Is locking someone up punishment, is it an attempt at rehabilitation, or is it simply a means of temporarily removing a danger to society? I think it has been all three to various degrees throughout history and in different cultures.
Punishment itself can be seen as one of two things. It can be a form of rehabilitation, in which case we must judge it on its merits as a form of behavior modification, and I refer you to the works of B.F Skinner and other behaviorists for a treatment of that subject.
But it can also be seen as a form of moral righting of wrongs itself, as balancing things out on some kind of karmic level, and it is here the danger lies. There is no way for a finite intelligence to know if and how the universe is out of balance in a moral sense. Many philosophies posit that the universe can't be out of balance, and most religions say it isn't our place to judge God's creation and plan.
And as far as removing a proven danger from society, I have no problem with that at all. That isn't making a moral judgment, it is making a judgment based on physical safety concerns. Execution I oppose on purely practical grounds, one can never be absolutely certain of a person's guilt. You can't know if you might need them some day. And you can't know if someone can be rehabilitated and made a useful member of society, so it pays to keep people around.
Well said. It never pays to ascribe anything to malice and just stop there. "Oh, well, it's malice. That explains everything!" No, malice happens for a reason, and it always pays to try to look a few jumps back up the chain of cause and effect.
Consequences are not necessarily a punishment, or at least not a punishment that spreads the authoritarianism virus. Withdrawal of reward is not punishment. Time out is not punishment. These types of consequences do not spread the authoritarianism virus. Hitting is punishment. Verbal humiliation is punishment. These types of consequences do spread the virus.
Hitting your kid or yelling at them that they are a fat sack of shit no one could ever love are despicable shortcuts to 'good' behavior. They may work in the short run, but turn out very damaged humans in the long run. Children inherently trust their parents, and unless that trust is broken, children have an inborn desire to do what they are shown is right. If you have children who are acting out, most likely the cause is broken trust of some sort. Speaking in evolutionary terms, children who rebelled against their elders without cause usually got eaten by something, throughout most of our history.
There are a lot of authoritarian fuckwits who can't stand it when people stand up to authority. They are small minded bullies who worship power, think humans are basically evil, and must be beaten into civility. The idea of these 'evil' humans refusing to take their beatings frightens them, because a human who hasn't been beaten into submission is a free and therefore dangerous human.
I'm being a little harsh here, as authoritarianism is actually a mental virus. If you've ever mentally beaten yourself up for a perceived failure instead of simply noting it and refocusing on how you want to be, you are very likely infected with it yourself. People infected with the virus do not need to coordinate their actions consciously, yet work together to spread the virus through abuse and fear mongering.
Always try to be impeccable with your words and thoughts and do not use them to harm yourself or others. Use reward, not punishment, to motivate yourself and others to behave in positive ways. Punishment will never create new and positive behaviors.
Well put! You know, I live in a swing state and do have friends who are Republican, and that is exactly the feeling I have gotten talking with them. In person, I can tell they are embarrassed and just trying to rationalize their choices.
I'm voting for him only because the other options are unthinkable evil, or a wasted vote. I wanted Dennis Kucinich, or as a distant second choice, Hillary Clinton. But I have to say, Obama is looking more presidential than I thought he could. Still, the man has no record and no experience.
Funny you should mention it, those happen to be flaws that everyone I don't like has. Not to mention being selfish and venal and having poor grooming and bad breath.
You obviously didn't understand my argument, if the timber industry went bankrupt it would prove my point wrong. The fact that they clear cut and move on proves me right. The workers and the environment get screwed.
Your view of human nature is wrong. Modern economic experiments prove that people value fairness and reciprocity over self interest, and only act selfishly because they see everyone else doing so. Google 'fairness reciprocity economic research' for some good papers on the subject, or look up 'ultimatum game' on wikipedia for a description of one of the experiments.
Pure free market capitalism has no checks and balances. Money equals power. The more money you have, the more power you have to dictate market conditions and accumulate more money without working for it. You can use money to skew the market. There is such a thing as economic oppression. When someone is offered only the unfairest of deals, it matters little to them that the free market will correct the situation given twenty years or so.
The free market is also prone to well known failure conditions, namely, externalities, imbalance of information, and natural monopolies. Even Adam Smith stated that a free market needs government regulation in order to remain free. You libertarians want to do away all the government checks and balances that keep sociopaths from using the positive feedback loops of free market money accumulation to enslave the rest of us.
