Good example is apologetics of Pinochet and his violent suppression of democratically elected but socialist Aliende. Many right wingers love Pinochet because of his economic policies and opposition to socialism.
I wouldn't say that people "love" Pinochet but given the two bad options that existed at the time, it is pretty obvious to me that the less bad one had won. Allende may have been democratically elected, but it is pretty well understood now that with Soviet and Castro's backing he was planning to nationalize industry and turn Chile into another Cuba. Large secret shipments of weapons from Soviet Union were already on their way to Allende at the time of the coup. Ask Chileans and Cubans today where they would rather live.
Liberrarians generally align more with Right in US, God knowd why, but they do not make Right. Neo-cons do.
Neo-cons are a group of (mostly) former marxists with a specific foreign interventionist agenda and not really particularly socially conservative. Left and right are completely inadequate terms to describe the political spectrum, I wish we would stop using them. But if by Right you mean the Republican party, then I think social conservatives still call the shots, not neo-cons. With Tea Party recently, and the economy in the toilet, more emphasis has been placed on small government, less spending etc, but there is still a long way to go. Any Republican candidate for high office still has to be socially conservative to have any chance.
For me, as a libertarian, it's a matter of lesser of two evils. Social issues where I disagree with Republicans, are just less important to me than the economic issues where I disagree with Democrats. BTW, there is less disagreement between two parties on social issues than you think. Just about all Democrat politicians, including Obama, are pretty conservative when it comes to religion, gay marriage, abortion, drugs etc.
Actually, I was asking for rational counter-arguments from someone who has actually read and understood what she wrote, which means that your response does not qualify. It simply demonstrates the continuing inability of her opponents to come up with anything other than yet more ridiculous personal attacks (an interesting question for psychologists: why does any conservative female, but not necessarily male, attracts such a high amount of vicious over the top hatred from those who disagree with her?). What does her smoking have to do with anything? What does the length of a speech have to do with anything? What rape fetish? You are responding to her alleged assertions by making your own assertion that they are wrong with nothing to back it up. By the way, not that it matters, but most of what you said is incorrect:
Atlas Shrugged - which Rand wrote as an introduction to her philosophy - is a silly superhero fantasy about an ubermensch engineer coming up with a magical generator and retreating from the world along with his equally superhuman businessman buddies, at which point the world collapses.
Totally wrong. Atlas Shrugged is really about the harm that government coercion in all its forms does, especially when it comes to the control of industry. It was written at a time when central planning and nationalization of industry were still popular themes among the left in the US and the disaster that those policies produced in the Soviet Union were not fully understood. It was exaggerated in order to make those harmful effects (which in reality happen over long time) more obvious.
Objectivism isn't really a philosophy
Yes, it is. You see, I can simply state things just as easily as you can.
it's a bunch of assertions about the nature of reality and human nature, and many of those assertions are flat-out wrong, those about the nature of selfishness perhaps most obviously so: selfish people don't debate whether it's in accordance to their nature as human to take something or not, they simply take and be done with it. That, alone, is sufficient to invalidate her conclusions about what the best political system might be.
I didn't understand that at all so I can't reply to it. Try saying something intelligible.
Objectivism has political goals which, due to the erroneous assertions at its core, tend to create truly destructive consequences when implemented.
Please provide an example of when objectivism was implemented and what destructive consequences has it produced.
And, much as I hate to say this, calm and reasoned debate on politics is not effective for stopping said policy, while mud-slinging is.
Absolutely wrong. It is ideas that matter in the long run. This is why, despite a long history of mud slinging against them, her books are among the best selling and most influential in history.
I didn't say higher intelligence causes people to commit genocidal acts or anything. BTW, your example of a stupid person is bad as Dubya possibly has a higher IQ than Obama. There is no way to be sure since Obama never disclosed his, but the rumor has it that his LSAT (which is a form of an IQ test, accepted by Mensa) score was lower than Bush's.
Thank you for the first insightful post in the whole thread. I think most conservatives would agree that Palin would be a bad candidate but there is a vocal minority who supports her and it's those passionate types who tend to turn up in primaries more than the moderates. I hope she can be convinced not to run but I doubt it. The only real hope is that an outstanding new candidate will emerge, cause the likes of Romney and Huckabee, or god help us John Bolton, aren't much better. Ryan would be my choice, with Gingrich and Christie close behind.
