I am not in favor of stealing people’s money so Mikie can say he favors legislation, no.

Yeah, so I guess babies, the disabled, children, the elderly, etc., better get off their asses.

Until I see you feeding any of those people I will never deny them any means to acquire food. You would.

Do you think food just falls in someone’s mouth? All food is acquired with work, buddy.

Yea, if someone wants to be a slave, learns to be under the dominion of a master, and have his money taken from him without his permission, like you want, I say go for it.

If you want to call voluntary activity between consenting parties “slavery”, be my guest.

The employer is forced to deduct a specific amount or else he is breaking the law.

Then why do you?

I don’t.

The principle is that I rail against the involuntary activity between non-consenting parties, not the voluntary activity between consenting parties. Your principle seems to be the opposite.

Which happens to an extreme degree in corporate America, the “private sector.” Oddly, we never hear you railing against that. It always works out somehow that this kind of exploitation is perfectly justified.

Why would I rail against the voluntary activity between consenting adults?

An observation regarding taxes...

The places I call home have what some would call fairly high taxes. Yet, I know a few ordinary families with, say, more than one car. Societies with public transportation and self-made rich folks. And reasonable general standard of living.

Such like suggests (to me at least) that anti-taxers go by (dogmatic) ideology, but I could surely be wrong.

Personally I don’t care if your tax money built me a home made of gold and furnished me with every luxury I could imagine. It’s wrong to take fruits of someone’s labor and use it to benefit others, just as it was wrong to do it to exploit the fruits of the slave’s labor, and for the same reasons. So I wouldn’t oppose it because I was told to, or because it furthers my lot in life, but because it is wrong to behave that way towards others.

But compare your tax burden with the tax burden in the UAE or the Cayman Islands or Monaco.

No. That melodramatic representation of taxes is both inaccurate and unacceptable. People's things aren't taken; only a predetermined and agreed-upon portion of the money which was issued and guaranteed by a government agency, and which they receive in return for some function they perform that is of value to somebody who is in possession of those funds.

Yes they are taken. You agree to a wage with an employer; the government takes a portion of your income. Neither you nor your employer determine how much is taken. This occurs involuntarily, whether you agree with it or not.

It’s either/or, collectivism or individualism. There is no middle ground.

I’m not saying you’re guilty of anything, either. I’m just showing you’re not writing anything new or nuanced, that you are making the same arguments that they have, and in so doing have revealed which side of the fence you have taken. The fact that that side of the fence is a veritable rogue’s gallery of evil, tyranny, and mass murder is not my fault. You’ve blamed individualism for the same things they have. You hold the same ideas.

Your description of the parts of individualism you like as “humanism” reveals only how badly you wish to avoid being associated with the label “individualism”. It does not indicate which political unit you believe exists, let alone which political unit you think ought to have rights or ought to be paramount in its relation to power and the state.

One of the greatest conceits is that only man in his government form can lay asphalt, deliver packages, pick up garbage, or care for the sick. Here in the great white north we have abandoned state-controlled air traffic control, one of the first countries to do so. It's one less thing I am forced to pay for even when I don't use it.

I can appreciate that. It was a loaded question, anyways.

Are you for or against appropriating the fruits of someone’s labor?

I can show any number of quotes from socialists, fascists, conservatives, communists, throughout the ages about the atomization theory of individualism, and the resulting fear of selfishness, hermitic lifestyle, and the anarchy that is supposed to result because of it. But again all of it rests on a false anthropology.

All of it was designed in service to the power of tradition, religion, the monarchy, the state, all of which imply subordination and obedience. So I do not care about your nuance when I can see what it is designed to protect: the sanctity and prestige of one or more collectivist and anti-social institutions. Collapse of what? The state? The church? The monarchy? No doubt it’s some amorphous institution set over and above the value of human beings qua human beings.

Conflating selfishness and individualism is a collectivist canard as old as the word itself, and flips the dictum that man is a social animal on its head. I can’t take anyone who repeats it that seriously because it posits a glaringly false anthropology, that man is a fundamentally anti-social animal—as soon as individuals were set free from the bonds of subordination and are afforded rights they’d become hermits and care only for themselves.