And you seem to want to make it very hard for people to protect themselves from economic aggression proactively. Only after one has been economically harmed, and has fewer resources to fight back, can one take one's case to the legal system. Not to mention, you all gloss over how THAT is supposed to work. Sure, injustice will be fixed by lawyers looking to get a cut of the fines. That could never go horribly wrong.
In short, libertarianism provides simple solutions, that don't work in the real world, to complex problems that have been better solved through other means. The only reason anyone still buys into it is because organizing libertarians is like herding cats, and no one can ever get their crazy ideas implemented in the real world. So libertarianism only really exists in libertarian fantasies, where it always works perfectly. In the real world, not so much.
I understand your arguments, I just don't agree with them.
First off, property as you describe it can be seen as an arrangement where property owners benefit at the expense of everyone else, but everyone is asked to go along with it. As Thibault said,
Another reason for pride, that of being a citizen! For the poor citizenship consists of supporting and sustaining the power and idleness of the rich. They must work for those goals before the majestic equality of the laws, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.
That is not equality, but I'm guessing equality and egalitarian are dirty words to you.
Good point about easements, except that most Libertarians I know favor absolute property rights without easements.
As for the commons, the parable only applies to unmanaged land. It does not apply to land that is managed collectively, that still counts as owned land. If you are confused by this concept, I recommend rereading The Tragedy of the Commons, it is pretty specific about that.
I will also present my 'Tragedy of the Privates,' wherein private owners ruin resource after resource extracting maximum short term profit from each, sell them off and move on to the next resource to rape. Real world examples abound, just look at the timber industry.
I like the way you discount capitalist countries that were at war when their famines happened, and loosely define any government you don't like as socialist. If you cherry pick data and redefine terms to suit you, you can prove anything.
There are certainly capitalist authoritarian regimes, both present day and historically. Just look at the history of Europe. Under the laissez faire system of unregulated capitalism, disparities in wealth created a de facto authoritarian system.
You have a false view of humanity, propagated by those in power because it serves their interests for everyone to believe that everyone else is selfish and stupid.
Modern economic research shows that people the world over are motivated more by notions of reciprocity and fairness than by self interest. People will act against their own interest to punish unfairness, even giving up months worth of real salary offered in experiments when their partners acted unfairly. Google 'ultimatum game' and maybe 'reciprocity fairness economic research.'
As for scaling well, I don't think social anarchism should scale. At the higher levels of organization, anything above a state level and maybe even a city level should be free market and free association based. If independent communes want to work together, let them enter into cooperative arrangements with whoever they like. There isn't really a need for anything as big as a national government.
But that is all out there in the future somewhere, and we have to deal with the political realities of the here and now. The danger lies in taking large actions with unknown consequences, and any kind of deregulation of industry or disbanding of national governments is a pretty huge risk.
It is the government's job to protect us in various ways because that is what we have decided government's job is. If you want it to be something different, we have also decided what mechanisms you can use to attempt to do so. I agree about killing the farm subsidies and corporate bailouts, though.
Korea isn't even remotely socialist. It's totalitarian and anyone who argues otherwise is either stupid or deliberately misleading. And you didn't answer the question, why is it okay to unilaterally declare property to be yours, when I don't agree to it? What am I getting in return for honoring that contract?
I'm not advocating that society own your clothes, your house, or your things. And I'm not advocating that control over land you are actively working be taken away from you. The things you work for are your own and no one else's, and the land you work directly is legitimately yours to control. But you can't own land and natural resources without infringing on other people's natural rights.
The question is, what are those people, especially people who don't own resources, getting in exchange for giving up their natural rights to go anyplace and use anything that isn't being used? Is it worth it for them to give up those rights? How do you convince them that giving up their rights is worth it?
I willingly give up my natural right to swing my fist wherever I like in order to gain the right not to be hit. You need to present your argument in the same light to get people to go along with it, but so far, in all the times I've tried to get libertarians to present such an argument, no one ever has.
You are ignoring all the famines in the purely capitalist countries of Africa. Oh, those aren't capitalist, their totalitarian? Yeah, then don't go confusing socialism with totalitarianism, either.
