The Glade 4.0

What exactly does it say about me Coro?

If Libertarians are going to say that Society cannot create and enforce certain rights because they chafe their freedom/right then why can't I say their rights chafe my freedoms/rights? I think that would make me more of a Libertarian than they are.

At what point do you say these are inalienable/natural rights? When 100% of the people agree, when 51% agree? Or are these intrinsic rights somehow imbued in all of us? Is there an engraving in my heart that tells me murder is wrong? Yes. Is there such an engraving in Ted Bundy's? No. At some point the collective must step in and espouse exactly what these rights are they must draw a line and say you shall not cross.

Taly, you said the founding fathers believed in these natural rights. If these rights are indeed natural and flowing from the hearts of all mankind why then did they need to be codified and stated in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights?

_________________

You liked that word, did you?

Hopwin, a better jumping off point, if you, like me, have a hard time accepting the ridiculous concept of inherent rights, is to approach it pragmatically.

Do you believe property rights are an important thing for society? Are they beneficial or detrimental? (overall.) Do you believe "stealing" is possible? Or is it a word that has no meaning to you?

Conversation and debate is pointless without common ground. I suspect, like most people in modern society, you really do believe in private property, whether as a useful and beneficial legal concept granted by government, or as some natural, and inherent thing. Once you accept the idea of property ownership being a right, then you've got the common ground needed to have the discussion regardless of whether you accept the idea of inherent rights. Hey, two of the glade's most extreme libertarian types disagree strongly on abortion. We used to joke that once Rynelmostan was formed, Elmo and Rynar would attempt to kill each other in a civil war over the matter. Looking at any one person's exact ideology as representative of the concept as a whole is silly. I'm a little bit libertarian in my views, and yet I see rights as just a human legal construct, nothing more.



Because they were full of ****? I thought I made that clear.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Hopwin:

Your first mistake is assuming that the collective must step in and draw the line in the sand. As I have noted before, humanity likes to forget that its composed of multicellular organisms commonly referred to as animals. The issue at hand is one of force; and, as history shows, the power to confer, rescind, or otherwise modify rights lays with the ability to exercise greater physical and/or intellectual force than those opposed to you. Regardless of the moral viability, the axiom that "might makes rights" (plural intentional) stands in practice.

The problem with any democratic experiment or collective paradigm is precisely the problem of the majority. In any voting nation, the majority exercises the most electoral power and consequently possesses the most electoral force. Assuming lawmakers and elected officials hold themselves to some unspoken, amorphous, and generally nebulous social contract, then they act with the authority of that force to necessarily harm and marginalize the electoral minority. They must be more right and more correct and more good than those who lost, because if they weren't, then they would not have lost (I realize that's circular, but that's the practical reality of mob thought).

"Might makes rights", and, at least politically speaking in the U.S., it also makes "right".

_________________

You may find the answers you seek by attempting to resolve the question I gave you as to the nature of ownership, that is if you are indeed interested in gaining knowledge.

The rights need to be sated because (as I have shown) humans tend to be bad at implicitly understanding rights when they are obfuscated (intentionally or not). Also humans like to rule over one another to gain power and this encourages and in fact require the infringement of rights of others so future individuals with power (those in government) would need to be countered by at least the public understanding of rights and (as we had done) the codification of those rights int he very system used by those who would seek such power for domination.

_________________
"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Taly, leave your cool-headedness outside this discussion and stop being so rational, it ruins a perfectly good philosophical debate



So then I have the right to walk on a Libertarians property so long as I am prepared to kill to enforce that right?



Or perhaps the problem with Democracies is that they must cater to the lowest common denominator since inherent rights differ from person to person? And if we accept that "inherent" rights aren't inherent to everyone nor self-evident then there must always be a minority who feels trampled.

_________________

Poppycock is a great word. I also would have accepted

_________________

Holy shitsnacks!

From a practical level, absolutely. If you have the power and will to do something, you have the "right" to do something. Even religion recognizes this. Let us assume there is an omnipotent Christian deity. God is good because He is omnipotent, and therefore He alone has the power to dictate good and evil, right and wrong, for everyone. It is God's "right" to do whatever He damn well pleases, because He is God. Might makes right.

That's not libertarian, though. Not at all.



One interesting thing is that the Libertarian for the most part avoids this problem. It really follows a "To each their own" approach. Sure, you'll get the occasional christian nutjob who feels their personal rights are violated by allowing two fags to marry, but they're just would-be tyrants.

There is a great deal to admire about libertarian ideology.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Why do I not have that right? Does a cat have a right to walk across your property? Who decided it was your property to begin with? I pick up litter to keep it from blowing onto your lawn, I planted the trees you cut down to build your house, I paid for the drilling that got the oil you used to make your petroleum products, I ride a bike to keep the air over your property clean (no not really lol), I recycle motor oil so that it doesn't end up in the ground water that you use on your lawn. We all pay costs, that is a function of living together. Why can't I enjoy the air over your defined property with a walk?

_________________

You have the ability. You do not possess the right, because there exists a large contingent of individuals capable of exercising collective force against you, as evidenced by current trespassing and Castle Doctrine laws in the United States. In a Libertarian society, you will still not possess that as a right, because the collective power structure would exist to prevent you from exercising it as a right. You would have the ability and perhaps the the forgiveness to exercise that ability, but it would still lack the intellectual force of rights as currently or even hypothetically constructed.Democracies rarely cater to the lowest common denominator. They cater to those capable of securing power by manipulating electoral force. A perfect example is Barack Obama, who believes his election is a mandate to exact wide ranging change on the United States. Instead of considering the reality of human behavior, which he willfully manipulated to gain said position, President Obama is using the electoral force as legitimation for his personal agenda and desires (although, I should note that the same can be said for most Presidents). This specific will to power manifests in some of his vocal supporters, particularly those that believe his election was a mandate for change without consideration of what they view as a minority opinion. Opposition to the president is marginalized at the level of language, through various speech acts that simultaneously sanctify his policies while otherizing valid and often more "correct" (at least in terms of real effect) ideas he does not support.

