China is actually experimenting with democracy on a local government level. The "shock therapy" theory of introducing democratic reforms all at once doesn't actually work.
As Neil Degrasse Tyson notes, the life we do know is primarily made of, in order of proportions - hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, other. Other than helium, the order matches exactly the proportions of "normal" matter in the universe. It's not a stretch to look for life made up of the most common elements in the universe.
Liberals want an improved education system handed down from on-high at the level of the department of education.
Complete bollocks. That's how libertarians like to demonize liberals, but that's not the truth of the matter. Most liberals aren't happy with common core - I certainly found it ridiculous.
The main issue libertarians make a big deal of, as I say before, is having to pay taxes at all, at any level. You can look through all the comments on this article, and you'll find a dozen libertarians saying taxation is theft, with no distinction between federal taxes or state taxes.
Stop trying to claim principles for yourself that are not exclusive to you.
Libertarians have no issue with paying for education.
The majority comments from libertarians on all issues is "tax is theft" - indicating they don't want to pay for public education.
What libertarians want is a more scientific approach to education. 50 experiments. 50 states, competing with each other to provide the best possible education that they can for their citizens.
So do us "liberals". The difference between libertarians and liberals is libertarians don't want to pay for public schools and want them to compete for survival. We can have competition, but libertarians want to go the extra step of introducing some form of social darwinism - that for whatever reason some kids can't go to a better school, tough luck to them as though their situation is entirely in their control and therefore their own fault.
Liberals also want an improved education with room to experiment with ways of teaching. That libertarians try to claim ownership of that desire is ridiculous.
Here's the test - can you decline to pay the fee, and therefore to use the service? No? It's a tax.
Can you decline to use the service? Can you decline to use the economic benefits from having interstate highways? Can you decline to benefit from having clean water and safe food?
So you're saying my lunchtime sandwiches should be paid for by taxpayers rather than a user-pays fee (me buying them)? Wowsers. Socialists in America go further than I thought!
No, I'm not saying that. Try reading comprehension and maybe realize that my point was that not everything can efficiently be paid for by individual user fees.
Liberty is a good ideal to strive for and that just means seeking a system of government which supports as much freedom as possible.
Here's what libertarians don't get: Just because your ideology has "liberty" in the name, does not make it the exclusive owner of the concept. Guess what? Unlike what the US right wing media try to tell you, people who are liberal ALSO want liberty and as much freedom as is SUSTAINABLE.
Libertarianism just means that people recognize that it would be better if we could just have a more free and prosperous society which paid for things based on individual free will instead of forced taxation and dictatorship. There is nothing impractical about an ideal
The impractical part is precisely that part about paying for society wide things based on individual free will. Sorry, but free will is overrated. Some things, like education and human rights are too important to be left up to free will. Children have no option but to go to school, and the South has no option but to accept integration.
"The system, introduced 20 years ago, allows parents to choose between municipal schools and independent schools, all financed by tax money. The aim was to increase quality by competition, but it has also led to the best students flocking to the same schools."
So here you are, arguing that STATE FUNDED schools, both municipal AND independent, are libertarian because they have choice.
You do not have a clue what you are talking about. Fact.
You have a poor grasp of logic, as evidenced by your apparent failure to understand the non-exclusivity of properties of things. Fact.
You tried to argue that the choice of state funded independent schools is a libertarian system. Fact. And you say *I* don't have a clue. Good job buddy. Showing everyone that libertarianism is a pipe dream that can only work with government backing. You don't really want government money to go away. You just don't want to pay for it but are happy to take the benefits of it.
Projection. Unlike you, I made an argument. Which you carefully inch around without facing.
Ironic that is the very thing you do in this sentence.
I actually lived in Scandinavia and noted with approval that the school system in the country where I was at is nearly exactly what Libertarians have been proposing in this country for many decades.
You mean libertarians have been asking for a socialist education system? Libertarians have been asking for improved government funding for universities?
As to Germany? The Prussian model is where US schools started. Even the Germans have moved on and improved, while the US sticks doggedly to Fichtes baby.
