Wow, way to create a ridiculous strawman that literally nobody believes.
There is no straw man - see all the poutrage directed at Black Lives Matter protestors. It's never the right time or the right place for them to protest racism and police brutality. If you want to complain about the actual misuse of identity politics, take it to the right wing Democratic Party that uses it to distract from the fact that they are horrible on issues of class, and want to own minority votes while doing nothing for those constituencies.
I trust experts. What I don't trust is politicians to select experts for me and then force me to act according to their preferences.
Could you be a little more vague? If you're referring to stuff like the "experts" who went on TV and lied us into a war in Iraq, sure. If you're talking about climate change, that's nonsense, as the USG is so into fossil fuel production that it will overthrow countries if they dare nationalize their own resources.
Chomsky, Habermas, and Sartre are intellectuals, but they have no expertise on anything that matters, like running the economy, treating cancer, or fixing a leak.
Experts on politics. Yeah, politics doesn't effect anyone or anything, way to enhance your credibility there slick.
You forgot those that don't trust experts because everything is hyper-political these days.
You forget that interested parties will go out of their way to make things political so people like you will throw up your hands and say "that's political!" It happened with recognizing cigarettes as being a leading cause of cancer, it happened with "intelligent design" in schools, and it's happening with climate change.
I guess we shouldn't have just blindly trusted the fucking experts.
Experts != shills from agricultural industry looking to sell you more cheap grain and stop using the dreaded "tropical oils" (i.e. ones not made in the USA, which is bad, mmmkay).
...that is doing the undermining. Insert eyeroll emoji here:
Yet in the recent past, some of the negative uses have become apparent, which leads some people to ask whether the Internet is just too dangerous.
You mean the fake news about Fake News. The deranged conspiracy theory that Putin knew years in advance that a failed game show host could be president, and set out to get him elected by spending a few thousand dollars on Twitter trolls in a $9 billion election.
To be more specific, we had the strongest economic growth in 20 years under Obama
Specifically, for bankers, robber barons and other capitalists. The working class still has stagnant wages, and the working poor have never recovered from the 2008 depression, or the houses that were stolen from them via fraudcloser, while Obama DGAF.
There's absolutely no evidence out there that Trump colluded with the Russians except the Manafort thing, and the Flynn thing, and the Papadopoulos pleading guilty thing, and the Roger Stone thing, and the Cohen thing, and the Kushner thing, and the Carter Page blah blah blah
NONE of which have ANYTHING to do with Russiagate, you incompetent boob. Manafort is being tried for issues that happened ten years ago and have no connection to Trump. Flynn talked to Russian officials first to ask them for their UN support on a vote for Apartheid Israel, and then to not retaliate in response to American sanctions. And so on.
All you guys have is a Gish Gallop - a rapid series of talking points that fall apart faster than toilet paper in a tornado when subjected to any scrutiny. Just like the Birthers, the Chem Trailers and anti-vaxxers, who quickly spout off billeted list of talking points - but it's all bullshit.
And they don't own up to it, either. They've written plenty of article's about Winner's prosecution, but always leave out their responsibility, or lack thereof.
Slavery is not free-market, it violates the property right of self-ownership.
Doesn't change the fact that human beings were bought and sold as capital.
It took government with laws like the Fugutive Slaves Act to push against basic human nature and economic forces to maintain slavery.
That's the Randian dipshittery of taking problems 100% caused by capitalism and blaming government for it.
Might I ask you to stop pretending that 'regulation' can, even in principle, improve on the free market?
You can't have a free market without regulation. For buyers and sellers to freely enter the market and exchange money, goods and services, you have to have regulation to prevent the formation of monopolies.
If you want to address something which YOU perceive as ugly, then kindly recognize that YOU are just another flawed, misguided human and blah blah blah blah blah
A human being without the direct financial incentive to screw everyone and everything over in the name of quarterly profits, as opposed to a DuPont executive who signs off on dousing everyone with cancer-causing chemicals to save a few bucks.
I think, more to the point, is that Socialism, Communism and dictatorships have been all shown to be WORSE for the environment.
Purely delusional, aside from the dictatorships. Socialism and communism aren't dependent on consumer-based economies, which depend on resource consumption. Socialism and communism don't provide a direct incentive to screw over everyone and everything just to make another nickel in quarter profits. As opposed to capitalism.
Capitalism assumes humans are going to be greedy and selfish, and optimizes around that. That will always work better than a system that assumes humans are going to be nice and altruistic.
