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Impressive to reply to biden with something even wronger.
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Jun 16, 2022 13:15
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They throw out the npc meme a lot when questioned "what about roads lol" but never bring up a definitive reply to the question. The answers I see are: -Roads existed before taxes, therefore taxation is entirely unnecessary for their existence. -The taxes paid towards road construction and maintenance are many times greater than actual costs to build/maintain them (no cite, just 'trust me bro'). -Poor roads exist as an avatar of everything bad about government. Those potholes are pock marks that blanket over the face of statism and exactly the reason why government is bad! A pizza chain and some bored libertarians filled in a few potholes once, showing how unnecessary the government is! I've directly asked Libertarians to provide for me an example of privatized roads that were built and maintained on the scale of what the government builds, and they never come up with a sincere example, it's usually some variation of "government is wasteful so most of those thousands of miles of roads don't even need to exist in the first place anyway".
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Jun 16, 2022 14:04
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Actually cells built all that, the idea of the 'individual' built of billions of cells somehow doing things is a humanist lie.
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Jun 16, 2022 14:20
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The real question is which individuals it's not the bosses
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Jun 16, 2022 15:22
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The existence of the Interstate Highway System alone disproves literally everything about that Libertarian tweet. Then again they probably think Pixar's Cars is a parable about how small-town America was destroyed by the Interstate bypassing so many of them
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Jun 16, 2022 15:38
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A real libertarian answer for roads: If they are needed, they will be built, just like all other necessary things. The problem is a lack of imagination for funding and managing the roads, but it's certainly possible. Not remotely preferable, for myriad reasons including right-of-way, eminent domain, and freedom of access, but possible.
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Jun 16, 2022 19:15
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Golbez posted:A real libertarian answer for roads: If they are needed, they will be built, just like all other necessary things. The problem is a lack of imagination for funding and managing the roads, but it's certainly possible. The problem with this is that building the road becomes a game of chicken because "literally anyone else building the road" is always the best option for you. But beyond that, the problems you mention aren't just difficult, they're impossible to reconcile with a Libertarian outlook.
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Jun 16, 2022 19:36
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Not necessarily totally impossible but I would certainly wager that they all just kill each other before being able to work out how to deal with any of them.
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Jun 16, 2022 19:37
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Picture 4 Killdozers at the edge of a cliff... Libertarianism works the same way.
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Jun 16, 2022 19:43
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Somfin posted:The problem with this is that building the road becomes a game of chicken because "literally anyone else building the road" is always the best option for you. But beyond that, the problems you mention aren't just difficult, they're impossible to reconcile with a Libertarian outlook. Libertarians would still be sitting around saying "well maybe the next bunch of robber barons will be fairer" and "I wrote a book about a guy who invents a flying train so the problem's solved" instead.
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Jun 16, 2022 20:32
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There's always the snow crash option of competing infrastructure so you can either pay to drive on the good road or pay less to drive on the lovely road, but you need at least twice as much space dedicated to roads and also all the roads are quite bad.
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Jun 16, 2022 20:37
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Except in the dawn of rail case the best route also means burning less coal, which means using less water and oil, requiring less maintenance, and still getting there faster, so the rail monopolist can be cheaper than your competing rail until you go out of business and then monopolize.
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Jun 16, 2022 20:41
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Obviously what the rail disrupters never thought of is how much people would pay extra to be able to operate their own personal trains on the railroad under the guise of consumer choice and freedom.