Intelligence is overrated when it comes to the president. They did IQ tests on the accused at Nuremberg trials and all of them scored far above average. Common sense and real life experience (outside academic and political world, which don't count) and understanding of history are more important. A slightest inkling of a clue about economics would be a nice change too. Not saying that Palin qualifies by any means, just that the fact that Obama has high academic qualifications doesn't make him a good candidate, as his presidency so far has demonstrated.
Fascism is not the only alternative to true democracy. For example, if you are from US and you paid attention in your civics class you would know that we do not have a democracy but a constitutional republic. The rule of the majority is limited in a variety of ways, specifically in order to prevent the tyranny of majority over minority. Since you are such a democracy champion, let me ask you something. In your view, if the 51% of the voters vote that the other 49% should be killed that is ok? Government is a difficult thing to get right and there are no perfect options and there will always be compromise, but if you really believe in class warfare crap about the majority of people, ignorant and uninterested in government as most of them are, rising up and producing a workers paradise you are as nuts as those remaining Marxist creeps still to be found crawling around even today. Things like that have been tried before and in every single case they ended in a complete disaster as every system that doesn't take into account human nature is bound to end.
Once, for an actual assignment, I tried to find some real counter arguments to Ayn Rand's philosophy and all I find is either idiotic ad hominem abuse like this or literary criticisms of her writing style/plot/characters etc which is an epic case of missing the point. If you know of any please feel free to provide them.
Please stop blaming corporations for government corruption. As long as there are politicians with the power to help or ruin any business (and with their hand aggressively extended in the direction of those businesses) there will be no choice for any industry or individual company but to play ball and to spend time and money on competing for influence in Washington instead of spending it on innovating and competing in the marketplace.
US government artificially limits imports of sugar, no cartel has the power to do that. A poster above blamed "mega-corps" for the fact that US government subsidizes corn. Why is it so hard for you lefties to place the blame where it belongs.
People click on ads. I don't and you probably don't but some people do, otherwise companies wouldn't spend money on them. I presume this is more geared towards special offers, kinda like collecting coupons that you don't want to use right now but you might later. Not sure if it's worth $8 mil. but I can see people using it and having a button on every ad on every site that takes them to your site is a valuable thing.
I'm a nerd and all and I see it's all sciency, but this reads like a journal entry from the world's most boring man.
I agree. After reading the summary a couple of times all I am sure of is that the next X-Men movie will be set on the Sun, but the plot seems very confusing.
Umm, a 10 sec google search of some NYC RC hobby message boards tells me that flying RC planes in NYC is actually illegal, as in most cities, except in some specific designated areas. Nothing to do with fear of terrorists, and everything to do with crashing into people, breaking windows, causing car accidents and such.
If by outside US you mean the Eurofagots, I can reliably inform you that most Americans do not exactly envy people who have forgotten (actually never even known) what freedom is like and who are happy to be paying 60% of their meager (by US standards) income to support their bankrupt welfare states, when they are not driving around in their midget cars and living in their 800 sf. government built apartments. Btw, a continent that produced communism, nazism, fascism and caused 100+ million deaths (lets not even go back further than 20th century) should maybe, just maybe, take a look at the US constitution and 225 years of unprecedented freedom, prosperity and stability that that system produced and try to learn something from it.
It just goes to show what great times we live in. It used to be that only the rich could afford the horse carriage, then only the rich could afford a car, than only the rich could afford a tv etc etc. These days everybody (in the developed world at least) can afford pretty much all the conveniences that latest technology provides. Really poor people (as in Africa) would laugh at the people in the US calling themselves poor even though they have a flat screen TV and an SUV in the garage of their 2000 sf. home. Ok if you live in NYC you probably can't afford much more than a cockroach infested apartment, but in most areas that's pretty much true. The most advanced options for home entertainment, transportation, home appliances etc are really not that much better than the affordable ones. The rich have to settle for diamond encrusted versions of stuff just to be different.
