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@FLRW
Canadian's laugh at dumb weird american men, like you and trump
One Big Beautiful Bill
Posts
Total:
157
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@Debunker
Well, we are going to make you our 51 state.
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@MayCaesar
“Freedom” is a concept describing a relationship between the individual and other individuals, characterized by the absence of the latter controlling the former. “Tyranny” is the opposite. These are not my definitions. English is not even my first language, for that matter.
Then you should recognize the implications of your definition. If “freedom” means the absence of others controlling you, then being economically coerced by systems of desperation — pricing structures, debt traps, resource hoarding — also violates freedom. If someone is sick and cannot afford medicine, and the price is set above their reach by a market they had no role in shaping, they are being controlled. Not by a tyrant with a crown, but by conditions engineered to serve someone else’s profit. That’s not liberty — that’s abandonment. “Freedom” in that sense becomes nothing more than the right to suffer alone while others call it voluntary.
You are simply practicing a collectivistic world view in which humans by default own each other. Neutrality and indifference you see as acts of aggression — which is utterly ridiculous, of course, but Christianity and other collectivistic ideologies humanity has come up with have made sure that most people remain blind to the cognitive dissonance here.
No one here is claiming people “own” each other. That’s a strawman. What I argue is that we are responsible to each other — not for each other’s choices, but for ensuring basic survival and dignity in a society we all co-create. You want to separate yourself from that responsibility while continuing to live in the society that enables you to do so — and that’s the real cognitive dissonance.
Indifference may not be violence, but in many cases, it is complicity. If someone is bleeding in the street and you walk by, you didn’t stab them — but you also didn’t stop the bleeding. If your ideology teaches that only direct aggression matters and all else is “neutral,” then it is blind to the ways harm can be passively upheld.
You have ignored the central point I have made regarding your attributions to the collective: that you are free to organize with others and build any mutual aid societies you want. I, in fact, highly encourage it. As long as it is done voluntarily, with consent of everyone involved. That is not what public healthcare constitutes. I am not asked nicely to join this mutual society, but I am thrown in jail if I do not. Screw this version of “solidarity.”
You’re already in a mutual aid society — you just don’t want to admit it. The roads you drive on, the sanitation that prevents plagues, the water that reaches your tap, the schools that taught you, and the emergency services that would come to your door — all exist because people were asked to contribute, not “nicely,” but democratically. You say you weren’t asked. But you were — that’s what elections, laws, and civil society are. You just didn’t like the answer.
And as for being “thrown in jail” for not paying taxes — let’s be honest. You do have the freedom to refuse. People dodge taxes all the time. The rich use loopholes and offshore havens. Some ordinary people go off-grid entirely. What you actually mean is: you want all the benefits without any responsibility. That’s not freedom. That’s entitlement.
What the individual chooses to do in his personal life is his business. There are people who, indeed, do not want to help anyone. Then there are people like me who often go out of their way to help a stranger. A strong freedom-loving individual will do as his conscience tells him and accept that other people might do differently — and a weak tyrant will demand that others do what he wants to be done.
The flaw here is in mistaking voluntary charity for a social system. Yes, helping strangers is admirable. But relying on it — on pure conscience — is how people die. Systems don’t run on individual goodwill alone, because not everyone has it, and even the best of us get tired.
You describe yourself as a “freedom-loving individual,” and yet the only version of tyranny you recognize is one that comes from the collective. When profit dictates the terms of survival, that’s freedom. When democratic consensus says “everyone deserves care,” that’s tyranny? That’s not a consistent moral position — it’s just a rigid rejection of cooperation.
I have not “defended price-gouging.” In all of these examples I have not made a single comment on how an individual “should” act: that is a matter of consciousness, personal values and so on. But I have explained why punishing someone for not sharing his water bottle makes as much sense as punishing a woman for not sharing her body with sexually starved men.
