Why Obama's Association with Bill Ayers should disqualify him from the Presidency

[jordan179]

I've heard several people claim that it is unfair for John McCain and Sarah Palin to attack Barack Obama over his association with Bill Ayers. They say alternately that the association was not a close one, or that Bill Ayers is a perfectly respectable figure in Chicago politics who many people associated with

Comments

[anonymous]

First of all, I want to say that I'm not voting for Obama. I don't vote. Also, I don't share Mr. Ayers' political views, nor do I condone the violent methods of his organization

Re: Choosing the Form of Government

[jordan179]

And who presents me with these choices, if not my fellow men - specifically, those who would rule over me?

Reality, of which your fellow men are a part, presents you with these choices. Reality creates the need for human organization to avoid, at a minimum, a confused scramble over resources without any way of registering property claims; and at a maximum, deliberate violence exercised to deprive others of their rights to life, liberty and property.

It is not just "those who would rule over you," but also those who would merely rob you to enrich themselves, or harm or kill you simply for the sheer joy of doing so. Given human nature, some sort of government is an unavoidable necessity.

And why are they any more fit to impose their social arrangements onto me than I am to impose mine onto them?

You are all equally fit. However, you are one: the entire rest of the human race is many. This, too, is part of reality.

If asked by a sadistic doctor to choose, out of myriad horrible diseases, the one with which I would like myself

Re: Choosing the Form of Government

[anonymous]

Reality creates the need for human organization to avoid, at a minimum, a confused scramble over resources without any way of registering property claims; and at a maximum, deliberate violence exercised to deprive others of their rights to life, liberty and property.

It is certainly desirable to avoid the conditions you have described, but governments achieve no such result. On the contrary, they are the perpetrators of violence exercised to deprive others of their rights to life, liberty and property, and to a much greater extent than are the small-time criminals from whom they purport to protect us. They are the principle source of economic, and thus social, disorder

Re: Choosing the Form of Government

[jordan179]

It is certainly desirable to avoid the conditions you have described, but governments achieve no such result. On the contrary, they are the perpetrators of violence exercised to deprive others of their rights to life, liberty and property, and to a much greater extent than are the small-time criminals from whom they purport to protect us. They are the principle source of economic, and thus social, disorder.

You are making the rather huge assumption that, if governments did not exist, all we would have to deal with would be "small-time criminals." Absent governmental interference, there would be nothing to stop said "small-time criminals" from growing into bigger and bigger organizations, until they BECAME states.

Our states, especially in the Western world, have co-evolved with our cultures over extensive periods of time and become relatively symbiotic with their citizenries. The sort of nascent states which would be formed by expanding criminal gangs would in all probability be far more malign, as is demonstrable from the

Getting Back to Ayers

[jordan179]

Oh, and FYI, William Ayers wasn't and isn't any form of anarchist. He didn't want to do away with government. He wanted to set up a Marxist totalitarian dictatorship with himself and his buddies in charge, which would then proceed to kill or imprison as many people as needed to maintain its unelected power.

You would suffer far worse under the rule of the Weathermen than you do under the modern US government.

Now, it's true that the Weathermen had no chance of succeeding. But again: incompetence is not innocence. Nor even its close cousin.

Continued from above...

[anonymous]

Government is not a disease, it is a necessity. Your only real choice is which government, and how it is to be chosen, composed and regulated. This is imposed not by malice, but by the nature of reality.Government is no more a necessity than are its constituent activities: murder, robbery, fraud, kidnapping and enslavement. All of the above have long plagued the human experience, such is the nature of man, but few would argue that we "need" them

Re: Continued from above...

[jordan179]

Government is no more a necessity than are its constituent activities: murder, robbery, fraud, kidnapping and enslavement. All of the above have long plagued the human experience, such is the nature of man, but few would argue that we "need" them.

Government is a necessity because anarchy is not an evolutionarily stable system. Do you understand what that means?

An "evolutionarily stable system" is one which can defend itself against those competitors likely to arise.

The problem with anarchy is that violent individuals will arise within it and organize to create, first, criminal organizations, which will develop into states. These states are likely to treat their subjects far worse than do modern Western liberal democracies, for the very good reason that modern Western liberal democracies treat their citizens far better than is the historical norm

See Things As They Are

[jordan179]

It is you who fail to "see things as they are."

You have grasped that governments are an evil, that their power derives from force. But what is your alternative?

I see no alternative either. Since there is no visible alternative to government, I choose to support that form of government which is the least evil and oppressive -- liberal democracy.

As opposed to what, you might ask? As opposed to, say, totalitarian dictatorships of various political stripes. Or even "social democracy," which is democracy with less economic freedom.

I could choose to emigrate to a dictatorship or a less free democracy. I don't, in part because I like the system of government that we have in America better than those alternatives.

Your fantasy about "others changing their minds" is and must remain a pipe dream as long as you have failed to propose a viable alternative. Others changing their minds to "Gee, it would be nice if we had no government" accomplishes nothing good if the abolition of the liberal democracy under which you live now is

Re: See Things As They Are

[anonymous]

You continue to insist that I should propose an alternative social structure. In the meantime, you are critiquing something broad and vague, "anarchy," which I have not proposed

[jordan179]

Even according to your own terms, your argument makes no sense, because the American state's alliance with the South Vietnamese state was un-Constitutional. There is no power granted Congress to give Americans' money to foreign governments, or to provide for their defense.Article II, Section 2