Doug and Chris

[nelison]

*calls the bookie*

[Venom]

The right to raise your child hardly exists solely due to government, nor does government exist because I have the right to raise my child. It is entirely feasible that a person could raise their child without the government intervening, and it's entirely feasible that a government could exist without telling people how to raise their children.

Try again.

You missed my point entirely. I was comparing the need to raise our children the way we see fit to the need for government. We need to be able to control our children and steer them in the right direction, just like we need government to keep us in line. Without either there would be chaos. People need laws as a deterrent to murder, theft, rape, etc. I want to hear Doug's argument that there wouldn't be chaos.

[Corey]

And the most right wing person we had was Corey who is completely reasonable 97% of the time.

I've all but given up on Partisanship. I still can't stand the left and I'm getting sick of the right. The whole "They are LIARS", "No THEY are!" crap is making me sick. "They are NAZIS", "They are COMMIES".... enough is enough. I'm going to go play video games or something.

[doug]

Ok, i'm going to continue but i want to make a few things clear: this is political theory. That's what i know. I can't argue about biology or chemistry or physics because frankly, it's been a long time since i've studied them and i've never much cared for them. therefore, i may not be able to respond to all of your arguments, Narbus.

Ok, let's move away from Halbrooks. Now we're debating what he actually meant in the article, and since he's not a posting member of clumsymonkey.net, he can't speak for himself. My intrepration of his article was that he was arguing that human beings have rights because we are concious, and therefore we may choose our own goals. That is what i believe. I believe his argument, and mine, has very little to do with whether or not human beings can override all of their body's impulses.

You say the rational human mind cannot overpower the impulse of the body. I disagree. Going back to Herbert, you can subject yourself to pain, which goes against instinct, if your rational mind insists. The brain controls the body - that i do remember from biology.

In your child-pricking-finger example, the child has the ability to leave his finger on the needle. That's all that Halbrooks is saying. He's not saying a human being always will intentionally harm himself, but only that he can.

But the main thesis of Halbrook's article is not that human beings have the ability to completely ignore their body's impulses/nerves. His thesis is that man is rational, man is concious, and therefore man must act rather then simply move.

Narbus, before we go any further, i need to say that i do not believe that animals are capable of reason. If you think they are, i will need proof that animals can act rationally. Even if this can be proven, while it raises some ethical questions about my diet and our use of the world, it does not disprove Halbrooks' (and my own) assertion that man is rational.

As for the child-rearing. First of all, i was a perfectly normal child living in a normal neighborhood. Nobody i knew while growing up ever put his hand on the hot stove on purpose. Neither has any small child i know now. You have to give kids more credit. Humans are suprisingly good at self-preservation.

Secondly, if your child is living in your home, you have the right to set rules about what sort of conduct you will allow somebody who lives in your home to indulge in. These rules may involve things like being respectful of the rights of others (so he can't punch a kid in the face). If your child wishes to disobey your rules, he may, but not while he lives in your house.

As a parent, your role is to offer advice and guidance. It's not to rule with an iron fist. You're suppose to be your childs friend and councilor - don't act like his governor.

Venom. First of all, this is political theory 101. The argument "it wouldn't work" doesn't hold water. it would work.

and speaking of working, who says demockracy is working? Taxes keep going up. We keep going to war. New and pointless laws are invented every day. Gay's cant get married. We still have poor people even with the welfare state. We have inefficient government services, we have police brutality, we have protest groups and political correctness.

You say laws deter murder? How? murders still happen every day at an alarmingly high rate in the USA. Rapes do too. Theft? Yes, we have theft in canada and the USA. Etc, etc, etc. Is that chaos?

Do you want to know how rapes are prevented? not by laws, or by police. By armed women.

The absolute best protection/deterrance against crime is an armed and informed populace. You do not need the government for that, in fact, the government is right now trying to take those rights (second amendmant) away.

You have admited that my political theory is ethically correct. Therefore, yours cannot be. This means that every action you take that supports demockracy is purposefully unethcial. Am i wrong, or does that not make you a huge hypocrite?

