A mother and a baby are in a space ship and the mother decides she doesn't want to take care of the baby anymore. Can the mother shove the baby out of the airlock? That baby is totally trespassing in the mother's property of the spaceship and has no intrinsic right to be there and share the mother's oxygen and food.
The question isn't whether you can construct some argument that the mother ought to have a moral or legal duty to keep the child alive under different circumstances, the question is whether such a duty derives from a child's absolute "right to life" or from some other principle. If it derives from some other principle, then that principle doesn't necessarily apply the same way in all these situations. Second, you gloss over what "can" actually means. Obviously she "can" do this physically. The question is what state interventions you are advocating to prevent this. Are you going to install pregnancy monitors on the spacecraft? Are you going to require special codes and government permission to unlock the airlocks? Are you going to have 24/7 camera surveillance?
If you consider a gestational entity a human, you cannot terminate its life support anymore than you can pull the plug on someone hooked up to a respirator because you don't want to provide for their care anymore.
That happens every day, and not just in the US, but also in countries with single payer health care that have constitutional guarantees of health care. It's impossible for things to work otherwise. In the end, there are people who need to work to provide those services, and if the burden becomes large enough on them, they can reasonably refuse to do so, no matter what your ideology may be.
All your examples simply illustrate your belief in an absolute right to life and the ability and necessity of the state to enforce such a right under any and all circumstances. That's a nice belief, but it isn't a libertarian belief, or even US law. From a libertarian point of view, as well as a US legal point of view, there is no positive right to life, and furthermore, even if there were, the state ought not to have unlimited power to investigate and prosecute violations of such a right. What libertarians recognize is a right to self-defense and the possibility to delegate enforcement of that right to the state to the extent that it doesn't infringe with other rights.
Well, so you agree then that Clinton is a neo-Marxist.
Now you're only quibbling about whether a "neo-Marxist" can properly be called a kind of "Marxist" or not. We'll just have to agree to disagree on that.
Those aren't exactly analogous. Under US law, if you push someone into the water and then find out they can't swim and you don't render assistance to save them
That analogy is wrong. Prior to pushing the person into the water, that person exists and would continue living on their own if you hadn't pushed them. A fetus does not exist prior to conception, and it has no independent existence until birth.
In the case of abortion if gestational product (whatever it is called) is considered a rights bearing human entity then
...then that "human entity" becomes a trespasser when its presence is no longer desired. You feel that such an "entity" has a right to trespass based on "private necessity", and that is US law, but I don't see how you can derive such a right from libertarian principles.
Do you consider anyone who has an idea traceable to Marxists to be a Marxist?
Neo-Marxist ideas aren't "an idea" that these people have, they are at the core of the political programs of both Clinton and Sanders, including their repeated references to European societies that are structured based on such ideas.
If equal treatment of people regardless of race or sex is neo-Marxist, BRING ON THE REVOLUTION!
Unfortunately, the opposite is the case: neo-Marxists advocate unequal treatment and violations of personal freedoms and property rights in an attempt to achieve equality of outcome. Not only are the policies they advocate arguably unjust, in practice, they fail to yield the promised results and instead lead to economic stagnation and massive government corruption.
In what way does that differ from any other ideology?
You're confusing theory and political/economic systems. Marxism is a theory about economic systems and society, not an ideology, and it happens to be a bad theory. There are multiple ideologies based on Marxism, including Marxism-Leninism and (indirectly, via neo-Marxism) modern social democracies. The fact that Marxism is a bad theory, of course, calls into question whether those are good ideologies.
Many other ideologies are not rooted in economic theories. For example, liberalism ("libertarianism" in the US) is not based on economic theory, it is based on a preference for individual freedoms and autonomy. Theocracies and Christian democracies are based on a preference for adherence to biblical dictates. Etc.
The poster claimed that compiling is hard to parallelize. I pointed out that there is, in fact, a lot of opportunity for parallelism in many build processes.
Part of my responce to your claims was that Marxism in the common parlance of our time typically refers to economic issues and not issues of race or gender issues as you described above.
Yes, and Clinton's political program is neo-Marxist on race, gender, and economic issues. So what exactly are you object to?
Arguing that libertarian beliefs are all based on contracts is a poor way to go about the abortion debate
I'm not arguing that "libertarian beliefs are all based on contracts"; libertarian beliefs are, in fact, based on the right to be free from violence or coercion. What I am saying is that Sharpr's example was based on an implied contract, instead of a "right to life".
