The law already puts a price on lives. the EPA has a standard calculation based on the most comprehensive research ever done into the economic impact of a lost life which is used as the baseline for environmental regulations and fines, it happens to be the best answer there is and likely the best there can be.
The current figure is about 7-billion dollars (it's wrong to just count what a person is likely to earn in his lifetime, you have to count the impact on the family, lost time for funerals, reduced income for his children's education - the loss of incomes from the businesses he would have spent his earnings at, the loss of income from the business they would have spent at - the jobs lost because of that loss of income etc. etc.) Every person who dies young costs the economy an average of 7-billion dollars.
Personally my only problem with that figure is that they made no attempt whatsoever to factor in the emotional costs, the grieving process, family members struggling with depression and other psychological impacts of loss (they did factor this in in the 'lost productivity' column but not in the impact on those people). Courts generally reward damages for such harm if proven - but in the case of the EPA figure no accounting is done for that. If you add the typical court settlement from wrongful death suits, on top you would get a more accurate figure I think.
Imagine if every time a person died in a car crash - we sent a bill for 7-billion dollars to the makers of the cars... auto-safety would very rapidly reach sky-high levels, and the best tech would no longer be only in the luxury models (as if rich people's lives are worth more than the rest of us), middle class people like me wouldn't have to buy a 12-year old car to get airbags, traction-control and ABS brakes. They'd stick these in every car and cut the costs like mad - better to make 10K less on a car, than risk a 7-billion dollar loss on it !
So what you are saying is... that according to you the only morally acceptable kind of car company is one that doesn't make cars.
Well I'm sure the very, very, very far extreme fringes of the environmental movement will agree with you - that is if you go live with them in their hippie communes in the woods - but the rest of the world will probably collapse if we tried that. Better to try and build greener and progressively safer cars. There are times when you can and should demand perfection - but this is one of those cases where perfection will never exist, so you can and should demand improvement, which is exactly what Tesla is doing. Bad things happening sometimes does not mean it isn't improvement. It just means it's not perfection.
But promissing mass deportations - that is directly out of the Nurember playbook. So is demanding people of a certain group be registered in a special database and carry special ID.
His immigration policy isn't particularly holocausty... insane and impractical to the point of utterly impossible but not holocausty - it's EVERYTHING ELSE HE SAID which you conveniently did not consider when trying to defend him.
>My FaceBook feed is full of crying women who believe America just elected LITERALLY HITLER
If you think you didn't, you haven't been paying attention. There is not a single Nuremberg law that he has not proposed as policy. If that is not enough to justify a Godwin then nothing will be.
When Hitler himself got elected people just like you were also declaring that he would never actually DO the insane shit he said to get elected. That the constitution would prevent it, that the checks and balances would constrain him.
You DID just elect orange Hitler. The only REAL question is - are you going to let him go full circle ? There is one last check and balance that can prevent that, one he doesn't control. That one is the citizens. They could constantly and harshly oppose him - enough to force him to not do the crazy things he said he would do. In Germany - they didn't, his party only got 32% of the vote ever - but the other 68% of the people got scared when he slaughtered all their elected representatives - and fell in line. Looks like maybe some people DID learn from history - because it looks like the 47% of people who know who he is and who knows what is not even SLIGHTLY an exagerated metaphor - are protesting already.
The only thing that will keep Orange Hitler from doing everything German Hitler did - are the protesters in the street right now. They weren't there in Germany. Those people right now, excercising their constitutional rights - they could change the outcome, or at least mitigate the worst of it. You better support them - they are your only hope.
>Unfortunately this is true. The only way to know how the populace will vote is to hold the election. Various polls come with various levels of Truthiness, but there are a great number of reasons that they can't accurately predict results.
Frankly, if they really could, there would be no reason to actually hold an expensive election now would there ?
Citation needed. There is actually sweet fuck all to back this idea up. Resources existed before we got here and their reason for existing had nothing to do with us. If anything consumption of (some) resources may be the one thing evolution has no way to recover from.
>By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? Birthright ? ?You haven't proven that a right exists, let alone a birthright. And besides, if that's the basis of your claim about a billion people have a stronger birthright claim than you (all native peoples for one) and they, overwhelmingly, favor NOT burning CO2.
There's a catch. If you want to see the biggest immediate impact of the Trump election - consider this. Renewable energy company shares tank... and arms company shares have skyrocketed.
So much for choosing the non-warmonger president. Historically, when America elects isolationists - world wars happen. That's good for arms companies and terrible for everybody else.
That's because deniers are overwhelmingly conservative and the position that short-term goals must have an absolute override over long-term outcomes is quintessential to all their thinking. It's the same reason they reject things like UBI, free college or universal healthcare - they see the immedate price (a short term goal) and ignore that the cost of all these things is actually NEGATIVE. They don't think far enough ahead to see that the return on investment is bigger than the price.
