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Libertarianism to me seems too hypocritical and has a lack of consensus among its supporters. It begins with a vague and conflicting ideology that seems to change amongst individuals depending on their personal situation. I love how the name of this thread implies property rights, yet it's really an op ed trying to defend and promote libertarianism. I see what you have done there. No one was listening to you in the smoking circle, so you went and built yourself a stage to bellow from.
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Feb 8, 2016 16:25
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Mises.org is full of awful articles. It's easy to see how jrod ended up so completely ignorant about even the most basic historical and scientific facts. I'd like to see how his reading list on the US Civil War compares to mine.
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Feb 8, 2016 17:24
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:Mises.org is full of awful articles. It's easy to see how jrod ended up so completely ignorant about even the most basic historical and scientific facts. Ten to one "A Politically Incorrect Guide" will be on that list, and possibly also Alexander Stephens and Jefferson Davis.
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Feb 8, 2016 18:21
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If one where to read good and accurate literature on the civil war what would it be? I admit my basic understanding is pretty much what they feed you in high school. I feel it is relevant to the thread because of its relationship to property rights.
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Feb 8, 2016 18:26
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Ten to one "A Politically Incorrect Guide" will be on that list, and possibly also Alexander Stephens and Jefferson Davis. I'd be surprised of Thomas DiLorenzo weren't right at the top.
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Feb 8, 2016 18:27
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He's cited DiLorenzo before iirc, and Tom Woods was on his favorite thinkers list. It's blatant where he gets his ideas when he starts talking about the poor ol' CSA.
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Feb 8, 2016 18:40
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Sort of. John Galt invents an engine while ignoring his regular job duties and still getting paid for them that runs on background static energy. It doesn't need any input and gives off mechanical energy...somehow. I think she describes it as consuming "ambient energy" or some such bullshit but the short of it is that he literally invented an infinite energy engine easily and then refused to share it with the rest of the world because he was a selfish, petulant baby. Wow that's like peak libertarian rear end in a top hat. Capitalist creates a perpetual motion machine, solving the world's energy crisis with the key to a post-scarcity world. Finally, everyone can have a decent standard of living, no one would ever have to go without! Wait, no, gently caress that, John Galt selfishly hoards it to himself for reasons. Nevermind he will benefit from the post-scarcity world; no, he has to benefit more than everyone else. Thanks for letting me know I wasn't missing anything when I gave up on Atlas Shrugged from sheer attrition and boredom.
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Feb 8, 2016 18:40
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Nolanar posted:I keep wanting to give their ideology the benefit of the doubt. I just assumed JRod is well-meaning and that he didn't realize he's parroting white supremacist rhetoric; and then nope, he thinks Trayvon Martin deserved to die for having candy. I assume JRod is an outlier, picking the worst thinkers and making the worst arguments; and then the few other libertarians who have posted have been a dude with the quickest intro-to-meltdown turnaround I've ever seen, an avowed white nationalist, and a dude whose entire range of opinion appeared to be tone arguments. I occasionally check in on the repository of all libertarian knowledge to see if they have stronger arguments, and come up with pages and pages of them writing the past into their narrative like astrologers and inventing new economic indicators when the current ones don't say what they like. What you really need to ask yourself is whether someone being willfully dense and in denial about provable fact in the age of the Internet is an excuse or not. It's not really possible to be truly ignorant about issues that you genuinely find interesting anymore. The truth is readily available, and you have to have some of these other defects to continue to cling to such a lovely ideology, or the colossally bad luck to not be exposed to better ideas. Jrode obviously does not fall into the latter camp.
