As a philosophy student, I'd say that you are the one with the uncommon conception of morality. (By which I mean only "you seem to understand the word 'morality' differently than most people do"; not "the things you approve of are immoral" or anything like that). Ethics is the study of systems of morality, of right and wrong, ought and ought not. Morality (and thus ethics) by it's nature concerns social behavior. There are still things which are good for you and bad for you outside of the realm of morality/ethics - eating sand, playing with scorpions, and excessive drinking and gambling being amongst them - but that doesn't make them immoral or unethical. Eating fast food is bad for you, but it's not immoral. Not exercising enough is bad for you, but it's not immoral. The list goes on and on.
Now, you can argue that the converse is true: that morality and ethics ultimately reduce to practical considerations of what's good and bad for you (your survival, your happiness, your reproductive fitness, whatever), and I think there's a few good arguments that could be made in that vein. But that still doesn't make everything that's "good" or "bad" in such a practical sense also "moral" or "immoral", or "ethical" or "unethical".
Maybe all moral/ethical issues are really just practical issues, but even so, that doesn't make all practical issues into moral/ethical issues. A lot of the problems with religious notions of "morality" arise from this conception. Yes, lots of promiscuous sex and eating a lot and drinking tons of alcohol and gambling is probably going to be bad for you. That doesn't make it immoral in the way that theft or assault or dumping toxic waste down river is. The latter things affect other people and are thus social, ethical, moral concerns. The former things concern only yourself and thus, while you shouldn't do them just as a simple matter of practical reason, such self-regarding acts are beyond the scope of morality or ethics.
I understood that you weren't arguing the merits of the libertarian system, I was just taking off on that tangent to point out that the concern for (to coin a term) voluntariety of interactions really ought to consider all power differences between the involved parties, not just the threat of physical violence. And I agree with you as far as government intervention in setting prices or compelling people to produce or buy or sell any particular product at any particular price; I dislike central planning and micromanagement like that. And I'm actually quite libertarian myself in most respects. But I think that broader, more general regulations that don't specify the actions of particular entities, but rather make the same demands of all individuals, which effect a smoothing out of market irregularities - in both the cases of people who wield disproportionately high and disproportionately low bargaining power - are a good idea.
I'm basically in favor of a generally free market plus a partial redistribution of wealth in the form of a flat tax which goes to fund a universal tax credit (i.e. everyone is taxed X% of their income, and then everyone gets $Y back - the result being a system where the greater the income disparity, the more progressive the taxation becomes, automatically, without changing the value of X; and with Y of course being dependent on X and people's incomes. In a fair, highly competitive market, there would be little if any redistribution going on). I'd eliminate most of the rest of the tax code, replacing penalty taxes with straight forward fines (to cover the cost of externalities, e.g. environmental pollution), getting rid of all tax shelters, exceptions, etc etc, and generally get rid of as much other regulation as possible.
I like to think of the justification for this by way of analogy. We in the liberal (in the classical sense, as in libertarian) modern world generally hold that not only is threatening violence against another bad, but that systems to prevent and counteract violence (i.e. some sort of police) are good, and further that threatening danger to the public but no individual in particular (e.g. shooting off fireworks in crowded urban streets) is bad, and systems to prevent even accidental danger to the general public (e.g. fire departments and other emergency management systems) are good. Thus, by analogy, not only is harming another's property bad, and systems to protect private property good, but damage to public welfare (including both the natural environment and human economic goods) is bad, and systems to promote the public welfare are good. In short, mandating public charity is analogous to mandating that we pay for fire departments, flood control, even the military - things that protect the public good, even if you as an individual are unconcerned about the danger to you yourself of fire, flood, invasion, or impoverishment.
And, back to the main point, that sort of mutual protection is necessary for the functioning of a free society. If all were under constant threat of assault unless they could secure the help of bigger, stronger men, then all would be subject to the whims of the strong, and as such, none would be free but the strong - the choice, for those unable to defend themselves, would be between death at the hands of the constant threat surrounding them, and subservience to those who have the power to stand up to those threats. This of course would create incentive for the powerful to keep the masses powerless [e.g. ignorant and unarmed] and dependent upon them. This threat of assault is why we collectively band together as a society and form things like militaries to protect us from such threats - and we today consider a society unfree if it is subservient to it's military forces.
Likewise, everyone constantly faces the threat of economic impoverishment, leading ultimately to death by starvation or exposure. Some people are capable of standing up to this threat on their own. Others are for various reasons not so capable. The situation is precise
A real libertarian should be for all of this, though - it's all voluntary agreements, by informed parties.
If a mugger points a gun at me and says "your money or your life", and I choose to give him my money instead of my life, that is in some sense a voluntary act. I could have just decided to live (brieflly) with the consequences of doing otherwise; but being robbed seems like a better deal than being killed, so I'd choose that instead. But we still call that coercion, and choices made thus are, in a very important sense, not voluntary. I don't want to choose between losing my money and losing my life.
The economic case is not so extreme, but similar qualitatively similar. It's still a case of someone with disproportionate power over another presenting the other with either a bad deal or a worse deal. In an ideal market, nobody has this sort of disproportionate power - if you don't like the deal you get from one person, you take a better offer from another. But real markets are far from ideal, and monopoly or monopsony status is the economic equivalent of the mugger's gun - you either take the bad deal you're offered, or you take the worse deal that's your only alternative. And such dilemmas can hardly be called free or voluntary choices.
This is why even Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, said that a well-regulated market was necessary. He was talking more particularly about regulations limiting violent coercion, but it seems to me that an extension of that to economic coercion is perfectly logical as well. A free market is great, yes. But a market with monopolists or monopsonists is little more free than a market where the mob makes sure nobody buys pizza except from Fat Tony.
Since empirical and philosophical are mutually exclusive, one would think that if an philosophical empiricist existed, we would enter some kind of twilight zone where military intelligence would make sense...
Philosophical and empirical are NOT mutually exclusive. Half of the "modern period" of philosophers (roughly those from Descarte through Kant; post-Kant is not considered "modern", oddly enough, but "contemporary") were labeled "empiricists", and emphasized how the only way we can come to knowledge of anything is through experience and observation. Those sorts of philosophers (such a Locke, Hume, and Berkeley) laid the foundation of the philosophical world view which underlies all of today's science. Don't forget, what we now call scientists were once known as Natural Philosophers, i.e. people who conduced a reasoned study of the natural world.
So philosophy is not exclusive of empiricism. Empiricism is itself a philosophical position, and (rightly so, in my estimation) the dominant one of today's academic world. But it took a lot of arguing about how it's possible to know anything before that consensus was settled upon, and were it not for philosophy we would not have the rigorously empiricist science that we have today.
Also, if you want a hardcore empiricist who took "I think therefore I am" seriously, look into Berkeley. He believed that the only things which existed were minds (as he could self-evidently tell that his own mind existed), and the things perceived by minds. He argued vehemently against the existence of a mind-independent material world (that is, something apart from the mere appearances of things) on the grounds that you couldn't observationally tell whether it was there or not, i.e. that it's a non-empirical idea! All you can know are your ideas, your sensory perceptions; so he concluded that talk of a material world was literally nonsense. So just being an empiricist doesn't prevent you from wandering off and cooking up "crazy" philosophical ideas, either.
For example if I purchase a CD I do not own the physical media in a way I can say it is my property but the artist gives me permission to listen to the works within and the physical medium is merely just a symbolic representation of that agreement.
Anyone with a law degree feel free to correct me, but from what I understand of U.S. law this is WRONG WRONG WRONG. There is no such thing as a "license to listen". The ONLY right of yours which copyright law limits is the right to COPY. When you buy a CD, you are receiving an authorized copy of the work, in the sense that the people who produced the CD were authorized by the copyright holder to make copies of their work and press them to discs. That is the ONLY "licensing" going on here. You own a physical disc with a legally-made copy of an artistic work on it. The only authorization required by the copyright holder for you to come into legal possession of this copy of his work is the authorization to make the CD in the first place - the rest of it is straight-up sale of a physical object between distributors, wholesalers, retailers, and you. You haven't been given any sort of license, and there is nothing that you might want to do with that disc that you would NEED to be licensed to do (i.e. nothing that's not already within your unrestricted rights) besides make copies of it.
If the music companies want to give you a "licence" to their music which works in the sense you describe, they'd have to give you an actual license agreement along with the CD saying that by this purchase you are entitled to one copy of the work contained on the disc in any format you like, and that they'd happily replace your damaged CDs or swap them for other media if you like. Of course they don't actually want to offer licenses like this because it would cost them money, while requiring you buy a new copy on each new media format you want would actually make them money, so why do it any other way? Of course, they could offer such a service for a recurring fee... and it would be especially nice for them if all your music stopped working if you failed to pay that fee. And that's what's really going on here. This talk of "licensing" is all just clever spin by the music companies to get people used to the idea of not actually owning music, but in thinking that the music companies are generously granting them a license in perpetuity for a small one-time fee. Then later, when everything moves to subscription-based DRM'd music downloads, people won't feel so shafted in comparison to before - the "one-time licensing fee" of purchasing a CD will seem like some miraculous bargain that they used to be getting instead of the regular way copyrighted works have always been distributed.
He is basically stating a problem with the media that transcends this issue: in the name of "balance" the media portrays both sides of an issue, no matter how few or how crazy the supporters of one side might be, as equal.
