TheRobin
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Posts
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Days Won
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Posts posted by TheRobin
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Please actually read up on the topic and science behind it before you embrace such a ridculously incorrect and damaging position, let alone "give advice".
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Link? No frame of reference is provided.
there you go http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2013/08/enhanced-punishment-can-technology-make-life-sentences-longer/
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meh, I didn't even et past 6 minutes...
some things are just factually incorrect or logically invalid. The rest is then just arbitrary "I'm afraid of x happening, therefore we mut use force to stop it... "rabble rabble rabble)
again, meh...
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Look, I've given y'all plenty of time to do this, so I'm just gonna do it myself: KHAAANNN!!! There, it had to be done- truly it did.
+2 nerd points.
Ha, the beauty if insider jokes is, that you look like a crazy madman to everyone who doesn't know the reference...you crazy madman
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The premise kind of assumes that happiness is not or can't be found by connecting with other people or seeing/making them happy. Is there a reason for that? Cause I don't see how that need to be the case. I'd argue for the opposite rather, that happiness requires at least to a certain degree some other people to share it with.
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For those who hanve't watched it (or knew of it), enjoy
https://www.ted.com/talks/edward_snowden_here_s_how_we_take_back_the_internet
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Hearthstone is out now and is a fun, free to play, 2 player, digital collectible card game.
Imo it sucks though -_- plus it only allows for comeptitive 2 player modes, which is probably not that enjoyable to play witha friend as cooporative.
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Well, if you want to educate yourself about the anarcho-capitalist position you're in the right place (free e-books and podcasts ftw), but in regards to your post, I can only say, most of what you consider anarcho-capitalism in your post is something else entirely.
(plus the semi-usual arguments from apocalypse that follow the strawman)
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Yes, I've gathered that the people here have heard just about everything there is to say on this issue. I have a problem with the DRO thing which is "What do the evil people do for a living?" ;o)
I know that sounds silly, but is it the position of rational anarchists that the establishment of rational anarchy will drive evil out of civilization?
Anarchy is first and foremost the recognition that everyone has to follow the same rules, as such, if you can't initiate force againt other peaceful people, a politician or policeman can't either. So Anarchy most of all wouldn't give evil people armies and most of the guns in the world (as is currently the case with statism) and hope those evil people will now protect them from other evil people.
As to how exactly the solution is to people commiting evil in an anarchist society. There are some ideas of how people could to that (like economic ostracism (for details, see Stef's "Practical Anarchy" for instance), I'm sure there are more (I haven't read much about that topic from other writers tbh), but the point is no one can enforce their view of how they think evil people should be dealt with onto others, so in a way it's kind of irrelevant what my or other anarchists opinion is on how this could be solved anyway.Anarchists don't accept that other people can force them to plan how they should live their life and solve problems, so there's no central plan for how each sociaety will deal with each arising problem. I would assume various entrepreneurs will come up with various ideas and those that can make a convincing enough case will get enough investors to try it out and after a while we see what is most efficient, not only in dealing with people after they commit the crime, but mostly in preventing people from becoming criminals in the first place.
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your quote from Locke rebuts your island example though. But if you say the guy appropriatly claimed 99% then I still don't know what that would look like (or what the island would look like). But assuming he worked for few months to make the island into something more suitable or plowed fields or built some fences to keep animals from eating the fruit on certain trees or whatnot while the other guy did nothing and just sat there, then surely he can't come after the work is done and complain or say he has a just claim on the other persons labour.
That still would not give him landownership of 99% of the land, but certainly ownership of whatever he did with the particular soil/trees etc.
As to your question, I'd accept Lockes argument that adding your own labour to something unowned makes it yours (as a general rule, ofc this gets more complicated with certain things that tend to fall back into entropy after arraning them etc. but the basic pricniple stands imo that if you put your own time and energy into something (unowned) it is, by extension, yours)
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Your island example only shows, that arbitrary claims of land are illegitimate imo, and that the person claiming the land would be initiating force for no moral reason (i.e. the problem would still be coercion in the way previously defined and not some "structural" thing (whatever that would mean anyway)).
Also, I'm not sure if that's really what libertarians would accept or if you're just strawmanning here (not saying intentionaly), cause I never heard any libertarian say that "people can just claim land and then have ownership just by claiming it".