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Jun 16, 2022 20:51
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Guavanaut posted:Or you get the history of rail transport in England, which spurred the first serious modern studies of economics, because there's by definition only one best route between two towns so you can camp the land on it or you can run a railroad as a monopoly but the one thing you can't do, even if you wanted to, is have some kind of 'fair rational free market' situation. It got silly enough that a bunch of 19th century liberals started writing about how natural monopolies can't coexist with a fair free trade system and most places learned some kind of lesson from it. Behold the rational efficiency of the Free Market:  That's two railways, going from the same place to the other same place, running down each side of the same river valley (swapping sides at one point), with separate but almost adjacent intermediate stations in the same town along the way. Notice they do the same thing at Launceston in the top-left corner (ironically the opposite of the ancap corner of the political compass...) OwlFancier posted:Obviously what the rail disrupters never thought of is how much people would pay extra to be able to operate their own personal trains on the railroad under the guise of consumer choice and freedom. That's exactly how it was assumed railways would run in the earliest days - because that was the model of the roads and the canals. The railway company would provide the railway but private operators would provide the locomotives and other private companies would purchase carriages and wagons to carry stuff. The rolling stock owners would pay the locomotive owners, and the loco owners would pay the railway company. Within a few years it became clear that this was insane and made any sort of standardisation or traffic control impossible so they compromised on allowing private freight wagons but company-owned track, locos and crews. Until the 1990s when they privatised the railways on strangely similar lines to the model that even 1830s turbo-liberal capitalists thought was stupid.
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Jun 16, 2022 20:59
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I really want to believe they were running different gauges too.
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Jun 16, 2022 21:02
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OwlFancier posted:I really want to believe they were running different gauges too.  For two years - the LSWR was standard gauge when the Plymouth route opened in 1890 and the GWR was still broad gauge in Devon and Cornwall until 1892.
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Jun 16, 2022 21:07
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I was going to simply point out how the british train system went to utter poo poo after privatision and then Corbyn was villified for wanting to renationalise it like a sensible person, but you all did better setting the scene regardless.
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Jun 16, 2022 21:14
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Also then, comedically, the tories had to renationalize some of it because it collapsed lol.
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Jun 16, 2022 21:20
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I refuse to use Twitter for utterly obvious reasons, but that post sums up libertwats and their utter sociopathic tendancies very well. One can easily picture a middle-class white guy who 'made it entirely on his own merit' furiously typing with foaming lips because he can't stand the thought of some poor person taking his tax money. That whole post is a slightly less psychotic way of saying THERE IS NO SOCIETY, ONLY INDIVIDUALS. EVERYONE SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO WHATEVER THEY WANT AT ALL TIMES OR IT IS OPPRESSION. It's a bit like the reverse-Borg from Star Trek, except somehow even more ridiculous. Meanwhile, anyone with any sense realises that libertarianism was corporate propaganda in response to the New Deal. There is nothing funnier, with a note of sadness, than when someone embraces an ideology designed to disempower them.
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Jun 16, 2022 22:26
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On top of the obvious issue of freedom being necessarily negotiated between people so that we don't run into each other, there is also generally a startling lack of conception of freedom from natural limitations among those sorts. Like, they tend to be remarkably bad about the notion of freedom from disease, freedom from hunger, freedom from the limits of your body. Both in the sense that they abhor any sort of social organization that eliminates those things to the point that people can reliably ignore them, and also in the sense that a lot of them are hideously regressive when it comes to things like reproductive healthcare. Their conception of freedom really is "I, personally, should be able to do whatever I want but most importantly, nobody else should be allowed to"
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Jun 16, 2022 22:33
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I keep thinking back to the drubbing given to that whole worldview in Albion's Seed, because it really is the monstrous great great grandchild of the English Gentleman's Idea that refuses to properly die.Albion's Seed posted:Virginia ideas of hegemonic liberty conceived of freedom mainly as the power to rule, and not to be overruled by others. Its opposite was “slavery,” a degradation into which true-born Britons descended when they lost their power to rule. The idea was given its classical expression by the poet James Thomson (1700-1748) in a stanza that everyone knows without reflecting on its meaning: Albion's Seed posted:When Britain first, at Heaven’s command, Arose from out of the Azure main, This was the charter of the land, And guardian angels sang this strain: Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; Britons never will be slaves.  Albion's Seed posted:In Thomson’s poetry, which captured the world view of the Virginians in so many ways, we find the major components of hegemonic liberty: the concept of a “right to rule”; the notion that this right was guaranteed by the “charter of the land”; the belief that those who surrendered this right became “slaves”; and the idea that it had been given to “Britain first, at heaven’s command.” It never occurred to most Virginia gentlemen that liberty belonged to everyone. It was thought to be the special birthright of free-born Englishmen—a property which set this “happy breed” apart from other mortals, and gave them a right to rule less fortunate people in the world. Even within their own society, hegemonic liberty was a hierarchical idea. One’s status in Virginia was defined by the liberties that one possessed. Men of high estate were thought to have more liberties than others of lesser rank. Servants possessed few liberties, and slaves none at all. Albion's Seed posted:This libertarian idea had nothing to do with equality. Many years later, John Randolph of Roanoke summarized his ancestral creed in a sentence: “I am an aristocrat,” he declared, “I love liberty; I hate equality.” In Virginia, this idea of hegemonic liberty was thought to be entirely consistent with the institution of race slavery. A planter demanded for himself the liberty to take away the liberties of others—a right of laisser asservir, freedom to enslave. The growth of race slavery in turn deepened the cultural significance of hegemonic liberty, for an Englishman’s rights became his rank, and set him apart from others less fortunate than himself. And that's really their ultimate fear.
