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As much as I like your writing, Caros, I think a written debate is a mistake. It's not going to be any different than his arguments here. Imagine the poo poo he just pulled with slavery and Qatar, but repeated. He doesn't want an audio debate because that'd make it obvious even to him that he's dodging and equivocating and feigning ignorance. I mean, it's obvious as poo poo to everyone here, but there's something about the human voice that shows it more nakedly. On a different note, I've been in a public health program for awhile now, and wow if I thought libertarianism was asinine before starting this, now it looks like the first stupid idea. You know, when you're presented with a problem like "How do we eliminate poverty?" and your response is "Give everyone a million dollars!" that's what libertarianism looks like to me now. For a real-life market failure, take the swill milk scandal. What is swill milk, you ask? Well, it's milked produced from sickly cows living in the city itself who are fed on a diet of hot mash from the breweries, so that their milk is actually alcoholic--and most of the nutrients in it have been stripped away. By the way, if your cow dies, make sure you get that last load of milk out of its udders, otherwise you're just leaving money on the table. So after you've got your milk from your cow-with-open-ulcers, it's often a kind of icky watery blue. To get that creamy white look and texture, mix in some chalk or plaster of paris or raw eggs. Then go and sell that in the crowded slums of New York, where there is basically unregulated housing and basically unregulated food markets. So you have the laboring poor, the women working twelve hours a day in a garment sweatshop or in service, paying for this adulterated shitshow of a product, because they couldn't afford anything else. Of course, no employer is going to let a woman take time off to go home and nurse her baby. Clean milk was available, but it was consumed by the rich and the small middle class, and there wasn't enough supply for the poor--because they couldn't afford it. This went on and on and on and the reformers kept trying to ban it and/or regulate it but the milk producer/distributors kept blocking it. In some cities it actually managed to get sorted out, but in New York it only actually changed once the expansion of the city made it less likely that a company both distributed and produced. But that took more than fifty years. The thing is, there were some 'good' milk producers selling to the poor. There were a whole range, from urban cows who weren't fed on brewers mash, to those who were but didn't have the milk adulterated, to those where the milk was complete nastiness. But since the poor were dying from so many other diseases and causes in their slum housing which they were being overcharged for due to unregulated housing markets, it was impossible even if they had the energy and the knowledge to do an epidemiological study and figure out which milk producers were the healthy ones and which weren't. And it might vary, day to day, at any particular point of sale, anyway. This is just one story, but it is repeated over and over and over. Libertarians pretend there will be perfect consumer knowledge--when called out, they may back down to 'well at least people will look into it and word will get around--but that ignores the reality of how loving hard it is to do epidemiological studies, to figure out what exactly killed someone. This is because libertarians don't actually understand science, they view it in the same way Rand did, as a series of straight lines connecting, moving ever-upwards. They think of each object functioning on its own, and are happy when every individual interaction fits their bullshit criteria. They do not look at the overarching result of all these individual interactions, because they fundamentally reject the idea of a whole that is greater than its parts, that a collective has abilities and powers individuals do not. To do so would be to reveal that they really are operating on that totally simplistic level, that they cannot possibly be trusted to think about systems since they basically deny that systems exist as they really do. Also did he seriously post pictures from mancrush or was that a hallucination I had.
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 23:38 |
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Obdicut posted:This is just one story, but it is repeated over and over and over. Libertarians pretend there will be perfect consumer knowledge--when called out, they may back down to 'well at least people will look into it and word will get around--but that ignores the reality of how loving hard it is to do epidemiological studies, to figure out what exactly killed someone. This is a really good point. Also worth drawing attention to is that even when something's been figured out, that doesn't exactly translate into an immediate consumer reaction. A link between smoking and poor health was suspected by some doctors as early as the 19th century, a direct link with cancer was postulated in the 1910s, that link was confirmed in Germany in the 1930s, those findings were replicated numerous times throughout the 40s and 50s, became the official position of the U.S. Public Health Service in 1957, and yet as late as the 60s only a third of doctors believed the link was established and as for consumers: ![]() I bet that graph looks great in libertopia!
