Privacy? How about their liberty, freedom, and human rights? Because if we're going to set those aside just because of cowardice towards a disease that you could protect yourself from with almost complete reliability using a simple condom, then we might as well all die right now.
You're one of those people that stands up and salutes whenever the government decides that you're too free, and that the terrorists will win if you're allowed to play with model rockets, own a gun, or leave the country without special permission from the DHS, right? Damn American cowards. What happened to people who were willing to die and/or kill for freedom? When did people lose their respect for Human dignity? When did clinging to life like a rat become the preferred way of existing in this blighted society?
Long-term parental abuse of a child does permanent psychological damage to the child. It frequently turns the child into an abuser themselves, potentially of children and potentially in the wider sense of becoming some kind of sociopath. So it's basically contagious. Like HIV, it doesn't always transmit. But the proliferation of child abuse demonstrates that it goes on enough to keep passing it from generation from generation. So lets isolate parents. You know, keep parents from having the chance to beat their kids. Quarantine is a viable way to break the spread of anything that is contagious and sufficiently unpleasant in our minds, right?
Sorry, no sale. In any good and reasonable society, we don't punish people for what they MIGHT do. Otherwise, I'd have you locked up right now on the off chance that you'll strangle someone to death with your bare hands or buy an SUV or something. HIV sucks, but it's completely possible to protect yourself. Everyone who catches HIV through sex played at part in that by not engaging in the vigilance necessary to protect themselves. Condoms are cheap and bountiful. Even in places like Africa, they're emminently affordable -- people just don't like to use them. That doesn't obviate people with HIV from their own responsibility to not infect others of course. People with HIV that have unprotected sex should be charged with murder and thrown in an isolated jail cell forever. But the person who didn't get that stranger they met in a bar to wear a condom has gotten a delayed death sentence for irresponsibility.
You'll forgive me then if I find your assertions unconvincing, and indeed morally wanting. I value freedom above simple survival. Rats survive; Humans should expect to do a bit more, to have at least a shred of dignity and respect for the freedom of others.
More certainly is necessary. Much, much more. But drug cocktails do help substantially. All else being equal, they drastically reduce the odds of a person spreading the HIV virus during an unprotected sexual encounter, and reduce the odds of a pregnant woman passing it to her child from 30% (surprising in and of itself) to something like 5%. Now granted, people with HIV shouldn't be running around getting pregnant in the first place, nor should they be having unprotected sex. But it's not a perfect world, and if drug cocktails slow the spread, that's a win in my book. If they save even a few children from being born with HIV, that's a gargantuan win against a terrible injustice.
I think that, in the long run, HIV is a prime candidate for eradication. Compared to something like smallpox or polio, HIV spreads slowly, the method of infection is easy to manage, quarantine is easy if morally questionable, the spread is easy to track, and we're on top of a few of the principal vectors already (ie: tainted blood and contaminated medical instruments). Needle-exchange programs could bring even more. Any capacity for actually eliminating or completely supressing the disease would make the eradication of HIV an immediate possbility, and one that would get acted on very quickly.
If a company is violating Constitutional anti-trust/monopoly laws, then yes the government should be powerful enough to take them down. But it should not be regulating much of anything in the marketplace.
What are anti-trust laws, if not regulation? If my company is truly unregulated, then I can make any kind of deals I like to get ahead. I can fix prices in any manner. I can get together with my "competitors" and make an arrangement that locks out distributors that don't play by our rules -- rules which consist of them locking out any new competitors for us. That's deregulation. Telling companies that they can't do business that way is EXACTLY regulation.
This is why no one takes libertarians seriously. The hypocrisy and inconsistency.
They whine about socialism and taxes, while supporting the single most expensive and socialist budget item that any nation on earth supports -- the military. The military could be volunteer -- that is, soldiers don't get paid and have to buy their own weapons with their own money that they earn doing REAL jobs rather than suckling of the public teat. It could be private -- this is, if you want a war with Iraq, vote with your dollars by writing a cheque to your local militia for bullets and plane tickets, allowing the rest of us who oppose military squandering to save our money. Wouldn't that be radical? Actual freedom from taxation, a kind that no libertarian has the guts to call for! Cutting every program other than the military would only marginally decrease taxes. That's how costly even the most modest armed forced are, let alone a world class force.
They say they want free market and a government that will enforce the law, but no regulation. Well guess what: LAW IS REGULATION. Protecting freedom is regulation. Anti-trust laws? That's regulation. Monopoly-busting? That's regulation. Telling corps that they can't buy slave labour overseas? Regulation. Hell, simple bans on things like selling opiates or assasination is a form of regulation -- assasination is definitely a way to get business done. It's happened in America before, and still occurs in many places. Corporations in Africa have been known to hire mercenaries to slaughter employees that try to unionize, or to kill people who simply wont let the corporation sieze their land. Want to enforce laws against that kind of thing? Sorry, but you're telling businesses what they can and can not do. THAT'S REGULATION.
You can call it something else, but it's regulation. You love regulation and couldn't live without it; it's just sad that you're so committed to an ideology that you try to play semantics to avoid having to accept that reality.
Oh, and we (specifically you, I'm not American) DO live in a democracy. The constition, as so many deluded libertarians forget, only limits the federal government. Your state government can do absolutely anything it likes to minorities. It can sell their organs to zoos for meat, if it likes. You'll note that they even fought a war over their right to consider certain minorities to be property -- thank God the feds decided to regulate how they do business and stomped their slaving asses into bloody chunks.
If you doubt that you live in a democracy though, ask yourself why pacifists can be forced to pay for wars? Why anarchists can be forced to pay for the salaries of the president and other assorted parasites? Why farmers get tax breaks at the expense of everyone else? Your constitution is only a meaningful as the force behind it, and there's no force so it doesn't mean shit. You DO live in a democracy, the majority DOES impose its will on minorities with impunity, and that's simply the nature of the modern nation-state. You get to choose between oligarchical tyrants, or the tyranny of the majority. No nation has EVER avoided going down one of these two paths.
That's what makes me so sad for religious folks -- that they can't believe in any morality that doesn't stem from fear of punishment. I do believe in morality -- real morality, that exists in and of itself. I don't NEED a vengeful parent telling me that murder is wrong. I can refrain from hurting others, and do as much good as possible in the world simply because it is the right thing to do. Besides, if god is your only source of morality, how do you expect to be able to tell any atheist what to do? For that matter, how do you expect to tell anyone whose interpretation of that religion is different what to do? Christians have kept slaves and thought it was okay, Christians have supported the Nazi party and thought it was okay, Christians have murdered Jews and Muslims and been absolutely sure that they were doing God's work. What makes your interpretation of God any more "correct" than theirs? Face it, relativism is inescapable -- Christianity is far, far more morally relative than Humanism. No one has EVER claimed that Humanism condones slavery or the murder of Jews, for example, both things that entire Christian societies have supported.
Do I see only evil in the world? Of course not. I just don't see God doing anything. All the good I've ever seen was done by myself or other people, the majority of them not Christians. If morality has to spring from God, how can atheists be doing good in the world? Why aren't they all just out murdering and killing and raping and molesting? Why are God-fearing men and women advocating murder? Could it be that god is superfluous to morality? Superfluous PERIOD?
It's funny that you mention computers, given that some of the most sophisticated and incredible algorithms were designed by genetic algorithms. They produce amazingling efficient, minimal, irreducibly complex solutions to problems -- solutions no Human could possibly understand, let alone invent. In fact, the term irreducibly complex only has a clearly defined meaning in computer science; it's possible to actually PROVE that something is or isn't irreducibly complex in computer science. And wouldn't you know it? Irreducible complexity is no barrier to natural selection, because mutation can add AND remove complexity. Flagella have been shown to only require two proteins that don't exist elsewhere in the cell, there is a clear progression of complexity from the simplest light-sensors right through to the mammalian eye, etc. Sorry, but intelligent design fails every test put to it. Evolution has been demonstrated to be a sound principle capable of generating any level of complexity, irreducible or otherwise.
