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YF19pilot posted:Not sure I'm 100% up on things yet, but that video about bitsquatting was quite interesting. BitCoin is inherently stupid. It is fundamentally flawed and was from the very get go. The entire point of it was to put a gold standard back in place by replacing gold with something else. The gold standard is inherently stupid but internet lolbertarians latched onto it because they believe that the gold standard was awesome. Then it turned out that this proof of concept didn't do much other than prove that deregulation doesn't work. Pretty much every single possible bit of financial fuckery that regulations were put in place to prevent ended up happening. Currency manipulation, price fixing, money laundering, black market trading...it all happened.
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Dec 13, 2015 06:25
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YF19pilot posted:I'm probably missing a lot of information about Bitcoin's history, but it seems like it was just some dude's pet project run amok by people who have co-opted it for the reasons you mention. Unless all this lolbertarian crap was the original plan all along. The very idea of a cyrptocurrency is to simulate the mining and use of precious metals in a digital setting. You "mine" by throwing numbers at the algorithm and seeing if it gives you coins. There is a finite number of coins that can actually exist which is meant to simulate the fact that there is only so much gold in this rock that we live on. It's a gold standard without the gold. Even if it never got adopted it would still be dumb as hell. Yeah it was a neat thought experiment and could have also been used as a commentary on how stupid the gold standard is but...ugh. Now we have a bajillion other cryptocurrencies cropping up which completely defeats the idea of a scarce product backing currency. A cryptocurrency is nothing by data. Data is effectively infinite for practical purposes.
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Dec 13, 2015 07:30
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Hey guys the constitution guarantees the right to property so let me tell you about how it was wrong to free the slaves because that was taking somebody'd property. Also taxation is theft because I'm not being compensated for the property the government is taking. QED, libtard. One thing that I just remembered was said by an old friend of mine who is also an ex-libertarian. He said that libertarians didn't want to abolish the state they wanted to be the state in their own little fiefdom, stemming from the fact that they believe you have an unalienable right to do whatever you loving please with any land that you own.
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Dec 13, 2015 08:42
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QuarkJets posted:4) "Backed by math" appeals to idiot goldbugs who think that their currency needs to be backed by something in order for it to have value It's also a problem because gold bugs fail to understand that fiat money actually is backed by things. The difference between fiat money and gold money is that fiat currency is basically an everything standard. Under a gold standard only gold has actual value so if you want more wealth you must acquire more gold. With fiat currency if you want more money you need to create, acquire, or have anything at all that has value. This can be nothing other than your time. If I agree to do 8 hours of work for $100 then I'm selling my time in exchange for cash I can spend to buy somebody else's time. Which is also another point of fiat money; in a way money is just exchanging time. However if you have a gold standard whoever has all the gold owns all the time. What gold bugs won't admit is that they want that situation, deep down inside, to be true. A hell of a lot of lolbertarians are fat white middle managers who think themselves ubermensch and natural elites who are being kept down by the system. The "gold has inherent value" line is absolute bullshit. Piles of other things have inherent value as well. That argument could be used to justify a wood standard. Hell farmers will pay for certain kinds of animal poo poo to fertilize fields. Let's put ourselves on a poo poo standard. That has inherent value. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Dec 14, 2015 |
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Dec 14, 2015 00:34
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VitalSigns posted:Yeah the main appeal of bitcoin is that there's a hard limit on the amount that can be mined, ever, and people justify mining at a loss by jacking themselves off to "well when bitcoin becomes the US's sole currency, replacing $70 trillion in wealth, each bitcoin will be worth a billion and I'll live like a king because I was smarter than the untermensch and got in early". It's the fantasy of getting unfathomably rich with zero effort because you're special. Not only that but Buttcoins were currency manipulated to Hell and back. Literally every cryptocurrency ever invented had so much fraud and crime wrapped up in it that if it happened with real money a large number of people would be going away for a very, very long time. A lot of people got bilked out of rather significant chunks of money but I can't even feel bad about it. BitCoin was blatantly obvious a god awful idea right from the get go. A few early adopters cashed out at the right time and came away with a million or so but really. BitCoins were in the end backed by US$ and were just a wrapper that allowed for criminal activity and the kinds of fraud that regulations prevent. Eventually it turned out that you had to go on waiting lists that were years long to sell BitCoins. Nobody was buying except what turned out to be a bot that slapped fake transactions onto Mt. Gox, who eventually just vanished into the ether and made a lot of money just kind of vanish. Normally I'm not one to laugh at misfortune but seriously ButtCoiners are a special kind of deliberate stupid. Every bit of misery they brought on themselves.
