Obama: By the numbers

[Archaix]

if Obama is an epic failure then I challenge those of you who believe Obama is amongst the worst presidents in US history to debunk as many as these facts and figures as you possibly can:

http://pleasecutthecrap.typepad.com/...y-20-2009.html

That's an interesting site, I'll be sure to check it once in a while.

Pints With Plato:
You're obviously a thoughtful person and have refrained from attacking others, and so I'm going to assume you're mature and stable enough for me to jump straight to your problems: you oversimplify, you create false dichotomies, and you ignore a huge array of evidence.
The point of rhetoric is to translate complex situations into simple, intelligible sentences. What you have done is the opposite, by merely oversimplifying things. I've observed you doing this three times in the posts I looked at. In the first place, you claim that:

The state is an illegitimate entity. The state is force. It is cold, bare violence. It takes liberty, which is an objective, observable consequence of our humanity, and shreds it; it takes life, liberty and labor and rends it into nothingness, inevitably.

Liberty clearly is not and has never been “an objective, observable consequence of our humanity”. The fact that humans have since Neolithic times been involved in hierarchical political agglomerations (which have gotten bigger, more centralised and capable as the centuries have passed) is merely the easiest way to shoot that down. And what about your claim that liberty is 'objective'? It's at least partly a subjective concept, given that no one is truly liberated (defined perhaps as being cut free from the vaguest ties of government). Even the most remote tribal society today, which exist because governments have started to care about anthropology and the bad press that accompanies minority extinction. Does that mean 'liberty' means nothing? No, it means that all liberty has to be put in context: you cannot have total liberty. Even children know this simple, intelligible fact -yet your oversimplification cannot comprehend it in the slightest.
You do it a second time with:

Everything the state does is death and destruction. The state does not ask permission.

No, that is not everything it does, although it can do those things, and is liable do so independently if we do not have the necessary means of control our governments through democracy. That's an incredibly important lesson of history you missed because you were being hysterical.
As for the third, you wrote:

I recognize only the individual as a legitimate political unit, because any other political unit is obviously comprised of individuals. Individuals alone can "think", "feel", and "act". No one can think/feel/act for another individual - they may coerce, but they cannot perform the actual act... obviously.

Governments do not know our thoughts, but they can represent our thoughts, feelings and our desire to act collectively. Perhaps it doesn't because it is a minority government, or a rainbow coalition, or a divided government (what we'd call weak), or because the elections that appointed them are poorly designed, accentuate the victor-loser gap or corrupt (what we'd call unfair). Either way, elections and the governments thereby produced are judged against the gauge of true democracy.
Those governments that compare well are therefore entitled to be the organs of people, and can channel individual weakness into collective strength. Again, simple but lost in oversimpliciation.

A dichotomy is only as strong a rhetorical flourish as it is close to the facts. If it isn't, it is a false dichotomy. One example is:

Neither God nor nature - however you may see it - created the state. Man did, in an attempt to enslave other men to his whim.

You distinguish between two things: God/nature and man (ignoring women, but whatever...), with the intention of showing that the state is man-made, synthetic and inorganic. That's pointless, because man is actually a part of nature, and has 'human nature' – and religion is a natural instrument of that, too. As I've already pointed out, states were formed simply out of a natural tendency to work collectively rather than individually. A more true dichotomy would be between natural “statism” and unnatural, synthetic individualism.
Another implied dichotomy is between such a stringent separation of 'individual' and 'collective'. I know of no left-wing 'collectivists' (by which I mean people who thing the state should intervene) who think that the government should interfere with people's private lives and govern their every actions. It's more true again to say that left-wingers on the whole feel that the intervention should be appropriate.
As for your ignorance of a huge array of facts, I think I've proved pretty sufficiently throughout that you either haven't done the thinking and left it to the nefarious interests of others (probably the right wing carousel), or just haven't thought enough yet. I'll leave your thoughts on currency in that other thread to CR, since I've written about that already in Ask Youself[sic] This Question.

[9ball8]

...
Your whining confirms how completely fucking stupid society has become. You're wet behind the ears and need to get off mommy's tit, open your eyes, not stop sucking leftist cock.
...You wussy.

OK, Mr. Yankee, that was funny. Sounds like someone got on a transgender blow-up sex doll (do they even make those?) with a portion of the anatomy placed off-center. Great stuff, a wonderful cure for clearing debris from the eyes through laughter.
Seriously, though, this is DA. It's like a public park. One can get into a political discussion and have it driven over a cliff (by a hermaphrodite doll, no less) & have absolutely no right to complain. However, there are enuf conservatives (and liberals) who post links and argue coherently, to make it all worthwhile for me. While most of the insults are tiresome, a few posts (from pissed off lefties & righties) are golden. This one from DY was near the top of the chart.

[Pints with Plato]

Pints With Plato:
You're obviously a thoughtful person and have refrained from attacking others, and so I'm going to assume you're mature and stable enough for me to jump straight to your problems: you oversimplify, you create false dichotomies, and you ignore a huge array of evidence.

Thanks for your observations. The people I’ve “attacked” have been well-deserving of it, for they make light of human suffering. Perhaps I should be less direct in my comments, but I’ve run out of patience with people like them.

Second, I’ll have to ask you to forgive me, for I’m clearly not trained in rhetoric, and I’m not a “philosopher”, as such. I make no pretentions, either. That does not mean that I do not understand what I’m talking about. It just means that you and I have probably taken a few different classes, or that we’ve read different books. (I can tell you that I used to be of a very "leftist" persuation.)

I appreciate your thoughts regarding what my “problem” is. I’ll keep them in mind.

With respect, it seems to me that among your problems, you have a tendency to over-complicate what is simple and observable.

The point of rhetoric is to translate complex situations into simple, intelligible sentences. What you have done is the opposite, by merely oversimplifying things. I've observed you doing this three times in the posts I looked at. In the first place, you claim that:

Liberty clearly is not and has never been “an objective, observable consequence of our humanity”. The fact that humans have since Neolithic times been involved in hierarchical political agglomerations (which have gotten bigger, more centralised and capable as the centuries have passed) is merely the easiest way to shoot that down. And what about your claim that liberty is 'objective'? It's at least partly a subjective concept, given that no one is truly liberated (defined perhaps as being cut free from the vaguest ties of government). Even the most remote tribal society today, which exist because governments have started to care about anthropology and the bad press that accompanies minority extinction. Does that mean 'liberty' means nothing? No, it means that all liberty has to be put in context: you cannot have total liberty. Even children know this simple, intelligible fact -yet your oversimplification cannot comprehend it in the slightest.