Religion is, and I quote, "A system of beliefs that involves the existence of at least one of: a human soul or spirit, a deity or higher being, or self after the death of one's body." Atheism satisfies none of these things, and is therefore not a religion of any kind. Worship of the self doesn't count either, unless one genuinely believes that they are a higher being of some kind. Science isn't a religion either, since it says nothing about any of those things whatsoever. Christians are just threatened because science doesn't REQUIRE God. But then, we've already seen that God isn't required for anything -- not for the money I donate to the Vancouver food bank, not for the volunteer work my atheistic friend Allison does with disabled people, or for anything else. God is simply not required.
The funniest thing, of course, is that you assume that I'M an atheist, just because I believe in science and don't support religion. I can find the divine without a cult, thank you. And I can understand the divine based on the real world -- ie, praying does nothing, so I know that any God that exists must generally not answer prayers. Christians have approximately the same increase in life expectancy that atheists who meditate have; ergo, God doesn't extend the lives of worshippers. Ultimately, you end up having to conclude that any god that does exist is stri
Oh, you missed the sarcasm completely. If a creator expects us to be accountable to it, why that creator leave all the responsibility for everything in our hands?
When I see prayer end homelessness, a disease (any disease at all will do, I'm a fair guy), bring an end to even a single war (or maybe I should expect it to end at least one war for each one that religion has inspired?), or really anything demonstratable whatsoever, I'll consider that a data point in religion's favour. Until then, religion has nothing going for it and about a zillion data points suggesting a random, unplanned universe. Any deific figures in that universe seem to be at best disinterested, and at worse actively cruel spiteful. Your god doesn't even have the goddam common decency to strike down his most evil hypocritical followers, like child-molesting priests, evangelists that steal from the faithful by taking god's name in vain, born-agains who execute children, condone torture, start wars, and poison god's creation. He doesn't strike down those who speak against him or turn their backs on his church and condemn his followers. He let 5 MILLION of his chosen people be reduced to a fine ash, along with 5 million more people who were assorted varieties of Christian. And what has that god done that is good? What has he done to give life meaning? And before you answer, visit one of America's ghettos, and try to find the meaning in the lifes of the people there. Visit a TB ward at a hospital. Check out the rising popularity of beating homeless people to death and putting videos of it on the Internet. Look at the war that American Christians have caused by voting for any man -- no matter how stupid, evil, and genocidal -- that can thump his bible the hardest. Just so that they don't have to face the prospect of a president who, despite following christian ethics more closely, isn't a vocal proponent of theocracy.
Let me summarize, assuming you have the courage to actually read this, by saying: fuck you, your religion, and everything about it. Religion is a disease, and has caused more violence and hatred than any other factor in all of Human history. Real morality comes from within. Real meaning comes from within. Only a shallow, immoral person needs it imposed from without by the threat of punishment.
Oh, sarcasm man, sarcasm. Didn't the mention of how scientists are evil tip you off? No one who uses a computer or an internet gets to say that without their tongue inserted well into their cheek. Hey, the bible quote about how great it is to murder babies ought to be enough on its own. I'd make it more obvious, but I have yet to come up with a good ascii-art rendition of the suckerfish logo.
My disgust for Republicans, as well as for the American (and most other nations') news media, knows no bounds. But I have trouble believing that an Iraqi court of any combination of political or religious persuasions would time its verdict on behalf of the US. Judges aren't perfect (far from it in fact), but kowtowing to politicians tends to not be their style. I just don't think that the GOP could arrange this for their own benefit. And this is from guy that DOES believe that the GOP may have been deliberately neglectful about reports of "an Al-Quaida plan to attack the US" so that they could sieze total control of American public opinion.
I think this is a case of people underestimating the Iraqi people's self-respect and dignity, tarnished though it is.
Evolution is about exactly what the name implies -- change. There is no preferred order, no preferred direction, no plan. Creatures can move on and off the land, into the sea or out, into the air or out, underground, into the Earth's crust, etc.
When a human is born with a vestigial tail, is that devolution? Of course not. There's no such thing as devolution. Evolution is just change -- it has no direction. You can't undo it, because the reverse of evolution is just more evolution.
Evolution is about populations, not individuals. Random mutations are an idividual characteristic until they spread enough to constitute a defining characteristic of a new species.
It doesn't matter where a mutation comes from -- if it spreads out and contributes to the creation of a new species, that's evolution. Many mutations come from the effects of ambient radioactivity. The ocean has lots of radioisotopes dissolved in it. The surface is exposed to solar and cosmic radiation. Lots of radioactive material gets spewed from black smokers, and they can release a number of other extremely horrible chemicals. And of course, every single time a cell divides, random chance alone suggests you'll get an error or two -- simply because of the error-rate of DNA replication is high enough that it can occur that often (which is still pretty amazing accuracy).
I don't think anyone other than random kooks and nerds looking to make a joke are suggesting that dolphins are evolving back into land animals. We KNOW that the genes for leg development are still there because embryonic dolphins have hindlimbs. They've simply been inactivated by evolution. All it takes is a small mutation to reactivate them, something we also know since snakes with legs pop up from time to time as well, humans with tails, and a variety of other vestigial features. Mammalian males still haven't completely lost their nipples -- that's how pernicious some of these characteristics are. It takes a huge number of mutations to eliminate them and backsteps can happen at any point. It's all just chance. Random mutations happen, and if they happen to be positive, they're a bit more likely to persist, and if not, they're slightly more likely to die with their owner. After all, this dolphin is dead now, right? Its hindlimbs may have contributed to that, slowing down its swim-speed or making it more clumsy. Or this too could be chance. Evolution is a higher-order effect of a random process. Weather is random too, the result of random movements of air and moisture in reponse to heat, but no one doubts that the west coast gets more rain than the midwest, or that hurricanes are rare in Alaska. So too does evolution result from random mutations and the vagaries of death, survival, and successfull reproduction.
Don't bother, unless you want to look silly. Any dolphins with legs are simply the products of the overworked imagination of a scientist trying to find creative new ways to squander taxpayer money, rather than getting out into the private sector and becoming marketing executives like god intended. Evolution is impossible. God would never make a half-formed creature like that. There are no missing links. For that matter, any vestigial organs you see on Humans are simply the product of your own diseased imagination, tainted as it is by that most evil of all Human inventions -- public education.
Well, the idea is that you combine the code with a worm that can infect webservers. That way, lots of webpages will have the code, and the odds of an unprotected Windows machine being infected increase rather substantially.
Just reading your post, you're obviously more of a big government guy than I am. You don't even seem to recognize the existence of any levels of government other than federal -- which is scary. If your attitude is that the Feds are the only government, then of course they'll gradually come to be completely involved in anything.
The constitution of the USA does indeed limit what the FEDERAL government can do, but it affords virtually LIMITLESS power to state governments. The constitution is completely unambiguous about that -- states can do absolutely ANYTHING that the constitution doesn't directly forbid them from doing. States can appoint noblemen, appoint a governor-for-life, hike taxes until your eyeballs bleed and you have to hock your spleen for rent money, make doctors and other magicians illegal and punishable by death, put Mister T on the state flag, declare poodles to be the only legal breed of dog, grant suffrage to some of the more notable species of fern, etc. And the US is
America not a democracy... where do people get this ridiculous nonsense?
You don't get it, do you. Without a government that has the power and centralization to enforce laws against businesses, people can get away with bullshit like selling family members into slavery (which happens in many countries), contracts that make it virtually impossible to get a new job because you'll be sued to death (and remember, bankrupty protection doesn't exist with a government to enforce it), exclusivity deals that make it impossible to even start a competing firm because suppliers and distributors have made agreements that lock new players out of the market, etc.
Free markets are something that a government creates. Without the government, an oligarchy can sieze total power and do absolutely anything it wants, prevent any competition, manufacture scarcity.
