If there is no institutional power structure in place to confiscate wealth and coerce behavior, it's extremely difficult to fight a large scale war, engage in mass murder or even mass incarceration.
It's cute that you believe that. You should go tell ISIS that it doesn't have the power to wage war, murder, enslave, or imprison people since it's not a legitimate government. Then maybe you could travel through some African nations and tell the vigilante gangs there that orchestrated ethnic cleansing campaigns that they really didn't kill anyone at all, because they weren't the government and thus incapable of mass murder.
Can you imagine a war of aggression in which all of the soldiers were unpaid volunteers furnishing their own weapons and equipment?
Yes. I take it you've never heard of militias?
How far would they be willing to travel and how long would they be willing to be away from their homes?
That depends on what they expect to get from their expedition.
Without a government, you wouldn't get people to travel from North America to Iraq or Vietnam to fight a war. Most people would rather maintain a peaceful existence and fight only in self defense.
And yet there are people who are travelling to Syria to fight without any support or direction from their home government. In Africa (and other places), groups which are not the government frequently kidnap young boys are force them to serve as soldiers and they go where ever their captors send them.
Libertarianism does not mean "no rules", it just means "no ruleRs".
Since he who makes the rules, is by definition, the ruler, "no rulers" means "no rules". The problem is as soon as anyone or any group can enforce a set of rules, they become the government. The only way to have no rulers is to have no rules. And, of course, "no rules" is a situation that never lasts longer than the first person who survives being wronged because as soon as that happens, then they start with the "there aughta be rules against that" and then you either get a government or a lot of dead people and then a government.
Not everything that libertarians say is wrong, but their philosophies work about as well as communism does. Which is to say they have never once worked at any reasonable scale in the entire history of humanity.
Libertarians should go to this iceberg and plant a flag on it as their own country! Sure it'll melt eventually, but they would've turned the place into a corpse-strewn hellscape by then anyhow.
And isn't that really the Libertarian dream? A corpse-strewn hellscape to call their own, with no rules and complete freedom for every survivor!
In true capitalism, we celebrate when companies fail because they get replaced by a greater number of stronger companies.
That's not actually true. A company will be replaced if the demand still exists, but there is no requirement that the company be replaced by more companies or stronger companies. And "a greater number of stronger companies" is a highly unlikely scenario. In fact, in a competitive market, the company that failed is most likely to be replaced by its already existing competitors. So it will most likely not be replaced by any new companies. Although, it's competitors will each become stronger because of the reduced competition. Note, this is generally bad for the customers of those corporations because competition has been reduced and each player in the field now has an increased ability to raise prices. Finally with fewer competitors, collusion is now both easier and more profitable. Of course, the destruction of the remaining competitors is also more enticing so that full power over the marketplace can be established, and then the market's customers will really pay.
My point is that you don't seem to understand Capitalism very well. Maybe you should be a cheerleader for something you do understand?
But in the end, only leftism, collectivism, socialism, communism hurt and kill people.
And this is why my Father in Law loves to tell stories about his father's lumber mill, where it was cheaper to nail severed thumbs to a sign telling the employees to be careful than to buy safety guards for the buzz saws... It was all communism's fault. Damn you Florida and your secret communist past!
Really? Do you also think the argument that if 1 pill in the bottle will make you feel better, then surely taking the whole bottle of Oxycodone right now must be great?
Most rational people recognize there are many things, where either too much or too little can very bad. Even simple "good" things like oxygen and water have levels where too much is harmful or even fatal.
It would be great if the Republicans in Congress (and elsewhere) started actually supporting measures to break up the monopolistic BS, and arrange a system where companies would actually compete on merits and service and cost and such. If I had a lot of choices, then it wouldn't matter so much if Comcast or Verizon or whomever decided to engage in shenanigans with network traffic. But like the vast majority of Americans, I don't.
The problem is that running cables to houses seems like a natural monopoly. Once you have one cable for an internet connection, you don't actually need a second one (unless it's somehow better than the first one). The only way that I can see to increase competition is to make the actual internet infrastructure a public utility managed by either the local government, not for profit organization, or maybe a corporation that is explicitly prevented from being owned by any service provider(s). However, these steps seem far more intrusive than Title II classification to impose network neutrality...