That humans have tended toward “hierarchical political agglomerations” does not in any way obviate that individual sovereignty is an objective, observable consequence of our humanity. Not in the least.

It seems – and this may not be your intention, but it seems – that your argument is that because humans have been involved in hierarchical political agglomerations sine Neolithic times, that human beings are necessarily beholden to this lineage, and/or that human history begins with their involvement in hierarchical political agglomerations. What this has to do with the nature of human beings, I’m not really sure. Human beings might have been forced to live without using their arms since Neolithic times, but that would in no way obviate the fact that they have arms.

Individuals are observably, objectively sovereign. There is no collective humanity, and all examples such as states, races, clans, etc., are constructs. Please don’t misunderstand me – I have no objection to humans working together collectively. What I object to is the imposition of violence and coercion.

With respect, it seems to me that your logic is circular. “There have always been a state, therefore the state is a natural condition of humanity.” I disagree. The individual is sovereign because he owns his life – his thoughts, his acts, and his physical being are all clearly his; or at least rather apparently more his than anyone else’s.

You do it a second time with:

No, that is not everything it does, although it can do those things, and is liable do so independently if we do not have the necessary means of control our governments through democracy. That's an incredibly important lesson of history you missed because you were being hysterical.

Sorry. It wasn’t hysteria. It was a statement of fact. I was perfectly calm when I typed it.

Everything the state does is death and destruction because it does so by force. Some people may agree with what the state does, and some may not. The state does not ask the permission of the people who do not agree. The state says that it is acting on behalf of some power greater than the individual, whether that power is a monarch, an oligarchy, or ‘the people’. Yet a monarch is just a man, who observably has no greater “human-ness” than the rest of humans (he may be greater in some particular trait or another, yet on the whole he is still just a man); an oligarchy is just some small set of humans, and a democracy is just a larger set of humans.

From where, then, is this power to dictate derived?

As for the third, you wrote:

Governments do not know our thoughts, but they can represent our thoughts, feelings and our desire to act collectively. Perhaps it doesn't because it is a minority government, or a rainbow coalition, or a divided government (what we'd call weak), or because the elections that appointed them are poorly designed, accentuate the victor-loser gap or corrupt (what we'd call unfair). Either way, elections and the governments thereby produced are judged against the gauge of true democracy.
Those governments that compare well are therefore entitled to be the organs of people, and can channel individual weakness into collective strength. Again, simple but lost in oversimpliciation.

I hope I adequately addressed this, above.

You distinguish between two things: God/nature and man (ignoring women, but whatever...)

I would have hoped that it was apparent that I meant “mankind”, or “humanity”. :?:

As for your ignorance of a huge array of facts, I think I've proved pretty sufficiently throughout that you either haven't done the thinking and left it to the nefarious interests of others (probably the right wing carousel), or just haven't thought enough yet. I'll leave your thoughts on currency in that other thread to CR, since I've written about that already in Ask Youself[sic] This Question.

Again, I appreciate your thoughts. I’m sorry, whatever the “right wing carousel” is, I haven’t ridden upon it. I do not buy into the false notion of a left-right paradigm.

I’ve actually given this a fair amount of thought. I’m guessing you have as well. It seems that we’ve come to different conclusions.

You seem like an interesting member here; far better than most of whom I’ve encountered during my return to this site, however short-lived it may be. Perhaps if we continue this discussion, we both can leave the snark behind and try to respect the fact that we both have put a lot of thought into these things, and try to discuss – at least with each other – with a little respect.

Cheers.

[Archaix]

That humans have tended toward “hierarchical political agglomerations” does not in any way obviate that individual sovereignty is an objective, observable consequence of our humanity. Not in the least … It seems – and this may not be your intention, but it seems – that your argument is that because humans have been involved in hierarchical political agglomerations sine Neolithic times, that human beings are necessarily beholden to this lineage, and/or that human history begins with their involvement in hierarchical political agglomerations. What this has to do with the nature of human beings, I’m not really sure.

“Individual sovereignty”, or individualism, has never existed. From what we can discern from anthropology and prehistoric archaeology, people lived in quasi-egalitarian bands rather than on their own until the Neolithic farming revolution, where the production of food led to to things: increasing sedentarism with the rise of permanent settlements, and the appearance of an elite that managed food surpluses for storage or trade (read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel for an excellent description of this process, and how it is entirely natural)

Humanity wasn't any more 'pure' or perfect before the rise of these states, despite (admittedly left-wing) perceptions of the 'Noble Savage':

From Rousseau to the Thanksgiving editorialist of Chapter 1, many intellectuals have embraced the image of peaceful, egalitarian, and ecology-loving natives. But in the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies … What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong
…
The archaeologist Lawrence Keeley has summarized the proportion of male deaths caused by war in a number of societies for which data are available:
(bar graph)
Jivaro: 50-60%
Yanomamö (Shamatari): 40%
Mae Enga: 30-40%
Dugum Dani: 30%
Murngin: 30%
Yanomamö (Namowei): 20-30%
Huli: 20%
Gebusi: 10%
US and Europe 20th C.: 0-5%
The first eight bars, which range almost 10 percent to almost 60 percent, come from indigenous peoples in South America and New Guinea. The nearly invisible bar at the bottom represents the United States and Europe in the twentieth century and includes statistics from two world wars.

(Source: S Pinker, The Blank Slate: the modern denial of human nature, p56-57)

It makes more sense for everyone to be within one sort of state or another, not least because of limited and centralised use of force, but because of law and common justice, the ability to plan for the future, and the ability to work cooperatively. People work well together, in families, in companies, and in states. Yes, they are 'constructs', abstract ties rather than physical ones, but that isn't a good enough argument to sustain the assertion that they don't exist or aren't meaningful.

What I object to is the imposition of violence and coercion … With respect, it seems to me that your logic is circular. “There have always been a state, therefore the state is a natural condition of humanity.” I disagree. The individual is sovereign because he owns his life – his thoughts, his acts, and his physical being are all clearly his; or at least rather apparently more his than anyone else’s.

