WoW! I got banned from FTL

[dalebert]

If you eat pop tarts (completely arbitrary), I will bop you on the nose.

You shouldn't joke about this, Caleb. Pop-tarts cause people to throw garbage in the streets. I've seen it. I was in this town where people were eating pop-tarts and there was garbage in the streets.

[Caleb]

Also, pop tarts could possibly cause a sugar high, which causes people to go wild and be out of control and destructive. That's why pop tart eaters are scum.

I must apologize in advance if some of you people eat pop tarts. I didn't mean to call you scum to your face. I prefer to talk bad about you behind your back.

[Riddler]

anyway.
where was i?......

[J’raxis 270145]

anyway.
where was i?......

Trying to think up more foulmouthed trollery to post?
Having the sudden revelation that "professional asshole" isn't something to be proud of?

[J’raxis 270145]

Nah, I just use the "Show unread posts since last visit" link, so I see your posts, just like everyone else's. If you think I'm following you around, that seems to be a nice big case of self-importance, nothing more. Others have called you a completely worthless human being. I just think you're amusing.

[Luke S]

Exactly. Your answer to #6 was particularly telling, because I asked for specific moral (not legal) justification for the action. You offered no moral answer, and only hinted at a legal justification.

These questions were designed to get you thinking about the moral foundation of laws. A law is meaningless. Hitler had laws that said Jews should be thrown in ovens. All a law is is a statement to this effect:  "If you do this, I will do this to you."  It has no moral significance. That's not to say that there is no moral justification behind it. The law could go like this, "If you murder someone else (a moral violation), I will put you in a cage for the rest of your life." Or it could just as easily read like this, "If you eat pop tarts (completely arbitrary), I will bop you on the nose."  A law, in and of itself, tells us nothing about morality. It only tells us about consequences to violations of social mores. And these mores could be moral imperatives, or they could be arbitrary.

That's why I wanted to dismiss the concept of laws, and speak about morality. I am interested in discerning whether your drug laws, (in particular) are moral or arbitrary. You acknowledge that you personally have no moral right to subject me to violence if I am smoking pot. You also acknowledge that a group of people cannot acquire rights that none of them possess.  Extrapolated properly, that would mean that in a society, no one would have such a right, and that is why you must appeal to the law and the legal foundation rather than any moral foundation to arrest me.  But any law that appeals to itself for its own legitimacy is by definition arbitrary.

No, I thought my answer to #6 was perfectly acceptable.

You asked me to imagine a scenario where I saw you and your friends smoking marijuana in your home, and you asked me what right I would have to go into your home and subject you to violence (which is libertarian code-speak for "arrest you for a marijuana violation").

I responded that I do not have that right, because I am neither a New Hampshire police officer, nor am I a citizen of New Hampshire. Thus I personally have no legal nor moral justification to arrest you for committing a marijuana violation in your home in New Hampshire.

My response was a perfectly acceptable response, Caleb. You asked me why do I have the right to do X, and I responded that I do not have the right to do X. That is a perfectly acceptable and reasonable response.

[Caleb]

Yes, Luke, it is a perfectly acceptable response to say that you don't have the moral right to do so.

But when you consider your answer to #5, it also means that no one has that right, and any law that says otherwise is therefore inherently immoral.

Your being a police officer or not is irrelevant, because police officer is a legal distinction. And we weren't talking about laws, only morality. I presume that you wouldn't think that you needed to be a police officer to defend yourself if I attacked you? You would, presumably, say that you have a moral right to defend yourself. But when given the opportunity to show the moral foundation for using violence against pot smokers, you admit that you have no such moral right. And turn to a legal argument to create that right for someone else (a police officer, which is simply a legal distinction, not a moral one.)

Look at it this way, Luke. A police officer is just a guy you and your buddies hire to enforce your "laws". But if you don't have a right to use violence against me for something. And if your neighbor doesn't have that right. And if his neighbor doesn't have that right. And so on. If no one has that moral right, then you can't hire someone to use violence against me, because none of you have that right. Remember your response to #5.

