|
Caros posted:
To expand on this, they believe that the initiation of force (or a threat to that effect) is never justified. Pacifists are a type of libertarian, in that they oppose aggressive force. What makes them pacifist is an extra opposition to defensive force. There is a third type of force that is rarely mentioned: retributive force. Libertarians tend to believe that the government alone has the right to seek vengance for aggressive attacks. Anarcho-capitalists want to privatize that as well.
|
#
¿
May 23, 2014 01:53
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:14 |
|
|
Against the defense of railroad barons, the Pullman train company came up with their own private, voluntary segregation policies: namely that sleeping car porters all be black men, and that they all be called “George”. That led to the formation of the Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters George, or SPCSCPG which turned into the first black-led labor union, whose members ended up organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott. So I guess it worked out in the end.
|
|
#
¿
May 28, 2014 17:31
|
|
|
An individual libertarian will not be very impressed, but “introducing a narrative” of the gold standard, etc., as a faith-based policy could weaken its popularity. Indeed, a similar narrative has been introduced to weaken socialist ideology, with some success. An individual socialist will not be very impressed, but the narrative goes that socialists already came to power in many parts of the world, and reality has declined to cooperate in all cases. Socialists examine each and every real world failure to attain long term prosperity, and announce that it does not ‘count’ as a failure of socialism because reasons. Of course, opponents can spin the story of socialism as a descent into dogma – the dogma of the Platonic philosopher-king who rules over a populace as harmoniously as a mind would rule over a healthy body.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2014 18:47
|
|
|
El Pollo Blanco posted:Changing the subject somewhat; how do Libertarians who are absolutely opposed to any form of Government assistance propose to feed/house severely disabled people who are unable to work, and do not have families to care for them? I ask this because the leader of my country's Libertarian party has proposed an utterly ludicrous policy that would require any government department to disclose what the personal income tax brackets would be if their department was not funded. This of course focuses heavily on showing that the 19% income tax band would become 13% if the Ministry for Social Development (welfare) ceased to exist. They tend to believe that private charity would go up as government assistance goes down, along with the old canard that removing the "incentive to be lazy" would solve half the welfare cases in one swoop. I once went to a talk by a CATO institute researcher who suggested that new welfare recipients stop being added to the roles nine months from next weekend. "So they get one more weekend to screw around, and that's that."
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2014 14:17
|
|
|
LogisticEarth posted:If you go back and read my posts again, you'll see that I'm not "railing against theoretical physics", and neither am I saying we should only go after "sexy" goals. It's just the increasing calls for state funding and welding the scientific community onto the government. The LHC being a particularly egregious example of a huge capital project. Please note here that I am not at all questioning the importance or validity of basic research, and I fully understand the potential for unknown applications for the discoveries. Of course, funding for basic research in universities, huge or otherwise, would decline without the fairly strong government funding we have now. To be clear, you're not presently complaining about taxpayer-funded research, but huge project research. You wouldn't be the only one to oppose a methane ice-drilling expedition to find life on Titan, when a thousand new species could be discovered in an ocean trench for the cost of a sturdy metal sphere.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 30, 2014 17:47
|
|
|
Cemetry Gator posted:I'm just trying to understand the thrust of this argument. The thrust would be, psychiatric drug research has cost many billions of dollars since the 1950's. Would that have been better spent on basic cog sci research on the nature of consciousness? How about just half? Would half of our psychiatric drugs be a reasonable cost for the potential of a big breakthrough in understanding brain structure? Cemetry Gator posted:For the LHC, let's consider all the jobs is creating. It's creating manufacturing jobs that require quality machines. Somebody has to run the experiments, somebody has to maintain the machine. Somebody has to take lunch orders and clean the bathrooms. And then you need people to train the next generation of researchers. Yeah, that's true of everything, though.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2014 03:23
|
|
|
