thebeardslastcall

You didn't answer my question. I didn't ask if what I was doing is ethical. I asked if it's ethical to stop me from achieving my goals. What if my goal is to run a successful restaurant and you open a competitive business across the street? If your goal is to be more successful than me with your new restaurant do I have to close mine? I'm trying to show that going by goals is not a sound foundation for ethics, unless you can make a good case to the counter and correct me. Goals are constantly at odds and can remain and be so without violence (and with violence too of course). Why did you choose goal based ethics and do you really believe it to be a sound and well formed approach? Exploring new ideas is all well and good, but giving a nascent idea an excessive claim of credulity will just fast track people towards ignoring you instead of helping you to develop your idea(s). I agree with the first response in that I didn't click on the link either for probably similar or the same reasons as them.

Where does my world domination goal fit in with this system? If you inhibit my world domination goal is that unethical?

Logic does apply to all levels. Different levels have different levels of generalization as to what is going on and how these events are described. Planets going around stars is fairly simple and straightforward in many ways. The planet loops around the Sun for millions or billions of years in a fairly consistent fashion following some general rules. We can predict this behavior pretty accurately. However if you look down at what's going on on the planet Earth it suddenly looks very weird and odd and to obey a whole other rule of physics and to act in a very strange and unpredictable way. The simple equations describing the motion of stars won't describe a complex planetary ecosystem. Everything on Earth is still subject to gravity and other forces of physics, but from the larger scale it seems very odd and to obey a different set of rules. A rocket flying off the planet would seem to come out of nowhere and make no sense if all you can see are planets and stars. With the quantum world we're looking down at a scale that moves super fast and is beyond our vision capabilities. Trying to understand what is going on in the quantum world seems strange, but it follows logic and physics with perfect consistency. When we are unable to see at these lower resolutions and scales however we're forced to use statistics and probabilities to guess how things will behave because we can't see and predict at the same scale and pace of the quantum world. I would agree the quote is a little confusing. I'd replace the word 'logic' with 'physics' and that would fit better to me. Physics are a way of describing reality and logic is a means towards assessing the physics of the world. We use our senses to validate or reject our logic, which leads us to developing principles of physics to help us in describing the rules of reality. With that said, it helps clarify the statement a little in that the behavior of matter and energy as perceived can help us show us when we're using flawed logic because it will lead us to an incorrect conclusion about the workings of reality. Reality, by being consistent, is constantly reaffirming logic by being consistent, which is required for the use of logic. Logic is only useful in a consistent universe, because otherwise you get into the problem of contradictions where logic is useless because you can derive no conclusions from an insane or contradictory universe. Note: I have one post that hasn't shown up yet.

If your logic says the cat is both alive and dead we're off to a bad start. If your logic says something is both moral and immoral then where can you go from there? If you give a contradictory statement as a truth you're not really saying anything. The point of logic is to determine a position. If you're stuck in some contradictory dualism you're stuck in a non-position and have removed the use and point of logic, which is to get some resolution on an issue. If someone is both guilty and not-guilty can you both kill and not-kill them? Reality denies contradictions and any logic that provides contradictions is taking an invalid look on reality and will be ultimately rejected by reality. The beauty of reality is that it has no fundamental contradictions. Adherence to and respect for reality is how you capture sanity and move forward with life. How do you consider contradictions and dualisms to be reasoning if they provide no reason? Definition of "reason" from Google:Define:reason = 1. a cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event. 2. the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic 3. think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic

