I disagree that all human beings are like this. I have seen plenty of people in positions of power outside the US who are friendly and not angry and cruel and just normal people who aren't out to hurt anyone or prove how 'bad' they are. For some reason there are a lot of people like this in our country. It must have something to do with our culture. Who knows. But it is not as big of a problem elsewhere in my experience. Power does corrupt, but not to equal degrees. One thing that is for sure is that if people like this are not immediately fired when caught in the act of abusing their power things will only get worse.
What makes you think he didn't have all of that? So maybe he made a slight mistake on one of the forms. That makes you think that the government has the right to take his property? What bullshit. If it is legal for the government to do that the law should be changed. And it still doesn't make it okay. Theft is immoral no matter who does it and no matter what 'laws' the government writes for itself.
Since the CAD is currently weaker than the dollar, having declared it in USD instead of CAD would be adverse to the government
1 USD = $1.01824 CAD. So it is just about equal, but even if it isn't I don't follow why it should make any difference what currency the price is in. Are you implying that the government doesn't know about exchange rates?
Judges are government employees who are a part of and believe in the system themselves. The fox is guarding the chicken coop and you consider that justice? Checks and balances my ass.
If/when things really get out of control and the US completes its transformation into East Germany or even WWII Germany what do you plan to do about it? Guns in the hands of private citizens are for that true SHTF situation when the government goes completely off the rails and truly takes over. Then a violent revolution would be necessary. In that situation I'd hate to see hundreds of unarmed citizens getting mowed down by assault rifles and crushed by tanks because the only thing they had to fight with was their fists.
And also everyone has the right to defend themselves, to at least try to fight back with current era weapons. The government shouldn't be the only one to have weapons. That's a recipe for disaster in every way.
Unfortunately Democracy is essentially mob rule and only protects the freedoms of the majority.
It doesn't even do that. It does allow the masses to believe that whatever happens is their own fault though. Even worse, it allows other countries to believe that as well. If you are arrested in some foreign country and tortured they will believe that you condone torture yourself because you voted in the government that has no problem using it, even against innocent people who haven't even been charged with any crime.
People do stupid things. If you hadn't noticed. Sometimes they get fired. He will, in all likelihood get his boat back with an apology. And I'm sure DHS has posts close to the Arctic circle for the agent involved. But, unless she clearly violated procudures she will not be fired. If every idiot was fired half the country would be out of work. And don't forget your tin foil hat. You never know...
What a load of bullshit. This isn't about stupidity it is about abuse of power. This woman needs to be fired immediately and never hired to work in any form of law enforcement ever again. Any other position is condoning this sort of behavior.
This has nothing to do with training and supervision. It has everything to do with law enforcement agencies hiring angry, stupid, thugs instead of normal people. And the 'bad apple' line doesn't cut it. You think this sort of thing doesn't happen all the time? It happens every day. It's just usually not this dramatic and so doesn't make the news. If it were a bad apple problem this woman would be fired immediately and never again hired to work in a position of power over others, but I guarantee that is not going to happen.
I am wondering who is supposed to decide what procedures are necessary? If you don't trust the doctors to do it, who do you trust? The insurance companies are the ones footing most of the bill. Let them worry about what is necessary. If they won't pay for it, many people aren't going to do it. Complaints like this ignore the real problem, which is that health insurance masks the true market costs and medical care is absurdly overpriced. If most people had to pay those prices they would seek medical care a lot less or maybe never. Most people just couldn't afford it.
It is easy to say that x% of work is unnecessary. What is hard to identify, before the fact, is which of this work is unnecessary.
Exactly. The whole point of diagnostic procedures is that the doctor doesn't have a crystal ball. It's easy to say after the fact that a procedure turned out to be unnecessary. In my experience the only person at fault for truly unnecessary procedures are the patients themselves. Assuming you are conscious you can always refuse a diagnostic procedure if you think you know more about medicine than the doctor. Don't blame the doctors for fuck sake. In my experience most are doing the best they can for their patients.
I'd like to say to these people complaining about unnecessary procedures that they can do their part by refusing them. Just don't try to force me to do the same. It's easy to claim that someone else's test is unnecessary.