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I really don't get what a written debate would change at all. It would just give a word count limit for him to ignore.Obdicut posted:Also did he seriously post pictures from mancrush or was that a hallucination I had. Um excuse me that was from a study that shows how libertarians are all smart and attractive and could totally take you in a fight. jrodefeld posted:Okay, I'll bite. Growing up, people thought I looked like Prince William, but that was way off. Maybe when he was younger. I've definitely got much better (and more) hair than he does.
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I know I was invited for a written debate, and frankly, I'm not too interested. JRod's philosophy is, to put it nicely, total nonsense. It requires you to accept a few a priori truths, and if you don't agree that "taxation is theft" or that "I pay taxes under the threat of violence," there's no way to have a meaningful conversation about the two worldviews. If we can't even agree on the color of the sky, then how are we supposed to talk about more complicated matters, such as property rights. Also, JRod has shown himself to be pretty bad at expressing his views in an intelligent manner. There's a lot of leaps that he makes, and there's a lot of times where I come across something that I can't effectively argue with him about because I really have no clue how he's trying to use a certain term or something. Finally, I don't know what the point of a debate would be. JRod has shown time and time again he is not going to change his worldview, and he may very well feel the same about me. The audience is not likely to change their mind. The audience here would likely agree with me, even if my arguments were just me smearing feces on a whiteboard and saying "That's libertarianism!" It wouldn't be a fun intellectual exercise for me, since I'd be debating with a brick wall.
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Cemetry Gator posted:Finally, I don't know what the point of a debate would be. ideally it would be realtime (irc, skype, etc) and we could try to force him to address what people are saying
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Literally The Worst posted:ideally it would be realtime (irc, skype, etc) and we could try to force him to address what people are saying Jrod: I'm making this slavery thing simple for you, since you're apparently incapable of understanding the most basic arguments or why we're "nitpicking" this. 1. You claim slavery is anathema to libertarianism 2. A list brought forward by you, from a libertarian source, holds slave states in high regard because it has low taxes 3. I am left to conclude that the list cares less about slavery than tax rates wrt economic freedom 4. I am left to conclude that you care less about slavery than taxes because, despite your claims, you will not admit that places built on literal slavery might not be very economically free (because they have low taxes) You don't get to say "slavery is anathema to libertarians" while holding literal slave states up as an example of a state we should aspire to work towards. "We" are not nitpicking anything, we are contesting your claim that you will not support slavery under the right circumstances (namely, that they come with low taxes on the slave-owners). e:vvvv I did that because in the same post he said he didn't know about the scenario in Qatar at all so I, in my bountiful charity, decided to take him at his word. And people better than I already brought up that if Qatar isn't slavery, taxes certainly aren't either. Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Nov 21, 2015 |
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You left out where he claimed it wasn't actually slavery, just a lack of union rights
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Literally The Worst posted:You left out where he claimed it wasn't actually slavery, just a lack of union rights Well you see there's Legitimate Slavery (income tax), and then there's Really-Just-a-Labor-Dispute-Which-We-Shouldn't-Get-That-Worked-Up-About (actual loving slavery).
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If it's a legitimate slavery, the libertarian state has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.
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Zanzibar Ham posted:If it's a legitimate slavery, the libertarian Fixed. To be fair, the quote you're making fun of was possibly one of the first to really make me start examining my political beliefs and those of the party and politicians I said I supported. It's such a simple gaffe, and yet it was so profoundly stupid that it triggered something in me.
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I thought even in libertopia you had this small government that existed only to enforce contracts through non-violent(?) means. e: and of course without taxing anybody, slavery is bad!
