I have a hardcore libertarian friend (hardcore as in pro child labour) who believes people should be able to sell themselves into slavery ... although he's now a born again Christian, so I'm not sure how that affects things.
@p@critical No — meaning you should be able to freely modify them, build your own cyborg army! And carry out an attack on… Oh, shit, I know this is getting old 😅
The big argument is, who owns your child? You or the state?
They're literally half of your DNA; made from you and another person. The hardcore libertarian will say you should be able to allowed to use your kid for labor or raise them to work in a brothel (literally heard this argument in real life).
And at one time, this was more true than not (like the movie Pretty Baby). Today the State says there are some things you cannot do. You can't beat your child. You can't break your child's bones. You can't fuck your child. You can't let other people fuck your child. You have to feed, cloth and take care of your child.
I'd like to hope most people can agree those are significant improvements for humanity. We now give children 16~20 years of protection before they have to face the realities of this world.
But now we get into more of the weird luxury belief stuff. Can the state be forced to medicate your child? Can you refuse certain health treatments the State mandates for your child? Can a child be taken away from you because you are teaching that child certain moral believes (like homosexuality or abortion is right/wrong?)
Today, you only partially owns your child, and the state partially owns your child, and those lines are currently changing and being argued about.
I get the draw toward extremist libertarianism's elegant simplicity, but there are questions that you cannot answer without either accepting that it's just not that simple, or else looking like an absolute fucking bellend.
That's not a fallacious question. Children are influenced by their parents and parents set boundaries. There was a man in the UK who's daughter started going out of control and he restrained her from going out one night at 11pm. Social services got involved and said he wasn't allowed to restrain her anymore.
She was then groomed by a gang and sexually exploited and pimped and he couldn't legally do anything about it. Her name was Scarlett and her and her father's tail is horrifying:
I literally just gave you a real story, a horrific one, of a case where a man wasn't allowed to raise his child by the state and she was raped, sexually abused and groomed. You responded so fast I'm absolutely sure you dismissed it without listening or trying to learn about it.
I've been here as long as you if not longer. You can response to the specific case, or you can continue your autistic screeching. That's not evidence or an argument.
You were the one who called me a noob. I'm not in a pissing contest. I gave you a real case with a real argument. If you don't want to listen to an hour interview, there are other articles:
but I'm not sure if they cover the significant part of where he wasn't allowed to keep his teenage daughter from roaming the streets past midnight due to the State.
You didn't reply to the argument and the specific case, just started hurling insults. You're not in the right here.
@djsumdog unfollow me if you don't respect me and you're gonna call it "autistic screeching" when i call you out on what you're actually doing, faggot.
@djsumdog >You're not in the right here. nor are you. i just decided to stop taking the conversation seriously after you clearly refused to admit to your ignorance.
You still haven't addressed the specific case, even when I went through the trouble of giving you the fucking timestamp. You can only hurl insults and not address the actual statement or argument. Then you think you've won somehow.
Is is 100% absolutely relevant. It's a real actual specific fucking example and you still, with your splurging, don't even address it. You just hurl some more insults and act pompous and mighty like you've somehow won a topic you haven't even fucking addressed.
Instead you just shielding yourself in victimization. "I'm such a victim QED I'm right." That's kinda sad that you don't understand how to have a discussion.
@djsumdog your video and whatever irrelevant backstory you infodumped has no relevance to the context of your original question. if you're so autistic as to not understand how you should have included this shit WITH your question in the same post, rather than after i shot you down for how bullshit it was to ask that out of pocket, then all i can say is i'm not your therapist, i cannot help you, and i was absolutely right when i said "you obviously have preconceptions on how you want this conversation with me to go"
i am a classic gamer, thanks. MLG, even. 1v1 me bro.
I just don't want to let you have the last word when you think you've somehow won. It's ... really sad honestly. I never called you a potaoitophile. That was someone else in this thread. I was talking about a real case with a father and his daughter, that you still won't address because you keep saying it's not relevant when it's literally the case from where I made the statement from. Then you say I should have included it in my original post, and then you keep bitching and refusing to read/listen to/address the case whining about how your right (somehow?) and your victimization trumping everything somehow.
@djsumdog muting the thread btw i've had my fun shitting on your obvious attempt to control the convo and now i just don't want to deal with the inevitable sidechatter from other "people" about how i must be a paedophile because of whatever delusional theories people want to cling onto
@djsumdog@critical@p@cjd > The hardcore libertarian will say you should be able to allowed to use your kid for labor or raise them to work in a brothel (literally heard this argument in real life).
i don't think it makes much sense to call this *the* libertarian position, but i agree, i have it heard a lot as well, but never from people with actual children. I don't think either parents or the state own the child, the relationship isn't one of property.
oh it's not. That's why I said "hardcore libertarian." .. maybe I should have said "extreme." I agree with what @cjd said elsewhere in this thread, where he talks about "stewardship" being a better term/concept.
