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All those poor BP executives living in Houston. God only knows the nightmare they live every day as people who can't pronounce the syllable "er". Taught by the Queen always to address the local honkies as "sir" and "ma'am" and never to look them in the eyes. Never knowing if the next traffic stop will be their last. Forced to ride in the 'limeys only' helicopter
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Feb 23, 2021 20:39
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JustJeff88 posted:Firstly, I don't really need the tsuris. I made my decisions for multiple reasons, I don't regret either and having a tertiary reason of 'poor cultural fit' is a perfectly sensible factor to consider when one has options. I don't like the weather in Texas either, nor do I apologise for that factoring in. Where I am now I did not have a practical choice, but if it were not for money reasons I would be elsewhere. Frankly, I get sick and bloody tired of hearing the so-called progressives admire their virtuous reflection and sniff their own farts when they don't have very much to be proud of. I honestly don't feel kinship with liberals/progressives/leftists (call them what you will) in the US either, so I suppose that it is a moot point. lmao
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Feb 23, 2021 20:43
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Panfilo posted:Something I noticed with Libertarians is that they are either super edgelord Atheists or rattlesnake juggling fundamentalists and rarely anything in between. I know that prosperity gospel influences libertarian beliefs in religious people but I'm surprised both extremes can coexist under the same tent. Super edgelord atheists and fundies really aren't all that different in thought processes outside of the religious dogma. In fact the former are often a result of being raised as the latter.
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Feb 23, 2021 21:31
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JustJeff88 posted:my commie Jew foreigner arse is not going to get over in Texas, of all places.
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Feb 23, 2021 21:34
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Eugene V. Dubstep posted:All those poor BP executives living in Houston. God only knows the nightmare they live every day as people who can't pronounce the syllable "er". 
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Feb 23, 2021 21:51
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Panfilo posted:Something I noticed with Libertarians is that they are either super edgelord Atheists or rattlesnake juggling fundamentalists and rarely anything in between. I know that prosperity gospel influences libertarian beliefs in religious people but I'm surprised both extremes can coexist under the same tent. Both groups are racist
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Feb 23, 2021 21:52
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Panfilo posted:Something I noticed with Libertarians is that they are either super edgelord Atheists or rattlesnake juggling fundamentalists and rarely anything in between. I know that prosperity gospel influences libertarian beliefs in religious people but I'm surprised both extremes can coexist under the same tent. I think I became immune to that kind of surprise once I understood that the Southern Baptist Convention continues to be a thing.
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Feb 24, 2021 08:18
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The Oil of Sandwich
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Feb 24, 2021 14:17
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Balsamic Vinegar.
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Feb 24, 2021 14:42
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JustJeff88 posted:Firstly, I don't really need the tsuris. I made my decisions for multiple reasons, I don't regret either and having a tertiary reason of 'poor cultural fit' is a perfectly sensible factor to consider when one has options. I don't like the weather in Texas either, nor do I apologise for that factoring in. Where I am now I did not have a practical choice, but if it were not for money reasons I would be elsewhere. Frankly, I get sick and bloody tired of hearing the so-called progressives admire their virtuous reflection and sniff their own farts when they don't have very much to be proud of. I honestly don't feel kinship with liberals/progressives/leftists (call them what you will) in the US either, so I suppose that it is a moot point. 
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Feb 25, 2021 06:14
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JustJeff88 posted:I honestly don't feel kinship with liberals/progressives/leftists Oh wow that's weird, I wonder why Mr. 88 could feel that way??
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Feb 25, 2021 07:40
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JustJeff88, do you get tired of starting so many sentences with "frankly"?
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Feb 25, 2021 20:28
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https://youtu.be/8kWjJPQXCyc While we wait for Jrod to finish bootstrapping batch of pirated DVD’s with his elbow grease enjoy this!
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Mar 2, 2021 07:49
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I love people holding the SATs up as some sort of intelligence barometer. I got just under 1100 on mine (enough to get me to the state college) even though I did precisely zero studying and have had so many concussions that I can no longer do math. They are some grade-A bullshit. Also the day libertarians actually address externalities is the day they cease to be libertarians
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Mar 3, 2021 11:18
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The way college admissions works in the US is just baffling to me.
