Who would try to argue that a busted drug dealer using an adjacent room meant you no longer owned your furniture?
Actually that's exactly what the US government has argued for a long time. It's called asset forfeiture and it's as nasty as your worst nightmare, squared.
In my mind, omnipotence is the ability to cause the universe to transition into a state that, while perfectly valid and non-contradictory under the laws of that universe, could not have been reached via any application of said laws from the previous state.
Well, in monotheistic theologies, particularly Christian ones, omnipotence is defined not as "the power to do anything", but as the attribute of "being all that's possible", that is, the "can" in each and every sentence of the form "x can y" (provided "x" and "y" are both real). That works more or less like when you define God as "the Being", that is, as the "is" in any sentence of the form "x is y" (also provided "x" and "y" are both real). When 'x' and/or 'y' aren't real, on the other hand, it just adds a layer of abstraction, but otherwise works the same, as in this case the resulting real sentence is "one can say 'x can y'", God's omnipotence attribute in action being the first "can", not the second one.
Omniscience ("x knowns y"), omnipresence ("x located-in y") and other such language-based attributes all work similarly.
It has been shown many times in studies that people are able to read a lot of emotion by looking at another person's eyes.
This is also the main reason most manga and anime authors prefer to draw big eyes. They're a much easier way to transmit emotions than body postures, allowing for a faster drawing process. In fact, one of the ways they to show a character (usually a villain) as having little to no emotion is by drawing small eyes on him, what also serves as contrast between pure lack of emotion and mere introversion (a character with cold demeanor plus big eyes). Lead characters, in contrast, have the biggest eyes in the cast. And if it's a soap story directed towards female teens you'll find HUGE eyes almost everywhere.
As a side note for those who don't know: there are tons of "small eyed" manga. Those are usually directed towards adults. What actually defines manga as a style isn't eye size then, but scene transition, which is based on action movies. That's why supposed "manga" drawn by Western authors usually feels wrong to fans: even though their characters are manga-like, their scene transition tends to follow super-hero comics patterns, with lots of poses, high expectation "halted impact" scenes, and step-by-step slow-motion-like narrative. Hence, not manga.
In Britain (at least England & Wales) a cop has never been found guilty of illegally killing someone during the course of their job. So, if you want a license to kill, just join an English police force.
And here I was, believing the concept of having "00" in front of your spy code were mere fiction...
Any belief that can be made to look ridiculous without misrepresenting it is an extremely superficial one.
Then why do you misrepresent what Catholics believe? I'm not Catholic, and neither Christian for that matter, but I study religions and I know what you (and Dawkins) said about the Catholic doctrine actually is a misrepresentation. See my other reply about this.
When one mocks someone for having an idea he actually doesn't, that person might look good among her peers, but among those who do know what the mocked person's actual ideas she'll look as either a troll or an ignorant. New Atheists have this very bad habit of not even wanting to understand what they go around criticizing, and some are even proud of their lack of knowledge on those subjects, so it's quite difficult to pinpoint whether it's one or the other. It's pretty much like watching creationists talking about evolution: you never quite know whether they are merely ignorant, or purposefully deceptive, or outright jerks, or some middle ground between the three.
Sorry, but I think he's right. Do catholics truly believe that the wine and wafer turn to the blood and body of a person supposedly dead for 2,000 odd years? Really? I'm pretty sure that Dawkins is right and they don't - and they need to admit to themselves that they don't.
No. They believe the substance of the wine and wafer is transubstantiated into that of the blood and flesh of their god's avatar. This is different from believing that the accidents of that wine and wafer "turn to" the accidents of human blood and flesh, which if it were to happens would be a quite remarkable miracle. Anyone who confuses the two concepts of substance and accidents and criticises the former as it was the latter is incurring into a straw man, that is, replacing the actual argument with a simplified (and fake) one that's easy to refute, but whose refutation says nothing about the original.
As for the 'ridiculed with contempt' - yes, that's a bit on the nose. Citation needed. Got the source? (Not a religious site quoting Dawkins...)
