Why was thiw removed? Jews in the attic alright...
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The Jews in the Attic Test
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Re: The Jews in the Attic Test
#32Why was thiw removed? Jews in the attic alright...
It hasn't been 'removed'. Users flagged it.
Re: The Jews in the Attic Test
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It tells you exactly what the commenter is saying. This is a really silly 'test'. I think you and the other commenter are seriously missing the point.
There are a lot of people who live in places that are essentially lawless, but that experience isn't freedom like extreme libertarians might believe. It's total fear that at any moment 20 people in shitty Jeeps can drive up and threaten to cut off your hands unless you kill your parents and join their gang. This is what we refer to as the state of nature. At some point, people get pretty tired of it, so they form the…
> The rule of law is a bedrock principle of human civilization
The article is not advocating abandoning the rule of law. It is advocating judging laws based on a particular criterion. The fact that many existing laws do not meet that criterion does not mean no laws do, nor does it mean the only alternative is to abandon laws altogether.
For example, consider the law against murder. Does it meet the criterion? Of course. Having a law against murder does not make it easier for the government to persecute the innocent.
Re: The Jews in the Attic Test
#34This is a powerful argument for limited government and decentralization, requiring a simple premise that I think most people can agree with: That the protection and concealing of Jews and other groups under Nazi Germany was a just and desirable act. Especially with the rhetoric today about creeping fascism, we should recognize that all authorities have the potential to become corrupt and oppressive. We should ensure…
What happens if the Army is told to kill everyone of a particular race? If maniacs take power, we’re deeply screwed. Our efforts should go toward making sure that doesn’t happen.
Absolutely agreed, and I think decentralization is a part of that. Instead of a single point of failure, spreading power between multiple groups reduces the potential damage and the incentive to corrupt a system.
Consider a treaty organization organized against a hypothetical enemy. If the adversary succeeds in corrupting and neutralizing one of the member states, that is significantly less damaging than if it were a centralized command that was corrupted.
It increases the cost dramatically to neutralize the treaty organization, and the threat to the system is easily and publicly recognized. As opposed to the slow and eventually catastrophic corruption of a centralized command.
Re: The Jews in the Attic Test
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The government also has a monopoly on law enforcement, so if "Jews in the Attic" are victim of a crime how can they seek justice? They can't. So by the proposed test, a government monopoly on law enforcement is a bad thing and should be opposed. If you ask "how can it be possible not to have a government monopoly on law enforcement?", note that historically that has been more often the norm than the system we have…
>See, for example, David Friedman's The Machinery Of Freedom for a number of historical case studies. Is it possible to give a reasonable summary of the thesis of this book? >No, it's a reason, as above, to not have the government have a monopoly on law enforcement. What is the definition of 'government' here? Also, whatever that definition is, it doesn't need a monopoly on law enforcement, but only some of the autho…
> Is it possible to give a reasonable summary of the thesis of this book?
I'm not sure, but I'll try: the main thesis is that many, if not most, if not all, of the functions we currently associate with conventional governments do not actually need to be provided by conventional governments; they can also be provided by private entities in a free market. Most of the book is trying to imagine and develop in detail how key functions, such as police, fire, and courts, might be provided in a system where conventional governments either did not exist or did not provide those functions.
> What is the definition of 'government' here? Also, whatever that definition is, it doesn't need a monopoly on law enforcement, but only some of the authority over it.
Different sources will use different definitions, which might lead to different answers to this. :-)
A good starting point might be Friedman's definition: a government is an entity which everyone agrees is allowed to do things that, if any other entity did them, would be considered crimes. A common example is taxation: the government is allowed to take money from you whether you agree to give it or not, which would be theft if any other entity did it.
A government under this definition might not need to have a monopoly on law enforcement, but it would need to have a monopoly on any actions required for law enforcement that would be crimes if another entity did them. (One common point of debate among different strains of libertarians is whether the set of such actions required for law enforcement is non-empty.)
Re: The Jews in the Attic Test
#36“Will this law make it difficult or impossible to protect innocent life from a government intent on their imprisonment or death?” This makes no sense to me. A tyrannical government can change the law. If there’s a law that will make it easier for them to commit atrocities, they can make it happen. Enacting that law now , or refusing to do so, won’t make a bit of difference. Laws should be evaluated on their merits as…
> A tyrannical government can change the law
The article is not talking only about tyrannical governments, or laws passed by such governments. The test the article is proposing is meant to apply to any law passed by any government. The example of Jews in the Attic is just an illustration; it's used because one of the article's points is that failing to apply the test early on, when your government is not tyrannical but is just asking for a little bit more power to "fix" some problem, is how you ultimately get to a government that is tyrannical enough to either just ignore laws or pass them by fiat to suit itself.
