wear and you *don't* have freedom of speech... If anything the people rising up in the Arab Spring have more self respect, but not necessarily worse government. It's so easy to be comfortable believing they have such obviously evil government, where even elections aren't free, but struggle to believe the pretty obvious fact that American elections are openly rigged... And the premise of the post seems so passive aggressive. As if the State is some theoretical evil that doesn't effect us in our day to day lifes, so does anyone have any *actual* evidence, of some *real* prevention of liberties in your *personal* life. Everything? Prevented from having a childhood, prevented from getting an education, prevented from going back to school, prevented from entering any of numerous professions I might want to, prevented from keeping my pay, prevented from buying what I want, prevented from doing what I want, prevented from living as I want.

Depends on the motherboard. Probably not in the way you want, however, yes it is theoretically and practically possible. The chips must have a compatible pin configuration and connection - the combination of which is commonly known as a socket. LGA 775 is probably the most famous and common socket, and I believe Intel intended for it to be a Universal socket when it was introducted, so it supports a suprisingly wide variety of Intel processors. Usually, you can't replace the processor with wildely different varieties, but some manufacturers (Cyrix comes to mind) have manufactured Intel socket compatible processors that are a direct swap fit.

I can't think of a pollutant easier to deal with than CO2 emissions... Aside from the obvious free market reactions to any pollutant (ostracisation of polluters, bankruptcy of polluting organisations, price increases on products that lead to pollutants), no pollutants reduction is more directly linked to our attempts to save money. Not wasting money on electricity and gas not only saves you money but directly reduces your carbon footprint. It's near impossible without the State to actually increase your costs while reducing CO2 output. And with the eventually inevitable price increases in fossil fuels, completely removing yourself from dependance on them because cheaper and cheaper.

What do you do when you get payed in money but your body doesn't accept that as a form of food? Who knows! We can't better know what currency will look like without violence than we can know what the packaging on different forms of long grain basmati rice will look like.

If a child can't conceive that they have done wrong - i.e. have it explained to them/be reasoned with - then how can that child conceive that they've done wrong as a result of being harmed? Or even have done wrong, where intent is important in most crimes (you can't steal if you genuinely believe something is unowned, you can't murder if you had no idea your television remote control had been maliciously connected to an electric chair). Nobody can learn better by being harmed, either you are capable of comprehending something, or you aren't. There's no evidence linking violence and improved cognition - infact, quite the opposite! Also, I notice a performative contradiction. You're suggesting teaching children not to perform certain acts because those acts are bad. Hitting is bad. Therefore, how can you teach someone not to commit bad acts by performing one? Yelling at someone - especially in an involuntary relationship - is abusive. It's a shame that we do still say things like "at a child", despite there being no philosophical basis for considering them a unique category.

No. 1. That would violate his principles. This is a no brainer, voting for Ron Paul is a validation of the State, and is an action hee has explicitly stated he is opposition to. 2. And this is so important, so obvious and has been repeated so often it's no funny. There is no link between Ron Pauls election and Libertarianism being achieved through the State. The first hurdle is the difference between his stated goals and actions. Maybe nothing as obvious as Obama saying he would shut down Guantanamo and then not doing, but suddenly there are practical hurdles, or Political obsticles etc. Then there's the fact that the President has no power over the State. We're talking about a monopoly on violence that has no reason to do as anybody says. The mechanism of the State is designed to and will successfully prevent and rollback of any statist institution. Every single major institution that is closed will result in massive Strikes, violence and resistance. 3. Because of 2, Libertarianism would be demonised further and be unpalatable to the majority of people for another 100 or so years, setting back Libertarianism further. See Margaret Thatcher effect upon "capitalism" and "free market" in the UK. Also, a couple of technicalities. 0. It's not really a point for the position, but it's always worth pointing out that a hypothetical is meaningless if it could never happen. 1. Stef is Canadian, he can't vote in U.S. elections. 2. Voting doesn't decide who is President of America, the electoral college is in place with the explicit intention of making sure the electorate don't make a "mistake", for example voting for Ron Paul, and would not elect him. This is a case of people within the system being blind to it's reality. Nobody in the west believes Middle Eastern (e.g. Iran/Afghanistan) elections are genuine, and the idea that America elections have any link between voting and who is elected is a joke outside America. 3. You don't know the current results of an election before you vote.