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Feb 8, 2016 18:59
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Muscle Tracer posted:What you really need to ask yourself is whether someone being willfully dense and in denial about provable fact in the age of the Internet is an excuse or not. It's not really possible to be truly ignorant about issues that you genuinely find interesting anymore. The truth is readily available, and you have to have some of these other defects to continue to cling to such a lovely ideology, or the colossally bad luck to not be exposed to better ideas. Jrode obviously does not fall into the latter camp. I think it's actually surprisingly easy to get stuck in a feedback loop of bad info in the internet age. If you get introduced to an ideology by one of its adherents and look into it more, you'll more than likely end up on forums and social media circles that reinforce that ideology, and the way every media site curates and personalizes the content you see will do the same. There's no shortage of people offering The Truth About [thing] out there to cater to whatever beliefs you already have. The only real way to escape it is to actively seek out opposing viewpoints, as espoused by the people who already believe them. Just hearing their ideas from someone trying to debunk them won't do it; just look at JRod's attempt to predict and counter "leftist" arguments to see how well that works. In theory, going out and evangelizing should expose you to opposing views and break you out of the echo chamber, but humans rarely work that way. That's why I am so keen on giving new libertarian interlopers the benefit of the doubt. I really want to engage with them on their ideas instead of talking with other leftists on what we think they think. But every single time, the actual arguments they put forward are weaker and more outlandish than the strawmen we make up to mock them. Valhalla DRO is hilarious and dumb, but it's nowhere near as hilarious and dumb as the actual hypotheticals Stephen Molyneaux puts forward as ideal DRO behavior.
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Feb 8, 2016 19:17
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Nolanar posted:I keep wanting to give their ideology the benefit of the doubt. I just assumed JRod is well-meaning and that he didn't realize he's parroting white supremacist rhetoric; and then nope, he thinks Trayvon Martin deserved to die for having candy. I assume JRod is an outlier, picking the worst thinkers and making the worst arguments; and then the few other libertarians who have posted have been a dude with the quickest intro-to-meltdown turnaround I've ever seen, an avowed white nationalist, and a dude whose entire range of opinion appeared to be tone arguments. I occasionally check in on the repository of all libertarian knowledge to see if they have stronger arguments, and come up with pages and pages of them writing the past into their narrative like astrologers and inventing new economic indicators when the current ones don't say what they like. I'm not a libertarian, but if your goal is to engage serious libertarians with strong arguments presented in good faith, you could do worse than reading Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The first two sections in which he dismisses anarcho-capitalism and responds to Rawls' theory of justice (while dismissing utilitarianism, alongside Rawls) are classics of modern political philosophy. Nozick has a rather iconoclastic writing style, but his arguments merit consideration whether you agree with them or not. There is also a nice response by Cohen, published as Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, in which he argues that the libertarian notion of self-ownership fails to guarantee the libertarian notion of freedom. However, Nozick is not a libertarian in the sense that jrodefeld is a libertarian, because he argues that a minimal state is consistent with libertarian principles (over one or more competing dispute resolution organizations). Edit: Something I've always found interesting is that Nozick stresses the importance of an adequate theory of rectification of injustices and the Lockean proviso; both of which, he thinks, imply that libertarian principles can't be consistently applied to modern societies in which chains of historical injustices permeate individual and group holdings. It's always seemed that this separates Nozick from other prominent libertarians, because they focus the application of his theory of justice on historical and institutional problems of racism, sexism, and so forth. It always seems suspicious when these more radical libertarians ignore or explicitly discard these principles (in order to advance some malicious goal). quickly fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Feb 8, 2016 |
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Feb 8, 2016 19:48
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KING BONG posted:If one where to read good and accurate literature on the civil war what would it be? I admit my basic understanding is pretty much what they feed you in high school. If you want a good, beginner's run-down of the war itself, James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom is more or less the standard work. A much longer, though still good read (despite being older and at times more than a little sympathetic to Jefferson Davis and other traitors, though it isn't Lost Cause-y, thankfully) is Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative. For Reconstruction, hit up either of Eric Foner's two works by that same name (Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, and the understandably much-shorter: A Short History of Reconstruction) If you want the war straight from the man itself, you could do far worse than Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.
