Libertarians don't want open borders...

[BugI02]

Yes. A group is a collection of individuals, and not a monolith. You’re describing the same attributes I have, but are saying that means it’s the the group that has the inherent rights. And I’m saying the inherent rights can only belong to individuals, not group’s.

It’s not overthinking. It seems pretty simple. A social construct, which a group is, isn’t alive, doesn’t have a single thought; it is the people who choose to associate together who think, perhaps even similarly, yet are diverse. That thing can’t have inherent rights. People have inherent rights. So maybe the source of the disagreement is in the definition of what is an inherent right.

You make this argument a lot. I see a group, whether a corporate or a political organization, as a complex component vector. Yes, each individual in the collective is pulling in his own direction driven by his wants and needs; but I don't need to pay that much attention to the component parts unless I want to interact with a particular individual on a personal basis

What is important is what is the direction of the component vector. In what direction is that organization trying to pull events? That decides my opinion of the organization; and no matter how much I may find certain individuals in that organization compelling, their freedom of movement is constrained by the aggregate vector and so it can be taken for granted that they will not or perhaps cannot deviate so very far from it.

You are in effect saying that each of the 2.6 trillion transistors in a Cor i7 are unique; I'm saying I can treat them as a unified whole because each individual is not unique enough to care about when discussing overarching issues

The map is not the territory, but too high a level of detail overwhelms any utility the map might have had as guidance. Abstraction for the win

 

[jamil]

You make this argument a lot. I see a group, whether a corporate or a political organization, as a complex component vector. Yes, each individual in the collective is pulling in his own direction driven by his wants and needs; but I don't need to pay that much attention to the component parts unless I want to interact with a particular individual on a personal basis

What is important is what is the direction of the component vector. In what direction is that organization trying to pull events? That decides my opinion of the organization; and no matter how much I may find certain individuals in that organization compelling, their freedom of movement is constrained by the aggregate vector and so it can be taken for granted that they will not or perhaps cannot deviate so very far from it.

You are in effect saying that each of the 2.6 trillion transistors in a Cor i7 are unique; I'm saying I can treat them as a unified whole because each individual is not unique enough to care about when discussing overarching issues

The map is not the territory, but too high a level of detail overwhelms any utility the map might have had as guidance. Abstraction for the win

This touches on one of my favorite quotes. It's from Margarete Thatcher: "There is no such thing as a society...there are individuals...and there are families." That's the abridged version of the quote. But it's true of whatever social grouping you want to talk about. You can abstract the individual members of congress, for example, to treat them monolithically as "Congress". You can even assign some aggregate behaviors to them. But the individual members act within their own interest, and hopefully within the interest of their constituents. You can't blame congress, as a whole, for not acting. You can say it, and people do, but it's essentially meaningless. "Congress" isn't accountable. The elected individuals are accountable, to some extent, at the ballot box. You can't lock up "congress" if they break the law. If you could get a conviction, you could lock up individual members of congress who break the law.

So I don't disagree with what you describe. Yes, you can abstract groups of things as a monolith in the thing you group them by. Abstractions are useful. It's arbitrary though, for whatever purpose. A group of transistors are transistors, and though their specs may vary, they'll still behave generally as transistors. Or, the grouping may be all the components of a particular system, in which the individual components are diverse, but they're part of an overall functional unit. And you can treat them as a group within the function of the overall unit. Especially in social groupings, the abstraction as a monolithic entity is not concrete. I talk about societies myself, yet I don't think of societies as concrete entities beyond the usefulness of the abstraction. Societies, or social groupings aren't anything else but a collection of individuals who have some criteria in common by which we're grouping them.

The group of white males is only comprised of males who have "white" ancestry. But beyond the grouping, you really can't make many universal predictions about every individual in the set, because those individuals vary widely on other attributes that aren't white and male. But the point I'm making in this thread is that social groupings are arbitrary constructs, and such groups can't possibly have inherent rights, even though they act as if they do for the purposes of the abstraction--because they're comprised of individuals who have inherent rights. At least in the Locke sense of "inherent rights".

 

[BugI02]

I do not dispute that because I agree with it. Our God-given rights inure to us individually, each individual has those rights without the need for membership in any group (except perhaps the group of 'human beings alive at this moment')

I wished merely to refer to the need for abstraction in most situations other than one to one, try to incorporate too much detail and suddenly you have a three body problem (or worse). Then (stretching the analogy beyond recognition) for the purpose of prediction it becomes better to say "The summation of all forces on this object results in motion characterized as [some general equation]'

It's analogous to how most quantum interactions, though interesting in a theoretical sense, quite often do not affect the perceived behavior of the system. Most individuals, no matter how interesting in microcosm, ... you see where I'm going. It is useful to posit membership in some group - an abstraction of varying degrees of accuracy - in order to improve predictions about future behavior of the individual, and to a certain extent that group if the individual is important enough within it (say, a Warren Buffett) or if the group is numerically small enough

 

[jamil]

Holy ****. We may actually fully agree on something. Is there a happy dance emoji?

 

[KLB]

Holy ****. We may actually fully agree on something. Is there a happy dance emoji?

Take your pick

 

[jamil]

Take your pick

Eh. The bacon one'd be fine.

 

[KLB]

Eh. The bacon one'd be fine.

But you are a bacon hating commie!