The Purpose and Execution of Law

Discussion in 'Debate Corner' started by Makaze, Dec 21, 2011.

  1. Patman Bof

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    Ah, it' s complicated, I don' t know all the quirks. Our driver licenses have a certain amount of points. If you' re caught breaking a law on the road then you lose points, all of them if your infraction is spectacular. If you manage to not break any laws (or rather not get caught doing so) for a whole year you can gain back a few lost points, if you loose all your points you loose your license. The problem is that all you need to get another driver license is even more money than a fine (some of it goes to the state), and a lot of time. This measure is even more unpopular than fines because for many people a license to drive is a license to go to work, if they were to lose their driver license they would also lose their job. I think that you can also loose your license for good, but I don' t know what the conditions for that are exactly.

    Here you are legally hold responsible for whatever the hell your kid might do. I wasn' t thinking about a rebellious teenager that is already fairly self-reliant, rather about a lil kid old enough to say "no" but young enough to ingest poison, burn the house to the ground, or whatever childish act you failed to anticipate.

    Here parents are allowed to slap their kids, but teachers are unconditionally forbidden to physically harm students in any way. Years ago there was some debate about forbidding parents to slap their kids too, which raised more than a few skeptic eyebrows. I don' t know the details, all I know is that this law didn' t come to pass.
     
  2. KeybladeSpirit [ENvTuber] [pngTuber]

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    Corporal punishment works slightly different here. Teachers are allowed to beat students, but only if the parent gives permission and even then only under any conditions that the parent may have (for example, they may wish to be present).
     
  3. Patman Bof

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    Oh, I missed that one :
    In French laws the right to education is called a "droit inaliénable", literally "a right that cannot be taken away".
    I thought that was the kind of right you were talking about.
    Does it force you to go to school, or does it prevent anyone to refuse you an education ? Yeah I know, potayto potato.

    Well if it forces you to do something bad or stupid then obviously not. I see mandatory schooling as neither bad nor stupid, at least in my country, and I don' t really see what kind of (good) plan B parents could have in mind for their kids, but I agree that it' s entirely subjective.
     
  4. KeybladeSpirit [ENvTuber] [pngTuber]

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    But that's just it. If it is mandatory, then it is not a right. A right implies that it is optional. You have the right to free speech, do you not? Now suppose that the French Government said that every citizen was required to write an article about your opinion on the state of affairs in France for your local newspaper at least once a year. You still have the right to express yourself. Do you know what you DON'T have anymore? You don't have the right to shut up and keep your opinion to yourself. And I think we both agree that is neither stupid nor bad to express your opinion, especially on the state of affairs in your nation.

    Now what right does mandatory schooling take away? It takes away, most obviously, your right to ignorance. Perhaps, for some reason, you do not want to know about what is taught in Sex Ed. You should have the right not to know.

    It also takes away your right to figure things out for yourself. Perhaps you want to develop your own understanding of the same Calculus that is required to be taught in your school. Sorry, you can't do that. You have to learn it by going to the schoolhouse and learning whatever the teacher is telling you.

    Or maybe you want to learn all the things about French history that make it seem like less than a good nation. Sorry, state approved curriculum. Not gonna happen.

    Let's take it further. Voting isn't a bad or stupid thing to do, right? That's a right here in America, a "sub-right" of the unalienable right to free speech to be exact. But suppose a state passes a law that makes voting mandatory. Now you have to vote, whether you have an opinion to express or not.

    In short: Making the exercising of a right mandatory violates that right.
     
  5. Makaze Some kind of mercenary

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    I can see how it would be, aye. I suppose I did not think it over too much. In retrospect, I simply prefer not punishing people at all if they have not harmed anyone else yet. Or perhaps a system in which potential fines are built up, so that if and when they do have an accident and it was their fault, the price goes up in proportion to how many warnings they were given. Does that sound more fair?

    Notice the 'legally'. I do not acknowledge any obligation based on a piece of paper. I need solid reasoning or it is off. I hold that you do not own your children, and they are responsible for their own actions as soon as they are able to intentionally leave your care. I hold this because that is the point as which they become their own person and decide that their best interest does not coincide with yours. Most children will not try to leave your care. But they should be able to if they want to. If you cannot argue against this without referencing laws, then I will continue to hold it throughout the argument. A child you birthed is the same as a stray child you took in and did not adopt, no obligations. What he does is on him. Is that clearer?

    Again, have you been completely ignoring what I have said? I present an ethical or profit based argument, and you tell me what the laws say in your country. Are you ever going to argue my ethics directly?

    You ignored his argument. You are being forced to exercise a right. Stating it a different way does not excuse you from the consequences of stating it. Not only can they not refuse you an education, they are forced to give you one even if you say no. What if you yourself refuse? Hm?

    What is bad is up to the individual. Values are subjective. You admitted this. And you used it to completely sidestep the argument. Do you or do you not believe that your assessment of its badness or stupidity should be enough to force others who find it bad and stupid to do it against their will? What about a state official's assessment? What about every other person's assessment? At what point do you believe that another subjective value can be used to force someone to violate their own subjective values?

