I have mixed feelings. I like the process of being able to lobby government. But I think the process in its current form favors money more than it ought.

There have been attempts to pull things back a bit, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honest...Government_Act

But as things are, I feel as though it's not a process that picks out the best ideas (measured in some sort broad societal benefit) and instead is a process that picks out the "best" ideas (measured in terms of what the people with the most money thinks is best).

On an off subject do you guys play online poker at WPN? If so I just wanted to say I won the On Demand Free roll leader board last week and the TD just regged me in the $215 this Sunday for winning it.

Sorry I just got excited and had to tell someone so why not my brother in humanity.

Meh. I think this kind of legislation is typically pointless and often harmful. The best legislation to lower corruption would be to double or triple politician salaries. Base pay for Congress is $174k. Almost any Congressperson could quit in two years and easily get a job paying 3-4 times that. Americans won't accept that though, so we'll continue to get this kind of corruption and playing whack-a-mole with smarter and more motivated opponents.

I guess. I just think people have completely unrealistic views here. Politics is ultimately about power. Money is a form of power that is affected by politics. Creating a system that forces money to ignore this impact is impossible in any kind of democratic system. What I think these kinds of legislation are really about is to devolve power away from elites towards the masses. I generally favor strong parties and representative democracy over direct democracy, so I'm not really in favor of that move.

force is physical violence. Perhaps I should use aggression rather than force, ie the initiation of physical violence. Credible threats of violence are also force, as in the gun to the head scenario.

coercion is using force to make someone perform an action that they dont want to do.

Fair enough. I'm anti-term limits because it makes it so that as people spend just enough time to get "good" at governance, they are forced to leave. So there aren't great solutions here. I will suggest that your approach probably has similar types of unintended outcomes. There's always more money to be thrown around at people.

In general, I favor transparency as a mechanism to keep things running smoothly.

It's not that money should be ignored. Money is what gets things done. But there is a tipping point at which the money is large enough to dominate over all other aspects. There are all sorts of stories about the amount of time that representatives spend doing fundraising.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/pol...F9H/story.html

So I think there's reason to reevaluate things.

I think democracy works best when both (all) parties are strong enough to be willing to negotiate with each other to work towards shared solutions. And that hasn't been the case since probably the late 1980s.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericasw.../#157e5e784031

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...-chart/454023/

Is a credible threat of death considered force? How are you understanding "violence"?

For example, if a scenario ends with "You will die unless you do what I say," would you consider this akin to the gun to the head scenario? What about "You will suffer unless you do what I say"?

Congratulations and good luck! Make sure to wear clean underwear for the occasion!

Thank you Aaron. You made my night with that comment!!! Laughed my bleep off at myself for 10 minutes.

yes

Who would have thought it was so difficult to define these things :S

I would say, an action, with the intent to damage physically, cause pain, or cause death, would be violence.



If someone is threatening death, whether with a gun to the head, or other means, yes, I would count that as the credible threat of violence


I dont think inaction counts as force or violence, but I am sure you are going to try and show me that I am wrong.

By not giving someone water, there is a credible threat of death. Do you agree?

Ahhhh... we're starting to get to intention now. This is important. There's a difference between actions that intend to cause harm and actions not intending to cause harm. So intention is now a part of violence.

How do you feel about this in terms of violence?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZSoJDUD_bU

Also, would you consider holding tightly to a water bottle an action or an inaction?

It depends on how far back you're allowing the chain of causality to apply.

I think you would agree that the following scenario is coercive:

"I have trapped you in a room with another person. I want you to kill that person. If you don't, I'll shoot you in the head."

But what do you say of this scenario:

"I have trapped you in a room with another person. I want you to kill that person. But here's the thing. There's this other guy over here that wants to kill you. I can stop him from doing that, but only if you kill the other guy. If you don't, I'll just not stop him, and then whatever consequences follow are things you've really just brought on yourself."

Also, you haven't clarified at all why you're justified in taking aggressive actions to prevent me from taking the water bottle that's over there. Since it's not yours, I should be able to just go over there and do that.

That depends on your definition of threat. Again, I dont think inaction is force or violence. If you hold a gun to someones head, you are limiting their actions. You are literally dictating their action. If you refuse to give something in your possession to someone, you are not limiting or dictating their actions. They are free to pursue whatever they want to pursue.