He's a lawyer. Being a lawyer means learning the language of law. They're the same as English words, except they all have their own definitions provided by the government. He's probably so deep into legalize speak that he forgets these words have actual meanings outside of their government definitions. All the legal terms he has learned are fairly meaningless outside the context of a central government defining terms. You can still have a group defining terms and providing a framework for legal type issues and property. The main difference is just that you choose this system for yourself instead of having it forced on you. I suspect most people will not choose a system that has all its own terms that overlap English as when people have to actually be involved in the process and understand the language they're going to want to keep things as simple as possible and as close to natural language as possible to avoid confusions. Saying property can't exist without government is saying before governments it wasn't murder to kill someone. He's suggesting he doesn't inherently or by any base rule possess or own his own body. The free market does have a regulatory system. This regulatory system is chosen and enforced without violence except in defense from violence. Law doesn't make sense in that it is a conglomeration of a thousand threads being pulled in different directions to control and design the same body of rules. Laws by majority rule are crazy. The law is a thousand chefs in the kitchen and chefs regularly cycling in and out as they all try to make a meal. This is a bad way to prepare a meal.

I don't. Lending money is a risk. You have to accurately assess the honesty of the person for yourself to minimize your risks. More honest people will have an easier time getting lent money and will likely, by virtue of being more honest, get better terms making it easier for them to repay as well. Reputation will be very important in a more free society. People will have a stronger incentive to not cheat each other and will have harder time getting away with cheating when people are more free to disassociate than they are now. The state's current policies also make it hard to fairly assess people without risking a discrimination charge and other troubles, inhibiting positive (win-win) associations. With all this said, if anarchy's "major problem" is a situation that is effectively better than what is had now, it's kind of hard to say it's a major problem. That's like saying "major problem with your system, it's not a utopian perfect solution with all answers from the start, therefore we shouldn't set it as a goal for improvement over what we have". That's how almost all challenges to anarchy basically go. They suggest a ridiculous standard blind to the current situation and say it's the wrong direction because it's not a golden kingdom of glory, so why bother trying to improve? Setting an impossible standard is just blocking progress because you don't want to face moral improvements and have to actually improve yourself and hold people morally responsible for their actions because you're afraid.

They'll now be more in agreement when they decide the constitution is irrelevant. Nine professionals elected to tell you what the law says. Supreme Clergymen interpreting the word of God too incomprehensible for us mere citizens to understand and still splitting 5/4 in many cases showing heavy disagreement. Ugh. Nothing just about the justice department (congrats newspeak).

That is distinctly not a system of government. Governments are what you get when you don't have universal agreement and people decide to use force to make up the difference. Universal agreement is a form of anarchy. Everyone agrees not to use violence to get their way and to respect other people's property. Debt is only an issue if ownership rules are violated to create confusion on ownership. So long as you are honest and respect ownership rules the issue will resolve itself in a reasonably just manner. Debt has risks and debtors know this and accept this risk for a potential pay off later in interest. That's the game. Government 'debt' is just theft. Forcing one group of people to pay for other people's spending they didn't agree to. That's the 'debt' of statism that is far more troublesome than the 'debt' of anarchism. If you don't want to risk losing your money in anarchy then don't lend out money to people. Problem solved.

Who says you can go 'bankrupt'? What do you mean by bankrupt? Did the person commit fraud to the second and later debtors about the first debt? What were the terms they agreed to should the person run into payment issues? All these possibilities will be baked into the agreement and there will be agencies both sides may pay into for arbitration purposes. Basically instead of having some forced central government being the arbiter the two individuals will decide who will arbitrate should issues arise and have terms for the contingencies. If they don't do this then likely what will happen is that one person will simply lose their investment. In a free society where reputation is king, however, people will have strong incentives to not rip people off or lie and will likely receive strong social punishments for cheating or playing dirty and will not easily get away with fraud without hurting themselves. There is no government to say you're bankrupt and give you a free ride out of your debt obligations. The bankruptcy system is a removal of liability enforced by the government. This liability escape the government gives in many areas is what inhibits a free market and what causes people to have to work around this possibility. In other words people are at more risk now than they would be in a free market of losing all of their investment because they can't not have bankruptcy as an option. You say a universal property law system or external rule everyone agrees to is need, except that it need only be between the individuals and not forced on everyone, and they choose their own system instead of having one forced upon them. The best systems will emerge and become popular for how to handle investments and debt without having to resort to violence.

