heyrabbit

8/10 If I was a teen-aged girl, and I needed a date for the prom...

Original: Fearless - Matthew Good Band Rip-off: Apparitions - Matthew good band Original: Apparitions - Matthew good band Rip-off: Truffle Pigs - Matthew good Band ;)

Morality is universal. That doesn't mean that everyone understands it, it means that it applies to everyone. In the same way, the laws of physics are universal. That doesn't mean that you necessarily know that walking off a cliff is bad. It means that, if you do walk off a cliff - you will die. Drinking anti-freeze is bad, irrespective of what anyone thinks. Everyone in the world could agree that drinking anti-freeze is good, and that handing it out to children is ethical. That doesn't change the fact taht if you drink it - you will die. Is there a consistent ethic that says drinking anti-freeze is bad? Deciding that it's ethical doesn't make it ethical. What makes it bad That's why I ask you what's wrong with suicide. I could tell you what I think, but I first want to hear what you think. What's wrong with suicide? Humans are not within the realm of science? The physical sciences are specialized sciences. While biology can tell us what a man is, philosophy tells us what existence is in relation to man. It deals with ->metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics.<- Whether or not you realize it, society operates according to its underlying philosophy. You operate according to your own philosophy, according to your fundamental view of yourself in existence. Whether or not someone chooses their philosophy purposefully, and with good reasons, that is up to them. But everyone has a philosophy, even if they blindly adopt one, which is what happens most of the time. Indeed, most people claim to not have philosophy!@ (The prevailing philosophy says that there is no such thing as philosophy). Philosophy is the backbone of science. And if you wish to know why, ask yourself why the West was performing surgery 2000 years before the East. p.s. sorry about the late reply What is this "Objectivism" you speak of? No, I have never heard of this so called "Objectivism" ;)

that reminds me of me when I was little. I had two six shooters, with the belt and holsters, and the hat. 10

This is too cumbersome... Why are you contrasting moral law with laws of physics? The physical sciences are not the only sciences. Ethics is also a science, and that involves studying man-kind, society and so on. We create law, but we base it on something. One does not, and cannot, invent what ethics is based on. You decide to refrain from walking off a cliff, but that doesn't mean you've invented gravity. Indeed, you choose not to walk off a cliff because you observed gravity. But according to you, ethics isn't even a science. Why, then, would you complain if I invented a law that says I'm allowed to kill you? If the criteria for determining moral law is that it has to be invented, what problem do you have with my killing you? All of a sudden, the fact that I "invented" the law doesn't suffice as a justification for it. Why? blank-out You disagree with law when it doesn't correspond to reality, when the rights they are based on don't correspond to reality. There would definitely be something bad about murder. Why is murder bad? blank-out That's a circular argument. Who is going to sell me all the water on earth? For someone to sell me all the water on earth, there needs to be someone who owns it first. Who sold them the water? The answer is nobody. Okay, so this hypothetical super-dictator somehow takes control of the world's supply of water. I think we should worry about that guy first! If you shoot yourself in the head, you don't die because we've created created a morality that says it's wrong to do so. Why, then, is suicide bad? In countries where women are treated like dogs, that is alright because it is the morality of the land?

I was talking about cars. What distinction have I missed about the ownership of cars? What are these distinctions that I have failed to make? I have rights sometimes? In what instances do I lose my rights? As a matter of fact, philosophy is a science.

