Westboro Baptist Church, Fred Phelps, Al Gore, and the Democratic Party

Lemme guess, you think he's a gold-bug code-pinko truther?

 

Will's problem with Ron Paul is that Will can't reconcile his so called Libertarian beliefs with the first fundamental of Libertarianism.

That aggressive violence should never be initiated.

Will believes that the projection of American values by coercive force is not only justified, but desirable.

So Will has a lot of problems with Ron Paul in that regard. And of course, Will holds Ron to the standard that keeps the LP from going anywhere, and that is demanding the perfect while being the enemy of the good.

Ron Paul's done 100x more than Will likely will, to spread the ideas of free markets, sound money, non-interventionism, individual liberty etcetera. And for this, he's vilified.

 

how much $ would be in it for me?

 

What is your soul worth to you?

 

Uh-oh, are those being sold with signature links now?

 

If I see a group of gang bangers beating you to death on the street, I'll make sure to remember that it would be wrong to initiate "aggressive violence" against them.

 

Self defense is different than aggression. You should know the difference.

In Vietnam they wanted land reform and the communists would give it to them.

So, in our infinite moral superiority, went and killed over a million of them (to protect them from communist land reform).

It's bizarre that you can justify defending someone from what they want by killing them.

Regardless, the non-aggression principle is the foundation stone of libertarianism. No one has a right to force anyone else to live a certain way.

 

Vietnam turned into a complete bloodbath after we abandoned the good people of Vietnam to the brainwashed totalitarian hordes swarming in from the North. Even today, the Vietnamese live without liberty or prosperity. Compare that to our friends in South Korea who we did not abandon.

Here's a couple of young boys who we can't help, under your failed misunderstanding of liberty.



They are being murdered by a vicious gang of street thugs -- the terrorists who currently rule Iran.

There is no moral difference between this murder and a bunch of gang bangers beating you to death on the street.

The only difference is that you feel that your skin is special in some bizarre way.

If the principles of liberty allow me to commit violence on the gangbangers who are attacking you, then they also permit me to commit violence on the gangbangers who are murdering these young men.

 

I'm not swayed by your utilitarian arguments. I want to know by what moral authority do you appoint yourself a policeman? If 30% of the Vietnamese want to be saved from Communism, does that give you the right to wage war on the 70% that will peacefully and willingly go along with communism?

I mean, the whole conversation is moot. Vietnam fell, there was no domino effect, and the Bay of Tonkin was a false flag which cost over 1 million people their lives. I find it laughable, in fact, a little scary that you would be willing to use this as justification for a policy of preemptive war.

Do you have the right to defend people who have not asked for your help? Do you have the right to destroy their country and kill thousands in collateral damage to impose an ideal of liberty you can't even live up to in your own country?

Of course not.

Mind you, I don't have a problem with your having these views, even though I think they are wrong. It's neo-colonial, or neo-conservative. Your Pax Americana and ravaging through the 2nd and 3rd world is a modern form of empire and feudalism.

But don't call it libertarian or liberty oriented. Liberty is universal freedom FOR EVERYONE. It's the absence of violence and coercive force, not a utilitarian argument to use force to impose social constructs on others.

 

Your failed ideology grants freedom only to those who would use violence to enforce their wills.

Your ideology gives a free ride to criminals, gangbangers, terrorists, totalitarians, communists, and anyone else who uses "aggressive violence" to abuse, enslave, or murder their victims.

Your failed ideology is not libertarian. In fact, it is anti-liberty. It steals liberty from everyone who is not strong enough to defend themselves -- without help from anyone else.

If you ever have children, and you happen to see your daughter being assaulted and raped by a group of ruffians, I hope you have the courage of conviction not to "appoint yourself a policeman." Grab some popcorn and watch the show -- that's all that you can do without committing "aggressive violence."

Here's some words which hold meaning for me:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
​

It is moral and right to defend anyone whose life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness is being unduly infringed.

It is immoral to stand by and fail to do so. As Dante said, "The hottest seats in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crises, choose to do nothing."

Edmund Burke said, "All that is essential for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." I fear that mankind may soon see this occur.

 

Self defense.

Not at all. Self defense and self determination are fundamental rights.

Let's put it this way Will. If people decide to form a commune and practice socialism amongst themselves, do you have a problem with that?

