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A lot of heartless bastards into Libertarianism also just assume that they will rule and their law will be supreme, freedom to others be damned. A good reading of this is in the six part fictional interview Journey into a Libertarian Future with full quotes from Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s 2001 book “Democracy: The God That Failed.". The link is to part VI which as all of the links for the previous installments.
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Nov 6, 2013 22:10
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Duke Igthorn posted:There is that element of course, Libertarians are all about being "better" than everyone so the rules for "normals" shouldn't apply to them. Libertarians fundamentally don't care about anyone but themselves (and people like themselves). However, they 1) want to consider themselves good people, and 2) recognize that "gently caress you, got mine" is not actually a persuasive argument for a radical political ideology. So they have to spend some effort on attempting to justify these kinds of issues, but they will never think about them too much for one simple reason: no libertarian imagines themselves to be among the bottom rungs of society.
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Nov 6, 2013 22:18
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Alkydere posted:I think my favorite part of that series is that the lone science ship trying to break the blockade and get home finds a nav beacon where the navies blockading earth put up a giant whine list of how the humans are stinking cheaters and not dying properly. What unfortunately gets buried in the series is that pretty much everyone going apeshit after the humans represent a small chunk of the total species of the Five Galaxies, they're just the loudest and most obnoxious. The other thing that gets overshadowed a lot is that for all the dogmatic faults of the civilization of the Five Galaxies, there are a few shining diamonds in the rough. The tradition of Uplift/Fallow cycles that requires species to take out long-term leases (never ownership) of planets and hold them to a strict environmental standard. Brin's concept of extremely long-term environmentalism is an interesting one, and I suspect a major reason he's been involved with the Long Now Foundation. Meanwhile, the husband of a former coworker once sat down at the bar I was tending and when the subject of climate change came up (I think it was on TV or something) guffawed and rhetorically asked why he should give a poo poo about it, since he'd be dead and gone long before it became a big deal. With his mid-twenties daughter sitting next to him. 
CarterUSM fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Nov 6, 2013 |
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Nov 6, 2013 22:28
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Doctor Butts posted:Posted this link after the picture as well: I'm fairly certain that Ciprean Pintea, a Romanian dude who appears to be bit of a snake oil salesman is behind this as well: http://www.danpena.com/the-hard-truth-online/ Kaiax inc I believe is the mothership company. Not sure what else they do. edit: http://www.homemadeenergy.org/ Same narator, except this time he's peddling magical free energy crap. This time the narator is named "Ben Ford" instead of "Jason richards" edit: Apparently they where selling a perpetual motion machine called a "johnson motor" at one point too. duck monster fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Nov 6, 2013 |
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Nov 6, 2013 22:58
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This popped up on Facebook. Gun control laws: just like cake.
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Nov 6, 2013 23:25
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Dirty Job posted:This popped up on Facebook. It's perfectly clear to me that someone who is stupid enough to think that's a valid analogy is far, far to stupid to be expected to responsibly own a firearm.
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Nov 6, 2013 23:27
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That's a shitload of words to make a simple "slippery slope" argument.
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Nov 6, 2013 23:31
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Dirty Job posted:This popped up on Facebook. "I want my drat cake back, all of it" Which I guess starts with the National Firearms act of 1934 which prohibits machine guns and destructive devices (stuff like missiles and hand grenades).
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Nov 6, 2013 23:31
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:"I want my drat cake back, all of it" My right to defend myself must be protected. Give me back my grenade missile cake, fascist.
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Nov 6, 2013 23:33
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How can we have a Civil War II if we aren't allowed to have rockets and machine guns guys? Jeeze, silly liberals.
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Nov 6, 2013 23:35
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LtStorm posted:I've noticed that with libertarian/ancap utopias they always require either robot labor to completely replace human labor, or an enslaved underclass that does all of the work no one wants to do. Libertarians seldom acknowledge this, but it seeps into all of their works. There was a libertarian webcomic that solved this problem by having apes suddenly deciding they were intelligent, could speak, and loved acting as slaves for humans. Other works at least use robots so they can pretend this isn't an issue that must be addressed at some point. 