Also the top-scoring group in: suicide rate, work-related deadly accidents, homelessness , incarceration rates.
Those claims seem pretty sketchy:
The white suicide rate is pretty close to the American Indian rate, and which rate is higher depends on which year you pick for comparison.
Work-related deadly accidents do happen to men far more often than women (it's almost 10x the rate), and to whites by a small, but still significant, margin (15%) compared to black workers based on population demographics.
In total, whites may represent slightly more homeless people than blacks in some years, but since black Americans are about 13% of the population compared to white Americans at 79%, the 40% of homeless people who are black are grossly over-represented in homelessness when compared to the 41% of homeless people who are white.
Similar to homelessness rates, whites might make up the largest block of the prison population by total for some specific years, however, the incarceration rate for black men is much higher than that for white men, so much so that the total number of black inmates is larger than the total number of white inmates for some years.
So, only one of your claims is marginally true, and your argument as a whole is grossly inaccurate.
Let's put "White male owned business" on a company website and see how much prestige it will gain. Or let's have a "Men in tech" conference, or a "White lives matter" demonstration or a "whitecupid.com" dating site, and then we can revisit your statement.
Could you please stop making white men look bad? "White male owned business" is pretty much every business unless explicitly noted otherwise, "Men in Tech" conferences are simply "Tech" conferences, "White Lives Matter" doesn't need to happen because the police don't shoot white people just because their skin is white, and "whitecupid.com" goes by the snappier name of "cupid.com". Acting like a blithering idiot who can't see the world in front of him isn't helping anyone, least of all yourself.
No, I believe that there are people in here who think that they are somehow "winning" if they attack something they don't believe in, and have a religion-like fervor that any disagreement must be crushed and terminated with extreme prejudice.
Of course you do. It's much easier to attribute fault to other than ourselves.
If you are seeing a "trolling asshole", consider that you are almost certainly looking in the mirror, and seeing your reflection in all of it's glory.
Yawn. Which one of us is rubber and which one of us is glue?
Because if you are doing your life's work by ruthlessly standing in full dudgeon, angry beyond rationality over metric versus English, so righteous in your indignation they you find some fellow who is simply posting something you disagree with, yet you are fully justified in calling him a "trolling asshole", well then thank your deity for your sheltered and relatively problem free life.
See? This is what I'm talking about. I have no righteous indignation because I don't really care what you think of the metric system. However, you insist on portraying me as a rabid defender of the metric system even while I'm telling you that maybe people hate you more than your opinions on the metric system. Personally, I think you're either being deliberately rude and obnoxious, in which case the result should be no surprise, or you have no idea how to communicate effectively.
I hate to break it to you, but your sample size is completely meaningless, regardless if you get a +5 on slashdot or not.
I hate to break it to you, but you're an idiot who doesn't understand statistics and can't follow a conversation.
Specifically, the sample size doesn't matter when you're disproving a claim that something happened in the 1960s that didn't actually happen in the 1960s.
The cheaper stuff is often made with inferior quality ingredients and then loaded with more salt, sugar and fat to "improve" the taste. It can be tastier and less healthy for you. Taste and price are not the only criteria to consider when picking what to eat. For example, when reading the label on a store brand pack of chicken fingers, I found they contained 34g of sugar per serving, which was more than the ice cream desert in the next freezer.
From a quick glance at the show you linked, it looks like your summary of the show might be lacking, though, it's called "Eat well for less" and it may have a focus on finding good, inexpensive, and healthy food.
The movie industry shouldn't have to do anything to control the distribution of their own product.
Clearly, we should never expect corporation to treat their customers like their actual people, how foolish of me to suggest that not-being-an-asshole would improve customer loyalty.
Just because you can do something easily doesn't make it morally, or legally right.
