All Comments on 'An Anarchist Rants About Fairness'

Facile.

Does that mean that if my dick is twice as long as yours, I'm only allowed to fuck your wife for half as long as you fucked mine?

not well thought out. not well argued. confused. "two wrongs..." is not circular reasoning. "life is not fair" is just an observation, pointing out the obvious, not fatalism. we have institutions for good reasons. society can't function without them. if we got rid of them and put everyone on their own slowly the injustices would pile up until there was a tipping point and then there would wars, etc., and we would rebuild, slowly, the institutions self-absorbed people like youself wanted to get rid of in the first place. you should read more history and less fiction and save the rest of us the burden of recreating what you and your ignorant followers tore down. we learn slowly. very slowly. we got ourselves out of caves. we're learning so give it more time and stop thinking tearing everything up and starting over is a good idea because it isn't.

1. You didn't prove that it is not circular reasoning. It is, after all, an assertion that offers no factual basis or proof to say that "two wrongs don't make a right", and it assumes a priori that an act which in another context would be wrong is always wrong. You have not offered a substantive rebuttal to this in support of your claim.

2. Same goes for the claim that this is merely an observation. I have noted repeatedly that this expression is often used by some as a cop-out to convince people to simply accept injustice. I have even heard it put in those terms rather baldly. Again, a cliche that has no validity and is used to encourage fatalism. You claim otherwise, but offer no evidence to support your "refutation".

3. You can't prove that a gradual, evolutionary replacement of the State by voluntary institutions would necessarily lead to chaos of the Mad Max sort.

In short, you attack me and my rant, which is admittedly a tirade (I don't pretend otherwise) by holding me to a higher standard and burden of proof than yourself. I never claimed that these were anything but opinions, but you claim that your views are absolute fact. Which of us is being a bit silly again?

To think you suck!

anarchy rules!

You are crazy. Nevertheless I will try to reason with you:

Did you know that in the Icelandic sagas there are tons of blood feuds? One person kills another and that starts it. According to the island's unique laws, if a person was convicted of murder, somebody among the victim's family was not only allowed to retaliate in kind against the murderer, they were actually *obligated* to do so. This derived from two things: first, honor had to be maintained, and this meant the victim had to be avenged. Secondly, this was meant to ensure that an individual who was a threat to the community (the island had a population of less than a thousand people, and it was hard enough to survive without people killing each other) would be promptly removed. This was the law on the island because there was nobody like a king to render judgement; the island was colonized by refugees from Norway and Sweden who were dissatisfied with their rulers. The problem with the laws regarding murder and lawful retaliation was that it didn't stop there. Retaliation prompted further violence, and this turned into a blood feud that might last generations. So no, two wrongs do *not* make a right.

"Life isn't fair". Nobody uses this to mean that injustice should continue. When 9/11 happened, insensitivity aside, I'm sure many people said "Life isn't fair", meaning there was no reason why so-and-so died beyond the fact they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But nobody would have thought it was alright to just sit and not do anything about it.

Revenge is not justice. Crime is crime. If I kill somebody as revenge for something, however comparable, I have still killed somebody. The legal system in the US (I assume you are in America) allows people to have a fair trial because nobody is above anybody else. This means that insofar as everybody is equally capable of lying to protect their ass, the word of a murderer is just as good as the word of an honest person in a court of law. It is up to the lawyers and jury to decide whether they think a person is guilty or not. This is why vigilanteism is illegal. If somebody takes it upon themself to administer justice, who is to say they are really doing that and not just hurting others for the fun of it or some other non-legitimate reason? What if they make mistakes because they don't have the full picture? The legal system is meant to minimize mistakes. The founding fathers said it was better to let a guilty man walk than to let an innocent man hang. If a guilty man walks, he can always be tried again (assuming he commits another crime), but if an innocent is hung, there's no going back or remedying that,