That comparison is not only grotesque — it’s conceptually incoherent. No one is asking you to give up your body. We’re asking you not to charge someone $1,000 for a bottle of water when they will die without it. A body is not a commodity. Water, food, medicine — in emergencies, they are human necessities. To withhold them for profit, to treat desperation as a business opportunity, is coercion. That you don’t “force” someone to buy it doesn’t make it voluntary. It makes it cruel.
And again, you say you don’t impose moral values — but you implicitly defend the right to do something most moral systems condemn. That is a moral stance. You just don’t want to be held accountable for it.
Then, again, for the vast majority of human history wife-beating was a very common practice. Not everyone has graduated from the mentality that caused people to do so.
You’ve just proven my point. Wife-beating only became less common because society — collectively — outlawed it. Not through voluntary individual action, but through democratic enforcement of moral norms. The exact kind of collectivism you call tyranny is what gave women legal protection. Without that “tyranny,” wife-beating would still be normalized. Thank you for making my argument for me.
Final Summary:
Your definition of freedom excludes everything except personal autonomy. But real life is not lived in a vacuum. Every individual depends on shared systems — water, electricity, food distribution, medicine, education, communication. The moment you use those systems but reject contributing to them, you are not defending liberty — you are exploiting it.
You want to organize privately and voluntarily? Good. But then don’t use the roads built by taxes. Don’t drink water regulated for public health. Don’t eat food grown with government subsidies or shipped on publicly funded infrastructure. And don’t complain when public hospitals close and you find yourself alone in the dark with your principles.
You say I want to control others. I say society already exists — it’s not optional. You’re free to leave. But as long as you stay, you are not a victim. You are a participant. Your freedom to opt out ends where your consumption of public goods begins.
And I’ll be the first to admit: no worldview is clean. Mine has contradictions, too. It’s not a utopia. But the key difference is this: I know that. And I accept that to live in society means you must contribute — not because you’re a slave, but because you’re a part of something larger than yourself. In capitalism, you’re forced to work for wages to survive. In a cooperative society, you’re expected to work to support the collective that supports you in turn. One system extracts; the other reciprocates.
And even if you try to live off-grid, building your tools from scratch — the language you speak, the math you use, the values you defend — all came from society. Your very ability to argue here is proof you’re part of a collective project. You just refuse to acknowledge the debt.
So let’s be honest: you’ve already benefited from the very system you claim to reject. The only question now is whether you’ll give back — or just keep taking while calling it freedom.
Then you should recognize the implications of your definition. If “freedom” means the absence of others controlling you, then being economically coerced by systems of desperation — pricing structures, debt traps, resource hoarding — also violates freedom. If someone is sick and cannot afford medicine, and the price is set above their reach by a market they had no role in shaping, they are being controlled. Not by a tyrant with a crown, but by conditions engineered to serve someone else’s profit. That’s not liberty — that’s abandonment. “Freedom” in that sense becomes nothing more than the right to suffer alone while others call it voluntary.
You are simply practicing a collectivistic world view in which humans by default own each other. Neutrality and indifference you see as acts of aggression — which is utterly ridiculous, of course, but Christianity and other collectivistic ideologies humanity has come up with have made sure that most people remain blind to the cognitive dissonance here.
No one here is claiming people “own” each other. That’s a strawman. What I argue is that we are responsible to each other — not for each other’s choices, but for ensuring basic survival and dignity in a society we all co-create. You want to separate yourself from that responsibility while continuing to live in the society that enables you to do so — and that’s the real cognitive dissonance.
Indifference may not be violence, but in many cases, it is complicity. If someone is bleeding in the street and you walk by, you didn’t stab them — but you also didn’t stop the bleeding. If your ideology teaches that only direct aggression matters and all else is “neutral,” then it is blind to the ways harm can be passively upheld.
You have ignored the central point I have made regarding your attributions to the collective: that you are free to organize with others and build any mutual aid societies you want. I, in fact, highly encourage it. As long as it is done voluntarily, with consent of everyone involved. That is not what public healthcare constitutes. I am not asked nicely to join this mutual society, but I am thrown in jail if I do not. Screw this version of “solidarity.”