How much care is required by law is based on intrinsic human rights, not contracts. Thus we come back to the real argument of abortion, at what point in gestation does an entity acquire rights?
Under US law, as well as under libertarianism, I am generally not legally obligated to jump into the water to save you from drowning, or to give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when you are unable to breathe on your own, or to let you reside on my property and feed you. That is, there is no general legal obligation for one person to keep another person alive (although there is obviously a strong moral obligation). Therefore, even if you postulate that a fetus has the same rights as a person, that is insufficient to argue that there ought to be laws against removing a fetus from the womb.
Even if you believe that a fetus has rights, if you accept that not everyone else believes that, you cannot use the rule of law to force your beliefs on others. I realize this isn't a perfect argument either (it could be used to allow slavery as well).
Well, you are expressing your own political beliefs there, and you are running into a common problem that people who postulate too many rights run into, namely the conflict between negative and positive rights. Libertarianism addresses that conflict by giving primacy to negative rights in law and recognizing that not every moral obligation can be enforced through government coercion and punishment. And I think you are actually tending the same way ("cannot use the rule of law to force your beliefs on others").
A member of the European Union with an 830-mile-long border with Russia, Finland has stayed outside the United States-led military alliance
Finland has a long history of "neutrality" and trying to play off both sides of the cold war against each other for their own benefit. It didn't take Russian propaganda to make the Finns pursue such a strategy. It's also hardly news that the Russians have been trying to place propaganda in Western media, that there are actual Russophiles in Europe and European media, or that the typical response of European government and media to speech they don't like is to stomp down on it. So, why is this crap on Slashdot?
As for your second part, I really have no desire to be drawn into a debate about Liberals being racist, classist or similiar nonsense
I didn't call them "racist" or "classist"; quite to the contrary: both Clinton and Sanders clearly make fighting racism and classism a key part of their politics.
You also fail to address the use of the term "Marxist" in modern parlance which is used overwhelmingly in an economic context.
I suspect that what you are trying to say is that Clinton and Sanders are not "Marxist-Leninists", which they are indeed not. But "Marxism-Leninism" refers to Stalin's ideology, not to Marx's ideology.
Clinton and Sanders objectively are running on ideas that are deeply rooted in neo-Marxism, on race, class, and economics (which are interdependent in neo-Marxist ideology).
when both of our parties clearly use ethnic identity and class to further their own gains
So? Neo-Marxism is only one particular way of "using ethnic identity and class to further one's gain"; there are many others (e.g., fascism). And we're not talking about which party is the better party, we are talking about Clinton's and Sanders' ideology, which is objectively rooted in neo-Marxism. If you want to attempt to make an argument that Donald Trump is also a neo-Marxist, be my guest (I suspect you may find some instances of neo-Marxist reasoning in his speeches, although I think he's simply too incoherent to place him in any category).
Which means that your claim of the overwhelming majority is crap.
No, it means that your claim of "the overwhelming majority is crap". You just reasoned through the steps yourself:
The overwhelming majority of American "Libertarians" are just Republicans with a couple gripes.
Now:
But what use would it be for President Barack "Lawnchair" Obama to select an incompetent person for SoS?
He may not have expected her to be as incompetent as she turned out to be. Or he may simply not have cared and hired her just out of a political calculation that having her in his administration and control was preferable to the alternatives.
So you are incompetent at grammar, then? The phrase "incompetent crook" - which you used specifically - is understood to mean a crook who is not competent at being a crook.
The error there is in your limited understanding of English, not my grammar.
Try to keep up. The poster I was responding to said that even if you considered a fetus an individual person, he couldn't see how it having a right to life being compatible with libertarianism.
Yes, and I responded that your reasoning doesn't reduce to a "right to life" (which libertarianism doesn't recognize anyway) but the "enforcement of an implied contract".
If you start transporting a person across a dangerous river, one in which the odds are overwhelming they'll die if not for your boat, then yes, you have an obligation to them to do what you can (without giving up your own life) to transport them to safety.
My obligation to you is determined based on whatever terms for transport we agree on. You are welcome to try to argue that conception implies a contract between a fetus and the mother, and hence confers particular legal obligations on the mother, but that line of reasoning is not rooted in a "right to life", it is rooted in arguments about contracts.
In any case, a river crossing example is misleading because its cost structure is wrong. A better example is where you lie dying on the ground (say, you broke your neck) and survive only if someone gives you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until the ambulance arrives. At least in the US (and under a libertarian understanding), both starting and continuing resuscitation are voluntary. You may well argue that there ought to be a legal obligation to start and continue resuscitation, but such a view is incompatible with libertarian principles (and is also incompatible with contract law as understood in actual legal systems).
