Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!roger From: roger@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig) Newsgroups: alt.individualism Subject: Re: Phil Ronzone's stereo Message-ID: <13028@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> Date: 17 Jan 90 22:45:54 GMT References: <4813908a.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> <2905@odin.SGI.COM> Reply-To: roger@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig) Distribution: usa Organization: Princeton University, NJ Lines: 129 In article <2905@odin.SGI.COM> pkr@maddog.sgi.com (Phil Ronzone) writes: >In article <4813908a.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> nelson_p@apollo.HP.COM (Peter Nelson) writes: >>>> And why should I care it it applies to ALL men? It may be rationally >>>> inconvenient that a certain man should continue to live or be free to >>>> use his mind. >>>A walking want-ad for ex-Securitate personnel ... >>>Sieg Heil. >> While he may lack for ideas or expressions of thought, Mr. Ronzone >> never lacks for catcalls. It has not yet ocurred to him that a >> cogent argument counts for more on this newsgroup. >The spectacle of an indivdual posting the "rationally inconvenient" >line above is sickening. Why is it sickening? He's pointing out the way things are! You've snuck "moral" into your definition of "rational." He has not. Can you justify what you've done? Hint: wishing won't make it so. You've made no effort to tell us why your morality is necessarily derived from mere rationality: and if not, what else must obtain before you can derive it. >Who decides the "convenience" of another persons life? You tell me! What if it's inconvenient for you to give a starving man food? A sick man medical aid? If you are telling me that you have no right to allow others to die because it's not convenient for you, then you have just talked yourself into the position counter to the one you proposed a while back, that rights are properties, and all of a sudden the person in extremis has a PROPERTY RIGHT to something that's yours! Or do simple property rights make the issue of convenience irrelevant, and override the issue of right-to-life at all? >It seems the Mr. Nelson is sure he can. Can you decide the relative convenience of resolving conflicting rights one way and another? >>>So in Germany in the 30's and 40's it was MORAL to kill Jews, the insane, >>>and anyone declared by the state to be "unfit"? >> That's right. By their standards it was OK. >> If Mr. Ronzone thinks that the world actually works Some Other Way, >> he is welcome to present his reasoning to the group for us all to >> consider and comment on. Personally, I don't think he's up to it. >I assume by this unimaginative concept the American revolution >would have never happened. Peter Nelson to the founding fathers ... > "Come guys -- give it up. Live in the real world. There have > always been Kings and Divine Right. There always will be. > Besides, the Kings has more soldiers than us. Get real." What has that to do with anything? First of all, the American Revolution was not fought over the Divine Right of Kings. Either come up with some evidence for such an assertion or chuck it. It was fought over economic matters: taxation; and specific political ones: representation. Had Parliament suddenly given the Colonies full voting status, even by Divine Royal Decree, I suspect there would have been no revolution -- at least not for a long while. For that matter, if the Colonies hadn't been taxed unfairly throughout the 1760's and 70's, revolutions wouldn't have attracted many backers at all, Divine Right or no. If the Crown had just let the colonies be, it would have been a trivial issue indeed. Finally, remember that not even most of the British subscribed to George III's revival of Divine Right. It just happened to be fairly easy for them to ignore him. Now, if you're arguing all of a sudden that you are NOT defining rights as they have meaning in the world we live in, but rights as they OUGHT to be in a perfect world, that's a very different matter. But it also carries a different burden: you must first demonstrate what conditions must necessarily obtain before your notion of rights has any "real-world" currency. Your arguments about taxation, which got us into this, are based on just that dissonance: in a perfect world, we don't need taxes, and any attempt to insitute them is wrong. But the world we live in has things like national boundaries, countries at odds with one another, protectionism, etc.; and no country can operate without drawing consequences from these bald facts. And to insist on using ONLY the perfect-world definitions of "rights" and so on is to take a religious stance, very similar to the Christian "All have fallen short of the glory of God" attitude. You can go and decry the entire world as evil, but unless you actually go and do something about making it less evil (aside from complaining bitterly about how rotten things are), it's not really a very interesting point. You tell us you don't vote because the system you'd be participating is evil because it's less than perfect. You are very much like a monk in that attitude. Think about it. Politics is the art of the possible, and the American revolution happened because it was a politically possible move to improve matters of justice, economics, etc. You have shown us no way to get to the utopian condition you describe, in which there is no conflict between absolute property rights and any other necessities, and where taxation is utterly irrelevant, and so on. At least Christians admit that their pie is in the sky. Roger >Of course, it is hard to discuss anything with an individual who >believes he has the Sole Truth Of The Way The World Works. > > > >------Me and my dyslexic keyboard---------------------------------------------- >Phil Ronzone Manager Secure UNIX pkr@sgi.COM {decwrl,sun}!sgi!pkr >Silicon Graphics, Inc. "I never vote, it only encourages 'em ..." >-----In honor of Minas, no spell checker was run on this posting---------------