Nicky

I define individual freedom as everything, except things that rely on force to prevent another person from acting freely. So the use of physical force is the only boundary, by my definition. One can cause harm to another person in two ways: with the use of physical force, and without it. I am for outlawing the former, and allowing the latter. My questions are these: 1. What is your definition of individual freedom? 2. What is your position on allowing someone to cause harm to another without the use of physical force? Irrespective of your answer, please elaborate on why.

"Empiricist" is a terrible way to describe Ayn Rand's philosophy. It adds no more information than just saying "she wasn't a rationalist", but it adds massive amounts of potential confusion. Ayn Rand's argument for her axioms, the foundation of Objectivism, has nothing to do with any kind of empiricism whatsoever. If anything, your average empiricist would call it a rationalist argument and dismiss it.

Right. So? I'm not suggesting you should do something that goes against your deepest values, like suck the blood of newborns, to make people like you. I'm suggesting you watch football. And the reason is not exactly what you said. It's not to prevent random people from not liking you. It's to cause specific people, who you are interested in having a good relationship with, to do like you. P.S. I have a suspicion that you might be going by what some of Ayn Rand's heroes might do, when interacting with others in their world. But you have to remember that their conflicts with their coworkers were not about football. Those characters are all deliberately set in hostile, philosophically evil environments, with no chance to succeed. That's not the case with you and I. Our coworkers are perfectly reasonable, hard working, life loving people who happen to like football more than you do. That shouldn't be a cause for conflict. That is something you should be compromising on.

The government should be limited to the protection of individual right. This is wrong because someone telling a lie is not a restriction on your freedom to act. Government should also be impartial. With that in mind, punishing lying should either be done across the board (meaning he should be punished for lying too), or not at all. Ask him if he would be OK with paying a fine or serving time every time he tells his girlfriend that her hat looks great.

I read that he will be sentenced on May 21st, and that the 10 years is the maximum he could get. But he might not go to prison at all. Also, he was found guilty of invasion of privacy, obstruction of justice and the more serious two counts of a hate crime (anti-gay intimidation), not anything related to the suicide. I don't entirely disagree with the idea of hate crimes (crimes meant to intimidate a group of people), but I disagree with the way they work in the US. They seem to consider any crime committed with the purpose of intimidating a person belonging to "protected group" a hate crime, even if is a personal attack against the victim, not the group. But a crime against a gay man, that is meant to intimidate him or discourage him from engaging in sex, is not different than a similar crime against a straight man. And it would be unimaginable to see a verdict that carries a ten year sentence, for someone invading the privacy of a straight roommate, to try and make him stop having sex in a shared space. It's an awful, biased verdict. I just hope the judge sees it that way, and is lenient.

No.

Could be, but it's not. It's not only in the tabloids, it's all over the mainstream media too. FoxNews runs articles about who's gotten fat, ugly or too old for their clothes on a daily basis on the front page of their website. It's the second item, right under the Obama bashing news headline usually.

No. I think the military industrial complex, in any sense other than having a military and a military industry that builds weapons the government orders, is a conspiracy theory, and conspiracy theories are invalid methods of forming knowledge of the world. I have seen no evidence that someone other than elected officials, specifically the President and his closest advisors, are dictating American foreign policy. Until I do so, I'm gonna continue to dismiss conspiracy theorists' claims that the "military industrial complex" has anything to do with foreign policy decisions. No. American constitutional issues are not a matter of foreign policy. The thread is about whether our foreign policy is beneficial or not, compared to Paul's isolationism. Of course this aside is irrelevant to that. And unless Ron Paul is running for Congress, along with 300 or so like-minded colleagues, it's not even relevant to him. Congress is the legislative body of the United States, and the only body with the power to actually legislate in a way that removes the presidential power to engage in lengthy conflicts without an explicit declaration. Not only that , but until Congress continues to implicitly support the status quo (by funding what is it, 150 or so different military engagements over the years, that were not explicitely declared?), Presidents will continue to have that power. President Ron Paul would have that power too. He won't use it for the same reason he wouldn't use the power to wage a declared war (he's a pacifist), but he would still have it, as will the Presidents after him. And Congress will continue to have the power to stop any such engagement, by not appropriating the required funding for it. They have the power to severely limit the President's ability to wage war (to only very small incursions with special forces or targeted assassinations - certainly no lengthy campaigns like we saw in Lybia), even if he continues to act unilaterally.

Bruce Campbell rules. That is all. Oh and welcome.

Sounds like someone should've invented deodorant instead.

Well, the successful browsers abide by that standard, and the reason is that the ones that don't fail. The reason why they fail is, once again, the fact that they are not allowed to use force to back their marketing campaign. When they are allowed to use force, they don't fail. Once again, that is the crucial difference between a commercial enterprise and an agent of justice: an agent of justice can and must use force. Expecting criminals to voluntarily abide by its rulings is absurd. Therefor there need to be other limits on its power, besides market competition based on the voluntary nature of market participation. Those other limits are the checks and balances of a constitutional republic, including the democratic process. It's very odd, by the way, that in the other thread you cite the US Constitution for every claim you make, and in this one the Constitution is the first thing you want to get rid of. I guess that's one of those obvious contradictions you mentioned you have, that you should work on.

