Stop trying to spin this story to your political ends. The list you give is halfway through the article, as an example of people who also use the service. It comes after a much longer list of government agencies that are using the services.
You deliberately lied, hoping that people would believe your summary and not read the story, didn't you? You hate it when "your team" looks bad, don't you? This isn't about partisan politics. Would you have the same dismissive reaction if it were a Democrat in office right now? Your "Arr, we hate bush, arr," comment gives your game away. No one is saying they hate Bush. We hate what the government is doing, and we'd hate it if it were a Democrat doing it.
Now I wonder...is there a way to transfer this little thread over to the Politics section?
Make a journal entry. That's what I do when a discussion gets interesting but is a little off topic.
I also think it is very dangerous to say that a government is "supposed to do whatever those that give the government power want it to do". While that is a very attractive philosophy in our modern society, I believe that simply causes governments to lose their ability to effectively arbitrate disputes: being fickle tends to reduce credibility.
I think it is dangerous to arbitrarily declare what government's purpose is above that set by the governed. That way lies tyranny, even if the road there looks paved in gold. For instance, suppose I do not believe government should be involved in arbitration. Perhaps I believe the free market can best provide that service. Perhaps my neighbors all feel the same way, but as we are all cranky iconoclasts, we also think healthcare should be socialized. Free market arbitration and socialized medicine, that's what my neighbors and I want. Who are you to force your form of government on us?
Oh, and we don't believe in property rights, so when you come to us trying to impose your arbitration and keep us off your land, we ask to see the contract we signed saying we would do stay off. Funny, I don't remember signing that, and as I don't believe in property, who are you to force your beliefs on me?
Where do me and my socialized medicine, free market arbitration, no-property-having neighbors fit into your little scheme? And how are you going to get us to go along with it, use force? Yes, it's a contrived example, but I use it to point out the folly of deciding for others what government should mean.
Are the people free to fund things, through taxes paid to government, that they can't get through the free market? And can we also decide, collectively, that if you want your protection for your government sponsored monopoly on use of your property, you have to help pay for things that the community deems important? Because that would be a really cool system, if someone could set up something like that.
I should have made it more clear that I agree with your basic premise, and that I was just trying to point out that board members are not always owners. It should also be noted that the duties of a board member, even the chairman, are quite a bit fewer than the duties of a CEO. Boards are like back seat drivers, telling the CEO where to go, when he's screwed up, and perhaps pointing out that semi he somehow didn't see and almost ran into. Not nearly as hard as actually driving, and a lot more fun.
Sadly, this has become the common useage. The phrase originally refered to a fallacy of deductive reasoning very similar to a circular argument but occuring within one syllogism. Basically, the proposition is used to prove itself. Example of begging the question: Paul never lies when he speaks. Paul speaks. Therefore, Paul is telling the truth. It is not a logical fallacy, as the logic is correct. It is classified as a material fallacy.
Now it also means raising the question, because meaning follows useage in language, and that is the common useage. People have faught unsuccessfully against that useage for decades, anyone who keeps fighting is like that Japanese soldier who never realized the war was over and kept fighting for thirty years. Yes, we get it, you know logic. Now give it a rest.
Here I was all set to put on my tinfoil hat and rant about Bush and you came along and ruined it by predicting what I would do in advance. That's pretty clever, did you think up that tactic all by yourself? You see what he did everybody? He claimed we would all rant about Bush, and implied that anyone who does is akin to someone with a mental illness who wears tinfoil on his head to keep out the evil mind rays. That is so clever, that is just so, so fresh, how did you come up with that? Wow, just... wow. I bow down before your superior debating skills.
The way things used to be done was that the shareholders elected the board, not necessarily choosing other shareholders. The board then appointesd the President/CEO. Nowadays, most investment is done through institutions who simply take their money elsewhere if the don't like the board, rather than electing a different board. Thus there is little oversight, and in fact, there are many times where the board is appointed by the President/CEO rather than the other way around. This new style of corporate governance is partially to blame for all the recent accounting scandals.
Glad you liked it. I'm particularly proud of the way I build towards complete frothing lunacy at the end, it adds a bit of dramatic tension to the piece.;) A good troll tweaks the noses of both sides, don't you think? The conservative response is funny, if predictable, but the funnier part is imagining all the liberals reading along uncritically, nodding their heads.
