Slashdot Mirror
Jill Stein and Gary Johnson Debate Online Tonight
Starting at 7 p.m. EDT (4 p.m. PDT), the Green and Libertarian candidates for President are debating on the Independent Voter Network. You can catch it via a Google+ hangout or Youtube both live and afterward (no word on flashless user unfortunately, unless anyone knows how to access youtube live streams). Since the big two candidates got some time here on Slashdot, we figured you guys might want to argue amongst yourselves about the third party platforms too. Note that there will be another debate with more candidates on Tuesday.
...is kind of hot.
Hey, I'm old.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
They picked the wrong night
The debate starts at minute 40, they have a few technical difficulties in the beginning, but solve them in a couple of minutes.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
There is only one political party that has been in charge of deleting rights for the last century; Repubmocrats. .8% incidental protein and .1% inert ingredients.
The Libertarians and Greens ARE honestly the REAL candidates along with other non-Repubmocrat offerings.
Repubmocrats are 99.1% plastic,
Leave First Post to the professionals.
Clinton: I Thought Obama 'Was Going to Cry'
"Governor Romney's argument is, we're not fixed, so fire him and put me in," said Clinton. "It is true we're not fixed. ...
Ouch. That's the sound bite that matters. The rest is just giving Bill Clinton cover. Makes one wonder if the Cintons have decided Hillary has a better chance running in 2016 as an outsider against Romney instead of as an effective incumbent against whoever.
I bet Obama's having second thoughts about trying to pin the blame for Benghazi on Hillary...
I don't see C'thulu on the list. He belongs there. I'm tired of choosing the lesser evil.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Seriously, you'd think with his connections...
OTOH how do you know he didn't serve already, remember the VP during W's terms?
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Hey, don't blame me. I voted for Kodos.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
everything out of the Libertarian's mouth boils down to "fuck you, I got mine"
The tea partier will hit you over the head with a pound of sacred dead tree matter, while explaining why corporate interests trump all else. Libertarians will just quote Ayn Rand instead.
How does that differ from what comes out of a Tea Partier's mouth?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Ah, I gotcha. They serve the same god, but just at different temples.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I've seen better video streams from the International Space Station. This is borderline unwatchable.
and everything out of a Democrat's mouth boils down to "fuck you, give me yours"
Did he have a long form birth certificate?
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Come on guys, this is 2012. Why didn't you setup this days in advance, and practice if they wanted to do this video conference method?
And why couldn't they find a place to hold their own debates? Invite the two main candidates even. Get them on a stage and have people in the crowd...
I would vote for Jill, since her views are more aligned with mine. But, I have to vote for Obama to get him in the White House in order to do a few things I like.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The Tea Partiers hate the Libertarians because Libertarians believe in a small government that lets people do things that make them feel funny; while the Tea Partiers believe in a big government morality police, as long as they don't have to pay for it.
Also, Ayn Rand thought abortions were awesome. How else are you going to keep the untermensch from breeding, preach at them?
Democrats and Republicans can reliably count on their party line votes, regardless of how they flip flop. That's why they focus more on the "independent" vote, come election time. The only way to influence the major parties anymore, is to show a significant uptick in the third party you most support. At the very least, you can affect the talking points of the next election.
Should change her first name to Beer, then she'd be a little more relevant.
The tea partier will hit you over the head with a pound of sacred dead tree matter, while explaining why corporate interests trump all else. Libertarians will just quote Ayn Rand instead.
So, the libertarians try to use two pounds of dead matter? Gotcha.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Why are the red states the ones that get more from the government than they give?
And a liberal will just take whatever they want from your pockets and act like you're the one who has a problem for wanting to hold on to what you earn. No explanations needed, just excuses for why their social programs have created generations of we're-do-wells.
A 'debate' amongst the loser retards. Dumber than the Special Olympics..
i forgot to add,
and everything out of a Republican's mouth boils down to "fuck you, I got mine... and btw give me yours too"
Well, I think that adequately sums up the various positions we're going to see in this thread. Good work everyone!
I believe the precise explaination they give is "you dont need it". Im pretty certain Obama actually used those words ("they dont need it", in the context of taxation on the rich), and certainly ive seen that here on slashdot.
Who, precisely, was elected to determine how much I need, I still havent heard.
while the Tea Partiers believe in a big government morality police
Thats an absolutely fascinating theory. Im just struggling to find its connection to reality.
It's not very hard. Are you retarded or something?
Tea Partiers don't want the government messing with their social security.
Tea Partiers are generally okay with increasing spending on the military. They generally are okay with medicare as well given their demographic. Tea Partiers are also okay with the government telling people what they can ingest and who they can marry. For all their rhetoric about smaller government, they just mean it on things they don't like. They're not really for limited or small government when it comes to issues they support.
This isn't the first 3rd party "debate" I've seen between these candidates, and the one thing I've noticed about all of them is that they never directly address each other. This is lame.
It's amazing to me that of all the things Paul Ryan could dislike about Ayn Rand's works the thing that seems to bother him the most is that Rand and her views were "atheistic". That her views were "atheistic" is what I liked the most about her writings.
Warning: This sig is not thread safe. For more information see Slashdot's sig policy.
So the tea party is now for getting government out the business of defining marriage and for legalizing drugs?
while the Tea Partiers believe in a big government morality police
Thats an absolutely fascinating theory. Im just struggling to find its connection to reality.
war on drugs?
war on fags?
war on damn dirty mexicans?
war on contraception?
war on evilution?
The state already defines marriage. Unless I am mistaken, the fight is to maintain the current definition rather than expanding it.
I am not aware of an official Tea Party position on drugs, but once again we already have drug laws.
The Tea Party certainly shares some ideals with the Libertarians... the founding fathers were largely Libertarian, after all.
But in general the Tea Party platform is a bullet list of platitudes and the Libertarian platform is a well-thought-out, self-consistent document.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If youre going to post ridiculous things, at least log in and do so. There is little incentive otherwise to start a discussion with an AC that is almost certainly going to end up going down the toilet.
you forgot the war on climate
and the war on sustainability
and the war on bicycles
and the war on the fucking continuation of America as a power.
Tea Party are traitors.
"We have to do something about the gross financial inequality in this country."
FAIL.
*click*
You can divide a sandwich among many men, but you cannot digest it in a collective stomach.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
That's also the most amusing part - at least Ayn Rand was consistent in her disdain for helping others in need.
The religious right will quote the Bible left and right when it suits their agenda, but then try to avoid one of the most important messages of the New Testament, which is to... wait for it... help others in need. I wonder how Jeebus felt about the 47%?
I guess Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J were busy tonight.
I doubt these two candidates sincerity, I am suspicious of their motivation and I encourage their supporters to think very carefully before voting for them.
There is not going to be a third party that breaks into the US political system nationwide. It's not going to happen because it cannot happen. The system is specifically designed for it not to happen, and the sooner supporters of these two lunatics get that message, the better off they will be.
On the other hand, there is certainly a place for political outsiders in the local elections, where they could actually have an impact. Most significantly, by influencing one of the two existing political parties. And it's much easier than you might think. Just about anywhere in the US, an average person could become a party committee member practically just by showing up, and once you've done that, now YOU are one of the people who picks primary candidates and who gets on the ballot and who doesn't. School boards, park district boards, but mainly members of the local party structure is the way to go.
That's how the tea party did it. They started showing up (albeit with corporate money in their pockets) for everything from the local school board to party precinct captains to committee members, and they ended up completely taking over the entire Republican Party and bending every elected Republican to their will. Just like that.
If you don't like the way politics works in the US, there are plenty of ways to approach changing it, but if you think you're going to do it by voting for a Libertarian or Greenie or some other third party candidate for president, you might as well just go jack off in your shoe for all the good it will do you. And that's without the rather questionable agendas of the two candidates named in this story.
Just think: Who stands to gain the most if a bunch of people vote for Ron Johnson? Jill Stein? Do you think that fact is lost on the Republican and Democratic parties? Do any of you believe that either Johnson or Stein is going to be elected president?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I don't have or want an account.
But I agree continuing a discussion with someone whose idea of an argument may be paraphrased as "if it's the status quo, supporting it doesn't count" is likely to end up down the toilet.
So forget I said anything. The tea party absolutely loathes big-government moral/cultural police with the exception of the moral/cultural pollice state we've already got; best guys ever!
I never said "supporting it doesnt count", but as the argument isnt "should the state recognize marriage", but rather "what should quality, its hardly a big government issue. That you chose to phrase it as a "war on fags" is kind of a turn off and is what makes me think the discussion isnt one worth having.
"Who, precisely, was elected to determine how much I need, I still havent heard."
That has always been the problem. Who determines how much I need, and what the definition of 'need' is anyway, and who determines my ability. Who is more qualified than I am to make those decisions as they apply to me?
My argument is no one.
There is a lot to like in the Green platform, but they have a serious issue with "free" health care, education, and so on. There is no free. Some one has to pay for all the goodies, and they are being as cagey as Romney in not saying who is picking up the tab.
Ayn Rand would certainly piss on you if you were on fire. She was of the "teach a man to fish" school, and disdained people who gave fish away. That's really all it boils down to in the end, anyway. You either get taught to fish, or learn on your own, or you're useless, and should stay out of the way.
You just made me spew water on my monitor I hope you're happy.
The same people as when democracy was first tried out, your neighbor. Before that it was your lord. Before that it was the biggest thug near you. The idea that you can be rich and be left alone really has never existed, this is a very liberal agenda you're pushing. There's always a been a balance between greed and self preservation, the current system seems a bit better than most since we're having an argument about how much of your money to take from you. It beats some of the past experiments in taxation that involved sharp objects, or men storming your house in the middle of the night.
If C'thulu was running for president in 2012, he would be the lesser evil.
Have you spend any time reviewing the history of the candidates? Not what they promise but what they have done so far?
Their antics would disgust even a pope.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You mean "teach a man to fish if he's already wealthy enough to afford to pay for his education." Free public education is another thing Rand was against.
I hate to say it (because I am more aligned with these candidates than the other two major parties'), but with what I've seen in the last ten minutes, these minor parties will never have their chance on the big stage.
The audio quality of this debate started out horrendous if I wasn't determined I would have left very early. Even throughout, you can hear typing, whispering to people off screen, and shuffling of papers. The Doctor's mic problems were almost laughable if we weren't talking about the presidency.
The video quality looks like they're using home-quality webcams and DSL connections. The governor's webcam cut out right before he was about to answer a question and he was gone for about 10 minutes.
These two candidates are decent, but not polished, speakers. They rarely looked at the camera and were often reading from something, there was poor lighting, and both had ugly backgrounds (was the Doctor in a basement?).
I know these parties don't have the bankroll of the major two, but they can't test and fix these things prior to the debate? Don't they have advisors for marketing and presentation? It's hard to take them seriously.
Don't get me wrong. I WANT these parties to succeed. And I know that the technical and superficial details I pointed out above don't come close to mattering in the big picture. I want a president that can fix our country's issues, not one that has a fancy webcam. Unfortunately, issues like this keep the majority of voters from giving them any consideration.