The same applies with climate change. The investments we need to make to change course are all cost-negative, but all they see is the short-term price-positive. And they are even LESS inclined to want to make the investments since the majority of them sincerely do not believe they'll live to get the ROI. Since there is nothing in it for them, and they don't actually LIKE their kids... well fuck everybody. But saying "fuck everybody" tends to have limited political clout (the new president-elect being an interesting exception) - so in order to actually fuck everybody else, their best course of action is to deny there is any reason to invest. That these denials fly in the face of overwhelming evidence, science itself, rational thought, critical thinking and indeed requires you to stick your head so far up your own rectum that if they ever needed brain surgery they would have to go to a proctologist clearly has never dissuaded them from the course.
Yep, apparently a science budget that has been set by republicans for 6 years has been funding only the scientists who keep finding what the republicans really didn't want to hear. Hell the last several chairmen of the senate science committee were all very vocal deniers and the majority of them were creationists (Apparently knowing anything about, or even LIKING, science actually DISQUALIFIES you for the job of overseeing the government's science funding).
Because modern humans didn't exist 200 million years ago and didn't leave Africa until 20-thousand years ago so global temperatures prior to that are utterly irrelevant since we've NEVER had to survive (let alone to try thrive) in them.
>It did originate in France because it was part of the enlightenment. It was *not* a form of socialism, quite the opposite , it was actually a form of individualism. And this is what is known classical liberalism.
No, European libertarianism is socialist to the core. It's closest similar philosophy is anarch-communism. It's the system that governed Andalusia, Spain in the early 20th century. The principles of left liberalism (as it's also called) is that ALL power imbalances are evil and this includes economic imbalances. Left liberalists believe corporations are private tyrannies. The ONLY business structure they support is worker-owned cooperatives that are run democratically, the ONLY form of banks they support are non-profits that give loans interest-free. The ONLY thing they have in common with the American philosophy by the same name is that they despise government - but they despise wall street and CEOs even more. They are NOT in ANY way related to classic liberalism - both originated in France but with completely different philosophers and at different times. Libertarianism in France was coined by the philosopher Proudhom during the reign of Napoleon (so a few decades after classic liberalism) and he made up the word specifically to get around Napoleon's ban on anarchist literature.
> But unlike the nonsense labels of "left" "right", "libertarian" actually has freedom (liber, latin for free) right in the name, and it has a very specific historic definition Actually if anybody has not right to use that label it's everybody who uses it in America sine the entire rest of the world thinks what you do is an insult the centuries old libertarian movement which it has almost nothing in common with. And American libertarianism is an extremely recent movement that only started in the 1970's - it has precursors in so-called classic liberalism and objectivism but the term as used in America did not exist before 1970. The wikipedia page on libertarian-socialism is actually very good, you should read it - and know what libertarian means to the rest of the world and why they get angry when people use it to describe something that Proudhom would have called tyrannical (NOT regulating all the inherent evil out of every business IS tyranny to a libertarian - since a business has power, and all power must be restricted into non-existence, that's the libertarian ethos for all the world outside America).
To non-American libertarians the reason communism failed had nothing to DO with the economic part, they blame it ENTIRELY on the fact that the government was autocratic, and in their view it would work fantastically if it was based on direct democracy instead - and they have some reason to say that since the one state that tried that (Andalusia) was a roaring success.
>Hitler was a national SOCIALIST Seriously - you're going to pull THAT piece of bullshit ? Hitler never claimed to be socialist. He inherited leadership of a party with that name and kicked all the socialists out, he didn't rename the party but he hated socialists. He wrote that over and over and his VERY FIRST ACT as Fuhrer was to brutally murder every socialist in the German parliament !
> What libertarian support bailouts for the banking industry, or subsidies for the oil industry? Yeah, I've been telling libertarians for decades that the republican party is conning them, promise them small government economics they like to get their votes and then do Bush-bailouts and crony-capitalism in their name economically while enacting all the freedom-destroying desires of the religious right socially. I've been telling them for years they should rather vote democrat because at least those guys really DO implement what they want socially - and if economic liberty and tax policy is not infinitely LESS important to you than social policy then you are not truly honest when you say you love freedom. Social policy is about the kind of freedoms that are worth dying for. Those are the ones you OUGHT to prize higher if you c
>I don't think that a group with so little power could be to blame for anything much less the movement that gave rise to the next president. Maybe you are confusing libertarians with another group or something.
You think the libertarians have 'little power' ? Hahahaha. The Koch Brothers are libertarians - and they fund almost all republican races. The libertarian PARTY may have little power - but the libertarian ideal has driven republican policy as a whole ever since Reagan and frankly the reason the LP never did well is because the libertarians all vote republican. The republican party has been the (quite insane) alliance of libertarians and the religious right for decades.
