Go back to sleep NOS. Or go read more Ayn Rand.

Take some drugs and think about it, Mike.

I don't think I understand you. Are you saying I don't have the right to speak freely unless you give it to me?

That’s right. If no people give and recognize your right to speak, then you have no right to speak freely. It sounds easy to understand to me.

Right, only man in his government form can flatten ground and lay asphalt.

Sure, set a bunch of bureaucrats to do the jobs you refuse to. That’ll work.

It surely is a right. My behavior is such that I allow you to use it, yes, just as my behavior is to allow you to speak when I give you the right to speak freely.

Sweet Jesus, wanting to tax people to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves is sociopathy?

Nah, it was just a joke. But it is immoral and unjust.

Yes, but we need an arrangement that will guarantee that the rights bestowed by citizens to other citizens and the private arrangements that they make are protected and honored, do we not? Don't we need some sort of basic legislation to do this?

In my opinion yes. The so-called Night-Watchmen state suits me just fine. Beyond that it should not go.

I can give you the right to borrow my lawnmower whenever you require it. Rights are bestowed by men, and not all men are legislators.

That’s very admirable. Now you just need to organize with others who do the same and on a grander scale. Do the work instead of demanding it if others. Lead by example instead of force and coercion. Lead by reason instead of sociopathy.

We were talking about the poor, just to be sure. But it appears you’re talking someone broken down on the side of the road. Would you extend the same kindness to the homeless in your community, as you would someone who cannot fix their car?

I don't look at someone on broken down on the road and say "Eh, I pay taxes -- let the government help."

Then what do you do?

Fair enough; my apologies. I’ll just say the American left used to uphold freedom as a guiding principle, and the void has been filled with statism, collectivism, and authoritarianism.

I completely agree that we should care for those who cannot take care of themselves, so long as they want our help. But I believe stealing people’s money or demanding others care for those who cannot care for themselves does not amount to any kind of care I that I can believe in. In fact I believe that is the opposite of care.

The worry for me is, if you limit caring to paying taxes, why should anyone care for those who cannot take care of themselves if they’ve already done it? Why should I give a man a quarter if I’ve already given that quarter to the institutions I’ve delegated to care for others?

Perhaps that’s where we differ. I don’t see how being payed a wage for one’s voluntary labor constitutes slavery while having a monopoly on violence appropriating one’s payments for labor constitutes a sacrifice for the greater good. Taxes are forced labor and slavery. To feel the force of this, try evade taxes on the one hand, and not showing up to work on the other. Only one may land you in prison, where slavery is still constitutionally protected.

Everyone does have the right to a decent standard of living, should they attain it. But if you believe everyone has a right to be provided with a minimum standard of living, why won’t you provide it to them?

Ready-made identities suit us perfectly. We don’t need to consider a person on his own when we need only apply an identity and be done with it. Of course, this is to misidentify rather than identify, but who cares at this point?

I thought it was obvious I wasn’t speaking of some “general individual happiness”, which sounds to me incoherent. Sorry, I should have been more clear. By “individual happiness”, I mean the happiness as determined by each individual. A collective, to me, is simply the sum total of individuals.

So yes, the arrangement, if one is required, should allow individuals to pursuit their own happiness instead of providing happiness to whichever group of individuals hold a majority. But this is an individualist, laissez faire system, such as the one theorized by the founders, but betrayed by everyone henceforth. Could such a system find a home in the left-wing, as it had once done?

If you mean most of the collective will be happy, you’re speaking of a majority, not the collective as a whole. So, again, you’ll need to sacrifice individual happiness to reach your goal, and crack a few eggs to make an omelette. To achieve this, your regime will be unjust.

I wasn’t intending to “flex”, just to offer my opinion.

I guess I agree with some of that. But why not model our government after what we know works and results in the most happiness (social democracy)?

The utilitarian concern is the problem to begin with because it sacrifices individual happiness for collective happiness. One exists, the other doesn’t. One can be attained, the other cannot.

First and foremost, become an independent. Gather with people of like mind instead of like affiliation.

Avoid authoritarianism and make freedom a guiding issue. The American left was on the correct side of every issue wherever it chose to defend and advocate for freedom and against authoritarianism.

