If I was the first person to desire exclusive ownership of Mars, every future human being would apparently be morally obligated to respect my claim. Even people who have never met me, never agreed to my ownership, and have absolutely no reason to recognize my authority.

Sure, but so what? What you’re missing here is the whole picture, which isn’t a knock on you. I never said this was simple, but it’s also not that complicated when you really get down to it.

Let’s say you do own Mars and everyone (or at least, the relative force monopoly) respect that and protect your rights over it. So what? Why should that even be a bad thing from a subjective perspective? Someone HAS to have exclusive authority over everything. There’s no such thing as a government - not really. A government is an idea, and ideas cannot own property. They can SAY they own property, but you can say anything you want. An agent of the government can just make a claim saying they can take your house and then the “government” owns it, all the while that single representative is the one who actually has exclusive authority over it.

The notion that you have some say over “public property” (a clear misnomer) is illusory. At least one person who represents “government” has the final say in what happens with that property. There’s no vote, and even if there is, there’s only a vote because that person or people let it happen. To argue that it’d be absurd to allow you to be the exclusive owner of Mars is nonsensical. Even if this weren’t the case, who exactly do you think is going to have exclusive authority over it if we ever do anything with the planet? Someone will. It will likely be divided up between owners, and many - if not the majority of those owners are going to be “government”.

Let’s assume you “own” a house. Do you, really? Do you hold EXCLUSIVE authority over that house? Can you do anything you want with it barring those actions do not violate the will of your neighbors? Well of course not. Hell, you can’t even finish your basement without the OK from the city. But there also is no OK from “the city”, is there? There’s always a PERSON who gives the OK. What does it matter who voted that person to have that authority? Who cares if that person has a badge, or a uniform, or claims to be “government”? Nothing changes that from just being a human being with the final say in what happens to a thing.

And what about property tax? You never stop paying taxes on the home you reportedly own.

So let’s go back to the Mars thing. So you own it, so what? What do you actually think you can do with Mars in a TRUE free society where we actually have freedom of both association and exclusive authority over our own property? Let’s say people ask to buy some land on Mars from you and you say no. OK, what if people want you to let them put hospitals on the planet, or power plants, or research facilities, or some such that might better mankind as a whole and you say no?

Well OK, so what stops your reputation from being tarnished due to an overwhelming feeling from people that you’re just a selfish asshole? If I own a place that sells food, I can just blacklist you from buying food from me. What happens if you can’t make purchases from a large portion of businesses because your reputation is so tarnished that everyone wants nothing to do with you?

What if your money becomes worthless because nobody will trade with you?

A true free society is one where someone can refuse to sell to black people and that’s “OK” because even if you and I disagree with that stance, we have freedom of association, so we can just refuse to associate with that individual.

If you like I can touch on your other points but I only had a few minutes to respond right now.

So you’ve declared your desire to hold exclusive authority over Mars, but that’s irrelevant because there’s nothing you can do with that. It doesn’t really create a conflict of wills of which need resolving in the first place.

Will it tomorrow? Maybe, but also maybe not. Let’s say it does. Well how do we resolve such a conflict? In addition, can you own something you’ve made up but don’t fundamentally know of what it is? For instance, what if I say I own your soul? Does your soul even exist? I would argue there’s no such thing and there’s simply no evidence to support that there’s such a thing as soul, so declaring that is kind of irrelevant. Can you own an entire planet? You know there’s apparently a planet out there and you know it has a name (likely, many), but do you have an actual context beyond that of that in which you’ve desired to own? It’s a good question I don’t have an immediate answer to but it doesn’t nullify anything I’ve said just because it’s complicated. Fundamentally, if you are the first person to ever desire exclusive authority with all of Mars, then Mars is your property.

I never said you needed to respect anyone’s will. I said it’s illogical not to. Logic is objective, and everything subjective is, at its core, arbitrary. There are ideas that are material and ideas that are ethereal - if those are the terms we’ll be using, anyway. In other words, you have ideas such as, which ship is the true ship of Theseus? But the truth there is neither, because there never was a ship of Theseus. We made the ship up. There are only simples arranged in particular patterns.