I'd say that's actually a good way to present an issue fairly, without tacitly conceding that a majority opinion on something makes it more likely to be true; provided, of course, that you actually present both sides of the argument, and not just their conclusions. Stating "some people believe X; others don't" is completely useless. Stating "some people believe X for the reason that A; while others criticise that study/argument on the grounds that B, and cite C in favor of their position. The X-ists, on the other hand, claim that C is inaccurate/fallacious because D."
You don't have to go into all the details of the specific evidence cited; just give a quick summary of the back and forth, why each side believes what it does and what the other side has to say in response. If you do that, the crazies will stand out for themselves (for having weak responses to criticisms against them), and any rational person will be able to see that; and irrational people will believe whatever they want to anyway, so no need to worry about them.
Do do anything else is to give credence to the idea that just because most people believe something, it's probably right; and there's a real slippery slope to dogmatism there.
Disclaimer: I trust the present scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change is happening, but I'm not so attached to that idea that my worldview would be horribly shaken if that turned out to be false.
It sounds pretty good, but it doesn't seem to have a protection against leaches, if I am constantly the "underclass" and don't mind living off a small dole (people do do it, albeit not in such high numbers as Fox News wants us to believe). I've always like the idea of welfare being time limited, with a non-breeding clause in most cases, with the only exception being true disability. Again, no strong opinion there.
I've been toying lately with the idea that only those filing tax returns, i.e. those people who are working and making a living of some sort, no matter how meager, would be participants in this system. So you can't just not work and live off the dole, cause then you get nothing. It basically enforces a dynamic minimum wage of half the average income (which as incomes are today would be around $20K/yr or about $10/hr, though I'm not sure if $40K/yr is the approximate average or median). However, that then leave open the problem of what to do about the legitimately unemployed (just lost a job and looking for new work), the disabled, and so forth. The thought that just came to mind as a solution right now is "insurance". You know, a publicly owned insurance company wouldn't be a bad idea, cause if it gets corrupt somehow and winds up making money hand over fist off its patients... that money just goes straight to the public. (Remember that "publicly owned" means "the citizens are equal shareholders earning tax-credits as dividends" in my scheme). I'll have to think about that more.
As for the structure, I don't think it would work, to much bureaucracy. Too much room for various tax departments to get greedy too.
Are you worried that the taxmen will just take money out of the pool for themselves and not give it back? Or that it will allow creep of various government expenditures at the citizens' expense?
That reminds me of another nifty tax idea I had. With everyone's bill/check, include a copy of that tax period's financial information (income distribution, taxes collected, collective profits and expenses, etc), as well as a ballot for proposed collective expenditures. Let the people see what's happening with their (collective) money and have direct input into how it's spent.
It also seems to be rather complex internally, which again leaves open more room for politicos to find loopholes.
How so? It's got three steps... gather income info from people (which is a straight number with no exceptions, shelters, or any such nonsense - how much money did you make, period?), add those together and divide by the number of people you're dealing with, and then bill everyone for half the difference between their income and that average income. If the number is a negative, you cut them a check instead.
Sadly the chances of anything like this happening is nill,it isn't in the politicos and bureaucrats best interests.
That I agree on. Though the FairTax initiative has some similarities to my own proposal, inasmuch as everyone gets an equal amount of money (a tax credit) straight from the govt, the tax is a flat, proportional tax (though on sales rather than income), and pretty much all the exceptions and loopholes are eliminated. Then again, FairTax isn't getting a lot of momentum either, from what I've heard.
Focusing more on ideas than the clear conveyance of ideas would indicate that maybe you should have been a philosophy professor. Accuracy and precision are our best tools to make ourselves understood.
I resent that slight against philosophers. Modern academic philosophy (in the analytic tradition at least, i.e. in the English-speaking world) places great emphasis on clarity, precision, and rigour. It's all basically an exercise in natural-language logic.
If you want to bitch about continental philosophers where "the Nothing Not's itself" and "Nothingness lies coiled like a snake in the heart of Being" are profound philosophical statements, go right ahead.
Ah, in that case I think you'd actually like the results of my system, which wind up being progressive to a variable extend depending on the particular circumstances of the market it's enacted upon. The idea is to avoid classifying people into different brackets or classes at all, and to avoid as many arbitrary variables as possible - to create a simple system of tax rules which will dynamically respond to the regulatory needs of the market without any human adjustment.
The rules are very, very simple. You tax everybody 50% of their income (sounds crazy at first, I know, but listen through to the end), pool that, subtract the collective expenses from (and add any collective profits to) that pool, and redistribute the results back to the people.
In some sort of anarchist utopia where everyone has equal incomes and there's no government expenditures at all, everybody would have the same amount "taken" from them, nothing added or subtracted to that, and then the same amount given back - in effect, no taxes at all. (I put "taken" in quotes because I envisage that the system would work such that you ask everyone to file tax returns but not send checks yet; then you do the math, and *then* bill them or cut them a check as necessary - so if nobody owed or received anything, people would just file their tax returns and be billed for nothing, so nothing's really taken at all).
In a market with equal incomes but some government expenditures, everyone bears an equal share of the cost. If the government somehow turns a profit, everyone gets an equal share of that. That, of course, is only fair; collective ventures share collective costs and profits.
In a market with no government profit or expenditures but unequal incomes, the further above the average income you get, the more progressively you're taxed (counting the final taxation as the initial 50% minus the average of everyone's 50% that you get back), and the further below the average income you make, the more direct cash welfare you're given. If you make an exactly average income, you don't pay or receive anything. The idea behind this is to limit the effect of market failures (e.g. monopolies, monopsonies, etc) by preventing anyone from having too disproportionate an amount of power in the marketplace. If income disparity is low, then even the wealthiest of people won't pay much (even percentage-wise), and the poorest won't get much; but if income disparity is high, the system dynamically becomes very progressive, preventing the upper and lower classes from getting too far apart. But at no point is it more profitable for anyone to work less; the poor will still be much better off working more rather than relying on welfare, and the rich can still get richer, just more slowly. In effect, it applies a pressure toward more people being middle-class.
And of course, in a realistic market with unequal incomes and some government expenditures, the "sweet spot" on the curve where you pay no taxes and get no welfare just slides lower down the pay scale, as everyone owes (the same amount) more, or equivalently, gets (the same amount) less.
The idea, then, is to run nonessential government services (e.g. non-emergency medical care, schools, etc) as publicly owned for-profit businesses (which have to compete with private businesses, of course), the profits of which go directly toward reducing everyone's tax burdens. The center-ward pressure and direct cash welfare described two paragraphs up will ensure that the poor can afford these services; though if they wish to abstain from them and pocket the cash instead, they're free to do that too. The profit-driven nature of these services forces them to be more efficient and competitive and not just count on there always being tax dollars to cushion their wastefulness - and if it turns out that the private sector can do those things better than the public, then it's in the publics interest not to run such businesses at a loss. More essential government services like police, fire, emergency medical, etc,
Here is my little niggle, I'm unclear on what you mean by "private affairs", since this can be interpreted in different ways. One person's private is another public (turn to most of our hot current issues for example). In other (non-western mainly) cultures the good of the public transcends individual good, meaning that private affairs are only protected until their is an effect on community. This is one complaint I have with much political thought, the line between private and public isn't as clear cut as most would have it.
By private affairs, I mean things concerning only oneself and one's own property. Basically, the category of things which libertarians are most interested in protecting. So consensual acts between individuals which don't have nonconsensual side-effects on bystanders ought not be interfered with, but e.g. a paintball battle downtown where there are bystanders (who are not interested in being shot) could rightly be prohibited; and of course, so could directly shooting someone who doesn't want to be shot. Likewise, if you choose to burn your own expensive books and paintings in your own fireplace, that's fine, but throwing a burning cigarette out your car window in the national forest, which is public property, is not OK; nor is burning down someone else's stuff either.
A peculiarity of my system which differentiates me from those aforementioned libertarians is that I hold people to have positive duties to others and to the public as well, though I'm not clear yet whether it's a collective duty of society (and thus only a duty for each individual to support that collective effort), or whether the duty falls on each any every individual himself. The four negative duties brushed over above are respecting (i.e. refraining from threatening violence to) other individuals, the general public, and private and public property. (The provision for respecting public property also calls for environmental laws, since the air, oceans, etc are all public property). The four corresponding positive duties are to defend other individuals from each other (or support collective efforts to do so, i.e. police), to defend the public in general (e.g. fire, medical, search and rescue, and other emergency management services), to defend private property (which I would do via a different service than the same police who go around protecting people from violence), and to defend the public [economic] welfare (which I would do via a flat tax which gets directly redistributed back to the people; the effect of this being to limit market distortion).
I like to think of this all in terms of the "everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten" mindset. The rules basically come down to: Don't start fights. Stop them. Don't steal or break other kids toys. Stop others from doing so. Don't start fires. Put them out. Don't make a mess of the room. And share with the rest of the class.
I always wondered, as a further tangent, what was the ethical implications of a democratic society voting to remove their democracy. Or freely removing freedom of speech.
Well, as I see it, each individual is (or ought to be, if you prefer) sovereign over his own private affairs, and the public is (ought to be) collectively sovereign over all strictly public affairs via democratic processes. So in the latter case, if a majority vote to limit someone's everyone's personal sovereignty, for example their right to free speech, then those who did not willingly limit their own sovereignty - i.e. the minority of the voters - are having an injustice forced upon them, just as much as they would if any common person were doing the same to them.
In the former case, if the majority vote to allow control of public affairs to be delegated into the hands of some individual, then that is fine and dandy, so long as that individual remains supported by the majority. All that basically is, is a majority of people saying "I vote for whatever he says". The power is still rightly vested in the populace, they are just lending their votes to one popular individual for now. So if at some latter point, this autocrat-elect is no longer supported by a majority, but continues to tamper with public affairs against the majority opinion, he is now committing an injustice against the public the same as any individual vandal or public nuisance would be.
