"appealing to Hume's razor"... I don't want to sound disrespectful, but that's laughable.
It seems that you believe that positive law (meaning: law that you "think" is right and want to impose on others) is perfectly reasonable.
The deal with argumentative ethics is that it derives natural law through logic reasoning. You may not like it, you may hate the conclusions it achieves, but it's only way you can build an ethical system that allows for the pacific co-existence of individuals in a way that is perennial in time and space that we can possibly agree on (but not necessarily will). Once you start removing constraints (eg. no need to allow for pacific co-existence, or no need for being perennial), then pretty much anything goes, and we're in the authoritarian/totalitarian land we live with today.
In any case, it really doesn't matter what I think or what you think, as decentralization removes the ability states and governments to exist, law will be progressively handled by the free market. How do you believe that law will be handled in a competitive environment, with no government, no "constitution" and Kelsen's pyramid for people to bow to?
In the end the only thing we can possibly agree on is that we hold negative rights on other people's properties. Even if someone doesn't agree on that, the market will find a way to record that person's actions against other's property in a distributed database, which can make the life of that person a living nightmare in a fully technologically decentralized society. We are not there though, so let's have authoritarian ideas pushed right and left while we can.
That's only if you didn't bother reading it carefully.
You missed the point about the ability of performing arguments. Babies and children might not be able to argument at the moment, but they are capable of argumentation. Therefore, for as long as they don't achieve maturity, tutors can act in the interest of the child.
Animals, on the other hand, can't argument at all, therefore are not capable of holding negative property rights.
Bear in mind that positive rights can't be reasoned without failing at Hume's razor, for the simple reason one can't have rights over other people's property. Collective property can't be reasoned either. In any case, I invite you to try to reason about said "rights" without resorting to positive law.
Which other articles didn't you like and that you claim are "nonsensical"?
Argumentative ethics is not about determining "truth".
It's about deriving the minimal ethical that we can agree upon using a logic derivation.
If the aim is to determine possible agreement it requires arguments.
Coming up with arguments require private property, starting with self ownership, and extending it to objects that can be delimited, modified, and protected.
Turns out the requirement for private property is the minimal ethical, as we can only agree (or disagree) that we can form arguments.
"I think this is nonsensical" ... "Actually I have a hard time charitably following his reasoning".
Let me help you a bit by over-simplyfing the logic:
- If I state an argument to you, it can either be true, false or indeterminate. No matter what argument you make to me in that regard, you'd end up agreeing with that argument, which means that specific argument is "a priori". Moreover, you can only reach a conclusion about my argument by being you, which means you need to have control over your own thoughts to achieve that conclusion (self-ownership)
- If we define ethics as the minimal set of rules that we agree upon in order to maintain our voluntarily stable pacific relationships over time and space, the only possible way we can achieve those ethics is through an argumentative process (I invite you to think of a refutation of that statement)
- Self-ownership can't be maintained (therefore invalidating the time and space requirement) without some means (food, water, shelter, etc). Those means are scarce, and can only be used by a single person at a time. So if we define property as something that is scarce (therefore delimitable) and is being used (therefore modified and protected), private property is a necessary requirement for sustaining self-ownership.
- In conclusion: A minimal system of ethics require arguments to be produced. Arguments require self-ownership to be produced. Self-ownership require private property to be sustained. Therefore if the aim is to achieve a minimal system of ethics that allow for the stable and pacific co-existence of individuals over time and space, the agreement on private property is required -- and that itself constitutes the minimal ethical.
That said, it doesn't mean that you'll agree with anything I exposed. By not agreeing, however, you are implicitly agreeing (by stating an argument). The moment you generate an argument, by the means of logic, you're agreeing on the minimal ethics of private property (although you may not be acting in alignment with that ethics).
That again disregards the fact that those regimes have to be sustained economically.
See, no matter what people believe, which gods they pray for, what ideologies they follow and how they manage their lives, they inevitably increase the means of production. Even if a given person is dumb and useless, that person would still prefer cheaper goods to more expensive ones, therefore generating economic signals for investments in production improvements.
Increased means of production mean lower transaction costs. Lower transaction costs generate decentralization. Decentralization progressively make centralized regimes not viable.
