—“My claim is that a minority can’t simply declare certain questions off the table of democratic deliberation, and try to enforce that declaration with threats.
I support a legal right to own a gun in self-defense. But the recognition of that right poses real risks to others’ safety. I think I’m obliged to persuade my fellow citizens that this is a right we ought to recognize. Trying to bully them into agreement just isn’t okay.
Way too much right-wing discourse is about why it’s OK to immunize minority policy preferences from the scrutiny and authority of democratic majorities. It’s a rejection of the republican ideal of popular sovereignty, the idea that political authority needs public affirmation.
Deep and intractable disagreement about the good and the right is a basic condition of political life in a pluralistic society. Democracy is a tool for managing those disagreements to keep them from becoming violent.
Dogmatic claims about inviolable rights are implicitly claims about the conditions for legitimate political authority and the proper scope of democratic decision-making. But people disagree about rights, and there needs to be space to peacefully negotiate those disagreements.
Pounding the table and insisting that YOUR list of basic rights, and YOUR opinion about their shape, is definitive, that the conversation is closed, and if majorities try to legislate to the contrary, they’ll have to have a conversation with your gun, is dangerously illiberal.”— Will Wilkinson @willwilkinson
Will,
Let’s reduce your argument to just this:
—“insisting that YOUR list of basic rights, and YOUR opinion about their shape, is definitive, that the conversation is closed, and if majorities try to legislate to the contrary, they’ll have to have a conversation with your gun, is dangerously illiberal.”—
RIGHTS?
Do you mean rights necessary to preserve willingness to cooperate rather than war? That’s just reciprocity. That is the only natural law we must obey for people to refrain from conflict. Everything else is arbitrary.
Or do you mean rights necessary to articulate the preservation of reciprocity under a given set of political institutions, processes, and procedures? That would be enumerated cases of natural rights. If our bill of rights was strictly constructed from the natural law that the
Or do you mean contractual rights, produced by a legislature, where such legislation is bound by enumerated ases of natural rights in turn bound by the natural right of reciprocity, without which parasitism, predation, and war are preferable for the strong?
Or do you mean artificial rights – reciprocities – impositions of costs upon others. Involuntary extractions and redistributions.
You see the difference between a right and a privilege is prohibition on action (restraint), universal application of the constraint, universal standing in defense of it.
But a ‘privilege’ is a claim of debt by one or some to another or others, that they must pay without obtaining a the fulfilment of a want in voluntary exchange.
So what would you offer to those who bear arms in exchange for greater constraint on those who may bear arms? With full recollection that the vast majority of criminals are leftists, as are the vast majority of school shooters, as well as the vast majority of the mentally ill.
YOU USE SOPHISM TO AGITATE PEOPLE MADE IGNORANT BY INTENT
What causes more harm to civilization? Underclass immigration and single motherhood reproduction; redistribution of middle and working class reproduction to the underclasses and immigrants; financialization of the economy and the export of physical and knowledge capital; the single parent single income family, the dissolution of the intergenerational family; forced association and prohibited disassociation, permissive policing of behavior in the commons, our failure of an education system, the epidemic of loneliness, alcohol and drugs, middle age and late age suicide, or conflict between underclass minorities largely engaged in the drug trade or financing it?
People complain about what they see and understand. They act on what they are told to by the commentariat. They rarely if ever understand or vote for returns on capital rather than the tragedy of the commons produced by their hyperconsumption. Because they were infantilized by the left – just like you were – by design.
Majority means nothing in matters of choosing means to achieve conflicting ends, it only in matters of conflict on means of agreed ends. Why? Because the only reason to cooperate is reciprocity not majority. The majority favors ending many government programs. Majorities tell us nothing about reciprocity. They only tell us how hard people will work to avoid the cost of reciprocity.
So is your proposition of mob determination of disarmament reciprocal? No. A trade? No. A Right? No. It’s just the use of the state as a proxy for violence.
Reciprocity is the basis of international relations, international law, federal relations, civic relations, and interpersonal relations? That’s the natural law. Natural Law (reciprocity), Rule of law, Rights under both, are all derivations of the one necessity of reciprocity. Reciprocity isn’t a right, it’s a necessity of preserving non-violence.
We produce ‘rights’ so that we may claim juridical, political, and military defense of reciprocity. That’s what a ‘right’ means. It means a claim before an insurer (judicial, political, military), that like law, having universal standing and universal application. (Isonomy)
LIBERALISM?
Liberalism evolved as an application of Christianity. Christianity provides us with an expansion of natural law. Christian forgiveness is not only compatible with natural law, it is the optimum prisoner’s dilemma strategy – it maximizes incentive to adapt to middle class norms (trust). That is why christians (europeans) are wealthier than other peoples – except those who seek rents by ir-reciprocity from christians – and why christianity spreads wealth wherever it goes. ( I will refrain from enumerating the evidentiary consequences of the other monotheistic religions for the moment )
The purpose of liberalism was to devote new found tax revenue, from new found middle class productivity in trade, made possible by British preservation of natural law (anglo saxon normal traditional law – tort), to the production of commons that in turn would produce multipliers. (Which in turn would continue to disempower the church as a competing set of institutions. )
That is liberalism – classical liberalism. Use of the proceeds of rule of law to produce commons of even greater multiples of returns. Not consumption, but production of returns.
