You can't explain that; you have to explain to them why gambling is better than not-gambling.  I hope you fail in this regard, as this would mean your parents are a lot wiser than you are, which is good for you.

You're not alone

You're not responsible for those crimes because you don't legitimize them; at the same time, many of us are no longer legitimizing the state.  I'm of two minds on this one, now; I believe what I and Kulge said makes more sense to a Fe user; the Fi user naturally holds no relationship with the "we", but is more so connect to the "I", and so the actions of the state aren't connected to the Fi user, while the Fe user is more prone to feel guilt for participating in a society which believes these actions to be justified.

Anyway, ultimately, it's those who are in support of the state and see these deaths as necessary casualties to rid the world of evil (the classic villain archetype...) that are the true underlying vehicles stirring these events in motion.

Though you and I realize this, so long as a corporation appears to provide a service or product of great value, it remains a legitimate business.  Take snake-oil, for example; so long as people believe it cures cancer and makes their skin smoother, they'll pay for it.  In this way, all businesses provide a benefit to society, even if we realize some don't; because we're a minority, popular belief always holds true that any business that stands on its own legs is a boon to us all.

There's nothing a person can do without knowledge; all businesses are good in the eyes of the typical consumer.  The only solution, of course, is knowledge.

Wonderful.  Now I have an excuse to call them the American Bitcoin Foundation

Hah.  That'll learn 'em about a piss-flavored ignore button.

This is of extreme importance to understand.  Point being, the law makes no difference; if you have a principle against animal cruelty, you are not cruel to animals.  If you do not have this principle, you don't care.  Either way, there have been laws against animal cruelty for a long time now, and the animals are still treated cruelly.  The fact that PETA exists at all is enough evidence that the law is meaningless; nothing can replace knowledge and empathy, which is the only way animal cruelty can ever be resolved.  If the state is the sole, or among, the solutions to animal cruelty...what are they waiting for?

Hawker doesn't want to prevent animal cruelty, he wants to harm the people who are cruel to animals; little does he know, this is the societal behavior that contributes to producing the people who are cruel to animals in the first place.  It's a horrendously vicious cycle that can only be brought to an end with knowledge and, for our less-empathetic friends, abstinence from the use of violence.

It's because they have no principles; when they cannot govern themselves, the only thing left to latch onto, to give them any semblance of a civil society, are the principles other men have cast upon them.  My theory is, when a person is provided with these things, they have a tendency to not develop their own principles, just as a person who is given everything he needs in life has such trouble taking care of himself when his providers leave him.  It's these same people who believe anarchy is chaos--because nobody is providing their principles for them, they immediately acknowledge, though they may not understand, that there would be no order; they acknowledge there's no order within themselves, the very people who would kill at the drop of a dime if their principle-providers asked them to.  The law, then, becomes an irreplaceable gem; without it, how could society survive?  As a convenient example:

No principles here.

I believe most people aren't like this; I believe the principles are there, and they're very basic; anyone with a reasonable amount of empathy can guess what they are, even if they don't fully realize them, and I do believe they make up the vast majority of people.  So where do these principles go?  My guess: when you violate these principles at a very early age, i.e. circumcision, spanking, abandonment (daycares, babysitters, et al), they tend to drop out of a person.  This person then grows older, goes from "troubled child" to "troubled teen" and then gets unleashed onto society after 14 years of being kept in a box.  The only thing the person has to go from at that point is this: follow the law out of fear (since they have no principles to fall back onto), or overcome this fear and become a law-breaker.  The ones who follow the law out of fear continue to operate without principle however, and support such exploits as taxation, war, and the use of systematic violence against peaceful people.  For this reason, the law appears as a real life force, just as a ghost would, or perhaps God.

Wonderful; we'll finally be able to fool people into thinking Bitcoin isn't being used for nefarious purposes.  Even when it is.

This is also a very important distinction to make: I'm tired of socialist wannabes who say silly things like "We need to steal from the rich and give to the poor!"  All this does is move the money straight back into the hands of the rich   And this is ignoring that it's immoral to take from a person who got his money through acceptable means; if you give all your money to a person and later realize you want that money back, you can't just demand that he give it back with the threat of violence because you're now broke.  If you allow yourself to be duped, you deserve what you get; only thing we can do is learn from the mistake, but we never seem to do it.

If I'm smarter than the illuminati, does this make me super-illuminati?

The rich are rich because they're profiting from the poor; this can only happen in hierarchical relationships.  The current system is in the shape of a pyramid: the bottom ranks make the most, but they're also the biggest rank, and so divided, they each make far less than the members of the topmost rank, who make the least, but divide that wealth between very few people.  A huge amount of energy is being input by the bottom ranks, while the least amount of energy is being input by the topmost rank; the discrepancy is in why, despite each individual worker providing equal amounts of time and labor, some are paid very little, while others are paid a lot.

Socialism seeks to squash this divide; in the hierarchical system, you have a small group of owners who have the wealth to employ workers who generate more wealth for them; no business owner will ever hire a worker he cannot profit from.  In the non-hierarchical system, each worker holds a stake in the company, and though they perform different jobs of varying intensity, they each get a fair cut in profits generated; if the company does well, they all become richer; if the company does poor, they all become poorer.  This doesn't change the fact that company A can do far better than company B, but it certainly fails to centralize the world's wealth into a very small group of hands: it's not "Bill and Joe profits from Jason's and Lucy's labor", it's "Bill and Jason profit together, and Joe and Lucy compete with Bill and Jason."

I don't see anything wrong with voluntary poverty, don't get me wrong; if a person wants to be impoverished, that's his own business--perhaps he is a writer, or an otaku.  My concern is for the people who work 8+ hour shifts every day and still have to look for more jobs to support themselves and their family, meanwhile those at the top of the system have more wealth than they know what to do with (usually involving empires and lobbying and such.)  I don't find this agreeable; people who input a great amount of work should get a corresponding amount of profit.

You make a good point;


The left/right parable is, in my belief, nothing more than a divide & conquer tactic.

I'm arguing from the standing point that, since we do not act as a society to point out the thieves and murderers for who they are, we in turn accept that they are a legitimate institution and that their special rights are consistent with ethical behavior, which I don't believe it is, not even a little.  I realize that it is currently impossible to actually prevent ourselves from being swallowed whole by the state if we now decided we'd no longer support them, but this only motivates me more to alert our fellow man that we're being duped; divided, we are powerless, but together, we can make a difference, and we can then finally resolve this 10,000-year-old problem.

I didn't make it   Just remembered it from a long time ago and thought it was a funny correlation.

If you're suicidal, sure.  I think voluntary interaction is a far greater pursuit.

You both miss the point: some people like self-governance, some people don't.  The only point of this article is to force one group (wouldn't you know it, just happens to be the anarchists) to follow another (and boy, what a coincidence: people who prefer hierarchies!  This is going in my book as "rarest journalistic pursuits ever.")  I realize you two haven't spent any time studying anarchism, which makes sense, because it doesn't interest you; this doesn't bother me.  What bothers me is that you still operate under the belief that there can only be one way the world is run.  This is as silly as the belief that there can only be one religion, or only one football team, or only one fast food chain; what these three things have in common, that methods of government lack, is the fact that nobody is forcing you to root for the Packers.

That sounds remarkably useful, tell me more.

If you need about 30 minutes of happiness and energy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n64gYCzsDlM