(My apologies if this post is a little more terse than I would otherwise like - I just wrote it twice before, with my computer both times crashing right before I finished it. Grr.)
Private property is only useful to those who own property. Private property amounts to a contract between property owners to defend each other's property from the have-nots. As a concept, it is of no use to those who don't own property. Why should any non-property owner respect your claim of ownership?
Because whether or not they want to admit it, they'd like to have private property and to have it respected. And in fact they DO have some private property - their own bodies if nothing else - and if they've got any self-respect at all they'll be pretty adamant about it being respected by others as well. Your whole point here that the assertion of property rights is a fiction put forth by property owners to further their own interests can be turned right around, into the claim that the denial of property rights is just put forth by the poor to further their own interests. How do you decide who is right? Ask yourself, would it be better for everyone to own property, or for no one to own property? For everyone to be their own king, or everyone to be everyone else's slave? I don't remember who said it, but there's a quote along the lines of "the problem with capitalism is not that there are too many capitalists, but too few". The problem is not the notion of private property but the fact that some people have so little of it and that having more makes it so much easier to get more from those who have less than you- things which are very serious problems that need addressing, but not by abolishing or crippling the very notion of private property.
Now, assuming you do respect private ownership, do you respect collective ownership? If my wife and I own property together, may we not set the rules for that property together? May we not choose to elect someone to manage our collective property? If we do, is it fair for someone else to come in and tell us how to use that property? Now, substitute "US citizens" for "my wife and I." We have elected someone to manage our collective property, known as the United States. Now you want to come in and tell us what to do, because somehow, us deciding what to do with our collective property means we are coercing you into going along with our decisions. If you don't like how we, the US citizens, are managing our property, you can get the hell off of it or go through channels to change things. You can't claim any kind of moral high ground though.
I'm glad the conversation went this way, because I was going to use this very analogy in response to your earlier response to me. If the government was nothing but a big non-profit foundation dedicated to managing the jointly owned property of the citizenry, I don't think any libertarian would have any problem with it. The problem comes when it extends itself into meddling with people's private affairs - not just taking or regulating their private possessions but also their own bodies. Personally I think that such collective ownership of public goods is a pretty good idea, and one that I would support creating in a world with no existing government; but such a collective body must limit itself to managing the jointly owned property, and stay out of people's private business.
Furthermore, going beyond even existing libertarian thought and into the realm of my own philosophy, I'd hold that even if we were to grant that everything in America was the collective property of all Americans, that still would not legitimate majoritarian, democratic control of it. I believe that the just principle for the governance of collective property is that no co-owner (or group thereof, even a majority) may deny any co-owner the right to act upon or with their collective property, unless such an act would deny the equal rights of other co-owners. This nicely mirrors the Lockean notion of rights limited only by the equal rights
You are a free person who is a citizen of a Republic. Here in America, we elect people to make plans for us, because we are free, and we choose to do that. Sorry if you don't like that, but the majority of citizens do, so it is unfair of you to force your 'no government is good government' view on the rest of us. That'd be all well and good if the majority was just getting together, deciding to all pitch in to pay some guy to make plans for them, and then all voluntarily following those plans. That would be free and no libertarian, anarchist, or otherwise leave-me-the-hell-alone type would complain about that. But when your majority drags along those people who want nothing to do you or your plans, and even forces them at gunpoint to fund those plans, that stops being free.
Nobody is trying to force "no government" on anyone. Nobody is saying that you all can't get together, form a collective entity, direct it to perform public services, and pay for those out of your own pocket. People are just saying, "hey, thanks but no thanks, I can do without that or find it better elsewhere, so leave me out of it". You're all free to go do your thing; those who don't want to do your thing are free to abstain. It's no more right for the majority to force the minority to participate than it would be for the minority to prohibit the voluntary cooperative action of the majority. But "voluntary" is the key word there, and states as we know them are by definition not voluntary...
That was a joy to read. I agree with #1, but not with #2.
Why thank you; and yes, #2 usually spurs further discussion, though I'm surprised you commented on the wage-labor issue of it rather than the rent-and-interest issue. The wage-labor bit was actually an afterthought of mine; originally I was concerned primarily with housing rent, then the implications on interest hit me, and then it dawned on me that this would catch wage labor too. But the former issues are the ones that usually get the most OMGWTFBBQ responses out of Slashdot libertarians here. So I'm rather curious - what's your take on that part of it? Any problems with abolishing the institutions of rent and interest?
#1 implies, if I understand it, that Bob cannot pollute water that will naturally, downstream, become Alice's. That's good, and feasible.
Sort of, but it's not so much an issue of one person's thing becoming another's; it's that they all jointly own it and so all jointly have claim to it, exactly as shareholders all have a say in how their joint property is used, except that the group which jointly owns public property is unlimited. Private property is defined, that is, made private, by its exclusion of others. You can include more and more people in the ownership of a piece of property, but so long as there is even one person excluded from it, it is still private. Public property is something which *everyone* owns; rather than "unowned" resources as classical liberals like Locke thought of them. That said, it may make more sense for local resources to be owned locally, rather than being *truly* public. The people who live around a lake all jointly own that lake; the people of Earth all jointly own the atmosphere and oceans; that sort of thing.
The straightforward application of this is to subject it to a straight up majority vote, but I've been giving some thought lately to the idea that jointly owned property should perhaps be subject to more individualistic rules. More technically, I mean that the majority (of owners in a given piece of property) cannot deny any minority (of owners of that property) the free use of that property as they (the minority) see fit, so long as such a use does not deny any others (with a stake in that property) the equal use of it. The two examples I conceive of to illustrate this are: (A) Public sidewalks, which in my system would be jointly owned by the people of the municipality where they are built. It seems unjust that a 51% bloc of the population there could decree that, for example, certain identifying articles of clothing must be worn by anyone of a certain gender/color/etc who wishes to walk upon the public sidewalk. And (B) a mill built and jointly owned by three neighboring farmers on the frontier somewhere, which two of said farmers decide they'd rather convert into, say, a factory, denying the third farmer the value of that mill which he helped build so he could mill his grains, and building a factory that he doesn't want or need in its place. If they really want to do that, they can buy out his share of the mill - at a price that he (the dissenting farmer) finds acceptable.
#2, as I understand it, violates the right of people to voluntarily enter into wage employment contracts. Why any employer would prefer such a thing is a genuine mystery to me, but they all seem to want to save me the trouble of paying separate bills to health insurance companies. In a lot of situations, having # workers available in case there is a paying customer is a genuine necessity. Would you deprive all owners of such businesses of their right to continue to do business?
I think perhaps you've misunderstood me. For one, I'm not intending to prohibit any actions whatsoever, rather to make certain contracts unenforcable; people are still free to enter into any gentleman's agreements that they want, but they are just that and no more, not legal contracts. Just like how accepting money from someone cannot legally obligate you to vote a certain
My position is roughly the American libertarian position (everything is permissible except actions upon a person's property, including their own body, against that person's will; and physical coercion is justified exactly to the extent that it is necessary to enforce that law and that law only), but with the following rather significant modifications:
1) All and only physical things are property; but not all property is private. This both excludes any form of intellectual property (which is logically incompatible with physical property rights), and solves environmental concerns (i.e. justifies prohibiting certain acts for the sake of environmental protection) because everything which is not a person (self-owned, owned by none other) or private property (exclusively owned by some) is public property (inclusively owned by all), meaning all have a legitimate right to complain about abuses of such public resources as air, water, wilderness, etc, just as they have right to complain about theft or vandalism of their own private property.
2) Rights are unwaivable and cannot be signed away in contracts. This seemingly intuitive premise (you can't sell yourself into slavery, you can't sell your vote, etc) has rather interesting and far-reaching 'socialist' implications when taken to its logical conclusion regarding property rights, because to rent something is to temporarily sign away your rights in it without actually selling it (which is not waiving right you have but rather agreeing that the property now belongs to someone else, which fact alters your rights in the thing). In renting, you agree to waive your right to exclude some person from using your property in exchange for some sort of payment from that person. But as rights are unwaivable, all such rental contracts are invalid; you can let someone use your property, and you can accept money from them for doing so, but you cannot sell them the *right* to use your property, for so long as it remains yours, you have the right to exclude them from its use and you cannot waive that right. So if you want to make money off your property, you've got to sell it; can't rent it out.