GROVER CURES HOUSE posted:Would half of our potential psychiatric drugs be a reasonable cost for the potential of a big breakthrough in understanding brain structure? Well ... would it? Either version of the question is fine. Developing a new psychiatric drug surely isn't considered 'basic' research any more. And yet, as you point out, lots of drugs contributed to the understanding of underlying physiology. Leaning too heavily in the direction of basic research might have missed those improvements.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2014 04:03
|
|
|
Jazerus posted:Well, uh, yes, part of psychiatric drug research is heavily dependent on "basic" research. SSRIs couldn't have been developed without a detailed understanding of serotonin reuptake, could they? And yet before SSRIs someone studying serotonin reuptake was just some nerd in a lab fiddling with pointless cellular minutia. But psychiatric drug development existed before SSRIs, of course - so at what point did the preliminary stages of drug development leave the realm of basic research? After SSRIs but before now? No, of course not. They never left. If developing a new product is "in the realm" of basic research, then literally everything is in the realm of basic research, and it's not a very meaningful distinction. Phyzzle fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Aug 31, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2014 14:19
|
|
|
GROVER CURES HOUSE posted:That is not even close to what was said. "at what point did the preliminary stages of drug development leave the realm of basic research? After SSRIs but before now? No, of course not. They never left." So it was in the realm of basic research and it never left. Which is not even close to suggesting it's in there now. Okay.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2014 15:55
|
|
|
Hodgepodge posted:The basic research was used to identify SSRIs as drugs to develop. Read more carefully. The development of SSRIs is not, and cannot be, basic research. It can be inspired by basic research (Identifying neurotransmitters, etc.), but that does not make it the same thing as basic research. You can of course say the development of SSRIs was inspired by basic research, but that's not meaningful. All research was so inspired. eNeMeE posted:And how exactly do you expect to develop new drugs for anything without understanding what you're trying to deal with? And how exactly do you make use of any understanding without the development of any drugs or other products? But wait, you don't want to eliminate applied research, not even to dedicate all of these resources to pure research. Because that would be dedicating too much to basic research.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2014 16:32
|
|
|
Jazerus posted:It is inherently ridiculous, also, to talk about eliminating applied research unless the state has complete control over the economy - most applied research is done by private entities in response to basic research discoveries. Theoretically if literally all humans were doing basic research and nobody ever bothered to put their discovery to use then yeah, it would be too much basic research; but that is, well, silly! Yes, and it would also be somewhat silly to invest so heavily in basic research that practical research is stifled, falling below whatever the optimal balance might be. (The stifling could happen with enough of a tax burden, or by taking up too many qualified engineers, etc..) LogisticEarth suggested that some sort of full privatization scheme would take care of the balance. While I don't agree, I do agree that over-investment in pure research has happened, and I agree that the LHC is probably an example, along with any talk of a manned mission to Mars. In fact, I'd add the Moon landing as another example. The sheer number of man-hours lost by not waiting for modern simulation tools and numerical lathes can't be recovered now. quote:e: I was curious, so I googled "applications LHC research." It turns out there are a lot of them! To put it in perspective, the 13 billion used to discover the Higgs boson could have taken 100 newborns, raised them up, put them through grad school for Ph.D.s in electrical engineering, and given them million dollar grants to work on whatever the Hell they wanted every year for the rest of their careers. You'd think a few useful computer chips might have come out of that, too.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2014 21:24
|
|
|
Cercadelmar posted:That's not a thing. I'm afraid finite resources are very much a thing. Like when making a science specialist takes away that one hammer of production you were getting from the plains plot.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2014 23:57
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:14 |
|
|
President Kucinich posted:I'd personally join the Beautiful Buff Men Brigade DRO as an insurance adjuster and spend my days roaming the country side, putting people's property in figure 4 leglocks while my companions tombstone the emaciated farmers populating the country side while wooing all the pretty ladies with our muscles. Bob le Moche posted:I really hope that authors or game or movie writers have been following this thread for inspiration because holy poo poo is there potential for some awesome DRO-land dystopian sci fi Anarcho-capitalist Ken MacLeod had a buff, gay DRO with a shirtless uniform in his sci-fi novels, called the "Rough Traders".
|
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2014 15:25
|
|