Socialism doesn't lead to deaths, authoritarianism does. Now, we can argue over which system gives authoritarians more leeway, socialism or the free market, but looking at history, and the present day, it's pretty obvious that capitalism is an unregulated playground for sociopaths.
It's not just the social contract but the focus on rights. Conservatives tend to focus on negative freedoms, or 'freedom from' something while Liberals tend to focus on positive freedoms, or 'freedom to' do something. A conservative will say, "I want freedom from your taxation," while a liberal might say, "we want freedom to have health care covered."
The Chalice and the Blade is a great book. You may also like Saharasia by James DeMeo, and The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, which cover related themes.
By the sound of things, what with the housing crisis, you being an apprentice carpenter (good career move!) and me being in the high paying field of computers, I'll be supporting you. But I don't mind, it's a small price to pay for social stability.
I'd love to get the name of your accountant, because even when I was making your salary, I never got everything back on my returns. The last time I paid nothing in taxes was when I was working part time and going to college. You didn't even read the link I posted, did you? Can't have those pesky facts interfering with your preconceived world view.
What makes you assume I'm not fighting for what I believe in? What makes you think I enjoy being screwed over by both sides?
By saying you focus on local issues, you are as much as agreeing with me that on a national level, there isn't a viable option. What do you mean your choice isn't on the list? Why don't you just get up on your hind legs and fight for it? Right, you sure are so superior.
Right, because there are enough full time, well paying jobs for everyone, and the system would continue to function perfectly if no one did the minimum wage jobs. Get real.
And you are just delusional about the income tax. Payroll tax IS income tax, you moron. You have been grossly misled: Look here and follow the links to more info if you need to. If you make $16.73 an hour, you are SOLIDLY in the bottom 50%. The median income is about $23 per hour. Do YOU pay no income tax?
Eh? What's your actual beef with the ideas? I suppose you're a individualist, free market libertarian who would rather use coercion to enforce your unilateral ideas about private ownership of natural resources and take away my right to go wherever my legs will take me and make use of whatever someone else isn't directly using.
Agreed, partly. I'd rather have a Clinton style fiscally responsible Democrat who inherited a broken economy and still managed to lower taxes, increase wealth, and increase government services by doing away with waste.
You can opt out. Leave the country if you don't like it. Fifty percent of Americans pay no income tax? You've been watching too much Fox News. That statement doesn't even pass a basic sanity check, and if it were true, it would mean that a huge number of Americans were unemployed or living below the poverty line. Which would be all the more reason for them to demand more equitable treatment.
Jesus christ on a fucking pogo stick, go back and reread that post. Here's the relevant sentence: "the Democrats (and Republicans) in the House and Senate are just as complacent in whatever damage has been done,"
That poster was using the word complacent WRONG. You can't be just as complacent IN something, but you can be just as complicit in something. Nice try, but you fail.
Right, in your fantasy world, everything is fair, the powerful all got their power by hard work and determination, the powerless are that way because they are weak and don't deserve any power, and anyone who complains is not taking responsibility for their lives. That tells me a lot about you, and none of it is good.
Wow. A 'you live in your parents' basement' joke. What a stinging rejoinder. You have discovered my shameful secret and wounded me to the core by exposing my basement dwelling to my peers. I shall slink off and trouble you no more.
Oh please. The 'big mean government is coercing me with guns' argument is so old and tired. If you don't like it, go some place else. There's plenty of uninhabited land in the world where you can set up a homestead and no one will ever even know. No one is holding a gun to your head and making you participate in society. You do so because you benefit more by doing so than by leaving, and you know it.
The thing that gets me about you libertarian types is how hypocritical you all are about coercion. It's perfectly okay to use coercion to enforce your unilateral ideas about property and take away MY rights to go wherever my legs will take me. That's okay, but using 'coercion' to ensure that everyone has enough to eat before allowing anyone to profit outrageously from the hard work of other people is communism.
You people do not believe in individual responsibility. You simply support the individual's right to amass power and use it against others with less power. You hate any method such as democracy or rule of law that the less powerful can use to band together to protect themselves against the more powerful. You see yourselves as superior to the rest of us, and the right you want protected is your right to prey on us.
Slashdot Mirror
Is locking someone up punishment, is it an attempt at rehabilitation, or is it simply a means of temporarily removing a danger to society? I think it has been all three to various degrees throughout history and in different cultures.
