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Oakes

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Everything posted by Oakes

  1. The government holds the monopoly on the use of retaliatory force. Thus when someone is having their rights violated, it is the duty of the government to intervene, not private citizens. Your obligation as a private citizen is only to report the crime (and possibly give testimony in the court of law), so the government can perform said duty.
  2. Which is exactly why I consider it invalid to create a contract saying that you own me and I no longer have the right to life, liberty, and property. I can consent to be killed, I can consent to fight to the death, but I cannot consent to renouncing my ability to consent (i.e., to be someone's slave).
  3. 1) No crime is being committed. 2) Even if a crime was being committed, you would only be obligated to report it, not to intervene.
  4. I agree with CF that such "Death Entertainment" is not a waiving of your right to life, but an exercise of it (though it is unquestionably irrational). A far more genuine example of waiving your right to life would be if you sold yourself into slavery, since that would essentially mean that, after consenting to being enslaved, your enslavers can do what they want to you without your consent (you would not be able to exercise your inalienable right to life from that point on).
  5. I see the distinction, but I think both should be illegal. If one knows a crime is in progress, one should be legally obligated to report it whether or not one is directly questioned. If the law currently states that it is legal to not report a crime that you witness, I can't imagine an egoistic reason being brewed up to justify it.
  6. Why does this matter? It should be illegal either way. Anyway, I believe it was the latter: They didn't inform the police that he was staying there. I have never heard of the case you mentioned, but if that is true, I am apalled by the ruling. Harboring a criminal? Those three people - as far as I understand - lived with Couey. There wasn't any harboring going on, and they didn't have to do anything active at all. But at least you admitted the important part: You think that if someone passively witnesses a child being raped, they should have no legal obligation to report it to the police. When did I ever say "you are punishable for the crimes of those who control you"? The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not punishments for crimes; they were attempts to end the war sooner and save American lives. When we killed Japanese civilians, we were retaliating against the Japanese government, but at the same time the civilians had their right to life violated by the government who provoked such bombings (their government). So I thought of it as a parallel to when the police subpeona someone; the government is only retaliating against the criminal, but at the same time the individual receiving the subpeona had their right to liberty violated -- by the criminal.
  7. The point is that people were intentionally killed who never themselves initiated force. Their right to life was violated, but not by the Americans; they were violated by their own government the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
  8. I don't want to drift into a discussion about this, but I do hope you realize that this completely contradicts the Objectivist position. BTW, do you have any response to #1?
  9. This thread might be helpful: Abused Children and Orphans
  10. I have two points, both tying this discussion back to concretes: 1. I'm sure most of you are aware of the brutal murder of Jessica Lunsford. There are some reports that Couey's half-sister and two others failed to tell officers that Couey was staying at their mobile home. Assuming this is true, would it not fall under the category of "non-action"? Who in their right mind would suggest that it should be legal to not tell the government that a child is being raped? 2. There are many examples of the government initiating force, while the responsibility lay with someone else. Do those who disagree with this concept regard the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as immoral?
  11. I remember having to choose a favorite song to play for my 7th grade music class, and I chose to play Aeris' Theme. My teachers loved it, and I still have it on a CD along with Rinoa's Theme (FF8), Eyes On Me (FF8), Drifting (FF7), Edea's Theme (FF8), and Balamb Garden (FF8).
  12. Understood; it was just shorthand. I recall Yaron Brook saying the exact same thing - that immoral governments have no right to exist - in the Q&A section of his lecture, the Morality of War. It means that when you as a government official abuse your power, you have no right to continue being a government official. With power comes responsibility.
  13. This, I think, hits the crux of the disagreement, of the "false dilemma." A government either has the right to exist - and thus to preserve itself - or it doesn't. For that reason, I don't think the free/non-free dichotomy is avoidable. I definitely agree with this as it applies to individuals, but it is a little disingenuous to pretend that this applies to governments as well. Governments hold a specific job, and if they don't do it right, they have no right to exist - and thus, no right to preserve themselves.
