I'm painfully moderate and often painfully honest. My opinion on everything is such that I can never agree with anyone who takes one side in a polarized issue. The pro-immigration people hate me, but so do the anti-immigration people. The pro-cannabis people hate me, but so do the anti-cannabis people. It's like this with pretty much every issue in the book, because my position forces me to be contrary with most people.
@skypage If you want to be consistent about liberty, that is indeed the correct position to hold. The left thinks it's liberal, but it's no less selective than the right. They're just liberal and authoritarian simultaneously about different things.
@skypage *The left and the right are just liberal and...
@skypage Where I run into problems with being consistent is that I take everything to its logical extreme, and there, I find problems with being consistent, because the results of being consistent would be completely absurd, or impossible to enforce in practice.
@skypage Property rights: Can I demand that methane from my neighbor's farts may not waft on to my property under any circumstance? What about the smoke from a fire? Smoke from a chimney? Where do you draw the line? If a river passes through several plots of land, are the guys upstream allowed to dump their sewage in that river? The concept of absolute liberty sort of runs into problems when there are shared resources.
@bthall @skypage So far, it's more of a dead end than a discussion. "Okay, so that's the limit for that." If you go the other way and look for the logical extreme of utilitarianism, you end up with something like "One person's organs can save many lives. Clearly, we should kill people for their organs."
@skypage @thor Um sorta. The field of environmental economics is an interesting thing to follow for its philosophical developments regarding this point about your neighbor's farts, for instance. There seems to be a desire for a static conception of property that suggests that one moment of time was the point at which one's properly was defined in its totality and things like air currents and your neighbor's farts have since disrupted it.
@thor @skypage I'm a person that's worried by the notion of being controlled by my peers and/or the rest of society, so going down this route of inquiry isn't without it's uncomfortable moments, as it might suggest that we should be endlessly worried about this or that action of ours (say, farting) costing us something or opening us up to a lawsuit. And that's a real concern with carbon taxes and things that we don't think about yet due to our non-granular tech.
@skypage @thor
what you do and what not is alsways strongly ancord to culture. following law is also culture.
in #anarchism you don't ask if you're allowed but thinking who might be effected from it and creating consens with those if needed.
@thor
I deal with a similar issue, though I piss off the respective political extremes because I actually hold a logically consistent view of liberty. For instance:
I think homosexual couples should be able to defend their marijuana fields with machine guns.