    Should a pacifist be forced to carry a gun if you were forced to exercise your right to a carrying license by law? Well? It might be hard for you to imagine, since it is not a law, and you seem set on defending current laws in your country, specifically... But if it were, wouldn't you defend it in the same way?
     
  6. Guardian Soul hella sad & hella rad

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    What right is mandatory education forcing you to exercise?

    Let us use the example that Patman provided earlier about a man hitting his wife. You say that unless one member of the dispute defines it as a dispute then it isn't a dispute. Both the man and woman say that there is no dispute. The man because he doesn't see the error of his ways while the wife doesn't say anything because she's too scared for her life or believe that she herself is at fault for her abuse to admit that something is wrong. Under your definition of law, the police officier shouldn't do anything because it isn't a dispute, correct? But does such a woman have sufficient mental faculties to make a competent decision?

    You seem to associate physical coercion with aggression when mental coercion such as manipulating a child to do what you want is also aggression because you are in a sense violating by force his right to liberty by restraining him to your standards, aren't you? This is going against the non-agression principle that you stated. While it is a less violent approach, it isn't any less aggressive in nature.

    First things first, making the exercise of anything mandatory makes it a duty. And no, only a liberty right, or privelege, is optional. Certain rights in and of themselves aren't optional such as claim rights. A claim right is a right which entails responsibilities, duties, or obligations on other parties regarding the right-holder. In contrast, a liberty right is a right which does not entail obligations on other parties, but rather only freedom or permission for the right-holder. Take for example, the right to life, liberty and property. Under the Declaration of Indepedence, these rights are inalienable so they aren't optional and they impose an obligation upon others to abide by a person's rights by not allowing them to assault or restrain a person, or use their property, without the a person's permission. Both of us can agree that living isn't bad or stupid, right? Even the right to free speech is a claim right as it obligates others to not prevent you from saying whatever you want.

    The government never did take away this right though. The government has only set you on a path that in the end is helping you figure things out for yourself. What's keeping you from learning multiplication when you're in the first grade? Nothing but yourself and if you figured it out by yourself then good for you, you're ahead of the crowd and now you know something that will help you learn more things.

    What's keeping you from learning about it by yourself? Compulsory education doesn't make you not learn things. If you wanted to know those bad and stupid things that your country did, then nothing is keeping you from finding it yourself during your own time, is there? I could easily go to the public library to acquire that knowledge or even go to Google and search "Stupid shit that Brazil has done" and nothing is stopping me from doing so.

    It is a privelege given to you by the government. While for example in my country, it is your duty to vote. Your argument is flawed because making the exercise of anything mandatory makes it duty and thus not a right.
     
  7. Patman Bof

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    Touché.

    It does. I think fighting ignorance is a good thing, a super awesome thing, and I' m glad it' s being enforced, but you' re right, it does contradicts our freedom on a fundamental level. After all if my reasoning was carried through it could be used to caution things like colonization, and I' m not ok with that.

    Sorry, I' m gonna side-track but I can' t help it.

    Actually there' s already plenty of ugly things in our public school history lessons. You should ask someone German if his history lessons put his country in a good light. Did your own history lessons skip the Indians massacre and eluded it with a nice and fuzzy Pocahontas tale instead ?

    All I learned in history is certainly biased nonetheless, but then every single historical source you might find is biased, state-approved or not, is that a good enough reason to not learn history at all ? Do their biased and unreliable nature strip history lessons of any usefulness (if you are told how biased and unreliable they are that is) ?

    It does.

    Man, that' s cold.
    I guess I assumed loving and caring parents would feel concerned about what might happen to their kid if they aren' t careful enough, whatever the law might say about that. It' s just a kid, making horrible mistakes is like his job description.

    Am ... am I boring you ? End of the story : even though I too feel skeptic about it I would see no harm in trying and see where it goes.
     
  8. KeybladeSpirit [ENvTuber] [pngTuber]

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    Shouldn't it be pretty obvious? The right that mandatory education forced you to exercise is the right to an education.

    I disagree here. The right to free speech is optional by way of its implied opposite. I call it the right to shut up. Do you, by law, have to exercise your right to free speech? No. All you have to do is let others exercise their right to free speech, a very easy thing to do if you are exercising your right to shut up. Now take my earlier example. What if the government forced you to write and article for your local newspaper regarding your opinion on the state of affairs in your nation. They are infringing on your right to shut up by turning your right of free speech/press into a duty. Wouldn't you agree?

    On claim rights: That's what I call a privilege. You have the right, once you are over a certain age, to attempt to earn a driver's license. Once you have earned this license, you are granted the privilege of being allowed to drive under the condition that you are obligated to obey the driving laws of wherever you are driving.