And of course, the public cannot delegate to anyone the power to meddle in anyone's private affairs, as that power does not belong to them in the first place.
In your opinion what would be a positive definition of "rights" (as distinct from ethics), I've noticed a lack of definitions in this whole thread.
Well, as I see it political philosophy directly follows from ethics, as politics (as in issues regarding governance) is rightly nothing more than applied ethics. Of course it's not really treated that way, instead being all power play and popularity contests, but applied ethics is what it should be - practical issues of how to [maximize the happiness/defend the rights/pick-your-ethical-objective] of a given populace. And my notion is rights is the ethical sense is a quasi-Kantian one of, as you said, treating everyone as an end.
However, I gather by your criticism of a Kantian take on rights as "purely normative" that you're looking for a more descriptive account of what rights people do in fact enjoy or possess, rather than those which they (I suppose you could say) "own", i.e. those which are owed to them. In that sense I would agree with your earlier account. The "rights" people actually enjoy or possess are those they can convince others that they deserve. But that's not really an answer to the question of what do they in fact deserve, which is what usually seems at issue when people debate whether something is a right or not. It's rarely an argument over whether someone actually enjoys some particular freedom or entitlement - just look around and see if they do or not - but rather, it's an argument over whether they deserve to enjoy it, whether it is permissible to deny them such. And in that regard, the rights-as-social-constructs account fails miserably at giving any useful answers.
think a right is what you can convince others is a right. Rights are what you can defend. Governments exist as a social contract to create, AND protect those rights. I beleive this, like most political scientists, as a matter of convention, and not a matter of science, it is the most pragmatic theory on rights.
As a fellow philosophy student, I'm quite surprised that you can rationally take this position, for it logically commits you to the position that there can be no violation of individual rights by the majority, because if the majority, i.e. "others" or "the government", doesn't recognize it as a right, then by your position, it isn't one, and thus no right has been violated. Nor does it make sense for anyone to petition for a right to be recognized or defended in a time when it is not, for there can be no such thing, by your account, as a "right" which is not recognized and defended by others. This makes any talk of "rights" at all rather meaningless.
That's not necessarily to say that rights are "God-given" either. That would be a false dilemma. There are other accounts of rights that could be appealed to (e.g. some sort of Kantian requirement of rationality). But an account of rights as mere social constructs is about as silly as an account of "goodness" as "whatever you can get away with". It just deflates the term to uselessness.
Remember, the left-right spectrum is an economic spectrum, ranging from pure communism at the far left to pure capitalism at the far right, and everything in between. Not all leftists believe in civil liberties (look at Stalin, Mao, and Castro, for example). Respect of civil liberties are represented on a different scale.
The left-right spectrum is not a purely economic one. In its original sense, the Left were those in favor of individual liberty (of both the economic and civil variety), what we today would call Libertarians in America, or Liberals in Europe; while the Right were those in favor of maintaining elitist control of both person and property. After that original Left pretty much won in most of the world, a new Left emerged advocating socialist/communist economic policies; and for a while, the Left-Right divide was almost a purely economic one, with everyone generally in favor of civil liberty, and the Right now those opposed to the socialist reforms, as opposed to the new Left. Some of those on the "new left" even went so far as to completely reverse most of the benefits gained by the old Left, like those totalitarians you named.
But there are still vestiges of the older Right around, though they now ostensibly support capitalism (though what they really support is themselves being rich and powerful), and in recent years they've been gaining power again (ironically under the banner of the "new Right"). Trying to fit all four of these positions (the old Left; the new Left; the new Right; and the totalitarians you mentioned, who are not too different from the old Right) onto a linear spectrum is futile; the new Left and Right aren't further along the same axis as their old counterparts, they're along a different axis entirely. The old Left-Right was a pure battle between authority and liberty. The new Left-Right is, quite literally, orthogonal to that (on a Nolan chart at least). The modern Right sides with the old Left on economic issues, and the modern Left sides more with the old Right on economic issues; and more perplexingly, those with authoritarian positions most similar to the old Right are now most often considered Leftist (like those you mentioned), while those with libertarian positions most similar to the old Left are now considered Rightist!
But it's all a big bag of hooey anyway. The only consistent meaning to "Left" and "Right" are "progressive", generally support by the underdogs, who want a change for their own betterment; and "conservative", generally supported by the big dogs on top who don't want their comfy spot in life disturbed. These notions map well to the origins of the terms (the commoners on the Left of parliament and the lords on the Right), but they don't evaluate consistently into any particular position on either civil or economic matters, because what's new today will be old in a few generations, and what's old today will become new again.
I seem to remember reading about the following hypothetical experiment:
Let 2 enormously rigid "rods" of astronomical length be parallel. Let the one set of endpoints be fixed, and accelerate the other ends towards each other until crossing, and let them continue moving, now apart, with the rods intersecting. Even if the individual endpoints are moving at sub-c, one could easily imagine having the intersection point moving faster than c, however the intersection point is a logical construct, carrying neither mass nor information, and thus would this setup not contradict relativity, but merely present a challenge of engineering for anyone interested in carrying it out./F
If you could construct an astronomically large rod rigid enough that it stayed perfectly straight as you wiggled one end of it, you could transmit information faster than light. The people at the other (fixed) end of the rod could just measure the rotation on that end, and thus tell how you were wiggling the other end. The reason this isn't a practical way to send information faster than light is because you cannot build rods that rigid; the energy you impart on the atoms at one end would have to be imparted in turn to the other particles in the rod faster than the speed of light. Since they cannot do that, the compression wave caused in such a rod can travel no faster than the speed of light.
Thus, your enormous rods would be extremely floppy if viewed altogether, no matter how rigidly you tried to build them; you would move the ends of them, and the middle portions would take, at the very least, a number of seconds equal to their distance in light-seconds away from you to move in response. So you uncross your ends, and three years later, the portions of the rods three lightyears away from you would uncross (assuming these rods were as rigid as theoretically possible, transmitting compression at c).
Even at mundane scales, if you grab a stiff piece of rebar (the heavy iron reinforcement bar used in stone/brick/block construction), about an inch thick and maybe three feet long, and wave it around... it may appear incredibly rigid to you, and there will certainly be no visible compression waves in it, but when you wave it around, it is still flopping about ever so slightly, just as a floppy car antenna would if you waved it around likewise. If you got a longer piece of rebar and waved it around you'd even be able to see it flopping. You could make it thicker and it would flop less again (to the point of not being noticeable), but at no point does it actually cease to flop entirely. In fact, that's a good mundane model of this. Grab two long pieces of half inch rebar, say 50ft long, and fix one end of each at some point, like your setup. Note that if you move the loose ends fast enough, you can cross and uncross them before the crossing has propagated all the way down their lengths. The longer or thinner the rebar, the more noticeable this is, and the shorter and thicker (and therefore more rigid) it is, the less noticeable - in fact you'll quickly get to proportions where you simple can't, as a mere human, move the ends faster than the compression travels - but those compressions waves are always there, and still limited to the speed of light.
In short, to surmount your "challenge of engineering" would itself require that relativity be violated, for energy would need to be transmitted faster than c for any rods to be so rigid; and perfect rigidity would require instantaneous transmission of energy.
One issue I do have with Google, Yahoo, et al. is that they are quick to assert their 'editorial' rights when they refuse an advertiser (and I agree that not only should they have the right, but that they should exercise it). However, when they do publish something egregious - be it child porn, whatever, they are as quick to assert that they - like a telephone company - have no control of what passes through their search engine. There's an inconsistency between their advertising and content policy that I'm not totally comfortable with. I can see why each exists, but is this for the best?
Google's ad content is something that they publish themselves, entering into particular business arrangements with each advertiser to put their ads up on the internet. As such, they necessarily do have editorial control over their ads, and thus ought to be free to put what they like in there or not. They can choose to do business with whomever they please, and refuse business as they please as well.
Google's search engine content is an aggregate listing of things that other people publish, gathered together by an automated process which, in order to remain as optimal as possible (i.e. fair search results, no gerrymandering), needs to be maintained as hand-off as possible. As such, adding/removing or promoting/demoting a particular result that comes up in their search engine (rather than tweaking the algorithm to make sites of a certain sort ranked differently) is a violation of their normal process.
Others have already chimed in about making broad generalizations, or how you're taking a rather pessimistic view of Slashdotter tendencies here yourself (instead of the "Detailed/Cautious/Skeptical" view another poster made), but I'd just like to comment that even if you take this pessimistic generalization as true, there's good reasons why companies like Apple and Google (and others like them) are favored even amongst such people:
They seem to honestly want to do cool things, and often succeed at doing so.
The "cool things" part gets past the pissiness. Slashdotters may love to bitch about things, but nobody likes to bitch about things that are genuinely cool. The pissiest person in the world may, for example, bitch about the nitty gritty downsides of every job he's ever had, no matter how nice by any objective standard of job quality - but if someone offered to just give him big lumps of money to do something fun that he'd be doing anyway, not even that guy could bitch about that. So when people do things that are just plain awesome, it's hard to be pissy about them.
The "success" part gets past the pessimism. Sure, Slashdotters may doubt claims of fancy new doodads or any other such optimistic future-looking statements in general, but when someone has a track record of doing cool things well, and says "we're going to do Cool Thing X soon", even the most pessimistic of people can find some ray of sunshine there.