too blurry, but there appears to bea hot girl there. 6

The "free" in the free market means freedom from the government. If you think the market needs to be "kept in check", you're not only not in favor of a free market, you're describing precisely the antithesis of a free market. Warren Buffet gave 37+ BILLION to charity. What an asshole. Bill gates has given BILLIONS as well. What's immoral about Africans choosing to be dictators, choosing to war with each other, and choosing not to make use of their wealth of resources? There may be excuses for why Africa is in the state it's in, but lack of resources is not one of them. And the rest of the oil producing countries in the region, in africa and in the Middle East, are existing solely on the technology they expropriated from the West (Syria, Saudi Arabia). That's right. Ethics cannot be a science, because people have dilemmas. Similarly, biology isn't a science because scientists can't cure cancer. Since everyone knows everything, science exists for the very purpose of forgetting everything we already know. The only purpose for studying something is to not learn something. You're obviously not going to be interested in viewing ethics scientifically, considering your view that reality doesn't exist, that knowledge is acquired randomly by magically popping into your head. That makes it easy, eh? Simply wait for knowledge to pop into your head, and let me know when it does. Of course, that knowledge may not correspond with "my" reality, because reality is subjective. But let me know anyway, as you always do,by posting in here, despite the fact I may or may not receive your comments due to our difference of realities. Socrates' quote wasn't meant to be taken in the way you're portraying it. But if you ever see Confucius, do me a favor and ask him how he knows that he knows nothing. You know, I encountered this type of coercion earlier in the week when I went to buy a car. I'd decided that I wanted to pay two dollars for it but, Toyota wouldn't let me buy it for that amount, despite the fact that I really wanted it!. Those evil, coercive bastards! Where the hell do they get off? Unlike employment, the marketplace has nothing to do with an exchange of value. I have the right to trade with anyone, regardless of whether or not the other person consents, and I have the right to choose how much they are to trade me. This doesn't constitute theft, as theft is only something done by those wearing ski masks while brandishing guns. One apple for one orange? Oh, hell no, I want 10 of your oranges, you immoral bastard! To be hones,t I'm not sure what the question was. maybe you're dependent, but speak for yourself.

he was a hippy, a drug addict and a moral degenerate. let's all worship him

*COUGH* government interference in the economy. My dad spends thousands at an Indian reserve, buying tax free cigarettes. The government is being silly now, charging, what, like 80 bucks for a carton, or whatever it is ? This is one of my pet peeves. I actually order people out of the bus shelter if they are smoking, or tell them to smoke elsewhere if they are on a platform. And they respond with, "WHat?! what do you mean?" On the topic of guns, I think only criminals and police have the right to protect themselves. I blame guns for violence, in the same way that I blame food for fat people. Come to think of it, we should regulate cheese-burger consumption and raise the cost to $20 a burger. And we can use the money to help fight heart disease. Wouldn't that be a noble caues?