How is being socially conservative at all libertarian?
It's not, I meant the fiscal part. Fox is pretty consistent in calling for a smaller, less intrusive government, less spending, lower taxes etc. They also supported the Tea Party movement, while the likes of CNN started off by deliberately ignoring it, then switched to calling it racist and are now sulking as they realize none of the smears worked.
Fox News and Rupert Murdoch aren't libertarians, they are authoritarians.
I certainly wouldn't count Fox News as a libertarian channel (in what sense are they authoritarian though?) but rather as conservative both fiscally and socially, which is still closer to libertarian than any other main channels. Fox Business News is very libertarian though - see Stossel's show http://www.hulu.com/stossel and Freedom Watch, the two most libertarian shows on television. Murdoch himself has a history of being anti-socialist more than anything else. In Britain, his newspapers, The Times and The Sun, supported Tony Blair against Conservatives because he defeated the long standing Labour party far left leadership (which almost destroyed the party: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_(UK)#The_.22Wilderness_Years.22_.281979.E2.80.931997.29) and more towards the center-left.
It does not provide any hi-tech features. No apps. No Internet. No camera. No text messaging. All you have to do -- in fact, all you can do -- is call, talk and hang up.
You don't have to be crazy to want a phone like that but you do have to be crazy to pay 79.95 EUR ($105) for it.
But what does it matter what federal courts and elected representatives say when an unelected five man commission says otherwise with a 3-2 vote, right?
Slashdot has long stopped being a technology forum. Approximately half the articles on the front page right now are purely political and not just under YRO. There is a labor dispute story under Hardware section. People like to give their juvenile political opinions, that's where ad impressions are.
Slashdot Mirror
Good example is apologetics of Pinochet and his violent suppression of democratically elected but socialist Aliende. Many right wingers love Pinochet because of his economic policies and opposition to socialism.
I wouldn't say that people "love" Pinochet but given the two bad options that existed at the time, it is pretty obvious to me that the less bad one had won. Allende may have been democratically elected, but it is pretty well understood now that with Soviet and Castro's backing he was planning to nationalize industry and turn Chile into another Cuba. Large secret shipments of weapons from Soviet Union were already on their way to Allende at the time of the coup. Ask Chileans and Cubans today where they would rather live.
Liberrarians generally align more with Right in US, God knowd why, but they do not make Right. Neo-cons do.
Neo-cons are a group of (mostly) former marxists with a specific foreign interventionist agenda and not really particularly socially conservative. Left and right are completely inadequate terms to describe the political spectrum, I wish we would stop using them. But if by Right you mean the Republican party, then I think social conservatives still call the shots, not neo-cons. With Tea Party recently, and the economy in the toilet, more emphasis has been placed on small government, less spending etc, but there is still a long way to go. Any Republican candidate for high office still has to be socially conservative to have any chance.
For me, as a libertarian, it's a matter of lesser of two evils. Social issues where I disagree with Republicans, are just less important to me than the economic issues where I disagree with Democrats. BTW, there is less disagreement between two parties on social issues than you think. Just about all Democrat politicians, including Obama, are pretty conservative when it comes to religion, gay marriage, abortion, drugs etc.
Actually, I was asking for rational counter-arguments from someone who has actually read and understood what she wrote, which means that your response does not qualify. It simply demonstrates the continuing inability of her opponents to come up with anything other than yet more ridiculous personal attacks (an interesting question for psychologists: why does any conservative female, but not necessarily male, attracts such a high amount of vicious over the top hatred from those who disagree with her?). What does her smoking have to do with anything? What does the length of a speech have to do with anything? What rape fetish? You are responding to her alleged assertions by making your own assertion that they are wrong with nothing to back it up. By the way, not that it matters, but most of what you said is incorrect:
Atlas Shrugged - which Rand wrote as an introduction to her philosophy - is a silly superhero fantasy about an ubermensch engineer coming up with a magical generator and retreating from the world along with his equally superhuman businessman buddies, at which point the world collapses.