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Feb 8, 2016 20:37
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quickly posted:I'm not a libertarian, but if your goal is to engage serious libertarians with strong arguments presented in good faith, you could do worse than reading Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The first two sections in which he dismisses anarcho-capitalism and responds to Rawls' theory of justice (while dismissing utilitarianism, alongside Rawls) are classics of modern political philosophy. Nozick has a rather iconoclastic writing style, but his arguments merit consideration whether you agree with them or not. There is also a nice response by Cohen, published as Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, in which he argues that the libertarian notion of self-ownership fails to guarantee the libertarian notion of freedom. However, Nozick is not a libertarian in the sense that jrodefeld is a libertarian, because he argues that a minimal state is consistent with libertarian principles (over one or more competing dispute resolution organizations). I've been passingly familiar with Nozick due to the professor who introduced me to political philosophy being a follower of him, but I've never read much of his work beyond summaries. And it's pretty interesting to me that he absolutely never gets brought up in Libertarian discussions, except as part of an unelaborated "list of influences." And if I'm remembering correctly, he actually argues that DRO-like organizations will resolve into regular old states pretty quickly due to market forces. I brought this up to JRod when he slapped Nozick onto his Big List of Libertarians, but for some reason he never responded. 
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Feb 8, 2016 20:43
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Didn't Karl Marx of all people write a bunch of stuff about the American Civil War while it was happening? Are those papers of his worth reading?
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Feb 8, 2016 20:45
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Malleum posted:Didn't Karl Marx of all people write a bunch of stuff about the American Civil War while it was happening? Are those papers of his worth reading? Yeah they're pretty interesting, but you have to remember he's writing on like thirdhand reports at best, since he never went over to the warzones.
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Feb 8, 2016 20:48
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Malleum posted:Didn't Karl Marx of all people write a bunch of stuff about the American Civil War while it was happening? Are those papers of his worth reading? The First International actually sent Lincoln a letter expressing their support and admiration for him freeing the slaves, and how they were excited to have someone fighting the oligarchs on behalf of the working class. One of Lincoln's ambassadors wrote back a hilariously awkward "uh, thanks for the support
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Feb 8, 2016 20:57
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Malleum posted:Didn't Karl Marx of all people write a bunch of stuff about the American Civil War while it was happening? Are those papers of his worth reading? "American capitalist pig-dog kills American capitalist pig-dog. All goes according to plan to topple hated land of freedom and install glorious people's communism."
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Feb 8, 2016 21:04
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Who What Now posted:"American capitalist pig-dog kills American capitalist pig-dog. All goes according to plan to topple hated land of freedom and install glorious people's communism."
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Feb 8, 2016 21:12
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Nolanar posted:And if I'm remembering correctly, he actually argues that DRO-like organizations will resolve into regular old states pretty quickly due to market forces. I brought this up to JRod when he slapped Nozick onto his Big List of Libertarians, but for some reason he never responded. The heart of Nozick's argument isn't that any free market in dispute resolution organizations will resolve into a minimal state, replete with a monopoly on the use of force: that would be a contingent fact about states, and says nothing about the legitimacy of the minimal state. Rather, Nozick argues that the minimal state could arise in such a way that nobody's fundamental rights are violated; and that a minimal state must arise in order to guarantee the protection of everybody's fundamental rights. In other words, the minimal state is not only morally justified but morally necessitated. The basic idea is that any dominant dispute resolution organization would be morally obligated to protect the rights of its clients, including protecting them from independents and other dispute resolution organizations who would exercise justice outside that organization's jurisdiction. In order that this prohibition not violate the rights of independents and other organizations, it must compensate them by extending its protection services to everybody living in its territory. In order to satisfy the constraint that nobody's rights be violated, the minimal state can only charge independents whenever it acts in a legitimate fashion on their behalf (thus the state doesn't have a right of taxation in the traditional sense, because independents are not required to pay whatever periodic fees the dominant agency charges). In any case: if anyone sees any errors, please correct me! It's been a while since I took political philosophy. Edit: I really think that libertarians throw Nozick into a big list of influences because he actually does a pretty good job of thinking through the logical consequences of libertarianism, even if he is optimistic about market forces and all that. He also espouses some principles (for example) that I think are quite antithetical to the spirit of some of the modern libertarians/ancaps (or at least brings up issues that they'd rather not think about). Malleum posted:Didn't Karl Marx of all people write a bunch of stuff about the American Civil War while it was happening? Are those papers of his worth reading? There used to be a collection of Marx's Civil War writings at marxists.org, but only a few are still available. quickly fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Feb 8, 2016 |
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Feb 8, 2016 21:37
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Nessus posted:It's entirely orthodox Marxism, honestly. The North, warts and all, was an industrial capitalist nation while the South was sort of pseudo-feudal and literally held their workers as property. Unless I have been misinformed in my public school indoctrination, industrial capitalism is held to be vastly preferable to agrarian slavery. And all of this was sixty years before the Soviet adventure began, anyway. Yes, it's right there in the manifesto that in a fight between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, one should side with the bourgeoise. Whilst the USA did away with things like titles that European aristocrats had, I think it's fair to that say the hold over the land and people that the slaveowners had qualifies them as such.