One point he was trying to make that Molyneux seemed to be missing was that the same basic action can be sex or rape, but this is determined by desire and intent as separate from the core actions. Rape requires action, but the distinction is not the action, but the intent and desires attached to those actions. Like if I eat a piece of someone else's cake it's theft, but if they said it was okay then it is no longer theft, but in both cases I ate the cake. So it isn't the action per say, but whether or not permission is had, to perform the sexual act. Thus he was trying to separate the action as rape or not rape based not on the sexual act, but based on whether or not there was permission, which is not the sexual act itself that would thus differentiate them.

No such thing as just compensation for someone being forcefully kicked off their land. If it was just compensation they'd take the offer willingly. If you have to force them it says it was unjust because they turned down the deal as insufficient compensation for their home and land, which they may have owned for generations. Setting such a negative precedent is bad for the general welfare's rights and morality. It's stealing for private interests plain and simple. The projects are also frequently paid for or 'subsidized' financially by the taxpayers meaning the project was viewed by the free market as not worth the costs or a bad plan as it would not provide sufficient service for the cost. I hate eminent domain and anyone who peddles that crap. Ted Cruz really rubs me the wrong way when he talks. He's in a pretty nasty position of pedaling false liberty and justice and trying to claim semi-libertarian or libertarian status.

With no mass inflation hurting the poor and no government monopoly systems (including forced intellectual 'property' rules), as well as a removal of all the insane anti-productive practices inhibiting currently less productive people, I would guess that wealth would be much more evenly spread. The government is not an equalizer and is not helping the poor (far from it). That government agents repeatedly claim to be one should be the first big hint they do otherwise in practice and by unintended consequences. Also stocks are worth nothing until you sell them, which requires someone to buy them. Many common counts of how much wealth rich people have count assets based on a guess of their worth. Also money is no good if you have no where to spend it. There must be people willing and able to provide services and thus people willing and able to earn the money for their services.

Do all your neighbors hate you? Why would someone be living next to a bunch of people that hate them? How exactly do you imagine this happening? What of the millions of people forced into cages with current societies? Are you seriously concerned about this happening to you by a bunch of people that have rejected force and violence and are acting on ethical principles?

Facts are all well and good, but generally they're not what matters in a moral debate and they're more likely just going to trip you up. What kind of point are you trying to make? That gun laws don't work or that they have no right in the first place to take your guns, regardless of whether or not it works? How about some government statistics of how much productivity is destroyed by government policies. The number is not known and is far higher than most people would guess. Morality and life are being destroyed. People want more wealth while they actively work to burn it. People cripple you and say it's for the best, because if we're all crippled how much harm can we do? Somebody kills a bunch of people it must be because we aren't all crippled enough they say, so they move to cripple some more under the guise of being reasonably limited for humanitarian reasons. They're killing us. They don't care about statistics, they don't look at the stats and they aren't open to changing their opinions based on statistics. They're convinced a crippled populace is the only way to live peacefully. If they've got you convinced you just didn't bring the right statistics and you need to go and memorize more stats you're being fooled and playing the wrong game and will inevitably lose the real game.

How will we build the pyramids without the slaves!? This hasn't been satisfactorily addressed either. /sarcasm To say such and such hasn't been satisfactorily addressed is to put forward the thesis that these things both need to be done and they can't be done without violent theft or slavery. You put forward the thesis we must have a 100% foolproof plan for picking the cotton before we free the slaves. What a sinister position.

Cheating by whose rules is the critical question. Different people are playing different games and thus by different rules. Some people like to define all rich people as cheaters as that's how they comfort themselves that they lost. People have a habit of defining cheating versus non-cheating in a way that favors themselves.

