Xahrx, you need to step away and calm a bit. Some folks here are very aggressive, don’t let them pull you down with them. On that note consider the following statements again by LS.
Yet some of them are Americans. Murderers are murderers whether they live here or iraq. The label of ‘terrorist’ is arbitrary. We have evil men here just as there are evil men there.
Being a nationalist doesn’t mean that all murderers are foreigners and that foreigners are some how born murderers. I know I am mis-representing you, I am doing so to give you an example of how your mis-representing LS. If the middleeast has a higher rate of angry people right now there is a reason for that. Blowback is one example.
Be carful with your premise. Blood fueds, vendetta’s, and the like are never justified, despite who started them. Should you get sucked into that trap you are just as evil as the man who started it. Consider the Montaques and Capulets.
As for me, I side with everyone else. Leaving the middle-east immediately would be of greatest benefit to us economically and morally. It would also be of greatest benefit to the Iraq’s. But to be honest, I care not what they do after we are gone. It is not our responsibility or our business. Just as it is not my responsibility or my business to take any type of authority over my neighbor.
No, I said immigration should be made easier so people who want to come here can do so without having to cross illegally with scum criminals. I also dared to suggest that in this less than perfect world totally open borders might not be workable, and that people who have objections to ‘immigrants’ coming across the border might not necessarily be anti ‘immigrant’ when their actual complain is the ‘immigrant’ in question was blasted on drugs, had a loud conversation with the family dog, and then pissed in the front doorway. i’m also a big, big fan of ‘immigrants’ with typhoid and other such sicknesses making salads for people. Come down to the local pen when my cousin works, we’ve got a bunch of them in there. Not to mention a bunch of ‘immigrants’ who apparently thought buggerring prepubescent girls was A-OK in the good old US of A.
The problem with the government and immigration is that they are concentrating on the wrong population, much as with the drug war. They target all drug users, the problem is people who harm others whether on drugs or not. Same with immigrants. So their policy is to oppose all immigration when legal immigration should be relatively easy so actual immigrants who want to come here and make a life for themselves can do so without jumping in a van with a ‘coyote’ and a bunch of scum criminal bastards. That is why legal immigration must be made much easier, so the population if illegal immigrants both shrinks and is much more homogenously criminal and worth concentrating law enforcement on.
But, I suspect such an argument is beyond your ability to comprehend. Ever hear that the perfect is the enemy of the good?
Easy on the logical fallacies. There are examples of stateless societies failing and examples of stateful societies failing. There are reasons and rational conclusions for why stateful ones have appeared to be predominant. That doesn’t justify them, no more than it justified slavery before much of the world abandoned that.
There is nothing wrong with intelligent men questioning status quo, pointing out the errors, and presenting a way to improve.
There is a difference between aggressive and stupid. The biggest problem I deal with in trying to get people to even consider freedom as an option is that they think Anarchists are a bunch of naive utopian dipshits who are more concerned with intellectual purity and perfect, flawless logic than anything that might actually make a real difference for the better in this world. It’s big problem because they’re not wrong. I’m all for calling bullshit on those who are hopeless statists, however more than a few people here need to learn that not everyone who disagrees with them wants to construct a pan opticon and enslave the human race to the state forever.
Never said otherwise, so once more, the point?
How have I misrepresented him? He wants a full and immediate pull out, I want a gradual one. For that I am labeled a statist and asked why I want to kill Iranian babies and rape Iranian women. Hyperbole? Certainly. Also on point. There will be blowback for an immediate pull out too, even assuming it’s possible which for all practical purposes it isn’t. So one can advocate for an ideal policy which will never happen and which itself takes place in this same less than ideal world and which itself will have unintended consequences, or one can advocate for gradually changing policy and drawing down troops, which yes will have its own problems and unintended consequences but also has the advantage of: one, being possible and at least a change in the right direction; and two, allowing for some possible mitigation of all the bad will our ‘leaders’ have built up over the years.
I disagree. And even if it does make me as evil as DinnerJacket, I’d be alive and he’d be dead, and I have no desire to nuke anyone. Once more, the perfect is not an available choice. So marginally speaking and on the absurd but for argument’s sake workable premise, if it came down to it who would you want to deal with on a semi permanent basis, him or me?
I disagree. Or rather, I’m sure they would on your statement of responsibility for what’s going on over there. And if we did pull out immediately and the region when to hell, nukes came into the equation and some dipshit melted New York into a glass sculpture specifically as revenge for first disarming his people, then leaving them to be massacred when we pulled out, what then? Once more, most people do not agree with anarchist ideals and they do apply personal analogies to international affairs. And in their minds we, meaning the US, broke into their, meaning the middle east, house and tore the place up. And you want to now leave with no reparations, no peace made, no attempt even at some kind of mending of wrongs done.
