Sunday, June 23, 2013

Politics IV: Property

The justification of the existence of a state is that it is a social contract (→ Rousseau) among its citizens in order to protect their physical integrity and their property from from possible hostilities among them. Therefore the main principle of every state has to be the protection of its citizens against physical harm and to defend their property.

In this post we will have a closer look at the concept of property.
Property means that the proprietor can dispose of his property in any form he wishes and that he is the supreme authority over it.
Unfortunately this concept has been thoroughly undermined by the modern state. The state itself claims supreme authority over any property making it effectively the real proprietor of every property in its territory. This idea is not only held by the last communist states, but also by supposed capitalist states who claim to respect the property of their citizens. The truth is, they don't.
No state has the right to interfere with whatever a citizen does with his property. A citizen neither needs a permission nor a licence for whatever he wants to do with it. Requiring any kind of business licence, construction permission is illegitimate. No law can be established over the property of a citizen, because the proprietor is the ultimate law-giving instance over his property. The sovereignty of the proprietor supersedes the sovereignty of the state in this matter. A state that does not respect this principle is illegitimate.

Another important issue is the concept of "intellectual property", which includes copyright, patents and so on. This concept is in contradiction of the concept of material property. 
There can only be one owner of an item, not a material owner and a intellectual owner. If an item is lawfully acquired, it becomes the sole property of the one who acquired it. There cannot be an intellectual proprietor else telling him what he is allowed to do with his property and what not. With the sale of an item the previous owner has ceased any claims and property rights over it. If he did not wish this to happen, he should not have sold the item in the first place.
Example: If a music CD is purchased, it becomes the sole property of the buyer. He can do whatever he wants with it. He may listen to it, he may make backup copies and he may allow friends to listen to it and give copies to his friends. If he was not allowed to do this, he would not be the proprietor.

The concept of "intellectual property" is not only incompatible with material property and therefore practically inapplicable, it is furthermore a major obstacle for technological progress.
Under current patent law inventors cannot build on existing ideas, if they have been patented. They have somehow to reinvent the wheel in order to improve an item. Patent law suits have slowed down the entire IT sector. "Intellectual property" has become a big business that allows to make money without producing anything. It is such a big business that the state has been bribed to defend the interests of the big intellectual property holders, and they have formed powerful syndicates to abolish the concept of material property. Today there are few crimes, which are as strictly persecuted and with such long jail terms as copyright infringements. For copyright infringement you can be imprisoned for 20 years and more and authorities will hunt you down all over the world. It is much easier to escape punishment as a murderer as for copyright infringement.

A further negative side-effect of  "intellectual property" is that the quality of its products is declining significantly. Every intellectual product that is only produced with the intention to make the maximum possible amount of  money from it, has lost value in itself.
A book should be written because an author has to tell something. With the current copyright business, it is only written, because the author tried to guess what the readers would like to read, so he can sell more copies. The author has no message at all. He cannot even afford to have a message, because this message might offend some of his readers and therefore diminish the market that he can reach with his book.
The same is true for the movie and the music industry.A movie cannot afford to be controversial or surprising. It has to target the whole audience and it has to have all the usual elements in it.that each of these audiences expect including special effects, happy end, family values, things that can later be turned into merchandise etc. The magnitude of these project is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. When there is so much money involved in the marketing of intellectual property, nobody can afford any experiments. Everything has to be according to reliable patterns that have formerly proved success. So instead of new movies we get sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots etc.
In the computer industry commercial software has not the main purpose to be useful, but to sell more. They have become marketing tools and are generally inferior to similar software which has been produced without "intellectual property" involved like open source products.

Intellectual property must be abolished. It undermines the concept of real property and it is responsible for stagnation and a decline in quality.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Politics III: State and Religion

One of the major absurdities of modern human societies are the concept of "Freedom of Religion" and "Separation of Church and State".
Religion is a term, which summarizes every kind of irrational human behavior. It is the antonym of education. When this relic of infantile behavior remains in adult human beings, it becomes a mental disorder.
How can a mental disorder claim freedom to be practiced? Freedom of Religion is essentially not different from "freedom of being schizophrenic" or "freedom to remain illiterate". Why should a state protect such aberrations or deficiencies of the human mind?
It is the duty of the state to encourage its citizens to seek education. This can be done by opening institutions of education like schools and universities to the public. Some states even provide free education to their citizens. But a school where religion is taught is not a school. Religion is the negation of everything education stands for. Students are supposed to acquire knowledge in schools and to learn methods of rational thinking. Religion does the opposite. It opposes and denies knowledge and discourages rational thinking. It is diametrically opposed to the efforts of a school.
The state therefore needs to protect children whose judgment can easily be influenced either in a positive or in a negative way from such harmful influences like religion, which could seriously threaten their mental health.
A school that permits the presence of religious teachings in its curriculum or religious symbols in its buildings and facilities is no school. And a state that permits them has failed its citizens and especially its future generation - its children.
Freedom of religion is no human right, because it is no individual right in its current definition. It is a violation of human rights, because it gives privileges to religious organizations so that they can break the laws and disrespect the individual rights of its members.
In the name of freedom of religion children are physically mutilated (circumcision) and coerced into boring and absurd rituals. Neither their human rights nor their dignity are respected. Therefore freedom of religion is not only no human right, but a gross violation of them. If privileges of religious organizations are protected by a constitution, it is a proof that the whole concept of human rights is not respected in this state.
Of course no citizen can be banned from believing whatever he wants and to practice whatever he wants in private. But this is not necessarily the case in public where it might become a nuisance for others (e.g. prayer in public places). When religions demand exceptions from laws, this is incompatible with the rule of law.
There are numerous examples where religious privileges are used to break laws and to undermine the principles of any legitimate state:
  • Physical mutilation of the genitals of children
  • Disrespect of animal protection laws by practicing ritual slaughter
  • Noise pollution by church bells and loudspeakers from mosques
  • Coercion to force certain dress codes on adolescents