Sorry about the late reply. I replied once and deleted it by accident. There is no absolute ethic? What about the ethic of not killing someone without reason or provocation? Ethics is a normative science. Like any other science, there is a mode and method for determining truths. Ethics should not be - and cannot be -determined by what you want or feel. Everyone has their own set of ethics, but that doesn't mean they are the best possible set of ethics. Some people have no qualms with stealing your car, and so who are you to know that it is unethical? How do you "know" anything in science? You need to make a clear distinction between ethics and morality. Ethics are derived from morality. Proper ethics are derived from the proper morality. Ethics is not an necessarily absolute in the same way that scientific knowledge absolute, unless you subscribe to the 10 commandments. One can't claim that they know everything because how would you know you don't know something without knowing it? You can't know something you don't know for the same reasons you can't not know something you know. (I apologize). You only know what you know! i.e. Knowledge is finite. For this very reason, when someone claims to know one tidbit of information, they can't claim to know everything. That,however, doesn't mean that they can't claim to know anything at all. If you study physics, you know that gravity is universal. Nobody can escape gravity. Does that mean you're taking a "hard-lined" approach? If so - that is how it should be. . There are also universal ethics in the field of ethics. I do not think that a mixed economy or dictatorship(!), in the guise of a free-market, constitutes a free-market. I don't know anything about the overthrowing of Allende in Chile, so I can't say much. I'm suspicious of a country that "institutes" a free-market.That's suspicious wording. I'm almost positive that if if I read into it, it would turn out not to be free at all. But I simply don't know neough about it. Now, even though I don't approve of the government meddling in the economy, that doesn't mean there should be no government whatsoever. Economics is simply a matter of money. A free-market is only an economic system. It does not mean one is free to kill someone else. Law still exists, and that is why government needs to exist. This is precisely the purpose of the government - to subordinate man to moral law. All men are rational to some degree or another.That doesn't mean all men are completely rational all the time. But anyone who has no rationality is literally brain dead. We are a thinking species. That is what differentiates us from every other animal. Think of what the word "rational" means. It is ratios, math, mathematical equations. That is how our minds function. When you are thinking, you are performing math unconsciously, through measurement omittance of your perception of reality, with facts of reality substituting for numbers. When someone "knows" something, it is literally because they've solved an algebraic equation. The statement "Dogs can run" is a true statement. "Birds can swim" would be a false statement. When you are arguing something, you are attempting to solve an equation. Whether or not you arrive at the correct answer depends on how well your concepts correspond to reality. Thus every statement is hypothetically true or false. Every human being knows this unconsciously, which is why even the dumbest people cling to a rational argument whenever they stumble upon one. Like any mathematical equation, if you're answer is false, you need to work backwards and check your premises. This is getting into the epistemology. It is important to understand how we acquire knowledge, but I don't want to get into that too much right not because it will take a long time to explain. Just to summarize, we are not only all rational, but we live or die to the extent of our rationality. Parenting has nothing to do with the economy. You said it yourself - that value is not monetary. Money is a tool for exchanging value long range. It has nothing to do with the market, unless you plan on trading your children. because you are not trading anything, the value is an end in itself, as you also said. Parenting still produces value, and that value is your children. It is a job one pays themselves to do, if you like, and it can be a full time job, as may parents would adamantly attest. That's right. Humans can be irrational but they can also be extremely rational. We are not infallible, but we are still amazingly efficient and achieving. There's a disdainful attitude towards humanity present in just about every religion. When we fail it it because humanity is weak(by default, everything created by man is liable to be erroneous, or whatever you said) but when we achieve it is by accident or because of God. Human survival definitely requires freedom. Freedom,by definition, is freedom from coercion. There is no other freedom. And I don't think that we shouldn't strive for freedom because we cna't be completely free all the time. That's a defeatist position. It's like saying that there's no point in making murder illegal because somebody will always murder. Also, a boss setting the conditions of employment does not constitute coercion. People have brought htis up before. e.g. "My boss won't let me earn the amount I want to earn, he's being COERCIVE". No ownership is free from interference. If we lived in the neolithic era, I could break into your house and steal your grain. We didn't become civilized until we recognized that that action is immoral. And property rights aren't there for simplicity sake, it is the entire application of individual rights! If you have no right to property, you have no rights at all. The government can interfere and subsequently interfere to try to fix the problem they initially created, but none of that really helps anyone. Capitalism doesn't pit one person against the other (make us individuals fighting for survival). That happened already. We were individuals before anyone coined the word freedom. Capitalism, unlike every other system, recognizes this fact. Surviving can be difficult, but I don't think the answer is to pretend that we aren't men, that we're just material belonging to the rest of humanity. We're no longer altruist barbarians, existing to unconsciously further our species, like ants. I think we should create our own purpose. Again, Morality is not subjective. You're taking the position of an ethical hedonist. Morality, to you, is defined by your feelings, not an objective observation of reality. Since your only means of knowing anything is by observing reality, I question any subjective morality. I highly doubt you magically acquired a set of ethics by feeling pleasure. No, you acquire ethics by thinking. Thinking requires sense perception. Existence exists. Moonlight: I'll respond next time round.

It would be interesting to see a word count. I'd bet that some people have 3 or 4X my posts, but with 3 or 4 X less words posted

