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They do not. To think that there is some "must" there is to make the same mistake as the lady with her cat.
Laws can and often do just reduce to whoever has the most power, consent has nothing inherently to do with it.
You've got that backwards It is those who appeal to silly abstractions like "power" and "legitimacy" who are making the same mistake as the lady with her cat, because a cat is always going to do as the cat pleases. You're appealing something that does not exist.
The only way to prevent a cat from walking through an open door is ensure that the cat does not want to leave the house in the first place. IE to attain the cat's consent.
Legitimacy is an abstraction but power is not. Power is very real. A man who holds a gun to another man's head has power over that man. If cats understood language and understood what guns do, you could also prevent the cat from walking through the open door by telling it that you would shoot it if it did.
No he doesn't, or at the very least only in so far as the man being threatened chooses to allow it. That's kind of what I'm trying to get at. You're imagining that "the system" (or whatever you want to call it) is self-acting when it manifestly is not.
The man with the gun does have power over the other man. In some very unusual sense -- the sense in which "your money or your life" is a free choice -- he does not have the power to force the other man to act as he wishes. But he does have the power to force the other man to choose between acting as he wishes and dying.
I know what I'm about to say is a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason.
We are all dying. we are all going to die.
Even the retarded Yudkowskite who achieves his dream functional immortality by of uploading his consciousness to a block of computronium is doing to die when the last embers of the universe burn out, assuming the molecular structure of his processor didn't get melted down and repurposed long before that.
Death is not the end of things.
I'm a materialist; that's one thing I do have in common with Marxists. Death is the end. I'm not so sure about the heat death of the universe being the end of everything, it's not a concept I can wrap my head around. But as for me, when I die I'm done.
And there in lies the core of the problem, a materialist can never be free because he will always be a slave to the material.
what you mean by that? Do you really think that just because someone is atheist/materialist then credible death threats will force them to do anything?
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Well, I'd say you're in for a rude surprise when you decide what happens in the material world isn't that important and then it turns out there's nothing more. But of course no matter which of us is right, you aren't.
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