  14. I think we have hit an impassible barrier. You believe that choosing to use speech instead of illegal means to fight unjust laws in a free society is equivalent to "[cooperating] with predators" (a phrase you used twice in this post) and "giving in." I don't know what else to say without repeating myself, so let the record show that I disagree. Fair enough. To each individual person, I ask: Which do you value more, the government's protection of your rights, or the rights that the government is violating? If the former, then you regard the government as a legitimate protector of your rights; if the latter, I don't want to hear you defending your government's right to self-defense. Regardless, that's what persuasion is for. If you don't believe in the power to change peoples' minds, why have this discussion with me? Will you under a laissez-faire system? One last time: Just because I'm arguing not to break unjust laws does not at all mean that the government is "entitled" to impose them. Just to be clear: You believe that even immoral governments have the right to defend themselves. You think that America's right to self-defense lies not in the fact that she is fundamentally rights-respecting, but rather, that she simply is a nation. Am I misinterpreting your analogy?
  15. I assume this also applies to private military forces. I remember a documentary that said the US government has used private forces to do operations that its forces were restricted from under international law.
  16. This is interesting... I haven't considered the idea of contracting a police force. (To anyone:) Used on a wide scale, would this uphold the government's monopoly on the use of force? That was my mistake - by "police," I was referring to its proper functions. Good, I agree with this entirely.
  17. I think the first paragraph in my initial post should answer all of your questions. I do recognize that private security forces are a good thing, but is that really what Badnarik is proposing? Do you intepret him as simply suggesting that we bring the police back to its proper limits? I read it literally: that our tax-supported police forces should be "converted to private ones." Are you suggesting that as long as state police don't completely protect our rights, private security forces should go beyond the job of initial retaliation and become a de facto government?
  18. Oh I certainly recognize that many of them are anarchists, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't misinterpreting it. Does anyone know anything about the Oro Valley situation he was talking about? There is little if any chance that the two-party system will change any time soon, so creating another fringe party won't do us much good. We can find our own little niche in the Republican Party, and do what we can to make our views more mainstream.
  19. I am fine with the concept of private security forces to do the initial retaliation when a contract is broken - for example, bouncers in bars or highway patrol - but I am completely mind-boggled as to how one could advocate privatizing police and not be an anarchist. The man I am referring to is Michael Badnarik: http://www.badnarik.org/plans_crime.php Am I missing something?
  20. I've thought about this, and decided that I am in agreement with David Odden on the point that a law must allow man to live according to his nature, and preventing love on the basis of race would do just that. However, income taxes, to the extent that they don't impoverish you, or alcohol prohibition, to the extent that your life doesn't rely on it, do not fit into this category. That's what persuasion is for. Because you delegate your right to self-defense to the government. Although it may abuse that privelege to a degree, as long as you consider it your legitimate protector, you treat it as such. I'll try to be a little more careful with my word usage. By "peaceful," I meant "legal." Yes, you can persuade and break laws, but I have already outlined why I think that is a contradiction. You misunderstood me. I want to know: Does that state have the right to defend itself from foreign aggressors? Do you consider it legitimate and deserving of the right to self-defense, or not? You're missing my point (perhaps I cleared it up in the previous quote). You defend America's right to national defense because she is fundamentally free. In other words, you have used the same justification you at one time called a "package deal." Why are you willing to call her legitimate enough for national defense, but you refused to ascribe such a "package deal" to her before?
  21. I didn't say he had the right - I said he may have. I don't know enough about your grandfather's situation to know whether evading laws was the right thing to do. You're forgetting political pressure. Remember the context: A free society. If the majority reigns terror on the minority, you have no obligation to follow their laws. However, if society is fundamentally free, and the government is representative (i.e., you can change it peacefully), using persuasion is an honest acknowledgement of that legitimacy. Let me ask you something: When do you think a state has the right to defend itself? Is it when the state is fundamentally free, or completely free? Imagine a state that had completely laissez-faire capitalist policies in every single area except one: Selling 2% milk is illegal. Does it have the right to defend itself? Will you acknowledge that despite this stupid law, it is fundamentally free? That is the source of this "package deal." If you cannot admit the inescapable dichotomy between legitimate and illegitimate, America would have no right to defend herself. She is legitimate not because she is completely free, but because she is free in the most fundamental areas, allowing her citizens to change the laws by persuasion.
