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Ron Paul Atreides posted:man Colorado must be a real shithole look at that discount Primo price in Kansas, though. And there's no way that'd eeeeeeeever turn out to be a bad investment a couple decades down the line.
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Oct 19, 2015 22:52
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Ron Paul Atreides posted:man Colorado must be a real shithole look at that discount Colorado is hella alkaline.
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Oct 19, 2015 22:53
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YF19pilot posted:I'm feeling disenchanted with the party that I was raised to vote for, but I'm not sure that I want to vote for their opponents either. Two party system really sucks.
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Oct 19, 2015 23:15
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Nessus posted:While this is going back a ways, I'm curious how come this would be different if there were more political parties. because by having only two parties that "matter" any votes for a party you actually agree with are in vain because let's face it the green party ain't winning any elections
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Oct 19, 2015 23:17
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Is there a libertarian argument for why we need to replace the fuzzy but largely functional system we have now for human interaction with some kind of weird honour-driven barter system? Because it seems like that would cause more problems than it solves.
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Oct 19, 2015 23:21
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OwlFancier posted:Is there a libertarian argument for why we need to replace the fuzzy but largely functional system we have now for human interaction with some kind of weird honour-driven barter system? By some vaguely defined "Freedom" scale the an-cap society would be more voluntary than living in a nation-state.
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Oct 19, 2015 23:27
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Literally The Worst posted:because by having only two parties that "matter" any votes for a party you actually agree with are in vain The best solution we currently have is to align yourself with the party that is most in line with your personal beliefs and work with it to move towards the changes you want to see, which can be done through a number of ways like speaking directly to the congressmen from your district and to work more closely with state and local elections where your efforts can have a bigger impact. The solution is not and almost never is "burn down everything and rise up from the ashes of civilization as a band of bloodthirsty marauders" which as we all know by now is where Libertarianism inevitably leads.
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Oct 19, 2015 23:37
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OwlFancier posted:Is there a libertarian argument for why we need to replace the fuzzy but largely functional system we have now for human interaction with some kind of weird honour-driven barter system? Because they mistakenly believe doing so would lead to them being the Immortans, rather than (at absolute best) warboys.
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Oct 19, 2015 23:51
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OwlFancier posted:Is there a libertarian argument for why we need to replace the fuzzy but largely functional system we have now for human interaction with some kind of weird honour-driven barter system? Because then they don't need to pay for food stamps or pay welfare benefits for single mothers. Also for some, because it means you can bring back segregation without having to outright say "I want to ban fags from my neighborhood" (unless you're Hans-Herman Hoppe who just cuts right to the chase).
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Oct 20, 2015 00:28
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jrodefeld posted:The reason property rights are so incredibly essential is that we live in a world of scarcity. In such a world, the desires, wants and needs of humans will always exceed the available goods needed to fulfill all our desires simultaneously.
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Oct 20, 2015 01:05
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Who What Now posted:The best solution we currently have is to align yourself with the party that is most in line with your personal beliefs and work with it to move towards the changes you want to see, which can be done through a number of ways like speaking directly to the congressmen from your district and to work more closely with state and local elections where your efforts can have a bigger impact. Just to say, though, what you describe is not a democracy in any way. The method you describe is a plaster over the wound of a non-democratic state. When your political choice is to attempt to democratically alter one of two ruling parties, you have to question the validity of the process. Not to defend capitalist libertarianism or not engaging with the political process, but America's concept of 'democracy' is somehow the least democratic system I've seen in a country with legitimate voting.
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Oct 20, 2015 01:10
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cheese posted:Wrong, we live in a world of abundance where we have the technology to meet the reasonable needs of every human. We do not because humans are greedy creatures. Thanks for trying though. You know, when I first read the OP, this was the line I wanted to rant about. I decided to catch up on the thread but it still sticks out as the most bullshit part of the whole argument. Scarcity is a concept but not a proven fact and frankly the continued survival of humanity plus our consistent food surplus in 'first-world' nations suggests that the concept of scarcity peddled by capitalist libertarians is either a dishonest lie or a mistaken assumption.
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Oct 20, 2015 01:13
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Tesseraction posted:You know, when I first read the OP, this was the line I wanted to rant about. I decided to catch up on the thread but it still sticks out as the most bullshit part of the whole argument. Scarcity is a concept but not a proven fact and frankly the continued survival of humanity plus our consistent food surplus in 'first-world' nations suggests that the concept of scarcity peddled by capitalist libertarians is either a dishonest lie or a mistaken assumption.
