RoR: Forum

Aaron,

Your take on the constitution is just that, your take. The 5^th Amendment is pretty clear about the taking of private land for public use. Until it is amended and says otherwise, you shouldn’t waste your time debating it. I have read some of your posts, you are a smart person and that is why it pains me to see smart people debating issues that can’t be changed at this moment. We should be debating and raising awareness about issues that will make America a better place for all of us, not about some hillbilly who doesn’t want to move out of his mobile home. Thanks for your time. Jbrad

Post 61

Tuesday, July 19, 2005 - 7:27pm

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - 8:45am

Aaron,

From your post 59, “If I stick to keeping my property, the solution isn't stealing it. It's really pretty simple - go to the neighbor behind me and build me outside the wall.”

This puts you in the camp I suspect most “No” respondents belong to. This camp refuses to accept the plausibility of any defensive need scenario. Give them any scenario and they will respond that the wall can simply go around, or the obstinate property owner can be persuaded, but if he can’t, then this fact “proves” that the need must not really be a need at all, end of problem.

Hypotheticals that bring the defensive need to light should not be difficult to imagine for someone who really wants to consider the problem. Just imagine a peninsula a few miles long that wraps around the approach to a harbor. A paper company owns the peninsula. Clarence Hardy and I wish to place large cannon atop this peninsula as this is *the only way* to keep the enemy, who is on the way now, from taking this harbor. Lumberjack employees who say they will shoot us if we trespass stop us.

(There is another response, other than rejecting the scenario, which I forgot to mention. Michael Marotta will read the above and say that Clarence and I must have been fucking up spectacularly to reach this point. Last resort of the incompetent, etc.)

Jon

Post 63

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - 3:40pm

You've joined several discussions long enough to write off discussion of movies, Atlas Shrugged, and laws that we have little chance of affecting as all pointless. So... what are you doing here? This is not a veiled 'Go away!' - I really am wondering what the motive is.

I recognize that with very rare exceptions, arguing on discussion boards will have nil effect on anyone's ideas. I know this but accept it as still often entertaining, a notch or two above TV on the leisure time scale. You've joined SOLO and even filled out one of those long extended profiles, so I assume that if you find the current discussions futile and not worthwhile as diversions, you have some other specific goal in mind. Is there some particular other issue of which you are trying to raise awareness? Adam

Adam,
Like yourself, I find chat boards entertaining. I do not think I wrote off the discussion of movies and books. I believe I said I do not delight in it because I am not an english major.I beleive movies and books are too subjective for my criticism.Now, I will answer your question about what I am doing here. Well, I finished The FountainHead a few weeks ago and was interested to learn more about ayn rand and her philosophy. It is one thing to read and study a certain philosophy but it is another to iteract with people who claim to follow it. So that is why I joined the SOLO. Mostly out of curiousity and partly because after reading about objectivism I thought that the people who follow this would tend to be very pushy and abrasive. So I hope to come to a conclusion soon. Also, I do not find the discussions futile. In closing, my ultimate goal is to learn about objectivism and compare it to what I believe and then come up with my own decision. Thank you for your time. Josh

Post 64

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - 3:41pm

Aaron,

I apologize. I typed Adam. Sorry.

Josh

Post 65

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - 3:52pm

Sarah, I'll grant that we've been able to teleport photons in the lab. But, as I understand it, the technology doesn't scale up to the point where teleporting a macroscopic object, like a package or a person, is feasible.

Post 66

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - 5:15pm

Matthew,

You're absolutely right. Right now the technology is extremely limited. The principle is the same on any scale though. Don't know if I'd ever want to be teleported though. I don't even like flying.

Sarah

Post 67

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - 7:12pm

So you are onboard with 2) and 3) (hostage and stolen property cases, but separate issues from eminent domain) ? Ah, why ask. You're for kicking grandma out if the government wants a new park or projects or prison or monorail. I am curious here though to see who else against eminent domain has thoughts on Adam's scenarios including the other 2.

If you're having difficulty with the property rights 'camp' refusing to accept the plausibility of your defensive scenario, that's only because it's quite implausible.

Adam's original example was already a rare but feasible example of building a defensive perimeter. You've further stretched it with:
a) a specific type of landmass
b) a military which didn't previously recognize the strategic importance of a peninsula and either buy the land or extend it with landfill
c) a military so shortsighted that they didn't invest in mines, ships, torpedos, cruise missiles, attack aircraft, etc.

Those are indeed highly implausible. Impossible? Technically not. However, if those conditions were actually met, we'd be talking about a military so clearly incompetent you wouldn't trust it to stave off an invasion by the Luxembourg navy. Those lumberjacks and their guns look like a more effective line of defense.

I'm sure we can construct other contrived cases that get even further from reality - eg. your farm contains the only remaining source of Unobtanium in the universe, needed to fuel the military's fusion weapons, or the gateway to hell is in your basement and the army needs to harness its demons against the enemy, etc. I'm not sure what you're trying to get to though. If you're just trying in general to sort intrincisists from contextualists from consequentialists from subjectivists, there are simpler thought experiments to get there.

Post 68

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - 7:57pm

Well, Sarah, if I am understanding the principles behind quantum teleportation correctly, QT involves destroying the photon at the transmission end and recreating the photon using stored information about its quantum state at the receiving end.