But wait, there's more - interest is really just rent on money, so interest clauses are gone too. Between that and rent, there go the major ways that the rich can get richer just by being rich. But there's still more - wage labor is really nothing but renting *yourself*, giving another temporary rights to control you in exchange for money. So wage labor is out too. Between these three things, economic relationships will need to be drastically revised. Instead of renting, people will have to sell on installment - and more people will end up owning their own homes. Instead of loaning money, people will have to invest (buy stock), and take on a share of the risk in the business venture they're loaning to; or for personal loan purposes, community-owned mutual banks or credit unions (with jointly owned investment portfolios to cover the expenses) can be set up. And instead of labor contracts, people can be paid straight-up for their services as contractors (e.g. I pay you $X to accomplish Y for me; rather than $X/hr or $X/yr to do follow my orders between the hours of 9AM and 6PM), or for more regular jobs, to encourage loyalty, let the workers own stock in the company, making their regular income off of dividends, with frequent "bonuses for completing projects" as they also contract themselves to the company they partially own. This way, more people will be self-employed, or at least part-owners of their own company. Thus, the employer-employee class distinction goes away along with the lessor-lessee distinction. You just have a bunch of people freely trading goods and services amongst each other, all of them equals. A free and fair marketplace, where everyone truly has equal opportunity, not in the "tough shit if you're born poor" sense that many self-proclaimed libertarians mean it, but in a sense where already having wealth won't allow you to sit on your laurels forever.
Anyone who takes an idea and expands to into a universal absolute (with the exception of a few situations where this is reasonable, such as in math and physics) is a fundamentalist. That's what the Islamic terrorists are doing, is what strong libertarians do (which you appear to be, although you could be an objectivist--yet another form of fundamentalism).
Logic is not just the domain of math and physics. Logic applies everywhere. And it is the tendency seek out axiomatized systems whereby all the correct answers can be logically deduced from a simple set of premises that leads many techies to idealistic philosophies like libertarianism. ("Idealistic" in the sense of "utopian", not "immaterialist"; and not pejorative, either). A libertarian reasons that freedom is self-evidently good, and trespass against it self-evidently bad. Therefore anything that trespasses against someone's freedom, even things that do some good, are on the whole bad. The conjunction of a true proposition P and a false proposition Q is, all together, false: if not Q, then not (P and Q), even if P is true. Likewise with some good action A (say, feeding the poor) and some bad action B (say, stealing from someone): if B is bad, then (A and B) is bad, even if A is good. Though I will admit, there is an annoying tendency of many libertarians to argue against "A and B" so often that as soon as anyone says "A" they assume that implies "B", and thus end up arguing against "A" on the grounds that not-B, without considering that "A" might not logically imply "B", no matter how often they seem to come packaged together.
Anyway, that tangent aside, the difference between this kind of logical idealism and the fundamentalism that drives terrorism, religious persecution, etc, is that if you can successfully show this kind of idealist that his logic is invalid, or that his axioms may not be spot-on, then he will come to different conclusions, and you will have changed his mind. A fundamentalist, on the other hand, believes that he is right because he is right goddamnit, and any argument to the contrary is to be ignored or belittled. The flaw comes not from taking things to their logical conclusions, the problem is being unwilling to examine your logic and your premises to make sure your arguments are sound. I agree entirely with another poster in this thread that the fundamentalists of every religion are more correct about the teachings of their religion than those who pick and choose what part of the religion to keep and which to throw away. This doesn't mean I like religious fundamentalists better than religious moderates: it means that religious fundamentalists are more true to their religion, and the ridiculousness of the fundamentalist version of a religion is a condemnation of the religion altogether. It's a form of argument to absurdity: "look, if you REALLY believed that book was the divine word of God himself, you'd be acting like a crazy nut job like those guys." (P entails Q). "I see you agree that they are crazy nut jobs and that that is bad." (not Q) "Therefore, you shouldn't believe that, because people like that are the logical end of that path." (not P).
You can use that same kind of argument against a non-religious philosophy too, showing a particular flavor of political ideology, e.g. libertarianism, to have absurd consequences as it is presently formulated. And if a person holding to that ideology sticks his fingers in his ears and says "la la la la la I can't hear you" then yes, he is being a fundamentalist too. But if he merely rebuts your argument by saying that logical consequences of these apparently self-evident premises necessitate that such-and-such, and he refuses to ignore that logic and you can't point out any flaws in it, he's not being a fundamentalist, he's being rational. Now, if he were really rational he would listen to the counter-arguments against him, accept those such arguments that are themselves logically sound, and then figure out how to reconcile his existing reasoning with this
Those of us who are not in the USA really do not know what that means despite many efforts to explain it and the "anarchists that want the government to protect them from their slaves" cracks that I hope are way off the mark. "Libertarian" in America means very roughly the same thing as it does in Europe - tending much more toward permissiveness than regulation, prohibition, or obligation; favoring freedom or liberty, hence the name - except, and this is a pretty major exception to a lot of people, European libertarians are generally more anarcho-socialist, while American libertarians are generally more anarcho-capitalist.
The technical issue they disagree over is private property rights; European libertarians (and anarcho-socialists) generally disavow that any such things exist, saying people have rights only in themselves, and everything else is public property, with no one having any right (or any legitimate basis of obtaining such a right) to exclude others from the use of anything but their own body. They hold that the notion of property rights is the very foundation of government, with landowners becoming little tyrants of their own little kingdoms. Contrarily, American libertarians (and anarcho-capitalists) argue that private property is fundamental and intrinsic to the very notion of personal liberty; that without receiving control of the product of your labor, your labor is being stolen by society, and you are effectively enslaved by them, as you become dependant on society leaving you the fruits of your labor to enjoy, since you have no legitimate claim to take them for your own. Thus, they argue that the abrogation of private property rights is the very foundation of government, with the people at large supporting or at least condoning the violation of individuals' rights by the state.
Technically, most American libertarians aren't anarchists, but minarchists: they hold that government is good precisely to the extent that it is safeguarding people's rights to life, liberty, and property; less government than that is a failure to serve the public good, and more government than that is a violation of those same rights that government is supposed to protect. Though I'm not European and so can't personally vouch on its usage, I get the impression that "libertarian" in Europe means basically "anarchist" (in a sense of that term that excludes anarcho-capitalists), rather than a parallel minarchist socialist position.
The American libertarian philosophy could be nicely summed up with the motto "mind your own business".
Disclaimer: not all people in America who call themselves libertarians are of this persuasion, but the U.S.'s Libertarian Party holds roughly to the description I've given here, and a lot of people here on Slashdot, and a lot of former Republicans who got tired of the theocratic bullshit in that party, call themselves libertarians and hold roughly this same position too. But from my personal experience both online and in the streets, there are a good number of self-proclaimed "libertarians" who are just as suspicious and disliking of big business and unrestrained capitalism as European-style anarcho-socialist "libertarians", even while agreeing with the private-property-is-essential-to-freedom argument; people who look for interesting ways of reconciling the apparent logic of said argument with the harsh reality of the harm that lassie-faire capitalism can allow. I think I've got a rather interesting solution myself, if anybody would care to hear it...
Maybe in time it will expanded be with Bush... There _are_ similarities with the nazi-regime and the current situation in the USA... Kind of ironic since the US was needed to stop nazi-Germany I find it deliciously ironic that you are comparing the Bush regime to the Nazi regime in a post explaining Godwin's law. Now I'm not criticising that comparison here... but that's pretty damn funny.
"No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law." I've always been a little hazy about the wording of this amendment, specifically that "but" in the end. Is it saying that soldiers shall not be quartered against the consent of the house's owner EXCEPT in a manner to be prescribed by law (i.e. soldier shall only be quartered against an owner's consent in circumstances that the law says is ok)? Because that seems like a rather useless protection - 'the government can't do this except in ways that they say they can'.
