The consensus was it’s not rape?!
Jesus Christ I hate people.
So what’s the point. Ifwedecide that poverty is coercive, then what does that mean?
Well it could mean a lot of things. Probably a big one is it’d take a lot of steam out of arguments that labor laws and taxes for social programs are coercive. I’ll let you connect the dots about why.
As to the thread, I don’t think poverty itself is coercive, but it opens up individuals to a lot of coercive abuse.
Who does the wind think it is, pushing us around like that? Bastard!
And gravity. What an asshole!
Come on now. A person who can meet their needs and knows it lives under different conditions than a person who can’t meet their basic needs. If somebody has been lacking food and/or shelter and this is starting to really bite them in the ass, these conditions may motivate them to resort to remedies that include actions which most of us would never consider in our daily lives. ‘These conditions’ = poverty. Doesn’t this ‘biting in the ass’ act as a coercive prod to action, any action, so long as it stops the biting? Monks and hippies can take it. A good monk knows there is no birth or death. A good hippie has good weed at least. But Joe Average cannot ‘reasonably’ be expected to be either one of those guys.
C’mon, Rand. The OP should be considered as ending with ‘Full Stop’. We have the debate, and later about 50% of people will take one side, 50% the other. Aren’t you ever, I don’t know, curious about things? Ever??
But since you asked, I spun this thread off the ‘Should prostitution be legal?’ thread, since 1) I got warned for making a point by being a jerk to Finn and 2) the question is enough its own debate that it might have derailed the thread and 3) I guess my position in that threat hinges on my position on whether or not poverty is a certain kind of coercive force or not, so why not open the question to debate on the 'dope?
Personally I think a lot of people are numb/ignorant to what poverty can mean. Try to put on your empath hat and listen to a song. The famous quote, “It’s ok to eat fish cuz they don’t have any feelings” is not, I think, some internal debate concerning vegetarianism but rather a meditation on life at the bottom of the food chain. I believe that lots of influential people don’t really understand this.
That’s an appeal to pathos. ‘If we decide that poverty is coercive’, then that means I arrived at the truth via pathos. I tend to put more stock in logos, but have never denied that pathos and ethos have real roles to play.
Well I was being lazy in quoting you. But in that case the sign is not the coercion. It’s just the reminder of the ability of the police to use actual coercion. The act of the government in putting the sign up could be considered coercive. I think your point about the human action applies here. The sign is not the action itself, it carries no intent. But if you mean something else I won’t try to argue that you don’t.