Real life question of morality.

[Fraggle Rocker]

Fraggle, your way is simply unworkable in the real world where everyone is NOT the same as you. I.e., 10,000 pacifists' peace and harmony can be undone almost completely by ONE heavily armed, aggressive killer.

I never recommended being disarmed. We libertarians are stauch defenders of the Second Amendment. And frankly we believe a well-armed citizenry is necessary to keep the government in check as much as foreign enemies. This means that some of the guns that the leftists would prohobit should probably be allowed or we would be too easily overwhelmed in the event that we had to defend ourselves against a fascist government. If I were worried that my younger, more nimble neighbors were all Gandhis, I with my trifocals and arthritis would get myself a shotgun or a grenade launcher or something I could rely on in an emergency. One heavily armed aggressive killer can't defeat ten thousand people if merely one percent of them are armed. Ten percent could hold off the National Guard under the deranged authority of the next Orville Faubus.

You can't win, Fraggle, unless you stoop to his level of aggression.

Being defensive is qualitatively different from defending yourself, and it's also qualitatively different from not defending yourself. You're just not making sense here. You continue to misrepresent me to make me out to be something I'm not. I suppose I don't qualify technically as a pacifist because I believe it's okay to hit someone back. But I also think I deserve to be differentiated from the people who would hit someone first and also from the people who would respond to a punch in the nose with a gunshot. By no measure am I "stooping to the same level of aggression" as any of those people.

Oh, yeah, I read your bullshit about self-defense and not hurting the enemy too much! ...LOL! But even if you defend yourselves a little bit using violence, then your ideals of pacifism and non-violence are nothing but a sham, a bunch of words with no meaning or importance. It's just talk that sounds good in the company of friends and fine wine ...as long as reality is kept in check behind closed, locked, bolted doors!

My ideals are the libertarian philosophy of freedom, which as I said requires the discipline to not initiate violence but does not require one to suffer violence at the hands of one not so disciplined. That is not bullshit, not a sham, not meaningless words. It is a perfectly workable philosophy that is robust enough to survive a modest level of miscreancy without rendering anyone except the miscreants immoral or hypocritical.

"Pacifism" and "non-violence" are are my concepts of the behavior of people in an ideal world. I believe I go further than most people in pursuing peace and refraining from violence in circumstances where you, for example, would already be deploying nuclear weapons against foreign capitals, and I believe I uphold and proselytize the libertarian principles which, if I were persuasive enough, would create that ideal world. So I believe I am both morally justified and safe from misunderstanding if I wear those labels loosely and assume that I don't have to wrap myself in fine print to keep people from believing that I am actually Gandhi or Jesus reincarnated. I suspect that you continue to misrepresent me knowingly as a way of ribbing this self-proclaimed scientist and linguist for his imprecise language and as a way of creating a straw man at whom to vent.

 

[Baron Max]

, and I believe I uphold and proselytize the libertarian principles which, if I were persuasive enough, would create that ideal world.

Yeah, if all people felt and thought exactly as you do ...perhaps. But is that really what you want? No disagreements, no discussions, no arguments, ...everyone thinking and feeling and talking exactly the same way about virtually everything and everyone? And you call that "ideal"?

And just so you know, didn't Jesus have those same basic ideals some 2,000 years ago? What happened? If it was such a great deal, why aren't all people following those ideals? Don't you wonder, just a little bit?

Baron Max

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Yeah, if all people felt and thought exactly as you do ...perhaps. But is that really what you want? No disagreements, no discussions, no arguments, ...everyone thinking and feeling and talking exactly the same way about virtually everything and everyone? And you call that "ideal"?

You could say that about any philosophy. If we all thought alike society would collapse from apathy. But our model presents less danger of that than most.

The Libertarian Party may not be exactly the Constitutional Party. But a nation with a government that strictly abides by the U.S. constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, the checks and balances of the Three Branches, and the absolute limits on government authority, comes close enough to our utopia that it would take us decades to find anything to complain about. That country would hardly stifle dissent, that environment would not nurture a people who feel the same way about everything. Libertarians argue constantly among themselves over issues like immigration and abortion. We actively encourage the creation of communities in which people can make their own rules and experimentally live under them. If the Boy's Club doesn't admit girls, if the Church of the Holy Gall Bladder requires its members to have sex with their neighbors' spouses, if the Model Railroad Association makes diesel locomotive enthusiasts sit in silence during their meetings, they are welcome to try these things out, subject to some messily enforced rules about not getting so big that they in practice intefere with the citizens' rights to things like housing, education and employment.

I think a libertarian utopia would be a far more intellectually, morally, recreationally and spiritually diverse and chaotic place than a communist utopia, a Southern Baptist utopia, a white supremacist utopia, or a Mensa utopia.

And just so you know, didn't Jesus have those same basic ideals some 2,000 years ago? What happened? If it was such a great deal, why aren't all people following those ideals? Don't you wonder, just a little bit?

I'm no fan of Jesus and a little googing will lead you to several days' reading on why he was no libertarian.

Nonetheless he did resonate with my extra-libertarian ramblings on the supremacy of our pack-animal instincts for harmony and cooperation over our more primitive hunting-animal instincts for competition and violence.

You and I consistently disagree over this point. Jesus's role (or even the historical authenticity of his existence) notwithstanding, I see a world which 2,000 years later has indeed moved in the direction of his ideals. Our packs have been merging into ever larger nations and within those packs the principles of pack harmony and cooperation are ever more strongly adhered to. Today we have scores of nations comparable to and even much larger than the Rome, India and China of Jesus's day. Within the borders of those nations the citizens observe a Pax Romana that would be the envy of any Caesar and at least get a nod from Jesus; would embarrass even the most enlightened Caesar and put a shine on Jesus's halo with our eradication of slavery, our institutionalized charity, our literacy rate and our public health; and would shock the later Caesars and give Jesus cause for solemn reflection with our nascent repudiation of the sexism of Christianity.

For all the world's grief, it is a far better place than it was 2,000 years ago. And Homo sapiens, glorious Homo sapiens, gets all the credit. The victory of our massive forebrains over our primitive animal brains. The balancing of instincts with learned and reasoned wisdom. The collective understanding that we're far better off putting up with each other and living as one huge pack than we were in the survival-obsessed life of our tribal ancestors.