Why not? In any case, here's the YouTube video. It's the full speech, but the link goes directly to the segment I quoted, which starts at the 14m28s mark.
Dawkins not only is an insulting person, he sometimes explicitly instructs his followers to be insulting too. This is a quote from a speech he made at Reason Rally last March:
So when I meet somebody who claims to be religious, my first impulse is: “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you until you tell me do you really believe — for example, if they say they are Catholic — do you really believe that when a priest blesses a wafer it turns into the body of Christ? Are you seriously telling me you believe that? Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood?”
Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!
Don’t fall for the convention that we’re all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits.
Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt."
No matter how you feel about what someone believes, telling others to go out of their way to specifically "mock", "ridicule", and display "contempt" towards the person and/or the idea is nothing but doing your best to be offensive, and knowingly so.
all of these should be articles, and would be if it we were allowed to make them.
There, fixed it for you. For more obscure subjects it isn't only a matter of having the knowledge about them, and then the references about them, but also of having editors consider them relevant. I've lost the number of times I've searched for a subject just to find a page that at some point existed in Wikipedia, but was deleted because it wasn't "notable" enough. Funnily enough though, sometimes the exact same "non-notable" article exists in some foreign edition of Wikipedia, so Google Translate comes to the rescue.
And what about before then? If the people originally writing it thought it to be a literal account, that's all that matters.
Maybe it's all that matters to you, but to others, not so much.:) For example, I'm a Shintoist. All, and I mean all, Shinto priests, think the creation myth as related in the Kojiki is figurative, not literal. In fact, later works collected alternate versions of the same myths, with contradictory details, and grouped them together for further study. Does it matter whether the scribe who wrote it down from legends in the 8th century thought about it? Not at all.
In any case, the Abraahamic religions always had mystic traditions. Old Judaism had the so-called "circles of prophecy", much like recent Judaism has its Khaballah. We don't know much of the specifics on what they believed, but if if they were even slightly similar to other mystic approaches, then yeah, they took it as symbolic too.
This is quite the feat of mental gymnastics. So, in order to make the reading of this text fit what we know about the world, we must read it as a description of ideas that didn't exist until after it was written. Is this some kind of joke?
It depends. If you think the works of Shakespeare can only be understood by using whatever was explicitly known in the 16th century, and that every Shakespearean department in existence where current understanding is applied to better grasp his genius are a collective joke, then yes, that one's a joke too.:)
As for serious scholars, the notion is that whatever makes things clearer and more understandable is most welcome. As Platonic archetypes make the Biblical myths extremely easy to understand, yeah, they're used. If you don't like it, well, nothing prevents you from establishing your own intellectually-poor Christian sect. It's no like there isn't some (un)healthy competition there.
No, they're central planners,with all the dirty trappings of a centralized power structure.
Internally, yes, but looking from the outside and taking China as a single ultra-huge corporation, then what they're doing is typical monopolistic capitalist entity.
One should always remember that liberalism and libertarianism are almost never what a mega-corp CEO believes in, they're middle class ideologies. The very poor want someone to pay their bills for them, hence they lean left. The middle class want to be left alone, so they lean libertarian. And the very rich and powerful want to stay rich and powerful no matter what, not wanting that silly free market to put them at risk, so they lean "power", whatever the label. Thus, being a capitalist-like entity isn't opposite to leaning left on other things, all the while is most certainly is leaning anti-libertarian.
You'd have to do some pretty liberal stretching of Genesis to make it fit what we know about evolution.
Not really. The creation account in Genesis has been understood by knowledgeable Bible followers as not literal since at least the 1st century BC by reading into it a mythic description of Platonic archetypes. These can, in turn, be easily made compatible with modern hard sciences, either directly or via some of its derivative versions, such as Aritotle's. So much so, in fact, that any Christian who follows some version of Aristotle's philosophy, meaning most Catholics and a ton of historic Protestants, don't mind evolution at all, ditto most branches of Judaism, the older Islamic ones etc. What doesn't necessarily mean they profess belief in it, only that they don't mind either way, as it just isn't an important subject.
