11-13-2018, 03:42 PM
(11-12-2018, 08:18 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(11-05-2018, 05:12 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(11-05-2018, 02:53 AM)Galen Wrote: I am not opposed to free speech but the liberals and progressive currently are hostile to free speech. The left these days label anything that someone says that they don't like as hate speech.
Rights have never guaranteed an ability to harm others. What some libertarians call the right of free speech violates this principle. They must want to harm others, which makes many reject their approach. Government providing enforcement of rights is accepted.
(11-05-2018, 02:53 AM)Galen Wrote: It is not the job of the government to take from one group of people and give to another. It wrong for an individual to do this and it is wrong for a group of people including a group called the government or the state. Initiating force even to do something good is still wrong because it is a violation of the non-aggression principle. This is why libertarians oppose the welfare state. Just because the theft occurs at the hands of the state does not make theft any less wrong.
It is correct to acquire services through taxation given the bulk of the people are willing to pay and everyone is represented. Proverbially, taxes along with death are considered inevitable. Many people are fine with this, which is why libertarians struggle.
We keep coming back to these same points, the eagerness to harm others, and the unwillingness to pay for the community. These days, it is possible with computer networks to correct the latter, to pay taxes only for services sought and approved of. If you would care to seek that, it could be done, but you don't seem eager to take that path.
If you are just hostile and greedy, there is little more to be said. You will remain in a tiny fringe minority.
(to Butler) -- freedom of speech does not imply the right to an audience, especially if the expression is unpleasant, offensive, or unsettling. One is free to pen an offensive tome that describes a part of Humanity as less than human. One has no right to expect people that one depicts as less than human as such has any duty to listen to or read such.
It is possible to organize one's life so that one lives in a community that pays for services that one might use and does not pay for services that one can never use. Kentucky spends heavily on medical care for people with ailments relating to the use of cancerweed products, and Utah doesn't. Utah spends money on other things. The distinction between private benefit and public benefit is not always clear. Literacy is a prime example: I do not want to get sick just because some illiterate fellow confused a cleaning powder with flour and mixed cleaning powder into the bread that I eat.
Quote:There is a difference between funding roads, police forces, fire departments, the military and so forth and the funding of people primarily associated with the Democrats. Right now, the vast majority still views, still speaks and still acts as if government funding is associated with money that grows on trees or a debt that we won't have to answer and are so how or another immune to financially. In a decade or so, the American view of government funding is going to begin to drastically change whether we want it too, whether we'd like it too, whether we are able to comprehend and accept it or not.
Education. People appropriately educated decisively rejected Donald Trump in 2016 and did so again in 2018. One of the old objectives of the liberal-arts school was to improve the youth who entered it by giving him some exposure to a high culture that could give him access to a richer life and to compel him to contemplate the complexities of truth, morality, and justice. People incapable of such or contemptuous of such can live debased lives and can inflict the consequences of such on others. They are also amenable to demagogues whether Hugo Chavez or Donald Trump. One is on the Left and the other is on the Right, and they are both calamities for their countries. What seems necessary for functioning in an increasingly-complex world both in technology and organization seems to have risen greatly in about 100 years. An eight-grade education used to be adequate for competent adults to get a start in a world in which subsistence farming and early industry dominated life.
People of limited education are particularly well suited to authoritarian styles of management that hold that most people are lazy, unmotivated shirkers who would never do anything except under threat of hunger or brutal punishment. You will notice that the vilest totalitarian regimes were at their worst when the normal level of education is bare literacy -- enough to read instruction manuals and crude expression of propaganda. Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, North Korea, the situation for blacks under Apartheid in South Africa, Libya under Qaddafi, and Iraq under Satan Hussein exemplify such. It is worth remembering that the system of terror that underpinned Stalinism weakened as the system had to educate people to do complex tasks.
The word intelligent seems to come from Latin inter (between) and legere (to read) It does not take a particularly smart person to achieve bare literacy. To be able to judge what one reads (or hears) takes a more sophisticated mind. If more formal learning makes one less likely to believe some dogma, then there probably is something wrong with the dogma. Remember that Donald Trump said "I love low-information voters" at a rally. For someone like me such is an insult. The low-information voter that so heavily voted for him does not realize that he has been insulted. Contrary to myth, ignorance is not innocence.
Quote:I'm not worried about the Libertarians, the Libertarians are pretty much able to survive on their own. I'm not concerned about the Reds, the Reds are pretty resilient and more able to make do with whatever they have to work with and whatever's available to them and they're a very staunch group when it comes to protecting the things that they value the most and so forth. Right now, I don't see the Democratic party surviving the government crisis that's coming considering all the Democratic interests that will be at stake and understanding the obvious divide that exists between traditional Democratic voters and the liberal/blue voters.
We Democrats are the ones who can bring communities of people very different in religious heritage and ethnic origin. Such is necessary for keeping a diverse nation from becoming bands out to destroy each other in tribal warfare. Think of the horrific attack by a neo-Nazi (I cannot find an insult, even an indecent one. adequate for him) who mowed down Jewish worshipers in a synagogue. Muslims, who might have been hostile to Israel in the Middle East, showed solidarity with people who share a respect for the same God, value life, have mostly the same prophets, and much the same morals. They probably voted for the same political causes (Muslims and Jews both vote heavily Democratic in America).
Note also that the black bourgeoisie votes in solidarity with poor blacks. The black bourgeoisie is smart and well-educated, and it typically holds professional occupations or owns businesses. It will survive unless America gets a Nazi-like government that chooses to do to blacks what Nazis did to Jews. American has a fast-growing Hispanic middle class that can assimilate non-Hispanics into its culture. It is obviously doing far better than poor whites, especially in Appalachia and the Ozarks. Asian-Americans? Need I say more?
I recognize that people with advanced education may be less likely to start businesses that are not professional practices or that do not depend upon some technological or creative miracle. It is easier and less risky to hold a job in a corporate or government bureaucracy than to start a restaurant, convenience store, or specialized boutique. But if we should ever have another Great Depression, people will take the low-yield, high-touch, sweat-equity course of starting a business that must cultivate customers and pinch pennies just to survive -- and that one cannot simply sell easily to some other sucker. I cannot see one ideology doing better at that than another ideology.
Maybe it will take another Great Depression to bring down arrogant oppressors such as people paid very well for treating other people badly (our executive nomenklatura) and to greatly reduce the value of easy money. Or perhaps it will take a war that devastates the century and a half of American investment, makes money that is the lifeblood of commerce worthless, makes profit impossible, and basically puts industrial America back to a level of development characteristic of the pre-Civil War Era while we pick up the pieces. Such will smash the arrogance of elites who did not so much build the wealth as either inherit it or charm their way into it.
That is a bad crisis, and we are insulated from the worst possible crisis unless we choose to accept the worst possible leaders, as did the Germans in the last completed Crisis Era.
We can choose our leaders wisely or we can get results like this in a city near you. That is if there is no nuclear exchange.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.