Punishment itself can be seen as one of two things. It can be a form of rehabilitation, in which case we must judge it on its merits as a form of behavior modification, and I refer you to the works of B.F Skinner and other behaviorists for a treatment of that subject.
But it can also be seen as a form of moral righting of wrongs itself, as balancing things out on some kind of karmic level, and it is here the danger lies. There is no way for a finite intelligence to know if and how the universe is out of balance in a moral sense. Many philosophies posit that the universe can't be out of balance, and most religions say it isn't our place to judge God's creation and plan.
And as far as removing a proven danger from society, I have no problem with that at all. That isn't making a moral judgment, it is making a judgment based on physical safety concerns. Execution I oppose on purely practical grounds, one can never be absolutely certain of a person's guilt. You can't know if you might need them some day. And you can't know if someone can be rehabilitated and made a useful member of society, so it pays to keep people around.
Well said. It never pays to ascribe anything to malice and just stop there. "Oh, well, it's malice. That explains everything!" No, malice happens for a reason, and it always pays to try to look a few jumps back up the chain of cause and effect.
Consequences are not necessarily a punishment, or at least not a punishment that spreads the authoritarianism virus. Withdrawal of reward is not punishment. Time out is not punishment. These types of consequences do not spread the authoritarianism virus. Hitting is punishment. Verbal humiliation is punishment. These types of consequences do spread the virus.
Hitting your kid or yelling at them that they are a fat sack of shit no one could ever love are despicable shortcuts to 'good' behavior. They may work in the short run, but turn out very damaged humans in the long run. Children inherently trust their parents, and unless that trust is broken, children have an inborn desire to do what they are shown is right. If you have children who are acting out, most likely the cause is broken trust of some sort. Speaking in evolutionary terms, children who rebelled against their elders without cause usually got eaten by something, throughout most of our history.
There are a lot of authoritarian fuckwits who can't stand it when people stand up to authority. They are small minded bullies who worship power, think humans are basically evil, and must be beaten into civility. The idea of these 'evil' humans refusing to take their beatings frightens them, because a human who hasn't been beaten into submission is a free and therefore dangerous human.
I'm being a little harsh here, as authoritarianism is actually a mental virus. If you've ever mentally beaten yourself up for a perceived failure instead of simply noting it and refocusing on how you want to be, you are very likely infected with it yourself. People infected with the virus do not need to coordinate their actions consciously, yet work together to spread the virus through abuse and fear mongering.
Always try to be impeccable with your words and thoughts and do not use them to harm yourself or others. Use reward, not punishment, to motivate yourself and others to behave in positive ways. Punishment will never create new and positive behaviors.
Well put! You know, I live in a swing state and do have friends who are Republican, and that is exactly the feeling I have gotten talking with them. In person, I can tell they are embarrassed and just trying to rationalize their choices.
I'm voting for him only because the other options are unthinkable evil, or a wasted vote. I wanted Dennis Kucinich, or as a distant second choice, Hillary Clinton. But I have to say, Obama is looking more presidential than I thought he could. Still, the man has no record and no experience.
Funny you should mention it, those happen to be flaws that everyone I don't like has. Not to mention being selfish and venal and having poor grooming and bad breath.
You obviously didn't understand my argument, if the timber industry went bankrupt it would prove my point wrong. The fact that they clear cut and move on proves me right. The workers and the environment get screwed.
Your view of human nature is wrong. Modern economic experiments prove that people value fairness and reciprocity over self interest, and only act selfishly because they see everyone else doing so. Google 'fairness reciprocity economic research' for some good papers on the subject, or look up 'ultimatum game' on wikipedia for a description of one of the experiments.
Pure free market capitalism has no checks and balances. Money equals power. The more money you have, the more power you have to dictate market conditions and accumulate more money without working for it. You can use money to skew the market. There is such a thing as economic oppression. When someone is offered only the unfairest of deals, it matters little to them that the free market will correct the situation given twenty years or so.
The free market is also prone to well known failure conditions, namely, externalities, imbalance of information, and natural monopolies. Even Adam Smith stated that a free market needs government regulation in order to remain free. You libertarians want to do away all the government checks and balances that keep sociopaths from using the positive feedback loops of free market money accumulation to enslave the rest of us.
