02-09-2019, 12:59 PM
(02-08-2019, 06:57 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(02-08-2019, 01:36 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Poor libertarians, like our spammer here. Automation and computers will soon put their punitive work ethic out of business. "Free stuff" "given by the government" will be in vogue again, overcoming the Reaganoid plague. Libertarians base their whole "freedom" propaganda on the idea that we must work for a living. But what if work has to change, as envisioned by the Ted speaker on the new new ideas thread I started? What if a guaranteed basic income puts the guilt of the survival/scarcity-based work ethic off the table, and libertarian conservatives can no longer use the rant about stealing "my" tax money to give to freeloaders, because we will ALL become freeloaders? What if wage guarantees of more money for less hours of work are put in place so machines and trade doesn't put us all out of a job? What if the people see that the owners of the machines and all the wealth don't deserve and did not "earn" all the huge salaries and dividends that they expropriate and hoard and use to wield enormous power over our state and our lives?
No, "janet" "hiphopper" "dcgal" "nebraska" dude or dudette, whichever you are. No, Classic Xer and Galen. Your libertarian guilt trip is on its way out! And good riddance!
... libertarian minded people don't go around imposing guilt trips on people who disagree with their views or reject their views or those who consider their views as being irrelevant to them. I've never used a guilt trip to establish moral dominance.
At least you recognize the futility of such!
Quote:I've had many blues of many types affiliated with blue groups try to do it with me over the years including some who claimed to be Libertarian believers/followers.
Essential to being a libertarian is to not feel guilt about extreme, dehumanizing inequality. So what if people must make the Satanic choice between starvation and a peonage contract! There will always be some time in which people must give up all decency and hope in return for economic survival. Hunger kills, and libertarian philosophy has no problem with the concept of an unconscionable deal. A raw deal made in extreme distress is just as legitimate as a deal made under more equitable conditions. Eternal subjection, even hereditary, to a lord in return for short-term survival in the wake of a food shortage? Such is the source of feudal bondage that the Enlightenment repudiated.
Quote:As I've mentioned many times, you are free to elect whoever you want to represent your interest and you are free decide whether the American system has been beneficial to you or not and you are free to choose whether you will be ruled or whether you'll be free to make your own decisions or not. However, you aren't free to make those important decisions for me
Freely-elected governments must still impose taxes just to survive. Dictatorship and despotism simply takes. If you have seen the glowing stories of the military in some Commie regimes 'helping' with the harvest -- they are simply taking the harvest. I would be more impressed if the military in such places helped with the planting, which is similarly difficult and tedious, but offers no food for the take.
Quote:or determine my beliefs and if it takes a war to prove it to the blues then so be it.
We have the teachers as civil servants; most graduated from low-cost state universities like Eastern Michigan State University that offered at best second-rate college educations but the likelihood of getting a modestly-paid job as a teacher. One need not be a great intellect to be a K-12 teacher. But the subtle lessons are there. One wouldn't attend the pricey University of Chicago (where Milton Friedman was a professor of economics) with the expectation of being a K-12 teacher; it turns out people who want to be business executives.
Quote:As an alternative to war, if it takes a period formal financial separation and economic isolation and ideological containment to prove it to the blues then so be it. The American right isn't leaving America or aborting it's kids.
I assure you of this -- the farm laborers and factory workers will hate your ideology. So it was in the 1930s. Your side has appealed to the low-brow culture of country music, fundamentalist Protestantism, and bad reality TV. Man may not live by bread alone, but the culture that the Right exploits is itself inadequate. The smarter kids from their culture leave it.
The American Right is going to stay here. It could not adapt to another country. I saw a placard "I'd rather be a Russian than a Democrat" and asked whether that fellow could learn Russian quickly or even recognize something so obvious as the greatness of the opera Yevgeny Onegin (Tchaikovsky wrote an excellent Italian opera, except that he used a Russian libretto); the literary masterpieces of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky; or string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich (which I consider the greatest body of musical work in the 20th century). The abortive, short-time experiments in Russian modernism that Stalin murdered or found their way to France, Britian, or America such as Roman Petrovich Tyrtov (Роман Петрович Тыртов), are quite attractive. Heck, I would do better, and I could stay here. I just don't like the Russian political heritage, at least with the tsars, Bolshevism, and Putin. I also despise Donald Trump for kissing up to the Russian political heritage and trying to imitate it here.
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.