Post 69

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - 8:07pm

Matthew,

Teleportation works off the fact that any elementary particles of the same species, say electrons, with the same quantum states are identical. The same particle, just in a different place. Using quantum entanglement the quantum state of one particle can be transmitted to another entangled particle any distance away instantaneously. The original isn't necessarily destroyed in the 'boom' sense, but since the starting no longer has the same quantum state its no longer the original particle. So it's kinda destroyed... if you look at it in a certain light... and squint. You have to squint.

Sarah

(Edited by Sarah House
on 7/20, 8:09pm)

Post 70

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - 8:11pm

Thanks, Sarah. It looks like I have some reading to do.

Post 71

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - 8:29pm

“we'd be talking about a military so clearly incompetent you wouldn't trust it to stave off an invasion by the Luxembourg navy.”
–Aaron

Did everyone catch that? Clarence and I have been so damn incompetent that we have lost our right to dismiss the lumberjacks so that we may save our lives, the harbor, and the safety of the entire continent from the enemy.

Post 72

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - 8:50pm

The worst part is that Clarence and I are not even in the military. We hate it for the very incompetence that Aaron describes.

But finally something is being done, or would be done, except for those lumberjacks in our way.

Anyone care to comment? Or should we go on and on and on about how this could never happen?

Jon

Post 73

Thursday, July 21, 2005 - 6:22am

Jon:

"Clarence and I have been so damn incompetent that we have lost our right to dismiss the lumberjacks so that we may save our lives, the harbor, and the safety of the entire continent from the enemy."

You never had that right.

A "need" is not a valid claim. Your belief that you "need" someone else's property to accomplish some goal of yours does not entitle you to violate their rights.

"The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others." — "The Cashing-In: The Student Rebellion"

Post 74

Thursday, July 21, 2005 - 10:02am

Rick,

Here we have a conflict between the right to protect one’s life from external aggression and the right that one’s pine trees be free of trespass.

In your formulation, these two rights carry exactly the same weight. Pure intrinsicism. An utter refusal to consider context.

Jon

Post 75

Thursday, July 21, 2005 - 12:07pm

Let’s take the state and takings out of this to simplify.

Let’s say this disagreement between Clarence/myself and the paper company is happening sometime in the far future. There’s been some kind of disaster, so the militaries of the world are back to 19th century dimensions, America's is almost nonexistent. There is a proper minimalist government in place, and you are on the jury in a civil trial brought by the disputing parties.

*Is it legitimate for you as a juror to rank rights and aspects of rights in deciding the conflict?*

I’ve done so above when I said to Rick that my right to life is superior to the co’s right to property. I would even do it again, treating the *aspects* of property rights to ranking:
Control over how the property will be used.
Power to disallow all trespass.
Power to assign inheritance.
Probably more.

“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” recognizes rights grouping and ranking, and gets the order correct, too. Life being owned by the individual is the most fundamental right, we never can get to “liberty and the pursuit of happiness” without agreement on “life.” Property rights are more derivative, they arise within liberty. Freedom from gov’t censorship is within liberty. Right-to-die is within life. Right to privacy is within pursuit.

Jon
(Edited by Jon Letendre
on 7/21, 12:11pm)

Post 76

Thursday, July 21, 2005 - 1:20pm

Starving kids in Africa have a need for food. If you don't recognize their their need as outweighing your property rights, thus giving them right to take what you have, then that must be pure intrinsicism.

Post 77

Thursday, July 21, 2005 - 2:10pm

No. Their right to life is to try to earn some food. Anyone who wants to help is free to try, by right. So I might help, but my help is drop-in-the-bucket, *it is not unique.*

The help that I am asking be forced on the paper company is *singular.* The single insane act of the paper company stopping us *really will* mean that self defense is impossible and I have to accept death. The arrival of the Russian naval attack is only a day away.

To make your starving African child analogy fit my scenario, contrivances are required that:
-put us alone somewhere for what I know will be a limited period not exceeding X.
-I enough food and water for both of us plus much more.
-I give her no food and no water, even up to the last of it seeing that our rescue is nearing.
-she dies.

If you agree to these modifications, I say: Put me in prison.

Jon

Post 78

Thursday, July 21, 2005 - 2:47pm

Aaron,

*Is it legitimate for you as a juror to rank rights and aspects of rights in deciding the conflict?*

Can you think of cases where this would be appropriate?

Another comes to mind:
A dispute between Peikoff’s Heir and Penguin Books. During the last few years of the copyright for Atlas Shrugged, Penguin starts printing it. Peikoff’s Heir shows a good case for there still being a few years left. Penguin makes a good case that the copyright has lapsed. The evidence comes down evenly, like it does in Night of January… I would be more afraid of getting it wrong and wronging the legitimate copyright owner of Atlas Shrugged, than I would be afraid of getting it wrong and wronging Penguin’s right to free use of anything in public domain.

Even if the evidence was 60-40 in Penguin’s favor, I would still exercise my bias and rule for Peikoff’s Heir. My only excuse for this bias, is that I acknowledge a superior quality in copyright: it’s unique application to a specific work—versus the lesser right to freely print stuff written by long-dead people. I’m fallible, and if I rule in error for Penguin, I hurt Peikoff’s Heir *a lot.* If I rule in error for Peikoff’s Heir, I hurt Penguin *very little*, and I care very little, because there is plenty of free stuff for them to profit from, they’re not even creators, for goodness, sake.

Is this terrible, or does it make any sense?

Jon

By the way, Aaron, is it ok if I repost what you’ve written in post 76 to the thread I started in the general forum? Then we can leave this thread to the poll issue.

Post 79

Thursday, July 21, 2005 - 3:06pm