And you seem to want to make it very hard for people to protect themselves from economic aggression proactively. Only after one has been economically harmed, and has fewer resources to fight back, can one take one's case to the legal system. Not to mention, you all gloss over how THAT is supposed to work. Sure, injustice will be fixed by lawyers looking to get a cut of the fines. That could never go horribly wrong.
In short, libertarianism provides simple solutions, that don't work in the real world, to complex problems that have been better solved through other means. The only reason anyone still buys into it is because organizing libertarians is like herding cats, and no one can ever get their crazy ideas implemented in the real world. So libertarianism only really exists in libertarian fantasies, where it always works perfectly. In the real world, not so much.
I understand your arguments, I just don't agree with them.
First off, property as you describe it can be seen as an arrangement where property owners benefit at the expense of everyone else, but everyone is asked to go along with it. As Thibault said,
Another reason for pride, that of being a citizen! For the poor citizenship consists of supporting and sustaining the power and idleness of the rich. They must work for those goals before the majestic equality of the laws, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.
That is not equality, but I'm guessing equality and egalitarian are dirty words to you.
Good point about easements, except that most Libertarians I know favor absolute property rights without easements.
As for the commons, the parable only applies to unmanaged land. It does not apply to land that is managed collectively, that still counts as owned land. If you are confused by this concept, I recommend rereading The Tragedy of the Commons, it is pretty specific about that.
I will also present my 'Tragedy of the Privates,' wherein private owners ruin resource after resource extracting maximum short term profit from each, sell them off and move on to the next resource to rape. Real world examples abound, just look at the timber industry.
I like the way you discount capitalist countries that were at war when their famines happened, and loosely define any government you don't like as socialist. If you cherry pick data and redefine terms to suit you, you can prove anything.
There are certainly capitalist authoritarian regimes, both present day and historically. Just look at the history of Europe. Under the laissez faire system of unregulated capitalism, disparities in wealth created a de facto authoritarian system.
You have a false view of humanity, propagated by those in power because it serves their interests for everyone to believe that everyone else is selfish and stupid.
Modern economic research shows that people the world over are motivated more by notions of reciprocity and fairness than by self interest. People will act against their own interest to punish unfairness, even giving up months worth of real salary offered in experiments when their partners acted unfairly. Google 'ultimatum game' and maybe 'reciprocity fairness economic research.'
As for scaling well, I don't think social anarchism should scale. At the higher levels of organization, anything above a state level and maybe even a city level should be free market and free association based. If independent communes want to work together, let them enter into cooperative arrangements with whoever they like. There isn't really a need for anything as big as a national government.
But that is all out there in the future somewhere, and we have to deal with the political realities of the here and now. The danger lies in taking large actions with unknown consequences, and any kind of deregulation of industry or disbanding of national governments is a pretty huge risk.
Too true. It's why I gave up trying to have rational debates with right wingers and started trolling them mercilessly. Thus my sig.
It is the government's job to protect us in various ways because that is what we have decided government's job is. If you want it to be something different, we have also decided what mechanisms you can use to attempt to do so. I agree about killing the farm subsidies and corporate bailouts, though.
Ah crap. You caught me. I could never wade through the book Dune and only know the movie version.
*hangs head in shame*
Nicely put. It also explains why I viciously troll right wingers instead of arguing with them in a reasonable manner.
Korea isn't even remotely socialist. It's totalitarian and anyone who argues otherwise is either stupid or deliberately misleading. And you didn't answer the question, why is it okay to unilaterally declare property to be yours, when I don't agree to it? What am I getting in return for honoring that contract?
I'm not advocating that society own your clothes, your house, or your things. And I'm not advocating that control over land you are actively working be taken away from you. The things you work for are your own and no one else's, and the land you work directly is legitimately yours to control. But you can't own land and natural resources without infringing on other people's natural rights.
The question is, what are those people, especially people who don't own resources, getting in exchange for giving up their natural rights to go anyplace and use anything that isn't being used? Is it worth it for them to give up those rights? How do you convince them that giving up their rights is worth it?
I willingly give up my natural right to swing my fist wherever I like in order to gain the right not to be hit. You need to present your argument in the same light to get people to go along with it, but so far, in all the times I've tried to get libertarians to present such an argument, no one ever has.
You are ignoring all the famines in the purely capitalist countries of Africa. Oh, those aren't capitalist, their totalitarian? Yeah, then don't go confusing socialism with totalitarianism, either.