You haven't even figured out what you're opposed to - the economic model or the education model. The Germans may have moved on from the Prussian education model, but the economic model for providing education is still pretty much state funding for the majority.
Really, you should educate yourself before you spout off.
I for one will make sure never to call the Scandinavian and German countries' public funded institutions "libertarian", for one. Now THAT is embarassing.
Gotta love libertarian logically fallacious reasoning. Calling something a name constitutes an argument, apparently.
Here's the test - can you decline to pay the fee, and therefore to use the service? No? It's a tax.
Can you decline to use the service? Can you decline to use the economic benefits from having interstate highways? Can you decline to benefit from having clean water and safe food? Can you decline to benefit economically from a nationally enforced currency and social stability from a commonly applied law?
Actually, yes you can. You decline to use the service by leaving society. Don't like it? Tough. You can actually leave, and you won't pay taxes. So by your very own definition, they are just as much fees as any other fee.
Quality of life is not an entitlement and is only possible through joint investment from every member of society.
What is fair can only be determined by consensual transactions arrived at in a competitive environment.
Circular reasoning. By whose rules do you say that is the only possible definition of fair? Only if you buy into libertarianism do I accept those rules. I don't, so I don't.
Furthermore, what constitutes a "consensual transaction"? Under contract law, consent does not exist if made under duress. Someone who accepts a job way below minimum living standards because they are pressed to do so is under duress, yet that is what libertarians like you like to take advantage of. Or do you mean to restrict consent to the consent of the employer, and not the employee? Only consent matters for the poor put-upon employer?
Education is critically important, yes, which is exactly why we need a competitive market for it
A non-sequitur if there ever was one, and also a tautology because, again, you'd need to assume libertarianism to accept your conclusion. Why do Americans continually ignore the examples of Scandinavian and German public education, as though other people have not already figured out how to make schools valuable without introducing social darwinist forces into education?
You know the models of other countries are ALSO competition in principle, and your ilk's ideological and puritanical approach has failed compared to the competition. Like I said, your ilk's systems are self-defeating.
A strict libertarian would expect infrastructure to be paid for by user fees.
Which is what we call TAXES. That's why the GP is right to call it a fantasy. It is a fantasy to think individual user fees would be an efficient way of paying for widely used necessities.
a libertarian would be extremely opposed to slavery.
Libertarians that oppose the notion of a fair minimum wage is using slavery.
I used to be very libertarian. I'm not anymore because a healthy libertarian society requires people to be intelligent and rational,
And intelligent and rationality requires education on mass, which libertarians also don't want to pay for, making libertarianism a self-defeating system.
I focus on Australia because that's where I live. I don't care what other countries are doing. I care about what MY country is doing. Maybe you like to live according to standards set by other people, but I'd prefer living to the standards we set ourselves.
The Australian standard is the "Aussie battler". Yet one little fight and people like you run away like pansies. If you can't live up to your own standards, you are nothing. Stop pretending you have it tough when you really don't.
Historically, what Galileo and Newton and other "scientists" in the 17th-century called their work was not "science" but rather "natural philosophy." And the reason they called it that was because it came out of a long philosophical tradition, which was in the process of evolving under the work of a number of scientist-philosophers like Mersenne, Descartes, etc. who was seen at the time as leading the real intellectual "revolution."
Really? And how often did Newton and Galileo cite philosophers in their works?
As for how things are practiced, well there are in fact scholars who work on philosophy of science
I've never disputed that. But those who work on the philosophy on science can only do so insofar as there are established practices within science. They never touch the frontiers of science, which is arguably where science always is. People can philosophize about science all they want, but science develops independent of what philosophers claim science is.
Are you serious? Of course they cared about the big questions. That's why they created gods and goddesses and personified nature to create explanations for all the "big questions" happening around them. Religion was the first answer.
I'm pretty sure agriculture developed before religion. Religion arose after agriculture got sophisticated enough. Mostly due to the fact that there is a stable supply of food and people can sit around more and think. But in the early stages of agriculture, people were experimenting with growing things MORE than they were thinking about the philosophical underpinnings of agriculture. I don't see how you can dispute that. No amount of philosophizing grows crops. Simple as that.