Did the Vietnamese who were slaughtered in their villages, or the children growing up with deformities today helped by Agent Orange or John McCain flying bombing missions on them?

When Bush's troops used white phosphorus as a chemical weapon on civilians in Falluljah, was that libertarianism?

Libertarianism is based on the non-aggression axiom. You cannot impose your ideology or values on others with force. To do so, justifies flawed or bad ideologies/values having the same right to use force instead of persuasion.

That's SELF-DEFENSE, as her defense is my responsibility as her father.

You can post all of the extreme, personalized and flawed examples as you want. It doesn't change that most Vietnamese wanted communism and the land reform that would bring, instead of continued western colonialism (ie. the French) that subjugated them. And for that, they were slaughtered en masse, in an ideological war, that was neither in their interest, nor in their defense.

Finish the rest. That the people have the right to rise up and overthrow bad government. You don't arbitrarily have the right to go around overthrowing other people's governments, or forcing them to live in a secular society when they would prefer a religious one. What you judge to be bad government, might be better than what you replace it with. One could certainly argue that the Iraqis enjoyed much more prosperity and freedom under Saddam than they do under the occupation.

There is no reason you can't provide charity, aid, education, tolerance, compassion, prayers, finance, knowledge, etc. The Soviet Union collapsed without a military intervention. China is becoming more capitalistic and westernized through trade. It's hard to buy your justification for fabricating a false war through lies, with Vietnam, where 60,000 Americans die, over 1 million Vietnamese die, billions of dollars of wealth are destroyed, there is long term damage to the ecology of Vietnam, and in the end, the people got what they wanted. Communism and land reform.

If you're such a good man, do something about the injustice and inequality in your own country before you bomb and torture people in other countries trying to spread hypocrisy. At the very least, your moral justification is only as moral as the man wielding it.

 

She's not you. She is her own person. By your own silly rules, she is responsible for her own defense.

You cannot at the same time morally justify the use of "aggressive violence" to intercede in her affairs and deny the moral imperative to intercede on behalf of your sister below:



To assign different moral value to these two people just because you happen to be related to one of them is nothing but racism.

 

is that darth vader?

 

Racism? Hunh?

I think you've finally lost it Will. You can't take me on in an argument of ideological purity, because while I am imperfect, I don't justify killing anyone to benefit someone else. You do.

For you the ends justify the means. And that has to be unacceptable to any moral and sane person.

 

I have followed this thread and I would have to ask: At what point do you draw a line and say "I won't help that person"? You say that helping your daughter would be self-defense, would you help a neighbor? Would you help the random person on the street?

I have read enough stories about people watching someone get robbed, beat, killed without helping (mostly in L.A.) but I don't understand how crowds of people can just keep walking by. I would help, even at a risk to my life.

 

Without a doubt.

But that's not what Will is talking about. That is what he is trying to conflate with his position, to appeal to an emotional and moral argument.

Will's position is that America has an obligation to militarily go into countries like Iraq and Vietnam, not to protect Americans, not for national defense, but to liberate the people of those nations from whatever regime they are under.

Even if 2 million Iraqis asked us to topple Saddam, what about the 4 million that would rather we didn't invade? Will's argument fails there. It's about American empire (Pax Americana as he calls it) and hegemony.

If you ask for my help, in an act of self-defense, I should help you. But to arbitrarily impose myself in disputes and pick sides, using the weaker side as the only determinant of my efforts, is completely flawed.

In Will's example, a girl is being gang raped. But how do we settle a dispute between two girls? Or two gangs? Is his principle of intervention consistent enough to be applied across the board?

I don't think so.

And there is one more thing that drives me about Will's pseudo-Libertarian positions. Libertarians don't believe in using force or coercion to impose morality, the only exception being in self-defense. Just because you don't like Vietnamese people becoming communist, or Iraqis from becoming a fundamentalist Islamic state, gives us no right to dictate how they live their lives. As long as they are not harming others, how they live, what they believe is their business.

I'm pounding this out on the fly,so I may not have explained myself clearly or precisely. But I'm happy to continue the discussion. Hopefully Will avoids trying to play the emotional and theatrical examples of a girl being gang raped as justification for invading a sovereign nation with 160,000 troops.