I'm amazed you can't see how a right to life for a person could be compatible with libertarianism.
An absolute "right to life" cannot even be defined consistently (go try it). Under libertarianism, if you trespass upon my property or body, whether to remove you from my property or body is my choice, and that is a free and moral choice I make, not a choice that can be compelled by the legal system.
Economics being Marx's chief concern and most certainly what he's popularly known for today.
No, that's an incorrect interpretation. Marxism is primarily about analyzing history and society in terms of class relations and conflict. Marxism is not a synonym for central planning or Soviet-style communism. In fact, from a Marxist point of view, the class struggle is the real issue, and whether it is ended via increasingly tight regulation of a market economy or via a centrally planned economy is a secondary question.
In othet words, calling a candidate like Hilary (who in regards to the economy is a moderate) a Marxist without further elaboration like the above post did is obsurd
I disagree. Both Hillary and Sanders divide up society into competing groups (primarily "classes" and "minorities") and then advocate policies based on reasoning about power, privilege, exploitation, and oppression between these groups. That is the essence of Marxist analysis. It is the basis for many of their policies related to race and women (in fact, their positions are textbook neo-Marxist), and it is also a justification for economic policies.
While that's true, it's misleading because the word "Marxism" has very nasty connotations that the academic, theoretical aspects of Marx's work don't deserve
I'm not sure what aspects of Marxism you think there are besides "academic, theoretical". Marxism is, and has always been, a "method of socioeconomic analysis". The root problem wasn't that it was wrong, it was that it lacked scientific rigor, falsifiability, and empirical verification. It is that root problem that allowed "vicious and power-hungry people" to misuse it as the basis of totalitarian regimes, just like "vicious and power-hungry people" misused scientific racism and eugenics as another basis of totalitarian regimes.
I'm not saying Marx's economics was right, but Marx himself would have been horrified to see what vicious and power-hungry people were able to do by exploiting his high-minded, if technically erroneous, ideas... So, "neo-Marxist" is correct in the dry, academic sense, but it's very misleading in terms of the connotations and reactions the phrase will generate.
I think it generates the right connotations: neo-Marxism as a theory fails in the same way that Marxism fails, and it is therefore open to abuse by "vicious and power-hungry people" just like traditional Marxism. The fact that the details of the conclusions that neo-Marxism reaches differ from those of traditional Marxism doesn't change that.
The overwhelming majority of American "Libertarians" are just Republicans with a couple gripes.
The overwhelming majority of Americans is either Republican or independent.
They know that they cannot block a Clinton presidency by voting for a third party.
You bet that blocking a Clinton presidency may end up being high on the agenda for a lot of people, because Clinton is a lying, incompetent crook, regardless of her party affiliation, or what political goals she pretends to stand for today.
To call anybody in a mainstream US political activity marxist is a staggering misunderstanding as to what the term means.
The ignorance there is yours. The feminist and racial ideas promoted by Hillary and Sanders are rooted in a mix of progressivism and critical theory, and critical theory is simply another term for "neo-Marxism". That's not an accusation or an interpretation, that's how the people who developed this theory actually understand themselves.
but having the belief that a second or third trimester fetus (or, in extreme cases, at conception) deserves the same rights to life you have is certainly not against libertarian principles... because it all comes down to when you believe a fetus has that right to life.
Abortion isn't about whether a fetus "has a right to life", it is about whether a fetus "has a right to live using someone else's body for survival against their will".
If you base your argument for the use of government power to force women to carry a fetus to term against their will on fetal personhood, you then have to postulate a right that no major political ideology recognizes, namely a right of one person to use another person's body for survival against their will. I can't see such a "right" being compatible with libertarianism.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and guess what? That was the point. Congratulations for figuring it out, even if you seem to be a little slow.
The question isn't whether you can construct some argument that the mother ought to have a moral or legal duty to keep the child alive under different circumstances, the question is whether such a duty derives from a child's absolute "right to life" or from some other principle. If it derives from some other principle, then that principle doesn't necessarily apply the same way in all these situations. Second, you gloss over what "can" actually means. Obviously she "can" do this physically. The question is what state interventions you are advocating to prevent this. Are you going to install pregnancy monitors on the spacecraft? Are you going to require special codes and government permission to unlock the airlocks? Are you going to have 24/7 camera surveillance?
