Quote from Jay13x »I do not, but if other forum users have good ideas, please let us know. In all honesty, other gaming sites don't have debate sections like this one for some of the same reasons I mentioned above.Quote from Kryptnyt »It was nice to have a place to put potentially vitriolic thoughts where intelligent people could sift through it for you. I was actually trying to find the words for such a thing. It's not something I can do on Dotabuff, haha... Can you suggest any similar forums with a decent mix of political backgrounds like this one has?
The irony is that the reason you guys are closing this debate site is what has made it so much better than most debate sites that I've perused: our moderators are rarely asleep at the wheel, which says a lot about Blinking Spirit and his various helpers through the years I've been here. They put in the work to keep this forum going, and more importantly, were able to discern infractions from bias triggers quite well. There probably are other decent online debate forums, but I've yet to find one better than this one. I'll be on the lookout.
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Once you start thinking of the result we care about it, the result we'd like to achieve for how society operates, it becomes pretty clear why a god isn't necessary to determine that murder is bad. Murdering other people for no reason, or just for kicks, has some pretty obvious negative consequences for the people affected.
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Where do governments come from? Everywhere in the world started with anarchy, with no governments around. People then gathered power and declared themselves kings, or any other form of government you dislike. Obviously it becomes rather hard to just "compete" with these existing powerhouses that you think are abusing their power, or else you wouldn't be on here complaining about it.
Your system obviously doesn't work. It doesn't function the way you say it does. We have several thousand years of human history as proof.
Governments are not some magical curse cast by a witch that can be broken by blog posts. It's just people in power forcing other people to do what they want. If I and a group of people in an anarchist society decided to pool our money to pay for a private security force, then decided we would force you to pay for it as well and would send our private security force after you if you didn't... That's police. That's taxes. What you gonna do about it?
Your kneejerk reaction is to say, "Well I'll make my security force and it'll be so much better and bigger and cooler than yours." Okay then, do it. Do it right now, in the real world. What's stopping you?
The whole world started with absolute freedom and without any governments buddy. Where did they come from? Clearly absolute freedom DOES produce abusive power structures despite what you claim. So how did that happen?
Rich Guy: "I'm a rich guy with a gigantic private security force and I've conquered or purchased huge amounts of land."
Libertarian: "No problem."
Rich Guy: "I'm also going to label myself a King."
Libertarian: "No! Now you're suddenly a government and that's bad!"
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That's like asking, "Why eat a cake when it's fresh when it's just going to go stale eventually?"
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*People choose to create governments of their own will*. You can establish a starting circumstance, but anarchy by definition refuses to enforce laws. People given perfect freedom will choose to form an organized structure, either for defense or for power or both. That *always* happens, throughout all of human history across the entire world. You can claim it won't happen, but you're denying the evidence of the entire world - which always show governments arising in every society that starts in anarchy.
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Your central error is assuming that "governments" are some mystical non-human-produced force. Rich dudes amassing power and conquering people is how you get kings in the first place, which is a system of government. We started with anarchy everywhere, and now there are governments basically everywhere. You suggest that people will come together in organized resistance against people who are abusing their powers. You're correct, that's what governments are. That's what a police force is.
Clearly every group of people starts in anarchy and eventually results in governments forming. If you think this is a bad thing, then you have to admit anarchies DO tend towards bad things. You're caught in a contradiction.
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Fortunately, there is no compelling reason to believe that an afterlife exists. All our experience indicates that a person's mind and identity is dependent on and determined by their physical brain. You don't exist before your brain develops. Taking brain damage can radically change a personality. You can lose a limb and keep on living, but destroy the brain and it's all gone.
We're pretty clearly software and the brains are our hardware. Destroy the hard drive of a computer and ask if the data that lived on it goes to an afterlife. Obviously there's no reason to think so, and it would invalidate our understanding of how things work.
This shouldn't be troubling, unless you live in terror of your memories of how it felt to not exist for billions and billions of years. I personally don't remember that experience as being too troubling.
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This is a new level of facepalm.
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Is that true Typho0nn? In that case, if I choose to violently resist your argument and am killed because of it - you're threatening my disagreement with DEATH?! That makes you sound like quite the big brother police state dictator. Sure you want to stick to that argument?