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Nov 6, 2013 23:35
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It's missing the panel where he gets some cake back for the Assault Weapons Ban expiring.
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Nov 6, 2013 23:39
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Dirty Job posted:Gun control laws: just like cake. What a lovely comic. Stolen cake never killed anyone. Mentally ill people have never done worse than cause embarrassment with cake. Leaving cake on the base never cut military suicide rates by 40%. The comic only works if you buy guns solely to put them in display cases, cake is literally harmless. Who gives a poo poo what you could own if we never restricted firearms laws, we have WMD and bio-weapons and anti-materiel poo poo the founders could never have imagined. 10% of current weaponry categories being legal sounds pretty reasonable unless you're looking at a total-war scenario.
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Nov 6, 2013 23:40
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sweart gliwere posted:The comic only works if you buy guns solely to put them in display cases No, it only works if you eat guns.
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Nov 6, 2013 23:52
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Duke Igthorn posted:There is that element of course, Libertarians are all about being "better" than everyone so the rules for "normals" shouldn't apply to them. Oh God some of the libetarians I've talked to have been the most disingenuous pieces of poo poo about things like slavery and prostitution. They start in by asking if it's okay to sell your labor via indentured servitude, or if it's okay to sell your body via prostitution. There's room for debate there, hey, let's discuss whether you should be allowed to do these things at your choice or not! Then the evil clown music starts and the conversation takes a twist as you suddenly realize they absolutely do not acknowledge that people can be coerced into these things or why that's wrong. Nor do they acknowledge that indentured servants and prostitutes in their libertarian utopia would both be in positions where society could easily and gleefully abuse them. Of course having extensive and effective legal protections are off the table because that would be forcing government regulations on the slave trade and sex trade and they need to protect themselves! Bringing up that we loving know how this will play out without any sort of oversight or regulation because it's happened loving continuously in the past never helps. Then there's the assholes that unironically argue that child labor laws are needlessly strangling industry. Dirty Job posted:This popped up on Facebook. I can't help but notice it ignores the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 that gave the guy his original cake back then took a few crumbs off a new small slice which is the only slice he's still giving up at this point. Yes, thank you, I vaguely remembered that comic but forgot it was Bob the Angry Flower and couldn't find it.
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Nov 6, 2013 23:58
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Dirty Job posted:This popped up on Facebook. When a woman asks for the last slice of cake, a man should scream at her & overturn the table. A Mike Lester Cartoon.
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Nov 7, 2013 00:05
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Mornacale posted:Libertarians fundamentally don't care about anyone but themselves (and people like themselves). However, they 1) want to consider themselves good people, and 2) recognize that "gently caress you, got mine" is not actually a persuasive argument for a radical political ideology. So they have to spend some effort on attempting to justify these kinds of issues, but they will never think about them too much for one simple reason: no libertarian imagines themselves to be among the bottom rungs of society. The fact that libertarians can't shut the gently caress up about charity is proof that they are openly admitting their system is flawed. Any libertarian who discusses charity as a more moral welfare are also acknowledging that their system is rigged with social and economic inequality. The best success I've ever had in arguing with them is taking an accelerationist stance them that charity is no different from welfare, in vague terms, and that they should be openly hostile towards the poor.
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Nov 7, 2013 00:06
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gradenko_2000 posted:Wait, what? Who makes that argument? People support the ACA because it's a good (ok, fine, not as bad) idea as far as providing affordable healthcare to lots of people who otherwise cannot afford it. The only time that Jesus gets into it is usually when the right-winger brings it up first. I do. Whenever someone tries to claim its not their responsibility to have to do anything to help with someone elses healthcare, I point out that by saying that, Jesus will condemn them to hell. Usually the only tactic they have is to claim to be an atheist, or try to claim that they do enough good in their day to day job that they don't have to sacrifice any more.