That happens every day, and not just in the US, but also in countries with single payer health care that have constitutional guarantees of health care. It's impossible for things to work otherwise. In the end, there are people who need to work to provide those services, and if the burden becomes large enough on them, they can reasonably refuse to do so, no matter what your ideology may be.
All your examples simply illustrate your belief in an absolute right to life and the ability and necessity of the state to enforce such a right under any and all circumstances. That's a nice belief, but it isn't a libertarian belief, or even US law. From a libertarian point of view, as well as a US legal point of view, there is no positive right to life, and furthermore, even if there were, the state ought not to have unlimited power to investigate and prosecute violations of such a right. What libertarians recognize is a right to self-defense and the possibility to delegate enforcement of that right to the state to the extent that it doesn't infringe with other rights.
Obviously, the landlord is an idiot, and your best choice is not to rent there.
Well, so you agree then that Clinton is a neo-Marxist.
Now you're only quibbling about whether a "neo-Marxist" can properly be called a kind of "Marxist" or not. We'll just have to agree to disagree on that.
That analogy is wrong. Prior to pushing the person into the water, that person exists and would continue living on their own if you hadn't pushed them. A fetus does not exist prior to conception, and it has no independent existence until birth.
Neo-Marxist ideas aren't "an idea" that these people have, they are at the core of the political programs of both Clinton and Sanders, including their repeated references to European societies that are structured based on such ideas.
Unfortunately, the opposite is the case: neo-Marxists advocate unequal treatment and violations of personal freedoms and property rights in an attempt to achieve equality of outcome. Not only are the policies they advocate arguably unjust, in practice, they fail to yield the promised results and instead lead to economic stagnation and massive government corruption.
You're confusing theory and political/economic systems. Marxism is a theory about economic systems and society, not an ideology, and it happens to be a bad theory. There are multiple ideologies based on Marxism, including Marxism-Leninism and (indirectly, via neo-Marxism) modern social democracies. The fact that Marxism is a bad theory, of course, calls into question whether those are good ideologies.
Many other ideologies are not rooted in economic theories. For example, liberalism ("libertarianism" in the US) is not based on economic theory, it is based on a preference for individual freedoms and autonomy. Theocracies and Christian democracies are based on a preference for adherence to biblical dictates. Etc.
The poster claimed that compiling is hard to parallelize. I pointed out that there is, in fact, a lot of opportunity for parallelism in many build processes.
Yes, and Clinton's political program is neo-Marxist on race, gender, and economic issues. So what exactly are you object to?
cd /tmpfs/mybuild
make -j 10
I'm not arguing that "libertarian beliefs are all based on contracts"; libertarian beliefs are, in fact, based on the right to be free from violence or coercion. What I am saying is that Sharpr's example was based on an implied contract, instead of a "right to life".
Under US law, as well as under libertarianism, I am generally not legally obligated to jump into the water to save you from drowning, or to give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when you are unable to breathe on your own, or to let you reside on my property and feed you. That is, there is no general legal obligation for one person to keep another person alive (although there is obviously a strong moral obligation). Therefore, even if you postulate that a fetus has the same rights as a person, that is insufficient to argue that there ought to be laws against removing a fetus from the womb.
Well, you are expressing your own political beliefs there, and you are running into a common problem that people who postulate too many rights run into, namely the conflict between negative and positive rights. Libertarianism addresses that conflict by giving primacy to negative rights in law and recognizing that not every moral obligation can be enforced through government coercion and punishment. And I think you are actually tending the same way ("cannot use the rule of law to force your beliefs on others").
Finland has a long history of "neutrality" and trying to play off both sides of the cold war against each other for their own benefit. It didn't take Russian propaganda to make the Finns pursue such a strategy. It's also hardly news that the Russians have been trying to place propaganda in Western media, that there are actual Russophiles in Europe and European media, or that the typical response of European government and media to speech they don't like is to stomp down on it. So, why is this crap on Slashdot?
I didn't call them "racist" or "classist"; quite to the contrary: both Clinton and Sanders clearly make fighting racism and classism a key part of their politics.
I suspect that what you are trying to say is that Clinton and Sanders are not "Marxist-Leninists", which they are indeed not. But "Marxism-Leninism" refers to Stalin's ideology, not to Marx's ideology.
Clinton and Sanders objectively are running on ideas that are deeply rooted in neo-Marxism, on race, class, and economics (which are interdependent in neo-Marxist ideology).
So? Neo-Marxism is only one particular way of "using ethnic identity and class to further one's gain"; there are many others (e.g., fascism). And we're not talking about which party is the better party, we are talking about Clinton's and Sanders' ideology, which is objectively rooted in neo-Marxism. If you want to attempt to make an argument that Donald Trump is also a neo-Marxist, be my guest (I suspect you may find some instances of neo-Marxist reasoning in his speeches, although I think he's simply too incoherent to place him in any category).