It was the conservatives and royalists who invented the term and the communists, socialists, and fascists that keep using it with this meaning today. Consequently it was collectivists who historically stood in opposition to freedom, human rights, individual worth, and human dignity. Apparently this meaning persists on philosophy forums.

That's what I said, both are extremes that eventually lead to collapse. And we've also seen somewhat of a pure individualistic society through the neoliberalism movement in the 80s. Most of the Millennial generation has been formed as individualists and many of the problems today are the result of individualism, even though we've not seen a nation embracing it fully, since that would almost be anarchistic.

It cannot be said that any of the problems of today are the result of individualism. Greed, egotism, self-concern, which are often associated with individualism, are all of them perennial problems, not limited to any specific political epoch, and found in collectivists as much as in individualists.

There is no individualism. There has never been any individualism. Everywhere we look the individual is subordinate to a collective state, bound to act in compulsory cooperation with people that are not his brethren or friend, and under rules that are not his own.

This is inherently built into the Westphalian system of international relations, which is essentially anarchistic. Look at which being in the world is considered sovereign. Look at which being in the world is afforded life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the dominion and jurisdiction over all lands, all behaviors, all interactions, that occur within the bounds of its property. Far from a liberal individualism, we have adopted the individualism of Carlyle, "the vital articulation of many individuals into a new collective individual". We have adopted collectivism.

The individual has no rights, but only the rights the state provisionally grants him; the state may suspend them, modify them, or take them away at its own pleasure. It's how a nominally liberal democracy can get away with subjugating its entire population, as they did during the most recent pandemic. That's why the notion of a res publica, a government for the people by the people, is the greatest stroke of propaganda ever written. It has convinced people that their master is themselves. They now believe the conditional life of a conscript, a serf, a slave, is freedom, and an absolutist oligarchy is democracy. They believe that since they get to exercise their sovereignty on an astronomical basis (according to how many times the earth revolves around the sun), every few years voting for which mammal gets to dominate them, that they too are in control.

I suspect that this condition more so than individualism has led to the problems of today.

We often forget how Western communism is, how bourgeois Marx was, and so it would inevitably erect itself on the Roman, republican model. A written constitution, the rule of law, representative government—all of it is subject to the iron law of oligarchy, in communist states as it in is the “liberal democratic” ones. In that sense communist rights and freedoms are little different than republican rights and freedoms, insofar as the sphere of allowable activity is dictated by the republican state machinery, subject to be taken away as quickly as it is given.

I would say any form of organization is possible if it is free to do so from the ground up, through voluntary association, and not through the dictates of a man, a group of men, or a piece of paper.

My only real gripe is that most theories of mind and consciousness are dualistic, or fractured, whereas a human being is not. For some reason we try to reduce it to some organic or spiritual locus within the body, maybe in the brain and nervous system, or maybe just floating around jn there somewhere. But blood, oxygen, hormones, brain, bones, energy, flesh, and so on, are all so integrated into it that any large absence of one leads to the absence of consciousness, mind, and indeed the death of the entire. By the time they find their locus, consciousness is gone because they've thrown it out with the bath water.

It's the sort of thinking that leads us to utter absurdities such as brains in vats and p-zombies, and in my opinion indirect realism. There is really no reason to fracture the body in any abstract way, or include some sort of intermediary, in order to better understand the body's mysteries, especially when all conscious humans are by-and-large whole.

Oh dear. You’re annoyed at the arrogance. Excuse me while I cringe. I’m annoyed at the fence-sitting and tone-policing. At any rate, yours or mine feelings on the matter help nothing.

“Bodily” pertains to the body, you know, the structure and being of a human organism? Is that not something? Can any of this be described in any other way? It’s not like the term describes nothing, and it’s actually quite important. In fact any disruption or damage in bodily activity related to hearing, and occurring at any point in the auditory system, can lead to deafness.

We’re not brains, Frank. If you don’t want to include the ear in the act of hearing then the fence-sitting charade can no longer be maintained.

