There's a big difference: Those guys actually broke a law. Possibly justifiably (and almost certainly in Badnarik's case), but there was at the very least charges, arrests, court hearings, and so forth. The kind of stuff both I and GP were talking about both involve people being repressed without committing any crime whatsoever because of a political statement. The difference is the people you listed were charged for actions, not beliefs or statements.
For instance, Irwin Schiff chose to put his tax refusal belief into practice, which is why he was charged. That puts him in roughly the same category as, say, a politically motivated draft dodger during Vietnam: arguably morally correct, but legitimately in legal hot water. He's been charged repeatedly with refusing to pay his taxes, not for being a libertarian.
Yeah, someone needs to send RightSaidFred99 to a Cato Institute reeducation center before he starts thinking that health insurance is a life-and-death kind of thing too and needs to be regulated!
But even my longest (currently) planned trip (a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail) still has me going into town for resupply every week at most and of course ends with me safe back home.
The other factor here is that the AT thru-hikers generally get to know each other over the course of the trip, so there is actually a fair amount of social contact involved. There's a relatively short window of sensible times to start in Georgia or Maine, so everyone starts within a couple of weeks of each other. In addition, there's a relatively small difference in hiking paces, especially by the end of it, so you can reasonably expect to run into roughly the same set of folks from night to night. And if someone gets ahead of you, you'll find them in the shelter log books more often than not.
I've never done an AT thru hike, but I've hiked most of the New Hampshire and Vermont portion of the AT, and that's the kind of stuff you learn from them.
The call for Assange to be prosecuted for something, anything, is the bipartisan consensus position in Washington. The conservative position is for Assange to be summarily executed. So poking fun at Peter King for hypocrisy may be fun and all, but it's not a great argument.
Really, the reaction to Wikileaks has been so dramatic that I have to think that they have something really really damaging on somebody that they haven't released yet. And it has to be more damaging than evidence of war crimes, because when Dick Cheney proudly stated that he ordered waterboarding (which was a war crime when the US accused the Japanese of doing it) on national TV, not much happened.
Just because group A does something does not justify group B behaving the same way. If I commit a robbery and get arrested, "the other guy committed a robbery too, and he wasn't arrested" is not a valid defense.
So you'd be happy to have a libertarian on your staff then, would you?
1. I don't have any staff, nor expect to acquire any. 2. When I was in that sort of role, I cared whether the prospective employee could do the job, and politics never came up in workplace discussions with them.
Imagine what damage such people might do, in positions of influence and authority.
You completely missed that my grandfather's profession was that of a music theorist, collector of folk music, and composer. Explain exactly how he would have caused political problems by writing a string quartet, writing down a mining song from Appalachia, or describing why humans find C major to be a more pleasing chord than a B diminished.
Blacklisting targeted ordinary folks with no political clout whatsoever for their political views. It's as simple as that.
the US also has a little problem of accidental shootings by police
They also have a little problem of 'accidental' shootings by police, where the police shoot intentionally and afterwords claim it was accidental in order to get away with it.
Somebody who really took the time to understand Timothy McVeigh was Gore Vidal. For instance, this article in Vanity Fair. McVeigh wrote back to Vidal, and they corresponded for a while. Vidal basically argued that McVeigh had reasons for doing what he did, and felt justified in doing it. McVeigh also pointed out that the United States Military did this same sort of thing all the time in foreign countries (this was before the US really started going after people in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen).
Hell, it's almost to the point where it feels like calling yourself a "libertarian" or - worse - being a registered libertarian, is potentially as risky as calling yourself a communist or socialist in the 1950s.
Have you ever been fired for being a suspected libertarian? Have you ever been fired, and then all your potential employers informed that they shouldn't hire you because then they might be suspected as being libertarians too? Have you ever been called up in front of a congressional investigative committee for being a libertarian? Have libertarian leaders been imprisoned? All those things were happening to suspected communists during the 1950's: For instance, my grandfather went from being a highly respected academic musicologist to teaching a dozen piano students in his living room.
And if you want to know what the most risky group to be affiliated with right now in the US, it's not libertarianism, its Islam, which subjects you to regular harassment at airports, hate crimes, and in a few cases being disappeared.
Is this proof that humans make and respond to pheromones?
Anyone can find this out very easily: Just don't shower or apply deodorant for a couple of days, and you will notice everyone around you respond (assuming you leave your parent's basement on a regular basis).