Is it just me that thinks everyone is completely missing the point? If people are ok with it, great, good for them, call it voluntary if you like - similar to how Religion is voluntary given that the organisation that does the taxing educates the children but that's beside the point. I am not ok with it, when I am taxed, I am being stolen from, if you want to be taxed, then send cheques voluntarily to the State Revenue Collection organisation of whatever Government you like. As metaphors seem obligatory in this topic - Boxing might be a sport, but it's immoral to throw someone who doesn't want to be in a boxing match into the ring and beat them. Boxers might be ok with it, and like taxation that might be the result of trauma, but I'm the one being stolen from, not the people who are ok with it.

Plus the NSPCC, like Oxfam, is heavily funded by the Government, it's not a charity in the first place.

You've clearly changed the terms of your argument and definitions half way through this post. Stealing implies immorality, taking without permission. Stealing is a word used to define the act *after* it's circumstances have been determined to classify it as immoral. If circumstances meant that you had permission to take the bread, then it's not stealing. "Taking a piece of bread" has no moral context true, I took some bread this very morning, from my own cupboard, and because I own the bread, it isn't stealing. The original poster was specifically refering to situations in which the starving man has no right to, and is therefore stealing, the bread. We wouldn't say that someone performing an emergency tracheotomy is attempting murder, but that the circumstances make it ok, we just don't accuse them of attempted murder. By changing this definition you are also confusing your argument for "exigent circumstances". You give examples that make it sound like the circumstances that determine morality are what you are refering to, and then try to use that to determine that the circumstances of the person who commits an act that is definitely stealing (the subject of this post) might not be immoral.

Of all the industries I would choose, Software is the last one I would choose as an example of "regulations that stifle compeition". It's one of the few skilled professions I know of in America that doesn't require licensing, where released products don't have to meet a minimum set of requirements and where companies that enter into the market don't have to be granted permission to begin or continue working - which is why the overwhelming number of Statists in Software blows my mind. Yes, Microsoft made alot of Government sales, especially in the late eighties and early nineties, when they were already huge, and when their market was already large. Of course, the Government could just have easily bought tonnes of SCO UNIX, DR-DOS, CP/M or picked up Linux.Kernel 0.0.1 and an early GNU build; but that's pretty much the history of the world. Literally no industry can run without Government or unaffected by it, and it seems so childish, so meaningless to even mention this one in particular. Linux's development would probably be completely different if not for the Government, so what. Note, it wasn't until the late nineties, when people (Novell?) started using the power of the State to try and crush the relatively free market Microsoft that it discovered the power of the State and started trying to use it itself. However, that's inevitable, people will always try and wield the State to protect themselves from others doing the same to them. AFAIK Margerine has the same history, but people are so childish about this Microsoft thing. No part of the economy is how it would be without the State. I might have more money, I might have much less, I might not exist. No single entity has benefited or fallen because of the Government, we are overall worse off.

Very interesting if that's true about Rothbard's view on this. I wonder if Libertarians and Anarchists take that view seriously or kind of just ignore it. As you say, this issue would have huge implications with the US and Native Americans for example, with many well-documented examples of broken treaties and so on that could probably be shown. I think, at least for philosophical consistency, this issue can't be totally ignored. I believe Walter block has written about it, I don't think other libertarians have taken it seriously, but they probably just haven't heard the argument, Rothbard has written so much that its hard to read everything he has written. I myself am prepaird to pay restitution to a Native American if they demonstrate proof that my house was stolen from their ancestors. its possible though that a lot of Native Americans could be persuaded to not press charges Or just don't take it seriously becaue it's an invalid argument that makes a number of incorrect assumptions. The most pressing is the assumption that being someone's descendant gives you any right over their property. That's a workable solution to a single generation inheritance where no record of the actual wishes of the deceased is left. Even that isn't Universal though, with legal disputes between children and the spouse of parents being common. I don't see any reason why people I haven't met who happen to be the offspring of my great grand children, suddenly have a right to my property. There's also the problem of justification of the original property. Does a descendant of a Monarch of England have a claim to the whole of England? No? What about the descendant of a Lord that was given land by the Monarch, made lots of money off the land, gave up the land and title, passed his money down three generations, to someone who bought a large home with it, and then a few generations later they had that home taken by the State? Is that land the descendants? Then there's the problem with "proof". If the actual current owner of some amount of property is the descendant of some "rightful" owner but can't prove it, does a descendant with a better genealogy have a stronger claim to the land? Also, to add to the absurdity, nearly every single person on this board, and that this board knows, or has ever met, is descended from Charlemagne and his contemparies. That gives us only about 1200 years of arbitary justification of our property claims, from a time when nearly all claims are completely unjustificalbe because of Feudalism and the fact we're all one big happy family.