    Typically, a first grader won't try to learn about things that he or she doesn't know exists. And in many schools, higher level concepts are kept hidden until it comes time to teach them. Square roots, for example. From third grade up I was taught that it is completely impossible to take the square root of a negative number. Then, in twelfth grade, I suddenly learned about imaginary numbers. Eighth grade, I learned about how protons, neutrons, and electrons are the only things that make up atoms. Then in 11th grade I learned about quarks, gluons, and bits and pieces of string theory. Tell me: Why would I, the impressionable 3rd-8th grader who takes his teacher's word as the only way things can be, go and look for a reason that my teacher could be wrong or lying to me?

    What's keeping you from learning it is that you generally don't learn about any of your nation's mistakes in your early schooling, only the things that make you believe whatever mistakes you may learn about later were justified. Children tend to be impressionable like that. You were, I was, Makaze was, Patman, and even all of our parents, grandparents, and their grandparents' parents. It's why religion works and it's why history classes work.

    Except that IS my argument. If something is called a right, then it should be treated as a right, not as a duty. You have the right be educated. You do not have the duty to be educated. As a result, France's unalienable right to an education is being alienated by being mandatory and, as you pointed out, no longer a right, but a duty.
     
  9. Patman Bof

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    Same reason any kid stops believing in the tooth fairy sooner or later ? If a kid, retcon after retcon, keeps blindly holding whatever his parents or teachers tell him as the unquestionable truth isn' t he the only one to blame ?

    I was sent to catechism for years from the age of ten. The concept of God seemed as funky to me as the concept of Santa from starters. As young and supposedly impressionable as I was catechism never made a believer out of me, it only made me entertain the possibility of God' s existence. As boring as it often felt I don' t resent my parents for sending me there, because what I learned there comes in handy every now and then.
     
  10. Makaze Some kind of mercenary

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    I lost my post twice. Please forgive me if it not as good the third time, I am getting very tired of rewriting.

    A right to a state-approved education? Isn't that self-explanatory?

    She does. Certainly, it is not up a third party to make her decisions for her. How do you propose determining what her will is?

    It is not aggression according to any definition I have known. You must be violent or wish harm on another to be aggressive. Being manipulative does not fall under aggressive behavior.

    By your definition, any time that you deny a request, you are displaying aggression towards the requester by restraining their interactions with you due to your standards.

    ag·gres·sion /əˈgreSHən/
    Noun:
    1. Hostile or violent behavior or attitudes toward another; readiness to attack or confront.
    2. The action of attacking without provocation, esp. in beginning a quarrel or war: "the dictator resorted to armed aggression".
    Again you assume that we speak of the United States alone.

    The right to free speech is a liberty right because you do not infringe on another's liberty by speaking or publishing. However, you do infringe on another's claim to be able to stop you.

    And you display why rights are an obsolete and incompetent concept. You claim that the 'right' to free speech is a claim right because it claims freedom from the aggression of others. What about those others? Wouldn't they need to claim the right to stop you? What makes one a right and the other a default, and how do you discern the difference?

    The very phrase 'obligates them not to' is incoherent. Do you not mean 'forbids them from'? The natural state of things would have you speaking freely and according to the other laws, such as those forbidding coercion, assault or theft, anyone who took action to prevent you from speaking would be breaking one of those laws. You do not need to claim the 'right to free speech' with these laws in place, it is granted by default.

    Yes, it did. You still have to go to the school and take tests so that they can see if you learned to do it the way that they teach you to, even if you are home schooled. If you did not, then they teach you or make your parents teach you how they do it before you are allowed to leave. This is true in every subject. Children are not given liberties with what methods they learn or who assesses them. Why do you think that they make you write out your work on nearly every math test? And that is just the logical subject. There is a significant difference between being ahead of the game and playing a different game. And you are not allowed to do the latter.

    This is the part that really pisses me off. I cannot remember what I had written, and now I have writer's block. Mind blank. lost all will to write. What I would not give you have my post back...

    Yes, it does. Children naturally trust the parties that raise them. Children do not think to look for bad things that their parents did, and if they ask their parents and their parents tell them their side of it, they will not be likely to look for more. In the same way, children who are raised in church are conditioned to avoid 'atheist propaganda', and they are less likely to trust people who are not from their religion, even inside their family. If a child asks you a question and you answer, even if you tell them a lie, their curiosity will be sated. Children are not likely to question what you say unless you explicitly tell them that they should into it on their own or they were told something else by another adult before you. What do you know about behavioral conditioning? Let me give you an example that goes beyond simply telling a child something or answering a question. If you teach a child what they should think and rate their intelligence and overall success based on how well they can recite what you said, they are even less likely to question it.

    You might say that tests exist to mark a child's progress, or that they serve as an incentive to progress, and that is exactly what I mean. By being taught from a young age and having their worth rated based on how much they focus on what they are taught, a child's mind is forced to conclude that what they are learning is the truth, and that anything contradicting it is what needs to be questioned, rather than what they were taught. So they will not purposefully look for opposing ideas, and they will even defend what they were taught in the face of them. This quote summarizes it quite well.