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Oct 20, 2015 01:17
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DrProsek posted:Because then they don't need to pay for food stamps or pay welfare benefits for single mothers. Captain_Maclaine posted:Because they mistakenly believe doing so would lead to them being the Immortans, rather than (at absolute best) warboys. I mean like, what's the supposed reason why it would be good for all humanity rather than just because they want it. Obviously self interest is taken as a given but I've never really come across the reasoning from the horse's mouth as to why we need to replace the web of minor to moderate obligations we all live in with formal contracts and private murder cops to enforce them. DarklyDreaming posted:By some vaguely defined "Freedom" scale the an-cap society would be more voluntary than living in a nation-state. So what's their supposed distinction between economic coercion in the form of taxes and economic coercion in the form of "pay the army their dane-geld if you don't want to get your literal rear end repossessed"?
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Oct 20, 2015 01:18
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cheese posted:Wrong, we live in a world of abundance where we have the technology to meet the reasonable needs of every human. We do not because humans are greedy creatures. Thanks for trying though. Yes but have you considered that if jrod had a trillion dollars he would buy all the food and burn it out of spite?
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Oct 20, 2015 01:19
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Even if we had that kind of scarcity it would probably at best be an argument for culling of the human population honestly, not Libertarianism.
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Oct 20, 2015 01:20
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Who What Now posted:Primo price in Kansas, though. And there's no way that'd eeeeeeeever turn out to be a bad investment a couple decades down the line. Not sure $620 an acre (2015 money) can really be called a primo price.
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Oct 20, 2015 01:21
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Tesseraction posted:Just to say, though, what you describe is not a democracy in any way. The method you describe is a plaster over the wound of a non-democratic state. When your political choice is to attempt to democratically alter one of two ruling parties, you have to question the validity of the process. Wait, how is democratically changing society not democracy?
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Oct 20, 2015 01:21
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OwlFancier posted:I mean like, what's the supposed reason why it would be good for all humanity rather than just because they want it. Obviously self interest is taken as a given but I've never really come across the reasoning from the horse's mouth as to why we need to replace the web of minor to moderate obligations we all live in with formal contracts and private murder cops to enforce them. OwlFancier posted:So what's their supposed distinction between economic coercion in the form of taxes and economic coercion in the form of "pay the army their dane-geld if you don't want to get your literal rear end repossessed"?
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Oct 20, 2015 01:23
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OwlFancier posted:So what's their supposed distinction between economic coercion in the form of taxes and economic coercion in the form of "pay the army their dane-geld if you don't want to get your literal rear end repossessed"? Well it's (technically) not a  GOVERNMENT MONOPOLY ON FORCE and you could (theoretically) take your "business" elsewhere.
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Oct 20, 2015 01:24
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spoon0042 posted:Well it's (technically) not a
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Oct 20, 2015 01:26
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Who What Now posted:Wait, how is democratically changing society not democracy? But you're not 'democratically changing society' as your country is a first-past-the-post system that effectively limits you to two parties. Before continuing, it's worth mentioning I'm British, and we have the same problem. Of those two parties, there's observeable trends towards polarisation (apologies for Time but this was the non-bullshit one I could find fastest). In such a system, you can perhaps shape a narrative within your own party, but that party has less than 50% of (vote-eligible) American support (according to most American voting public analyses). If a minority of the population can choose policy, it's not a democracy. It may well be the best choice - see a technocracy or meritocracy, but that doesn't mean it's a democracy. And frankly, American universities have admitted that the US is an oligarchy. Your personal politics are less important than that dude with more than just a few Benjamins to flash.
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Oct 20, 2015 01:33
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cheese posted:We have scarcity in that we cannot all have a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, but the idea that basic housing, reliable and healthy food, clean drinking water, preventative medical care, universal education, etc for all people are somehow beyond us because "scarcity" is hilarious. As I typed that sentence, dozens of cars were built by factories full of robots. Wholeheartedly agree!
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Oct 20, 2015 01:34
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cheese posted:That it doesn't survive even 30 seconds of deeper examination (how loving terrifying would it be to live in a world where private armies wandered around and demanded payment to "keep you safe"?) is a reflection of the general quality of the reasoning. At this point they can try to argue that nobody would actually do that because of the sacred Non-Aggression Principle, but anyone sane is already ignoring them. edit: And then it all circles around to "government is bad because MEN WITH GUNS can shoot you just because they can, if we got rid of the government MEN WITH GUNS wouldn't shoot you just because they can because ~farts~". Polygynous fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Oct 20, 2015 |
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Oct 20, 2015 01:36
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OwlFancier posted:I mean like, what's the supposed reason why it would be good for all humanity rather than just because they want it. Obviously self interest is taken as a given but I've never really come across the reasoning from the horse's mouth as to why we need to replace the web of minor to moderate obligations we all live in with formal contracts and private murder cops to enforce them. Well you see everyone knows what they themselves want better than anyone else, and of course everyone wants what's best for themselves, so if we just let people do what they want we'll all get what is best. Now dress that up by using the words "liberty", "freedom", "market", and "property" and that's about the extend of it.
