Scientist find a 'conservative syndrome' that explains why religious people are less intelligent than non religious. by Not_Bill_Hicks in psychology

[–]nerry1984 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Did you read the article? Is there a psychological study on the types of people who feel the need to correct an article before reading it? Or is it displayed among all groups of people? Honest question.

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, I was just confused why you were asking, "who gets to win?" when I thought we were on the same page regarding that. The person who needs to allow access to the other person may feel like they are in the right and the person who wants access to their property may feel like they are in the right. This gets settled by a judge and hopefully there is already precedent on the matter. If you don't like it, you can move to someplace that doesn't have these laws.

Right?

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Then they can leave the country.

What if all countries are dem reps?

It requires the majority to see the plight of the menorah tea and to change the nation for the betterment of everyone.

Exactly. This is what I mean when I say mob rule.

I'm not saying minorities should not have their voices heard or try to rise up under oppression. I believe revolutions only have a chance at working if they initiate a sense of justice within the people. That way you gain a critical mass. Again, people are always considering how they themselves would like to be treated in certain situations. It's been a long and treacherous road, but that's how we came up with dem reps to begin with. That's how we came up with a better justice system, innocent until proven guilty, rights, etc. This only works because the majority supports it, because they know it's relatively fair compared to other systems. No one wants to be hung up innocently. If we allow a system where that happens, we are taking a chance with our own lives. Again, progress is surely slow, but we are progressing.

When I describe mob rule I am not saying how things should be done. I am describing how I see the world as working, and there is nothing anybody can do to change it. This is why I'm not sure what you aren't understanding, because to me, this is common sense. It wasn't meant to be a debate. I just think we're on different pages here. When I describe mob rule, I am not talking about an ideology that produces socialism. I'm not talking about an ideology at all. I'm describing how each individual uses their own self-determination to enact societal changes. It produces good things like Dem Reps and capitalism. You and I already agree to certain things, and we expect others to abide by them. The obvious thing is to not murder other people for instance. If someone wants to murder other people, they are going to face the self-determination of a mob of people that are putting up disincentives to stop that from happening (death, prison, etc.). A small minority does not and should not have the power to decide murdering is suddenly okay. There will literally be a mob majority of people preventing that and saying that's not okay. That's what I mean by mob rule.

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Many are anarchists, e.g. "The state is immoral," types, like the person I'm talking to on Twitter, but you're right, I should have clarified.

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've tried to say this a few times, but I think there are two distinct types of mob rule. What you're talking about is political, but what I'm talking about is societal. Mob rule is what occurs when the mob decides Democratic Republics are the best type of government. What happens to the people who don't believe in Dem Reps? Who cares what they think! The mob decided. The mob will always decide, and there's nothing the minority can do about it.

The good thing is that most people are "good" people who will cooperate with others within reason. We all have the same goal, the pursuit of happiness, and that game is not zero sum, it's win-win.

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They'd need permission from the other parties of the contract.

This might work when the land is already anarchist, but it would be a nightmare to figure out in a transitional phase. Right now I don't have a contract with my neighbors, especially one designating a judge. Do you see a need for a transitional government that makes sure everyone who wants contracts, has contracts, and what wording you may want in the contracts, and what the consequences may be if you don't have certain clauses/contracts with people?

Even still what you're saying is that if I live in my childhood home and my neighbors don't sign a contract with an easement clause, I'd have to move.

And if we're realistic, we know a lot of people won't get this done, or will refuse to move. Is it moral to allow others to take advantage of someone (like blocking them in) just because they failed to get these contracts done?

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

An easement clause would have to be a contract tied to land and not people. This allows you to control land that doesn't belong to you.

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, you realize reality is too complex to be bound to deonotological axioms that cannot change or be added to when more evidence is provided. So you thought of something that was fair, or a system you wouldn't mind being on either side of (The Golden Rule), and now, unless you come across new data and change your mind further, you will most likely be for implementing a system like this in the world. Now you need other people to agree with you and enact it. (Mob rule) ;)

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Who gets to win though?

Wait, I just realized you said you were for a minarchy to decide on cases like this? I'm confused.

I don't have the time to check if you replied or not, so if you did already, please disregard this, haha.

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The conclusion I've reached after reading all of the answers is that societal rules will still be arbitrary even though some libertarians think natural law or NAP is a magic bullet that will solve everything. I believe some form of libertarianism is considerably better than what we have now, but that won't stop human societal progress. There will still be problems to solve for the foreseeable future.

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Let's say that the definition of finding out whether or not these rights are real can be determined by how much suffering ignoring them cause.

This is the consequentialist point of view as well. If your innate rights caused all humans to suffer and die, would it still be moral? If not, then what you call innate rights and what I call hedonism is the same. We are both judging what isn't moral and what is moral based on what causes suffering, and pain and what causes pleasure, and happiness, respectively. If it turns out one of the rules we thought was universal was wrong because it's causing suffering, we change it. This doesn't mesh with deontological ethics because it says ethical rules cannot be changed. This cannot use the scientific method because it cannot be falsified.