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Feb 8, 2016 21:47
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KING BONG posted:If one where to read good and accurate literature on the civil war what would it be? I admit my basic understanding is pretty much what they feed you in high school. Like others said, Battle Cry of Freedom by McPherson is the best one-volume. After (or before) that, read McPherson's This Mighty Scourge, which is a collection of his essays on various topics. He gets into the historiography and argues effectively for his positions. McPherson's Antietam is loving excellent as well. As far as non-McPherson stuff, Charles Royster's The Destructive War examines the coming of Total War and the personalities of Stonewall Jackson and W T Sherman. George Rable's Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! is a great example of military history in the modern and McPherson mold. The Impending Crisis by Potter is the best book on the politics of the 1850's and gives you basically everything you need to know about why secession happened. For arguing with neo-Confederates: Charles Dew's Apostles of Secession is a great book that destroys the "states' rights" argument by examining the rhetoric of Davis, Stephens, and the Secession Commissioners. Gary Gallagher's Myth of the Lost Cause is a compendium of essays that effectively dismantle Confederate apologia. It should also be noted that McPherson takes hot steaming shits on fools like DiLorenzo and Tom Woods constantly throughout his books. Grand Theft Autobot fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Feb 8, 2016 |
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Feb 8, 2016 21:54
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Igiari posted:Yes, it's right there in the manifesto that in a fight between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, one should side with the bourgeoise. Whilst the USA did away with things like titles that European aristocrats had, I think it's fair to that say the hold over the land and people that the slaveowners had qualifies them as such.
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Feb 8, 2016 22:03
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Nessus posted:It's entirely orthodox Marxism, honestly. The North, warts and all, was an industrial capitalist nation while the South was sort of pseudo-feudal and literally held their workers as property. Unless I have been misinformed in my public school indoctrination, industrial capitalism is held to be vastly preferable to agrarian slavery. And all of this was sixty years before the Soviet adventure began, anyway. I wasn't being serious.
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Feb 8, 2016 22:07
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Nessus posted:Hell, they were more aristocratic than the actual aristocrats in England in a lot of ways. A bunch of those guys were basically just landlords or living off established fortunes. Calvin Candie literally had bondsmen tilling the soil for him. Only, of course, he could kill them with total impunity. Before the Emancipation Proclamation England was pretty seriously pro-Confederacy as well. Nearly all the major newspapers in England were pro-South. They bought the propaganda of the respectable Southern Gentry, identified them as their kith and kin, and were obviously very interested in ensuring the continued flow of cotton. England came close to recognizing the CSA as independent several times. France and Belgium wanted to recognize the CSA basically immediately.
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Feb 8, 2016 22:24
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:Before the Emancipation Proclamation England was pretty seriously pro-Confederacy as well. Nearly all the major newspapers in England were pro-South. They bought the propaganda of the respectable Southern Gentry, identified them as their kith and kin, and were obviously very interested in ensuring the continued flow of cotton. England came close to recognizing the CSA as independent several times. France and Belgium wanted to recognize the CSA basically immediately. The South's whole idea of using their cotton as leverage also got the Brits to put money into Indian and Egyptian cotton. Good work dudes!