I thought Ayn Rand was a dude.
and everything out of a Democrat's mouth boils down to "fuck you, give me yours"
You have that a little wrong. Democrats tend to be holier than thou, the other reason they want everyone else's stuff is so they can give it to those who won't for for their own. So it's more like "Fuck you, I'm taking yours and giving it to some lazy piece of shit who doesn't deserve it because I'm such a great humanitarian and you're a rotten hard working individual who ought to be ashamed at having so much.... But don't take my stuff because I'm a humanitarian who helps other people."
You know, I asked the very same thing years ago, and was told that because I had more, I should feel proud to give to those who have less. Funny how these noble sentiments go out the window as soon as the "wrong" politics get involved, eh?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The state already defines marriage.
Oh? And what the fuck business is it of theirs?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
You mean like when Jill and some random Libertarian candidate faced Mitt Romney for the Massachusetts gubernatorial election?
The Boston Globe called her "the only adult in the room."
I think she should get arrested more often. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you...
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The Tea Partier will get uncomfortable if you bring up drugs. And the Libertarian will be able to argue you into a deontological system of ethics based on the non-aggression principle. Alternatively: one will talk about Sarah Palin, and one will talk about Murray Rothbard.
Gary Johnson is a clone of Ron Paul, who is just GOP turned up to 11. He offers nothing new, he just cranks everything the GOP wants up to an extreme level that the party leadership realizes they cannot sell. Unlike the regular GOP brass, however, he manages to pull in a few younger people who don't read the full text of what he wants - or the analysis of what it would actually do to the vast majority of Americans.
Jill Stein, on the other hand, actually offers some new ideas. Unfortunately nobody will take her seriously. Unlike in 2000, however, when republicans ran ads for Nader to pull voters away from Gore, Stein is being ignored outright because if the two main parties acknowledged her then people might realize how little difference there is in action between the republicans and the democrats.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The people watching are the people willing to vote for these people in the first place. So whose minds do they think they are changing? You think a green party voter is going to vote libertarian or vice versa? This is just phony debate trying to get people to think they are actually trying to win. If they were serious they would look ay other methods to get their message out.
When the "Tea Party" first started, the definition was pretty similar, but now that the wazoos have taken it over:
A Libertarian believes that all people (every living human being on planet earth) have the right not to have violence initiated against them, and equally important, that one does not have the right to initiate violence against any other person.
A Tea Partier believes that Jesus will use the might of the US govt. to show them evil leftists a thing or two, and turn the Middle East into a glass parking lot, because our "Communist" President is not enough of a warmonger (even though he's actually even more of a warmonger than Bush was)
The former is a rational, logical, and very peaceful code of ethics for how to conduct one's self in social situations. Not a political platform per se - although a Libertarian political platform MUST conform to this code of ethics. EG. Aggressive warfare, or warfare in general is immoral, because it initiates violence against others, thus violating their rights. An anti-war stance is the only proper position for a real libertarian.
The latter is. . . DERP!!!! DERP!!! DE DOOOO!!! THEY TOOK R JERBS!!! SEND EM TO GITMO!!!!!
Sad to say, the Tea Party started out fairly libertarian. Not the case anymore. Just thought I'd clear that up for the uninitiated in the bunch.
everything out of the Libertarian's mouth boils down to "fuck you, I got mine"
What you've said has no connection to reality.
Plenty of libertarians are not financially wealthy (I am downright impoverished - by choice). Plenty of libertarians donate to charity. People who want to protect what's theirs from competition are likely to turn to government for help, which is how we get all those cronyist regulations. Libertarians believe that all people are equal in their negative Rights.
Everything out of a real libertarian's mouth boils down to "violence is wrong", including violence by governments to buy loyalty of the mob with stolen loot!
--libman
What I don't understand is how some people (those who fight against gay marriage) can fail to see how a single word can have multiple meanings. The word 'gay' doesn't even mean what it used to, and sometimes it's even used to describe something that someone doesn't like. These people need to get over the fact that language evolves.
While taking when in need herself after smoking like a chimney.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
By the way, stop confusing technocrats with liberals.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
That's also the most amusing part - at least Ayn Rand was consistent in her disdain for helping others in need.
She never had disdain for helping others - voluntarily and logically, not through government force or irrational guilt.
The religious right will quote the Bible left and right when it suits their agenda, but then try to avoid one of the most important messages of the New Testament, which is to... wait for it... help others in need. I wonder how Jeebus felt about the 47%?
In the United States, the "religious right" is only slightly bigger than the "religious left", mostly due to the historical cultural trend popularly called the "protestant work ethic". In other countries it can be the other way around.
And, although I'm an atheist, I've read the Bible (and Asimov's commentary, etc), and I don't seem to recall Jeebus ever running for political office on the platform of stealing from the rich to finance his popularity with the poor. He was for voluntary charity through irrational guilt, and if anything he was an enemy of the state.
--libman
Tea partiers hate gays the most, dixiecrats hate blacks the most, and libertarians hate climatologists the most. All of them agree that a big state stops them from engaging in their preferred for of looting, so that has to go first.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
They all believe in the ownership of government by another power, for the Tea Partiers, it is the churches, for the Libertarians it is the pot smoking bit coin miners.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
But they both agree that climate change is a hoax and that people should die for lack of health care, so they at least have that in common.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Same is true with libertarians.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Why are the red states the ones that get more from the government than they give?
Perhaps you have the causality backwards. Red states think that the government spends too much. Perhaps that is because in those states, it does.
That's the Green Party / Eco-terrorist / Gaia worship position.
Which until a few years ago was in favor of legalizing child prostitution, and many whose candidates are still evasive about the question.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Negative rights are pointless. They mean nothing to the dead, and without healthy air to breathe and healthy water to drink no one will survive.
To support negative rights you must support strong protections of the environmental commons, and if you do that you should support the Green party instead of the Libertarian party.
That has always been the problem. Who determines how much I need, and what the definition of 'need' is anyway, and who determines my ability. Who is more qualified than I am to make those decisions as they apply to me?
Whether you are more needy than all the other people who also want something of a limited resource? You may be the most knowledgeable about your own needs but also the least objective. And if there's no relationship between ability and reward because it's all based on need you have an equally strong biased interest in not measuring your ability correctly too. Why work hard for no benefit? So then you have to bring in arbitrators to determine if you're really that useless and needy as you claim, but then they aren't neutral but rather biased and corrupt. Then it becomes more about gaming the system than actual abilities and needs, which is a self-enforcing circle. The less actual ability and need matter, the more people try to game the system and the more corrupt it gets.
By US standards I'm probably a socialist in that I want good social safety nets but for general employment you need rewards to be related to effort and results, not just needs. Because I do a kick-ass job and deliver great value to society I feel I deserve more money than the person who does a crap job, even if we're practically equal and as such have the same needs. Real needs like health care I think should be covered, but I don't feel bad about me eating out at a fancy restaurant or going on a two week vacation to a tropical getaway and he doesn't even if does his job to the best of his ability - it's just not that good. I'm not too hot on mass wealth redistribution though, only that there's a base floor provided for everyone.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's also the most amusing part - at least Ayn Rand was consistent in her disdain for helping others in need.
The religious right will quote the Bible left and right when it suits their agenda, but then try to avoid one of the most important messages of the New Testament, which is to... wait for it... help others in need. I wonder how Jeebus felt about the 47%?
I know it's chic to believe that republicans, tea party members, and libertarians don't care about the (actual) downtrodden, but they just don't think it should be government's role to provide aid. When you look through the New Testament, the only attempts to make a system of charity were done within the newly formed Church. Jesus didn't go to Pilot or Herod and demand they set up charitable organizations with tax money, he asked his followers to "feed my sheep". The difference is that forced systematic charity is not charity or good. It enslaves souls on both sides of the transaction, while voluntary charity liberates.
This is a better answer than most to a stupid question. OP ought to close his browser, turn off his TV, and start reading some books. Alternatively, he could read the wiki pages on each group... for a start.
Everything out of a real libertarian's mouth boils down to "violence is wrong"
Which boils down to "those with land have rights, those without have none."
If everything is privately owned, then existing requires you be on someone's private property. If you don't own it, then you can be kicked off it, and on to someone else's private land you "violently" trespassed onto. If you don't own land, you go to jail for initiating violence by living.
Or: "Fuck you, I got mine."
Learn to love Alaska
I don't seem to recall Jeebus ever running for political office on the platform of stealing from the rich to finance his popularity with the poor.
Do you remember what he did say about rich people?
Learn to love Alaska
The state already defines marriage. Unless I am mistaken, the fight is to maintain the current definition rather than expanding it.
No, the teabaggers have started to make a movement to have the feds tell the states what they can call marriage, and to partially repeal inconvenient parts of the Constitution, like Full Faith and Credit.
And it's ok for them to support interfereing in people's lives, so long as the law was already there? We should go back to slavery, that started before the teabaggers came along.
Learn to love Alaska
ah, no that is not the libertarian perspective. that is the libertarian perspective twisted by leftist wingnuts.
They aren't ridiculous. The teabaggers have called for all those wars and more. They want the same thing as every other party. A large government that does exactly what they want, and no more. Yes, that includes Libertarians.
Learn to love Alaska
Well, who wants ugly old prostitutes?
Learn to love Alaska
and the error liberals make with this statement is that bigger government is not always (if ever) the best way to go about helping others.
Christian individuals, and christian charity organizations, provide the great majority of all the funds and labor used to help disadvantaged people in the USA and abroad. It's a simple fact, despite your wishful truthyism.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Your romanticisation of democracy doesn't stand up to rational scrutiny.
All stable forms of social organization need to be popular, whether this popularity is formalized through voting or not, and all of them involve ideological indoctrination. When warlords and other thugs grow large enough and achieve hegemony, they inevitably establish a bureaucracy, gain influence over religion and/or schooling, and, in the modern world, establish shiny modern systems of feedback-driven governance - which is to their advantage. Governments will always have far, far more influence on the public than the public can ever have on the governments!
Democracy has been around for thousands of years, and has never been particularly associated with freedom, which in practice is a relative concept. You can have individual freedom in a democracy if everyone votes the right way (which is pretty much impossible, given how easy it is for demagogue politicians to bribe the mob with stolen loot), or you can have individual freedom in a monarchy if the monarchs (and their advisors, etc) happen to support it. Life in the absolute monarchy of Qatar or a single-party state like Singapore is far better today than in a "democratic" hellhole like Venezuela. (To say nothing of the People's Democratic Republic of (North) Korea, where the government is indeed very popular.)
Freedom depends not just on how collective decisions are reached, but, more importantly, on how many decisions are collectivized in the first place! The theoretical ideal of freedom is one of perfect individualism, with no laws except Natural Law (aka the Non-Aggression Principle, that is the negative Right to life, liberty, property, contract rights, and parents' rights), and where all other social conventions are voluntary.
