Karia posted:

Because he wants to get us angry. He wants to invoke the emotional response associated with these recent events so he can claim that we're not actually reading or engaging with his (again: hypothetical) situation. It's a cheap con trick.

VitalSigns posted:

Ok jrodefeld I have a couple of serious questions for you.

1: if you want to get out from under the US government so bad, why don't you move to New Zealand or whatever other libertarian paradise that fits your values better?

DarklyDreaming posted:

It's been his go-to for about as long as I've followed this thread. The thing is it works, but only during a formal debate and there's enough enlightened centrists in the audience who are waiting to boo the first person to break decorum. Here on Debate and Motherfucking Discussion it has the same effect as throwing rocks at a beehive

Weatherman posted:

Hey, lurkers! Anyone think the lolbertarian gospel according to JRod is cool and/or good?

Weatherman posted:

Hey, lurkers! Anyone think the lolbertarian gospel according to JRod is cool and/or good?

polymathy posted:

polymathy posted:

I don't know what you mean by "wrong". I have strong disagreements with every one of the people I read and listen to on different issues. I don't mind saying this when it's the truth.

What you're really saying is that you want me to denounce people as horrible racists or fascists with no redeeming value. I'm not doing that because I don't think it's true.

Alctel posted:

I don't know who this JRod person is but he sure has a very shaky grasp of history and economics

Alctel posted:

I don't know who this JRod person is but he sure has a very shaky grasp of history and economics

Alctel posted:

I don't know who this JRod person is but he sure has a very shaky grasp of history and economics

Caros posted:

There is a reason the third most common rebuttal to Jrod is "On the other hand, recorded history."

The other two are asking if he's hosed a watermelon and demanding he fight you.

theshim posted:

I hope he doesn't get banned only because I deeply enjoy the amount of thoughtfulness and research that people put into dunking the gently caress out of him.

Hello Sailor posted:

You just have to keep seceding until every Great Man has his own plantation-state.

Hello Sailor posted:

You just have to keep seceding until every Great Man has his own plantation-state.

Sephyr posted:

One from a family that fled the USSR during Stalin and made them wary of even school lunches because it was the slippery road to 'socialism'

Guavanaut posted:

That line of thinking implies that the USSR happened because the Tsar gave people too many lunches and too much healthcare until Stalin appeared, rather than being a poo poo rear end until people were so done with it that they'd rather risk Lenin's ideas.

VitalSigns posted:

Keep going!

The heart does all the work pumping the blood, why should those other lazy welfare queen organs get to mooch of its labor. Every organ for itself!

VitalSigns posted:

Ok jrodefeld I have a couple of serious questions for you.

1: if you want to get out from under the US government so bad, why don't you move to New Zealand or whatever other libertarian paradise that fits your values better?

2: secession might work out very well for you since you live in a nice progressive blue state, but what about me? Where I live, laws against being gay are still on the books and only the Fourteenth Amendment to the federal constitution and the supreme court restrains the state government from prosecuting me. So why should I support secession when it's totally cool if not desirable in the eyes of my state government when people like me get dragged behind a truck?

And I won't accept "well then your local government should secede, and if they hate gays then your street should secede and if they hate gays then your house should secede", because the secessionists in my state don't believe in your ideas of decentralized hands-off local government. They believe they're fighting a culture war for their way of life and people like me threaten them by existing. They're only secessionists because they fear they're outnumbered nationally and they don't want the US government dominating them, but on the state level they have the numbers so they want the state government dominating cities and neighborhoods. So why is secession by angry Trump voting states good for people like me whose civil rights are threatened by right-wing state governments? It sounds like your solution to anti-gay legislators is just to say "well I don't have any around here so gently caress you if you're gay in the South", seems not great.

Who What Now posted:

It's pretty funny that we can't use the capitol hill riots to judge 74 mil Trump voters are fascist sympathizers but we can use that to assume 74 mil Trump voters are secessionists.

Caros posted:

See, it is this kind of argument that is loving infuriating.

Imagine that I shoot you in the chest, like seven or eight times. I can imagine it quite vividly, in fact, I do so daily. Now you're on the ground, bleeding out your last pathetic life, but against all odds, you actually hold out for several hours. I missed every major organ, and eventually you die of blood loss, but only after some crows peck out your eyes. Does it make any sense to suggest that 'well there were many causes for his death, including blood loss'?

No. No it doesn't. The cause of death was multiple gunshot wounds. Remove the multiple gunshot wounds and there is no blood loss, you could have even defended yourself against those dastardly crows.

If you remove the issue of slavery, there would be no civil war. Every southern state admitted that slavery was the cause for their secession, the president of the confederacy admitted it, their loving constitution was more or less identical to the union constitution, minus a few protections for individual states and the fact that slavery was written into it in perpetuity.

What you're doing is confederate apologia, probably brought on by severe brain damage or listening to Ron Paul folks speak too often (but I repeat myself). And this is what is so loving infuriating. Let's go back to your first mention in this most recent shitshow of a post history:


Some US states seceded partially over the issue? You're just being monumentally dishonest. Every state that seceded was a slave state, and they all openly talked about how they were seceding because they wanted to keep slavery and were afraid the north would abolish it. You can quibble about 'well maybe they were afraid of some dumbass tariff no one has heard of or cares about' if you feel like being dishonest, but the reality is clear as loving day to anyone with a functioning brain.

So why lie about it? Why persist in this absolute loving horseshit lie that the southern states seceded for any reason other than that they wanted to keep owning people? Because you know it makes your case for modern day secession look bad. You've rejected reality and substituted your own version where yeah the slave owning states were bad, but they had some other legitimate grievances, so really who knows who was in the wrong during the civil war.