Most people don't need to study religion to understand good and evil. Religions work by mixing a few nuggets of common sense wisdom in with heaping piles of utter bullshit. People believe in the religion because the nuggets agree with what they already believe, and so they try to accept the bullshit, and in so doing, remove from themselves the capacity for logical thought, thus ensuring that they stay converted.
Religion is just brainwashing. The making people better part is just a tactic. People who would be moved by religion to do right don't need it, they would do right anyway. People don't need to be made betetr, they are perfectly capable of improving themselves. If people were really so bad, why would you ever trust them to make YOU better?
Think of it in terms of opportunity cost. Religion is like an investment. People invest in religion and the good parts are like profit. You look at the profit and say, look, religion does good. But that is assuming that nothing else could do better. If you invested money and got a 1% return, would you say that was a good investment? No? But you got something out of it. People get something out of religion, sure, but it isn't worth the cost.
Religion isn't a theory because it isn't falsifiable, it makes no testable predictions. It can't be disproven, but that doesn't mean it has value. You can't disprove the flying spaghetti monster or the invisible pink unicorn, either. Are those useful theories?
What you really need to make a rig like that shine is a 300 baud accoustic coupled modem. Running over tin cans and string. I bet it could work. Nothing could be more old-skool than surfing the web on a TRS-80 with a 300 baud accoustic coupled modem running TCP/IP over a cans-and-string network! Dude, that would be such a babe magnet.
Chill out, it's just a joke. Try taking that stick out of your butt, that'll help. I was making fun of liberals my man! Dude predicted trolls, so I gave him one. Can't be a proper troll without being over the top. I swear, conservatives have no sense of humor.
Oh come on, have a laugh. It's on me. Someone predicted anti GWB trolls, so I supplied 'em. Wouldn't be funny if I were actually critiquing the man, I had to use troll tactics. You really want me to critique GWB in a non-troll fashion? Gah, go read an editorial page. Listen to Air America. That shit is depressing. No, I'd rather have a laugh and go wildly over the top with it.
You conservatives can dish it out but you can't take it. Admit it, you have a little chuckle at the verbal diarrhea spewing out of the mouths of people like Anne Coulter, but let some poor liberal say something that's not 100% PC and you go all righteously indignant.
Ah, good old C.S. That he would call himself a Christian almost redeems Christianity in my eyes;) Any spiritual seeker of any stripe would do well to read "The Screwtape Letters" for a list of pitfalls that might trip up anyone on a spiritual path, not just Christians.
I do not think humans are by nature completely selfish, rather we have two sides, either of which can be brought out by circumstance. Some would argue that on the whole religion brings out the good, while others would say the opposite. I say look at the opportunity cost of embracing religion. Pascal did not calculate the true odds in his famous wager, for he discounted the cost of giving up rationality which I would argue one simply has to do in order to believe in a God who is at once 1.) all loving, 2.) all powerful, and 3.) all knowing. Those hypothesis do not match observable reality.
Intelligent and rational followers of a religion should never be blind to the criticisms that others place upon their chosen path. The lack of an ability to accept criticsim is one of the great problems with religions that claim to derive from some higher authority: once you admit that you got even one thing wrong, your whole basis for belief comes into question.
Simply claiming that human failings occur in all spheres of human endeavor misses the special position that religion claims for itself above other spheres. Religion, if it is worth anything at all, should encourage better than average behavior, or what is the point?
Thank you, thank you very much. To have a GWB supporter call me an idiot is a great compliment indead. It need not be said as you were warned in the very title, but YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Well, yes. I was just nit-picking, really. This is slashdot, after all, and we are all geeks, not known for our hygiene. Someone has to pick the nits, or we'd be covered in them.;)
George Bush is a semi-sapient simpering simian simpleton. He is a retarded rich fuck who snorted cocaine and drove drunk. He ran every business he ever touched into the ground. He's a complete puppet for the monied interests that control our country. He thinks God talks directly to him. He probably knew about 9/11 beforeheand, which is why he wasn't surprised when it happened. Hell, he wanted it to happen so he could take away civil liberties and give huge no-bid contracts to all his cronies. George Bush is a traitor, and should be put up against the wall and shot, not just impeached. Anyone who voted for George Bush should be sterilized. George Bush hoodwinked real conservatives. He isn't conservative, he's a fucking bandit, a pirate out to loot and pillage this great country and disappear before anyone figures out we've been robbed.