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Dec 14, 2015 01:55
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YF19pilot posted:What I mean is, for every 'digital' dollar, there is a physical dollar. No there isn't. That's actually one of the big issues with the U.S. economy right now. You might ask "but how is that possible?" Fractional reserve banking is how. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking Short of it is that a bank is allowed to loan $X for ever $1 they have deposited. This is also why, for the entire history of money, there has always been more money "on paper" than there has been in circulation. In any event if a bank has $10 and loan out $50 they've basically just miracled $40 into existence. This isn't actually as big of a deal as it sounds; a certain amount of fractional reserve banking doesn't really cause issues. It's only a problem if people run on the bank but there are things in place to prevent that from happening. That's why there are things like FDIC insurance on deposits. If the bank implodes than most people get all of their money anyway. This is once again an example of why regulation came into being. If you could pillage a bank in just the right way in the past then you could just shrug and walk off with everybody's money. Anyway you might be saying "but what's the stop the bank from just loaning money then loaning money based on those loans?" Regulation again. There is a hard limit on what $X is. It varies by nation. I think in America it's 9:1 but don't quote me on that; it's around there but I forget where. Even so an American bank if it's 9:1 can only loan $9 for every $1 they actually have. This puts a limit on the amount of loans a bank can write which of course puts a limit on the bank's income as loaning money is like, well, what banks are for. Banks make most of their money off of interest, generally based on loaning money backed by their deposits. Of course banks, being banks, loving love money and want as much of it as possible so they tend to...well...let's say not stop at 9:1. With the wretched enforcement of financial laws right now banks were loaning money at ratios orders of magnitude above the legal limit. The worst were up over 300:1. They gave no fucks whatsoever and this is ultimately why bubbles started popping. They were ultimately just stuffing poo poo loads of money into the system that only existed on paper and then handing the bill to everybody else when it inevitably popped. The banks kept their own money while the money that didn't really exist vanished from everybody else's pockets. How do you prevent this? You put regulations in place and create an agency with teeth watching for this poo poo. The short of it is: money doesn't work the way you think it does. One of the biggest issues right now is that banks have ways to manipulate the overall supply of money. If right now you're thinking "but then people are paying real money interest on imaginary money" it's because that's what happened.
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Dec 14, 2015 03:00
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Dr Pepper posted:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/29/bitcoin-bots-bought-millions-in-the-last-days-of-mt-gox If you Google it you get lots of stuff that were crytpo-coin related blogs (and often bad ones at that) but it crept into actual news as well. But yeah the short of it is actually what it sounds like; Mt. Gox was refusing to let people cash out and the actual demand for coins was incredibly low. Artificial demand was created to inflate the price then Mt. Gox blew up and collapsed. I mean, really. Anybody that wasn't a complete dumbass could see that buying ButtCoins was a terrible idea when the sellers far outnumbered buyers but the price kept going up anyway. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Dec 14, 2015 |
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Dec 14, 2015 03:05
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do you have a link to news and bitcoin threads talking about this.
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YF19pilot posted:Okay, I was misinformed then. I had worked collections and did some underwriting at a small bank for a while and was told things were pretty much 1:1. I had never gotten the chance to actually read any of the regulations and stuff like that, though I usually get a call around Christmas time every year from the FDIC about a certain purchase one of my coworkers made. It's hilarious and I wish I could remember the name of the account, because I honestly think the person should have more government in their lives. To put this into its horrifying perspective... This is what the banks were caught doing. What other fuckery did they get up to that they managed to hide?
