However it must be noted that currently the Left is far more into promoting statist ideals than the Right (which was body-checked by the Tea Party over this issue).
Two observations about this. First, the republicans don't control the government right now. So obviously they're not going to want to increase the power of the government. Put republicans back in charge and they will rapidly increase the power of the state just like they've done every time they held power.
Second, the Tea Party alternative to statism is corporatism which is even worse than statism.
As a US voter, I voted in the 2008 election for a mainstream candidate, McCain precisely because he was the lesser of two evils (a view unfortunately confirmed by subsequent history).?
And if we were in a war with Iran right now, you would be to blame.
Personally, I'd rather third parties like the Libertarians or Greens get enough influence to matter at the national level
Then vote for them.
So in other words, the choice has been "framed".
Agreed. Break the frame.
I'm not going to cast a vote for a non-Republican unless the Republican candidate is similarly harmful
Democrat and Republican policies are both so incredibly harmful that the differences are really insignificant. The only issue that matters is breaking the hegemony. Period.
It is louder, it's just not amplified. The (RMS) average power of the sound wave is greater, without increasing the peak value. This is how they get around simple amplitude limits and why modern legislation requires more sophisticated methods of measuring loudness.
Coercing you under pain of fines or imprisonment is less coercive on the whole than coercing me under pain of death. In fact, this is exactly the reason why every civilized country has socialized health care by now.
Even in the most extreme case imaginable, if you were dying, and only what they offered could save your life, they didn't put you in that position. They didn't have to make the offer at allâ"and you don't have to accept. There is no coercion here. If you do accept, you do it of your own free will.
The fact that the 2nd person didn't cause the danger excuses them from moral responsibility for the situation. But from the first person perspective the choice between life and death is exactly the same as if there was a gun to my head.
You don't understand the difference between amplification and dynamic range compression. Dynamic range compression increases the RMS amplitude without affecting the peak amplitude, thereby sounding louder without exceeding simple amplitude limits.
Agreed, but it's far more common in illicit industries.
in countries that are trying to combat it, like the US, there are generally provisions in the law that make it so that trafficked prostitutes can't be charged with a crime if they manage to escape and contact authorities.
Which has absolutely no effect on the demand for prostitutes, and does nothing to fill that demand with through consensual means. As such, it has very little effect on human trafficking.
Consent is a legal fiction. As long as we have to work to eat, nothing is truly consensual. There's always some duress in any sort of employment. There's no reason that we should be any more concerned about people being coerced into sex work than we are about people being coerced into making hamburgers.
I'm an engineer that has performed hydraulic fracturing treatments for 30 years.
Ah, so you're an industry shill.
My resume includes about a hundred treatments without environmental contamination
All done in geologically suitable areas, I'm sure.
People act like this is a new phenomenon - we've been doing this safely since WW2.
Ah, so we may be running out of geologically suitable areas soon then?
Fracturing treatments are done on geologic formations that have held oil and gas in place for millions of years. Seriously - what are the chances of these chemicals migrating upward through a couple miles of solid rock?
Yes, they've existed for millions of years without fracturing. What are the chances of chemicals migrating after fracturing? A lot better than if they didn't fracture it.
The ONLY time "fracking" can pose a hazard to potable groundwater is when you have a mechanical failure.
Chemicals don't have "families". Each compound is a unique individual. For example, ethanol and methanol might be said to be in the same "family". They are both alcohols. Ingest the first and you'll get drunk. Ingest the latter and you'll be permanently blinded.
This isn't a step in the right direction at all. This is a way for drilling companies to escape oversight. Nothing more nothing less.
EVERY compund that goes into fracking mixtures could end up in drinking water. EVERY compound that could end up in drinking water should be tested for safety in humans.
Actually, the more educated libertarians (not the internet nut/strawmen type) do have better (or at least more developed) solutions to this problem then "take them to court in this system that is completely rigged in favor of the big companies."
I'm waiting...
Mostly involving more highly developed property rights and protections.
And how do you defend these rights except in court systems that are completely rigged in favor of the big companies? The more highly developed your system of property rights is, the more you're going to rely on court systems to interpret and enforce it.
Do all libertarians actually believe there's a cosmically enforced good/evil balance, that the little guy actually can take down the big evil groups if not for the government holding them back, and that certain metals have a universally recognized value? Or is it just the ones I've encountered?
Libertarians believe that might makes right. Those who are powerful are powerful because they have been successful and therefore deserve to wield that power. In this world view, the problem you've described disappears. There are no big evil groups to a libertarian. What you describe as evil a libertarian describes as freedom.
