holy fucking shit

[BigBallinStalin]

When you keep saying "our," you aggregate individual means of expression, so the outcome is not exactly what each member of the group wants--nor does it guarantee an average if the process is skewed in some way (e.g. the modern democratic process with its rent-seeking of private actors and public/govt. actors).

The same could be said of market equilibrium or social order.

There's a difference between voluntary exchange (market interactions) and involuntary exchange (government interactions). The point being that these claims can't be true:

"These institutions are the physical expression of our inner being, the average of our wants. A government does not impose itself on the people; people impose the government on the people. "

Governments obviously impose themselves on others

Their legitimacy to impose themselves is given by their citizens. If they are roundly rejected by their citizens then they can be overthrown, as has happened throughout history and is in the process of happening in various states around the world today. Governments rule with the consent of those they rule.

How?

If it's "consent depends on revolution," then suppose you impose a government over me. You cut off my arms and legs, so I can't effectively resist you. Then you proclaim, "ah, I govern this person because he has consented!" It doesn't make sense if the costs of resisting are very high. Besides, there's easier ways to get actual consent--e.g. "do you agree? here's a contract, please sign if you do."

[mrswdk]

When you keep saying "our," you aggregate individual means of expression, so the outcome is not exactly what each member of the group wants--nor does it guarantee an average if the process is skewed in some way (e.g. the modern democratic process with its rent-seeking of private actors and public/govt. actors).

The same could be said of market equilibrium or social order.

There's a difference between voluntary exchange (market interactions) and involuntary exchange (government interactions). The point being that these claims can't be true:

"These institutions are the physical expression of our inner being, the average of our wants. A government does not impose itself on the people; people impose the government on the people. "

The complaints you originally made - that the outcome is not exactly what everyone wants, that the system can become skewed - are just as applicable to societies and markets as they are to systems of government. If you dislike governance for those reasons, you must also dislike societies and markets for those reasons. If you oppose government on those grounds but do not oppose markets and societies on those grounds then that's a pretty big double standard.

Governments obviously impose themselves on others

Their legitimacy to impose themselves is given by their citizens. If they are roundly rejected by their citizens then they can be overthrown, as has happened throughout history and is in the process of happening in various states around the world today. Governments rule with the consent of those they rule.

How?

If it's "consent depends on revolution," then suppose you impose a government over me. You cut off my arms and legs, so I can't effectively resist you. Then you proclaim, "ah, I govern this person because he has consented!" It doesn't make sense if the costs of resisting are very high. Besides, there's easier ways to get actual consent--e.g. "do you agree? here's a contract, please sign if you do."

If enough people want the government to be removed then it will not be able to cling to power. Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, Congo, Mexico etc. have all lost control of the regions within their borders that contain high levels of opposition to the central administration. People who feel their life would be better off with their current government removed will seek that government's removal. If enough people feel the same way as them, then together they will facilitate change. A community gets a government that, on the balance, it accepts.

[BigBallinStalin]

When you keep saying "our," you aggregate individual means of expression, so the outcome is not exactly what each member of the group wants--nor does it guarantee an average if the process is skewed in some way (e.g. the modern democratic process with its rent-seeking of private actors and public/govt. actors).

The same could be said of market equilibrium or social order.

There's a difference between voluntary exchange (market interactions) and involuntary exchange (government interactions). The point being that these claims can't be true:

"These institutions are the physical expression of our inner being, the average of our wants. A government does not impose itself on the people; people impose the government on the people. "

The complaints you originally made - that the outcome is not exactly what everyone wants, that the system can become skewed - are just as applicable to societies and markets as they are to systems of government. If you dislike that aspect of governance, you must also dislike that aspect of other forms of order. If you oppose government on those grounds but do not oppose markets on those grounds then you have to consider why you are applying this double standard.

Okay, do you agree or disagree that "These institutions are the physical expression of our inner being, the average of our wants. A government does not impose itself on the people; people impose the government on the people"?