Unnecessary procedures are not the problem with our system. The problem is that the procedures themselves are absurdly expensive due to the fact that a huge megacorporation is the one directly paying for them. So the hospitals charge them fuck you money for everything. There is no price competition.
I have asthma and the inhaler that I need in order to breathe costs around $300 per month. That alone represents about a third of my monthly income. Drugs in the US are so absurdly expensive that you pretty much have no choice but to get medical insurance. So it's a trap. The market is not allowed to set prices because no one can afford the prices except the uber-rich and medical insurance companies.
Yes, I am aware of overseas pharmacies and I use them despite the fact that I have decent medical insurance, but they do not carry every drug.
..letting you know something is seriously wrong in your life and that you need to change some habits to fix it
Well for me chronic pain (which I have had in the past) leaves me only two choices: 1. Opiates. 2. Suicide. (Is this the 'change' you are referring to?)
Have you ever had chronic pain? If not then you should probably STFU. Not every medical problem has a cure. In fact most don't. There is nothing wrong with pain medication.
Pain pills are handed out like candy, I personally hate it. I have several bottles of pain killers on my fridge that I get prescribed every few months and I usually don't take any of them. I think pain pills need to become MUCH MORE regulated, to the point that we really don't give enough of them to make the pain go away, only slim down bit.
Dude, you could be selling those on Silk Road and be making a ton of bitcoins. What a waste. Can I have the name of your doctor who is handing out pain pills like candy? I'd like to see him. My doctor is stingy with them, but is willing to prescribe a very small amount when it is obvious that I am in a huge amount of pain. But the last time I was in severe pain he refused. In the old days I would have switched doctors hoping to find one that actually gives a shit when I'm in pain, but nearly all of them are afraid to prescribe pain meds now. Partially because of people like you supporting the DEA and the war against sick people, err, I mean drugs. The DEA is now more in charge of patient care than doctors are. Reminds me of this story in that someone who is not a doctor believes that they can decide what is or is not necessary for a patient.
For example the de-facto core predicate of libertarianism goes something like this "Liberty is the highest good.
Close, but not exactly. I would say that the most fundamental principle of Libertarianism is voluntarism, that to use force by one human being against another (when you are not merely defending yourself from an attacker) is inherently wrong and having a big gang to back you up does not make the use of force any less wrong. That all human interaction should be based on the idea that all human beings are born with inalienable human rights which a government can neither give nor take away. That any just society must treat all human beings as inherently equal.
In order to justify forcing anyone to do anything that they do not want to do you are asserting that you are in some way superior to that person. That they are your slave and you are their master.
So you see, like socialists, and unlike either democrats or republicans, libertarians base their ideas, not on pragmatism, but on actual ideas about right and wrong. Politics are subservient to ethics.
Most, or at least many, Americans agree with this tenant, but when it's twisted to be "Liberty from government interference is the only good" it becomes a dangerous short-circuit on the role of society in achieving humanistic goals.
You seriously believe that many/most Americans believe in the principle of liberty? That is demonstrably untrue. AFAIK, Libertarians are the only group in America that believes in individual liberty. Republicans obviously don't. They are welcoming a police state with open arms. The democrats may be slightly more reluctant, but they definitely do not support freedom in any way. At least not anymore.
Claiming that libertarians believe that freedom is the only good may be a bit of a stretch. Nevertheless if you are the one who is locked in a cage by the state it would seem hard to imagine a higher good than freedom. Without freedom, genuine freedom, which means freedom from government tyranny, what possible good could be achieved in such a society. A society of masters and slaves.
I don't consider slavery of any kind to be "humanistic", but I agree that freedom is definitely a short circuit toward achieving the dream a dystopian society where imperfect humans working in the government get to decide the fates of everyone else and micromanage our lives and order us to do as they say in a manner no different from a Mafia kingpin. The society you envision is a society of slaves. You just don't like to call it that. You are like the man who rapes a woman and believes throughout the experience that despite the gun to her head she is enjoying it.
