Does it work this way for other rights? Doesn't restraining or injuring or even killing someone who is about to kill someone else violate their general right of bodily autonomy and freedom of movement?

Rights are not absolute "bubbles" that extend a certain given distance at all times. They're rules that apportion a territory given by the circumstances.

Yes it does but only because they are about to violate the general right of bodily autonomy and freedom of someone else. Rather, one defends these rights and freedoms by stopping people from trampling on them and denying them of others. I don't the same cannot be said of forcing someone to provide the conditions for someone else's free self-expression of actualization.

Yes it does but only because they are about to violate the general right of bodily autonomy and freedom of someone else. Rather, one defends these rights and freedoms by stopping people from trampling on them and denying them of others. I don't the same cannot be said of forcing someone to provide the conditions for someone else's free self-expression of actualization. — NOS4A2

So let me simulate a little conversation between our two positions:

I say: Bread is important for people, I think people should have a right to bread.
You say: Why yes I agree. People should be allowed to freely buy bread, if they so wish, and noone should be allowed to take their bread away.
I say: But if bread is important to people, then surely we ought to make sure everyone actually gets bread.
You say: But that means taking away bread from people who already have it, and this violates their right to bread, which you agree they should have.

So taking the metaphor, my question to you is: What about the people who can't get bread? Do they not get bread just because they happened to not have any when we implemented this rule?

I am currently struggling with what it is I should care about.

I have created for myself a situation that is about as close to what it is I think you would like to have, as is possible in the world today. A couple of thoughts come to mind: In my cat-bird seat, many would have me be concerned about the affairs of man, simply because I am a man, and because I am supposed to have empathy for my fellow man. I am partially persuaded by their thinking, not simply for the logic of it, but, believe it or not, I actually do have empathy. So, should I limit my concern for my fellow Americans, who have it relatively good, like me, and in which case I would probably limit my actions to voting? Or should I go over seas, take up arms and engage the POS-statists who really do impose themselves upon my fellow man? Or should I simply encourage my state to do the heavy lifting for me when it comes to POS-statists overseas?

Do you, NOS, really feel imposed-upon by your state? And, just for the sake of argument, would you be satisfied with a state that could impose upon you but which does not do so? Or do you not want a state to even have the capability/power to impose upon you if it felt like it? Those are two vastly different situations, and vastly different "asks."

When I hear the champions of the oppressed appeal, or demand, that I care about their specific area of concern, I hear some pretty compelling cases. Yet I also hear the Earth crying out from under the weight of the whole human race, and I feel that to champion her is, ultimately, in the best interest of the human race. So the idea of helping people seems inimical to helping people, unless that help is directed at the Earth upon which others (non-humans and humans) depend.

How much of the individualist's fear of the state is simply a fear that more justice for someone else means less justice for them; as if it were a pie? How much of their fear of the state is a fear that if the state works for others, it will be working against them/the individual? I'm reminded of a meme that shows your typical Trump supporter all armed up to the teeth and saying "I will not live in fear!" Below that is a list of 30 people/groups/things that his ilk seem to be afraid of (sharing power with). Is he not me, in the cat-bird seat, unwilling to let those 30 types of people/groups/things have the same civil liberties that he has? If their individual liberty boat rises, will his lower? And if so, who's fault will that have been? Personally, I understand where he is coming from. But he's personally offensive to me and seems like a POS. I'm no fan of the other side either, but I can understand their point even more.

So, why should I give a shit about any of them or any of their concerns? If I find them all offensive, why can't I turn my back on them, stand on their bones and sacrifices, and live my life in peace?

I'm inclined to toss my moral support to the oppressed, and let the POS learn empathy through experience. He's going to be a minority soon. If he insists on being a POS, well, the results will be interesting. If justice is a pie, "they" will be coming after me, too. Maybe I'll deserve what I get for having failed to take up their cause. Either way, I see a new generation on the way; it's going to be their planet, and if we don't like what they've become, we certainly won't be able to say that we knew how to raise them. That will be on us. Men like us don't blame others.

I guess I'll just sit up here, resting on my laurels, but I won't look down upon them in derision or fear. And if I share, I will reduce my footprint and share with the Earth. Maybe people can thank me later. Or they can piss on my grave. LOL!

White Privilege: it's real.

All power is illegitimate until it can prove itself legitimate. When a father leads his child across a street his authority need not be questioned. The relationship, the motivations, the behavior—all of it can prove the father’s authority over his child to be legitimate. When this principle is applied to the state, however, one can hardly find any reason why such an institution should reign over any individual, let alone to dictate his life and activities.