Privileges like these violate the principle of equality before the law and are unacceptable. A state that grants privileges to religious organizations is illegitimate.
The separation of church and state is one example of such illegitimate privileges. There can be no separation or non-interference between church and state. This means there can be no separate realm for religious institutions to practice their unlawful traditions. The church, which is named here representatively for all religious institutions, must remain below the state authority and has to obey to the law like any other citizen.
A state has to be committed to rationalism and should therefore not recognize any religious institution.
Religion is a permanent cause of intolerance, violence and social disorder. It does not respect state authority and the rule of law. It should therefore have no place in a modern state.
Therefore the only right that might be granted to adult religious people is not to be reeducated by force. But tolerance towards religion should not go any further.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Politics II: Marriage

Recently the topic of same-sex marriages has become more and more popular. Many countries have changed their family laws in order to allow homosexual couples to be able to marry just like heterosexual couples. For some it is an advancement towards equality and against discrimination based on sexual orientation. For others it undermines the basic principles on which human society is built on.
This controversy is caused by the fact that marriage has a totally different meaning for people depending on their educational and cultural background.

Marriage as Partnership or Slavery?

In the Western society marriage means a kind of partnership between two people. It is historically derived from Hellenic/Roman and Germanic customs that paired one man and one woman together for reproduction purposes. Following the frequent contact among different civilizations, this European understanding of marriage has been paralleled with a completely different phenomenon in Middle Eastern and African societies. 
Such a concept of partnership between a man and a woman did not exist there. But the concept of slavery existed there. And women were considered natural slaves. They were purchased and became part of the household of their owner. Depending on personal wealth a master could have either one or many female slaves.
When Europeans made contact with these cultures, they misunderstood the nature of this relationship and mistranslated it as marriage. What was translated "wife" into English actually meant "female slave". This mistake in translation is first of all visible in the fact that for these cultures it was quite natural that a man could purchase as many women as his wealth allowed, while no female slave could of course have several masters. But even this observation did not make Europeans reconsidering their wrong translation, so up to the present day female slavery is totally legal in Arab and African countries, because it is not translated as such. However women are still exchanged against a certain amount of money or cattle and nobody considers this to be ethically wrong or thinks of human trafficking.

Even in the grammar of Bantu languages, we can still see how this misunderstanding is based on a wrong translation.
In Swaheli the sentence "Ali marries Sheila" means "Ali alimwoa Sheila".
So we should assume that "Sheila marries Ali" would mean "Sheila alimwoa Ali." But this is not the case.
The correct sentence is "Sheila aliolewa na Ali". "Aliolewa" is actually the passive form of "alimwoa" So the literal translation into English is "Sheila was married by Ali". It is grammatically impossible that a woman marries a man, she can only be married by a man.
The reason is that the verb "-oa" doesn'Ät mean "to marry" in the first place. It means "to purchase a slave girl".
Therefore the correct English translation for "Ali alimwoa Sheila" is "Ali purchases Sheila". And "Sheila aliolewa Ali" is "Sheila is purchased by Ali." It is quite logical that you cannot say Sheila purchases Ali, because Sheila is the slave, and a slave girl doesn't buy her master.

This is the actual understanding of "marriage" in many non-Western cultures. It is not a mutual relationship between two equal partners. It is the relationship between a master and a slave, two different roles that are not equal in any way.
This is why same-sex marriage is so radically opposed in those primitive patriarchal societies. It is unthinkable that two persons of the same gender could marry, because who would be the master and who would be the slave? A marriage has to be an unilateral relationship between two complementary social roles.
But even in Western countries there is a strong opposition against same-sex marriage, but mostly by religious conservative persons. The reason for it is obvious: Their understanding of marriage is based on the bible, which is a scripture of Middle Eastern, not European origin. Therefore the bible doesn't have the European concept of marriage as a partnership, but marriage as a master/servant-relationship.