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Feb 8, 2016 22:28
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Nolanar posted:The First International actually sent Lincoln a letter expressing their support and admiration for him freeing the slaves, and how they were excited to have someone fighting the oligarchs on behalf of the working class. One of Lincoln's ambassadors wrote back a hilariously awkward "uh, thanks for the support  That is awesome.
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Feb 8, 2016 22:35
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Nessus posted:If I remember McPherson well, this existed but was a lot shallower than you might think. The working classes - even in places that were economically hit by cotton shortages, or would be - were stoutly pro-North, and even the aristos were more "We're generally in favo(u)r of the Americans killing each other instead of growing and edging us out on the sea" than "we looooooove slavery!" It depends on timing, really. Pre-Antietam there were active debates in Parliament about recognizing the CSA. Palmerston shut down debate on July 18 1862, stating that the CSA needed to prove its independence on the battlefield. Foreign Secretary Russell and Palmerston had a meeting scheduled for October to officially discuss intervention and mediation. Lee had basically an unbroken string of successes from the early summer to Antietam. Losing that battle put off any hope of recognition in 1862, and in January 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation effectively turned all of England pro-Union. edit: this is from McPherson's essay "The Saratoga That Wasn't." edit2: link to Saratoga That Wasn't Grand Theft Autobot fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Feb 8, 2016 |
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Feb 8, 2016 22:37
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I have a question, jrodefeld: where do rights come from? You constantly assert that property rights are natural rights, but your only defense of property rights was conventional. How do you respond to somebody who claims that the best approximation to the state of liberty would involve rescinding some legal rights and abandoning some so-called natural rights to property? For example, somebody from the Marxist tradition (which you are apparently so fond of) might argue that the state of liberty is best achieved by ensuring conditions which maximize the potential and capabilities of each individual, allowing her to act unhindered by restrictions imposed or caused by modern or libertarian forms of property.
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Feb 8, 2016 23:15
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:It should also be noted that McPherson takes hot steaming shits on fools like DiLorenzo and Tom Woods constantly throughout his books. This is a good point I should have mentioned, and now wish to reinforce. For dunking on Lost Cause fools, Chandra Manning's What this Cruel War was Over is a great read as it gives consistent, first-hand evidence that the majority of soldiers North and South knew the war was being fought over Slavery and, in the Southern instance, non-slaveholding soldiers by and large condoned it as such as they approved of the institution and wanted to be part of it some day. Manisha Sinha's The Counterrevolution of Slavery, which takes South Carolina as a case study, helps demonstrate how secession was ultimately a rejection of those parts of the American revolution that Southern conservative slavelords dislikes (ie: just about all of it other than their own independence and protection of property), and how the Confederacy was established, baldly and openly, as an anti-democratic, pro-slavery republic. It's not as easy a read as the others mentioned so far as Sinha isn't as gifted an author as some, but it's not onerous by any measure. quickly posted:I have a question, jrodefeld: where do rights come from? You constantly assert that property rights are natural rights, but your only defense of property rights was conventional. 
Captain_Maclaine fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 00:25
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JVNO posted:Wow that's like peak libertarian rear end in a top hat. Capitalist creates a perpetual motion machine, solving the world's energy crisis with the key to a post-scarcity world. Finally, everyone can have a decent standard of living, no one would ever have to go without! Wait, no, gently caress that, John Galt selfishly hoards it to himself for reasons. Nevermind he will benefit from the post-scarcity world; no, he has to benefit more than everyone else. Pretty much. All you need to know about lolbertarians is that whenever somebody says "I am John Galt!" they're telling you that they are, in fact, a selfish rear end in a top hat that would rather burn the world down than improve it if they weren't getting paid enough.
