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Panzeh posted:I got through some more of the book- the libertarians have arrived. The bears came before most of them, but I believe I am soon to get to the part of the book where the libertarians clash with the bears. Normally my heart bleeds for any poverty, but when it's modern libertarians I consider it karmatically delightful.
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Oct 17, 2020 01:44
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Panzeh posted:I got through some more of the book- the libertarians have arrived. The bears came before most of them, but I believe I am soon to get to the part of the book where the libertarians clash with the bears. I want to play this game but as the Head Bear.
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Oct 17, 2020 02:06
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Do we know that the bears have a hierarchical structure or is it possible that the decentralized nature of their organization afforded them superior flexibility against the libertarians?
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Oct 17, 2020 02:23
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OwlFancier posted:Do we know that the bears have a hierarchical structure or is it possible that the decentralized nature of their organization afforded them superior flexibility against the libertarians? The MMO version is decentralized.
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Oct 17, 2020 02:32
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 I found the original, the classic. Has our latest libertarian run off screaming about the NAP/Gotten banned again yet? E-Tank fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Oct 17, 2020 |
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Oct 17, 2020 20:09
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https://twitter.com/HoratioSkald/status/1317293961044758529?s=20 https://twitter.com/AwfulReddit/status/1317356836748730368?s=20 uber_stoat fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Oct 18, 2020 |
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Oct 17, 2020 20:16
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I'm getting to the part of the book where they get into what happens with 7 years of libertarian rule and one of the first measures mentioned was the increase in sex offenders in Grafton from 8 to 22 as more libertarians arrive. The town wasn't hugely interested in public services in the first place, and everything gets worse and worse as time goes on. A private fire department pops up and fails to actually put out any fires. The big reason for the bears coming back is that the previously productive agricultural land was rendered fallow by fire and hurricanes which reforested the area. In addition, a nearby nature preserve had its retaining wall breached by the hurricane which introduced a number of weird animals to the Grafton area. The book compares Grafton to a more effective town nearby, Canaan- Grafton is a mostly dead area, Canaan is a reasonably prosperous town with actual businesses. The funny thing is that the post-Libertarian taxes only ended up being 33% less than those of Canaan since Canaan actually has other means of income than property taxes.
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Oct 18, 2020 17:35
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Other fun facts: domestic calls to the police chief rose 2-4x during the libertarian period, and legal fees paid by the city of Grafton increased tenfold. These are supposedly people who can handle themselves without those durn statists. I've gotten to a story about a woman feeding the bears and i'm waiting for the libertarians to get mad about her for the bears loving up their poo poo- right now they're on about how cool she is for feeding the bears.
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Oct 18, 2020 21:08
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OwlFancier posted:Do we know that the bears have a hierarchical structure or is it possible that the decentralized nature of their organization afforded them superior flexibility against the libertarians? Libertarians are also decentralized, which is why it's such an ineffective form of capitalism.
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Oct 18, 2020 21:33
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Panzeh posted:The book compares Grafton to a more effective town nearby, Canaan- Grafton is a mostly dead area, Canaan is a reasonably prosperous town with actual businesses. The funny thing is that the post-Libertarian taxes only ended up being 33% less than those of Canaan since Canaan actually has other means of income than property taxes. This was a thing in that Colorado town too, the one that paid for part of their tax cuts by charging user fees to switch on the streetlights in front of your house at night. Only turns out, with the streetlights off, it was very easy for thieves to steal the copper wire from darkened streetlights, so the cost of replacing the wire over and over drive the user fees on the people who wanted streetlights up higher than the taxes to operate them had been. One of the people interviewed for the article said that was fine because at least their (higher) fees for individual service weren't paying for someone else to get streetlights.
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Oct 18, 2020 21:50
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VitalSigns posted:at least their (higher) fees for individual service weren't paying for someone else to get streetlights.
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Oct 18, 2020 21:53
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Libertarians are also decentralized, which is why it's such an ineffective form of capitalism. Are they though? I guess I've never been really clear on how they square the circle of capitalism's tendency towards centraliztion with supposedly not liking being beholden to people. Like they're uncooperative sure but I figured they would organize into hierarchies based around money or some poo poo or just be weird lone wolves, as opposed to decentralized but organized ancoms.
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Oct 18, 2020 21:53
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OwlFancier posted:Are they though? I guess I've never been really clear on how they square the circle of capitalism's tendency towards centraliztion with supposedly not liking being beholden to people. Most libertarians don't even know what capitalism is. Like, if you asked them to define it you'd get some nonsense about private property and markets like those things never existed more than 300 years ago. poo poo, we had one in this very thread do just that! So, to a Libertarian, capitalism is just money going from one hand into another. They all want to be lone-wolf self-employed supermen and therefore actually desire to exist outside of capitalist hierarchies or on top of them. Everyone wants to be a boss, nobody wants to be a bitch. They are humans that are fundamentally opposed to following orders and have no coherent frame of reference to understand that capitalism is just a bunch of people following someone else's orders.