Ditch the European socialism for something more American, like Georgism. It was a big mistake to propagate the Euro-brand of socialism when there is a rich history of American leftism worth remembering.

Quit playing identity politics. It is just as superstitious and divisive as when the right uses it, and for the same reasons.

Avoid methodological collectivism because it leads right back into authoritarianism.

So, I have this question: "Is there any meaning in talking about 'materialism' to materialists, since they can't see or think that there's anything else than matter, anyway?" That is, it is something self-evident for them. You can see this also as a paradox: "Materialism has no meaning for a materialist"!

All this is true, at least in my own case. I prefer the concrete and physical to the abstract and immaterial. But it’s more a preference for dealing with a thing rather than a nothing. One I can point to, the other I can only find in the pure wind of idealist literature. So there is some thrift to holding on to the position: one needn’t waste his metabolism on what amounts to fiction and fairytale.

The American’s in power right now are the same ones who meddled in Ukrainian affairs during the Euromaidan events. Par for the course, for them, so this is no suprise.

At any rate, American leadership already has the Afghanistan disaster under its belt, so I’m not sure why Putin should care one straw about Biden’s saber-rattling.

The road to hell is paved in good intentions, goes the old refrain. The belief we can force society to resemble some utopian vision is the problem to begin with. It isn’t long until even the most well-intentioned socialist is tossing people in a Gulag. Just say “that isn’t true socialism”, try again, kill millions, rinse and repeat.

Welfare isn’t a one-to-one ratio with socialism, but I agree.

Which socialist society appeals to you? Kampuchea, Cuba, North Korea? Eritrea? East Germany?

Resist falling under the spell of socialism, if you can. The world is still recovering from its lies and ruin.

The question one needs to ask, is given that different ontological assumptions about life lead to radically different conclusions about death that are in large part tautological, why choose a single ontology as being correct? Why not accept all of them and accept their respective conclusions relative to their respective ontology?

Simply because observation and study confirms the one and not the other. I am just unable to take the leap from assumption to conclusion.

One would hope that such an idea would be as disreputable as statism is to you. If "the revolution" was successful--and not just a rearrangement of the deck chairs--people's thinking would be different.

I don’t think a system of voluntary cooperation is as disreputable as statism, because statism is a system of compulsory cooperation. That’s why I wonder if your system would be compulsory or not, and what you’d do to those who refuse. If it’s voluntary, it’s just; if it’s compulsory, it’s unjust.

I’m familiar with Debs but only vaguely with DeLeon. I’ve read Debs, his free speech trial, but only know DeLeon through his criticisms of George. Both were contemporaries of George, though. If I remember correctly Debs praised George and Deleon excoriated him. But those debates during those times, between the socialists and the Single Taxers, were fascinating to read about, and represent an exciting moment in American political theory.

I’m well aware of the treatment of socialists in the early 20th century and beyond, Debs included. It’s embarrassing that a country so adamant about freedom and free speech would violate these principles due to fear of ideas. I wager had they left them alone, socialism and communism would have fell out of favor in America long ago.

Experience could be construed as the state of a living body, perhaps. But beyond that it cannot go. Both the body and thus all states of the body dissolves upon death.

It’s completely voluntary, and the opportunities myriad, far more than would be available to him should the the capitalist be absent. We could exploit some patch of land somewhere and through toil accumulate enough to make a living, but exploiting capitalists is far easier. We could also live off the toil of others, but that would be unjust.

An experience of what? It is the experience of a body, by a body. It’s body all the way down.

The other conclusions beg the question. They assume that an entity or substance exists within the biology but is not the biology, and second, that this entity or substance can somehow persist beyond the biology itself. It seems to me one should be proven before contemplating the other.

Not only Marxists, but Georgists believe in roughly the same thing regarding exploitation. But Henry George was able to devise a far more just system. (It’s a damned shame Americans prefer German socialism to Henry George’s ideas, which are these days relatively unknown).

For me, I don’t see how a relationship of voluntary exchange can be the same as exploitation proper, for instance in slavery. It is because the capitalist is the same human animal that I see them as an opportunity. They want and need things, as well, and I can provide it to them in exchange for some of their capital. Perhaps the Marxist should learn to exploit them.

Why just those two choices as default?