Make prostitution legal and well regulated. You'll decrease the demand for sex slaves. Anyone who claims to care about sex slavery and doesn't advocate the legalization of prostitution is simply not serious.
Quit blaming the people who hold a (extremely common, and IMHO, historically genetically advantageous) attraction for the clearly wrong actions of the perpetrator.
The fact that women reward these "wrong actions" with sex implies that they're not actually that wrong at all. Men are just doing what they need to to have the best chance at passing on their genes. If you're going to excuse the behavior of women because it's evolutionarily successful you also have to excuse the behavior of men that is evolutionarily successful.
Until women stop voluntarily having more sex with jerks than they do with nice people, we're going to have more jerks than nice people. The supply of jerks, like everything else, is demand driven.
I'd contrarily state that: given the premise of "what you're attracted to can't be helped" and "it's unreasonable to ask someone to not date people they're attracted to"
Contradicts this one:
a better avenue of your efforts would be toward eliminating cultural acceptance of stalker-ish behavior from guys
Dating IS social acceptance. Women date assholes because they like them, which is the definition of social acceptance. If you can't change what people are attracted to you can't change what is socially acceptable. Men get sexual favors for acting like jerks, that's a more powerful incentive than anything sort of cultural stigma you might like to impose.
Besides, your strategy has unintended negative consequences. If you were actually able to reduce the number of assholes in the world, that would just increase demand for the remaining assholes. That gives those assholes an even greater advantage over the women they date and abuse.
Really, the key is to teach your kids impulse control. Just because you like something doesn't mean it's good for you. It's entirely appropriate to ridicule someone who can't learn this lesson.
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Did you forget that the farther (what you call) 'right' you go, the less government you have?
So ultra right wing governments, like say, Saudi Arabia are the freest in the world?
However it must be noted that currently the Left is far more into promoting statist ideals than the Right (which was body-checked by the Tea Party over this issue).
Two observations about this. First, the republicans don't control the government right now. So obviously they're not going to want to increase the power of the government. Put republicans back in charge and they will rapidly increase the power of the state just like they've done every time they held power.
Second, the Tea Party alternative to statism is corporatism which is even worse than statism.
As a US voter, I voted in the 2008 election for a mainstream candidate, McCain precisely because he was the lesser of two evils (a view unfortunately confirmed by subsequent history).?
And if we were in a war with Iran right now, you would be to blame.
Personally, I'd rather third parties like the Libertarians or Greens get enough influence to matter at the national level
Then vote for them.
So in other words, the choice has been "framed".
Agreed. Break the frame.
I'm not going to cast a vote for a non-Republican unless the Republican candidate is similarly harmful
Democrat and Republican policies are both so incredibly harmful that the differences are really insignificant. The only issue that matters is breaking the hegemony. Period.
Why would she want to rip a CD? Youtube is the source of everthing good as far as she's concerned. CDs are for old fuddies like me.
This is the mindset that has caused the US to move steadily to the right for the past 30 years. The lesser evil is still evil.
There's nothing stopping you from firing up NWN or Diablo 2 on your home LAN today.
My girlfriend's daughter does. She's 10. She wouldn't know what to do if I bought her a CD. It complicates gift giving.
Unfortunately, this is true. Evil will always triumph because good is dumb.
It is louder, it's just not amplified. The (RMS) average power of the sound wave is greater, without increasing the peak value. This is how they get around simple amplitude limits and why modern legislation requires more sophisticated methods of measuring loudness.
Coercing you under pain of fines or imprisonment is less coercive on the whole than coercing me under pain of death. In fact, this is exactly the reason why every civilized country has socialized health care by now.
Guess 7 isn't enough.
Even in the most extreme case imaginable, if you were dying, and only what they offered could save your life, they didn't put you in that position. They didn't have to make the offer at allâ"and you don't have to accept. There is no coercion here. If you do accept, you do it of your own free will.
The fact that the 2nd person didn't cause the danger excuses them from moral responsibility for the situation. But from the first person perspective the choice between life and death is exactly the same as if there was a gun to my head.
You don't understand the difference between amplification and dynamic range compression. Dynamic range compression increases the RMS amplitude without affecting the peak amplitude, thereby sounding louder without exceeding simple amplitude limits.
Habitual pirates buy spend more on media than those who don't pirate AND they are happier with their purchases. Isn't this a good thing?