>If they did, the death penalty would be abolished, we wouldn't have an interventionist foreign policy, gay marriage would have been legal way before 2015, drugs would be legal, prostitution would be legal, doctor assisted suicide would be legal, etc You don't get to dismiss the fact that the libertarians wrote the republican economic policy for decades just because they compromised the social liberal values to appease the religious right in order to win elections -they ALWAYS considered tax policy to be more important than actual freedom - and I have challenged them about that alliance for over a decade, and they always make excuses. They always say: "We ONLY ally with them on economic things, we don't support what they do with social policy" - but they never fought them either. Make no mistake the libertarians write the republican economic policy. Tax breaks for the rich, deregulation, cutting spending, cutting welfare -these are the cornerstones of libertarian policy.
>If someone only believes in lower taxes, they are not libertarian. Maybe they call themselves libertarians, but libertarians believe in liberty for everyone, not just themselves. Bwhahahahahahahah - no. That's what libertarians SAY - it's not what libertarians DO.
>Noam Chomsky is a libertarian for fucks sake. No, he's not. Your mistake is not realising that there are two completely different philosophies both known as 'libertarian'. The one originated in France, is a form of socialism, and is what Noam Chomsky is. In most of the world that is what is understood by 'libertarian' - an anti-corporate, anti-government SOCIALIST. In America, uniquely, the word is used to refer to small-government capitalists. They differ from the neocons ONLY in favoring isolationism and this has NEVER been a sufficient deterrent to stop them all from actually voting for neocons.
That is generally true but it's not true of everything. Some things are so terrible - that you CANNOT condone them or tolerate them without being complicit in them.
You want to know who is really to blame for Trump's rise ? More than anybody else ? The fucking libertarians. They, and their republican panderers have spent 40 years dismantling the working class with their false dichotomy of "you either have sweatshops or unemployment" (and anything else they tell you is bullshit - THAT's the only options they offer - deregulation = creating sweatshops, anti-unionism = creating sweatshops and the reason they give every time they do this shit is always "to create jobs"). And the worst thing about that lie is that it didn't work. They deregulated, they destroyed quality work, they destroyed unions.. and there are still not enough jobs, people still struggle to make ends meet.
The libertarians did that, in their endless quest to concentrate every fucking penny in the hands of a few rich dickwads.
And they created an America desperate for any kind of escape - and Trump offered one. So did Bernie Sanders - but Bernie wasn't a candidate.
But here's the kicker - as much as I understand their anger, as much as I am sympathetic to that anger, angry people NEVER make good choices, it's literally impossible because the parts of your brain that are active when you're angry cannot also be rational, rational anger does not and can never exist. I can understand when their anger made them overlook that he lied in 71% of all the statements he ever made (yet somehow they thought Hillary was less honest ? Despite her score being BELOW average for a politician ? I don't get that). But where I part ways with them - where I stop being AT ALL sympathetic, is when they allowed their anger to let blame OTHER suffering people. Trump blamed immigrants, and foreigners for taking their jobs - but that's not where the blame lies. Mexicans aren't the enemy, they are your fellow soldiers, they are part of your class. Muslims aren't a threat to you - even the FBI officially considers rightwing terrorist groups the single greatest threat to American national security. And when that wasn't bad enough... they overlooked that he's a fucking rapist ! He bragged about it and they let it slide.
When they got so angry - that they would let the man they pinned their hopes on get away with anything, so desperate that no amount of proof that he was just using them for his own gain and would forget their plight the day after the election, when they hated for him - on the people they should be teaming up with against the wall street douchebags who are profiting from their misery, that's where they stopped being sympathetic working class sufferers and became a basket of deplorables.
Unfortunately - when they sided with orange hitler, the basket started to fit.
I have been begging for a working class revolt in America for half my life - and trust America, when it finally happened, it was THIS fuck up. There can be no worse working class revolt than one that consists of half the working class blaming the other half...
The moment they started condoning racism, sexism, homophobia and hatred - no matter how much I sympathise with them economically, I became their enemy... which is a really weird feeling for me, having been fighting and arguing for the working class my whole life, so much so I am constantly accused of romanticising them ! Why the hell did they have to go and prove the worst stereotypes about them right ? Why the fuck did they have to go and be everything the wall street douchebags think they are, when they are justifying to themselves treating these people like shit ? You just answered the people who soothe their conscience about treating your like shit by thinking you ARE shit... by acting like shit.
And that makes the people who used to defend you turn away from you... I cannot defend this.
4 seperate Trump speeches. How the fuck can you doubt this. Its amazing how the source for every bad thing about Trump dismissed as smears by his followers is Donald Trump himself. But then they all believe he was the target of an assasination attempt as well... and like most things they believe it never happened.
Quite a lot of people are. But quite a lot of people are also terified, and many have been subjected to horrifying harassment, violence and indeed murder already. Minorities would be complete idiots NOT to be scared. Only an idiot doesn't get scared when people are threatening to attack them and making good on those threats.
