Samson Corwell

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  1. Rand's thing was "non-initiation of force" and Rothbard's NAP defined "aggression" as initiation of force. If someone puts their money down for a second and I snatch it when they aren't looking, then how do I run afoul of either of those two? Here are other things that don't involve force initiation: Hacking. Trespass. Dumping garbage onto someone else's property. Breach of contract. Murdering someone by dropping poison into their drink when they aren't looking. Not paying for the food you eat at a restaurant. An honest reading of "initiation of force" would permit the things listed above. It could even allow taxation if the tax collectors were surreptitious about it! (They come in the middle of the night and take a few dollars out of your safe.) So why does anyone continue to use that word choice? Other movements don't try to act like all of their positions can be spun from a single sentence. It would be better to accept that trying to do it that way leaves a lot of openings through which undesirable policies can slip through.
  2. Look at what I get when I search for Palestine on Google Maps. And look at the non-historical maps that I get when I perform an image search on Google. No specificity required when I use Palestine to refer to Gaza and the West Bank.
  3. Tony, you're declaring perfectly normal parlance to have a coded meaning. Palestine today is comprised of Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli settlements are occuring in that collection of territory (at least in one of those three regions). That's common meaning, so I can expect to not have to bend to pedantic people about it.
  4. Not to bump, this is just a test. Testing. Testing. Testing. Testing.
  5. I imagine that she was refering to Israel's settlements. It might be appropriate to call that an occupation (which is not to say that Israel should "sit back and take it" when it comes to missile attacks that penetrate into non-settlement portions of Israel and so forth). This shouldn't mean anything. "You don't understand economics" is the biggest gripe that I have with common political discourse. Economics is a science and as such it has nothing to say regarding normative questions. She can be a socialist and believe that the labor theory of value is wrong. Someone could be themselves a libertarian and think that the labor theory of value is correct. Well, she went on to win the Democratic primary and eventually the general election. I've been paying attention to her. She's an interesting person me to follow in national politics. (I feel like I need to clarify—though I wish I didn't feel like I need to—that none of the above is to say what positions of hers that I favor, if any, or which statements of hers I concur with, if any.)
  6. Are we no longer able to create a post using markup directly?
  7. Unaware of what? The "centrist" drones that chant "Both sides are equally bad."? Everyone knows that they exist.
  8. Very strange comment. Economics is supposed to be value-free and laissez-faire constitutes public policy.
  9. You've come the closest. First, why would you say that the farmer has only partial ownership of the crops instead of saying that he has full ownership of the crops whereas he has no ownership of the scraps? When I used the term "scraps" in the post, I did not mean it in the sense of "scraps of food", it's just my term for what the Bible verse was referring to. The passage in question talked about gleanings of the crops. Second, I am of the belief that "positive rights" are not coherent if we are using the term to refer to a vague cosmic command. However, many of things called "positive rights" can be reformulated as "negative rights". Instead of a cosmic duty that is silent on who it is to be enforced against, in the example that I use, the gleanings of the crops—what I called "scraps"—do not belong to the farmer. He has no negative right in/to them. The negative right belongs to the poor person who comes along and collects them. Remember, I'm not trying to endorse the Bible's command, only to make a point about the negative/positive rights dichotomy. I hope I was able to clarify what I meant.
  10. I'm pleasantly surprised, Michael. That definition is many times better than what I've seen up until now. Previous definitions I've encountered were vague, kinda cloudy-feeling stuff about "socialists", "multiculturalism", "Islam", and hodge podge of other things. I saw the title of this thread and was wondering just what I was going to see. Also, no welcome back? Nothing like "Hey, Samson. Haven't seen you around as of late. How have you been?"?
  11. I'd dispute the notion we were freest in the 1800s.
  12. I was just reading an article on the Microsoft anti-trust case written in 2006 by an Objectivist (maybe I'm a masochist) by the name of Edwin A. Locke (I looked him up and he's the O'ist who thinks PETA wants humans to suffer). So, in this article he brought up the oft-repeated libertarian talking point that "true" monopolies can't exist without government intervention. Now, the word monopoly may have originally meant policy that prohibited anyone other than one particular entity from selling an item, but 100+ years ago it took on the meaning it now has today. It's as if some pedantic handy-man went about correcting people who said they were "screwed" that "screwing" is something that is done with a screwdrive to a screw. Or if a prudish farmer went around screaming at people that an "ass" is a donkey and not a person's fanny.
  13. I just revisited this video. It's one of your best {insert word that encompasses debates, essays, lectures, and so on here}. One the comments on it declared that Friedman crushed you. Being too stupid to know how stupid oneself is comes to mind. Jeez, some of the more economistic types are really deluded. I think they are the movement's biggest problem. Keep up the good work, George. You're among the best.