First a couple of definitions:

Violence: Using force or the threat of force to do something to someone else against their will.

Immoral: Something is immoral if it makes life worse.

These are not a perfect definitions but hopefully they help to describe what I mean.

For starters I have to admit that the quote “You can’t legislate morality” is a bit vague and easy to misunderstand, but that’s almost always a problem with these easy to say/remember axioms.

A longer, less ambiguous way to say what I mean would be:

Just because something is immoral does not mean there should be a law making it illegal.

Another way to put it would be:

If you want to justify a law to make X illegal you need a better argument then just demonstrating that X is immoral.

And:

You should not try to legislate morality.

And:

The standard for having a law to make X illegal (and punishing people who are guilty of X) should be that X is an act of violence not just that it is immoral.

Here’s a picture that might help too.

So all the stuff in the big circle is immoral stuff (stuff I do not want people to do). However in order for me to think we need a law to make any given immoral act illegal it also need to be a violent act.

Why? I’m glad you asked. There are lots of reasons. However this is the main one.

It is bad to be the aggressor. So the first person to resort to violence is the bad person.

If someone is doing something immoral but is not being violent and someone else uses violence to stop them from doing it they become the aggressor and are now also acting immorally.

This is what’s called the Non-agression-principle.

The non-aggression principle is an important part of my moral framework and it should be a part of yours.

I was told that one of the ways dyslectics are able to recognize and spell words is by associating the way a word looks with something more meaningful (to a dyslectic), like what they represent and how they sound. For instance when I see the word “penny” I think of holding a real penny.

Most of the time it works well (it can be a little slow sometimes), however there are those words that are hard to associate with actual things. Words that do not easily associate with concrete objects or actions are tricky, homonyms are also trouble.

Both are against me in the case of since, sense and cents.

‘Cents’ has never given me any trouble, even though it sounds like the other two, the picture for that word is obvious and unique. Those other two though, those are trouble.

Currently my trick for figuring out which of these two words is called for is to imagine a brain, when I want to write “sense.” As in “you got any sense?”. Conversely when I want to write ‘since’ I think of a “river of time” or “one idea flowing in to the next” (dramatic isn’t it).

I wish I just knew which one to use with out having to think about it, but at least I know how to determine the right one to use if I give my self enough time to figure it out.