    "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

    This is especially true of children, and even truer of children who are raised in institutions where everyone believes what they are learning. Schooling itself is bad enough, but mandatory schooling such that you learn the same things no matter who teaches it to you? I do not approve by any means.

    Duties do not exist aside from your paper. The only responsibility that any person has is to avoid attacking someone else. There you go!

    On the bold... Then drop it. Individual freedom beats out your subjective appreciation every time.

    More or less, actually. The only story I can think of in which the Indians were put in a good light is when the settlers first came to the states. They teach the rest as if the Indians deserved it because they broke the treaty. As an example of the severity of this indoctrination, think of the phrase 'Indian giving'. I means giving something away and then taking it back without asking, and is a derogatory phrase that I learned to use as a child when other children did it. The bias has been so internalized that I did not think about how racist it was until somewhat recently. They do not have to tell you fuzzy stories to make you believe in manifest destiny.

    The question is not so much about how biased accounts of history are as how easy it is to get a hold of each side of it. Mandatory education borders on censorship because everything but the state approved curriculum does not sell. If you enforce a monopoly on education, as they have, then those other biased accounts do not get told to children while they are young, and it is only the state-approved ideas that condition them while they are impressionable. And conditioned children do not want to go out and relearn history. So no one buys books with alternate accounts, and as a result publishers do not publish books with alternate accounts, and home schoolers cannot buy books with alternate accounts to teach their children even if they wanted to.

    Mandatory and standardized education causes a lot of problems, this not the least of them.

    I guess it kind of is, isn't it?

    It should work as great incentive, so why wouldn't we do that instead? The only reason I can think of is because it is less profitable for the police.

    You were right to assume that, it is true of most parents. If you believe that is the case, then why do you propose a legal obligation on top of it?

    It is more like you are being annoying. I argue ethics and present a reasoned position, and recite your nation's position. I would rather you counter my reasoning on your own terms.
     
  11. KeybladeSpirit [ENvTuber] [pngTuber]

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    I'd say it's the people who are telling him to believe whatever his parents and teachers are telling him, namely, his parents and teachers. If he wants to know the truth but isn't allowed to use the resources available to him (parents often don't let their kids on the internet, watch certain TV channels, or watch TV at a certain time of day, etc.), then how is he to know that the truth hasn't simply changed? Retcon after retcon, he'll either keep believing them on the logic that they're his parents and teachers and thus would never lie to him, or he'll simply regard them as liars and look for a way around whatever rules are keeping him from knowing the truth. What's more likely in the thought process of an 8-9 year old?

    You have a point, but what caused you believe otherwise? Was it simply your own logical conclusion that God doesn't exist or did someone tell you and you just happened to believe that person before your catechism classes?

    As a matter of fact, you're not so far off. Our state approved curriculum is set up such that we only learned the bad things AFTER we've been conditioned to believe that our country is always good, no matter what. So by the time we learn that America isn't all sunshine and rainbows, the toxic sludge just looks like what had to be done so we could get the sunshine and rainbows.
     
  12. Patman Bof

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    Well, I don' t know about books, but I did watch this American movie in a theater when I was a kid :

    [video=youtube;2VbYZDohsHk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VbYZDohsHk[/video]

    Because "most" doesn' t mean "every" ?

    Well I can' t have a definitive opinion on anything and everything now, can I ? If I don' t directly answer you it probably means I neither agree nor disagree.
     
  13. Makaze Some kind of mercenary

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    Heh, I remember this. My parents did not let me watch it.

    Comedic portrayals do not count as historic accounts... Though this particular historic fact is not so much hidden as ignored. After all, we are not telling the Indian's story. We are telling our own. Far more unsettling is the lack of knowledge about the Civil War.

    And why do you believe that because most people act a certain way, others should be forced to as well?

    Then it would be best if you did not respond at all. It will save me the annoyance of seeing you pretend to have a position.
     
  14. Patman Bof

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    It was my own logical conclusion. Not that God doesn't exist, rather that he probably doesn' t, and more importantly that I don' t really care either way.

    It' s not about forcing everyone to act the same, it' s about protecting those few kids that have uncaring parents. Why are we even arguing this ? I have a hard time following you since a few posts, you would think of preventive laws about road behavior but do nothing about uncaring parents or beaten spouses ?

    I didn' t know a trivia was the international code for "pretense of a position". You argued that mental coercion is much more acceptable than physical coercion. I neither agree nor disagree. Both are coercion and both can have benign or severe consequences, which I thought was already established as my opinion in my previous post and I saw little point in repeating myself just because you more or less did.
     
  15. Makaze Some kind of mercenary

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    You can somehow protect someone from another's lack of care? When did this happen? That is my point, that there is no such thing as protecting someone from another's inaction.

    We have deviated from the main point. My threads tend to do that, as I argue each point that you bring up. If you compare the road laws to education, I begin to argue education. That is how we got here.