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Nov 7, 2013 00:10
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Breadallelogram posted:No, it only works if you eat guns. I'd love to see a fancy preserved Georgian-era cake, but I wouldn't eat any cake older than two weeks, much less two hundred years. Gross. Now, Georgian-era weaponry restrictions, I'd pay to see that. And I'd pay more to fire off some rounds. The craftsmanship and individuality of the weapons is really interesting.
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Nov 7, 2013 00:21
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The more fundamental problem with that stupid cake cartoon is that there is no such thing as a natural right, so the whole drat cake was a gift from society at large in the first place. So the comic is missing the panel in the beginning where the woman takes her time and effort to bake the cake, and then all the interstitial panels where instead of eating, the dude uses his finger to smear icing on her face.
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Nov 7, 2013 00:29
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Job Truniht posted:The fact that libertarians can't shut the gently caress up about charity is proof that they are openly admitting their system is flawed. Any libertarian who discusses charity as a more moral welfare are also acknowledging that their system is rigged with social and economic inequality. The best success I've ever had in arguing with them is taking an accelerationist stance them that charity is no different from welfare, in vague terms, and that they should be openly hostile towards the poor. The thing that always gets me about libertarians and charity is that it's virtually always someone else that will be helping the poor and those who fall on hard times. 'Oh, don't worry, people will take care of each other without a nasty government forcing them to contribute! I'm sure if times are tough you'll be able to find someone to help you. But not me! Definitely not me!' They never talk about private charity as something they themselves plan on participating in, it's just some nebulous 'other people' who will take care of things so the libertarian supermen don't have to.
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Nov 7, 2013 00:36
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http://vimeo.com/50867951 "Can't someone else do it?" pretty much sums up libertarians.
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Nov 7, 2013 00:41
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 An old teacher who has turned super right wing evangelical and libertarian. She home schools her kids and wonders why more people don't, and also maintains a garden to save money and is angry other people aren't as self-reliant as her family. I finally lopped her off my friends list, even on the hidden list she was too tempting to check in on, and every time I did I just wanted to argue with her.
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Nov 7, 2013 01:00
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AlliedBiscuit posted:
I thought I remembered reading a story about how some colonists starved because they all decided to grow tobacco instead of food because tobacco was more profitable.
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Nov 7, 2013 01:37
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It's always an interesting insight when people can list all kinds of things that communism gets wrong (because of human nature, you know!), but can't conceive of a single thing that the free market could do suboptimally (because of human nature, you know!).
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Nov 7, 2013 01:39
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AlliedBiscuit posted:
Yeah, I bet socialism was really popular in the 16th century. Marx was still a young man and his theories hadn't yet been disproved by Adam Smith's book "Wealth of Nations" published in 1776.
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Nov 7, 2013 01:44
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I can usually laugh off the horrible right-wing memes posted on my wall by friends from podunk Texas by bringing them here, because those friends usually backpedal from the worst ones with "I just thought it was funny" or at least prefer to argue that the free market is the best way to help the poor rather than hating on them. What I didn't expect was one of my gay friends here in liberal Austin to post about homeless people with laptops and to see a sudden Freepout poor-bashing in almost every post. Unfortunately, I impulsively unfriended him after he deleted my comments about how a few hundred bucks on a second-hand laptop is probably the most cost-effective way to look for a job, because I just didn't ever want to see that on my feed again, so I can't get you guys any screencaps now  Ugh, it's soul-crushing to know that the minute the Republicans' oldest gay-haters die off they can do a 180-pivot on gay marriage and instantly pick up a constituency of privileged wealth-worshiping gay men to go all-in on their gently caress-the-poor agenda. Guys, our community has spent so long demonized and hated by the right for existing...how can any gay person join up on hating any other disadvantaged group, I don't even 
VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Nov 7, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 01:56
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AlliedBiscuit posted:
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Nov 7, 2013 02:15
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Guilty Spork posted:I like how "people are too selfish for communism" is 100% an indictment of communism and 0% a critique of Western culture. No, but you see, human behavior is natural and biological or something
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Nov 7, 2013 02:18
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VitalSigns posted:Guys, our community has spent so long demonized and hated by the right for existing...how can any gay person join up on hating any other disadvantaged group, I don't even Life isn't so bad for me if I have someone below me I can pick on!
