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mcclay posted:Wait what? I need the details on this pronto. Basically what Goon Danton posted, but that link leaves out that the Tongan "expedition" which so brutally violated NAP and invaded the peaceful Minervan territory was, in fact, a convict work detail, elements of the Royal Tongan Marching Band, and all 400lbs of King Taufa’ahau Tupou himself, who ceremonially tore down the Minervan flag while the convicts disassembled the small platform they'd built. All the while the band played the Tongan national anthem, after the completion of which, everyone left. Defeated and abandoned, Minerva itself slowly washed out to sea not long thereafter since it was just several bargeloads of sand that the libertarian settlers had dumped on the reef to create land.
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Apr 29, 2016 13:53
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What I love about Minerva is how all the surrounding countries got together and all decided really quick that it was fine if Tonga took the reefs if it meant crushing the dreams of libertarian assholes.
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Apr 29, 2016 14:18
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Tonga may be a small country, but if you're a bunch of rich white nerds, don't go pissing off a country where 1/6th of the population is on a rugby team.
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Apr 29, 2016 14:54
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Halloween Jack posted:Tonga may be a small country, but if you're a bunch of rich white nerds, don't go pissing off a country where 1/6th of the population is on a rugby team. Yeah I had a friend in high school who was Tongan and played rugby and told me about the war dances other teams would do, where the captain is allowed to strike the other team's captain on his chest a bunch and he has to just take it with a straight face. They don't gently caress around, but I love that basically all they had to do was walk on over and take the flag down, no resistance.
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Apr 29, 2016 15:43
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GunnerJ posted:I mean, you are literally at sea in this scenario, so all the "this isn't a real court, it's a maritime court!" poo poo is guaranteed to fail. ...when has stuff being guaranteed to fail ever stopped SovCits before? Halloween Jack posted:Tonga may be a small country, but if you're a bunch of rich white nerds, don't go pissing off a country where 1/6th of the population is on a rugby team. I had a secondary school teacher from nearby Fiji who was telling us that for PE your choices were Rugby or Failing PE, whether it was the middle of winter, spring or summer. Then school broke up and everyone went and played rugby with their mates anyway.
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Apr 29, 2016 15:50
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I tried to do a mises search for Minerva and Liberland, but the latter is only mentioned once in passing, and the former doesn't appear to be mentioned at all. They don't seem to want to talk about them for some reason!
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Apr 29, 2016 16:20
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MikeCrotch posted:...when has stuff being guaranteed to fail ever stopped SovCits before? Hmm, good point! Well, more like it couldn't even get off the ground because what are you going to do at a literal admiralty court where your actions at sea are being tried? The obvious answer, I guess, is to argue in a burst of intense irony that it's not a real admiralty court because it doesn't have star stickers in the correct corners of its summons.
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Apr 29, 2016 16:23
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Goon Danton posted:I tried to do a mises search for Minerva and Liberland, but the latter is only mentioned once in passing, and the former doesn't appear to be mentioned at all. They don't seem to want to talk about them for some reason! They weren't ｅｎｔｅｒｐｒｉｓｉｎｇ enough to have the resources hire a mercenary army to protect their land. Oh I forgot to mention, the new reboot of Mr. Show had a libertarian skit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pBougV1JK4
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Apr 29, 2016 17:18
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On the topic: Libertarian seasteading strikes me as having zero libertarian appeal, at least to the archtypical American libertarian. If you want to the seagoing lifestyle, and can afford it, you have the cruise ships (and since going on a cruise is a voluntary choice, there's no real ideological inconsistency in adhering to the cruise line's rule). Otherwise, living out in international waters, just past a national boundary, strikes me as combining all the worst elements of condo ownership, HOA membership, and city living, with zero upside. No cars, gun ownership becomes less practical, your drugs still come from violent cartels that would view your city-ship as some tantalizing target, and if you want to source hookers, you're still going to be under the Coast Guard's eye. And that's kind of the big problem. A big floating ship going "LOL, we don't recognize your laws! FREE SHIP NATION, BITCHES!" is just painting a big red bullseye on itself and drawing scrutiny and attention to its actions. Oh, and since the economy is not going to be self-contained, welp, embargo if you do something illegal and unethical that involves an actual nation. So at the end of the day, states still have power over you, you're sharing cramped apartments with a bunch of other degenerates, and your cans of Coke and bags of Doritos are probably $10 each since everything has to be flown in. Oh, and if you're a billionaire captain of industry, sharing ship space with people is pointless. You can build the biggest, grandest pleasure yacht you want and outfit it according to your tastes, needs, and wants. Mieville's argument again; libertarianism is for the frustrated losers, and while it benefits the ultra-wealthy, it's not that crucial to how they live or do things. Don't get me wrong; I could see the cyberpunk or adventure appeal of living on some big floating assemblage ala The Raft in Snow Crash or what-have-you. But as an ideological flip of the bird to nation-states, as something for functional, day-to-day living? Seasteading has zero appeal to anyone except scammers and charlatans.
