Wait. What brand of Libertarianism are we trouncing here? Collectivist anarchism? Libertarian socialism? Anarcho-capitalism? I'm Canadian I don't know you Americans like your Libertariansim.
Read some Ayn Rand. That's the predominant flavor here. All the Libertarians I knew at Rutgers were pushing her on me. I finally flogged myself into reading Atlas Shrugged over a weekend. (By the time I was finished, I felt that I had really flogged myself.)
As far as "The Fountainhead" goes, I recommend the movie over the book.
Wait. What brand of Libertarianism are we trouncing here? Collectivist anarchism? Libertarian socialism? Anarcho-capitalism?
Whata ya got?
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Delightful, your last sentence should read "I don't know [b]how[b] you Americans like your Libertarianism". Sorry to be a pendant, but i'm getting really tired of people missing or misspelling words in sentences.
And personally, as a fan of both Lois McMaster Bujold and Rumiko Takahashi, I [b]despise[b] Libertarianism. Any system that requires people to regularly sign contracts without being trained in contract law is a recipe for disaster.
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Delightful, your last sentence should read "I don't know [b]how[b] you Americans like your Libertarianism". Sorry to be a pendant, but i'm getting really tired of people missing or misspelling words in sentences.
the internet where grammer go to dye.
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Delightful, your last sentence should read "I don't know [b]how[b] you Americans like your Libertarianism". Sorry to be a pendant, but i'm getting really tired of people missing or misspelling words in sentences.
the internet where grammer go to dye.
Colour me gruntled. ;)
Delightful, your last sentence should read "I don't know [b]how[b] you Americans like your Libertarianism". Sorry to be a pendant, but i'm getting really tired of people missing or misspelling words in sentences.
Don't be hard on him, he's a foreigner. He probably doesn't even speak American.
And personally, as a fan of both Lois McMaster Bujold and Rumiko Takahashi, I [b]despise[b] Libertarianism. Any system that requires people to regularly sign contracts without being trained in contract law is a recipe for disaster.
...so what we have currently?
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Colour me gruntled. ;)Delightful, your last sentence should read "I don't know [b]how[b] you Americans like your Libertarianism". Sorry to be a pendant, but i'm getting really tired of people missing or misspelling words in sentences.
the internet where grammer go to dye.
Irregardless, I could care less.
Irregardless, I could care less.Colour me gruntled. ;)Delightful, your last sentence should read "I don't know [b]how[b] you Americans like your Libertarianism". Sorry to be a pendant, but i'm getting really tired of people missing or misspelling words in sentences.
the internet where grammer go to dye.
You need to feel the aster.
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Irregardless, I could care less.
*twitch*
*twitch*
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Delightful, your last sentence should read "I don't know [b]how[b] you Americans like your Libertarianism". Sorry to be a pendant, but i'm getting really tired of people missing or misspelling words in sentences.
And personally, as a fan of both Lois McMaster Bujold and Rumiko Takahashi, I [b]despise[b] Libertarianism. Any system that requires people to regularly sign contracts without being trained in contract law is a recipe for disaster.
.. What does Takahashi-osensei have to do with this?
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Well, I come back to find some of my comments removed because someone thought I was talking about a person that I wasn't talking about, even after I clarified that I wasn't.
The mod explicitly said that the word "snowflake" was the problem.
Also, I will remind everybody that despite the narrative of Bernie's campaign somehow being more negative, it sure as hell didn't start that way. Clinton's campaign endeavored to smear Bernie as a radical sexist racist European pro-Castro communist pretty much from the get-go, and she consistently talked down to him when he talked about economic policies. One of their number even suggested painting him as an atheist (probably because he didn't toe the jingoist Israel Can Do No Wrong line most candidates follow). Meanwhile, Sanders started out in the first debates refusing to go after Clinton directly on most issues, and he never said a word about her emails—even defending her on them at one point.
Basically, primary campaigns are quite often negative. Anybody remember the 2008 primary, where Obama gave that famous quote about her that people have recited so often lately? "Hillary Clinton. She’ll say anything, and change nothing." Holy s!@$. And people get mad at Sanders for daring to bring up her paid Wall Street speeches. ABC News actually said at the time, "The ad is so harsh, in fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see whomever the GOP nominee ends up being using it in his ads against Clinton, should she become the Democratic nominee."