In the Next Generation, Picard said they have no money or materialistic conflict. The only goal is self-improvement. If you can replicate anything for free, maybe that would work. "No money" doesn't necessarily mean not "run on taxpayer dollars". The Federation is a Government monopoly. You can't replicate "anything" for free, in order to become a Starfleet captain (for example), you have to be selected by that monopolistic organisation. All the people not part of whatever elitist system provides the path to exploration and quality of life off planet is likely forced into work providing Labour to support the illusionary structure of people living only for "self-improvement". They simply replaced the illusion that you are earning your own money that is then taxed with directly Labouring for the state (obviously the only employer) Without monetary incentives, price signals or basic human rights to property, life is likely hell for the majority on Earth, so that the Picards of their world can spend their Labour "exploring".

Man who wanted to be President of United States turns out to be Statist... Not even comical enough to be worthy of the Onion, definetly not suprising.

Man, so sorry to hear that. On the one hand that you were brought up by a violent religious fanatic, but also that she's been so sedated by drugs. Which surely wouldn't help if you ever wanted to talk things over with her. Apart from if your mother was correctly labeled schizophrenic, I want to direct you to my thread discussing physical properties of mental illness: Biology and mental disorders? It seems there are behavioral and physical symptoms that co-occur in schizophrenia and which are not solely the effect of drugs. Even though drugs are able to dampen delusional thought and hallucinations, they are not at all a cure. They actually do hasten the decline in brain matter that was already present. What's far more promising is saving the schizophrenic's mental functions by targeted mental and social exercise ('use it or lose it'). Talk therapy might be helpful in disentangling childhood trauma that led to the disorder and managing the psychotic symptoms. I highly encourage everyone to actually look up above sources, look at further evidence of either side and make up your own mind. Psychiatry does a lot of harm to people, but that doesn't imply that mental disorders and their characteristics aren't real. Sure there are probably non drug-related physical brain differences between those with certain mental illnesses and "normal" people, but that's no different in principle to a bruise, scar, cut etc on a physically abused person. The approach taken now in psychiatry if applied to the body would be to label a beaten child with a black eye "black eye syndrome" based on an innate genetic predisposition to swelling of the eye area and to indefinitely prescribe anti-inflammatory drugs with horrible and permanently damaging side-effects. If these so called physical proofs of mental illness exist, then essentially we have objective physical evidence in the brains of mentally ill children that they've been been abused and traumatized, just the same as if there were bruising or cuts on the body - but do we send the parents to jail? Nope, just chemically lobotomize the abuse victims instead. I would make a relatively confident bet (of course I might be 100% wrong) that extreme trauma survivors such as civilians in war, soldiers, people from gang cultures/neighborhoods have different brains as well. That's nothing to do with some innate disease though, it's simply evidence of the brain having been damaged by terrible experiences, and I think it's the same with extreme mental disorders like schizophrenia. I really don't see any grey area in which modern psychiatry is sort of ok sometimes even if mainly bad - except maybe in the most extreme cases where drugs are absolutely needed to prevent somebody hurting themselves or others (which is a very small percentage of the millions put on drugs today) I really appreciated your 2 cents here, I find responses to the conflation of Physical Damage and Illness hard to express and your analogies were very helpful to my thinking. The same goes for the prior posts and Stefs excellent Video/Sources!