You're not making any distinction between moral right and legal right. A right doesn't cease to exist if someone chooses not to misbehave. The very act of misbehaving implies that a right has been violated. Rights exist whether or not anyone recognizes them. Depending on the country you live in, you may or may not have the legal right not to be raped, beaten and tortured. Irrespective of whoever recognizes your right not to be beaten, that doesn't change the fact that if you are beaten severely, you may die. Your brain is your means of survival. I never said humans don't or shouldn't live in collectives. But that the loose aggregation "collective" doesn't subsume anything about economics. Studying human nature doesn't consist of simply counting humans, and humanity is certainly not reducible only to numbers. No offence, but I responded to your whole work spiel in other threads. Natural selection occurs too slowly to have any sort of relevance in politics, and I certainly never said anything about survival of the fittest. It's true, of course, that the fittest will survive, but evolution is completely amoral. My position is not that the fit take precedence over the unfit, because I have made no such distinction between fit and unfit in the context of evolutionary time. How am I supposed to know what is "fit" in the context of evolution. Economic success in 2007 is not any indication of what will happen during millenniums of evolutionary change. The fittest will survive. That doesn't mean all "fit" people will survive, or that smart people should survive, or whatever you thought I meant. I think we should worry about our lives first before being concerned with altering the course of evolution! You seem to be concerned with the rights of those born in less favorable circumstances. Rights is a matter of morality. Define your code of morality. From what you said I gathered that you think I don't think the homeless work hard enough, for example, and that that's why they don't succeed. But before one can "work harder", they first have to work. Work is the production of value required to sustain life. To work is literally to live. Doing a job is not necessarily work, not if one doesn't produce value, not if you're talking about how work pertains to human survival. Trying to produce does not guarantee that you will produce. And trying harder will not work for everyone - you are right. And so I do completely agree that all men have the capacity to sustain their own lives,to live, given the right circumstances. We're all basically the same in that sense, you are right, because the difference between the smartest man in the world and dumbest is trivial when compared to the difference between the human mind and the brains of any other species. But human survival requires freedom from coercion in order to survive. The only application of freedom in an economic system is a free market. The free market, by definition, is an economic system of private ownership free from government interference. Since taxation is the most obvious and probably the best example of government interference in the economy, because taxation is literally government interference in and of itself, consider what you just told me. To paraphrase: "A free market has to not be a free market in order to be a free market." (?!) A is non A. So long as taxes exist, there is no true free market. The idea of an economy complete separated from the state is the very definition of Laissez-faire Capitalism. I've been very clear that I do not approve of government interference in the economy, in any way shape or form, to any degree, no matter how minor. Bingo. You are entirely correct in your estimation of how my logic applies to the free market, despite trying to get me to admit it, because you think it's absurd. I admit it. Coercive monopolies are created by government funded subsidies, by laws both restricting and increasing the freedoms of certain corporations. Those monopolies would not exist otherwise. Subsidization is an act of socialism. It is entirely against every capitalism stands for. Notice the consequence of subsidization - the corporatoins you love to despise. Despite the fact that subsidization is an act of pure, unfettered socialism, in its rawest form, everyone blames "Capitalism" for the problems of the country, proclaiming that men were "too greedy", that they "wanted too much money". This is why Capitalism is repeatedly and erroneously blamed for the injustices sanctioned by the manifestion of their ideal - socialism. To make matters worse, they immediately offer socialism as a solution to the problem,unaware that it caused it in the first place, declaring that mankind should be more "fair", without offering a definition of morality, a criterion by which to determine what is "fair", which results in more socialism and more problems. The common misconceptions people have about Capitalism stems from ignorance of the word, from the assumption that capitalism equates to nothing more than reverence for the rich and disdain for the poor. Capitalism is not synonymous "pro-corporation". When someone is a capitalist, it doesn't automatically mean they love all fortune 500 companies. I don't have admiration for people who make lots of money. I have admiration for those who earn money, whether they're billionaires or whether they earn a single dollar. I also don't hate large corporations for no other reason than they are large, unlike many of Capitalism's retractors. Most people's definition of capitalism seems to be something like this: "Men who love money and are greedy and like big corporations and like screwing the "little" man and all they care about is money. There's more to life than money" If that is anyone's definition of capitalism, I am not a Capitalist! Nobody owns ideas, and I never claimed that anyone does. The right to property is the right to action, not the right to an object. What men own is their means and consequences of producing the object. That's not a guarantee that I will produce any objects, but that the right to property grants me the legal right to own the object provided I earn it. Do you see? Since we live in physical reality, all value has to be exchanged in terms of physical objects. If I write a book that doesn't mean I have the right to think about my book, it means I have a right to its value. This is exactly why property rights are the only implementation of rights whatsoever. That doesn't mean that property rights should be ignored, just because it's hard. That's the whole purpose for having legal system. Not everyone will always receive what they earn, but what is the alternative? Should should we deny everyone's right to their property because we can't be bothered to have a legal system, or should we strive to improve the system as much as possible? It's the job of the law philosophers to work it out. We already have a fairly advanced system. Musicians often receive at least some value. Many authors make great money. Capitalism is an economic model based on the proper morality, the manifestation of morality, it is not morality itself. Define morality. Define your code of ethics. "what if my morality is not based in a capitalist ideology?" You have it backwards. Reality is not based on Capitalism. Capitalism is based on reality, because reality exists FIRST. A is A. And there is no such thing as "your" morality. You exist in the same reality as me. You are the same kind of animal as me. What is fundamentally good for you is fundamentally good for me. It would be immoral to give to the bum regardless of how he chose to make use of the money. You'd be training him to be morally lazy, giving him no incentive to get off the street. If that man chooses to die, you are not responsible because you cannot be responsible for every human being on earth. You cannot live for every human being. You cannot live for ONE human being, let alone billions. The best way to help the bum is to live your own life, and that includes respecting your rights as well as his, which includes not sacrificing your values to him. And you certainly should not "help" him by helping him hit rock bottom. That is no sort of justification. You cannot be - and I cannot be - an indentured servant to 6 billion people. You cannot be expected to continuously buy your life by living the lives of others. It's not only immoral to try to do so, it is impossible! If you want to help him, enforce moral law, in the same way that parents enforce moral law upon their children. I have a profound admiration for man, and if a homeless man makes something of his life, that is great. I do view man that way. But if I am going to treat every bum as a capitalist waiting to be born, I have to to just that; I have to trade with him in the only way that makes sense - value for value. It really is this simple: Immorality exists only insofar as people sanction it.