The problem you guys have there in the USA with your Bible Belt Christian fundamentalists and related nutjobs is that most of its pastors, priests, reverends or whatever the favored term is nowadays are philosophically illiterate.
I wonder what the answer would be if the question was phrased as "Do you support more use of drone aircraft to kill potentially innocent householders suspected of terrorism?"
Then I got sort of mad and decided to break a 15 year old principle on not pirating stuff. Went to google, and had the ebook literally 30 seconds later! 10 seconds later on my device, and I could start reading.
Well, I don't have that specific principle as, for me, copyright itself is immoral. On the other hand, I believe in paying for actual services, including that of convenience, and also in paying authors for works I like (as an entirely voluntary act of appreciation for the author, not because it'd in some way be "morally correct" to do so). So, while I mostly pay for digital goods, and gladly so, I have absolutely no qualms about going the pirate route the very instant "they" make it difficult. If at the very first click some bullshit that translate to "we don't want your money" happens, my very next step is Pirate Bay or Usenet, no second thoughts.
Typical case in point: I have an anime subscription to Crunchyroll. I can see tons of great anime, but many of the ones available in the site are still region locked and unstreamable here. Now, ask me how many of those that I wanted to watch I didn't watch. So, yeah.:-)
The power user/business desktop just isn't cool enough for Steve Ballmer, Steven Sinofsky, and the other myopic decision-makers at MS these days.
What I don't understand is why Microsoft feels the need to force an upgrade when they could charge an annual feel from anyone wanting to keep using an older version of Windows past then end of "free" upgrades. They could make it expensive, perhaps even more so than the new version, and businesses all around would keep paying. In fact, had Windows for Workgroups 3.11 been available with this option, and improved in places where needed (Y2K bugs fixed, long file name support, NTFS etc.), I bet lots of places would still be running it quite happily today even if it cost $150/year/user. How hard would it be to maintain a team of programmers working on it, making sure it worked fine with newer versions, and backporting whatever was needed? Ditto for Win9x, Win2K etc. Calculated and periodically recalculated right, the subscription fee would cover everything and provide Microsoft as much net profit as the current strategy, with the advantage of not pissing off old customers, until the OS died a natural death for simple lack of paying customers.
Every system has advantages and disadvantages. For example, democracy has the theoretical advantage of allowing change to happen without wars, but this only works as long as the popular parties don't cartelize. Once they do, it becomes a kind of aristocracy, but without the vantages an actual aristocracy provides, such as the long run personal involvement a noble has on policies and their outcomes, so you end up stuck with the worst of both worlds rather than the best of either.
It's news to me that libertarians are in favor of regulating what two parties can agree in a private contract between themselves.
Of course libertarians are in favor of regulating this kind of thing. The difference is on what is to be regulated. A libertarian form of regulation would be very simple: both parties in a contract are allowed to do whatever they want with whatever they own, and nothing with whatever they don't own. The problem with mega-corp CEOs making deals with bureaucrats is that such deals don't stay limited to whatever both CEOs and bureaucrats own, but turns into us "agreeing" too OR ELSE...
My reference to the friendly mega-corp CEOs is related to bureaucrats validating such cartel deals by way of restrictive legislation that prevents the entry of new competitors in that sector. Without that, any such backdoor deal is only valid between the dealers. Anyone outside the deal isn't bound by it and can do whatever they want. A cartel in a pure free market is much weaker than its big government-sanctioned counterpart.
Actually, quite a few companies LOVE Libertarianism: those that have an entrenched market.
And yet, for some reason, the likes of Ron Paul in the US can never really compete against the republicrats, and here in Brazil the few libertarian think tanks we had all closed due to lack of funding.
Sorry, but if you list a few exceptions to the rule, I can simply point out to the huge majority of basically everyone else out there.
Besides, even those love at best a limited form of Libertarianism. Full blown Libertarianism would have every single law causing single businessmen to avoid personal responsibility and to obtain government sanctioned advantages to be revoked, starting with the abolition of corporate personhood, limited liability, and copyright, patent and trademark laws, as well as the cessation of government possession of, for starters, the RF spectrum.