--libman
Democrats and Republicans and their corporate overlords are ruining my country. Voters could, hypothetically, stop voting for them and initiate a real change in course. But they don't, because dumbasses like you keep telling them that they have to vote for Ds and Rs.
Let me explain something: you don't win a goddamn thing by voting for the candidate who wins. Your job as a voter is to vote for the candidate who will best fill the particular role in government. Your job is NOT to vote how you think the crowd is going to vote. This isn't the fucking stock market. If you vote for sociopaths who are selected and paid for by monied interests, that is all you will EVER get.
You sound more and more like that stupid fuck from Florida who was a one-termer because instead of proposing solutions and working with people, he chose to insult the other party and set up straw men. You have posted several times in this discussion and not once did you say anything remotely insightful. Billy Madison would be embarrassed.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The people you are talking to don't care about the truth. They're like the idiot who told my in-law that Romney said women who were raped were "asking for it". I am not sure where this idea even came from. My best guess is somehow Todd Aiken's statements about women "shutting down" a pregnancy due to rape got morphed into this disgusting lie attributed to a totally different person.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
A libertarian is fine with you smoking pot next to your same sex spouse.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
You know, I asked the very same thing years ago, and was told that because I had more, I should feel proud to give to those who have less. Funny how these noble sentiments go out the window as soon as the "wrong" politics get involved, eh?
The problem with republicans claiming to be against redistribution while benefiting from it isn't that redistribution is wrong, it's that the hypocrisy is irritating.
I'm not too hot on mass wealth redistribution though, only that there's a base floor provided for everyone.
Congratulations, you're a socialist.
Whatever happened to the avid discussions concerning Vote Swapping and Instant Runoff Voting? I liked when those topics were on the forefront because they gave me more hope than any of the candidates for fixing the seemingly impenetrable wall of muffled cries between the citizens' desires and the ruling bodies.
I don't ever want to vote against. I want to vote for.
[Sad face here]
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
Marriage affects taxation, property law, and rights in medical situations. All of those things are legal matters, and so the government needs to track it. How the nanites do you not know this?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Nobody in the establishment talks about debt based money and how it systematically conveys the wealth of society, the worker class, to the international bankster fraudulent monetary system engineers. Debt Money Tyranny money flow shows this process graphically: http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/4768883/debtmoneytyranny-6-1-pdf-60k?tr=77 That's the flow chart of the biggest con job ever pulled in human history. That's right, when debt is money, the monetary wealth of the richest people on planet Earth is, by definition, the debt of everyone else. The ONLY way to pay that debt back is if the richest people on Earth gave all their money to pay back our debts. The exact opposite is, in fact, happening. The richest people on the planet are bailing out their front corporations at the expense of society. The net effect of these bailouts is they are bankrupting society even faster! Anyone not talking about this issue is doing you a disservice. Our engineered insolvency is has already started the end game and Greece's current stage isn't that far in our future. Get prepared.
Oh bullshit. Let me guess, somebody decided that legalizing prostitution as well as reforming child labor laws must necessarily mean an explicit and positive call for child prostitutes? It's this kind of intellectual dishonesty and disingenuity that makes me loathe the mainstream left.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
The Tea Partiers hate the Libertarians because Libertarians believe in a small government that lets people do things that make them feel funny; while the Tea Partiers believe in a big government morality police, as long as they don't have to pay for it.
You're talking out of your ass.
Both the "Tea Parties" and the "Libertarians" (especially if you mean small-l libertarians, who are not necessarily big-L Libertarians, that is supporters of the U.S. Libertarian Party) are diverse and amorphous groups of people, who overlap to some degree. There are very few accurate generalizations that you can make about either group. If you want to provide constructive criticism, then you should avoid vague labels and criticize specific philosophies and view-points instead.
Plenty of people at Tea Party rallies are as much against "right-wing social engineering" and warfare statism as they are against welfare statism. And plenty of perfectly principled libertarians would support reasonable contractual restrictions on drugs, alcohol, guns, lewd behavior, etc in their neighborhood associations, private schools, businesses, churches / secular voluntary cultural institutions, etc.
Also, Ayn Rand thought abortions were awesome. How else are you going to keep the untermensch from breeding, preach at them?
Unless you can reference a quote that I don't know about, then I must assume that you, again, are talking out of your ass...
There is a big difference between being pro-choice, as she was, and supporting any sort of anti-natalist eugenic bullshit, which she most certainly didn't. We live in a very large and resource-rich solar system (to say nothing of the things beyond), and there's plenty of room in it for everyone, even idiots, just as long as they can agree to follow the rules of capitalism and respect the Rights of others.
I am an atheist, a big Ayn Rand fan, and I am opposed to a prohibition on abortion, but I must say that her view that a fetus has no rights is flawed. Scientifically a fetus is a helpless human being, only circumstantially different from a born baby. What is clear is that it doesn't have any "positive right" to "occupy" the mother's body against her will, but the mother having the right to evict the fetus doesn't equate with the fetus not having a negative Right to life. Since at present levels of technology such an eviction is guaranteed death, then abortion should be legal.
I am a pro-natalist (I see people (who can afford them) having more babies as a good thing), and I don't see how any rational person who studies the current demographic trends and their economic consequences could possibly come to a different conclusion. If (or, rather, "when") in the future we'll have the technology to safely transplant fetuses and/or grow them in an artificial environment, then killing a fetus would be a truly pointless and sadistic thing to do! Even without laws mandating live extraction of the fetus, I think that in the future there'll be a super-abundance of Pro-Life charities willing to pay the mother for the fetus to be extracted unharmed, and to pay for it to be grown to maturity and adopted. (This would be especially true in a rational society that recognizes stronger Parents' Rights (which transfer in case of adoption), and stronger moral responsibilities of grown offspring to take care of their (adoptive) parents, thereby giving people more of an incentive to have and adopt children.)
The need for abortion is yet another "political problem" that science and technolog
Are you sure you are responding to the right post. GP did not say anything about Chirstians, only about religious right.
Cthulhu doesn't have to throw himself into the court of public opinion. Whichever candidate gets elected, Cthulhu fhtagn!
20 minutes into the future
Why are the red states the ones that get more from the government than they give?
That is a meaningless question. The fact is that on the whole, Republican voters pay more in taxes, Democrat voters pay less and receive more. Even in the blue states the most productive people tend to vote Republican? Look at the demographic breakdown in the polls and even in California the college educated, small business owners, mid to higher income are overwhelmingly Republican voters. Low income, low education, young people and minorities (but in particular low income minorities - high income are also Republican) are the Democrat voters and they are not producing the money that goes to the red states.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Libertarianism is just a slightly less honest version of anarchism. The political sentiments are pretty much the same and both are equally untenable, but the libertarians wrap theirs up with ideals about private property to pretend they aren't just a bunch of crazies.
Anyone who believes fundamentally that everything ought to be private falls into one of two categories. People who believe that when everything turns private they will be one of the people running the show and idiots who think that the first group of people won't be worse than any government which has ever existed.
Oh? And what the fuck business is it of theirs?
It became their business when they decided that married people were special.
Make no mistake, homosexuals don't want to get married because of their faith in the institution of marriage. They want to get married for all of the special rights afforded to married people. This isnt about equality.. its about a new group of people wanting to also be treated special.. they want to be elite too.
Fuck the single people, am I right?
"His name was James Damore."
Tea Partiers are generally okay with increasing spending on the military.
Because it's one of the very few things the Constitution specifically requires the federal government to do (in addition to being something the states or individual citizens are not really well-equipped (not just in hardware, but structurally, financially, technically, etc)
They generally are okay with medicare as well given their demographic.
And also given that they had money forcibly taken from them through their entire working lives (which meant they could not use those dollars to make any arrangements they might have preferred... and also the government involvement in the markets distorted them so much that seniors now face severely manipulated price and availability issues if they try to get medical care outside the system)
Tea Partiers are also okay with the government telling people what they can ingest and who they can marry.
Because they know the government will tax them to pay for the costs of all the human wreckage that results from extremely dysfunctional lifestyles. I know this will shock you, but TEA partiers like the constitution which does not include massive social spending and does indeed include marriage (but marriage at that time was one-man-and-one-woman and will always mean that to TEA partiers). Wanna be a gay couple? Fine... but don't demand we re-define the word marriage and then distort all sorts of government activity accordingly. Wanna do drugs? Fine... but do not demand we pay for your re-hab, pay for your hospital visits, pay for your jail time, pay for more police and higher home owner insurance rates because you steal for your drug money (because you are too lazy and or dysfunctional to hold a job that pays enough for drugs in addition to all the stuff people generally need wages for), etc. If the constitution is ammended to indemnify the taxpayers from the costs of those dysfunctions while also providing 100% protection for all the innocents that would be impacted by them (and keep judges from ignoring those new provisions) and the resistance to those lifestyle choices will drop dramatically... most TEA party people want to be left alone by government and will happily demand a government that is small enough to leave you alone too, even as you do things they do not like as long as you do not harm them (including by demanding their taxes for social services) or any innocent bystanders
They're not really for limited or small government when it comes to issues they support.
Yes they are... as long as it is true small government, not some liberal cartoon of small government that provides an unconstitutional safety net while failing to provide a constitutional national defense
The Independent Voter Network stepped in a Texas-sized pile of shit today, showing that they can't manage to host a three-way video chat, or run a debate. I have a 17 year old niece who could have done a better job. From the Jill Stein audio embarrassment to the Where's Johnson? segment, this thing has shown these guys are not ready for prime-time. Frankly, I think if Jim Lehrer watched this, he'd feel a LOT better about how he did as mediator of the first Presidential debate.
If they had any brains at all, they'd have gotten them all together in the same place, and done the debate in a fashion that at least vaguely resembles a professional one. Even if they couldn't they could at least have filmed the debate, then edited it to remove all the time spent waiting for Dr. Stein to figure out how to unmute her computer, and the time spent waiting for Gov. Johnson to get his dial-up connection back up. Or was he using ISDN? The whole thing was a fucking joke, and that's sad, because God DAMN it, this matters, and it would be great if we had a choice beside the Coke-or-Pepsi "choice" of Whateverschmuckthedemocratswanttobepresident or Whicheverassholetherepublicanswanttodestroyamerica. It'll be hard to get someone who might break the cycle of two-party-dickheads getting elected over and over again, if we can't agree on a third person to put up against the billions of dollars who want us to elect one or the other of their puppets, in this case Obama or Romney, and we can't agree if we don't know anything about these people, and GOSH, a debate sure would have helped with that, shame these guys FUCKED THAT UP SO FUCKING BADLY!