You’re already in a mutual aid society — you just don’t want to admit it. The roads you drive on, the sanitation that prevents plagues, the water that reaches your tap, the schools that taught you, and the emergency services that would come to your door — all exist because people were asked to contribute, not “nicely,” but democratically. You say you weren’t asked. But you were — that’s what elections, laws, and civil society are. You just didn’t like the answer.
And as for being “thrown in jail” for not paying taxes — let’s be honest. You do have the freedom to refuse. People dodge taxes all the time. The rich use loopholes and offshore havens. Some ordinary people go off-grid entirely. What you actually mean is: you want all the benefits without any responsibility. That’s not freedom. That’s entitlement.
What the individual chooses to do in his personal life is his business. There are people who, indeed, do not want to help anyone. Then there are people like me who often go out of their way to help a stranger. A strong freedom-loving individual will do as his conscience tells him and accept that other people might do differently — and a weak tyrant will demand that others do what he wants to be done.
The flaw here is in mistaking voluntary charity for a social system. Yes, helping strangers is admirable. But relying on it — on pure conscience — is how people die. Systems don’t run on individual goodwill alone, because not everyone has it, and even the best of us get tired.
You describe yourself as a “freedom-loving individual,” and yet the only version of tyranny you recognize is one that comes from the collective. When profit dictates the terms of survival, that’s freedom. When democratic consensus says “everyone deserves care,” that’s tyranny? That’s not a consistent moral position — it’s just a rigid rejection of cooperation.
I have not “defended price-gouging.” In all of these examples I have not made a single comment on how an individual “should” act: that is a matter of consciousness, personal values and so on. But I have explained why punishing someone for not sharing his water bottle makes as much sense as punishing a woman for not sharing her body with sexually starved men.
That comparison is not only grotesque — it’s conceptually incoherent. No one is asking you to give up your body. We’re asking you not to charge someone $1,000 for a bottle of water when they will die without it. A body is not a commodity. Water, food, medicine — in emergencies, they are human necessities. To withhold them for profit, to treat desperation as a business opportunity, is coercion. That you don’t “force” someone to buy it doesn’t make it voluntary. It makes it cruel.
And again, you say you don’t impose moral values — but you implicitly defend the right to do something most moral systems condemn. That is a moral stance. You just don’t want to be held accountable for it.
Then, again, for the vast majority of human history wife-beating was a very common practice. Not everyone has graduated from the mentality that caused people to do so.
You’ve just proven my point. Wife-beating only became less common because society — collectively — outlawed it. Not through voluntary individual action, but through democratic enforcement of moral norms. The exact kind of collectivism you call tyranny is what gave women legal protection. Without that “tyranny,” wife-beating would still be normalized. Thank you for making my argument for me.
Final Summary:
Your definition of freedom excludes everything except personal autonomy. But real life is not lived in a vacuum. Every individual depends on shared systems — water, electricity, food distribution, medicine, education, communication. The moment you use those systems but reject contributing to them, you are not defending liberty — you are exploiting it.
You want to organize privately and voluntarily? Good. But then don’t use the roads built by taxes. Don’t drink water regulated for public health. Don’t eat food grown with government subsidies or shipped on publicly funded infrastructure. And don’t complain when public hospitals close and you find yourself alone in the dark with your principles.
You say I want to control others. I say society already exists — it’s not optional. You’re free to leave. But as long as you stay, you are not a victim. You are a participant. Your freedom to opt out ends where your consumption of public goods begins.
And I’ll be the first to admit: no worldview is clean. Mine has contradictions, too. It’s not a utopia. But the key difference is this: I know that. And I accept that to live in society means you must contribute — not because you’re a slave, but because you’re a part of something larger than yourself. In capitalism, you’re forced to work for wages to survive. In a cooperative society, you’re expected to work to support the collective that supports you in turn. One system extracts; the other reciprocates.
And even if you try to live off-grid, building your tools from scratch — the language you speak, the math you use, the values you defend — all came from society. Your very ability to argue here is proof you’re part of a collective project. You just refuse to acknowledge the debt.
