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To: illinoissmith
You are trying to say that freedom supersedes life and human potential, as evidenced by the fight club or shooting people club. In your mind these freedoms contradict my position on freedom, and force the logically confounded and/or mystical reading.

I'm not sure whether I understand you or not. If some idiot wants to commit suicide, do you believe it's your business to stop him? I don't mean trying to talk him out of it--I sincerely hope you'd do that--but to arrest him? Lock him up? Commit him? Note that there is a legitimate question how to deal with the truly insane. Ignore flat-out crazy people for the moment.

If you do believe that, and you probably do, then where does it end? Smokers are "killing themselves"; why don't you go force them to stop? So are people who overeat; are you lacking in compassion, or do you plan to stop them? Drinking--don't get me started! I've cared for enough nursing-home patients to know what drinking does to you. Are you prepared to reinstate prohibition for the people's own good?

Senator Kennedy cannot freaking stop that without putting you in a cage. He CAN NOT stop you if you want to do it RIGHT NOW.

You're suddenly getting highly emotional, so I'll take a break for the moment. What personal experience with suicide is prompting this intense reaction? Whatever it was, you have my sympathy and condolence. Note, however, that FR doesn't allow bad language. Repeated dropping of the F-bomb will get your posts deleted, and might lead to a brush with a moderator.

200 posted on 02/13/2006 4:00:28 AM PST by Shalom Israel (Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.)
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To: Shalom Israel
"You're suddenly getting highly emotional, so I'll take a break for the moment. What personal experience with suicide is prompting this intense reaction? Whatever it was, you have my sympathy and condolence. Note, however, that FR doesn't allow bad language. Repeated dropping of the F-bomb will get your posts deleted, and might lead to a brush with a moderator."

You were giving an number of signs that you were more interested in absolute, fetishized freedom than in good (I will detail these below). I could view these signs as one of (a) coincidental, or as (b) a result of you basically being an OK guy fundamentally motivated worthy concerns who happened to pick up some jargon from others (hey no one is perfect), or (c) as a result of your being what I call a "death-wish" anarchist (not that the people I call this are entirely bad or motivated, as people, solely by a death wish - it is just that is one strong thing inside some people).

I have spent the last number of years of my life in university, and even on the internet, with Gen-Y peers, surrounded mostly, shall we say, *not* by clean-cut Republican folk. Not having calculated that things would be different on FR (as I should have calculated), I ended up pegging you for (c), after consideration of the signs I was getting (which I will detail below). Having pegged you as a (c), I was essentially going to give up on the conversation, but not without yelling what I really thought of you and your situation first (what I thought is a mix of ideas I mostly derived from having read 1984, which I assumed almost all Americans read in high school, and some ideas from what I think really drives anarchists to obsess over Fight Club, and some ideas from a book written in the '60s during their recovery from Ayn Rand's cult - I can go more into all this later if you want).

Then, after the yelling, I read on (I am now behind on reading my pings, and I don't want to wait to read them all before replying), saw that when pressed you really backed up your position not with a fetish, but with real concerns - this suggested that one of (a) or (b) were the case. I realized I was mistaken. I noted that what I did was weird (I really should have considered the fact that I was on FR--and also the fact that you appear to support Israel's fight for survival against terrorism--more carefully). I tried to explain it as best I could in a line or two.

The signs you were giving me (that I can remember) were the following:

(1) Jargonized use of 'government', jargonized use of 'constitution', jargonized use of 'anarchy'.

(2) Insistence that what differentiated your form of constitutionalism was mine was, essentially, whether or not we talked about it, and the name. This is manipulative.

(3) Apparently grouping me in with enemies of freedom and with property infringers for disagreeing with you. Again, I am not on your property by typing stuff FR, unless you own FR. If I am in your head at all, it is because you chose to read what I wrote - you can always go to yahoo.com or something else. If I am not infringing on your property, and you believe I am saying bad things, the way to fight that is with words. Not by categorizing me in with property infringers. This delicate distinction has the potential to reduce massive amounts of bloodshed, and to allow people who disagree with each other to live with each other nonetheless. It also has the potential to allow multiple people to learn from each other without having to fear for their safety.

(4) Failure to recognize that words like 'freedom' and 'liberty' have two meanings - one loaded with ideas morality and maximizing human choice and human potential hand human happiness (by limiting freedom just enough ("Human liberty" = you should not be 'free' (see below) to steal my car and have me powerless to stop you, or be free to steal my car and go unpunished, or the like) so that your neighbor has freedom, too), and another meaning that is simply about lack of constraint. Absolute lack of constraint is not possible in this world - cars would float. Absolute lack of constraint for living things means death.

(5) A slip-up use of the word 'victimizers' when what you should have said was 'tyrants'. This confusion is important because changing government will not reduce 'victimizers' because a man can be his own victimizer. Someone who thinks "anarchy" will eliminate victimizers is mistaken, and quite possibly looking for an external solution to a problem only he himself can fix, inside himself.

This last one, (5) is related to why I think cubicle-living urban anarchists obsess over the violence and voluntary submission in Fight Club (note that in the real world, once you have a structure like that, the chances of everything is does staying voluntary 5 years after they have started blowing up buildings, is next to nil). They see allegiance to an voluntarily-chosen tyrant as a way to get out of what they see as prison, and they obsess over this option instead of, say, taking a salary cut and moving rural, or starting their own businesses or the like. Even though there are many unjust bounds in our society, it is still good to make as much, starting with yourself, out of what you do have (and we have a heck of a lot more than, say, people in Poland in the 1970s, or Angela Merkel growing up - read about what she did in spite of her unjust restrictions, and how she herself is now using what she learned from her experiences to make things better). That is the only way those bounds will become more just: hard work by self-motivated, clear-thinking, caring individuals, doing what they can. Civil war, or government collapse, will just birth a different unjust system if the ideas in the heads of people are wack (and people who can see any sort of long-term hope in the social structure formed in Fight Club have wack ideas). This does not mean you hit people for disagreeing with you. It means you hold your own and try to talk to them.

You've seen what progress Poland has made in the last few decades. Real progress can, and in fact only will, be made without getting men to prostrate themselves and their minds to other men Fight Club style.

"I'm not sure whether I understand you or not. If some idiot wants to commit suicide, do you believe it's your business to stop him?"

It is not my business to stop him. It is his life, not mine, not yours, he should have the choice is he ends it or lives it. More on what I believe to by the why of this later.
210 posted on 02/17/2006 1:15:42 PM PST by illinoissmith
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