I have objections with most libertarian thought in that it implicitly endorses many kinds of harm one private citizen can visit upon another, with no mechanism for limiting that harm.
The whole point of libertarian thought is that harm against innocent people is minimized. Is there any worse harm than that of government imposing its will? There is no greater concentration of power than that of a government and the power can only grow and grow until or unless it is stopped through force. The 20th century had quite a few governments that attempted to achieve 'humanistic' goals and the cruelty was almost unimaginable and the body counts were in the millions.
but I can identify commonly considered core principles to be poorly reasoned.
Which principles are poorly reasoned? The point of my original comment about logic and rationality is that, based on my own personal experience, libertarians are far more likely to value both of those than people with more mixed and pragmatic political beliefs. It also takes a great deal more thought and independence to believe in such an unpopular system of government than it does to believe almost exactly the same thing that your parents and friends and most of the people you know j
The vast majority of US politicians are attorneys. Isn't that what people generally do when they don't believe in anything and want power for its own sake? They go to law school and then run for office.
Republicans aren't any better. In fact back in the 80s and early 90s the Democrats actually seemed to care at least somewhat about civil liberties. At least insofar as it didn't interfere with their monetary agendas.
Now of course both major parties stand squarely behind censorship and the growing police state. The only way to tell them apart is by their rhetoric. And neither side actually believes in anything. Neither side has ideals. They leave that to the 'extremists' which both sides consider to be nearly as bad as terrorists.
Actually, Libertarians rarely assume anything. Most Libertarians are fans of logic and rationality. Problems such as how to avoid overly congested airwaves could be handled just fine by limited government libertarians for obvious reasons.
Anarcho-libertarians OTOH would simply argue that either the solution is worse than the problem or that the problem will work itself out naturally. There is actually lots of room in the EM spectrum, at least for narrow band. It makes little sense for two competitors to block out each others transmissions when one can merely shift 500 kHz higher or lower. It would really be in everyone's interest to come up with commonly followed standards/guidelines for EM transmissions.
I'm not really up on all the latest pirate radio stations, but I haven't heard of many who fight against other transmissions on the same frequency. If you know that someone is already transmitting on 176.432 Mhz you can just choose 177.389 Mhz or whatever. Also consider how rare pirate radio stations are. It's just not such a huge problem that we need police state enforcement.
I don't think we have to all live as slaves just so our radio and TV stations are nice and clear. If the price of not being a slave is that it makes wireless communication more problematic then so be it. It may very well be true that EM waves are more efficient when allocated by the government, but I would much rather live in a free society with more difficult wireless than live as a slave in one where there is never any interference because causing it is punishable by death (or in our case a slap on the wrist fine only occasionally enforced)
Personally I don't have a major problem with the FCC when they are attempting to sort out wireless standards. That's a useful activity whether or not it is truly necessary. I do have a problem with them however when they engage in censorship. And such censorship is pretty much inevitable once the government is given control of the EM spectrum.
Do you have any kind of reference for 100 kW boosted mobile CB radios? That is a lot of power. It's hard for me to picture how you could get that much power from even a very large 12v battery and/or the alternator. Even 20 kW seems pretty amazing for a mobile transmitter.
I guess it's a case of do as I say not as I do, but it would be great if Visa and Mastercard refused to do business with google due to their illegal activities (torrent searches etc).
I like it. Live in a border town of Washington and drive over the bridge to buy everything in Oregon. Also rent a P.O. Box in Oregon so as to avoid the new internet sales tax. Ideally what you want to be is a resident of Washington with an address in Oregon. Now if I could just figure out a way to avoid federal income tax.
Correction. It's the internet tax he is against. The way you stated it makes it sound like he is against a national VAT as an alternative to the income tax. As a Libertarian and a Proletarian I would support a national VAT as a replacement for the income tax as long as food is exempt. I also don't think states need the additional income from this internet tax. They seem to be doing just fine with what they have.
Slashdot Mirror
And "regulating commerce" means stealing boats? Nice try though.