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Apr 29, 2016 17:42
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The funny thing about the "frustrated losers" thing is that if you look at it the places where the libertarian ideas come from these days are heavily bankrolled by the ultra rich. Look at how much The Cato Institute and The Heritage Foundation harp on "lower taxes and less regulation because freedom!" and then look at where the money comes from. You know, the same people lobbying for heavy government subsidies toward particular industries that these people just happen to have a stake in and preferential legislation. I also feel like libertarians (the non-rich ones, anyway) frequently completely fail to understand how much raw inertia massive amounts of wealth has. A company like Goldman Sachs is obscenely wealthy and uses that wealth as a lever to get more wealth, which then makes the lever bigger. They do things that were literally illegal a few decades ago specifically because that creates an unfair and not free market. Granted some non-rich lolbertarians think that they'll be rich enough to rig the game some day and that means they deserve to be able to rig the game and reap the ill-gotten gains, unlike you dirty plebs with a lovely time preference.
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Apr 29, 2016 18:00
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The funny thing about the "frustrated losers" thing is that if you look at it the places where the libertarian ideas come from these days are heavily bankrolled by the ultra rich. Look at how much The Cato Institute and The Heritage Foundation harp on "lower taxes and less regulation because freedom!" and then look at where the money comes from. You know, the same people lobbying for heavy government subsidies toward particular industries that these people just happen to have a stake in and preferential legislation. I was talking about this in Prester Jane's "Decoding Authoritarians" thread, but the ultra-wealthy who bankroll organizations like the Cato Institute don't seem to be libertarians or have any ideology at all, really. To the extent that they have one, it's: 1. I am special 2. I should get to do whatever I want, because I'm special 3. What's good for me is good for the world, because I'm one of the special people whose genius sustains the world. They think they're residents of Galt's Gulch, but their actions appear to be based on a rationale that's simplistic even by Rand's standards.
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Apr 29, 2016 18:39
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Libertarianism would work better if they could get entropy and scarcity to agree to the NAP.
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Apr 29, 2016 18:49
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The funny thing about the "frustrated losers" thing is that if you look at it the places where the libertarian ideas come from these days are heavily bankrolled by the ultra rich. Look at how much The Cato Institute and The Heritage Foundation harp on "lower taxes and less regulation because freedom!" and then look at where the money comes from. You know, the same people lobbying for heavy government subsidies toward particular industries that these people just happen to have a stake in and preferential legislation. Oh, certainly, there's a definite amount of wealth behind libertarian agitation, but I think it comes down to the inertia you mention and how crucial libertarian beliefs are to maintaining that wealth (not very, which I think was Mieville's point). They help, but those who are already wealthy don't really need libertarian policies. They already have their hands on the levers, as you mentioned. The wealthy can be also, in a sense, be forgiven (as it were) for advocating those policies because, just as in the parable of the scorpion and the frog, we know they're "scorpions" and it's in their nature to try and accrue more wealth and power. The problem really is more that there are plenty of middle-class libertarians who buy in to the rhetoric under the idea that they will benefit (and so will everyone else), or it will otherwise help them to pursue their more socio-cultural ideals (such as excluding minorities and undesirables and so on). This is problematic for those reasons, but also because middle-class libertarians have the most to lose (in a sense) from the excesses of libertarian-derived and justified policy. The poor ain't got poo poo, anyway, but the whole American self-image is bound up in material wealth and the sense of seeming security and privilege that being middle-class is supposed to afford. Libertarians think that a rollback of taxes, social spending, and regulations will help them maintain that, at least, but it'll do nothing of the sort; there are always trade-offs, and the money one saves in taxes to the state gets eaten up in fees and surcharges from private actors, the entrepreneurial spirit one would pursue is curtailed by the bigger, more established, and more ruthless players (so you're relegated to a niche, at best, until those players figure you out and do what you do the same way), and when the air and water are polluted, workplace safety standards aren't present, well-enforced, or are played with fast and loose, and you have no employment protections and no safety net...well, see how easily you maintain a happy middle-class existence in that climate. We already see the end results of this in action, where the physical exertion and toil of one's labor (for occupations such as food service workers, janitorial staff, and so on) doesn't correlate to meaningful compensation (minimum wage or a bit above it, at best), and where you also get snubbed and poo poo on by society for doing these necessary occupations to boot. In a world with few labor regulations, though, high-paid occupations would also be diluted. Imagine no H1B program at all, if you're in IT or the tech industry, because companies wouldn't even have to maintain a pretense of bringing in lower-paid workers. If they're a warm body, they can come in, and if you don't like it as an overpaid American, there's the door. Don't let it kill you on the way out.