People didn't get mad at Sanders because he got especially negative. They got mad because he got slightly negative during a coronation.
That said, look, he wasn't perfect. I do wish he'd given up on the primary after New York and started to focus on helping in the Congressional primaries. I really don't want to re-fight the primary, but with people trying to insist that Sanders is to blame for...running in a primary, I feel like someone has to say something.
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Delightful, your last sentence should read "I don't know how[b] you Americans like your Libertarianism". Sorry to be a pendant, but i'm getting really tired of people missing or misspelling words in sentences.
And personally, as a fan of both Lois McMaster Bujold and Rumiko Takahashi, I [b]despise[b] Libertarianism. Any system that requires people to regularly sign contracts without being trained in contract law is a recipe for disaster.
Delightful. Your BBCode should read, "I don't know how you Americans like your Libertarianism," and "I despise Libertarianism." Oh, and it should be "I'm", and your first sentence is a blatant comma splice. Sorry to be a pedant, but I'm getting really tired of people correcting other people's grammar while making errors themselves.
;D
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I've been wondering that since Trump's speech in Nevada, when he was heard exclaim, "I loooove the poorly educated," and the crowd went wild, and I was left thinking about how we used to be unhappy about being poorly educated, and want a better future for our children.Not that we needed another demonstration of the baked in misogyny in this country, but some of you folks might have seen the Audi Superbowl commercial... the one with the girl with the soapbox derby.
Well Youtube has made it's dispeleasure known with 25,000 dislikes compared to 2,000 likes along with the following endearing comments.
"Can we start a petition to send these women to Saudi Arabia so they can experience true female oppression,""Tell your daughter to find a real man to marry, and to avoid the mistake that her mother made," says another upstanding citizen. "Tell her to buy a Dodge. "
"The wage gap does not exist," writes an expert on corporate finance. "There is no company that pays a woman less then a man for the same job."
I'm fully on board with the comment below>
The common theme in the comments is that this is liberal propaganda. Why? When did it become controversial to say that women should have the same rights as men? Have we stumbled through a Mario Warp Pipe into the Land of A!#+~$$s?
See, that's your problem right there. You assume that these people actually want or even understand what's best for their children's future. Hell, your assuming that they even want to be educated.
Never seem human decency in people you don't know.
I'm willing to assume they want a better future for their children, but have been misinformed as to how to accomplish said better future. (Yes, that means I think I know what will make for a better future for them better than they themselves do, I get the irony.)
At some point (post election) it occurred to me that the US is rather screwed by its large population. (The numbers in the following examples have been rounded for convenience.) For instance, 5% unemployment is about as low as the unemployment rate can get, but with a population of 300 million, that's 15 million people right there. My state (Rhode Island) has a population of 1 million. I think a lot of the people who voted for Trump because every single person they know is unemployed and the Democratic Party wasn't addressing their concerns at all weren't confused about the day to day experience of their lives, they just got talked into voting against their own interests.
I'm not saying it's a good idea to assume decency in people I don't know , but it seems a worse idea to assume indecency simply because I don't know them.
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I'm willing to assume they want a better future for their children, but have been misinformed as to how to accomplish said better future. (Yes, that means I think I know what will make for a better future for them better than they themselves do, I get the irony.)
At some point (post election) it occurred to me that the US is rather screwed by its large...
It's a strange tension between wanting something better for there children and not wanting things to change. Or wanting the same (exact) life for their children as they had. Which means working the same sort of factory jobs in the same small monolithic communities.
There are two trends going on for jobs right now. One is the old globalist principle that you should only ever produce (excepting the most skill-focused production) in low-wage countries. As more and more countries get better work situations, however, it is mostly a matter of time until the lowest wages available aren't all that low, at which point the jobs will get pretty evenly spread. It is quite likely that while Trump may get some production jobs back to the US through trade barriers, more jobs will be lost in export and other sectors. It certainly was the experience with the Smoot-Hawley act.
The other is automation and improved production technology. Fewer jobs in production will be needed overall. We can rail about this if we want, it isn't going to help. We could of course reevaluate the international rules of intellectual property, which would carry the possibility of reshaping the principles of production and economy as they stand, but oddly enough this seems to be a step too far for an incredible number of people. In the meantime, we will get more centralized production, and more money to fewer and fewer people.