But that kind of thinking isn’t helpful for us to navigate the world. We know what fundamentally manifests the idea of “ship”, and that’s primarily material, but the idea for instance of “trans” is ethereal - it isn’t predicated on any kind of essence like ship is. We know what ship is not for instance, and we have enough cardinal attributes associated to ship to communicate the idea of ship, but trans is more abstract so as to not really mean anything - it fundamentally means whatever you want it to because that’s all anything without an essence can even mean.

So when you say, “this ship is mine” we can do something with that, but if you say, “I am trans”, there’s nothing we can do with that information that isn’t arbitrary. We can defend your property rights to your property being ship, but how do we defend your rights to being trans without it being wholly arbitrary?

I’m not picking at trans by the way, I’m just using it as an example since it’s so frequently in our discourse today.

To circle back and reiterate: I’m not saying that anyone has to respect property rights and clearly some people do not, but this is a philosophical proposition of logic that’s by far more rational than the arbitrary systems many use today to discern right and wrong. Saying you obtained your morals from god is nonsensical because it is patently clear that god-beings and “magic” just don’t exist. It is delusion to believe that they do, so predicating ones worldview around what doesn’t even exist can only lead to coincidence - it cannot lead to actual predictions of reality of which logic can - with certainty - accurately predict.

I’d be happy to go over more of this because I could write an entire book about it - not because it’s convolutedly complicated, but because most people don’t stop and think what the words they’re using even mean. Reductionism is how you get to truth, and reductionism requires logic to get there. We don’t know the difference between stool and chair, nor when something stops being something as you shave off atoms, or why we’re alive beings made of dead materials, but this is the stuff if ignorance, not of reality. Given enough time and reverse engineering, the answers are likely to come.

That being said, I believe the answers to a solid and just moral framework rely on logic and reason. If you’re not using logic and reason, you’re simply arbitrating. Everything else becomes an argument over justifying why you should hold exclusive authority over something because you feel a certain way about it. This is always just an argument over might makes right.

I would argue that the whole of human conflict does not come because two or more individuals have a different opinion per say, but because they see the same part of the world and believe it is construed in completely different ways. For instance, in Islam, the prophet Muhammed married a girl who was 6 years old and consummated the marriage when she was 9. Traditional Sunni Hadith outline this, and her name was Aisha bint Abi Bakr. Muslim scholars sometimes argue that she may have been older, but my point is that many millions of people believe the former, and if your worldview is such that the prophet of god was permitted to marry a 6 year old then your worldview is likely to accept that as simply a god-given moral construct.

It is not a matter of, “why can’t we all just get along” when you have someone who believes it should be OK to marry a 6 year old with a marriage consummation of 9. For many millions, that is simply rape and there is no way to reconcile this - do this and the answer must be violence. Full stop.

Or another example could be China or Russia’s believe that America and capitalism are sinister agents of the world while many Americans see Communism and the collectivist way as ultimately sinister and authoritarian. There are never any “good” arguments between the two, simply different justifications for why “I feel strongly, therefore fuck you”.

This stance I’m presenting is a philosophical neutral point (it’s more or less the NAP just described in more detail) that explains why it shouldn’t matter how you feel because everyone should be allowed to live their life the way they so choose so long as they are not initiating actions of which violate the will of others.

In short, do not murder, assault, rob, or defraud others.

And the thing here is: The moment you want to try to argue that there are justifications for murder, assault, theft, or fraud, why should anyone care to hear you out anymore? When you show up at my doorstep armed threatening to kill my children, there’s only one answer I have for you, there’s no alternative discussion there.

And I will be on the right side of morality, it doesn’t actually matter how you or I feel about it personally.

Try to use mental gymnastics to pour over justifying why you should be able to murder my children just doesn’t matter, and it shouldn’t matter, and my explanation for why is a hell of a lot more logical and rational than justifications predicated on, “I feel strongly, so fuck you”.

In fact, what I propose doesn’t even concern how I feel personally. You could live your life in ways I completely think are nonsensical, delusional, or down right self-destructive, and my stance is simply that you should be allowed. I might try to convince you otherwise, but never use violence to control how you live.

There is no other way for us to coexist in this world without a non-stop attempt at dominating one another unless we adhere to this kind of worldview. No other worldview comes even close.

Absolutely.

So you have objective and subjective morality. Morality simply meaning actions we should or should not take. If something is immoral, it is an action we should not take. What actions should we not take is predicated on logic.

The fundamental premise here is simple: You cannot desire the violation of your own will.