I disagree that all human beings are like this. I have seen plenty of people in positions of power outside the US who are friendly and not angry and cruel and just normal people who aren't out to hurt anyone or prove how 'bad' they are. For some reason there are a lot of people like this in our country. It must have something to do with our culture. Who knows. But it is not as big of a problem elsewhere in my experience. Power does corrupt, but not to equal degrees. One thing that is for sure is that if people like this are not immediately fired when caught in the act of abusing their power things will only get worse.
[citation needed]
Perhaps you should look up the definition of 'fascism'.
What makes you think he didn't have all of that? So maybe he made a slight mistake on one of the forms. That makes you think that the government has the right to take his property? What bullshit. If it is legal for the government to do that the law should be changed. And it still doesn't make it okay. Theft is immoral no matter who does it and no matter what 'laws' the government writes for itself.
Since the CAD is currently weaker than the dollar, having declared it in USD instead of CAD would be adverse to the government
1 USD = $1.01824 CAD. So it is just about equal, but even if it isn't I don't follow why it should make any difference what currency the price is in. Are you implying that the government doesn't know about exchange rates?
Judges are government employees who are a part of and believe in the system themselves. The fox is guarding the chicken coop and you consider that justice? Checks and balances my ass.
If/when things really get out of control and the US completes its transformation into East Germany or even WWII Germany what do you plan to do about it? Guns in the hands of private citizens are for that true SHTF situation when the government goes completely off the rails and truly takes over. Then a violent revolution would be necessary. In that situation I'd hate to see hundreds of unarmed citizens getting mowed down by assault rifles and crushed by tanks because the only thing they had to fight with was their fists.
And also everyone has the right to defend themselves, to at least try to fight back with current era weapons. The government shouldn't be the only one to have weapons. That's a recipe for disaster in every way.
Unfortunately Democracy is essentially mob rule and only protects the freedoms of the majority.
It doesn't even do that. It does allow the masses to believe that whatever happens is their own fault though. Even worse, it allows other countries to believe that as well. If you are arrested in some foreign country and tortured they will believe that you condone torture yourself because you voted in the government that has no problem using it, even against innocent people who haven't even been charged with any crime.
People do stupid things. If you hadn't noticed. Sometimes they get fired. He will, in all likelihood get his boat back with an apology. And I'm sure DHS has posts close to the Arctic circle for the agent involved. But, unless she clearly violated procudures she will not be fired. If every idiot was fired half the country would be out of work. And don't forget your tin foil hat. You never know...
What a load of bullshit. This isn't about stupidity it is about abuse of power. This woman needs to be fired immediately and never hired to work in any form of law enforcement ever again. Any other position is condoning this sort of behavior.
This has nothing to do with training and supervision. It has everything to do with law enforcement agencies hiring angry, stupid, thugs instead of normal people. And the 'bad apple' line doesn't cut it. You think this sort of thing doesn't happen all the time? It happens every day. It's just usually not this dramatic and so doesn't make the news. If it were a bad apple problem this woman would be fired immediately and never again hired to work in a position of power over others, but I guarantee that is not going to happen.
I am wondering who is supposed to decide what procedures are necessary? If you don't trust the doctors to do it, who do you trust? The insurance companies are the ones footing most of the bill. Let them worry about what is necessary. If they won't pay for it, many people aren't going to do it. Complaints like this ignore the real problem, which is that health insurance masks the true market costs and medical care is absurdly overpriced. If most people had to pay those prices they would seek medical care a lot less or maybe never. Most people just couldn't afford it.
It is easy to say that x% of work is unnecessary. What is hard to identify, before the fact, is which of this work is unnecessary.
Exactly. The whole point of diagnostic procedures is that the doctor doesn't have a crystal ball. It's easy to say after the fact that a procedure turned out to be unnecessary. In my experience the only person at fault for truly unnecessary procedures are the patients themselves. Assuming you are conscious you can always refuse a diagnostic procedure if you think you know more about medicine than the doctor. Don't blame the doctors for fuck sake. In my experience most are doing the best they can for their patients.
I'd like to say to these people complaining about unnecessary procedures that they can do their part by refusing them. Just don't try to force me to do the same. It's easy to claim that someone else's test is unnecessary.
