GoodOrigamiMan

Well I hope we get this sorted out before roads go out of style.

Transportation, specifically a road, is a service not a right. If that service was there when you moved in then removed no ‘rights’ have been violated. It would be no different from moving next to a store before it closes. When the time comes that you are surrounded by four unreasonable liberals you must act according – but deriving from that situation that you need a right to access your property means that you’re going to be treating everyone like they are unreasonable liberals. Roads are an extremely important service but we have no right to a road as we have no right to a car, food, or clean water. We have a right to produce these things, to keep what we produce, and partake in free trade. The paranoia surrounding the thought that roads could be privatized and all public property abolished comes from the premise that somehow we need public property, that somehow we must have a right to something we haven’t earned in order to survive - that last bit of protection from absolute justice.

All I need is the side facing the road – and since all that land is owned by me up until to land owned by the roadman I have very little to fear. Anyways you can be my guest trying to enforce property rights for a 1-inch-strip. I forget what they are called but any residential area would probably have the private equivalent of “zoning” – I hate to say this but as it stands now we can not even paint our house a different color without permission from some bungalow association, so good luck trapping me in Pasadena. Actually, come to think of it, 3 fourths of our property already has a 1-inch-wide strip that I can’t cross – its called a fence. I’ve already mentioned that nobody is going to starve over this and why.

Do you see a similarity here between your approach to validating “a right to access” and an altruists approach to validating “a right to values”? And lets not lose focus on what were talking about here… your position, as I understand it, is that your right to access property justifies the disposal of someone else’s property. Meaning if I own property surrounded by someone else’s land I have a right to go thru their land in order to access my land. As you are putting it, is it or is it not putting your right to access in conflict with my right to my land?

Just because they are easy to imagine doesn’t mean they occur "quite frequently." Awesome! I am so happy that I can get a court to force my neighbor build a road thru his property!

I didn't assume, my point is that they wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long; they will run out of money and be thereafter impotent. My point was - if you did trespass you’d be arrested and end up in a court anyways.

I’m doubtful of how much harm an organized group of liberals could do in a capitalist society. Sure, they could choose to demonstrate a pseudo “market failure” but I can’t imagine any scenarios where they could profit from this – in other words: it would be a big waist of their time and money. Another thing… you cannot mine roads to keep people off of them or shoot trespassers on sight – so while everyone has the right to defend him or herself not one of the issues in this thread has suggested criminal actions. Therefore the worst that could happen in any of these scenarios would be that everyone ends up in a courtroom. ...If I was the poor sucker whose land was surrounded I am not suggesting that a court could give me the right to walk thru the other guys land – but I am noting that a courtroom is a better alternative then starving on my land. I think you could argue that if someone was being irrational and malicious by trying trapping with no choice but to violate their rights your actions would in effect not be punishable – this argument could only work once, because you would have a choice to go back to your land thru theirs. Regardless it is an extremely bizarre situation that I doubt I will ever occur as things stand today, must less a in capitalist society.

Bryan, you are muddling the water… I am only interested in one issue here: that your property rights do not entail a right under any circumstance to violate someone else’s property rights. The problems you bring up are somewhat legit, however you yourself have hinted that they can all be solved with private contracts – and that is the answer as well a completely different subject entirely. It is a simple issue. If the mineral owner made a contract with the surface owner upon sale to the effect that access would be provided for the minerals – the mineral owner could have the contract enforced by the government (this isn't a ‘right’ to access, but most defiantly a ‘guarantee’). If the mineral owner had no such contract then he’s out of luck. It is presumable that there would be something of good value the mineral owner would be trying to dig out - but if the surface owner was unwilling to lend, lease, or sell enough land for an excavation – obviously not valuable enough.

Just to add an example… my family owns some land in Texas where this is a marginal amount of oil underground. This oil is ours because the property rights for the land extend 300 feet below the surface. Would could legally stop anyone from taking our oil even they found a way to suck it out from across our borders (if we expected to sue them though we would need proof of how much oil is there and of how much oil was removed). Eventually though, if prices go up enough to make it profitable, we will end up giving permission for an oil company to come in while taking a reasonable percentage of the profits. In the case you presented it would seem the resort would have a wonderful hidden asset if people stopped going on vacations.