One reason this comes up is that since at least 1960 or so, the right wing of the political spectrum in the United States has generally been fine with violence as an acceptable part of politics. There were Dixiecrats almost openly cheering when Martin Luther King was killed. Jesse Helms once threatened then-President Bill Clinton on national television (saying something along the lines of "if he comes to North Carolina, he needs to watch his back"). Very recently, Dr George Tiller was gunned down in a church by a right-wing activist for performing abortions, and a liberal Unitarian Universalist Church was shot up in Knoxville for supporting gay rights.
So when violence actually occurs against Democratic political figures, a lot of left-wing people think that somebody right-wing is behind it. Whether that speculation is justified, it's certainly understandable.
Forget fiction, how about realUS-supportedregimes? I should point out that I could have picked plenty of others, those were just the ones that came to mind.
Ignorance is never an excuse in matters of the law.
What about the knowledge that the US Supreme Court specifically ruled in the Pentagon Papers case that what Wikileaks has been doing is completely 100% protected by the First Amendment? I should also point out that the really interesting part of this whole incident is that Barack Obama's reaction to the leak was more authoritarian than Richard Nixon's was to Daniel Elsberg's leak.
I might remind you that humans didn't develop these capabilities until the last 10,000 years or so after around 2 billion years of evolution.
Not really. Flintknapping was an invention. Flintknapping a hand ax or arrowhead or spearhead was an invention. The stone-tipped spear was an invention. The bow and arrow was an invention. Figuring out how to first control and then consistently be able to start a fire was an invention. What evidence we have of that period suggests that they developed some understanding how seasons worked (if they lived in a temperate climate), and made some attempts at medicine. They probably also started telling stories about the world around them, now known as myths.
Our cave men ancestors were ignorant and starting from scratch, but there's no reason to think they were stupid and didn't invent stuff, learn stuff, and pass that knowledge along. And they were really no dumber than we are.
Totally incorrect: Don't we remember the Dilbert Equation?
Compensation = Work / Knowledge
So it's actually beneficial salary-wise to be hardworking and stupid. Just like the Wall St guys, many of whom work 100 hours a week and are also complete morons.
My dad took about a 30% pay cut in addition to the time and money it took to get a graduate teaching degree in order to switch from software development to teaching. He really had been wanting to do that all his life, but the simple fact is that objectively it's a bad economic decision. Why? Simple - we don't like paying teachers anything close to what their level of education would get them in any other field. An entry-level engineer makes an average of $125K per year total compensation. An average teacher makes about $43K per year.
If your nose tells you that there might be a dead body rotting, you don't need a warrant - no more than seeing a gun or hearing a scream. Of course, you know that, and you're just adding a little Troll spice to your story.
Oh yes you do. The Supreme Court in particular has stated very clearly that the home has maximum protection from being searched without a warrant and without consent. Unlike, say, a vehicle stop, a home is not likely to skip the jurisdiction. What the police are supposed to do if they have probable cause for a search of the home but do not have the consent of the owner for a search is to possibly leave an officer there to watch the place to make sure that what they're looking for doesn't move, then get a warrant, and then return with the warrant to search the home.
It may be a BS excuse, but the reason they push it is because it works - especially when the target audience has a high unemployment rate.
An example here: The ballot initiative in the last election cycle to approve a really lousy casino gambling amendment was run by a group called "Jobs for Ohio", with billboards like "Vote Yes on 9, 23,000 jobs for Ohioans". It didn't matter that the effect of casinos is generally to suck money right out of an economy into the hands of the gaming industry, because the 10% of people who were unemployed and their buddies who wanted them to be able to get back on their feet thought they had a good shot at getting those 23,000 jobs. As a result, the same electorate who had rejected casinos at least 4 times previously voted for them in 2010, because they were desperate enough for work.
I mean, the kind of stuff Elizabeth Warren's proposed for regulating credit cards has approval of something like 95% of the public in polls. That doesn't mean she can actually make it happen.
That's chump change on Wall St. Compared to the kind of stuff Goldman Sachs pulls on a regular basis, I'm not too worried about high-frequency traders getting scammed. What's very clear is that none of it has much of anything to do with actual sound investing.
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And of course, the Golden Rule always applies in this situation: Those that have the gold make the rules.