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Oct 18, 2020 21:59
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OwlFancier posted:Like they're uncooperative sure but I figured they would organize into hierarchies based around money or some poo poo or just be weird lone wolves, as opposed to decentralized but organized ancoms. They seem like they're too incompetent and fractious to organize into a hierarchy, none of these guys could run a large organization. I mean look at the town, there was never an opportunity for it to all come under the dominion of a single landowner who vertically integrated everything and bought them all out or whatever, because they were all eaten by bears first.
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Oct 18, 2020 22:00
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OwlFancier posted:Are they though? I guess I've never been really clear on how they square the circle of capitalism's tendency towards centraliztion with supposedly not liking being beholden to people. The usual libertarian take is that capitalism will tend to centralize around the best* and most efficient point, and if it happens to not do that (probably because of dirty statist interference), then people are free to go move out to some uninhabited, unowned place, stake their claim somewhere, and Make Their Own Rugged, Individual Way Through Life. Eventually people will realize how right they were to do that, and a new, more libertarian community will spring up. This is why frontier mythology - both the view of an idyllic America of the past as an unpeopled paradise free for the taking, and the future-looking/sci-fi dreams of state-free paradise platforms in international waters or interstellar colonization - tends to be deeply important to libertarians. The ideology demands an owner for everything, and also an unowned space that anybody's free to move to if they don't like their current government and/or DRO.
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Oct 18, 2020 22:11
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I guess that's maybe the disconnect between what they say, what their big thinkers say, and what most of them actually do. Cos yeah I guess most of them in practice who aren't already loaded tend to be of the weird "let's go live on the frontier and fight bears" type, just virulently uncooperative and antisocial.
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Oct 18, 2020 22:15
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To be fair, most Americans, including prominent woke thinkers like Hannah Jones, think that capitalism is synonymous with commerce
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Oct 18, 2020 22:28
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Halloween Jack posted:To be fair, most Americans, including prominent woke thinkers like Hannah Jones, think that capitalism is synonymous with commerce This is very much on purpose. We learned what democracy was in 5th grade because it is a universally agreeable concept. Capitalism is an obvious tragedy, so they just never loving mentioned it.
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Oct 18, 2020 23:12
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VitalSigns posted:This was a thing in that Colorado town too, the one that paid for part of their tax cuts by charging user fees to switch on the streetlights in front of your house at night. One of the things that comes across clearly in the book is that- the libertarians had most of what they wanted by the time they moved into Grafton. It was already very reluctant to spend money on anything. Even New Hampshire in general is very favorable to them. And with that all said, they called the police chief(who had his wages frozen and had his car out for long periods of time because the town would not pay for its maintenance) more often than the previous residents. It's hilarious.
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Oct 18, 2020 23:15
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I've been thinking about this a great deal, and I think that it also has to do with the fact that capitalism is great at a sort of negative freedom, but not positive, and that appeals to the very selfish. I think that Owl Fancier called it a "gilded cage" where people under capitalism feel like they have total freedom while having very little. No-one stops people from doing anything per se, but meanwhile wages drop, the necessities of life become prohibitively expensive, power becomes more consolidated, jobs become more scarce accompanied by a drop in employment mobility, the small businessman is hosed etc etc. That said, I do understand why people, especially in the Anglophone nations and especially especially in the US, have little to no concept of positive freedom anymore. For decades, everything has become more and more a case of "we won't stop you from doing X, Y or Z, but we will make it impossible to get medical care, find a flat and/or educate yourself without crippling debt". The oligarchy doesn't specifically need to hang anyone for "crimes against the state" in a USSR sort of way, they just tighten the noose more and more all while saying "Look, the rope isn't touching you." Sometimes I wish, foolishly, that I had lived in an era with actual class consciousness. Watching people stomp on those with whom they have the most in common while they are bled dry and they pretend that either party in a supposedly 2-party system cares about them is painful.
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Oct 18, 2020 23:54
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The entire idea that anything can get better is quite radical in this day and age yeah. I guess I hope that as that becomes true for more people they might revolt against it rather than just accepting it.
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Oct 18, 2020 23:57
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OwlFancier posted:The entire idea that anything can get better is quite radical in this day and age yeah. I guess I hope that as that becomes true for more people they might revolt against it rather than just accepting it. I don't remember where I heard this, but I will never forget something I once read that expressed roughly the following idea: "True evil is when bad becomes normal, when people internalise the truly awful and it becomes normal."