Anybody who follows INTERNATIONAL news knows that they ARE exactly the same thing - that EVERYWHERE such laws have EVER been passed THAT is what they meant. And that person will also know that those are the LEAST horrifying versions of what is done whenever those laws are passed, in nearly all cases it ends up being much WORSE - which is what makes that a euphemistic equation. Because that's assuming the BEST possible meaning of those laws.
Being told you have to register in a special database and carry special ID is calling for harm to you. Even so, regardless - that is what (a lot of) his supporters think he said - that's why they are going around harassing people. Telling black people to "go back to Africa" etc.
Trump may not have said those things outright, but you bet your fucking ass it's what most of his voters heard.
>But really it is there for a REASON. You are a citizen of your state first, and then a citizen of the United States.
That is not the reason. The EC was created for one very simple reason - to ensure the US was not truly democratic, and it was created in a very specific context. If the constitution was written one decade later it would never have existed, and there's a reason no other country in the free world has such a profoundly undemocratic system. The context was a number of states that passed debt relief laws - which the rich hated. They had power even then, and this led to some founding fathers being rather scared of "too much democracy" - indeed this is why the constitution prohibits states from passing any law that interferes with the "obligations of contract". The other significant context was that, even then, the abolitionists were becoming a fairly strong voice in the US - and the slave states were nervous. The last thing they wanted was to risk letting the abolitionists choose a president if they got a majority of the population. So they came up with a rather odd bit of math in the original electoral college. Every slave, despite these not being allowed to vote, were counted as 3/5 of a person in the measure of the state population - and the states with slaves therefore had more EC votes than the ones without, even though the slaves weren't voting. It was a way to shore up the slave states by effectively giving them more votes per person.
That is EXACTLY how it STILL is. In fact, the 14th amendment demands that there be restitution by reducing the number of electoral votes for the former slave states to what it would have been if slaves had never been counted - which would greatly reduce all their numbers. So that the abolitionist states would control the majority of the EC votes, that adjustment was never made (congress has ignored their constitutional obligation for 150 years and gotten away with it).
If that adjustment had been made- Trump would have seen a landslide loss. The problem with the EC is that it, to this day, gives people in the Southern states 3 votes for every 1 vote in the others. It's as undemocratic as anything can be. Ironically this is made worse by the fact that it doesn't even serve it's original purpose. Originally electors were allowed to vote their conscience and could, in extreme cases, vote against the votes of the state - which likely would have prevented a Trump victory. That was the very purpose of creating the college - to put something in check to act as a brake on democracy, a prevention of tyranny of the majority problems. That very soon got lost, and the EC thus became simultaneously undemocratic AND useless.
It was created to give slave owners more votes than abolitionists, and it continuous to do that for their descendants - and that makes it the single biggest fuckup in the free world today. Any time when you have a system that can allow a minority to enforce bad ideas on a majority that's the opposite of democracy. The UK has a similar problem, with a different shape. Their first-past-the-post system means parties frequently gain absolute power with minority votes. The current Tory government only had 37% of the votes - yet control the entire government. So the US isn't alone in having a terrible system - but the US and the UK collectively have the two least democratic systems in the entire free world... the exact opposite of what they like to tell themselves.
>so quick to label anyone that supported him as a deplorable, racist, sexist, bigoted misogynist. A 100% accurate label. Just because they didn't want to publicly wear the label, doesn't mean it's any less accurate.
This isn't like past elections. There have always been people threatening to leave if X wins - but almost none of them ever did. This time the Canadian immigration website fucking crashed under load ! Why would this lot suddenly seem to apparently be SERIOUS about it ?
Because none of those past presidents were elected on a platform that actually threatened anybody's actual life and physical wellbeing, which now has happened. The Trump supporters won't NEED Trump to deport lots of Muslims, Jews and Black people to get many of them out of the country - they are running - because only an idiot wouldn't. When the people at the new president's victory party are chanting "We hate Jews, We hate Blacks, we will take out country back" - you fucking run.
>Back when Obama came president those liberals laughed at those crazy republicans who got all panicky because the democrat party took over.
That's because all the reasons for that panic were made up. He was not a Muslim, he was not born in another country, he was not a communist, he was not a socialist, he didn't take anybody's guns away.
Where-as all the reasons for THIS panic is based on what the candidate ACTUALLY SAID - not what one particular news channel claimed he thinks, even though he doesn't say it.
Slashdot Mirror
The law already puts a price on lives. the EPA has a standard calculation based on the most comprehensive research ever done into the economic impact of a lost life which is used as the baseline for environmental regulations and fines, it happens to be the best answer there is and likely the best there can be.