Short of bribes, it doesn't work like that with bureaucrats.
Why short of bribes? Evidently what I'm talking about is all about bribes, be them of the direct, indirect, legal or illegal kinds.
So the next time you hear a capitalist say "induce competition," remind them that they're the ones that asked for the exclusive contracts. Afterall, it's good business, right? And for them... it is.
Which is why capitalists neither vote nor support libertarian candidates, preferring to go with some of the big government parties, not caring much whether it's right or left-leaning. Libertarianism, with all that talk of deregulating markets, undoing legislation, removing trade barriers, eliminating subsidies etc. is quite scary for them. It's way, WAY easier to "make a deal" with a handful of high level bureaucrats and a few very friendly mega-corp CEOs, all working together to lock down the market into a de facto monopoly, than to deal directly with hundreds of millions of customers and thousands upon thousands of competitors.
the population is largely unaware of the psychological effects of extended isolation
Well, I guess learning Buddhist meditation can become a quite useful ability for grey hat hackers then. Worst case scenario, time passes faster. In a better one, you'll arrive at some kick ass level of focus and be able to become extremely productive in anything you do once you get out of prison. Best scenario? All the benefits of the better one, plus enlightenment.
Palm readers, Farmer's Almanac, anyone who publishes a book about Nostradamus, etc...
This is beyond ridiculous. It's just stupid.
Well, in Old Testament law there was a provision that anyone calling himself a prophet (i.e., someone to whom God himself speaks), then predicting something to happen and that thing not happening, should be killed.
Slashdot Mirror
Its still there, alive and kicking. its just you have to go looking for it, its not avaiable to the 'click and droolers'.
In four words: Usenet, IRC, Tor, Freenet.
Who would try to argue that a busted drug dealer using an adjacent room meant you no longer owned your furniture?
Actually that's exactly what the US government has argued for a long time. It's called asset forfeiture and it's as nasty as your worst nightmare, squared.
In my mind, omnipotence is the ability to cause the universe to transition into a state that, while perfectly valid and non-contradictory under the laws of that universe, could not have been reached via any application of said laws from the previous state.
Well, in monotheistic theologies, particularly Christian ones, omnipotence is defined not as "the power to do anything", but as the attribute of "being all that's possible", that is, the "can" in each and every sentence of the form "x can y" (provided "x" and "y" are both real). That works more or less like when you define God as "the Being", that is, as the "is" in any sentence of the form "x is y" (also provided "x" and "y" are both real). When 'x' and/or 'y' aren't real, on the other hand, it just adds a layer of abstraction, but otherwise works the same, as in this case the resulting real sentence is "one can say 'x can y'", God's omnipotence attribute in action being the first "can", not the second one.
Omniscience ("x knowns y"), omnipresence ("x located-in y") and other such language-based attributes all work similarly.
It has been shown many times in studies that people are able to read a lot of emotion by looking at another person's eyes.
This is also the main reason most manga and anime authors prefer to draw big eyes. They're a much easier way to transmit emotions than body postures, allowing for a faster drawing process. In fact, one of the ways they to show a character (usually a villain) as having little to no emotion is by drawing small eyes on him, what also serves as contrast between pure lack of emotion and mere introversion (a character with cold demeanor plus big eyes). Lead characters, in contrast, have the biggest eyes in the cast. And if it's a soap story directed towards female teens you'll find HUGE eyes almost everywhere.
As a side note for those who don't know: there are tons of "small eyed" manga. Those are usually directed towards adults. What actually defines manga as a style isn't eye size then, but scene transition, which is based on action movies. That's why supposed "manga" drawn by Western authors usually feels wrong to fans: even though their characters are manga-like, their scene transition tends to follow super-hero comics patterns, with lots of poses, high expectation "halted impact" scenes, and step-by-step slow-motion-like narrative. Hence, not manga.
In Britain (at least England & Wales) a cop has never been found guilty of illegally killing someone during the course of their job. So, if you want a license to kill, just join an English police force.
