Recently, Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas took to the floor of the House to talk about Wikileaks, transparency in government, and the case of Daniel Ellsberg, the 
Pentagon Papers, and the New York Times. He spoke about how the Iraq War was based on lies. He asked how the U. S. government should prosecute a citizen of Australia for publishing classified U. S. documents that he did not steal. Paul also said the following: “Revealing the real nature and goal of our presence in so many Muslim countries is a threat to our empire, and any revelation of this truth is highly resented by those in charge.”
Paul posed a number of questions at the end of his talk:
Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
Number 3: Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised ‘Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed.’ I yield back the balance of my time.
Source: Huffington Post
– Elaine Magliaro
Tony,
First, I’m going to call you an asshole and then move on . . .
You’re kind of narrow minded for a scientist. You said “If it’s just fuzzy by nature of dealing with emotion, that’s fine. I have a handle on that.” But your statements dismissing other forms of logic clearly indicates that you don’t have a handle on it.
And this is why you are wrong . . .
Logic, and therefor rationality, comes in more than one form. If you truly understand the nature of fuzzy logic and aren’t just using the word because you think emotions are “fuzzy” (which is not the same as “messy”), we wouldn’t be having this discussion. To wit and relevant to this discussion (but not all inclusive): classical bivalent logic, Bayesian logic and fuzzy logic.
Bivalent logic is constrained by the following features:
1. The Law of Identity – the proposition that an object is the same as itself (A ≡ A). Or as Frank Zappa put it, “You are what you is.”
2. Law of the Excluded Middle – the propositions that all values must be 1 or 0 (or True or False). It is a correlate of the law of identity.
3. Law of Contradiction/Noncontradiction – the proposition that contradictory statements cannot both at the same time be true. A = B and A ≠ B are mutually exclusive. It is also a correlate of the law of identity and the compliment of the law of the excluded middle.
4. Double negative elimination – which is just like the linguistic application of double negatives, i.e. the car is not not red means (is the equivalent of) the car is red.
5. Monotonicity and idempotency of entailment – As to monotonicity, for brevity, I’ll simplify this to the concept of deduction (the proposition that two sentences A and B are related such that the truth of B follows from the truth of A). As to idempotency of entailment, it is the proposition that one may derive the same consequences from many instances of a hypothesis as from just one, i.e. there can be more than one path to a unitary true solution.
6. Commutativity of conjunction – the proposition that predicates on both sides of a logical conjunction operator are interchangeable.
7. Logical operators are dual to another, specifically AND and OR, i.e NOT (P OR Q) = (NOT P) AND (NOT Q); NOT (P AND Q) = (NOT P) OR (NOT Q). This is sometimes referred to as De Morgan duality.
Sometimes I shorthand this kind of logic when referring to a particular type of error in thought by referring to it as binary logic because I find a lot of engineers get hung up on the law of the excluded middle. Oddly enough, even though you’re a scientist and not an engineer (and as such presumably familiar with statistics beyond the basics), this is the same error you make by insisting everything is either “rational” or “emotional”. The real world, not the abstractions of pure logic or mathematics, is analog, not binary. There are values between 1 and 0 and while some of these values may be derived from emotionally based thought and/or faith based thought (for which there is little utility), some values between 1 and 0 can be described and utilized based in reason: the very modes of thought (or logic) you so readily dismiss in your thoughts about the nature of reason that you’ve bound to the law of the excluded middle. These are useful logics for dealing with subjects that don’t always (but sometimes) deal in the absolute terms of 1 and 0.
Like the human psychology . . . and the law.
As I said before, “Law and its cousins philosophy and psychology are not bound by absolute logics and are considered soft sciences – they live and die by the vagaries of human psychology and while capable of logic it is a reality that not all human behavior is logical or desirable. This is consistent with the goal of philosophy and of psychology to understand and define the nature of human existence, knowledge, reason, experience (including the irrational) and language. Herein lies the analogy – law is to psychology and philosophy as physics/applied mathematics is to pure mathematics. Law has a different objective than physics though. The objective of law is the maintenance of social order to engender the stability required for contiguous civilization. Law is a form of applied psychology and philosophy. It is the mechanic of civilization – social engineering if you will – built with the grammar and vocabulary of psychology and philosophy. As such, it cannot be as axiomatically bound as physics or mathematics but requires flexibility and approximations to address the fundamentally irrational and undesirable parts of human nature.”
In order to make practical application of psychology/philosophy, the flexibility and approximations required can be derived using the forms of Bayesian and fuzzy logics.