What exactly is wrong with, instead of an immediate pull out, saying to the middle east, “Sorry guys, our bad. Our troops are going to leave at a rate of X amount per X time period until at point Z we will be gone. You have until then to tell us what you want from us as payback for all the shit we pulled before we go, and while we won’t be here killing you anymore, we also won’t be here to stop you from killing each other should you decide to do that, so you also have until time Z to get a very big potato masher and a bowl to get your own shit together. We’ll throw in a reconnection of the plumbing, electricity, and cable TV on us s a gesture of goodwill…” It is at least as possible as a full and immediate pull out, likely way more possible. It’s not as ethically pure or satisfying morally, but it accomplishes roughly the same goal and maybe doesn’t leave a complete hell in the wake of our leaving.
There is a difference between questioning the status quo and incestuous gas baggery though. I see no example of a stateless society. Show it to me. And if it’s so wonderful and still in operation, what are you still doing in a state society?
i would suggest Austrians take the Public Choice school to its logical conclusion and realize the state exits by and large because enough people demand such a mechanism in society. They want some level of institutionalized theft and murder, they seem to want a central authority be it God or the government. I don’t know why. Maybe they have trouble seeing the difference between explicit and implicit cooperation. Maybe humans just have enough of a natural criminal tendency to make the existence of institutionalized force viable.
My personal view is that just as actual capital needs to accumulate to make advances possible in physical wealth, so does intellectual capital. People need to develop to anarchism and can’t just make the jump anymore than stone age hunters can all of a sudden become first world service sector highly specialized workers. They will develop toward anarchism if given the chance because it is correct and right morally and ethically, but they will do so slowly, and especially slow when their any and every compromise away from the purest of anarchist ideas is met with derrision, insults, caricatures, and mocking. So do you want to actually accomplish something and perhaps enjoy some measure of real freedom at some point in your life, or does gassing around uselessly on message boards with the monolthically like minded truly satisfy you?
I have no problem with the government of Iran owning nuclear weapons, so long as DinnerJacket and his ilk aren’t a part of that government. My problem is not with the Iranians, it is with the nut jobs within their government who seem to want to be able to melt cities for some reason. And no, I do not think I have the ultimate moral authority to make that decision, but I’m going to try and do so anyway because I think DinnerJacket and his ilk believe they do have that authority and will exercise it. And yes, I worry about our own government’s past and possible future use of such weapons as well. However I consider a nuking by Obama here or abroad less likely than a nuking by DinnerJacket and/or any nutter he may decide to ‘sponsor’ with a present of a small, tactical nuke which will likely go off in my backyard considering they seem to love to target NY. I’ve seen enough people die here to last me a life time, and I’m not willing to see another couple thousand dead neighbors of mine simply to satisfy my desire for ideological purity. And no, I do not get the moral authority to kill others by witnessing death myself. I just get the practical frame of reference of what I can and can not live with, and the desire and the balls to stand up and stop it.
There is a difference between fear and common sense self defense, between trying to come to a workable peace and simply turning your back on a possibly dangerous enemy and walking away, giving him the opportunity to stick a knife in your back. Idealism is only maintainable relative to what you have to lose. I suppose being very idealistic, you have little to lose. I have friends and a family and a life I’d like to see continue uninterrupted. Under normal circumstances I see the the US government as the biggest problem in that regard. With regard to the middle east I see fanatical dipshits in pajamas who want nuclear weapons as the biggest problem, and the US government as my less than perfect, unlikely ally of the moment.
Where is the minarchism? This system isn’t exactly what we advocate anyhow. In the thread about Xeer law, someone objected that the family/clan component was necessary, but this can be easily reproduced by for-profit companies.
No one in particular. Who are you to make them choose complete inaction? I make no pretentions to ideological purity, asking me to is therefore pointless. I submit here and now to the judgement of murderer for killing DinnerJacket if that’s what it comes to and I advocate that action. I will be a murderer. Given the possible alternatives, I’m cool with that. I have accepted that my role in this world will not always be perfect by the standards to which I wish everyone would adhere. And I’m well aware that the governments of the world are full of people who think the same thing and use the same reasoning. I just hope that knowing what the my ideal is, which is anarchism, and how unattainable it is, I can limit my compromises to those which will result in a net good for the world in general. That’s the price you pay for living in the world as opposed to lobbing criticisms at it from a hermetically sealed ideological bubble.