Naive empiricism is not the same as philosophy nor science.
You miss the point. Science evolves from naive empiricism mostly independent of philosophy. Philosophy can talk about the progression from naive empiricism from science, but that doesn't mean it becomes the parent of science. They are just commentators, not originators.
but it did develop out of philosophical debates, and the underlying assumptions are still something to think about.
I find this to be strange reasoning. Just because you can have debates about something from a philosophical standpoint doesn't make it the child of philosophy. Philosophy was APPLIED to science after science evolved into something recognizable. Science's evolution owes its modern form to debate, which is always a part of science and does not require philosophy to grant it such powers.
I don't accept that definition of philosophy, so no. If that is philosophy, then nothing isn't philosophy, making it a meaningless term. I don't care for definitions. All that matters is how they arose and how they're actually practiced.
I'm not the one arguing for any authority over the other. I'm pointing out the attitude of some philosophers towards science as a junior form of philosophy when it isn't and probably never was. When humans were learning how to farm, they were doing proto-scientific research and they probably couldn't care less about the "big questions" or the "nature of things".
The process of observation and working out what is happening is not in itself philosophy. It's something every human does since birth.
You mischaracterize the debate. The debate is not about what either of those is, but whether science comes from philosophy, or developed as a complement/reaction to philosophy that has now far exceeded philosophy's capabilities. The corollary to that debate is the argument that if philosophy gave birth to science, whether philosophy is allowed to "pull rank" on science any time they hit a wall and claim credit for things as though science "owes" anything to philosophy for its existence. As though because there's a perpetual licencing agreement for science to pay or otherwise the philosophers will get angry and try to shut it down.
First, there is no "Scientific Method", with capital letters. There have been many philosophical attempts at trying to formally define science, but none are accurate and often fly in the face of how science is actually done.
If science doesn't exist before attempts to formalize science, then you are saying that Galileo wasn't doing science. The practice came before the theory and is a recorded historical fact. You demonstrate precisely the problem with philosophers - the theory overrides facts. Science also continues to evolve outside of the philosophical boundaries philosophers try to impose on science.
One can only assume these attempts by philosophers trying to pull rank on science because of supposed priority is the twitchings of a dead body.
Science is an EVOLVING discipline and philosophers can only formally define science insofar as there are established practices to begin with. On the frontiers of science where we're still trying to figure out how to do science, no philosopher has ever created a definition that ever satisfies those practices that are just beginning to be fleshed out.
Except "human speech" can be anything. Complex language started out simple and people were experimenting then as well. Learning how to make fire and tools requires experimentation that would approach what we would call research.
Science was created because philosophy couldn't cut it. Galileo didn't bother trying to figure out the philosophical underpinnings of things rolling down planks or pendulum swings or the moons of Jupiter. He went straight to observations.
Without science, philosophy is useless. Philosophers have a bad habit of treating things as binary true or false and statistical answers are not acceptable. No philosopher I know has made any sense of Quantum Mechanics or natural selection so far and are completely beholden to science in modern times. The only philosophy that's worth pursuing these days is the philosophy of science itself, but even that is hitting its limits. I've been in too many debates where philosophers try to label science as "logical positivism" or some other ridiculous mischaracterization. Even science must now be looked at under a scientific lens and figure out what science actually is by looking at what scientists actually do rather than imposing philosophical strawmen.
Slashdot Mirror
China is actually experimenting with democracy on a local government level. The "shock therapy" theory of introducing democratic reforms all at once doesn't actually work.
Please explain Enron, Lehmann Brothers, Bernie Maddoff and Fox.
As Neil Degrasse Tyson notes, the life we do know is primarily made of, in order of proportions - hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, other. Other than helium, the order matches exactly the proportions of "normal" matter in the universe. It's not a stretch to look for life made up of the most common elements in the universe.
Liberals want an improved education system handed down from on-high at the level of the department of education.