First of all, that's just not true. Your life is not really “sovereign” since your thoughts and acts are as much a reaction to other human and environmental stimuli as they are your own (see Sam Harris' work on “free will”), and your physical being was given to you by your parents and by the genetic legacy of your ancestors. Second, even if you had the right to call your thoughts, actions and past deeds your own, it's impractical to do so since people are shaped more by their environment and genetic predispositions than by their own will to accomplish things. You have the ability to write -that is not so much an option to people growing up in Chad, where I assume you don't hail from. If you live in a Western country, you currently have the benefit of knowing that if you are suddenly made redundant, you will not starve but will be supported by society. If you buy something, the law -set up by society- is on your side if it turns out to be other than what was advertised.

This is an accomplishment of collective endeavour and the state, not individualism.

Everything the state does is death and destruction because it does so by force. Some people may agree with what the state does, and some may not. The state does not ask the permission of the people who do not agree. The state says that it is acting on behalf of some power greater than the individual, whether that power is a monarch, an oligarchy, or ‘the people’. Yet a monarch is just a man, who observably has no greater “human-ness” than the rest of humans (he may be greater in some particular trait or another, yet on the whole he is still just a man); an oligarchy is just some small set of humans, and a democracy is just a larger set of humans.

You're comparing absolute monarchies with republics (and reducing republics to oligarchies) without even taking into consideration how these separate machines work. Or perhaps your argument is that they all operate in the same way -except they clearly don't.

And no, not everything the state does is death and destruction – that's just what you choose to focus on.

I hope I adequately addressed this, above.

With respect, you haven't. You're still clinging to the idea that all statehood is wrong, without any sound reason why except that individualism makes more sense to you. You have shown no interest in describing or explaining the apparatus of the state, or why democracy is apparently unable to protect the individual within a state framework.

I’m sorry, whatever the “right wing carousel” is, I haven’t ridden upon it. I do not buy into the false notion of a left-right paradigm.

You might not buy into it (like lily), but it's painfully real and growing wider by the day. Your radical, anarchic individualism fits in almost perfectly with the modern American right's vision of government small enough to 'drown in a bathtub', state intervention inherently wrong and American intervention abroad unnecessary. You're right wing whichever way you spin it.

[optimus]

Good God Damn Yankee sucks a bag of dicks. Jesus. One of the all-time worst posters on this forum. Top 2 or 3 I'd say.

[hadit]

Knock off the personal insults.

[optimus]

You're a moderator now?!

[hadit]

You're a moderator now?!

Yes I am.

[Pints with Plato]

“Individual sovereignty”, or individualism, has never existed. From what we can discern from anthropology and prehistoric archaeology, people lived in quasi-egalitarian bands rather than on their own until the Neolithic farming revolution, where the production of food led to to things: increasing sedentarism with the rise of permanent settlements, and the appearance of an elite that managed food surpluses for storage or trade (read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel for an excellent description of this process, and how it is entirely natural)

I think I see the problem... we're talking past each other.

I'm not talking about 'individual sovereignty' in terms of man(kind) physically existing as a wholly separate physical entity. I could not agree more that people are better off when they work together in groups and, under ideal conditions, the larger the better.

When I assert that the individual is sovereign, I in no way mean that he is an autonomous physical entity preferring to live apart from all other humans and thriving in that condition... which is not to say that it wouldn't be possible for some humans to do so (digression)... What I mean is that it is immoral to subject human beings, as a consequence of the ownership of their lives and their distinct individuality, and the logical 'equality' of that individuality, to physical and coercive violence.

The state, by definition, is physical and coercive violence.. As I mentioned in my previous post, the state does not ask permission of those who disagree with it's actions/dictates. Again, from where is this authority to dictate derived?
I would be interested in reading your response to this.

First of all, that's just not true. Your life is not really “sovereign” since your thoughts and acts are as much a reaction to other human and environmental stimuli as they are your own (see Sam Harris' work on “free will”), and your physical being was given to you by your parents and by the genetic legacy of your ancestors. Second, even if you had the right to call your thoughts, actions and past deeds your own, it's impractical to do so since people are shaped more by their environment and genetic predispositions than by their own will to accomplish things.

For the sake of argument, if I grant you these points, if my thoughts, actions, etc., are not my own, then to whom more do they belong?

This is an accomplishment of collective endeavour and the state, not individualism.

Collective endeavor is not the state.

You're comparing absolute monarchies with republics (and reducing republics to oligarchies) without even taking into consideration how these separate machines work. Or perhaps your argument is that they all operate in the same way -except they clearly don't.

And no, not everything the state does is death and destruction – that's just what you choose to focus on.

The relevant point is that the state, be it a monarchy or a republic, at the end of the day exerts force upon the individual.

The state is clumsy; there is no nuance to the state. Even when the state acts in 99.999% accordance with the will of those over which it rules, it is still enacting force upon some individual, even just one. That is unjust because there is very, very little in human existence which is objective.

When it exerts that force upon the individual, the logical extension is death and destruction. If the individual resists the force of the state, the state will up the ante up to the point of destruction and death. When the logical outcome of an encounter between the state and an individual over whom it claims dominion is death, you have discovered the essence - the true nature - of the state.

Practical example abound. Take a look around you.

With respect, you haven't. You're still clinging to the idea that all statehood is wrong, without any sound reason why except that individualism makes more sense to you. You have shown no interest in describing or explaining the apparatus of the state, or why democracy is apparently unable to protect the individual within a state framework.

Aggression against even one individual is immoral. Collectives are an abstraction – again, do you know my mind? I don’t mean, do you have a concept of your own which is what you consider to be my mind. I mean, do you KNOW my mind. Can you feel what I feel? Of course you cannot. Nor can I know what you know, nor feel what you feel. Therefore it is objectively unjust for me to force you to act, even if I believe that I am forcing you to act on your own behalf, for your own good.

That is not to say that I cannot appeal to you, or to attempt to influence you. I’m happy to work with you on a voluntary basis. But I must respect that your life is your own. I must not presume that I know what is best for you. Your life is not mine. It is yours.

You might not buy into it (like lily), but it's painfully real and growing wider by the day. Your radical, anarchic individualism fits in almost perfectly with the modern American right's vision of government small enough to 'drown in a bathtub', state intervention inherently wrong and American intervention abroad unnecessary. You're right wing whichever way you spin it.

The left-right paradigm has been created for you so that you never focus your vision on your true enemy, the state. The left-right paradigm has been created so that you think there is some kind of conflict between people who think that the state should regulate “personal choices” and people who think that the state should regulate “the economy”. In reality, there is statism, and anti-statism; there is pro-humanity and anti-humanity.