Unnecessary procedures are not the problem with our system. The problem is that the procedures themselves are absurdly expensive due to the fact that a huge megacorporation is the one directly paying for them. So the hospitals charge them fuck you money for everything. There is no price competition.
I have asthma and the inhaler that I need in order to breathe costs around $300 per month. That alone represents about a third of my monthly income. Drugs in the US are so absurdly expensive that you pretty much have no choice but to get medical insurance. So it's a trap. The market is not allowed to set prices because no one can afford the prices except the uber-rich and medical insurance companies.
Yes, I am aware of overseas pharmacies and I use them despite the fact that I have decent medical insurance, but they do not carry every drug.
..letting you know something is seriously wrong in your life and that you need to change some habits to fix it
Well for me chronic pain (which I have had in the past) leaves me only two choices:
1. Opiates.
2. Suicide. (Is this the 'change' you are referring to?)
Have you ever had chronic pain? If not then you should probably STFU. Not every medical problem has a cure. In fact most don't. There is nothing wrong with pain medication.
Pain pills are handed out like candy, I personally hate it. I have several bottles of pain killers on my fridge that I get prescribed every few months and I usually don't take any of them. I think pain pills need to become MUCH MORE regulated, to the point that we really don't give enough of them to make the pain go away, only slim down bit.
Dude, you could be selling those on Silk Road and be making a ton of bitcoins. What a waste. Can I have the name of your doctor who is handing out pain pills like candy? I'd like to see him. My doctor is stingy with them, but is willing to prescribe a very small amount when it is obvious that I am in a huge amount of pain. But the last time I was in severe pain he refused. In the old days I would have switched doctors hoping to find one that actually gives a shit when I'm in pain, but nearly all of them are afraid to prescribe pain meds now. Partially because of people like you supporting the DEA and the war against sick people, err, I mean drugs. The DEA is now more in charge of patient care than doctors are. Reminds me of this story in that someone who is not a doctor believes that they can decide what is or is not necessary for a patient.
For example the de-facto core predicate of libertarianism goes something like this "Liberty is the highest good.
Close, but not exactly. I would say that the most fundamental principle of Libertarianism is voluntarism, that to use force by one human being against another (when you are not merely defending yourself from an attacker) is inherently wrong and having a big gang to back you up does not make the use of force any less wrong. That all human interaction should be based on the idea that all human beings are born with inalienable human rights which a government can neither give nor take away. That any just society must treat all human beings as inherently equal.
In order to justify forcing anyone to do anything that they do not want to do you are asserting that you are in some way superior to that person. That they are your slave and you are their master.
So you see, like socialists, and unlike either democrats or republicans, libertarians base their ideas, not on pragmatism, but on actual ideas about right and wrong. Politics are subservient to ethics.
Most, or at least many, Americans agree with this tenant, but when it's twisted to be "Liberty from government interference is the only good" it becomes a dangerous short-circuit on the role of society in achieving humanistic goals.
You seriously believe that many/most Americans believe in the principle of liberty? That is demonstrably untrue. AFAIK, Libertarians are the only group in America that believes in individual liberty. Republicans obviously don't. They are welcoming a police state with open arms. The democrats may be slightly more reluctant, but they definitely do not support freedom in any way. At least not anymore.
Claiming that libertarians believe that freedom is the only good may be a bit of a stretch. Nevertheless if you are the one who is locked in a cage by the state it would seem hard to imagine a higher good than freedom. Without freedom, genuine freedom, which means freedom from government tyranny, what possible good could be achieved in such a society. A society of masters and slaves.
I don't consider slavery of any kind to be "humanistic", but I agree that freedom is definitely a short circuit toward achieving the dream a dystopian society where imperfect humans working in the government get to decide the fates of everyone else and micromanage our lives and order us to do as they say in a manner no different from a Mafia kingpin. The society you envision is a society of slaves. You just don't like to call it that. You are like the man who rapes a woman and believes throughout the experience that despite the gun to her head she is enjoying it.