Complete bollocks. That's how libertarians like to demonize liberals, but that's not the truth of the matter. Most liberals aren't happy with common core - I certainly found it ridiculous.
The main issue libertarians make a big deal of, as I say before, is having to pay taxes at all, at any level. You can look through all the comments on this article, and you'll find a dozen libertarians saying taxation is theft, with no distinction between federal taxes or state taxes.
Stop trying to claim principles for yourself that are not exclusive to you.
Libertarians have no issue with paying for education.
The majority comments from libertarians on all issues is "tax is theft" - indicating they don't want to pay for public education.
What libertarians want is a more scientific approach to education. 50 experiments. 50 states, competing with each other to provide the best possible education that they can for their citizens.
So do us "liberals". The difference between libertarians and liberals is libertarians don't want to pay for public schools and want them to compete for survival. We can have competition, but libertarians want to go the extra step of introducing some form of social darwinism - that for whatever reason some kids can't go to a better school, tough luck to them as though their situation is entirely in their control and therefore their own fault.
Liberals also want an improved education with room to experiment with ways of teaching. That libertarians try to claim ownership of that desire is ridiculous.
The main advantage of the origami wheel is five-fold.
What could possibly go "booonnnggggg"?
Here's the test - can you decline to pay the fee, and therefore to use the service? No? It's a tax.
Can you decline to use the service? Can you decline to use the economic benefits from having interstate highways? Can you decline to benefit from having clean water and safe food?
So you're saying my lunchtime sandwiches should be paid for by taxpayers rather than a user-pays fee (me buying them)? Wowsers. Socialists in America go further than I thought!
No, I'm not saying that. Try reading comprehension and maybe realize that my point was that not everything can efficiently be paid for by individual user fees.
You can attack any ideals with extreme examples.
Libertarianism IS an extreme ideal.
Liberty is a good ideal to strive for and that just means seeking a system of government which supports as much freedom as possible.
Here's what libertarians don't get: Just because your ideology has "liberty" in the name, does not make it the exclusive owner of the concept. Guess what? Unlike what the US right wing media try to tell you, people who are liberal ALSO want liberty and as much freedom as is SUSTAINABLE.
Libertarianism just means that people recognize that it would be better if we could just have a more free and prosperous society which paid for things based on individual free will instead of forced taxation and dictatorship. There is nothing impractical about an ideal
The impractical part is precisely that part about paying for society wide things based on individual free will. Sorry, but free will is overrated. Some things, like education and human rights are too important to be left up to free will. Children have no option but to go to school, and the South has no option but to accept integration.
Sweden has school choice. Fact.
Doesn't make it libertarian. Fact.
Having a choice doesn't make something libertarian. Fact.
Libertarianism having choice does not mean anything else with choice is automatically libertarian. Fact.
Trying to say Sweden's system is libertarian simply because it has choice is like trying to say
http://www.economist.com/news/...
"The system, introduced 20 years ago, allows parents to choose between municipal schools and independent schools, all financed by tax money. The aim was to increase quality by competition, but it has also led to the best students flocking to the same schools."
So here you are, arguing that STATE FUNDED schools, both municipal AND independent, are libertarian because they have choice.
You do not have a clue what you are talking about. Fact.
You have a poor grasp of logic, as evidenced by your apparent failure to understand the non-exclusivity of properties of things. Fact.
You tried to argue that the choice of state funded independent schools is a libertarian system. Fact. And you say *I* don't have a clue. Good job buddy. Showing everyone that libertarianism is a pipe dream that can only work with government backing. You don't really want government money to go away. You just don't want to pay for it but are happy to take the benefits of it.
Projection. Unlike you, I made an argument. Which you carefully inch around without facing.
Ironic that is the very thing you do in this sentence.
I actually lived in Scandinavia and noted with approval that the school system in the country where I was at is nearly exactly what Libertarians have been proposing in this country for many decades.
You mean libertarians have been asking for a socialist education system? Libertarians have been asking for improved government funding for universities?
As to Germany? The Prussian model is where US schools started. Even the Germans have moved on and improved, while the US sticks doggedly to Fichtes baby.