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Apr 29, 2016 19:27
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I think the major distinction here is between libertarianism (for idealistic morally inflexible losers of capitalism) and neoliberalism (for pragmatic morally flexible outcomes-based winners of capitalism and other believers in actually existing capitalism). The latter can be overused as a slur, hence the filter, but its actual meaning becomes clear in contrast to libertarianism: As an ideology, libertarianism starts from a set of moral premises about permissible behavior (NAP, homesteading, contracts, etc) and arrives at a desired end goal that is not something many real capitalists would want, but pursues it by means which are useful. On the other hand, neoliberalism as an ideology has a particular set of policy outcomes in mind (low taxes, few regulations, free trade, privatized public services) which it argues for by reference to utility, i.e., that these policies have good outcomes, rather than any strict abstract principles. The end result of its policies is something beneficial to actual capitalists, but desirable enough to the losers of capitalism that they can be roped into supporting it via libertarian moralism.
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Apr 29, 2016 19:45
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So for example, take Hayek: a libertarian forefather, but also on the ground floor of neoliberalism as a coherent political project. His Road to Serfdom has the kind of moralistic tone that resonates with libertarians, but is not really their kind of ethical argument. In the book, he does not argue that government involvement in the economy, regulation, taxation, etc. are bad because they violate some a-priori freedom rules. He argues that they can be bad because trying to plan economies leads to totalitarian regimes. This is actually a consequentialist outcome. It accords with the fact that he actually did support some regulations and tax-funded welfare policies.
GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Apr 29, 2016 |
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Apr 29, 2016 19:49
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GunnerJ posted:So for example, take Hayek: a libertarian forefather, but also on the ground floor of neoliberalism as a coherent political project. His Road to Serfdom has the kind of moralistic tone that resonates with libertarians, but is not really their kind of ethical argument. In the book, he does not argue that government involvement in the economy, regulation, taxation, etc. are bad because they violate some a-priori freedom rules. He argues that they can be bad because trying to plan economies leads to totalitarian regimes. Contrast Hayek's Road to Serfdom with the more-recent Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who considers European feudalism, which relied on serfdom to function, to be the ideal society. Also, Hoppe dismisses Hayek as a "moderate social democrat", thus confirming my hypothesis that libertarianism is the right-wing facsimile of leftist infighting: 5,000 tiny splinter sub-philosophies that all hate each other. (It's almost enough to make me feel sorry for Hayek. Poor guy codified the anti-government Austrian Business Cycle theory, which is beloved by libertarians, then gets pissed on anyways by later an-caps for not being heartless enough.)
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Apr 29, 2016 20:14
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Sup, libertards and statist monsters! Check out libertarian Spider-Man: http://imgur.com/a/osWpEHalloween Jack posted:I was talking about this in Prester Jane's "Decoding Authoritarians" thread, but the ultra-wealthy who bankroll organizations like the Cato Institute don't seem to be libertarians or have any ideology at all, really. Do you think the Koch brothers are libertarian?
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Apr 29, 2016 20:30
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This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!
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eatenmyeyes posted:Libertarianism would work better if they could get entropy and scarcity to agree to the NAP.
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Apr 30, 2016 00:15
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DeusExMachinima posted:Sup, libertards and statist monsters! Check out libertarian Spider-Man: http://imgur.com/a/osWpE
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Apr 30, 2016 00:39
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Libertarianism would work in a world where everybody had perfect, complete access to perfect, complete information at all times as well as the time to make a perfect, complete, informed decision. It would also require that nobody be greedy or evil in anyway. Because we are, you know, human we really can't pull that off.