There's a big difference: Those guys actually broke a law. Possibly justifiably (and almost certainly in Badnarik's case), but there was at the very least charges, arrests, court hearings, and so forth. The kind of stuff both I and GP were talking about both involve people being repressed without committing any crime whatsoever because of a political statement. The difference is the people you listed were charged for actions, not beliefs or statements.
For instance, Irwin Schiff chose to put his tax refusal belief into practice, which is why he was charged. That puts him in roughly the same category as, say, a politically motivated draft dodger during Vietnam: arguably morally correct, but legitimately in legal hot water. He's been charged repeatedly with refusing to pay his taxes, not for being a libertarian.
Yeah, someone needs to send RightSaidFred99 to a Cato Institute reeducation center before he starts thinking that health insurance is a life-and-death kind of thing too and needs to be regulated!
But even my longest (currently) planned trip (a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail) still has me going into town for resupply every week at most and of course ends with me safe back home.
The other factor here is that the AT thru-hikers generally get to know each other over the course of the trip, so there is actually a fair amount of social contact involved. There's a relatively short window of sensible times to start in Georgia or Maine, so everyone starts within a couple of weeks of each other. In addition, there's a relatively small difference in hiking paces, especially by the end of it, so you can reasonably expect to run into roughly the same set of folks from night to night. And if someone gets ahead of you, you'll find them in the shelter log books more often than not.
I've never done an AT thru hike, but I've hiked most of the New Hampshire and Vermont portion of the AT, and that's the kind of stuff you learn from them.
The call for Assange to be prosecuted for something, anything, is the bipartisan consensus position in Washington. The conservative position is for Assange to be summarily executed. So poking fun at Peter King for hypocrisy may be fun and all, but it's not a great argument.
Really, the reaction to Wikileaks has been so dramatic that I have to think that they have something really really damaging on somebody that they haven't released yet. And it has to be more damaging than evidence of war crimes, because when Dick Cheney proudly stated that he ordered waterboarding (which was a war crime when the US accused the Japanese of doing it) on national TV, not much happened.
Oh, I believe GP on that though, it's straight from the horse's mouth!
Are you familiar with the tu quoque fallacy?
Just because group A does something does not justify group B behaving the same way. If I commit a robbery and get arrested, "the other guy committed a robbery too, and he wasn't arrested" is not a valid defense.
So you'd be happy to have a libertarian on your staff then, would you?
1. I don't have any staff, nor expect to acquire any.
2. When I was in that sort of role, I cared whether the prospective employee could do the job, and politics never came up in workplace discussions with them.
Imagine what damage such people might do, in positions of influence and authority.
You completely missed that my grandfather's profession was that of a music theorist, collector of folk music, and composer. Explain exactly how he would have caused political problems by writing a string quartet, writing down a mining song from Appalachia, or describing why humans find C major to be a more pleasing chord than a B diminished.
Blacklisting targeted ordinary folks with no political clout whatsoever for their political views. It's as simple as that.
the US also has a little problem of accidental shootings by police
They also have a little problem of 'accidental' shootings by police, where the police shoot intentionally and afterwords claim it was accidental in order to get away with it.
Somebody who really took the time to understand Timothy McVeigh was Gore Vidal. For instance, this article in Vanity Fair. McVeigh wrote back to Vidal, and they corresponded for a while. Vidal basically argued that McVeigh had reasons for doing what he did, and felt justified in doing it. McVeigh also pointed out that the United States Military did this same sort of thing all the time in foreign countries (this was before the US really started going after people in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen).
Hell, it's almost to the point where it feels like calling yourself a "libertarian" or - worse - being a registered libertarian, is potentially as risky as calling yourself a communist or socialist in the 1950s.
Have you ever been fired for being a suspected libertarian? Have you ever been fired, and then all your potential employers informed that they shouldn't hire you because then they might be suspected as being libertarians too? Have you ever been called up in front of a congressional investigative committee for being a libertarian? Have libertarian leaders been imprisoned? All those things were happening to suspected communists during the 1950's: For instance, my grandfather went from being a highly respected academic musicologist to teaching a dozen piano students in his living room.
And if you want to know what the most risky group to be affiliated with right now in the US, it's not libertarianism, its Islam, which subjects you to regular harassment at airports, hate crimes, and in a few cases being disappeared.
Is this proof that humans make and respond to pheromones?
Anyone can find this out very easily: Just don't shower or apply deodorant for a couple of days, and you will notice everyone around you respond (assuming you leave your parent's basement on a regular basis).