Bayesian logic is a logic that deals with probabilities and is therefore not axiomatically bound to the law of the excluded middle. It is an interpretation of probability that is an extension of logic that enables reasoning with uncertain statements. Since certainty is key to law and the law is a form of applied psychology – a subject that is inherently uncertain – it is a good form of reasoning to apply when thinking about law. There are two schools of Bayesian logic and they relate to how one interprets the state of knowledge: objectively or subjectively. Ideally, good law is based on the objective. And when I say “objectivism” here, I don’t mean in the childish Randian sense of a rationale for greed and selfishness, but the in the metaphysical sense of objectivism – the belief that reality is mind-independent which correlates to reality being quantifiable and capable of verification through testing and observation. Where a lot, if not most, of the bad and/or politicized non-objective law comes stems from subjectivists for which the state of knowledge corresponds to a ‘personal belief’ (and therefor possibly irrational and/or unprovable) rather than the objective state of knowledge in the world. Misapplication of subjective Bayesian logic is part of the basic reason of why most politicians suck, but I digress.
Fuzzy logic is simply another form of probabilistic logic like Bayesian logic. The primary difference is that fuzzy logic corresponds to “degrees of truth”, while probabilistic logic corresponds to “probability, likelihood”. Because these logics fundamentally differ in approach, fuzzy logic and probabilistic logic yield different models of the same real-world situations but because fuzzy logic deals with truth, it is sometimes more useful of analysis and development of good law than the Bayesian model but it is not a replacement for Bayesian logic but rather a complement to it. This is consistent with the idea of possiblity theory (as constrasted to probability theories). Since law is by necessity the realm of the possible, using possiblity theory as informed by the two forms of probabilistic logic is the proper reasonable and logical framework for discussing law instead of the bivalent logic that is more prevalent in the practice of the scientific method and mechancial engineering.
I’m really surprised I have to explain this to a scientist. There are more tools and sets of tools in the reason toolbox than one, Tony. If you don’t recognize the truth of this, any questions I’d ask relevant to explaining a social contract are going to be an exercise in futility as you are “logic locked” into binary thinking.
There is an excellent book that would help explain the proper foundation for logic and legal reasoning that was one of my law school texts. Strangely enough, it was originally written to help train Mossad agents for field work. While not intended for legal analysis per se, it is of high utility. An Elementary Approach to Thinking Under Uncertainty by Ruth Beyth-Marom and Shlomith Dekel.
I’m going to be very busy for the next week (moving between Christmas and New Years, long story that narrows down to my current landlord is a douche bag), so my posting may be sproadic and certainly not as in depth as this one until after I’ve gotten moved and settled.
@Buddha: Is there a point in that? How can something be a “contract” if it is, in essence, involuntary? How can an infant be bound by an agreement?
I am fully aware of the psychology of people and crowds; I earned a large amount of money in my professional career selling my services to clients of all sizes. I have had many ends different than the goals of science, for most of my life in fact. Certainly the goals of government and law are very different from that of science.
I am suspicious of any other “modes of thought,” in my experience, which is reasonably wide (from slums to boardrooms) there is emotional thought and rational thought. Rational thought is by definition reasoned, and those that reject it prefer to believe in things without reason — they are faith based. Whether their faith is in scripture, or a favorite writer or some other dogma, they believe what they believe without reason, it just makes them feel good emotionally.
I am a rational thinker. I am capable of reasoning about people’s feelings, and well-being, greed, fear, love, aspirations and other emotions. I am also an emotional person: As a general philosophy, I believe the intellect exists to serve the ends of the emotional being; there is no purely rational reason to do anything. Everything we do is motivated by some emotional end. Sometimes it is whimsical, sometimes substantive. The intellect is primarily a tool of the emotional being (and every once in a while a brake on the emotional being to prevent short term satisfaction from producing long term misery).
In any case, explain what other valid method or mode of thought you think exists besides rationality. If it is faith-based or relies on fantasy, I’ll have no truck with it. If it’s just fuzzy by nature of dealing with emotion, that’s fine. I have a handle on that.
As for explaining what I suspect is a deeply flawed concept, feel free, but if you disagree with what I have written just tell me why you think I am wrong. If you think it is wrong because legal dogma sees it differently, that is not a valid reason to dismiss it. If it were, science would end, no original idea would ever see the light of day.
So I don’t know if that answers your question or not. Ask your question, if you don’t like the answer, call me an asshole and move on.