That's just sniffing your own farts. Pray tell, what is the capitalist solution for climate change? How would capitalism have eradicated polio and smallpox, by selling vaccines to anyone who could afford them? How would capitalism prevent rain forest from being chopped down, a major carbon sink, or drastically reduce petroleum dependency, a major source of CO2?
Nah, that's you regurgitating capitalist indoctrination. It's capitalism that promotes laziness, as it allows people to get rich based entirely on the work done by others. The "socialism promotes laziness" dipshittery is predicated on the notion that socialists are happy to do their own work plus the slacker down the line, and human beings just aren't built that way.
Let's say the CEO of the company you work for retires, and he announces he's converting the enterprise to a co-op and giving the employees ownership of the company. Would you immediately say "fuck it, I'm gonna do shit all day and collect the same paycheck, because reasons". Probably not. But that's all socialism is - workers owning the means of production.
socialism has sever problems as well such as little incentive to achieve and not punishing the lazy
Sounds just like the trope that unions exist to protect the lazy worker. The problem with that canard is it is dependent on workers being overjoyed at having to do their own work plus the slacker down the line. Human beings just aren't built that way.
Because the "Founders" were elitist pricks who didn't want proles to have a say in their own governance. If the common shmoe was able to vote, they might do crazy stuff like vote for income & property taxes, or break the the giant estates held by landed gentry.
It was recognized over 200 years ago what a complete shit system direct democracy is if you value the rights of the individual.
You even listen to yourself? Yeah, we'll protect the rights of the individual - by denying almost all of them the right to vote! Taxation without representation! Draft young men who can't vote because the don't own property into serving in the Army!
When they were blathering on about 'protecting the minority from the majority', they were referring to protecting the elites from the people they ruled.
As recently as WWII, 90% of the American public would have supported continuing Jim Crow laws. In your utopia there could have never been a Brown v. Board of Education because a simple vote would have done away with integration.
No, seriously, you even listening to yourself? All those events happened under your representative utopia. And yeah, you could have just as easily have had Brown under a direct democracy, because there is no reason you cannot have a Bill of Rights that takes a supermajority of citizens to modify.
The only difference between capitalism and communism is
...showing you don't understand either term, then.
Where did I suggest that the ID needs to be a driver's license? Government issued ID can be many things.
Yeah, other things that still involve hundreds of dollars if not more time and money. Passports? More time and money than drivers licenses. Student ID's? Have to register for school, so even more time and money.
But I have to ask.... why is the right to vote somehow more fundamental than the right to simply eat to live, because if you can't afford to do these things and secure some ID over the entire time period that you have in advance of an election where you know you are going to need to prove who you are, then you are, quite honestly, going to starve to death long before the election and wouldn't be voting anyway.
Hand waiving. If you want to tear down at the capitalist system of having to work as a necessity rather than a choice, have at it. But its not relevant to voting being a right, having to work being a necessity, and in-person vote fraud being so rare it may as well not exist.
Nearly EVERY one of the uber-rich folks out there have worked for their money and earned it.
Many millionaires have earned their money through their own work or luck. Doctors, engineers, someone who bought a house in Los Angeles in 1970. No one has ever become a billionaire through their own work. Only through other people's work.
Also, the "leisure class" is largely non-existent.
Leisure class != unemployed trust fund baby. Plenty of these people - like a Ford or a Walton or a Koch - have a job they go to, usually at a company founded by previous generations of the same family. But that employment is a choice where for the rest of us plebs it's a necessity. So they spend some of their leisure time telling other people to go make them some money - doesn't change the fact they are members of the leisure class.
Well, let's just go full communist then. Why not? IF the rich cannot be trusted to use their wealth wisely and you believe that this is a fundamentally unfair situation that they have more than most, Let's just go take their wealth and make things fair.
Finally, something sensible. The vast majority of the human race would have been infinitely better off under communism than capitalism. You manage to break free of decades of indoctrination, well done.
First, let me preface this by saying I've been doing the full Philip "shut up and take my money" Fry impression ever since Dodge announced they were putting a V6 diesel in a Ram truck....but not in the Durango. Now Ford and Chevy are jumping on the 3.0L bandwagon, so if another model year goes by without a diesel going into a durango/explorer/expedition/tahoe imma gonna cut a bitch. Mercedes has a diesel for the GL line, but for 19 mpg on the highway I want a lot more than 7500 lbs towing. Now, that said...
Why is there so much concern on diesel cycle engines? As heat engines go they are quite efficient devices. As far as providing a lightweight and compact power source for transportation these things are close to miraculous. So, where is the problem?
The pollution they generate is a problem. If pure biodiesel doesn't produce the particulates or NOx that petroleum does, cool beans, but I've never seen anyone make that claim.