And the "honest" part gets pass the paranoia. For the most part, companies like these do cool things just because it'd be cool to do and they think they can do so profitably. There's a middle ground between doing cool things in a completely selfless manner no matter the cost to you (which no company would do), and only begrudgingly doing cool things when you're forced to do so to stay profitable (which many companies do frequently). Companies like Apple and Google seem to do cool things just because they're cool and they can afford to do them (i.e. turn a profit), even though they don't *have* to do them to keep ahead; and that kind of honestly progressive attitude surmounts even the greatest anti-corporate paranoia.
Now I'm not here saying that Google, Apple, et al, are some sort of flawless paragons of corporate virtue above criticism, and if you pay attention (that bit about not generalizing comes in here again), they do get their share of often-justified criticism, even on Slashdot. But because they generally tend to try to do, and succeed at doing, cool things just for their own honest sake, that makes them and others like them the darlings of this pissy, pessimistic and paranoid community.
Conservativism and Christian beliefs are two quite different concepts. One can have conservative polital beliefs without being Christian, and vice versa. It's hard to see what political conservatism has to do with this event.
While this is technically true, I get the feeling that you are thinking of the Progressive-Conservative axis as one purely of economics, and thus saying "conservative" when you really mean "libertarian" or "classical liberal". While it's true that the economic aspects of conservativism (belief in free markets, etc etc) has little to do with Christian beliefs, the *social* aspects of conservativism are very closely tied to religious fundamentalism, inasmuch as they (pretty much by definition) are all about the preservation of "traditional values" (i.e. the opposition to personal liberty, for the supposed benefit of the person denied said liberty). And given that America is a predominantly Christian country, anyone with a strong emphasis on "traditional values" is probably going to be a fundamentalist Christian. Thus the association of conservativism in America with Christian fundamentalism is well founded.
Really though, the whole "Progressive-Conservative" terminology is misleading, "progressive" and "conservative" literally meaning in favor of moving ahead or in favor of holding on to the past. It's a mere historical accident that liberal and socialist ideologies emerged out of a background of statism and capitalism, and the concepts need not be paired that way or have developed in that order. I prefer "Right" and "Left" for those common names of classifications, though these terms are themselves fairly arbitrary. For the extreme corners I prefer combinations of the terms capitalism and socialism with the prefixes anarcho- and tyrano-, i.e. anarcho-capitalism (extremely libertarian), anarcho-socialism (extremely Left), tyrano-capitalism (extremely Right), and tyrano-socialism (extremely communitarian), but those terms aren't broad enough to describe the areas on the political spectrum which are merely in the direction of those extremes.
I believe Aladrin was wishing that people would release their code to the public domain, i.e. release all claims to copyright on it.
Would you, squiggleslash, consider a pubic domain release a "license", or simply the disavowal of automatically legally granted privileges to restrict the rights of others?
For example: I hereby release this post into the public domain. Have I "licensed" you to use this post, or have I just given up my copyrights on it?
Full disclosure: I see no ethical justification for intellectual property laws at all. (Trademarks are close, but I think fraud laws should cover that).
Sure I know it is "haha" since Microsoft in the recieving end, but take the context put linux and gpl on one end, and you will realize that a court could rule that since no one is placed in a financial disadvantage people can abuse the gpl. When Microsoft gets screwed over by something it is just a matter of time before someone applies to opensource stuff.
So much the worse for GPL protections in Russia.
I've been thinking recently that this ought to be a general rule of law - not only that no act ought to be prohibited unless it causes or at least directly threatens harm to person or property (private or public), but that no one ought to be convicted of any such otherwise just prohibition unless it can be demonstrated that in that particular case, harm to person or property was actually caused or at least directly threatened. (I speak of "directly threatened" here in the sense that firing a gun at someone and missing them, or firing at random in a crowded public place and fortunately not hitting anyone, threatens harm; not in the sense of "oh someone could conceivably be hurt by this maybe", which would justify things like the RIAA's claims that they've lost oh-so-much money that they say they could have made but never actually had to begin with).
As an interesting side question, for someone with more knowledge of international copyright law than me... If someone in Russia did violate the GPL, and Russia said "who cares?", and the violators then released that software online, would its distribution in America be a crime? As in, if an American downloaded it and (say it's freeware but not Free-ware, so there's no Russian copyrights being violated) gave a copy to his friends... would he (the American) be breaking the GPL by (otherwise legitimately) distributing a work which (illegitimately) contains compiled GPL code with no source?
Crap... I wrote a nice long response to this last night but I must have just clicked "preview" and then forgotten to actually post it. So, this message may be a bit more terse than the other one I wrote... though given my propensity for verbosity and exceedingly superfluous circumlocution, it probably won't be:-)
OK, I believe I understand that line of reasoning, but how would one be able to scientifically confirm this concept? It can't be just "because we do not believe that something can come out of nothing, an infinity of something must be the truth"? I feel like we're just picking the lesser of 2 demons right now (which is relative actually)
Almost no significant thesis can be known with absolute certainty. Only mathematical and logical truths can be, because those are really only truths about what sorts of states of affairs even make sense and could possible be the case - they don't really tell us anything about the world we live in. For pretty much everything else, meaning all of science (physics, chemistry, biology, etc), all we can do is generalize from our perpetually limited experiences, and then extrapolate from those generalizations to areas where we don't have direct experience. So things like the Laws of Motion or the Laws of Conservation are only called "laws" because they hold true for every observation we've ever made, and so we generalize that they always hold true in every case, even cases far away in space and time where we can't directly observe them. But it really is just an assumption - it's logically possible that tomorrow there will be an action to which there is not an equal and opposite reaction, which would prove Newton's third "law" of motion wrong, or that tomorrow we will see something pop into existence out of nothing, which would prove all sorts of Laws of Conservation wrong.
Although most people seem very inclined to say that inductive reasoning like this provides good justification for believing such conclusions, some philosophers like David Hume have said that there really is no rational reason to believe what inductive "reasoning" leads us to; in other words, that just because you've seen something always be the case in every case you've seen, doesn't mean that you have any better reason to believe that it is always the case in every case ever. I myself agree with him to a limited extent. I am inclined to follow inductive lines of reasoning myself, and thus agree with things like the Laws of Motion and the Laws of Conservation; but if you disagree, there's not really any argument I can give you but "oh, come on - just look around you! this is always the case!" But you could still say "Yeah, in all these cases, but I think it might not happen in some other cases we haven't observed." And there's not really anything I could say to that.
So, if you buy inductive arguments in general, and agree that seeing something always be the case in every case you've seen gives you good reason to think that it's always the case all the time, then you should probably agree with the Laws of Conservation, inasmuch as you should agree with the Laws of Motion and so on. And if you do agree with the Laws of Conservation, you logically must agree that there is no origin, or else contradict yourself by saying "everything comes from something but this thing came from nothing". But if you don't buy the inductive argument, there's not really any counter-argument I could give, other than a vague appeal to "common sense" or something like that.
Isn't that just for "closed systems"? Which implies that a closed system has to exist first before this concept could have been somewhat factual.
I think you're thinking of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that entropy (disorder) in a closed system always goes up, which has nothing to do with the creation or destruction of energy, only it's arrangement or configuratrion.
As an interesting aside, we now know that the Second Law of Thermodynamics actually isn't a universal, inviol
But if we theorize that there's no origin/first concept, how can you not conclude that "infinity" "exists"? Obviously not in any shape of form by itself, but as concepts, or perhaps string(s) of concepts, that eventually make up the concept of infinity.
The concept of infinity "exists" inasmuch as the concept of zero "exists"... but they're not "things" out there in the world that need to be observed to prove their existence or nonexistence. To say that a concept "exists" is just so say that we are able to think about things a certain way. I can think that there are zero square circles in the world, and it would be true, but that doesn't mean that "zero" is somewhere out there for me to find. It just means that I will never, ever find a square circle anywhere. Likewise, I can think that there are an infinite series of causes, and it may be true, but even if it is, that doesn't mean that there is "infinity" somewhere out there to be found; just that I will never, ever find something with no cause. (Logically, a claim that "all things are X" is equivalent to saying that "no things are non-X"; so to say that everything has a cause, i.e. "comes from something", is just to say that no thing has no cause, i.e. "comes from nothing"; so to say that there are an infinite string of causes is just to say that there are zero uncaused things).
I agree, but to me "an origin" makes as much sense as "no origin".
If you're OK with saying that something can come from nothing, then yeah, that's perfectly fine. I'm just saying that IF you reject that (or conversely, accept that something cannot come from nothing), you have to accept the conclusion of infinite time (which isn't the same thing as an infinite series of causes; there logically *could have been* an eternal being; in fact as modern physics understand it, every bit of energy in the world is an eternal being which has always existed, as energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed).
Is it wrong to say that "an origin" equals "something out of nothing" and "no origin" equals "something out of something"?
Close. "There is an origin" equals "something came from nothing", and "there is no origin" equals "everything came from something". Which is precisely the nature of my argument; if you accept that everything must come from something else (and thus that everything which exists came from something, and so on), you must accept that there is no origin. But if you reject that, then you must accept that there was an origin. And most people don't seem happy to reject it, even theists like yourself, for they (most theists) claim that God has no beginning, so even then, something has always existed. It was just God all by himself for an infinitely long time, before he made other things.