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Nov 7, 2013 02:19
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So this just popped up in my facebook feed.Facebook posted:Found this site and and sent them my cancellation notice. Anyone else been cancelled? I log into Facebook maybe once a week, and when I do I never comment on political crap anyway. I scrolled through a few pages and it struck me kinda odd to think that these people must all have even shittier plans than the one I have. For years I have bitched about how crappy my plan is. However it meets the PPACA mandate. Premiums still went up like they do every year of course, but it had nothing to do with the PPACA. Do these people have the absolute bottom of the barrel insurance?
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Nov 7, 2013 02:41
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AlliedBiscuit posted:
Funnily enough, I'm a communist because I'm selfish. I support a more fair and equitable society for fundamentally self-interested reasons. I'm not delusional enough to believe that I would be one of the few people to end up at the top of the hierarchy and rule as a Randian superman in the libertarian utopia. Purely from a mathematical/probability standpoint, in a laissez-faire capitalist economy, I am far more likely to end up objectively worse off than I am right now - or, at best, no better off than I am now. And the thing is, my family isn't exactly doing well under the current system either; not only am I one of the first people in my family to go to college, I'm one of the first people in my family to graduate loving high school. I don't gravitate towards the far left because of some high-minded moralistic desire to build a utopia for all mankind, but because I've realized that this just isn't working. At the moment, the most I can realistically hope for is managing to finish my four-year degree, with substantial government assistance and a heaping pile of student loan debt, and using that to maybe get a decent job that might be in my preferred field and will hopefully be a reliable, steady career - and with that, I will have finally pulled myself up past the loving poverty line. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of building a more equitable and fair society for other people too, but my politics are still, at bottom, motivated primarily by self-interest. I oppose right-libertarianism and capitalism because it is in my self-interest to do so. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Nov 7, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 03:04
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Farside posted:Do these people have the absolute bottom of the barrel insurance? Yes, they mostly have plans that would not be allowed under the ACA, were grandfathered in, then dropped by insurance companies because of the hassle and if they do it now people will blame Obama instead of the insurance companies.
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Nov 7, 2013 03:09
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My mom went over to help my grandma cover up a bush in her yard today. Then grandma ranted for an hour about how the school board was going to implement a policy to have girls and boys shower together. Thinking it was bullshit from the outset but not wanting to start anything mom didn't argue with her. Then she went on to say that her neighbor supposedly called our senators to bitch about it, and supposedly talked to Franken, who if this happened at all must have been very confused. Then supposedly tried to talk to Klobuchar, but she wouldn't talk to him because she supposedly voted for this policy because she has a gay son (She doesn't have a son), and they're the ones pushing this policy. Now of course what would senators have to do with an imaginary school board issue, I have no clue? She hears all kinds of dumb poo poo at her church and believes it fully without doing any sort of checking. This latest one is so bizarre and easily disprovable that I probably wouldn't have been nice to her while tearing it to shreds.
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Nov 7, 2013 03:12
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Guilty Spork posted:I like how "people are too selfish for communism" is 100% an indictment of communism and 0% a critique of Western culture. Well, they obviously are trying hard not to find anything in the least bit redeeming in communism. I think their criticism works just as well against the sort of laissez faire free market stuff libertarians are always on about. No regulations (other than the invisible hand making everything more efficient!) sounds really great, until people start cornering markets and fixing prices, and shafting their employees who cannot escape for a better job somewhere else. I get the idea that some of these libertarians haven't heard about the Gilded Age, or maybe they don't truly understand what a disaster letting the robber barons run amok was for this country.