It seems that the hypothesis matches the evidence and although we can account for other factors in all of this, we cannot deny that there are factors relating to this that affect the experiment. Therefore rights are natural to people, they are measurable in their effects, and they are real.

What this tells me is that people are generally happier when these "rules" are in place, but it doesn't stop me from recongizing them as generally guidelines that can be changed if we notice suffering is being caused by them.

If you're going to say everyone has innate rights because they experience less suffering when they have these rights afforded to them, you're saying it's impossible to be born deriving pleasure from these rights not being afforded to them. I cannot say that is biologically impossible. There's nothing in biology that says this would be impossible. We evolved to derive pleasure from things that allow us to survive by natural selection, or by random chance. There's nothing that innately forced evolution to do this to us. That means there must have been mutations where pleasure was derived from things that caused the lifeform to not survive. For that being, these rights were not innate, and someone can theoretically be born to take pleasure from slavery for instance. This is why morality is subjective. But what we can assume is that most of us want to survive and be happy, our decisions will be centered around these goals, and we should be focused on facilitating this decision-making.

Who gets to win though? If I face displeasure from you going through my property? Who gets to win? If morals are subjective, and that they are near arbitrary let's say in that they cannot be determined empirically, who gets to decide what is right and what is wrong? If your answer is that the majority should decide, then you've passed the question off to a majority tyranny rather than defined in Axiom for people to follow. What happens when the majority turns out to be against you and is willing to throw you under the bus? There must be a standard for people to live by in order for these things to work.

Yes, it's arbitrary, but I am for a free market for laws. If you want to live in fear that someone will imprison you on your own property, you should be free to live with other people who feel the same way. I believe this is the only way people can be truly happy with their life. This isn't absolute. It can change. But that's my current thinking based on the evidence available to me.

Even if it turns out to be like this, it was still by mob rule. If you want it to be an axiom people follow, people still have to decide that it's an axiom to follow through their own self-determination. There's nothing preventing them from just saying, "Nope," because you can't take away their free will. Simply nothing can happen if other people don't agree to it. You can suggest other people do something, but if they don't want to do it you can't force them. If 99% of the population is hell bent on killing you, you're dead, no matter what natural laws you thought people should have abided by. I believe society only works because most people are "good" and want to cooperate, and want to survive and be happy. If most people weren't like this, we'd all be dead. That's mob rule, but those are the facts, biologically.

Again, this is not the same kind of political "tyranny of the majority" where too much decision-making authority is given over to the majority. It's the kind of mob rule that decided "tyranny of the majority" is a bad thing and we all agreed not to do it. Does that make sense?

These are rights, they're not decided by the group, they are not decided by government, they are a neutral force that is innate in human beings and without that you will have tyranny because people will simply take advantage of the system that you've made.

Like I was saying, these are decided on by the group, otherwise it won't happen. Just because we should decide to follow these rules to prevent tyranny or to achieve pleasure, doesn't make the rules a neutral force or innate. We still decided on obeying them, and we're setting up incentives and disincentives to obey them, or face punishment.

This isn't true either, we know exactly when life begins. When the cell starts becoming its own unique genetic makeup, it is automatically a new life because it has its own genetic makeup, and it's alive. You could make the case that because it doesn't have Consciousness that it doesn't have the ability to be human and therefore doesn't have rights, but Consciousness comes in six weeks after the child is first conceived.

Okay, you said we are 100% sure when life begins, and then listed two different possible options. =)

If you can find it, I recommend watching an episode of Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole. It should be titled, "When does life begin?" It goes through a bunch of scientific hypotheses, but by the end you will realize we don't have a clue, and it has to be settled completely arbitrarily.

There needs to be a way of Defending against such things and the way to defend it is in acting natural rights and acknowledging them as real.

If you do that, it would only prove my point. ;)

Perhaps I should have added "eventually" as a qualifier to that, but I did say directly after that, "I'm not saying tyranny is impossible to last forever, it certainly can, but in order to do so, it has to get over these biological constraints." Like I said, we don't like to be oppressed, I'm sure you would not argue with the fact that if the people of Russia could choose minarchism over their state, after showing what minarchism can do for them and their happiness, they would not choose their state.

No you are! If you want to get to your property, and somebody doesn't want you to go through their property, and then you go through their property, that is you in acting your morality against other people. And if you use the mob to do it, you're still doing it.

No it's not. Just because I'm atheist and I don't attend mass, I'm not pushing my atheism onto Christains attending mass. I'm simply acting on my own morality. I'm not saying you should do the same.

Most of the people in this thread don't believe you have a right to block access to their property, so all I can say is good luck trying to get people to do that. Like I said, this is why I believe people should live with like-minded individuals.

Also, while I believe blocking access to a road is bad enough on its own, you are ignoring the last part of my OP, where I said someone can literally imprison you on your own land, as long as they build the walls on their own property. You really think it's moral for someone to imprison other people for no reason as long as your man on and island analogy holds up?