The GP says "This once again shows the stifling effect that religion can have on science." and you say, "I kept reading through the posts until I found it, and I knew I would -- the god-hater's words on the matter." So hating religion means hating God in your book? Guess what, religion is a work of man. If there is a God, one should be able to know Him directly without going through multiple layers of imperfect human understanding. God may be real, and might even be worthy of worship, but religion is a sick scam perpetuated by power hungry con artists. It mixes little nuggets of common sense wisdom in with great heaping piles of utter bullshit. The nuggets draw you in, and the mental gymnastics you have to go through to accept the steaming piles as truth ensure that you will never leave. All so that a certain class of people never have to work an honest day in their lives, and yet get ultimate power over others.
It is perfectly possible to love God and hate religion.
Survival of the fittest applies exactly the same to humanity as it does to other animals. There is no absolute, external, objective measure of fitness. There is only fitness for a given environmental niche. The environment is always changing, and so what constitutes fitness is always changing. And we aren't the first creatures to radically alter our environment. Earth's original atmosphere had no free oxygen. Then anaerobic critters came along and started farting out oxygen. Which killed them, but gave us the atmosphere and ecosystem we have today. Those critters were fit for their environment, through their actions they changed their environment, and they were unfit for their new environment. And so it goes...
I'm marking you as a friend because I love intelligent discourse. Dialectic, the interplay of ideas, to me this is the most beautiful thing about being human.
Did you read the Mark Twain essay? It's very short, and quite profound, well worth the read even if you don't agree with him in the end. I am an idealist at heart, and I wouldn't wear my hair shirt of supposing actions are inherently selfish unless I found real explanatory value in it. The way I see it, the very fact that unselfish acts arise from selfish motivations is beautiful. It shows that what we consider to be good is so for a reason, that what we conventionally see as good is in fact smarter than evil, to use two terms that often just muddy the waters.
As for the Bari case, there is no proof of anything, except in so far as I have met her and do not believe she was capable of bombing anything.
I am interested in hearing what your experiences with the paranormal are, for I too have had experiences that lead to to believe, well, at the very least that there is certainly the possibility of an emergent intelligence in the universe. Not a creator God, I don't think, but a, shall we say, created God. And it's waking up. I am a cynic of the old school, though, which means I don't believe or disbelieve things. I entertain ideas, if you catch my drift.
You have a good point about selfishness. For example, capitalism assumes selfishness, and so in fact encourages it. In my way of looking at things, 99% of people don't need to be taught the right thing to do, they just need to not be taught the wrong thing. Therein lies the conundrum of all moral and ethical systems: in accounting for the 1% who do need to be motivated towards good, we must not screw up the other 99%! Most systems fail to some extent in this regard. Buddhism is a good example of a system that accepts slower progress in order to, as Hippocrates said, "First, do no harm."
As far as property goes, I agree with your definition, and add a clarification. We can look at the various types of property and determine how much State intervention is necessary to uphold their ownership. Intellectual property requires a great deal of state intervention. Real property requires slightly less, but still quite a bit. Personal property requires very little State intervention to uphold. Early Anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote a book called "Property is Theft," but in it he also said, "Property [is] a triumph of Liberty. For it is born of Liberty... Property is the only power that can act as a counterweight to the State, because it shows no reverence for princes, rebels against society and is, in short, anarchist." So no, it is not entirely a poisonous concept.
I think you might be interested to read about The Mondragón Cooperative Corporation, a cooperative society of (mostly) Basques in Spain. They have cooperative housing, schools, business services, everything. They have a (currently) 50:1 cap on income ratio, meaning the highest income can not be more than 50 times the least income in their society. They only fairly recently raised this from 10:1. To me, this is a fair cap on selfishness.
I would definitely call you a liberal anarchist. You say, "My view is that an intelligent analysis of social mechanisms leads to a form of liberalism, as minorities of all kinds are protected, and evolutionary mechanisms are recognised, and are encouraged, rather than being oppressed." Well this is what I'm on about when I say that enlightened self interest leads to good. A truely intelligent moral philosophy need not appeal to some vague ideal of good, it is demonstrably smarter for the individual and need not rely on any "Thou Shalt's."
He wants his "America, love it or leave it" jingoism back. You know who should get the fuck out of MY country? Idiots like you who don't know the value of freedom. Take your fascist authoritarianism elsewhere, buddy, this is the Land of the Free and I won't have you or anyone else trying to turn it into something else.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop trying to spin this story to your political ends. The list you give is halfway through the article, as an example of people who also use the service. It comes after a much longer list of government agencies that are using the services.
