Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Howdy

based on past experience I'm not sure how welcome the Voice of Reason is around the fire!


but welcome anyway!

Barak, you make a very cogent and convincing argument.

However, I am more a realist that an idealist. I don't see the state giving up power, no most people wanting the state to shrink.

I think part of the problem with your ideal is that it assumes individuals will have equal power in a anarchistic state, and that they are all enlightened enough to operate out of long term self interest. Unfortunately, people like criminals show that's not the case.

It is very easy to show that people will do things that in the long term are no in their self interest in return for short term gratification. Society as a whole has to force those to behave civilly for the sake of the greater good.

It's not a great system, nor even a good one. It's just what has worked. If anarchism really worked, we'd see all sorts of examples of anarchistic governments.

Welcome to the campfire. Go look at the other forums now while you have a chance. Once you get sucked into the hunters campfire it is hard to tear yourself away. I almost missed a great deal on the optics forum by letting myself get too distracted here.

Welcome....


So it's the big Gov't guy repressing freedom of speech already.

I refer you to the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when the peasant affirmed that the watery tart passing King Arthur a sword was no basis for a political system. Instant "repression" ensued.

If that's true, it's only because it's been whetted and stropped on the patience and longsuffering of many unfortunate Campfire members.


I'm both.

I don't see the State voluntarily giving up power either, and I'm scared to death of violent revolution.

I'm the laid-back kind of anarchist, not the black-shirted, slogan-screaming, Molotov-throwing kind. My fondest fantasy is not killing politicians or the bourgeoisie (dang, but that's hard to spell--kill the French instead, I say), but finding a way to subject the government to free-market competition and running it peacefully out of business.

I'm not sure I agree that most people don't want the State to shrink. I'd say probably most people have sort of a mild, back-burner distaste for government in general, in the sense that when they see a cop in their rear-view mirror their first thought is not relief that they're being served and protected from such close range but concern about what that cop might do over the next ten minutes or so. But for most people, I think, there are much more important concerns in their life than who's running the government or what laws are being passed. If those concerns could be addressed in a more effective, cheaper, quicker way without government than with it, and the difference was obvious, I think most of the folks who still protested the waning of government would be those to whom it gave illegitimate power over others.


Actually, it doesn't. (Since it's your first offense, I'm ignoring for the time being the phrase "anarchistic state.") In a free society, some people will have much more power than others.

For example, one guy might be CEO of a hundred-billion-dollar company. That's an awful lot of power. Another guy might be a highly venerated private judge, whose pronouncements are given almost the force of divine revelation because of his reputation for impartiality and wisdom. A third might be a business consultant on whose every word hangs the undivided attention of a lecture hall full of very rich men.

The difference is that in a free society, none of the real power is coercive: all of it is voluntary. The mighty CEO got where he is by satisfying his customers better, faster, and cheaper than the next guy, and providing a work environment that was attractive to the best people. The judge got where he is by pronouncing judgments that are consistently wise and impartial. The business consultant accumulated his power by coming up with business advice that reliably produces high profits and satisfied customers. If any of these men stopped doing the things that persuaded others to give them the power they have, that power would evaporate or pass to competitors.


Even short-term self interest works out well; and that's good, because it seems to be the one thing in human nature that you can depend on. Occasionally you do run across a person who seems to be driven by something other than short-term self-interest: but to the extent a free society contains people like that, it works better.


Criminals can indeed have temporary, low-grade coercive power in a free society. But it's temporary because it only lasts until people have time to forcibly object to it--generally with some kind of self defense--and it's low-grade because a criminal organization without the kind of government help you see the Mafia getting can't grow nearly as big on coerced income as a protection firm that provides a positive service can on voluntary income.

Under a government, the coercive power of criminals is neither temporary nor low-grade: it's institutionalized, and coercively financed with taxes.


Of course they will. That's how they learn. Experience Is The Best Teacher. Government can take that teacher away, but none of the substitutes it provides have proven to be any better; on the contrary, they're all significantly worse.


Ahem. Whose greater good? Who gets to decide what the greater good is, and by what authority, and why?

I frequently don't even know what's best for me at any given moment, as can easily be seen by examining the course my life has taken to this point. What's best for you? Hey--I don't want responsibility for that. I'm going to have to trust you to figure that out for yourself. The greater good?! Heavens to frickin' Betsy!


Yeah, I have a theory about that too, but you don't want to hear it on this thread: it's religious.

Good to meet ya VOR, just make sure your tinfoil hat is hardened.

Go ahead and post the thread when you're ready to discuss it. I would enjoy discussing and hearing everyone's thoughts.

Penny

"It's not a great system, nor even a good one. It's just what has worked."

Has it really worked? or only passed off as sufficient for a time... After a time all governments fail. Ours is in the process now. I have no problem with the failure of governments (I view it as a good thing) except they always seem to drag the nation and the people down with them.

"If anarchism really worked, we'd see all sorts of examples of anarchistic governments."