To debate about politics, you don't need to memorize a list of names and events, you simply need to understand concepts. It is simply a matter of understanding a vocabulary list that is necessarily related to politics. What is a system ofgovernment? It's a matter of rights. What is a right? etc. Understand what a right is and you already know more than the majority of politicians, past and present. you'll be equipped to debate with the most educated politicians. Ask Stephen Harper what a right is, and watch him stumble, mumble, teeter totter and evade the question. Politicians are not philosophers, despite the fact that politics is a matter of philosophy. To relate it to something, it would be similar if our scientific community consisted only of Creationists! I think it's good to understand how the mind works. It's the most important thing in your life, and if you understand it, you can improve it. I'm interested in lots of things, but I only have time for so much. Physics is one thing I've never gotten around to reading about.

That is very true. Thanks for the reassurance, because I sometimes have doubts. I like to study psychology and philosophy, too

Thanks. I'm going to be a paramedic. I don't think I could handle politics, because I know exactly why everyone is wrong. If I had the chance to start over, I'd want to be a lawyer.

How about we increase GST by 200%? What is the justification for that proposition As for Bernardo, he abrogated his own rights by committing heinous crimes. He had the right not to be imprisoned before breaking the law, but he negated those rights. That's what it means to be imprisoned - your legal rights are revoked. Your freedom is taken away from you. There is a standard. That's why I ask you to find your standard of morality. Obviously you agree that Bernardo should not be "helped" as much as other citizens (he should not be supported financially, which is your definition of help), aside from the cost of his stay in prison. Why? Blank-out Also, Moonlight Graham, you know what I think about anarchism. I'm a laissez-faire Capitalist. Christing, I'm a petty clerk, and in school.

I dunno Dr.Riviera. Please don't enter the medical profession.