[Venom]

and speaking of working, who says demockracy is working? Taxes keep going up. We keep going to war. New and pointless laws are invented every day. Gay's cant get married. We still have poor people even with the welfare state. We have inefficient government services, we have police brutality, we have protest groups and political correctness.

Taxes just went down under George Bush, when new problems arise new laws need to be made to counter them, civil union is allowed in 3 US states and Massachusetts TODAY legalized gay marriage, and its legal in 2 Canadian Provinces. We have poor people because they dropped out of school (their choice, they own themselves right?!), and/or because they are lazy. What do you have against protests??

You say laws deter murder? How? murders still happen every day at an alarmingly high rate in the USA. Rapes do too. Theft? Yes, we have theft in canada and the USA. Etc, etc, etc. Is that chaos?

Without those laws murder would go up ten fold. The murders that do happen are by people who just don't care about the punishment, or who think they will get away with it. I can point to hundreds of instances where people say "if there were no consequences I would have killed him". Just because these things happen does not prove that they don't deter others from acting on thier impulses.

You have admited that my political theory is ethically correct. Therefore, yours cannot be. This means that every action you take that supports demockracy is purposefully unethcial. Am i wrong, or does that not make you a huge hypocrite?

Again you are putting words in my mouth. You love to twist things around don't you? I never said it was "ethically correct". I said it was "fine" as long as people could follow and live by those principles. I ALSO said that people can't. Like you said even with laws people murder, rape, and steal. Without laws it would be worse. If you think it wouldn't....why?

We vote our government into office. They act on our behalf or else they are out of a job. I don't remember the exact wording but in your first link it says that people have the right to choose leaders to make decisions for them. That is what we do in a democratic state.

[Narbus]

The idea that we are, in fact, conscious, is the hinge of the argument Halbrooks is putting forth. Our brain handles our thoughts, handles our consciousness. The brain is a cause/effect system. Quite a bit of Plato's work deals with the paradox this presents, it's not unreasonable to bring it into discussion, nor does it require a huge grasp of biology or physics.
Atoms don't "choose" to bond, to shed electrons, to react. They just do. If you put Na in a tub with Cl, they react to form NaCl. This is the basis of, well, everything.
I'd lead a very brief life if I had to worry about the acids in my stomach reacting with that apple to form gunpowder and a lit match instead of breaking the apple into helpful substances. An equally brief life if the carbohydrates and other chemicals in the brain could randomly form cyanide, or arsenic.
Since the brain is built off of such chemical reactions, and is a physical organ that is bound by the (predictable) laws of physics, I cannot see a rational, logical proof whereupon we have free will.

And if we do, then why can't other animal also have free will? They are bound by nothing but the same laws we are, they have brains that operate on the same chemistry.

Again, the issue of time comes into play. If I knowingly subject myself to pain, yes, I resist the urge to move away. I've given blood, had blood drawn for tests, etc.

But if I am pricked, by the time I think "ouch, pain, where's it coming from, oh, my arm, well, what's causing it, oh, my brother is poking me with a dart, should I move away?" my body has already moved away. Without foreknowledge, we are bound by the same instincts as other animals, is the point. It takes us time to assert our rational mind, time in which our body is, in fact, in control. This is not a bad thing, necessarily. By the time I managed to get through that thought process after touching a pan that's hot, my hand would be hurt considerably worse than if my body just makes me drop it.

Also: In herbert's book, the boy in question (paul) is the result of years of bloodline manipluation in order to create a human with a more highly evolved mind. The book is about the evolution of humans to a higher state, the obvious corollary is that humans are not fully evolved, nor are they fully capable of using their minds. Halbrooks forgot to mention that part.

A child does not have the ability to leave their finger on the needle, no, simply because their brain (which does control their body) hasn't developed enough to allow them too. They are not developed enough to decide if they should remain in pain for some greater goal, so the brain is designed for a higher level of self-preservation. This is simply a question of the physical brain still needing time to grow (a child's brain is very obviously smaller than that of an adult).

As a child, I did the following: touched a hot lawn mower resulting in burns so severe I had to go to the hospital (age 1.5); climbed a ladder to the top of a 2.5 story house to say "hi" to my dad (age 2); made frequent trips up trees, to the point where my parents had to routinely get out the ladder to get me down (various); wandered off in shopping centers, etc etc and so forth.