Socialism doesn't lead to deaths, authoritarianism does. Now, we can argue over which system gives authoritarians more leeway, socialism or the free market, but looking at history, and the present day, it's pretty obvious that capitalism is an unregulated playground for sociopaths.
Good lord. An intelligent reply. Where am I?
It's not just the social contract but the focus on rights. Conservatives tend to focus on negative freedoms, or 'freedom from' something while Liberals tend to focus on positive freedoms, or 'freedom to' do something. A conservative will say, "I want freedom from your taxation," while a liberal might say, "we want freedom to have health care covered."
The Chalice and the Blade is a great book. You may also like Saharasia by James DeMeo, and The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, which cover related themes.
By the sound of things, what with the housing crisis, you being an apprentice carpenter (good career move!) and me being in the high paying field of computers, I'll be supporting you. But I don't mind, it's a small price to pay for social stability.
I'd love to get the name of your accountant, because even when I was making your salary, I never got everything back on my returns. The last time I paid nothing in taxes was when I was working part time and going to college. You didn't even read the link I posted, did you? Can't have those pesky facts interfering with your preconceived world view.
What makes you assume I'm not fighting for what I believe in? What makes you think I enjoy being screwed over by both sides?
By saying you focus on local issues, you are as much as agreeing with me that on a national level, there isn't a viable option. What do you mean your choice isn't on the list? Why don't you just get up on your hind legs and fight for it? Right, you sure are so superior.
Right, because there are enough full time, well paying jobs for everyone, and the system would continue to function perfectly if no one did the minimum wage jobs. Get real.
And you are just delusional about the income tax. Payroll tax IS income tax, you moron. You have been grossly misled: Look here and follow the links to more info if you need to. If you make $16.73 an hour, you are SOLIDLY in the bottom 50%. The median income is about $23 per hour. Do YOU pay no income tax?
Eh? What's your actual beef with the ideas? I suppose you're a individualist, free market libertarian who would rather use coercion to enforce your unilateral ideas about private ownership of natural resources and take away my right to go wherever my legs will take me and make use of whatever someone else isn't directly using.
Agreed, partly. I'd rather have a Clinton style fiscally responsible Democrat who inherited a broken economy and still managed to lower taxes, increase wealth, and increase government services by doing away with waste.
You can opt out. Leave the country if you don't like it. Fifty percent of Americans pay no income tax? You've been watching too much Fox News. That statement doesn't even pass a basic sanity check, and if it were true, it would mean that a huge number of Americans were unemployed or living below the poverty line. Which would be all the more reason for them to demand more equitable treatment.
Jesus christ on a fucking pogo stick, go back and reread that post. Here's the relevant sentence: "the Democrats (and Republicans) in the House and Senate are just as complacent in whatever damage has been done,"
That poster was using the word complacent WRONG. You can't be just as complacent IN something, but you can be just as complicit in something. Nice try, but you fail.
Right, in your fantasy world, everything is fair, the powerful all got their power by hard work and determination, the powerless are that way because they are weak and don't deserve any power, and anyone who complains is not taking responsibility for their lives. That tells me a lot about you, and none of it is good.
Wow. A 'you live in your parents' basement' joke. What a stinging rejoinder. You have discovered my shameful secret and wounded me to the core by exposing my basement dwelling to my peers. I shall slink off and trouble you no more.
Oh please. The 'big mean government is coercing me with guns' argument is so old and tired. If you don't like it, go some place else. There's plenty of uninhabited land in the world where you can set up a homestead and no one will ever even know. No one is holding a gun to your head and making you participate in society. You do so because you benefit more by doing so than by leaving, and you know it.
The thing that gets me about you libertarian types is how hypocritical you all are about coercion. It's perfectly okay to use coercion to enforce your unilateral ideas about property and take away MY rights to go wherever my legs will take me. That's okay, but using 'coercion' to ensure that everyone has enough to eat before allowing anyone to profit outrageously from the hard work of other people is communism.
You people do not believe in individual responsibility. You simply support the individual's right to amass power and use it against others with less power. You hate any method such as democracy or rule of law that the less powerful can use to band together to protect themselves against the more powerful. You see yourselves as superior to the rest of us, and the right you want protected is your right to prey on us.