Governments obviously impose themselves on others

Their legitimacy to impose themselves is given by their citizens. If they are roundly rejected by their citizens then they can be overthrown, as has happened throughout history and is in the process of happening in various states around the world today. Governments rule with the consent of those they rule.

How?

If it's "consent depends on revolution," then suppose you impose a government over me. You cut off my arms and legs, so I can't effectively resist you. Then you proclaim, "ah, I govern this person because he has consented!" It doesn't make sense if the costs of resisting are very high. Besides, there's easier ways to get actual consent--e.g. "do you agree? here's a contract, please sign if you do."

If enough people want the government to be removed then it will not be able to cling to power. Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, Congo, Mexico etc. have all lost control of the regions within their borders that contain high levels of opposition to the central administration. People who feel their life would be better off with their current government removed will seek that government's removal. If enough people feel the same way as them, then together they will facilitate change. A nation gets a government that, on the balance, it accepts.

What's your criterion for legitimacy? The relative inability to attack and successfully remove a government?

How does overcoming some price of removing a government equal consent?

[mrswdk]

Yes, I agree with those statements.

A government's 'legitimacy' is popular acceptance of its authority.

Not sure what you mean by that third question.

And NOW. A question for you: what's your favorite Rage Against The Machine album?

[BigBallinStalin]

Yes, I agree with those statements.

A government's 'legitimacy' is popular acceptance of its authority.

Not sure what you mean by that third question.

And NOW. A question for you: what's your favorite Rage Against The Machine album?

None. It's childish ranting.

Consent is about clear agreement. It's codified by signing a contract. There's no signed contract with the state, so if consent is the basis for legitimacy, then no state is legitimate (so far).

[mrswdk]

Consent is about clear agreement. It's codified by signing a contract.

lol. At which point during foreplay do you drop that bombshell?

[nietzsche]

Exactly. Foreplay describes this exchange between mrs. wdk and bbs. I've been expecting the hardcore stuff for days now.

[Army of GOD]

is the best btw

[BigBallinStalin]

Consent is about clear agreement. It's codified by signing a contract.

lol. At which point during foreplay do you drop that bombshell?

I make all my sex victims sign a contract (Haha, oops!). Sure, there's the informal; however, there's neither formal nor informal consent between government and subject.

[mrswdk]

If you vote in an election then you are recognizing the legitimacy of the system. If you didn't think the system was legitimate, you would not participate. And, for the reasons I have previously given, the continued leadership of a government shows that on aggregate there is consent, even if in some places it is only informal.

What if I refused to sign your sex contract? Would you dare throw caution to the wind?!?!

[Gillipig]

If you vote in an election then you are recognizing the legitimacy of the system. If you didn't think the system was legitimate, you would not participate. And, for the reasons I have previously given, the continued leadership of a government shows that on aggregate there is consent, even if in some places it is only informal.

What if I refused to sign your sex contract? Would you dare throw caution to the wind?!?!

This is almost right, just change "would" to "should" because a lot of people who don't support the system vote anyway. If you feel the election is a choice between pest and cholera, then you really should not grace the election with your vote because that makes it seem like you approve of it.

[BigBallinStalin]

If you vote in an election then you are recognizing the legitimacy of the system. If you didn't think the system was legitimate, you would not participate. And, for the reasons I have previously given, the continued leadership of a government shows that on aggregate there is consent, even if in some places it is only informal.

What if I refused to sign your sex contract? Would you dare throw caution to the wind?!?!

Suppose some society establishes a political system where they get to vote on raping someone. That someone votes, "No, thanks," and everyone else votes, "Yes." Since an election system exists, and since the victim allegedly recognizes the legitimacy of this system, the victim has consented to being raped.

Does that conclusion sound odd to you?

[mrswdk]

It sounds unusual, but it's not my job to tell another country how to conduct itself.

[Gillipig]

If you vote in an election then you are recognizing the legitimacy of the system. If you didn't think the system was legitimate, you would not participate. And, for the reasons I have previously given, the continued leadership of a government shows that on aggregate there is consent, even if in some places it is only informal.

What if I refused to sign your sex contract? Would you dare throw caution to the wind?!?!

