Schmelzer
Valued Senior Member
People have always, with all available means, defended their rights. A simple way to enforce contracts is reputation. If somebody does not fulfill his contract, the victim will distribute knowledge about this as wide as possible. This destroys the reputation of the contract breaker.Well, what benefit does the private property or its owner receive from the social contract by which societal obligations are established? That is to say:
How――do you intend――to enforce――that――contract?
Hint: Explain how you intend to enforce your contracts without asking the state to occupy any part of that territory.
Some of the usual means of defense of rights and enforcement of contracts are monopolized by the government. Which, of course, makes it much harder to do this without the government. But in the particular case, this is not really a problem. If the government offers some service to throw out trespassers from my property, I can allow them to enter my property temporarily for doing this job.
The "strawman" is the guy presented as American liberalism.Yeah, we get that you reject your own straw men; that is, after all, the reason you construct them in the first place.
In a liberal society I do not have your claimed obligations. If and how one can survive in an optimal way in a non-liberal, totalitarian society is an interesting question, but off-topic.Again, how are you going to enforce those contracts? Are you going to invoke your benefits under the social contract? After refusing your obligations?
You are unable to argue without such defamation?How not unexpected of a racist too incompetent to comprehend that being born black is not an act of will intended to offend a white supremacist.
Yes.Let us try the philosophical principle of charity: Do you mean people [outside] the U.S.?
There is, of course, an antisocial and antiliberal variant of supremacism, those who want slavery or the extinction of inferior races or so.There is no paradox, however, in supremacists attempting to simultaneously appeal to and undermine societal posterity; supremacism is, after all, antisocial behavior.
But there is also a liberal variant. At least a possibility. How popular this variant would be among real supremacists is nothing I care about - but to accept and live along this variant would be the offer a liberal society can (even would have to) make to supremacists.
In this variant, the supremacists would be allowed to organize on private property gated communities, where blacks would not be allowed to enter. With exceptions only for civil servants doing things where they are in general allowed to enter private property even against the will of the owner. Given that such a gated community is also a small society, to name those living there antisocial would be defamation. And, given that they would not violate any liberal principles, they are also not a danger for a liberal society.
This is the liberal way to handle problems with supremacists. Divide at impera: To create a split among them between those who accept liberal rights of blacks, and those who don't. The are good reasons to hope that this split will end with a large majority on the pro-liberal side, because all what they really want they get, but there will be no conflict. The anti-liberal part, instead, intentionally creates violent conflicts essentially for nothing an average supremacist would care about. And this pro-liberal majority among the supremacists would not be a danger at all for a liberal society.
A liberal society as I see it is also not a suicide pact. Those supremacists who accept liberal rules are not a danger to liberal society. They will isolate themselves in their racist gated communities and in this way reduce racial conflicts.You propose, for instance, to distinguish 'twixt a "liberal defense of equal rights even for those with despicable views" and "a defense of these despicable views", yet are incapable of recognizing the illiberal proposition of alienated rights.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact; your inalienable rights, common to all people, do not by the Constitutional purview include the alienation of other people's rights.
Your beloved society, where white racists are degraded (in their opinion, which is what makes degradation important, because this is what motivates them fighting against this) every day by obligating them to serve blacks, even black racists, is much more suicidal. Because it creates and increases hidden (but therefore in no way less dangerous) hate.