This is actually impossible. Let’s say for instance that you don’t want to be punched in the face, but then you want me to punch you in the face. You are not desiring the violation of your own will here, your will has simply changed to desiring that I strike you. Even if you changed your mind again, you are still not desiring the violating of your own will.

And since it is not possible to quantify value in an objective way, you also cannot create an objective hierarchy of value for will. Your will and mine are equal, for all intents and purposes. Any and all ideas we might have that seem to contradict that claim are merely our personal opinions.

So what this fundamentally means is that since you would never want me to initiate any actions of which violated your will - AND you cannot quantify an objective hierarchy of value for human will - then it leads that you as well should not initiate any actions of which violate my will.

Imagine the golden rule but edited in just the slightest. It’s not do unto others as you would want done to you but do unto others as they would want done to them.

In fact, majoritively this is how all human societies already engineer themselves - they just take a great many smaller caveats away from this in their own quest for greed and power.

Take murder, rape, assault, theft, or fraud for instance. ALL of those things are only made manifest when at least one party initiates an act against another in which the second party did not consent. If you hand me $20 and your will is aligned to do so (a gift, say), that does not manifest the idea of theft. But if I take that $20 from you without your permission, I have violated your will within a logical order of operations across time.

In short, we both held the same will as it pertained to that $20 - exclusive authority over it.

The reason why you are the owner of that $20 is because you fulfilled two primary fundamental criteria: 1. You desired exclusive authority over it. And 2. You did not violate the will of another as it pertains to that $20 in order to obtain exclsuive authority over it.

In other words, you wanted it and you didn’t steal it.

And these things predated my will to also hold exclusive authority over it. We have a conflict here though - a conflict of wills - where both of us desire an outcome that we both cannot have. There is only one $20 bill and both of us want exclusive authority over it, but only one of us can.

So morally, we back you, because logically neither of us can desire the violation of our own wills and also because your will predated mine. In short, in order for you to continue to hold exclusive authority over that $20, you need do nothing, whereas for me to hold exclusive authority over it, I must violate the second rule of ownership - I must violate your will in order to have it. I have to rob you.

This is why societies punish murderers, rapists, robbers, and fraudsters. They don’t punish all of them because of power and corruption, but as a whole, all societies always have done this, or desired to do this, given their resources and power.

Rape as another example does not manifest unless there’s at least one non-consenting party. Same thing for murder. If both of us went into an MMA match together for example and we both fully understand the risks therein - including but not limited to possible death - then so long as we both followed the rules then if one of us died in the ring, we didn’t commit murder. Would it be a tragedy? Well, sure, but it wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) be called murder.

Now if I laced my gloves with lead which wasn’t in the rules and you didn’t consent to that? Then I murdered you. Even if my intent wasn’t to kill you, that is still breaking your consent which lead to a highly negative outcome for you. In many societies across the world as well we wouldn’t even classify such an act as first degree murder, and the penalty wouldn’t be as severe, though it would still be severe.

Or if someone tries to enter my home to harm me and my family and I put them down - that too isn’t murder, even though the assailant didn’t want to die, the logic there is that my will predated theirs - I did not want someone to attack me and my family, or even enter my home without my consent - so the moment they did my act of violence was a reaction to their initiated act of which violated my will. It’d be akin to taking my $20 back if you stole it from me. I should be allowed to at that point even if you don’t want me to because it’s my $20.

In fact you already agree to this because you have no choice because of the two cardinal premises here. You would never want me for example to violate your will, so even if you were to tell me you would be OK if I took $20 from you that’s missing the point - that just means your will was aligned to give me $20. I again, never robbed you. You never ACTUALLY want to be robbed, you might just agree if someone takes something from you that you subjectively agree with their justification for doing so and thus, change your will so that you would be OK with them having what they took.

Your will was never violated then.

Well it depends on what you mean by cheating. Cheating tends to be a concept where more than one player is agreeing to a single ruleset and when one of those players breaks that ruleset, that’s the cheating.

You cannot compete in a system if you don’t both work in the same system. How do you know who’s won in a game of chess for example if the other player is playing as if all of their pawns are queens, and you are not? From their perspective they won, but from yours, they didn’t play the same game you’re playing.