You haven't even figured out what you're opposed to - the economic model or the education model. The Germans may have moved on from the Prussian education model, but the economic model for providing education is still pretty much state funding for the majority.
Really, you should educate yourself before you spout off.
I for one will make sure never to call the Scandinavian and German countries' public funded institutions "libertarian", for one. Now THAT is embarassing.
typical socialist mind-rot.
Gotta love libertarian logically fallacious reasoning. Calling something a name constitutes an argument, apparently.
Here's the test - can you decline to pay the fee, and therefore to use the service? No? It's a tax.
Can you decline to use the service? Can you decline to use the economic benefits from having interstate highways? Can you decline to benefit from having clean water and safe food? Can you decline to benefit economically from a nationally enforced currency and social stability from a commonly applied law?
Actually, yes you can. You decline to use the service by leaving society. Don't like it? Tough. You can actually leave, and you won't pay taxes. So by your very own definition, they are just as much fees as any other fee.
Quality of life is not an entitlement and is only possible through joint investment from every member of society.
What is fair can only be determined by consensual transactions arrived at in a competitive environment.
Circular reasoning. By whose rules do you say that is the only possible definition of fair? Only if you buy into libertarianism do I accept those rules. I don't, so I don't.
Furthermore, what constitutes a "consensual transaction"? Under contract law, consent does not exist if made under duress. Someone who accepts a job way below minimum living standards because they are pressed to do so is under duress, yet that is what libertarians like you like to take advantage of. Or do you mean to restrict consent to the consent of the employer, and not the employee? Only consent matters for the poor put-upon employer?
Education is critically important, yes, which is exactly why we need a competitive market for it
A non-sequitur if there ever was one, and also a tautology because, again, you'd need to assume libertarianism to accept your conclusion. Why do Americans continually ignore the examples of Scandinavian and German public education, as though other people have not already figured out how to make schools valuable without introducing social darwinist forces into education?
You know the models of other countries are ALSO competition in principle, and your ilk's ideological and puritanical approach has failed compared to the competition. Like I said, your ilk's systems are self-defeating.
A strict libertarian would expect infrastructure to be paid for by user fees.
Which is what we call TAXES. That's why the GP is right to call it a fantasy. It is a fantasy to think individual user fees would be an efficient way of paying for widely used necessities.
a libertarian would be extremely opposed to slavery.
Libertarians that oppose the notion of a fair minimum wage is using slavery.
I used to be very libertarian. I'm not anymore because a healthy libertarian society requires people to be intelligent and rational,
And intelligent and rationality requires education on mass, which libertarians also don't want to pay for, making libertarianism a self-defeating system.
I focus on Australia because that's where I live. I don't care what other countries are doing. I care about what MY country is doing. Maybe you like to live according to standards set by other people, but I'd prefer living to the standards we set ourselves.
The Australian standard is the "Aussie battler". Yet one little fight and people like you run away like pansies. If you can't live up to your own standards, you are nothing. Stop pretending you have it tough when you really don't.
Aussies have this imagined persona of the "Aussie battler".
I guess that is until it comes to do any real battling, like reducing carbon emissions and settling refugees.
Then you have data back on computers. They haven't actually solved anything.
With computers, you can store vast amounts of data and run a lot of analysis on it. With paper, not so much. Good for the privacy conscious citizen.
electric cars are not very piratical for a lot of people
Well there's your problem. If it electric cars don't increase piracy, then global warming continues unabated. We need more pirates, not less. Ramen.
Historically, what Galileo and Newton and other "scientists" in the 17th-century called their work was not "science" but rather "natural philosophy." And the reason they called it that was because it came out of a long philosophical tradition, which was in the process of evolving under the work of a number of scientist-philosophers like Mersenne, Descartes, etc. who was seen at the time as leading the real intellectual "revolution."
Really? And how often did Newton and Galileo cite philosophers in their works?