It's just stupid to think that if a town of one hundred people in the middle nowhere want to put their money together to buy a satellite dish and share it, that YOU should be apply to come along and say that they're not allowed because it violates the precepts of your insane little religion. Who is really depriving people of freedom -- me, with my suggestion that cities and towns can do whatever they bloody well feel like so long as the people are in sufficient agreement, or you with your suggestion that these people, even if in 100% agreement, should be forbidden to create a public works project with their own money in their town, which you don't even live in? On behalf of everyone everywhere, fuck you. You don't get to tell any community other than your own what to do, and you'll be lucky if even your own community gives a shit so long as you have such a despotic attitude.
Seriously, go cry at Mussolini's grave and light a candle for Walt Disney. The rest of us will live in the real world -- cooperating and competing as appropriate. We don't need your extremist little religion.
Hey, so they found some new species?! That means there's no such thing as extinction, and that populations never shrink!
In case the sarcasm isn't clear, let me say: you're an idiot.
Many marine food stocks have already collapsed. Very few viable abalone fisheries remain. Whaling is completely impracticle for most species and some have such small gene pools that recovery is basically a fantasy. The atlantic cod and salmon stocks are less than a quarter the size they were in the 1940, and even the 1940s levels were vastly lower than those in the 1700s. The sturgeon and swordfish are critically endangered. But obviously the discover of some new invertebrates on the sea floor makes it all better, right? Even though they exist in tiny numnbers, we don't eat them, and we don't particularly want to start? I'll take huge, viable salmon stocks capable of feeding half the planet over some toxic molluscs any day. And all it takes is a bit of restraint and centralized management. Yet you act as if conservationists are asking you to cut off your own legs.
The scientists behind this study were credible. You just don't like it so you assume that they must be gay communists with AIDs just trying to ruin your life, you know, for fun or something. Notice how there are no actual scientists denying the validity of this study? Just economists, industrialists, and other people that don't know shit about how ecosystems work? Not to mention random message-board jackasses that are threatened by anything that has even the slightest inkling of a suggestion that maybe capitalism isn't the highest form of morality in the universe?
Yeah, except that farmed fish lack all the health benefits that are supposed to go with fish. You might as well get a steak, it's cheaper and nutrionally superior.
The problem has nothing to do with people eating fish. It's more to do with the fact that for every fish caught for food, a hundred more are caught to be ground up and used in various animal feeds and fertilizers, as well as the fact trawlers destroy vast tracts of the seafloor ecosystem so thoroughly that regrowth can take centuries. Banning trawlers and other destructive fishing practices, as well as placing strict limits on overfishing, is the only way forward.
Well, if by raw materials you mean the U235 or Pxx (I forget which plutonium isotope is used), then absolutely. Frankly, developing the bomb seems like something that any good team of engineers could do -- and if there's one type of professional that every nation seems able to muster, it's engineers. Even terrorist groups seem able to get their hands on competent engineers. After all, they're keeping all that Soviet weaponry in good repair, manufacturing rockets and IEDs that are, in some cases, quite sophisticated. Any jackass can make TATP (and blow his fingers off in the process), but some of the other explosives that get used are rather more difficult to create, and require a genuine chemical engineer.
Profileration is really a national issue, an issue of resources. Nations build nukes. Maybe a particularly industrialized and wealthy city could as well; but has it ever happened? As far as I know, only two nations have EVER gotten nuke building to point where it was anything other than a horrendously difficult, trial-and-error, hand-tweaked mega project. And those two nations -- the USSR and the USA -- have both since then lost/abandoned their ability to mass-produce nuclear weaponry. North Korea is bankrupting itself trying.
Building a nuke is definitley not about knowledge, it's about the time, money, and manpower to DO it. You really don't need much uranium, although it certainly is helpful that the bulk of the world's uranium mines lie in the hands of Australia and Canada, both non-proliferation nations that enjoy liberal trade with other capitalist democracies.
Well, even in the US you get your "two weeks". Employers typically don't want you around after they've severed your contract, so it's practically custom to give someone a cheque for two weeks pay and then escort them out of the building. Something about people who wear ties being notorious cowards and being sure that anyone beneath them in the hierarchy is just waiting for the opportunity to start killing people.
Labour law is a funny thing. You need a job to live -- even the best welfare program is pretty lousy compared to the worst minimum wage job. You definitely need a job to thrive. Employment -- not just access to employment -- would seem to be a basic human right, at least unless technology obviates both labour AND scarcity, and we end up defaulting to some kind of socialism (robotic socialism, as its sometimes called). And yet the more you try to protect peoples' jobs, the more you restrict the ability of businesses to do their thing. You decrease their ability to cherry pick employees and maximize their efficiency. If you give business the freedom to fire incompetent employee WITHOUT the two verbal warnings, two written warnings, and a disciplinary meeting (that's the process here in British Columbia anyway), you're also giving them the freedom to fire employees for nonsense reasons like their religion or drinking a different brand of beer than the CEO.
GOOD businesses don't need any regulation of course -- my job sucks, but my manager is fantastic. Time off when you need it, encouragement for what you do right, helpful advice on how to improve, no flak about sick days, etc. I had no intention doing more than the bare minimum necessary to keep the job and pay for classes and coffee. Now I actually kind of care, and do my best to excel (to whatever extent it's possible to excel at working a cash register, anyway).
Conversely, a bad manager will find some dumb excuse to fire you no matter what. That's not to say you can't come out ahead in a labour hearing, but it's so difficult and such a hassle that it rarely occurs. I know so many people that have had to work 2 and 3 hour shifts (illegal in BC -- you HAVE to pay employees for at least four hours of work no matter how long they're actually there). Restaurants are particularly bad about this. It's just the opposite for people in unions of course, since they have the union reps to make sure that their rights are enforced, no matter how monstrously shitty the employee in question. Teachers who flirt with students and have to be "firewalled" because it's so difficult to fire them are practically a cliche. I dated a woman who did HR for a hospital -- her entire job was described as "interpreting the collective agreement". The hospital had a staff of twenty people who dealt entirely with handling union issues, completely aside from the effort of actually HIRING and FIRING people, running benefit programs, etc. Ironically, the HR staff were not themselves unionized, and earned less than half of what a newly-hired nurse would. It's a good thing that people who get into HR do it because they love the work.
I'd say that finding the balance between employer rights, employee rights, the right to work, how to deal with bad employees, how to deal with bad managers, etc, is definitely a work in progress. It's definitely one of the challenges involved in getting capitalism "right", that is, not something that makes life miserable for people. Employers deserve the freedom to run their businesses the way they like, but employees deserve to have confidence that they can get as much work as they need and to be treated reasonably. It makes it easy to see why some people like the idea of socialism so much -- when everyone receives the necessities of life automatically, it frees them up to treat labour as a true commodity, one that can be bought or sold freely at whatever prices the market will bear. As it is, we essentially HAVE to sell our labour, other than those few who get the opportunity to be entrepeneurs.
Can't say I find Hoppe's argument particularly persuasive. He seems to grossly abstract the notions of government and state, and has a highly romanticized notion of what life was like during the feudal era, notably the total absence of any kinds of rights or freedoms for the vast majority of people. Having my fiance ceremonially raped by the local baron on our wedding night doesn't really turn my crank; I can't help but notice my MP and my MLA have never attempted to ceremonially rape anyone or even assert that they have that right. It's also notable that even during the feudal age there was such a thing as public property.
Like it or not, constitutional democracies are the absolute minimal form of tyranny possible in the real world.
I'll conclude by saying that Hoppe repeatedly refers to "natural" as if it were somehow good. Natural is a life without antibiotics or toilet paper. Nature is awful and horrible, and there's a very good reason that humanity has been running away from all things natural for as long as we've had the capacity to do so. The naturalistic fallacy automatically relegates those who make it to short bus.
Vote republican? Vote for a party that runs massives deficits, spies on its people, engages in torture, and wastes money on unwinnable wars? I'm not THAT in favour of government.
