Trans-Fascism

[pvn]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Telling yourself this may make you feel better but it doesn't change the facts; your default stance is still "regulate until proven otherwise".

[/ QUOTE ] You know best, dear. What was that about erecting straw men and then fighting them? Or the one about misrepresentation of the other party's position? Obviously the commentary was based on inside experience.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's based on the observation of your writings.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
It is extremely impractical to either negotiate everything in person or never agree to anything otherwise.

[/ QUOTE ]That still does not give anyone else the right to negotiate on someone else's behalf without explicit consent. People are perfectly capable of entering into such collective bargaining on a voluntary basis.

[/ QUOTE ] So without explicit consent and authorisation, no agreement between two or more persons whatsoever in a society, right? Right. Instead of a totally paralysing impracticality, we are to have a mildly paralysing impracticality!

[/ QUOTE ]

Such a requirement does, admittedly, paralyze certain types of actions. Namely, the actions you seek to perform without other people's consent. That's pretty much the general idea. I mean, if your actions are so wonderful, you should have little trouble getting consent.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Whether the process is direct democracy or representative democracy or one single guy making arbitrary decisions based on his own personal preferences makes no difference at all to me. The only thing that concerns me is who is bound by those decisions - did they voluntarily agree to such a decision making process or not?

[/ QUOTE ]In societies comprised by more than mere thousands of people, i.e. every modern society, various assumptions must take effect lest we start from zero every time two or more interact in any way.

[/ QUOTE ]

All you have to do is get explict consent, then you don't have to start from zero every time.

[ QUOTE ]
One such assumption, for instance, is that those who belong to said society are bound by rules that have been there before they joined and, implicitly, before they gave their consent for them.

[/ QUOTE ]

OK, that's fine. The problem is that you're including people in a "society" without their consent. Form your little club, draw up your rules, regulations and by-laws, and let the members follow those rules. Enjoy.

[ QUOTE ]
And if they wanna change (some of) them, including the way such rules are changed, as such, they have to work to get their way.

[/ QUOTE ]

Hey, you can have whatever rules for changing rules you want. I dispute none of this. All I dispute is your membership drive technique.

I started a britney spears fanclub. One of the rules is that everyone must pay $100 to the supreme briney spears fanclub leader (me) every month. I signed you up (because it's too laborious and taxing for me to actually mail you a membership form and wait for you to fill it out). So, where's your check? BTW, the penalty for non-payment is one week of hard labor scrubbing Rosie's toilet. If you don't like this, the procedure for challenging the rule is to fly to the moon, bring back three rocks, then juggle them for four days straight. Then we (the council of britney spears fanclub poobahs) will entertain your rulechange request.

[ QUOTE ]
If they are ACers and succeed, bingo.

[/ QUOTE ]

Might makes right!

[ QUOTE ]
If they don't, it's the ol' choice between (a) abide and keep agitating, or (b) leave it. Don't take it the wrong way; it's the sensible thing.

[/ QUOTE ]

Love it or leave it! Nothing personal, btw!

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Not every substance on earth is supposed to be treated the same way.

[/ QUOTE ] I agree with that. I treat the football I own quite differently than the crystal wine glasses I own. But I didn't need an overlord to give me guidelines on how to handle them and violently enforce them.

[/ QUOTE ]Some of our fellow citizens, on account of their knowledge have been elected to act as experts (or appointed by elected representatives who have been mandated to appoint such folks). Some times, the opinion of such experts carries more than advisory weight. On account of the nature of the issue being examined, we have given them enforcement powers, e.g. to ban substance XYZ from drinking water because it is seriously harmful for health.

[/ QUOTE ]

Right. "We" can prevent you from toking a little doobie, or watching a dirty movie, or reading a dangerous book, or eating a twinkie because we're smarter than you.

[ QUOTE ]
You might argue that you have not consented to such an authority been given to those people; or you might argue that the fact itself that these people are working for the government makes them tyrannical by definition. Nonetheless, such a process is aside from all else practical, in ways your Little Chemist testing the drinking water every time he drinks from the tap, or your Restaurant Taster trying out his chances in the totally unregulated restaurant possibly serving tasty but poisonous food, just cannot be.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's practical... for you.

Yes, if we don't have centralized, coercively funded monopoly testers, we will have none at all.

I don't know how to make a pencil, and even if I did, I would find it extremely impractical to make one every time I want to write a letter. Therefore, using your reasoning, pencil production should be monopolized by the state and everyone should be compelled to fund it. Because, obviously, the only other way to get them is to make them yourself.