Suppose some society establishes a political system where they get to vote on raping someone. That someone votes, "No, thanks," and everyone else votes, "Yes." Since an election system exists, and since the victim allegedly recognizes the legitimacy of this system, the victim has consented to being raped.

Does that conclusion sound odd to you?

If you live in a country where almost everyone actively want to see others get raped then you're in deep shit regardless of if there's a vote or not. A society like that would obviously made rape legal in the first place so this vote you're talking about would never have taken place, and if everyone appearantly thinks rape is a good idea then we must also assume that most people who gets raped would previously have voted in favour of others being raped, so you could really say they had it coming.
i.e the problem here is not the voting system but rather that everyone is fucked up in the head, if everyone is fucked up in the head no system will work, it would have very little to do with the system itself.
There's a saying, "you can't fix stupid", well that applies perfectly here, you paint up a scenario where everyone are idiots and ask mrswdk to create a sytem of law that will fix their stupidity. Of course that's unfair of you to ask as you cannot fix their stupidity either.

[BigBallinStalin]

It sounds unusual, but it's not my job to tell another country how to conduct itself.

Obviously, consent isn't given due to participating in elections. It's not about telling whoever what they can and can't do; it's about recognizing if consent is given or not.

[BigBallinStalin]

If you vote in an election then you are recognizing the legitimacy of the system. If you didn't think the system was legitimate, you would not participate. And, for the reasons I have previously given, the continued leadership of a government shows that on aggregate there is consent, even if in some places it is only informal.

What if I refused to sign your sex contract? Would you dare throw caution to the wind?!?!

Suppose some society establishes a political system where they get to vote on raping someone. That someone votes, "No, thanks," and everyone else votes, "Yes." Since an election system exists, and since the victim allegedly recognizes the legitimacy of this system, the victim has consented to being raped.

Does that conclusion sound odd to you?

If you live in a country where almost everyone actively want to see others get raped then you're in deep shit regardless of if there's a vote or not. A society like that would obviously made rape legal in the first place so this vote you're talking about would never have taken place, and if everyone appearantly thinks rape is a good idea then we must also assume that most people who gets raped would previously have voted in favour of others being raped, so you could really say they had it coming.
i.e the problem here is not the voting system but rather that everyone is fucked up in the head, if everyone is fucked up in the head no system will work, it would have very little to do with the system itself.
There's a saying, "you can't fix stupid", well that applies perfectly here, you paint up a scenario where everyone are idiots and ask mrswdk to create a sytem of law that will fix their stupidity. Of course that's unfair of you to ask as you cannot fix their stupidity either.

You don't like thought experiments, do you?

[mrswdk]

It sounds unusual, but it's not my job to tell another country how to conduct itself.

Obviously, consent isn't given due to participating in elections. It's not about telling whoever what they can and can't do; it's about recognizing if consent is given or not.

She is recognising the legitimacy of the vote by participating in it. If you and your girlfriend are hanging out with three of your friends and those friends say 'We're going to vote on gang banging your girlfriend. Us three vote yes, what do you two say?', would you say 'I vote no' or would you say 'f*ck off'?

[Gillipig]

If you vote in an election then you are recognizing the legitimacy of the system. If you didn't think the system was legitimate, you would not participate. And, for the reasons I have previously given, the continued leadership of a government shows that on aggregate there is consent, even if in some places it is only informal.

What if I refused to sign your sex contract? Would you dare throw caution to the wind?!?!

Suppose some society establishes a political system where they get to vote on raping someone. That someone votes, "No, thanks," and everyone else votes, "Yes." Since an election system exists, and since the victim allegedly recognizes the legitimacy of this system, the victim has consented to being raped.

Does that conclusion sound odd to you?