So let’s be honest: you’ve already benefited from the very system you claim to reject. The only question now is whether you’ll give back — or just keep taking while calling it freedom.
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@Proletariat
"Coercion" is an act of one human imposing his will on another human against that human's consent. There is no such thing as "coercion by systems of desperation". There is no "coercion by hunger", or "coercion by a lion", or "coercion by debt". These concepts make no sense.
With the debt example, for instance, I offer someone a loan, and they are free to accept or not accept the terms. If they do not accept the terms, then they walk away and face no retaliation from me - and that is what makes it a voluntary interaction. If they do accept the terms, then they voluntarily accept the responsibility for fulfilling them, and if they cannot fulfill them, then they have made a mistake and will pay for it.
What humans actually do with all this is up to them to decide. Some will try dirty tricks to lure others into engaging in interactions that, in the long run, hurt them. It takes strength and intelligence to make a good use of freedom; naive fools do not do well in a free system. But if someone has so much compassion for them, then nobody prohibits them from subsidizing their bad choices. The key, again, is that nobody can be coerced into doing so.
"Elections" have nothing to do with freedom, any more than you voting for who Google's CEO is and then having to pay for Google's products whether you like them or not has to do with freedom. "Democracy" is just another form of tyranny - more insidious, perhaps, than an outright absolute monarchy, for monarchs do not pretend to be their subjects' employees. If you cannot walk away and face no retaliation, then you are being coerced.
That is different from a voluntary mutual aid society which you can enter or not enter - or quit once you have entered, without anyone throwing you in jail. Existence of such societies I strongly encourage, and only such societies have any degree of solidarity. There is no solidarity at a gunpoint.
Your interpretation of my wife-beating argument appears false. Beating one's wife is coercive, and, as any act of coercion, it is against my system of values. But it is not against yours, for in your system of values the collective decides what is right and what is not. In your system of values, if the collective has determined that wife-beating is legally acceptable, then it is acceptable and that is it. My system of values does not depend on the current opinion of the mob. It does not blindly cave in to the "democratic majority". If the "democratic majority" elects Hitler, then gassing Jews will not suddenly become acceptable.
You have written a lot, yet missed the essential part of my argument: that there are free/voluntary interactions between humans, and tyrannical/coercive ones. Of course, I have benefited a lot from actions of other humans - everybody has. How does it compromise my argument? In no way. I did not benefit from their actions via coercion; I have never put a gun to Newton's head and forced him to invent classical mechanics. There is no "debt" here. If you feel you have a debt to someone, then feel free to pay it - as for me, my debts are accompanied by something solid such as a signature on an official document, or, at least, a handshake.
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@Double_R
What insurrection? No one has ever been accused of insurrection, let alone convicted. Exaggeration does not help your baseless argument.
idk if it's spam but vote for my last two debates please someone...
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@fauxlaw
What insurrection? No one has ever been accused of insurrection, let alone convicted.
The fact that no one has ever been charged with insurrection is irrelevant to the question of whether January 6th would qualify under any reasonable definition. It is a fundamentally bad faith argument to suggest otherwise because you're conflating that which can be observed and reasonably derived, with that which would likely meet the burden of being proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. There is a reason no one in US history, even confederate generals, have ever been tried under this statue.
This is why I've never referred to J6 as an insurrection, not because it's not reasonable to call it that, but because partisan hacks like yourself tune out every legitimate point made about why it matters so you can play the legal gotcha game as if that's really what we're talking about. This is just deflection.
But in this case notice I wasn't even referring to J6 broadly, I was referring to Trump specifically by calling him an inserrectionist. That's very different. And why is that a fair label for him? Because he incited a mob to attack the US Capitol in order to stop the certification of an election he lost. And before you respond with all the usual nonsense about how he isn't responsible because there's no such thing as inciting a grown adult who can make their own decisions...
You could have argued he really didn't mean it up until the 187 minutes of him watching the attack play out on live TV doing absolutely nothing as president to stop it and wondering why the rest of his inner circle wasn't as excited about what they were seeing as he was. At that point, all of those arguments collapse.