#1 Conscription: good or bad?
Is it OK to put a gun to someones head and say, "you must serve"? And inevitably by extention from there, "You must run into that hail of bullets so we can take that hill, or I will shoot you."
#2 Almost as old as conscription is the practice of paying a fee in exchange for being exempted from conscription. Good or bad?
Is it ok to put a gun to someone's head and say "you must serve, or pay this fee so we can have some other poor slob serve..."
Since most here are liberal and most of the liberal crowd say "no" to these...
Most will see #1 as a pure issue of free will: one should be free to choose their own destiny. And by extention they probably see #2 in the same manner.
Now the big disconnect for a majority of people on earth comes here.
They think that conscription is not a simple extention of law, or put another way, they think that law is not another form of conscription.
If I say no to conscription, they pull the trigger and I'm dead. Wait, a few steps got left out: 1) I say "no", 2) when they come to take me away I say "no", 3) when they use force to take me I say "no" with equal but opposite force, 4) the mob which is government (AKA "the will of the people") always has a bigger gun, and, sooner or later, they shoot me.
But wait, I had the option of not resisting right? That makes it all OK? Then what was wrong with conscription again?
Here we come back to that disconnect. A few people didn't get lost by that last argument, but still all of these fail to see how "conscription is law".
The mob decides to put up signs that say "speed limit 35 mph". And they write it into law.
So now I'm driving down that road on a motorcycle going 36 mph. Far less of a threat to anyone than any car or truck, easier to stop or evade collision (the majority of the time). Nobody has been harmed.
A policeman sees me speeding, gets behind me and puts on his lights in his desire to pull me over. The idiot which is me in this example thinks, "no one has been harmed, no one is being harmed, I choose to be free", and continues on his way, minding his own business.
(Some of you will get lost in minutia: assume the cop yells out "pull over you're speeding" and I say, "so?")
Having not kow-towed to his authority, the cop gets more agressive in his attempts to pull me over and extract something from me for breaking the law.
I'll save some steps in description here and jump to the end: If I choose freedom, I will be shot/killed. Government is a gun to my head demanding my obedience in all things. Every law or government issued regulation is an ultimately explicit authority to kill anyone who refuses to comply.
Since a microsecond after the inseption of the concept of government/human law, the concept of "doing harm or having done harm" as "officially wrong" crossed over an invisible philosophical line past the hypothetical "potential to do harm" and slid home into "just do what we say. Or else".
Democrats have used the "for the greater good" argument as much or more than their slightly less "liberal" cohorts the Republicans. That is, they've got this "in the long run" philosophy which they apply to the rules and laws that they think are OK. When the short term harm of these rules or laws is pointed out they fall back on (their perceived) long term positive effects.
Is that not the same justification that the Nazi would make to his "final" solution to racial tentions? (People always leave out that the Nazi party was the socialist party.) Is that not the same justification the neocons make for war?
Disclaimer:
I told you I was an idiot, and I do think this is pointless and not appropriate to post here. I especially apologize for not talking about writing. (I have been castigating myself for that for several days.)
This post is clearly knee-jerk reactionary to the minority bashing I see happening here (i.e. this board is a majority liberal minded). In the same way that some of you would try to explain to the redneck how under the skin he is the same as the person of another color, I blame my inner quixote for trying to show how the liberal and the conservative are the same under the skin: two sides of the same person who will not let me be free.
Perhaps I should have just simply asked the question: Is freedom a myth?
Now back to our regularly scheduled (with a soft "sh") program.
Is it OK to put a gun to someones head and say, "you must serve"? And inevitably by extention from there, "You must run into that hail of bullets so we can take that hill, or I will shoot you."
#2 Almost as old as conscription is the practice of paying a fee in exchange for being exempted from conscription. Good or bad?
Is it ok to put a gun to someone's head and say "you must serve, or pay this fee so we can have some other poor slob serve..."
Since most here are liberal and most of the liberal crowd say "no" to these...
Most will see #1 as a pure issue of free will: one should be free to choose their own destiny. And by extention they probably see #2 in the same manner.
Now the big disconnect for a majority of people on earth comes here.
They think that conscription is not a simple extention of law, or put another way, they think that law is not another form of conscription.
If I say no to conscription, they pull the trigger and I'm dead. Wait, a few steps got left out: 1) I say "no", 2) when they come to take me away I say "no", 3) when they use force to take me I say "no" with equal but opposite force, 4) the mob which is government (AKA "the will of the people") always has a bigger gun, and, sooner or later, they shoot me.
But wait, I had the option of not resisting right? That makes it all OK? Then what was wrong with conscription again?
Here we come back to that disconnect. A few people didn't get lost by that last argument, but still all of these fail to see how "conscription is law".
The mob decides to put up signs that say "speed limit 35 mph". And they write it into law.
So now I'm driving down that road on a motorcycle going 36 mph. Far less of a threat to anyone than any car or truck, easier to stop or evade collision (the majority of the time). Nobody has been harmed.
A policeman sees me speeding, gets behind me and puts on his lights in his desire to pull me over. The idiot which is me in this example thinks, "no one has been harmed, no one is being harmed, I choose to be free", and continues on his way, minding his own business.
(Some of you will get lost in minutia: assume the cop yells out "pull over you're speeding" and I say, "so?")
Having not kow-towed to his authority, the cop gets more agressive in his attempts to pull me over and extract something from me for breaking the law.
I'll save some steps in description here and jump to the end: If I choose freedom, I will be shot/killed. Government is a gun to my head demanding my obedience in all things. Every law or government issued regulation is an ultimately explicit authority to kill anyone who refuses to comply.
Since a microsecond after the inseption of the concept of government/human law, the concept of "doing harm or having done harm" as "officially wrong" crossed over an invisible philosophical line past the hypothetical "potential to do harm" and slid home into "just do what we say. Or else".
Democrats have used the "for the greater good" argument as much or more than their slightly less "liberal" cohorts the Republicans. That is, they've got this "in the long run" philosophy which they apply to the rules and laws that they think are OK. When the short term harm of these rules or laws is pointed out they fall back on (their perceived) long term positive effects.
Is that not the same justification that the Nazi would make to his "final" solution to racial tentions? (People always leave out that the Nazi party was the socialist party.) Is that not the same justification the neocons make for war?
Disclaimer:
I told you I was an idiot, and I do think this is pointless and not appropriate to post here. I especially apologize for not talking about writing. (I have been castigating myself for that for several days.)
This post is clearly knee-jerk reactionary to the minority bashing I see happening here (i.e. this board is a majority liberal minded). In the same way that some of you would try to explain to the redneck how under the skin he is the same as the person of another color, I blame my inner quixote for trying to show how the liberal and the conservative are the same under the skin: two sides of the same person who will not let me be free.
Perhaps I should have just simply asked the question: Is freedom a myth?
Now back to our regularly scheduled (with a soft "sh") program.