In many real ways, we are in complete agreement. I have no objection with your views of human society. I simply believe that humans must be allowed to organize voluntarily, rather than according to the whim of some segment of humanity through physical/coercive force.

[Archaix]

I'm not talking about 'individual sovereignty' in terms of man(kind) physically existing as a wholly separate physical entity. I could not agree more that people are better off when they work together in groups and, under ideal conditions, the larger the better … Collective endeavor is not the state … As I mentioned in my previous post, the state does not ask permission of those who disagree with it's actions/dictates. Again, from where is this authority to dictate derived?

We can agree that humans naturally come together economically, through simple trade or the capitalist system (the communist system is synthetic or imposed); and come together socially in countless ways -why can you not be persuaded then that humans naturally come together politically? I agree with you that the individual is important (who wouldn't except a totalitarian?), but you can only seem to imagine two scenarios: one where the individual is free and stateless, the other where the individual does not exist in the collective state. As I've already shown, the individual in stateless societies has total freedom -to live the short life they have left, to starve if drought sets in, to kill one another in the most obscene and brutal ways, to move perhaps as much as 10 miles away from where they used to live.

Modern, western libertarianism (which your response reflects) is descended chiefly from the writings of Tom Paine. He agreed with you in the Rights of Man that governments were mostly created through theft:

Those bands of robbers having parcelled out the world, and divided it into dominions, began, as is naturally the case, to quarrel with each other. What at first was obtained by violence was considered by others as lawful to be taken, and a second plunderer succeeded the first. They alternately invaded the dominions which each had assigned to himself, and the brutality with which they treated each other explains the original character of monarchy.

But Paine didn't mean that government was illegitimate, but that the grand system of monarchy was. Instead, Paine advocated representative democracy. He went on in the same chapter to write:

Government ought to be a thing always in full maturity. It ought to be so constructed as to be superior to all the accidents to which individual man is subject; and, therefore, hereditary succession, by being subject to them all, is the most irregular and imperfect of all the systems of government … Simple democracy was society governing itself without the aid of secondary means. By ingrafting representation upon democracy, we arrive at a system of government capable of embracing and confederating all the various interests and every extent of territory and population … In the representative system, the reason for everything must publicly appear. Every man is a proprietor in government, and considers it a necessary part of his business to understand. It concerns his interest, because it affects his property. He examines the cost, and compares it with the advantages; and above all, he does not adopt the slavish custom of following what in other governments are called LEADERS.

(Source)
This is a much better way of asserting individual rights; protect them through a common state. That's where all legitimacy must come from, and government has no public (and thus official) legitimacy without it.

When I assert that the individual is sovereign, I in no way mean that he is an autonomous physical entity preferring to live apart from all other humans and thriving in that condition... which is not to say that it wouldn't be possible for some humans to do so (digression)... What I mean is that it is immoral to subject human beings, as a consequence of the ownership of their lives and their distinct individuality, and the logical 'equality' of that individuality, to physical and coercive violence … The state, by definition, is physical and coercive violence.

No, the state is by definition the control over the use of force. You're right that this is a loss of your individual right, but it makes much more sense; countries with fewer restrictions on guns (the USA, Canada and Finland) have far higher rate of gun-related deaths than countries with heavy restrictions (e.g. the U.K., Japan). By giving up that right I am safer, by accepting it in yours I am not.

Yes the state can misuse the use of force. That is not the same as being inherently destructive. Even in a century of unprecedented misuse of force -the 20th century- Europe and the USA had a lower rate of deaths caused by war than in any non-state tribe for which we have anthropological data (as I showed in my last response). If you read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, furthermore, you'll read some excellent passages building on his own anthropological work with tribes which shows other problems with state-free societies: they have no means of independent conflict resolution and no code of laws. This means that murder is commonplace, and can even become endless between feuding families. Even in petty states this is overcome by some small degree.

For the sake of argument, if I grant you these points, if my thoughts, actions, etc., are not my own, then to whom more do they belong?

Clearly, not just to one person. As even Isaac Newton wrote: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”

When it exerts that force upon the individual, the logical extension is death and destruction. If the individual resists the force of the state, the state will up the ante up to the point of destruction and death. When the logical outcome of an encounter between the state and an individual over whom it claims dominion is death, you have discovered the essence - the true nature - of the state.

Practical example abound. Take a look around you.

I am, and I see absolutely no death and destruction. I also do not understand how it would profit 'the state' to kill its members.

Aggression against even one individual is immoral. Collectives are an abstraction – again, do you know my mind? I don’t mean, do you have a concept of your own which is what you consider to be my mind. I mean, do you KNOW my mind. Can you feel what I feel? Of course you cannot. Nor can I know what you know, nor feel what you feel. Therefore it is objectively unjust for me to force you to act, even if I believe that I am forcing you to act on your own behalf, for your own good.

That is not to say that I cannot appeal to you, or to attempt to influence you. I’m happy to work with you on a voluntary basis. But I must respect that your life is your own. I must not presume that I know what is best for you. Your life is not mine. It is yours.

If aggression against an individual is immoral, then surely non-statehood is the most immoral of all political structures. I also feel that you could be a little less abstract, and provide some examples.

The left-right paradigm has been created for you so that you never focus your vision on your true enemy, the state. The left-right paradigm has been created so that you think there is some kind of conflict between people who think that the state should regulate “personal choices” and people who think that the state should regulate “the economy”. In reality, there is statism, and anti-statism; there is pro-humanity and anti-humanity.

Since anti-statism equals the artificial disestablishment of political collectivism in order to create a situation where war, criminal opportunity and economic/natural circumstance would pointlessly claim untold millions of lives, it is obvious that it cannot conceivably be the side of 'pro-humanity'. The left-right paradigm, in any case, is more about the size and role of the state than you give it credit; in fact, the right more resembles your argument with every single day.

[antiquity]

Good God Damn Yankee sucks a bag of dicks. Jesus. One of the all-time worst posters on this forum. Top 2 or 3 I'd say.

I guess Optimus got her/he props knocked out from under her/he. Just goes to show her/his post weren't so classy.

[Pints with Plato]

We can agree that humans naturally come together economically, through simple trade or the capitalist system (the communist system is synthetic or imposed); and come together socially in countless ways -why can you not be persuaded then that humans naturally come together politically?