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Zanzibar Ham posted:I thought even in libertopia you had this small government that existed only to enforce contracts through non-violent(?) means. That would make sense, and that's the kind of night watchman state von Mises supported. Jrod supports turning over law enforcement to free-market competing security forces (which is a complete contradiction in terms, because the free market is a creation of the state and its monopoly on violence), and even Ayn "exterminate the Native Americans" Rand realized that means the mafia and concluded Libertarians are stupid as hell. When you've got Ayn loving Rand saying "whoa bro, you're giving businesses too much power over people", it's time to think things over a bit more. Ayn 'adultery is wrong unless you are Ayn Rand or loving Ayn Rand' Rand posted:A recent variant of anarchistic theory, which is befuddling some of the younger advocates of freedom, is a weird absurdity called “competing governments.” Accepting the basic premise of the modern statists—who see no difference between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between force and production, and who advocate government ownership of business—the proponents of “competing governments” take the other side of the same coin and declare that since competition is so beneficial to business, it should also be applied to government. Instead of a single, monopolistic government, they declare, there should be a number of different governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens, with every citizen free to “shop” and to patronize whatever government he chooses. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Nov 21, 2015 |
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I suppose no matter how extreme a viewpoint there's always one more extreme.
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Zanzibar Ham posted:I suppose no matter how extreme a viewpoint there's always one more extreme. And sooner or later Jrod will unintentionally cite it.
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VitalSigns posted:When you've got Ayn loving Rand saying "whoa bro, you're giving businesses too much power over people", it's time to think things over a bit more. Bryter posted:This is a really good point. Also worth drawing attention to is that even when something's been figured out, that doesn't exactly translate into an immediate consumer reaction. A link between smoking and poor health was suspected by some doctors as early as the 19th century, a direct link with cancer was postulated in the 1910s, that link was confirmed in Germany in the 1930s, those findings were replicated numerous times throughout the 40s and 50s, became the official position of the U.S. Public Health Service in 1957, and yet as late as the 60s only a third of doctors believed the link was established and as for consumers:
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Do we even know where jrod stands on the link between tobacco smoke and lung cancer? On the one hand, the government is saying it's true, which is reason enough to suspect it of being an insidious lie to hobble fair Dame Industry and dupe the sheeple into giving them more control over our lives in the form of packaging regulations, smoking bans, and sin taxes. On the other hand, we already know private organizations like the American Medical Association and the American Dental Association also regularly engage in sinister plots to poison Americans with vaccine preservatives and dental fillings, so Big Tobacco might be doing something along the same lines. Hmm, I'm still going to go with the first option, because the tipoff that the AMA and ADA are conspiring to profit off the toxins their lackeys sell to us is that the government agrees with them. Since the government disagrees with Phillip Morris, we can be confident that Phillip Morris has our best interests at heart and the man is suppressing their research that nicotine smoke is critical to the health of the human T-Zone.
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jrodefeld posted:The single point I was trying to get across was that when we look at our un-libertarian world, the general trend is that those nations that have policies that are closer to laissez-faire libertarian free markets have greater prosperity, larger middle classes, less poverty, and higher general living standards. I made some graphs comparing UN development data to Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom Index (as an index, obviously not so objective, but unbiased groups tend not to measure "economic freedom" and this is the best we have.) ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Broadly: developed countries tend to have higher "Economic Freedom" than developing countries, but within the developed world, there's no correlation between "Economic Freedom" and GDI or standard of living as measured by the Human Development Index; that bottom-right graph is nearly a textbook picture of uncorrelated data. The economic freedom index doesn't make a good argument for developed countries adopting neoliberal/libertarian policies. And if we're talking about less developed countries, currently some of the least-hospitable territories in the world are functionally stateless areas in Central Africa. The warring non-state groups in Central Africa and in the Levant right now are a good match to Rand's characterization of DROs as "a number of different governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens" above.
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Saeku posted:And if we're talking about less developed countries, currently some of the least-hospitable territories in the world are functionally stateless areas in Central Africa. The warring non-state groups in Central Africa and in the Levant right now are a good match to Rand's characterization of DROs as "a number of different governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens" above. Why, that's simply because they haven't heard of the Non-Aggression Pact! Surely if some brave libertarian souls go down there and give them the good news...