Totally wrong. Atlas Shrugged is really about the harm that government coercion in all its forms does, especially when it comes to the control of industry. It was written at a time when central planning and nationalization of industry were still popular themes among the left in the US and the disaster that those policies produced in the Soviet Union were not fully understood. It was exaggerated in order to make those harmful effects (which in reality happen over long time) more obvious.
Objectivism isn't really a philosophy
Yes, it is. You see, I can simply state things just as easily as you can.
it's a bunch of assertions about the nature of reality and human nature, and many of those assertions are flat-out wrong, those about the nature of selfishness perhaps most obviously so: selfish people don't debate whether it's in accordance to their nature as human to take something or not, they simply take and be done with it. That, alone, is sufficient to invalidate her conclusions about what the best political system might be.
I didn't understand that at all so I can't reply to it. Try saying something intelligible.
Objectivism has political goals which, due to the erroneous assertions at its core, tend to create truly destructive consequences when implemented.
Please provide an example of when objectivism was implemented and what destructive consequences has it produced.
And, much as I hate to say this, calm and reasoned debate on politics is not effective for stopping said policy, while mud-slinging is.
Absolutely wrong. It is ideas that matter in the long run. This is why, despite a long history of mud slinging against them, her books are among the best selling and most influential in history.
I didn't say higher intelligence causes people to commit genocidal acts or anything. BTW, your example of a stupid person is bad as Dubya possibly has a higher IQ than Obama. There is no way to be sure since Obama never disclosed his, but the rumor has it that his LSAT (which is a form of an IQ test, accepted by Mensa) score was lower than Bush's.
Thank you for the first insightful post in the whole thread. I think most conservatives would agree that Palin would be a bad candidate but there is a vocal minority who supports her and it's those passionate types who tend to turn up in primaries more than the moderates. I hope she can be convinced not to run but I doubt it. The only real hope is that an outstanding new candidate will emerge, cause the likes of Romney and Huckabee, or god help us John Bolton, aren't much better. Ryan would be my choice, with Gingrich and Christie close behind.
Intelligence is overrated when it comes to the president. They did IQ tests on the accused at Nuremberg trials and all of them scored far above average. Common sense and real life experience (outside academic and political world, which don't count) and understanding of history are more important. A slightest inkling of a clue about economics would be a nice change too. Not saying that Palin qualifies by any means, just that the fact that Obama has high academic qualifications doesn't make him a good candidate, as his presidency so far has demonstrated.
Fascism is not the only alternative to true democracy. For example, if you are from US and you paid attention in your civics class you would know that we do not have a democracy but a constitutional republic. The rule of the majority is limited in a variety of ways, specifically in order to prevent the tyranny of majority over minority. Since you are such a democracy champion, let me ask you something. In your view, if the 51% of the voters vote that the other 49% should be killed that is ok? Government is a difficult thing to get right and there are no perfect options and there will always be compromise, but if you really believe in class warfare crap about the majority of people, ignorant and uninterested in government as most of them are, rising up and producing a workers paradise you are as nuts as those remaining Marxist creeps still to be found crawling around even today. Things like that have been tried before and in every single case they ended in a complete disaster as every system that doesn't take into account human nature is bound to end.
You mean how they took over in Russia and happily ensured decades of starvation and slavery for themselves and their children.
One of the most insightful and funny posts here. Naturally, it is modded Troll.
China is still the darling of all the so-called "free trade" advocates.
Ok, can you provide some examples of free trade advocates who consider China their darling?
Once, for an actual assignment, I tried to find some real counter arguments to Ayn Rand's philosophy and all I find is either idiotic ad hominem abuse like this or literary criticisms of her writing style/plot/characters etc which is an epic case of missing the point. If you know of any please feel free to provide them.
Please stop blaming corporations for government corruption. As long as there are politicians with the power to help or ruin any business (and with their hand aggressively extended in the direction of those businesses) there will be no choice for any industry or individual company but to play ball and to spend time and money on competing for influence in Washington instead of spending it on innovating and competing in the marketplace.
US government artificially limits imports of sugar, no cartel has the power to do that. A poster above blamed "mega-corps" for the fact that US government subsidizes corn. Why is it so hard for you lefties to place the blame where it belongs.
