[wittysense]

Planned Economies, Post-scarcity anarchism.

Alain Badiou, Murray Bookchin, Noam Chomsky. The only reason we're all seemingly fucked is because the U.S. DID a decent enough job to lock down knowledge and disseminate according to their time tables.

I'm not going to answer your thought experiment. I've been through it too many times. Go read HLA Hart. Go read Donald Dworkin. If all you can think in terms of is coercion, you are NOT in a good spot intellectually to deal with these problems. "So what if I hold a gun to you?" is so demonstrably non-critical, HLA Hart had to write a book "The Concept of Law" in order to demolish it with VERY, VERY, VERY boring to read, DRY analytic philosophizing.

Stop feigning dissent, and actually start reading.

[oleganza]

You seem to hide an answer to my simple question into "go read these sophisticated books".

Again: if I simply don't agree with you and don't give you a penny from my peaceful income, will you point a gun at my head? Will you endorse someone to do that? Yes or no?

[wittysense]

??? I wouldn't. But clearly these governments will.

We're getting muddled here. Stop asking "me" as if you are asking me, this user: wittysense. Whatever I personally would do is irrelevant, and the answer to your questions are NOT easy. They don't come easy. You don't just get the answer to these questions in passing in line at a coffeeshop, dude. And no one is calling these books with positive, pompous, bourgeoisie descriptors.

I said DRY. BORING. ANALYTIC. BORING. I didn't have fun reading this crock of shit, and I don't think I'm cooling on behalf of it. But talking about "what if they point a gun at me" premisses is so uncritically off the mark, and absolutely not at all even the beginning stages of how these people are thinking at an international or federal level.

The only way we can avoid fucking it up is by giving ourselves the opportunity to understand the conceptual schemes they are using. They use these schemes to produce vagueness and unclarity which results in MISMANAGED human lives (people shooting people because they follow orders) which results in SOMETIMES carnage and death. Yes, sometimes people just mug you. Shit happens. We're talking about GLOBAL if not effing INTERGALACTIC surveillance.

THIS is not a "shit happens" scenario. We need CRITICAL THINKING. May I say "critical thinking" without seemingly advancing some posh 1% tone? Everyone agrees with critical thinking. I am here trying to point you in the direction of those people who have given us critical thought on concepts like "amorality" and by analogy "alegality."

I'm [not] going to teach it to you. I had to read it myself, and I am quite confident I am not WAY of the mark. I can say "I have a degree in philosophy from a top school" but that won't convince anyone of my points. So I'm not arguing in that way. I'm telling you that "I have a degree in philosophy" at least affords me the telling of which authors one should read. Have SOME faith in that. Or just bloody a Google search. "Error Theory" "amorality" -- my typings here are DENSE with connected keywords.

"What if the President points a gun at you?" is the obvious response. It is RADICALLY different from "What if Joe points a gun at you?" You're asking the latter. I'm underlining the former. Why are they different? Why is one representative of this debate and the other not?

[EDIT: Some of my typos are so bloody self-defeating.]

[kshatrea]

I am totally going to have to ask you to define "we". All your talk, your speech here has an ambiguity based on your definition: "we" are all not the same. For e.g. your last question seems rhetorical; you feel that Joe and the President are not different. "My" answer is simply this: I can kill Joe in self-defense if he threatens my life; I cannot kill the President. Try to kill a cop in a threatening situation and you know the police force will come down on you harder. There's anecdotal evidence to prove it. Are you going to deny that?

Oleganza's question is simple: If I disagree with your morality or legal system, what would you do about it? If your answer is to say that I shouldn't ask you but read a book, then your value to me in a mutual free society is quite low and of course I don't intend to live at your expense. Therefore, I reject your "we" and "everyone" since those words imply consent, which I most certainly have not given.