I can see that this is going to go round and round, with you getting ever more lifeboaty. If someone was literally dying in front of you from dehydration, it would be a horrible dick move to not help them, sure.

Which is why I'm asking you the question.

Yes. You've stated that over and over again. And the way that you have been able to justify it is by making definitions that attempt in every way to buttress this statement by making definitions of words in such a way as to affirm what you want to conclude.

Am I? Are you quite certain of this? Don't they have the option to defy me anyway?

Unless they want to pursue the thing in your possession, in which case you invoke this magical concept called "property rights" that you don't believe exists but is sufficient for you to justify your ability to act aggressively towards others are prevent their free actions from happening.

That's still not the point. You're also still barely responding to any of the questions. They're designed to get you to confront the underlying difficulties of your position, but you're choosing to run from them. So be it.

I don't know why the formatting of the page is as weird as it is. Hopefully it gets fixed.

https://www.christiantoday.com/artic...bia/110376.htm

There is no definition of violence that I know of, that includes inaction or refusal to hand over a possession.

If you do include that, then any time you refuse to give me anything, you are being violent.

Here's the definition of violence you gave:

The intentional withholding of water from someone dying of thirst with the intent to let them die of dehydration is violence, according to your own definition. And yes, intentionally withholding something is an action (withholding = active refusal to give).

No. This is you just being silly with definitions. And this is why I pushed you really hard to present a definition. From the way you're making your argument, you're not going to win if I force you to stick with a specific concept. The ability for you to keep your beliefs together in tension is by constantly shifting around between lots of different ideas.

I can withhold something without the intention of them dying. are you setting up the scenario where they 100% die if I refuse to give them water?

Im sure I can come up with some equally ridiculous chain of events where me not giving person A an empty matchbox will result in the death of person Z.

Nope. What rule are you trying to establish here?


I kind of agree with this, in that there is a lot of pressure on my beliefs, and Im not going to "win".

You can, but that wasn't the question.

In this case, yes.

Sure. I actually asked you specifically about things like this when I talked about the chain of causality. You never responded. But in this example, I've reduced the chain to a one step process because it's irrelevant to the point to introduce the chain of causality.

Yup.

None. I'm just trying to work within the framework presented.

There are a couple ways to look at this:

1) Your overly reductionist point of view could be re-evaluated so that there's room for nuance. Your position throughout has been very hard-lined all-or-nothing in everything.

2) You have an internal contradiction (strong feelings about property rights but a philosophical perspective that prevents its existence) that can be resolved by altering your beliefs.

(These are the two things I'm pushing on.)

I'm sure there are other things you can do. I'd turn this around the way that many people talk about fundamental religious beliefs: You're doing a lot of mental gymnastics here to hold onto your beliefs. Isn't it easier to just adopt new beliefs?

A society where you are free to not give your neighbor dying of thirst water (assuming you have water to spare) is just a ****ty society. Not that there aren't faults with the alternatives, but I fail to see any moral high ground from defending such extreme versions of property rights.

I also fail to see any slippery slopes. Water, food and air are necessary to live for any human being. That's just biology, not philosophy or ethics.

If we have no obligations to those around us, the result is not going to be some voluntarist utopia. It would simply become a non-society, and likely a tribal one... a small scale version of country borders.

Although Franklin Graham was not specifically named in the following article, but it speaks to his response.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/eds...-for-evan.html

Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley - Nail Pon Cross
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=8lE-5g2B62E

Well, things have come so far as to invoke Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ry-falwell-jr/

America's response to American Christianity's response to Donald Trump:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed...823-story.html

From above link:

The paradox of tolerance is important in the discussion of what, if any, boundaries are to be set on freedom of speech. Popper asserted that to allow freedom of speech to those who would use it to eliminate the very principle upon which they rely is paradoxical. Rosenfeld states "it seems contradictory to extend freedom of speech to extremists who... if successful, ruthlessly suppress the speech of those with whom they disagree," and points out that the Western European Democracies and the United States have opposite approaches to the question of tolerance of hate speech.

Popper should have been strangled to death in his own crib. His crimes of deluding people simply multiply over time.

Also from above link:

Thomas Jefferson addressed the notion of a tolerant society in his first inaugural speech, concerning those who might destabilize the country and its unity, saying, "...let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

Jefferson is correct. Popper is a quisling philosopher.