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Mar 3, 2021 12:43
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pleb
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Mar 3, 2021 13:53
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Is that video intended to be libertarian propaganda and an explanation of their 'principles' or is it supposed to be satire of their nonsense? It's hard to tell sometimes; libertarians are kind of a parody of themselves.Prokhor Zakharov posted:I love people holding the SATs up as some sort of intelligence barometer. I got just under 1100 on mine (enough to get me to the state college) even though I did precisely zero studying and have had so many concussions that I can no longer do math. They are some grade-A bullshit. You have my condolences. I also have had a lot of concussions in my youth, and to this day I have poor memory of my life pre-20s. A few were from sport, but others were just freak accidents. It's a major reason why I am so down on gridiron football with its terrifyingly high rates of brain injury, not to mention boxing etc.
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Mar 3, 2021 16:19
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JustJeff88 posted:Is that video intended to be libertarian propaganda and an explanation of their 'principles' or is it supposed to be satire of their nonsense? It's hard to tell sometimes; libertarians are kind of a parody of themselves. Mr. Knowing Better is somewhere around left to centre left, certainly not a libertarian.
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Mar 3, 2021 16:34
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JustJeff88 posted:Is that video intended to be libertarian propaganda and an explanation of their 'principles' or is it supposed to be satire of their nonsense? It's hard to tell sometimes; libertarians are kind of a parody of themselves. Neither? I mean he has a couple “characters” but it’s not satire, it’s a video essay going over the anti-egalitarian and anti-democracy roots of American libertarianism in objectivism.
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Mar 3, 2021 16:38
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Alhazred posted:The way college admissions works in the US is just baffling to me. Test scores are correlated to wealth, wealth is correlated to race, and the US absolutely loves keeping minorities down as hard as possible through systemic bullshit.
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Mar 3, 2021 17:38
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On one hand collage admissions are bullshit. On the other hand most of the stuff you learn in college as admissions for a job is also bullshit.
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Mar 3, 2021 18:08
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Why, it's almost as if a society driven by capitalism is a disaster both for individual humans, and the planet in aggregate!
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Mar 3, 2021 19:45
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Venting here, but interested in people's opinions on my diatribe. First of all, free-market capitalism and individualism is not an optimized system. John Nash proved this with game theory in the 50s, and most all of the world's stable, high-quality-of-life countries don't use it. Really the US doesn't either, our economic system is Fascist by definition, a blend of government and corporate interests, but I tend to avoid using the F word since it often colloquially means Nazis (and while there are Nazi tendencies in the US on a small scale, let's not equate them to the actual Nazi party - yet). This is often softened to "Corporatism", which isn't inherently bad - many other countries colloquially referred to as socialist, or Democratic socialist, utilize well-regulated, private sectors to carry out some of their functions, like healthcare. It depends on how it's used and regulated. Second, libertarianism itself has gray areas and questionable interpretations. A general economic definition people can agree on is that the government should limit itself to only areas that the "free market" can't adequately provide for. This tends to include defense, currency production & regulation, internal policing and courts for criminal and citizen dispute resolution. Beyond that, you'll have some libertarians arguing for other specific things that benefit them while rejecting things that don't - some may say we'd be better with private and toll roads only, others may say public roads are necessary to carry out the above functions and are "OK". Also the magnitude of the spending is in question - in my days of defense contracting, some people identified as libertarian but were fine billing the government for their services on for-profit programs non-essential to defense. In this sense, a large private prison infrastructure could be built and still called "libertarian" since it's helping the government fulfill one of its functions, criminal law enforcement. A general social definition is that the government shouldn't limit any freedoms outside of those that affect others without their consent. This sounds good and largely aligns with the left, but there's still specific issues that don't get addressed. A big one, alluded to in the thread title, is children or handicapped or mentally incompetent people who can't consent. Is a mentally slow person