    Incorrect. I argued that refusing to interact with others is never coercive and so is better than physical coercion. You might as well tell me that if I see a starving man and tell him that he can have my food if he does something for me, I am coercing him into doing it. That is not the case. Being an opportunist still leaves the man at complete liberty to choose what to do. Actual or physical coercion does not leave him with a choice regardless of whether he wants the food or not.
     
  16. Guardian Soul hella sad & hella rad

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    I completely forgot that in some parts of this debate, we were talking about France. My bad >_>

    That was my mistake. Simple misinterpretation on my part. The right to free speech is a liberty right.

    Well you're wrong since a privelege, liberty right, is the inverse of a claim right. You are given the legal liberty right to drive after a certain age because the legal claim right that doesn't allow to drive under a certain age doesn't restrict you anymore. For example, a person has a liberty right to walk down a sidewalk and can decide freely whether or not to do so, since there is no obligation either to do so or to refrain from doing so. But pedestrians may have an obligation not to walk on certain lands, such as other people's private property, to which those other people have a claim right. So a person's liberty right of walking extends precisely to the point where another's claim right limits his or her freedom. Capiche?

    And children and teenagers tend to be rebellious too, don't you agree? I almost never took things at face value when I was child and almost always asked "Why? Why? Why?" until I either got an answer or until that person got angry and gave up, forcing me to look for the answer myself. Take religion for example. When I was a little kid, I was always sent to Sunday School and told that it was a great place for me to learn yet I was always bored and uninterested in whatever was taught. And as I got older, I even started to outright disagree with the things that were taught to me. So I picked up the Bible and started reading things for myself and started to make my own interpretation of things.

    I don't think you understand the meaning the word of unalienable. An unalienable right is a right that can't be taken away from you. It isn't the same as a liberal right. In France, education is an unalienable right so their only option is to give you an education since not giving you one would be taking away your right to education which they can't do since it's unalienable.

    I'm sorry for your loss.

    But a third party can obviously see that she isn't mentally fit nor competent to make her own decision. Anyone who had full information of the situation and sufficient mental faculties would never choose to continue being beaten. Thus the law would be justified in helping her, no?

    http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/aggression

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggression

    You say that when most people say "right", they mean a "right to liberty". Wouldn't you be infringing on a person's liberty by manipulating them instead of letting them form their own decision? Aren't you causing both physical and mental harm to a child by restraining food from him for not meeting your standards and thus showing aggression? You advocate the use of ostracism if a child doesn't meet your standards which can cause both mental and emotional harm. How is this peaceful?

    I was using the US as an example since the person I was responding to is from the US. I would just cause confusion if I were to just use the laws from my country. I don't know everything about American law but I know enough to get a point across.

    Both of the statements are coherent and mean practically the same thing from what I understand of the English language. Although I agree that "forbid them from" rolls off the tongue better but that is beside the point.

    The point of writing out your work in math tests is to show that you do know how to get from point A to point B. If how you got from point A to point B makes sense then good for you, you got the question right! Most of the time in unbiased subjects such as math, there is usually only one way to solve a problem and most of the time, most of the ways shown to solve a problem are given to you. Only one time have I not been given all the possible ways to solve a problem. I believe it was either in math or physics. My teacher showed us the 'hard' way to solve an equation and then after testing us, he showed us the "easy" method for us to use on things such as exams given to us by the state. Why didn't he just teach us the "easy" method? Because he wanted us to fully understand how the subject worked. We may not be given liberties as to what methods we learn but most of the time, the methods learned are the only ones.

    But this only applies to biased subjects. Let me use Brazil's core curriculum as an example. In Brazil, you are required to learn Portuguese, a foreign language (usually English, also Spanish and very rarely French today), History, Geography, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Philosophy and Sociology. History and Philosophy are the only ones capable of being biased while the rest are unbiased. There's no possible way of teaching math in a biased way, is there? One plus one will always equal two and the same applies to languages such Portuguese and English where I can't change the way the grammar works and so on forth for the Science classes, Geography and Sociology.

    The latter actually. People are naturally attracted to freedom, that is, having as many options open to you as possible. When an option is closed off, your instinct is to open it back up. In general, this effect is greatly lessened if a (good, valid and fair) reason is given for not doing something, since then it feels like you have the option but are choosing not to, whereas if you are forbidden without an explanation it feels like you are being restricted.This effect is strongest in teenagers because they are just starting to realize freedoms but don't have any boundaries set yet.

    I could put a link here saying "Do not click this link. Do not click. Ever. At all. You won’t like it if you do." And sure enough, people would click it.

    Weren't historical accounts of the Civil War made by the losers? I'm just asking to be sure. And what lack of knowledge about the Civil War do you mean? I'm curious.

    For the same reason you believe that nobody should infringe on your liberty, no?

    Ouch, that stings and it's not even directed at me.

    Yet it is another's inaction that is causing harm in cases such as child negligence for example.

    It's what makes them so fun to be honest.
     