Tony,
I would like to ask you a couple of questions. They are simple questions and ones which I will use to make a point or points dependent upon your answers, although the stipulation I’m about to make isn’t simple. It is, however, true. I may or may not ask the questions based upon your reaction to the stipulation.
First: the stipulation;
Law and physics are both forms of science in that they are systematic examinations of the world, but to different ends and by different methods. To wit:
Physics and its cousin mathematics are bound by absolute logics and are regarded as hard sciences – their axioms live and die by the equation. Either logic follows and the equation balances or it fails, but that is consistent with the goal of science in general – understanding the true nature of the universe by either proving, disproving or modifying theories. The relationship between these cousins is not unlike the relationship between a true statement (physics) and the grammar and vocabulary used to form a true statement (mathematics). The true statement of physics has real world application (F=ma, E=mc^2) – it’s applied mathematics – where pure mathematics may not have a practical real world application (although it may) and is useful for modeling the abstract (like number theory) and addressing generality or helping to understand the interrelation of pure mathematics to its sub-fields or to applied mathematics.
Law and its cousins philosophy and psychology are not bound by absolute logics and are considered soft sciences – they live and die by the vagaries of human psychology and while capable of logic it is a reality that not all human behavior is logical or desirable. This is consistent with the goal of philosophy and of psychology to understand and define the nature of human existence, knowledge, reason, experience (including the irrational) and language. Herein lies the analogy – law is to psychology and philosophy as physics/applied mathematics is to pure mathematics. Law has a different objective than physics though. The objective of law is the maintenance of social order to engender the stability required for contiguous civilization. Law is a form of applied psychology and philosophy. It is the mechanic of civilization – social engineering if you will – built with the grammar and vocabulary of psychology and philosophy. As such, it cannot be as axiomatically bound as physics or mathematics but requires flexibility and approximations to address the fundamentally irrational and undesirable parts of human nature.
Do you accept this stipulation?
If not, then the point of asking the questions is moot. You are bound too tightly to the scientific method to consider that there are other valid methods and modes of thought applicable to ends different than that of science in general.
If so, then I may be able to explain the legal axioms behind the idea of a social contract (aka social compact).
Although I may or may not get to it tonight.
I’m just beat and I hear the siren song of soft cotton sheets whispering in my ear.
@Bob: You do understand, I assume, that Locke and others lived and were educated and raised in the existing societies of their time, and that they were proposing their own inventions of justifications for law, government and human rights?
I am sure monarchs and despots were scoffing at these ideas, like “consent of the governed,” when they were first introduced.
I do not claim to be either a Locke or Burlamaqui, but I do claim the right to think for myself, to reject dogma and arrive at different and more workable conclusions. Just as they thought for themselves, and rejected the dogma of their time, and arrived at different and more workable conclusions for their own time.
They did that, I think, in response to tyranny. I do the same; but now the tyranny is one of greed, and corporations and corrupt politicians, not kings and emperors.
Buddha,
In the spirit of Christmas, and while I finish shopping, could you help Tony C.?
I can’t recall ever having an “argument” quite like this one.
@Bob: You are not ‘educating me,’ you have taught me nothing except that you are incapable of logic.
Bob says (or quotes): The creation of the social compact necessitates an exchange of consideration; i.e. the individual leaves the state of nature, where he had ALL RIGHTS, and gives up a portion in exchange for better protection of those ‘retained rights.’
Yes, I remember reading all this drivel while waiting to be killed in the military when I was 18. Here’s what is wrong with it:
1) Even in a state of nature, I disagree that a person has ‘all rights.’ I do not believe a person has the right to ambush a stranger and kill them for their food, even if they are the only two people within a hundred miles. It is morally wrong and I do not subscribe to a philosophy in which murder for personal gain is ever a ‘right’ for anybody.
2) I have never existed in a state of nature. I was born in a fine American hospital and raised a citizen of the USA. I never had ‘all rights’ and I never “exchanged” some of my rights to live in a society; because I was incapable of assent one way or another, I was raised without my assent in a succession of American cities to adulthood; and in that process thoroughly lost any ability to exist in a ‘state of nature.’
Perhaps cavemen might have found this construct appealing; the situation for the modern person (and most people 400 years ago) is they are born into this “exchange” and have no choice in the matter whatsoever; it is similar to the situation indentured servants found themselves in during the middle ages; born into servitude to repay a debt by their grandfather that could never be repaid. It wasn’t their debt or their choice, they were essentially born into slavery.