Because all of those other ways are perfectly voluntary associations. As I showed in my previous post: If the individual resists the force of the state, the state will up the ante up to the point of destruction and death. When the logical outcome of an encounter between the state and an individual over whom it claims dominion is death, you have discovered the essence - the true nature - of the state. My philosophy is best described as voluntaryism; I do not object to government. I object to the state. Government can be voluntary – the individual might govern him/herself, or submit himself to the governance of his family, community, religious order, etc. I have no objection with any voluntary association, even those which I personally find abhorrent, as long as those associations do no violence (physical/coercive) to other individuals. “The State” cannot meet that criteria.

I agree with you that the individual is important (who wouldn't except a totalitarian?), but you can only seem to imagine two scenarios: one where the individual is free and stateless, the other where the individual does not exist in the collective state. As I've already shown, the individual in stateless societies has total freedom -to live the short life they have left, to starve if drought sets in, to kill one another in the most obscene and brutal ways, to move perhaps as much as 10 miles away from where they used to live.

With respect, I do not think that you have shown this. I do not subscribe to the Hobbesian notion that life without the state will be nasty, brutish and short. Later in your post you ask me:

I also feel that you could be a little less abstract, and provide some examples.

Medieval Iceland
Early Pennsylvania
The not so Wild West
Medieval Ireland
And finally, Murray N. Rothbard put together a practical, modern application of statelessness in his work, For a New Liberty

If I recall correctly, Rothbard discusses private arbitration/dispute resolution in the (I think) medieval English maritime community as well but I can’t locate a link at the moment.

These articles provide examples of prosperous, flourishing historical cases of stateless/relatively stateless societies, as well as proposed solutions in the modern world.

Modern, western libertarianism (which your response reflects) is descended chiefly from the writings of Tom Paine. He agreed with you in the Rights of Man that governments were mostly created through theft:

But Paine didn't mean that government was illegitimate, but that the grand system of monarchy was. Instead, Paine advocated representative democracy. He went on in the same chapter to write:
(Source)
This is a much better way of asserting individual rights; protect them through a common state. That's where all legitimacy must come from, and government has no public (and thus official) legitimacy without it.

It is certainly one way of attempting to do it. It is certainly a utilitarian argument for the state. It does not make logical sense, however. You cannot protect rights by destroying them, as you go on to admit, below:

No, the state is by definition the control over the use of force. You're right that this is a loss of your individual right, but it makes much more sense; countries with fewer restrictions on guns (the USA, Canada and Finland) have far higher rate of gun-related deaths than countries with heavy restrictions (e.g. the U.K., Japan). By giving up that right I am safer, by accepting it in yours I am not.

Yet by this line of argument in favor of the state, there is absolutely no end to it. There are an infinite number of ways that people can be protected by a state. At what point do you propose that the state should stop attempting to protect the individual?

Yes the state can misuse the use of force. That is not the same as being inherently destructive. Even in a century of unprecedented misuse of force -the 20th century- Europe and the USA had a lower rate of deaths caused by war than in any non-state tribe for which we have anthropological data (as I showed in my last response). If you read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, furthermore, you'll read some excellent passages building on his own anthropological work with tribes which shows other problems with state-free societies: they have no means of independent conflict resolution and no code of laws. This means that murder is commonplace, and can even become endless between feuding families. Even in petty states this is overcome by some small degree.

I feel as though I’ve addressed these points above, with the links, and with my comments in my previous post, which I re-quoted. Furthermore, I do not advocate thoughtless, chaotic statelessness. I advocate purposeful, intentional statelessness.

Contra the “Somalia” argument:



But, also: http://mises.org/daily/5418

Clearly, not just to one person. As even Isaac Newton wrote: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”

Again, I’m not opposed to human interaction.

I am, and I see absolutely no death and destruction. I also do not understand how it would profit 'the state' to kill its members.

It does it all the time. Again, the logical conclusion of opposing the state’s dictates is death. For a quick, easy example, take a look at the drug war, the most blatant example of the state killing it’s members, essentially over the ownership of certain plants and chemicals which it has deemed “illegal” (in other words, for no offense against the other individuals under it’s dominion, which might be an example of the justified use of force by the state). So the question is turned to you: what does it profit the state to kill it's members?

Since anti-statism equals the artificial disestablishment of political collectivism in order to create a situation where war, criminal opportunity and economic/natural circumstance would pointlessly claim untold millions of lives, it is obvious that it cannot conceivably be the side of 'pro-humanity'. The left-right paradigm, in any case, is more about the size and role of the state than you give it credit; in fact, the right more resembles your argument with every single day.

War is very clearly and obviously the health of the state, as Randolf Bourne once observed. A quick reflection of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century neatly bears this out, without mentioning the wholesale, socially-sanctioned “criminal opportunity” of the past few years. The State, as Rothbard quipped, is nothing but a bandit gang writ large. Whatever ills exist in a society will be hastened, and worsened by the existence of the state, because the state gives these criminal elements access to the whole of society, and society foolishly sanctions it. Again, look no further than the in-broad-daylight robbery which has been committed against literally everyone on the planet, as well as untold, unborn generations over the past 4 years in particular, and the past 40 years in general (through the global fiat currency regime).

The modern American right have no real intention of bringing this scheme to an end, any more than the modern American left. Again, ultimately, it is a question of pro-state and anti-state; pro-humanity and anti-humanity, as I have illustrated.

[Archaix]

Because all of those other ways are perfectly voluntary associations. As I showed in my previous post: If the individual resists the force of the state, the state will up the ante up to the point of destruction and death. When the logical outcome of an encounter between the state and an individual over whom it claims dominion is death, you have discovered the essence - the true nature - of the state. My philosophy is best described as voluntaryism; I do not object to government. I object to the state. Government can be voluntary – the individual might govern him/herself, or submit himself to the governance of his family, community, religious order, etc. I have no objection with any voluntary association, even those which I personally find abhorrent, as long as those associations do no violence (physical/coercive) to other individuals. “The State” cannot meet that criteria.

I am sorry that you are unable to reconcile yourself to the state, but you are free to leave it. In modern western states the state can only kill you if you happen to live in a place with the death penalty (I do not), or cause you to be killed in wars. In the latter case, you have to be soldier.