I hear people claim that electric cars are the future, charged up by electricity from wind, water, and sun. But has anyone done the math on what it would take to make that happen? It turns out that people have and the math does not work out for such a world.
First thing is to do the math on how much in resources we'd need to just make up for the electrical use right now and replace that with wind, water, and solar.
Sounds like people who complain that mass transit and high speed rail cost too much, while acting as if hundreds of billions haven't been spent to build and maintain highways, and billions more for pipelines, refineries, oil transportation and gas stations. You also talk as if there wont be a huge cost to build biodiesel refineries to replace petrol-based fuels, or nuclear power plants to replace coal.
Windmills don't run all the time at maximum output, in real life they produce maybe 30% of their maximum rated output. So we don't need 2.3 TW of wind to replace what we need, we'd have to start with 3 times that, 7 TW.
Annnnd the inevitable baseload baloney. When your nuclear power plant goes down for planned - or worse, unplanned - maintenance, sometimes for years at a time, you have a megawatt+ sized hole in your grid. That means you need to either build more nuclear generating capacity as well, or use a pumped storage facility as backup. And if pumped storage is good enough for nuclear, it's good enough for wind and solar.
All of the FUD thrown at wind and solar can easily be answered with tech that has long been used for nuclear and coal, like the aforementioned pumped storage. An entire region isn't going to remain both windless and sunless for an extended period of time, but you can move power hundreds of miles via long distance power lines, like ND's Coal Creek Station that generates power for Minneapolis. This means a solar farm in Mexico could supply power to Los Angeles, New York City could be supplied by windmills in Canada, or Miami getting electricity from a pumped storage facility in the mountains of Cuba.
The future is nuclear power.
Nuclear power takes the cost argument, throws it in a dumpster, covers it in diesel fuel and sets it on fire. Finally, the dumpster is nuked from orbit.
Just to be sure.
Nuclear power is not just too risky and too time consuming to build, the cost makes it unjustifiable. Can't throw shade at a solar farm when it costs 20 billion and takes 20 years to bu
The key word here is unreasonable. UNREASONABLE. Read that word. To be legal, the search just has to be defined as reasonable. And you don't get to decide it if it is.
Far more so than statist bootlickers, we do. Beyond searches for contraband or weapons, the state and its apologists can fuck right off unless they get a warrant.
technically you are not in US and do not have the full citizen rights
So the government is free to arrest you without probable cause, hold you without an attorney, and beat a confession out of you if they feel like it? As long as you are in this supposed Constitution-free zone that isn't actually mentioned in the Constitution....
Statist bullshit. Border searches are "reasonable" in terms of catching contraband or illegal items (i.e. weapons). Neither of which applies to a personal cell phone that can legally be purchased in the United States.
First, there is no use case for voter ID. It's a solution in search of a problem so rare it may as well not exist. All the cases voter ID cultists use when arguing for requiring ID - wouldn't have been prevented by ID. Vote registration fraud, felons voting, voting in person and by absentee, voting in more than one state - not prevented by ID.
Second, voting is a right. You do not need to show an ID to enjoy your rights. You don't need to display your drivers license to enter a church. You don't need a passport so the military doesn't commandeer your house for a temporary barracks. You don't need a birth certificate to have an attorney if you are put on trial, be free from torture, or be forced to testify against yourself. Skip second amendment comparisons unless you read the first sentence of it and note the lack of a right to purchase arms.
Third, step outside your privilege bubble already. It can cost hundreds of dollars to get a "free" ID if you don't have one already. Today's voter ID laws could have barred Ronald Reagan from voting in any of his runs for governor or the presidency as he, like millions of Americans, was born at home and had no birth certificate.
And all for a problem so. rare. it. may. as. well. not. exist.
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Calm down, snowflake, you're melting.
There is no straw man - see all the poutrage directed at Black Lives Matter protestors. It's never the right time or the right place for them to protest racism and police brutality. If you want to complain about the actual misuse of identity politics, take it to the right wing Democratic Party that uses it to distract from the fact that they are horrible on issues of class, and want to own minority votes while doing nothing for those constituencies.
Could you be a little more vague? If you're referring to stuff like the "experts" who went on TV and lied us into a war in Iraq, sure. If you're talking about climate change, that's nonsense, as the USG is so into fossil fuel production that it will overthrow countries if they dare nationalize their own resources.
Experts on politics. Yeah, politics doesn't effect anyone or anything, way to enhance your credibility there slick.
You forget that interested parties will go out of their way to make things political so people like you will throw up your hands and say "that's political!" It happened with recognizing cigarettes as being a leading cause of cancer, it happened with "intelligent design" in schools, and it's happening with climate change.