A smart person knows there is a cost to eating candy. Candy may be freely given, but even the wealthiest may not afford the cost of consuming the candy. Less intelligent, often poor, people think free to get is free to use and take and consume everything they're given with no thought to the costs. The welfare state feeds bad habits while pretending to be a friendly gift. Cheating is not without risks, but in a corrupt environment those risks tend to be reduced since integrity is already lost and desperation may be high. The study may mean to damn monetarily wealthy people while forgetting that it could also damn those wealthy with power and suggest they're more likely to be corrupt. So a corrupt group delivers a foul claim against their dummy target while pretending it doesn't also implicate themselves and feeds into class warfare as if the politicians and researchers on government money aren't also 'upper class' of a sort, though with integrity and morality they are lower class.

Who do you imagine paid for such a study and what do you suppose their motivations for doing so might be? If more money makes you more likely to cheat then what does that say about researchers and politicians and others who don't earn their money on the free market? The whole statist system corrupts everything. The more money you earn the more gets stolen and the more skewed one becomes against playing by kind rules because they're constantly being raped. If a female's physical quality and fertility is her sexual market value and a man's is in providing money and he's constantly having people steal his money this is equivalent in many ways to stealing sexual market value and rape and in such a culture why wouldn't you be more inclined to cheating to try to 'rebalance' the scales by gaining some additional sexual market value on the side wherever you can get it. Also it's basically like saying hot women are more likely to cheat than ugly women in many ways. This doesn't address the actual morality of the people necessarily so much as how often they're tempted and propositioned sexually due to their higher sexual value. It's also well known by now that once you're beyond a certain level of subsistence more money isn't what makes you more happy, especially if you have to give up more of your time to gain that more money. Once you're making enough you want more spare time to engage in other more profitable activities as simply piling on more money you can't enjoy while sucking up more and more of your time to earn that money at an ever decreasing rate of productivity due to the state's theft and it's easy to see why such a path leads many to unhappiness.

Sad and scary state of affairs that such a thing would need to go to a Supreme Court. Of course having a supreme court in any system seems to suggest a concession of sanity and comprehensibility in the laws. Ignorance is no excuse, but a group of 'high status' experts constantly disagreeing on the meaning of the laws is 'legit'. Yeah, people are evil for suggesting they can't steal their way to sufficiency. Gah. I hate thieves and thieves that act like their thievery is moral... so much the worse. This is what happens when people have no foundation of ethics, they say all manners of ridiculous things and grant themselves whatever skeevy 'rights' they can get away with. Moral principle of the left is "if you're losing then it's fair to cheat, because no one should ever lose".

I didn't point that out, you did. I thought my point was that free and independent thinkers, the type more inclined to be here in comparison to the average person, aren't the bandwagon type and would judge the situation for themselves. You seemed to fear a herd mentality among a group of people who ended up where they are specifically because of their anti-herd mentality. I was trying to counter your fear by showing that it didn't seem justified or fair to the rest of us here on the forums. Sounds like you learned a lesson the hard way and realized it's not easy to help some people and if you try to help people in a dishonest fashion you're more likely to do harm than good.

They're allowed to not hire people, to fire people, not close stores, to not open new stores. Oh crikey! New plan, make closing stores illegal and force them to hire! Wait, scratch that, why bother working when we can just get those rich bastards to give us the money directly without having to work for them! Guaranteed money for all! /sarcasm If they could just get rich by stealing they wouldn't bother with having stores and providing a service. Perhaps just maybe they earned their wealth and you can't simply steal and bully your way to unearned sufficiency. Asking for or expecting a guarantee on life is giving up on life and resigning to deathly ways. Eternal life is an oxymoron. Life must be earned, continuously, and eventually you will no longer be able to earn it and you will die. Such is life, as it should be. Life is nothing without death, that is why it has never, will never, and can never be guaranteed.