By the way, Steve Peace? We didn't land on the moon in 1960. If you're going to reference historical facts, and don't want to sound like Sarah Fucking Palin, it pays to know what you're talking about, or keep your mouth shut so you don't have shit like that popping out of it making you look stupid. ...and oh, BTW Slashdot... as bad as this was, and as few comments as there seem to be about what an absolute clusterfuck this was, seems to me most of you are commenting on this, but must not have actually bothered to watch it. Half this conversation people are trolling back and forth about what the difference is between Libertarians and Tea-Partyers, etc. Let me help you poor bastards out. Here's the difference:
Libertarians see themselves as the ideological descendants of the Founding Fathers (TM), and feel that government should perform those functions that are absolutely essential and that can ONLY be performed by a government, such as national defense, and that laws should be enacted to keep the absolutely most destructive behavior of citizens in check, AND NOTHING WHAT-SO-FUCKING-EVER ELSE!
Tea Party-ers are ultra-right, socioeconomic conservatives who want to revoke the provision of the first amendment of the US constitution prohibiting the establishment of an official religion, and require as a minimum that any person who wants to hold any office of power or enjoys any privilege in the United States as a minimum, swear that he or she, (who am I kidding? HE...) believes in the existence of a Supreme Being (TM), preferably a white one, whose Child, (who is also generally depicted as if he were Caucasion, even though that's absurd for SO many reasons,) was nailed to a tree roughly 2000 years ago as a Sacrifice to "Him" on our behalf. They're essentially the Christian Taliban Party of the United States, whether or not the rank-and-file "Tea Party" member knows this. As further example what kind of people they are, their name is taken from an event in which a bunch of criminals, wearing crude and offensive disguises, sneaked aboard a ship, and committed acts of vandalism and destruction of property not belonging to them, dumping boxes of tea into Boston Harbor.
The act is euphemistically called the "Boston Tea Party." It was not really a party, and not the same kind of party as a political one anyway, making the name even more inappropriate. I
It is the LEFT that is always trying to take things from one person and give it to another person... while demanding credit for being generous and caring
It is impossible to steal from a man who has nothing... this meme that the rich just want to steal from the poor only works on the stupid
The Liberal Democrat line is: "You earned yours, fuck you, I'm taking it and giving it to somebody else... who will then think I am a good generous guy (even though I did not personally sacrifice anything for him... I used your money) and then he will vote for me so have the political power to steal more from you and give it away to buy more mis-placed goodwill. Smile and give me the money voluntarily... if you resist, I will have the government point a gun at you.
Examples of libertarians calling for larger government?
This is the second ludicrous statement about Libertarians you've posted in this thread. Thanks for no sources on absolute horseshit like this child prostitution gem. I have never ONCE heard any Libertarian in favor of this, read a platform about it, read it in a book, or heard it ever brought up, even by lp haters.
So put some fucking links here or stop fucking lying kthx
Libertarians believe that rights derive from property, and without property, you deserve no rights
Learn to love Alaska
No, everything out of a libertarian's mouth boils down to "fuck you, politicians and government, let us pursue ours, get ours, enjoy ours, and do what we all want as long as it doesn't negatively impact another unwilling person".
But, you know, if you want to keep having your money taken and keep having people tell you who it is okay to marry and who it is or isn't okay to pray to and what you can and can't consume (in every sense of the word), then the two existing parties have you covered.
The Tea Party essentially started off as a Libertarian movement, of sorts. It was co-opted by the republicans. The right has nothing to do with libertarians any more than the left does (other than some people who are clearly libertarians are subscribed to the republicans or democrats, simply because that's the only way to have a real chance of being part of the process, sadly).
I've had many many people object to that, but none could explain the logical flaw. One did point me to a long and boring Youtube video that explained that property is a necessary requirement of freedom, so freedom is the basis for everything, but it doesn't resolve the issue of conflicting freedoms. The person owning the land you are standing on has more freedom than you. In all Libertarian cases. If I'm twisted, untwist it. Lots have complained, none have fixed it.
Learn to love Alaska
Anarchism wants no government. Libertarians rationally want minimal government. That is, government that exists only to accomplish those things which we need, but can not do as individuals. For example, national defense. Diplomacy. And, one could argue (at least for a time), space exploration. Libertarians just don't want unnecessary government nor unnecessary government intervention. How the idea of not wanting the government to censor people, execute, or enslave (through taxed-bailouts or other means) them makes people crazy or somehow un-American or something is beyond me.
But, it's clear that some of you are commenting without having any clue what libertarian ideals are.
I am a huge fan of Ayn Rand, but libertarians have many bookshelf-fulls of other great authors that we could quote. The writings of USA's "founding fathers" are usually applicable as well.
--libman
Tea partiers hate gays the most [...]
Nonsense. USA isn't Iran, and the negative Rights of "gays" are very secure here. People don't hate things that aren't shoved down their throat (or down their children's throats through government indoctrination) (no pun intended). Take away government intervention in marriage, government-enforced anti-discrimination "laws", allow vouchers and free choice of schools, etc and you don't have a problem. What people should hate is the state!
[...] libertarians hate climatologists the most
Only those that commit academic fraud (which, in this political climate, sadly, is most of them), and those that push socialist solutions where free market solutions to pollution control would be more effective.
I like climatologists who don't ignore basic scientific concepts like error margins for crudely collected data, urban warming, ice cycles, the >95% of total CO2 emissions on this planet that have nothing to do with man, water vapor, and of course the sun. Real scientists don't jump to politically convenient conclusions to get funding, and know when to say "we simply don't know".
--libman
Tea Partiers don't want the government messing with their social security.
Yes, to a person who isn't as brainwashed as you are, concepts like retirement security and medical care can exist without government monopolies forced down the barrel of a gun.
Please stop generalizing about vague and amorphous groups of people, and attributing to them whatever strawman arguments that you care to imagine. Focus on specifics, and provide references. You may then be able to prove that some specific individuals attending a specific Tea Party rally might be idiots, as there will be idiots in any group.
I personally never go to rallies of any kind. I only speak for myself, and no one else may speak on my behalf.
--libman
Where is this notion that Libertarian societies are bad for the environment?! Libertarians are not Republicans!
In a Libertarian society it wouldn't be illegal to sue over air/water/land/noise pollution seeping onto your property. The cost to pollution would be so astronomical, it would be infeasible to create a company that pollutes.
Libertarians want government. Therefore, there is a public sector and public property. So your whole post is off-base.
Because if government doesn't do it, no one will.
* that was sarcasm
Why are the red states the ones that get more from the government than they give?
Because population density has a positive correlation with both (A) more socialist political preferences, and (B) concentrations of wealth, and therefore a greater tax burden. Although there is some overlap, it doesn't necessarily mean that the same individuals within a state produce the wealth and also vote for the more socialist parties (Dems, Greens, etc).
The overlap that does exist has various explanations. Some wealthier individuals vote for the more socialist parties (or at least claim to in public) due to "rich man's guilt", desire to appear compassionate (without the direct expense of charity), or to appear "young and hip". It is possible to become moderately wealthy in this country by specializing on one thing, and without gaining the understanding of economics that encourages one to vote for freer markets (i.e. Republicans or Libertarians).
Urban areas often attract foreign immigrants and people looking to mooch off the state, while more self-reliant individuals who want to own their own home move to less densely populated areas. The latter also have more children, which means more tax breaks and more government services.
The more-urban states have been the first to industrialize, and therefore have considerable economic momentum in their favor. (This same phenomenon of economic and cultural momentum is what's keeping the Northern European countries afloat today.) They have the best universities (again, mostly for historical reasons), and top corporations may still find it in their interest to locate there because the benefits of density outweigh the added liabilities of taxation and regulation.
This, however, is gradually beginning to change...
--libman
You don't really believe that, do you? If you do, I want to sell you a bridge. Only one owner, Roman Polanski.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I am not really comfortable painting them all with such large brush strokes. The first few were not what mobilised them, and frankly, I think its extremely disingenuine to cast all people who oppose a specific approach to healthcare with wantring people to die for lack of care. Is there no room for believing that a specific solution is not the right one?
Or even just...not trusting the people implementing it. It looked to me like a huge giveaway to the insurance companies.
Yes the Constitution calls for the federal government to have a military but that is not the same as calling for our military expenditures to equal the rest of the world combined. Nor is to have a military base in half the countries in the world. Nor is it for us to constantly be at war without ever declaring war.
Medicare and Social Security are not in the Constitution at all. Yeah, people have paid in, but if you're not willing to ax it then you're not really for small government. Regardless of what marriage means historically there is no basis in the constitution for the Federal government to define it. Regardless of what drugs may do to someone there is no constitutional basis for controlling it. In fact, one has to wonder why prohibition of alcohol required a constitutional amendment but prohibition of drugs do not.
For all of your arguments, none address making the government smaller. The military, Medicare and Social Security are what make our government large. You can cut welfare, head start, school lunches, the interstate system, Nasa and whatever else you want but until you start talking about cutting the big three any rhetoric about small government is disingenuous.
Kodos the alien or Kodos the Executioner?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
"Plenty of libertarians are not financially wealthy"
Yes, but most of those are too young to vote. People go through their Libertarian phase between ~14 through around the time they either (1) change majors in college or (2) get married. A few never grow up and realize we live in a society.
Which boils down to "those with land have rights, those without have none."
If everything is privately owned, then existing requires you be on someone's private property. If you don't own it, then you can be kicked off it, and on to someone else's private land you "violently" trespassed onto. If you don't own land, you go to jail for initiating violence by living.
There is more to property than just land. Rights begin with your ownership of yourself: your life, your body, your mind, your skills, your time, your reputation, etc. The vast majority of people are able to use these assets in a free market to make a living, including living space to rent or eventually buy. Not all real estate owners in a free market are hostile to their renters or buyers (which would be rather bad for business and their reputation), and of course there can be non-profit living establishments, voluntary communes, charity housing projects (made crime-free with enough security cameras), etc.
As technology advances, the cost of living space relative to income should go way down, which would especially be the case without government's artificial raising of construction / maintenance costs through taxes and regulation. Cheaper transportation and telecommunication, along with more open borders, means people can move further in search of a perfect home that they can afford. Just imagine what advances in technology (cheap energy, new materials, robotics, water desalination, irrigation of deserts, etc) could do to the cost of building a house in the coming decades! (And don't even get me started on outlook further into the future - seasteading, someday space stations, etc.)
And people don't just fall out of the sky on random bits of other people's property when they begin their lives: most parents plan for their children's well-being. This becomes increasingly so as a culture becomes more civilized and fewer children are unplanned, so parents have their children later in life, with more funds available to raise them. The Internet and FLOSS / free content culture can do great things to lower the costs of education down to zero, which means anyone who is willing can learn a high-tech trade to get a good job to pull their economic weight.
--libman
(As noted in my previous posts, I am a libertarian gradualist who is perfectly fine siding with Republicans in this election, but, to make things more interesting, in this post I will defend the long-term libertarian ideal.)
Libertarianism is just a slightly less honest version of anarchism.
Libertarianism (which in USA'ian usage means pure free market capitalism) has nothing to do with anarchism. The only connection between the two is that Murray Rothbard (possibly as a joke) used the term Anarcho-Capitalism, where the a-word is used as a descriptive qualifier for purity of capitalism: no involuntary monopolies of any kind (ex. no hierarchy in jurisdiction of fully independent polycentric courts). That does not equate it to the common definition of "anarchism" - a chickpea is not a chicken!