Experts != shills from agricultural industry looking to sell you more cheap grain and stop using the dreaded "tropical oils" (i.e. ones not made in the USA, which is bad, mmmkay).
...that is doing the undermining. Insert eyeroll emoji here:
You mean the fake news about Fake News. The deranged conspiracy theory that Putin knew years in advance that a failed game show host could be president, and set out to get him elected by spending a few thousand dollars on Twitter trolls in a $9 billion election.
Specifically, for bankers, robber barons and other capitalists. The working class still has stagnant wages, and the working poor have never recovered from the 2008 depression, or the houses that were stolen from them via fraudcloser, while Obama DGAF.
NONE of which have ANYTHING to do with Russiagate, you incompetent boob. Manafort is being tried for issues that happened ten years ago and have no connection to Trump. Flynn talked to Russian officials first to ask them for their UN support on a vote for Apartheid Israel, and then to not retaliate in response to American sanctions. And so on.
All you guys have is a Gish Gallop - a rapid series of talking points that fall apart faster than toilet paper in a tornado when subjected to any scrutiny. Just like the Birthers, the Chem Trailers and anti-vaxxers, who quickly spout off billeted list of talking points - but it's all bullshit.
And they don't own up to it, either. They've written plenty of article's about Winner's prosecution, but always leave out their responsibility, or lack thereof.
Doesn't change the fact that human beings were bought and sold as capital.
That's the Randian dipshittery of taking problems 100% caused by capitalism and blaming government for it.
You can't have a free market without regulation. For buyers and sellers to freely enter the market and exchange money, goods and services, you have to have regulation to prevent the formation of monopolies.
A human being without the direct financial incentive to screw everyone and everything over in the name of quarterly profits, as opposed to a DuPont executive who signs off on dousing everyone with cancer-causing chemicals to save a few bucks.
Purely delusional, aside from the dictatorships. Socialism and communism aren't dependent on consumer-based economies, which depend on resource consumption. Socialism and communism don't provide a direct incentive to screw over everyone and everything just to make another nickel in quarter profits. As opposed to capitalism.
That's just sniffing your own farts. Pray tell, what is the capitalist solution for climate change? How would capitalism have eradicated polio and smallpox, by selling vaccines to anyone who could afford them? How would capitalism prevent rain forest from being chopped down, a major carbon sink, or drastically reduce petroleum dependency, a major source of CO2?
Nah, that's you regurgitating capitalist indoctrination. It's capitalism that promotes laziness, as it allows people to get rich based entirely on the work done by others. The "socialism promotes laziness" dipshittery is predicated on the notion that socialists are happy to do their own work plus the slacker down the line, and human beings just aren't built that way.
Let's say the CEO of the company you work for retires, and he announces he's converting the enterprise to a co-op and giving the employees ownership of the company. Would you immediately say "fuck it, I'm gonna do shit all day and collect the same paycheck, because reasons". Probably not. But that's all socialism is - workers owning the means of production.
Sounds just like the trope that unions exist to protect the lazy worker. The problem with that canard is it is dependent on workers being overjoyed at having to do their own work plus the slacker down the line. Human beings just aren't built that way.
...as opposed to capitalists who would beat you to death with their own grandmothers if it sees them another nickel in quarterly dividends.
Because the "Founders" were elitist pricks who didn't want proles to have a say in their own governance. If the common shmoe was able to vote, they might do crazy stuff like vote for income & property taxes, or break the the giant estates held by landed gentry.
You even listen to yourself? Yeah, we'll protect the rights of the individual - by denying almost all of them the right to vote! Taxation without representation! Draft young men who can't vote because the don't own property into serving in the Army!
When they were blathering on about 'protecting the minority from the majority', they were referring to protecting the elites from the people they ruled.
No, seriously, you even listening to yourself? All those events happened under your representative utopia. And yeah, you could have just as easily have had Brown under a direct democracy, because there is no reason you cannot have a Bill of Rights that takes a supermajority of citizens to modify.
Liberal are right wingers. Often the very worst sort of right-wingers, as they only take a break from voter-shaming to sniff their own farts.
Not remotely pointless, and the statements remain the same.
The only way to keep capitalism as a justifiable enterprise is to impose appropriate penalties when the system fails. Otherwise, fuck capitalism.
Yeah, other things that still involve hundreds of dollars if not more time and money. Passports? More time and money than drivers licenses. Student ID's? Have to register for school, so even more time and money.