The current figure is about 7-billion dollars (it's wrong to just count what a person is likely to earn in his lifetime, you have to count the impact on the family, lost time for funerals, reduced income for his children's education - the loss of incomes from the businesses he would have spent his earnings at, the loss of income from the business they would have spent at - the jobs lost because of that loss of income etc. etc.) Every person who dies young costs the economy an average of 7-billion dollars.
Personally my only problem with that figure is that they made no attempt whatsoever to factor in the emotional costs, the grieving process, family members struggling with depression and other psychological impacts of loss (they did factor this in in the 'lost productivity' column but not in the impact on those people). Courts generally reward damages for such harm if proven - but in the case of the EPA figure no accounting is done for that. If you add the typical court settlement from wrongful death suits, on top you would get a more accurate figure I think.
Imagine if every time a person died in a car crash - we sent a bill for 7-billion dollars to the makers of the cars... auto-safety would very rapidly reach sky-high levels, and the best tech would no longer be only in the luxury models (as if rich people's lives are worth more than the rest of us), middle class people like me wouldn't have to buy a 12-year old car to get airbags, traction-control and ABS brakes. They'd stick these in every car and cut the costs like mad - better to make 10K less on a car, than risk a 7-billion dollar loss on it !
So what you are saying is... that according to you the only morally acceptable kind of car company is one that doesn't make cars.
Well I'm sure the very, very, very far extreme fringes of the environmental movement will agree with you - that is if you go live with them in their hippie communes in the woods - but the rest of the world will probably collapse if we tried that. Better to try and build greener and progressively safer cars. There are times when you can and should demand perfection - but this is one of those cases where perfection will never exist, so you can and should demand improvement, which is exactly what Tesla is doing.
Bad things happening sometimes does not mean it isn't improvement. It just means it's not perfection.
Nobody does, ever will, or ever SHOULD give a flying fuck what their driving motivations WERE.
They TOLERATED the fucked up shit - and that makes them GUILTY of that fucked up shit, no matter WHY they did it.
But promissing mass deportations - that is directly out of the Nurember playbook.
So is demanding people of a certain group be registered in a special database and carry special ID.
His immigration policy isn't particularly holocausty... insane and impractical to the point of utterly impossible but not holocausty - it's EVERYTHING ELSE HE SAID which you conveniently did not consider when trying to defend him.
>My FaceBook feed is full of crying women who believe America just elected LITERALLY HITLER
If you think you didn't, you haven't been paying attention. There is not a single Nuremberg law that he has not proposed as policy. If that is not enough to justify a Godwin then nothing will be.
When Hitler himself got elected people just like you were also declaring that he would never actually DO the insane shit he said to get elected. That the constitution would prevent it, that the checks and balances would constrain him.
You DID just elect orange Hitler. The only REAL question is - are you going to let him go full circle ? There is one last check and balance that can prevent that, one he doesn't control. That one is the citizens. They could constantly and harshly oppose him - enough to force him to not do the crazy things he said he would do. In Germany - they didn't, his party only got 32% of the vote ever - but the other 68% of the people got scared when he slaughtered all their elected representatives - and fell in line.
Looks like maybe some people DID learn from history - because it looks like the 47% of people who know who he is and who knows what is not even SLIGHTLY an exagerated metaphor - are protesting already.
The only thing that will keep Orange Hitler from doing everything German Hitler did - are the protesters in the street right now. They weren't there in Germany. Those people right now, excercising their constitutional rights - they could change the outcome, or at least mitigate the worst of it.
You better support them - they are your only hope.
>Unfortunately this is true. The only way to know how the populace will vote is to hold the election. Various polls come with various levels of Truthiness, but there are a great number of reasons that they can't accurately predict results.
Frankly, if they really could, there would be no reason to actually hold an expensive election now would there ?
>Resources exist to be consumed
Citation needed. There is actually sweet fuck all to back this idea up. Resources existed before we got here and their reason for existing had nothing to do with us. If anything consumption of (some) resources may be the one thing evolution has no way to recover from.
>By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright?
Birthright ? ?You haven't proven that a right exists, let alone a birthright. And besides, if that's the basis of your claim about a billion people have a stronger birthright claim than you (all native peoples for one) and they, overwhelmingly, favor NOT burning CO2.
There's a catch. If you want to see the biggest immediate impact of the Trump election - consider this. Renewable energy company shares tank... and arms company shares have skyrocketed.
So much for choosing the non-warmonger president. Historically, when America elects isolationists - world wars happen. That's good for arms companies and terrible for everybody else.
That's because deniers are overwhelmingly conservative and the position that short-term goals must have an absolute override over long-term outcomes is quintessential to all their thinking. It's the same reason they reject things like UBI, free college or universal healthcare - they see the immedate price (a short term goal) and ignore that the cost of all these things is actually NEGATIVE. They don't think far enough ahead to see that the return on investment is bigger than the price.