As for how things are practiced, well there are in fact scholars who work on philosophy of science
I've never disputed that. But those who work on the philosophy on science can only do so insofar as there are established practices within science. They never touch the frontiers of science, which is arguably where science always is. People can philosophize about science all they want, but science develops independent of what philosophers claim science is. Are you serious? Of course they cared about the big questions. That's why they created gods and goddesses and personified nature to create explanations for all the "big questions" happening around them. Religion was the first answer.
I'm pretty sure agriculture developed before religion. Religion arose after agriculture got sophisticated enough. Mostly due to the fact that there is a stable supply of food and people can sit around more and think. But in the early stages of agriculture, people were experimenting with growing things MORE than they were thinking about the philosophical underpinnings of agriculture. I don't see how you can dispute that. No amount of philosophizing grows crops. Simple as that.
Naive empiricism is not the same as philosophy nor science.
You miss the point. Science evolves from naive empiricism mostly independent of philosophy. Philosophy can talk about the progression from naive empiricism from science, but that doesn't mean it becomes the parent of science. They are just commentators, not originators.
but it did develop out of philosophical debates, and the underlying assumptions are still something to think about.
I find this to be strange reasoning. Just because you can have debates about something from a philosophical standpoint doesn't make it the child of philosophy. Philosophy was APPLIED to science after science evolved into something recognizable. Science's evolution owes its modern form to debate, which is always a part of science and does not require philosophy to grant it such powers.
I don't accept that definition of philosophy, so no. If that is philosophy, then nothing isn't philosophy, making it a meaningless term. I don't care for definitions. All that matters is how they arose and how they're actually practiced.
I'm not the one arguing for any authority over the other. I'm pointing out the attitude of some philosophers towards science as a junior form of philosophy when it isn't and probably never was. When humans were learning how to farm, they were doing proto-scientific research and they probably couldn't care less about the "big questions" or the "nature of things".
The process of observation and working out what is happening is not in itself philosophy. It's something every human does since birth.
You mischaracterize the debate. The debate is not about what either of those is, but whether science comes from philosophy, or developed as a complement/reaction to philosophy that has now far exceeded philosophy's capabilities. The corollary to that debate is the argument that if philosophy gave birth to science, whether philosophy is allowed to "pull rank" on science any time they hit a wall and claim credit for things as though science "owes" anything to philosophy for its existence. As though because there's a perpetual licencing agreement for science to pay or otherwise the philosophers will get angry and try to shut it down.
Again, bollocks.
First, there is no "Scientific Method", with capital letters. There have been many philosophical attempts at trying to formally define science, but none are accurate and often fly in the face of how science is actually done.
If science doesn't exist before attempts to formalize science, then you are saying that Galileo wasn't doing science. The practice came before the theory and is a recorded historical fact. You demonstrate precisely the problem with philosophers - the theory overrides facts. Science also continues to evolve outside of the philosophical boundaries philosophers try to impose on science.
One can only assume these attempts by philosophers trying to pull rank on science because of supposed priority is the twitchings of a dead body.
Science is an EVOLVING discipline and philosophers can only formally define science insofar as there are established practices to begin with. On the frontiers of science where we're still trying to figure out how to do science, no philosopher has ever created a definition that ever satisfies those practices that are just beginning to be fleshed out.
Except "human speech" can be anything. Complex language started out simple and people were experimenting then as well. Learning how to make fire and tools requires experimentation that would approach what we would call research.
Bollocks.
Science was created because philosophy couldn't cut it. Galileo didn't bother trying to figure out the philosophical underpinnings of things rolling down planks or pendulum swings or the moons of Jupiter. He went straight to observations.
Without science, philosophy is useless. Philosophers have a bad habit of treating things as binary true or false and statistical answers are not acceptable. No philosopher I know has made any sense of Quantum Mechanics or natural selection so far and are completely beholden to science in modern times. The only philosophy that's worth pursuing these days is the philosophy of science itself, but even that is hitting its limits. I've been in too many debates where philosophers try to label science as "logical positivism" or some other ridiculous mischaracterization. Even science must now be looked at under a scientific lens and figure out what science actually is by looking at what scientists actually do rather than imposing philosophical strawmen.