And here I was, believing the concept of having "00" in front of your spy code were mere fiction...
Any belief that can be made to look ridiculous without misrepresenting it is an extremely superficial one.
Then why do you misrepresent what Catholics believe? I'm not Catholic, and neither Christian for that matter, but I study religions and I know what you (and Dawkins) said about the Catholic doctrine actually is a misrepresentation. See my other reply about this.
When one mocks someone for having an idea he actually doesn't, that person might look good among her peers, but among those who do know what the mocked person's actual ideas she'll look as either a troll or an ignorant. New Atheists have this very bad habit of not even wanting to understand what they go around criticizing, and some are even proud of their lack of knowledge on those subjects, so it's quite difficult to pinpoint whether it's one or the other. It's pretty much like watching creationists talking about evolution: you never quite know whether they are merely ignorant, or purposefully deceptive, or outright jerks, or some middle ground between the three.
Sorry, but I think he's right. Do catholics truly believe that the wine and wafer turn to the blood and body of a person supposedly dead for 2,000 odd years? Really? I'm pretty sure that Dawkins is right and they don't - and they need to admit to themselves that they don't.
No. They believe the substance of the wine and wafer is transubstantiated into that of the blood and flesh of their god's avatar. This is different from believing that the accidents of that wine and wafer "turn to" the accidents of human blood and flesh, which if it were to happens would be a quite remarkable miracle. Anyone who confuses the two concepts of substance and accidents and criticises the former as it was the latter is incurring into a straw man, that is, replacing the actual argument with a simplified (and fake) one that's easy to refute, but whose refutation says nothing about the original.
As for the 'ridiculed with contempt' - yes, that's a bit on the nose. Citation needed. Got the source? (Not a religious site quoting Dawkins...)
Why not? In any case, here's the YouTube video. It's the full speech, but the link goes directly to the segment I quoted, which starts at the 14m28s mark.
If you CONTEND "god" exists, back it the fuck up NOW.
Easy reply: "You believe in atoms. Show me an atom. NOW!"
"Oh, but, you see, we need equipment and a lab and..."
"I SAID NOW!!!!!1!1!!!!11"
Dawkins not only is an insulting person, he sometimes explicitly instructs his followers to be insulting too. This is a quote from a speech he made at Reason Rally last March:
So when I meet somebody who claims to be religious, my first impulse is: “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you until you tell me do you really believe — for example, if they say they are Catholic — do you really believe that when a priest blesses a wafer it turns into the body of Christ? Are you seriously telling me you believe that? Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood?”
Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!
Don’t fall for the convention that we’re all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits.
Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt."
No matter how you feel about what someone believes, telling others to go out of their way to specifically "mock", "ridicule", and display "contempt" towards the person and/or the idea is nothing but doing your best to be offensive, and knowingly so.
We haven't yet found a cure for cancer, or other horrible and debilitating diseases, but we've found time to research something like this?
Simple: Destroying is always much easier than constructing.
all of these should be articles, and would be if it we were allowed to make them.
There, fixed it for you. For more obscure subjects it isn't only a matter of having the knowledge about them, and then the references about them, but also of having editors consider them relevant. I've lost the number of times I've searched for a subject just to find a page that at some point existed in Wikipedia, but was deleted because it wasn't "notable" enough. Funnily enough though, sometimes the exact same "non-notable" article exists in some foreign edition of Wikipedia, so Google Translate comes to the rescue.
It's extremely impressive to see someone pull that off at a religious debate.
Thank you for your kind words. I have my trolling moments too, but I usually avoid (or at least try) getting into that mood. :)
Yep, and are making their brains smaller.
Very interesting article. Thanks!
And what about before then? If the people originally writing it thought it to be a literal account, that's all that matters.
Maybe it's all that matters to you, but to others, not so much. :) For example, I'm a Shintoist. All, and I mean all, Shinto priests, think the creation myth as related in the Kojiki is figurative, not literal. In fact, later works collected alternate versions of the same myths, with contradictory details, and grouped them together for further study. Does it matter whether the scribe who wrote it down from legends in the 8th century thought about it? Not at all.