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Jun 16, 2022 23:07
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Golbez posted:Quick history of my life, as I knew it: Raised by single mom, never knew my dad at all. It probably didn't help that your father was from the second moon, and how you were taking over the Red Wings to gather the crystals.
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Jun 16, 2022 23:17
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OwlFancier posted:On top of the obvious issue of freedom being necessarily negotiated between people so that we don't run into each other, there is also generally a startling lack of conception of freedom from natural limitations among those sorts. Like, they tend to be remarkably bad about the notion of freedom from disease, freedom from hunger, freedom from the limits of your body. Both in the sense that they abhor any sort of social organization that eliminates those things to the point that people can reliably ignore them, and also in the sense that a lot of them are hideously regressive when it comes to things like reproductive healthcare. They seem to view freedoms in a very passive way. "Your freedoms end where mine begins" is a slogan you hear a lot. So they insist on the freedom to defend their stuff, as this doesn't in theory compel others to act on their behalf to do so. If you try to take my pop tarts, I can stop you,for example. However, with things like Healthcare, they will insist your freedom to not die of disease will require the positive actions of others (doctors, scientists, caregivers, etc). Someone will be compelled to act against their will to enforce your right, whereas they aren't press ganging their neighbors into acting as security guards for their precious pop tarts. They treat it as their own responsibility. This gives them a couple of outs. If you don't respect property rights, then why should anyone respect yours? If their unilateral pop tart defense extends and overlaps with your pop tart holdings, they're not robbing you, they are defending what's rightfully there's. And that veers to a fun thought experiment that I never get a straight answer from Libertarians-if property rights are sacrosanct, does that mean I have the right to steal back property that was stolen from me unjustly? If my ancestor got cheated by your ancestor and you refuse to engage in good faith to resolve the matter in the present day, isn't it still my right to defend my pop tart hoard by knocking you over to get what's rightfully mine? Libertarians seem to always treat these transactions as happening perpetually in the present. And couldn't we argue that our labor is a form of property in a sense? And if someone is, oh, I dunno, stealing a portion of our labor to enrich themselves, shouldn't we get to reclaim what is still technically ours?