If you live in a country where almost everyone actively want to see others get raped then you're in deep shit regardless of if there's a vote or not. A society like that would obviously made rape legal in the first place so this vote you're talking about would never have taken place, and if everyone appearantly thinks rape is a good idea then we must also assume that most people who gets raped would previously have voted in favour of others being raped, so you could really say they had it coming.
i.e the problem here is not the voting system but rather that everyone is fucked up in the head, if everyone is fucked up in the head no system will work, it would have very little to do with the system itself.
There's a saying, "you can't fix stupid", well that applies perfectly here, you paint up a scenario where everyone are idiots and ask mrswdk to create a sytem of law that will fix their stupidity. Of course that's unfair of you to ask as you cannot fix their stupidity either.

You don't like thought experiments, do you?

Not when the thought experiment is useless meaning it and can't be used to relate to reality in any way or form. A flawed thought experiment is about as useful as a knife without an edge.

[BigBallinStalin]

It sounds unusual, but it's not my job to tell another country how to conduct itself.

Obviously, consent isn't given due to participating in elections. It's not about telling whoever what they can and can't do; it's about recognizing if consent is given or not.

She is recognising the legitimacy of the vote by participating in it. If you and your girlfriend are hanging out with three of your friends and those friends say 'We're going to vote on gang banging your girlfriend. Us three vote yes, what do you two say?', would you say 'I vote no' or would you say 'f*ck off'?

"f*ck off," but even if I voted, "no," it doesn't always follow that I'm giving consent nor viewing the majority rule as legitimate. In some cases, your conclusion follows, and in other cases it doesn't follow because it depends on how the constitutional rules were agreed upon. For example:

Let's say you, me, AoG, and Mets find ourselves marooned on an island because we were getting too rowdy on the pirate ship. In order to alleviate conflict, we decide to create method for coordinating our activities (a.k.a. government). What will the rules of decision-making be? After much bickering and arguing, we unanimously agree to a constitution that requires 3/4 approval for the very important decisions (all other decisions like picking your nose are left to your discretion). We also decide on other rules like (a) respecting one's property, (b) contracts--whether informal or formal--are totes cool.

We've all given consent and agreed to abide by the judgments of the majority in the case of emergencies. That's the 'social contract', but the members of the society have explicitly agreed to it, so it's a real contract---not that imaginary social contract. In the real world, this simple example doesn't hold because (a) I didn't agree to any contract with the existing government, and (b) if the government reneges on the 'social contract' (US Constitution), the 'social contract' becomes null-and-void, but it's not like government will allow me to seek legal redress. Governments in the real world--even with elections--don't receive your consent nor require your consent because government forces you to abide. Citizens rationalize their victimization by believing that they've magically agreed to this deal, thus the state has become 'legitimate'.


Something of a tangent with the hope of clarifying all of this:
Thinking of governments as Mafia organizations better approximates the reality of governments. Thinking of governments as this Ideal Type (as in the desert island type) is a way of rationalizing oppression by (incompletely) reasoning that you somehow have given consent. This kind of rationalization is where 'legitimacy' reaffirms the general population's normative judgments about government (especially democratic government).

It's not like people are born understanding economics, so it's no surprise when their opinions about immigration, international trade, markets, and government diverge from economists. As people grow within states, they essentially become indoctrinated, so it takes a lot of thought and emotional anguish to overcome the 'preconceived' beliefs. The basic problem is that there's no such thing as the Ideal Government; it's a unicorn, and many have yet to realize that (nor wish to because it's costly to do so).

[BigBallinStalin]

If you vote in an election then you are recognizing the legitimacy of the system. If you didn't think the system was legitimate, you would not participate. And, for the reasons I have previously given, the continued leadership of a government shows that on aggregate there is consent, even if in some places it is only informal.

What if I refused to sign your sex contract? Would you dare throw caution to the wind?!?!

Suppose some society establishes a political system where they get to vote on raping someone. That someone votes, "No, thanks," and everyone else votes, "Yes." Since an election system exists, and since the victim allegedly recognizes the legitimacy of this system, the victim has consented to being raped.

Does that conclusion sound odd to you?