I don't see how this is different from Hillary, Sanders, or any other major politician?
In fact, "appealing to the lowest common denominator" of your electorate is arguably what you should do in a representative democracy.
No, it means that your claim of "the overwhelming majority is crap". You just reasoned through the steps yourself:
Now:
He may not have expected her to be as incompetent as she turned out to be. Or he may simply not have cared and hired her just out of a political calculation that having her in his administration and control was preferable to the alternatives.
The error there is in your limited understanding of English, not my grammar.
What makes me "gag" is your inability to follow a link and accept simple, basic facts about political science.
Yes, and I responded that your reasoning doesn't reduce to a "right to life" (which libertarianism doesn't recognize anyway) but the "enforcement of an implied contract".
My obligation to you is determined based on whatever terms for transport we agree on. You are welcome to try to argue that conception implies a contract between a fetus and the mother, and hence confers particular legal obligations on the mother, but that line of reasoning is not rooted in a "right to life", it is rooted in arguments about contracts.
In any case, a river crossing example is misleading because its cost structure is wrong. A better example is where you lie dying on the ground (say, you broke your neck) and survive only if someone gives you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until the ambulance arrives. At least in the US (and under a libertarian understanding), both starting and continuing resuscitation are voluntary. You may well argue that there ought to be a legal obligation to start and continue resuscitation, but such a view is incompatible with libertarian principles (and is also incompatible with contract law as understood in actual legal systems).
An absolute "right to life" cannot even be defined consistently (go try it). Under libertarianism, if you trespass upon my property or body, whether to remove you from my property or body is my choice, and that is a free and moral choice I make, not a choice that can be compelled by the legal system.
No, that's an incorrect interpretation. Marxism is primarily about analyzing history and society in terms of class relations and conflict. Marxism is not a synonym for central planning or Soviet-style communism. In fact, from a Marxist point of view, the class struggle is the real issue, and whether it is ended via increasingly tight regulation of a market economy or via a centrally planned economy is a secondary question.
I disagree. Both Hillary and Sanders divide up society into competing groups (primarily "classes" and "minorities") and then advocate policies based on reasoning about power, privilege, exploitation, and oppression between these groups. That is the essence of Marxist analysis. It is the basis for many of their policies related to race and women (in fact, their positions are textbook neo-Marxist), and it is also a justification for economic policies.
I'm not sure what aspects of Marxism you think there are besides "academic, theoretical". Marxism is, and has always been, a "method of socioeconomic analysis". The root problem wasn't that it was wrong, it was that it lacked scientific rigor, falsifiability, and empirical verification. It is that root problem that allowed "vicious and power-hungry people" to misuse it as the basis of totalitarian regimes, just like "vicious and power-hungry people" misused scientific racism and eugenics as another basis of totalitarian regimes.
I think it generates the right connotations: neo-Marxism as a theory fails in the same way that Marxism fails, and it is therefore open to abuse by "vicious and power-hungry people" just like traditional Marxism. The fact that the details of the conclusions that neo-Marxism reaches differ from those of traditional Marxism doesn't change that.
The term "independent" refers to party registration.
She is incompetent at government, not at lying. And without Bill Clinton to back her up, she would be a non-entity.
No, I "foed" you because you are a partisan idiot.
As Friedman put it, "Government is the delusion in which you put unselfish and ungreedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men."
Nevertheless, even among selfish and greedy men, there are gradations of ruthlessness and incompetence.
The overwhelming majority of Americans is either Republican or independent.
You bet that blocking a Clinton presidency may end up being high on the agenda for a lot of people, because Clinton is a lying, incompetent crook, regardless of her party affiliation, or what political goals she pretends to stand for today.
The ignorance there is yours. The feminist and racial ideas promoted by Hillary and Sanders are rooted in a mix of progressivism and critical theory, and critical theory is simply another term for "neo-Marxism". That's not an accusation or an interpretation, that's how the people who developed this theory actually understand themselves.
Abortion isn't about whether a fetus "has a right to life", it is about whether a fetus "has a right to live using someone else's body for survival against their will".
If you base your argument for the use of government power to force women to carry a fetus to term against their will on fetal personhood, you then have to postulate a right that no major political ideology recognizes, namely a right of one person to use another person's body for survival against their will. I can't see such a "right" being compatible with libertarianism.