From where, then, does the state gain its authority? Assuming that, like money, the state has no power of its own, it goes to follow that we in the West, with our nobles and parliaments and congresses, willingly and obsequiously furnish it power each time we head to the ballot-box to select which mammalian “representatives” should have the right to our thraldom. Where one may on some days think it absurd to choose others to run his life, come election time he falls in line seeking suffrage, only to receive a perversion of it. It is in this act, the vote, that we participate in the state’s aggrandizement, never our own. And no matter whether our guy or their guy sits upon the throne, the throne itself, perched parasitically upon the wealth, land and bodies of the people who live there, remains long after he has left it. This is because the transient power of our so-called representatives is always offset, if not negated, by the absolute power of the institution. Furthermore, if the body of legislations, prohibitions, and regulations increase far quicker than their repeal, as they always do, state power must grow in inverse proportion to our own. It’s statism all the way down.

If one cannot justify state authority, if he believes with William Morris that no man is good enough to be another’s master, perhaps refusing to participate in the state’s aggrandizement is a first step to conscientious objection. But unless everyone refuses to vote this is not enough. One must, in a sense, vote through means not available in marking a slip of paper: with his influence, his voice, and his activity.

In his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Etienne de la Boétie provides the only means of escape from this relationship without descending into another kind of tyranny, which is to simply refuse to obey.

“Everyone knows that the fire from a little spark will increase and blaze ever higher as long as it finds wood to burn; yet without being quenched by water, but merely by finding no more fuel to feed on, it consumes itself, dies down, and is no longer a flame. Similarly, the more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields to them, and obeys them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies.”

Remember Shelley: “Ye are many—they are few!"

Boétie’s sentiment precedes the civil disobedience of Thoreau and Satyagraha of Gandhi by centuries, but it is an idea seemingly unvanquished by state power and propaganda. At this point refusing to obey, and the many actions and reactions such a choice may entail, is all we have left.

L'état, c'est moi

Wherever the state relinquishes power, whether through privatization, deregulation, or cuts in spending and taxation, there is no shortage of critics lamenting the process. But why? If the criticism is not so servile as to be the knowing and explicit defence of state power, then it teeters on one flimsy assumption: that what the government loses so too does the governed.

This assumption brings to mind Ortega Y Gasset’s "The Revolt of the Masses". In it he distinguishes between the superior man and the “mass-man”. Man is naturally-inclined to seek a higher authority. “If he succeeds in finding it of himself, he is a superior man; if not, he is a mass-man and must receive it from his superiors.”

According to Ortega Y Gasset, one should watch with interest the attitude mass-man adopts before the state:

“He sees it, admires it, knows that there it is, safeguarding his existence; but he is not conscious of the fact that it is a human creation invented by certain men and upheld by certain virtues and fundamental qualities which the men of yesterday had and which may vanish into air to-morrow. Furthermore, the mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own”

“The mass says to itself, “L’ État, c’est moi,” which is a complete mistake. The state is the mass only in the sense in which it can be said of two men that they are identical because neither of them is named John. The contemporary State and the mass coincide only in being anonymous. But the mass-man does in fact believe that he is the State, and he will tend more and more to set its machinery working on whatsoever pretext, to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it—disturbs it in any order of things: in politics, in ideas, in industry.”

I suppose this is why, in statist terms, the “state sector” is synonymous with the “public sector”. The state thrives when the public believes it is the state, that the ruling class and its mechanisms of power represents the public en masse rather than its own interests. But when one recognizes the parasitic nature of this relationship, who is host and what is parasite, it becomes difficult to sustain it, or at any rate, to maintain the faith in symbiosis.

It’s easy to fall pray to statism. We are born in it, moulded by it, and forever governed by it. So we should always remember, like Proudhon, what it means to be governed.

“To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so…. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. And to think that there are democrats among us who pretend that there is any good in government; Socialists who support this ignominy, in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity; proletarians who proclaim their candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic! Hypocrisy! …”

The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century

someone always brings up roads and bridges and how a state is necessary for infrastructure, the implication being that only man in his statist form can flatten ground and lay asphalt. — NOS4A2

I only go there for argument. In the final analysis, I love the state as a weapon I wield against those who would oppress me in it's absence. I need only subordinate myself to it to wield it. Could it come back to bite me? Yes, but I'd rather be bitten it than to subordinate myself to a man. And of all men, I find the greatest threat in those who want to be free of the state. They are, irretrievably, the villain.

the implication being that only man in his statist form can flatten ground and lay asphalt. — NOS4A2

By the way, that is true. You can't flatten my ground or lay asphalt on it without my permission, and the permission of countless other private property owners from here to there. Some things just aren't for sale, and you'd end up with roads that had to go around so much that was not for sale, or come to a dead end, that it would not be worth building.

The state is operated by men. It was also built by men. So you are subordinate to men. But these men don’t act like men, like your neighbor might. They act like officials. So you are subordinate to a lower form of man, the official. The statist is little more than a stooge or thrall in that sense.