A free market capitalist society unavoidably involves the emergence of hierarchies - firstly within families on the basis of Parents' Rights, and then on the basis of voluntary association in the many areas of human endeavor where hierarchical organization may constitute an advantage.
People would find it in their interest to form voluntary groups on the basis of contractual agreement, ranging in size from a family to a neighborhood association to an alliance of charter cities established for a common purpose (ex. common infrastructure). Very few people would choose to exist without contractually-established institutions of any kind.
The political sentiments are pretty much the same...
The political sentiments are almost polar opposites. Anarchists are brain-damaged emotionalist idiots trying to get back at their parents for grounding them. They even make their Marxist pals seem rational in comparison! Free market capitalists like von Mises, Hayek, Karl Popper, Rothbard, Hoppe, Rand, the Friedmans (etc, etc, etc) are brilliant economists and philosophers. Gaining an understanding of free market capitalism requires many years of diligent study. Gaining an understanding of anarchism requires a death-metal CD and huffing some paint thinner.
...and both are equally untenable...
So let me get this straight... A world with 200 sovereign governments that we have today is perfectly tenable, but if governments become fragmented into smaller and smaller sovereign entities that people are free to choose between then at some point it becomes untenable? At what point does that happen? Switzerland and Liechtenstein can decide on matters of jurisdiction based on geographic borders, but several Liechtenstein-sized (or smaller) neighborhoods / city-states cannot?
...but the libertarians wrap theirs up with ideals about private property to pretend they aren't just a bunch of crazies.
OK, fine, we're a bunch of crazies. The reason why free market economics works so well (i.e. the well-demonstrated causal relationship from economic freedom to growth) is... crazy juice! The reason why free market economists (ex) were so accurate in predicting this current economic crisis is... more crazy juice! Etc.
So, if we're just a bunch of crazies, with our silly econometrics and non-aggression principles and all that, then why not permit things like seasteading (without the threat of Uncle Sam sending in the navy) or private land secession (without Uncle Sam restricting access and trade)? Why do you need to tax and otherwise enslave a bunch of crazies? Why not just let us free?
Anyone who believes fundamentally that everything ought to be private falls into one of two categories. People who believe that when everything turns pri
Those are separate rights tacked on to the idea of marriage. The status quo is not an argument for itself.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I'm not making a vacuous argument. Why do you oppose spousal rights? They're legal recognition of marital trust.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Yeah I think I said that, less pedantically. I never said anything about freedom, freedom to take someones money or freedom to keep it. The only disagreement we have regards ideological indoctrination's permanence. I argue that the "generation gap" is an example of how transitory it really is.
Perfect individualism ("the idea that you can be rich and left alone") does not exist. I wish it did, but it never will until there is exactly 1 living sentient being on the planet and no means to come or go.
A government is a local monopoly on the use of force. In human societies, this right is conserved: if your society does not claim this right, then they have no effective means of denying others this right over them. This is a natural monopoly: the "competitive market" for government is usually called warfare.
You're arguing that your chosen government should not have the right of violence over you. This can be understood as saying that you wish not to have government, and so you may understand others labeling you as a dishonest anarchist. It will work as well as any anarchy has ever worked: the combined benefits of force and communal action are overwhelming. And in that lie the seeds of government.
Hammurabi's laws were enacted "...so that the strong might not harm the weak," and even in them the right to government force is implicit. To dispute the founding concept of government is to implicitly negate that social compact.
Inevitability is not the only argument for government. The ultimate heuristic for "good" is that which drives the continuation of the species. That we are a social animal is dictated by our biology; if individuals could reproduce themselves we might indeed hold their rights supreme. Certainly amoebas have no need for government. If you're willing to tell the continuation of the species to go hang, you may have the start of an honest argument. If not, then ultimately the needs of the society trump your rights, and we are merely arguing about degrees.
If you say that governments are evil, you are half correct: they are a necessary evil. It is the mark of the intelligent man, in any society, in any age, to recognize that evil, and wish to change it. To leap to disputing the necessity of government is foolish; it betrays a naive understanding of what government is, and its purpose.
This evil must be resisted, by those championing the rights of the individual, as well as the champions of the weak and lowly lesser societies. Strike at the root of this evil, however, and it will spring up, hydra-like all around you. Your neighbor might ultimately have less power than the Government, but he has the keenest and most zealous interest to exercise this power over you.
Violence is indeed wrong. It is the ultimate recourse of societies, and never to be used lightly. The responsible use of this power is the sacred charge of nations -- and no others.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Rand said:
The average [public school] graduate has no concept of knowledge. He has the cynicism of a decadent adult and the credulity of a child. His mind is in a state of whirling confusion. He finds himself in the midst of the brilliant complexity of an industrial, technological civilization which he cannot begin to understand.
The purpose of education is to teach a student how to live, by developing his mind. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e. conceptual. He has to be taught how to think, to integrate, to prove by his own effort. This is what the colleges renounced long ago. What they are teaching today has no relevance to anything.
A private school has the right to teach any ideas of its owners' choice, and to exclude all opposing ideas; but it has no power to force such exclusion on the rest of the country. The opponents have the right to teach a wider spectrum of viewpoints, if they so choose. The competition of the free marketplace of ideas does the rest, determining every school's success or failure - which, historically, was the course of the development of the great private universities. If you want to prove to yourself the power of ideas, the intellectual history of the Nineteenth Century would be a good example to study.
Note that Ayn Rand was OK with vouchers during the privatization of education:
Q: So you would support a voucher system?
A: It would work not as a motor of freedom, but as a brake on total regimentation, a temporary measure in a grave national emergency. We are living in a disastrously mixed economy, which cannot be freed overnight. In today's context, the proposal would be a step in the right direction.
[Note: I am not a religious follower of Ayn Rand]
Everything out of a real libertarian's mouth boils down to "violence is wrong"
Which boils down to "those with land have rights, those without have none."
Originally, the Constitution only granted land owners the right to vote. Just sayin'.
She has a point.
So I'm a registered Libertarian, and do 6 hours per week of charity work for a cause I believe in.
However the truth is that I probably help out people a lot more through my day-to-day commerce. I spend a lot of money, and that provides jobs to several people and puts food on their family table.
Through mutually beneficial free market commerce, we help people far more than we can imagine, because the effects are often hidden from us through many levels of transactions (unless you have people working directly for you, when it suddenly becomes more obvious).
He's there, just using a pseudonym.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Pretty sure the tea party wasnt around when the war on drugs started. But seriously, you demonstrate my point exactly with your childish name calling.
Good ol' Libertarians modding down to flamebait. Sort of shows you the kinds of evil tyrants they would be if they ever got in to power.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Whether you are more needy than all the other people who also want something of a limited resource
If that were true, then everyone should STFU about jobs being outsourced, because people in India and China need those jobs a heck of a lot more than some recently unemployed yuppie in the Occupy movement.
But as is usual, I rather suspect it is not altruism, but selfishness (as evidenced by the outrage about outsourcing) that drives people to want to tax the rich. At least Francis Hollande is honest about why hes taxing the rich.
Myself, Id rather the government just kept its opinions on how much money I need to itself, and let me be charitable in the way that I choose.
The custom of marriage varies considerably depending on the culture. Why should the government enshrine one particular variation?
I've just finished rereading Le Comte de Monte Cristo. Among other things, marriage was a repeated theme, and central to this, moreso than the ceremony, was the signing of a marriage contract binding the two persons and their families.
Show that these rights are better protected by common law rather than contract law.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I've put this out there before, but: http://politicalcompass.org/uselection2012
Disclaimer: unaffiliated, just an interested visitor to the site.
8-PP
That's right you printed those dollar yourself, built the whole internet yourself, and invented the quantum chromo dynamics just to build your own DRAM.
The rationalizations are as pathetic as ever. But I see something we can fix right away. I'll just start printing my own dollars to ease that particular burden on the rest of society. I'm sure it'll turn out well.
It's exactly like anarchism because it involves the core presumption that the world will somehow just work out. That's the core of pure anarchism in the same way it is the core of pure libertarian philosophy. If we just get rid of all these governments then somehow, someway, millions of years of human history will prove to be wrong, we'll somehow get everyone to follow the non aggression principle, and then we'll somehow make it all work out, billions of people in a world you can go round in a bit over a day with new laws every 30 feet. It's a fantasy, it's the "but if everyone thought exactly like me it'd be perfect" well guess what if everyone thought exactly like each other pretty much any government works out, democracy, dictatorships, they all work fine when you don't have any kind of diversity.
You can give excuses like "if we have problems it's because we haven't gotten there", but it's the same crap that every crazy ideology goes with. Communists, Anarchists, hell it's the same lie most tyrants tell themselves "I'll be able to stop killing them as soon as we're there and they all see what I'm doing" it really doesn't matter which fantasy is behind it.
Did you actually think that through? What are the consequences of having zero pollution enforced by lawsuit?
This is why I don't like Libertarianism. Few libertarians ever consider the rational consequences of the policies they advocate for.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Why are the red states the ones that get more from the government than they give?
What makes you think that? Just because money is spent in Iowa doesn't mean that it stays in Iowa. They aren't known for either their financial or IT industries. A lot of that money ends up elsewhere.
Eskarel, you have already been corrected several times. Why do you still choose to be wrong about basic tenets of libertarianism? Again, Libertarianism is about minimizing government not about eliminating government altogether.
Could you provide a citation for that? I'm don't actually doubt you, but I can't find a reputable source for that myself.
You have no point, other than anyone who doesn't like teabaggers is wrong, and your point is what's wrong.
I'm not name calling. They were ignorant enough to call themselves teabaggers without realizing the slang existed. I'm calling them what they called themselves. Is your complaint that I don't capitalize Teabaggers to indicate the party that called themselves such?
Whether they were or weren't around for the beginning of the Republican War on Drugs (declared by Nixon, right?), doesn't change the fact they don't support ending it. You seem to hold on to history (they didn't start it, so supporting it is ok), but then ignore history (they called themselves teabaggers) when it's inconvenient for you. That makes you a hypocrite. Or are you going to whine about name calling again?
Learn to love Alaska
So even libertarians believe the world will definitely *not* "somehow just work out"? Good to know even the libertarians believe they are full of shit.
10,000 years of civilization (or attempts thereof) have proven that the core ideals of libertarianism simply do not work. Giving people unlimited freedom with punishment long after the wrong and more related to the ability to catch them than the act they did that was wrong is, in practice, no better than nothing. Humans are animals. despite the "I'm vulcan, not an emotional animal" slashdot crowd, human behavior is well modeled from animals. Like dogs not learning a lesson from having their nose rubbed in their "accident" after the fact. You have to catch them in the act and swat them there and then for them to associate "house-poo" with "bad".. Humans are the same. Delayed and perceptually arbitrary punishment is unrelated to deterring the act. Libertarians believe that punishment will deter an act (as they abolish all reward-based systems - taxes, fees, etc) and that simply doesn't work.