Or is it rather saying that soldiers shall not be quartered against the consent of the house's owners, RATHER, they shall be quartered in some some other manner, to be prescribed by law later on (i.e. we're not specifying here in the constitution how they shall be quartered, except to say that it shall not be in this way)? That seems a more sane and useful thing to say, but it's not clear to me that that's what those words there actually mean.
There is no universal reference frame. (At least, so say both Newtonian mechanics and GR.) Actually, Newton believed quite strongly in the existence of an absolute space, or as we'd say today, a universal reference frame. Samuel Clarke famously argued at length about this, somewhat on Newton's behalf, against Newton's contemporary and rival Gottfried Leibniz. Wiki link about their correspondance here.
The problem I have with there being no universal reference frame shows up with centrifugal forces. If I'm allowed to imagine that the rest of the universe is spinning and my merry-go-round is not, why do I get pulled to the outside? And would centrifugal forces exist in a universe that consisted of nothing but me, a merry-go-round, and a third "reference object"?
Samuel Clarke's famous "rotating bucket" thought experiment claimed to show the absolute nature of space (i.e. a universal reference frame) like this, imagining a spinning bucket, filled with water which is also spinning and thus at rest relative to the bucket, in a universe where nothing but this bucket and the water exist (and let us imagine a lid on the bucket so the water does not fly out without Earth's gravity to hold it in). This experiment is meant to show that space must be absolute because the water and bucket are at rest relative to one another (and thus all matter in this imagined universe), but as we are led to imagine that the water appears drawn toward the sides of the bucket as though the bucket were rotating, we must conclude that the bucket is rotating relative to something. As no other objects exist in this imagined universe, that something must be space itself - or so Clarke intended to prove by this.
The relationalist objection usually raised to this thought experiment is that it cannot actually be conducted, as we cannot observe a spinning bucket of water in a universe where ourselves and the rest of the universe do not exist. Thus, we can't conclude that the rest of the universe has no effect, or that spinning the rest of the universe around the still bucket would not produce the same effect as rotating the bucket in a still universe.
But I believe that beyond that, we can clearly show via another thought experiment that if a still bucket of water in an otherwise empty universe were suddenly to become surrounded by massive objects rotating around it, that the masses of those objects - that is to say, the force of gravity exerted by them on the bucket and the water - would in itself draw the water toward the edges of the bucket in exactly the same manner. As we would classically describe water so drawn out in a spinning bucket as doing so because of its inertia interacting with the centripetal force of the bucket walls, to show that this same effect can be seen as caused by the force of gravity exerted by the rest of the universe on the water (and its subsequent interaction with the bucket walls) will show conclusively that inertia is a result of the force of gravity exerted by the rest of the universe upon the "massive" object in question. In short, I believe that that inertia (and thereby centripetal/centrifugal force) can be shown, by the following thought experiment, to be simply the product of what we might call "background gravitation".
Consider first our still bucket, filled with water, sitting alone in space. We will imagine the bucket as being held "still" relative to any other motion, so that we can examine simply the effects of other masses in the universe upon the water. (This situation is indiscernible from imagining the bucket moving in an otherwise still universe). Now, imagine that two equally massive objects come into being on either side of this bucket. Their gravity would draw the free- floating water toward the sides of the bucket, and so the water would pool on either side of the bucket. Imagining three such equal masses, evenly spaced around the bucket, would produce a more neutral distribution of gravity fields across the water, and more and more such masses evenly surrounding the bucket along it's axis would produce an outward force similar to the "centrifugal force" experienced by a rotating bucket - though this is not the point of my proof. If we then imagine even more such masses surrounding the bucket above and below, a sphere of mass encompassing the bucket, then all the gravitational forces would cancel and the water would be left in free fall again; that is, dr
Actually, I think a better argument is the predictiveness argument... Predictiveness and testability are the same thing. What you test about a theory are its predictions. If it makes no predictions, you can't test it; and while there are other, practical reasons we wouldn't be able to test a theory, it's the "is there some test that *could* disprove this theory, even if we ourselves can't run that test here and now?" that people are talking about when they speak of testability, and that question just is equivalent to "does this theory make any predictions which may or may not turn out to be accurate?"
Religion and philosophy are flawed ways of finding things out. You seem to have a layman's misguided understanding of what exactly 'philosophy' is.
Philosophy is not sitting around speculating "hmm maybe all of reality is made out of water (or fire, etc)!" and then calling it a day. Philosophy is not baseless speculation. Philosophy is the attempt to reason about absolute, universal truths which can be known a priori. In that sense, philosophy is much like mathematics. Actually I'm fond of referring to philosophy as "math with words"; philosophy is ultimately concerned with the development and application of qualitative logic, analysis of the concepts we're asking questions about and the framework within we conduct our investigations. Philosophy, just like math, doesn't by itself tell you much about what sort of things actually exist out there in the world, but rather is a tool to use in such investigations. As I like to put it, philosophy is about figuring out just what the hell are we talking about, exactly what questions are we really asking anyway, and how do we go about answering them? In some circumstances the answers to questions become patently obvious if you just understand the question itself, and this are the sort of 'a priori' or 'analytic' truths that philosophy comes up with.
The scientific method *is* a philosophical position: it is an answer to questions along the lines of "how do we answer questions about what sort of things exist and how they behave?", and its answer is "make observations, construct a model that matches those observations, make predictions from that model, test those predictions against new observations, repeat as necessary". So-called 'fideism' (faith-based 'reasoning') is another philosophical position: that you can arrive at the truth just by 'having faith' in some strange mysterious way. If you can't tell, I'm inclined to side with the former, scientific position. But my point is, philosophy is not an intermediate stance between religion and science. Religion and science are both grounded in their own respective philosophical stances. We (humanity) didn't go from religious ways of thought to philosophical ways of thought to scientific ways of thought. We went from religious ways of thought, stepped back for a moment, got philosophical, and asked "wait is that really the right way of going about this sort of thing? isn't there a better way?" and then eventually settled on the scientific method as that better way.
Philosophy is not on the same categorical level as religion or science; it's a step back to a more abstract level. That is the quintessential, defining characteristic of philosophy: it's a second-order, "meta" discipline, pulling your nose out of what you're doing, setting aside your preconceived notions, and questioning the very methods by which you go about asking and answering questions. Even what I'm doing right here is philosophy; one of the subjects within philosophy is "metaphilosophy", which asks what exactly is philosophy, what is its purpose, can there be any progress made, etc. Personally I'm of the opinion that the purpose of philosophy is as I've described here, to clarify our methods of reasoning and come up with better ways of asking and answering questions, and to that extent the greatest progress yet made in philosophy could very well be the idea of the scientific method.
Of course even if we found a way to tap those flows, corporations, governments and religions would all try to claim control of it, or abolish it as contrary to their plans. Not to mention the wise old adage, TANSTAAFL: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. If you could somehow tap energy from the Earth's magnetic fields, the Earth's magnetic fields would weaken. And unlike most other power sources on Earth (excepting nuclear), the planet's magnetism is not solar-powered, and the Earth will not recharge its magnetic field naturally. The Earth's magnetosphere is responsible for many important life-sustaining functions, such as protecting us all, in non-polar regions at least, from the more harmful bits of radiation coming from the sun. (I suppose you might try to harvest the deflected radiation which causes auroras at the poles, and so indirectly take advantage of the magnetosphere without depleting it).
Did you ever see the movie "The Core"? It would be something like that, except less lame and far more problematic to fix. (Most likely whatever method you used to tap the energy from the core could simply be reversed, since electric motors are all capable of being electric generators and vice versa, so you wouldn't have to mount an exciting manned expedition deep into the Earth's mantle to fix it ala The Core. But, that would require that you supply even more energy than you've been taking out. Imagine if, when we ran out of oil, we not only had to find an alternative fuel source but had to spend it all on somehow creating new oil deposits, lest we all die from some resultant catastrophe. Where the hell are we going to get all that energy from, and why weren't we using it to begin with?)