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Dec 14, 2015 03:38
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VitalSigns posted:Well fractional reserve banking is legal and not fraud. No, fractional reserve banking is not fraud so long as banks stay within the lines. American banks were not staying within the lines. This was the problem, really; the legal limits put in place that the banks knew about were being ignored because said limits were not being enforced and the banks knew that. A law that isn't enforced may as well not exist. It was just another facet of the gigantic poo poo storm that you posted about. Trust me, I know about all of that but that's also why I say "this is what we knew about and it is terrible." Goldman Sachs was the worst offender and they had fractional reserve banking going into downright absurd ratios. This isn't a matter of the super wealthy playing a game at a different level than the rest of us. They aren't even playing; they're writing the rules and the rules are "gently caress you the bank wins and gets everything."
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Dec 14, 2015 05:20
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VitalSigns posted:Yeah the leveraging was insane, although I thought that was all on the unregulated financial products and credit default swaps side, not on the deposits which are still tightly regulated because they're FDIC insured. The SEC has a revolving door between itself and Wall Street. It also has no teeth and is woefully underfunded. Take a wild guess how much of this stuff was actually investigated which is kind of the first step to, you know, actually prosecuting anything. The laws mean gently caress all if the agency supposed to enforce them can't or won't.
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Dec 14, 2015 05:32
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VitalSigns posted:Pretty much. It was the perfect example of the Prisoner's Dilemma. "Well if I make a bad loan, it doesn't matter if it fails because it's packaged with loans from all over the country so there will still be good payouts since no nationwide downturn has ever happened", unless of course everyone thinks that way and makes bad loans in every part of the country at once. On the surface libertarianism sounds good. I ended up going libertarian when I started voting because I had read about various political theories (I was...strangely informed as a teenager but was also literally crazy and also, you know, a stupid teenager) and agreed with the central points of libertarianism and anarchism. What I eventually came to realize was that the greatest irony of free markets is that it actually takes a ton of regulation to keep them free. Libertarian policies, as they advertise them today, will absolutely not sync up with libertarian goals. This is why I ended up becoming a socialist in the end. The core of my beliefs haven't changed but I became less young, less stupid, and less crazy and realized some pretty important things along the way. Perhaps the most important is that you can only have true meritocracy if you have a level playing field. The playing field is only level if you create it in the first place and then force it to stay that way. Current libertarian policy is directly opposed to that.
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Dec 14, 2015 06:52
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:Goddamn that was the most liberal thing I've ever seen, like no offense but once we hit full communism I'd rather not see where meritocracy goes... The whole point of meritocracy is that people who are capable of great things should have the opportunity to do great things. Similarly people that want to pursue greater reward than others should be able to do so without being held back. My own experiences with being poor as hell made me realize that silly socialist concepts like "a strong safety net" or "removal of dynastic wealth" would go a long way toward helping that along. Plus things like free college, socialized medicine, and what have you will also allow our best and brightest to do their thing. I'm not arguing in favor of brutal social Darwinism like libertarians often advocate simple because what the total deregulation, no taxes ever, and no free lunch things ends up doing is creating a caste system. Libertarian policy prevents people with potential from achieving it based on accidents of birth. Without things like strong social safety nets and free education those born poor, in the wrong neighborhood, or into the wrong race are handicapped, sometimes impossibly so. I realized through my own experiences being a poor guy that there are certain things that absolutely must be provided to everybody equally or actual meritocracy is impossible. The end result of that will be everybody getting food, housing, educational access, and medical care provided for them if they can't afford it otherwise but really, I'm OK with that. The end result of cutting taxes and social services to the bone will not achieve the end results that libertarianism claims to want. The thing with meritocracy is that you don't know where, say, your next top scientist will come from. Some of the most important advances in various fields came from places you'd never expect. If said top scientist is too busy struggling to keep the rent paid and the lights on to study physics then society has lost out. That's wasted potential but the end result of libertarian policy is things like that. If that person is born into crushing poverty it's unlikely they'll get a proper education. Which is I think where the communist quote of "from each according to ability, to each according to need" comes from. Not everybody can be Nikola Tesla, after all. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Dec 14, 2015 |
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Dec 14, 2015 08:52
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:I mean, I was just concerned by your conceptions of meritocracy. The only concern I have with the term is that in practice it has devalued current materials (like, keeping a bridge up to code) with shiny new poo poo to replace it. Maybe I'm being conservative garbage, but I do agree with the main goals of communism and Lenin is my dude. I think I reacted so harshly because 'meritocracy' is conflated with 'did you make a thing?' and being a sociologist my field doesn't produce things, so university department gets devalued. Like you said, when everyone's basic needs and rights are met, then the creme can rise to the top (or however that saying goes). Well being a sociologist means you're like...out studying things or fixing social problems or something, right? You don't need to be producing an actual, physical good to be doing something that has value, which is where a lot of libertarians go wrong. This is incidentally why libertarian views on science are pretty loving stupid. The idea is that any form of study is useful only if it quickly and directly leads to something that you can profit on. Which is not at all how science and learning work. In the case of sociology the answers to questions like "how do humans act in very large groups?" are well, you know, pretty drat useful. Knowledge is a thing. If what you're doing is furthering the human race's understanding of the universe then hey, high five, keep doing that. The point of meritocracy is that you let your best and brightest be the best and brightest no matter where they came from. One of the big issues with libertarian thought is really that it would make America's inequality problems significantly worse.