I wrote in my previous response that economic, social and political unions are natural -you seem to be confusing that with 'voluntary'. There is nothing 'voluntary' about economic union; even if you exerted yourself enough to be fully independent of others you would suffer incalculably in your standard of living. There is nothing 'voluntary' either in your social life either, unless you're particularly sociopathic; it's an extension of your human need to be social. Both of these things could be done without an organised political framework, but would be much weaker. You need protection from fraudsters and periodic market disasters, and you need protection from your fellow human beings and a common code of what's acceptable.

The formation of political unions in a state makes perfect sense to humans, which is why it developed naturally over millennia. The question is not then how can we resist the state, but how can you prevent people from creating one.

With respect, I do not think that you have shown this. I do not subscribe to the Hobbesian notion that life without the state will be nasty, brutish and short ...
Medieval Iceland

The article you cited itself cites a loftily-named libertarian book, The Machinery of Freedom, which bases most/all of it's evidence on sagas -sagas being of questionable usefulness since they were mostly taken down centuries later by people like Snorri Sturluson. In fact, you can see the anti-Norwegian nature of the sagas reflected in the wiki page: “in 1262, King Haakon graciously offered to come in and quell the conflict he had helped to create”. The origins myths about Iceland's settlement are also inaccurate, and in fact Iceland was always indebted to Norway, which could provide the island with timber, iron, and foodstuffs (that's why Norwegians could demand the island turn to Christianity around 1000AD). And why was the Icelandic bargaining position so weak? Because “free enterprise” ensured all forests were cut down within a few generations of settlement, never to be seen again (see RA Hall's Exploring the World of the Vikings and A Forte, R Oram and R Pedersen's Viking Empires for more on this). Dick Tator tried to make the same analogy late last year, but I suppose you never saw that thread.

Early Pennsylvania

Early Pennsylvania existed for the blink of an eye as a self-ruling territory, hardly long enough to determine whether its people would have been better off with that system (I also doubt Rothbard, being a libertarian himself, examined crime or production during that period). They merely seemed to have been grateful not to pay taxes, despite the fact that they wouldn't have been in the New World in the first place without explorers and settlers gaining royal sponsorship in the first place. Christopher Columbus didn't discover the Americas through private enterprise, after all.

The not so Wild West

This article (again, from a libertarian perspective and referencing both Rothbard and Friedman of Machinery of Freedom fame) performs some truly spectacular feats of logic. Claiming that reported deaths in the Wild West were incredibly low, the two authors build their argument on reports -that is, whatever information was collected by the decidedly thin-on-the-ground authorities. Are they accurate? Who cares!
Second, in discussing vigilante groups that emerged to combat crime the authors ignore the fact that collective action reduced murders from “more than a hundred in the six months before the committee was formed” (a figure which also suggests the authors are cherry-picking death rates) to a mere two. Clearly the problem was not that crime did not exist, but that the authorities had not yet developed enough to cope, leading to private action. These vigilante groups and protection rackets apparently 'developed rules consistent with the preferences, goals, and endowments of the participants', but does not even bother to substantiate that claim. The paper does not even demonstrate whether these groups were responsible, treated lawbreakers humanely, or were governed effectively by market control.

Medieval Ireland

I'm disinclined to inspect that article thoroughly, not least because it's apparently written by a crony of Rothbard's, and relies heavily on law (problematic since we can never tell how much the law was followed, or how exactly it was interpreted). Needless to say, however, that no matter how anarchistic Ireland was, it never out-competed the state-led kingdom of England, which eventually (or inevitably) absorbed it. Which political model was more superior?

It is certainly one way of attempting to do it. It is certainly a utilitarian argument for the state. It does not make logical sense, however. You cannot protect rights by destroying them, as you go on to admit, below:

I don't consider my comments to be contradictory. Rights are meaningless if not bracketed in some context and security -nor is it logical for people to have the right to do whatever they please. The argument of rights for rights' sake is pointless.

Yet by this line of argument in favor of the state, there is absolutely no end to it. There are an infinite number of ways that people can be protected by a state. At what point do you propose that the state should stop attempting to protect the individual?

At exactly the point there is no need to. In my (poor) town, there is an obesity crisis. This is caused not by any sort of cultural problem, but the unavailability of costly healthy foods for people -they turn to cheap, unhealthy foods instead. Now, by a market based approach there is no problem – clearly what people want is fatty foods, and they're exercising their choice by buying that. If they wanted cheap healthy food, they would either grow it themselves or create a market option for it. Neither, however, are practical alternatives, seeing as people have no land or capital in order to do either of these things. Since the recession -a crisis caused by unregulated capital- bank lending is now more difficult than ever before.

The only obvious solution is to artificially reduce the price of healthy food, something only the state has the inclination to do.

Contra the “Somalia” argument:

As the official statistics explain (but were somehow left out of your video and webpage): “The figures in the table above do not tell the full story. The relative stability in living standards may in part be because of the work of international aid agencies.
Throughout some of the worst periods of conflict, Somalia has still received assistance with food and health.
These figures from the UN World Food Programme show that food aid has increased in recent years, coinciding with a period of fighting between Islamists and forces loyal to the Somali government.” (Source)

In the meantime, piracy has flourished, and state-led countries have been forced to prevent disease and starvation. But that's okay, because the people are free!

Again, I’m not opposed to human interaction.

No, but you have an aversion to giving credit where it is due.

It does it all the time. Again, the logical conclusion of opposing the state’s dictates is death. For a quick, easy example, take a look at the drug war, the most blatant example of the state killing it’s members, essentially over the ownership of certain plants and chemicals which it has deemed “illegal” (in other words, for no offense against the other individuals under it’s dominion, which might be an example of the justified use of force by the state). So the question is turned to you: what does it profit the state to kill it's members?

Again, my state doesn't kill criminals -along with the rest of the developed world. And I reject the assertion that drugs only impair, injure or otherwise cripple the user, since (as has been well understood by non-individualists) users have families, friends and dependents. That's not to say that US drug policies are effectively or well-joined up, though.

[Pints with Plato]

I am sorry that you are unable to reconcile yourself to the state, but you are free to leave it. In modern western states the state can only kill you if you happen to live in a place with the death penalty (I do not), or cause you to be killed in wars. In the latter case, you have to be soldier.

It isn’t a question as to whether or not I should be free to leave it; it is a question of whether or not it is just. I’m not unable to reconcile myself to it. I'm under no illusion that I’m ever see the state de-legitimized in the minds of most people.