I've an interesting anecdote along these lines (no pun intended).
The people I work for are somewhat floofy new-age spiritualists. During my first week at this job, they had some 'feng-shuei' person over with a pair of straight metal rods with little right-angle bends at the ends for handles - "dowsing rods" - to detect where the "magnetic ley lines" of the building were, and thus how to align the furniture. Said person would walk around the building, "dowsing rods" in hand, and every so often then would swing together, indicating that they had passed over a "magnetic ley line". Needless to say I was highly suspicious of the accuracy of such crude equipment and methods in detecting such subtle energies. After watching this for some time, the new-age consultant person finally left, and gave her "dowsing rods" to my boss to keep. I asked the boss if I could see the "dowsing rods", and she said sure, but what will I do with them, I don't know how to use them.
So I held them out parallel in front of me like the floofy new-age consultant had, stared at them intently, and - voila! The rods crossed! I relaxed my gaze and they became parallel again. I stared intently again and the rods crossed again. My boss was amazed! How was I doing that, she asked. And I replied, "I'm tilting my hands ever so slightly."
She was... disenchanted, I suppose is the word. Though it doesn't seem to have dissuaded her from similar beliefs, such as her fear of "EMFs... or EMRs or ELFs or whatever the bad ones are", coming out of the wiring in her bedroom. I guess some people just don't care to grok real physics, and prefer to see magic dangers and health-improving furniture arrangement strategies in this spooky electromagnetism stuff.
No, the GPL follows _exactly_ the spirit of copyright law: That software can be distributed according to the wishes of the copyright holder. The GPL uses an ingenious way to set these conditions in a way that benefits society as a whole, which is exactly what the intention of copyright law was all the time. Except that GPL achieves this goal, while copyright law often doesn't. I agree entirely; however, the point I was making is that the *only* such benefit which GPL licensing provides but which the abolition of copyright altogether does not provide is the propagation of source code, so if we're considering getting rid of intellectual property laws altogether, but someone raises the point "but wait! then we won't be able to oblige people to distribute source code with binaries via the GPL!", is that really a strong enough reason to counter whatever arguments we have for abolishing copyright altogether? (The person I was replying to, you'll note, was saying that we should get rid of patents etc, but that we need copyright to make the GPL enforceable).
Ubiquitous GPL-like licenses on some sort of information that does not have the source/binary distinction would have no practical differences from a world where such information was not protected by copyright law at all. Say music, for example: if all music was licensed under "you may use, modify and distribute this music as you please so long as any derivative works you make from it are likewise licensed", then all music would be exactly as free as if music was not protected by copyright law. You would have absolutely no reason to preserve copyright law so as to preserve the strength of such licenses; you'd only want copyright law to preserve other license clauses, such as demanding that recipients pay money if they wish to redistribute the code, or that they bundle the sheet music along with every recording they distribute, or something like that.
The capitalists amongst us will of course say that we need copyright law to enforce the former sort of clause because people deserve to get paid for their intellectual works; and the socialists amongst us will likely say that we need copyright law to enforce the latter sort of clauses, like the GPL, for the benefit of society; but as more of a libertarian/anarchist myself, while I agree that paying artists/authors is a good thing, and source code being freely available is a good thing, do we (via our government) really have any moral authority to restrict what people may say (or print, or transmit) in order to further such ends? GPL proponents seem to think it's fine in order to further the latter (social) ends but not the former (financial) ends; but I'm not inclined towards that sort of ends-justify-the-means reasoning, so if we've got the authority to do that then we've got the authority to do that, regardless of why we want to do that; and if we don't, then we don't, and copyright law should be abolished altogether, even if it means some people will be allowed to keep their source code secret.
Though if you think about it, in a copyright-free world, why would anybody even bother to do so?
Copyright laws are still important though, as they care for software licences like GPL to not be abused. Most GPL proponents (here on Slashdot at least) are fond of claiming that the GPL is only necessary because copyright law exists and that without copyright law there'd be no need for the GPL. Of course technically the GPL does not provide the same rights as a public domain license would (which is what you'd have everywhere if there were no copyright law), since it obliges you to distribute the source code along with any binaries... but if it weren't for that forced source/binary coupling, the GPL would basically be a viral pubic domain license, so to speak. That is, something like "I hereby waive any claims to control how this information may be used or distributed, to anyone who agrees to waive such claims over any derivative works they may create from it." And a copyright-free world would be identical to a world where everything was distributed under such a license; so really, copyright is not necessary to enforce the popularly understood "spirit" of the GPL; it's only necessary to enforce the propagation of source code wherever the binaries go.
The GP's point was that the GGP's post was a copy and paste of a very old troll (which I myself remember from comp.sys.mac.* newsgoups as far back as '94 or so), which has been reposted for over a decade with nothing but the computer specs changed somewhat; and that this particular troll failed to update the specs to anything currently on the market, and so fails even as a respectable troll. (A "new" G5? Like the kind that they don't even make anymore?)
Besides which, even back then this troll was bunk, and no modern Mac should even show you a progress bar at all for copying a 17MB file. IIRC my 2000-vintage G4 only flashes one for less than a second on tens-of-megs (e.g. 30-50 MB) files, and that's already seven years out of date.
Aren't you the one always accusing Dave whatshisname here of constantly defending the government? And now you're calling someone a wacko (or inferring it at least) because he expresses a strong distrust of the government?
Back on the topic at hand, I'd like to reconcile your two positions by saying that ubiquitous surveillance would increase justice only in a sufficiently just society. In my eyes it's much like firearms - in the hands of bad people, be they cops or civillians, they can cause great harm; in the hands of good people, be they cops or civillians, they can be a great equalizer and make bringing true criminals to justice much easier. The exact same is true of surveillance. It's just a powerful tool; whether it serves justice or injustice depends entirely on the character of those who wield it. If society on the whole is more just than unjust, ubiquitous surveillance would promote justice, just as would ubiquitous firearms.
That said, since I see no essential difference in character between cops and civillians (i.e. cops are just people like you and me), my opinion on surveillance is the same as that on guns: there should be just standards of when they are and are not OK to use, and police should get in just as deep shit as your or I would for violating those standards; and conversely, if you or I were to use them in accordance with those standards, to serve the ends of true justice, then you or I would deserve the same honor as a cop who did the same. The only thing that distinguishes a cop from anyone else is that the cop is paid to use such tools in a just manner, while you and I are only obliged to refrain from using them unjustly, and other not obliged to use them at all. If cops fail to use such tools effectively to the ends of justice, they should be fired for incompetence on the job; but if they use those tools unjustly, that's just as much a crime as anyone else doing so.
Wow, a lot of "old man" responses here. For the record, I *am* this generation - I'm only 25, probably younger than most of you here. I'm not talking about this generation versus the last or even the one before that; and I'm not talking about people today versus people thousands of years ago, either. (I'm quite familiar with that famous Socrates/Plato quote about 'kids these days' from 2400 years ago). Nor am I talking about damn unruly kids on my lawn versus the well-mannered and orderly grown-ups. I'm talking specifically of rule by intimidation versus rule by respect - remember this conversation came from one about whether police are or should be intimidating - and contrasting the way things unabashedly are today (everybody legislating their way into everybody else's lives, slowly and gladly turning us into a police state) with the way things supposedly were in the early days of this country (with at least some true respect for individual liberty, not just the lip service it gets today).
And, as I said in another post, I'm not even convinced that things really were so good, even in that one respect, "back then" - for all I know those lofty ideals only ever existed on paper. I wasn't around back then and I'm not a historian so I can't say for sure. But the layman's impression I get is that there was, once upon a time, some degree of popular respect for those ideals enshrined in great documents like the Declaration of Independence, a respect which is all but gone today; and if there's any truth to that notion, then those earlier times were, at least in that regard, more civilized than now.