In a free world we’d build roads together in common enterprise. But since we live in a statist world we cannot. So your property is declared eminent domain, the state’s property, and a road goes through your property without your say in the matter.

The state is operated by men. It was also built by men. So you are subordinate to men. But these men don’t act like men, like your neighbor might. They act like officials. So you are subordinate to a lower form of man, the official. The statist is little more than a stooge or thrall in that sense. — NOS4A2

The state is operated by men that the community elected. I am subordinate to my community and no individual fuck-stick that might use his might to subordinate me. The elected men ARE officials. They are officially elected. So I am subordinate to a higher form of man: the official who has subordinated himself to the community and who is (or, but for the creep of the individualist into ownership of government) subordinate to the community. The individualist is little more than a stooge who think he could defend himself from Alpha males who would make him their bitch.

In a free world we’d build roads together in common enterprise. — NOS4A2

First, there is not such thing as a free world. That is a utopian fantasy of a child. And no, you would not build roads together in a common enterprise across my land because I wouldn't let you. Oh, wait, I wouldn't have a choice because that aforementioned man I referred to would do what the state does and run rough shod right over me. And I wouldn't even have a vote or fair market value.

So your property is declared eminent domain, the state’s property, and a road goes through your property without your say in the matter. — NOS4A2

Who declares eminent domain? DOH! The state. You need the state to protect you from people like you who would take your land without your permission or without fair market value under the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment.

In a free world we’d build roads together in common enterprise. But since we live in a statist world we cannot. So your property is declared eminent domain, the state’s property, and a road goes through your property without your say in the matter. — NOS4A2

What law proscribes the voluntary building of roads in a common enterprise? I'd think the barrier to such a communal sense of purpose would be lack of cooperation, not government intervention.

Let's assume eminent domain were illegalized, describe your vision of how new roads would be built.

...the belief that a select coterie of fallible human beings should operate an all-powerful institution to meddle in the lives of everyone else is paramount, not only in those who seek to lead but also in those who seek to be led. — NOS4A2

Yessuh...c'mon!

Others prefer the state to intervene in nearly every facet of life, if not to nominally determine and protect our rights, than to provide the most basic necessities and securities, to direct our trade and industry, to educate, to house, to regulate our lives as if it were a parent and we it’s unweaned children. — NOS4A2

That's right, Reverend, that's right....

...someone always brings up roads and bridges and how a state is necessary for infrastructure, the implication being that only man in his statist form can flatten ground and lay asphalt. — NOS4A2

Lay it down, brotha...preach!

I fear the latter end of the spectrum because it approaches a degree of statism expressed in fascism and made concrete by a variety of totalitarian regimes. — NOS4A2

Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!

As you can probably tell, you are preaching to the choir with me. I had something of a revolution in my thinking a few years back, and the once quite patriotic, pro-American, "don't mess with the U.S., cause we the best" type fella quite quickly evolved into a guy who has a certain resentment towards the institution known as "the nation-state", not particularly my own nation state, but rather ANY nation state and ALL nation states. I particularly resent the fact that there is no habitable place on the face of this globe which is not claimed as sovereign territory by one or another nation state; I cannot simply go anywhere without some goddamned (forgive the emotive tone) government presuming to demand to see my "entrance visa". Apparently, all land on Earth is now some form of private property of "the nation states".

As a matter of fact, this seeming imperative to have all available land under the control of some government seems to me akin to the (I believe "western", as in "Western Civilization") imperative towards private property. I think that both arise in the same type of ideology. Of course, there have been cultures, such as certain "Native American" cultures, wherein the concept of the private ownership of land would have been considered absurd. How did we get here? The problem with "the state" is, I think, a particular case of the general problem with all human organizations: once established, they tend to quickly become greedy for authority and increased power, and self-protective even with respect to those who founded the group. It is always the same with organizational structures, which quickly get out of our control, take on a life of their own, and often become something which the organizational founders never intended them to be. Now that the state has become ubiquitous, however, we all must have one, because a stateless people will quickly become the Uighurs to a powerful nation-state like China; only a state can defend itself against a state. This is because only a modern State has the capacity to organize and direct the effective implementation of technology in fulfilling civil needs and in fielding an effective military to defend against the type of agression that we are seeing in Xinjiang province (ostensibly) in China, which is really a Turkic land. Like it or not, it seems that now we're stuck with "the state" for our own good. What a state of affairs...

:100: Yup.

Hell, even before the state, there was the tribe and, while some of them might have found the idea of land ownership preposterous, they too would kill you in a heart beat if competition for resources on that land became an issue.

The rise of the state is the direct result of the rise of population. Where the individualist demands his God-given right to breed like a rabbit, he himself has sewn the seeds of his own destruction. It's too late put that horse back in the barn.

