Donnadogsoth

One more try: You are activating for anarcho-capitalism. Never mind how you arrange your personal life, if your presence on this board is any indication, you participate in the project to spread anarcho-capitalism worldwide, to "break the spell" as we have agreed in another thread. But you wreathe yourself in language that seems to deny that you are doing this, that says you are simply existing. You are not simply existing, you are activating for ancap, trying to persuade me, him, and the others here that you are right. I'm asking why are you doing this. Why waste your time trying to spread ancap (4300 posts) when you could be, I don't know, playing mini-putt or singing in a band or writing poetry or something? Why are you on this board?

Would you agree essentially with the principle of agape, that you should do these things out of love of man? Or do you have another motive?

What you're describing is a spell, dsayers. How will you break that spell?

Indeed, achieving a capitalist anarchy without Christianity is about as likely as surgically reattaching a severed hand without a surgeon.

If "anarchy and capitalism are the naturally occurring default" why are you spending your valuable time talking about them? They'll just slide into place on their own, regardless of what anyone says. It's the inexorable destiny of history! Right?

My premise is that anarcho-capitalism will be impossible to popularise unless additional principles are added to it. This first demands the recognition that God has loaned man his soul and body, from which capital man owns his fruits, good or ill. Once God is recognised, natural law is recognised, which leads into the wealth of principles, including specifically, at probably least, (1) the principle of ligaments or agapic love, and (2) the principle of creative mentation or man's mind made in the image of God. Together, man with imago viva Dei, and man subject to agape, we have Christ crucified as the essential motivating idea behind Christianity. Anarcho-capitalism by itself is not inevitable, it is just a dyad of interesting principles that require other principles in order to bring about its condition into the world. Can a farmer dig a well with only a cow and an axe? Thus, anarcho-capitalism is, as I have said, a project, as much as would be raising a dam or curing a disease. You can't do it alone, through your sheer ideological zeal and logical intensity.

And if a group of people believe certain physically relevant things about leprechauns, the idea of leprechauns can have real physical effects on the world. So with the State. It's misleading to say the state isn't real. Of course it's real, it's a collection of brain patterns in people. Brain patterns are real aren't they? So are groups of brain patterns.

I agree. Is a marriage real? Is romantic love real? (The rarity of unicorns notwithstanding.) These things certainly effect the physical world, and have a physical neurological location.

The State is like a friendship. A friendship has a real, physical existence--we can literally point to it in the form of the relevant neural pathways and networks in the brains of any two people who claim to be friends with each other. So, too, the State is made up of "wetware" in the brains of the people who serve as its agents. Just as friendship's power is real, so is the State's.

Anarcho-capitalists are ruled by the non-aggression principle, aren't they? That which governs or guides your behaviour rules you.

Ruled by God, yes, in the form of natural law. The highest law is to love God and love one's neighbour. Everything else is derivable from that, using reason. His commandments are not taken at face value as such (e.g., the Ten Commandments, the Mosaic Law, etc.) but are subject to reason using the principles I just mentioned. Paying a portion of one's income to the Church is not mandatory.

Christians are ruled ultimately by natural law, not by Cæsar. If you're not going to read what I wrote, why respond to any of it? And why expect I'll respond to your responses?