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Oct 20, 2015 02:17
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I am trying my hardest to give this ideology the benefit of the doubt because some allegedly educated and presumably intelligent people have espoused it at some point but I am having great difficulty with the mental gymnastics required to hold all of the ideas in my head at once without my brain screaming at me. Short of everyone involved having some kind of very specific mass hysteria or brain damage I can't understand how this idea perpetuates.
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Oct 20, 2015 02:26
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"All problems stem from <thing> and have nothing to do with you as a person" is really attractive regardless of what <thing> is. In this case, it's the state.
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Oct 20, 2015 02:45
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General property question: At what point can I legitimately say "gently caress you got mine"? Is it a set amount of property I have to own before hand? Or is it more of a relative sliding scale?
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Oct 20, 2015 04:22
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Buried alive posted:"All problems stem from <thing> and have nothing to do with you as a person" is really attractive regardless of what <thing> is. In this case, it's the state. It's also really comforting to believe that there's this one simple book that has The Truth, and bad things happen because the world has rejected it. See also: religious cults.
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Oct 20, 2015 04:35
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OwlFancier posted:I am trying my hardest to give this ideology the benefit of the doubt because some allegedly educated and presumably intelligent people have espoused it at some point but I am having great difficulty with the mental gymnastics required to hold all of the ideas in my head at once without my brain screaming at me.
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Oct 20, 2015 05:08
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cheese posted:Stop trying. There is a reason Libertarianism is considered babies first political philosophy. It is what happens when middle/upper middle class white boys turn into middle/upper class white young men and start to 1) realize that the world is a horrible, lovely place and 2) wonder why their lives, among the billions of people out there, are actually really great. It is a philosophy that starts with the need to defend a certain privileged 1st world lifestyle, and then creates conditions and ideas that justify that privilege. "I have so much and so many have so little, that doesn't seem fair! But wait, I must have earned all that I have by virtue of there's also quite a few white working class boys who come to the conclusion that it's the big bad gubmint keeping them down from realizing their place as ubermenschen
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Oct 20, 2015 13:48
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Jerry Manderbilt posted:there's also quite a few white working class boys who come to the conclusion that it's the big bad gubmint keeping them down from realizing their place as ubermenschen The most lolbertarian people I've ever met are absolutely always fat, middle-aged white guys that had their lives literally handed to them for free that think they're being held back by the system and they succeeded, why can't others? While, of course, failing to realize how much of a massive leg up having parents wealthy enough to pay for your college then connected enough to get you your first job really is. Free college and nepotism are enormous privileges not everybody gets access to but you just can't tell that to these guys. It's always "I got where I am through hardwork and gumption!" Except that they're also mediocre workers at best and squeaked through college with a mediocre GPA. They just can't handle the idea that they aren't John Galt.
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Oct 20, 2015 14:34
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cheese posted:Wrong, we live in a world of abundance where we have the technology to meet the reasonable needs of every human. We do not because humans are greedy creatures. Thanks for trying though. The flip side of this is that we live in a world of absolute scarcity of those things that cannot be purchased, like respect, trust, fulfillment, self-esteem, and so forth. One of the common arguments for the free market and against welfare states is that it would destroy people's motivations to no longer be at risk of starving to death, ignoring the very real scarcity of these other non-buyable things that people might reasonably get out of providing value to society.
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Oct 20, 2015 14:34
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The most lolbertarian people I've ever met are absolutely always fat, middle-aged white guys that had their lives literally handed to them for free that think they're being held back by the system and they succeeded, why can't others? I guess it's time to bust out this perennial thread favorite: China Mielville posted:The libertarian seasteaders are heirs to this visionary tradition but degrade it with their class politics. They almost make one nostalgic for more grandiose enemy dreams. The uncompromising monoliths of fascist and Stalinist architecture expressed their paymasters’ monstrous ambitions. The wildest of the libertarian seasteaders, New Utopia, manages to crossfertilize its drab Miami-ism with enough candy floss Las Vegaries to keep a crippled baroque distantly in sight. Freedom Ship, however, is a floating shopping mall, a buoyant block of midrange Mediterranean hotels. This failure of utopian imagination is nowhere clearer than in the floating city of the long defunct but still influential Atlantis Project. Though in practice, I could have bolded the whole drat thing...Ok, just one more bit from Mieville's damning conclusion: quote:It is a small schadenfreude to know that these dreams will never come true. There are dangerous enemies, and then there are jokes of history. The libertarian seasteaders are a joke. The pitiful, incoherent and cowardly utopia they pine for is a spoilt child’s autarky, an imperialism of outsourcing, a very petty fascism played as maritime farce: Pinochet of Penzance.
