Yeah, because economy works when stuff is given for free and people pay for it voluntarily.

Proponents of slavery argued the economy would collapse with abolition. Slavery worked, sure, but it was evil. My point is, the idea that taxation works is not much of an argument when it is premised on the denial of someone’s liberty and the appropriation of the fruits of his labor.

Who should pay for street lights when anybody can freely benefit from them?

Those who want to do so voluntarily.

Each of you, try to identify something, anything in your lives that you want, need, or benefit from, that government, i.e., taxes, have had nothing to do with. I will be surprised if you can come up with even one single thing.

I want the government to stay out of my way, and at most to defend my rights and liberty.

It’s difficult to identify such a thing because statism is very prevalent. It has taken over our lives to that extent. But the prevalence of statism surely isn’t an argument in favour of it.

And how are they robbed? Nor this is not a question of whether or not some people are robbed - maybe some have been. But how is an assessment for benefits provided a robbery?

Try refusing to pay taxes to see what happens. But it has become so common place that we now do it before they show up with shackles and their guns drawn.

Admittedly the idea comes from Frederic Bastiat in his book The Law. It’s a great read.

Who pays for infrastructure and services in your community?

Those who have money to take.

If a neighbor told us we need to make a compulsory contribution to their revenue we’d cry “Extortion!”. But when the government does it we call it “taxes”.

It is legal robbery, plain and simple.

Why is a movement against perpetuating the package of social structure and negative evaluation of human activities needed to survive condemned off the bat, but the perpetuation of this package is condoned and praised? Can't there be another point of view?

I think the simple reason this movement is condemned is that it is ugly. To look upon and preach that the world as an imposition, escapable only by suicide and self-sterilization, is itself a negative human activity, and many don’t like believing or participating in it. We can’t paint dog shit on a canvas and expect people to condone and praise it.

Anthropologist Franz Oppenheimer wrote a good little book called The State that is worth a look, because it covers the thesis of the “conquest theory of state”, the idea that the state formed in no other way than the exploitation of the vanquished by the victors:

“The State, completely in its genesis, essentially and almost completely during the first stages of its existence, is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group over the vanquished, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion had no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors.”

There are some great ideas within. He lays out some anthropological evidence for his thesis, though it may be a little outdated. But I’ve come to accept the “conquest theory” over the so-called “social contract”.

I know that you are not speaking about the current rules and regulations and they may vary from country to country. However, I have wondered if this whole situation might have been better responded to if people had been asked to take care of themselves and others rather than it all being enforced by the government.

Absolutely. The knowledge and will to protect oneself is all that is required. But what happens to this knowledge and will when a society that has been raised to depend on the state for both education and protection is asked to protect itself?

If the track-record of political correctness is any indication, this phrase will be deemed racist, discarded, and we'll be presented with another handy but inadequate phrase to describe a vastly diverse group of people. It's an absurd game, and It won't be long until "descendants of Ham" becomes vogue again.

The only advancement racists have made in the last while is the critical race theorists permeating academia and the industrial media complex. It will lead to segregation, apartheid, but not war.

My point is you have referred to criminality and corruption this whole time without being able to mention what crime he has committed or if a crime has occurred at all. In other words you advocate for using a criminal justice system to harass your political opponents. That makes you corrupt and weak at the same time.

So, what do you think? How long until he's in jail?

Who knows? 30 plus investigations and nothing yet. What’s another 30?

So all this talk about determinism, free will and physical processes - how does that have an impact on Free speech at campuses?

Like the sophists of old, some believe words can harm the human body, and if they rid the world of the words their pain will end.

That’s what corrupt, immoral and unjust witch-hunters do, yes.

To deny the power of words could be a defensive stance taken as a means to exonerate someone from bearing the responsibility of the results stemming from their own word use(free speech). It is self-defeating. In order for it work, the defender and/or defendant uses the power of words(free speech) to convince the jury that words(free speech) have no power. The key to defeat such a defense is to point this out to the jury.

Well, yes, that’s the point. It puts responsibility on the listener. Think of Mashal Khan, who was lynched and murdered for posting blasphemy online. Were the actions of the mob caused by his words or was it caused by their own bigotry and superstition?