By what they say they want to do and seem to be working toward doing, such as nuking Israel, getting rid of the great satan the US, and enriching uranium to weapons grade levels. Now I couldn’t care less about Israel, but since the US seems to be linked with Israel in the minds of fanatics because of our ill advised support for Israel over the years, I do at least have to consider them in the equation. Personally I’d rather move Israel to somewhere within Utah and be done with it, but I don’t think the Israelis would go for that.
I think the biggest problem you have is communicating logically, coherently, consistently, without ad hominem. As to what people think anarchists are, most people don’t even know what ancaps are or that such ideas even exist. And as a matter of individualism, anyone who rejects freedom because it is “utopian” or someone else has “utopian ideas” is making a fallacious argument.
So it seems to me, you have trouble communicating, when dealing with people who work from falsehoods. My ideological purity has nothing to do with your inability to make headway in these scenarios.
As far as making a “real difference for better in this world”, what is better is subjective, and so the responsibility does not fall on you to determine what is and is not better for this work, nor for you to implement any universal notion of such. The only issue I can see you having with anarchists, is that we won’t go vote with you assuming you are a democrat. If there is some other positive obligation you want to hang around our necks, then you’re not even a minarchist libertarian. What next, we all have to pay our fair share so we can have more nukes and air craft carriers than the rest of the world combined?
They are wrong, and they operate from false premises. It is somewhat unsurprising, but still disturbing that you think that their false premises are an indictment of people with good ideas and conviction.
We need to get to the bottom of this fallacy. He has no nukes. The IAEA says he is not producing nukes. The entire world is watching him, to make sure he doesn’t make nukes. If he tries to make nukes, Israel will attack him. Even Ron Paul doesn’t believe he’s a nuclear threat. So what do you know, that the weapons inspectors, Israel etc do not?
Also, where is he evil. By this I mean, how is he more evil than any other statist? What precisely has he done that is so evil? Why is he such a great threat?
The US will never leave, never make reparations, and never allow peace in the middle east. To do so, would mean dropping support for Israel, leaving them to establish diplomatic relationships with their neighbors, instead of being militant antagonists.
Have you considered for a minute, that the people being tortured in Iraqi prisons, and bombed in Pakistan, probably don’t want you to take your sweet ass time leaving? That they wish you had never stayed one more second in their country, causing pain and destruction, supporting corrupt governments?
You make a dualistic argument here. First you argue your own fear and paranoia, then you argue that these people wouldn’t be better off if US troops left immediately. Neither argument is based on reason. It’s entirely based on emotion, like your premise that we should just make compromises now, because that is how progress is made.
Ron Paul doesn’t buy that, Murray Rothbard had little to show for that, and the size and scope of the state is a clear indication that the libertarian compromisers have done little or nothing, and perhaps even exacerbated the growth of leviathan, rather than rein it in.
The only way the system can reform is if the people will change. You can’t change government, you have to change the will of the people.
The minarchism is in the fact that, whether you like it or not, Iceland is now and always has been under the control of some form of government. Limited and close to anarcho clannism at times perhaps, government none the less. I asked for a stateless society. What you have shown is working examples of what I advocate; an extreme limiting of government to what most people think are its bare ‘essential’ functions with functioning private alternatives. You get there by convincing enough people that it’s what’s right, not by espousing some unachievable anarcho capitalist ideal, unless it is framed as just that; an ideal to aspire to, if never to reach.
There is no such thing as inaction. Praxeology 101.
Ok, fair enough, you’re a statist. So why are you here?
But that is the past, and you said that was irrelevant when applied to the US. How is that logically consistent?
Source?
Khomeini tried that, and nobody cared. The Iranians can’t radicalize themselves, it is people like you, who support their government making threats, that radicalize these people. This is that eye for an eye thing I was talking about. You can’t even see, that by saying you would kill a man, you are setting the stage for future violence. That the sanctions the US is putting on Iran, is going to drive Iranians to radicalize against America. Every intervention causes the next crisis (paraphrasing Mises). You think you’re making yourself more safe through intervention, by threatening murder, by refusing to go home, but all you are doing is exacerbating the crisis. It’s like a drug addict, that can’t stop getting high, until they die from an overdose.
Source? Last I read, the UN Weapons inspectors maintain there is no proof they are trying to establish a weapons program. What proof do you have?
Not that you care about all of the Utes you would displace right? Because the end justifies the means?