even able to consent to sex, or would any act with them be considered rape? Who determines who is unable to consent? Is it okay for a neighbor to severely beat his child because it's his belief that that is how parenting should be and his kid can't consent to not being beaten? It also splits on the scale of the government - a common (erroneous) example is that the government has too much power if it can ban people from collecting rain water. While there's no national law that says this as far as I know, if there were it could be viewed as excessive power. But on a local level, it might make sense - if you collect water in a hot, humid area and don't cover it, you may create a mosquito bio hazard for neighbors. If you collect it in broken containers in an area with the right topology, it could leak and flood a neighbor's property. Even common local bylaws make sense in terms of avoiding eyesore houses, which could affect neighbor's property values, smoking in certain populated places which could affect others' health, etc. Third, libertarianism has a poor track record in areas where it has been tried. Some people refer to early America as "libertarian" before big government messed it up, but if that's the case, they're admitting libertarianism allows for slavery and a vague and unclear constitution for the sake of "compromise". The "Free State Project", which I hadn't heard about until recently, was a failure, which is probably why they don't bring it up. There was minimal local code enforcement, so people would leave garbage out or openly feed bears - this creates a contradiction to the fundamental libertarian notion of limiting your actions to minimize effect on others. Not trying to invoke the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, as these people literally picked up and relocated their lives to live "libertarian", but in practice there are definitive contradictions to what is said on paper. Lastly, libertarianism may be "mostly fair", albeit suboptimal, but a rapid conversion to a libertarian government would carry much of the intrinsic unfairness onto people who don't benefit from the current corporate oligarchical system. For example, if all public schools were converted into private schools, many poor people who were forced to pay property taxes through escrow or landlord rent, would suddenly find themselves potentially unable to send their kids to a school they had been forced to pay into for years. Or on a federal level, instantly removing Social Security and Medicare would be a literal theft from people who had been forced to pay into it their whole lives. I have seen libertarians making fiscally sound reasons for removing certain programs, but they fail to address the inequity of people who haven't been able to benefit from them in their current form and how they will be screwed if the programs disappear. Personally, I have benefited a lot from government. Short list - my dad was a tenured professor at a public liberal arts college, I went to public schools, my uncle lived in a nursing home on Medicaid since he had cerebral palsy and couldn't walk, I went to a public university with tuition mostly paid from a public lottery fund, worked for the federal government, worked for a "private" government contractor, worked for a state government that did contracts with the federal government, worked for a private company that profited off of complex Medicare claim coding in data analytics. This is besides all the background public services, like electrical energy commission regulation, police, libraries, FCC communications standards, NIST time and GPS calibrations, the military (despite its modern day inappropriate use in causing conflicts), etc. Because of this, I can never identify as a libertarian. I can only identify as an independent who supports leftist initiatives to improve society optimally, but acknowledges that many people are going to fight tooth and nail to oppose any initiative that doesn't benefit them, and we should integrate that in to our planning. 74 million people voted for Donald Trump after the dumpster fire that his presidency was. Most all of these people don't want to "get rid" of government, only certain parts like welfare, public colleges if they don't or didn't go, or anything that might be perceived as helping a race/culture/ideology that they don't like. That's not to say we have to compromise with them in terms of making our programs terrible and inefficient in order for them to "allow" them. The compromise can be letting them opt out in the first place. A recent example I recall was John Oliver blasting Pete Buttigieg's proposal to make a public option, but let people choose not to use it and take a private provider plan instead. Oliver correctly pointed out that the system would work better if everyone was forced to contribute, but the alternative ended up happening - people voted for the centrist who's spoken out against public health plans in the primary and his victory against a bumbling fascist with no plans at all was uncomfortably thin. I suspect that many people who bash big government will suddenly go silent as they have to pay "out-of-government" network fees to have their clocks synchronized, their bags checked on an airline, their internet providers register their bandwidth, or when they get a $10K+ medical bill from an out-of-network private provider or their electric company if they dared use electricity in a cold snap.