I’m not sure what you mean by neurological processes being at the mercy of biology...they are part of your biology. This biology is triggered and effected by abstract symbols as well as other biological processes. Symbols we recognise have an effect on our thoughts and actions. You call it sorcery, but it’s only sorcery in the way an ipad is sorcery to a caveman.

I understand your point about knowledge, understanding and language...these are the sorts of biological processes that you referenced right? There are internal things effecting action as well as external. Sometimes (maybe most of the time) the internal things can override the external but saying the external has no effect in the way you are is incorrect. It’s both. It’s dynamic.

Glyphs may not cause you to understand them but they do cause certain neurological outcomes if you do recognise them. The degree to which they do effect action is certainly debatable, but that they do is well established.

I think you can recognise that and still maintain your free speech absolutism but your argument that it’s fanciful, magical thinking to claim words effect action doesn’t hold up.

I don’t deny that the environment effects the body, and that words exist in the environment. My only contention is that it is the biology that causes us to recognize, interpret and supply meaning to symbols, give them “power” so to speak.

One can make a word out of anything, say a pile of sticks, but the light from a symbol made from sticks will hit your eye in the same way, with slight variation, as sticks in any other configuration. It does the same to other mammals, too, and they would be none the wiser despite having a set of mammalian eyes and neurons. This isn’t because the symbol doesn’t effect their eyes or doesn’t fire their neurons. They lack the capacity for recognizing these kinds of patterns and they lack the capacity for language.

And until someone can convince me that words can travel through light and sound, that they can effect humans differently than any other being or phase of matter, I have to chalk up such a belief to magical thinking, because it necessarily leads one to believe that speaker can manipulate another’s biology, matter, with words. That’s sorcery.

I am not ignorant of neurological processes. My point is that neurons and neurological processes are at the mercy of my own biology and not some abstract symbol out in the world. Yes, we recognize symbols, not because there is something in the symbols, but because we already know what they mean.

Heiroglyphics don’t cause you to understand them. We cannot understand or recognize a language by virtue of it being spoken. We have to refer to our own knowledge, understanding, language in order to do so.

I wish to see a compelling argument that makes thinking of free will as a possibility without the use of some outside power.

When you extend your notion of self to the very surface of your being, beyond the little homunculus we often pretend is there, you’ll find that the “outer forces” are often your own. The thing that causes the heartbeat, the metabolism, the immune system to do what they do is none other than yourself. All conscious and unconscious activity is determined, “willed” by this being. This being persists in all anterior, present and posterior events throughout your time here.

For what?

It's not enough 'not to be racist (fascist)'; you're either anti-racist (anti-fascist) or you're not.

Simply repeating that old saying is not enough, though. One has to actually do it. And to do that one must not be racist. Unfortunately one finds plenty of racism in those who repeat that saying.

It literally does. 654 exerts a power on the system which unlocks the door, 456 loses all the mechanical power in waste heat. It's basic physics. If 654 physically switches a switch but 456 doesn't then 654 has more power (within that system) than 456 (whose power is lost to that system as waste heat). You can't make things happen without power - basic laws of thermodynamics.

The keys exert power, no matter what’s written on them. The numbers on the keys exert none. This beginning to get ridiculous.

The only moral choice is to lead by example, hope for the best and prepare for the worst, unfortunately. Any “solution” as applied by some centralized authority will ultimately end in tyranny and failure.

That’s right. I will respect someone’s property rights while simultaneously holding the belief their censorship is unwarranted. No matter how many times you speak my position back to me, sooner or later you might have to come up with an argument against it or drop it altogether.

I once picked up an Arabic newspaper and my eyes went immediate to the top-left of the page and I followed the script left-to-right. Had I known Arabic went right-to-left I might have started on the other side. That wasn’t determined by the symbols, which are completely blameless. It was the consequence of me not being able to read Arabic.

As for your keypad, the code opens the door because it is programmed to do so, and is able to do so through mechanical forces and means. It certainly doesn’t open the door because 654 is more powerful than 456.

All you're saying is that the sum of the energy within the arbitrary boundary you've chosen (the paper and ink) is the same, so the sum of the energy in that which it causes will be the same. Yes. You're absolutely right about that. So?

Right. So how can one be more powerful than the other? You’ve already said “because the ink is in a different arrangement”. That to me is sorcery. Witches inscribe runes on objects and recite incantations premised on the same belief.

