Stripping out some smilies again...
You were defending aggie's position by & large. You don't do that unless you think I am wrong. I get self righteous against people who don't use their brains & prefer ignorance / irrationality / illogicality. This is one of those times.
Get off your high horse. No, I was not defending Aggie's position by and large. Reread my first post. I made no comment on the drunk driving issue in the first post (only to say I wasn't making a comment, which you took issue with, drawing me into a pointless debate on a subtle topic I have ambivalent feelings on and which I care little about). The ONLY thing I wanted to say was that you were treating Aggie unfairly with respect to his Lew Rockwell position.
I assumed & what do you know - I was right.
It's not subtle. I do realise every facet of my position. I criticized your position? No. But I am now... which is exactly the position I thought you held, surprising that.
Come on you're better than that.
And what is a person hit by a sober driver? The DRINK DRIVING IS IRRELEVANT. Property has been damaged. It does NOT matter if you caused the damage because you poked yourself in the eye, had to blow your nose or had a few drinks. THE RESULT IS THERE, GIVEN.
...which is what I mentioned in the very next sentence.
You have prescribed that there has in fact BEEN a crash or accident; that is COMPLETELY FALLACIOUS & w-r-o-n-g.
You ASSUME that has been a crash or property damage. You have attempted to reframe the debate / argument = EPIC fail.
Jesus Christ, arguing with you is like arguing with a child. You just responded to the first sentence of a complete paragraph by "schooling" me on things I already know and mentioned in the subsequent sentences, which I will repeat here. I'll bold the sentences you APPARENTLY MISSED:
I can see both points of view, and to answer your question, the victim in question is the other person hit by the drunk driver. Of course, "aggression" isn't always committed anyway (though aggression isn't a very precise word, because it's generally accidental), and that's important to take into consideration. The actual act of damaging person or property should be outlawed and punished (or more precisely, the victim should seek redress), not necessarily any reckless behavior that might lead to it.
Clearly, I don't "ASSUME" any of the things you say I assume. For the sake of completeness, I made the obvious statement that [in the event of a crash], the victim you're asking about is the person whose body or property was hit. OBVIOUSLY there is not always a victim, and by acting as though I'm trying to obfuscate this, you're only betraying your own desire to lash out at other posters at every possible opportunity. Writing replies to your posts is a chore, and I tire of defending myself from your brain-dead insinuations. Of COURSE there is not always a victim, which I clearly acknowledged in the bolded portions of my paragraph above! I merely mentioned who the victim was (in the case of an accident) for the sake of completeness. That said, I'm not stupid. I knew all along how you were framing the argument, and I already knew you were asking who the victim was as a simple setup so you could scream, "
FAIL! THERE IS NO VICTIM! BLAH BLAH FUCKING BLAH!"
That's why I carefully made sure to elaborate on the fact that I understood this already. Unfortunately, I forgot that no clarification would ever be good enough for you to say, "Okay, continue," to anyway, because of your propensity for tearing into people rather than seeking common ground. EPIC FAIL.
We are talking simply DRINK DRIVING.
This is exactly like Hate Crime...
"do you really care if you are killed by someone with joy in their heart, or hate in their heart? You are still dead."
i.e "Do you really care if you are killed by someone who is drunk, or sobre? You are still dead."
How I Won in the Election - John Sophocleus (25min:30s+)
Reparations by Walter Block.
Blah, blah, blah. Deliberately sidestep your opponent's clear agreement on a point here, drop a link to mises.org or lewrockwell.com to demonstrate intellectual superiority and learnedness there, act like a total asshole the whole time...check, check, check.
I already addressed and agreed with everything you said by my statement, "The actual act of damaging person or property should be outlawed and punished (or more precisely, the victim should seek redress), not necessarily any reckless behavior that might lead to it."
Of course, that's not good enough, because acknowledging my agreement on that point would mean you'd have to pass up an opportunity to be confrontational and have an argument.