:up:

Apparently, all land on Earth is now some form of private property of "the nation states". — Michael Zwingli

Explain this. Do you want all land to be privately held with each landowner being an independent sovereign, or do you want all land communal? As you've stated it, it's private yet belongs to the nation state, which isn't clear.

course, there have been cultures, such as certain "Native American" cultures, wherein the concept of the private ownership of land would have been considered absurd — Michael Zwingli

Except that's a myth. https://daily.jstor.org/yes-americans-owned-land-before-columbus/

As you've stated it, it's private yet belongs to the nation state, which isn't clear. — Hanover

It's very clear in the U.S. The sovereign is, well, sovereign. But in it's sovereignty it has recognized the right to property being held by private individuals.

Except that's a myth. https://daily.jstor.org/yes-americans-owned-land-before-columbus/ — Hanover

Except it's not a myth. As is typical of such articles, they lead with an enticing headline speaking to a universal truth, and then cover their ass shortly thereafter with an "it's complicated." LOL! The only "myth" that "all" Native Americans were of one-mind on anything is a myth created by those with a guilty conscience about stealing what was not theirs under their own understanding of private property. It's easier to take what, ostensibly, no one claims ownership of.

Regardless, the "complicated" part was over 500 separate nations, with some, albeit few, that did not conceive of land as something to own. Many a hot spring or mineral spring was deemed a place of peace for all. Other areas, before the horse assisted with inroads, were vast, empty of humans, hard to penetrate and deemed to be not owned by anyone, but they would be used. Conflict often resulted over competition for resources without a claim to ownership thereof. When there was plenty, the conflict was cultural (war parties and what not) and not over alleged ownership.

Were there a lot of nations that understood and used the concept of property? Yes. But to lead with a universal and call the inverse a myth, in the face of complexity is just as disingenuous as the alleged myth itself. Let's give some kid a talking point and don't expect him to read the caveats in the article. We'll bolster it with those tribes that support our contention of ownership and ignore those that don't, covering with an "it's complicated." Yeah, that's the ticket!

Side bar: I fucking hate articles like that because they seem to spin themselves as a correction of some liberal ideal that did not exist. Kind of like racists alleging that anti-racists don't know about blacks selling blacks in Africa, or blacks owning blacks in the U.S. It's all a BS strawman designed to give talking points to a choir that is out to "own the libs" with our outstanding research and critical thinking skill. :lol: And the irony is, it wasn't the libs that spun up the idea of non-ownership or "one with nature" in the first place.

Sorry, end rant.

Let's assume eminent domain were illegalized, — Hanover

Eminent domain cannot be rendered illegal under our system of land tenure, precisely because the state is the only entity to hold allodial title to land, which it does over all the land within it's sovereign territory. Land today is held by "owners" in just the same way it was under feudal systems, as a "grant in fee" (that is, a "fief"), with the state having taken the place of the king in the scheme. A "fee" is only a grant of a right to use your superior's land, which is the key point to understanding this. Where once there were several types of "fee" by which land could be owned, each with its own differing levels of right and responsibility, now there is only one: the grant of land tenure in fee simple. This type of fee is transferrable, which is what allows a person to "sell" his real property, but what one is really selling is his grant of land tenure, not actually the land itself, since the land is actually owned, "in allodium", by the state, regardless of who holds the grant of land tenure at any particular time. Indeed, none of us actually "owns" our own land, we only hold a grant of tenure thereto in fee simple, from the state. You see, you are not sovereign, only the state is sovereign, without any authority over it, which is the condition that allows it to hold allidial title to land (actually, it is the law that is sovereign, and the state acting in proxy, but that is splitting hairs). When the state takes land by "eminent domain", for which action it must make adequate compensation to the holder of the grant in order to comply with the principles of equity underpinning the law, what it is actually doing is revoking its grant of land tenure in fee simple, as is the right of the sovereign to do. After all, what does the term "eminent domain" mean? "Eminent"..."high", "lofty"; "domain"..."the control of land", which alludes to the fact that the state's title to "your" land is of a higher/stronger type than is yours.

Explain this. Do you want all land to be privately held with each landowner being an independent sovereign, or do you want all land communal? As you've stated it, it's private yet belongs to the nation state, which isn't clear. — Hanover

No, of course not. As to the nature of the ownership of land, see my previous post, in which I seem to have preconcieved your question. As to nation states claiming sovereignty over literally all the habitable land on Earth, which is my basic gripe, Mr, Riley hit that nail on it's head...too many homo sapiens, too little a planet. I don't have a good answer for this conundrum, but given a long enough time, I feel certain that mother nature will.

I feel certain that mother nature will. — Michael Zwingli

:100: :up: Yes, as they say on Wall Street, there will be a correction. :grin: