Quote from: FredericBastiat on August 01, 2012, 03:42:30 PM

I was a democracy pandering nitwit for awhile until someone showed me the folly of my ways. I personally won't force anyone to do or say or believe any specific thing, especially on what's right and wrong, given that it's a subjective topic, and given that it's against my personal beliefs to do so. However, what I can say is that Libertarianism, in it's simplest form, is the most logically sound of philosophies I've read. Although admittedly, it does encounter some 'life-boat' scenario oddities. But who cares about the one-in-a-million happenstance? Besides, if you do, then logic and reasoning is important to you, in which case, you should reconsider all of your beliefs.

That doesn't make it right or wrong per se, but if you use logic and reason to justify anything you do (which is the premise of any of the idealogues), it makes all of the other philosophies look absolutely ridiculous by comparison.

Simply put, if I respect your opinions, will you respect mine? If you do, you can't force your opinions on me and vice versa, without violating that simple premise. Shall we accord each other the right to our opinion and not impose it on each other? Because if we do that, that's the basis of Libertarianism, and if it's not, it's a battle of wills, not one of reasoning.

Flame on.

What are opinions? Do they have any external context or meaning? What is the application of opinions?

Ideas are what I wish to discuss, and I only really infer personal-level stuff when I'm trying to show the person believing XYZ to look at his fellow person believing it and see if there is any perhaps demographic, or societal, or external actor to why he is believing what he is; or to look at themselves in the mirror and to assess what they are seeing. Seeing as the arguments to expand one's knowledge and to rationally discuss the ideas and tenants of the ideology have failed due to lack of effort and willpower on behalf of the Libertarian audience here, then that is the 'second rate' strategy that my arguments have had to employ as of late.

Do you remember when you learned that being a 'Democracy peddling-nitwit' was a bad-idea? Do you remember the conversation, the specific instants that made you realize: "could I be mistaken?" And the path that you took to learn more about a superior system of morality or social-organization or whatever? Imagine going on that path of learning, rigorously, for years - what do you think that you would learn? What things would you realize that would turn out to be just as absurd as democracy-peddling would be to you now? This is the question I want every Libertarian to ask, as becoming a Lib prematurely makes people (specifically white males within a certain age range) to believe that they are wizened old men and possess answers for everything. More absurdly, they think that this can be derived from a single, or at best, a handful of books that all spew the same basic, underlying ideology.