Should private school officials be able to stop/prevent people from recklessly driving monster trucks at 100 MPH on children's school playgrounds at lunchtime?
GUESS WHICH one word I left out. And tell me how it changes anything? I know where you'll go with this next, that is if you continue to fail to see the light. Which is fine... Socratic method is slow like that.
Of course you know where I'm going with this: Driving drunk isn't necessarily dangerous. Driving recklessly is dangerous, and drunkenness is merely one major cause of recklessness. It's not so much that my argument is predictable as it is that I already laid out my argument in my last post. Here, in this post, I just explicitly spelled out that recklessness is what endangers people...as you expected me to. Still, it's such an obvious point that I'm only filling in that blank for the sake of completeness.
The STATE owns the property. Not the people. Not you, nor I, nor anyone else.
The State by Murray Rothbard
It CANNOT be
just. Just like stealing from A, then giving to B - CANNOT be called compassion.
EVEN according to YOUR own philosophy, a minimal state. Defence of LIFE, LIBERTY and PROPERTY - this VIOLATES the states minimal role. It is violating Liberty, voluntary actions where there are no victims.
Yes, I know all that. Believe it or not, I have a lot of sympathy for the anarcho-capitalist position, especially because of its moral and ideological purity. I'm just not entirely convinced of its stability. I may eventually come around, I may not - but it's not looking like you'll be helping with that any time soon. In any case, both of our opinions on the justification behind the state's existence are irrelevant in the context of weighing the drunk driving issue under the present assumption of state-owned roads. Because it's essentially a non-issue when it comes to privately owned roads, the only meaningful debate anybody can have about drunk driving must necessarily be within the context of a society with a state and state-owned roads.
By the way, if we accept the idea that the state is the legitimate owner of the roads, then the issue becomes more clear: They make the rules, and no matter what the rules are, we are bound to follow them. After all, they're the property owners, right?
However, I say this in jest, because I do not actually subscribe to the idea that the state legitimately owns the roads. In a working version of today's world, the collective public is currently the legitimate owner of the roads, and the state would be at best merely the agent of the public (legitimately). In reality, the legitimate owners of the roads are spread disproportionately throughout the public (depending on who paid in what), because the money was taken by force, and the state is less of an agent of the shareholders and more of an usurper. Still, let's pretend that the laws governing rules of the roads were implemented in accordance with a vote of the actual legitimate shareholders (like with the shareholders of private roads). Would these rules not be entirely valid, on the basis of property rights? Ultimately, all rules of the road derive from property rights. Of course, the laws governing rules of the road are not exactly implemented in accordance with a vote of the actual legitimate shareholders (weighting proportionally, etc.). Similarly, because everyone is forced to be a shareholder of every road equally within large geographical areas, free market competition between roads with different rules becomes impossible. However, the shareholders nevertheless do hold claim to the road, and they are therefore within their rights to come up with terms and conditions for passage, and that includes the possibility of a ban against drunk drivers. While it's impossible for shareholder votes to be taken and tallied correctly in practice (and what we have at the moment is at best a gross approximation by the usurper state
), it still holds in principle.
If you accept your FLAWED premise then there is NO limit to what the state can do. And they WILL go that far. Illegal to use a cell phone... illegal to eat etc!
FASCIST!
I still haven't submitted my hypothetical checks and balances to writers on Lew Rockwell's site to examine, but in any case, you still have not bothered to seriously address them yourself. Until you do, you already know I disagree with your blanket assertion that the state cannot be controlled by any means, and it's pointless to continue trying to convince me otherwise without first addressing the specific counterargument I offered in another thread.
No Road Rules "View of a one way street in Phnom Penh, Cambodia."
That's a clever and workable solution for future roads, although I do personally find one-way roads to be entirely frustrating. What about current roads, though? This is all fine and dandy, just like arguing for an anarcho-capitalist society in which drunk driving laws become moot (because of private road ownership), but it doesn't really address the issue at hand.