[Luke S]

Yes, Luke, it is a perfectly acceptable response to say that you don't have the moral right to do so.

But when you consider your answer to #5, it also means that no one has that right, and any law that says otherwise is therefore inherently immoral.

Your being a police officer or not is irrelevant, because police officer is a legal distinction. And we weren't talking about laws, only morality. I presume that you wouldn't think that you needed to be a police officer to defend yourself if I attacked you? You would, presumably, say that you have a moral right to defend yourself. But when given the opportunity to show the moral foundation for using violence against pot smokers, you admit that you have no such moral right. And turn to a legal argument to create that right for someone else (a police officer, which is simply a legal distinction, not a moral one.)

Look at it this way, Luke. A police officer is just a guy you and your buddies hire to enforce your "laws". But if you don't have a right to use violence against me for something. And if your neighbor doesn't have that right. And if his neighbor doesn't have that right. And so on. If no one has that moral right, then you can't hire someone to use violence against me, because none of you have that right. Remember your response to #5.

Caleb, you didn't listen very carefully to my answer. I said, "I do not have that right, because I am neither a New Hampshire police officer, nor am I a citizen of New Hampshire". Caleb, I am a citizen of Michigan going to college in Ohio.

The fact is that the reason why I do not have that right is that I am not a New Hampshire police officer. If I were a NH police officer, I would have that right. In fact, it would not even be a right, it would be my duty.

As a New Hampshire police officer, I would be an officer that has been hired to serve and protect the citizens of New Hampshire, and to enforce the laws that the democratically elected government of New Hampshire has agreed on.

Government has the right to exist if and only if it has the consent of the governed. The question that you asked in #5 was could you get 1,000,000 of your friends together and acquire new rights. No you can't. But the government doesn't have to have consent of 1,000,000 people in order to rule. The bar is that it has to have consent of the majority of its constituents. If that majority is composed of less than 1,000,000 people, then that's all that it needs to rule. It doesn't need "additional rights" or any of that stuff.

Actually Caleb, now that I think about what I just said, this actually puts us here in the USA in a dangerous situation, because in most elections, the official who is elected receives less than 50% of the constituents' consent. Oh, it's true that he always receives a majority of the voters' votes, but not every eligible voter votes in every election. So if you add up all the eligible voters' votes who vote for the official that is eventually elected, and you divide that by the number of eligible voters, both those who voted and who didn't vote, then usually that turns out to be less than 50% since there are so many non-voters.

Ok now I think I see what you're saying Caleb (and Free Libertarian).

You're saying that the government said "X gives us the authority to rule", and then they point to John Locke's texts, and "government with the consent of the governed", and "government with the consent of the majority of voters", only problem being that they rarely in actuality have the consent of the majority of voters. Am I correct?

Anyway, Caleb and Free Libertarian, you're right. You're very right. Because if you have an election like Bill Clinton's election in 1996 where turnout was only something like 49% of eligible voters, then you can have a situation where 24.6% of the people vote for one guy, and he gets elected, and then you have a situation where 24.6% of the population gets to put a guy in there to tell 75.4% of the population what to do, and that's more akin to an oligarchy than a democracy. In other words, it's a great big no-no.

And perhaps part of the reason why a lot of you are anarchists is you think that in that situation, the people who didn't vote effectively voted for no-one at all for president, so that's 51% who voted for no-one. And then there's whatever amount of people who voted for Clinton, which was something like 30% (I'm forgetting about the electoral college here, but it would be the same results only more laborious calculations if I included them in the calculation), so based on that logic, 51% beats 30%, so we should have had no-one be president from 1997 to 2001. And by that logic we should have had no-one be in the House of Representatives in almost all of the districts, since whoever got the most votes in each of the districts usually didn't get more votes than all the non-votes. And same thing for the Senate and most of the state elections, since state-level elections usually get even lower turnout than national elections, if I'm not mistaken.