Morality and legality are completely separate issues from difficulty. Although, if a law is easy to break, that law will broken far more often than one that is difficult to break. However, my point had noting to with morality or legality. I'm pointing out that the problem is easily solved by the people who created it, the media companies themselves. They should stop being angry that people want their products and start providing them in a timely manner. Time and again, we have seen that copyright infringement is dramatically reduced by one thing: providing good, easy, and legal access to the content. In contrast, yelling at people about the morality and legality of downloading doesn't seem to have any noticeable effect on the rates of copyright infringement. It would be simply be stupid for the Australian government to spend any money on investigation and enforcement until the media companies have stopped creating the problem in the first place.
So you're ok with $1M, or $50k, or even $10? Dollar value itself shouldn't matter, assuming its greater than zero.
Why not? If they lost $10 to online copyright infringement, I don't think anything should be done about it, because any attempted solution would be more expensive than ignoring the "problem". Frankly even at half a billion dollars, I'm sceptical that anything should be done about it. Refusing to have the government address the "problem" might encourage the networks and studios to treat Australians with a little bit more respect and stop expecting them to pay to see movies 6 to 12 months after everyone in the Northern Hemisphere has already seen them.
You know who gets the credit for changing it from "global warming" to "climate change" in the American public discourse? George W. Bush. It was Bush's advisor who recommended that he always refer to climate change instead of global warming because climate change isn't as scary as global warming. It also allowed them to shrug off the effects of climate change by suggesting that the climate is always changing. The focus groups indicated many voters would accept that deception uncritically because it sounds like common sense.
The scientists actually have slightly different definitions for global warming and climate change and they are used for different purposes. Specifically, global warming is a subset of climate change.
It's not that funny, because the problem isn't that the icebreaker can't go near the ice, it's that it can't leave the area where fishing boats and tankers are being trapped by unusually heavy iceberg activity, mostly because leaving would endanger the lives of those fishermen and sailors.
With that line of thinking, we shouldn't allow anyone under the age of about 22 to be considered responsible for their actions.
You seem to think I'm excusing their actions, rather than pointing out that if you take people who are not fully adults and then put them in a situation where they provoked into acting poorly, some of them are going to do so. I fully support holding people responsible for their actions, I just think that smart people should realize that college students are not fully adults and often lack the life experience, wisdom and even full mental faculties of older adults. It's easy to pontificate at them about how they should be more like you, either because of the benefit of hindsight, or because you were never in the same situation.
If you haven't learned that your actions have consequences by the time you're in college, you had fuckwits for parents, and that has nothing to do with the development of your pre-frontal cortex.
By the simple law of averages, some college students actually have fuckwits and worse for parents.
Contrary to the suppositions of drooling morons, criticizing a stupid idea doesn't mean I support the exact opposite of that idiocy.
Neither expelling students for being angry nor letting them run wild are good ideas. Are you capable of thinking of anything that lies between those two extremes?
And just because you obviously didn't understand the point, if you make a rule to expel anyone who "shouts down anyone else", anyone with actual malicious intent will simply organize a group to make complaints against the very same people this idea is supposed to protect. So not only will it not help the situation, it will make it much, much worse.
It doesn't have to be true among the 15 to 23 year-olds, but the profs who are indoctrinating them are very well aware.
Wait, are those professors colluding with the scientists who invented Global Warming for the Chinese to kill American industry? Will our tinfoil hats protect us from their mind control? You should go post something about that on your blog!
Do you understand the childish people often act on their emotions without thinking through the consequences?
FTFY Learn to be an adult and control your emotions. You don't get to interfere with other people just because you're offended.
Hey, I bet yelling "you'll all acting like children" will work really well to protect you from a mob. Why don't you go try it?
If you can't understand that college students are pretty much the poster children for irrational, short term, emotion driven behaviour, you are fucking clueless. So you're god damn right that they're acting childishly. The pre-frontal cortex on the average person doesn't complete it's develop until after they have graduated from college, and there's not a whole lot that anyone can do about that. Telling people to be different than they are is about as effective as pissing into the wind.
a student shouts down pretty much ANYONE speaking on campus, they should be kicked out for the term or permanently, depending on how tolerant the institution is feeling.
Brilliant. So anyone who disagrees with me can be expelled because they were "shouting me down". How could this ever possibly backfire?