Celebrity gossip is aimed at destroying famous people's image, of tarnishing them in the eyes of the general public. And people consume it because they are envious and because they hate the good for being the good. I understand that some celebrities have done nothing to earn their fame. But most of them do have admirable qualities. And the few who have been popping up, who don't, are just another symptom of the same philosophical trend: nihilism. They are admired for not having any qualities, and once they acquire one thing that is perceived as a quality (fame), they are torn down too. Obviously, this is a generalization that doesn't apply to every single celebrity, every person involved with celebrity news, or every person who reads it. But it is by far the greatest motivating factor. And don't get me wrong, this is not the cause of the phenomenon of celebrity in general. In a better culture, celebrity would be limited to people who deserve and have a use for it, and celebrity news would be limited to objective and important stories about famous people, but it would still exist.

No, it's not like that at all. One is based on the use of force to apprehend and jail criminals, the other is based on voluntary agreements between market participants. This exact point, btw., is made by David Odden in post #25.

No, he doesn't. He assumes that different groups have different understandings of what justice is, in a particular case. That happens today as well, even though there is only one law. Luckily, we have an objective justice system to sort it all out.

It took much longer for the contributors to this thread to provide intelligent and sometimes even brilliant answers to every single issue you raised. Why would you want us all to just ignore all that effort, and start fresh with you?

Yes. I pick out the stuff I disagree with, leave the rest. Your next sentence doesn't change the fact that you do not have the right to that proof. You cited taxation as the source of this supposed right. That makes no sense. The reason you cited is the Gulf of Tomkin incident and an unsubstantiated allegation of a misinformation campaign about WMDs in Iraq. I explained why the former is not a valid argument, and someone answered the latter a few posts back. Would congressional support affect your or Ron Paul's opinion on any past military intervention, or a future one in Iran? The reason why I've been ignoring you on this is because I don't think it would. I agree with the legal point you're making, but I don't think it's relevant to the thread. Besides, most members of Congress have been openly supportive of the Lybian intervention, and they are supportive of a possible decision by the White House to bomb Iran. That makes this legal aside of yours that much less relevant.

No, you don't. You don't have the right to classified information. Why would I blame "Americans" for anything? Americans aren't writing your posts, you are. I'm blaming you. As for the notion that a lot of Americans favor Ron Paul's foreign policy, I'll just point out that a lot of Americans also think 9/11 was an inside job, vaccinations cause autism and aspartame is the Devil's sugar. And that the two groups overlap quite remarkably. So don't tell me that "Americans'" skepticism is justifiable. In general, it's not. It's quite idiotic. Just stick to citing and justifying your own skepticism, please.

It most certainly is not. In fact, if anyone here were a member of the government, with access to that proof, it would be their duty to withhold that proof from you. This is what anti-government types don't seem to get: the final arbiter of proof, in the wake of a war, is not the UN security council, the international community, the American people, or the population of the world: it is the President and Congress. That is how the Republic works: elected officials and members of the military and law enforcement are tasked with collecting, reviewing and acting on classified information to protect the nation. They owe you an explanation, but they don't owe you proof. That explanation has been given. Stop demanding "proof" as a condition of supporting a war. It is not your job, as a regular citizen, to review the evidence and make a fully qualified determination for or against war. Your job is to make a qualified determination on whether the reasons given warrant a war, and whether the specific officials giving the explanation can be trusted or not. And whenever you do wish to accuse specific officials of malice, the burden of proof is on you!!! As for accusing the whole government of malice, before every single conflict, like a broken record (as pacifists such as yourself invariably do), based on a few cases of abuse and corruption over the long and quite exemplary history of the US government and military as a force for good in the world, that is just blind anti-Americanism.

Are you aware of how old a civilization Japan is?

Not unless you value the absence of social connections for some reason. Selfishness isn't doing whatever you feel like, it's doing what is good for you. And having social connections is good for you.

Your logic would be flawless, if every instance of the word "government" and "they" referred to the same exact entity, the way you are pretending that it does. But, alas, that's not the case. The people who lied about the Gulf of Tonkin are not the same people you are accusing of being liars because of it. If you discard the reification of government you're building your argument on, and instead say "some people in some administrations are liars, therefor all people in all administrations and all agencies of government are liars", it's easy to see that your inference is flawed.

Interesting to everyone involved, ideally. But just "interesting to you and hopefully to others" is fine too, as long as you're moving in the right direction. As for the football thing, if everyone around you is interested in football, then why not learn about football? What's the harm in that? Or even better, learn just enough to be able to crack jokes about how stupid it is. Now you're communicating honestly, and about a subject people are interested in. Either of those two things is better than saying "we don't have any common interests, so we should just keep interactions to a minimum".

You, today: Me, yesterday:

Doesn't change anything. You still have to stop relying on the floating abstraction called "society" this theory is built on, and point to the actual people who are acting as racists, describe the way they are acting as racists, the error in their thinking, etc. Are government agencies, political parties, business leaders, universities, churches and NGOs actively excluding qualified black people from their ranks? By what means exactly?

P.S. Trying hard, even if you're not good at it, is fine. If you're trying, that communicates your interest. In a business environment, that's what matters, not how good you are at socializing. No one cares that some guy is the funniest person in the office, when it comes time for a key assignment or a leadership role. They just care about giving it to someone who is interested in other people and competent in his job.