It is this dishonesty that has broken my patience with you. You know you're wrong here, but rather than conceding the point and formulating an argument for secession that addresses the history of the matter, you've chosen to deal with your cognitive dissonance by dipping your head fully into lost cause confederate propaganda. You've taken the easy way out, as you so often do, and it is loving tiresome.

You asked why I brought up Molyneux, and honestly the answer is because I want to rub your face in your dogshit beliefs to see if maybe you'll come to some sort of epiphany about your foundational beliefs being based on the words of a bunch of garbage people. You sung the praises of Walter Block up and down this thread back in the day, and would you look at that, he's gone full MAGA. Do you think that might be because in their heart of hearts, a lot of the libertarian thinkers you have used to formulate your arguments were actually feeding you the same kind of poo poo you're trying to shovel onto us? That maybe Block realizes how stupid minarchism actually was, but since his actual goal was just to suck off capitalism he shifted to what he found to be a more effective strategy in the form of a strongman would be dictator?

But enough of all that, topic change:

How would your perfect decentralized wonderland have remotely handled Covid-19?

Bonus question: Do you think it is wrong for the government to mandate mask wearing?

Car Hater posted:

This is your brain engaging in self-protection via ad hominem in order to avoid the expansion I am attempting to force upon it.


Centralization is the problem, is it not? You've already explored some of the ways that it negatively impacts people in here, and declared yourself in opposition to it. I share your distaste for it. I fantasize often about my entire bioregion escaping the control of the united states. But I come at it from a physics perspective, and it's not a policy that we get to set, the level of centralization in a system is inherently tied to how rapidly the system in question is able to convert exergy to entropy, thereby maximizing power/work. The larger a system becomes, the more intermediate functions are needed to sustain it, functions which are achieved with minimum energy costs (and losses to the overall system) when under the control of a local monopoly.

I'll reference Lean Logic here, I cannot recommend it to you enough as a methodology for local thinking, quoting from https://leanlogic.online/glossary/intermediate-economy/



This is why you can't be anti-centralization and pro-economic growth, at any level, it makes even less sense than the ancoms.


Not a political ideal, a thermodynamic ideal, why do you think so much effort has gone into interconnecting the world and standardizing every aspect of it? Why do you think capitalism and communism struggled against one another so mightily? This has in practical terms already happened, capitalism won, it was more efficient* (maximized throughput better). Those 200 countries (save a few holdouts with their own, competing forms of order) all trade goods on the world market and generally play by the same rules, reckon in the same time, use the same weights and measures, get abused by the same megabanks etc; they trend toward homogeneity, and through that, increased flow of energy, one could term this a globally capitalist world. Scarcity and competition is still a fact of life though, and competing centers of power vie to maximize growth in their territory, lest they be dominated and someday eaten by a stronger portion of the system, that will use the pillaged resources in order to increase its own growth. To abide by the rules of the current order though, they are obliged to do their eating economically, territory-taking and physical looting/enslavement is frowned upon. Does that seem like anarchy to you?

So again, and I will continue at this, your image of yourself seems to be wrong, like many people's. If you are for decentralization, you must accept degrowth, and if your ultimate aim is anarchism, you must accept primitivism. You can have your village, and you can walk to your neighboring villages, but that's about it.

Karia posted:

Thing is, he's explicitly not doing this, but I'm quite sure he's not doing this in the most ham-fisted way intentionally in order to get us pissed at him. He's not talking about the current right-wing fascists: he's talking about some hypothetical group of Trump supporters who only want to peacefully and democratically exit the union. Along with Arizona. For some reason.

This, of course, does not exist, but if you read (way too) closely, he's not actually claiming it does: it's just a made-up scenario he wants to wargame with us. Why is he doing this rather than coming up with some hypothetical which doesn't pretend that fascists just want to be left alone and protected from the socialist left stealing their freedom

Because he wants to get us angry. He wants to invoke the emotional response associated with these recent events so he can claim that we're not actually reading or engaging with his (again: hypothetical) situation. It's a cheap con trick.

polymathy posted:

Okay, maybe the confusion here is that you're conflating "decentralization" with "political decentralization". I oppose the latter but not necessarily the former. I oppose the State because I'm opposed to the initiation of violence and because I recognize the danger in permitting a monopoly of violence to exist.

The centralization of other non-State entities as required by economic growth or consumer preferences is unobjectionable by a libertarian anarchist.

Halloween Jack posted:

He's a von Mises crank, remember? He believes in "praxeology," which claims to be a science while being proudly anti-empirical.

Libertarians can't argue their principles with historical or current examples because they're arguing for enclosure, genocide, slavery, de jure racism, and other inequalities that violate the values they pretend to hold.

polymathy posted:

Most were poorer working class people who felt deeply alienated from the common culture, the Establishments of both parties and had a bunch of very legitimate grievances. They wanted to give the biggest middle finger to the Elites that screwed them over that they could and they desperately turned to a demagogue who they erroneously thought would "drain the swamp" and fight for them.

Panzeh posted:

Secession, in addition to not being quite as simple a project as one might think due to the complexity of human habitation patterns(though people are more sorted today than they used to be, at least in the US), is not really an answer to a polarized politics, as it's just punting important questions down the road. The breakup of Yugoslavia, for example, did not end politics in the newly-divided states, it simply changed the axes of disagreement in those countries.

Politics is a complex question, and secession isn't the One Weird Trick that answers all of them.