Slashdot Mirror
If there is no institutional power structure in place to confiscate wealth and coerce behavior, it's extremely difficult to fight a large scale war, engage in mass murder or even mass incarceration.
It's cute that you believe that. You should go tell ISIS that it doesn't have the power to wage war, murder, enslave, or imprison people since it's not a legitimate government. Then maybe you could travel through some African nations and tell the vigilante gangs there that orchestrated ethnic cleansing campaigns that they really didn't kill anyone at all, because they weren't the government and thus incapable of mass murder.
Can you imagine a war of aggression in which all of the soldiers were unpaid volunteers furnishing their own weapons and equipment?
Yes. I take it you've never heard of militias?
How far would they be willing to travel and how long would they be willing to be away from their homes?
That depends on what they expect to get from their expedition.
Without a government, you wouldn't get people to travel from North America to Iraq or Vietnam to fight a war. Most people would rather maintain a peaceful existence and fight only in self defense.
And yet there are people who are travelling to Syria to fight without any support or direction from their home government. In Africa (and other places), groups which are not the government frequently kidnap young boys are force them to serve as soldiers and they go where ever their captors send them.
Libertarianism does not mean "no rules", it just means "no ruleRs".
Since he who makes the rules, is by definition, the ruler, "no rulers" means "no rules". The problem is as soon as anyone or any group can enforce a set of rules, they become the government. The only way to have no rulers is to have no rules. And, of course, "no rules" is a situation that never lasts longer than the first person who survives being wronged because as soon as that happens, then they start with the "there aughta be rules against that" and then you either get a government or a lot of dead people and then a government.
Not everything that libertarians say is wrong, but their philosophies work about as well as communism does. Which is to say they have never once worked at any reasonable scale in the entire history of humanity.
Libertarians should go to this iceberg and plant a flag on it as their own country! Sure it'll melt eventually, but they would've turned the place into a corpse-strewn hellscape by then anyhow.
And isn't that really the Libertarian dream? A corpse-strewn hellscape to call their own, with no rules and complete freedom for every survivor!
Ah. I missed the sarcasm, sorry.
That's ridiculous. Companies don't get bailed out by governments in capitalism!
That sounds like a No True Scotsman fallacy.
In true capitalism, we celebrate when companies fail because they get replaced by a greater number of stronger companies.
That's not actually true. A company will be replaced if the demand still exists, but there is no requirement that the company be replaced by more companies or stronger companies. And "a greater number of stronger companies" is a highly unlikely scenario. In fact, in a competitive market, the company that failed is most likely to be replaced by its already existing competitors. So it will most likely not be replaced by any new companies. Although, it's competitors will each become stronger because of the reduced competition. Note, this is generally bad for the customers of those corporations because competition has been reduced and each player in the field now has an increased ability to raise prices. Finally with fewer competitors, collusion is now both easier and more profitable. Of course, the destruction of the remaining competitors is also more enticing so that full power over the marketplace can be established, and then the market's customers will really pay.
My point is that you don't seem to understand Capitalism very well. Maybe you should be a cheerleader for something you do understand?
But in the end, only leftism, collectivism, socialism, communism hurt and kill people.
And this is why my Father in Law loves to tell stories about his father's lumber mill, where it was cheaper to nail severed thumbs to a sign telling the employees to be careful than to buy safety guards for the buzz saws... It was all communism's fault. Damn you Florida and your secret communist past!
Really? Do you also think the argument that if 1 pill in the bottle will make you feel better, then surely taking the whole bottle of Oxycodone right now must be great?
Most rational people recognize there are many things, where either too much or too little can very bad. Even simple "good" things like oxygen and water have levels where too much is harmful or even fatal.
It would be great if the Republicans in Congress (and elsewhere) started actually supporting measures to break up the monopolistic BS, and arrange a system where companies would actually compete on merits and service and cost and such. If I had a lot of choices, then it wouldn't matter so much if Comcast or Verizon or whomever decided to engage in shenanigans with network traffic. But like the vast majority of Americans, I don't.