So am I getting at something here folks? Am I not getting at something here? What do you think? Truth be told, I've never thought of things this way before.

[Caleb]

You are getting closer. But you are still quite a ways off. You keep running back to legal arguments. So you are presupposing the system that exists.  We are trying to move you back to an earlier stage, so that you can analyze the inherent foundation for your government. But everytime you get close, you run back to the current legal situation, talking about police, etc.  That is to say, when you get back to the point where your government is shown to have no foundation, you simply presuppose it and go onto a later stage.  This is called "begging the question".

Before you can appeal to a law or to a legal situation such as Police officer or congressman or fuhrer, you need to first establish the foundation for the authority. It is convenient you dismiss other people's rights when they aren't your concerns. Remember the Niemöller poem

    First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out -
    because I was not a Socialist.

    Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out -
    because I was not a Trade Unionist.

    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out -
    because I was not a Jew.

    Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.

When you are dismissive of the moral foundation for other people's rights, when we assign legitimacy to something merely because it is a law or it is a constitution, without concern for the moral foundation of it, then we set ourselves up for the rights that we are concerned about to be stomped on.

The classic case is your guns. You are dismissive of that, because you think that the Constitution enshrines your right to own a gun. But an activist Supreme Court or a Constitutional Amendment could change that for you in a New York minute. Then, you might be a little more concerned about the moral foundation for laws. Most of us here believe that if there isn't a victim, there cannot be a crime.

In other words, people don't have a right to curb other people's liberties based on possibilities of what might happen. Because that limits tyranny only to the extent of the imagination or lack thereof of the tyrant. If you can show a victim, an actual person who has experienced real, tangible loss, then you can quantify a crime. Otherwise, you have completely eroded the concept of rights, once you grant the idea that a government can somehow (through a Constitution or a law or a court ruling) arbitrarily tell people what to do, then no one has any rights in any sense of the term. It's only what the government lets them do or doesn't let them do.

[KBCraig]

Luke conflates "right" with "authority" (aka "power"). Not to mention confusing "right" with "right or wrong". He retreats from the argument that he's making a legal distinction, not a moral one.

Whether or not it is right for him to use force against someone who is harming no one (except possibly themselves) seems to be a matter of situational ethics to Luke. He's only concerned with legal authority, not whether or not it's the right thing to do.

[srqrebel]

I don't believe Luke has a clear definition for "authority"... nor is he able to identify it's root source.

[NJLiberty]

Okay, well that was a long read getting caught up with this thread.

Luke, you are right in suggesting that any group of people can come together and form the government of their choosing, be it weak, strong, whatever. They would then be bound by that government for as long as any of them choose to remain within that agreement. However that does not give them the right to impose their government on anyone else.

The government created by the Constitution of the United States was not agreed upon by everyone at the time. There were fierce debates about it and many people wanted nothing to do with it. Rhode Island refused to send delegates to the convention that created it. When it came time to ratify it, it was unclear if it would pass at all. Ironically, New Hampshire was the state that put the Constitution into effect by being the ninth to ratify it. It was then imposed on the other 4 states, who ratified it after the fact.

Be that as it may, none of us, unless one of has a great secret, were parties to that original agreement. I know I for one have never had anyone come and ask me if I consented to be governed by the Township of Boonton, the County of Morris, the State of New Jersey, or the Federal Government of the United States. Hence, according to your argument, since I have not consented to be governed, the various governments must have no right to govern me.

Does that mean that I believe there should just be murder and mayhem in the streets with everyone free to do what they want? No. I do not think that anyone has the right to infringe on any other person's right to their life, liberty, and property. I guess that is where you and I part ways. It sounds like you believe that rights are rights only so long as the majority of a group of people believe you have that right and enumerate that "right" someplace on a legal document. I believe that people's rights are inherent. If you put a condition on a right then it is no longer a right, it merely becomes a privilege administered by someone else.

