http://i.imgur.com/xAxid.png

If you constantly post stupid meme images, is it spam?

Each one is unique and adds something to the community, so... nope.

Yes, but the "implied contract" when, say, you go to Wal-Mart and buy a bag of chips (and we'll say paying in cash, since debit/credit both actually do involve a 'contract' signing of sorts) has much, much clearer consent than this social "contract." The express purpose of going into a Wal-Mart, picking up a bag of chips and going to a checkout line is to buy the chips. Assuming I wasn't coerced into any of these actions, my active choice to perform these actions clearly indicates consent.

This is quite different from the social contract argument, which essentially says that you consented to the government/society/etc. in which you currently find yourself by your continued existence there. The key problem is that you do not consent to your place of birth. The initial action that allegedly "gave" consent was something over which you had no control. That's not consent. Continued existence there cannot even be said to be consent, either, since there may be circumstances preventing your departure (a lack of financial resources to make the move, for instance).

Now, again, none of that necessarily invalidates the argument itself, but it, in my view at least, very clearly demonstrates it is not a contract, hence my request to have the argument renamed.

They're also not meme images, they're just image macros. The difference being that people generally don't like them.

By the broadest definition of meme, they are memes. "Broadest" being the key word.

"I don't know what's rich about that. Pathetic attempt to derail the thread because you're a child who can't defend his position without throwing a tantrum. 0/10."

Right, because I was clearly the one who started attacking irrelevant side-tangents to distract from the discussion. You don't honestly believe that, do you?

"How many times are going to go through this game where PE insults and condescends to everybody but still manages to whine that nobody bothers to reply to him?"

Well, firstly, it took you about four posts to actually get to addressing what I said, and you did that after I said that you didn't address my original statement. So at the time, yes, that actually was accurate. Secondly, I didn't insult anyone in this thread. You, on the other hand, preceded to insult me in the very post after the one in which you accused me of insulting people....

Eden, go ahead and call it whatever you want, the point still stands. You don't have to pay taxes until you stop being dependent on your parents, at which point you've had sufficient time that you don't like the system and would like to live somewhere else. You instead claim the right to use the infrastructure created, either directly or indirectly, by the government while not doing your part to contribute. That makes Libertarians, in essence, leeches, who should really just go find somewhere with no taxes or government infrastructure. I hear Somalia is nice this time of year. Have fun.

Your parents consented to your place of birth, and your parents sign contracts for you until you're an adult all the time. That's a bad analogy.

The financial inability to leave is on par with many many labor contracts which are signed because people don't have the means to leave their place of employment or seek it elsewhere. Again, you've failed to show how this social contract is remotely different than this.

You take advantage of citizenship by voting, working freely without need of special documents, etc, protection from the laws, etc which is equivalent to buying the bag of chips at Wal Mart. If you don't feel like you consented to the contract you can forfeit citizenship at any time and become stateless, but nobody does.

A meme is defined as "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." The bastardized definition ("an image macro loosely based on the advice dog meme") is silly.

Ah, glad we can use Merriam-Webster! I prefer American Heritage (actually a paraphrase from wikipedia, but the citation goes to AHD): "The word meme is a shortening of mimeme, from Ancient Greek μίμημα mīmēma, "something imitated", from μιμεῖσθαι mimeisthai, "to imitate", from μῖμος mimos "mime."

So under the broadest definition, these are imitations of others. As I said, "broadest" being a key word.

"Right, because I was clearly the one who started attacking irrelevant side-tangents to distract from the discussion"

I wasn't attacking irrelevant side tangents. I was making relevant points about duress and the Constitution. The latter of which you still haven't replied to. You simply declare everything to be a side tangent when you don't want to bother to address it. Calling us "cute" while denying you're being a condescending ass.

I don't even know how to reply to that. My only point in the thread was that the analogy to a contract is bad (which I've argued further), so if you're saying "go ahead and call it whatever you want" then that's as far as I intended to contribute to the thread. Everything else in there is off-point (because I'm not getting into a discussion of the argument itself) and the argumentum ad Somalia at the end reeks of trolling (because obviously if I think the social contract argument shouldn't be called a contract, I want to go live in Somalia), so I'm not really sure what to say to that.

Fucking linguistics man, I just can't win.

#fuckghug

Arguing with PE is like playing dodgeball.

Okay, ghug, that was funny. You got me. That was funny, man.

PE, your original intent in your post was to make a semantic argument against a viewpoint you disagree with. If you don't want to have the argument, sure, but the discussion existed before you got here, and you clearly came down on one side, so you were included. The argument stands for any who do want to get involved.

If you don't like Somalia, you could try The Congo. I think they might have more of a government down there (I don't really know shit about it), but I hear that the food is excellent.

The contract bit is based on an older, more medieval understanding of contract in the first place. The vassal gave up rights to get rights from the lord. That was a contract. That is why this is called a contract.

and if you noticed, Leviathan wasn't written yesterday and was written at a different time with different meanings.

Can we please just reminisce about the good times? Like when KA would randomly post "The +1 troll is +1ing!" and give everybody a shit-ton of a +1s? I'm fairly certain that's the only way Putin, obi, and Krellin got any +1s.

On one hand, the extreme libertarian (a hypothetical one -- I'm accusing nobody) is wrong that the born citizen has no obligation to the state, or to obey or follow the state, or to pay taxes. There are various strong arguments for why this is so.

On the other hand, the moderate libertarian is right that the power to tax is ultimately the power to put somebody in prison if he will not donate an often substantial proportion of his labor or the use of this time and resources for causes over which he has little control and may disagree with, and that therefore, it is morally appalling to extend these beyond the minimum that are required for the functioning of civil society.

In essence, a state with high taxes and many programs is much farther (and probably much farther than necessary) from the idealized, pre-contract state, and libertarians have a strong preference, ranging from aesthetic to moral, for states that approximate the former as closely as possible. There is nothing hypocritical about trying to work within the system to better this approximation, or even about feeling that it is morally imperative to do so.

Physically and a priori, men are free beings. The rest is all a question of how far we're willing to go using force on them to make them conform their behavior to our ideal.

I +1 krellin whenever he uses correct English or stays civilized. It shows a marked improvement and deserves to be rewarded.

I've +1'ed all three multiple times.

Apologies, I've miscalculated. It's not possible to argue a logically consistent demonstration that the social contract isn't a contract if you take the premises of the SC argument itself at face value, and I don't intend or desire to get into an argument about those premises. I concede the point.

I am wondering if any of the proponents of the "social contract" would be willing to clearly define the bounds and parameters of said contract. Under what conditions is it (or can it be) voided by either the State or the individual? What exactions would constitute too high a price for "civilized society"? Is taking 50% of the product of someone's labor too much? How about 90%? What if the state refuses to provide essential services that its subjects are paying for, and instead squanders it on wealth and luxury for the politically connected at the expense of everyone else? If the state has decided that all individuals with severe mental and physical disabilities need to be removed because they aren't living up to their side of the "social contract" by contributing an adequate amount of wealth/labor, are people allowed to resist "society's" enforcers when they come to take "non-contributors" away to the glue factory? If so, to what degree - verbal admonishment? Deadly force?

you fundamentally misunderstand the social contract if you think there are strict parameters

defined by the social contract itself that is.

Funny that you say that, when you brought up feudal contracts earlier - which often had very strictly defined parameters, and were abandoned at the drop of a hat when one party felt the other wasn't living up to the terms.

From a legal sense, the "social contract" lacks all of the elements of a valid contract in English/American jurisprudence.