The same applies with climate change. The investments we need to make to change course are all cost-negative, but all they see is the short-term price-positive. And they are even LESS inclined to want to make the investments since the majority of them sincerely do not believe they'll live to get the ROI. Since there is nothing in it for them, and they don't actually LIKE their kids... well fuck everybody. But saying "fuck everybody" tends to have limited political clout (the new president-elect being an interesting exception) - so in order to actually fuck everybody else, their best course of action is to deny there is any reason to invest. That these denials fly in the face of overwhelming evidence, science itself, rational thought, critical thinking and indeed requires you to stick your head so far up your own rectum that if they ever needed brain surgery they would have to go to a proctologist clearly has never dissuaded them from the course.
Yep, apparently a science budget that has been set by republicans for 6 years has been funding only the scientists who keep finding what the republicans really didn't want to hear. Hell the last several chairmen of the senate science committee were all very vocal deniers and the majority of them were creationists (Apparently knowing anything about, or even LIKING, science actually DISQUALIFIES you for the job of overseeing the government's science funding).
Apparently he isn't... but that doesn't make him wrong.
Because modern humans didn't exist 200 million years ago and didn't leave Africa until 20-thousand years ago so global temperatures prior to that are utterly irrelevant since we've NEVER had to survive (let alone to try thrive) in them.
>It did originate in France because it was part of the enlightenment. It was *not* a form of socialism, quite the opposite , it was actually a form of individualism. And this is what is known classical liberalism.
No, European libertarianism is socialist to the core. It's closest similar philosophy is anarch-communism. It's the system that governed Andalusia, Spain in the early 20th century. The principles of left liberalism (as it's also called) is that ALL power imbalances are evil and this includes economic imbalances. Left liberalists believe corporations are private tyrannies. The ONLY business structure they support is worker-owned cooperatives that are run democratically, the ONLY form of banks they support are non-profits that give loans interest-free.
The ONLY thing they have in common with the American philosophy by the same name is that they despise government - but they despise wall street and CEOs even more. They are NOT in ANY way related to classic liberalism - both originated in France but with completely different philosophers and at different times. Libertarianism in France was coined by the philosopher Proudhom during the reign of Napoleon (so a few decades after classic liberalism) and he made up the word specifically to get around Napoleon's ban on anarchist literature.
> But unlike the nonsense labels of "left" "right", "libertarian" actually has freedom (liber, latin for free) right in the name, and it has a very specific historic definition
Actually if anybody has not right to use that label it's everybody who uses it in America sine the entire rest of the world thinks what you do is an insult the centuries old libertarian movement which it has almost nothing in common with. And American libertarianism is an extremely recent movement that only started in the 1970's - it has precursors in so-called classic liberalism and objectivism but the term as used in America did not exist before 1970.
The wikipedia page on libertarian-socialism is actually very good, you should read it - and know what libertarian means to the rest of the world and why they get angry when people use it to describe something that Proudhom would have called tyrannical (NOT regulating all the inherent evil out of every business IS tyranny to a libertarian - since a business has power, and all power must be restricted into non-existence, that's the libertarian ethos for all the world outside America).
To non-American libertarians the reason communism failed had nothing to DO with the economic part, they blame it ENTIRELY on the fact that the government was autocratic, and in their view it would work fantastically if it was based on direct democracy instead - and they have some reason to say that since the one state that tried that (Andalusia) was a roaring success.
>Hitler was a national SOCIALIST
Seriously - you're going to pull THAT piece of bullshit ? Hitler never claimed to be socialist. He inherited leadership of a party with that name and kicked all the socialists out, he didn't rename the party but he hated socialists. He wrote that over and over and his VERY FIRST ACT as Fuhrer was to brutally murder every socialist in the German parliament !
> What libertarian support bailouts for the banking industry, or subsidies for the oil industry?
Yeah, I've been telling libertarians for decades that the republican party is conning them, promise them small government economics they like to get their votes and then do Bush-bailouts and crony-capitalism in their name economically while enacting all the freedom-destroying desires of the religious right socially. I've been telling them for years they should rather vote democrat because at least those guys really DO implement what they want socially - and if economic liberty and tax policy is not infinitely LESS important to you than social policy then you are not truly honest when you say you love freedom. Social policy is about the kind of freedoms that are worth dying for. Those are the ones you OUGHT to prize higher if you c
The stuff on Breitbart is not 'information' - it's lies. There's a difference.
I do filter out people whom I know for a fact are lying to me. Not doing that isn't being 'open-minded', it's called being a fucking fool.
>I don't think that a group with so little power could be to blame for anything much less the movement that gave rise to the next president. Maybe you are confusing libertarians with another group or something.
You think the libertarians have 'little power' ? Hahahaha. The Koch Brothers are libertarians - and they fund almost all republican races. The libertarian PARTY may have little power - but the libertarian ideal has driven republican policy as a whole ever since Reagan and frankly the reason the LP never did well is because the libertarians all vote republican. The republican party has been the (quite insane) alliance of libertarians and the religious right for decades.
