I really thought Forbes would be unbiased enough. That might be foolish, I don't know. I looked, although admittedly not much.
After reading up a little more on the issue, while I agree that Ron Paul's moral compass is scary, it doesn't sound like has any goals I object to. It seems he wants to reduce the power of the federal government so that Texas can outlaw abortion and gay sex. And while I can't imagine people wanting those laws, I think there are enough people in this country who believe they are absolutely necessary that it is justified for a state to have them.
I really think that a huge problem in the US is that we have too many people who are too different, and we're trying to get them all to play nice and think the same things. And I think reduction in federal power and increase in state power improves that situation.
I am, of course, assuming that if Paul got what he wants, I'd be able to find a state that doesn't outlaw abortion or gay sex, but I'm pretty comfortable with that assumption. The number of states that had outlawed abortion before Roe v. Wade is scary, but I'm hoping more states would be more sane about that now, and there were still a few states that hadn't outlawed it back then.
It sounds like you wouldn’t have cared about slavery if you could have found a place to live where you could personally have avoided it. Either that, or your attachment to the Libertarian brand (as opposed to any principles) is so deep that you don’t care about morality and consequences, you just want your team to win. (Actually, it sounds like you’re content supporting your team while they lose, and find that preferable to actually working for greater human freedom.)
I really think that a huge problem in the US is that we have too many people who are too different, and we're trying to get them all to play nice and think the same things.
To some extent, I agree with you, but I’m not willing to go so far as repealing the 14th amendment and ending Incorporation (and some amount of jurisprudence before it) and letting state governments oppress their people arbitrarily.
If you think it’s not morally OK for large numbers of people to get together (e.g., the citizenry of the United States) and agree to stop medium-sized numbers of people (e.g., the states, or for that matter corporations or other power centers) from oppressing small numbers of people or individuals, then you are no defender of freedom.
I think you're more comfortable deciding what other people should or shouldn't do than you would like people who have different beliefs to be. Yes, for gay people currently living in Texas, it would be unfortunate if gay sex were outlawed. But they could leave. But that still leaves gay children born in Texas in an unpleasant position. It's not a great situation, but I think it's better than continuing to have those people who would outlaw gay sex continuing to exert political pressure on the federal government I share.
I think slavery is easily an entirely different class of oppression, because slaves don't have the option to leave. I recognize gays may have practical reasons making leaving difficult, it might even be financially impossible for some people, but I think that's resolvable. I think that's a cause I could donate time and money to. I think it's much more resolvable than coming up with one set of rules regarding abortion that satisfy everyone in this country.
I believe very strongly that it's wrong to outlaw gay sex or abortion. But I know that there are people who feel much more strongly that I'm wrong. How can you determine which of us is right? Why not just split us up as peacefully as possible?
Yes, for gay people currently living in Texas, it would be unfortunate if gay sex were outlawed. But they could leave.
What a lovely solution! If your neighbours don’t want to grant you equal rights as a person under the law, just leave. That’s always been the best and most just solution to persecution, hasn’t it?
Tell you what: Let’s apply that to you. You disagree with some things the country you and I share, and you want to change that country to better suit your political views, and more poorly suit mine (and poor people’s, and women’s, and those of anybody without the particular set of power advantages you happen to have, and probably also all the people who have power in ways you don’t). But you’ve hit upon the perfect solution! Get the fuck out of my country.
(Seriously, if you and people with your kind of sociocognitive dysfunction got your own little Libertarian Heimat, it would descend into civil war in short order, because you can’t see the beams in your own eyes, but you would put out your brothers’ eyes because the specks bugged you, and think yourselves righteous in doing it.)
I already have moved to a different state because of my preference for laws / government. I'm not suggesting anybody else do anything I haven't demonstrated a willingness to do (while recognizing I was in a better than average position to do it).
Your inability to consider the possibility you're wrong is no better than Christian extremists. Similar inability to discuss the problem calmly. Everything has to be run your way, and anybody who thinks different is evil. Sound familiar? I at least try to consider the possibility I'm wrong, and try to figure out what's best in that context.