I waded through shit. Then I found philosophy. Then I waded through shit while knowing I was wading through shit. You wade through shit and wonder "Why can't I just be happy wading through shit, why must I know I'm wading through shit?" You get angry at philosophy, at your eyes, for showing you that you were wading through shit as if your eyes put you into the shit and surely gouging out your eyes would save you from the shit. Philosophy has done you no wrong. By your eyes you've be given sight to see that you are in shit and by sight you've been given the ability to imagine the possibility of not being in shit. Yet you still find yourself in shit, because seeing you are in shit isn't enough to get you out of shit and forsaking your eyes will not spare you from being in shit and now that you've seen you're in shit you can't return to blind thoughts. To live in illusion is to accept death. To long for illusion is to long for death's embrace to take you quietly because you've given up on life. You want to be free of shit, but you aren't willing to do what it takes to get yourself out and as many are aware simply being able to see you're in shit won't free you from the shit you're in. Others, with eyes closed, have never seen this shit and they reject your requests to open their eyes because they've embraced philosophy more than you have. They do not open their eyes because they know they have not the will or means to get free of the shit. Know thyself. To open your eyes and demand others open theirs without the will or means to free yourself from shit is to be in the hellish middle of pseudo-philosophy. Those that think they've found philosophy and happiness merely by opening their eyes to where they stand. Philosophy doesn't say open your eyes, it says open your eyes if you're going to do something and will accept and be grateful for knowing where you stand and will accept what you can change and what you cannot change and will be glad with the results. To force the eyes open of others is to do to others what you have done to yourself. To try to damn them to a half measure and the misery that follows. Now that you've opened your eyes you must accept and move forward or live in misery accepting that you had not the will to do what was necessary to get out of what shit you could. You're afraid and won't admit it is fear and denial, not philosophy, that keep you. You can't reinsert yourself into the matrix. To fight this is anti-philosophical and will bring you more and more misery. Stop whining. Stop trying to force others to open their eyes until you've figured out what to do with yours. If all you're going to do is stand there whining that you're in shit and demand others open their eyes to whine with you then be silent. You're doing no one any good acting like that. Trying to damn philosophy and turn everyone permanently blind will surely never save you from your shit and would only guarantee more people never see and free themselves from the shit. Equality of misery or death is no life, no joy, no good, and is no philosophy. Philosophy is no shovel. Philosophy is the eyes to see the shit and the will to find the shovel and to use it to get out of what shit you can and the ability to accept what shit you can't get out of. Philosophy neither takes nor gives life, it simply reveals what life you have and haven't got. You opened your eyes, got scared, and shut them again. Silly thing to do aye?

I for one welcome are new robot overlords.

Fight capitalism by quitting your job (where you were unduly profiting for providing a service!) and then stealing your way to sufficiency from productive people. Sounds legit.... if you're violently suicidal and a sore loser. Perhaps a picture... http://i.imgur.com/80O3PgS.jpg If you're not profiting from anything you're dead. The mass media and forced indoctrination systems seem to have successfully deranged a lot of people on the meanings of a great many words. They rarely seem to have any idea what they're talking about and are just ignorantly lashing out at supposed injustices as they were taught to do. I'd be very careful if you choose to engage with these people because they're not likely to understand a word you say and are likely to just be inflamed by your attempts to pull them out of the rabbit hole as if you were digging them in further.

I've been thinking about this topic a little myself recently and the simple definition I seemed to be coming to was something like this: Those who share similar values and inclinations. This is a sort of mutual love and respect had not by thought, but because the two of you are naturally aligned towards mutual benefit. Then on a higher level would include people you also get along well with and enjoy their company and interactions with them are generally pleasant and desired on both sides. Sets the bar far higher than most people who toss it around with the slightest acquaintances and are more inclined to vanities and manipulations. Anyone who claims to have tons of friends almost inevitably has a low bar, which says much of them. There are some people whom are friendly and may be friends, but you won't know until you get to know them better. Many people also will confuse you by being 'kind' and 'helpful' to you, but also to your enemies, in which case they are not true friends because in your company they help or pretend to help you and outside of your company or otherwise they hurt you. Friends do not spite each other or aid those with antithetical values as that would show them to be against your values and to not share your values but to be playing all sides as if they are tolerant and kind when they are nothing of the kind. To have values is to have standards and to be without standards, 'kind to all' is to have no standards and to be aligned with none and unkind to all but the wicked.