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Oct 20, 2015 16:07
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Nessus posted:While this is going back a ways, I'm curious how come this would be different if there were more political parties. Tesseraction basically said what I would have, which is when you have two dominant parties, they will tend towards polarization. Members of the party who sit towards the middle of the political spectrum will be ostracized with terms like "RINO" and "Blue Dog" and will only be electable in places where people tend to vote dominantly towards the other party. If one party declares support for an issue, the opposing party has to, almost out of necessity, oppose it. Likewise, if the opposition opposes an issue, you must therefor support it. And this leads to people who vote for one party, seeing the opposition support an issue they would otherwise be for, and voting against or even changing their positions based on the idea that well, if they support it, it must be bad! (Likewise, if my party supports it, it must be good). You stop having parties of ideologies or identities, and start having parties of opposites. That's why everyone bends over backwards to make a big deal out of the two parties agreeing on poo poo. And you get stupid poo poo like the two parties both being in favor of an issue, but in order to appeal to their base, one party will pretend to be against it, let the other party "die on that hill", and hope to use the issue to get them elected the following cycle, even though they supported the issue anyways (and then they can get the credit for "fixing" it). This simplifies things quite a bit, but simple is easier to parse.
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Oct 20, 2015 16:32
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YF19pilot posted:Tesseraction basically said what I would have, which is when you have two dominant parties, they will tend towards polarization. Members of the party who sit towards the middle of the political spectrum will be ostracized with terms like "RINO" and "Blue Dog" and will only be electable in places where people tend to vote dominantly towards the other party. This hasn't been true until the past thirty years or so. If you make this claim, you have to explain why it wasn't so before.
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Oct 20, 2015 18:57
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^^ a generation of chemtrails and water fluoridation has resulted in a polarized the political climate, obviouslyToxicSlurpee posted:The most lolbertarian people I've ever met are absolutely always fat, middle-aged white guys that had their lives literally handed to them for free that think they're being held back by the system and they succeeded, why can't others? Wasn't John Galt like the ultimate "ideas guy" though? He basically asks a bunch of people to strike against society and then rubes them into creating Galt's Gulch. The only thing that he actually creates is a magic infinite energy machine, which he probably didn't even build himself (he had the resources of a former employer at his disposal)
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Oct 20, 2015 19:40
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QuarkJets posted:^^ a generation of chemtrails and water fluoridation has resulted in a polarized the political climate, obviously Galt was only very marginally anything other than a mouthpiece for Rand herself. He really had no characteristics other than "is supremely cool and good and you should all listen to him you guys," and even by the exceptionally low standards of Rand's writing is notably one-dimensional.
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Oct 20, 2015 19:45
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QuarkJets posted:Wasn't John Galt like the ultimate "ideas guy" though? He basically asks a bunch of people to strike against society and then rubes them into creating Galt's Gulch. The only thing that he actually creates is a magic infinite energy machine, which he probably didn't even build himself (he had the resources of a former employer at his disposal) Not only that but he literally created it on the job. Like he was being paid to do a thing but refused to do said thing and made his engine instead. It was basically the only thing he ever did but because it was a literal infinite energy machine (that mysteriously only John Galt was actually smart enough to figure out) he could just do whatever after that. He was really a heavy duty Mary Sue character. So super duper smart that he could violate the laws of physics at will but also super duper charming and able to convince all the smart people to gently caress off and follow him without question. Oh, he was also super duper sneaky to the point where nobody could find him if he didn't want to be found and just so drat awesome he single-handedly pulled off his grand scheme and convinced the world not to literally murder him with a really really awesome speech. I mean seriously, what he was doing would not go over very well in the real world.
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Oct 20, 2015 23:27
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Not only that but he literally created it on the job. Like he was being paid to do a thing but refused to do said thing and made his engine instead. It was basically the only thing he ever did but because it was a literal infinite energy machine (that mysteriously only John Galt was actually smart enough to figure out) he could just do whatever after that. Since Galt is such a champion for the sanctity of the contract, I can only assume that the 20th Century Auto Company (iirc) did not have the foresight to include a standard "employee cedes all copyright and patent right to employer for inventions made on the job" clause.
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