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Dec 14, 2015 22:53
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Heavy neutrino posted:"Meritocracy" as you envision it has a fundamental problem with stability. If you conceive of a system where individuals are allowed to gather unlimited wealth and power, how do you prevent them from simply using that power to slowly regress towards where we currently are? What I'm arguing in favor of is allowing people to climb without harming others or holding others back in the process. This is why libertarianism and the current state of America are not meritocratic. Creating a situation where some can potentially gain unlimited wealth and power actually also goes against what I'm in favor of. Complete, perfect equality is a nice thing to think about but from a practical standpoint isn't possible. At least not currently. The other thing of it is there just isn't a single one size fits all set of things that will make everybody happy. Some people need to pursue wealth, fancy things, and big houses. Some people are perfectly content with something that isn't boring to do all day, enough to eat, and a warm, dry place to sleep. One of the major flaws of the American system, and the libertarian system, comes from how much control dynastic wealth has over everybody that doesn't have it. To be more specific what I'm arguing in favor of is more or less giving everybody a guaranteed minimum income and providing free schooling and such. A lot of what I'm arguing for focuses on opportunity more than anything. Right now the opportunity is focused very heavily among the wealthy. If you remove the barriers between the poor and opportunity I think you'll find that there is a lot of untapped potential there. More importantly if you have things like a social safety net, GMI, and free school you'll reduce the suffering that poverty causes by, you know, eliminating poverty. This will also reduce the control the rich have over the non-rich. Which is where the regulations come in. With a minimum standard of living guaranteed to everybody and systems that prevent individuals from amassing the amount of wealth and power that the 1% of America have right now then unlimited wealth and power becomes impossible. If somebody has a billion dollar idea then sure they deserve a billion dollars but right now in America the primary way to become a billionaire is "have super rich parents." The problem in America is a lack of meritocracy. The best education and the best opportunities are horded by the rich for the children of the rich.
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Dec 15, 2015 00:16
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YF19pilot posted:I'm probably off base, but in addition to that, isn't the Marxist thought more that trying to make money off a very important idea/patent/invention is basically exploitation, so Marxists want to prevent someone trying to make it rich off an invention that everyone should have access to (basically prevent that rear end in a top hat who was in the news recently about buying a drug company and jacking the prices to something ridiculous like $700/pill). Marxists believe that if something benefits people then no individual should control the idea. Right now, as it stands, if you own a patent you can literally just say "nobody anywhere gets this until the patent runs out." The libertarian thought is that whoever can do something the best and cheapest gets to do it, end of story. Both criticize the patent system but they ignore a pretty big part of it. Kind of the point of patents is that whoever invents something and patents it gets exclusive control over it for X years (I think it's like ten) in return for creating a public record of exactly how it works. Once the patent ends then anybody can work from that patent record. Libertarians want to eliminate the X years part, totally ignoring that it costs time and money to invent things. The communist answer is that you fund science and scientists and say that whatever they invent is held in common. The scientist gets to slap his name on it of course but he doesn't own it. Inventors should invent for the common good rather than for financial gains (which, incidentally, is what does in fact motivate a ton of inventors). The Marxist answer is that scientists get to science all day and in return they give their innovations freely. Libertarians also oppose public funding on science and argue that the wealthy would fund the innovation that matters as they want new products to sell. Ignoring, of course, that reality doesn't function like computer games and you don't get X advance after you spend Y gold on test tubes. Science is more along the lines of curious people loving around and prodding at various theories, ideas, and what not. Then somebody says "hey I can use that!" and inventions happen.