In any case, the Abraahamic religions always had mystic traditions. Old Judaism had the so-called "circles of prophecy", much like recent Judaism has its Khaballah. We don't know much of the specifics on what they believed, but if if they were even slightly similar to other mystic approaches, then yeah, they took it as symbolic too.
This is quite the feat of mental gymnastics. So, in order to make the reading of this text fit what we know about the world, we must read it as a description of ideas that didn't exist until after it was written. Is this some kind of joke?
It depends. If you think the works of Shakespeare can only be understood by using whatever was explicitly known in the 16th century, and that every Shakespearean department in existence where current understanding is applied to better grasp his genius are a collective joke, then yes, that one's a joke too. :)
As for serious scholars, the notion is that whatever makes things clearer and more understandable is most welcome. As Platonic archetypes make the Biblical myths extremely easy to understand, yeah, they're used. If you don't like it, well, nothing prevents you from establishing your own intellectually-poor Christian sect. It's no like there isn't some (un)healthy competition there.
No, they're central planners,with all the dirty trappings of a centralized power structure.
Internally, yes, but looking from the outside and taking China as a single ultra-huge corporation, then what they're doing is typical monopolistic capitalist entity.
One should always remember that liberalism and libertarianism are almost never what a mega-corp CEO believes in, they're middle class ideologies. The very poor want someone to pay their bills for them, hence they lean left. The middle class want to be left alone, so they lean libertarian. And the very rich and powerful want to stay rich and powerful no matter what, not wanting that silly free market to put them at risk, so they lean "power", whatever the label. Thus, being a capitalist-like entity isn't opposite to leaning left on other things, all the while is most certainly is leaning anti-libertarian.
You'd have to do some pretty liberal stretching of Genesis to make it fit what we know about evolution.
Not really. The creation account in Genesis has been understood by knowledgeable Bible followers as not literal since at least the 1st century BC by reading into it a mythic description of Platonic archetypes. These can, in turn, be easily made compatible with modern hard sciences, either directly or via some of its derivative versions, such as Aritotle's. So much so, in fact, that any Christian who follows some version of Aristotle's philosophy, meaning most Catholics and a ton of historic Protestants, don't mind evolution at all, ditto most branches of Judaism, the older Islamic ones etc. What doesn't necessarily mean they profess belief in it, only that they don't mind either way, as it just isn't an important subject.
The problem you guys have there in the USA with your Bible Belt Christian fundamentalists and related nutjobs is that most of its pastors, priests, reverends or whatever the favored term is nowadays are philosophically illiterate.
I wonder what the answer would be if the question was phrased as "Do you support more use of drone aircraft to kill potentially innocent householders suspected of terrorism?"
Then I got sort of mad and decided to break a 15 year old principle on not pirating stuff. Went to google, and had the ebook literally 30 seconds later! 10 seconds later on my device, and I could start reading.
Well, I don't have that specific principle as, for me, copyright itself is immoral. On the other hand, I believe in paying for actual services, including that of convenience, and also in paying authors for works I like (as an entirely voluntary act of appreciation for the author, not because it'd in some way be "morally correct" to do so). So, while I mostly pay for digital goods, and gladly so, I have absolutely no qualms about going the pirate route the very instant "they" make it difficult. If at the very first click some bullshit that translate to "we don't want your money" happens, my very next step is Pirate Bay or Usenet, no second thoughts.
Typical case in point: I have an anime subscription to Crunchyroll. I can see tons of great anime, but many of the ones available in the site are still region locked and unstreamable here. Now, ask me how many of those that I wanted to watch I didn't watch. So, yeah. :-)
The power user/business desktop just isn't cool enough for Steve Ballmer, Steven Sinofsky, and the other myopic decision-makers at MS these days.