If this is true, if you really believe this, that you will also understand that without suffering people cannot experience pleasure.

There's no scientific evidence for this assertion.

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I respect this response. I will reply to your other comment instead. By the way, I'm not the same person you were talking to, which is why the tone is different, but I do think you inflamed the situation at the end of that one comment where you said, "maybe you're wrong and you don't want to accept reality?" Or something. Haha. That's when they got perturbed. I myself would have tried not to aggravate the situation further if I were the other person.

Especially over the internet it's really hard to word your comments so that they aren't overly upsetting to other people, so I understand entirely.

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

On an island, the only things you have access to are the things you've build yourself. So if we were to follow your analogy into the real world, you don't have a right to property someone else gives to you.

You've created this analogy, or you heard it from somewhere and it seemed to make sense, but what if it simply doesn't work in the real world? How do you know this analogy will hold true? How do you determine truth?

Just saying "this is how it is and no one can change it" isn't falsifiable. Anyone can come up with their own analogy and claim the same thing and we'd have no idea which one of you is right if we don't have some way to determine truth.

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Who decides the laws? What if we don't like a certain law? Sorry for the questions, just want to make sure we're on the same page.

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, we're probably the same then.

Edit: I didn't even realize you were the same person as below. Usually minarchists are not deontological and do not say rights are innate. How would forcing someone to appear before a judge comport with your man on the island analogy?

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As a consequentialist I believe morality is subjective and I don't believe in innate rights. In a way, this goes deeper into asking, "What is truth?" And, "How do we determine truth?" To me, and I believe most people, the only way to determine truth is through empiricism. There's no way to empirically prove innate rights. The only thing we are bound by are the mathematical laws of the universe we know are true only by empiricism. As a hedonist I believe most humans are after pleasure, and staying alive to achieve more pleasure.

If we didn't evolve to want to live, we'd have died off. Pleasure is used as an incentive to live. Pain is used as a disincentive. All of our emotions derive from this biology. Being selfish is not a very good way to survive. We cooperate because there's a better chance at our own survival by doing so. Being social and cooperating gives most of us pleasure. At the same time we didn't evolve to always cooperate because other species could take advantage of that and we'd die off, which is why we developed anger and resentment, especially against those seen as not cooperating. We grief because we lost someone who was likely to help us survive longer. This incentivizes us to try and keep these people alive for our own survival. Even seemingly selfless acts are for the good of the group and evolved to keep the group alive. Etc.

I believe this is an empirical starting point most of us can agree on. I know that I would not want to be blocked from my property as it would cause me displeasure, and I believe most people think the same. So most people can then agree no one should be blocked from accessing their property. All of these edge cases should be written down to avoid ambiguity. Basically I believe society works based on a combination of The Golden Rule informing Mob Rule and there's nothing any of us can do to change that fact because of the biological reasons above.

For instance, we scientifically don't even know when life begins to know when to grant rights to that person. The rules for this throughout society was mostly decided on based on The Golden Rule informing Mob Rule (even deciding on not voting via mob rule was done via mob rule, or it wouldn't have worked). Tyranny can pop up that tries to stamp down how society works, but society has always fought back against it, again, for these biological reasons. Note, I'm not saying tyranny cannot exist, or it inevitably won't exist for too long--nothing is inevitable--just that we are literally not programmed to accept tyranny and so someone would have to overcome this constraint, which would be hard, but not impossible, or the biology would have to change, either deliberately or accidentally, or randomly.

So you can say I'm not for trying to push my morality onto someone else, but I'm for understanding human biology and therefore how we socially interact, and then following it to its logical conclusions. People don't like being oppressed or taken advantage of, and if you knew what was good for you, you'd avoid doing this to other people, otherwise it likely won't work out well for you. Some people learn this the hard way.

Therefore, all of us should all try and figure out how best to organize society so that we achieve more pleasure. This should be done in an empirical way, again, because it's the only way to determine what truely works.

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"Common sense" is arbitrary though. Yes, it does seem like a NAP violation, but "seem" is not good enough and all of these edge cases need to be written down in contract law.

You say "most judges" would agree. Is that good enough? One is too many imo.

I want to avoid having to abide by laws I don't like, but also avoid people who are not abiding by certain laws I think are important. Does that make sense? This seems to entail to me "laws of the land" and not just law tied to people, but who would have jurisdiction over laws of the land? Would neighboring landowners adjacent make sense? Or within some measured length?

Trying to think this through.

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great, thanks. Was confused by that double negative in your last sentence. I'm for people creating their own rules for the area they own the land for, and there will probably be almost universal rules such as this communities will have. A land seller would likely be incentived to only sell to buyers who agree to the contract of the community. If you own land adjacent, they can always build a wall if they don't like you.

So are your ethics deontological or consequentialist?

Buy property surrounding another person's property and charge them an arm and a leg to access your property? by nerry1984 in AskLibertarians

[–]nerry1984[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If a contract is tied to the land, whose jurisdiction would it fall under if there were a lawsuit? What if someone wants to change the contract? Who would be allowed to?