What could the Democrats do to change this? Nothing they are prepared to. The old concept of the heavy industrial worker is ashes. What will they do to help those people?
What could the Democrats do to change this? Nothing they are prepared to. The old concept of the heavy industrial worker is ashes. What will they do to help those people?
Investing in creating nation-wide retraining programs and greater accessibility to higher education so that those industrial workers and their children are capable of finding work in the information economy.
Of course, know of these things are going to happen any time soon given the Right's likely reaction to such efforts, but getting the idea out in the public consciousness would be good.
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I'm not a Democrat, I'm an Outright Libertarian.... but this is a very interesting thread to read.Libertarian usually means "republican in denial" these days...
On the other hand, my right-wing associates think I'm a democrat.
It's like being a half-elf: looking like an elf to a human, and looking like a human to an elf.
What could the Democrats do to change this? Nothing they are prepared to. The old concept of the heavy industrial worker is ashes. What will they do to help those people?Investing in creating nation-wide retraining programs and greater accessibility to higher education so that those industrial workers and their children are capable of finding work in the information economy.
Of course, know of these things are going to happen any time soon given the Right's likely reaction to such efforts, but getting the idea out in the public consciousness would be good.
Retraining is a crock on the larger scale. It helps you fight for a one of the fewer remaining decent jobs, but all that does is push others out.
Even the info jobs aren't go to last that long. Outsourcing's already taken a big bite and tools are getting more and more efficient there too.All the solutions I can think of work to make US employment less "efficient" and "productive" and are thus basically non-starters in the current world economy. It really does all boil down to finding ways to make ownership take a smaller cut of profits from productivity increases and leave more for labor. Job retraining doesn't change that fundamental equation.
Higher wages would. Shorter work weeks would. But as I said, those and similar things just increase the push to offshore or automate.
Blatantly taxing the high end and distributing the results a Basic Income kind of thing would work, but likely has its own drawbacks.It's no surprise Democrats don't have a ready answer. This is a hard problem. This is a fundamental economic shift on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. The answer then took a long time to arrive - unions, the threat of communism and government regulation to address the worst excesses of capitalism.
I don't know what the answer to our current problems is.
I think the goblin does. ;)
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I'm not a Democrat, I'm an Outright Libertarian.... but this is a very interesting thread to read.Libertarian usually means "republican in denial" these days...On the other hand, my right-wing associates think I'm a democrat.
It's like being a half-elf: looking like an elf to a human, and looking like a human to an elf.
I think we might need a Fun-Timey Libertarian Duergar thread now, to be honest. I have something I want to ask the libertarians on this thread, if they're up for it, and I promise it's not a trap.
Most libertarians I've met profess the whole "socially liberal, fiscally anti-big government" viewpoint you hear about a lot. But the impression I get from a lot of them is more "anti-big government, socially apathetic". My main libertarian friend is very much anti-BLM, anti-"political correctness", "skeptical" of progressive ideas about gender, and generally speaking acts more like a South Park libertarian than anything. He talks a lot about "reverse racism". He generally supports equality and such for LGBT people, but never actually campaigns for them to my knowledge. He seems to mostly support civil rights in a passive, "do no harm" sort of way. Is that common in libertarian circles, or is a new thing?
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What could the Democrats do to change this? Nothing they are prepared to. The old concept of the heavy industrial worker is ashes. What will they do to help those people?Investing in creating nation-wide retraining programs and greater accessibility to higher education so that those industrial workers and their children are capable of finding work in the information economy.
Of course, know of these things are going to happen any time soon given the Right's likely reaction to such efforts, but getting the idea out in the public consciousness would be good.
Retraining is a crock on the larger scale. It helps you fight for a one of the fewer remaining decent jobs, but all that does is push others out.
Even the info jobs aren't go to last that long. Outsourcing's already taken a big bite and tools are getting more and more efficient there too.All the solutions I can think of work to make US employment less "efficient" and "productive" and are thus basically non-starters in the current world economy. It really does all boil down to finding ways to make ownership take a smaller cut of profits from productivity increases and leave more for labor. Job retraining doesn't change that fundamental equation.