You deliberately lied, hoping that people would believe your summary and not read the story, didn't you? You hate it when "your team" looks bad, don't you? This isn't about partisan politics. Would you have the same dismissive reaction if it were a Democrat in office right now? Your "Arr, we hate bush, arr," comment gives your game away. No one is saying they hate Bush. We hate what the government is doing, and we'd hate it if it were a Democrat doing it.
Now I wonder...is there a way to transfer this little thread over to the Politics section?
Make a journal entry. That's what I do when a discussion gets interesting but is a little off topic.
I also think it is very dangerous to say that a government is "supposed to do whatever those that give the government power want it to do". While that is a very attractive philosophy in our modern society, I believe that simply causes governments to lose their ability to effectively arbitrate disputes: being fickle tends to reduce credibility.
I think it is dangerous to arbitrarily declare what government's purpose is above that set by the governed. That way lies tyranny, even if the road there looks paved in gold. For instance, suppose I do not believe government should be involved in arbitration. Perhaps I believe the free market can best provide that service. Perhaps my neighbors all feel the same way, but as we are all cranky iconoclasts, we also think healthcare should be socialized. Free market arbitration and socialized medicine, that's what my neighbors and I want. Who are you to force your form of government on us?
Oh, and we don't believe in property rights, so when you come to us trying to impose your arbitration and keep us off your land, we ask to see the contract we signed saying we would do stay off. Funny, I don't remember signing that, and as I don't believe in property, who are you to force your beliefs on me?
Where do me and my socialized medicine, free market arbitration, no-property-having neighbors fit into your little scheme? And how are you going to get us to go along with it, use force? Yes, it's a contrived example, but I use it to point out the folly of deciding for others what government should mean.
Are the people free to fund things, through taxes paid to government, that they can't get through the free market? And can we also decide, collectively, that if you want your protection for your government sponsored monopoly on use of your property, you have to help pay for things that the community deems important? Because that would be a really cool system, if someone could set up something like that.
Where's the "+1, Dirty" mod when you need it?
You forgot the meta posts listing all the types of posts you are likely to see in this story.
I should have made it more clear that I agree with your basic premise, and that I was just trying to point out that board members are not always owners. It should also be noted that the duties of a board member, even the chairman, are quite a bit fewer than the duties of a CEO. Boards are like back seat drivers, telling the CEO where to go, when he's screwed up, and perhaps pointing out that semi he somehow didn't see and almost ran into. Not nearly as hard as actually driving, and a lot more fun.
Sadly, this has become the common useage. The phrase originally refered to a fallacy of deductive reasoning very similar to a circular argument but occuring within one syllogism. Basically, the proposition is used to prove itself. Example of begging the question: Paul never lies when he speaks. Paul speaks. Therefore, Paul is telling the truth. It is not a logical fallacy, as the logic is correct. It is classified as a material fallacy.
Now it also means raising the question, because meaning follows useage in language, and that is the common useage. People have faught unsuccessfully against that useage for decades, anyone who keeps fighting is like that Japanese soldier who never realized the war was over and kept fighting for thirty years. Yes, we get it, you know logic. Now give it a rest.
Here I was all set to put on my tinfoil hat and rant about Bush and you came along and ruined it by predicting what I would do in advance. That's pretty clever, did you think up that tactic all by yourself? You see what he did everybody? He claimed we would all rant about Bush, and implied that anyone who does is akin to someone with a mental illness who wears tinfoil on his head to keep out the evil mind rays. That is so clever, that is just so, so fresh, how did you come up with that? Wow, just... wow. I bow down before your superior debating skills.
You, sir, are a master debater.
The way things used to be done was that the shareholders elected the board, not necessarily choosing other shareholders. The board then appointesd the President/CEO. Nowadays, most investment is done through institutions who simply take their money elsewhere if the don't like the board, rather than electing a different board. Thus there is little oversight, and in fact, there are many times where the board is appointed by the President/CEO rather than the other way around. This new style of corporate governance is partially to blame for all the recent accounting scandals.
Glad you liked it. I'm particularly proud of the way I build towards complete frothing lunacy at the end, it adds a bit of dramatic tension to the piece. ;) A good troll tweaks the noses of both sides, don't you think? The conservative response is funny, if predictable, but the funnier part is imagining all the liberals reading along uncritically, nodding their heads.