If it makes you feel better to think of it this way, have fun, but it is drivel and I reject the construction from the beginning. The entire thing is drivel. You are like Chan, just quoting verses from your Bible that you accept without question.
I am not a solipsist, I suspect you need to look up that word. I am a rationalist, an atheist, and I do not accept dogma from anybody on anything.
I have logical reasons for my beliefs in property rights, but they are not inalienable. I will say again, when property is used as a tool of oppression, property rights become subordinate to human rights.
A person with the inalienable right of self-ownership is not property by definition.
If he owns himself, you are treating the body and mind as property. The body is not a property, and the rules of property do not apply. A person cannot sell themselves into slavery; ‘ownership’ cannot be transferred to somebody else; he cannot own a second ‘self.’ This phrase “self-ownership” is completely devoid of meaning.
The reason a person is not property is that a civilized society does not treat ANYBODY as a property of ANY entity. Despotic and primitive societies do, but that is a form of slavery. Even American prisoners are not property; they are controlled because they have proven themselves incapable of controlling themselves.
A person has essential birthrights, among these are that once they are an adult, they can decide the course of their own life (self-determination) and decide what they want to do (self-control), as long as they don’t infringe upon the rights of others. No right is “inalienable,” including life. We can execute murderers.
There is no “social contract” that people choose or decline to enter into; their society is something they are born and raised in with absolutely no choice on their part, indeed with insufficient neural equipment to even make a choice for many years. I did not choose to learn English or wear clothing, it was imposed upon me. (I’m glad I did, but there was no choice involved.)
I did not engage in a contract negotiation at 18 to become a member of this society. I was not given a choice, I was born into it and there was no other viable option.
Trying to construct some fantasy “contract” based on nonexistent “alternatives” is just a profoundly stupid approach; I prefer to face reality and find a logical justification for both my responsibilities and my freedoms that holds logical water in the real world.
You and Chan can just keep re-reading your dogma with its careful omissions and laughable generalities and rigid denial of reality. I understand dogma can be comforting for people incapable of critical thought.
Tony C:
does it matter? But I am quoting Mother Teresa.
Buddha,
Congrats on the good feline news. Do you lace the salmon with cat nip for an extra treat?
When the cat’s fully recovered, maybe you and Oscar can send him out to find Big Foot.
@Chan: Who are you quoting, and why? Are you just incapable of making your own arguments? You might as well be quoting the Bible at me.
Tony C:
“Modern collectivists . . . see society as a super-organism, as some supernatural entity apart from and superior to the sum of its individual members.”
“The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.”
Tony C:
“A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)”
Tony C.: “You say this without any proof or reason for your analogy. This conversation had degenerated to the point of you just making empty claims you cannot justify or defend; why should I work at it? You have proven yourself an ideologic parrot incapable of original thought. If I wanted to hear a diatribe on tired old crap you have read, I know where to find the same books.”
The only way for me to ‘justify or defend’ an area of study of which you prove yourself to be completely ignorant is to personally tutor you through the argument. Furthermore, without knowing the basics of which you speak, you lack the capacity to judge whether any of my thoughts were original.
Tony C.: “I get it, you stand in awe of the edifice of libertarianism and don’t care if it has a foundation of bullshit.”
Wow; I did not know that.
Tony C.: “That is your right. I reject the bullshit, I don’t care how many times it has been used to justify actions it cannot logically justify, it does not make it any less bullshit.”
Based on your thorough examination of the topic; of course.
Tony C.: “Now as for property law, I am sure the majority of that is just fine; because it deals with actual property and who owns it or how it is to be divided or disputes over the employment of it.”
Have you ever picked up a text on property law in your entire
life? Ever read a thorough treatment on the origins of property law as it still exists as a foundational basis today? Judging from your inane arguments that answer would be no.
Tony C.: “My problem becomes paramount when property rights are equated to human rights.”
And who did that? Property rights are alienable; rights retained by the individual during the formation of the social compact, i.e. the sticks in the bundle of self-ownership rights, are INALIENABLE.
Yet another ‘oversight’ due to your ignorance.
Tony C.: “In my view no person is a property,”
That’s Locke’s view and my view as well.
Tony C.: “and no property (like a corporation) is a person.”
I too have trouble with the legal fiction of corporate person-hood.
Tony C.: “The libertarian view that a person is property is abhorrent to me, anything they conclude from that is unsupported by transference.”