Slashdot Mirror
As a philosophy student, I'd say that you are the one with the uncommon conception of morality. (By which I mean only "you seem to understand the word 'morality' differently than most people do"; not "the things you approve of are immoral" or anything like that). Ethics is the study of systems of morality, of right and wrong, ought and ought not. Morality (and thus ethics) by it's nature concerns social behavior. There are still things which are good for you and bad for you outside of the realm of morality/ethics - eating sand, playing with scorpions, and excessive drinking and gambling being amongst them - but that doesn't make them immoral or unethical. Eating fast food is bad for you, but it's not immoral. Not exercising enough is bad for you, but it's not immoral. The list goes on and on.
Now, you can argue that the converse is true: that morality and ethics ultimately reduce to practical considerations of what's good and bad for you (your survival, your happiness, your reproductive fitness, whatever), and I think there's a few good arguments that could be made in that vein. But that still doesn't make everything that's "good" or "bad" in such a practical sense also "moral" or "immoral", or "ethical" or "unethical".
Maybe all moral/ethical issues are really just practical issues, but even so, that doesn't make all practical issues into moral/ethical issues. A lot of the problems with religious notions of "morality" arise from this conception. Yes, lots of promiscuous sex and eating a lot and drinking tons of alcohol and gambling is probably going to be bad for you. That doesn't make it immoral in the way that theft or assault or dumping toxic waste down river is. The latter things affect other people and are thus social, ethical, moral concerns. The former things concern only yourself and thus, while you shouldn't do them just as a simple matter of practical reason, such self-regarding acts are beyond the scope of morality or ethics.
I understood that you weren't arguing the merits of the libertarian system, I was just taking off on that tangent to point out that the concern for (to coin a term) voluntariety of interactions really ought to consider all power differences between the involved parties, not just the threat of physical violence. And I agree with you as far as government intervention in setting prices or compelling people to produce or buy or sell any particular product at any particular price; I dislike central planning and micromanagement like that. And I'm actually quite libertarian myself in most respects. But I think that broader, more general regulations that don't specify the actions of particular entities, but rather make the same demands of all individuals, which effect a smoothing out of market irregularities - in both the cases of people who wield disproportionately high and disproportionately low bargaining power - are a good idea.
I'm basically in favor of a generally free market plus a partial redistribution of wealth in the form of a flat tax which goes to fund a universal tax credit (i.e. everyone is taxed X% of their income, and then everyone gets $Y back - the result being a system where the greater the income disparity, the more progressive the taxation becomes, automatically, without changing the value of X; and with Y of course being dependent on X and people's incomes. In a fair, highly competitive market, there would be little if any redistribution going on). I'd eliminate most of the rest of the tax code, replacing penalty taxes with straight forward fines (to cover the cost of externalities, e.g. environmental pollution), getting rid of all tax shelters, exceptions, etc etc, and generally get rid of as much other regulation as possible.
I like to think of the justification for this by way of analogy. We in the liberal (in the classical sense, as in libertarian) modern world generally hold that not only is threatening violence against another bad, but that systems to prevent and counteract violence (i.e. some sort of police) are good, and further that threatening danger to the public but no individual in particular (e.g. shooting off fireworks in crowded urban streets) is bad, and systems to prevent even accidental danger to the general public (e.g. fire departments and other emergency management systems) are good. Thus, by analogy, not only is harming another's property bad, and systems to protect private property good, but damage to public welfare (including both the natural environment and human economic goods) is bad, and systems to promote the public welfare are good. In short, mandating public charity is analogous to mandating that we pay for fire departments, flood control, even the military - things that protect the public good, even if you as an individual are unconcerned about the danger to you yourself of fire, flood, invasion, or impoverishment.
And, back to the main point, that sort of mutual protection is necessary for the functioning of a free society. If all were under constant threat of assault unless they could secure the help of bigger, stronger men, then all would be subject to the whims of the strong, and as such, none would be free but the strong - the choice, for those unable to defend themselves, would be between death at the hands of the constant threat surrounding them, and subservience to those who have the power to stand up to those threats. This of course would create incentive for the powerful to keep the masses powerless [e.g. ignorant and unarmed] and dependent upon them. This threat of assault is why we collectively band together as a society and form things like militaries to protect us from such threats - and we today consider a society unfree if it is subservient to it's military forces.
Likewise, everyone constantly faces the threat of economic impoverishment, leading ultimately to death by starvation or exposure. Some people are capable of standing up to this threat on their own. Others are for various reasons not so capable. The situation is precise
A real libertarian should be for all of this, though - it's all voluntary agreements, by informed parties.
If a mugger points a gun at me and says "your money or your life", and I choose to give him my money instead of my life, that is in some sense a voluntary act. I could have just decided to live (brieflly) with the consequences of doing otherwise; but being robbed seems like a better deal than being killed, so I'd choose that instead. But we still call that coercion, and choices made thus are, in a very important sense, not voluntary. I don't want to choose between losing my money and losing my life.
The economic case is not so extreme, but similar qualitatively similar. It's still a case of someone with disproportionate power over another presenting the other with either a bad deal or a worse deal. In an ideal market, nobody has this sort of disproportionate power - if you don't like the deal you get from one person, you take a better offer from another. But real markets are far from ideal, and monopoly or monopsony status is the economic equivalent of the mugger's gun - you either take the bad deal you're offered, or you take the worse deal that's your only alternative. And such dilemmas can hardly be called free or voluntary choices.
This is why even Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, said that a well-regulated market was necessary. He was talking more particularly about regulations limiting violent coercion, but it seems to me that an extension of that to economic coercion is perfectly logical as well. A free market is great, yes. But a market with monopolists or monopsonists is little more free than a market where the mob makes sure nobody buys pizza except from Fat Tony.
Since empirical and philosophical are mutually exclusive, one would think that if an philosophical empiricist existed, we would enter some kind of twilight zone where military intelligence would make sense...
Philosophical and empirical are NOT mutually exclusive. Half of the "modern period" of philosophers (roughly those from Descarte through Kant; post-Kant is not considered "modern", oddly enough, but "contemporary") were labeled "empiricists", and emphasized how the only way we can come to knowledge of anything is through experience and observation. Those sorts of philosophers (such a Locke, Hume, and Berkeley) laid the foundation of the philosophical world view which underlies all of today's science. Don't forget, what we now call scientists were once known as Natural Philosophers, i.e. people who conduced a reasoned study of the natural world.
So philosophy is not exclusive of empiricism. Empiricism is itself a philosophical position, and (rightly so, in my estimation) the dominant one of today's academic world. But it took a lot of arguing about how it's possible to know anything before that consensus was settled upon, and were it not for philosophy we would not have the rigorously empiricist science that we have today.
Also, if you want a hardcore empiricist who took "I think therefore I am" seriously, look into Berkeley. He believed that the only things which existed were minds (as he could self-evidently tell that his own mind existed), and the things perceived by minds. He argued vehemently against the existence of a mind-independent material world (that is, something apart from the mere appearances of things) on the grounds that you couldn't observationally tell whether it was there or not, i.e. that it's a non-empirical idea! All you can know are your ideas, your sensory perceptions; so he concluded that talk of a material world was literally nonsense. So just being an empiricist doesn't prevent you from wandering off and cooking up "crazy" philosophical ideas, either.
For example if I purchase a CD I do not own the physical media in a way I can say it is my property but the artist gives me permission to listen to the works within and the physical medium is merely just a symbolic representation of that agreement.
Anyone with a law degree feel free to correct me, but from what I understand of U.S. law this is WRONG WRONG WRONG. There is no such thing as a "license to listen". The ONLY right of yours which copyright law limits is the right to COPY. When you buy a CD, you are receiving an authorized copy of the work, in the sense that the people who produced the CD were authorized by the copyright holder to make copies of their work and press them to discs. That is the ONLY "licensing" going on here. You own a physical disc with a legally-made copy of an artistic work on it. The only authorization required by the copyright holder for you to come into legal possession of this copy of his work is the authorization to make the CD in the first place - the rest of it is straight-up sale of a physical object between distributors, wholesalers, retailers, and you. You haven't been given any sort of license, and there is nothing that you might want to do with that disc that you would NEED to be licensed to do (i.e. nothing that's not already within your unrestricted rights) besides make copies of it.
If the music companies want to give you a "licence" to their music which works in the sense you describe, they'd have to give you an actual license agreement along with the CD saying that by this purchase you are entitled to one copy of the work contained on the disc in any format you like, and that they'd happily replace your damaged CDs or swap them for other media if you like. Of course they don't actually want to offer licenses like this because it would cost them money, while requiring you buy a new copy on each new media format you want would actually make them money, so why do it any other way? Of course, they could offer such a service for a recurring fee... and it would be especially nice for them if all your music stopped working if you failed to pay that fee. And that's what's really going on here. This talk of "licensing" is all just clever spin by the music companies to get people used to the idea of not actually owning music, but in thinking that the music companies are generously granting them a license in perpetuity for a small one-time fee. Then later, when everything moves to subscription-based DRM'd music downloads, people won't feel so shafted in comparison to before - the "one-time licensing fee" of purchasing a CD will seem like some miraculous bargain that they used to be getting instead of the regular way copyrighted works have always been distributed.
He is basically stating a problem with the media that transcends this issue: in the name of "balance" the media portrays both sides of an issue, no matter how few or how crazy the supporters of one side might be, as equal.
I'd say that's actually a good way to present an issue fairly, without tacitly conceding that a majority opinion on something makes it more likely to be true; provided, of course, that you actually present both sides of the argument, and not just their conclusions. Stating "some people believe X; others don't" is completely useless. Stating "some people believe X for the reason that A; while others criticise that study/argument on the grounds that B, and cite C in favor of their position. The X-ists, on the other hand, claim that C is inaccurate/fallacious because D."