Not all human trafficking is about sexual slavery
Agreed, but it's far more common in illicit industries.
in countries that are trying to combat it, like the US, there are generally provisions in the law that make it so that trafficked prostitutes can't be charged with a crime if they manage to escape and contact authorities.
Which has absolutely no effect on the demand for prostitutes, and does nothing to fill that demand with through consensual means. As such, it has very little effect on human trafficking.
Being harassed by an individual is still better than being persecuted by your government.
Consent is a legal fiction. As long as we have to work to eat, nothing is truly consensual. There's always some duress in any sort of employment. There's no reason that we should be any more concerned about people being coerced into sex work than we are about people being coerced into making hamburgers.
Prostitution is evil
[Citation needed]
To those of us unburdened by bronze age concepts of sexual morality, it looks like just another job.
I'm an engineer that has performed hydraulic fracturing treatments for 30 years.
Ah, so you're an industry shill.
My resume includes about a hundred treatments without environmental contamination
All done in geologically suitable areas, I'm sure.
People act like this is a new phenomenon - we've been doing this safely since WW2.
Ah, so we may be running out of geologically suitable areas soon then?
Fracturing treatments are done on geologic formations that have held oil and gas in place for millions of years. Seriously - what are the chances of these chemicals migrating upward through a couple miles of solid rock?
Yes, they've existed for millions of years without fracturing. What are the chances of chemicals migrating after fracturing? A lot better than if they didn't fracture it.
The ONLY time "fracking" can pose a hazard to potable groundwater is when you have a mechanical failure.
Prove it.
Chemicals don't have "families". Each compound is a unique individual. For example, ethanol and methanol might be said to be in the same "family". They are both alcohols. Ingest the first and you'll get drunk. Ingest the latter and you'll be permanently blinded.
This isn't a step in the right direction at all. This is a way for drilling companies to escape oversight. Nothing more nothing less.
EVERY compund that goes into fracking mixtures could end up in drinking water. EVERY compound that could end up in drinking water should be tested for safety in humans.
Actually, the more educated libertarians (not the internet nut/strawmen type) do have better (or at least more developed) solutions to this problem then "take them to court in this system that is completely rigged in favor of the big companies."
I'm waiting...
Mostly involving more highly developed property rights and protections.
And how do you defend these rights except in court systems that are completely rigged in favor of the big companies? The more highly developed your system of property rights is, the more you're going to rely on court systems to interpret and enforce it.
it doesn't really work...
The most factual statement in your entire post.
Do all libertarians actually believe there's a cosmically enforced good/evil balance, that the little guy actually can take down the big evil groups if not for the government holding them back, and that certain metals have a universally recognized value? Or is it just the ones I've encountered?
Libertarians believe that might makes right. Those who are powerful are powerful because they have been successful and therefore deserve to wield that power. In this world view, the problem you've described disappears. There are no big evil groups to a libertarian. What you describe as evil a libertarian describes as freedom.
Make prostitution legal and well regulated. You'll decrease the demand for sex slaves. Anyone who claims to care about sex slavery and doesn't advocate the legalization of prostitution is simply not serious.
Quit blaming the people who hold a (extremely common, and IMHO, historically genetically advantageous) attraction for the clearly wrong actions of the perpetrator.
The fact that women reward these "wrong actions" with sex implies that they're not actually that wrong at all. Men are just doing what they need to to have the best chance at passing on their genes. If you're going to excuse the behavior of women because it's evolutionarily successful you also have to excuse the behavior of men that is evolutionarily successful.
Until women stop voluntarily having more sex with jerks than they do with nice people, we're going to have more jerks than nice people. The supply of jerks, like everything else, is demand driven.
This statement:
I'd contrarily state that: given the premise of "what you're attracted to can't be helped" and "it's unreasonable to ask someone to not date people they're attracted to"
Contradicts this one:
a better avenue of your efforts would be toward eliminating cultural acceptance of stalker-ish behavior from guys
Dating IS social acceptance. Women date assholes because they like them, which is the definition of social acceptance. If you can't change what people are attracted to you can't change what is socially acceptable. Men get sexual favors for acting like jerks, that's a more powerful incentive than anything sort of cultural stigma you might like to impose.
Besides, your strategy has unintended negative consequences. If you were actually able to reduce the number of assholes in the world, that would just increase demand for the remaining assholes. That gives those assholes an even greater advantage over the women they date and abuse.
Really, the key is to teach your kids impulse control. Just because you like something doesn't mean it's good for you. It's entirely appropriate to ridicule someone who can't learn this lesson.