What I don't understand is why Microsoft feels the need to force an upgrade when they could charge an annual feel from anyone wanting to keep using an older version of Windows past then end of "free" upgrades. They could make it expensive, perhaps even more so than the new version, and businesses all around would keep paying. In fact, had Windows for Workgroups 3.11 been available with this option, and improved in places where needed (Y2K bugs fixed, long file name support, NTFS etc.), I bet lots of places would still be running it quite happily today even if it cost $150/year/user. How hard would it be to maintain a team of programmers working on it, making sure it worked fine with newer versions, and backporting whatever was needed? Ditto for Win9x, Win2K etc. Calculated and periodically recalculated right, the subscription fee would cover everything and provide Microsoft as much net profit as the current strategy, with the advantage of not pissing off old customers, until the OS died a natural death for simple lack of paying customers.
Democracy sucks, but less than the other options.
Every system has advantages and disadvantages. For example, democracy has the theoretical advantage of allowing change to happen without wars, but this only works as long as the popular parties don't cartelize. Once they do, it becomes a kind of aristocracy, but without the vantages an actual aristocracy provides, such as the long run personal involvement a noble has on policies and their outcomes, so you end up stuck with the worst of both worlds rather than the best of either.
It's news to me that libertarians are in favor of regulating what two parties can agree in a private contract between themselves.
Of course libertarians are in favor of regulating this kind of thing. The difference is on what is to be regulated. A libertarian form of regulation would be very simple: both parties in a contract are allowed to do whatever they want with whatever they own, and nothing with whatever they don't own. The problem with mega-corp CEOs making deals with bureaucrats is that such deals don't stay limited to whatever both CEOs and bureaucrats own, but turns into us "agreeing" too OR ELSE...
My reference to the friendly mega-corp CEOs is related to bureaucrats validating such cartel deals by way of restrictive legislation that prevents the entry of new competitors in that sector. Without that, any such backdoor deal is only valid between the dealers. Anyone outside the deal isn't bound by it and can do whatever they want. A cartel in a pure free market is much weaker than its big government-sanctioned counterpart.
Actually, quite a few companies LOVE Libertarianism: those that have an entrenched market.
And yet, for some reason, the likes of Ron Paul in the US can never really compete against the republicrats, and here in Brazil the few libertarian think tanks we had all closed due to lack of funding.
Sorry, but if you list a few exceptions to the rule, I can simply point out to the huge majority of basically everyone else out there.
Besides, even those love at best a limited form of Libertarianism. Full blown Libertarianism would have every single law causing single businessmen to avoid personal responsibility and to obtain government sanctioned advantages to be revoked, starting with the abolition of corporate personhood, limited liability, and copyright, patent and trademark laws, as well as the cessation of government possession of, for starters, the RF spectrum.
Short of bribes, it doesn't work like that with bureaucrats.
Why short of bribes? Evidently what I'm talking about is all about bribes, be them of the direct, indirect, legal or illegal kinds.
So the next time you hear a capitalist say "induce competition," remind them that they're the ones that asked for the exclusive contracts. Afterall, it's good business, right? And for them... it is.
Which is why capitalists neither vote nor support libertarian candidates, preferring to go with some of the big government parties, not caring much whether it's right or left-leaning. Libertarianism, with all that talk of deregulating markets, undoing legislation, removing trade barriers, eliminating subsidies etc. is quite scary for them. It's way, WAY easier to "make a deal" with a handful of high level bureaucrats and a few very friendly mega-corp CEOs, all working together to lock down the market into a de facto monopoly, than to deal directly with hundreds of millions of customers and thousands upon thousands of competitors.
the population is largely unaware of the psychological effects of extended isolation
Well, I guess learning Buddhist meditation can become a quite useful ability for grey hat hackers then. Worst case scenario, time passes faster. In a better one, you'll arrive at some kick ass level of focus and be able to become extremely productive in anything you do once you get out of prison. Best scenario? All the benefits of the better one, plus enlightenment.
Palm readers, Farmer's Almanac, anyone who publishes a book about Nostradamus, etc ...
This is beyond ridiculous. It's just stupid.
Well, in Old Testament law there was a provision that anyone calling himself a prophet (i.e., someone to whom God himself speaks), then predicting something to happen and that thing not happening, should be killed.