At 07:57 AM 9/26/00 -0400, Sampo A Syreeni wrote:

I do not agree. I think shunning harms you regardless, if it is organized well enough. Say, you do something which causes your whole town to shun you. Where do you suppose you get food, shelter, whatever from there on? You'd say 'just leave', here, right? What if you do not have the means? You just die?

It takes a lot to get a whole town annoyed enough at you that they won't do business with you. You can do it, but it's much easier to do in a small town where it's easier to leave than in a large city.

...

Your suggestion to "play nice" is quaint but irrelevent when talking about sovereign adults.

I don't see it quite like that. In order to have meaningful freedoms one needs to have the possibility of enjoying them. When someone claiming their rights in so doing limits the rights of others, I tend to resolve the conflict by limiting the rights themselves. In this case, demanding that people indeed 'play nice'.

Demands without consequences are stupid. "Play nice" or else what? "Play nice or I'll cry a lot and flame you on Usenet!" "Play nice or I'll take my ball and go home!" "Play nice or I'll picket your business and you'll lose customers" "Play nice or I'll shoot you" Governments usually go for "Play nice or we'll use as much violence as it takes to get you to obey us", which isn't nice at all.

(Really, this is simply the age old debate about positive liberties as opposed to negative ones. In other words, a can of worms. Should we close it before more nasty things crawl out?)

Oh, it's way too late for that :-)

Of course one valid attempt at resolving the problem would be to limit private ownership of things somehow essential to the preservation of people's liberties. I think I better not go there, right?

:-) In particular, it gets into the debate of how land ownership works, how it's justified, and how the land gets given out. Here in North America we usually resolve it by saying that the British/French/Mexicans stole it from the Indians and we stole/bought it from them and most remaining Indians are dead, which may or may not be related to naming many baseball teams after Indians :-) Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639