You don't have to go into all the details of the specific evidence cited; just give a quick summary of the back and forth, why each side believes what it does and what the other side has to say in response. If you do that, the crazies will stand out for themselves (for having weak responses to criticisms against them), and any rational person will be able to see that; and irrational people will believe whatever they want to anyway, so no need to worry about them.
Do do anything else is to give credence to the idea that just because most people believe something, it's probably right; and there's a real slippery slope to dogmatism there.
Disclaimer: I trust the present scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change is happening, but I'm not so attached to that idea that my worldview would be horribly shaken if that turned out to be false.
It sounds pretty good, but it doesn't seem to have a protection against leaches, if I am constantly the "underclass" and don't mind living off a small dole (people do do it, albeit not in such high numbers as Fox News wants us to believe). I've always like the idea of welfare being time limited, with a non-breeding clause in most cases, with the only exception being true disability. Again, no strong opinion there.
I've been toying lately with the idea that only those filing tax returns, i.e. those people who are working and making a living of some sort, no matter how meager, would be participants in this system. So you can't just not work and live off the dole, cause then you get nothing. It basically enforces a dynamic minimum wage of half the average income (which as incomes are today would be around $20K/yr or about $10/hr, though I'm not sure if $40K/yr is the approximate average or median). However, that then leave open the problem of what to do about the legitimately unemployed (just lost a job and looking for new work), the disabled, and so forth. The thought that just came to mind as a solution right now is "insurance". You know, a publicly owned insurance company wouldn't be a bad idea, cause if it gets corrupt somehow and winds up making money hand over fist off its patients... that money just goes straight to the public. (Remember that "publicly owned" means "the citizens are equal shareholders earning tax-credits as dividends" in my scheme). I'll have to think about that more.
As for the structure, I don't think it would work, to much bureaucracy. Too much room for various tax departments to get greedy too.
Are you worried that the taxmen will just take money out of the pool for themselves and not give it back? Or that it will allow creep of various government expenditures at the citizens' expense?
That reminds me of another nifty tax idea I had. With everyone's bill/check, include a copy of that tax period's financial information (income distribution, taxes collected, collective profits and expenses, etc), as well as a ballot for proposed collective expenditures. Let the people see what's happening with their (collective) money and have direct input into how it's spent.
It also seems to be rather complex internally, which again leaves open more room for politicos to find loopholes.
How so? It's got three steps... gather income info from people (which is a straight number with no exceptions, shelters, or any such nonsense - how much money did you make, period?), add those together and divide by the number of people you're dealing with, and then bill everyone for half the difference between their income and that average income. If the number is a negative, you cut them a check instead.
Sadly the chances of anything like this happening is nill,it isn't in the politicos and bureaucrats best interests.
That I agree on. Though the FairTax initiative has some similarities to my own proposal, inasmuch as everyone gets an equal amount of money (a tax credit) straight from the govt, the tax is a flat, proportional tax (though on sales rather than income), and pretty much all the exceptions and loopholes are eliminated. Then again, FairTax isn't getting a lot of momentum either, from what I've heard.
Focusing more on ideas than the clear conveyance of ideas would indicate that maybe you should have been a philosophy professor. Accuracy and precision are our best tools to make ourselves understood.
I resent that slight against philosophers. Modern academic philosophy (in the analytic tradition at least, i.e. in the English-speaking world) places great emphasis on clarity, precision, and rigour. It's all basically an exercise in natural-language logic.
If you want to bitch about continental philosophers where "the Nothing Not's itself" and "Nothingness lies coiled like a snake in the heart of Being" are profound philosophical statements, go right ahead.
Ah, in that case I think you'd actually like the results of my system, which wind up being progressive to a variable extend depending on the particular circumstances of the market it's enacted upon. The idea is to avoid classifying people into different brackets or classes at all, and to avoid as many arbitrary variables as possible - to create a simple system of tax rules which will dynamically respond to the regulatory needs of the market without any human adjustment.
The rules are very, very simple. You tax everybody 50% of their income (sounds crazy at first, I know, but listen through to the end), pool that, subtract the collective expenses from (and add any collective profits to) that pool, and redistribute the results back to the people.
In some sort of anarchist utopia where everyone has equal incomes and there's no government expenditures at all, everybody would have the same amount "taken" from them, nothing added or subtracted to that, and then the same amount given back - in effect, no taxes at all. (I put "taken" in quotes because I envisage that the system would work such that you ask everyone to file tax returns but not send checks yet; then you do the math, and *then* bill them or cut them a check as necessary - so if nobody owed or received anything, people would just file their tax returns and be billed for nothing, so nothing's really taken at all).
In a market with equal incomes but some government expenditures, everyone bears an equal share of the cost. If the government somehow turns a profit, everyone gets an equal share of that. That, of course, is only fair; collective ventures share collective costs and profits.
In a market with no government profit or expenditures but unequal incomes, the further above the average income you get, the more progressively you're taxed (counting the final taxation as the initial 50% minus the average of everyone's 50% that you get back), and the further below the average income you make, the more direct cash welfare you're given. If you make an exactly average income, you don't pay or receive anything. The idea behind this is to limit the effect of market failures (e.g. monopolies, monopsonies, etc) by preventing anyone from having too disproportionate an amount of power in the marketplace. If income disparity is low, then even the wealthiest of people won't pay much (even percentage-wise), and the poorest won't get much; but if income disparity is high, the system dynamically becomes very progressive, preventing the upper and lower classes from getting too far apart. But at no point is it more profitable for anyone to work less; the poor will still be much better off working more rather than relying on welfare, and the rich can still get richer, just more slowly. In effect, it applies a pressure toward more people being middle-class.
And of course, in a realistic market with unequal incomes and some government expenditures, the "sweet spot" on the curve where you pay no taxes and get no welfare just slides lower down the pay scale, as everyone owes (the same amount) more, or equivalently, gets (the same amount) less.
The idea, then, is to run nonessential government services (e.g. non-emergency medical care, schools, etc) as publicly owned for-profit businesses (which have to compete with private businesses, of course), the profits of which go directly toward reducing everyone's tax burdens. The center-ward pressure and direct cash welfare described two paragraphs up will ensure that the poor can afford these services; though if they wish to abstain from them and pocket the cash instead, they're free to do that too. The profit-driven nature of these services forces them to be more efficient and competitive and not just count on there always being tax dollars to cushion their wastefulness - and if it turns out that the private sector can do those things better than the public, then it's in the publics interest not to run such businesses at a loss. More essential government services like police, fire, emergency medical, etc,
We will have to agree to disagree with the flat-tax idea though, an issue for another time and place though...
I'm curious in which direction you disagree. Do you oppose taxation in general, or would you prefer a progressive tax?
Here is my little niggle, I'm unclear on what you mean by "private affairs", since this can be interpreted in different ways. One person's private is another public (turn to most of our hot current issues for example). In other (non-western mainly) cultures the good of the public transcends individual good, meaning that private affairs are only protected until their is an effect on community. This is one complaint I have with much political thought, the line between private and public isn't as clear cut as most would have it.
By private affairs, I mean things concerning only oneself and one's own property. Basically, the category of things which libertarians are most interested in protecting. So consensual acts between individuals which don't have nonconsensual side-effects on bystanders ought not be interfered with, but e.g. a paintball battle downtown where there are bystanders (who are not interested in being shot) could rightly be prohibited; and of course, so could directly shooting someone who doesn't want to be shot. Likewise, if you choose to burn your own expensive books and paintings in your own fireplace, that's fine, but throwing a burning cigarette out your car window in the national forest, which is public property, is not OK; nor is burning down someone else's stuff either.
A peculiarity of my system which differentiates me from those aforementioned libertarians is that I hold people to have positive duties to others and to the public as well, though I'm not clear yet whether it's a collective duty of society (and thus only a duty for each individual to support that collective effort), or whether the duty falls on each any every individual himself. The four negative duties brushed over above are respecting (i.e. refraining from threatening violence to) other individuals, the general public, and private and public property. (The provision for respecting public property also calls for environmental laws, since the air, oceans, etc are all public property). The four corresponding positive duties are to defend other individuals from each other (or support collective efforts to do so, i.e. police), to defend the public in general (e.g. fire, medical, search and rescue, and other emergency management services), to defend private property (which I would do via a different service than the same police who go around protecting people from violence), and to defend the public [economic] welfare (which I would do via a flat tax which gets directly redistributed back to the people; the effect of this being to limit market distortion).
I like to think of this all in terms of the "everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten" mindset. The rules basically come down to:
Don't start fights. Stop them. Don't steal or break other kids toys. Stop others from doing so. Don't start fires. Put them out. Don't make a mess of the room. And share with the rest of the class.
I always wondered, as a further tangent, what was the ethical implications of a democratic society voting to remove their democracy. Or freely removing freedom of speech.
Well, as I see it, each individual is (or ought to be, if you prefer) sovereign over his own private affairs, and the public is (ought to be) collectively sovereign over all strictly public affairs via democratic processes. So in the latter case, if a majority vote to limit someone's everyone's personal sovereignty, for example their right to free speech, then those who did not willingly limit their own sovereignty - i.e. the minority of the voters - are having an injustice forced upon them, just as much as they would if any common person were doing the same to them.
In the former case, if the majority vote to allow control of public affairs to be delegated into the hands of some individual, then that is fine and dandy, so long as that individual remains supported by the majority. All that basically is, is a majority of people saying "I vote for whatever he says". The power is still rightly vested in the populace, they are just lending their votes to one popular individual for now. So if at some latter point, this autocrat-elect is no longer supported by a majority, but continues to tamper with public affairs against the majority opinion, he is now committing an injustice against the public the same as any individual vandal or public nuisance would be.