Also, in practice, power vacuums will be filled. If you allow for massive private armies and have little state power, someone will make a domestic army larger than the government. It has happened before, and does every time the government is sufficiently weak. But that won't happen under libertarianism. Why? Nobody can explain, it just won't. Don't worry. It'll "somehow just work out."
Learn to love Alaska
If I own myself, can I sell myself to someone else? So libertarians believe in slavery? If not, then I don't own myself, the state does. Then libertarians believe in enslaving everyone to the state. Since most libertarians run from the slavery question, it seems they do believe in slavery in principle, buy don't like the connotations, so they avoid the question. If they are lying to us about that, what else are they lying to us about?
Learn to love Alaska
Wow, that's epic stupidity right there.
First, demographically blacks hate gays the most. Tea partiers as a group have no position on gays per say, but they probably are pretty representative of the mainstream because of the large numbers involved. As such, I'm sure there are plenty of homophobic, gays-are-a-disease types in the tea party movement. Still, as a group they lean libertarian - and libertarians are 100% pro personal liberty (particularly with respect to your own body and what you do with it).
I couldn't confirm or deny the modern dixiecrat position on blacks - most of the original dixiecrats having long been relegated to the nursing home. Still, in my experience the most virulent (and un-self-aware) racists were from the northeast. They have all kinds of racism up there - not just your normal black/white divide. The most clueless racist I ever talked to was from Long Island. She was talking with a girl from Connecticut about how racist the south is - sounding like a parody of a bad TV movie. So I asked them about their experience with minorities. Between the two of them they knew 3 black people - none more than acquaintances. But they do see blacks and other minorities working at the stores they shop in.... so there is that. In most areas of the south even the most virulently racist white person has more than 3 black friends.
Libertarians in general espouse the non-aggression principle. So they don't go for looting of any kind. Free exchange between individuals without coercion is their thing. Tea partiers tend to agree on this point as far as property rights and low taxation is concerned. Dixiecrats? Again, I'd have a hard time finding a representative sample. Probably all pro-medicare and social security if age is any gauge - so there is that.
That leaves climatologists. Online you'll find a lot of climate "deniers" self-identifying as libertarian, there's no doubt. But the libertarian position on CO2 emissions is hardly that simple. In the first place their presidential candidate is no "denier", often talking about the solid science behind global warming. Libertarians in general acknowledge government as having a role to play in "tragedy of the commons" situations (although anarchists have non-governmental ways to handle the same situation). I don't think Gary Johnson is in favor of Cap-and-trade though.... so if that is your measure of "hating climatologists" .... well....
What epic fail.... last you talk derisively of "looting" in a post that seems to come from the point of view that big government social safety net wealth redistribution is a good idea. Good idea or not, it is certainly a form of "looting". Congratulations Stirling. You just won the internet! Stupid, ill-informed, off-topic, and hypocritical. That's one hell of a post!
Ok, apparently Newberry is just a troll. Libertarians come in various stripes, but they are certainly for small and limited government.
On defense they are for a fairly isolationist, non-interventionist military policy. Their presidential candidate proposes cutting the military by 43% for next year as a starter.
As a general principle they are mostly only for a government that protects you from aggression from others (physical or otherwise). In the specific they vary widely on how radically change can be brought about. They are all in favor of ending the war on drugs - that'd free about 1.5 million people from prison right there. Most of the poorest 10% of the country is there because of involvement with the legal system. Most of those because of drugs. Want to help the poor (and minorities)? Get rid of the drug laws.
Libertarians are for free association. As long as there is no coercion, go for it. That means the government has no say in who you can marry.
The only thing Libertarians are against is using force to make someone else do something. That includes using government force to make someone give you his stuff. If that's what you mean by "libertarians don't really support limited or small government", I suppose you are right. It's a silly interpretation, but there ya go..
There's the problem of the difference between libertarian philosophy and the Libertarian party. I'm generally in favor of libertarian philosophy, though I'm certainly not "small government" enough to really qualify. But last time around the Libertarian party really was pretty much "I'm alright Jack, ...". So that's not an unfair characterization.
That said, I have my doubts that the "libertarian philosophy" could be applied in a workable way in a world of dense populations and fast transport. It sort of works if you know your neighbors (though even then it can lead to atrocities when even a small gang of authoritarians invade). So there needs to be a governmental structure. And I also believe in various public goods (streets & roads, water, electricity, communications, defense, environmental protection, civil rights, etc.). What I don't believe in is centralization of power. And I believe in strong penalties for the abuse of power that are enforceable and enforced.
So there isn't a single political party that represents my beliefs. Not one. The Libertarians address some of the problems with the current system. The Greens address other problems. It's not quite a disjoint set, but there isn't that much overlap. Neither one would be satisfactory, but either would be better than what we've had for the last 40 years. (I can't speak about earlier, because history tends to be selective reporting that favors the powerful, even if there are some exceptions. E.g., was it proper for FDR to mousetrap the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor? Lots of reasonable arguments on both sides. Nobody really has enough information to make decisions except, PERHAPS, some of the people who lived through the period. My father thought so, and so did my wife's father. They were there, I wasn't. In fact my father was AT Pearl Harbor during the attack, which gives him more rights than most to an opinion.)
And I also suspect that before information systems became readily available, decentralization of power would have been impractical. But it's practical now. The problem is, it's hard to get from here to there. (Think of it as trying to tunnel through a quantum barrier. The new state might be stable, but the transition is quite unlikely.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well, given the millions/billions of dollars sitting around in the bank accounts of these rich people and the horrible state of health care and public welfare system in the US, they are clearly failing in that charity department as well. I seriously doubt it will get *better* if you stop taking any tax money from them.
And *please* mention Romeny's Mormon tithe as a counter argument. He gave what, like $2M to the Mormon Church last year? That's good, I think that about covers the Mormon contributions to support the passive of Proposition 8 in California a few years ago. What an important, selfless cause that was.
Face it, it really is human nature to look our for yourself. The point of government is to force people through (sometimes tyranny of) the majority to work together to provide the planning, infrastructure, and services that aren't possible on their own. No one will agree with all of it, but so far no one has been able to come up with anything better...
Quite the contrary. There's a reason our flagship magazine is called "Reason" ;)
Environmentalism and Libertarianism get along quite well. If you want something from a less partisan source, go read Thoreau, or Wendell Berry. Neither were self identified libertarians, but the intellectual roots are similar, and most of their arguments about land-care ethic and small government can be transplanted into a libertarian frame of reference without any difficulty. And Wendell Berry's take on property rights is great.
So even libertarians believe the world will definitely *not* "somehow just work out"?
It's like most other beliefs. Some do have a belief that things will magically work out. Most don't.
10,000 years of civilization (or attempts thereof) have proven that the core ideals of libertarianism simply do not work.
Not at all. What's the point of asserting things that are clearly wrong?
Giving people unlimited freedom with punishment long after the wrong and more related to the ability to catch them than the act they did that was wrong is, in practice, no better than nothing.
This is a problem which has nothing to do with libertarianism. For starters, it's a weakness of most systems of law. The criminal is rarely caught in the act, but well afterward and punishment in turn comes well after that. We would have to be a lot more closely supervised than we are to have this responsive a law enforcement system.
If you allow for massive private armies and have little state power, someone will make a domestic army larger than the government.
Ok. I don't see the problem there. That's part of the implication of the government losing its monopoly on force. I'll note that the EU has no military forces of its own, all military forces are controlled, maintained, and funded by the member states meaning that even the smallest state effectively has a larger military than the EU. Yet no one gets worried that there's a domestic army larger than the EU government.
I've had many many people object to that, but none could explain the logical flaw.
Given how easy it is to either rent a place or buy your own land, what was the point of that argument?
The person owning the land you are standing on has more freedom than you.
Name a society where that's not true. In practice, while you have some limited "right of way" on most property, you do have to abide by the rules set forth by the land owner, public or private, or you have to leave.
I've attended three Libertarian conventions where the party's platform has been modified and kept myself abreast of the actions of a fourth that I was not able to attend. Do you have any evidence for the claim you made? Post a link, if so.
You forget that Libertarians believe your body is your most important property and have inherent rights because of that.
While cleaning out some old letters from the attic of the family farm, I found a letter from my grandfather to the adjoining natural gas pipeline. Back in the '60s or maybe '70s, something had leaked into the pond near the property line, making some of the cattle sick. Amazingly, the government laws on pollution did not prevent this accident but his hiring of a lawyer with his private money made him whole without having to go to court.
First: wrong. These things are trivial to research, this link took me 10 seconds to find.
http://www.christianpost.com/news/u-s-religious-donations-at-8-8-billion-for-developing-world-32354/
$8.8B for foreign aid is a lot, that's great - but as the *Christian newspaper* says, it's only 37% compared to what the US government provides. "Great majority" and "simple fact"? Yeah, try again...
And second: I didn't say anything about "Christians", I was pointing out hypocricy of the wealthy religious right. Do you know where a disproportionate amount of religious donations come from? Those who can barely afford to donate... http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/05/19/68456/americas-poor-are-its-most-generous.html
In general, all stats I have looked up say that religious (NOT just Christian, all religions) make up about 1/3 of charitable donations in the US. As I said above, that's admirable, but had nothing to do with my point.
But you could have looked ALL of this up just as easily if you really cared about truth vs truthiness.
That's an interesting and valid point, and I do like the idea of it. It certainly deals with spousal rights. Of course, as long as income tax is around, there will still be exemptions and special terms, but contract law admittedly would deal neatly with the rest of the matter.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
....why vote for any of their candidates?
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
I'll note that the EU has no military forces of its own, all military forces are controlled, maintained, and funded by the member states meaning that even the smallest state effectively has a larger military than the EU.
So you are holding up the EU as an example of an ideal libertarian society? I think the issue is that we define every word differently.
Learn to love Alaska
Given how easy it is to either rent a place or buy your own land, what was the point of that argument?
If nobody is renting and you can't afford to buy, what do you do?
Name a society where that's not true.
The USA. Everyone has the same personal rights in all locations. That's why the USA is one of the few places where they can post the "we reserve the right to search your bag at any time" signs, but they still have no right to search your bag. Your personal rights trump their property rights. Period. They can ask you to leave, but usually, by the time anyone is asking to look in a bag, you are walking out anyway, so there's nothing at all they can do, other than arrest you for shoplifting, which almost nobody ever does because citizens arrests open them up to lots of liability issues.
you do have to abide by the rules set forth by the land owner, public or private, or you have to leave.
Many places the owner can hold you until you comply with some requests, so it isn't a "you are free to leave" situation. Not to mention that "you have to leave" isn't always true in the US either. If they put up a "no blacks" sign, they are not allowed to kick black people out. So, the USA is a place where that is not true. Where are you that you have no idea how US rights work?
Learn to love Alaska
That is, until you develop a parasite, then you lose rights to that.
Learn to love Alaska
It's exactly like anarchism because it involves the core presumption that the world will somehow just work out. That's the core of pure anarchism in the same way it is the core of pure libertarian philosophy.