Higher wages would. Shorter work weeks would. But as I said, those and similar things just increase the push to offshore or automate.
Blatantly taxing the high end and distributing the results a Basic Income kind of thing would work, but likely has its own drawbacks.It's no surprise Democrats don't have a ready answer. This is a hard problem. This is a fundamental economic shift on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. The answer then took a long time to arrive - unions, the threat of communism and government regulation to address the worst excesses of capitalism.
I don't know what the answer to our current problems is.
To respond sissyl, and somewhat echo thejeff, Democrats had short term solutions for those people. But it would be difficult, and it would mean some people wouldn't get to do the job they felt they deserved. Long term solutions are simply untenable to the many portions of the American public and will be for a long time. The republican party had neither short term nor long term plans, so they just lied and said everything would be like it was. I'd applaud their brazenness if it weren't so successful.
So it seems the Democratic Party can either keep telling the truth and lose, or start lying and maybe win. I'm honestly unsure which is better.
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I'm not a Democrat, I'm an Outright Libertarian.... but this is a very interesting thread to read.Libertarian usually means "republican in denial" these days...On the other hand, my right-wing associates think I'm a democrat.
It's like being a half-elf: looking like an elf to a human, and looking like a human to an elf.
I think we might need a Fun-Timey Libertarian Duergar thread now, to be honest. I have something I want to ask the libertarians on this thread, if they're up for it, and I promise it's not a trap.
Most libertarians I've met profess the whole "socially liberal, fiscally anti-big government" viewpoint you hear about a lot. But the impression I get from a lot of them is more "anti-big government, socially apathetic". My main libertarian friend is very much anti-BLM, anti-"political correctness", "skeptical" of progressive ideas about gender, and generally speaking acts more like a South Park libertarian than anything. He talks a lot about "reverse racism". He generally supports equality and such for LGBT people, but never actually campaigns for them to my knowledge. He seems to mostly support civil rights in a passive, "do no harm" sort of way. Is that common in libertarian circles, or is a new thing?
Some libertarians do take non-involvement to the extreme, while others believe that they should spend time working for their ideals of freedom. The former may genuinely be apathetic, though some are opposed to using government to achieving any sort of ends.
Of the many criticisms I've heard of libertarians, the one I've found to be most valid is that they can sometimes be overly dogmatic.
I think the goblin does. ;)What could the Democrats do to change this? Nothing they are prepared to. The old concept of the heavy industrial worker is ashes. What will they do to help those people?Investing in creating nation-wide retraining programs and greater accessibility to higher education so that those industrial workers and their children are capable of finding work in the information economy.
Of course, know of these things are going to happen any time soon given the Right's likely reaction to such efforts, but getting the idea out in the public consciousness would be good.
Retraining is a crock on the larger scale. It helps you fight for a one of the fewer remaining decent jobs, but all that does is push others out.
Even the info jobs aren't go to last that long. Outsourcing's already taken a big bite and tools are getting more and more efficient there too.All the solutions I can think of work to make US employment less "efficient" and "productive" and are thus basically non-starters in the current world economy. It really does all boil down to finding ways to make ownership take a smaller cut of profits from productivity increases and leave more for labor. Job retraining doesn't change that fundamental equation.
Higher wages would. Shorter work weeks would. But as I said, those and similar things just increase the push to offshore or automate.
Blatantly taxing the high end and distributing the results a Basic Income kind of thing would work, but likely has its own drawbacks.It's no surprise Democrats don't have a ready answer. This is a hard problem. This is a fundamental economic shift on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. The answer then took a long time to arrive - unions, the threat of communism and government regulation to address the worst excesses of capitalism.
I don't know what the answer to our current problems is.
'Tis true.
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My main libertarian friend is very much anti-BLM, anti-"political correctness", "skeptical" of progressive ideas about gender, and generally speaking acts more like a South Park libertarian than anything.
If he looks at Berkley and says, "this is what political correctness means -- it's better to destroy the campus rather than allow others to listen to an alternative viewpoint," then I can sort of understand declaring oneself as "anti-" that.