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Feb 9, 2016 00:28
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Who What Now posted:I wasn't being serious. This is the thread to make jokes against libertarians, not make jokes from a far-right slavery-apologist perspective. Given I know you're neither, be careful about how one-liners come across. Heck, I've been owned by the same thing in this very thread.
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Feb 9, 2016 00:43
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So anyway, jrod almost certainly got his entire Civil War "education" from white supremacists, whereas we got/get ours from respected and accountable scholars.
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Feb 9, 2016 00:52
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jrod, what is your opinion on the attention economy?
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Feb 9, 2016 01:09
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KING BONG posted:If one where to read good and accurate literature on the civil war what would it be? I admit my basic understanding is pretty much what they feed you in high school.
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Feb 9, 2016 01:25
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Rhjamiz posted:
He has a face more hosed up than Freddy Krueger's.
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Feb 9, 2016 01:44
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 e: '1. The Founders were overwhelmingly against slavery and desired to create a nation that respected freedom for all men. That is why they put "all men are created equal" in the Constitution.' Goon Danton fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 02:14
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My favorite part is when he tries to play the collectivist argument again:quote:Libertarians are incapable of being racists. The philosophy of individual liberty is incompatible with all forms of bigotry, intolerance, and prejudice. A libertarian sees all people as not members of groups but as individuals who should be judged by their character and actions, just as my personal hero Dr Martin Luther King Jr. advocated.
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Feb 9, 2016 02:47
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theshim posted:My favorite part is when he tries to play the collectivist argument again: Jrod has never read anything written by MLK in his life.
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Feb 9, 2016 02:52
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theshim posted:My favorite part is when he tries to play the collectivist argument again: Do I need to go dig up a Hoppe quotedump again? e: yes. Yes I do. quote:Private property capitalism and egalitarian multiculturalism are as unlikely a combination as socialism and cultural conservatism. And in trying to combine what cannot be combined, much of the modern libertarian movement actually contributed to the further erosion of private property rights (just as much of contemporary conservatism contributed to the erosion of families and traditional morals). What the countercultural libertarians failed to recognize, and what true libertarians cannot emphasize enough, is that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic increase in social “discrimination” and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the multicultural-egalitarian life style experiments so close to the heart of left libertarians. In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives. quote:In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one's own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order. quote:In every society, a few individuals acquire the status of an elite through talent. Due to superior achievements of wealth, wisdom, and bravery, these individuals come to possess natural authority, and their opinions and judgments enjoy wide-spread respect. Moreover, because of selective mating, marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, positions of natural authority are likely to be passed on within a few noble families. It is to the heads of these families with long-established records of superior achievement, farsightedness, and exemplary personal conduct that men turn to with their conflicts and complaints against each other. These leaders of the natural elite act as judges and peacemakers, often free of charge out of a sense of duty expected of a person of authority or out of concern for civil justice as a privately produced "public good." quote:Thereby, in order to illustrate one's theoretical conclusions, every attempt should be made to compare societies which, apart from the theoretical distinction under consideration, are as similar as possible. It would be an error, for instance, to illustrate my theory of comparative government by contrasting European monarchies with African democracies or African monarchies with European democracies. Since Caucasians have, on the average, a significantly lower degree of time preference than Negroids, any such comparison would amount to a systematic distortion of the evidence. By contrasting European monarchies to African democracies, the theoretically predicted differences between monarchical and democratic rule would become systematically overstated, and by contrasting African monarchies with European democracies, the differences would become systematically understated. Goon Danton fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 02:57