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Jun 17, 2022 00:06
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Yes, for all that they like to try and get all high minded and philosophical about it, they are not really capable of engaging with the fact that you can reason your way into describing virtually anything in terms of positive or negative action. Which I think is just because the philosophy bit doesn't really matter and is an after-the-fact concoction in order to prop up their instinctive desires in the here and now which are largely informed by the status quo. And that inability to really think outside that is why when they try they just end up recreating the worst bits of what currently exists but with them on top, somehow. Also why they are generally much more willing to play with ideas that don't affect them, such as abortion rights and slavery, because they can't conceive being on the receiving end of those and therefore they are merely toys to flesh out their fantasy world, whereas MAH PROPERTY RIGHTS are something they are deeply invested in and thus are non negotiable. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Jun 17, 2022 |
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Jun 17, 2022 00:10
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I actually think, perhaps highly fear, that humans are inherently too selfish to not exploit each other given the rope to do so. I don't give a two-handed toss about people's 'freedom' when it comes to hoarding wealth and power, and I have no inherent problem with the state or social systems imposing equality in order to prevent abuse, I simply don't trust those systems to not become corrupt themselves. I think that it's incredibly easy for people to be 'progressive', all sarcasm intended, when they don't think that it costs anything but a few kind words. I'm currently spending the summer at a huge university where I did one of my degrees, and the town and university itself might as well be called 'Neoliberalismburg'. The town and campus are gorgeous, but everything is horribly gentrified and overpriced. The cost of living is insane, especially renting, and tuition, fees and housing on campus are ludicrous. Of course, everywhere you go there's moral masturbation about diversity and etc etc, but then one goes downtown and sees shop windows with huge rainbow flags under which homeless people are sleeping in filthy bedrolls in the blazing, suffocatingly humid, 24-hour heat and I think 'Yeah, that's progress all right'. I've given away hundreds of quid to homeless people on the streets and at intersections this summer, and I feel horrible for not emptying my bank accounts. It's the most painful feeling that I can imagine... I can't fix the problem, I can't make the guilt go away, I hate myself and I don't know what to do.
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Jun 17, 2022 00:32
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Yeah, in general modern libertarians have little to no conception of positive liberty ("freedom to") and are all about negative liberty ("freedom from"). It's always fun when they quote people who self-described as 'libertarians' in the 19th/early 20th century when they haven't read around the quote they've stolen from someone's facebook feed, and said free-thinker from 150 years ago was actually all about enabling people to do things and equality of opportunity. Panfilo posted:And couldn't we argue that our labor is a form of property in a sense? And if someone is, oh, I dunno, stealing a portion of our labor to enrich themselves, shouldn't we get to reclaim what is still technically ours? That's why they get weird about unions - because in theory in a world without overarching laws and complete freedom of contract it's a perfectly rational and self-interested course for workers to band together to essentially form a 'labour corporation' (or even a labour cartel) to strongarm employers into giving them the best pay and conditions they can. But that's not how libertarianism is supposed to 'work' (i.e. neo-feudalism where they're the baron and no one can tell them what to do) so it makes their brains melt. Therefore unions are corrupting the free market by encroaching on business owners' liberty to exploit people (see also: the "love liberty/hate equality" quote from Guavanaut above).
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Jun 17, 2022 00:35
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Libertarianism takes the very cynical retort that selfishness is baked into the human condition and concepts like socialism simply deny the reality that not everyone is going to pull their weight, so why put yourself in the position where they can drag you down with them? We've all had situations in a group setting (or dysfunctional relationship) where you were doing way more than others yet were still negatively impacted, creating resentment towards those exploiting your own effort and goodwill. Libertarians seem to crystallize that feeling into an ideology in of itself. They think the only way you'll get people to work as a group is at gunpoint, so hate the idea of any collective action. For some of them their beliefs are almost boiled entirely down to simple misanthropy. I see this a lot with veteran type Libertarians-"leave me alone" is their rallying cry.
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Jun 17, 2022 00:40
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I would suggest, if anything, that your human nature there is struggling against the confines of a society that is built to make you terrified of losing the security that a healthy bank account brings. Which is a completely reasonable thing to fear! It works because it is terrifying. But if we are to start making proclamations about human nature which I would generally try to avoid doing, it being impossible to observe through the layers of social conditioning, I would suggest that recognizing that is wrong even under the weight of all the reinforcement that it isn't, the idea that it's the natural order of things, that some people should have and others should have not, and who has and has not is properly organized by the market and/or god himself, something about you still rebels against that and people across history and the world have done the same thing. That nothing is on offer to properly right that feeling is not a personal failing, it is just what the society we live in is like. There was a nice passage someone quoted at me once (I think it was Guavanaut) and I keep thinking it was bakunin or bookchin or kropotkin or someone but I can't remember it properly or who it was. But it went something to the tune of "Even if you're right that humans are inherently horrible creatures, it is all the more important that we remove them from the system that encourages them to do that." Personally I think people can be a lot of things, and that we live in a world with that many horrible people is more an indication that we live in a horrible society, that makes horrible people, not that all humans that will ever exist are so horrible.