Most people don't need to study religion to understand good and evil. Religions work by mixing a few nuggets of common sense wisdom in with heaping piles of utter bullshit. People believe in the religion because the nuggets agree with what they already believe, and so they try to accept the bullshit, and in so doing, remove from themselves the capacity for logical thought, thus ensuring that they stay converted.
Religion is just brainwashing. The making people better part is just a tactic. People who would be moved by religion to do right don't need it, they would do right anyway. People don't need to be made betetr, they are perfectly capable of improving themselves. If people were really so bad, why would you ever trust them to make YOU better?
Think of it in terms of opportunity cost. Religion is like an investment. People invest in religion and the good parts are like profit. You look at the profit and say, look, religion does good. But that is assuming that nothing else could do better. If you invested money and got a 1% return, would you say that was a good investment? No? But you got something out of it. People get something out of religion, sure, but it isn't worth the cost.
Religion isn't a theory because it isn't falsifiable, it makes no testable predictions. It can't be disproven, but that doesn't mean it has value. You can't disprove the flying spaghetti monster or the invisible pink unicorn, either. Are those useful theories?
What you really need to make a rig like that shine is a 300 baud accoustic coupled modem. Running over tin cans and string. I bet it could work. Nothing could be more old-skool than surfing the web on a TRS-80 with a 300 baud accoustic coupled modem running TCP/IP over a cans-and-string network! Dude, that would be such a babe magnet.
Chill out, it's just a joke. Try taking that stick out of your butt, that'll help. I was making fun of liberals my man! Dude predicted trolls, so I gave him one. Can't be a proper troll without being over the top. I swear, conservatives have no sense of humor.
It's been done.
Slashdirted. There, fixed that for you.
And some dirt! Never underestimate the value of dirt!
Oh come on, have a laugh. It's on me. Someone predicted anti GWB trolls, so I supplied 'em. Wouldn't be funny if I were actually critiquing the man, I had to use troll tactics. You really want me to critique GWB in a non-troll fashion? Gah, go read an editorial page. Listen to Air America. That shit is depressing. No, I'd rather have a laugh and go wildly over the top with it.
You conservatives can dish it out but you can't take it. Admit it, you have a little chuckle at the verbal diarrhea spewing out of the mouths of people like Anne Coulter, but let some poor liberal say something that's not 100% PC and you go all righteously indignant.
Ah, good old C.S. That he would call himself a Christian almost redeems Christianity in my eyes ;) Any spiritual seeker of any stripe would do well to read "The Screwtape Letters" for a list of pitfalls that might trip up anyone on a spiritual path, not just Christians.
I do not think humans are by nature completely selfish, rather we have two sides, either of which can be brought out by circumstance. Some would argue that on the whole religion brings out the good, while others would say the opposite. I say look at the opportunity cost of embracing religion. Pascal did not calculate the true odds in his famous wager, for he discounted the cost of giving up rationality which I would argue one simply has to do in order to believe in a God who is at once 1.) all loving, 2.) all powerful, and 3.) all knowing. Those hypothesis do not match observable reality.
Intelligent and rational followers of a religion should never be blind to the criticisms that others place upon their chosen path. The lack of an ability to accept criticsim is one of the great problems with religions that claim to derive from some higher authority: once you admit that you got even one thing wrong, your whole basis for belief comes into question.
Simply claiming that human failings occur in all spheres of human endeavor misses the special position that religion claims for itself above other spheres. Religion, if it is worth anything at all, should encourage better than average behavior, or what is the point?
Thank you, thank you very much. To have a GWB supporter call me an idiot is a great compliment indead. It need not be said as you were warned in the very title, but YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Well, yes. I was just nit-picking, really. This is slashdot, after all, and we are all geeks, not known for our hygiene. Someone has to pick the nits, or we'd be covered in them. ;)
George Bush is a semi-sapient simpering simian simpleton. He is a retarded rich fuck who snorted cocaine and drove drunk. He ran every business he ever touched into the ground. He's a complete puppet for the monied interests that control our country. He thinks God talks directly to him. He probably knew about 9/11 beforeheand, which is why he wasn't surprised when it happened. Hell, he wanted it to happen so he could take away civil liberties and give huge no-bid contracts to all his cronies. George Bush is a traitor, and should be put up against the wall and shot, not just impeached. Anyone who voted for George Bush should be sterilized. George Bush hoodwinked real conservatives. He isn't conservative, he's a fucking bandit, a pirate out to loot and pillage this great country and disappear before anyone figures out we've been robbed.
How's that?
