yes
yes
/\This
So don’t say anything bad about the left and if I do it shuts down conversation. Got it.
Forgive me if I refuse to comply.
You can’t rightly say something is your personal property if you don’t have exclusive use to it. Exclusive use is called property rights.
Let’s do a thought experiment. I believe everybody has the right of self ownership. Part of the right of self ownership is the ability to choose who one has sex with. The violation of this right to choose one’s sexual partners is called rape.
By your logic, there’s really no such thing as rape until there’s a government that comes around and decrees that rape is a crime. If an individual lives in anarchy, totally without any form of government, and another person forces sex upon that individual, is it not rape?
Yes, that’s what I mean by property rights. That condition exists before a government is formed. Governments are formed because sometimes people do unethical stuff, like commit theft, and a government can stop stuff like that.
Property first, then governments.
Taking of material - that is owned by another person who doesn’t want to part with it - is theft. Homicide is murder.
Government doesn’t invent either, it only prevents and/or punishes the commission of those crimes.
Having stuff is owning property. Stronger/most murderous person taking stuff is theft. All before the existence of government.
You’re playing a shell game with the definition of words. And to what end I can’t tell, except to avoid calling taxation theft. Seems like a long way to go for very little reward.
I don’t think this is analogous. Ownership of one’s body is not the normal justification for forbidding rape; rather, it’s the extreme trauma that rape entails.
But I see what you’re getting at.
The problem is that property rights the way we understand them in a modern capitalist society are highly complex and not intuitive. A person’s ability to own something they’ve never seen, will never touch, will never directly interact with is key to our system, but is not something that exists in any state of nature in any form.
In nature, in anarchy, property transfers happen violently all the time. Government exists to stop this–but cannot do so without resources. Taxation is the only means of obtaining those resources that has proven effective.
This is incorrect. Look at homicide: your definition includes things like capital punishment, deaths in war, self-defense shootings, and police shootings of armed and dangerous criminals under the definition of “murder.” This is every bit as idiosyncratic a definition of “murder” as your definition of “theft” is.
You may claim it’s I playing the shell game, but given that my definitions are the ones used by almost everyone else, and that virtually nobody uses your definition of “theft” to refer to things like lawful taxation, I’d turn this quoted bit around almost exactly on you, with the one change of “avoid calling” to “call.”
I disagree. I think rape is forbidden because people own themselves and shouldn’t be forced to have sex with somebody if they don’t want to.
But regardless of why rape is prohibited, the question remains. If somebody is forced to have sex while living in a state of anarchy, is it or is it not rape?
I agree. Property rights law as it now exists is very complex. But that doesn’t invalidate the basic of precepts of property rights. If somebody owns a piece of property and another takes it by force, it’s theft.
Again, I agree. But the purpose of taxation is besides the point. Making a person pay a tax he or she doesn’t want to is theft.
Not really. Ending another persons life is murder. Homicide is a synonym for murder. Sometimes murder is justifiable, but it’s still murder.
You took a poll and got everybody else’s opinion of what certain words mean? Can I see the data from this poll?
Anytime you call taking somebody’s money against his or her will anything other than theft, you have to get into a lot of circumlocutions to justify it. Easier just to call a spade a spade.
May as well go all the way.
Taxes are theft.
The draft and jury duty are slavery.
Compulsory education is brainwashing.
Arrest and imprisonment are kidnapping.
Traffic laws are tyranny.
Child labor laws destroy the free market.
One model of government formation is ISIS. Basically the mob writ large. Libs definitely don’t like this observation, though I’m not sure why outside of silly debates with cons. They’re supposed to be able to handle gray issues and moral complexities, but for them the government has to be born of immaculate conception for some reason. Despite all the excellent arguments against it, government is here to stay, and huge government is vital to modern, technologically advanced nations, so what if it’s totalitarian. Do you think anybody’s going to replace it all with voluntary worker collectives or something? Pull the other one.
If people come together to form a government to stop people from taking their stuff that sounds like a rather modern ordeal. With guillotines.
This comment struck me. So then why is “the left” trying so hard to get votes from drunk college students with poor judgement? It seems to me these drunk college students are saying exactly what many on “the left” think.
They are supported by many full grown adults in academia, like professors and some administrators.
Are they all drunk as well?
Untrue. Government predates everything, including humanity.
“Nature” is not anarchy - our hominid ancestors may have had very simple social structures, but they still had rudimentary government, if only in the form of an alpha male who hit you with a rock if you didn’t do what you were told. Anarchy - true, everyone-for-himself anarchy - was never a part of human history. And in the grand scheme of thing, private property is a very recent invention; maybe 10,000 years old at most.
It is. Because this is not a good analogy, it’s irrelevant.
No poll, but see here for an example of how dictionaries derive definitions, and see here for various definitions of “theft,” and see here for definitions of murder.
Sure–it’s easier to ignore complexities of the world. Nobody’s denying that. The question is whether ignoring complexity in favor of simplistic thinking is wise.
That sounds like tyranny. I would assume that most people, in a discussion about property, theft and government, are talking about some type of democracy or at least some “body” of laws, even a crude such grouping of laws. Does a tyrant fit that definition?
Neither private property nor democracy are in any way “natural”, nor are they the default conditions of humanity.
They can, however, be considered an improvement on nature.
Ok, but we are trying to “work backwards” to define the origin of “civilized” laws. (Isin’t that more or less the current topic at hand)? Obviously, they existed will before 2015 or 2010. How far back do we need to go?
But do not groups of mammals cooperate and work or share areas of land? Males may fight for dominance but how is that really (like really really really) different than people “fighting” in the marketplace for better paying jobs? Obviously, you can’t bash your coworker over the head and take their job, that is not what I am implying… I am saying it is all a scale from one end to the other…
Stated otherwise, it is rare, in the animal kingdom to kill for territory, right? It is usually fighting… killing is rare and mammals, despite fighting, often workin groups, right?