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Jun 17, 2022 00:44
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OwlFancier posted:I would suggest, if anything, that your human nature there is struggling against the confines of a society that is built to make you terrified of losing the security that a healthy bank account brings. Which is a completely reasonable thing to fear! It works because it is terrifying. But if we are to start making proclamations about human nature which I would generally try to avoid doing, it being impossible to observe through the layers of social conditioning, I would suggest that recognizing that is wrong even under the weight of all the reinforcement that it isn't, the idea that it's the natural order of things, that some people should have and others should have not, and who has and has not is properly organized by the market and/or god himself, something about you still rebels against that and people across history and the world have done the same thing. I wonder constantly how much nature vs 'nurture', by which I mean social conditioning, and I don't pretend that anything is a sure thing. I wholeheartedly agree that we need to remove from people the ability to exploit, I just have no idea how to do so. The defining trait of libertarian idiocy is that, to quote James Hacker, they are devoted to means and not ends. They aren't alone, but they are zealots in that they care about freedom for freedom's sake. Again, plenty of other ideologies do that, if ony sometimes, but they might be the most egregious to me. Some are true believers, but most are just sociopaths of one stripe or another. I will also say that I am *painfully* aware of the consequences of defying social consensus on so many things. I'm not sure about a lot of things, but one thing I am utterly certain of is that morality is utterly arbitrary and entirely a construct of power, as is most everything. To quote something I read once: 'Morality is based on accepted norms, and accepted norms are based on morality'. This was, ironically, said by a twat libertarian whom I hate. Write and wrong are utterly meaningless concepts that vary in various times, places and contexts. This quote is from Bill Waterson, I just changed one word: quote:“ The above is on the door of my office, but in French.
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Jun 17, 2022 02:44
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There seem to be a bizarre amount of board games where the players are 19th century railroad companies competitively building tracks and stations, but also having a whole mechanic of selling stock in their company to the other players. I haven't actually played any of them, so I have no idea how fun they are, but there's a weird amount of them. I wonder if Europeans romanticize that period more? I've never heard any American have much good or much in general to say about rail barons. And that's as opposed to games about being construction firms working for the government like how all Europe's train lines are made now, or something like the game Switch & Signal, which is about coordinating rail traffic. Anyways, there was a time when roads were made by for-profit groups, but it sucked and they all eventually defaulted and ended up belonging to the state in the end.
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Jun 17, 2022 07:27
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Not sure if it came up itt but Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon is apparently a shockingly accurate depiction of the period complete with how the economy and business works- trying to actually play smart and get a steady income will get you ousted by your shareholders who want big shiny boondoggles and ridiculous returns, and the real way to play is to gently caress around with your competitors.
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Jun 17, 2022 07:31
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SlothfulCobra posted:There seem to be a bizarre amount of board games where the players are 19th century railroad companies competitively building tracks and stations, but also having a whole mechanic of selling stock in their company to the other players. I haven't actually played any of them, so I have no idea how fun they are, but there's a weird amount of them. I wonder if Europeans romanticize that period more? I've never heard any American have much good or much in general to say about rail barons. I don't think it's about romanticizing, but if you want to win in eurogames you have to be utterly calculating and make decisions based on pure "numbers go up" without considering any other factors, which seems to fit the mindset of railroad barons thematically. Decisions made purely out of greed and completely missing the human aspect so to speak. All about the money, people do not count except as maybe resources. Biggest boardgame fight I've ever had was while playing Agricola though.