I believe an alliance with Christianity is necessary to achieve a capitalist anarchy, and shall show here why. In short, it comes down to the existence of natural law, the human ability to discover natural law, and the human inclination towards applying that law in a beneficial manner. Right now anarcho-capitalists tend to view Christianity as an obstacle if not an enemy. This is wrong-minded. Christianity--the religion of 2.2 billion people, most of whom live in the West and participate in Western culture—contains the principles and the people needed for anarcho-capitalism's success both in the West and globally. Christianity believes three things which, if true, are maximally relevant to the anarcho-capitalist project. First, it believes in a God who has created a rational world ruled by natural law. Without this, there is no knowledge to be had, just chaotic, phenomenal bases for bets on statistical probabilities. Second, it believes man is made in the mental image of this God and therefore capable of knowing and exploiting natural law for his benefit. Without this, knowledge may exist, but man can never find it, and so again is reduced to being a gambler focussed on the mean things rather than the constellations above. Third, it believes that love is the fundamental emotion of man, putting within him a conscience which is a desire to live according to the natural law. Without this, man's depravities have no check. Nothing is true, man must merely live according to Pufendorf (1632-94): “In common with all living things which have a sense of themselves, man holds nothing more dear than himself, he studies in every way to preserve himself, he strives to acquire what seems good to him and to repel what seems bad to him. This passion is usually so strong that all other passions give way before it. And if anyone attempts to attack a man’s safety, he canot fail to repel him, and to repel him so vigorously that hatred and desire for revenge usually last long after he has beaten off the attack.” If anarcho-capitalism is to be achieved, it cannot merely rely on man's self-interest as a “brutish, nasty, and short” Hobbesian animal, holding up with sheer moral fevour the nonaggression principle like a magic sword that will bring to heel all foes and gather together all men into a new culture of principle. This is naïve. Such a culture to function would have to include a principle of ligamentation or loving alliance between humans, and between human families, neighbourhoods, and organisations and societies of all types. Such things do not easily grow in a climate of selfishness, even enlightened selfishness. At the end of the day there is no reason to sacrifice one's life for others if the nonaggression principle is the final word on morality. Christian love shines past this. It takes the human freedom offered and demanded by the nonaggression principle and lifts it up into the realms of the glowing nebulæ of the highest expressions of the human spirit. And this spirit is inseparable from the desire to discover, create, and build to last that defines human intellectual mentation in contradistinction with the mere at best logical-rational or more typically sensory-instinctual apparatuses of the subhuman beasts. Children don't merely want the “book of the law” in the form of the nonaggression principle, they want to create, hypothesise, and understand, they want a world of natural law, not a world of chaos and probabilities. They want a world that they can understand the laws of. And they want a world in which man is, if not always good, then fundamentally worthwhile. Christians already have these things embedded, often sleeping, within their individual and collective souls. They have the ligamental principle, they have creative mentation, and they have the nonaggression principle itself buried in kernel within the Golden Rule of Matthew 7:12 (NIV) “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” Without this, I fear the nonaggression principle is simply too spare a nail to hang anything worthwhile on. It sidesteps natural law and leaves the treasures of Western culture to gather dust. A warrior needs more than a sword, no matter how gleaming it may be. Cf. ‘Man Measures His Intellect Through the Power of His Works’ The perfectly sovereign nation-state and the human individual are one

Very good, beard. I agree.

Our understanding of natural law, as exampled by principles which we discover through experimentation, allows us to increase the power of our labour over nature. We have the power to reorder the Universe using our minds, with no principled upper limit to our power except the limitation I described above in terms of the inscribed circle, which is our temporal limit on how quickly and easily we can acquire such power. That limit aside, we literally have the power of a God or of Gods at our potential disposal, subject to our operating according to natural law. Still with me? The next thing to consider is how these principles are discovered, were they just tripped over or what, and the answer is they are the result of not just thought but emotion, particularly the emotion of agape or love of man, the motivator to spend one's life searching for scientific truths—for the benefit of mankind. With that mind, take the case of Christ, the archetype of the love of man. Without Christ, no popular conception of natural law, and without that, no Renaissance, no scientific revolution, no Enlightenment, and no anarcho-capitalist movement. Ask yourself if Stefan would be conceivable without love of man, that his crusade against evil would mean anything and would even begin if his only concern were to not pay taxes. So we have the God-like human potential for intellect and power, and we have the human capacity for love, both of which are unlimited in principle, both combined in one sovereign mind. That's where we ask where these things come from, where does intellect and love come from? If we take a materialist viewpoint, very fashionable these days, you'll hang with all the best people, we have to assume that mind is nothing more than an “epiphenomenon” like a layer of brightly coloured gasoline on a water puddle, moving incidentally with the winds and ripples, utterly unfree. Could there be a more ironic or less harmonious conception to go with the freedom vaunted by the anarcho-capitalist movement? No, if political freedom is to mean anything, man must also be ontologically free. And so our freedom cannot be the function of the mixing of molecules, but must be in terms of a non-material strata. Intellect, power, love, freedom, all being part of the respective sovereign, non-material minds of men, yet forming through its action as part of the human species what V.I. Vernadsky termed the noösphere--the domain of cognitive action which has been, throughout human history, superseding and reordering the biosphere in accordance with human survival and happiness—all this exists in a non-material domain. Now apply this to the understanding that contingency cannot explain why there is something rather than nothing. Turtle upon turtle, all the way down does not explain why there is a Universe. At the end of the line the buck, or the turtle, has to stop at an æternal substance, something that by its nature exists forever, but which has the capacity to generate the Universe. This generation must include generating the mind of man, the noösphere, including those things' dominant nature over the biosphere and lithosphere or abiotic domain. How can this æternal substance so generate the noösphere, and the mind of man, if it itself were not primarily defined in those terms? If it were dead, abiotic, it would be nothing more than the Master Molecule and humans would revert to being epiphenomenal puppets. If man is free, if man is loving, if man's intellect has power, then man must exist in a Universe in which the generating force is made in man's image, or, vice versa.