Hand waiving. If you want to tear down at the capitalist system of having to work as a necessity rather than a choice, have at it. But its not relevant to voting being a right, having to work being a necessity, and in-person vote fraud being so rare it may as well not exist.
Red herring is red.
Many millionaires have earned their money through their own work or luck. Doctors, engineers, someone who bought a house in Los Angeles in 1970. No one has ever become a billionaire through their own work. Only through other people's work.
Leisure class != unemployed trust fund baby. Plenty of these people - like a Ford or a Walton or a Koch - have a job they go to, usually at a company founded by previous generations of the same family. But that employment is a choice where for the rest of us plebs it's a necessity. So they spend some of their leisure time telling other people to go make them some money - doesn't change the fact they are members of the leisure class.
Finally, something sensible. The vast majority of the human race would have been infinitely better off under communism than capitalism. You manage to break free of decades of indoctrination, well done.
First, let me preface this by saying I've been doing the full Philip "shut up and take my money" Fry impression ever since Dodge announced they were putting a V6 diesel in a Ram truck....but not in the Durango. Now Ford and Chevy are jumping on the 3.0L bandwagon, so if another model year goes by without a diesel going into a durango/explorer/expedition/tahoe imma gonna cut a bitch. Mercedes has a diesel for the GL line, but for 19 mpg on the highway I want a lot more than 7500 lbs towing. Now, that said...
The pollution they generate is a problem. If pure biodiesel doesn't produce the particulates or NOx that petroleum does, cool beans, but I've never seen anyone make that claim.
The same sort of higher math that claims a Prius or a golden retriever pollutes more than a Hummer.
Sounds like people who complain that mass transit and high speed rail cost too much, while acting as if hundreds of billions haven't been spent to build and maintain highways, and billions more for pipelines, refineries, oil transportation and gas stations. You also talk as if there wont be a huge cost to build biodiesel refineries to replace petrol-based fuels, or nuclear power plants to replace coal.
Annnnd the inevitable baseload baloney. When your nuclear power plant goes down for planned - or worse, unplanned - maintenance, sometimes for years at a time, you have a megawatt+ sized hole in your grid. That means you need to either build more nuclear generating capacity as well, or use a pumped storage facility as backup. And if pumped storage is good enough for nuclear, it's good enough for wind and solar.
All of the FUD thrown at wind and solar can easily be answered with tech that has long been used for nuclear and coal, like the aforementioned pumped storage. An entire region isn't going to remain both windless and sunless for an extended period of time, but you can move power hundreds of miles via long distance power lines, like ND's Coal Creek Station that generates power for Minneapolis. This means a solar farm in Mexico could supply power to Los Angeles, New York City could be supplied by windmills in Canada, or Miami getting electricity from a pumped storage facility in the mountains of Cuba.
Nuclear power takes the cost argument, throws it in a dumpster, covers it in diesel fuel and sets it on fire. Finally, the dumpster is nuked from orbit.
Just to be sure.
Nuclear power is not just too risky and too time consuming to build, the cost makes it unjustifiable. Can't throw shade at a solar farm when it costs 20 billion and takes 20 years to bu
Far more so than statist bootlickers, we do. Beyond searches for contraband or weapons, the state and its apologists can fuck right off unless they get a warrant.
So the government is free to arrest you without probable cause, hold you without an attorney, and beat a confession out of you if they feel like it? As long as you are in this supposed Constitution-free zone that isn't actually mentioned in the Constitution....
Statist bullshit. Border searches are "reasonable" in terms of catching contraband or illegal items (i.e. weapons). Neither of which applies to a personal cell phone that can legally be purchased in the United States.
Get a damned warrant.
First, there is no use case for voter ID. It's a solution in search of a problem so rare it may as well not exist. All the cases voter ID cultists use when arguing for requiring ID - wouldn't have been prevented by ID. Vote registration fraud, felons voting, voting in person and by absentee, voting in more than one state - not prevented by ID.
Second, voting is a right. You do not need to show an ID to enjoy your rights. You don't need to display your drivers license to enter a church. You don't need a passport so the military doesn't commandeer your house for a temporary barracks. You don't need a birth certificate to have an attorney if you are put on trial, be free from torture, or be forced to testify against yourself. Skip second amendment comparisons unless you read the first sentence of it and note the lack of a right to purchase arms.
Third, step outside your privilege bubble already. It can cost hundreds of dollars to get a "free" ID if you don't have one already. Today's voter ID laws could have barred Ronald Reagan from voting in any of his runs for governor or the presidency as he, like millions of Americans, was born at home and had no birth certificate.
And all for a problem so. rare. it. may. as. well. not. exist.