So it changes when you play a game by yourself. In my view, the ruleset was created by the developers. Now clearly you could say that maybe the devs wanted additional rulesets and didn’t have the time, money, or inclination to make them, and you could also say that some devs are actively accepting of alterations to their game, but you have to ask yourself then what the rulesets of that game really are.

For me, and this is just for me, even when the devs themselves make sweeping changes to a game I can lose interest - especially when those changes “dumb down” the content and make it more accessible/simpler. Take mmo’s for example: If for 2 years the game required other players and a lot of time investment and then suddenly the devs make a huge patch where you can now solo everything and achieve the same past accomplishments in a quarter of the time, I feel like that’s “cheating”. Generally I just quit when that happens.

Obviously this isn’t an objective thing here, it’s just my personal opinion. I think generally the original vision of the game is the “intended” vision, so altering it in certain ways just seems like it’s going against the spirit of the game itself.

Never. I literally never use cheats. I do not even use mods.

I’ve been here for a week or so now and my experience here has quickly shown me that there are a lot of very shallow-minded leftists here (I’m not a Republican/conservative) and a lot of people really quick to just sling profanities and slurs around if they don’t agree with something you have to say.

And I probably make exponentially more than you do.

Public schools should not exist, that is also correct.

Rich people don’t send their children to public schools because private schools are superior. The reason why I could not open my own private school for instance to compete against a local public school is because I am heavily regulated if I did so and I have to compete with an entity that does not need to make a profit to stay in business.

When a public school does so poorly that had they been a for-profit business, or even a non-profit business (but not “public”), they would have gone out of business, the government can just funnel more money into them because the government doesn’t make money by producing quality goods and services like the rest of the actual free market does, it just robs you and spends your money.

The USPS hemorrhages roughly 8 billion annually while both FedEx and UPS are fortune 500 companies, and on top of that, this is considering that USPS holds a monopoly on certain services, plus they lose millions of packages every year (or they get damaged), and the services themselves are horrible compared to businesses like FedEx, UPS, or even Amazon’s shipping.

I can pay almost nothing and have a package shipped from Walmart of Amazon same-day, but if I wanted to ship the same thing from the USPS - let’s say I wanted to ship a 5 lb turkey - that would cost me between a whopping $7.00 and $17.50 for standard domestic.

In addition, USPS has the worst on-time delivery performance.

Yes, lol. It isn’t for you to decide how someone else can use their property. The only thing you need to concern yourself with is if they are using it to violate the will of others per a logical order of operations.

For example, if Joe owns his bathroom, he absolutely can say black people can’t use it. It’s his bathroom. What he can’t do would be to shoot a black person with his gun. The reasons for each of these are logical and follow a very particular pattern of reasoning predicated on whether or not either is an initiated action against another’s preexisting will or not.

Public property is a misnomer. You are so very wrong and I hope you rethink your positions in light of how very inaccurate about the fundamental, logical aspects of reality that you’re so wrong about.

I don’t want to ban anything until you’re any age, I want to know what seems to be the most rational age that best quantifies the sentiment that you must be able to provide consent to interact morally in this world with your personhood. If you cannot reason properly, you cannot produce consent.

If you can - by way of sufficient evidence - show that a 21 year old can produce the fundamental same level of rationality as a 25 year old, then I would agree that a solid age is 21.

But the problem here isn’t age, it’s consent.

Sort of. I would probably say the best current descriptor would be voluntarist. Anarchist also works. I disagree with the notion that communists are anarchists.

A birth defect is a defect, it’s in the name. That isn’t the same as someone having a mental feeling that they don’t feel like something they couldn’t hope to define the essence of (because it hasn’t one.)

With respect, the argument you want to make is impossible. If a 12 year old for example can consent to irreversible treatments for a feeling of “trans”, then they can consent to having battery acid poured into their eyes so they go blind because they feel like they were supposed to be born blind.

Jewel Shuping (US) was diagnosed with Body Integrity Identity Disorder where she experienced an overwhelming desire to exist with a severe physical disability so she had numbing eyedrops and drain cleaner in her eyes at age 21.

Now it’s not for me to decide that it should be illegal for Jewel to have done this. At 21 she was - at least legally - able to make this choice herself. I would argue that she clearly was not of sound mind though, so anyone who assisted her should have been convicted of a felony offense. But I digress.