I’m not arguing or supporting whatever it is you deem ‘the libertarian view.’ I’m simply informing you of the structure of the social compact that defines itself as contradictory to tyranny.
Tony C.: “It may even be something I agree with, in regard to property, but if I agree then it is because I see a logical path back to axioms that ***I*** find self-evident, or their logic did not rely on an axiom of a person being property.”
***I***????
You must be a solipsist; since no other person would have the audacity to pass judgments on the axioms within a particular field of study without so much as learning the subject first.
Tony C.: To whatever extent your “social contract” relies on a person being property (as opposed to just being self-controlling and having self-determination (the right to make their own decisions on the best course of action for them)), I reject that contract.”
A person with the inalienable right of self-ownership is not property by definition. Your inability to grasp that basic concept here betrays your complete ignorance of the topic.
Bob,
The treat in question is a mix of his two favorites, canned tuna (in water only) and smoked salmon. But only a little. He’s a bit groggy still from the anesthetic. As soon as the drugs wear off, they promised he’d be better than he was before.
Better…stronger…faster.
Now pardon me, I have to get rid of some of that OSI freak trying to send him on a mission. Some guy named ‘Foldman’ or ‘Goldman’ or something.
@ekeyra: In this context, who determines the amount, time, and specifics of what you owe?
The people do, or their elected representatives, but I believe they must make and apply their rules to citizens without discrimination, or they violate my human right to non-oppression. The majority cannot oppress the minority, and vice versa.
Citizens don’t have to ‘check’ with anybody; you have an obligation to pay for the water you use; you don’t have to check in with anybody before taking a bath or washing the dishes.
My obligations are typically met by paying taxes, not in time; although of course the taxes could be roughly translated into time I worked to meet those obligations. But the vast majority of Americans pay their taxes and meet their obligations without ever checking in with anybody. They also, like me, rely heavily on the services of this society to live the life they are living.
@Bob: What you propose is tantamount to rejecting the medical axiom that unclean hands spreads disease.
You say this without any proof or reason for your analogy. This conversation had degenerated to the point of you just making empty claims you cannot justify or defend; why should I work at it? You have proven yourself an ideologic parrot incapable of original thought. If I wanted to hear a diatribe on tired old crap you have read, I know where to find the same books.
I get it, you stand in awe of the edifice of libertarianism and don’t care if it has a foundation of bullshit. That is your right. I reject the bullshit, I don’t care how many times it has been used to justify actions it cannot logically justify, it does not make it any less bullshit.
Now as for property law, I am sure the majority of that is just fine; because it deals with actual property and who owns it or how it is to be divided or disputes over the employment of it.
My problem becomes paramount when property rights are equated to human rights. In my view no person is a property, and no property (like a corporation) is a person.
The libertarian view that a person is property is abhorrent to me, anything they conclude from that is unsupported by transference. It may even be something I agree with, in regard to property, but if I agree then it is because I see a logical path back to axioms that ***I*** find self-evident, or their logic did not rely on an axiom of a person being property.
To whatever extent your “social contract” relies on a person being property (as opposed to just being self-controlling and having self-determination (the right to make their own decisions on the best course of action for them)), I reject that contract.
I have my own that doesn’t demand I treat myself or anybody else as property.
You can disagree, that is your right, but I believe we are at the point of, “Yes it is,” and “No it isn’t.” If you want to argue like a five-year-old, I can do that.
“I am not saying they owe everything to society; but I am saying what they do owe is not zero.”
That has nothing to do with the existence of self-ownership. The creation of the social compact necessitates an exchange of consideration; i.e. the individual leaves the state of nature, where he had ALL RIGHTS, and gives up a portion in exchange for better protection of those ‘retained rights.’
Yet another reason why the right of self-ownership must be inalienable is to protect the individual from being swallowed whole by an illusory social contract; i.e. one that fails for lack of mutual obligation. This of course brings us back to the reason for distinguishing usurpation from tyranny.
Then again, under your system, such considerations are unnecessary; having disposed of axioms you don’t understand.
Buddha,
So what kind of treats will you be spoiling the cat with when it gets home?
Tony: “No it isn’t.”
You say that having never devoted the time to study the system of laws of which you speak.
B,
I wouldnt say im a “cat person” but i am definately of the mind that pets are family members, whether dog, cat, spider, or reptile. I would consider it no different than if your child was ill. This is the season of connecting with loved ones, not losing them.
As for hope, isnt that what makes us all human, infinite potential?