Crime rates have been trending downwards for quite some time now. The only thing that's been trending upwards are arrests for drug violations. I'm not talking about "crime", I'm talking about force, as in violence. Crime is doing something that the government deems impermissible, which may or may not involve the use of force. Force (in this context) is physically doing something to someone against their will, which may or may not be criminal. It is possible to use force, even unjust force (for not all force is unjust), to reduce crime, but that is not necessarily a good thing; it just means that the use of force by the government successfully coerces people to do what the government says. A successful totalitarian police state will have a very low crime rate, but a very high amount of force being used to achieve that.
That is largely what I was talking about. When America was founded, it was founded on the principle that everyone's life is their own business except to the limited extent that we've got to make each others' lives each others' business in order for us all to survive and get along together. Granted, these principles may have existed nowhere but on paper and in the minds of the few people who wrote the words on that paper, but that was the standard that was set back then, whether it was met or not, and I get the impression that at least some notable portion of the populace backed those ideas back then. Nowadays, most everybody unabashedly believes that everybody else's business is their business and that "we" can get together and vote on matters that "we" have no rightful say over - say whether someone grows and consumes in his own back yard some particular plant that "we" disapprove of - and that "we" can use force to get "our" way in such matters. In a civil society, one based on respect and not the threat of force, those who wished others not to grow or consume such plants would try to convince them, maybe via reason or via emotion but not any presumed authority backed by the threat of force, for they would (by hypothesis) respect that person and his right to determine his own life. And if they did use the threat of force to try to coerce the person in question, that person would, if he had any respect for himself, stand up for his rights and not bow to threats like that. But today, since everyone thinks they've a right to meddle in everybody else's lives and send in men with guns to make sure things go their way, those same people all bow to whatever the majority (or at least most-vocal) will is, and look poorly upon anyone who dares stand up for themselves, calling them selfish, egotistical, violent, and dangerous - when really, it's the busybodies and their enforcers who are guilty of these accusations, not the victims of their organized violence.
This focus on the government being a perpetrator of violent force is precisely why I rephrased the GGP to better capture what I gathered his notion to be. We got here in the conversation by way of the new police scooters not being intimidating enough; the GGP was noting that police should be approachable, not frightening, as they are here to serve and protect us, not to rule over us. Thus my point being that "law and society" deserve no inherent respect, for the law is just the command of the rulers; rather, justice inherently deserves respect, people inherently deserve respect, and a law deserves likewise only inasmuch as it is just (and society likewise only inasmuch as it is a mass of people). But "society" as some abstract collective entity, or "the law" as the command of such an entity (or its appointed delegates), deserve no respect in and of themselves.
As to when exactly "more civilized times" were, I admit that I was intentionally vague there, since I'm not entirely convinced that any times have ever been properly civilized. But the principles which this country were founded upon would, if followed, make a more civilized society than we have today (though still not perfectly so); so if there ever was an era when those principles truly prevailed, then it would have been a more civilized time than now.
Slashdot Mirror
Private property is only useful to those who own property. Private property amounts to a contract between property owners to defend each other's property from the have-nots. As a concept, it is of no use to those who don't own property. Why should any non-property owner respect your claim of ownership?
Because whether or not they want to admit it, they'd like to have private property and to have it respected. And in fact they DO have some private property - their own bodies if nothing else - and if they've got any self-respect at all they'll be pretty adamant about it being respected by others as well. Your whole point here that the assertion of property rights is a fiction put forth by property owners to further their own interests can be turned right around, into the claim that the denial of property rights is just put forth by the poor to further their own interests. How do you decide who is right? Ask yourself, would it be better for everyone to own property, or for no one to own property? For everyone to be their own king, or everyone to be everyone else's slave? I don't remember who said it, but there's a quote along the lines of "the problem with capitalism is not that there are too many capitalists, but too few". The problem is not the notion of private property but the fact that some people have so little of it and that having more makes it so much easier to get more from those who have less than you- things which are very serious problems that need addressing, but not by abolishing or crippling the very notion of private property.
Now, assuming you do respect private ownership, do you respect collective ownership? If my wife and I own property together, may we not set the rules for that property together? May we not choose to elect someone to manage our collective property? If we do, is it fair for someone else to come in and tell us how to use that property? Now, substitute "US citizens" for "my wife and I." We have elected someone to manage our collective property, known as the United States. Now you want to come in and tell us what to do, because somehow, us deciding what to do with our collective property means we are coercing you into going along with our decisions. If you don't like how we, the US citizens, are managing our property, you can get the hell off of it or go through channels to change things. You can't claim any kind of moral high ground though.
I'm glad the conversation went this way, because I was going to use this very analogy in response to your earlier response to me. If the government was nothing but a big non-profit foundation dedicated to managing the jointly owned property of the citizenry, I don't think any libertarian would have any problem with it. The problem comes when it extends itself into meddling with people's private affairs - not just taking or regulating their private possessions but also their own bodies. Personally I think that such collective ownership of public goods is a pretty good idea, and one that I would support creating in a world with no existing government; but such a collective body must limit itself to managing the jointly owned property, and stay out of people's private business.
Furthermore, going beyond even existing libertarian thought and into the realm of my own philosophy, I'd hold that even if we were to grant that everything in America was the collective property of all Americans, that still would not legitimate majoritarian, democratic control of it. I believe that the just principle for the governance of collective property is that no co-owner (or group thereof, even a majority) may deny any co-owner the right to act upon or with their collective property, unless such an act would deny the equal rights of other co-owners. This nicely mirrors the Lockean notion of rights limited only by the equal rights
Nobody is trying to force "no government" on anyone. Nobody is saying that you all can't get together, form a collective entity, direct it to perform public services, and pay for those out of your own pocket. People are just saying, "hey, thanks but no thanks, I can do without that or find it better elsewhere, so leave me out of it". You're all free to go do your thing; those who don't want to do your thing are free to abstain. It's no more right for the majority to force the minority to participate than it would be for the minority to prohibit the voluntary cooperative action of the majority. But "voluntary" is the key word there, and states as we know them are by definition not voluntary...
That was a joy to read. I agree with #1, but not with #2.
Why thank you; and yes, #2 usually spurs further discussion, though I'm surprised you commented on the wage-labor issue of it rather than the rent-and-interest issue. The wage-labor bit was actually an afterthought of mine; originally I was concerned primarily with housing rent, then the implications on interest hit me, and then it dawned on me that this would catch wage labor too. But the former issues are the ones that usually get the most OMGWTFBBQ responses out of Slashdot libertarians here. So I'm rather curious - what's your take on that part of it? Any problems with abolishing the institutions of rent and interest?
#1 implies, if I understand it, that Bob cannot pollute water that will naturally, downstream, become Alice's. That's good, and feasible.
Sort of, but it's not so much an issue of one person's thing becoming another's; it's that they all jointly own it and so all jointly have claim to it, exactly as shareholders all have a say in how their joint property is used, except that the group which jointly owns public property is unlimited. Private property is defined, that is, made private, by its exclusion of others. You can include more and more people in the ownership of a piece of property, but so long as there is even one person excluded from it, it is still private. Public property is something which *everyone* owns; rather than "unowned" resources as classical liberals like Locke thought of them. That said, it may make more sense for local resources to be owned locally, rather than being *truly* public. The people who live around a lake all jointly own that lake; the people of Earth all jointly own the atmosphere and oceans; that sort of thing.
The straightforward application of this is to subject it to a straight up majority vote, but I've been giving some thought lately to the idea that jointly owned property should perhaps be subject to more individualistic rules. More technically, I mean that the majority (of owners in a given piece of property) cannot deny any minority (of owners of that property) the free use of that property as they (the minority) see fit, so long as such a use does not deny any others (with a stake in that property) the equal use of it. The two examples I conceive of to illustrate this are: (A) Public sidewalks, which in my system would be jointly owned by the people of the municipality where they are built. It seems unjust that a 51% bloc of the population there could decree that, for example, certain identifying articles of clothing must be worn by anyone of a certain gender/color/etc who wishes to walk upon the public sidewalk. And (B) a mill built and jointly owned by three neighboring farmers on the frontier somewhere, which two of said farmers decide they'd rather convert into, say, a factory, denying the third farmer the value of that mill which he helped build so he could mill his grains, and building a factory that he doesn't want or need in its place. If they really want to do that, they can buy out his share of the mill - at a price that he (the dissenting farmer) finds acceptable.