And, yes, there will always be a minority to be trampled. In general, that "minority" happens to be those individuals who simply want to be left alone. The irony here is that entitlement politics is always supported by the majority that doesn't want it to affect them. Sadly, we can't put that genie back in the bottle.

_________________

I would argue that in this case the lowest common denominator was "Change" and "Hope" two emotional reactions to what was perceived by many to be a low-point in recent history (I'm not making any calls on this one way or the other lol).

_________________

Some things need challenged here but I don't feel like (nor have time for) an essay.

1) The foundational documents didn't codify inherent rights, they listed some of them in order to protect them from usurpation by the state.

2) Generally speaking, the libertarian believes in 3 key rights: life, liberty, and property; where liberty is usually defined as autonomy of decision-making.

3) These extend to right of association and right of travel.

4) Government should only exist to mediate disputes between the rights of two parties, and should favor protection of rights as much as possible.

5) I would suggest that many people here are poor examples of "libertarianism" and are better examples of anarcho-libertarians. Instead you should read such sources as Locke, the Federalist Papers, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington.

_________________
“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

In disputes between people or societies, might always makes right. You have rights so long as you have the ability to access them and defend them. If someone stronger or better armed than you comes along and wants what you have, you're likely to lose your rights in a hurry, and likely your life as well. Individuals, w/o the benefit of society, are especially vulnerable. One bullet from an unseen ambusher and talk of rights becomes academic.

That's the difference between real world, and theoretical arguments about rights. Tell an invader till you're blue in the face, "You can't do that, you are violating my rights" and he'll say, "You're right, my bad" and go away?

Could I request that you define ownership for me? (Again) I believe your core issue is understanding ownership. You seem to grasp that you own you and that allows for certain actions determined solely by you but you ignore where your ownership of yourself intersects with another's ownership of land. If you define ownership we can remove this, I've only been asking for 3 or 4 posts in a row now.

_________________
"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Hah! That'll never happen. People are dumb and they'll just find a crisis to unite us or some bullshit. I think that as individuals, people can be pretty smart, but the more that group-think becomes a factor the overall intelligence level lowers dramatically. We're united all the time through our 24/7 media outlets. There's no opportunity for the masses to think of thinking. Americans have been voting these assholes into office for a long time now, why do you think it will stop? There is no hope that this country will turn around and embrace more individualisim and liberty.

Khross: I'd say he appealed to the lowest common denominator of that political spectrum. He maybe be a bullhit artist of the highest calibre, but we're all united by the LCD. Just as the Alaska lady appeals to the LCD of the Republicrats.

_________________
"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I can assure you that you are absolutly correct.

_________________

Ezekiel 23:19-20 

This is the easiest way to understand it. Property is rights. The word "property" was invented as a way to describe the containment of a thing which one man owns, and holds total privelidge over. Land means something different. Property, by litteral execution of it's function, implys ownership.

Why do men believe in rights at all? The answer, easily enough, is exclusive ownership of man's own mind. Only you have the natural privelidge of your own mind. No one else may peek a glimpse any more than you might give them. We are built that way, regardless of the manner of our engineering, so our thoughts must conform to our basic making. Extensions of a man's acklowledgement of his own, basic, ownership of his thoughts extend logically into ownership in general, and since property is the origional right from which all of our other rights logically stem, your right to property can't have logical conflict with mine.

What's mine is mine and what's yours is yours. From your thoughts, to your work, to your value, and to your land.

_________________

Ezekiel 23:19-20 

There were many ancient societies that did not believe in property rights, in fact they had no concept of "property" at all. By your logic, that means none of them had a right to life either in any of those societies, which is clearly false.

Most societies don't believe in property rights...

So what?

That dosen't prove that individuals don't and haven't. Infact, historically, most of our greatest thinkers have, and did.

_________________

Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I find it absolutely hilarious that conservatives are calling an 18 seat minority in the Senate, a massive minority in the house, and a Democratic White House a mandate because they won a single election against a shitty candidate in a democratic stronghold. Mind you, none of them are talking about losing a congressional seat that was held by republicans for a century in a special election, nor why they lost. Here's a tip - the hard-right Tea Party candidate split the conservative vote and the Democrat sailed in to victory. But no, that wasn't a liberal mandate.

Double standards are double.

_________________


It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

To be honest I've never considered it so bear with me while I think through this out loud.

To me ownership is a perceived right, you can claim to own anything you want but you need external validation to legitimize it. I can own the Statue of Liberty if enough other people recognize that claim. So if no one recognizes your claim of ownership then it isn't true.

_________________

I like this line of reasoning, basically the ego gave rise to property. Almost as if "I think, therefore I am... and that **** over there is mine." To me this argument makes sense, but what happens when two egos claim the same property?

_________________

That could be true for the declaration of what color green is as well. What if only you recognize your claim of ownership but no society is around? What if half the people recognize the claim? Most importantly, what does this ownership allow one to do that non-ownership does not?

_________________
"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I keep reading this subject as Mass Effect as Conservative Mandate.

>_> <_<

_________________


Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

Yeah, me too, and I didn't even like Mass Effect.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

You said that rights and property are equivalent. That means when someone says to you, "I don't believe in property," he might as well be saying, "I have no right to life," and this will be true regardless of what kind of society he comes from. This is absolutely ridiculous.