Note how no one can answer why they themselves need to be governed. I expected as much. It’s always someone else who needs to be governed, like the murderer in your condescending fantasy. Someone else needs to be governed so I can drink clean water. Someone else needs to be governed because I don’t want to be mugged. And because you cannot single out this someone else, everyone must be governed. To protect you from these bogiemen you’re willing to put up with and justify despotism, whether hard or soft, on entire populations of people, so that you can carve out a safe habitat somewhere on the spectrum of slavery.

But your government is an actual murderer, slaver, liar, brigand, knave. The historical record makes this clear. So who protects you now?

“Government is a tool of the human race to ensure survival of groups of people.” No greater propaganda has been uttered. The state cares only for its own existence. There is no right it hasn’t violated, no law it has not broken, no truth it hasn’t suppressed, to benefit itself. It’s not the institution you claim it is; it is an anti-social institution. You’re not participating in society; you’re aggrandizing the state at the expense of society.

Yes, but you are claiming that when you do it, it isn't the state. The divine right of NOS to his private army etc. Privacy is itself government - thou shalt not forage in my garden. My agri-culture necessarily excludes you, and there can be no privacy without government. Privacy entails contractual agreement just as much as community. You and your insistence on your private property are the predatory and disagreeable government you complain of. Alas for you," To live outside the law you must be honest."

I wouldn’t do anything like a state. I’ve only claimed that there are ways to organize without the state, on grounds of voluntary rather than involuntary cooperation, and only claimed such as a counter argument to the suggestion that a state is required. Unlike the state, I would not monopolize any of those activities, nor would I regulate anyone’s lives and livelihoods, that is, until they sought to regulate mine. If Unenlightened wants VIP access to my garden or other people’s things you might try asking nicely.

I’m quite certain that you and I could come to some sort of agreement, neighbor to neighbor, and abide by that agreement without including a third party. We could abide by it because we have consciences and it is the right thing to do. Rather, if your agreements need to be governed by a third party, I fear your word probably means little.

I do not know what unspoken agreements you speak of. But if you speak them they are no longer unspoken. How can I agree to such an agreement?

If it is not an explicit agreement then it is not a contract. Since a condition is not a contract, it is a poor analogy on Rousseau’s part. Perhaps “social condition” better describes the state of affairs we’re in, since most of us are born into it, after all.

I can’t imagine a state of nature, only social organizations that are voluntary and not ruled by this or that class. Rousseau’s Social Contract is not only statist, but collectivist, which history has proven is a poor combination indeed. Submitting to the general will, being forced to be free, and all that, isn’t the best look for the social contract theory in my mind.

It’s the State. They formed when one group of predatory men sought to exploit the rest. There is nothing public about the State except that they do it all in the open.

I use “private” in this sense to mean something doesn’t have any official standing nor is it owned and controlled by any government. I see no nefarious connotations. Besides, I hardly see any difference between a state and any other criminal organization, except that one seeks to control me and the other doesn’t, so if a private organization seizes power and the monopoly on violence I will naturally oppose it.

My own view is that states form through conquest and appropriation. They are imposed. Not one man agreed to any contract. This is because no such contract exists.

I didn’t advocate for any of those, nor anarchism. I’m speaking against the state, not for or against other forms of organization. They were examples of man using other, non-state, collective means to accomplish tasks deemed worthy of government only,

But the government can?

Very true, Paine. Both Rousseau and Hobbes believed in the social contract. Perhaps this belief, despite its lack of evidence, persists as the undercurrent of statism.

I’m not so sure of that. History is replete with state violence and democide. There is not one human right that the state has not violated. They can and have taken as much property as they wish, and in fact claim ownership and jurisdiction upon entire territories. See what happens when you don’t pay your property taxes. Your proof of ownership in any state system is contingent on what the state wants to do with your property, nothing more or less.. I’d much rather defend my own property than be subject to what amounts to slavery.

Sure you can. Private schools, private roads, private insurance, private firefighting, private healthcare, private charity, private armies, ….the model of voluntarily exchange for such services has been in effect since time immemorial. The idea that a man must be in government before he can provide any such services is damn near ludicrous.

I appreciate the effort it took to write that down, and find little to disagree with. But I’m just asking why you yourself must be governed.



Rather, I was asking why you must be governed. Can I extrapolate from your answer that you require the State to protect you?



I just can’t see how man in his government form is the only one capable of providing or funding such services.

The authoritarian statist barks but cannot provide an answer.

Quid Pro Joe is at it again. According to the Saudis he was asking them to postpone their OPEC decision to cut oil production for another month, until after the midterms. I can’t think of any reason, moral, economic, or otherwise, that Biden would ask them to postpone such a move, besides that it benefits Biden and his party. Of course they declined.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/10/13/biden-admin-asked-saudi-arabia-to-postpone-opec-cut-by-a-month-saudis-say.html

Life and chess are incomparable. The fact that one can move on from a game like chess is another reason why it is a false analogy.

Minority or majority rule is not the rule of the people, but the rule of some people over other people. And so long as democracy remains collectivist and statist this is how it will always be. All that we have to protect the individual are the threadbare and paper-thin human rights some institutions have agreed upon, but which are violated across the board nonetheless.

If we want true democracy, the rule of the people, we cannot rule over the people. We have to quit thinking in statist terms. Democracy in the form of government is a perversion of democracy. It isn’t nor can ever be the rule of the people.

Stop thinking in statist terms is a good start.

The utility of the state is a part of the problem. People think they can just set the great machine in motion and reach their desired goals, so they compete to sit at its levers. Understandable. However, whatever direction it moves or whichever class it operates to benefit, people are being ground beneath its weight at all times. It operates parasitically, survives on plunder and extortion, so the immorality of it all would remain even if angels occupied its positions.

Worse, its coordination requires force and coercion. Involuntary coordination is on the spectrum of slavery. Assuming that it’s evil to force people to serve my ends, I’d much rather find voluntary means of coordination.

If you look at the earliest examples of statehood, these forms "occur naturally" as seen by their repeated emergence and are at the same time imposed, and are deeply exploitive.

Very true. States are essentially the organized means of exploitation imposed by the conquering class upon the vanquished, and it has been that way from their beginning. Even through centuries of reform their fundamental functions and institutions still remain.

The end result is that all subsequent political movements, whether Marxist, liberal, or fascist, have only ever convinced the revolutionary to adopt and use the system of their oppressors to serve their political ends.

Yes and I think it is abusive. Nonetheless, socialists say this is the right thing to do... because the rich and businessmen need to be solidary with the working class or the poorest (meanwhile those taxes always end up to cover the costs of minorities... But this is a subject of a different topic). My country is a example of what happens when political correctness is in power.

It’s odd reasoning, if there is any reasoning in it at all. Solidarity with the working class will never result from raising someone’s taxes. It’s pure socialist propaganda.

I noticed they are slashing the 10% sales tax for feminine hygiene products. You’re right. Political correctness is in power.

The idiom “one cannot make an omelette without breaking a few eggs” serves well to explain that it isn’t so much a hijacking but the inevitable result of such a system. Such a system doesn’t occur naturally, but is imposed, often against the wishes of large subsets of the population. A state can now use Marx’s dream to justify any and all atrocities and privations.

The forceful transfer of wealth from private to state hands is one of the less talked about tyrannies in human history. A little math might explain the apparent arbitrariness of the amount of taxation, and a budget of some sort might explain what the state plans to do with its newly found wealth, but nothing can explain away the unjust transfer of wealth, the outright theft, that is taxation.

A company earning more than a million has to give a quarter of what it earns to your government. To cover that cost while at the same time covering the overhead the best one can do is lower wages, raise prices, cut corners, lay people off, and so on, just to be able to pay such exorbitant prices. Even if we let the state get away with the act of theft, it’s hard to look past the effects all this has on the poorer among us who have to deal with the rise in the cost of living, a large amount of which is used to cover any offsetting. A tax on the rich is also a hidden tax on the poor, in this sense.

The term was once a socialist bugaboo but has become familiar with overuse. In the mouths of critics and defenders alike “capitalism” confounds more than it clarifies, though, because if capital is the portion of wealth which is applied to the production of more wealth, then any system that does not consider the ownership and management of capital is unthinkable. All systems are capitalist. The differences lie only in who ought to own the capital, whether public or private, employer or employee, the collective or individual, and so on. Even Lois Blanc, who arguably coined the term, says as much (the appropriation of capital by the few, to the exclusion of the many).

The referendums in eastern Ukraine went swimmingly for Russia. Annexation is next.

I know it's nos but I don't even need to leave this page to find an ignorant opinion. I'm really surprised to hear you think that the average person is well-versed in what it means to be transgender, non-binary or such. For how long have these concepts really been in the public consciousness? LGBT is now LGBTQIA and the list of ideas and concepts surrounding gender continue to change every single year.

It doesn’t take much to assume dysphoria and contempt for one’s own body must be harrowing. Dysphoria is the antonym to euphoria, after-all. It’s ignorant to assume otherwise.

The contextomy was quite obvious. You even removed the last half of one sentence in order to give weight to the first half. Sorry, pal, but this is disinfo of the highest order.

It is meaningless. Remove the make-up, the clothes, the act, and we’ll see the reality of it all, and whether one’s identity conforms with it or not. This inescapable reality must bear heavily on the gender bender, I imagine.

Here’s the real quote before you had your way with it.

The economy lost 2.9 million jobs. The unemployment rate increased by 1.6 percentage points to 6.3%.

Paychecks grew faster than inflation. Average weekly earnings for all workers were up 8.7% after inflation.

After-tax corporate profits went up, and the stock market set new records. The S&P 500 index rose 67.8%.

The international trade deficit Trump promised to reduce went up. The U.S. trade deficit in goods and services in 2020 was the highest since 2008 and increased 40.5% from 2016.

The number of people lacking health insurance rose by 3 million.

The federal debt held by the public went up, from $14.4 trillion to $21.6 trillion.

Home prices rose 27.5%, and the homeownership rate increased 2.1 percentage points to 65.8%.

Illegal immigration increased. Apprehensions at the Southwest border rose 14.7% last year compared with 2016.

Coal production declined 26.5%, and coal-mining jobs dropped by 16.7%. Carbon emissions from energy consumption dropped 11.5%.

Handgun production rose 12.5% last year compared with 2016, setting a new record.

The murder rate last year rose to the highest level since 1997.

Trump filled one-third of the Supreme Court, nearly 30% of the appellate court seats and a quarter of District Court seats.

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/10/trumps-final-numbers/

And everyone with anti-Trump, pro-Biden points get a huge pass.

“Listen to Ben Bail out Wallstreet Bernanke”….I’ll pass.

The proof is in the pudding.

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SA0L1E?output_view=pct_12mths

Biden bears no responsibility for the American economy. His American Rescue Plan Act, his Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, have little to no effect on inflation and the economy…unless the economy is good, of course.

The question as to weather a president can declassify at will or has to follow a process are addressed in the quotes I cited, all of which contradicts your assertions saying otherwise. That you’d shift focus to their opinions on an impeachment strategy in order to avoid this accounting is obvious.

“Different people say different things but as I understand it, if you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it. Because you’re sending it to Mar-a-Lago or wherever you’re sending it. There doesn’t have to be a process. There can be a process, but there doesn’t have to be.”

Trump’s statement is true, and that’s probably why the phrase “by thinking about it” was torn from its context and served as fodder for those who fall for those sorts of efforts.

Article 2 says NOTHING about classified information.

But the Supreme Court has long ago determined that his classification powers come from his authority under Article II of the Constitution.

According to Executive order 13,526, which established the detailed process through which secret information can be appropriately declassified, he is obligated to follow procedure. Executive orders have the force of law. Only a subsequent executive order can overturn an executive order. Trump did not do that and could not do that by thinking it.

As Lawfareblog determined:

Let’s dispense with one easy rabbit hole that a lot of people are likely to go down this evening: the President did not “leak” classified information in violation of law. He is allowed to do what he did. If anyone other than the President disclosed codeword intelligence to the Russians in such fashion, he’d likely be facing a long prison term. But Nixon’s infamous comment that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal” is actually true about some things. Classified information is one of them. The nature of the system is that the President gets to disclose what he wants.

The reason is that the very purpose of the classification system is to protect information the President, usually through his subordinates, thinks sensitive. So the President determines the system of designating classified information through Executive Order, and he is entitled to depart from it at will. Currently, Executive Order 13526 governs national security information.

The Supreme Court has stated in Department of the Navy v. Egan that “[the President’s] authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security ... flows primarily from this Constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.” Because of his broad constitutional authority in this realm, the president can, at any time, either declassify information or decide whom to share it with.

Michael’s reasoning attempts to make us believe that a President must follow “established procedures” as outlined by another president’s executive order, and that the lower courts get to decide what the leader of the entire American military can and cannot declassify.

I’m aware that the case has to do with the inadvertent declassification of documents, and said as much.

“Your ruling shows that the president cannot inadvertently declassify documents.”

“Designated officials” are those designated by the commander in chief, the president. The power to declassify at will is satisfied by article 2 of the US constitution. He is not obligated to follow any procedures other than those that he himself has prescribed.

The ruling says “we decline to hold that the judiciary may conclude that certain executive branch statements may trigger inadvertent declassification because such determinations encroach upon the President’s undisputedly broad authority in the realm of national security”. The judiciary has no say on this matter. The “procedure” is that the president is the highest authority on classification, has “undisputedly broad authority”, and can declassify anything at will. Trump is right. “You’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it”.

The president can do whatever he wants with classified documents. He is ultimate authority.

Declassification cannot occur unless designated officials follow specified procedures.

...

Because declassification, even by the President, must follow established procedures, that argument fails.

“Established procedure” is that the president is the ultimate authority on classified materials and can declassify at will. Your ruling shows that the president cannot inadvertently declassify documents.

Heritage Expert: Americans Have Lost $4,200 in Annual Income Under The Biden Administration

Under former President Trump’s low-inflation economy, the average American worker’s real annual earnings increased by $4,000. That has been completely wiped out in about a year and a half under the Biden administration. Despite seeing the failure of various policies, such as paying people more to stay home than remain employed, the Biden administration has doubled down on these mistakes so that families can no longer afford to live in Biden’s America.

At least there are no more mean tweets.

The danger or threat is found wherever it becomes authoritarian, for instance the idea that one must, as a duty, dismiss his own grammar and furnish it with another’s. If it’s about choice, all parties involved ought to be able to use whatever pronouns they wish. Isn’t that so?

Other than that I think the only concern for me is the normalizing of drastic and irreversible medical interventions in young people, such as using puberty blockers, which often amounts to chemical castration.

At any rate, I do not see transgenderism as some threat to the concept of gender. Gender is largely incoherent, anyways, and can be dropped altogether.