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greek, I remember this converstion from the chat, so, to give my perspective again real quick. Liberty and coercion are two different things. You can have little liberty when stranded on an island and you need to get food and water and shelter, but that doesn't mean the island is using coercion against you.
Liberty has degrees, more choices and opportunities means more liberty. Coercion means someone is actively using force to prevent you from certain choices and opportunities.
Absence of coercion doesn't garantuee a large amount of liberty, but presence of coercion garantuees less liberty that one could have. So the first thing one has to look out for when persuing liberty is whether or not there's a coercive element and deal with that first. Especially since coercion will continue to limit liberty (choice and opportunity) more and more if it remains unchecked.
But either way calling a structure or circumstance "coercion" isn't accurate either way, else out bodies are constanty using coercion against us, by demanding food and water.
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Other than that, how are the food producers gonna defend themselves against the hungry masses? I mean, if people are starving you can't really expect an adherence to ethics, so that would imo be another practical point where the idea became impractical for the food producers.
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well, there's been enough put out by Stef (both in book and podcast form) about Anarchy and it's reasonings and the most common fallacies people make when thinking/criticizing it. I think if you're really curious about the position that most people here hold (and/or want some actual productive debates/feedback on your ideas) you might want to take the time and familiarize yourself at least a little with the positions held here, as what you write about anarchy and how you justify governments is really nothing new and has beend dealt with and explained numerous times.
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maybe this helps
(Murray Rothbard on Cartels (5:16min long) -
as nobody already mentioned: None of the voters have the right to rule over another, so no representative of the voters can have or gain that right by bein voted to represent them.The rest is just hypotheticals, which can never really be solved or contested anyway (i.e. no one can really say what "would happen if..." so everyon will just fill that blank with whatever they feel is right or whatever they want to come true, without any possibility of falsification)
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Just wanted to say thanks. Really great, works even better than the ignore option we had in the old chat. Very useful at times So thanks again
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Ah okay, thanks for claryfing that for me
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I thought I had. Birds don't only turn down food that's in front of them, they turn down food that is already inside of them for the benefit of their offspring. Caring for offspring is another choice, and one that comes with personal sacrifice.
That last one just occurred to me and I find it fascinating as it challenges my previous grasp of reasoning which included the ability to conceptualize beyond one's self and survival.
I don't think you've established that what they are choosing is unknown.
Well, unless you want to argue that knowledge either doesn't require reasoning capacities or that reasoning isn't limited to our frontal cortex,I thought I did demonstrate how it is unknown.
But to use your example, are you saying to motherbird could have kids and then choose to not feed them (efven thoguh there was enough food)? If so, has this been recorded somewhere?
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How can you chose when you don't know what it is that you're choosing?Like, if you lack knowledge of an idea, how is that not the same as the idea not existing for you?I don't deny that animals have preferences btw, I just don't think they can chose to act a certain way, but merely go with whatever feels right to them in the moment.
In the example of food, I don't think there's an animal that, when hungry, could choose to not eat the food right in front of him, to safe it for later or something like that, though a human could.
Maybe it would be easier if you could give me an example of a choice an animal could make.
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"Don't want to disagree with you on your timeline. The WHO promotes circumcision as a means of reducing the rate of HIV infection in men. Three randomised trials in Africa were stopped on ethical grounds, because the infection rate in the uncircumcised group was so much higher than in the circumcised group. Injections and dental treatment also cause distress to children, but few would argue delaying until adulthood. Maybe there is a discussion to be had on parental choice and cultural practice, but the science clearly disagrees [with opposing circumcision on the grounds it prevents HIV and Aids]. HIV and AIDS is a serious blight in much of the world. I think we should all be careful that we are disseminating accurate data. One of my best friends is statistical epidemiologist specialising in the subject, and I have a background in international development, so it's a subject I follow."
My first thought was along the lines of "If men want their foreskin cut off, they're obviously free to do so if they believe they gain a benefit from it, but that doesn't mean you can cut of part of another mans penis, just cause you think it's better for them".