In my opinion this issue it is more or less along the lines of trying to make property rights work for savages and the fact remains they don’t apply. What I mean by this is that a society which recognizes individual property rights must already be rationally selfish – the people of this society have to a large extent, implicitly or explicitly, discovered a proper morality. If a time comes when people treat property rights like pieces on a Go board and make efforts to suffocate each other, buy the roads leading to a city then deny passage, hoard land an arrest all trespassers – well that society is rotting from the inside out. Why is it rot? Because starving a city, denying passage at a reasonable toll or arresting some picnickers are not rationally selfish things to do – they are stupid things to do – and the only way people that stupid could acquire enough wealth to play such a dirty game would be from some guilt-milking altruist policy… but nonetheless these scenarios have become example candy for altruists who claim that selfishness means sacrificing others to oneself. Grr… Grrr Maximus! Anyways, if a right to access your property means in effect the right to dispose of someone else’s – then by no means is it a right.

I would do everything the same except wait a little while longer (a century or so ) before having kids – at which time I could take a break from engineering (find somebody to manage my company) then build or buy and run my own school… I could manage part time engineering, teaching and parenting (a group of 3 kids every 30 years) until the technology developed to explore space

Just to make it clear objection is based on the premise that a private forum would block members, specifically me, from valuable forum content. I have no problem with a thread with posting privileges limited to moderators for their convenience - so long as the thread remains open to public, specifically me, for viewing. I find a lot of value in threads I don’t participate in, expectably between more knowledgeable members of the forum, and needless to say I don’t want any of those threads becoming invisible to me. Watching the moderators interpret the rules and handle trouble makers is in my opinion a valuable means of understanding the forum rules and to some extent the individual moderators themselves; considering judging other members, such as those who might be sympathetic to libertarianism, is one of the more controversial issues on this forum, I like to keep tabs on where everyone stands – especially on the moderators as they are responsible for enforcing the rules. Another problem with creating totally private threads for moderators, is that it will result in discussions in said threads that otherwise would have taken place in a public thread. There is a difference between a simple tool for keeping track of which moderator warned so and so, so another moderator doesn’t warn the same person, and full fledged private threads whose capabilities are geared towards discussions not keeping tabs. As for the concept RationalCop brought up, “praise in public, chastise in private” - I think this should be irreverent in an Objectivist forum. Regardless of whether or not members are individuals or second-handers I think people should be treated and expected to act like individuals – if they can’t handle it then Objectivism is not for them. Anyways, I realize I’m going against the grain – which is why I felt this slightly elaborated objection was in order. I appreciate what our moderators do and don’t want make their lives harder or their time less productive - I just prefer to keep a watchful eye on everything.

I have no problem with choice numero uno.

I voted ‘no’ because I don’t see what moderators could talk about in a private forum that they couldn’t talk about in a public forum.

Logical fallacy of not comparing enough posts! Actually it seems as if the number counts up for each and every post on the forum regardless of what thread it was in. So there were 5 new posts on the forum in-between the two posts whose numbers you were comparing. Instead of counting you can check the post number by clicking on the Post # link in the upper right corner… the number at the end of the link is the post number. Since every post on the forum seems to have a unique number, a quote with a snap back will work if you throw it in a different thread, like this one:

To show the structure of the second version of your example: [.quote=GoodOrigamiMan,Dec 29 2004, 11:51 AM] [.quote=Marc K.,Dec 29 2004, 11:11 AM] Is there a way to retain a quote within a quote when replying? [.right][.snapback]66555[./snapback][./right] [./quote] To do multiple or compound quotes I always work with a text editor. [.right][.snapback]66565[./snapback][./right][./quote] If anything ever goes wrong it means that your opening and closing tags are not matching up. This happens if you accidentally deleted a tag or cliped off a bracket.. Sometimes I have found not having a space between them stops them from functioning.. Anyways, better safe than sorry - preview your post when messing with multiple quotes.

