David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

I don't think the NAP is a good idea.

> Either way, these are just ideas, and then, as you pointed out, there's the real world.

I'm curious. You keep saying that I'm preventing you from getting somewhere useful by throwing up these "complications". But if you're not headed to the real world, what the fuck is the point here?

I used to practice eschatology. That's the study of the Book of Revelation in order to figure out details of how the world will end. You know why I stopped? Because it was pointless. Its real world applications were meaningless. After years of that, I felt like my English teacher had written "So what?" on the last page of my essay.

Tell me that your beliefs are useful for something other than mental masturbation. Explain how, if the real world is too complicated for them. You've had months of practice; surely you have an answer to this one. Surely you have a reason, since you're all about the reasoning.

> there really are countless different "lifeboat scenarios" or edge cases you could keep coming up with and bringing up

They're not edge cases. As you pointed out in your counter-questions, the scenarios are extremely common. "Covet a woman", "Touch a person", "Enter a Wal-mart", "Open a door". These aren't lifeboat scenarios. I wasn't offering any gotcha questions, despite your persecution complex. Plenty of people carry guns with the intent of using them in anticipated scenarios, too.

> Then you threw various unrelated questions at me, and I responded to them, trying to get you to see that the answers to most of your questions depend on various circumstances etc that aren't known.

It's almost as if knowing these various circumstances and stipulating the relevant response to them is important.

> You can figure out the correct answers to all of your questions with a moment's thought, at least hopefully.

> Reasoning is important.

The problem is that people disagree. I don't know if you've noticed, but I don't agree with you. Reasoning is not a function with a single output for any given input. Reasoning yields different conclusions for different people. When someone says "read the Bible", one person will say "Clearly Jesus wants us to help poor people" while another will say "We should kill all the heathens".

> Does anyone have the right to take someone else's property by force?

Yes. It's called privatization. Or maybe colonization. Depends on the century.

> For example, everyone knows that punching someone in the face for no reason is wrong, and that it constitutes violence.

But what was the intent? Why does intent matter if I'm the one asking questions, but it doesn't matter if you're the one asking questions? This seems like an awfully contrived scenario; no one punches people in the face for no reason.

> It's a very simple, but extremely effective rule, and one that actually does fit the way we naturally behave and the kind of things we naturally consider immoral.

Is this the part where you tell me that I should go on a paleo diet in order to get in touch with my inner manliness so that women are more attracted to me? Or is it the part where we hold hands and commune with the Earth Goddess in order to better understand why the bear is chasing us after getting poked with a stick?

Seriously, though, every time you say "it's obvious" or "it's natural", I keep thinking of a Bible salesman who told me that I just needed to read the Bible, try a little prayer, and the facts of Jesus' sacrifice for me would be readily apparent because it says so right there in the Psalms. After all, any reasonable person would look around and conclude that there's an intelligent designer which is obviously the Christian God who instills morality in our hearts as part of our creation in His image. Thus any stirrings to war we feel in our hearts is also from God so killing people is actually quite justified as long as you don't feel bad over the deaths of heathens who never intended to know Him.

Secondly, why do you assume that the only two institutions in the world are the government and the market? That itself is emblematic of the erosion of the social fabric in America.

Heightened expectations of intelligence, probably. I wasn't surprised that it was the case, but I used to be a libertarian programmer until I got an education, so unfair advantage there.

Because the other kind of awareness you ought to build is, "I wish I could do something about this." Eventually, you'll run across someone who says, "I know what to do, but I need manpower." You talk to that person, you figure out how sane his plan is and how much gamble you're willing to put down on it, and hopefully change happens.