I enjoy your formulation and largely agree, though we could probably quibble with the terms. It reminds me of Thomas Paine’s distinction between society and of government in Common Sense: “Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices”.

Yes, all censorship is unwarranted in my view. It is for this reason that I refuse to deny or punish someone’s choice to publish what they wish, and censor what they wish, on their own platforms. I can hold that their censorship is unwarranted while refusing to censor them at the same time without any contradiction.

Edit - just to be absolutely clear - this is the grounds on which I don't believe your false virtue signalling about 'free speech'. If you really believed words were powerless, then banning all of them would be a trivial matter, like banning hats. Stupid, pointless, but ultimately harmless. We'd all just get used to wet heads and have done with it. No. The reason why you don't want certain words banned is because (despite your phoney nonsense to the contrary) you know perfectly well that words have the power to influence people and you don't want influence in your chosen direction to be taken away from you.

That’s a silly analogy and conclusion. Your claim to understand what I know and want is fabricated from thin air, projected, just like the power you ascribe to words.

Here’s a thought experiment. Take two pieces of paper and two inkwells with a small but exact amount of ink in them. On one piece of paper, scribble gibberish and random symbols until all the ink is applied to the page. On the other, write something, maybe a letter to a loved one, a song or whatever, until all the ink is applied to the page. There should now be the same amount of paper, same amount of ink, same mass, same velocity, same potential energy, same forces acting on each. So how is the power of one different than the power of the other?

I wouldn't characterize your having written that as "ironic". I'd say it was, is, and will forever remain self-contradictory, untenable, inconsistent, irrational, illogical, unacceptable rhetorical bullshit.

If all censorship is unwarranted, then none is warranted. <-------that points out the self-contradiction and/or untenability of what you've offered here.

It's really pretty simple and easy to understand...

If all censorship is unwarranted then even in situations when an individual owns the means of discourse - say television, radio, or other social media outlet - that ownership does not provide warrant for them to censor.

I never said censorship was warranted. I said that they can censor if they wanted to. This is because it is their property. To deny or punish them for publishing what they want on their own property is to infringe on both their property and free speech rights, which I fully grant them and defend. That doesn’t mean they did the right thing.

Then why post? If it's irrelevant what people take away from your doing so?

I seek expression for its own sake. I also find it healthy and beneficial to hold my ideas to the grindstone of criticism and disputation. It get’s me thinking.

1. Neurons firing are the proximate cause of all action and speech.

2. Sound and light patterns cause different neurons to fire depending on very fine details of the exact sound and the exact light pattern.

3. Nothing we know of causes neurons to fire apart from sensory or interocepted signals, or other neurons. Our current best physics determines that it is impossible for a chain of neurons to fire without having been physically stimulated to do so.

So. Words trigger specific neurons to fire, which form part of a chain of reactions, the end of which is some speech or action in response. Of course other factors also contribute to that chain, but to deny that the specific sounds are one of those factors is to deny everything we know about neurology and physical causation.

If you want to deny that, be my guest. People deny the earth is round, stupidity exists. Just don't expect to be taken seriously if you do.

I see no disagreement in the biology, so I won’t deny it. And I would not say certain sounds are not a factor in hearing certain sounds. It’s true that light can fall upon photoreceptors and vibrations can move eardrums. There is undoubtedly a direct interaction between the body and the environment. But that’s where your chain ends for me.

After that the events are generated by, sustained by, governed by, performed by, and therefor caused by the human being. It is true that light falls upon photoreceptors, but photons enter the eye only to the extent that the body allows it. It seems to me that the body, the “other factors”, is the reason why the eyes are open, why light is focused in such a way, absorbed rather than reflected, activating the necessary nerve cells, and so on. It is doing the work.

The same with words. We seek them out, focussing on them, reading them, listening to them, speaking them, understanding them, ascribing meaning to them, becoming aroused or anxious or offended by them, venerating some and banning others. Again, in my admittedly common sense understanding, these are the activities of a human being. At each step we control what we do with these sights, sounds, or whatever form words may take in our environment. And I believe these actions are not just the immanent reactions to word themselves, but of the entire organism as it exists a long process of language development and acquisition.

Basically, I believe people overestimate the power of words while underestimating their own power over words. Words are beautiful, useful, important, valuable—but they are not powerful.

Nice examples of unwarranted censorship. Do you find all censorship unwarranted?