And of course, the public cannot delegate to anyone the power to meddle in anyone's private affairs, as that power does not belong to them in the first place.
In your opinion what would be a positive definition of "rights" (as distinct from ethics), I've noticed a lack of definitions in this whole thread.
Well, as I see it political philosophy directly follows from ethics, as politics (as in issues regarding governance) is rightly nothing more than applied ethics. Of course it's not really treated that way, instead being all power play and popularity contests, but applied ethics is what it should be - practical issues of how to [maximize the happiness/defend the rights/pick-your-ethical-objective] of a given populace. And my notion is rights is the ethical sense is a quasi-Kantian one of, as you said, treating everyone as an end.
However, I gather by your criticism of a Kantian take on rights as "purely normative" that you're looking for a more descriptive account of what rights people do in fact enjoy or possess, rather than those which they (I suppose you could say) "own", i.e. those which are owed to them. In that sense I would agree with your earlier account. The "rights" people actually enjoy or possess are those they can convince others that they deserve. But that's not really an answer to the question of what do they in fact deserve, which is what usually seems at issue when people debate whether something is a right or not. It's rarely an argument over whether someone actually enjoys some particular freedom or entitlement - just look around and see if they do or not - but rather, it's an argument over whether they deserve to enjoy it, whether it is permissible to deny them such. And in that regard, the rights-as-social-constructs account fails miserably at giving any useful answers.
French bashing just for the sake of it is *so* last season ;o)
But French bashing is so safe and easy! I mean, it's not like they ever fight back about it...
[dodges tomatoes]
think a right is what you can convince others is a right. Rights are what you can defend. Governments exist as a social contract to create, AND protect those rights. I beleive this, like most political scientists, as a matter of convention, and not a matter of science, it is the most pragmatic theory on rights.
As a fellow philosophy student, I'm quite surprised that you can rationally take this position, for it logically commits you to the position that there can be no violation of individual rights by the majority, because if the majority, i.e. "others" or "the government", doesn't recognize it as a right, then by your position, it isn't one, and thus no right has been violated. Nor does it make sense for anyone to petition for a right to be recognized or defended in a time when it is not, for there can be no such thing, by your account, as a "right" which is not recognized and defended by others. This makes any talk of "rights" at all rather meaningless.
That's not necessarily to say that rights are "God-given" either. That would be a false dilemma. There are other accounts of rights that could be appealed to (e.g. some sort of Kantian requirement of rationality). But an account of rights as mere social constructs is about as silly as an account of "goodness" as "whatever you can get away with". It just deflates the term to uselessness.
Remember, the left-right spectrum is an economic spectrum, ranging from pure communism at the far left to pure capitalism at the far right, and everything in between. Not all leftists believe in civil liberties (look at Stalin, Mao, and Castro, for example). Respect of civil liberties are represented on a different scale.
The left-right spectrum is not a purely economic one. In its original sense, the Left were those in favor of individual liberty (of both the economic and civil variety), what we today would call Libertarians in America, or Liberals in Europe; while the Right were those in favor of maintaining elitist control of both person and property. After that original Left pretty much won in most of the world, a new Left emerged advocating socialist/communist economic policies; and for a while, the Left-Right divide was almost a purely economic one, with everyone generally in favor of civil liberty, and the Right now those opposed to the socialist reforms, as opposed to the new Left. Some of those on the "new left" even went so far as to completely reverse most of the benefits gained by the old Left, like those totalitarians you named.
But there are still vestiges of the older Right around, though they now ostensibly support capitalism (though what they really support is themselves being rich and powerful), and in recent years they've been gaining power again (ironically under the banner of the "new Right"). Trying to fit all four of these positions (the old Left; the new Left; the new Right; and the totalitarians you mentioned, who are not too different from the old Right) onto a linear spectrum is futile; the new Left and Right aren't further along the same axis as their old counterparts, they're along a different axis entirely. The old Left-Right was a pure battle between authority and liberty. The new Left-Right is, quite literally, orthogonal to that (on a Nolan chart at least). The modern Right sides with the old Left on economic issues, and the modern Left sides more with the old Right on economic issues; and more perplexingly, those with authoritarian positions most similar to the old Right are now most often considered Leftist (like those you mentioned), while those with libertarian positions most similar to the old Left are now considered Rightist!
But it's all a big bag of hooey anyway. The only consistent meaning to "Left" and "Right" are "progressive", generally support by the underdogs, who want a change for their own betterment; and "conservative", generally supported by the big dogs on top who don't want their comfy spot in life disturbed. These notions map well to the origins of the terms (the commoners on the Left of parliament and the lords on the Right), but they don't evaluate consistently into any particular position on either civil or economic matters, because what's new today will be old in a few generations, and what's old today will become new again.
Thus, we are banging the same drum, only at a slightly different frame of reference, and thus I can only agree most wholehaertedly with you
:-)
I got a much-needed giggle out out that little turn of phrase. Well said
I seem to remember reading about the following hypothetical experiment:
/F
Let 2 enormously rigid "rods" of astronomical length be parallel. Let the one set of endpoints be fixed, and accelerate the other ends towards each other until crossing, and let them continue moving, now apart, with the rods intersecting. Even if the individual endpoints are moving at sub-c, one could easily imagine having the intersection point moving faster than c, however the intersection point is a logical construct, carrying neither mass nor information, and thus would this setup not contradict relativity, but merely present a challenge of engineering for anyone interested in carrying it out.
If you could construct an astronomically large rod rigid enough that it stayed perfectly straight as you wiggled one end of it, you could transmit information faster than light. The people at the other (fixed) end of the rod could just measure the rotation on that end, and thus tell how you were wiggling the other end. The reason this isn't a practical way to send information faster than light is because you cannot build rods that rigid; the energy you impart on the atoms at one end would have to be imparted in turn to the other particles in the rod faster than the speed of light. Since they cannot do that, the compression wave caused in such a rod can travel no faster than the speed of light.
Thus, your enormous rods would be extremely floppy if viewed altogether, no matter how rigidly you tried to build them; you would move the ends of them, and the middle portions would take, at the very least, a number of seconds equal to their distance in light-seconds away from you to move in response. So you uncross your ends, and three years later, the portions of the rods three lightyears away from you would uncross (assuming these rods were as rigid as theoretically possible, transmitting compression at c).
Even at mundane scales, if you grab a stiff piece of rebar (the heavy iron reinforcement bar used in stone/brick/block construction), about an inch thick and maybe three feet long, and wave it around... it may appear incredibly rigid to you, and there will certainly be no visible compression waves in it, but when you wave it around, it is still flopping about ever so slightly, just as a floppy car antenna would if you waved it around likewise. If you got a longer piece of rebar and waved it around you'd even be able to see it flopping. You could make it thicker and it would flop less again (to the point of not being noticeable), but at no point does it actually cease to flop entirely. In fact, that's a good mundane model of this. Grab two long pieces of half inch rebar, say 50ft long, and fix one end of each at some point, like your setup. Note that if you move the loose ends fast enough, you can cross and uncross them before the crossing has propagated all the way down their lengths. The longer or thinner the rebar, the more noticeable this is, and the shorter and thicker (and therefore more rigid) it is, the less noticeable - in fact you'll quickly get to proportions where you simple can't, as a mere human, move the ends faster than the compression travels - but those compressions waves are always there, and still limited to the speed of light.
In short, to surmount your "challenge of engineering" would itself require that relativity be violated, for energy would need to be transmitted faster than c for any rods to be so rigid; and perfect rigidity would require instantaneous transmission of energy.
One issue I do have with Google, Yahoo, et al. is that they are quick to assert their 'editorial' rights when they refuse an advertiser (and I agree that not only should they have the right, but that they should exercise it). However, when they do publish something egregious - be it child porn, whatever, they are as quick to assert that they - like a telephone company - have no control of what passes through their search engine. There's an inconsistency between their advertising and content policy that I'm not totally comfortable with. I can see why each exists, but is this for the best?
Google's ad content is something that they publish themselves, entering into particular business arrangements with each advertiser to put their ads up on the internet. As such, they necessarily do have editorial control over their ads, and thus ought to be free to put what they like in there or not. They can choose to do business with whomever they please, and refuse business as they please as well.
Google's search engine content is an aggregate listing of things that other people publish, gathered together by an automated process which, in order to remain as optimal as possible (i.e. fair search results, no gerrymandering), needs to be maintained as hand-off as possible. As such, adding/removing or promoting/demoting a particular result that comes up in their search engine (rather than tweaking the algorithm to make sites of a certain sort ranked differently) is a violation of their normal process.
Others have already chimed in about making broad generalizations, or how you're taking a rather pessimistic view of Slashdotter tendencies here yourself (instead of the "Detailed/Cautious/Skeptical" view another poster made), but I'd just like to comment that even if you take this pessimistic generalization as true, there's good reasons why companies like Apple and Google (and others like them) are favored even amongst such people:
They seem to honestly want to do cool things, and often succeed at doing so.
The "cool things" part gets past the pissiness. Slashdotters may love to bitch about things, but nobody likes to bitch about things that are genuinely cool. The pissiest person in the world may, for example, bitch about the nitty gritty downsides of every job he's ever had, no matter how nice by any objective standard of job quality - but if someone offered to just give him big lumps of money to do something fun that he'd be doing anyway, not even that guy could bitch about that. So when people do things that are just plain awesome, it's hard to be pissy about them.