Re: The Jews in the Attic Test
#37I've seen arguments like this before. It boils down to "the second amendment gives me the right to own/buy/manufacture any weapon I need to defend myself against tyranny." The problem is to maintain the private citizen/armed forces of a cou try balance of power is ludicrous. What exactly do you need to buy to defend yourself against a troop of Navy Seals? OK, training and gear. For a start: Teflon coated bullets, hig…
> It boils down to "the second amendment gives me the right to own/buy/manufacture any weapon I need to defend myself against tyranny."
At the time the amendment was passed, privately owned warships, comparable in power to those available to governments, were common. In fact the use of such warships as privateers was a key component of the United States' strategy in both the War of Independence and the War of 1812.
The current situation, where governments have a level of force available to them that is much, much greater than that available to any private entity, is a large change from the situation throughout most of human history. That might indeed make it a good idea to talk about a further amendment to balance the right to keep and bear arms with the realities of current weaponry; but unless and until that happens, the second amendment says what it says and you can't just ignore that because you don't like the implications.
Re: The Jews in the Attic Test
#38I've seen arguments like this before. It boils down to "the second amendment gives me the right to own/buy/manufacture any weapon I need to defend myself against tyranny." The problem is to maintain the private citizen/armed forces of a cou try balance of power is ludicrous. What exactly do you need to buy to defend yourself against a troop of Navy Seals? OK, training and gear. For a start: Teflon coated bullets, hig…
There are 300M guns in the USA spread across 3.8M m^2.
1M soldiers (O(current armed forces)), armed with all the equipment they have (unless they decide to nuke the whole country) could not take down a rebel force spread across most of the US (concentrated away from the coasts, of course ;-).
It's not just theoretical.
Re: The Jews in the Attic Test
#39I've seen arguments like this before. It boils down to "the second amendment gives me the right to own/buy/manufacture any weapon I need to defend myself against tyranny." The problem is to maintain the private citizen/armed forces of a cou try balance of power is ludicrous. What exactly do you need to buy to defend yourself against a troop of Navy Seals? OK, training and gear. For a start: Teflon coated bullets, hig…
Of course an average civilian wont be able to match the training and resources of a soldier. The idea is to raise the cost of engaging the civilian populace. No government wants to rule over piles of ruble and streets full of corpses.
Occupation is already expensive and essentially temporary. Look at the situation in Afghanistan, the US invades and occupies the country. As they begin to withdraw, territory is taken back by the Taliban and warlords, they simply bide their time and wait for an opportunity to return.
An armed populace changes the math around occupation and engaging in violence. Of course this also leads to other oppressive mechanisms like propaganda and manufacturing concent, but at least people aren't dying. Its a step in the right direction.
Re: The Jews in the Attic Test
#40[flagged]
> So of course, with this uninfringed right, you have people killing their spouse, children accidentally killing their family members, people seeking help after a car crash getting shot [1], increased rates of suicide, etc. etc. That's not to mention otherwise lawful firearms owners shooting up schools, churches, and theaters.
You're leaving out some key factors.
First, firearm violence in the US (like violence in general) is highly locality dependent. It's not a coincidence that the incident you linked to of a woman getting shot while seeking help after a car accident happened in Detroit. Most of the US has a rate of violence (firearm and otherwise) than is at or below the norm in European countries like Switzerland. The statistics you see don't show this because they average over the entire country instead of separating out the particular areas where almost all of the violence actually happens.
Second, the localities in the US that have high rates of violence, including firearm violence, are all inner cities that have been run for decades by liberal governments that have imposed strict controls on firearm ownership. The rest of the US, which, as above, looks like Switzerland as far as violence is concerned, has much more reasonable policies on firearm ownership. So at least in the US, the data does not support the common claim that gun control reduces firearm violence; it supports the opposite claim.
Third, the mass shootings that make the news are most often not perpetrated using firearms that were legally owned by the shooters. Either they were legally owned by someone else and the shooter got access to them (illegally), or they were illegally obtained by the shooter in the first place.