I never said that you should not help people. The important thing to understand is that you cannot value another person's life over your own. You cannot trade a value for a non-value or a lesser value. For instance, if your brother was dying on the street, and you had only one drink of water left, and you give it to the other dying man lying on the street - THAT is sacrifice. There can be no higher value than your own life, because without it, you are unable to value anything else. There is no such thing as value to a dead man. If that man, the man dying on the street, were to do absolutely nothing, he would eventually die. Death is the default. Life has to be achieved, and nobody else can achieve life for you. Notice that you require thought in order to live. If you want shelter, you have to use your mind to build it. If you want food, you have to use your mind to catch it. You may or may not stumble upon a cave randomly, but if you evade thought, eventually you will die. Humans are rational animals. We are not a fast animal. We don't have poison, we can't emit repugnant fumes, we don't a way to make food out of pollen. Our darwininan survival tool is your MINDS. Thus your basic moral choice is to think or not to think, to choose to live or to choose to die. If you choose to live life for another man, you are not only killing yourself, you are killing that man! You are sanctioning immorality. Some people require help, yes, but you cannot give more help than is required, and you cannot give help for bad reasons. Think of every bum on the street. Some of them may need help, but every time you give change to a man who is too lazy to acquire work, you are sanctioning his immorality, you are making him morally lazy, and you are not helping yourself or the bum. So long as suckers give him money, he has no need to improve his life because YOU are living life for him, by giving wealth that you produced with your mind. You are sanctioning his immorality and you are killing him. He needs to produce with his own mind. Giving him money whenever he desires, whenever he extends his hands, is not helping him, and it gives him no incentive to stop being a bum. I've been very clear that altruism is immoral! As I explained above, valuing another life over your own is to go against your nature as a human being. Selfishness does not constitute greed and meanness. Rationality is *included* in the (proper) definition of selfishness. Being mean to people is not selfish! Mean is training a dog to be fed for free, then kicking it out on the street without the skills necessary to survive. Your analogy doesn't make any sense, which doesn't surprise me because you only made it for the sake of throwing my own analogy back in my face. Despite proclaiming as much on a previous post, you are also not an advocate of the free-market,nor do you understand what it means. Your analogy reflects this. Capitalism is about the freedom to trade. In order to trade, you require something of value, and that requires that something be produced. Obviously if apes are running around fighting, there are no rights, no laws, and no Capitalism. What would it mean if every person who wants to be civilized is forced to leave civilizatoin?! The point is that they can't! The only alternative is to live in another country, where there is more of the same. Given a choice of two evils, we are forced to choose the lesser evil, just as Blacks chose to obey their Masters instead of being whipped or hanged. Rights cannot be re-designed; they can only be discovered. LAW can be re-designd. Legal rights are only moral insofar as they agree with rights. Rights exist whether you are alive or dead. If there were only two people left on the planet, they would still have rights. To give you an example, Let's suppose I lived in another country and we "re-designed" a law that gives me the right to kill you. That doesn't mean I have the right to kill you. Indeed, if I did kill you, your family would be morally indignant -- by what right?. "He had no right to kill my son" she would say. But since its in the law, she would have no problem with it, right? It is right and proper for a society to decide ownership laws, you are right. Although what is right and proper about society deciding that 50% of your income goes to ME? You wouldn't think that is right and proper. So you see that rights are not man made. No matter which laws are created by men, you only approve of some of them, depending on your view of morality. That's why I continue to ask you to define your view of morality, your code of ethics. To admit that you don't have one is to admit that you have absolutely no idea why your opinion is what it is - you just have an opinion. Capitalism has never forced "self-reliance" on anybody. In a Capitalist society, you have every right to go sit in a corner and refuse to eat or drink until you die. Capitalism does does not force people to be self-reliant(living), it prevents people from leeching off of the intellect and effort of others. If you choose to live, that is your choice. Yes, it would "force" you to live your own life, instead of living the lives of others. It would forcibly prevent you from acquiring the product of someone else's effort, whenever you produce "collectively"(with and around other individuals), which is your fancy way of saying that the wealth produced by some men should be distributed equally to a group of men. It is like the kid in high-school who wanted to work as a "team", while you did 90% of the work and he got 50% of the grade. Note what would happen if you protested that you are being "forced" to write your own examination in school, despite the fact that you are perfectly capable of writing it as a "team". If you don't understand the injustice in that, I don't know what else I can say to you.

Cool! What type of business?

Socialism's morality is altruism. It is a system which admonishes men to sacrifice themselves for other men. That is the very definition of altruism. Now, since there is absolutely no such thing as a "collective brain", or a "social brain", whose brain creates wealth? The answer is, simply: the mind's of men. Wealth is brought about by effort which is guided by the human mind. Not only is all wealth created by someone, but all wealth belongs to someone. Knowledge can be passed on from generation to generation, or from person to person, but no man can force another person to think. That requires an effort by each individual. Anyone who is unable or unwilling to think can only survive by looting the wealth of others, or by copying and imitating the work of others. A person can be trained to pull a lever, but if not for the ingenuity of the person who created that machine, no wealth would have been available to anyone. Your argument is disproved every time a single man makes a single act of volition and creates something of value. This post is mine. I created it. It's the product of MY effort. If somebody finds value in what I'm writing, it's not because it was produced "socially". There was no straw man. If you think it's bad, then define why it's bad. Why is it bad? Define your morality. I've been waiting months for you too define your morality, and yet you refuse. I have an obligation to whom? Do I have an obligation to help Paul Bernardo? Why? If you are asked to help everyone, you are asked to help nobody. What is the standard? What is the criterion by which you select who you're going to help? If there is no criterion, you are sacrificing your life indiscriminately to everyone else. Altruism is trading a value for a non-value or a lesser value. You cannot sacrifice something that has no value. It is precisely because it has value that makes it a sacrifice. Nobody ever sacrificed rocks; They sacrificed animals to the gods, people, food, anything valuable. The predominant systems of social organization throughout human history were formed with altruist-collectivist ethics(Socialism). Our road to civilation was marked by the fact that we freed ourselves from that system and implemented rights through law. And that's what you want us to return to, to the pre-historic jungle when man lived in tribes. It is a tribal view of man. Altruism has its roots in our Darwinian past when we were a new species, but it extends far beyond that to when we were apes. Much like baboons, we lived in small roving bands of hunter-gatherers. In that time period it was normal to help any human without discrimination, because the probability of you meeting someone who'd reciprocate the action was very high.Why? Because most of the humans around you were close kin. Nowadays, probability indicates that most people you'll come in contact with will be strangers. We are still programmed to live in small bands in the Sahara desert, and yet we're now living in cities with thousands and millions of people. Evolution hasn't taken place fast enough for us to adapt to our changing atmosphere. We still have the intrinsic and primitive urge to help our fellow man. Those of us who're civilized have realized that it's not in our best interest to sacrifice ourselves for any random stranger. It is the very act of freeing men from men which lead to civilization. You want us to return to the jungle. Property rights are definitely not natural, because uncivilized countries do not have them. And the reason why is precisely because there are no rights. What is natural is man's need for them. Rights are not open to "redesign" in its basic form. Property rights is the only implementation of any rights at all. Without property rights, you have no rights! Since man needs to put forth effort in order to sustain his life, he needs to own the consequences of that effort. That is property rights. It doesn't mean you have right to an object, but that you have the right to an object if and when you produce or earn it. "The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave" That is the system you propose, a system of slavery. Also, your rights are permanent. If you go on a killing spree, obviously you have negated your rights.