I’m not here to tell anyone what they can or cannot do with themselves and their life. I am 100% in favor of anyone living the life they so choose, trans or anything else. My problem isn’t even necessarily one of my own personal opinions or feelings on the matter, but on logic and reason for logic and reason’s sake.

If you cannot consent, you should not be allowed to make decisions such as to go blind. Of course you could consent (especially with your parents/guardians) to REPAIRING eyesight, even if you were born blind, because that is a fundamentally unnatural state.

We don’t have to have a 300 page dissertation to go over what a “natural state” is. Being born blind is not the intended state of a human being. Arguments past the self-evident like that are generally deluded and attached to some level of nefarious intent.

Note that I can be completely accepting of how an adult wants to live their life but not OK with asserting that a child can consent. Both things can be true. A child also cannot consent to sex with an adult, full stop. Anyone who claims otherwise is an enemy to rational justice and morality and doesn’t need a conversation in argument.

We don’t discuss pedophiles who act upon their feelings, we imprison or kill them. No discussion is necessary there.

Now can some of these conversations hold some level of nuance? Well of course they can, but I stand with what I said. IF you’re talking about endorsing certain mannerisms, dress, or presentation, so be it. If you’re talking about consenting to cutting off body parts at 12? No, full stop. A 12 year old cannot consent to that and their parents cannot either, and anyone who does cut off body parts to a 12 year old for such things should be seen as nefarious and tried to the fullest extent of the law.

There are no such things. Rights aren’t real. The only rational morality is objective morality, which is predicated on a logical order of operations across time.

What is moral is just that in which is not immoral, and that in which is immoral are those actions of which we should not engage, and those actions of which we should not engage are predicated on a foundational premise that you cannot desire the violation of your own will, and that it is not objectively possible to quantify value.

Thus, if our wills collide, creating a conflict, the proper (moral) way of resolving said conflict is to note which of us held a will that was already initiated, and which would require some level of action of which would violate that preexisting will in order to make it manifest into the world.

Take for example, theft. Theft is, at its most fundamental level, an act of which violates the will of another as it pertains to their property. If you have $10 and I want that $10, I am the one who would need to initiate an action (theft) to have that $10 without your consent (your will), ergo, we side with you in our contest because I would need to become a thief in order to manifest my will unto the world.

This is actually the logic that produces the ideas of murder, rape, theft, assault, fraud, slavery, etc. This is why in our languages we do not say someone was murdered if it was purely accidental and there was no amount of negligence (in which case, the negligence was the will violation which then lead to the result.)

It doesn’t matter what you look like, what color your skin is, how your eyes, nose, or mouth appears, what clothing you wear, how you talk, walk, or what features on a human being you find attractive - none of that has anything to do with human will (personhood.)

EVERYTHING else is nonsensical authoritarianism which is predicated entirely on arbitration.

The PROBLEM is that government exists and asserts that it can somehow “own” things. Public property is a misnomer. You cannot threaten your neighbor with violence unless they give you $500 to buy a lawn mower and then try to argue that the lawn mower is public property and thus, it isn’t theft. Ask someone if that would be OK sometime and after they say no, realize that the neighbor IS the state in this instance. Slapping a badge on something or putting someone in a uniform does not change the reality of what is or is not immoral, or even sane.

The whole world is quite brainwashed by statism because we were all indoctrinated into it from birth. The vast majority of people’s minds explode the moment you start talking about statelessness because they cannot fathom the idea that - for example - HAD the government previously been in charge of all of the food the argument would be that without government we would all starve to death - except of course the governments of the world are not in charge of all the food and we - in the US at least - have such an overabundance of food that we throw away billions of tons annually and have an obesity epidemic in the nation. That’s HOW GOOD WE DO FOOD without the state.

The problem isn’t “trans rights”, and it never was. The problem is this: If someone who claims they are “trans” wants to use my bathroom - IE: The bathroom in MY house that I own - then I consent to that. Come use my bathroom.

If you want to use a bathroom in a public building, the problem isn’t whether or not a group of wolves should be allowed to vote alongside the sheep to decide what’s for dinner. The problem is that neither the wolves nor the sheep should be allowed to manifest their wills in a manner of which is immoral, full fucking stop.

You can’t say you come from a system you were fucking BORN INTO that dictates you can vote in the oppression of your fellow man and then say that the removal of that system is too scary to fathom. That’s insane, cowardly, and sinister.