If you live in a country where almost everyone actively want to see others get raped then you're in deep shit regardless of if there's a vote or not. A society like that would obviously made rape legal in the first place so this vote you're talking about would never have taken place, and if everyone appearantly thinks rape is a good idea then we must also assume that most people who gets raped would previously have voted in favour of others being raped, so you could really say they had it coming.
i.e the problem here is not the voting system but rather that everyone is fucked up in the head, if everyone is fucked up in the head no system will work, it would have very little to do with the system itself.
There's a saying, "you can't fix stupid", well that applies perfectly here, you paint up a scenario where everyone are idiots and ask mrswdk to create a sytem of law that will fix their stupidity. Of course that's unfair of you to ask as you cannot fix their stupidity either.

You don't like thought experiments, do you?

Not when the thought experiment is useless meaning it and can't be used to relate to reality in any way or form. A flawed thought experiment is about as useful as a knife without an edge.

It helps to understand the simple case first, then build up from there.

For example, change "rape" to "extortion"--I mean "taxation," and you get closer to real-world governments. You'd say something like "that's a fucked up society; something's wrong with those people." I agree.

[mrswdk]

We've been through this before, I seem to remember. Were you forced to get a job or did you choose to? Even if you remain within US borders, there are lifestyles available to you that don't require you to get a job and thus would not require you to pay tax. At the very least you could save up some money, buy a small plot of land and then live on it as a subsistence farmer. At the other end of the scale, you could just become a vagrant. Instead, however, you have decided that you'd rather seek paid employment and enjoy the lifestyle that come with that, and one of the conditions of doing that is that you pay tax on your income.

[natty dread]

"Soul" is a pointless construct. Like most religious ideas, it just ends up into an endlessly recursive tought-wank...

However, I find the concept of a collective consciousness fascinating on an intellectual level. It's at least something that could conceivably exist: If we accept that our brains are just biological computers, and consider human consciousness as the software running on those computers, then it could conceivably be that the unconscious communication between all these consciousnesses facilitates a sort of network, a computing grid of human consciousness.

In this scenario, one could think of the cessation of thought in the same way as one would think of the decay of the body: nothing is really lost - the matter that your body is formed of is still there, it just changes form, the pattern collapses and the particles that form your body scatter into the universe. It could also be that your consciousness simply merges back into the collective. To continue the analogy with computers, when you close a program, the resources allocated to it get released back to the operating system...

Or it could all be a huge load of bullshit, but still, I think it's at least a cool idea to consider.

What is the difference between your understanding of the concept of soul and your theoretical concept of consciousness as the software?

There's a difference. "Soul" as the term is usually used in religious contexts seems to refer something external, some kind of homunculus or "driver" that sits inside your brain, operating it as something external to your body.

That's not where I'm going at, at all.

What I'm getting at is that your "self", your individual consciousness, definitely dies. There's no "external self" that would somehow survive the death of your brain. But if we consider the idea of the collective consciousness, then it's analoguous to the matter in your body "returning" back to the universe (although technically, it was never apart from it). Only the pattern collapses, but the matter still remains, in another form.

In other words, given collective consciousness, your "self" dies, but that doesn't necessarily mean that your consciousness doesn't continue existing in some form. Probably not in any way that would be meaningful form our current perspective though.

Anyway, this is all just conjecture and "what if" and has no relevance to any real world stuff. Probably I've just done too much acid. Just disregard my ramblings.

[BigBallinStalin]

We've been through this before, I seem to remember. Were you forced to get a job or did you choose to? Even if you remain within US borders, there are lifestyles available to you that don't require you to get a job and thus would not require you to pay tax. At the very least you could save up some money, buy a small plot of land and then live on it as a subsistence farmer. At the other end of the scale, you could just become a vagrant. Instead, however, you have decided that you'd rather seek paid employment and enjoy the lifestyle that come with that, and one of the conditions of doing that is that you pay tax on your income.

None of that changes the nature of the exchange between a citizen and the government in terms of taxation.

[mrswdk]

Yup. It's the same thing as a customer being billed by their internet provider.

[BigBallinStalin]

Yup. It's the same thing as a customer being billed by their internet provider.

The IPS has IRS agents and the guys with guns who'll threaten to kill you if you don't pay your taxes?