#2, as I understand it, violates the right of people to voluntarily enter into wage employment contracts. Why any employer would prefer such a thing is a genuine mystery to me, but they all seem to want to save me the trouble of paying separate bills to health insurance companies. In a lot of situations, having # workers available in case there is a paying customer is a genuine necessity. Would you deprive all owners of such businesses of their right to continue to do business?
I think perhaps you've misunderstood me. For one, I'm not intending to prohibit any actions whatsoever, rather to make certain contracts unenforcable; people are still free to enter into any gentleman's agreements that they want, but they are just that and no more, not legal contracts. Just like how accepting money from someone cannot legally obligate you to vote a certain
My position is roughly the American libertarian position (everything is permissible except actions upon a person's property, including their own body, against that person's will; and physical coercion is justified exactly to the extent that it is necessary to enforce that law and that law only), but with the following rather significant modifications:
1) All and only physical things are property; but not all property is private. This both excludes any form of intellectual property (which is logically incompatible with physical property rights), and solves environmental concerns (i.e. justifies prohibiting certain acts for the sake of environmental protection) because everything which is not a person (self-owned, owned by none other) or private property (exclusively owned by some) is public property (inclusively owned by all), meaning all have a legitimate right to complain about abuses of such public resources as air, water, wilderness, etc, just as they have right to complain about theft or vandalism of their own private property.
2) Rights are unwaivable and cannot be signed away in contracts. This seemingly intuitive premise (you can't sell yourself into slavery, you can't sell your vote, etc) has rather interesting and far-reaching 'socialist' implications when taken to its logical conclusion regarding property rights, because to rent something is to temporarily sign away your rights in it without actually selling it (which is not waiving right you have but rather agreeing that the property now belongs to someone else, which fact alters your rights in the thing). In renting, you agree to waive your right to exclude some person from using your property in exchange for some sort of payment from that person. But as rights are unwaivable, all such rental contracts are invalid; you can let someone use your property, and you can accept money from them for doing so, but you cannot sell them the *right* to use your property, for so long as it remains yours, you have the right to exclude them from its use and you cannot waive that right. So if you want to make money off your property, you've got to sell it; can't rent it out.
But wait, there's more - interest is really just rent on money, so interest clauses are gone too. Between that and rent, there go the major ways that the rich can get richer just by being rich. But there's still more - wage labor is really nothing but renting *yourself*, giving another temporary rights to control you in exchange for money. So wage labor is out too. Between these three things, economic relationships will need to be drastically revised. Instead of renting, people will have to sell on installment - and more people will end up owning their own homes. Instead of loaning money, people will have to invest (buy stock), and take on a share of the risk in the business venture they're loaning to; or for personal loan purposes, community-owned mutual banks or credit unions (with jointly owned investment portfolios to cover the expenses) can be set up. And instead of labor contracts, people can be paid straight-up for their services as contractors (e.g. I pay you $X to accomplish Y for me; rather than $X/hr or $X/yr to do follow my orders between the hours of 9AM and 6PM), or for more regular jobs, to encourage loyalty, let the workers own stock in the company, making their regular income off of dividends, with frequent "bonuses for completing projects" as they also contract themselves to the company they partially own. This way, more people will be self-employed, or at least part-owners of their own company. Thus, the employer-employee class distinction goes away along with the lessor-lessee distinction. You just have a bunch of people freely trading goods and services amongst each other, all of them equals. A free and fair marketplace, where everyone truly has equal opportunity, not in the "tough shit if you're born poor" sense that many self-proclaimed libertarians mean it, but in a sense where already having wealth won't allow you to sit on your laurels forever.
Anyone who takes an idea and expands to into a universal absolute (with the exception of a few situations where this is reasonable, such as in math and physics) is a fundamentalist. That's what the Islamic terrorists are doing, is what strong libertarians do (which you appear to be, although you could be an objectivist--yet another form of fundamentalism).
Logic is not just the domain of math and physics. Logic applies everywhere. And it is the tendency seek out axiomatized systems whereby all the correct answers can be logically deduced from a simple set of premises that leads many techies to idealistic philosophies like libertarianism. ("Idealistic" in the sense of "utopian", not "immaterialist"; and not pejorative, either). A libertarian reasons that freedom is self-evidently good, and trespass against it self-evidently bad. Therefore anything that trespasses against someone's freedom, even things that do some good, are on the whole bad. The conjunction of a true proposition P and a false proposition Q is, all together, false: if not Q, then not (P and Q), even if P is true. Likewise with some good action A (say, feeding the poor) and some bad action B (say, stealing from someone): if B is bad, then (A and B) is bad, even if A is good. Though I will admit, there is an annoying tendency of many libertarians to argue against "A and B" so often that as soon as anyone says "A" they assume that implies "B", and thus end up arguing against "A" on the grounds that not-B, without considering that "A" might not logically imply "B", no matter how often they seem to come packaged together.
Anyway, that tangent aside, the difference between this kind of logical idealism and the fundamentalism that drives terrorism, religious persecution, etc, is that if you can successfully show this kind of idealist that his logic is invalid, or that his axioms may not be spot-on, then he will come to different conclusions, and you will have changed his mind. A fundamentalist, on the other hand, believes that he is right because he is right goddamnit, and any argument to the contrary is to be ignored or belittled. The flaw comes not from taking things to their logical conclusions, the problem is being unwilling to examine your logic and your premises to make sure your arguments are sound. I agree entirely with another poster in this thread that the fundamentalists of every religion are more correct about the teachings of their religion than those who pick and choose what part of the religion to keep and which to throw away. This doesn't mean I like religious fundamentalists better than religious moderates: it means that religious fundamentalists are more true to their religion, and the ridiculousness of the fundamentalist version of a religion is a condemnation of the religion altogether. It's a form of argument to absurdity: "look, if you REALLY believed that book was the divine word of God himself, you'd be acting like a crazy nut job like those guys." (P entails Q). "I see you agree that they are crazy nut jobs and that that is bad." (not Q) "Therefore, you shouldn't believe that, because people like that are the logical end of that path." (not P).
You can use that same kind of argument against a non-religious philosophy too, showing a particular flavor of political ideology, e.g. libertarianism, to have absurd consequences as it is presently formulated. And if a person holding to that ideology sticks his fingers in his ears and says "la la la la la I can't hear you" then yes, he is being a fundamentalist too. But if he merely rebuts your argument by saying that logical consequences of these apparently self-evident premises necessitate that such-and-such, and he refuses to ignore that logic and you can't point out any flaws in it, he's not being a fundamentalist, he's being rational. Now, if he were really rational he would listen to the counter-arguments against him, accept those such arguments that are themselves logically sound, and then figure out how to reconcile his existing reasoning with this
The technical issue they disagree over is private property rights; European libertarians (and anarcho-socialists) generally disavow that any such things exist, saying people have rights only in themselves, and everything else is public property, with no one having any right (or any legitimate basis of obtaining such a right) to exclude others from the use of anything but their own body. They hold that the notion of property rights is the very foundation of government, with landowners becoming little tyrants of their own little kingdoms. Contrarily, American libertarians (and anarcho-capitalists) argue that private property is fundamental and intrinsic to the very notion of personal liberty; that without receiving control of the product of your labor, your labor is being stolen by society, and you are effectively enslaved by them, as you become dependant on society leaving you the fruits of your labor to enjoy, since you have no legitimate claim to take them for your own. Thus, they argue that the abrogation of private property rights is the very foundation of government, with the people at large supporting or at least condoning the violation of individuals' rights by the state.
Technically, most American libertarians aren't anarchists, but minarchists: they hold that government is good precisely to the extent that it is safeguarding people's rights to life, liberty, and property; less government than that is a failure to serve the public good, and more government than that is a violation of those same rights that government is supposed to protect. Though I'm not European and so can't personally vouch on its usage, I get the impression that "libertarian" in Europe means basically "anarchist" (in a sense of that term that excludes anarcho-capitalists), rather than a parallel minarchist socialist position.