I disagree with your whole premise. Assuming “individualism” is supposed to refer to some principle that values the primacy of individual freedom over collective societal benefits, none of those things (except arguably the last one) actually says anything about “individualism” except in the most extreme and frankly lunatic interpretations of how a society should function (if indeed it’s even acknowledged that it should function at all). Specifically:
LGBT issues
… are not about some arbitrary right to express “individuality” by deciding one day that you’re going to be gay, just like no one wakes up one day and decides they’re going to be black. It’s a matter of basic human rights that we not engage in bigoted discrimination, period.
abortion
… has been beaten to death here over and over, and it’s also a human rights issue – the rights of an actual sentient existing human being with an actual life history, not a hypothetical one. The liberal view isn’t pro-abortion, it’s the recognition that there are honest philosophical disagreements in different theologies and ideologies and therefore there’s no basis for a legal stand on it.
not requiring voter ID
… is a total red herring. The argument has never been about the principle of authenticating voters, it’s been about deliberate efforts to intentionally suppress a particular voting demographic.
illegal immigration
… so you know someone in favor of illegal immigration? I don’t. The question is about rational policies to deal with an existing situation. Nothing to do with “individualism”.
legalization of marijuana
… isn’t so much an ideological question as a question about readiness to accept scientific conclusions about medical and social impacts of legalization. It’s not libertarianism, but simply a question of establishing that such harm is minimal.
*… but go against individualism when it comes to gun ownership… *
… no one is interested in banning gun ownership, and I would hope that no one in their right mind would argue against controls and regulations to keep dangerous weapons out of the wrong hands and prevent abuses. There are differences of opinion on where to draw the lines, but that should have more to do with interpreting objective scientific data than with ideology.
the teaching of creationism
… gimme a break! :rolleyes:
healthcare (ACA or single payer = everyone must acquire insurance or participate in the system
… why do conservatives always want to frame this as some ridiculous parable of a heroic individualist pitted against an evil system that “forces” said hero to have health insurance? It’s not about insurance, it’s about health care, and the need for health care is a universal fact of life, not a construct of ideology. So what’s the alternative? Agree that you’ll never use health care services unless you can pay for all of it yourself, and if you can’t, you agree to die quietly? There’s only one ethical way to deal with it in a civilized society and that’s to consider health care a universal human right. It’s not an “individualist” argument because there’s really no rational alternative, and people in most countries with UHC don’t see themselves being “forced” to “participate” in anything, they just see themselves living in a country where they get health care, period. The same way they know that if they become destitute they’ll at least get basic food and clothing and won’t starve to death on the street. Because we’re “forced” to “participate” in a social safety net, too. It’s called civilization.
compulsory school attendance
… I’d be interested to know who has a problem with a principle of education that’s been recognized since the Reformation in the 16th century and on which societies have been built ever since. Public schools support this process for most people, but I have no issues with alternative programs like private schools as long as appropriate academic standards are maintained. Why would anyone object to educating their child, or to curriculum standards, unless it was their intent to teach their children counterfactual bullshit? On the matter of childhood education, there’s a difference between being an individualist and being an idiot.
higher taxation
Really? There are people around who love higher taxes? I don’t know any. Aside from extreme libertarians who don’t seem to want to live in a functional society at all, the sane arguments about taxes are over the prioritization of program spending and the extent to which taxes should be progressively indexed to income. This is where most of the reasonable arguments between liberals and conservatives occur, reflecting honest differences in values, and where conservatives tend more toward individual rather than collective responsibilities, but it’s a pretty broad continuum.
There are many apologists for illegal immigration who want to call them “undocumented” as if they simply forgot to fill out a form at the border. Illegal immigrants is a proper term because they came here illegally as immigrants. On the other side, “illegals” makes them seem like they are inherently illegal to the core, instead of just their acts, and going further back, “illegal aliens” makes them seem like they’re Martians.
That’s why I call them people, or, neighbor. Because it makes me feel like they are people. Like they are my neighbor. I feel like the most proper term is one that most accurately reflects what they actually are.
In general you’ve given your position on these issues but entirely ignored the question of whether they’re questions of individualism. On one issue you’re factually incorrect:
polls say otherwise: on the question of whether handgun ownership should be banned for everyone except police and other authorized persons, 24-36% of Americans want the ban.
That doesn’t mean someone’s an apologist for illegal immigration, of course. On the other hand, someone who immigrates here illegally is obviously in favor of illegal immigration; wolfpup’s comment just shows he doesn’t know anyone who’s done so.
Yes, I’ve given my position on the issues and I would venture to say it’s probably a fair characterization of the progressive position on them, but I don’t think I’ve ignored the individualism question. I would argue that I tried to show how some of the OP examples have nothing to do with “individualism” at all, and those that might be interpreted that way have a solid rationale for the liberal position that has nothing to do with individualistic ideology.
The argument that marijuana should be decriminalized and possibly legalized, for example, is based on growing scientific evidence of low risk of harm; the argument that guns need to be reasonably restricted is based on statistical evidence of relatively high risk of harm; there’s no inconsistency because neither is based on any blanket ideological notions about intrinsic individual rights. To my mind the scariest ideologies are those that promote absolutism – that individual liberties are always more important than the interests of society, or conversely that collective societal interests are always more important than individual freedoms. The latter can lead to tyranny; the former, to chaos and anarchy.
“Handguns” ≠ “guns”. Different types of guns call for different degrees of restriction. I didn’t say anything inconsistent with the views of that 24-36%, and in fact I basically agree with them.