The "success" part gets past the pessimism. Sure, Slashdotters may doubt claims of fancy new doodads or any other such optimistic future-looking statements in general, but when someone has a track record of doing cool things well, and says "we're going to do Cool Thing X soon", even the most pessimistic of people can find some ray of sunshine there.
And the "honest" part gets pass the paranoia. For the most part, companies like these do cool things just because it'd be cool to do and they think they can do so profitably. There's a middle ground between doing cool things in a completely selfless manner no matter the cost to you (which no company would do), and only begrudgingly doing cool things when you're forced to do so to stay profitable (which many companies do frequently). Companies like Apple and Google seem to do cool things just because they're cool and they can afford to do them (i.e. turn a profit), even though they don't *have* to do them to keep ahead; and that kind of honestly progressive attitude surmounts even the greatest anti-corporate paranoia.
Now I'm not here saying that Google, Apple, et al, are some sort of flawless paragons of corporate virtue above criticism, and if you pay attention (that bit about not generalizing comes in here again), they do get their share of often-justified criticism, even on Slashdot. But because they generally tend to try to do, and succeed at doing, cool things just for their own honest sake, that makes them and others like them the darlings of this pissy, pessimistic and paranoid community.
Conservativism and Christian beliefs are two quite different concepts. One can have conservative polital beliefs without being Christian, and vice versa. It's hard to see what political conservatism has to do with this event.
While this is technically true, I get the feeling that you are thinking of the Progressive-Conservative axis as one purely of economics, and thus saying "conservative" when you really mean "libertarian" or "classical liberal". While it's true that the economic aspects of conservativism (belief in free markets, etc etc) has little to do with Christian beliefs, the *social* aspects of conservativism are very closely tied to religious fundamentalism, inasmuch as they (pretty much by definition) are all about the preservation of "traditional values" (i.e. the opposition to personal liberty, for the supposed benefit of the person denied said liberty). And given that America is a predominantly Christian country, anyone with a strong emphasis on "traditional values" is probably going to be a fundamentalist Christian. Thus the association of conservativism in America with Christian fundamentalism is well founded.
Really though, the whole "Progressive-Conservative" terminology is misleading, "progressive" and "conservative" literally meaning in favor of moving ahead or in favor of holding on to the past. It's a mere historical accident that liberal and socialist ideologies emerged out of a background of statism and capitalism, and the concepts need not be paired that way or have developed in that order. I prefer "Right" and "Left" for those common names of classifications, though these terms are themselves fairly arbitrary. For the extreme corners I prefer combinations of the terms capitalism and socialism with the prefixes anarcho- and tyrano-, i.e. anarcho-capitalism (extremely libertarian), anarcho-socialism (extremely Left), tyrano-capitalism (extremely Right), and tyrano-socialism (extremely communitarian), but those terms aren't broad enough to describe the areas on the political spectrum which are merely in the direction of those extremes.
I believe Aladrin was wishing that people would release their code to the public domain, i.e. release all claims to copyright on it.
Would you, squiggleslash, consider a pubic domain release a "license", or simply the disavowal of automatically legally granted privileges to restrict the rights of others?
For example: I hereby release this post into the public domain. Have I "licensed" you to use this post, or have I just given up my copyrights on it?
Full disclosure: I see no ethical justification for intellectual property laws at all. (Trademarks are close, but I think fraud laws should cover that).
Sure I know it is "haha" since Microsoft in the recieving end, but take the context put linux and gpl on one end, and you will realize that a court could rule that since no one is placed in a financial disadvantage people can abuse the gpl. When Microsoft gets screwed over by something it is just a matter of time before someone applies to opensource stuff.
So much the worse for GPL protections in Russia.
I've been thinking recently that this ought to be a general rule of law - not only that no act ought to be prohibited unless it causes or at least directly threatens harm to person or property (private or public), but that no one ought to be convicted of any such otherwise just prohibition unless it can be demonstrated that in that particular case, harm to person or property was actually caused or at least directly threatened. (I speak of "directly threatened" here in the sense that firing a gun at someone and missing them, or firing at random in a crowded public place and fortunately not hitting anyone, threatens harm; not in the sense of "oh someone could conceivably be hurt by this maybe", which would justify things like the RIAA's claims that they've lost oh-so-much money that they say they could have made but never actually had to begin with).
As an interesting side question, for someone with more knowledge of international copyright law than me... If someone in Russia did violate the GPL, and Russia said "who cares?", and the violators then released that software online, would its distribution in America be a crime? As in, if an American downloaded it and (say it's freeware but not Free-ware, so there's no Russian copyrights being violated) gave a copy to his friends... would he (the American) be breaking the GPL by (otherwise legitimately) distributing a work which (illegitimately) contains compiled GPL code with no source?
Crap... I wrote a nice long response to this last night but I must have just clicked "preview" and then forgotten to actually post it. So, this message may be a bit more terse than the other one I wrote... though given my propensity for verbosity and exceedingly superfluous circumlocution, it probably won't be :-)
OK, I believe I understand that line of reasoning, but how would one be able to scientifically confirm this concept? It can't be just "because we do not believe that something can come out of nothing, an infinity of something must be the truth"? I feel like we're just picking the lesser of 2 demons right now (which is relative actually)
Almost no significant thesis can be known with absolute certainty. Only mathematical and logical truths can be, because those are really only truths about what sorts of states of affairs even make sense and could possible be the case - they don't really tell us anything about the world we live in. For pretty much everything else, meaning all of science (physics, chemistry, biology, etc), all we can do is generalize from our perpetually limited experiences, and then extrapolate from those generalizations to areas where we don't have direct experience. So things like the Laws of Motion or the Laws of Conservation are only called "laws" because they hold true for every observation we've ever made, and so we generalize that they always hold true in every case, even cases far away in space and time where we can't directly observe them. But it really is just an assumption - it's logically possible that tomorrow there will be an action to which there is not an equal and opposite reaction, which would prove Newton's third "law" of motion wrong, or that tomorrow we will see something pop into existence out of nothing, which would prove all sorts of Laws of Conservation wrong.
Although most people seem very inclined to say that inductive reasoning like this provides good justification for believing such conclusions, some philosophers like David Hume have said that there really is no rational reason to believe what inductive "reasoning" leads us to; in other words, that just because you've seen something always be the case in every case you've seen, doesn't mean that you have any better reason to believe that it is always the case in every case ever. I myself agree with him to a limited extent. I am inclined to follow inductive lines of reasoning myself, and thus agree with things like the Laws of Motion and the Laws of Conservation; but if you disagree, there's not really any argument I can give you but "oh, come on - just look around you! this is always the case!" But you could still say "Yeah, in all these cases, but I think it might not happen in some other cases we haven't observed." And there's not really anything I could say to that.
So, if you buy inductive arguments in general, and agree that seeing something always be the case in every case you've seen gives you good reason to think that it's always the case all the time, then you should probably agree with the Laws of Conservation, inasmuch as you should agree with the Laws of Motion and so on. And if you do agree with the Laws of Conservation, you logically must agree that there is no origin, or else contradict yourself by saying "everything comes from something but this thing came from nothing". But if you don't buy the inductive argument, there's not really any counter-argument I could give, other than a vague appeal to "common sense" or something like that.
Isn't that just for "closed systems"? Which implies that a closed system has to exist first before this concept could have been somewhat factual.
I think you're thinking of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that entropy (disorder) in a closed system always goes up, which has nothing to do with the creation or destruction of energy, only it's arrangement or configuratrion.
As an interesting aside, we now know that the Second Law of Thermodynamics actually isn't a universal, inviol
But if we theorize that there's no origin/first concept, how can you not conclude that "infinity" "exists"? Obviously not in any shape of form by itself, but as concepts, or perhaps string(s) of concepts, that eventually make up the concept of infinity.
The concept of infinity "exists" inasmuch as the concept of zero "exists"... but they're not "things" out there in the world that need to be observed to prove their existence or nonexistence. To say that a concept "exists" is just so say that we are able to think about things a certain way. I can think that there are zero square circles in the world, and it would be true, but that doesn't mean that "zero" is somewhere out there for me to find. It just means that I will never, ever find a square circle anywhere. Likewise, I can think that there are an infinite series of causes, and it may be true, but even if it is, that doesn't mean that there is "infinity" somewhere out there to be found; just that I will never, ever find something with no cause. (Logically, a claim that "all things are X" is equivalent to saying that "no things are non-X"; so to say that everything has a cause, i.e. "comes from something", is just to say that no thing has no cause, i.e. "comes from nothing"; so to say that there are an infinite string of causes is just to say that there are zero uncaused things).
I agree, but to me "an origin" makes as much sense as "no origin".
If you're OK with saying that something can come from nothing, then yeah, that's perfectly fine. I'm just saying that IF you reject that (or conversely, accept that something cannot come from nothing), you have to accept the conclusion of infinite time (which isn't the same thing as an infinite series of causes; there logically *could have been* an eternal being; in fact as modern physics understand it, every bit of energy in the world is an eternal being which has always existed, as energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed).
Is it wrong to say that "an origin" equals "something out of nothing" and "no origin" equals "something out of something"?
Close. "There is an origin" equals "something came from nothing", and "there is no origin" equals "everything came from something". Which is precisely the nature of my argument; if you accept that everything must come from something else (and thus that everything which exists came from something, and so on), you must accept that there is no origin. But if you reject that, then you must accept that there was an origin. And most people don't seem happy to reject it, even theists like yourself, for they (most theists) claim that God has no beginning, so even then, something has always existed. It was just God all by himself for an infinitely long time, before he made other things.