  17. Patman Bof

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    Ow come on, that was merely a peaceful attempt at infringing my freedom to free speech. Or maddening me, I haven' t picked one yet. ^^
     
  18. Makaze Some kind of mercenary

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    I hope it does not happen again.

    Wrong. They cannot objectively judge her competence. It is subjective. How do you tell the difference between a masochist and a fearful person? If you can objectively determine which she is, then you have avoided the question of "Is there a problem?" She has made a decision if her motivation is out of fear. That decision is that she does not wish to be harmed. She has expressed a wish for help by being afraid. On the other side, if you believe that she is taking it out of love, then she clearly values the relationship over her own well-being. She is at liberty to place those values, not the state.

    The question of whether she is afraid or loving is a tricky one, but I hold that she may be incompetent if her only reason for not asking for help is a fear of retribution. It is never incompetent to love, however, no matter what you or the state might say.

    This appears to help me, specifically the part you bolded. Violation by force. See 'force' there. It is important.

    While I agree that an individual may feel aggression without acting on it, very few would say that refusing to associate with someone you dislike is an aggressive action. As such, manipulation without violating liberty is not an aggressive action, whatever you are feeling. It does not force the other person to do what you want. It forces them to do what you want if they want you to help them back.

    For the purposes of this discussion, an initiation of aggression is an act based on it. An act of war between two individuals. Because I hold that individuals are sovereign, it should be somewhat easy to understand this idea. What qualifies as an initiation of aggression for a nation? An act of war, I would think. Or isn't that the case? The same is true of individuals as defined by the non-aggression principle. You have not initiated aggression simply by being frustrated with, angry with, or hating someone else. Nor have you initiated aggression by refusing to associate with them based on your anger. Is a neutral or independent nation initiating aggression against the Unites States (as an example) by not trading with it? No. Rather, the United States would be initiating aggression when it decided to occupy or otherwise threaten it until it agrees to trade. Only when you act to violate another person or their property do you 'initiate aggression'.

    How is manipulating them not letting them form their own decision? Do I, by having food, infringe on the liberty of a starving man? Does he then have to ask me for the food, am I forcing him to? By your logic, I should just give it to him as soon as I come to know he is starving whether he asks or not, else I would be infringing on his liberty. And if he asks and I do not give it to him, I am still infringing on his liberty. Is it not my food to do with what I wish? Could the man not still walk away without any added restraint? Well?

    Every single action or inaction will harm another. This is no fault of yours. Whether you act or you do not, you affect those who see you do it. It is up to those who see it to be harmed by it, they are responsible for their own reactions. It is no fault of yours if they choose to watch when you have not tied them to the spot, and it is even more a choice of theirs to be bothered when they could have walked away. The fact that every action affects those who know of it is no basis for enforcement. Otherwise, every single action or inaction would be either banned or compulsory.

    Opportunism should be no crime, my friend.

    However, KS and I are both arguing on the concept of law itself and not any individual country's law. Unless I mistook him.

    You see, we argue for what is ethically sound, and not what is lawful (what is currently executed by law). You, of course, would need to specify a country, as you are defending the current law rather than ethics. Arguing from completely different bases.

    You failed to acknowledge anything but the opening sentences about semantics. Please read the section you quoted again. I will post it here for convenience.

    "The natural state of things would have you speaking freely and according to the other laws, such as those forbidding coercion, assault or theft, anyone who took action to prevent you from speaking would be breaking one of those laws. You do not need to claim the 'right to free speech' with these laws in place, it is granted by default."

    It is to show that you know how to get from point A to point B in the way they told you. Certainly, my point is that someone does not need to learn how to write out problems to arrive at the answers. And yet if they cannot, their grades will go down the drain. It is not simply about methods. It is about not being taught the same way of doing things. A child who is not taught to write out his work and yet still arrives at the correct answers will be at a disadvantage according to the state.

    What I hold is that you do not need a state's approval to be educated.

    Another subject that works a bit better for this is science. Both fundamentalist (six day) creationism and biological evolution or determinism have the fatal flaw of not being able to cite a first cause, and they both have limited evidence of what happened along the way. Depending on how you view the evidence, you can arrive at the same answer, that being now, and have completely different methods for getting here. In the same way, it was customary to believe that the earth was at the center of the solar system, and it did work if you added enough formulas. Both the multitude of theorems that explained how the earth was the center and the few that explained how the sun was worked out. Doing things the hard way, as you said, is not allowed by the state, and a different method for reaching our current position is neither taught nor tested on, while there is a state-approved method that is.

    Actually, the sun and earth model is a great example for this entire debate. I hold that the laws we have now are pile upon pile of corrective laws (because the original laws did not cover enough cases) and in others violence at the hand of a mob (motioning for new laws, voting on issues based on majority opinion regardless of any notion of what the purpose of law is), the circles within circles of the earth-centered model. And the non-aggression principle, or a liberty based system rather than a rights based one is more like the sun based model. You will never need to vote if you base your laws around the non-aggression principle. You will never have a change in laws, and you will never need them. The non-aggression principle is either put into law or it is not. Go with the simplest answer; the formula that reaches the answer with the fewest entities (here, laws). That is Occam's razor, is it not?