I mean, assuming it is true, then there's still no need to do that to a defensless child, as it is not something that loses it's potency later (unlike say correctional dentist work that is a lot easier before full development of the mouth/skull), so that's certainly no valid principle by which one person can make the decision to cut off a part of another person.
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That they cannot reason limits the motivations behind their decisions, but doesn't eliminate or challenge the idea that animals have free will.
Assuming there's such a thing as free will, would you arrive at the same conclusion I have? If not, why not?
I'd argue to opposite. Decisions require choice, which requires knowledge of multiple options and the ability to compare the options relative to a desired outcome. As far as I understand it, this happnes in our Frontal Cortex (or is at least linked to it). Without that, everything happens as a direct result of an emotion rising and a desire forming, but without any decision to act on it or not (as that would require comparing doing it to not doing it and weighing the advantage of each).So I don't see how free will could happen in an animal. Or what do you think?
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no. because since his anxiety is the result of those variables, then once the variables change, so does his reaction (to something other than the anxiety he had previously)i think the most important perspective to view this topic from is from the perspective of solutions. what solutions does the avenue of free will offer? free will says a person is 100% responsible for their actions, because they have this incorruptible orb in them that is always representative of their 'true' choice, so any choice anybody makes can only be traced back to that person -- not their environment, not their abusive home, not their lack of food and water, not the fact that they've just lost a loved one. none of that can be accounted for with free will, because the buck stops at the person. this is why free will can not lead to solutions, because it does not account for everything that is causing the problem. imagine if there is a child in a violent home, a person with a deterministic perspective can say to this child: "your home is a violent and dangerous place, not only will you physically suffer, but over time you will also be degraded mentally. you should remove yourself from that environment, because it will cause your self-integrity to be compromised over time." this quote recognises that environmental factors (the violent home) will have negative influences upon a person and will impair their "free choice" (so to speak), and so the solution that can be proposed is to remove oneself from that violent home to avoid such consequences.the free will perspective however cannot propose such a solution, because free will implies that a person's mental state is uncompromisable (and thus always responsible), so warning a person that their violent home will cause them to be mentally compromised doesn't make any sense, because it's essentially acknowledging that their "free will" is corruptible, and thus won't necessarily be "free" at all.
two points: Determinism doesn't have any solutions, cause you can't DO anything. It either happens or not. Things will get better or they won't. But there's no solution, cause there's no one who could make it happen.The other point is: Free will doesn't mean unlimited free choice for everything all the time. I can't chose to go and do 500 push ups right now, but I could chose to start working ut and do maybe 8 push ups and do the training necessary to build up muscle mass.Or a better example is, a drunk driver doesn't chose to hit the tree, but he chose to get so drunk he can't no longer chose to drive safely. (So he's still responsible for this choice).Or the guy whop hits his wife in a rage. Sure he might not've been able to chose to not hit her in that exact moment, but there's a lot of choices preceding that incident (like not getting help with his anger issues, making excuses, getting drunk instead, blaming others for his actions and such).Or a person coming from an abusive household can't just choose to be a loving and empathetic person (as these muscles/brain regions haven't had a big chance of developing) but he can still chose to acknowledge that lack of capability and do the steps necessary to develop these muscles.So in regards to solutions, free will sure acknowledges the environment to a certain degree. If there's no gym (or knowledge of how to built up muscles) then people don't really have the choice in that regard. In the same sense, if there was no psychotherapy or self-knowledge methods that could help people change their behaviour then there wouldn't be a choice there either. And if there weren't abusive homes that people grow up in then there would be no need for anyone to have to make the choice to spend a lot of time and energy to fix that once you're no longer dependant and surrounded by those people.
I feel this is one of the more common strawmen against the free will position, that it's somehow means you can choose everything all the time or that the only thing that matters is your "willpower" regardless of the environement you live in, which it isn't (at least as I understand it)
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
in Reviews & Recommendations
Posted
I was quite underwhelmed when I read this book, aside from a bit of anarchist ideas going around and some questioning of the current government situation there was not that much in it.
Except for Mike ofc
My theory would be that this along with Stranger in a Strange Land were bestsellers more because of the culturally unocrrupted childlike (yet semi-omnipotent and practically invincible) charcters, who incidentally both are named "Mike". But yeah, just a vague theory ofc.