So again, the problem isn’t which rights trans individuals do or do not have or might not have in the future. The ACTUAL problem is that there is a system in place that lets some people vote in others who can make laws that can control what you can or cannot do on threat of violence that isn’t simply protecting the innocent from murder, theft, rape, enslavement, assault, and fraud.

I don’t care WHAT the law said: If a law was put in place saying the government would take my innocent child to have them put to death, I would kill every single government official that they sent my way until they physically stopped me. The bloodshed would either be very limited, or they would be calling it the new red sea. What is “legal” or not is of no consequence to good people. All that matters is what is MORAL, and law and morality have NOTHING to do with one another.

Ad hominem. Try a conversation.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

I would argue that you’re thinking about contracts wrong. I’m not talking about a piece of paper. The piece of paper is just a way for us to write down something that at least two consenting parties agreed with.

“Same bullshit argument like with terms of service.”

How it that a bullshit argument? I will reject a service based on its terms of service. Do you just agree to every terms of service provided to you? You’re not entitled to any services. None of them. I would go as far as to say that if a company is writing out a terms of service that’s too long, too complicated, or too one-sided, then that should be an immediate red flag that you shouldn’t be giving your money to that business.

Apple. I don’t buy Apple products because I don’t like the way that company does business. I worked consulting for years in large companies where part of what I did was consult surrounding cellular devices. I used to advise clients not to use Apple products - that’s how far I went.

You can’t control the world and chances are your vote on anything is insignificant - and so be it - but if you have principles, you should follow them. Don’t complain because of your own weakness on your own principles.

And remember: Any business committing fraud isn’t acceptable.

And another thing: One of the big problems we have with businesses in the US (and most places) is that we don’t hold the actual owners of businesses personally accountable for the actions of a business. If some company poisons a river and a little girl dies because of it, our government fines the company. What SHOULD happen is the CEO and everyone else at that business who knew the company was committed to actions of which they knew might end up taking the life of a child should be thrown in prison for life as murderers. The fact that we do not do this is a failure of our government and transforms the entire paradigm of how companies DO business in the first place.

I can tell you the issue, but it won’t be what everyone else is telling you the issue is.

The real issue is that there are votes at all. You cannot be born into a system of consent, so you cannot be born into a system where by default, some huge organization can steal your income and use it to produce things you never asked for, probably mostly don’t use, and even blatantly don’t want.

You shouldn’t need an ID to do anything that isn’t something you’ve not already consented to, and the only people you would ever need to consent to would be those who own property you wish to utilize.

Why can’t you bundle any number of things into a single contract? If my neighbor and I want to bundle 300 things into a single contract we both agree to, who are you, as a third party, to tell us we can’t?

This is the problem. You have to let adults make their own choices. There’s no such thing as the wiser of two people. To say there is implies that someone has answers about the universe that the other does not. Even human life holds no objective value. All value is relative to the subject.

If you don’t like how a contract is written out, you just don’t consent to it.

What do you mean, why? What is moral is fundamentally just what isn’t immoral and what is immoral are just those actions we shouldn’t take. The only way to know that and not have that be entirely arbitrary is to utilize logic. Logic would mandate that since you would not desire the violation of your will, you cannot choose to violate the will of another.

But all human conflict creates will violation, so this means you just need to decide which will is actually initiating the violation of the other will and then side with the individual who’s will is being violated by the other’s.

For example, let’s say you own a car. It is your will to own that car (hold exclusive authority over it) and for me not to take it from you. If it is my will to also hold exclusive authority over that car I will need to take it from you. If I try to do this, my will is such that it desires the violation of your will which already existed prior to my desire to rob you.

This is actually what murder, rape, theft, fraud, etc. all are. Rape for example is only rape when there’s no consent. In order for the idea of rape to be made manifest, at least one “participant” must have not desired to be violated in such ways while another’s will must have been made manifest after the fact to do the violating. If this does not occur than the output is simply a consensual sexual act.

The same goes here. If a landlord asks you to consent to an idea where they can enter the place you rent anytime they like and watch you under any circumstances, then he isn’t violating your will because you consented to it. If the government (which is simply a third party utilizing violence) tells either party that they cannot engage in this consent then that is just the thuggery of the state telling people how they can or cannot consent.