The American libertarian philosophy could be nicely summed up with the motto "mind your own business".
Disclaimer: not all people in America who call themselves libertarians are of this persuasion, but the U.S.'s Libertarian Party holds roughly to the description I've given here, and a lot of people here on Slashdot, and a lot of former Republicans who got tired of the theocratic bullshit in that party, call themselves libertarians and hold roughly this same position too. But from my personal experience both online and in the streets, there are a good number of self-proclaimed "libertarians" who are just as suspicious and disliking of big business and unrestrained capitalism as European-style anarcho-socialist "libertarians", even while agreeing with the private-property-is-essential-to-freedom argument; people who look for interesting ways of reconciling the apparent logic of said argument with the harsh reality of the harm that lassie-faire capitalism can allow. I think I've got a rather interesting solution myself, if anybody would care to hear it...
Or is it rather saying that soldiers shall not be quartered against the consent of the house's owners, RATHER, they shall be quartered in some some other manner, to be prescribed by law later on (i.e. we're not specifying here in the constitution how they shall be quartered, except to say that it shall not be in this way)? That seems a more sane and useful thing to say, but it's not clear to me that that's what those words there actually mean.
Awww yeah... giggity giggity...
The problem I have with there being no universal reference frame shows up with centrifugal forces. If I'm allowed to imagine that the rest of the universe is spinning and my merry-go-round is not, why do I get pulled to the outside? And would centrifugal forces exist in a universe that consisted of nothing but me, a merry-go-round, and a third "reference object"?
Samuel Clarke's famous "rotating bucket" thought experiment claimed to show the absolute nature of space (i.e. a universal reference frame) like this, imagining a spinning bucket, filled with water which is also spinning and thus at rest relative to the bucket, in a universe where nothing but this bucket and the water exist (and let us imagine a lid on the bucket so the water does not fly out without Earth's gravity to hold it in). This experiment is meant to show that space must be absolute because the water and bucket are at rest relative to one another (and thus all matter in this imagined universe), but as we are led to imagine that the water appears drawn toward the sides of the bucket as though the bucket were rotating, we must conclude that the bucket is rotating relative to something. As no other objects exist in this imagined universe, that something must be space itself - or so Clarke intended to prove by this.
The relationalist objection usually raised to this thought experiment is that it cannot actually be conducted, as we cannot observe a spinning bucket of water in a universe where ourselves and the rest of the universe do not exist. Thus, we can't conclude that the rest of the universe has no effect, or that spinning the rest of the universe around the still bucket would not produce the same effect as rotating the bucket in a still universe.
But I believe that beyond that, we can clearly show via another thought experiment that if a still bucket of water in an otherwise empty universe were suddenly to become surrounded by massive objects rotating around it, that the masses of those objects - that is to say, the force of gravity exerted by them on the bucket and the water - would in itself draw the water toward the edges of the bucket in exactly the same manner. As we would classically describe water so drawn out in a spinning bucket as doing so because of its inertia interacting with the centripetal force of the bucket walls, to show that this same effect can be seen as caused by the force of gravity exerted by the rest of the universe on the water (and its subsequent interaction with the bucket walls) will show conclusively that inertia is a result of the force of gravity exerted by the rest of the universe upon the "massive" object in question. In short, I believe that that inertia (and thereby centripetal/centrifugal force) can be shown, by the following thought experiment, to be simply the product of what we might call "background gravitation".
Consider first our still bucket, filled with water, sitting alone in space. We will imagine the bucket as being held "still" relative to any other motion, so that we can examine simply the effects of other masses in the universe upon the water. (This situation is indiscernible from imagining the bucket moving in an otherwise still universe). Now, imagine that two equally massive objects come into being on either side of this bucket. Their gravity would draw the free- floating water toward the sides of the bucket, and so the water would pool on either side of the bucket. Imagining three such equal masses, evenly spaced around the bucket, would produce a more neutral distribution of gravity fields across the water, and more and more such masses evenly surrounding the bucket along it's axis would produce an outward force similar to the "centrifugal force" experienced by a rotating bucket - though this is not the point of my proof. If we then imagine even more such masses surrounding the bucket above and below, a sphere of mass encompassing the bucket, then all the gravitational forces would cancel and the water would be left in free fall again; that is, dr
I've always preferred it:
...the women are, too... and little girls are FBI agents."
"Ah, the internet; where the men are men!
Philosophy is not sitting around speculating "hmm maybe all of reality is made out of water (or fire, etc)!" and then calling it a day. Philosophy is not baseless speculation. Philosophy is the attempt to reason about absolute, universal truths which can be known a priori. In that sense, philosophy is much like mathematics. Actually I'm fond of referring to philosophy as "math with words"; philosophy is ultimately concerned with the development and application of qualitative logic, analysis of the concepts we're asking questions about and the framework within we conduct our investigations. Philosophy, just like math, doesn't by itself tell you much about what sort of things actually exist out there in the world, but rather is a tool to use in such investigations. As I like to put it, philosophy is about figuring out just what the hell are we talking about, exactly what questions are we really asking anyway, and how do we go about answering them? In some circumstances the answers to questions become patently obvious if you just understand the question itself, and this are the sort of 'a priori' or 'analytic' truths that philosophy comes up with.
The scientific method *is* a philosophical position: it is an answer to questions along the lines of "how do we answer questions about what sort of things exist and how they behave?", and its answer is "make observations, construct a model that matches those observations, make predictions from that model, test those predictions against new observations, repeat as necessary". So-called 'fideism' (faith-based 'reasoning') is another philosophical position: that you can arrive at the truth just by 'having faith' in some strange mysterious way. If you can't tell, I'm inclined to side with the former, scientific position. But my point is, philosophy is not an intermediate stance between religion and science. Religion and science are both grounded in their own respective philosophical stances. We (humanity) didn't go from religious ways of thought to philosophical ways of thought to scientific ways of thought. We went from religious ways of thought, stepped back for a moment, got philosophical, and asked "wait is that really the right way of going about this sort of thing? isn't there a better way?" and then eventually settled on the scientific method as that better way.
Philosophy is not on the same categorical level as religion or science; it's a step back to a more abstract level. That is the quintessential, defining characteristic of philosophy: it's a second-order, "meta" discipline, pulling your nose out of what you're doing, setting aside your preconceived notions, and questioning the very methods by which you go about asking and answering questions. Even what I'm doing right here is philosophy; one of the subjects within philosophy is "metaphilosophy", which asks what exactly is philosophy, what is its purpose, can there be any progress made, etc. Personally I'm of the opinion that the purpose of philosophy is as I've described here, to clarify our methods of reasoning and come up with better ways of asking and answering questions, and to that extent the greatest progress yet made in philosophy could very well be the idea of the scientific method.
Did you ever see the movie "The Core"? It would be something like that, except less lame and far more problematic to fix. (Most likely whatever method you used to tap the energy from the core could simply be reversed, since electric motors are all capable of being electric generators and vice versa, so you wouldn't have to mount an exciting manned expedition deep into the Earth's mantle to fix it ala The Core. But, that would require that you supply even more energy than you've been taking out. Imagine if, when we ran out of oil, we not only had to find an alternative fuel source but had to spend it all on somehow creating new oil deposits, lest we all die from some resultant catastrophe. Where the hell are we going to get all that energy from, and why weren't we using it to begin with?)
I've an interesting anecdote along these lines (no pun intended).
The people I work for are somewhat floofy new-age spiritualists. During my first week at this job, they had some 'feng-shuei' person over with a pair of straight metal rods with little right-angle bends at the ends for handles - "dowsing rods" - to detect where the "magnetic ley lines" of the building were, and thus how to align the furniture. Said person would walk around the building, "dowsing rods" in hand, and every so often then would swing together, indicating that they had passed over a "magnetic ley line". Needless to say I was highly suspicious of the accuracy of such crude equipment and methods in detecting such subtle energies. After watching this for some time, the new-age consultant person finally left, and gave her "dowsing rods" to my boss to keep. I asked the boss if I could see the "dowsing rods", and she said sure, but what will I do with them, I don't know how to use them.