The problem is that running cables to houses seems like a natural monopoly. Once you have one cable for an internet connection, you don't actually need a second one (unless it's somehow better than the first one). The only way that I can see to increase competition is to make the actual internet infrastructure a public utility managed by either the local government, not for profit organization, or maybe a corporation that is explicitly prevented from being owned by any service provider(s). However, these steps seem far more intrusive than Title II classification to impose network neutrality...
Also the top-scoring group in: suicide rate, work-related deadly accidents, homelessness , incarceration rates.
Those claims seem pretty sketchy:
So, only one of your claims is marginally true, and your argument as a whole is grossly inaccurate.
Let's put "White male owned business" on a company website and see how much prestige it will gain. Or let's have a "Men in tech" conference, or a "White lives matter" demonstration or a "whitecupid.com" dating site, and then we can revisit your statement.
Could you please stop making white men look bad? "White male owned business" is pretty much every business unless explicitly noted otherwise, "Men in Tech" conferences are simply "Tech" conferences, "White Lives Matter" doesn't need to happen because the police don't shoot white people just because their skin is white, and "whitecupid.com" goes by the snappier name of "cupid.com". Acting like a blithering idiot who can't see the world in front of him isn't helping anyone, least of all yourself.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Why should anyone bother? You're just going to spout the same idiocy again.
Sigh. It figures that you were unable to understand that I was calling you childish.
Do you ever stop to think before you post your bullshit? Your "look in the mirror" comment was grade school level commentary.
No, I believe that there are people in here who think that they are somehow "winning" if they attack something they don't believe in, and have a religion-like fervor that any disagreement must be crushed and terminated with extreme prejudice.
Of course you do. It's much easier to attribute fault to other than ourselves.
If you are seeing a "trolling asshole", consider that you are almost certainly looking in the mirror, and seeing your reflection in all of it's glory.
Yawn. Which one of us is rubber and which one of us is glue?
Because if you are doing your life's work by ruthlessly standing in full dudgeon, angry beyond rationality over metric versus English, so righteous in your indignation they you find some fellow who is simply posting something you disagree with, yet you are fully justified in calling him a "trolling asshole", well then thank your deity for your sheltered and relatively problem free life.
See? This is what I'm talking about. I have no righteous indignation because I don't really care what you think of the metric system. However, you insist on portraying me as a rabid defender of the metric system even while I'm telling you that maybe people hate you more than your opinions on the metric system. Personally, I think you're either being deliberately rude and obnoxious, in which case the result should be no surprise, or you have no idea how to communicate effectively.
I hate to break it to you, but your sample size is completely meaningless, regardless if you get a +5 on slashdot or not.
I hate to break it to you, but you're an idiot who doesn't understand statistics and can't follow a conversation.
Specifically, the sample size doesn't matter when you're disproving a claim that something happened in the 1960s that didn't actually happen in the 1960s.
I see the metric warriors are out in full force today. I'm at 0 and you are at -1.
You posted bullshit and you got moderated down for it, so the system is working as intended...
Mod me down Metric warriors, let no opposing thoughts spoil the purity of your unquestionable truths!
Did ever stop to think people might be moderating you down because your posts make you look like a trolling asshole?
The cheaper stuff is often made with inferior quality ingredients and then loaded with more salt, sugar and fat to "improve" the taste. It can be tastier and less healthy for you. Taste and price are not the only criteria to consider when picking what to eat. For example, when reading the label on a store brand pack of chicken fingers, I found they contained 34g of sugar per serving, which was more than the ice cream desert in the next freezer.
From a quick glance at the show you linked, it looks like your summary of the show might be lacking, though, it's called "Eat well for less" and it may have a focus on finding good, inexpensive, and healthy food.
The movie industry shouldn't have to do anything to control the distribution of their own product.
Clearly, we should never expect corporation to treat their customers like their actual people, how foolish of me to suggest that not-being-an-asshole would improve customer loyalty.
Just because you can do something easily doesn't make it morally, or legally right.