It is inaccurate to say that “the state can only kill you if you happen to live in a place with the death penalty”; I’ll try again to illustrate a scenario: the state has dictated that possession of a plant is “illegal” (one of the many completely arbitrary little rules that the state dreams into existence). This is by all reasonable, rational considerations utter nonsense. Morally, then, a person would be well within their rights to resist the confiscation of their property and/or restraint of their physical self. When this individual resists the agents of the state, those agents will invariably escalate their methods to force compliance with the arbitrary rule. If the individual is dead-set on maintaining his property and/or liberty, the agents of the state will – MUST – kill him, for his disobedience.

In the case of wars, the state often enslaves (“draft”) individuals into their service.

This is objectively unjust, and reveals the true nature of the state. The state is not benign. If an individual objects to some arbitrary dictate - even if the majority of people support the particular dictate - of the state, that individual must be subdued.

I wrote in my previous response that economic, social and political unions are natural -you seem to be confusing that with 'voluntary'. There is nothing 'voluntary' about economic union; even if you exerted yourself enough to be fully independent of others you would suffer incalculably in your standard of living. There is nothing 'voluntary' either in your social life either, unless you're particularly sociopathic; it's an extension of your human need to be social.

A person may decide that they have no need for creature comforts, nor human interaction. Those relations are indeed voluntary – one is not [i]forced[/] to engage in them, certainly not in the same manner a person is forced into relations with the state.

Both of these things could be done without an organised political framework, but would be much weaker. You need protection from fraudsters and periodic market disasters, and you need protection from your fellow human beings and a common code of what's acceptable.

Of course, protection from fraud and market disasters, as well as from fellow human beings can and have been provided by the free market.

The formation of political unions in a state makes perfect sense to humans, which is why it developed naturally over millennia. The question is not then how can we resist the state, but how can you prevent people from creating one.

I understand that people recognize some utility in the state.

I'm disinclined to inspect that article thoroughly, not least because it's apparently written by a crony of Rothbard's, and relies heavily on law (problematic since we can never tell how much the law was followed, or how exactly it was interpreted). Needless to say, however, that no matter how anarchistic Ireland was, it never out-competed the state-led kingdom of England, which eventually (or inevitably) absorbed it. Which political model was more superior?

It took England 1000 years to subdue Ireland, and mostly after the Irish foolishly began to adopt characteristics of the state. Superior? I suppose, at confiscating property and people and sending them into battle on their behalf. Yes, the state is far superior to individuals in that regard.

Again, I understand that there is a good utilitarian case for the state. I didn’t offer those articles as an example of stateless societies that would out-compete the state in certain functions; I offered them because they provide concrete examples of stateless societies, as you requested. My position is not that statelessness is more ‘practical’, or utilitarian; it’s that it is more moral.

At exactly the point there is no need to.

There is no end to the need; that point is completely arbitrary and will vary according to whomever you may ask. And thus, especially in a “democracy”, conflict is endemic – everyone fights everyone else for control of the reins of power, to impose their vision of where exactly the state must begin and end.

No, but you have an aversion to giving credit where it is due.

The state was not necessary. Newton was not talking about the state when he made that comment.

It seems to me that we are reaching a point where we’ve realized that there are some fundamental, foundational disagreements that aren’t going to be overcome in this conversation (and setting), at least: the crux of my position is moral, not utilitarian/pragmatic, and is best summed as I wrote in my second paragraph, above.

[Archaix]

It isn’t a question as to whether or not I should be free to leave it; it is a question of whether or not it is just. I’m not unable to reconcile myself to it. I'm under no illusion that I’m ever see the state de-legitimized in the minds of most people.

It is 'just' if people need it, people want it, and people have a reasonable amount of power over it.

It is inaccurate to say that “the state can only kill you if you happen to live in a place with the death penalty”; I’ll try again to illustrate a scenario: the state has dictated that possession of a plant is “illegal” (one of the many completely arbitrary little rules that the state dreams into existence). This is by all reasonable, rational considerations utter nonsense. Morally, then, a person would be well within their rights to resist the confiscation of their property and/or restraint of their physical self. When this individual resists the agents of the state, those agents will invariably escalate their methods to force compliance with the arbitrary rule. If the individual is dead-set on maintaining his property and/or liberty, the agents of the state will – MUST – kill him, for his disobedience.

In the case of wars, the state often enslaves (“draft”) individuals into their service.

And in fact drafts themselves were controversial and are rarely sanctioned by democratically through plebiscites -as drafts, national service and foreign policy should be. The drugs issue is more complicated, and would be less complicated and more lethal if it were left alone by the state entirely.

This is objectively unjust, and reveals the true nature of the state. The state is not benign. If an individual objects to some arbitrary dictate - even if the majority of people support the particular dictate - of the state, that individual must be subdued.

That's a more sinister way of putting it like it is: if the individual breaks laws, that individual is imprisoned (unless killed under certain U.S. laws). There are all sorts of restraints on what sort of legislation can and cannot be past, particularly in your country. You can't function according to your own laws -it's simply unworkable if anything collective is to be done at all.

A person may decide that they have no need for creature comforts, nor human interaction. Those relations are indeed voluntary – one is not [i]forced[/] to engage in them, certainly not in the same manner a person is forced into relations with the state.

You can live as spartan a life as you want, and if you receive no income you have no obligation whatsoever. You're hardly forced into service by the state.

Of course, protection from fraud and market disasters, as well as from fellow human beings can and have been provided by the free market.

Explain how?

It took England 1000 years to subdue Ireland, and mostly after the Irish foolishly began to adopt characteristics of the state. Superior? I suppose, at confiscating property and people and sending them into battle on their behalf. Yes, the state is far superior to individuals in that regard.

Within even Norman times the English were occupying the east coast of Ireland (you can read an overview of this process in Chibnall's The Normans). Elizabeth I attacked it in Tudor Times, James I, Charles I and Oliver Cromwell attacked it in the 17th century, and by the mid 19th century even the Irish language was dying out. Now, I'm not going to pretend that the English state was in anyway benevolent, but it really wasn't a case of Irish ideas about 'freedom' or Irish culture crossing the sea and spreading into English territory.

Again, I understand that there is a good utilitarian case for the state. I didn’t offer those articles as an example of stateless societies that would out-compete the state in certain functions; I offered them because they provide concrete examples of stateless societies, as you requested. My position is not that statelessness is more ‘practical’, or utilitarian; it’s that it is more moral.