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Apr 30, 2016 02:24
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Libertarianism would work in a world where everybody had perfect, complete access to perfect, complete information at all times as well as the time to make a perfect, complete, informed decision. It would also require that nobody be greedy or evil in anyway. thanks that one was funnier than the first good job
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Apr 30, 2016 04:49
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Professional libertarian John Stossel cheats death, and insults the very institution that made that possible, because of course he does. Like all professional libertarians, Stossel has no "off" switch to his dickishness. He is always in rear end in a top hat politics mode.John Stossel cannot stop whining posted:I write this from the hospital. Seems I have lung cancer. It's always doubly grating when a libertarian starts talking about a specific business, because it invariably reveals they don't know how actual businesses function. Like, business is supposed to be their thing, the institution they place above all others, but their understanding of business is so comically shallow that they appear to think it's powered by consumerist fairy dust, wizard executives, and unicorn entrepreneurs. Curvature of Earth fucked around with this message at 06:13 on May 2, 2016 |
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May 2, 2016 06:10
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Curvature of Earth posted:Professional libertarian John Stossel cheats death, and insults the very institution that made that possible, because of course he does. Like all professional libertarians, Stossel has no "off" switch to his dickishness. He is always in rear end in a top hat politics mode. Holy poo poo. How can someone go through loving cancer treatment of all things and not want the full battery of tests to make sure that it's gone from your system for good? I should think even the most layperson of laypeople should know that.
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May 2, 2016 06:37
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Because being woken up at 4am to have your blood drawn is an inconvenience that wouldn't stand in a system designed to cater entirely to my whims! Seriously though, it's because being a hospital patient leads to a massive loss of control of your personal life, up to and including the ability to breathe on your own terms, and people struggle with that, often mal-adaptively. Cancer patients seem to do especially poorly with that.
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May 2, 2016 07:01
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Ravenfood posted:Because being woken up at 4am to have your blood drawn is an inconvenience that wouldn't stand in a system designed to cater entirely to my whims! See I think it's because he's an insufferable asshat
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May 2, 2016 12:38
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The only difference between oncology and an airline ticket is who pays for it.
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May 2, 2016 12:41
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Curvature of Earth posted:Professional libertarian John Stossel cheats death, and insults the very institution that made that possible, because of course he does. Like all professional libertarians, Stossel has no "off" switch to his dickishness. He is always in rear end in a top hat politics mode. Healthcare is always where they reveal what a pack of petty pissbabies they are. "Sure, UHC can treat what ails us without having to pay for it, but we'd have to wait in a liiiiine!!  " is typical, so props for a more original variant, "I got more tests than I, a professional moron, think are necessary. SOCIALISM! "
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May 2, 2016 14:07
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Also, obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0q44ALM7jo
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May 2, 2016 14:09
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After his encounter with Dr. D, maybe Stossel is just afraid of doctors.
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May 2, 2016 14:28
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Juffo-Wup posted:The only difference between oncology and an airline ticket is who pays for it.
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May 2, 2016 14:45
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Stossel does have the right of it though, I mean those tests were totally unnecessary. A thriving free-market of cells has decided that nimble cancer has outcompeted the sluggish and inept cells of his lungs and thus the only outcome acceptable to the glorious free market is for him to become a nest of tumorous growths.
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May 2, 2016 14:50
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Did he try asking his doctors or nurses about what tests he was having and why he was having them? You can do that nowadays.
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May 2, 2016 15:10
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It is odd, though; isn't the usual libertarian delusion with regards to free health care that hypochondriacs will overburden the system by having tests done all day erry day for funsies?
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May 2, 2016 15:23
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Curvature of Earth posted:Professional libertarian John Stossel cheats death, and insults the very institution that made that possible, because of course he does. Like all professional libertarians, Stossel has no "off" switch to his dickishness. He is always in rear end in a top hat politics mode. What a Stinky_Pete fucked around with this message at 16:32 on May 2, 2016 |
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May 2, 2016 15:58
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Stinky_Pete posted:What a moron for having insurance. he should just pay for it himself. Honestly, this is like the easiest problem he can solve for himself No, but you see, he would forgo the SOCIALIST private-market insurance companies, except he's an employee of  and/or Obummercare. Take your pick.
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May 2, 2016 15:59
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:See I think it's because he's an insufferable asshat
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May 2, 2016 19:16
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Feinne posted:Stossel does have the right of it though, I mean those tests were totally unnecessary. A thriving free-market of cells has decided that nimble cancer has outcompeted the sluggish and inept cells of his lungs and thus the only outcome acceptable to the glorious free market is for him to become a nest of tumorous growths. Only Collectivist Statist Socialists speak in terms of "organs" and "the body as a whole." I respect the autonomy of the individual cell! Who are we to tell that little bugger he can't reproduce indefinitely and homestead other organs?
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May 2, 2016 19:27
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I finished finals today and there were libertarians on OSU's main quad. gently caress this institution
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May 2, 2016 21:58
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:I finished finals today and there were libertarians on OSU's main quad. Ohio State University or Oregon State University?
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May 2, 2016 22:10
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Curvature of Earth posted:Ohio State University or Oregon State University? Ohio
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May 2, 2016 22:32
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