Morality and legality are completely separate issues from difficulty. Although, if a law is easy to break, that law will broken far more often than one that is difficult to break. However, my point had noting to with morality or legality. I'm pointing out that the problem is easily solved by the people who created it, the media companies themselves. They should stop being angry that people want their products and start providing them in a timely manner. Time and again, we have seen that copyright infringement is dramatically reduced by one thing: providing good, easy, and legal access to the content. In contrast, yelling at people about the morality and legality of downloading doesn't seem to have any noticeable effect on the rates of copyright infringement. It would be simply be stupid for the Australian government to spend any money on investigation and enforcement until the media companies have stopped creating the problem in the first place.
So you're ok with $1M, or $50k, or even $10? Dollar value itself shouldn't matter, assuming its greater than zero.
Why not? If they lost $10 to online copyright infringement, I don't think anything should be done about it, because any attempted solution would be more expensive than ignoring the "problem". Frankly even at half a billion dollars, I'm sceptical that anything should be done about it. Refusing to have the government address the "problem" might encourage the networks and studios to treat Australians with a little bit more respect and stop expecting them to pay to see movies 6 to 12 months after everyone in the Northern Hemisphere has already seen them.
You know who gets the credit for changing it from "global warming" to "climate change" in the American public discourse? George W. Bush. It was Bush's advisor who recommended that he always refer to climate change instead of global warming because climate change isn't as scary as global warming. It also allowed them to shrug off the effects of climate change by suggesting that the climate is always changing. The focus groups indicated many voters would accept that deception uncritically because it sounds like common sense.
The scientists actually have slightly different definitions for global warming and climate change and they are used for different purposes. Specifically, global warming is a subset of climate change.
It's not that funny, because the problem isn't that the icebreaker can't go near the ice, it's that it can't leave the area where fishing boats and tankers are being trapped by unusually heavy iceberg activity, mostly because leaving would endanger the lives of those fishermen and sailors.
The cynic in me says it's always politics, unless the shooter agrees with my politics, then it must a different reason.
With that line of thinking, we shouldn't allow anyone under the age of about 22 to be considered responsible for their actions.
You seem to think I'm excusing their actions, rather than pointing out that if you take people who are not fully adults and then put them in a situation where they provoked into acting poorly, some of them are going to do so. I fully support holding people responsible for their actions, I just think that smart people should realize that college students are not fully adults and often lack the life experience, wisdom and even full mental faculties of older adults. It's easy to pontificate at them about how they should be more like you, either because of the benefit of hindsight, or because you were never in the same situation.
If you haven't learned that your actions have consequences by the time you're in college, you had fuckwits for parents, and that has nothing to do with the development of your pre-frontal cortex.
By the simple law of averages, some college students actually have fuckwits and worse for parents.
Contrary to the suppositions of drooling morons, criticizing a stupid idea doesn't mean I support the exact opposite of that idiocy.
Neither expelling students for being angry nor letting them run wild are good ideas. Are you capable of thinking of anything that lies between those two extremes?
And just because you obviously didn't understand the point, if you make a rule to expel anyone who "shouts down anyone else", anyone with actual malicious intent will simply organize a group to make complaints against the very same people this idea is supposed to protect. So not only will it not help the situation, it will make it much, much worse.
It doesn't have to be true among the 15 to 23 year-olds, but the profs who are indoctrinating them are very well aware.
Wait, are those professors colluding with the scientists who invented Global Warming for the Chinese to kill American industry? Will our tinfoil hats protect us from their mind control? You should go post something about that on your blog!
Do you understand the childish people often act on their emotions without thinking through the consequences?
FTFY Learn to be an adult and control your emotions. You don't get to interfere with other people just because you're offended.
Hey, I bet yelling "you'll all acting like children" will work really well to protect you from a mob. Why don't you go try it?
If you can't understand that college students are pretty much the poster children for irrational, short term, emotion driven behaviour, you are fucking clueless. So you're god damn right that they're acting childishly. The pre-frontal cortex on the average person doesn't complete it's develop until after they have graduated from college, and there's not a whole lot that anyone can do about that. Telling people to be different than they are is about as effective as pissing into the wind.
a student shouts down pretty much ANYONE speaking on campus, they should be kicked out for the term or permanently, depending on how tolerant the institution is feeling.
Brilliant. So anyone who disagrees with me can be expelled because they were "shouting me down". How could this ever possibly backfire?