I have objections with most libertarian thought in that it implicitly endorses many kinds of harm one private citizen can visit upon another, with no mechanism for limiting that harm.
The whole point of libertarian thought is that harm against innocent people is minimized. Is there any worse harm than that of government imposing its will? There is no greater concentration of power than that of a government and the power can only grow and grow until or unless it is stopped through force. The 20th century had quite a few governments that attempted to achieve 'humanistic' goals and the cruelty was almost unimaginable and the body counts were in the millions.
but I can identify commonly considered core principles to be poorly reasoned.
Which principles are poorly reasoned? The point of my original comment about logic and rationality is that, based on my own personal experience, libertarians are far more likely to value both of those than people with more mixed and pragmatic political beliefs. It also takes a great deal more thought and independence to believe in such an unpopular system of government than it does to believe almost exactly the same thing that your parents and friends and most of the people you know j
The vast majority of US politicians are attorneys. Isn't that what people generally do when they don't believe in anything and want power for its own sake? They go to law school and then run for office.
Republicans aren't any better. In fact back in the 80s and early 90s the Democrats actually seemed to care at least somewhat about civil liberties. At least insofar as it didn't interfere with their monetary agendas.
Now of course both major parties stand squarely behind censorship and the growing police state. The only way to tell them apart is by their rhetoric. And neither side actually believes in anything. Neither side has ideals. They leave that to the 'extremists' which both sides consider to be nearly as bad as terrorists.
Actually, Libertarians rarely assume anything. Most Libertarians are fans of logic and rationality. Problems such as how to avoid overly congested airwaves could be handled just fine by limited government libertarians for obvious reasons.
Anarcho-libertarians OTOH would simply argue that either the solution is worse than the problem or that the problem will work itself out naturally. There is actually lots of room in the EM spectrum, at least for narrow band. It makes little sense for two competitors to block out each others transmissions when one can merely shift 500 kHz higher or lower. It would really be in everyone's interest to come up with commonly followed standards/guidelines for EM transmissions.
I'm not really up on all the latest pirate radio stations, but I haven't heard of many who fight against other transmissions on the same frequency. If you know that someone is already transmitting on 176.432 Mhz you can just choose 177.389 Mhz or whatever. Also consider how rare pirate radio stations are. It's just not such a huge problem that we need police state enforcement.
I don't think we have to all live as slaves just so our radio and TV stations are nice and clear. If the price of not being a slave is that it makes wireless communication more problematic then so be it. It may very well be true that EM waves are more efficient when allocated by the government, but I would much rather live in a free society with more difficult wireless than live as a slave in one where there is never any interference because causing it is punishable by death (or in our case a slap on the wrist fine only occasionally enforced)
Personally I don't have a major problem with the FCC when they are attempting to sort out wireless standards. That's a useful activity whether or not it is truly necessary. I do have a problem with them however when they engage in censorship. And such censorship is pretty much inevitable once the government is given control of the EM spectrum.
Do you have any kind of reference for 100 kW boosted mobile CB radios? That is a lot of power. It's hard for me to picture how you could get that much power from even a very large 12v battery and/or the alternator. Even 20 kW seems pretty amazing for a mobile transmitter.
If both parties are aware of what is going on it is not fraud.
I guess it's a case of do as I say not as I do, but it would be great if Visa and Mastercard refused to do business with google due to their illegal activities (torrent searches etc).
Well I do say that.
I like it. Live in a border town of Washington and drive over the bridge to buy everything in Oregon. Also rent a P.O. Box in Oregon so as to avoid the new internet sales tax. Ideally what you want to be is a resident of Washington with an address in Oregon. Now if I could just figure out a way to avoid federal income tax.
Also Tunguska was more than 3000 km to the east of Chelyabinsk. Having said that Mother Russia does seem to be lucky when it comes to meteors.
Correction. It's the internet tax he is against. The way you stated it makes it sound like he is against a national VAT as an alternative to the income tax. As a Libertarian and a Proletarian I would support a national VAT as a replacement for the income tax as long as food is exempt. I also don't think states need the additional income from this internet tax. They seem to be doing just fine with what they have.