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Nov 7, 2013 04:01
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stan worship posted:I think their criticism works just as well against the sort of laissez faire free market stuff libertarians are always on about. No regulations (other than the invisible hand making everything more efficient!) sounds really great, until people start cornering markets and fixing prices, and shafting their employees who cannot escape for a better job somewhere else. Anytime those things exist it's because of too much government. The US was never laissez-faire; in the Gilded Age the government collected tariffs and regulated railroads or something, so therefore that was the cause of all monopoly, exploitation, fraud, collusion, snake oil medicine, unsafe food, sadness, and lovely Christmas gifts and the solution is less government. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Nov 7, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 04:16
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Casimir Radon posted:My mom went over to help my grandma cover up a bush in her yard today. Then grandma ranted for an hour about how the school board was going to implement a policy to have girls and boys shower together. Thinking it was bullshit from the outset but not wanting to start anything mom didn't argue with her. Then she went on to say that her neighbor supposedly called our senators to bitch about it, and supposedly talked to Franken, who if this happened at all must have been very confused. Then supposedly tried to talk to Klobuchar, but she wouldn't talk to him because she supposedly voted for this policy because she has a gay son (She doesn't have a son), and they're the ones pushing this policy. Now of course what would senators have to do with an imaginary school board issue, I have no clue? Have you ever heard of "lying for the lord"?
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Nov 7, 2013 04:16
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Mornacale posted:The more fundamental problem with that stupid cake cartoon is that there is no such thing as a natural right, so the whole drat cake was a gift from society at large in the first place. So the comic is missing the panel in the beginning where the woman takes her time and effort to bake the cake, and then all the interstitial panels where instead of eating, the dude uses his finger to smear icing on her face. There are debunkings, and there are actual takedowns. This one is a beaut. Generally when I descend to the level of one of these analogies, it involves the word "gently caress."
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Nov 7, 2013 04:18
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Mister Bates posted:Funnily enough, I'm a communist because I'm selfish. I support a more fair and equitable society for fundamentally self-interested reasons. I'm not delusional enough to believe that I would be one of the few people to end up at the top of the hierarchy and rule as a Randian superman in the libertarian utopia. Purely from a mathematical/probability standpoint, in a laissez-faire capitalist economy, I am far more likely to end up objectively worse off than I am right now - or, at best, no better off than I am now. And the thing is, my family isn't exactly doing well under the current system either; not only am I one of the first people in my family to go to college, I'm one of the first people in my family to graduate loving high school. I don't gravitate towards the far left because of some high-minded moralistic desire to build a utopia for all mankind, but because I've realized that this just isn't working. At the moment, the most I can realistically hope for is managing to finish my four-year degree, with substantial government assistance and a heaping pile of student loan debt, and using that to maybe get a decent job that might be in my preferred field and will hopefully be a reliable, steady career - and with that, I will have finally pulled myself up past the loving poverty line. I hear that, and I'm right there with you. But the standard right winger response to something like this is "you'll understand once you're older/have kids." And there might be something to that. I mean, I grew up in rural North Texas. Church was a pretty big part of a lot of stuff, but most of my friends couldn't care one way or the other. Once they started having kids, they all seemed to convert to evangelical Christianity. It's almost as if they think that if you have a kid, it's your responsibility to raise them Christian, regardless of what you personally believe. And of course, in Texas, being a good Christian means being a good Republican. For better or worse.
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Nov 7, 2013 04:19
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:"I want my drat cake back, all of it" The NFA doesn't actually prohibit those things, it just requires a $200 tax stamp and adds regulations for them.
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Nov 7, 2013 04:21
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