    And we already went into history. What of English? Children in the US may prefer to learn the way the UK writes and speaks English. However, they will not be tested on that English, and will likely be rated as lower in intelligence if they answer as they were taught.

    I will say it again; mandatory and standardized education creates many problems, this not the least of them.

    I rather disagree on Sociology, that can be extremely biased. Granted, I have not been in a class, so I cannot say what your country teaches, but... Do you not see the incentive for misleading information in that regard? When it comes to society, a government will always teach you that governments are necessary for society to run. Always. There will be absolutely no exceptions. They will defame any society that tries to run without a government, point to violent uprisings alone and call the mafia and gang-infested turf war that follows anarchism, leaving you with either your government or... Mafia and gang-infested turf wars. Isn't that what you have been raised to believe? Isn't that more or less what you believe now?

    Do not get me started about state-approved Sociology. By definition, a state approves of societies that it runs rather than ones that it does not. If it approves of its own society, as it must, then it will teach you with bias in that direction. Please.

    What is good, valid and fair is subjective. So such a claim is completely invalid as a basis for law. I believe the only true question that people wish to ask in response to any given enforcement is, "Who is the victim? Can you show them to me?" No victim, no crime. Simple enough, right? An objective standard that does not depend on what people believe sounds more or less good and fair. You can make just about anything sound good and fair... But what are you judging that against? Judging the law against itself is out, so...

    What? No. Are you kidding me? The South had its rights to freedom of press, habeas corpus, trials by jury and so on effectively taken away after the North 'saved' the Union. It took years before the South was free of an oppressive thumb for fear of more rebellion after they had tried to tear the nation apart based on a state's right to secede. The North occupied it for many years following, as any nation does in a nation it has overcome. They most certainly did not write the history that we have today, and they were not allowed to distribute it until far later if they did write it.

    I will ask you a question in turn. What do you know about Abraham Lincoln? What do you think he thought of the war, and do you think he wanted to the free slaves?

    For those who believe that slaves were freed, here is a bit about vagrancy laws in the United States.

    The bold part sounds rather like the slavery they had before, does it not? Because the 'freed' slaves had a choice between working and prison, their employers could pay them whatever they wanted and it would still be better than prison. You could probably blame stereotypes regarding poverty and the existence of largely black slums on this economic principle. How long was it before they instituted a minimum wage for all races, I wonder?

    Given that the start date of the laws is not stated, I will use the end of the war.

    This vagrancy law was in place from the 1860s-1960s, and its effects can still be seen today with how many random arrests are made based on race.

    The average US citizen does not know any of this, and would tell you that Abraham Lincoln wanted to and did free the slaves as soon as the war ended.

    Do you see what I mean now?

    No. It is not an objective fact that they should not, that is a personal preference of mine. It is, however, an objective fact that everyone will suffer less by their own definitions if infringing on liberty is against policy. Most people believe that they personally would be better off if they were given true liberty. The subjective profits of each individual will go up, and as such the profits of all will. Whether the profits of all matter or not is of course subjective, but the logic is hard to refute.

    Please keep in mind that I have lost my posts several times now. I would rather not waste my time.

    Under what circumstance is that coherent? There are at least one million children in the world who are starving. I am not feeding them, and yet I probably could if I bothered to. Am I somehow obligated to feed them as well? At what point does negligence stop and being neutral begin? Why should I accept your claim to a difference? The law is no basis for deference on ethical reasoning.

    I am glad you enjoy it.
     
  19. Guardian Soul hella sad & hella rad

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    You basically stated what I was trying to get across. It's nice to see that we came to the same conclusion. Although I personally think that a woman who was beaten constantly by her husband, only to continue her relationship with him out of "love" isn't mentally competent.

    In the post that I had replied to, KS was specifically talking about France's unalienable right to education. So yes, he is talking about an individual country's laws.

    Oh sorry. I don't usually reply to parts of a post in order so I can forget about a part without noticing every now and then. I think I probably didn't answer to that part because I agreed with it. I don't see anything wrong with it and it doesn't go against anything that I've said so I see no need to counter it or discuss it.

    Does what I say go through one ear and right out the other? While there is some truth in your statement, there is also truth in mine. You may not need to learn how to write out problems to arrive at the answers but it helps, no? I know that I'm capable of solving complex math problems in my head but I write them out anyway because most of the time, I won't make a mistake then. A child who is able to arrive at the correct answers without writing out his work should theortically be able to write his work out because in the end, he knows the methods.

    I did not say that at all. I said that my teacher gave me the easy way to solve a problem on state exams because of mostly the time restraints that are given to us. While I have until the next class to finish my homework, I only have until the afternoon to finish an exam.

