>>PS: concluding that someone needs to die because their unorthodox ideas
>>cause the theft of your property is the sign of an emotionally unbalanced
>>person. Libertarians don't have the right to initiate force against me,
>>fuckface.
At 11:27 PM 02/26/2000 -0500, Petro wrote:
> Theft of property *is* the initiation of force.
Theft of property is initiation of bad behavior, but not necessarily force.
Robbery of property is initiation of force ("yer money or yer life",
or even armed burglary of an occupied residence.)
Using force to keep stolen property is initiation of force.
But sneak thievery of property isn't force, it's just theft.
It's obviously wrong, but when my fellow Libertarians claim
it's force, they're weaselwording to evade the problem that the
Non-Aggression Principle doesn't let them initiate force in response.
> You threaten my life, I have the *responsibility* to respond in kind.
Nonsense. You have the option to do so, but you've also got the
option to turn the other cheek, or to decide that the
Hatfields&McCoys approach isn't helping problems,
or to decide that the armed thugs in blue suits outnumber you
and you're better off getting them fired or suing them than shooting,
or that non-violence is a better method of throwing the bums
out of India or Alabama than violence is.
And if the miscreant isn't threatening your life, only the car you've
parked in front of the 7-11 with the keys in it while you're getting coffee,
responding in kind doesn't mean killing him - stealing his car does...
>A quote from Petro's Archives:
**********************************************
>If the courts started interpreting the Second Amendment the way they
interpret
>the First, we'd have a right to bear nuclear arms by now.--Ann Coulter
That right is of course independent of how the courts interpret it.
Unfortunately, if they interpreted the 2nd the way they interpret the 1st,
you wouldn't be able to carry scary-looking weapons,
you'd have a limit to the size of guns you could use in politics,
and commercial gun-carrying, sales, ownership would be highly regulated,
and handguns are clearly in bad taste so you can't carry them in public,
or get them by mail in brown paper wrappers, much less in packaging
that showed the gun right out on the package,
and running a militia would require a license, of which their seem
to be a limited number available, and you wouldn't be able to teach
about guns in public schools (though you could teach against them),
.... just about as screwed up as today.
Occasionally you'd get a judge who'd treat "shall not be infringed"
just as directly as Hugo Black treated "shall make no law",
but nobody listened to him :-)
A few years ago, the Libertarian Party was debating a platform plank saying
that individuals clearly have the right to possess any weapons that their
governments have, and one of my colleagues from New Jersey proposed
amending that to *targetable* weapons - you can aim a bazooka,
but you can't nuke somebody without irradiating innocent bystanders,
and generally even without blowing up innocent bystanders.
Thsi does of course mean that governments don't have the right to
use nukes either, and it's really annoying when your employees
don't listen to you...
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