As far as I can tell there are only two types of general “means” to acquire the wealth required to satisfy needs, namely, (1) through one’s own labor or the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, and (2) through the appropriation of the labor of others. One is just, the other unjust.

Anyways, as far as economic systems go, Justice is the prevailing ideal for me. All others, like charity, community, wealth equality, are better left to ethics and matters of personal conscience.

Yeah I like your threads.

Well yes, I don’t like starving to death so I work. Having a place to work and receive payment for my work is therefor a benefit. Living off the land is at the time too difficult.

We already know what happens after death, have the cadaver farms to prove it, and it ain’t pretty.

Problem is origination of capital. Not everyone starts equally. Not everyone has the chances to put the resources together. The Marxist would ask, by what right does one human own the means of production over another if we all have the same goal of survival? In other words besides words like freedom, do you like the idea that some people own how we survive and some people have to sell their labor to them?

Sometimes I envy them, sure, but envy is a great motivator. To me it’s very kind that they would start an enterprise at which I can work and be rendered payment for my services. The right by which someone usually comes to own the means of production is through purchase or gift or labor, though there are nefarious means.

We know that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics wrote socialism into law and declared in their constitutions the abolition of capitalism, private property, and economic exploitation. Every country that has ever declared these kinds of things have often struggled, imploded, or gone the way of the dodo bird. Is this system so worth it, even if many countries have hardly risen from its rubble?

But the so-called liberal democracies are not much better, in my mind, to the point that I can only differentiate them by rhetoric and other superficialities these days. They’ve turned every contingency into a resource for accruing power in the government, as Madison once wrote. They’re all strands of the same collectivist statism—I don’t know what else to call it. At least there are some encouraging signs of people thinking in terms of freedom again.

I swear that if I ever saw something like your kind of socialism I would applaud it, at least as a feat of organization, and because it isn’t of the German variety. What I’d worry about, though, is what you’d do to those who don’t want to take part in it, or seek to make their living from your property. There is always that problem of individuals believing they know how to run their own lives better than some central committee.

Absolutely. A socialist system would have to manage it's capital resources too -- mines, factories, land, ports, and so on. The difference is that socialists manage resources for the common wealth, and capitalists manage resources for the creation of their own wealth.

The act of managing resources for the common wealth would require a monopoly on the resources, a cabal of managers to govern it, and an army of workers to till for it. I’d prefer the voluntary system, myself.

It seems to me that that the category “those incapable of non-lethal self-defense” would also include those who lack the strength and numbers to defend themselves in certain situations, which could be anyone of any level of strength and ability. Accordingly the same ethical justification should extend to them—everyone—and not just the disabled.

“Capitalism” has always been a collectivist bugaboo, anyways, forced into the economic lexicon and seemingly left there. So it’s strange to see those who abhor collectivist projects fall into using it to describe the present system. But really, a system that doesn’t consider managing capital is unimaginable, and a system that is not capitalist has never existed. Had they named it better the problems with the present system might be more apparent. At least we’d know, as you said, what about the present system is the more important enemy, and we could work to rectify it. Until then I guess we have to engage in a naive form of class struggle.

I’ve always understood that suicides make up a majority of firearm fatalities.

But as far as I can tell the right to self-defense arguments still stand, and for the same reasons countries employ armed soldiers and police. Sometimes people need to protect themselves and others. Sometimes using a gun is the best way to do that. I’m not aware of any new arguments, nor do I think new ones are required.

Leader of Oath Keepers and 10 Other Individuals Indicted in Federal Court for Seditious Conspiracy and Other Offenses Related to U.S. Capitol Breach

These are the first sedition-related charges in the capitol riot. Apparently one of the defendants is actually on Tucker Carlson right now, which is stupid if you care to beat the charges.

Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab - but feared debate could hurt ‘international harmony’

Leading British and US scientists thought it was likely that Covid accidentally leaked from a laboratory but were concerned that further debate would harm science in China, emails show.

An email from Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, on February 2 2020 said that “a likely explanation” was that Covid had rapidly evolved from a Sars-like virus inside human tissue in a low-security lab.

The email, to Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins of the US National Institutes of Health, went on to say that such evolution may have “accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans”.

But a leading scientist told Sir Jeremy that “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular”. Dr Collins, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health, warned it could damage “international harmony”.