Children are dumb. That's just how it is. They do not have rational minds.
Since children aren't rational, they don't have the mindset necessary to make the kind of decision that leaving the house entails. Their brain just isn't physically ready to be able to weigh consequences in that manner, just as it isn't ready to weigh the consequences of touching a hot mower.

Where is the point where we declare a mind to be rational? What test do we take to prove we're mature? When I drink, it's usually 2 glasses of beer. That's about it. That's all I've ever really done, the number of times I've been full-on drunk is still in the single digits. I'm 23, and there are people years older, even decades older that routinely get smashed out of their minds. Clearly age isn't a prerequisite for rational thought, so what is?

[doug]

Venom:

taxation is still rampant. The government continues to grow in size, therefore, they will continue to require more of your money in order to fuel that growth. You justify new and ridiculous laws by saying "new problems arise."

Yes, they do. But we don't need the government to solve them.

If you know a person who says "if there were no concequences i would have killed him" that person is dangerous and i suggest you stop knowing him, ASAP. A rational individual would not arrive at such a conclusion.

What does "fine" mean, if not ethical? Look, venom, one of us two has to be wrong. You say government is ethical, i say it isn't. My logic is being debated at this very moment and it's holding up to scrutiny. You can't prove that anarchy is unethical by saying it would result in a chaotic society, so you must now admit that at the very least, you can't prove me wrong.

My first link did say that people may choose leaders. That's fine. But those leaders cannot use force to take the property, lives or time of others. That's what you do in demockracy.

So, narbus, you are saying that we do not have free will because our brains use chemical reactions to function. You are right, chemicals do not have a choice about how they react to one another.

But what iniates that reaction?

Just now i took a drink of my diet coke. I lifted my arm, grabbed the cup and brought the straw to my lips, where i then sucked the liquid out of the cup and into my mouth. Then i swallowed.

you are saying that i took that drink because some chemicals were released by a gland in my body telling my brain that i was thirsty. That's true, they did. But i made the choice to drink. Other days, I have made the choice not to drink.

There is no way you could ever acurately predict whether i would drink or not. It is impossible to know until i have made the choice.

In fact, as i was writing this, i had to go to the bathroom. I made a choice to put off going to the bathroom until after i had finished responding to venom.

The brain is bound by physics. When we are thirsty, for intstance, chemicals are released and they react together to send signals to our bodies letting us know we are thirsty.

But there is no way you can predict how a human being will choose to respond to the chemical reactions going on in his body. Under most circumstances, when a person is thirsty, they drink. But sometimes, they don't.

Why not? Because we have free will. We can disobey our bodies. We can put off sustaning them if we feel we need to or it serves our purposes to do so. Neither I nor Halbrooks are arguing that we can put off our bodily functions forever. Our bodies do need maitenance. However, people have willingly starved themselves (anorexics), people have willing killed themselves, people have willingly endured pain.

choice is what gives us free will. Since we are concious and aware, we have the power to make choices. Whether animals can or not is up for debate, but even if they can, that does not prove that we can't.

if you are arguing that our choices themselves are the result of further chemical reactions, i would like to see proof. That's an interesting theory, but it's one i disagree with.

Children are the same. All humans are built with this capability. You say a child could not, under any circumstances, leave his finger on the needle even if it hurt?

even if i told him "hey kid, prick yourself for 1 minute and i'll give you $100"?

if he could under the above circumstances, he could under any circumstances.

babies, and toddlers, do not display a faculty of reason. but a fully developed human mind does. kids can't walk when they're young, either, does that mean that humans can't walk? as the child develops and grows, so does his faculty of reason.

[Narbus]

Absolutely nothing you just said addressed my central issue: Where do these choices come from? I want a purely logical, sound reply.
"Choice gives us free will." No, choice is free will. You just said "free will gives us free will," which is a rather nasty bit of begging the question.
The brain is a physical system, based on the same (predictable) laws as anything else. That the brain is a really BIG system doesn't matter. If a butterfly flaps it's wings in Tokyo, the weather doesn't choose to produce a tornado in Kansas.
On the same note, weather prediction is abstract at best because of those damn butterflys. It wasn't just your body telling you that you were thirsty. It was a nigh-impossible-to-list combination of chemicals that each had some affect on you. Just as leaving that butterfly out of the equation changes the weather some time down the road, leaving any chemical, temperature, firing neuron, or sensory input out of the "what will you do next" equation invalidates the results.