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Jun 17, 2022 08:29
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Corporations joining together to inflate their profits at the expense of the consumer: Good, natural free market forces Workers joining together to improve wages at the expense of the corporation: Bad, unnatural market manipulation
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Jun 17, 2022 08:42
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Not sure if it came up itt but Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon is apparently a shockingly accurate depiction of the period... I think you saw my post in the UKMT Spring Edition: BalloonFish posted:I spent a lot of my childhood (not at all wasted, I promise) playing Railroad Tycoon II, which had - for the time - quite a sophisticated in-game model of capitalism with investors, shareholders, dividends, bonds, etc. etc. One of my perpetual frustration was that your virtual shareholders always wanted More Growth, All The Time. You could stitch together a perfectly sized, sustainable rail network monopolising the Midwest, carrying grain and cattle into Chicago and processed food and manufactured goods back out, with no effective competitors and a steady 5% dividend every year and if you just kept things ticking along like that your shareholders would eventually get angry and overthrow you - GAME OVER. So you'd always end up getting pushed into doing something stupid and unsustainable like building a transcontinental railroad over the Rockies or expanding into an area that an equally-powerful and rich competing company already had sewn up, ensuring that you would never be able to attract profitable traffic. When your grand new route to some backwater swamp on the west coast opened the share price would soar (Growth! Change! Potential! New Route Mileage! Shiny New Trains!) and then after a few years when it turned out to be a huge loss-making boondoggle and your railroad was now running at a loss, the stock price would crash and you'd get turned on by the shareholders - GAME OVER. I do post about stuff that's Not Trains, honest...
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Jun 17, 2022 09:28
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SlothfulCobra posted:There seem to be a bizarre amount of board games where the players are 19th century railroad companies competitively building tracks and stations, but also having a whole mechanic of selling stock in their company to the other players. I haven't actually played any of them, so I have no idea how fun they are, but there's a weird amount of them. I wonder if Europeans romanticize that period more? I've never heard any American have much good or much in general to say about rail barons. There are a lot of games in genre because the rules are quite involved and each of the different games can emphasise different aspects. Some games can be focused more on running good companies while some are focused on loving people over on the share market. Some are fairly straightforward while others include mergers, nationalisation, receivership and more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QErygzM4W_Y This is a good rundown of 18xx games and includes a section about how well (and badly) the genre handles social commentary Doctor Spaceman fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Jun 18, 2022 |
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Jun 17, 2022 11:13
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QuarkJets posted:Corporations joining together to inflate their profits at the expense of the consumer: Good, natural free market forces 
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Jun 17, 2022 12:56
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Someone touched on it earlier, but I noticed that quite a few Libertarians are veterans, and I don't think they are terribly honest about the connection. Like they'll throw out the JK Simmons "We know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two" as their reasoning for being Libertarian in the present, yet for all their puffed up cynicism they seem downright nostalgic about their experience. It seems stupid to me to simultaneously believe "taxation is theft, the government is bad" but also "the military is good and necessary". I assume joining up with some Blackwater type outfit is the happy medium for them, getting the best of both terrible opinions. Thinking about it more, it's funny who doesn't typically become turbo Libertarians. Like you'd think ex convicts would be super Libertarian since they've seen firsthand what horrors the government can inflict on people. Yet this rarely seems to be the case (I could be wrong here) in my observations. I mean, could you imagine a bunch of anarcho capitalists chatting it up in a cell? "So what are y'all in for?" "I installed an unauthorized rain barrel on my house, they gave me fifteen years for that." "Well I got busted at the state border trying to help my niece get an abortion in the next town over." "Parole violation when my ankle bracelet glitched when I turned on my microwave."
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Jun 18, 2022 01:34
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Ex cons have actually experienced consequences for their actions. Also they're often subject to the worst excesses of privatisation and legal slave labour.
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Jun 18, 2022 03:17
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Right, but it was the government that facilitated that, not businesses directly. Does serving time make a person less libertarian, you think?
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Jun 18, 2022 04:57
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An extremely key part of libertarianism is internalised privilege, and disdain for 'hand-outs' for everyone but themselves and maybe people exactly like themselves.
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Jun 18, 2022 05:47
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