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Oct 19, 2020 00:34
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Panzeh posted:One of the things that comes across clearly in the book is that- the libertarians had most of what they wanted by the time they moved into Grafton. It was already very reluctant to spend money on anything. Even New Hampshire in general is very favorable to them. well that just proves what Libertarians say about the tragedy of the commons! If calling the cops is free of course everyone will call the cops as much as they can. Now if the city had switched to a fee-for-service model where you had to transfer 0.0042069 Bitcoins to the police bitcoin wallet before he'd come out, then the burden of 911 calls would drop and the police chief would have the money to maintain his cruiser
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Oct 19, 2020 01:17
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VitalSigns posted:well that just proves what Libertarians say about the tragedy of the commons! If calling the cops is free of course everyone will call the cops as much as they can. Now if the city had switched to a fee-for-service model where you had to transfer 0.0042069 Bitcoins to the police bitcoin wallet before he'd come out, then the burden of 911 calls would drop and the police chief would have the money to maintain his cruiser Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®
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Oct 19, 2020 01:26
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Grace Baiting posted:Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!® Lmao I love that article.
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Oct 19, 2020 01:33
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POtqYiBAgTM
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Oct 19, 2020 02:22
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OwlFancier posted:Are they though? I guess I've never been really clear on how they square the circle of capitalism's tendency towards centraliztion with supposedly not liking being beholden to people.  white privilegeLibertarians are the people who don't think about what happens in a system of pure virtuous property rights and rational actors when a rich guy buys every single plot of land around your house and the street in front of it and then starves you out because he wants you to sign your children over to him, because they've been protected their whole lives by institutions and systems that they would rather believe are oppressing them.
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Oct 19, 2020 04:55
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I got to the end of the book and it's honestly kinda sad, the libertarians left Grafton a wasteland- it went from 2 functioning businesses to 0. When the Free State Project happens, the libertarians have no interest in moving to low-tax Grafton- they go to places like Keene with strong public-funded amenities. Turns out libertarians are pretty much parasites. NH was already pretty libertarian in the first place, though- their Fish and Game department went from 50 in the 70s to 34 in the 2010s. This meant that basically all they did when a bear attacked humans(twice in Grafton) was blame the humans and gently caress off. The only people who actually get effective wildlife management are the rich communities who have the pull to actually have Fish and Game deal with it. There's a story of a guy who buys a historic meeting house to be a libertarian church, tries to avoid having the property seized when he can't get a religious exemption to taxes(because he refuses to communicate with the IRS) by handing over the property to a council of other libertarians who supposedly would actually get in touch with the IRS. The council proceeds to also ignore the IRS and eventually the property burns down. Also the talk about Ian Freeman(who i've seen in Soverign citizen videos) having a video where he talks about age of consent laws which makes the Free State project disavow him is great. They also mention Chris Cantwell.
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Oct 22, 2020 16:34
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1UucF11oms I want to die
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Nov 5, 2020 23:41
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yeah, scrubbing that from my watch history
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Nov 5, 2020 23:59
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truly wretched. all ancaps must be destroyed but she really goes extra hard. https://twitter.com/DaPholosopher/status/1324159584924246017?s=20
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Nov 6, 2020 00:01
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At least they're against negative wage paid internships, that's progressive by ancap standards 
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Nov 6, 2020 00:03
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Guavanaut posted:At least they're against negative wage paid internships, that's progressive by ancap standards https://twitter.com/Anandabhairava/status/1324207546714914816
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Nov 6, 2020 00:08
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Guavanaut posted:At least they're against negative wage paid internships, that's progressive by ancap standards https://twitter.com/Anandabhairava/status/1324207546714914816 Demons.
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Nov 6, 2020 00:09
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This proves that whenever an AnCap says something poo poo, another will be along in a second to say something worse.
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Nov 6, 2020 00:11
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This is also the problem with satirizing ancaps. There's no take rancid enough that they won't just immediately blow past the satire. Here watch, I'll try to satirize them. "ACKSHually, precious job creators should be legally allowed to demand a kidney in exchange to access to their gig economy platform that randomly matches human chattel with johns seeking nonconsensual sex acts and sue them for the other kidney if they don't give the client full release" I give it 24 hours before someone finds a black/yellow Twitter with a more evil and completely serious opinion than this one.
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Nov 6, 2020 00:18
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The obvious conclusion of Liberalism is madness. None should be surprised.
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Nov 6, 2020 00:48
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The Oldest Man posted:This is also the problem with satirizing ancaps. There's no take rancid enough that they won't just immediately blow past the satire. Here watch, I'll try to satirize them. Literally anything to do with children in libertarian models
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Nov 6, 2020 00:52
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libertarian philosophy always ends up going to some really dark places if you follow the thread to its logical conclusion. a decent normal person would then renounce that philosophy, having discovered it to be abhorrent. but ancaps read the poo poo about selling your kids to pedophiles and they're like "LET'S DO THIS poo poo!"
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Nov 6, 2020 01:06
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Somfin posted:Literally anything to do with children in libertarian models It's like they found the cheat code to morality. If you just change the "Age of Consent" parameter, all sorts of atrocities become moral.
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Nov 6, 2020 01:12
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