But that won't help, because you can't consider the possibility you're wrong. How could you be? It's all so obvious. To you.
Right? Can you ask yourself the question? What if you're wrong?
I am honestly sorry to have upset you as much as I expect this has. You have only been incredibly kind and generous to me.
I expect you're pretty much done with this conversation. But if not, I'd love it if you could tell me why your certainty is any more valid than anybody's who is certain you're wrong.
I expect you're pretty much done with this conversation.
On the edge, but your honest request to continue it kept me here a bit longer.
But if not, I'd love it if you could tell me why your certainty is any more valid than anybody's who is certain you're wrong.
To some extent, this is fundamentally unanswerable on a philosophical level. How do I know genocide is wrong? I know I don’t like it, but how do I know that matters, that it’s a valid basis for action? I know the people who see it as possibly happening to them don’t like it, but how do I know that in some abstract, non-subjective way, their feelings matter? I know that, if we lived in a world where genocide were more routine than it is now, people would on average be less happy than they are now, but so what? Maybe people’s desire to commit genocide is more important, according to somebody else’s moral lights, than people’s desire not to have genocide perpetrated against them. If you don’t accept my moral intuition that genocide is to be avoided (and if you don’t accept some God whose word you think you need to obey — and I will note that throughout history gods’ opinions of genocide have been a bit mixed), then there’s nothing I can do to convince you.
On the other hand, you and I may agree that genocide is a bad thing, and disagree factually about how to avoid it. In the ’30s, there was sincere debate in the West about whether confrontation or conciliation with Hitler was likely to have the best outcome for the people whose lives he affected. In the ’50s and ’60s, there was similar debate in the US over what policy towards the Soviet Union would be best, in the long and the short term for Soviet citizens (including the Jews and other minorities brutally persecuted by Stalin). People with very similar goals argued radically different courses of action. And since you can’t go back and repeat the experiment the other way, it’s kind of tricky to collect data from history. But it’s not impossible.
I think you want (or think you want) to maximize human freedom. I also want to maximize human freedom. I think you think that if you got to be the architect of the Utopian society, designing its rules, you could be the perfect watchmaker and construct a machine that would produce maximal freedom. And I look at the machine you want and its starting state (including the watchmakers) and it’s obvious to me that that would be a machine for producing human misery on a grand scale, that would turn on many of the people who had put it in place in the first place and destroy them (somewhat like the French Revolution).
So here I’m basing my decisions about what to fight for and what to fight against on two basic things I trust about myself: My moral intuition (which tells me that letting people live their lives as freely as possible consistent with other people also living their lives equally freely is desirable), and my ability to predict consequences.
If you want Ron Paul to be president, and you want him to be able to put into practice his articulated policies, you are advocating for a the most radical sudden change this country has seen since the Civil War. (And in fact, when you make the arguments you are making for state sovereignty over the Federal constitution and Bill of Rights that you are making, you are essentially advocating going back to the condition of the US prior to the Civil War, modulo the fact that the country’s a lot more urban now and slavery has lost a lot of popularity in the intervening century and a half.) Even if I didn’t think Ron Paul was a racist, misogynist, homophobic lunatic who would be happy seeing Dominionists in power, even if I agreed with everything he said and thought he was a wise and foresightful person, I wouldn’t want to make such a huge restructuring in one jump. I would want to make smaller changes as experiments and see how they go.
OK, that’s maybe one third of the first point of three or four, and probably not the most important or the most interesting point, but I can’t let this discussion take over my life. (And LJ won’t let me post comments that long, anyway.)