But you did state that you “do not subscribe to the Hobbesian notion that life without the state will be nasty, brutish and short” - Iceland suffered incredible ecological damage, important resource deficits and maintained a servile relationship with Norway all because of a very loose (and short-lived) 'anarcho-capitalist' system. Early Pennsylvania is too short to bear evidence one way or another. The wild west clearly suffered huge problems from crime due to the lack of government. Medieval Ireland was not only attacked by Vikings (who founded Dublin), but occupied and settled by the English and Scots.

I'm not seeing much evidence for any lasting stability, prosperity or security from these examples, though I appreciate you went to more trouble than most would to find some.

There is no end to the need; that point is completely arbitrary and will vary according to whomever you may ask. And thus, especially in a “democracy”, conflict is endemic – everyone fights everyone else for control of the reins of power, to impose their vision of where exactly the state must begin and end.

And it's good that there should be a fight. There should always be a struggle over what the government does, because without it there would be totalitarianism.

[hadit]

And it's good that there should be a fight. There should always be a struggle over what the government does, because without it there would be totalitarianism.

I wonder if anyone could possibly disagree with that statement?

[Pints with Plato]

And in fact drafts themselves were controversial and are rarely sanctioned by democratically through plebiscites -as drafts, national service and foreign policy should be. The drugs issue is more complicated, and would be less complicated and more lethal if it were left alone by the state entirely.

That's a more sinister way of putting it like it is: if the individual breaks laws, that individual is imprisoned (unless killed under certain U.S. laws). There are all sorts of restraints on what sort of legislation can and cannot be past, particularly in your country. You can't function according to your own laws -it's simply unworkable if anything collective is to be done at all.

It isn’t simply a matter of drug laws or the draft. Act upon your opposition to some arbitrary dictate of the state and the state will kill you. Any one of them.

My country – which was established with the expressed purpose of limiting the authority of government – has proven that there are no restrictions on what sort of legislation can be passed.

And again it’s perfectly possible to act collectively without initiating coercive and/or physical force.

You can live as spartan a life as you want, and if you receive no income you have no obligation whatsoever. You're hardly forced into service by the state.

You’re forced to comply with its dictates, however, as shown.

Explain how?

I realize it’s somewhat bad form on a message board to refer one to a lengthy work, but Rothbard does a great job of theorizing private security, fraud protection, etc., in For A New Liberty, which I linked previously (I apologize for not providing the link at the moment, I’m a little short on time right now).

Within even Norman times the English were occupying the east coast of Ireland (you can read an overview of this process in Chibnall's The Normans). Elizabeth I attacked it in Tudor Times, James I, Charles I and Oliver Cromwell attacked it in the 17th century, and by the mid 19th century even the Irish language was dying out. Now, I'm not going to pretend that the English state was in anyway benevolent, but it really wasn't a case of Irish ideas about 'freedom' or Irish culture crossing the sea and spreading into English territory.

It took Cromwell committing near-genocide to subdue the Irish, after a thousand years of warfare.

Further, even a state cannot guarantee absolute security… although – as we are seeing today – it will do its best to try.

But you did state that you “do not subscribe to the Hobbesian notion that life without the state will be nasty, brutish and short”

As I said, the links were for reference; again, I do not advocate haphazard, thoughtless statelessness. I think what I as a Rothbardian anarchist advocate has yet to be tried in human experience.

I'm not seeing much evidence for any lasting stability, prosperity or security from these examples, though I appreciate you went to more trouble than most would to find some.

Cheers. As I said, you’ve at least provided a compelling conversation. I’m happy to enjoin as time permits.

[Archaix]

It isn’t simply a matter of drug laws or the draft. Act upon your opposition to some arbitrary dictate of the state and the state will kill you. Any one of them.

Drug policy isn't "arbitrary", but in constant negotiation with scientific findings about the effect of drugs on individual users and society. Good draft policy, on the other hand, should not occur for the sake of extending military adventurism but in response to manpower shortages as regards real threats to the country -something that can't be organised effectively by a stateless society and something that can't be judged properly by poorly or un-democratically elected officials.

Is it more true to say "the state will kill you", or that "the state may get you killed if it is not held responsible"? I think that's the real point of departure in our argument.

My country – which was established with the expressed purpose of limiting the authority of government – has proven that there are no restrictions on what sort of legislation can be passed.

The only evidence I've ever seen from people arguing that are unconvincing references to the NDAA and the PATRIOT Act. Both refer incessantly to a wealth of constitutional law going back decades, although the latter is extremely vague.

And again it’s perfectly possible to act collectively without initiating coercive and/or physical force.

Which is exactly what happens in a well-functioning (democratic) state, but one that cannot be guaranteed in a law-less society.

I realize it’s somewhat bad form on a message board to refer one to a lengthy work, but Rothbard does a great job of theorizing private security, fraud protection, etc., in For A New Liberty, which I linked previously (I apologize for not providing the link at the moment, I’m a little short on time right now).

Sounds like the material for a different thread. I'll search for it and get back to you on that note.

It took Cromwell committing near-genocide to subdue the Irish, after a thousand years of warfare.

The Irish only seemed to be happy once they set up a state of their own. Again, while I never argued English involvement in Ireland was benign, it was still a one-way process of a more powerful state taking over a weaker one. States work, and work very effectively indeed.

[Pints with Plato]

Drug policy isn't "arbitrary", but in constant negotiation with scientific findings about the effect of drugs on individual users and society.

It is always arbitrary; why should an individual be forced to face violent consequences for doing something with his own body?

Good draft policy, on the other hand, should not occur for the sake of extending military adventurism but in response to manpower shortages as regards real threats to the country -something that can't be organised effectively by a stateless society and something that can't be judged properly by poorly or un-democratically elected officials.

A draft is nothing more than involuntary servitude, regardless of the perceived righteousness of the cause.

The only evidence I've ever seen from people arguing that are unconvincing references to the NDAA and the PATRIOT Act. Both refer incessantly to a wealth of constitutional law going back decades, although the latter is extremely vague.

I don't mean this disrespectfully, but when someone such sees no limit to what the state can do, it isn't very surprising to read what you just wrote. I'm just not sure where the conversation can go from here...

The Irish only seemed to be happy once they set up a state of their own.

And that's a new one on me...

Again, thanks for the conversation.