>If they did, the death penalty would be abolished, we wouldn't have an interventionist foreign policy, gay marriage would have been legal way before 2015, drugs would be legal, prostitution would be legal, doctor assisted suicide would be legal, etc
You don't get to dismiss the fact that the libertarians wrote the republican economic policy for decades just because they compromised the social liberal values to appease the religious right in order to win elections -they ALWAYS considered tax policy to be more important than actual freedom - and I have challenged them about that alliance for over a decade, and they always make excuses. They always say: "We ONLY ally with them on economic things, we don't support what they do with social policy" - but they never fought them either. Make no mistake the libertarians write the republican economic policy. Tax breaks for the rich, deregulation, cutting spending, cutting welfare -these are the cornerstones of libertarian policy.
>If someone only believes in lower taxes, they are not libertarian. Maybe they call themselves libertarians, but libertarians believe in liberty for everyone, not just themselves.
Bwhahahahahahahah - no. That's what libertarians SAY - it's not what libertarians DO.
>Noam Chomsky is a libertarian for fucks sake.
No, he's not. Your mistake is not realising that there are two completely different philosophies both known as 'libertarian'. The one originated in France, is a form of socialism, and is what Noam Chomsky is. In most of the world that is what is understood by 'libertarian' - an anti-corporate, anti-government SOCIALIST. In America, uniquely, the word is used to refer to small-government capitalists. They differ from the neocons ONLY in favoring isolationism and this has NEVER been a sufficient deterrent to stop them all from actually voting for neocons.
That is generally true but it's not true of everything. Some things are so terrible - that you CANNOT condone them or tolerate them without being complicit in them.
You want to know who is really to blame for Trump's rise ? More than anybody else ? The fucking libertarians. They, and their republican panderers have spent 40 years dismantling the working class with their false dichotomy of "you either have sweatshops or unemployment" (and anything else they tell you is bullshit - THAT's the only options they offer - deregulation = creating sweatshops, anti-unionism = creating sweatshops and the reason they give every time they do this shit is always "to create jobs").
And the worst thing about that lie is that it didn't work. They deregulated, they destroyed quality work, they destroyed unions.. and there are still not enough jobs, people still struggle to make ends meet.
The libertarians did that, in their endless quest to concentrate every fucking penny in the hands of a few rich dickwads.
And they created an America desperate for any kind of escape - and Trump offered one. So did Bernie Sanders - but Bernie wasn't a candidate.
But here's the kicker - as much as I understand their anger, as much as I am sympathetic to that anger, angry people NEVER make good choices, it's literally impossible because the parts of your brain that are active when you're angry cannot also be rational, rational anger does not and can never exist. I can understand when their anger made them overlook that he lied in 71% of all the statements he ever made (yet somehow they thought Hillary was less honest ? Despite her score being BELOW average for a politician ? I don't get that). But where I part ways with them - where I stop being AT ALL sympathetic, is when they allowed their anger to let blame OTHER suffering people.
Trump blamed immigrants, and foreigners for taking their jobs - but that's not where the blame lies. Mexicans aren't the enemy, they are your fellow soldiers, they are part of your class. Muslims aren't a threat to you - even the FBI officially considers rightwing terrorist groups the single greatest threat to American national security.
And when that wasn't bad enough... they overlooked that he's a fucking rapist ! He bragged about it and they let it slide.
When they got so angry - that they would let the man they pinned their hopes on get away with anything, so desperate that no amount of proof that he was just using them for his own gain and would forget their plight the day after the election, when they hated for him - on the people they should be teaming up with against the wall street douchebags who are profiting from their misery, that's where they stopped being sympathetic working class sufferers and became a basket of deplorables.
Unfortunately - when they sided with orange hitler, the basket started to fit.
I have been begging for a working class revolt in America for half my life - and trust America, when it finally happened, it was THIS fuck up. There can be no worse working class revolt than one that consists of half the working class blaming the other half...
The moment they started condoning racism, sexism, homophobia and hatred - no matter how much I sympathise with them economically, I became their enemy... which is a really weird feeling for me, having been fighting and arguing for the working class my whole life, so much so I am constantly accused of romanticising them !
Why the hell did they have to go and prove the worst stereotypes about them right ? Why the fuck did they have to go and be everything the wall street douchebags think they are, when they are justifying to themselves treating these people like shit ? You just answered the people who soothe their conscience about treating your like shit by thinking you ARE shit... by acting like shit.
And that makes the people who used to defend you turn away from you... I cannot defend this.
4 seperate Trump speeches. How the fuck can you doubt this.
Its amazing how the source for every bad thing about Trump dismissed as smears by his followers is Donald Trump himself. But then they all believe he was the target of an assasination attempt as well... and like most things they believe it never happened.