I do. When I think about the sum total of linguistic expression, it pains me to think of all the history, knowledge, and art that has been stolen, suppressed, and destroyed because someone could not bear to look at it. I don’t envy the censors; they will forever be tied to what they stole from posterity.

I do think, however, that if someone owns their own means of discourse they can censor at their whim and fancy, ironically, on free speech grounds.

s it okay - on your view - to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, for example? Is it ok to spread falsehood after falsehood as a means to effect/affect deliberately taken action, say to... oh, I don't know... how about... stop the certification process of an American presidential election by virtue of taking over the building in which the elected officials certify the aforementioned results on the day of certification? Is that protected under free speech? Seems like that speech was an instrumental element, without which, the insurrection attempt would not have even been attempted.

Yes, it is all protected under the principle of free speech, in my view. I am not so fearful of falsity nor doubtful of truth as to require someone such as yourself to pick and choose what I am allowed to read and say. What I am fearful and doubtful of are your abilities and moral superiority to make these decisions. In fact, I cannot think of any man or group of people in history with the ability and moral superiority to decide what others cannot say and read. Can you?

Do you find that Trump's words over the previous year regarding the election are protected under free speech?

I do.

You're not fooling anyone. You know that, right? This is a good example of when words don't have an effect. When I disbelieve the person speaking them.

I don't care if you believe me or not. I think what you believe is stupid, so you asserting what is opposite of the case is no surprise. You evoked my name to spread a malicious falsehood in what I suppose was an attempt to "suppress" me with your magical words. It didn't work because it cannot. So here I am, in good faith, correcting you and stating what I actually believe.

We've been through this argument and you bailed, not me. Don't start it up again like nothing was said last time. If you have a non-magical means by which physical neurons are caused to fire without prior signals then lay it out. Otherwise shut up. I've no objection to you believing in magic/religion/yet-to-be-discovered science. But it's pitiful to try and paint that belief as knowledge and the current science as the fantasy. Again, if you have a non-magical means by which physical neurons are caused to fire without prior signals then just lay it out. Otherwise it's your notion of uncaused reactions which is nonsense here.

I mistakenly tried using your deterministic language in an effort to explain it in a way that might be helpful. I regret doing so, and I apologize.

I have never believed nor stated that sound and light doesn’t have an effect on the body, so there is no need to pretend I did. I am merely opposing the idea that words, whether spoken or written, have a different, more powerful effect on the body than gibberish or arbitrary marks on paper. I am opposing the idea that some words, certain combinations of letters or articulated guttural sounds, are more dangerous than others. I oppose the idea that certain combinations of letters or articulated guttural sounds should be banned, thrown to the fires, while others are venerated. I am saying the words as they exist in the world are wholly innocent of everything we usually blame them for.

I am willing to defend this belief if you care to argue the point.

Absolutely. Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but I sense, in the arguments of free-speech absolutists like nos, that they're not merely 'confounded' but deliberately use the confusion as a smokescreen for promoting the use of language to suppress minorities. That's really the only reason I got involved here, to point out that assuming a hard disconnect between the speech of one and the response of another is a political, not a logical decision.

Your sense is way off in my own case. Throughout history censorship has been used against minorities of all types: religious, racial, political, the individual. Censorship suppresses minorities; free speech liberates them. Frederick Douglass, who was once a slave, reasoned as much.

No greater excuse has been used to justify censorship than this action-at-a-distance, the magical thinking that words cause adverse effects on groups of people or society as a whole, as if it was poison, pollution, or a natural disaster. Examples of this are myriad. Whether expression is “corrupting the youth” in the case of Socrates, “adversely affect public health, safety, and morals” in the censorship of Bertrand Russel, or it leads to “disorder and mischief which were thence proceeding and increasing to the detriment of the Holy Faith” in the case of Galileo. In each case some fearful authority attempts to raise expression to a species of dangerous sorcery somehow capable of manipulating matter.

So I tend to oppose that type of thinking and don’t want to see our children taught to believe it, not only because I believe it is metaphysical nonsense, but because it disarms them against hatred, cruelty and bullying.

"Why do human interactions on the internet tend to skew negative, as opposed to positive? What does this say about human behaviour?"

Most likely because we are interacting with screens instead of human beings. So much of human interaction is missing from the equation to begin with.