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Saeku posted:I made some graphs comparing UN development data to Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom Index (as an index, obviously not so objective, but unbiased groups tend not to measure "economic freedom" and this is the best we have.) What's that country that is literally off the charts for both of them?
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paragon1 posted:What's that country that is literally off the charts for both of them? It's a graph legend with no label attached that Google Charts put on there for some reason. The real outliers: The country at the top of the GDI axis is Qatar; the highly developed country with unusually low economic freedom is Argentina.
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Libertarianism just always comes off as such a useless philosophy. I mean, I guess it might sound alright for some fantasy-land, but there is no real way to apply it earth in this modern era. For fairness' sake, I tried applying libertarian principles to a hypothetical space exploration scenario. How, exactly, would the principle of homesteading shake out in this case: Let's say there is an earth-based mining company called Planetoid Resource Corporation (PRC for short) that intends to mine resources from a small celestial body, perhaps a Jupiter trojan which we will call C. lanatus. Currently, though, colonists live in orbit of Jupiter, and some of them regularly collect resources from nearby sources. These colonists form a union called the Guild of Jovian Refiners and Orbital Detritus Extractors (JRODE). At one point, on a expedition to C. lanatus, the guild encounters a PRC probe that contains some scanning equipment, a telemetry beacon, and a flag. Presumably, more equipment is on route from earth. In this (albeit far-fetched) scenario, has the planetoid been homesteaded? by whom? can JRODE drill C. lanatus?
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say no to scurvy posted:Libertarianism just always comes off as such a useless philosophy. I mean, I guess it might sound alright for some fantasy-land, but there is no real way to apply it earth in this modern era. Has JRODE ever been to C. Ianatus in any way shape or form to gather resources from it? If not I'd guess PRC but the real complication here is what constitutes "mixing labor," just planting a flag might not be enough. In that case JRODE can still... ...ahahaha, who am I kidding, this is exactly the kind of poo poo that the prototype of "homesteading theory" was meant to justify, it's PRC no doubt. I actually have thought for a while that pretty much the only context in which you could come close to making any kind of libertarian society is exactly this kind of sci-fi scenario, where if you actually can find vast new uninhabited space to move into. That's probably because the first depiction of an ancap society I ever came across was in the setting of Transhuman Space though.
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Jrod, do you play Civilization? What is your preferred tech path?
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say no to scurvy posted:Libertarianism just always comes off as such a useless philosophy. I mean, I guess it might sound alright for some fantasy-land, but there is no real way to apply it earth in this modern era. It only works in a world without any scarcity of resources, because the minute where you have one group who needs something (like water) to survive, and you have another group who has plenty of that thing, you're going to have issues. And there's a lot of things that can be scarce, and can create scarcity. I lived through Hurricane Sandy, and that was a great example about how libertarianism would just break down. So, in Hurricane Sandy, you had massive blackouts and you had issues with the roads. For a week after the storm, it was very difficult to get around, if not downright impossible. Because the power was out in so much of the area, supplies were hard to come across, so if you needed gas, you were hosed, which meant the few gas stations that were open had massive lines, which made the travel difficulties even worse because those roads would get backed up like nothing. Then you had massive damage caused by the storm. The weakest link for many people was the power company. Let me tell you about JCP&L, or the most incompetent power company to walk this earth. They are owned by First Energy, a loving incompetent power company. Even before Sandy, they were notorious for their incompetency. The summer before, Jersey kept having a ton of power outages for no apparent reasons. Well, what happened was the year before, there was a fire in the power station in Morristown, and that damaged their capabilities. Well, in the summer, when there was more demand for power, we would keep losing electricity on hot days or during thunderstorms. Now the thing about power companies is that there can only be one really servicing an area (it gets a little weird because you do have 'choice' but not really). After all, only so much electricity can be flowing through the lines, and the way our power grid works, you can't have 20,000 lines from 20,000 different plants trying to service the same area. It's a grid of power. Frankly, JRod, I'd love to hear you explain how electricity would work in a libertarian environment, because as I said, you can't have individualized power grids for each company. There can really only be one. Well, anyway, back to the point. You have a poorly maintained power grid, you have a private company in charge of that grid, and then you have a massive hurricane hit, and you see how quickly things fell apart. The roads were clear within a week. Some people were without power for 2 or 3 weeks. JCP&L was the weak point. Many towns were actually petitioning Chirs Christie to do something. Yeah. So the private company who has a reason to keep the power grid well maintained and to be prepared for massive hurricanes completely dropped the loving ball. Meanwhile, the roads and poo poo that the government was responsible for was handled pretty well.