(1) I think I may have misunderstood your question, since it sounds like you’re saying either that all argument about right and wrong is completely futile, or that I don’t have a right to disagree with you, because no matter what my reasoning process may be I might be wrong, but you have a right to disagree with me, because I might be wrong. Wrong about what? If I’m wrong that all people deserve equal human rights, and I’m successful in persuading my government to protect those equal human rights, then I suppose some people are tragically defended from being enslaved or raped or murdered who don’t “deserve” to be, but that’s a very strange argument for somebody who claims to be a libertarian to be making. (That said, it’s a conclusion that capital-L Libertarians seem to come to on a surprisingly regular basis.)
(2) Backing up, you’re telling me that the American people should support for president someone who you have granted is a racist and a homophobe; who doesn’t believe in evolution or global warming (in fact, claims global warming is a deliberate hoax); whom the overwhelming majority of Americans in almost any demographic and of almost any political stripe think is an absolute nutcase*; a large fraction of whose prominent supporters explicitly want to impose their religious views on their neighbours by force and turn America into a theocracy; and who you yourself have said has lots of unforgivable beliefs that belie any claim to be a (real, small-l) libertarian. I’ve tried to take you seriously and argue individual points, but if it’s not apparent to you that there’s something wrong there, then there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.
(3) All of that said, by all means, vote for Paul in the New Hampshire primary! First of all, the right to vote is important, and I think everyone should have the right to vote, but secondly, I want to see the contemporary Republican Party and capital-L Libertarianism not just utterly discredited, but made a laughing stock, such that their distinctive ideas fall out the Overton window and more space is made for sane, realistic political discourse in this country. The more places Ron Paul makes a respectable showing in the GOP primaries, the more discredited the GOP will be, and the more people learn about Ron Paul, the more discredited capital-L Libertarianism will be.
* This is the one thing in this list that I don’t think is necessarily disqualifying, but given the tiny minority of Americans who don’t think Ron Paul is batshit crazy, I think it’s almost disqualifying. On the bright side, it guarantees he won’t be elected, and goes some way towards guaranteeing that if he were elected he couldn’t get his policies implemented.
Oh, and yes, you’re right, I’m more comfortable having myself decide (say) how the Afghan government should treat women than I am having the Taliban decide how the Afghan government should treat women. That’s not because I’m a hypocrite unjustly trying to impose my own arbitrary and frivolous personal preferences on the Taliban, that’s because the effects on women of the way the Taliban would like the Afghan government to treat women are not morally equivalent to effects on women of the way I would like the Afghan government to treat women.
Way, way off topic, but I managed to get from that Wikipedia article to the articles on coats-of-arms and English heraldry, as well as the Bayeux tapestry.
To bring this comment back to topicality, while I agree with you in general about the principle of states' rights (the 9th and 10th amendments don't get nearly enough love), I really think you've missed the forest for the trees on this one. To pick an intentionally incendiary example, should the deep South be allowed to re-institute segregation? (I forget if it was Rand or Ron that mentioned the Civil Rights Act as an example of Federal overreach, although I think it was Rand but am too lazy to go look it up.)
The rights to abortion and gay sex are both examples of having sovereignty over one's own body. Would you not consider mutually consensual sex with someone to whom you are attracted to qualify as a pursuit of happiness? (While the Declaration of Independence isn't a document that really has any legal force today, I will remind you that the Founders agreed that some of the most basic, "unalienable Rights" that people have include "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.")
How much of an infringement of personal liberty is it to say that you can't have sex with that (willing) person over there just because you both happen to have the same set of genitalia? How disingenuous is it to say that your civil rights are only civil rights as long as they stand up to a majority vote? Would it be valid for a state to, say, disenfranchise gun owners or redheads if there was support for it?
To draw an analogy, you're advocating for BSD-style government, while beowabbit is in favor of a GPL-style government. You want maximum freedom from an author who imposes the fewest possible restrictions on anyone at all, which makes it possible for a middle-man third party to close-source the codebase and restrict the freedoms of modification and distribution among the end users. He's saying that it's much better to accept a few additional restrictions up front so that the code base stays open and anyone can modify it, resulting in much greater net freedom for all. (I'm not sure which license you prefer these days, but the analogy seemed interesting when it hit me.)