I am not a pot smoker. That is my personal choice. It is not my choice however to decide if you or anyone chooses to smoke pot. Those choices belong to each of you. I cannot make them for you, nor do I expect any of you to ask for my consent to make them for yourselves. Nor do I seek or need your consent to choose to ingest something, whether it be pot, tobacco, alcohol, trans-fats, or Pop Tarts. It is none of your business what I choose to ingest so long as it does not infringe on your rights.

Luke, how would you, or anyone else, be harmed because I chose to eat a Pop Tart, have a beer, or smoke a joint? If you are honest the answer is that you wouldn't be harmed at all. And if you are not harmed by me, why would you support having my freedom and my property taken from me for doing something that did not harm you?

Let's for a moment suppose that you like to drink energy drinks. And let's for argument's sake say that I find the drinking of energy drinks offensive, because they cause changes in people's personalities, make them more aggressive, more argumentative, and these drinks are detrimental to your overall health. Would you think it was right for me and my fellow energy drink haters to have those drinks banned, and to have your property and freedom taken away if you chose to continue to drink these in defiance of my wishes? I think you and I would both agree that that is a ridiculous scenario, but it is exactly the same scenario used to make pot illegal.

You claim to be in favor of freedom and liberty, but you want to be the arbiter of who has freedom and liberty. You are in favor of removing government laws and regulations that infringe upon your rights, but are more than willing to use that same government to infringe on other's rights, and are willing to violate other's rights provided they live in the same state as you. I'm not sure I understand how you feel you can have it both ways. How can you justify asking for certain things to be removed from yourself, but at the same time justify imposing things on others? Quite frankly I find your hypocrisy more offensive than the fact that you chose to malign people whom you do not know, including many of those who create and enforce the drug laws you espouse.

George

[dalebert]

Luke, you were onto something when you started to realize that many of our leaders don't even have majority support. You were beginning to realize on a gut level why our government is illegitimate. That's often how it starts. Where it falls short is the notion that even if they did have a majority, they wouldn't have consent of the governed. Surely you've heard of tyranny of the majority. There are many historical precedents of it- Hitler's Germany, inter-racial marriage, etc. History has proven that majority support for something does not make it right. Majorities are well known for abusing minorities. Therefore, that is not a valid basis for government authority, even if a lot more people did actually vote.

Our founding fathers spoke of this. They knew a pure democracy was doomed to fail for exactly that reason. So in comes the Constitution, right? It was intended to act as a restraint on government power. Of course it doesn't work. So we should ask ourselves why. It's because it's completely arbitrary. Some people gathered and wrote it, but there was nothing to make it valid. It was just the opinion of a few people. Ratification by the states just brings us back to voting again, which even our founding fathers knew to be an invalid basis of authority.

So we have government as plastic man, turning into a ball and trying to pick itself up. It defies all logic. The government makes the claim "I am valid" and then backs that up with "because I say so." Ultimately, you will realize their authority comes down to might makes right. Anyone who questions their authority and acts against their arbitrary laws is subject to threats of fines or imprisonment and ultimately violence and potentially death if they resist those punishments.

Now if you're interested in the difficult task of establishing governments that are truly valid, that deserves it's own subject. SRQRebel is working on some writings about exactly that. These would be governments based on explicit consent of the governed which means they must be completely opt-in and cannot monopolize via force.

[dalebert]

Surely you've heard of tyranny of the majority... They knew a pure democracy was doomed to fail for exactly that reason. So in comes the Constitution, right?

Wow! What great timing. This video was just posted. Watch this, Luke.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naJLn8rZMBM

[J’raxis 270145]

Luke:—

You seem to understand that if an elected official isn't supported by the majority, but gets elected due to the low-voter-turnout scenarios that often happen, that his power is not legitimate. Simple question: If said official is supported by the majority, but you're not a member of that majority, why is he suddenly legitimately your ruler? If you don't support him, you don't support him: What's magic about having one or two extra people on the other side, turning a minority into a majority?