Pretty much… to create your example I replied to your original message, cut out what I didn’t want, then pasted the results in my text editor. To quote my response I replied to my post, cut out what I didn’t want, then pasted the results as well. To layer the quotes you simply paste one inside the other – that includes the header: [.quote], the end: [./quote], and everything in-between. (periods are to fool html) As far as where to paste one quote in another that depends on the sequence / structure you are going for – for example I could have changed the order of the example you suggested and used my quote as the primary one and simply pasted yours before the text in mine: So the good news is: there is still some room for individual expression!

To do multiple or compound quotes I always work with a text editor. I just hit reply to anyone I want to quote then cut and paste in MS Word. So if you want to quote the quote of the quote you are responding to, you must reply to the original message - which isn't usually hard to find tks to the snap back icons. Personally I encourage this way because it takes care of the snap back icons and the header for the quote – which are really convenient for people to catch up on the context. An additional perk of using a text editor is you catch many silly errors - like your spelling of ‘replies’. It would be nice if there is an easier way, but if not, cutting and pasting isn’t all that hard. One question to add though… the QUOTE box to the left of the REPLY box on the bottom right corner of the posts… what does it do? Clicking on it makes it go from + to - but I don’t know what it is affecting. Originally I thought it was for doing exactly what you inquiring -including the quotes in the message you are replying to– but alas this doesn’t seem to be it.

A little googling led me to this article, check this out… Social and lonely, rational and spiritual, loved and alone… amazing. To read between the lines or not to read between the lines, that is the question. Very interesting person… I’m going to have to go rent her other movies.

My original exposure to the musical was the original cast recording with Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford - which I have listened to dozens of times and more or less set my standards; subsequently I loved the movie. I was a little sad at times because they followed some of the original songs so closely they could have just made them the same… just little things the voice play at the end of ‘Think of me’ during the rehearsal or changing ‘specter’ in “he’s a funny sort of specter - to expect a large retainer - nothing plainer.” There was also a couple liberties taken with the audio mixing in some of the songs – but after all, the musical was written for Sarah Brightman, so all in all I think Emmy Rossum did a superb job. While they did made the choice at times to make the set look more like Disneyland forsaking realism, after I accepted that the movie was in part fantasy I had no trouble accepting and enjoying the extravagant sets. One thing I did like especially about the movie was how Raoul was portrayed, I agree with Daniel that he was a much stronger character, and amazingly I liked him – in the sense that I wasn’t devastated when Christine left with him. I think the movie played that really well at the end – Christine’s love for both the Phantom and Raoul was really apparent and it was her honesty if nothing else that saved the Phantom’s spirit in the end. Thank you for that article on her Stephen, after the movie I ended up defending some accusations towards her from some of my acquaintances basically along the lines of ‘airhead’ ‘superficial’ ‘gaudy’ etcetera – so while I was defending her role as Christine in the movie it is nice to know she’s a fairly decent person on the outside as well. All in all excellent movie.

Donations.

Fair enough… I figured when you said, “…any kind of romantic relationship I can imagine” and “your true love”, that you meant a genuine "romantic" relationship – in which case you were asking for a broadside. You wouldn’t have fooled me had you originally said something more along long the lines of, “any psychological problem riddled relationship I can imagine.” But on the subject of psychological problem riddled relationships - I think there is a lot to disagree on and very little that can be resolved, so my principle concerning them is to keep my distance.

You’re welcome. That was a very relevant quote

No, I meant what I meant. Yes, they almost did, but most of that tension was caused by Reardon and Dagny’s ignorance of Francisco personality due to his secrecy. But regardless, at the conclusion of Atlas Shrugged Dagny had exchanged hands three times but remained friends with the first two men and all three men remained friends with each other as well. So in response to what you wrote: I sincerely disagree and provided Dagny’s relationship with Reardon as a counter-example – seeing as how they were lovers for a time but remained close friends after even though they no longer “…owned [each other] completely…”. If you have a true romantic relationship it should go without saying that the two of you are of great value to each other beyond sex. If you can’t “tolerate” having an ex around after the relationship I would say you have a psychological problem. It is a problem because you judged this person to be of great value and presumably you haven’t found otherwise,, so now you have to keep your distance from them? – this rings of sacrifice.

What about Dagny Taggart’s relationship with Hank Reardon?