..and the person I heard that argument from does have kids :blobcatgrimacing: (one became a Marine). Although he recently became a born again Christian, so maybe his position has changed. :bunthinking:
> The hardcore libertarian will say you should be able to allowed to use your kid for labor or raise them to work in a brothel
Maybe on Reddit they do. Most other people (non-Redditors) don't think of a child as a thing that is "owned" by anyone.
"Who has responsibility for your child?" is a better question. Bad decisions are made when authority and responsibility diverge.
> Today the State says there are some things you cannot do.
There has always, from the beginning, been things that society will not tolerate another person enduring, even if it is your own child. That is not what changed: what changed is the scope of the state enforcement. That is, this civilization at this time delegates responsibility to the police.
> We now give children 16~20 years
This is still statist thinking, that there's a magic line. This is an artifact of thinking that the law preceded the morals or that the law dictates morals; reasoning backwards. We put in the dictionary what words people use, we put on the map what borders states recognize, we put in the law what society will tolerate. The law includes the dictum that the law does not create morality: "Non omne quod licet honestum est." Not all that is permitted is honest, or a little less directly, not everything that is legal is honorable. The law is (and has to be) a system and a system cannot make everyone good. :alex:
Ideally, there's a gradient: a baby cannot make meaningful decisions, obviously the baby has no understanding of consequences. You let a toddler pick out meals and it's going to be junk food. A teenager that eats shit all day is going to be able to understand the connection between that and being fat and unhealthy.
The way a state *has* to work is that you have to be able to predict whether an action you perform violates the law. So the state has to draw a clean line: date of birth for cigarettes, for example. If you're going to enforce a law (and your plan is not to exploit selective enforcement and deliberate ambiguity), people have to know if they're violating it before they do something. So you cannot sell cigarettes to someone below a certain age: it has to be a line. The gas station is not going to try to figure out whether your kid is competent to make a decision. The error is confusing morality with law. The state draws a clear line because it has to: that doesn't mean that the situation is simple, just that people have to be able to understand the law. Reasoning backwards by thinking that the law preceded the morals or looking to the law for moral guidance is bad reasoning.
If your child is your property, then what happens on their 18th birthday? Is that some kind of theft? There's no foundation in common law or natural law for property that stops being property at a certain moment, so the glove doesn't fit.
There is a legal concept that does fit, and that is the concept of a Ward / Warden relationship. Fun fact, the word Warden comes from the Anglo-Norman dialect dialect of French, while the word Guardian comes from Old French which often used G where Anglo-Norman used W, so from their origin they are the same word.
Guardianship is a messier concept than ownership, which is why libertarians don't like it, but it is INCREDIBLY common. You own some land but it's a designated historical site so zoning law says you have to protect its beauty, you're a guardian. You've inherited the family wealth but a majority of your education has been brainwashing you into believing you must preserve it for the next generation - you're a guardian. Parent, you're a guardian.
As you can see, there is sometimes no structure to enforce against the guardian treating his ward as property that can be destroyed or sold for scrap. For example a 3rd son of money can blow the family treasure, a king can run his country into ruin.
In a healthy functioning country, the state (or church) is your guardian - and that's something you want, because you don't want to live in a world where some mafia can walk up and grab everything you have.
An argument I have with ancaps is how their voluntary society can prevent someone from extorting money from everyone else and using that money to raise an army and police force to be able to extort more money. They always come back with the same arguments about private armies and private courts - to which I say "well, the IRS is precisely that, so why aren't you hiring blackwater to fight them?"
Unfortunately we mostly live in failing states. Transnational criminal elites have converted them from cohesive nations into multi-ethnic power struggles because it allows them to gain control by playing the groups against each other. So our governments no longer play a parental role, but now are more like orphanages.
The solution is not to eliminate the state (our only bulwark against transnational criminal elites controlling everything), but rather to construct new states (churches, political machines, etc) which we can trust.
@lain@critical@djsumdog@p@cjd The flaw in this whole argument is the concept of the child as an object to be owned. Both some pseudo-libertarian positions and many statist positions treat it as such, but the problem solves itself by treating the child as an individual.
You break the NAP by abusing the kid because it is an individual, but you also do it by neglecting a kid that's yours because you willingly made that child and need to be responsible for your own actions (which in this case means raising it until it's old enough to do its own thing); the state breaks the NAP by trying to force you or the child to do things that neither wants.