 

There really is no logical or rational difference at all.

The only difference is that guerilla is emotionally attached to his conceptual "daughter", but he doesn't give a damn about another girl being murdered thousands of miles away.

It's easy to defend liberty when that liberty is your own. It's not so easy to motivate yourself to defend the liberty of another human being.

guerilla's own liberty is important to him, but guerilla is not at all interested in liberty for other human beings.

That's not proper libertarianism. Real libertarians believe in liberty for all human beings.

To believe otherwise is just to be a selfish poser.

guerilla, quit being so emotional and get back to logic and reason.

There can be no communist or islamist state without harming other people, because the tenets of those belief system are that harming other people is necessary and good.

Communism and Islam are both totalitarian regimes which deny the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" to all who are under their dominion.

You are once again confusing individual liberty with your confounded socialistic notion of "group rights."

"Muslims" don't have rights. "Communists" don't have rights. "Iranians" don't have rights. "Teamsters" don't have rights. Individuals have rights.

Those ideologies deny the individual rights of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." As such, those ideologies are the eternal enemies of any true libertarian.

 

Thank you for the opportunity to spread some libertarian ideas.

This is a straw man. And a continuation of your attempts to sidetrack the discussion with emotionally extreme arguments.

To imply that you can defend someone else's liberty, means that their liberty is beholden to you. That liberty is not a natural right, nor are individuals capable of gaining it for themselves.

It's a flawed argument Will.

On the contrary, I'm not being emotional at all. I'm not tossing out "selfish poser" or "real libertarianism". Libertarianism is founded on the non-aggression axiom. It is the crux of libertarian philosophy. Don't confuse Walt Williams and Barry Goldwater Sr. with von Mises, Bastiat or Rothbard.

Anarchists and agorists would make the same argument about representative republic and any democracy. That the tyranny of the majority overrules the right of the individual. That taxation is theft, and the threat of coercive force (jail time or wealth confiscation) by the government, is inherently evil, regardless of how it is empowered.

So to condemn communism, and endorse democracy is just gradualism.

Again, the same could be said of Western democracy. Look at the # of non-violent drug offenders in jail. Look at the gestapo tactics of the IRS. Blatant vote fraud. Free speech zones. National security letters and warrantless wiretaps.

It's funny you would try to label me a collectivist. I agree in individual rights, which makes me wonder why you would approve attacking Vietnam, and slaughtering many Vietnamese who favored land reform over colonial servitude to the French, and communism was their vehicle?

I mean, you're the one who is willing to kill people, civilians and soldiers, to enforce an ideology regardless of whether the people you are freeing want to be free. I'd like to see an explanation of the moral authority you (as an individual) have to decide what is good for someone from Vietnam. Because the minute you assume that role, you are taking the right of self-determination away from the individual, and again fail the libertarian test, exposing yourself as a statist.

Democracy is also the enemy of any true libertarian. Democracy favors the group, the majority over the individual.

If people are ok with being oppressed under another ideology, they have the same rights you do, to participate in a democracy, where the majority may dictate that you have to pay for or participate in something you do not approve of.

I can literally run circles around you on this topic all day. I'll buy that you are a neo-conservative, with right values mixed with Wilsonian foreign adventurism and delusions of empire.

But you're no libertarian. Certainly not in outlook or spirit.

 

Will, lets hear your take on our government helping to overthrow the peaceful majority elected government of Doctor Mossadegh in ira in the 1950's and replacing it with a forced non lected dictatorial government of the SHAH and on top of that training his secret police the Savak to kill and torture anyone that didnt agree with this forced non elected government. Lets hear your answer to that one? Our government started the whole ball rolling in iran and if it wasnt for this action Iran would have been a moderate government today. The main reason the islamic revolution happened was to rebel against the forced dictatorship that we helped to place in Iran (against the iranian peoples will) all for the right to keep getting oil at pennies for the dollar while denying the iranian people majority ownership over their precious resource which they were willing to sell to us anyways but at a more fair price.

I agree with guerilla, who the heck are we to force our form of government covertly on any country. If we are perfect ourselves and without sin then i say go for it, but can you truely say that after knowing what we have done to smaller countries over some greed and power?

 

in Texas you can fry retards in the electric chair, does that mean it would be ok for France to invade texas?