I don't presume anything - I analyze economic systems and identify the natural laws by which they operate. There is a difference between the understanding of emergence-based systems and faith. You, on the other hand, presume perpetual government efficiency and benevolence - even though all of history teaches that monopolies cause stagnation, and that power corrupts!
The difference between free market capitalism and whatever flavor of statism you advocate is like the difference between science and religion - you have a psychological need for a centralized planner to bring order to the universe.
The difference between free market capitalism and commie anarchism is that commie anarchists are completely detached from reality. They don't understand the most basic things about economics, strategic security considerations, or basic human nature.
Another difference between free market capitalism and all other systems is that the former is a meta-system that allows for other systems to be practiced inside it on the basis of voluntary consent. I leave you free to form whatever commune you wish (on justly acquired private land, and with all adults being there by choice). I want nothing from you except that you don't initiate aggression against myself and others. Your system, on the other hand, depends on my obedience and enslavement.
If we just get rid of all these governments then somehow, someway, millions of years of human history will prove to be wrong, we'll somehow get everyone to follow the non aggression principle, and then we'll somehow make it all work out...
On this planet we have thousands of years of recorded human history (not "millions", that's called anthropology), which I've studied extensively, and all of it confirms my theories about the nature government. Economic analysis can tell you why Rome rose and fell, why China and India stagnated, and why a bunch of small Anglo-Saxon tribes produced a culture that came to dominate the world. You really should spend a few years educating yourself before jumping to all sorts of ridiculous conclusions...
The non-aggression principle isn't some touchy-feely wishful thinking, but an empirically-observable phenomenon of game theory - the vast majority of people will not initiate aggression if they know they cannot get away with it. Today we have one class of people, The Holy Government, that get special treatment and can get away with fraud and violence on a massive scale. A rational system can have no blind-spots or sacred cows: one formula of human interaction that is based on pure reason, and (except for the Rights of parents over their children) no one has the power to pull laws out of their butt and enforce them on others!
You'll note from my previous statements here that I am a gradualist (much more so than most libertarians), and opposed to "shock therapy" of any sort. The transition to a free society would take many decades of privatization, governmental fragmentation, and intergovernmental competition. This process is driven by evolutionary forces of natural selection, with some parts of the world reforming faster than others, for which they'll be rewarded with an inflow of brains and investment capital.
... billions of people in a world you can go round in a bit over a day with new laws every 30 feet.
It is my expectation that the speed and affordability of air (and someday space) travel will continue to increase, which will be a great benefit to resolving the various difficulties of terrestrial infrastructure that have encouraged governmen
The philosophy of libertarianism (meaning, in USA'ian usage, free market capitalism) stretches from Barry Goldwater cold-warrior pragmatism, through minarchism (variously represented by people like Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Ron Paul, and others), and well into the Rothbardian ideal of perfect demonopolization of governance. All libertarians agree on the direction in which they should go, and their disagreement over how far to go are easy to reconcile.
Libertarian philosophy, in its most rational variation, is about making all systems of governance beyond Natural Law (i.e. NAP) voluntary. People would be free to contractually subscribe to whatever policies they wish, and most people would choose plenty of rules and regulations over their lives - marriage contracts stipulating sexual exclusivity, neighborhood association policies, employer-mandated obligations to recognize intellectual property, insurance company mandated prohibitions on unhealthy behavior, even Sharia Law.
I think that the ideal currently-existing example of a libertarian society is Singapore. (Hong Kong is a good example too, but larger and no longer sovereign.) It's a small and relatively-recent nation "built on an empty rock", so almost everyone came there by choice, and almost anyone can leave at any time - as would be the case with an all-voluntary charter city. Its governance has been built around the reality-dictated requirements of business competitiveness, which in a freer world would increase tremendously. It has plenty of restrictions on people's behavior, including draconian anti-drug laws, but most people came to Singapore to work and engage in business, and that is a trade-off that they are willing to make. A libertarian world is one of tens of thousands of little Singapores, some freer (or richer, greener, more drug-friendly, etc) than others, all competing with each-other for your patronage.
Socialists and theocrats would be free to start their utopias as well, but evolutionary forces of global competition would quickly leave most of them on the ash heap of history. Socialists would only attract lazy moochers, while smart and productive people go elsewhere. Theocrats probably won't be very competitive at scientific and technological innovation. Crazy libertine drive-200mph-while-snorting-cocaine-from-between-a-hooker's-breasts places probably won't fare too well either. It will be sober, practical, pro-corporate societies that will dominate.
--libman
Because I actually read what you and others respond to my statements, and I see nothing to change my opinion.
The "state" isn't some horrible foreign entity, it's people, it's you and it's me, and it's your neighbor, and the woman from around the corner, it's all of us. Government, every single one in all of human history is formed as a way to make the involuntary association known as humanity function. It exists, and has always existed, solely with the consent of those it governs. This is as true of China as it is of the US, as it was of Ancient Rome or any other country. It's not perfect, it's an attempt to compromise, it's cruel, and it's horrendous and tyrannical because we are. We fear and we hate, we are greedy and selfish and so is the government we choose for ourselves. This is as true now as it has ever been and as it ever will be.
Libertarianism is no different, your ideal will create a government, a state for the simple reason that we need each other and always have, the world getting smaller only makes that more true not less. We need people to work out where the roads will go, where the internet cables will go, and we need them to do so on a big enough scale that things actually work, someone needs to build all that be it governments we elect or private companies we choose or any other formation you want to try.
Since in the end the result will be the same, I have to look at the founding principles of a philosophy to judge it, and its adherents. The core idea of the Libertarian philosophy is ME. It's about choosing what parts of society I want to belong to. It's about choosing what laws will apply on MY land. It's about the free market giving ME what I deserve and letting me keep what I have. It's all rights, no responsibilities, no compromise except with people who think exactly the way that I do.
At its core every explanation of Libertarian ideology I have heard, including all those provided by you is about the freedom to choose not to give up anything of MINE mixed with a fantasy that the state is some evil and unnatural thing we can do without, usually on Slashdot through the magical use of technology as if we don't all come here over the most gigantic, world encompassing central infrastructure man has ever known.
I will change my opinion of Libertarianism and perhaps even give it a modicum of respect the second I hear a single explanation of its values that is concerned with what happens to anyone who I don't 100% agree with. You and all those who have come before you have failed to provide that, just more "I", "Me" and "Freedom".
I am not a Statist, I am not a Communist, I believe in the free market, but I believe it is a tool we use not a god we follow. I believe that we should care about others and use the government that is, after all, just us to provide for people in need, and I believe that for all its faults, through the government that is us, we can do that more effectively than any charity, church or voluntary association can. I do not fail to see or understand your world view, but I reject it utterly.
If nobody is renting and you can't afford to buy, what do you do?
Well, what do you do in today's US? Move on or get creative. As it turns out, there's always someone renting or willing to barter your labor for a place to stay.
The USA. Everyone has the same personal rights in all locations. That's why the USA is one of the few places where they can post the "we reserve the right to search your bag at any time" signs, but they still have no right to search your bag. Your personal rights trump their property rights. Period. They can ask you to leave, but usually, by the time anyone is asking to look in a bag, you are walking out anyway, so there's nothing at all they can do, other than arrest you for shoplifting, which almost nobody ever does because citizens arrests open them up to lots of liability issues.
It looks to me like the only difference is that you might have some sort of citizen's arrest power in the libertarian case. Your bag is your personal property. The property owner doesn't get the authority to search that bag just because you're on their property.
Libertarianism isn't your tired old strawmen. You've been corrected many times on this sort of thing.
If they put up a "no blacks" sign, they are not allowed to kick black people out.
And when that was legal, they were allowed to kick black people out.
Where are you that you have no idea how US rights work?
Why ask stupid and pointless questions, AK Marc?
So you are holding up the EU as an example of an ideal libertarian society?
No, merely pointing out that there's no expectation that a central government should have the largest military power.
He said what his pappy would do to them in the afterlife (something about shoving a camel up their needlehole, IIRC), but I don't think he preached involuntary redistribution of wealth by man.
Like I said, I am an atheist.
--libman
Sure, as long as you never signed a contract (that is still in force) prohibiting homosexual behavior or ingestion of that particular plant.
Such contracts may be more common than you think, given how unpopular those things are in some cultures. Such contracts may also exist for purely rational reasons: your employer may want to make sure you can be on call and don't suffer short-term memory loss, or your medical insurance company might take sexual risk factors into account in determining the details of your policy... But of course you'd be free to move to a different neighborhood, work elsewhere, get different insurance, etc.
We're not commies - we're not out to change reality or human nature! Freedom is not a utopia, but it does lead to a more flexible and civilized world.
--libman
Are you trying to win a contest for the most idiotic thing ever said on the Internet?
The only tolerance for any government action that a libertarian may have is for things that need to be phased out slowly, because "shock therapy" would be even worse.
--libman
The people you are talking to don't care about the truth.
Very likely. But I care about the truth, so I will answer them - not in hope of changing their minds, but to document why they are wrong.
--libman
Or you are trying to prove the fact that libertarianism is taking the "best" from 1000 other types of structure and combining them in a way that's impossible and impractical, yet pretending it "could" work (if and only if everyone agreed 100% of the time and nobody had any personal ambition, and wealth was evenly distributed).
The very fact that libertarians have to hold up anti-libertarian organizations as libertarian examples only proves that point.
Learn to love Alaska
If they put up a "no blacks" sign, they are not allowed to kick black people out.
And when that was legal, they were allowed to kick black people out.
So, does libertarianism support slavery and segregation, or the government having more rights over your property than you have? That was the issue, and you are avoiding it (quite gracefully, as if you've had lots of practice asking questions then dodging any returning questions).
Why ask stupid and pointless questions, AK Marc?
You asked me to "Name a society where that's not true." and I did. The USA. Depending on your definitions, you may have to pick a different point in time, but it is the answer to your question. But you never addressed your initial questions. I answered them, and you didn't indicate whether you agreed or disagreed with the answers, you just ignored the answers and changed the subject to avoid the question you asked.
In all, that's what I expect from libertarians. They are a bunch of liars. The smart ones know they are liars and won't ever answer a question. The dumb ones answer questions, believing what they say, when the answers are contradictory. I've never met a libertarian that would answer questions, and your deceit proves me right. Even if you don't believe so, you've only propagated the impression that libertarians are insane liars. Put up a candidate for president. Nobody will vote for him, no matter the platform. Satan could make any promises to get elected, but we still wouldn't want him in office.
Learn to love Alaska
He didn't talk about involuntary redistribution explicitly, but did speak extensively on wealth redistribution. I remember some of his comments on voluntary redistribution, and there seemed to be an implication that involuntary wasn't necessarily out of line, in at least a few of them.
Learn to love Alaska
The "state" isn't some horrible foreign entity, it's people, it's you and it's me, and it's your neighbor, and the woman from around the corner, it's all of us.