For private roads it is reasonable. For public, it is tyrannical.
With such low standards for tyranny, what do you call the concentration camps of Kim Jong-Il? You know, to uh...differentiate them from laws against drunk driving? Hyperbole aside, laws against drunk driving on public roads are at worst unreasonable, not tyrannical. I gave an argument above explaining why they might be rationalized as reasonable (paragraph on shareholders, etc.). Of course, the counterargument is transparently obvious, considering the lack of 1:1 correspondence with private roads and shareholders. The degree to which such rules are unreasonable is directly proportional to the degree to which the reality of our situation diverges from a scenario in which the shareholders' votes are properly counted and tallied (and then a bit more to compensate for the fact that there's no competition). Personally, I think road rules against reckless driving in general (or drunk driving in particular) are probably more reasonable than not...but as I mentioned before, I have no strong opinion, because it's such a subtle issue.
Punishment? For what? Driving your car whilst under the influence? You wrongfully assume there will be damage caused.
Deprivation of Liberty. Removal of Freedom of movement... is what you advocate here. The state gets to relocate someone simply because they are drunk? That's your premise - why just keep it to roads?
Here, you're reframing the argument. My premise is simply that property owners can kick people off their properties, ban them from their properties, etc. This is not inherently an argument against freedom of movement, though freedom of movement does get pulled into the equation when the state is the property "owner" in question. It's a special case, and it certainly deserves special attention and caution as well, because - among other reasons - the state is not really the legitimate property owner in the first place (the public "shareholders" are). Still, my basic premise is not the general supremacy of the state, but merely the idea that property owners can set terms and conditions on the usage of their land.
*Actually, freedom of movement can come into conflict with property rights at other times, too - even private property rights in an anarcho-capitalist world. What if your neighbor somehow buys up all of the land surrounding your property and forbids you from ever trespassing on his land? Technically speaking, leaving your house (or coming back) would be a violation of your neighbor's property rights. Would you be justified in violating his property rights to make passage?
Drunk driving = driving drunk. There is no inherent victim, there is an individual driving a motor vehicle whilst drunk. There is no victim. How can you fail to see this blind, stark, reality?
I do see this particular blind, stark, reality. I fruitlessly took painstaking steps in my last post to make sure you knew that I did, too. Of course, you don't care about that, because you'd rather ignore our points of agreement and argue against a straw man who doesn't understand anything you're saying.
I am only satisfied with the truth. Where you do not agree with me (Lew Rockwell... and anyone with a brain) it is because you are wrong. This is not just said, but logically sound through praxeology, a priori / deductive reasoning.
I am only an ass to those that prefer ignorance to knowledge. Emotion to that of logic & reason.
Here you are acting like a self-satisfied, smug know-it-all again, and the sad thing is, your posts are comprised less of logic than of yelling, hand-waving, raging against straw men, anger at disagreement of ANY degree, and arrogant putdowns. Your conceit that anyone who disagrees with you must be wrong or brainless is simply laughable. It is not only unwise and unhealthy, but perhaps borderline crazy, to have such immutable and closed-minded certainty in your knowledge and opinions that you leave open no possibility for being even slightly mistaken. You claim that I think with emotion instead of logic or reason, yet many of your posts are little more than emotional tirades against other posters whose disagreement apparently frustrates you
to the very point that you can't even take the time to write complete and proper sentences. In fact, you go so far as to rail against my posts (and against me) simply because I don't have the same level of
conviction or absolute faith in anarcho-capitalism as you do! I don't disparage your views, and I even acknowledge the possibility that they may ultimately be correct, yet every bit of caution I might have to subscribe wholeheartedly to them is apparently some mortal sin in your eyes.
The way you debate has nothing to do with logic or reason, even if you might have initially come to your viewpoints using those faculties. Rather, the way you debate has everything to do with using brute force to shout down your opponents, and it stems from your intolerant religious fundamentalism against anyone who is not a devout and unwavering worshipper in the Church of Anarcho-Capitalism. It's silly how you have to literally write down that you have superior logic, as if that makes it true. Why must you brag that your arguments are logically sound, through praxeology (do you even remember what the word means?