If he encounters the same well-meaning people who told me that X and Y chromosomes don't actually exist, and that I can easily change my penis to a vagina without surgery just by changing "how I identify," then, yeah, I can understand the skepticism of "progressive" ideas like that, too.
The tabula rasa crowd is nearly that bad.
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Tabula rasa is a mystery to me. Anyone who has held more than one tiny baby in their hands and isn't completely emotionally deficient will see that the babies actually have different personalities. What this says about parents of two or more kids, who believe in the tabula rasa fairy tale isn't pretty.
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What could the Democrats do to change this? Nothing they are prepared to. The old concept of the heavy industrial worker is ashes. What will they do to help those people?Retraining is a crock on the larger scale. It helps you fight for a one of the fewer remaining decent jobs, but all that does is push others out.
Even the info jobs aren't go to last that long.
It's no surprise Democrats don't have a ready answer. This is a hard problem. This is a fundamental economic shift on the scale of the Industrial Revolution.
I absolutely and one hundred percent agree with thejeff. We're undergoing a fundamental economic shift. Like Sissyl said, the industrial worker is ashes. We're left with millions of people who don't know what they can do in this world anymore. Retraining is only a stopgap measure, and even so, not every coal miner is going to *want* to work tapping keyboards in a cubicle.
There is no easy ready answer. We're facing a massive issue.
The Wall is basically another stopgap measure to provide labor jobs to the industrial worker. In that it greatly resembles the American Civil Conservation Corps of the thirties, or the Irish Potato Famine's Famine Follies. Put the desperate into work on something fairly trivial and give them a subsistence wage. It'll keep them alive until the next election and then they'll be so grateful for the scraps that they'll vote you in again.
But it won't solve the actual issue.
I can't think of any solution to the actual issue that won't involve either 1) people accepting greater socialism and a basic income system or 2) a global world war that will prevent offshoring, remove overpopulation and possibly lower our technological level.
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There's 2 ways we can go from here.
A socialist paradise/dystopia where people don't have to work to make a living and can concentrate on their own thing whether or not it makes money
or
we go continuim full on corporate congress where corporations don't need workers to work, fight, make war, and only put up with the peons so long as they don't get uppity.
I never thought cyberpunk was going to be too optimistic.There's 2 ways we can go from here.
A socialist paradise/dystopia where people don't have to work to make a living and can concentrate on their own thing whether or not it makes money
or
we go continuim full on corporate congress where corporations don't need workers to work, fight, make war, and only put up with the peons so long as they don't get uppity.
No need for a human decker when you have watson on watson combat.
Whenever I go on one of my "Game f@&@ing over" rants and don't want to go sell newspapers cuz what's the point?, Mr. Comrade tells me how after the planet is destroyed, there will be "mole socialism" in underground bunkers.
Anyway, was bopping around on Facebook and ran across an article that reminded me of the last turn of this thread.
Haven't really read it, but I like the pretty pictures.
What We Can Learn from the Brief Period When the Government Employed Artists
Here's a pretty good rebuttal against some of the more common "liberals hate free speech!" claims. I don't even fully agree with this person—you know by now how I feel about freedom of speech as a purist ideal—but this writer makes some very strong points.
Mr. Comrade is my best bud. It's a bromance for the ages.
There used to be a Mrs. Comrade, too, but they got divorced and now she's Ex-Mrs. Comrade and then she joined the Democratic Socialists of America.
Splitter.
Al-Jazeera article that features our group and her's.
Here's a pretty good rebuttal against some of the more common "liberals hate free speech!" claims. I don't even fully agree with this person—you know by now how I feel about freedom of speech as a purist ideal—but this writer makes some very strong points.
From the article:
"[Progressives are] banning speakers whose opinions [they] don't agree with from college campuses. That's not progressive."
I'd agree! And again, so would everyone I've ever met! Refusing to listen to anyone you disagree with is not only "not progressive" -- it's borderline insane and completely impractical. But it's also not what "progressives" are fighting for.
Yes, sometimes a college will invite a controversial speaker to their campus, and students will petitions or protest or otherwise demand that that speaker not be allowed to come because they don't want to be around them.
Let's parse this. "Liberal students don't want to ban speakers they don't agree with. Colleges invite controversial speakers, and are banned by petitions and protests from the students. Therefore the students are obviously not against free speech," because sometimes the speakers see all the protests and decide to withdraw -- they give two examples.