One reason this comes up is that since at least 1960 or so, the right wing of the political spectrum in the United States has generally been fine with violence as an acceptable part of politics. There were Dixiecrats almost openly cheering when Martin Luther King was killed. Jesse Helms once threatened then-President Bill Clinton on national television (saying something along the lines of "if he comes to North Carolina, he needs to watch his back"). Very recently, Dr George Tiller was gunned down in a church by a right-wing activist for performing abortions, and a liberal Unitarian Universalist Church was shot up in Knoxville for supporting gay rights.
So when violence actually occurs against Democratic political figures, a lot of left-wing people think that somebody right-wing is behind it. Whether that speculation is justified, it's certainly understandable.
Forget fiction, how about real US-supported regimes? I should point out that I could have picked plenty of others, those were just the ones that came to mind.
Ignorance is never an excuse in matters of the law.
What about the knowledge that the US Supreme Court specifically ruled in the Pentagon Papers case that what Wikileaks has been doing is completely 100% protected by the First Amendment? I should also point out that the really interesting part of this whole incident is that Barack Obama's reaction to the leak was more authoritarian than Richard Nixon's was to Daniel Elsberg's leak.
I might remind you that humans didn't develop these capabilities until the last 10,000 years or so after around 2 billion years of evolution.
Not really. Flintknapping was an invention. Flintknapping a hand ax or arrowhead or spearhead was an invention. The stone-tipped spear was an invention. The bow and arrow was an invention. Figuring out how to first control and then consistently be able to start a fire was an invention. What evidence we have of that period suggests that they developed some understanding how seasons worked (if they lived in a temperate climate), and made some attempts at medicine. They probably also started telling stories about the world around them, now known as myths.
Our cave men ancestors were ignorant and starting from scratch, but there's no reason to think they were stupid and didn't invent stuff, learn stuff, and pass that knowledge along. And they were really no dumber than we are.
Totally incorrect: Don't we remember the Dilbert Equation?
Compensation = Work / Knowledge
So it's actually beneficial salary-wise to be hardworking and stupid. Just like the Wall St guys, many of whom work 100 hours a week and are also complete morons.
Right here.
Easy for you to say.
My dad took about a 30% pay cut in addition to the time and money it took to get a graduate teaching degree in order to switch from software development to teaching. He really had been wanting to do that all his life, but the simple fact is that objectively it's a bad economic decision. Why? Simple - we don't like paying teachers anything close to what their level of education would get them in any other field. An entry-level engineer makes an average of $125K per year total compensation. An average teacher makes about $43K per year.
If your nose tells you that there might be a dead body rotting, you don't need a warrant - no more than seeing a gun or hearing a scream. Of course, you know that, and you're just adding a little Troll spice to your story.
Oh yes you do. The Supreme Court in particular has stated very clearly that the home has maximum protection from being searched without a warrant and without consent. Unlike, say, a vehicle stop, a home is not likely to skip the jurisdiction. What the police are supposed to do if they have probable cause for a search of the home but do not have the consent of the owner for a search is to possibly leave an officer there to watch the place to make sure that what they're looking for doesn't move, then get a warrant, and then return with the warrant to search the home.
Meh, that's nothing: During street protests, it's not uncommon for people to be arrested for assaulting a police officer's knee with their groin.
It may be a BS excuse, but the reason they push it is because it works - especially when the target audience has a high unemployment rate.
An example here: The ballot initiative in the last election cycle to approve a really lousy casino gambling amendment was run by a group called "Jobs for Ohio", with billboards like "Vote Yes on 9, 23,000 jobs for Ohioans". It didn't matter that the effect of casinos is generally to suck money right out of an economy into the hands of the gaming industry, because the 10% of people who were unemployed and their buddies who wanted them to be able to get back on their feet thought they had a good shot at getting those 23,000 jobs. As a result, the same electorate who had rejected casinos at least 4 times previously voted for them in 2010, because they were desperate enough for work.
Good luck with that.
I mean, the kind of stuff Elizabeth Warren's proposed for regulating credit cards has approval of something like 95% of the public in polls. That doesn't mean she can actually make it happen.
That's chump change on Wall St. Compared to the kind of stuff Goldman Sachs pulls on a regular basis, I'm not too worried about high-frequency traders getting scammed. What's very clear is that none of it has much of anything to do with actual sound investing.
FYI, Native Americans, at least the ones I've talked to about it, generally prefer to be called American Indians.