What you are casting as ‘liberal’ (a market process) is socialism (an irreciprocal process) , which is the redistribution of genetic, cultural, traditional, normative, institutional capital.
So you are using a sophism (pilpul) and straw man (critique) and a false promise (freedom from genetic differences) to undermine the source of our privilege of redistributed wealth – the natural law of reciprocity, and the first written constitution to construct a polity on it.
Now the average, and even educated american, no longer knows this because you (leftists) have been successful in your postmodern attack on the natural law, the constitution, the knowledge to preserve it, the science of our differences, and truthful speech in persuasive exposition of it. In fact, you are little more than a counter reaction against Smith, Hume, Jefferson, Dawin, Nietzche, Menger, and Hayek.
So the only purpose of reciprocity, negotiation, and truth is to seek continuation of returns on reciprocity – meaning TRADES that increase capital rather than consume it. So if one will not engage in reciprocity (trade), or boycott (secession) then only violence remains.
Democracy CAN only function as (a) a means of overthrowing a failed government (b) a means of jurying a proposition by a government using a house of each class, (c) a means of selecting priorities from a set of common interests with because of limited capital. But in conflict we can only trade without ir-reciprocity.
And that is the net of conservatism: Sovereignty, Reciprocity, Testimonial Truth, Duty of Commons, the Sacredness of the Law (constitution), the Jury, and at least for our supernatural kindred, the Sacredness of Christianity’s ten commandments (property rights), Jesus’s teachings (extension of family forgiveness to kith and kin), and the Church’s teaching of mindfulness by anthropomorphic externalization.
YOU DON’T MEAN LIBERALISM, YOU MEAN ARBITRARY RULE – RULE BY COMMAND
You keep talking about liberalism ( a lie ) but you don’t mean reciprocity, and you don’t mean rule of law, you don’t mean production of commons, and you don’t mean increase in capital.
You mean destruction of ‘the third way’ -western civilization, and creating a monopoly state (defense), government (commons), and church (education and insurance). WHen the secret of western success was markets in all walks of life, including state, govt, craft(biz), and church.
So no, you are not a ‘liberal’, your just another acolyte of Byzantium, Persia, Mesopotamia, China and Egypt – an ego, a despot making false promise that genders, individuals, groups, classes, nations, and yes, even races, are equal in distribution of class size (ability) and …
… demand( neoteny, depth and rate of maturity). But you know, we ended the pomo lie of nature over nurture in gender, personality, intelligence, and potential last year, and right now , within a year or two we will end the pomo lie of indifference of groups, nations, races.
But you and yours are just priests, this time, selling false promise, sophism and pseudoscience, instead of false promise in an afterlife, with sophism and supernaturalism – as a means of destroying the rule of law, markets, truth and trust that makes your privilege possible.
THE COMING CIVIL WAR
So we are going to have a civil war because of you and yours.
Not because it’s just a matter of winning a political challenge, or because of a moral outrage, but because we need not have another dark age of ignorance, poverty, and decline, because you reversed the underlying reason for western and eastern prosperity: Reciprocity, Rule of Law in defense of it, and the Armed Militia of every able man to insure it.
The West used market and agrarianism, and aggressive prosecution, and east used bureaucracy, agrarianism, and aggressive prosecution, to produce the eugenic society that made our majority genetic middle class civilization possible.
That’s the dirty secret of western civilization. Rule of Law Produces Markets and Markets produce Eugenic results, and eugenic evolution under markets under rule of law, creates a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement.
And you are doing everything possible to restore monopoly and dysgenics that has destroyed every great civilization of the ancient world – and beginning with the marxist rebellion, and culminating the postmodern neoliberal – succeeded in destroying european – as fast as the roman empire – in just seventy years.
So no. We aren’t going to let that happen. Because we have arms. (Guns)
You and your fellow ‘liberals’ are just another priesthood selling another false promise, counter to laws of nature, and the natural law of human cooperation.
And that is why we are going to have a civil war bloodier than all others in history. Not because conservatives are petty empathetic, emotional temporal drones. But because we will not tolerate genocide, culture-cide, the end of the only ‘third way’ middle class civilization. But we will not let our descendants, few as they may be, experience another dark age of deceit that empowers a priesthood over a vast ignorant obedient underclass.
So it’s not a matter of ‘rights’. It’s a matter of war. The Reciprocal decision is secession and separation. The irreciprocal decision will end in your defeat. Every simulation and war game ends with right wing success.
And worse, you are thinking ethnocide. But we’re thinking Politicide.
And we’re going to not only win, but outlaw, in the constitution, false promise, baiting into hazard, pilpul, critique, straw-manning and pseudoscience in word and deed. We’re going to end free use of, irreciprocal, false, and deceitful speech, and restore the limit of truthful, reciprocal, speech, and an involuntary warranty of due diligence against ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion obscurantism, fictionalism, and deceit.
We’re going to end your pseudoscientific and sophomoric priesthood.
Forever.