A lot of the rest involves cherry-picked examples of people garbling facts as "proof" that everyone the author disagrees with is obviously wrong. Edge close to ad hom territory for fun, and end the article.
Color me unconvinced.
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Over the past twenty years I've been kicked off so many campuses (permanently banned from Vassar, although I never tested that) for peddling socialist newspapers (or, like last year, holding Jill Stein signs), that I have to laugh at the whole "free speech on campus" thing.
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Over the past twenty years I've been kicked off so many campuses (permanently banned from Vassar, although I never tested that) for peddling socialist newspapers (or, like last year, holding Jill Stein signs), that I have to laugh at the whole "free speech on campus" thing.
have you tried wearing pants?
Obviously protesting should be banned in the name of free speech.
Does not follow. Maybe leading people to understand that protesting against free speech is not conducive to it -- rather than praising them? Just a thought.
Is it acceptable to protest someone for the contents of their protected speech? It's one thing to accept that the American Nazi Party has a right to exist, publish articles, hold rallies and marches. It's another to argue that protesting when they hold such rallies and marches is a bad thing.
Is the purpose of your "protest" to present a dissenting view, or to prohibit them from speaking in the first place?
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Have we really sunk so low that we consider private institutions with six figure tuition costs as the arbitrators of "Free Speech"? That idea was always silly, but now it is silly and 60 years out of date. If I want to know what some controversial speaker has to say, I can watch them on youtube, or some other place on the internet. Why should I care what a bunch of wealthy college students think? That hasn't been relevant in decades (if it ever was).
Also, you weren't going to Vassar just to sell newspapers, you were courting Snookie!
EDIT: If you want to know about the state of "Free Speech" in the US, follow Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir.
Haven't been following Billy since Occupy. Keep on keepin' on, Rev.
[Looks up Snooki's wiki page and does some math]
She was six at the time.
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Here is a good example of what "Free Speech" looks like in the real world.
It should be noted that when I was charged with trespassing in Grand Central Terminal, it was dismissed by the judge because, "you can't trespass in a public place".
I love it when people who served in the armed forces call out cops for sucking, (3:30).
But yeah, when I protest something, I generally want it to stop. If I boycott some company for using their free speech (money) to support something reprehensible I don't just want to "present a dissenting view", I want them to stop. Using public and commercial pressure to do so is a fundamental tactic and does not infringe on free speech in the slightest.
So, if protesters were to physically blockade a store so that customers couldn't go in -- would that also be OK with you?
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If you accept the idea that the left is against free speech based on the evidence then you have to accept that the right is equally against free speech because the evidence is at least as good.
The instrument of the left shutting down free speech is "sorry, you can't use our universities podium. You'll have to make do with your own radio show, talk show, pulpet, the town square, a few city blocks, or an infinite number of youtube channels.
The instrument of the right shutting down free speech is to beat protestors with clubs, tear gas them, place undercover operatives to cause a ruckus to shoot them down, allow private paramilitary rentagoons to freeze people with a fire hose in the middle of winter, and shoot them in the head and then use that shooting as an excuse to clear the place out.
The idea that you are for free speech so you're going to vote for the right is ludicrous.
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If you accept the idea that the left is against free speech based on the evidence then you have to accept that the right is equally against free speech because the evidence is at least as good.
No argument. But that doesn't mean that I also need to be against free speech.
The instrument of the left shutting down free speech is "sorry, you can't use our universities podium. You'll have to make do with your own radio show, talk show, pulpet, the town square, a few city blocks, or an infinite number of youtube channels.
Or, "sorry, if you try to come to our campus, we'll destroy it rather than admit you."
The instrument of the right shutting down free speech is to beat protestors with clubs, tear gas them, place undercover operatives to cause a ruckus to shoot them down, allow private paramilitary rentagoons to freeze people with a fire hose in the middle of winter, and shoot them in the head and then use that shooting as an excuse to clear the place out.
Also intolerable, for a so-called civilized nation.
The idea that you are for free speech so you're going to vote for the right is ludicrous.
Agreed. But the idea that, because neither major political bloc seems to care about it doesn't mean it's not a useful value.