The GP says "This once again shows the stifling effect that religion can have on science." and you say, "I kept reading through the posts until I found it, and I knew I would -- the god-hater's words on the matter." So hating religion means hating God in your book? Guess what, religion is a work of man. If there is a God, one should be able to know Him directly without going through multiple layers of imperfect human understanding. God may be real, and might even be worthy of worship, but religion is a sick scam perpetuated by power hungry con artists. It mixes little nuggets of common sense wisdom in with great heaping piles of utter bullshit. The nuggets draw you in, and the mental gymnastics you have to go through to accept the steaming piles as truth ensure that you will never leave. All so that a certain class of people never have to work an honest day in their lives, and yet get ultimate power over others.
It is perfectly possible to love God and hate religion.
Survival of the fittest applies exactly the same to humanity as it does to other animals. There is no absolute, external, objective measure of fitness. There is only fitness for a given environmental niche. The environment is always changing, and so what constitutes fitness is always changing. And we aren't the first creatures to radically alter our environment. Earth's original atmosphere had no free oxygen. Then anaerobic critters came along and started farting out oxygen. Which killed them, but gave us the atmosphere and ecosystem we have today. Those critters were fit for their environment, through their actions they changed their environment, and they were unfit for their new environment. And so it goes...
I'm marking you as a friend because I love intelligent discourse. Dialectic, the interplay of ideas, to me this is the most beautiful thing about being human.
... Property is the only power that can act as a counterweight to the State, because it shows no reverence for princes, rebels against society and is, in short, anarchist." So no, it is not entirely a poisonous concept.
Did you read the Mark Twain essay? It's very short, and quite profound, well worth the read even if you don't agree with him in the end. I am an idealist at heart, and I wouldn't wear my hair shirt of supposing actions are inherently selfish unless I found real explanatory value in it. The way I see it, the very fact that unselfish acts arise from selfish motivations is beautiful. It shows that what we consider to be good is so for a reason, that what we conventionally see as good is in fact smarter than evil, to use two terms that often just muddy the waters.
As for the Bari case, there is no proof of anything, except in so far as I have met her and do not believe she was capable of bombing anything.
I am interested in hearing what your experiences with the paranormal are, for I too have had experiences that lead to to believe, well, at the very least that there is certainly the possibility of an emergent intelligence in the universe. Not a creator God, I don't think, but a, shall we say, created God. And it's waking up. I am a cynic of the old school, though, which means I don't believe or disbelieve things. I entertain ideas, if you catch my drift.
You have a good point about selfishness. For example, capitalism assumes selfishness, and so in fact encourages it. In my way of looking at things, 99% of people don't need to be taught the right thing to do, they just need to not be taught the wrong thing. Therein lies the conundrum of all moral and ethical systems: in accounting for the 1% who do need to be motivated towards good, we must not screw up the other 99%! Most systems fail to some extent in this regard. Buddhism is a good example of a system that accepts slower progress in order to, as Hippocrates said, "First, do no harm."
As far as property goes, I agree with your definition, and add a clarification. We can look at the various types of property and determine how much State intervention is necessary to uphold their ownership. Intellectual property requires a great deal of state intervention. Real property requires slightly less, but still quite a bit. Personal property requires very little State intervention to uphold. Early Anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote a book called "Property is Theft," but in it he also said, "Property [is] a triumph of Liberty. For it is born of Liberty
I think you might be interested to read about The Mondragón Cooperative Corporation, a cooperative society of (mostly) Basques in Spain. They have cooperative housing, schools, business services, everything. They have a (currently) 50:1 cap on income ratio, meaning the highest income can not be more than 50 times the least income in their society. They only fairly recently raised this from 10:1. To me, this is a fair cap on selfishness.
I would definitely call you a liberal anarchist. You say, "My view is that an intelligent analysis of social mechanisms leads to a form of liberalism, as minorities of all kinds are protected, and evolutionary mechanisms are recognised, and are encouraged, rather than being oppressed." Well this is what I'm on about when I say that enlightened self interest leads to good. A truely intelligent moral philosophy need not appeal to some vague ideal of good, it is demonstrably smarter for the individual and need not rely on any "Thou Shalt's."
He wants his "America, love it or leave it" jingoism back. You know who should get the fuck out of MY country? Idiots like you who don't know the value of freedom. Take your fascist authoritarianism elsewhere, buddy, this is the Land of the Free and I won't have you or anyone else trying to turn it into something else.