Gangs and warlords aren't examples of anarchy -- they are examples of what anarchy degenerates into. You know, in chemistry, there are all kinds of interesting but worthless compounds that have wonderful properties -- but under real-world conditions they decompose too quickly into worthless and uninteresting byproducts. Anarchy could be fantastic -- but a few hours later, someone enslaves you. Sure, you've got a gun, and your neighbour has a gun, but when the tyrant comes with a hundred men and a gun, your choice is slavery or death. And most people will choose slavery. If you're not one of them, good for you. But you can't possibly believe that the willingness to die for freedom is anything other than a rare, precious quality possessed by very few. It doesn't take much to cow people into submission. So anarchy dissolves into tyranny.
Is nature anarchistic? Even that is ascribing too much order on the universe. But check out any species of social animal. They live or die by their ability to organize and establish authority and dominance structures. Few would call an ant colony "anarchy". And America? America was a highly anarchistic place once, populated by a number of peoples who didn't feel any particular need to organize into nations or states. And they were armed. Then people who DID organize into nations and states came along, and almost completely exterminated them. So much for anarchy. Over and over again throughout history, any group of people that have tried to live without organization get annihilated or assimilated by people that do organize and consolidate power. That's what your precious nature does best -- allow the strong to replace the weak. And those who cooperate are far, far stronger than those who don't.
But, since you're so well-armed, why not depose your huge authoritarian government and "kill the idiots in short order"? Form an anarchistic state. Then count the minutes before either a government emerges and initiates some social programs, or some other state organizes a government and takes control of your state. After all, the US came to be, despite an independent streak a mile-long among many of its citizens.
My definition of anarchy is based on the people that went around assasinating people in the 20s and 30s. I don't think that anarchists want destruction -- I'm sure they're as well meaning as any other idealist. Communists think that they just want what is best for us all, and that we'll all be happy working and sharing (I doubt many people actually think this, but people sure used to back before the cold war turned nasty). Neocons are sure that their ideas will maximize human potential. Blah blah blah.
Should we be striving towards the ability to live without authority over us? Sure! That would be great. We should also strive towards a society where people don't labour to stave off death for another day, but rather labour to become more wealthy and to better themselves and their community. We should strive towards a society where people respect each other, and the thought of doing anything that might hurt anyone else would be competely repugnant to most people. Will these things happen? Maybe someday. But right now, anarchy is as silly as communism. There are too many things that only a large organization can provide, there are too many peope that will try to exploit others, the economy is far too prone to pathological behaviours.
I suppose the difference in opinion stems in large part from how one thinks of the government. Being Canadian, I tend to think of the government as a bunch of people that are there to do my bidding. When I needed student loans, I tell them to give them to me. When I think that the government is making the wrong decision about something, a letter telling them to shape up is in the mail (or in the opposite situation, a letter telling them that I approve). When it bothers me that there are so many homeless, I write to my MLA and inform him that we need more affordable housing and maybe to reopen the psych hospitals (the homeless in my area tend to be people with mental illnesses, junkies, or both). I generally think of the government in terms of what it can do for me and my community -- in terms of how to maximize the value generated by the taxes we pay. Someone whose contact with their government is different -- say, a small business owner -- could very well have a quite different perspective. Someone whose government behaves authoritatively would certainly see their government as more of as a force of control and dominance, rather than as a service organization. Someone whose government generates no value for them would be quite unlikely to see much benefit to government whatsoever.
So maybe I'll say this: the problem may be less about more versus less government, but about the attitude of government and towards the government. Is the government there to rule, or to serve? Decide for yourself, convince your neighbours, and elect leaders that much that attitude. But you know what? The moment someone shows me a practical way to dispense with most aspects of government -- a way that doesn't involve me tripping over frozen hobo corpses everytime I leave my house, or dying of diptheria because the jackass next-door doesn't think that he needs innoculations, or having to whip out my VISA card if I want the fire consuming my house to be put out -- I'll be right there in the anarchist camp. Just like I'll sign-on with the communists when I see robots that can repair each other and replace the majority of human labour. Until then, I'll just tell the feds to pass their responsibilities to the province, and the province to pass them to the municipality, wherever feasible. Until then, I'll focus on finding a nice balance where the hobos get some kind of effort to uplift them, the innoculations are mandatory, and the housefire gets put out at cooperative expense.
Democracy, like any other group behavioural phenomenon, is certainly capable of becoming desctructive. Techniques for preventing cooperating people from degenerating into mobs is an inherent challenge of democracy, just like it's an inherent challenge for clubs, social groups, investment markets, forum discussions, protest groups, etc. The Republic is simply a way of enshrining the most important beliefs of the group into doctrine (the constitution) and buffering the decision making process to reduce the emergence of mob behaviour. Natural rights don't exist -- the closest thing that exists are the rights that the group chooses to enshrine as doctrine. And there isn't even agreement on what those rights are. America executes CHILDREN for gods' sake. Few other nations would consider something so barbaric. Canadians generally consider access to health care an inviolatable right. How many nations outside of Europe would agree with that? Not many. England has a state church (sort of) -- something that many democracies would consider unthinkable.
I totally agree that mutual respect for individual rights is the basis of, well, pretty much every positive aspect of society. And I'd certainly agree that the founders of the US had great vision in establishing constitutional limitations on the federal government, to shift the responsibility of democratic governance as close to the people as possible. Democracy is the most primitive form of government; small groups naturally function democratically. That's why democracy is best at the local scale, neighbours and small groups of associates working together to achieve their common goals and to support each other in their individual goals. That's why small businesses can often run circles around large ones, and why so many corporations are trying to decentralize. That doesn't mean that democracy is bad -- it just means that it functions best when power is allowed to spread out to the fringes. Getting the people at the very top to do that is just as much a democratic choice as any other. The modern republic is the result of the people choosing to formalize the functioning of their democracy in a particular way.
We all know of Winston Churchill's famous quote about democracy, so I wont repeat it. But it certainly warrants contemplation from time to time. Democracy is as much the freedom of the people to choose a constitutionally-limited Republic as it is the freedom to have the least popular 50%-1 of the society put into camps and turned into a cheap source of orphanage-grade heating-oil. That's why it's so great. The people can choose to centralize or decentralize administration as much as they like. They can choose welfare state policies, socialist policies, or libertarian policies as they like. They can change the constitution, reframe the Republic as needed to meet the changing times. After all, a loose union of states couldn't have achieved some of the things that the US has done. A loose union of states could not have performed the USA's phenomenol industrialization effort that made the waging of World War 2 possible. During World War 2, America -- like every other nation that successfully participated -- was practically communist. That's how wars are one, by the state marshalling every single resource it has and throwing them at the enemy. And afterwards, the US went completely back to whatever it is that you prefer to call the American post-war political and economic landscape. That's the great power of democracy -- the ability of the nation to be whatever it needs to be.
I think I'm babbling at this point, a side effect of too much coffee to prep me for work. Needless to say, I love democracy. I have trouble even conceiving of why anyone would want anything else, given its ability to emulate nearly any government structure one could care to have, from theocracy to socialism to free-market welfare states to the most hardcore forms of capitalism.
1: Socialism and capitalism are coexisting RIGHT NOW. Unless you believe that your ridiculous anarchist fantasy could survive the predations of organized nations using just its privatized, non-communist military. Every nation has a completely communist, authoritarian military. The military produces no goods and subsists entirely off of taxation of the labour of real people. The same goes for the police, and indeed the government itself. Are we socialist? Hardly. You don't have to choose, and anyone who suggests otherwise is just some kind of deranged fanatic that's one pamphlet away from assasinating people and blowing up buildings.
"If there are enough people in your town that want a broadband connection, they'll get together and cough up the dough to get it there."
What the hell do you call that, if not a government? It may not be a federal or state government, but it's people organizing and consolidating money and power to accomplish goals. That's government (probably municipal in this case). That's why anarchy never works. People invariably want to gather together to accomplish goals that they couldn't achieve on their own. Rather than waste all their time overseeing every aspect of the project, they appoint a few people to manage it while everyone else just contributes resources and gets back to their own work. Now they have a government and taxes.