I'm not saying that it's easy to predict what people would do. We'd need every bit of pertinent information to a ridiculous amount of precision. As the weather clearly shows, that a finite mind cannot solve the equation doesn't mean it doesn't exist, nor does it mean it's not predictable.

The bit about the child: That's actually the point I was making. Infants are not able to think rationally. It's physically impossible. As a child grows and matures, so does the child's mind. But we all grow at different rates and in different ways. The point was that there are people who do not grow in the way and at the rate to become rational, and even those that do will retain some bit of irrationality. Ergo a community based upon all its members being rational would have to be very small (the USA is out), yet strong enough to deal with all the irrational people out there, of which there are many. You'd also need some way of proving that the people who want into the Gulch are rational, something elusive at best, as the alcohol example above shows. Age doesn't determine it, gender doesn't determine it (Rand was female, you are male), social class doesn't determine it (Enron, anyone?), background doesn't determine it (Bush was born into a very nice family, and Rand was born into an upper-middle class family), education doesn't determine it (Bush went to Yale)...what does? How can you judge?

While in theory, a current passing through a resistor will give a voltage equal to the product of current and resistance, the reality is that the voltage will be slightly less, a result of the inherent resistance of the wiring between the current source and the resistor, and the resitance of the device being used to measure the voltage.
Similarly, while in theory a society of purely rational people would be able to exist in a sort of utopia, the reality is the situtation is that people will always have that bit of irrationality in them, and unless they have that crucial time necessary to assert that mind (time that real life often doesn't provide), the irrationality will surface and undermine the society.

[Venom]

Yes, they do. But we don't need the government to solve them.

Then who solves them and how?

If you know a person who says "if there were no concequences i would have killed him" that person is dangerous and i suggest you stop knowing him, ASAP. A rational individual would not arrive at such a conclusion.

I would argue that government (and religion) through time has instilled these "ethics" into us. Its a common arguement in the study of ethics. Are these innate or are they influenced by society? You cannot say that they are by nature innate because its not factual. If thats your opinion fine. I don't agree with that. I believe for the most part our ethical and moral values are learned.

You can't prove that anarchy is unethical by saying it would result in a chaotic society, so you must now admit that at the very least, you can't prove me wrong.

I can prove that with anarchy comes chaos. I only need to point to ancient Egypt. Many periods of time are described as chaotic because there was an absence of government. You are the one who cannot prove me wrong. I have asked twice that you prove to be that with anarchy the world would not be chaotic. You have ignored that question both times. Laws put forth a consequence for certain actions. There laws act as a deterant, not to all but to the majority of the population.

My first link did say that people may choose leaders. That's fine. But those leaders cannot use force to take the property, lives or time of others. That's what you do in demockracy.

The same would be done in anarchy. In democracy we only use force to rid oppressed people of the ones who refuse them the right of freedom. This may be painful at first but its saves much more pain from comming about in the long run. People are still gonna want power in anarchy and these people are going to oppress others. There needs to be a deterant to this. Democracy fights for the rights of its people. It may not be perfect but nothing is, definitly not total chaos!

[Dr. Hobo]

Mass didnt legalize gay marriage, the court stopped short of legalizing it, the ruling essentially stated that it is "unconstitutional for them to be illegal" which is not the same as saying it is legal

[Venom]

Mass didnt legalize gay marriage, the court stopped short of legalizing it, the ruling essentially stated that it is "unconstitutional for them to be illegal" which is not the same as saying it is legal

Technically you are a little right. Its not legal yet, but they can't legalize it anyway. The legislature has 180 days to remove any unconstitutional laws prohibiting gay marriage. It will be legal unless they ammend the state constitution which I don't think a democratic state wants to do in an election year, especially with their very own John Kerry running. So what I should of said is that in no more than 6 months it will be legal.