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Mar 5, 2021 21:38
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I don't know how this happened as I wasn't looking for libertarian claptrap (I never do, because it makes me physically ill), but yesterday I somehow ran into the lovely idea that the ADA is a bad idea because it disincentivises (sp?) people from hiring the disabled. It's hard to put into words how that made me feel.
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Mar 9, 2021 19:05
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Feel the same disgust you feel at all other aspects of libertarianism, which is just a bare veneer for the impulse to throw people into the ovens.
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Mar 9, 2021 19:19
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the formula for the maximum number of jurisdictions for which you can know the age of consent without it being creepy is the number in which you have lived, plus zero
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Mar 10, 2021 11:56
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Jolly Jumbuck posted:
a fun game to play with libertarians in my experience is to ask them what period of u.s. history was the closest to their economic ideal. if they're smart, they'll realize they can't point to any period involving slavery, so that's the first nearly hundred years out the door already. then of course you can't have anything after 1913 since that's when both the dreaded income tax and federal reserve was created, so that nixes another hundred years there. so you basically have the period between 1866 and 1912, and we can't go for that trust busting bastard, teddy roosevelt, we're left with the last half of the 19th century, i.e. the utopia known as *checks notes* the Gilded Age. also funny thing i remember when someone told grover norquist his ideal country is somalia, he rebutted that somalia's not libertarian cause it has a thousand different authoritarian states within 
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Mar 12, 2021 08:48
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Mr Interweb posted:also funny thing i remember when someone told grover norquist his ideal country is somalia, he rebutted that somalia's not libertarian cause it has a thousand different authoritarian states within Which is, y'know, exactly what a libertarian free economic zone would be, but it'd just be broken up between
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Mar 12, 2021 10:42
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Libertarians and "left wing bias" in Science Fiction: https://beinglibertarian.com/science-fiction-left/ Here's a little bit about the author quote:Brandon Kirby has a philosophy degree with the University of New Brunswick. He works for a Cayman Island hedge fund service firm, owns a real estate company, and has been in the financial industry since 2004. He is the director of Being Libertarian - Canada. He is a member of the People’s Party of Canada and the Libertarian Party of Canada. This guy must be a real hoot at the Star Trek conventions.
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Mar 12, 2021 14:15
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He sees himself as the rich dude unfrozen on TNG whose first concern is his portfolio
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Mar 12, 2021 14:29
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Panfilo posted:Libertarians and "left wing bias" in Science Fiction: https://beinglibertarian.com/science-fiction-left/ While he's extremely stupid, he's still more perceptive and self-reflective than a good 80% of reactionaries. Science fiction also has a strong fixation on nostalgia and suspicion of modernity. Like a lot of the Twilight Zones written by Rod Serling are about how genuinely wonderful a boyhood in small-town America 1900-1930 was and how haggard, sweaty adults trapped in an anti-intellectual big city want to escape back there. Ray Bradbury was much the same way. Maybe that was just the zeitgeist for middle-aged men in the 1950s.
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Mar 12, 2021 14:57
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Somfin posted:a retroactively morally-acceptable process that we won't define I can't remember... how do libertarians backflip their way out of reparations for indigenous people? It seems like manifest destiny was a pretty overt rejection of the non-aggression principle, but don't they have some bullshit about "well the savage didn't think he OWNED the land, because he shared it with others, so really our pioneer forefathers were the first OWNERS of the land"?
