What's So Hard to Understand About the Right to Bear Arms?

[JoeyB]

Anarchism: Welcome to the 10th century BC. You need government for laws. You need laws for commerce. You need commerce for an effective economy beyond barter, you need government for reliable currency, common defense etc.

How did merchants work in collaboration before merchant laws? They made their own. I never said anything about barter, but if you study the history of money you'll see that it came about as a medium of exchange on the market. It was not decided by governments until governments took the process over with the establishment of central banks. People decided on the medium of exchange. Decentralized areas are harder to invade and occupy than a centralized country. Centralization has the mechanism in place for control of the masses

You think anarchy will mean no coercion? Tell ya what. Suppose I shoot faster and more accurately than you do. Thanks for your stuff, thanks for letting me rape your sister. Seeing as there is no form of government, you'd best hope your clan is tougher than mine.

No. I don't agree with murder, rape, theft or any type of initiated violence for violence sake. Those people should be sued for what they have done. Free market justice systems can provide those services. Plus, you seem to want protection (who doesn't). Free market protection agencies can do the same, if not a better job for economic factors, than what we have today. The idea being that you are free to choose if you want it or not.

Anarchy is just as clueless about the human condition as pacifism.

Vastly different philosophies. Pacifism would result in what you have described above because it won't use violence for anything, not even self-defense.

Forgive me, but I find anarchy, like pacifism, to be a philosophy popular among the very young and the very ignorant. "Small l" libertarianism is practical. Anarchy is not practical and will never be implemented, despite what the nutjobs protesting at the WTO meetings might wish.

Ignorant, no. Rational, yes. You are conflating anarchy with anarchism. Anarchy would be the actual realization of a social system without rulers. It's not a system without a set of rules to protect the weak from the strong. Anarchy simply means no rulers, but it most definitely would have "rules." Anarchism is the theory of individualism and self-rule covering a spectrum from human action to free market economics. Hundreds of years of intellectual thought has been put into anarchism. Those nutjobs at the WTO were simply fools who destroyed property. Lastly, one the defining characteristics about libertarianism is the non-aggression principle. Rationally speaking, if you follow the non-aggression principle to its ultimate end you have anarchism. Government is force which goes against the NAP. Thus you can't have a libertarian society with government as its a contradiction of terms. I just want to make this clear and defend my ground that anarchism is not some philosophy of the ignorant but a well thought out theory of social order.

 

[JoeyB]

Oh please...spare us from the naive rambling of the social psychologists. The "Nice theories" of social psychology have a habit of breaking down into sheer bloody mayhem when the leash is off the beast called mankind - and practice, not theory, takes over. Look at mob behaviour and deindividuation...this is what you get when the nice theory breaks down and I want to take what you have for my group.I kill you as there is no consequence, except that I may , in turn, be killed for what I have taken from you. Without laws, the nasty evil in society is free to roam the countryside at will. You want that? Did you ever see the Stanley Milgram experiment??? Milgram wanted to understand the atrocities carried out by the Nazis in WWII and designed an experiment to test out a theory that there was something about Eichmann and the German psychology that allowed these things to happen. After the experiments at Yale, he had his answer...we are all capable of unspeakable cruelty...

I'm sorry if you don't agree, but I'm certainly not naive. As I posted above killing is bad. There would be mechanisms in place to deal with such brutality in a free society because it is obvious that people want such protection.

I don't have a "nice theory." You seemed to have made a straw man out of my argument. Let's consider for a moment that people are nasty and evil. If people are seriously predisposed to break down, start killing each other, form gangs to roam the lands, etc. then would you actually want a deliberate formation of such a group? If people are so nasty and evil then how can they possibly pick "good" people to govern over them? The irony is that the more inherently evil people are leads to even greater forms of authoritarian rule to compensate for and combat said limitless evilness. That leads directly to the chaos, gangware, etc. that you are against.

People are definitely capable of unspeakable cruelty, I won't deny that. Look at all the wars we fight. But people are also rational, it's what separates us from animals. Taking into account our own rational self-interest social convention itself, combined with the natural incentives towards social cooperation, are the primary reason why most people tend to generally be peaceful in interpersonal relations.