A law against all abortion is a law that prosecutes mothers for miscariages. Never has it not been. Never will it not be.
Quite a lot of people are. But quite a lot of people are also terified, and many have been subjected to horrifying harassment, violence and indeed murder already. Minorities would be complete idiots NOT to be scared. Only an idiot doesn't get scared when people are threatening to attack them and making good on those threats.
Anybody who follows INTERNATIONAL news knows that they ARE exactly the same thing - that EVERYWHERE such laws have EVER been passed THAT is what they meant. And that person will also know that those are the LEAST horrifying versions of what is done whenever those laws are passed, in nearly all cases it ends up being much WORSE - which is what makes that a euphemistic equation. Because that's assuming the BEST possible meaning of those laws.
Being told you have to register in a special database and carry special ID is calling for harm to you. Even so, regardless - that is what (a lot of) his supporters think he said - that's why they are going around harassing people. Telling black people to "go back to Africa" etc.
Trump may not have said those things outright, but you bet your fucking ass it's what most of his voters heard.
>But really it is there for a REASON. You are a citizen of your state first, and then a citizen of the United States.
That is not the reason. The EC was created for one very simple reason - to ensure the US was not truly democratic, and it was created in a very specific context. If the constitution was written one decade later it would never have existed, and there's a reason no other country in the free world has such a profoundly undemocratic system.
The context was a number of states that passed debt relief laws - which the rich hated. They had power even then, and this led to some founding fathers being rather scared of "too much democracy" - indeed this is why the constitution prohibits states from passing any law that interferes with the "obligations of contract". The other significant context was that, even then, the abolitionists were becoming a fairly strong voice in the US - and the slave states were nervous. The last thing they wanted was to risk letting the abolitionists choose a president if they got a majority of the population. So they came up with a rather odd bit of math in the original electoral college. Every slave, despite these not being allowed to vote, were counted as 3/5 of a person in the measure of the state population - and the states with slaves therefore had more EC votes than the ones without, even though the slaves weren't voting. It was a way to shore up the slave states by effectively giving them more votes per person.
That is EXACTLY how it STILL is. In fact, the 14th amendment demands that there be restitution by reducing the number of electoral votes for the former slave states to what it would have been if slaves had never been counted - which would greatly reduce all their numbers. So that the abolitionist states would control the majority of the EC votes, that adjustment was never made (congress has ignored their constitutional obligation for 150 years and gotten away with it).
If that adjustment had been made- Trump would have seen a landslide loss. The problem with the EC is that it, to this day, gives people in the Southern states 3 votes for every 1 vote in the others. It's as undemocratic as anything can be. Ironically this is made worse by the fact that it doesn't even serve it's original purpose. Originally electors were allowed to vote their conscience and could, in extreme cases, vote against the votes of the state - which likely would have prevented a Trump victory. That was the very purpose of creating the college - to put something in check to act as a brake on democracy, a prevention of tyranny of the majority problems. That very soon got lost, and the EC thus became simultaneously undemocratic AND useless.
It was created to give slave owners more votes than abolitionists, and it continuous to do that for their descendants - and that makes it the single biggest fuckup in the free world today. Any time when you have a system that can allow a minority to enforce bad ideas on a majority that's the opposite of democracy. The UK has a similar problem, with a different shape. Their first-past-the-post system means parties frequently gain absolute power with minority votes. The current Tory government only had 37% of the votes - yet control the entire government. So the US isn't alone in having a terrible system - but the US and the UK collectively have the two least democratic systems in the entire free world... the exact opposite of what they like to tell themselves.
>so quick to label anyone that supported him as a deplorable, racist, sexist, bigoted misogynist.
A 100% accurate label. Just because they didn't want to publicly wear the label, doesn't mean it's any less accurate.
This isn't like past elections. There have always been people threatening to leave if X wins - but almost none of them ever did. This time the Canadian immigration website fucking crashed under load !
Why would this lot suddenly seem to apparently be SERIOUS about it ?
Because none of those past presidents were elected on a platform that actually threatened anybody's actual life and physical wellbeing, which now has happened. The Trump supporters won't NEED Trump to deport lots of Muslims, Jews and Black people to get many of them out of the country - they are running - because only an idiot wouldn't.
When the people at the new president's victory party are chanting "We hate Jews, We hate Blacks, we will take out country back" - you fucking run.
>Back when Obama came president those liberals laughed at those crazy republicans who got all panicky because the democrat party took over.
That's because all the reasons for that panic were made up. He was not a Muslim, he was not born in another country, he was not a communist, he was not a socialist, he didn't take anybody's guns away.
Where-as all the reasons for THIS panic is based on what the candidate ACTUALLY SAID - not what one particular news channel claimed he thinks, even though he doesn't say it.