On the contrary, dsayers, if you'll take the time to consider it closely, my claim is based on my knowledge of the profound ignorance of mankind. As Cardinal Cusa described, the situation can be understood using a metaphor: the Truth is as a circle, into which man's knowledge at any given point of time is inscribed as a polygon. Increasing knowledge can be represented by increasing the number of angles of the polygon. No matter how far man gets in his knowledge, he cannot achieve the angle-less perfection of the absolute Truth. However, there is no principle saying that his knowledge cannot be increased indefinitely. So the progress of man can be represented by an asymptotic curve towards infinity. We are the species that can do this, unlike any other species, as of the lower orders of beasts and other nonhuman things. So that gives us a special place in Nature, which is in fact supernatural because through our knowledge we are super-nature, we can reorder the biosphere to improve our power to survive and be happy. These two things, the ignorance of man of Truth, and the curve of man towards Truth, should, when considered carefully, stir in the mind an awareness that mankind's mind is made in the image of Truth, and that our knowledge comes from successful reflection—in the case of the universal physical principles, accompanied by successful empirical experimentation—within our minds. The human mind as super-nature thus reflects the Truth, is made in the image of the Truth, which is tantamount to God. I wish you would try to understand these things, as you obviously have a keen mind, a strong will, and a heart in the right place, but have focussed your efforts entirely on this anarcocapitalist logical laser you are so taken with. I, or rather Cusa and LaRouche, offer you a wider lens. Take a look. "Whatever is not truth, cannot measure truth precisely. (By comparison, a noncircle cannot measure a circle, whose being is something indivisible.) Hence, the intellect, which is not truth, never comprehends truth so precisely that truth cannot be comprehended infinitely more precisely. For the intellect is to truth as an inscribed polygon is to the inscribing circle. The more angles the inscribed polygon has, the more similar it is to the circle. However, even if the number of its angles is increased ad infinitum, the polygon never becomes equal to the circle unless it is resolved into an identity with the circle." --Nicolaus of Cusa and "Also, in De Docta Ignorantia, and also in the dialogues of The Layman and many of the sermons, he very much rejected the idea of man being able to achieve knowledge through sensuous experience. In the famous Trinity sermon of 1444, he developed the idea that the conception of the goal of the human intellect determines the road on which the mind travels to that goal; he called that the praesuponit—the future defines the present. It is that which the mind and faith defines as a goal, which defines the way how you achieve it, and which road you take. Knowledge, therefore, is not a logical extension of the addition of all existing knowledge of the past, but it is what we aim at, which is already in our faith and in our intention." --Helga Zepp-LaRouche

(1) Cause has to end somewhere. It can't end on contingency since that violates the principle of sufficient reason. The only sufficient reason for the contingent things of the Universe existing is an æternal thing. A tower of contingent causes leads to the absurdity of an infinite regress of causes. Therefore there must be an æternal cause. (2) Consciousness has no explanation in a sea of mindless molecules unless it is itself in some sense original, part of the æternal cause. That would make that cause analogous to our consciousness. Ergo, in light of mankind's creative nature able to discover and employ principle, man's mind made in the image of the Creator.

God is an æternal substance. He has always had and always will have his consciousness.

Trump names opponent of public schools to head Department of Education

God, obviously.

Put on those glasses...or start eatin' that garbage can.

A bank loans a customer $100,000. The customer uses the money to build a successful restaurant. Who owns the restaurant? The bank will own $100,000 of it, plus interest. Now, who loaned you your ability to think and speak?

For some reason the suicidal German passivity here reminds me of the Nero Decree.

Child Bride Legally Married Under Sharia Law, German Judge Rules "A regional German court has recognised as valid the marriage of a 14-year-old Syrian girl to her 20-year-old cousin, despite the legal age for marriage in Germany being 16. The case represents a landmark ruling, with the Federal Court set to adjudicate on the implications for the country as a whole." ... "...According to Die Welt, just 13 per cent of marriages in Syria involved a partner under the age of 18 before the war. Now the figure is around 51 per cent." ... "Robin Classen of the Criticising Immigration blog has called the verdict a “scandal”, highlighting that the judge “openly and completely uncritically quoted sharia law, applying it directly to this case. "“Therefore ‘only a marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim is void,’ in the judge’s own words, because Islamic law forbids this.” "Mr. Classen argues that the case is a prime example of Germany importing a foreign culture through mass migration. "“With mass immigration has come not only the sort of terrorism seen in Paris and Brussels and the sexual offences of New Year’s Eve, but also a completely different set of social values ideas,” he says. "“Mohammed married his ‘favourite wife’ Aisha when she was just six years old. He first had intercourse with her when she was nine. This is not a minor opinion within Islam, within Sunni and Shi’ite Islam it is absolutely undisputed. "“Since Mohammed is considered in Islam as an exemplary and virtuous man, this moral assessment also applies to his marriages with several women and the child Aisha, which is why forced marriages of children are completely normal in both Shi’ite and Sunni Islam.”"

Robert Heinlein had a good idea in Starship Troopers (1959), that only citizens with military experience should be allowed to vote, reason being they had proven their dedication to the society.