People click on ads. I don't and you probably don't but some people do, otherwise companies wouldn't spend money on them. I presume this is more geared towards special offers, kinda like collecting coupons that you don't want to use right now but you might later. Not sure if it's worth $8 mil. but I can see people using it and having a button on every ad on every site that takes them to your site is a valuable thing.
I'm a nerd and all and I see it's all sciency, but this reads like a journal entry from the world's most boring man.
I agree. After reading the summary a couple of times all I am sure of is that the next X-Men movie will be set on the Sun, but the plot seems very confusing.
It's an RC plane, It's a toy, it's a remote controlled piece of plastic and foam.
It all depends: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmKdA6L_MWk
Umm, a 10 sec google search of some NYC RC hobby message boards tells me that flying RC planes in NYC is actually illegal, as in most cities, except in some specific designated areas. Nothing to do with fear of terrorists, and everything to do with crashing into people, breaking windows, causing car accidents and such.
The mystery remains though why Fry's has upwards of 60 checkout registers when only 5 or 6 are open at any one time.
If by outside US you mean the Eurofagots, I can reliably inform you that most Americans do not exactly envy people who have forgotten (actually never even known) what freedom is like and who are happy to be paying 60% of their meager (by US standards) income to support their bankrupt welfare states, when they are not driving around in their midget cars and living in their 800 sf. government built apartments. Btw, a continent that produced communism, nazism, fascism and caused 100+ million deaths (lets not even go back further than 20th century) should maybe, just maybe, take a look at the US constitution and 225 years of unprecedented freedom, prosperity and stability that that system produced and try to learn something from it.
It just goes to show what great times we live in. It used to be that only the rich could afford the horse carriage, then only the rich could afford a car, than only the rich could afford a tv etc etc. These days everybody (in the developed world at least) can afford pretty much all the conveniences that latest technology provides. Really poor people (as in Africa) would laugh at the people in the US calling themselves poor even though they have a flat screen TV and an SUV in the garage of their 2000 sf. home. Ok if you live in NYC you probably can't afford much more than a cockroach infested apartment, but in most areas that's pretty much true. The most advanced options for home entertainment, transportation, home appliances etc are really not that much better than the affordable ones. The rich have to settle for diamond encrusted versions of stuff just to be different.
How is being socially conservative at all libertarian?
It's not, I meant the fiscal part. Fox is pretty consistent in calling for a smaller, less intrusive government, less spending, lower taxes etc. They also supported the Tea Party movement, while the likes of CNN started off by deliberately ignoring it, then switched to calling it racist and are now sulking as they realize none of the smears worked.
He pays for the content anyway (for his newspaper and tv channels), this is just another way of distributing.
Fox News and Rupert Murdoch aren't libertarians, they are authoritarians.
I certainly wouldn't count Fox News as a libertarian channel (in what sense are they authoritarian though?) but rather as conservative both fiscally and socially, which is still closer to libertarian than any other main channels. Fox Business News is very libertarian though - see Stossel's show http://www.hulu.com/stossel and Freedom Watch, the two most libertarian shows on television. Murdoch himself has a history of being anti-socialist more than anything else. In Britain, his newspapers, The Times and The Sun, supported Tony Blair against Conservatives because he defeated the long standing Labour party far left leadership (which almost destroyed the party: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_(UK)#The_.22Wilderness_Years.22_.281979.E2.80.931997.29) and more towards the center-left.
It does not provide any hi-tech features. No apps. No Internet. No camera. No text messaging. All you have to do -- in fact, all you can do -- is call, talk and hang up.
You don't have to be crazy to want a phone like that but you do have to be crazy to pay 79.95 EUR ($105) for it.
Because courts say it does not: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/06/tech/main6368331.shtml
Because congress majority says it does not: http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/100487-after-republican-letter-over-240-house-members-oppose-fcc-plan
But what does it matter what federal courts and elected representatives say when an unelected five man commission says otherwise with a 3-2 vote, right?
Slashdot has long stopped being a technology forum. Approximately half the articles on the front page right now are purely political and not just under YRO. There is a labor dispute story under Hardware section. People like to give their juvenile political opinions, that's where ad impressions are.