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Re: PS — a couple more articles
After reading up a little more on the issue, while I agree that Ron Paul's moral compass is scary, it doesn't sound like has any goals I object to. It seems he wants to reduce the power of the federal government so that Texas can outlaw abortion and gay sex. And while I can't imagine people wanting those laws, I think there are enough people in this country who believe they are absolutely necessary that it is justified for a state to have them.
I really think that a huge problem in the US is that we have too many people who are too different, and we're trying to get them all to play nice and think the same things. And I think reduction in federal power and increase in state power improves that situation.
I am, of course, assuming that if Paul got what he wants, I'd be able to find a state that doesn't outlaw abortion or gay sex, but I'm pretty comfortable with that assumption. The number of states that had outlawed abortion before Roe v. Wade is scary, but I'm hoping more states would be more sane about that now, and there were still a few states that hadn't outlawed it back then.
Re: PS — a couple more articles
If you think it’s not morally OK for large numbers of people to get together (e.g., the citizenry of the United States) and agree to stop medium-sized numbers of people (e.g., the states, or for that matter corporations or other power centers) from oppressing small numbers of people or individuals, then you are no defender of freedom.
Re: PS — a couple more articles
I think slavery is easily an entirely different class of oppression, because slaves don't have the option to leave. I recognize gays may have practical reasons making leaving difficult, it might even be financially impossible for some people, but I think that's resolvable. I think that's a cause I could donate time and money to. I think it's much more resolvable than coming up with one set of rules regarding abortion that satisfy everyone in this country.
I believe very strongly that it's wrong to outlaw gay sex or abortion. But I know that there are people who feel much more strongly that I'm wrong. How can you determine which of us is right? Why not just split us up as peacefully as possible?
Re: PS — a couple more articles
Tell you what: Let’s apply that to you. You disagree with some things the country you and I share, and you want to change that country to better suit your political views, and more poorly suit mine (and poor people’s, and women’s, and those of anybody without the particular set of power advantages you happen to have, and probably also all the people who have power in ways you don’t). But you’ve hit upon the perfect solution! Get the fuck out of my country.
(Seriously, if you and people with your kind of sociocognitive dysfunction got your own little Libertarian Heimat, it would descend into civil war in short order, because you can’t see the beams in your own eyes, but you would put out your brothers’ eyes because the specks bugged you, and think yourselves righteous in doing it.)
Re: PS — a couple more articles
Your inability to consider the possibility you're wrong is no better than Christian extremists. Similar inability to discuss the problem calmly. Everything has to be run your way, and anybody who thinks different is evil. Sound familiar? I at least try to consider the possibility I'm wrong, and try to figure out what's best in that context.
But that won't help, because you can't consider the possibility you're wrong. How could you be? It's all so obvious. To you.
Right? Can you ask yourself the question? What if you're wrong?
I am honestly sorry to have upset you as much as I expect this has. You have only been incredibly kind and generous to me.
I expect you're pretty much done with this conversation. But if not, I'd love it if you could tell me why your certainty is any more valid than anybody's who is certain you're wrong.
Re: PS — a couple more articles
On the other hand, you and I may agree that genocide is a bad thing, and disagree factually about how to avoid it. In the ’30s, there was sincere debate in the West about whether confrontation or conciliation with Hitler was likely to have the best outcome for the people whose lives he affected. In the ’50s and ’60s, there was similar debate in the US over what policy towards the Soviet Union would be best, in the long and the short term for Soviet citizens (including the Jews and other minorities brutally persecuted by Stalin). People with very similar goals argued radically different courses of action. And since you can’t go back and repeat the experiment the other way, it’s kind of tricky to collect data from history. But it’s not impossible.
I think you want (or think you want) to maximize human freedom. I also want to maximize human freedom. I think you think that if you got to be the architect of the Utopian society, designing its rules, you could be the perfect watchmaker and construct a machine that would produce maximal freedom. And I look at the machine you want and its starting state (including the watchmakers) and it’s obvious to me that that would be a machine for producing human misery on a grand scale, that would turn on many of the people who had put it in place in the first place and destroy them (somewhat like the French Revolution).