[ QUOTE ]
Try running a poll among posters here on 2+2 : How many people would rather have your kind of "anarchy" in, say, restaurant food, instead of the (flawed, bureaucratic, slow) alternative of government regulatory authorities? Who'll be offering relatively better assurance to those eating out on the town, your free-for-all-and-let-the-consumer-beware system, or the current flawed but strict system?

[/ QUOTE ]

Good question. Who could possibly do all that?







[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Wow. The alternative to majority decision imposed upon everyone is unanimous agreement or no decision at all. Right. I painted my house blue, and my neighbour painted his white. The decision of what colour each house should be painted was not the result of a majority rules process; neither was it unanimous.

[/ QUOTE ] Don't get carried away. Government is not supposed to regulate or fix everything.

[/ QUOTE ]

Right. Just the things you want it to fix!

[ QUOTE ]
I'm arguing for a minimum of responsibility that elected representatives, if not for anything else, for practical reasons, must be assigned with. Such as police work, specification enforcement, etc.

[/ QUOTE ]

Sure. You can *contain* it! That was the reason behind every other failure, those bozos didn't contain the bureaucracy. But now, you've broken the code, and with this new super-genius idea that nobody has ever thought of before, we have the roadmap to utopia!

[ QUOTE ]
Come to think of it, sometimes a bunch of people choose to have their neighbourhood/town/city organized around a grand plan -- so they have zoning regulations (e.g. you cannot open a McDonalds in some spots; you cannot have buildings higher than X storeys; etc). Among such regulations, sometimes are colours of houses, or the design of the houses themselves. In Britain, this is quite common.

[/ QUOTE ]

The status quo is evidence that the status quo is justified. There are regulations in some places that some books are forbidden. It's quite common in some locations!

[ QUOTE ]
Take your tent elsewhere if your don't like it in our part of the world, they'll tell you.

[/ QUOTE ]

Where does "their" part end? Can I pull this "if you don't like the rules, you can move" bit with my neighbor? I told him he's not allowed to listen to frank sinatra in our part of the world!

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Consumption of transfats is bad in restaurants, but not bad if you get it at the grocery and bring it home?

[/ QUOTE ] Try to figure it out. It's not that hard.

[/ QUOTE ]

As you've probably guessed, I are pretty dum. You'll have to explain it to me.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Beyond a certain level of lethal attributes, the "baseball" seller is guilty of facilitating crime, that's right.

[/ QUOTE ] Wow. I wonder if my sporting goods store knows of the huge liability they're facing. Perhaps some psychological background exams should be ordered for anyone wishing to buy a bat.

[/ QUOTE ] Do comedy as much as you want, but you keep missing the point. Check out the brackets again. Read back what I wrote. Beyond a certain level of lethal attributes, we are not talking about common things anymore, but about weapons, at least. When that something is a weapon, we write "baseball" when in reality it might be anything from a pistol to a suicide bomber's belt.

[/ QUOTE ]

How do you objectively determine this "certain level"?

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Let's allow, just for this discussion, that there is a case where you have a product that can only be used for criminal purposes, AND that trade in such product should be prohibited, legitimately.

Now, how do you get from that to transfat bans?

Hint: it's not a matter of degree!

[/ QUOTE ] Oh but is it! That's the whole point. (You spent three entire paragraphs in your post mocking my use of "it depends" - and I am not responding to that. Suffice to say that you still don't get what "it depends" truly means!)

[/ QUOTE ]

Transfat is not something that can ONLY be used for criminal purposes. Unless you circularly define its use as a criminal purpose. So where's the matter of degree here?

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
You should be free to make red lights a sign to accelerate at the intersection, and green lights a sign to stop.

[/ QUOTE ] How many times have you used this straw man? Please, start a separate thread on it, I'm more than happy to talk about this one at length.

[/ QUOTE ] Sure you are. But no need to go at it at length. I say, AC breaks down at the merest of close examinations. (Sklansky very casually devastated some choice tenet of it, only too recently.) You say, nah, bollocks, AC rules. So why don't you give us the cliff notes (no need for "at length" or "separate threads") about traffic lights?

Right, I forgot -- in order for it work we must have all roads privatised.

[/ QUOTE ]

Are you trying to say that non-privitized roads with free-for-all rules decided by each individual wouldn't work?

If so, then, duh. Yes, I would agree with that. OH NOES the house of cards comes tumbling down!