Strange. You seem to have more to say about American politics, when you don't even live here, than about the politics in your own country.

It’s a sort of cultural imperialism, spreading through various Internet echo-chambers as quickly as the Washington press will allow it. I also don’t live in the US, but our press no less resorts to the same churnalism as other countries, and everything comes out reading like a CNN article. I fear there isn’t an original thought among them.

No, they are not sufficient causes, they are necessary causes. Another necessary cause is a human tea-maker, or a machine. It doesn't make them not causes, otherwise nothing could ever be caused.

I suppose flour is the necessary cause of bread, and hops the necessary cause of beer. I’m not going to use such language. No matter what word you use to modify “cause”, and no matter how easily we can drift into the passive voice when we describe tea-making, none of these ingredients can gather and mix themselves with other “necessary causes” to create the end product.

Exactly. So, in terms of speech legislation, if I wanted to stop you responding, then removing one of the necessary causes (my post) would do that. Of course, in the real world we must usually talk about minimising chances rather than outright prevention because the number of sufficient causes is very large.

If you wanted to stop me responding you would have to stop yourself from responding. In both cases, the words did not cause any of these actions. These are the decisions of an agent, the only being with the capacity to act in such a manner.

You've just ignored what I previously said rather than counter it. That is not the public meaning of the term 'cause'. You'll not find such a meaning in any dictionary. It is not necessary for a cause to be sufficient in order for it to be a cause. My post was not sufficient to result in your reply, but - this is the important bit - nothing is. So if we reserve the word 'cause' for only those factors which are sufficient we have to accept the absurd conclusion that nothing has any causes.

Leaves are a cause of us raking them. They're just not a sufficient cause, they are a necessary one.

Again I don’t care about the jargon or arguments by gibberish. We can quibble about definitions of “cause” and variations of “cause” forever. But I still feel that you’re raising the ingredients of tea into the cause of tea by sheer act of rhetoric, nothing more.

We do not have to accept that nothing has any cause unless we extirpate the causal agent from your examples, as you have done above. The one thing that gathers the ingredients, boils the water, and combines the ingredients to form tea hardly makes an appearance in your analogy, or is relegated to the same species of cause as boiling water.

Leaves are not the cause of us raking them just as they are not the cause of us refusing to rake them. The very beginning of the raking process, starts in only one place and in one object.

Again, the importance for free speech legislation - remove the leaves and you remove the raking, because they are a necessary cause.

But how can you remove the leaves if not by raking? Cut down the trees? I suggest we teach people to not fear leaves so that we need not resort to such measures.

I appreciate the analogy. But who or what is making the tea? The milk? The tea-leaves? The kettle? Not a single one of these, or any combination of these ingredients, can cause tea.

It’s true; I would not respond to something that is not there, but I would also not respond had I not looked at my screen, taken the time to read, and chosen to respond. I could do the exact opposite: not respond. This is because your post isn’t the cause of me responding anymore than it is the cause of no one else responding. The causal chain of your language ended wherever you have left your words, and there they will sit until some agent comes across and chooses what to do with them.

Leaves don’t cause us to rake them. Rocks don’t cause us to pick them up. Your post doesn’t cause me to respond to it, and so on.

No, I could care less about jargon. The only thing you or your words have caused is the movement of some air and some sound waves.

If I give you the wrong directions to the pub, and you go that way, my words have caused you to do so. It's not that hard.

Your just skip a variety of preceding causes to the event you described—hearing, understanding, trusting etc.

Appealing to ridicule to disguise a shit argument. Not that hard.

Would he be that pesky?

No. The fears that “any candidates other than white men for jobs mostly held by white men might run into turmoil once their nominations got to the White House” is false in its face.

This Is the Woman President Trump Wants to Be the First Female African-American Marine General

That's a concern to me as well, as I noted previously, at least as a matter of definition. What will constitute promotion of free speech under the law? It happens defining "promotion" will involve defining "free speech" as well.

Great point. As their sanctions suggest, I think we can trust that their version of free speech extends only to views they agree with.

I don’t know much about the UK education system, so I’m not quite sure what their measures would exactly entail, or how much the government gets to decide curriculum. But I don’t like the idea that universities should be legally required to actively promote free speech for the same reason I don’t think they should be legally required to actively promote Marxism. When the state compels people to promote a certain stance under the threat of sanction we have entered the realm of censorship.