We do know that no sound called a voice is moving the membrane, moving the bones, converting mechanical vibration into electrical signals as you just tried to illustrate, so don’t go spouting off like you don’t know. Yet all of these are involved in the activity of hearing.

We do know that since there are no such waves, there are no such bodily movements as you described. No signals representing sound waves, no such signals reaching the brain. Therefor the bodily states involved in hearing a voice are different than the bodily states involved in hallucinating a voice.

If the bodily states were not different, hearing a voice and hallucinating a voice would be the same. The conflation comes from the one who confuses his one bodily state with the other, which is entirely fitting from the subjective perspective of a man who cannot even see his own ears.

If the biological act of hearing involves using the body to perceive physical sound waves, it cannot be said that a man is hearing voices in his head, because there is neither the biological activity nor the sound waves required to hear such sounds. The biological activity of hearing and the biological act of hallucinating are two distinct biological activities.

Should we confuse the two? While it could be said that from a limited 1st person perspective the experience of hearing voices resembles the experience of hallucination, it ought to consider from any other of the unfathomable amount of perspectives that there is no hearing, let alone the hearing of voices. Were we able to record the movements of the biology in great detail, down to the tiniest of acts, an accounting of all biological activity involved in one would necessarily be different than those involved in the other, and therefor there really is no similarity between hearing actual voices and hearing voices in the head.

I wonder if indirect realism and phenomenalism has served to obfuscate the biology of hallucination rather than helped to explain it.

I could also say he doesn’t hear at all, that everything is caused by activity outside the auditory systems, and that hearing is in fact a process of the auditory system as it functions in direct relationship with the rest of the world, as the biology demands. So if he’s not hearing and there are no voices, it would be incorrect to say he is hearing voices.

I get it. You directly feel a cold feeling. You directly feel yourself indirectly feeling the arctic air. But I think you’re really describing how you feel the arctic air, the ways and means with which you feel the arctic air, not your own feelings.

If x is representative of y then x by definition informs us about what y is like, no?

There is always an intermediary inserted into the logic. In this case it’s “experience”. It cannot be that a perceiver is experiencing the cold weather. That is too direct of a relationship. Rather, the perceiver is experiencing himself experiencing the cold weather. He feels the feeling of cold before he feels the weather. It’s entirely redundant.

They are not reality because they cannot be instantiated. They are without a referent. If I ask you to represent your abstraction with a single instance of it, you cannot point to anything but yourself, which is not a sensation or an experience or a sight or a taste as far as I can tell. I am left to observe only your words.

You are sensing sensations. You see sight. You smell smells. It’s not reality because it doesn’t apply to anything in reality. All we’ve done is taken a predicate, abstracted it, added a suffix or modified it in some other way, and moved it to the object position, holding it up as reality. Soon it will be a subject where it can do its own things and have a life of its own, all at the expense of what performed the action and whatever objects the action was performed upon in the first place.

If sensation is reality, what are you sensing?

A single act of charity or sacrifice can bring tears to the eyes, much like a piece of music. So I think there is something to the idea that morality, even basic manners, has a certain beauty to it.

As Oscar Wilde wrote, “the only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely”. The beautiful is often useless, and theism is in possession of both qualities.

Do you experience experience? Or sense sensations? It’s like saying that I walk a walk. In any case, it feels like we’re multiplying zeroes, at this point.

Sensations are by definition mind-dependant. As it is and as it was, it represents another layer of abstraction inserted between what is sensed and what is doing the sensing, leading some to believe that we somehow sense sensations and nothing besides.

Sensations, like impressions, perceptions, qualia, feelings, etc. arises from the inability to be objective about one's own body and its interaction with the rest of the world. A noun-phrase serves rightly to fall upon the subject: our body, its parts, the things we come into contact with; but considering the predicate as a subject forces us to use another noun, making a nothing into a thing in the grammar and in thought. it's place in the grammar subverted, the body is excised from consideration, replaced as it was with a pseudo-object. it isn't long before these objects get their own predicates and we are half-way into believing that these things can and do exist.

Better to realize this and be comfortable with this linguistic discrepancy, or to repudiate the use of the term entirely, which is exceedingly difficult.

Do you believe rocks are conscious? I can’t help ya there.

There is also a difference between leading by example and leading by dictate.

There is a problem wherever you try to force people to believe what you believe. In the same way they cannot force you to abide by their conscience, you cannot force them to abide by yours. You have to convince them. The best way to do that is through an expression, both physical and rhetorical, of your ways. If it is all you dream it to be, it will reveal that to them.

You don’t require force to get others to conform. With leading by example you do not sacrifice any one else’s autonomy on the alter of your own, and history will recognize this before it will recognize some authoritarian.

The culprit here is the autocratic mindset, usually, though not exclusively, the predominant attribute of conservative & reactionary ideologies. :mask:

Conservative, communist, socialist, fascist, progressive—all collectivist. Besides some variations in rhetoric, it’s hard to see any difference between them in practice. They want power and to tell people how to live their lives.

The mental act of moving a person into an in-group or out-group will breed the sort of hatred you’re speaking about. When that happens, all individual and unique characteristics inherent in each human being becomes diluted with the characteristics you attribute to the group as a whole. Unfortunately, this act is a sine qua non of collectivist politics.

The reason we don’t know much about conservatism is because intellectual conservatives are rare and academia and the press are mostly captured by the opposition.

I read Roger Scruton’s “How to be a conservative” a while back due to the same interest. According to him, he watched as the communists and socialists rioted in France in '68, and all he knew was he opposed everything they believed in. So he spent the rest of his life trying to articulate his beliefs.

What I remember most is the notion of “inheritance”. Since it is much easier to destroy but not so easy to create, we owe it everyone to pass on the Good to the future, as a sort of bond between the past, the present, and posterity. Even if these things and institutions are useless, like royalty, they are forged through generations, are often beautiful, and indicate this inheritance.

In any case, everyone is conservative about what they know and value.

So according to you there are no situations where lying is unjustified and immoral?

Not according to me because I never said anything close to that.

I've seen you making appeals to nature, which is a fallacy.

I never said something is good or bad because it is natural or unnatural, which is a fallacy. I said nature is a good indicator of what is necessary for survival and to enjoy living. That means simply that nature provides us with evidence.

What is your evidence? What do you observe in order to inform your position? Law? Empathy?

from your list, everybody has a right to eat, drink and breathe. So if you have enough food for two, another starving person has a right to half of it?

Everyone has a right to eat, drink, and breathe. It just means that one should not prohibit another from eating, drinking, and breathing. This is basic stuff.

In the natural state, there's also no property. Which I'm pretty sure you think is rather important.

Sure there is. Men have always occupied land and had their things.

Maybe you missed my questions:

How do you know whether a legal right is morally right or wrong? How would law make illegal a legal right to own slaves? Were the Nazis innocent because they were just following the law?

I’ll try to make it more clear. As I said, rights are a kind of normative principle. A principle is a basic idea or rule. A normative principle is a basic idea or rule that informs conduct and behavior. This would include legal rights.

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Your moral obligations do not make sense to me because they are unjust and born of feelings. They do not consider whether someone is deserving of being lied to, or whether the situation demands that someone lies. Sometimes lying and insult are key to various art forms, like satire, irony, and fiction. It is because of justice, not feelings, that the freedom to speak includes the right to lie and be mean.

Nothing happens once you confer a right. A right is declared, and that’s about it, I’m afraid. Nothing is exchanged. No one has to care. The one who declares the right must reify it, must promote and defend it, or do nothing, and it will end up a meaningless gesture.

—

No, not everyone has a right to be violent because it would violate another’s rights. But if someone transgresses your rights and becomes violent toward you, you absolutely do have the right to be violent. So some people have the right to be violent. It is also why we ought to have the right to own weapons.

No one is saying that because it is natural it must be good, or one ought to do something because it is natural. It’s just that human nature is a far better indicator of what rights are necessary to live and enjoy living. It is far better than the circularity of observing law, in my opinion. How do you know whether a legal right is morally right or wrong? How would law make illegal a legal right to own slaves? Were the Nazis innocent because they were just following the law?

From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects.

He was influencing the 2016 election all through 2017. Trump is so powerful he can influence elections in the past.