Centuries of... human nature have made us accept that organization is natural, unavoidable, and overwhelming. The most organized group will, at best, assimilate the rest; as often as not, it will annihilate them.
I work for a living. I work fucking hard at shitty jobs to pay for school so that I can do better, more valuable jobs at some point. Unlike the cowards I deal with everyday, paying a few taxes doesn't reduce me to fits of crying and impotence. I drive our roads, I use our sewer systems. I benefit from a government that defends the border and fights crime without my needing a personal bodyguard. I benefit from the fact that the government stomps monopolies and prevents them from price-fixing or creating (much) artificial scarcity. We've seen anarchy -- anarchy is the five minutes before a warlord enslaves you and your family and puts you to work picking opium poppies at gunpoint. Anarchy is the window of opportunity for the worst kinds of government to establish themselves. Anarchy is so monstrous that it convinces everyone to put power into the hands of a despotic church or a monarchy, and thanks them for the safety of slavery.
So you know what? I'll take the minor hassle of a few taxes, and having to fill out a few forms now and then. It's that, or paying ten times as much in protection money to the local organized crime ring that has a monopoly on security and murders anyone that tries to compete.
The real crux of it is that democracy trumps economics. If 50%+1 of the people say that we should all pay taxes for a health care system, we do it. If 50%+1 of the people say we turn the rest into dog food, we do it. There are balances to prevent rash, insane changes, but ultimately the people can do anything. The people want a national bank to buffer against economic fluctuations (imagine if entire military had to be sold for scrap everytime there was a downturn), so we do it. The people don't want losing a job or becoming too sick to work to be a death-sentence, so we establish a welfare system. The people don't want to have the spend time and money doing background checks into supposed hospitals and doctors everytime they have a medical emergency, so the government regulates hospitals and medical licensing. Are you tyrant enough to say that we should cast aside democracy because of your weak spine in the face of a deduction from your paycheque -- a paycheque that is already being scaled-up to take that deduction into account?
Only a fanatic suggests that an issue is black-and-white. There are always middle grounds. That's why
It's always fun when someone says that they're a libertarian, because -- unlike most statements of political identity -- it gives you very little idea what's about to come out of the person's mouth. "Compassionate conservative" is usually followed by ranting about how much the person hates liberals, the poor, the disabled, non-Christians, etc, and how actual compassion is evil and wrong. "Liberal" tends to be followed by an assertion that we need laws banning some product, behaviour, form of expression, or way of interacting with others. But a libertarian? That can be anything -- an anarchist, syndicalist, classical liberal, corporatist, or even a very odd degenerate form of socialist. As much as I'm not a libertarian, I love the heterogeneity in the movement.
The thing you hit on here that is the crux of it all is the part about local governments. Doing things at the most local level possible keeps the mandate pure, keeps the costs and benefits local, and maximizes accountability. That's where America's founders had such great insight, and where modern America has lost its way. Compare that Canada, which has been struggling to move in the opposite direction -- gradually transferring power, responsibility, and budgetary discretion to the provinces and even municipalities in some cases. I use the word struggle deliberately, since this kind of thing runs directly against the Human tendency towards centralization, and it's by no means clear that Canada has been particularly successfull at decentralizing. Still, America often seems to have given up on it entirely.
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You're one of those people that stands up and salutes whenever the government decides that you're too free, and that the terrorists will win if you're allowed to play with model rockets, own a gun, or leave the country without special permission from the DHS, right? Damn American cowards. What happened to people who were willing to die and/or kill for freedom? When did people lose their respect for Human dignity? When did clinging to life like a rat become the preferred way of existing in this blighted society?
Long-term parental abuse of a child does permanent psychological damage to the child. It frequently turns the child into an abuser themselves, potentially of children and potentially in the wider sense of becoming some kind of sociopath. So it's basically contagious. Like HIV, it doesn't always transmit. But the proliferation of child abuse demonstrates that it goes on enough to keep passing it from generation from generation. So lets isolate parents. You know, keep parents from having the chance to beat their kids. Quarantine is a viable way to break the spread of anything that is contagious and sufficiently unpleasant in our minds, right?
Sorry, no sale. In any good and reasonable society, we don't punish people for what they MIGHT do. Otherwise, I'd have you locked up right now on the off chance that you'll strangle someone to death with your bare hands or buy an SUV or something. HIV sucks, but it's completely possible to protect yourself. Everyone who catches HIV through sex played at part in that by not engaging in the vigilance necessary to protect themselves. Condoms are cheap and bountiful. Even in places like Africa, they're emminently affordable -- people just don't like to use them. That doesn't obviate people with HIV from their own responsibility to not infect others of course. People with HIV that have unprotected sex should be charged with murder and thrown in an isolated jail cell forever. But the person who didn't get that stranger they met in a bar to wear a condom has gotten a delayed death sentence for irresponsibility.
You'll forgive me then if I find your assertions unconvincing, and indeed morally wanting. I value freedom above simple survival. Rats survive; Humans should expect to do a bit more, to have at least a shred of dignity and respect for the freedom of others.
I think that, in the long run, HIV is a prime candidate for eradication. Compared to something like smallpox or polio, HIV spreads slowly, the method of infection is easy to manage, quarantine is easy if morally questionable, the spread is easy to track, and we're on top of a few of the principal vectors already (ie: tainted blood and contaminated medical instruments). Needle-exchange programs could bring even more. Any capacity for actually eliminating or completely supressing the disease would make the eradication of HIV an immediate possbility, and one that would get acted on very quickly.
What are anti-trust laws, if not regulation? If my company is truly unregulated, then I can make any kind of deals I like to get ahead. I can fix prices in any manner. I can get together with my "competitors" and make an arrangement that locks out distributors that don't play by our rules -- rules which consist of them locking out any new competitors for us. That's deregulation. Telling companies that they can't do business that way is EXACTLY regulation.
This is why no one takes libertarians seriously. The hypocrisy and inconsistency.
They whine about socialism and taxes, while supporting the single most expensive and socialist budget item that any nation on earth supports -- the military. The military could be volunteer -- that is, soldiers don't get paid and have to buy their own weapons with their own money that they earn doing REAL jobs rather than suckling of the public teat. It could be private -- this is, if you want a war with Iraq, vote with your dollars by writing a cheque to your local militia for bullets and plane tickets, allowing the rest of us who oppose military squandering to save our money. Wouldn't that be radical? Actual freedom from taxation, a kind that no libertarian has the guts to call for! Cutting every program other than the military would only marginally decrease taxes. That's how costly even the most modest armed forced are, let alone a world class force.
They say they want free market and a government that will enforce the law, but no regulation. Well guess what: LAW IS REGULATION. Protecting freedom is regulation. Anti-trust laws? That's regulation. Monopoly-busting? That's regulation. Telling corps that they can't buy slave labour overseas? Regulation. Hell, simple bans on things like selling opiates or assasination is a form of regulation -- assasination is definitely a way to get business done. It's happened in America before, and still occurs in many places. Corporations in Africa have been known to hire mercenaries to slaughter employees that try to unionize, or to kill people who simply wont let the corporation sieze their land. Want to enforce laws against that kind of thing? Sorry, but you're telling businesses what they can and can not do. THAT'S REGULATION.
You can call it something else, but it's regulation. You love regulation and couldn't live without it; it's just sad that you're so committed to an ideology that you try to play semantics to avoid having to accept that reality.
Oh, and we (specifically you, I'm not American) DO live in a democracy. The constition, as so many deluded libertarians forget, only limits the federal government. Your state government can do absolutely anything it likes to minorities. It can sell their organs to zoos for meat, if it likes. You'll note that they even fought a war over their right to consider certain minorities to be property -- thank God the feds decided to regulate how they do business and stomped their slaving asses into bloody chunks.
If you doubt that you live in a democracy though, ask yourself why pacifists can be forced to pay for wars? Why anarchists can be forced to pay for the salaries of the president and other assorted parasites? Why farmers get tax breaks at the expense of everyone else? Your constitution is only a meaningful as the force behind it, and there's no force so it doesn't mean shit. You DO live in a democracy, the majority DOES impose its will on minorities with impunity, and that's simply the nature of the modern nation-state. You get to choose between oligarchical tyrants, or the tyranny of the majority. No nation has EVER avoided going down one of these two paths.
When I see libertarians ca
Do I see only evil in the world? Of course not. I just don't see God doing anything. All the good I've ever seen was done by myself or other people, the majority of them not Christians. If morality has to spring from God, how can atheists be doing good in the world? Why aren't they all just out murdering and killing and raping and molesting? Why are God-fearing men and women advocating murder? Could it be that god is superfluous to morality? Superfluous PERIOD?
It's funny that you mention computers, given that some of the most sophisticated and incredible algorithms were designed by genetic algorithms. They produce amazingling efficient, minimal, irreducibly complex solutions to problems -- solutions no Human could possibly understand, let alone invent. In fact, the term irreducibly complex only has a clearly defined meaning in computer science; it's possible to actually PROVE that something is or isn't irreducibly complex in computer science. And wouldn't you know it? Irreducible complexity is no barrier to natural selection, because mutation can add AND remove complexity. Flagella have been shown to only require two proteins that don't exist elsewhere in the cell, there is a clear progression of complexity from the simplest light-sensors right through to the mammalian eye, etc. Sorry, but intelligent design fails every test put to it. Evolution has been demonstrated to be a sound principle capable of generating any level of complexity, irreducible or otherwise.
Religion is, and I quote, "A system of beliefs that involves the existence of at least one of: a human soul or spirit, a deity or higher being, or self after the death of one's body." Atheism satisfies none of these things, and is therefore not a religion of any kind. Worship of the self doesn't count either, unless one genuinely believes that they are a higher being of some kind. Science isn't a religion either, since it says nothing about any of those things whatsoever. Christians are just threatened because science doesn't REQUIRE God. But then, we've already seen that God isn't required for anything -- not for the money I donate to the Vancouver food bank, not for the volunteer work my atheistic friend Allison does with disabled people, or for anything else. God is simply not required.
The funniest thing, of course, is that you assume that I'M an atheist, just because I believe in science and don't support religion. I can find the divine without a cult, thank you. And I can understand the divine based on the real world -- ie, praying does nothing, so I know that any God that exists must generally not answer prayers. Christians have approximately the same increase in life expectancy that atheists who meditate have; ergo, God doesn't extend the lives of worshippers. Ultimately, you end up having to conclude that any god that does exist is stri
When I see prayer end homelessness, a disease (any disease at all will do, I'm a fair guy), bring an end to even a single war (or maybe I should expect it to end at least one war for each one that religion has inspired?), or really anything demonstratable whatsoever, I'll consider that a data point in religion's favour. Until then, religion has nothing going for it and about a zillion data points suggesting a random, unplanned universe. Any deific figures in that universe seem to be at best disinterested, and at worse actively cruel spiteful. Your god doesn't even have the goddam common decency to strike down his most evil hypocritical followers, like child-molesting priests, evangelists that steal from the faithful by taking god's name in vain, born-agains who execute children, condone torture, start wars, and poison god's creation. He doesn't strike down those who speak against him or turn their backs on his church and condemn his followers. He let 5 MILLION of his chosen people be reduced to a fine ash, along with 5 million more people who were assorted varieties of Christian. And what has that god done that is good? What has he done to give life meaning? And before you answer, visit one of America's ghettos, and try to find the meaning in the lifes of the people there. Visit a TB ward at a hospital. Check out the rising popularity of beating homeless people to death and putting videos of it on the Internet. Look at the war that American Christians have caused by voting for any man -- no matter how stupid, evil, and genocidal -- that can thump his bible the hardest. Just so that they don't have to face the prospect of a president who, despite following christian ethics more closely, isn't a vocal proponent of theocracy.
Let me summarize, assuming you have the courage to actually read this, by saying: fuck you, your religion, and everything about it. Religion is a disease, and has caused more violence and hatred than any other factor in all of Human history. Real morality comes from within. Real meaning comes from within. Only a shallow, immoral person needs it imposed from without by the threat of punishment.
Oh, sarcasm man, sarcasm. Didn't the mention of how scientists are evil tip you off? No one who uses a computer or an internet gets to say that without their tongue inserted well into their cheek. Hey, the bible quote about how great it is to murder babies ought to be enough on its own. I'd make it more obvious, but I have yet to come up with a good ascii-art rendition of the suckerfish logo.
I think this is a case of people underestimating the Iraqi people's self-respect and dignity, tarnished though it is.
Some points:
Evolution is about exactly what the name implies -- change. There is no preferred order, no preferred direction, no plan. Creatures can move on and off the land, into the sea or out, into the air or out, underground, into the Earth's crust, etc.
When a human is born with a vestigial tail, is that devolution? Of course not. There's no such thing as devolution. Evolution is just change -- it has no direction. You can't undo it, because the reverse of evolution is just more evolution.
Evolution is about populations, not individuals. Random mutations are an idividual characteristic until they spread enough to constitute a defining characteristic of a new species.
It doesn't matter where a mutation comes from -- if it spreads out and contributes to the creation of a new species, that's evolution. Many mutations come from the effects of ambient radioactivity. The ocean has lots of radioisotopes dissolved in it. The surface is exposed to solar and cosmic radiation. Lots of radioactive material gets spewed from black smokers, and they can release a number of other extremely horrible chemicals. And of course, every single time a cell divides, random chance alone suggests you'll get an error or two -- simply because of the error-rate of DNA replication is high enough that it can occur that often (which is still pretty amazing accuracy).
I don't think anyone other than random kooks and nerds looking to make a joke are suggesting that dolphins are evolving back into land animals. We KNOW that the genes for leg development are still there because embryonic dolphins have hindlimbs. They've simply been inactivated by evolution. All it takes is a small mutation to reactivate them, something we also know since snakes with legs pop up from time to time as well, humans with tails, and a variety of other vestigial features. Mammalian males still haven't completely lost their nipples -- that's how pernicious some of these characteristics are. It takes a huge number of mutations to eliminate them and backsteps can happen at any point. It's all just chance. Random mutations happen, and if they happen to be positive, they're a bit more likely to persist, and if not, they're slightly more likely to die with their owner. After all, this dolphin is dead now, right? Its hindlimbs may have contributed to that, slowing down its swim-speed or making it more clumsy. Or this too could be chance. Evolution is a higher-order effect of a random process. Weather is random too, the result of random movements of air and moisture in reponse to heat, but no one doubts that the west coast gets more rain than the midwest, or that hurricanes are rare in Alaska. So too does evolution result from random mutations and the vagaries of death, survival, and successfull reproduction.
Don't bother, unless you want to look silly. Any dolphins with legs are simply the products of the overworked imagination of a scientist trying to find creative new ways to squander taxpayer money, rather than getting out into the private sector and becoming marketing executives like god intended. Evolution is impossible. God would never make a half-formed creature like that. There are no missing links. For that matter, any vestigial organs you see on Humans are simply the product of your own diseased imagination, tainted as it is by that most evil of all Human inventions -- public education.
Well, the idea is that you combine the code with a worm that can infect webservers. That way, lots of webpages will have the code, and the odds of an unprotected Windows machine being infected increase rather substantially.
The constitution of the USA does indeed limit what the FEDERAL government can do, but it affords virtually LIMITLESS power to state governments. The constitution is completely unambiguous about that -- states can do absolutely ANYTHING that the constitution doesn't directly forbid them from doing. States can appoint noblemen, appoint a governor-for-life, hike taxes until your eyeballs bleed and you have to hock your spleen for rent money, make doctors and other magicians illegal and punishable by death, put Mister T on the state flag, declare poodles to be the only legal breed of dog, grant suffrage to some of the more notable species of fern, etc. And the US is
America not a democracy ... where do people get this ridiculous nonsense?
Free markets are something that a government creates. Without the government, an oligarchy can sieze total power and do absolutely anything it wants, prevent any competition, manufacture scarcity.
It's just stupid to think that if a town of one hundred people in the middle nowhere want to put their money together to buy a satellite dish and share it, that YOU should be apply to come along and say that they're not allowed because it violates the precepts of your insane little religion. Who is really depriving people of freedom -- me, with my suggestion that cities and towns can do whatever they bloody well feel like so long as the people are in sufficient agreement, or you with your suggestion that these people, even if in 100% agreement, should be forbidden to create a public works project with their own money in their town, which you don't even live in? On behalf of everyone everywhere, fuck you. You don't get to tell any community other than your own what to do, and you'll be lucky if even your own community gives a shit so long as you have such a despotic attitude.
Seriously, go cry at Mussolini's grave and light a candle for Walt Disney. The rest of us will live in the real world -- cooperating and competing as appropriate. We don't need your extremist little religion.
In case the sarcasm isn't clear, let me say: you're an idiot.
Many marine food stocks have already collapsed. Very few viable abalone fisheries remain. Whaling is completely impracticle for most species and some have such small gene pools that recovery is basically a fantasy. The atlantic cod and salmon stocks are less than a quarter the size they were in the 1940, and even the 1940s levels were vastly lower than those in the 1700s. The sturgeon and swordfish are critically endangered. But obviously the discover of some new invertebrates on the sea floor makes it all better, right? Even though they exist in tiny numnbers, we don't eat them, and we don't particularly want to start? I'll take huge, viable salmon stocks capable of feeding half the planet over some toxic molluscs any day. And all it takes is a bit of restraint and centralized management. Yet you act as if conservationists are asking you to cut off your own legs.
The scientists behind this study were credible. You just don't like it so you assume that they must be gay communists with AIDs just trying to ruin your life, you know, for fun or something. Notice how there are no actual scientists denying the validity of this study? Just economists, industrialists, and other people that don't know shit about how ecosystems work? Not to mention random message-board jackasses that are threatened by anything that has even the slightest inkling of a suggestion that maybe capitalism isn't the highest form of morality in the universe?
Rock, man. Is it odd that I started hearing Slayer's "Raining Blood" in my head while reading this?
The problem has nothing to do with people eating fish. It's more to do with the fact that for every fish caught for food, a hundred more are caught to be ground up and used in various animal feeds and fertilizers, as well as the fact trawlers destroy vast tracts of the seafloor ecosystem so thoroughly that regrowth can take centuries. Banning trawlers and other destructive fishing practices, as well as placing strict limits on overfishing, is the only way forward.
Profileration is really a national issue, an issue of resources. Nations build nukes. Maybe a particularly industrialized and wealthy city could as well; but has it ever happened? As far as I know, only two nations have EVER gotten nuke building to point where it was anything other than a horrendously difficult, trial-and-error, hand-tweaked mega project. And those two nations -- the USSR and the USA -- have both since then lost/abandoned their ability to mass-produce nuclear weaponry. North Korea is bankrupting itself trying.
Building a nuke is definitley not about knowledge, it's about the time, money, and manpower to DO it. You really don't need much uranium, although it certainly is helpful that the bulk of the world's uranium mines lie in the hands of Australia and Canada, both non-proliferation nations that enjoy liberal trade with other capitalist democracies.
Labour law is a funny thing. You need a job to live -- even the best welfare program is pretty lousy compared to the worst minimum wage job. You definitely need a job to thrive. Employment -- not just access to employment -- would seem to be a basic human right, at least unless technology obviates both labour AND scarcity, and we end up defaulting to some kind of socialism (robotic socialism, as its sometimes called). And yet the more you try to protect peoples' jobs, the more you restrict the ability of businesses to do their thing. You decrease their ability to cherry pick employees and maximize their efficiency. If you give business the freedom to fire incompetent employee WITHOUT the two verbal warnings, two written warnings, and a disciplinary meeting (that's the process here in British Columbia anyway), you're also giving them the freedom to fire employees for nonsense reasons like their religion or drinking a different brand of beer than the CEO.
GOOD businesses don't need any regulation of course -- my job sucks, but my manager is fantastic. Time off when you need it, encouragement for what you do right, helpful advice on how to improve, no flak about sick days, etc. I had no intention doing more than the bare minimum necessary to keep the job and pay for classes and coffee. Now I actually kind of care, and do my best to excel (to whatever extent it's possible to excel at working a cash register, anyway).
Conversely, a bad manager will find some dumb excuse to fire you no matter what. That's not to say you can't come out ahead in a labour hearing, but it's so difficult and such a hassle that it rarely occurs. I know so many people that have had to work 2 and 3 hour shifts (illegal in BC -- you HAVE to pay employees for at least four hours of work no matter how long they're actually there). Restaurants are particularly bad about this. It's just the opposite for people in unions of course, since they have the union reps to make sure that their rights are enforced, no matter how monstrously shitty the employee in question. Teachers who flirt with students and have to be "firewalled" because it's so difficult to fire them are practically a cliche. I dated a woman who did HR for a hospital -- her entire job was described as "interpreting the collective agreement". The hospital had a staff of twenty people who dealt entirely with handling union issues, completely aside from the effort of actually HIRING and FIRING people, running benefit programs, etc. Ironically, the HR staff were not themselves unionized, and earned less than half of what a newly-hired nurse would. It's a good thing that people who get into HR do it because they love the work.
I'd say that finding the balance between employer rights, employee rights, the right to work, how to deal with bad employees, how to deal with bad managers, etc, is definitely a work in progress. It's definitely one of the challenges involved in getting capitalism "right", that is, not something that makes life miserable for people. Employers deserve the freedom to run their businesses the way they like, but employees deserve to have confidence that they can get as much work as they need and to be treated reasonably. It makes it easy to see why some people like the idea of socialism so much -- when everyone receives the necessities of life automatically, it frees them up to treat labour as a true commodity, one that can be bought or sold freely at whatever prices the market will bear. As it is, we essentially HAVE to sell our labour, other than those few who get the opportunity to be entrepeneurs.
Evil too, of course, and I wouldn't be particularly sad if those responsible were raped to death by manatees. But still pretty fucking hilarious.
Like it or not, constitutional democracies are the absolute minimal form of tyranny possible in the real world.
I'll conclude by saying that Hoppe repeatedly refers to "natural" as if it were somehow good. Natural is a life without antibiotics or toilet paper. Nature is awful and horrible, and there's a very good reason that humanity has been running away from all things natural for as long as we've had the capacity to do so. The naturalistic fallacy automatically relegates those who make it to short bus.
Gangs and warlords aren't examples of anarchy -- they are examples of what anarchy degenerates into. You know, in chemistry, there are all kinds of interesting but worthless compounds that have wonderful properties -- but under real-world conditions they decompose too quickly into worthless and uninteresting byproducts. Anarchy could be fantastic -- but a few hours later, someone enslaves you. Sure, you've got a gun, and your neighbour has a gun, but when the tyrant comes with a hundred men and a gun, your choice is slavery or death. And most people will choose slavery. If you're not one of them, good for you. But you can't possibly believe that the willingness to die for freedom is anything other than a rare, precious quality possessed by very few. It doesn't take much to cow people into submission. So anarchy dissolves into tyranny.
Is nature anarchistic? Even that is ascribing too much order on the universe. But check out any species of social animal. They live or die by their ability to organize and establish authority and dominance structures. Few would call an ant colony "anarchy". And America? America was a highly anarchistic place once, populated by a number of peoples who didn't feel any particular need to organize into nations or states. And they were armed. Then people who DID organize into nations and states came along, and almost completely exterminated them. So much for anarchy. Over and over again throughout history, any group of people that have tried to live without organization get annihilated or assimilated by people that do organize and consolidate power. That's what your precious nature does best -- allow the strong to replace the weak. And those who cooperate are far, far stronger than those who don't.
But, since you're so well-armed, why not depose your huge authoritarian government and "kill the idiots in short order"? Form an anarchistic state. Then count the minutes before either a government emerges and initiates some social programs, or some other state organizes a government and takes control of your state. After all, the US came to be, despite an independent streak a mile-long among many of its citizens.
Should we be striving towards the ability to live without authority over us? Sure! That would be great. We should also strive towards a society where people don't labour to stave off death for another day, but rather labour to become more wealthy and to better themselves and their community. We should strive towards a society where people respect each other, and the thought of doing anything that might hurt anyone else would be competely repugnant to most people. Will these things happen? Maybe someday. But right now, anarchy is as silly as communism. There are too many things that only a large organization can provide, there are too many peope that will try to exploit others, the economy is far too prone to pathological behaviours.
I suppose the difference in opinion stems in large part from how one thinks of the government. Being Canadian, I tend to think of the government as a bunch of people that are there to do my bidding. When I needed student loans, I tell them to give them to me. When I think that the government is making the wrong decision about something, a letter telling them to shape up is in the mail (or in the opposite situation, a letter telling them that I approve). When it bothers me that there are so many homeless, I write to my MLA and inform him that we need more affordable housing and maybe to reopen the psych hospitals (the homeless in my area tend to be people with mental illnesses, junkies, or both). I generally think of the government in terms of what it can do for me and my community -- in terms of how to maximize the value generated by the taxes we pay. Someone whose contact with their government is different -- say, a small business owner -- could very well have a quite different perspective. Someone whose government behaves authoritatively would certainly see their government as more of as a force of control and dominance, rather than as a service organization. Someone whose government generates no value for them would be quite unlikely to see much benefit to government whatsoever.
So maybe I'll say this: the problem may be less about more versus less government, but about the attitude of government and towards the government. Is the government there to rule, or to serve? Decide for yourself, convince your neighbours, and elect leaders that much that attitude. But you know what? The moment someone shows me a practical way to dispense with most aspects of government -- a way that doesn't involve me tripping over frozen hobo corpses everytime I leave my house, or dying of diptheria because the jackass next-door doesn't think that he needs innoculations, or having to whip out my VISA card if I want the fire consuming my house to be put out -- I'll be right there in the anarchist camp. Just like I'll sign-on with the communists when I see robots that can repair each other and replace the majority of human labour. Until then, I'll just tell the feds to pass their responsibilities to the province, and the province to pass them to the municipality, wherever feasible. Until then, I'll focus on finding a nice balance where the hobos get some kind of effort to uplift them, the innoculations are mandatory, and the housefire gets put out at cooperative expense.
Damn, I'm babbling again. Rembmer kids, head-colds and coffee don't mix.
I totally agree that mutual respect for individual rights is the basis of, well, pretty much every positive aspect of society. And I'd certainly agree that the founders of the US had great vision in establishing constitutional limitations on the federal government, to shift the responsibility of democratic governance as close to the people as possible. Democracy is the most primitive form of government; small groups naturally function democratically. That's why democracy is best at the local scale, neighbours and small groups of associates working together to achieve their common goals and to support each other in their individual goals. That's why small businesses can often run circles around large ones, and why so many corporations are trying to decentralize. That doesn't mean that democracy is bad -- it just means that it functions best when power is allowed to spread out to the fringes. Getting the people at the very top to do that is just as much a democratic choice as any other. The modern republic is the result of the people choosing to formalize the functioning of their democracy in a particular way.
We all know of Winston Churchill's famous quote about democracy, so I wont repeat it. But it certainly warrants contemplation from time to time. Democracy is as much the freedom of the people to choose a constitutionally-limited Republic as it is the freedom to have the least popular 50%-1 of the society put into camps and turned into a cheap source of orphanage-grade heating-oil. That's why it's so great. The people can choose to centralize or decentralize administration as much as they like. They can choose welfare state policies, socialist policies, or libertarian policies as they like. They can change the constitution, reframe the Republic as needed to meet the changing times. After all, a loose union of states couldn't have achieved some of the things that the US has done. A loose union of states could not have performed the USA's phenomenol industrialization effort that made the waging of World War 2 possible. During World War 2, America -- like every other nation that successfully participated -- was practically communist. That's how wars are one, by the state marshalling every single resource it has and throwing them at the enemy. And afterwards, the US went completely back to whatever it is that you prefer to call the American post-war political and economic landscape. That's the great power of democracy -- the ability of the nation to be whatever it needs to be.
I think I'm babbling at this point, a side effect of too much coffee to prep me for work. Needless to say, I love democracy. I have trouble even conceiving of why anyone would want anything else, given its ability to emulate nearly any government structure one could care to have, from theocracy to socialism to free-market welfare states to the most hardcore forms of capitalism.
1: Socialism and capitalism are coexisting RIGHT NOW. Unless you believe that your ridiculous anarchist fantasy could survive the predations of organized nations using just its privatized, non-communist military. Every nation has a completely communist, authoritarian military. The military produces no goods and subsists entirely off of taxation of the labour of real people. The same goes for the police, and indeed the government itself. Are we socialist? Hardly. You don't have to choose, and anyone who suggests otherwise is just some kind of deranged fanatic that's one pamphlet away from assasinating people and blowing up buildings.
What the hell do you call that, if not a government? It may not be a federal or state government, but it's people organizing and consolidating money and power to accomplish goals. That's government (probably municipal in this case). That's why anarchy never works. People invariably want to gather together to accomplish goals that they couldn't achieve on their own. Rather than waste all their time overseeing every aspect of the project, they appoint a few people to manage it while everyone else just contributes resources and gets back to their own work. Now they have a government and taxes.
Centuries of ... human nature have made us accept that organization is natural, unavoidable, and overwhelming. The most organized group will, at best, assimilate the rest; as often as not, it will annihilate them.
I work for a living. I work fucking hard at shitty jobs to pay for school so that I can do better, more valuable jobs at some point. Unlike the cowards I deal with everyday, paying a few taxes doesn't reduce me to fits of crying and impotence. I drive our roads, I use our sewer systems. I benefit from a government that defends the border and fights crime without my needing a personal bodyguard. I benefit from the fact that the government stomps monopolies and prevents them from price-fixing or creating (much) artificial scarcity. We've seen anarchy -- anarchy is the five minutes before a warlord enslaves you and your family and puts you to work picking opium poppies at gunpoint. Anarchy is the window of opportunity for the worst kinds of government to establish themselves. Anarchy is so monstrous that it convinces everyone to put power into the hands of a despotic church or a monarchy, and thanks them for the safety of slavery.
So you know what? I'll take the minor hassle of a few taxes, and having to fill out a few forms now and then. It's that, or paying ten times as much in protection money to the local organized crime ring that has a monopoly on security and murders anyone that tries to compete.
The real crux of it is that democracy trumps economics. If 50%+1 of the people say that we should all pay taxes for a health care system, we do it. If 50%+1 of the people say we turn the rest into dog food, we do it. There are balances to prevent rash, insane changes, but ultimately the people can do anything. The people want a national bank to buffer against economic fluctuations (imagine if entire military had to be sold for scrap everytime there was a downturn), so we do it. The people don't want losing a job or becoming too sick to work to be a death-sentence, so we establish a welfare system. The people don't want to have the spend time and money doing background checks into supposed hospitals and doctors everytime they have a medical emergency, so the government regulates hospitals and medical licensing. Are you tyrant enough to say that we should cast aside democracy because of your weak spine in the face of a deduction from your paycheque -- a paycheque that is already being scaled-up to take that deduction into account?
Only a fanatic suggests that an issue is black-and-white. There are always middle grounds. That's why
The thing you hit on here that is the crux of it all is the part about local governments. Doing things at the most local level possible keeps the mandate pure, keeps the costs and benefits local, and maximizes accountability. That's where America's founders had such great insight, and where modern America has lost its way. Compare that Canada, which has been struggling to move in the opposite direction -- gradually transferring power, responsibility, and budgetary discretion to the provinces and even municipalities in some cases. I use the word struggle deliberately, since this kind of thing runs directly against the Human tendency towards centralization, and it's by no means clear that Canada has been particularly successfull at decentralizing. Still, America often seems to have given up on it entirely.