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Cemetry Gator posted:Yeah. So the private company who has a reason to keep the power grid well maintained and to be prepared for massive hurricanes completely dropped the loving ball. Meanwhile, the roads and poo poo that the government was responsible for was handled pretty well.
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Cemetry Gator posted:Now the thing about power companies is that there can only be one really servicing an area (it gets a little weird because you do have 'choice' but not really). After all, only so much electricity can be flowing through the lines, and the way our power grid works, you can't have 20,000 lines from 20,000 different plants trying to service the same area. It's a grid of power. Frankly, JRod, I'd love to hear you explain how electricity would work in a libertarian environment, because as I said, you can't have individualized power grids for each company. There can really only be one. Each power company hopeful would come together and do battle with swords, at the end whomever has the most heads has been chosen. For as we all know, there can BE ONLY ONE. . . .I'll get my coat.
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Just sent out a PM containing the relevant Google doc links. If you still want to participate, please let me know! Also let me know if you said you wanted to participate and you didn't get a PM.
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Bob James posted:Jrod, do you play Civilization? What is your preferred tech path? Sadly, his games tend to stall out in the mid-late game - he refuses to research Economics, so he can't reach the Modern Era.
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Cemetry Gator posted:Yeah. So the private company who has a reason to keep the power grid well maintained and to be prepared for massive hurricanes completely dropped the loving ball. Meanwhile, the roads and poo poo that the government was responsible for was handled pretty well. Dropping the ball seems what private power companies do best. It's the reason why our energy infrastructure is such a poo poo show now. They look at their profits, then look at the crumbling grid and go ![]()
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A point I wanted to make on the whole "taxation is slavery and or theft" analogy. You guys have covered the principal problem of slavery being the loss of individual freedom, but an alternative definition would include the theft of one's own labor, which is something that jrod emphasizes. Theft implies that I'm having something taken from me against my will and I'm either getting nothing in return or am being insufficiently compensated. But taxes are the cost of maintaining society. Taxes aren't theft; they're trade. I'm paying taxes to a government that is supposed to provide me with services. We can haggle over how many services a government should provide for so much taxes, but that's no different than haggling over prices of goods at a market, not theft, and certainly not slavery.
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Caros posted:"A new island is discovered in international waters. No government has any claim over it, nor has any government expressed any interest. Following your homesteading principles I go to this island and jam my dick into the soil until completion. How much of the island do I own." Jrod won't answer you but I will. There's no answer to this question. I can go buy a few hundred acres of virginal beachfront property, I can leave it untouched and simply walk out there, lie in the sun, and enjoy nature. And if someone comes along and starts building a dock because I'm not using the land, I can tell him to leave and the state will recognize my ownership and back up my request with force, even though neither I nor any previous owner plucked anything out of nature nor created anything new nor mixed our labor with it in a magical ritual of ownership. I own it because there is a record in a state land office somewhere describing the exact area I own, and our society has mutually agreed to recognize those records as constituting ownership. If libertarian property theory held sway, there'd be no way to enjoy and protect any unspoiled bit of nature because by definition it belongs to whomever comes in and starts digging it up. Some libertarians may try to get around this by saying if you mark it as yours, by putting a fence at the borders, or planting a flag or whatever then that counts, but that's nonsense on the level of that one Eddie Izzard bit. There is no objective definition of "plucking out of nature" and there never was: the only purpose of homesteading theory was to justify stealing land from the native inhabitants by claiming they're not really using it because they don't have deeds, or they don't do agriculture, or they don't do the right kind of yeoman farmer agriculture, or they don't have fences around their grazing lands like white ranchers do, or whatever. Once that excuse served our land--stealing purpose of making us feel better about overthrowing the preexisting land ownership system, we of course immediately replaced "homesteading" with an actually clear workable system of surveyors and land deeds.