The idea that "if a government fails, another government will take its place" only makes sense in an environment where centralization is viable economically.
There's this idea that "because things have been playing out in a way, they'll keep being played out this way", despite the fact the increased means of production (call it "technology") change things fundamentally all the time.
It's very expensive to maintain the military. It's only possible nowadays as governments can impose taxation and due to the currency monopoly they can print as much money as they want to fund that sort of self-preserving activity, which is technically called "debt spending".
As decentralization spreads over, the management costs of taxation skyrocket, and the currency monopoly disappears. Without that governments can't fund their own activities. Which means they'll shrink progressively. As time goes by, they'll start failing at providing law and order, and private companies start providing protection, insurance and private arbitration services to people. Further down the road those companies in their aggregate will start protecting people from the state itself. The state then either becomes a company which some people voluntarily contract services from, or it vanishes.
I'm pretty sure someone would say that the "evil companies" would then merge and become another government, but that's only if that person missed the whole point: in the long term centralization is not economically viable, and in a non-regulated free market environment monopolies are not really possible. As those companies are voluntarily contracted by people, an attempt to fight their customers would be catastrophic as they'd unrecoverably lose their business to competitors.
I'd encourage you to read about the logic derivation of natural law based on private property through argumentative ethics, as described in the article I mentioned.
They certainly don't work for me. I have to pay something between 20-80% of all my income and financial gains to governments despite the fact I don't agree with anything they do, or with their existence. I never signed a contract with them agreeing on that sort of taxation, and if I don't pay the taxes the government imposes on me I can have my property taken away from me, get arrested and even be assassinated. I also have to comply with laws that are created out of some old man's ass, "respect" the police and the military otherwise they will kidnap, torture, or kill me, etc.
That said, I don't advocate for anything, nor I think revolutions or reforms would "fix" a centralized system that persists on the basis of the monopoly of force, such as the so-called "democratic" governments we have all over the world.
What I think, however, is that those centralized systems will inevitably and progressively fail due to their own inefficiencies, and as the transaction costs [1] diminish. As that happens, the centralized state's functions will leak into the decentralized market, until the state loses its ability to hold a monopoly of force.
I think we're a few decades away from seeing the end of the governments and states as we have today. The "alternative" will be a free, decentralized market that will emerge progressively as the governments disappear. We don't have to do anything "special" for that to happen. Just sit down and observe.
One can claim anything about the goal of a democracy. Politicians are particularly good at "selling" it to the public with all sorts of marketing strategies.
In practice I think it's hard to fight that the ultimate goal of any form of government is to make the government itself persist.
Democracies can't work, as they're managed by politicians with low time preferences, which means that in order to get elected they'll promise and pass laws and regulations that make the government always spend more than what they make through taxes, disregarding long-term effects. That process generates debt.
Democracies inevitably end up achieving state bankruptcy through excessive debt. Regardless, that debt has to be paid by the population, so in that perspective democracy is a poverty generation engine.
Another point of view is that elections are way to make people believe they are represented and therefore won't fight a state that maintains the monopoly of force, which can impose taxation, arbitrary laws, and a lot of other attacks to individual freedoms that people wouldn't be keen to accept naturally.
"democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the rest"
That's until you realize that representative democracy (rule of majority) is effectively an authoritarian system, which is based on the monopoly of force and the monopoly of currency, and which incentivizes politicians with low time preference to spend more money than what they take (by force) through taxes, therefore indebting and impoverishing the whole population progressively.
There's a social organization system that allows for individual freedoms: free markets with no centralized governments. It's not a setup that will be implemented through revolutions, reforms or good will. It's inevitable that we'll get there as the cost of transactions becomes increasingly small (therefore making centralized systems of organization not viable). Refer to the work of Ronald Coase to understand why that is.
Trying to impose "one way" to write commit messages is silly at best.
At work I follow whatever convention the team I'm on agrees with.
For my projects I use commit messages as a way to "tag" changes, more than to explain the changes using prose. That way it's very easy for me to search for changes in the codebase.
eg. #event-loop #fix #multiple-dispatch #repeated-message (remove the # and you get the idea)