What significance does that statement have? Of course we're discussing the issues of human coexistence, not attacks by lions, tigers, and bears!
I do not share your definition of what's "foreign" and what isn't. Apparently the 315 million people who were born on the territory of Uncle Sam's expansion "from sea to shining sea" are all kin, and must make collective decisions that affect a very significant fraction of each-other's lives... (And if my actual next-door neighbor happens to be a "non-citizen", or an "ex-felon" for ingesting a bad plant, then supposedly he's not "one of us" so he doesn't count...)
If I could build a statue to democracy, it would show a mob of wretched human figures all chained together, pulling in different directions and yet unable to go their way, being suffocated by their chains and by each-other's bodies. Freedom doesn't come from being chained to "your neighbor and the woman from around the corner" instead of a rock! Freedom comes from those chains being broken! That doesn't mean everyone will walk away in a solitary direction, but individuals will come together with specific other individuals for specific purposes based on their individual consent.
Government, every single one in all of human history is formed as a way to make the involuntary association known as humanity function. It exists, and has always existed, solely with the consent of those it governs.
It doesn't have my consent, therefore your statement is false. The consent it supposedly obtains from others is obtained under duress, and with forcefully limited options and access to information, so that doesn't count either.
A government is not an angelic institution of pure benevolence, but a power hegemony that, first and foremost, exists to maintain and expand its own power. Like any parasitic entity, its evolutionary imperative is to feed off the host without killing it or being killed by it, which can involve convincing the host that the relationship is symbiotic. It can do some good things, but we cannot measure this good objectively, because it is a forced monopoly, and therefore there is very limited frame of reference to measure its performance. The need for government to solve certain specific problems within a society is conjecture, a sacred cow that cannot be questioned and is protected by force.
This is as true of China as it is of the US, as it was of Ancient Rome or any other country. It's not perfect, it's an attempt to compromise, it's cruel, and it's horrendous and tyrannical because we are. We fear and we hate, we are greedy and selfish and so is the government we choose for ourselves. This is as true now as it has ever been and as it ever will be.
Human nature is not an unchanging constant, from primordial soup all the way to interstellar civilization.
The natural economic phenomenon known as Rights doesn't exist at all in situations where there is no benefit to peaceful cooperation, but begins to emerge gradually as tribal societies become more complex. A system of justice that punishes an innocent man for every two guilty men is good by ancient standards, but horrible during the more advanced stages of civilization. More advanced aspects of Rights (particular liberties and recognition of property) gradually emerge after the agricultural and industrial "revolutions". A government that violates 25% of your Rights to protect the other 75% may be relatively good by recent standards, but this standard must continue to evolve, which the government has no incentive to do of its own institutional will. The theoretical goal is violating 0% of your Rights while protecting 100%, which is exactly what the ideal of pure free market ("""anarcho-""") capitalism aims to do.
Maybe once we used to need tribal o
Government always governs with the consent of the people, because you can always choose not to be governed. Yes they might throw you in jail or execute you for doing so, but you always have that power. It's part of the most fundamental core of freedom, your choice to die. If enough people agree with you the government topples always has, always will.
My point about government and human nature is that it isn't government that's evil, it's people who are, you don't get rid of the evil by eliminating government which is really only a tool. Government is not a monopoly on force, it's a consolidation of force. We as citizens of a country delegate our natural right to make laws to a body which represents us, we do this because it isn't democracy that is chains, it's life. Every relationship you form is a chain, some are chains you choose, some are not, but the only way to escape them isn't to destroy government, it's to destroy society, because society is links binding people together, give and take, good and bad. You can't have the one without the other, which is my whole point. By rejecting those chains you reject people, and if you try to do that without giving up all the good things that come with those chains, if you just try to free yourself while taking all the things that society builds then it's you who become the parasite.
So, does libertarianism support slavery and segregation, or the government having more rights over your property than you have?
Of course not. It's like you don't even have a clue what libertarianism is. Your personal body and thoughts are your property and hence protected by libertarian tenets. I'll just note that this leads to similar though broader freedoms than the US citizen currently enjoys.
Segregation would usually be allowed (since it is a fair use of one's property), but not supported since there's no incentive to segregate. Even in the US one can still segregate, but only on things that aren't illegal to do (such as dress, "No shoes. No shirt. No service."). Finally, government doesn't have more rights over your property than you do. Government doesn't have any rights at all (merely powers and restrictions). And that's true of the US system as well which only has one amendment asserting any sort of "right" for a body of government (and that's just because the amendment in question is poorly written).
That was the issue, and you are avoiding it (quite gracefully, as if you've had lots of practice asking questions then dodging any returning questions).
How could I "dodge" something you never confronted me with? Look, I figured you were up to something. But trying to put me in a trap is a whole different game than simply asking me the question that supposedly was on your mind. And yes, I have a fair amount of practice with people pulling this sort of crap.
Why ask stupid and pointless questions, AK Marc?
You asked me to "Name a society where that's not true." and I did.
You merely asserted some things without any shred of evidence. For example, claiming that owning land in a libertarian society somehow grants you more rights, while the same is not true of the US, which to be honest, is not that far off a libertarian society. Here, the problem is that you use the double standard fallacy with a different definition of "rights" for the libertarian society (associating benefits of owning property with "rights") than for the US society (defining rights as what's specified or implied by the Constitution).
In all, that's what I expect from libertarians. They are a bunch of liars.
This is what we call confirmation bias.
Satan could make any promises to get elected, but we still wouldn't want him in office.
I guess you really are that stupid. Who really thinks a deity of deceit and treachery would have even the slightest difficulty navigating the US political scene? He wouldn't go the Ron Paul route, if you are even remotely concerned about that.
Or you are trying to prove the fact that libertarianism is taking the "best" from 1000 other types of structure and combining them in a way that's impossible and impractical, yet pretending it "could" work (if and only if everyone agreed 100% of the time and nobody had any personal ambition, and wealth was evenly distributed).
Nope. I guess you're wrong again.
The very fact that libertarians have to hold up anti-libertarian organizations as libertarian examples only proves that point.
It's called learning from reality. Let's look at what I actually wrote:
No, merely pointing out that there's no expectation that a central government should have the largest military power.
So this wasn't a "libertarian example", but merely an example of "there's no expectation that a central government should have the largest military power". Why didn't you read what I actually wrote?
Of course not.
Wait, so are you insinuating that I don't have the freedom to sell myself into slavery, or that I do?
You merely asserted some things without any shred of evidence.
No, I named the place. USA. You didn't address the answer at all.
This is what we call confirmation bias.
Nope. I like to think of myself as libertarian, but I don't tell that to anyone because of all the jackasses who claim to be libertarians. Much like atheist/agnostic split where nearly all current agnostics fit the original definition of "atheist" but the church poisoned the definitions in an attempt to divide the heathens. I'd love to have a government that didn't try to interfere with people or business, other than preventing fraud and investigating crimes. Where the taxes are as closely associated with the costs as possible (increasing gasoline taxes and registrations cover roads, rather than most of road work coming from the general funds, as they do now). But I'm not interested in legalizing fraud, privatizing roads, or eliminating all social nets.
Learn to love Alaska
I like to think of myself as libertarian
You just equated the libertarian belief system with lying.
In all, that's what I expect from libertarians. They are a bunch of liars.
So do you "like to think of yourself" as a liar? I find this confusion rather annoying. Why not just sort out your ideas first before making unfounded, blanket denunciations?
Much like atheist/agnostic split where nearly all current agnostics fit the original definition of "atheist" but the church poisoned the definitions in an attempt to divide the heathens.
You ignore here both that the term agnostic was defined by a foe of organized religion and that the definition serves a useful non-ideological purpose, semantically distinguishing between an active disbelief in theism or the supernatural from one that doesn't have a belief one way or another due to the inherent unknowability of the problem.
You ignore here both that the term agnostic was defined by a foe [wikipedia.org] of organized religion and that the definition serves a useful non-ideological purpose, semantically distinguishing between an active disbelief in theism or the supernatural from one that doesn't have a belief one way or another due to the inherent unknowability of the problem.
I don't have a time machine to verify, but the original agnostics were all church members and believers. And the first atheists were agnostics on the other side. Note, apolitical means someone who isn't vested in politics, as opposed to someone who is against politics. Atheist meant someone who did not affirmatively believe in God. Whether through indifference (unwilling to make a choice), or active faith in the absence of a God (a stance that should have evolved the term anti-theist, not atheist.
So do you "like to think of yourself" as a liar? I find this confusion rather annoying.
And I find your attempts to intrepret everything in the worst possible way, when you are obviously capable of intrepreting things in a different light indicates you are the dishonest one. If there are two ways to take a statement, you take the lest useful one, then complain about your incorrect inferences. I can't fix that. My statements are consistent. But it's more like the distinction between Libertarians and libertarians, but on Slashdot, plenty identify with libertarianism and recognize that Libertarians are no more libertarian than the Green party.
Learn to love Alaska
And I find your attempts to intrepret everything in the worst possible way, when you are obviously capable of intrepreting things in a different light indicates you are the dishonest one.
Oh, come on. These are your words in two consecutive posts. If you don't want people to think that way of you, then give a little thought to what you are saying. I'll just point out that it is not hard to interpret this in a worse light than I have.
If you don't want people to think that way of you, then give a little thought to what you are saying.
He won't do that, as it goes against the libertarian MO.
Libertarians are all about not giving thought to what they're saying, as demonstrated by AK Marc, a self proclaimed libertarian. This leads to people misinterpreting and misunderstanding libertarianism, and ultimately create people like AK Marc who think of libertarians negatively.
Yes, that was circular: AK Marc speaks without thought, creating people like AK Marc. But that's the beauty of it: it's self sustaining. So even when it makes no sense (AK Marc, a libertarian, is bashing other libertarians), libertarianism can sustain itself if its members continue to speak without thinking.
Thus, libertarians speak without thinking. There's method in the madness,
My ideals line up with libertarianism, but I'd not call myself a libertarian in public (no, this isn't public, nobody here knows who I am, aside from tracability to past posts). Why? Because self-described and publicly active libertarians are assholes. Same as why there are so many agnostics and so few atheists. My father never believed in God. He was "atheist" until about 25, then became "agnostic". His reasoning was that atheists generally acted offensively, so he chose to disassociate himself with that group. I rarely talk politics, but if I were pinned down, I'd describe myself as "progressive" or some other label not fully defined becuase libertarians are generally evil. But that doesn't mean my brand of "progressive" doesn't line up with libertarian on nearly all the large issues (much better than Libertarian Party lines up with libertarian, in my opinion).
I get that the distinction is too subtle for you, but it is there, and that's how I can be libertarian and generally hate libertarians. I learned from my daddy who was atheist and generally hated atheists.
Learn to love Alaska
libertarians are generally evil
Never attribute to malice (evil) that which can be explained by stupidity.
Libertarians are not evil. They're just stupid. They're too stupid to win against tyranny and the truly evil. That's why there's always evil government for libertarians to complain about.