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paragon1 posted:Just sent out a PM containing the relevant Google doc links. If you still want to participate, please let me know! Also let me know if you said you wanted to participate and you didn't get a PM. I'd participate! Or at least sit in the cheap seats and throw popcorn. But I don't have PMs.
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E-Tank posted:I'd participate! Or at least sit in the cheap seats and throw popcorn. But I don't have PMs. Do you have some preferred way for me to send the links to you?
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Cantorsdust posted:A point I wanted to make on the whole "taxation is slavery and or theft" analogy. You guys have covered the principal problem of slavery being the loss of individual freedom, but an alternative definition would include the theft of one's own labor, which is something that jrod emphasizes. The problem with this argument is the involuntary car wash. If I wash your car without permission I can't go and say you owe me two dollars, even if I put way more than $2 work into the car wash. Trade doesn't simply require consideration, it also requires intent. Of course the simple counter to that is that the choice to continue living in America into adulthood is an implied in fact agreement to pay your taxes.
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Most people don't have the means to leave America even if they didn't have friends or family tying them here. And taxes are the one and only situation in which the lack of practical alternatives is effectively coercive even if there are no soldiers pointing guns at you to make you stay in America. Luckily there's an easy step-by-step Libertarian way to make taxation halal. (1) Incorporate the US government as a private corporation (2) Declare all land property of the US government, backed up by the US military (3) Destroy all deeds and records at state land offices Okay starting now, seizing land is wrong and everyone must respect the property rights of the existing title-holder (USgovcorp), even if the land was acquired by theft, that was in the past and USgovcorp is the present owner. Now if you can find a land office with an official deed for your property then you can sue to get your land back from among your choice of competing courts (no competing courts are allowed to operate nor have jurisdiction on USgovcorp's privately-owned land, sorry it's private property), oh you can't convince our court? Well we can't just violate USgovcorp's property rights on your say-so. But you can lease a plot of land in perpetuity for an annual fee that varies according to these progressive income brackets. Thank you for living in our 330-million-strong company town, if you don't like these terms you are free to leave and find some unowned land to start your own competing company. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Nov 23, 2015 |
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paragon1 posted:Do you have some preferred way for me to send the links to you? Skype? I'm Edward Tank. My icon is a big and very angry looking Burger
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Okays so, WHOOPS I didn't realize I had the docs set to view only. Surely a great sign of things to come.
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Is it debate set up in a way where one could be a spectator or are you asking only people who are contributing to be given access? I've been reading this thread with interest but my main contribution to the debate (how care would be afforded to those unable to contribute to the economy, especially if this disability is transient such as with mental dysfunction) but this question has been canvassed by people much more articulate than I and thoroughly ignored by the OP.
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I'm honestly not conceiving of it as a debate at this point because that would require some strong premise that the people participating would disagree on. So it is more of a group conversation that I'm recording for fun and random goons to listen to if they want to for some reason. That said anyone who wants to participate is welcome. I mean my main contribution has been insulting jrode in various ways and I'm MCing the thing so ![]() The only reason I'm not just posting the links in the thread is because giving google doc access to the Goon Public strikes me as not the greatest idea ever. If you just want to spectate, then I'll be making the recording available to everyone. paragon1 fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Nov 23, 2015 |
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 23:38 |
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paragon1, I wouldn't mind a link if you could PM me one. I may just spectate, but would love to see things as they unfold live(ish).
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