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My favorite part is how every Confederacy Apologist quotes Lincoln's letter to Horace Greeley selectively. Here's the whole thing: quote:Executive Mansion, Far from being a reckless tyrant, Lincoln was well aware that he had to make a distinction between his personal beliefs and the duties of his office. He didn't run for President on a platform of forcing the South to give up slavery, he ran on prohibiting its further expansion. He certainly didn't run on a platform or govern as one intent on destroying the founders' legacy. Quite the opposite. He believed the Civil War must end in reunion or else it would prove to the world that a republican form of government could not work. At any rate, Lincoln wrote this letter with a loving draft of the Emancipation Proclamation in his loving desk. He was persuaded to wait to unleash it until the situation in the Eastern Theater was improved, lest it look like an act of desperation instead of an act of moral and legal force. Note the date, August 22, 1862, a few weeks before the massive turning point of the war at Antietam. Lincoln issued anlimited Emancipation Proclamation after that battle and the full thing on January 1, 1863. edit: oh, and lol at his "The supreme court was super pissed about Lincoln later!" Well, you'll excuse me if I don't agree with a bunch of the fuckers from the majority decision in Dredd Scott. Lincoln loving rules. Grand Theft Autobot fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 03:40
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Slaan posted:I'm 90% sure they did actually make them sign one of these contracts. He took his John Galt stole the engine plans that he and his team designed and prototyped on company time because he didn't agree with his employers' compensation plan. For example, offering health care to their employees and their mooching children who weren't even putting their able eight-year-old bodies to work at the factory to earn it. Atlas Shrugged posted:And what was there to work for? You knew that your basic pittance would be given to you anyway, whether you worked or not – your ‘housing and feeding allowance,’ it was called – and above that pittance, you had no chance to get anything, no matter how hard you tried. You couldn’t count on buying a new suit of clothes next year – they might give you a ‘clothing allowance’ or they might not, according to whether nobody broke a leg, needed an operation or gave birth to more babies. And if there wasn’t enough money for new suits for everybody, then you couldn’t get yours, either. Galt needed access to the means of production to create his motor so it was all right to defraud his employer to gain the use of them and then steal the proceeds when he didn't like what his boss would do with the profits. But only if you're a superman. Full excerpt is worth a read. GunnerJ posted:Yeah, I was being sarcastic, the idea was that this is another example of the rules not applying to everyone equally. Thinking about the book in hindsight, I get the impression that Rand actually kinda hated capitalism, that it was only desirable to her as a vehicle for empowering her aristocracy of wealth while she tacitly (and approvingly) understood that they could easily break capitalism's own rules. This secret loathing is even more apparent when you consider her endless contempt for the paying customers that the captains of industry must debase themselves by trading with to get money. This is where it's most apparent that she is a lovely ripoff of Nietzsche: he at least realized that capitalism's need for mass consumption enabled and uplifted the masses he hated so much. Yeah her heroes spend a bunch of time spitting on their customers and calling them sniveling whiners for expecting things like getting the service they were promised in exchange for money. Her philosophy was sociopathy and selfishness, and she created this idea that everything great in the world was built by a few supermen (such as herself) with no help from anybody and it's only right that they get to do whatever they want, and of course she took a vicarious thrill in watching people be crushed and ground underfoot. Everything she wrote was a justification for this sentiment Ayn Rand posted:The first thing that impresses me about the case is the ferocious rage of a whole society against one man. No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the 'virtuous' indignation and mass-hatred of the 'majority.'... It is repulsive to see all these beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminal... Who is she talking about? John Galt? Harold Roark? Nah, William Hickman. What did he do that so impressed her with his unconcern for other people? quote:In December of 1927, Hickman, nineteen years old, showed up at a Los Angeles public school and managed to get custody of a twelve-year-old girl, Marian (sometimes Marion) Parker. He was able to convince Marian's teacher that the girl's father, a well-known banker, had been seriously injured in a car accident and that the girl had to go to the hospital immediately. The story was a lie. Hickman disappeared with Marian, and over the next few days Mr. and Mrs. Parker received a series of ransom notes. The notes were cruel and taunting and were sometimes signed "Death" or "Fate." The sum of $1,500 was demanded for the child's safe release. (Hickman needed this sum, he later claimed, because he wanted to go to Bible college!) The father raised the payment in gold certificates and delivered it to Hickman. As told by the article "Fate, Death and the Fox" in crimelibrary.com, Well yeah he murdered and cut up a young girl and taunted her parents with her body, but he's still better than the condemnatory public because they're guilty of something worse: empathy. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 03:43
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