Biological Concept of Marriage

Another argument against same-sex marriage is based on biology. Its main purpose is considered to be reproduction. Therefore it has to be between a man and a woman. The nuclear family is supposed to be the basic reproductive unit of the human society. This nuclear family is believed to consist of two parents (father and mother) and the children. This idea is based on the biological model that the father produces sperm cells and the mother produces egg cells. The fusion of the sperm cell and the egg cell becomes an embryo, which eventually develops into a child made of the two cells from both parents, mother and father.
Unfortunately this model is based on a misunderstanding of the fertilization process. The zygote (embryo cell) is not the result of the fusion of two cells (sperm and ovum). It is only the egg cell that develops into the embryo after the sperm cell injects its genetic data into it. The sperm cell itself dies after this process. The resulting embryo does not contain a single molecule from its father. All of its substance including all cell organelles are product of the mother. What remains from the original paternal chromosomes are only copies of their DNA sequence. The original DNA gets lost during the further development of the embryo, either metabolized or left in the placenta cells. There is no material link between the father and the child. They have only genetic information in common.
In other words the father only has the the copyright of a little less than 50% of the genetic information of the child. He makes no physical contribution to the child.
To fully understand what this means we have to take a closer look at the following situation:
If one of two monozygotic male twins impregnates a woman and she gives birth to a child, then both twins are equally fathers of the child. The one twin who had intercourse with the woman is not "more father" than his twin brother who might not even know the woman. The child has approx. 50% of the genetic information of these twins without any difference between them. There is no way to determine, which of the twins was the one who had sexual intercourse with the woman. There is in fact no biological distinction between these two fathers.
We have to understand that the term "father" is an abstract concept. It does not refer to a physical link between father and child. It only means that the father has provided about 50% of the genetic information of the child. He contributed information, not physical substance.
A child has actually only one parent - the mother.
Therefore in a biological sense the nuclear family only consists of mother and children, no father.
The single mother/child family therefore reflects much more the biological background than the father/mother/child family, which is only a cultural construct. And in many countries the single mother/child family becomes more and more the reality in the society.
This is the true basic unit of the human society.There is no biological justification to include a father in the nuclear family unit. The laws of our society should reflect this biological reality. Children belong to their mother, and their mother only. There is no biological justification to grant any privileges or authority to fathers. And therefore marriage between a father and the mother of a child is totally meaningless.
The relationship between a man and a woman should not be subject to any law. And it should not be allowed that anybody can claim any legal privileges from such an arrangement.

Why Marriage?

We have seen that marriage between a man and a woman has no biological justification. Furthermore we have seen that the concept of marriage has been abused to justify ethically questionable practices like female slavery. Marriage is therefore an immoral concept that is incompatible with human dignity and has been instrumental for the institutionalized oppression of women and children. It is the cause of many ills in our society. It should therefore be abolished.
It is unacceptable that our modern state recognizes this primitive and immoral practice.
Marriage should not be extended to same-sex couples. It should be outlawed even for heterosexual couples.

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Politics I : No Victim - No Crime

There are many legal definitions of crimes depending on the different jurisdictions. Since these definitions are different, they are apparently arbitrary and invalid as universal definition or general principle.
In fact every human being knows quite well, what is a crime without the need of arbitrary codes of law that are only locally valid. 

Universal Definition of Crime:
Crime is the initiation of violence or the threat thereof.

Definition of Violence:
Violence is causing physical or material harm to somebody (victim) without his/her consent.

These definitions cannot be disputed even by a criminal. For example a thief would not dispute that theft constitutes a crime and argue that it should not be persecuted, because he trusts that the property that he acquires by his illegal act will later be protected as long as his illegal act is kept secret. If he did not trust that his illegally acquired property was protected, the theft itself would not make any sense, because the acquired property could be taken away from him at any time and he could not claim protection for it. The concept of protected property is a prerequisite of the action of theft. Without this concept, theft would make no sense. Therefore the universality of this definition of crime cannot be disputed even by persons who intend to break this rule, because if they dispute it, it would turn against themselves. This definition of crime is therefore a tautology.

However modern laws go far beyond this definition of crime. They have established so called "victimless crimes". Known examples are laws against drugs, the possession of weapons, prostitution etc.
These laws are a logical problem. They openly violate the definition of a crime as the initiation of violence. By disrespecting the principle of not initiating violence, they take away their own justification. If those who establish these concept of "victimless crimes" dispute the principle of non-initiation of violence, they have to accept that violence can be initiated against them on the same legal grounds. 

Persecution of anything that doesn't fulfill the above definition of crime constitutes a crime by itself.

If persons who possess drugs or weapons and have not harmed anybody are persecuted by the state, then the state itself has initiated violence and becomes a criminal. The victim would have the legitimate right of self-defense and to use violence against the unprovoked aggressor, which is the state in this case.
By disrespecting the principle of "not initiating violence", laws have lost any logical justification, because if the initiation of violence is legal, violence could even be initiated against state representatives without provocation. By disrespecting the universal definition of crime, a state deprives itself of any legitimacy and turned the rule of law into a reductio ad absurdum. A law that punishes victimless crimes is no law, because its premises are contradicting. Such a law is only an arbitrary act of aggression.