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Dec 16, 2015 04:11
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Even if you strip out the racism there's just plan rampant nepotism as well. White people are overall just plain wealthier and more powerful. This gives white people better access to the people who can give business loans or hook you up with a good job. Same goes for stuff like home loans; if you live two blocks from the white bank owner and graduated with his son you can be all like "hello person I have known forever, give me a loan please!" and have an easier time of it. Libertarian thought refuses to correct for that or even acknowledge that it exists. The theory is that a business will hire whichever person is the most profitable but that assumes perfect knowledge. If you have an rear end load of unknown candidates but your drinking buddy's kid needs a job and you know he isn't a slacker well...who do you hire? Hell sometimes you don't even need competence. "Hey I'm a high ranking executive and I say my son gets a job here so gently caress you if you disagree. Also, nobody ever criticize or fire him."
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Jan 7, 2016 05:12
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GunnerJ posted:This is technically not always true though. The point you're raising, about the structural economic benefits white people have due to historical racial injustice, came up earlier in the thread. jrod did acknowledge that this was a problem but he also refused to do anything about it because it would be too hard and would violate his abstract principles to try. I mean you're right overall, it's just interesting to observe all the revealing things they cook up as excuses to not do anything about the problems they acknowledge but refuse to address, while simultaneously making it out like the failure of any proposed solutions to meet their standard of morality is everyone's failure but theirs. He also talked about bullshit like "poor time preference" or the like to excuse blacks being poor. As in if blacks were more motivated they'd work harder than whites to compensate for their lack of resources but they don't so it's proof that they're inferior and lazy. It seriously read like that "If I Was a Poor Black Kid..." article from a few years back. Even if they acknowledge systemic racism the response is "well that's not the white man's mess to clean up now is it?" Well yeah it is because they loving made it in the first place.
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Jan 7, 2016 06:13
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GunnerJ posted:The "higher time preference" thing is kinda complex honestly. Veiled racism is one aspect of it, justification for the right of capitalists to make a profit in general is another. Profiting off the work of employees is the reward for taking more time and risk to develop a business, while employees "trade" this profit margin for job security and more free time. There's a lot of reasons why this is dumb but thinking about it, large swaths of pro-capitalist discourse seem to rely on treating everything as a "preference," i.e., as optional in the way that employment really isn't. They also fail to ignore the fact that some people just flat out don't have the same opportunities. Oh yes I'd much prefer to be able to start my dream business but I don't have the money to do so. My options right now are "sell my time to somebody else" or "probably become homeless and die of exposure." Time preference has nothing to do with it; I can't easily earn money until somebody offers me a job.
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Jan 7, 2016 06:27
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Wanamingo posted:Hey Jrod, go gently caress yourself No, no, no, it's watermelons. Get it right. Sheesh.
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Jan 17, 2016 19:57
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jrodefeld posted:I'm down with abolishing the State. No you aren't. You want to be the state in your own little fiefdom.
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Jan 19, 2016 03:15
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Serrath posted:It's a small point to bring up in the sea of other points but arguing that food is efficiently provided by the free market in spite of being essential as an argument that health care can be provided for efficiently is really disingenuous. People starve in Western nations all the time and people in extreme poverty can often end up doing some pretty horrendous things to keep themselves fed. The dumpster behind the convenience store near my last apartment had people scrounging food from it every night until they put a lock on it. My university runs an anonymous food pantry program where students are allowed to take food as needed by entering an office from the student commons (the food is on a shelf behind a wall so no-one can even see you take it) and, having worked there before, I can promise that we had to stock it every night. Aside from that when you look at how America is set up right now people with money can literally hold the lives of people without money hostage. This is another reason why lolbertarianism as it exists right now is just sickeningly despicable. If you are not rich you must sell your time to somebody who is in order to get money to buy stuff from those same rich people. If government assistance all goes away then you must enrich somebody else or starve if you're 99% of people. If you don't have a job you don't get food, a place to sleep, or medical care. Given that "job" basically always means somebody is paying you for less than you produce, especially for menial minimum wage work, income inequality and poverty are absolutely not helped by eliminating taxes. More importantly the day you quit being profitable you get thrown to the elements to starve to death in libertopia. It doesn't even need to be your fault. Hey, you got hit by a bus and can't work now? Well, I hope you know somebody who likes you enough to feed you or else you're totally hosed.