The rule of law keeps the nasty side of humanity in check, to some degree, unless we want to get into a debate about state sponsored violence

If you are interested, read this about the myth of the rule of law: http://polycentricorder.blogspot.com/2008/04/myth-of-rule-of-law.html

Lastly, there is no difference between state sponsored violence and individual violence. The state is a group of individuals. Groups, collectives, etc are just words describing individuals with similar goals and aims. Violence is violence no matter who does it and its wrong.

I just want to let you know where I stand. Thanks man

 

[seanc]

Not a lot IS being taught in the schools these days,
well except how to put rubbers on bananas, teaching the greatness of being gay, and 2 months devoted to Black History month..
Oh, and of course Spanish..

It would seem that the tree Rs have been replaced by the 3 Ss..
Slavery, Sex and Spanish..

Will the person that gave me a negative rep point calling me a racist for this post please stand up and explain yourself?

 

[MetalgodZ]

Will the person that gave me a negative rep point calling me a racist for this post please stand up and explain yourself?

I'd hazard a guess that it was probably that your comment comes off as complaining about Black History Month and Spanish being taught in schools.

Wasn't me with the negative rep.

I don't understand the obsession with rep points here. Sure, your reputation in real life is important...but people here get bent out of shape over one or two negative imaginary reputation points, on "the internets."
ETA: Pretty lame it wasn't signed. Though, if it had been signed, given the post complaining about your negative rep, wouldn't you just have retaliated by giving them neg rep in return?

 

[seanc]

I'd hazard a guess that it was probably that your comment comes off as complaining about Black History Month and Spanish being taught in schools.

Wasn't me with the negative rep.

I don't understand the obsession with rep points here. Sure, your reputation in real life is important...but people here get bent out of shape over one or two negative imaginary reputation points, on "the internets."
ETA: Pretty lame it wasn't signed. Though, if it had been signed, given the post complaining about your negative rep, wouldn't you just have retaliated by giving them neg rep in return?

I am not over concerned abot rep points to tell the truth. The issue I have is that some one tags you anonomously and call somebody a racist. If somebody has an issue with what are factually true statements. Spell it out in person and stand behind the statement.

Is it racist of me to point out the fact that most high schools in mass REQUIRE 2 years of Spanish to graduate?
If the focus here is to better prepare the child to better themselves in the working world, then why would you not chose either Mandarin or Hindi or possibly Russian?


As far as Black History month...Raising "awareness" of one race over another IS by it's nature racism. Separating out the achievements of one group by reason of race is (IMO) Unamerican.

If you want to talk about Squanto in relation to Thanksgiving, Pocahontas in the exploration of the west. John Brown, Harper's Ferry
in relation to the CW time period, fine. If you want to talk about "the real McCoy" the Irish, or the Chinese in relation to the building of railrods, absolutely. You want to talk about the Navajo in relation to WWII, perfect. The Nissei company or tuskeegee airmen battling in Germany, absolutely.

The point here is that all of these need to be in context of Americans doing (great) things for their country or pioneering new things. That they happened to be of a certain background needs to be second to that fact. There is only so much time in a school year. The fact that more often than not schools never even get as far as WWII is a shame.

 

[MetalgodZ]

Point taken, and agreed. I'd be more comcerned if you and the mods weren't the only ones who can see what someone else had said about you in the rep comments.

Do they really requires Spanish, specifically? Or are there other options? At least in NY it was "foreign language," and you had your pick of whatever your school offered (usually French or Spanish).

 

[seanc]

Point taken, and agreed. I'd be more comcerned if you and the mods weren't the only ones who can see what someone else had said about you in the rep comments.

Do they really requires Spanish, specifically? Or are there other options? At least in NY it was "foreign language," and you had your pick of whatever your school offered (usually French or Spanish).

2 years of Spanish is required in all of the High Schools around me (northbridge). It is my understanding that this is a state req. My GF's son is in HS right now. And the requirement was put to him. He asked the powers that be if he could take a language other than Spanish to fill the requirement (he wanted french or German). The answer was a flat out no. He was told that AFTER he filled his 2yrs of Spanish requirement he was welcome to take any of the other offered language as an elective, however, ONLY SPANISH would fill the requirement to graduate.