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Mar 12, 2021 15:12
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:While he's extremely stupid, he's still more perceptive and self-reflective than a good 80% of reactionaries. I get the impression that it was (which is amusing given how strongly the 1950s is the nostalgic-escapist zeitgeist for a lot of middle-aged men now). There are a lot of Disney shorts (and 'Lady and and the Tramp' as a feature film) set in an idealised 1890s/1900s small Midwestern town. Disneyland itself featured a real-life version of that from the moment it opened. In terms of sci-fi I remember a short story, which I'm sure was published in the 50s, where the narrator finds a hidden corridor at NY Grand Central station which transports him back to 1894, and there's a long internal monologue where he pines for life in some small town in Illinois in the Gilded Age as a simpler, more peaceful time when the summers were longer, the people were more friendly and you could live a comfy life with good prospects with a simple job. Which just proves that the allure of the time just before your childhood is near-universal and any supposed 'golden age' was full of people looking back at a previous 'golden age' and complaining about how much their own time sucked. E: It's 'The Third Level' by Jack Finney, published in 1950, featuring a 31-year old protagonist. Judging from the search returns it's a set text on some school courses but I came across it in a short story compendium edited by Asimov. EE: Muscle Tracer posted:I can't remember... how do libertarians backflip their way out of reparations for indigenous people? It seems like manifest destiny was a pretty overt rejection of the non-aggression principle, but don't they have some bullshit about "well the savage didn't think he OWNED the land, because he shared it with others, so really our pioneer forefathers were the first OWNERS of the land"? Yeah, they conveniently define 'ownership' as 'things white people of the 1800s did'. So if your society uses land communally as an open range or shared foraging that doesn't count as owning it. That only starts when someone puts a fence around the land and runs a plough through it, because that's 'performing labour' on the land and that's what counts as proof of ownership. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Mar 12, 2021 |
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Mar 12, 2021 15:38
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Muscle Tracer posted:I can't remember... how do libertarians backflip their way out of reparations for indigenous people? It seems like manifest destiny was a pretty overt rejection of the non-aggression principle, but don't they have some bullshit about "well the savage didn't think he OWNED the land, because he shared it with others, so really our pioneer forefathers were the first OWNERS of the land"?
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Mar 12, 2021 15:58
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Yea there's two ways out of that dilemma. One is basically Eddie Izzard's "but do you have a flag, no flag no country that's the rules I just made up" bit. Locke did this: native Americans own the animals they kill and the fruit they pick but they don't own their hunting grounds because they do no labor to improve them (naturally this is totally false, the Europeans just didn't recognize what tended forests looked like because they didn't look like row orchards). And don't worry Locke was careful to stipulate that if someone's servant or slave does labor that actually counts as their master doing it for the purposes of acquiring property ownership, just in case you started to get ideas about how could the aristocracy own all this land when they don't do any work. The other solution is to admit it was wrong, but reluctantly and conveniently maintain nothing can be done about it now, because few if any legitimate heirs of native land have a chain of official court documents going back to the original seizures signed and stamped and saying "yes we violated the NAP and here is evidence for your great-grandchildren to produce in court saying they owned it and we did it". In other words violating the NAP is fine as long as you're careful to introduce enough ambiguity that no one person can definitively separate out the wrong done them from the wrong done everyone else. Jrodefeld takes this approach. The latter is also the Libertarian response to pollution: yeah a company that poisons you with industrial waste is violating the NAP but there's no recourse unless you can trace every molecule of lead in your lungs back to the original factory that emitted it plus prove the amount of damage that particular molecule did out of the millions of other lead compounds you inhaled and traced back to other people's factories.
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Mar 12, 2021 16:16
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BalloonFish posted:Yeah, they conveniently define 'ownership' as 'things white people of the 1800s did'. So if your society uses land communally as an open range or shared foraging that doesn't count as owning it. That only starts when someone puts a fence around the land and runs a plough through it, because that's 'performing labour' on the land and that's what counts as proof of ownership.