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Jan 19, 2016 10:48
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Anticheese posted:Where does national identity, or the concept of belonging to a greater society fit into an an-cap worldview? You should be free to voluntarily be a resident of whichever nation you want and, if the nation doesn't suit you, move.
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Jan 19, 2016 11:57
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jrodefeld posted:How do you know any of that? People have accused Ron Paul of plenty of things over the years,. but being insincere is certainly not one of them. Ron Paul got into politics to speak out and educate the masses about libertarian ideas and leave a record in American political history that people can look back on. He never cared about passing legislation. Nobody of a sane mind actually thinks that Ron's political positions, whether right or wrong, were taken for any reason other than that is what he genuinely and truly believes. Go look at Ron Paul's voting record. The only person further to the right than him is Ted Cruz. It's insincere because he talks a lot about social freedoms but then votes against them 100% of the time.
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Jan 20, 2016 04:04
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jrodefeld posted:Take it up with Lysander Spooner. Are you calling into question Spooner's abolitionist credentials? War was literally the only way the South would give up slavery. One of the reasons the Civil War happened was because the South realized that slavery was an increasingly unpopular institution that was going to be made illegal very soon. It was only a matter of time and their response was "gently caress you, we aren't giving up slavery." Yes it would have been preferable to just sign a law and say "no more slaves" and leave it at that but there was absolutely no way the South was going to do that peacefully. That was...kind of the whole point of the Civil War and everything leading up to it. After literal decades of a bunch of states screaming "YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!!!" to the federal government the feds started saying "knock that poo poo off." The South said "we aren't your states anymore" and the country was having loving none of that.
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Jan 20, 2016 05:46
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"I believe that self-ownership is inviolable and everybody owns themselves. Except slaves. They don't get to own themselves." - jrod
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Jan 20, 2016 06:04
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"I believe that non-violence and the non-aggression principle are the best option ever and must always be applied in every situation. Unless it stops somebody from purchasing another human being and then raping, beating, and abusing them." - jrod
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Jan 20, 2016 13:24
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If memory serves Lincoln's primary concern was actually preserving the union rather than ending slavery. His attitude was "hey if keeping slavery keeps the nation together than fine but if I have to end slavery to do it then I'll do that." It just turned out that the South was absolutely not willing to compromise on anything at all and seceded rather than play nice. They wanted to force the entire country to be all slave territory but the free states were having none of that. You saw that in the founding of the Confederacy; they wanted to spread slavery as they practiced it by force if necessary after the war. It was a legitimate threat to democracy in general as well. Even questioning slavery was absolutely verboten even in their constitution. Since they couldn't force the North do things their way they said "welp, see you fucks later" and tried to leave. The only way to keep the union together was to fight the war. It was also literally impossible for the CSA to win. They picked a fight they were severely outmatched in.
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Jan 21, 2016 16:13
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The big issue with "we should create a stateless society based on the NAP" is the very simple question of "but how do you enforce it?" The answer he comes up with is "DROs, of course!" but how do you enforce them? The free market won't do it. We've seen time and time again throughout history that businesses hate competition and are perfectly happy to collude with their competitors to destroy competition. Just look at the telecom industry. Monopolies, collusion, price fixing...that poo poo is rampant throughout its entire history and the businesses get away with it because how the gently caress can you survive in contemporary America without access to a phone? Plus if you can choose your own DRO you're going to choose the one friendliest to your interests. They're guaranteed to be corrupt if nobody has any power to force them to not be.