You're using it wrong, and if I were to stoop to your level of patronizing assholishness, I might just link you to a primer), a priori / deductive reasoning, etc.? Don't just tell me I'm wrong. Show me. Don't just tell me you showed me, either - actually show me.
Now that I've beaten you over the head with a reed repeatedly: Look, I'm not trying to be a jerk to you, but I don't take crap from anybody, and I have no qualms against striking back when provoked. I don't have any idea how to get you to chill out and stop being so demeaning, but at least consider that it's not working. You want people to start listening to you, right? As I said before, you are not winning over hearts and minds with your approach. If anything, you're driving them away.
Yes, the author wasn't racist - thus aggie's comment was wrong. Thanks for admitting it.
90% of the NBA is black. Ohhhh racist!?
Yeah, because that's exactly what the newsletters said.
The context certainly put things into better perspective and helped to redeem the author in my eyes, but casting stones against Aggie merely because he still doesn't approve (or want to associate himself with the author)...well, that I do take issue with. To put this back into context, the original comment I objected to was, "Racism? LOL. Isn't that ummmmmmmmmmmmm... collectivism - the very opposite of individualism. Calling Lew Rockwell a racist is like calling Stalin a free market anarchist. It is fcken delusional." The first part was patronizing beyond reason, and Aggie was not in fact "fcken delusional" for having his opinion, because - while I do disagree with his assessment - there are enough grains of truth to make it an opinion a reasonable person might still hold.
AggieforPaul =
- Called Lew Rockwell a racist.
- Said he has some retarded ideas, including this very issue.
- Begged the question that Lew had something to do with the biggest subversion to the RP campaign
- Asked WHO THE FUCK CARES?
- Pitched a strawman argument about people actually using this as a platform.
THAT is what you are defending. And excuse me.. you then try condemn for for ridiculing that? lmao
I respect everyone 100% from the get go - with me, you don't earn respect, you can only lose it. And once you fail, it is hard to get it back. The above lunacy constitutes a loss of respect. On the other hand, to those who have open minds and question their reality - I have the up most respect.. and should someone cease their lunacy and come around to reality, then things wld obviously change.
Conza, it's absurdly easy to lose your respect, and your apparent requirements for respecting people are ridiculously high compared to how you present them. In reality, you treat just about everyone who doesn't worship your every opinion, like complete crap. I'm a great example, because I've said many times that I acknowledge the possibility that you and the other anarcho-capitalists might be right, and I have sympathy for your views. I may even someday advocate them, if I become sufficiently convinced. I'm quite open-minded, but that's not good enough, is it? Since having any kind of reservations whatsoever against agreeing entirely with the almighty Conza88 is apparently "lunacy," well...who DOESN'T lose your respect, other than people who agree with you 100%? Seriously, get over yourself and have some common decency towards other posters. I'm in no way qualified to label a personality quirk as something pathological, but the way you treat anyone who doesn't worship the ground you walk on is pretty disturbing: It reminds me a bit of someone with narcissistic personality disorder lashing out against a former source of narcissistic supply who slighted him. I care little about having your respect, because this isn't about you, and I'm not in some contest to please you. Instead, all I want is for you to start treating people with the common courtesy that civilized adults afford each other. It's long past time for you to grow up and start doing so...and until you do, your words will continue to turn away potential allies than bring them to your way of thinking.
(I'd like for you to reply to this post with, "Okay, I'll try to tone down the attitude." Unfortunately, I'm expecting another tiresome reply along the lines of the ones I just got. Prove me wrong.)
Drunk driving = driving drunk. There is no inherent victim, there is an individual driving a motor vehicle whilst drunk. There is no victim. How can you fail to see this blind, stark, reality? 