No such thing as anarchistic governments. Contradictory terms. No one's actually tried. (except Somalia) How can one say something won't work if it's never really been given a go? It's a statement that cannot be proven.

There's an unexamined premise here.

What does "worked" mean? Obviously, it means "accomplished the objective." But what is the objective, and whose objective is it?

Everyone believes they are rational, believes in reason and few would claim they are not utilitarian. It would seem your indentification with those subjective "attributes" allows you to believe your atheism is superior somehow to those who would also count faith in their God as one of their own personal attributes. But then, this rediculous assertion drives straight to that point:

Welcome to the Campfire.

Atheism is at least as irrational as theism is. My own argument would be that atheism is more irrational than theism, because it amounts to faith in a negative, which according to the rules of logic can never, ever be proven, as over against faith in a positive, which is at least theoretically provable.

If he was really a rationalist, he'd be an agnostic. However, he can't be blamed for noticing that rationalism carries one only so far: there are important questions that neither science nor reason can answer. I happen to disagree with the answers that atheism gives, but at least the search for those answers demonstrates an intellect that has not been entirely enslaved by the public schools.


On the contrary, it's a perfectly reasonable assertion--a truism, almost. Religion is absolutely irrational--including, as I said above, the religion of atheism. But that's a good thing.

Rationalism says that the truly important questions, the ones that are outside the domain of science and experimentation, either don't exist or aren't worth answering. Is that what your religion says? Mine doesn't.

"John Stuart Mill, on his own free will
And a half a pint of shandy...." (Python)

Welcome to the 'fire

I disagree. To state that religion is irrational is to say that one cannot come by it logically or by reason. Many people do. Josh McDowell attempted to disprove Christianity by reason and logic while studing for an advanced degree and came to embrace it. Regardless of how people come by their religion, their reason and rationality is primarily what compels them to remain faithful to their beliefs. Now some might claim those people are not using valid logic or reason, but most if not all such claims are merely based on arrogance and a veiled claim to intellectual superiority. Claims to reason and rationality are as subjective as any other human attribute that cannot be accurately measured. They can only be judged by application and then those judgements are subject to the norms of a society. What is reasonable and logical in western society can often be viewed much differently by the standards of the oriental.

...or does it? The public school systems feeds impressionable intellects a steady diet of atheism when it's not pushing non-Christian faiths.

I'm interested in the theory.

But you'd think with thousands of years of human history, there'd be some examples of successful, technologically advanced large anarchic societies if it were a viable system. Just about everything else has been tried.

I was guessing about 18 years, Barak.

You guys, who think that hard, amaze me. It hurts my head and makes me want to spend the afternoon burning ants with my magnifying glass.

Well, HoundGirl was a young lassie, and not too many folks around here objected to that...

From a logical stand point you cannot prove a negative proposition. I doesn't matter if there is a 'Supreme Being'. Uou can't prove that aliens don't exist, either. Or that the supreme deity isn't the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Allah or the Gods of Rome or Greece.

But ultimately, the existence of a God or Good rests on nothing more that faith, not anything that can be weighed, measured observed or reproduced. The evidence supporting the existence of god is about the same as that supporting the existence or the tooth fairy or Santa Claus.



My biggest problem with religion boils down to a belief system not based on facts, and inevitably held to be correct in opposition to another equally held belief system which is adjudicated 'wrong'

I've been looking over this site, and am particularly thinking about the Christianity vs Islam thing. How can anyone argue that one religion is right and the other is wrong, since they both seem to have the same underpinning in terms of support.

For that matter, why is the bible more reliable than the Koran, the Upanishads or the writing on Buddhism or any other spiritual path?

At the dawn of man, the lightning and thunder was believed to be caused by gods. The Romans thought the sun was Apollo's chariot. The catholic church persecuted Gallileo for claiming the earth wasn't the center of the universe.

Now we have fundamentalist claiming the earth is 6,000 years old, and that evolution is a myth and who try to explain away things that are patently impossible by citing the bible and stating the equivalent of 'it's magic'.

At the center of it all seems to be the fear of mortality. If you believe, you'll got to some eternal happy place in the bosom of Jesus or with your 72 virgins.

Some people can't deal with the fact that they are a collection of chemicals and chemical processed combined by random chance, and that after a number of years that's all going to fall apart and that's it - end of story.

To paraphrase a common saying "wish (or pray) in one hand and sh*t in the other. See which one fills up first."

BTW, I am 46.

I would that you were joking but am reasonably sure you are not. Considering your last premise (underpinnings of support), do you realize that it is a capital offense in Islam to renounce it? Do you realize that if one parent is Muslim, it is incumbant on the child to also be Islamic per Islamic law? Are you aware that currently people are routinely killed (murdered) for attempting to depart the Islamic faith? I know of no such draconian law in any other religion, much less Christianity. It would seem to me that the support for Islam is fostered largely by the sword (literally) rather than personal commitment.