So here I’m basing my decisions about what to fight for and what to fight against on two basic things I trust about myself: My moral intuition (which tells me that letting people live their lives as freely as possible consistent with other people also living their lives equally freely is desirable), and my ability to predict consequences.
If you want Ron Paul to be president, and you want him to be able to put into practice his articulated policies, you are advocating for a the most radical sudden change this country has seen since the Civil War. (And in fact, when you make the arguments you are making for state sovereignty over the Federal constitution and Bill of Rights that you are making, you are essentially advocating going back to the condition of the US prior to the Civil War, modulo the fact that the country’s a lot more urban now and slavery has lost a lot of popularity in the intervening century and a half.) Even if I didn’t think Ron Paul was a racist, misogynist, homophobic lunatic who would be happy seeing Dominionists in power, even if I agreed with everything he said and thought he was a wise and foresightful person, I wouldn’t want to make such a huge restructuring in one jump. I would want to make smaller changes as experiments and see how they go.
OK, that’s maybe one third of the first point of three or four, and probably not the most important or the most interesting point, but I can’t let this discussion take over my life. (And LJ won’t let me post comments that long, anyway.)
Three things
(2) Backing up, you’re telling me that the American people should support for president someone who you have granted is a racist and a homophobe; who doesn’t believe in evolution or global warming (in fact, claims global warming is a deliberate hoax); whom the overwhelming majority of Americans in almost any demographic and of almost any political stripe think is an absolute nutcase*; a large fraction of whose prominent supporters explicitly want to impose their religious views on their neighbours by force and turn America into a theocracy; and who you yourself have said has lots of unforgivable beliefs that belie any claim to be a (real, small-l) libertarian. I’ve tried to take you seriously and argue individual points, but if it’s not apparent to you that there’s something wrong there, then there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.
(3) All of that said, by all means, vote for Paul in the New Hampshire primary! First of all, the right to vote is important, and I think everyone should have the right to vote, but secondly, I want to see the contemporary Republican Party and capital-L Libertarianism not just utterly discredited, but made a laughing stock, such that their distinctive ideas fall out the Overton window and more space is made for sane, realistic political discourse in this country. The more places Ron Paul makes a respectable showing in the GOP primaries, the more discredited the GOP will be, and the more people learn about Ron Paul, the more discredited capital-L Libertarianism will be.
* This is the one thing in this list that I don’t think is necessarily disqualifying, but given the tiny minority of Americans who don’t think Ron Paul is batshit crazy, I think it’s almost disqualifying. On the bright side, it guarantees he won’t be elected, and goes some way towards guaranteeing that if he were elected he couldn’t get his policies implemented.
Re: PS — a couple more articles
no subject
To bring this comment back to topicality, while I agree with you in general about the principle of states' rights (the 9th and 10th amendments don't get nearly enough love), I really think you've missed the forest for the trees on this one. To pick an intentionally incendiary example, should the deep South be allowed to re-institute segregation? (I forget if it was Rand or Ron that mentioned the Civil Rights Act as an example of Federal overreach, although I think it was Rand but am too lazy to go look it up.)
The rights to abortion and gay sex are both examples of having sovereignty over one's own body. Would you not consider mutually consensual sex with someone to whom you are attracted to qualify as a pursuit of happiness? (While the Declaration of Independence isn't a document that really has any legal force today, I will remind you that the Founders agreed that some of the most basic, "unalienable Rights" that people have include "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.")
How much of an infringement of personal liberty is it to say that you can't have sex with that (willing) person over there just because you both happen to have the same set of genitalia? How disingenuous is it to say that your civil rights are only civil rights as long as they stand up to a majority vote? Would it be valid for a state to, say, disenfranchise gun owners or redheads if there was support for it?
To draw an analogy, you're advocating for BSD-style government, while