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Mar 12, 2021 16:31
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I'm not exaggerating about the pollution either, we talked about it a few years back and it went something like this. Lawsuits will solve everything because when people are forced to pay the full costs of their pollution they will rationally choose not to pollute. Here's how you do it: You can't ban production of leaded gasoline because producing it is peaceful and it doesn't affect you until it's burned and you inhale the tetraethyl lead. But you can't ban burning it because it's not aggression if you burn something and someone inhales it ("that's like banning your neighbor from BBQing because you can smell it!"), you have to wait until it gives you quantifiable injuries and then sue for restitution. But you can't sue the manufacturer because it's not their responsibility how the product is used ("that's like suing Smith & Wesson because someone shot your kid with their products!"), so you have to sue the individuals whose particular car exhaust actually poisoned you in the exact proportions of the harm they each did to you. So basically you have to sit on your porch for 30 fricking years noting down the license plate of everyone who drives by and measuring the dosage of tetraethyl lead they hit you with, and I guess every other chemical just in case one of them later proves to be harmful and you want to sue about that too, then when you are finally diagnosed with lead poisoning you launch 50,000 lawsuits and pay tens of thousands in each one to get like a 2 dollar settlement apiece, so you have your $100,000 to cover your medical bills now (before paying 10 times that in court costs), and then when everyone does this and the court system takes a thousand years to work through 330 trillion cases, consumers will finally be rationally deterred from burning a single pollutant and manufacturing of tetraethyl lead will cease for lack of a market for it, VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Mar 12, 2021 |
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Mar 12, 2021 16:34
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Halloween Jack posted:In that case, how do they defend enclosure in Europe? (Of course, the vast majority of libertarians don't know what it is.) Peasant farming communities weren't ownership because that's "things white people in the 1500s did" and ownership is only "things white people in the 1800s did"
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Mar 12, 2021 16:37
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Halloween Jack posted:In that case, how do they defend enclosure in Europe? (Of course, the vast majority of libertarians don't know what it is.) Wow, I had completely forgotten about that from GCSE history. That said, I'm sure that libertarians would find a way to justify it. It's only really wrong if it's done by the state, especially if it's done to them.
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Mar 12, 2021 17:25
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VitalSigns posted:Peasant farming communities weren't ownership because that's "things white people in the 1500s did" and ownership is only "things white people in the 1800s did" Also, those lands were technically the property of some nobleman occupying some higher tier of the feudal system - and of course ultimately all the land was controlled by a monarch. So so long as the landowners got permission from the monarch to enclose their lands it was all hunky dory. Of course feudal monarchy is pretty much the system that libertarians yearn for. See also the draining of the Fens, covering 300,000 acres of eastern England. Apart from a few 'islands' in the middle (which supported cathedral cities or monastries) most of it is below sea level and flooded each winter, being swamp, marsh and bog the rest of the year. It was commercially and agriculturally 'useless' but supported a permanent population from the time of the Roman invasion onwards. The parishes on the edge of the Fenland developed a unique way of seasonal life, with arable agriculture on the dry high ground beyond the edge and grazing cattle on the lush grass that grew in the hinterland in the summer and then fishing and fowling on it when it flooded in winter, as well as doing a strong trade in growing and harvesting reeds. There were also communities that lived entirely in the Fenland itself, either as semi-nomads living virtually afloat in temporary shelters in the summer and retreating to the islands or high ground in the winter. Most of this region was technically owned by the Duke of Bedford but neither the Duke nor the kingdom of England really bothered maintaining any authority over the Fenland because it was remote, inhospitable, hard to travel through and commercially and agriculturally worthless in the conventional sense. Administration, such as it was, was mostly left to the church and its lands on and around the islands. Then in the 17th century the 4th Earl of Bedford was inspired by Dutch reclaimation projects and decided to drain the Fens and convert the resulting dry land into several hundred thousand acres of prime fertile arable land. With Charles I's permission he formed the second oldest joint stock company in British history (after the East India Company and before the Hudson Bay Company), the Bedford Level Corporation, which promised to divvy up the resulting land between the King, the Duke and his investors. Of course draining the Fens meant not only removing the people who already lived and worked there but destroying the entire landscape which supported their livelyhoods. And the familiar argument was raised - that the land had always been the Duke of Bedford's and the current inhabitants hadn't done anything to improve the land anyway so they were little more than squatters. The bailiffs of the BLC ended up getting into what occasionally amounted to an armed insurrection from the 'Fen Tigers' who carried out virtually guerrilla warfare agains the BLC by sinking its boats, breaking its dykes, burning down its wind pumps and taking the odd pot-shot at its surveyors and work teams.
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Mar 12, 2021 17:44
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