  22. The problem here is that you are mixing two different contexts: Can a nation kill innocent civilians, and can a person kill everyone on his street. Our government has one and only one duty, and that is to protect its citizens. It has no obligation to act as a policeman for non-citizens; it needs only to leave them alone, unless they pose a threat. When that threat is created, our government is not obligated to sacrifice the safety of its own young men and women in order to treat enemy civilians as individuals, each with civil liberties and each deserving a trial. The responsibility to do this lies with their government, whose aggression made it responsible for any civilian deaths resulting from our war of retaliation. As for the domestic context, our government must treat its own citizens as individuals because that is its job: to protect its citizens. Therefore killing everyone in a neighborhood to neutralize a murderer would not be justified.
  23. Correct, but I was responding to what you brought up about your family - they may have had every moral right to break the laws then, but the fact that the overall size of the government has increased since then does not mean that you individually have the moral right to violate laws today. This is a good point, although in a case like Prohibition where dissent was rampant, I don't think violating the law was needed to change them. The Boston Tea Party was a protest of taxation without representation - it was perfectly legitimate to break British laws when we had no freedom to change them any other way. As for executing a communist butcher - you are not morally obligated to follow the laws of a non-free government. The United States is a fundamentally-free nation. If we cannot agree on that much, we will get nowhere here. We've already gone over Martha in this thread - nobody is obligated to follow laws that cannot be followed. Note: Don't try to compare serious crimes with comparatively trivial ones. The severity of your crime is the measure of your declaration of war on the government. I don't suggest that you need to accept giving an obscene portion of your income to politicians - you have every right to dissent. The question is by what means should you dissent, and the answer is entirely dependent on the way you view the government. The difference between picking and choosing a few laws to break, and full-scale violent revolution, is only one of degree. What's so absurd about your analogy is that it both warps the principle and destroys the context in which it resides. The context is not a slave state, it is a free state. And the principle does not state that objecting to unjust laws is wrong - of course some laws can be legitimate and others not - rather the principle states that breaking unjust laws is wrong. In a slave state, you may accept police help while breaking unjust laws, but as long as you consider the government free, accepting police help while breaking unjust laws is a contradiction.
  24. Whether or not the overall oppression has increased is irrelevant. The question is whether the government has increasingly violated your rights. If it today decided to make it illegal for Tom Robinson to buy anything, you would be morally correct to disregard the law and become a fugitive - even if at the same time it enacted free-market reforms for the rest of society. That is why it is important that we stick to talking about modern times in the United States. In other words, your argument is that if a society is civilized and rights-respecting, breaking the unjust laws will not only not undermine those qualities, it will actually improve them. My question is this: When has the government ever responded to law-breakings by removing the laws that are being broken? The essential quality of a civilized and rights-respecting society is that you do NOT have the streets filled with crowds glorifying and "cheering" on law-breakers. All disagreements are solved by persuasion. If you break any laws, you have fundamentally declared war on the government; you have told them that you no longer accept it as a legitimate protector of rights. You are sacrificing nothing and it is not against your interests. "Playing by the rules" of civilized society is very much in your interests, because it maintains your integrity: If you break unjust laws while continuing to accept the government as a protector of your rights, you are maintaining a contradiction. Either the government is legitimate, or it isn't. Either you call 911 when your house is burglarized, sue when a company commits fraud, and put a Support Our Troops sticker on your car - or you reject the government as fundamentally oppressive and go underground. There is no middle ground. I hope this answers the last two of your quotes.
  25. It is an absolute waste of time (not to mention a waste of electrons) to express outrage about one of thousands of trivial, dumb laws in this country. I'm with Tom Robinson: Keep a wider perspective. Kill a thousand birds with one stone by focusing your arguments against the root cause of these laws: government ownership of property that should be private.
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