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Jan 22, 2016 16:07
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QuarkJets posted:Probably, but at this point I wouldn't care if he never came back. His entire posting history is basically bitching about poor jrod's mistreatment and bitching about personal attacks while ignoring anyone who was actually interested in having a discussion. Do you suppose he's a sock puppet? I get a weird feeling Jrod just realized he can create sock puppets and is assuming he's a brilliant person who thought of it first.
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Jan 25, 2016 20:26
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Muscle Tracer posted:Jrode is not the sock puppet type. He's rereged the same account over and over again for years, and although he's not quite as self-referential as Eripsa his idea of his relationship with this forum is strong. I don't think he'd want to divorce himself from his current identity, especially because he has no qualms making those sorts of petty complaints already. It's not like he has a reputation to defend... I just figured maybe he came up with a new tactic? Like maybe he assumed if some dissenting opinion said "hey quit being mean to Jrod" we'd realize we were being huge, mean jerks and stop dogpiling him, let him speak his mind, and see that he's right. Which is...not likely.
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Jan 25, 2016 21:11
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GunnerJ posted:This "Is Promontorium a sock puppet?" controversy is going to tear the thread apart. Well with Jrod not posting we have to find other things to be furious about until he resurfaces.
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Jan 26, 2016 02:11
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GunnerJ posted:...or that they totally count and are actually rad as gently caress! A disturbingly common argument sums up to "I am an ubermensch and would take control of the country."
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Jan 26, 2016 19:55
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Polybius91 posted:The more I learn about libertarianism, the more I struggle to grasp how anyone could believe in it without being an outright sociopath. Well I was a libertarian due to a combination of being both young and stupid and literally insane.
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Jan 27, 2016 02:37
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GunnerJ posted:Most of those have to be fake. Unlikely. Never underestimate the ability of Americans to be profoundly and colossally stupid.
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Jan 27, 2016 19:29
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Who What Now posted:Lotta people on SA fit that profile too but still manage to rise above Libertarianism. Somebody once explained FYAD to me as "adults pretending to be children pretending to be adults." As immature as posters here can be I get a sinking feeling that it's frequently in jest.
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Jan 28, 2016 01:32
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Polybius91 posted:I love how basically every single loving one of the "independent" libertarians voted for Romney. Yeah there are a gently caress load of lolbertarians that went third party for the indie cred and to talk about how they totally just vote for the most qualified candidates. Which are, for some bizarre reason, almost always old, white, Republican, and male.
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Jan 28, 2016 16:42
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If anything the FDA should come down harder on all of this alt med bullshit being thrown around. Homeopathy is a loving lie and should be banned.
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Feb 2, 2016 05:08
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Who What Now posted:Also, stop loving trying to appeal to us as being a "true leftist". We aren't going to suddenly accept you for being on "our team". We don't reject you for that, we reject you because you personally are an awful human being incapable of empathy or critical thought. Hey man a true leftists that cares about  TRUE NATURAL FREEDOM would support policy that would lead directly to right wing fascism because *colossal, window shattering fart that can be heart for miles*
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Feb 2, 2016 06:08
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jrodefeld posted:"The people as a whole" don't act, though. Only individuals act. You heard it here, folks! SOCIETY DOESN'T EXIST! You, sir, are so profoundly stupid I'm surprised that you can figure out how your feet work.
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Feb 2, 2016 17:11
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 12:07 |
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jrodefeld posted:In all seriousness, can't you see the potential problem with this? Don't you think that a political institution that has the power to ban medical treatments and drugs would be pressured to keep out good and effective medicine from the market if they would undermine the profits of the most politically well-connected medical and drug companies? Don't you have any concern for the millions of people who have died from diseases because the FDA wouldn't allow them to access medical treatments that are widely available in other countries? So you're saying that the answer to that is to let pharmaceutical companies sell actual, literal poison and say "this will cure all diseases and make you live forever?" You have zero clue what you're talking about. As it stands a patient will be told what the treatment options are and are allowed to pick or just plain not. Nobody is forcing anybody to take a certain treatment; that's why there's a motivation to create less unpleasant/better treatments. The FDA really just says "OK this treatment is legal to use, you can go sell it." It's a check to keep bad treatments out and little else. You're advertising a system that would actually kill people and make it impossible to know which treatments would actually work.
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Feb 2, 2016 17:25
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