    And anything can be made the center of anything with the right numbers. That doesn't make it right. You're right that we can arrive at the same answer with completely different methods. The reason we usually stick with the 'state-approved' one is because of Occam's razor. It gets you from A to B with only what is needed. The rest is superfluous. Most theories have a foundation of underlying premises, all of which need to be true for the theory itself to be true. Occam's Razor suggests believing the theory with the fewest underlying premises that are still true. That isn't to say that Occam's Razor is always right though. Newtonian physics are simpler then modern theories and were sufficient to take man to the Moon, but Newton simply could not explain all the data eventually collected. This required men like Einstein to formulate more complex theories, particularly the outrageous chaos we call "particle physics" which seem to function according to competely different rules. Many scientists have spent decades trying to come up with some Grand Unified Theory that explains why physics works the way it does because Occam's razor would suggest such and so far...they haven't succeeded. So far, Occam's Razor isn't always right, and the universe simply functions according to completely different sets of physical rules, for no good reason whatsoever.

    I don't understand why people use Occam's razor in debates and think that it adds weight to their particular argument. This usage is entirely fallacious as the Razor does nothing more than recommend the hypothesis that makes the fewest new assumptions. It is not a magical tool that points to the right answer. In a lab it will be used hundreds or thousands of times, with each and every one of the chosen hypothesis being rigorously tested, before a correct answer is found. In a debate the Razor will be used once and will, invariably, choose the user's answer as the 'right' one. Funny that. Remember that Occam's Razor is a guideline, not a rule. In the end, nothing actually dictates that a explanation must be simple at all.

    I think you mean "However, they will not be tested on that English, and will likely be rated as lower in intelligence if they don't answer as they were taught."

    You realize that the differences between British and American English are restricted largely to minor spelling differences and lexical and grammatical difference. The differences between them are so small that an American could pick up British English easily with their own knowledge of American English and vice versa. Plus the state doesn't control how a language is used and its only responsiblity is teach you the correct way to use the language of your country.

    I included sociology in the list of unbiased subject because it is the scientific study of society which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity. Although I can see how it could be manipulated by the state.

    Did you completely ignore what that part of the post was replying to? It had no relation to law at all so I have no clue why you're bringing it up in the first place. There is no need for me to respond to this post.

    Yet there are plenty of pro-Confederate accounts. This of course started with the fact that many Southern generals and politicians were forced into inactivity after losing the war and thus had more time to devote to writing their memoirs. Confederate president Jefferson Davis wrote a multi-volume apologia of his government while his victorious opposite number Abraham Lincoln for obvious reasons never got around to writing anything.

    Pretty cool guy who doesn't afraid of anything.

    I don't know everything about Lincoln but I do know that for today's standards, while it is hard to admit for some, he was basically a racist. He considered blacks to be inferior to whites. He was also willing at least in principle to allow slavery to continue, believing that it would end on its own. Early in his Presidency he even said that he would back any solution to the slavery question that preserved the Union, whether it was freeing all the slaves, freeing none of them, or freeing some and leaving others enslaved. But as the conflict began to rise between the Union and the Confederate, his anti-slavery views became stronger over time. Guess where I learned this? 10th grade history class O:

    The average US citizen is still able to find out. The Civil Rights Movement was a big part of American history, no? It's hard to find an American who doesn't know about it. It's in our history textbooks and the amount of accounts on it are huge. To find out what people were fighting for so adamantly and why isn't hard and I'm pretty sure a lot of people are curious as to why.

    They're great for exercising the brain.

    I know that I didn't reply to everything. If I didn't counter something, then it most likely means that I didn't have a counter for it at the moment but I still wanted to respond to the things that I did have a counter for or wanted to discuss.
     
  20. Patman Bof

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    Also, as standardized as public schools programs may appear to be, in the end these programs are relayed by teachers. I' ve had dozens of teachers, each having their own take on the program and their own teaching methods. Those programs are more like guidelines, leaving room for improvisation to teachers (and sometimes teachers outright refuse to follow them to the letter, or even to follow them at all). In my country school programs aren' t mere orders given by the state, teachers, recruiters and parents can influence them too.

    Keeping this in mind, even if homeschooling parents didn' t have an obligation to follow any state-approved guidelines they would still deliver a much more leading and one-minded education. One of my philosophy teachers never explained anything twice, he figured out it was often useless. If someone didn' t understand what he just said then he simply asked another pupil who did understand to explain it with his own words, which nearly always worked.

    I doubt it. I don' t see how we could not end up with pile upon pile of corrective laws. A while back we discussed about non-agressive ways to deal with people breaking speed limits. Cars and roads haven' t always existed, and I' m pretty certain new ways to maim or kill ourselves and new ways to objectively measure harm or potentially harmful behavior will be invented eventually.

    Once you have a culprit how do you punish him ?
    With imprisonment ? Where ? How long ? Does his nationality matters ?
    With fines ? How much is one dollar worth those days ? Are you even still using dollars ?