So I held them out parallel in front of me like the floofy new-age consultant had, stared at them intently, and - voila! The rods crossed! I relaxed my gaze and they became parallel again. I stared intently again and the rods crossed again. My boss was amazed! How was I doing that, she asked. And I replied, "I'm tilting my hands ever so slightly."
She was... disenchanted, I suppose is the word. Though it doesn't seem to have dissuaded her from similar beliefs, such as her fear of "EMFs... or EMRs or ELFs or whatever the bad ones are", coming out of the wiring in her bedroom. I guess some people just don't care to grok real physics, and prefer to see magic dangers and health-improving furniture arrangement strategies in this spooky electromagnetism stuff.
Release some software under such a license and hope it becomes popular?
Hmm I wonder if such a license would be GPL-compatible...
Ubiquitous GPL-like licenses on some sort of information that does not have the source/binary distinction would have no practical differences from a world where such information was not protected by copyright law at all. Say music, for example: if all music was licensed under "you may use, modify and distribute this music as you please so long as any derivative works you make from it are likewise licensed", then all music would be exactly as free as if music was not protected by copyright law. You would have absolutely no reason to preserve copyright law so as to preserve the strength of such licenses; you'd only want copyright law to preserve other license clauses, such as demanding that recipients pay money if they wish to redistribute the code, or that they bundle the sheet music along with every recording they distribute, or something like that.
The capitalists amongst us will of course say that we need copyright law to enforce the former sort of clause because people deserve to get paid for their intellectual works; and the socialists amongst us will likely say that we need copyright law to enforce the latter sort of clauses, like the GPL, for the benefit of society; but as more of a libertarian/anarchist myself, while I agree that paying artists/authors is a good thing, and source code being freely available is a good thing, do we (via our government) really have any moral authority to restrict what people may say (or print, or transmit) in order to further such ends? GPL proponents seem to think it's fine in order to further the latter (social) ends but not the former (financial) ends; but I'm not inclined towards that sort of ends-justify-the-means reasoning, so if we've got the authority to do that then we've got the authority to do that, regardless of why we want to do that; and if we don't, then we don't, and copyright law should be abolished altogether, even if it means some people will be allowed to keep their source code secret.
Though if you think about it, in a copyright-free world, why would anybody even bother to do so?
The GP's point was that the GGP's post was a copy and paste of a very old troll (which I myself remember from comp.sys.mac.* newsgoups as far back as '94 or so), which has been reposted for over a decade with nothing but the computer specs changed somewhat; and that this particular troll failed to update the specs to anything currently on the market, and so fails even as a respectable troll. (A "new" G5? Like the kind that they don't even make anymore?)
Besides which, even back then this troll was bunk, and no modern Mac should even show you a progress bar at all for copying a 17MB file. IIRC my 2000-vintage G4 only flashes one for less than a second on tens-of-megs (e.g. 30-50 MB) files, and that's already seven years out of date.
Aren't you the one always accusing Dave whatshisname here of constantly defending the government? And now you're calling someone a wacko (or inferring it at least) because he expresses a strong distrust of the government?
Back on the topic at hand, I'd like to reconcile your two positions by saying that ubiquitous surveillance would increase justice only in a sufficiently just society. In my eyes it's much like firearms - in the hands of bad people, be they cops or civillians, they can cause great harm; in the hands of good people, be they cops or civillians, they can be a great equalizer and make bringing true criminals to justice much easier. The exact same is true of surveillance. It's just a powerful tool; whether it serves justice or injustice depends entirely on the character of those who wield it. If society on the whole is more just than unjust, ubiquitous surveillance would promote justice, just as would ubiquitous firearms.
That said, since I see no essential difference in character between cops and civillians (i.e. cops are just people like you and me), my opinion on surveillance is the same as that on guns: there should be just standards of when they are and are not OK to use, and police should get in just as deep shit as your or I would for violating those standards; and conversely, if you or I were to use them in accordance with those standards, to serve the ends of true justice, then you or I would deserve the same honor as a cop who did the same. The only thing that distinguishes a cop from anyone else is that the cop is paid to use such tools in a just manner, while you and I are only obliged to refrain from using them unjustly, and other not obliged to use them at all. If cops fail to use such tools effectively to the ends of justice, they should be fired for incompetence on the job; but if they use those tools unjustly, that's just as much a crime as anyone else doing so.
Wow, a lot of "old man" responses here. For the record, I *am* this generation - I'm only 25, probably younger than most of you here. I'm not talking about this generation versus the last or even the one before that; and I'm not talking about people today versus people thousands of years ago, either. (I'm quite familiar with that famous Socrates/Plato quote about 'kids these days' from 2400 years ago). Nor am I talking about damn unruly kids on my lawn versus the well-mannered and orderly grown-ups. I'm talking specifically of rule by intimidation versus rule by respect - remember this conversation came from one about whether police are or should be intimidating - and contrasting the way things unabashedly are today (everybody legislating their way into everybody else's lives, slowly and gladly turning us into a police state) with the way things supposedly were in the early days of this country (with at least some true respect for individual liberty, not just the lip service it gets today).
And, as I said in another post, I'm not even convinced that things really were so good, even in that one respect, "back then" - for all I know those lofty ideals only ever existed on paper. I wasn't around back then and I'm not a historian so I can't say for sure. But the layman's impression I get is that there was, once upon a time, some degree of popular respect for those ideals enshrined in great documents like the Declaration of Independence, a respect which is all but gone today; and if there's any truth to that notion, then those earlier times were, at least in that regard, more civilized than now.
Don't get smart with me there, sonny!
Damn kids these days...
That is largely what I was talking about. When America was founded, it was founded on the principle that everyone's life is their own business except to the limited extent that we've got to make each others' lives each others' business in order for us all to survive and get along together. Granted, these principles may have existed nowhere but on paper and in the minds of the few people who wrote the words on that paper, but that was the standard that was set back then, whether it was met or not, and I get the impression that at least some notable portion of the populace backed those ideas back then. Nowadays, most everybody unabashedly believes that everybody else's business is their business and that "we" can get together and vote on matters that "we" have no rightful say over - say whether someone grows and consumes in his own back yard some particular plant that "we" disapprove of - and that "we" can use force to get "our" way in such matters. In a civil society, one based on respect and not the threat of force, those who wished others not to grow or consume such plants would try to convince them, maybe via reason or via emotion but not any presumed authority backed by the threat of force, for they would (by hypothesis) respect that person and his right to determine his own life. And if they did use the threat of force to try to coerce the person in question, that person would, if he had any respect for himself, stand up for his rights and not bow to threats like that. But today, since everyone thinks they've a right to meddle in everybody else's lives and send in men with guns to make sure things go their way, those same people all bow to whatever the majority (or at least most-vocal) will is, and look poorly upon anyone who dares stand up for themselves, calling them selfish, egotistical, violent, and dangerous - when really, it's the busybodies and their enforcers who are guilty of these accusations, not the victims of their organized violence.
This focus on the government being a perpetrator of violent force is precisely why I rephrased the GGP to better capture what I gathered his notion to be. We got here in the conversation by way of the new police scooters not being intimidating enough; the GGP was noting that police should be approachable, not frightening, as they are here to serve and protect us, not to rule over us. Thus my point being that "law and society" deserve no inherent respect, for the law is just the command of the rulers; rather, justice inherently deserves respect, people inherently deserve respect, and a law deserves likewise only inasmuch as it is just (and society likewise only inasmuch as it is a mass of people). But "society" as some abstract collective entity, or "the law" as the command of such an entity (or its appointed delegates), deserve no respect in and of themselves.
As to when exactly "more civilized times" were, I admit that I was intentionally vague there, since I'm not entirely convinced that any times have ever been properly civilized. But the principles which this country were founded upon would, if followed, make a more civilized society than we have today (though still not perfectly so); so if there ever was an era when those principles truly prevailed, then it would have been a more civilized time than now.