So reality is one thing for you and another thing for me? How about your dog. Does he have his own reality too? Humans all have their own realities, but every other animal perceives the same existence? No matter how much you may deny it, existence still exists. I'll respond to your other posts later

Politics is a BRANCH of philosophy. So what's wrong with admitting that you renounce philosophy in the field of politics? It literally means that you don't know what you're doing or why you're doing it! So not only is mostly everyone wrong, but they don't even know the philosophy from which they derive all their wrong and bad ideas. If you refuse to declare the premise of your ideas, your intentions are unknown. Incidentally, that makes it easier for anyone to say whatever the hell they want, without identifying the source of their ideas, because one cannot contradict a philosophy one refuses to identify and subscribe to. This is the state of politics today. The result is a bunch of people saying random, unintelligible things, because they can because nobody appreciates philosophy. "This is MY opinion." " Oh yeah this is MY opinion." Who knows whose opinion is correct because "THERE IS NO WAY TO KNOW WHOSE OPINION IS CORRECT." Reality does not exist! And yet your only means of arguing is by applying applying reason to observations of reality. So why bother arguing? You are correct, Lauren. I don't care if you don't want to debate, but why would you announce it to me? Also, I don't know what a non-abstract ideology is. I defend certain ideologies because I think they are right. Forgive my being stubborn enough to keep conviction in my ideas. Perhaps I should be open-minded enough to accept any and all ideologies.

The trouble with "helping the nation as a whole" is that there is no such thing as "whole people". There are only individuals. So which individuals are to be helped? If you are asked to help everyone equally,without standard, you are asked to help nobody! What it means is that every single person, regardless of ANYTHING, has the right to someone else's wealth. What's wrong with that?!. Also, what constitutes "help"? How do you reach the conclusion that 6% GST is good, but 5% is bad? Based on what? What is the philosophical justification for that? Socialism is a grossly incorrect, immoral system. It's philosophical premise is altruism. So what's wrong with killing yourself?! That is literally what it means to be an altruist and a socialist. Tell me why would you not want to live in Cuba or China? The words "Communism" and "Socialism" are often interchangeable. Communism is just the manifestation of socialism. It is the implementation of socialism by a totalitarian state. Communism implies totalitarian leadership, socialism does not. Socialism is simply the collective ownership of the means of prodution. So if people only forgot about themselves, and tried to benefit others, the world would be a better place? That is the present code of morality! So why are you complaining about it? The government has control of the economy. It collects wealth for hte purpose of redistributing it. That is nothing other than socialism. If it's not socialism, how did they get a hold of our money? No. I don't think that anyone has the right to emergency service, and I don't like paying for it. Nobody has the right to stolen health care, or stolen fire service, etc. I don't approve of paying for the emergency care of every asshole who gets shot because he's a drug dealer, and he's the victim of a drug hit. I don't approve of paying for a doctor's time because someone went to the emergency room with a cold. I don't approve of paying for fire service for someone who burned their house out of pure negligence. No. The problem is precisely the fact that they are in control of your money. Stealing someone's money is literally to steal a person's life. You cannot own the product of someone's life, because they require it to live Watch this: