Everyone knows that docs are the shoes of the masses! /s
A quick look on the trans tag and I see someone defending child abusers as a free speech issue. Not a great start.
I have anarcho-communist sympathies. I prefer sites that recognise the above and that giving that same power to an unelected plutocracy is a far worse option.
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[quote=“anon73430903, post:42, topic:104361”]
A quick look on the trans tag and I see someone defending child abusers as a free speech issue. Not a great start. [/quote]
I respectfully disagree with your assessment of his position. He doesn’t support it and acknowledges that it doesn’t work. He goes on to elaborate how the law wouldn’t actually prevent anything, so even being in favor of it or against it is literally meaningless in practical terms. And ends by suggesting that other approaches could be tried. That’s hardly defending child abusers. I feel like that falls into the logic trap of arguing that questioning sex offender list laws are in favor of sex crimes, or that drug legalization is being in favor of people shooting up heroin.
What happened to lib-soc?
The plutocracy dreams of having the power gov’ts have, which is why they are constantly co-opting its power. Given the far greater power over your life that government has (Applefaceazonsoft doesn’t, yet, have a police force and a jail and doesn’t, yet, shoot you for violating the terms of service), I see this as a contradiction? If one recognizes that double edged sword (that not that long ago, and in some cases still right now, the power of the government is used to enact the oppression), how could it possibly be worse? I mean, I’ll take living in a van eating garbage scraps down by the river over being forcibly committed to a mental institution, or being thrown in jail, or being regularly beaten by cops, any day of the week. Being allowed to elect our totalitarian dictators doesn’t change the fact that one is living under totalitarian dictators.
I have to confess I completely don’t understand, perhaps illustrating the dangers of cultural metaphors. My reference point is of Doc Martens being boots for violent stomping. On people. Googling reveals it means a lot of different things to different people, so I’ll admit it was perhaps a poor choice on my part. Let’s change that to “spikey glacier boots”.
Indeed. But they were originally associated with working class skinheads (of whatever political affiliation, left, right, or none), not the elites. Of course, now they are relatively overpriced cultural signifiers for generation Xers (myself and probably lots of folks here included). But back the day, wearing Docs would mean you were a working class person.
Not entirely, I don’t think. For lots of people, they associate docs with skinheads, who they see as all neo-nazis (which of course they’re not).
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There are probably a dozen airbags, side impact beams, rollover structure, massive bumper structure, etc. included in that weight. That’s what packs on the pounds, not the satnav and sunroof. We could bring back the Geo Metro or the Honda 600 (I would love a new first-gen Accord myself), if the insurance industry, the government, and the whole Nerf Civilization/helicopter mom culture would promise not to have a collective aneurysm.
Citation please??
Are you talking about energy consumption if the world continues to use fossil fuels at the current rate, or energy consumption independent of the source? Because if I knew of a cheap, abundant source of electricity that did not damage the atmosphere, I would want to give it to everyone, especially the third world, as fast as I possibly could do so.
Okay, so let’s figure out how to do the one without the other.
Sorry, I must have missed the memo. I guess that the idea of the government not spending money unless it’s appropriated by people who we get to vote for is just too mutant for this place.
Apparently you did. In the last 30 years average inflation was only below 1% in two years. I even tried making it easy for you by not including the high inflation years of the 70s and your plan still fails to work over 90% of the time, needing a vote to get the extra money needed in each of those years. If you go back 100 years it still only works 20% of the time, and that requires that something like the Great Depression happens.
Let’s not forget that I was talking about welfare, which includes disabled people who are not capable of getting jobs. Your plan will be a disaster unless your goal is social darwinism (which will still be a disaster, but in a different way).
I guess it is. A guy who lived nearby to me starved to death a few years ago because he was wrongly found capable of work (reducing his benefits to the minimum, which also reduces government spending) and the government has frozen all welfare (except pensions) until 2020. Things haven’t improved since then, people are still being found capable of work when they clearly aren’t.
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So you’re saying you wish cars were as dangerous as they used to be? Why do you want more rather than less traffic deaths?
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Defending is putting it a bit strongly, but we are not talking about adults making a choice in full posession of the facts. we are talking about children being coerced by their parents and religious groups.
Just to make it clear, conversion therapy does not do nothing. It is psychological torture that results in a higher likelyhood of mental illness and suicide attempts. I doubt that most libertarians believe that poisoning children or beating them so badly they end up in hospital is acceptable, so why is psychological torture different?
Anarcho-communism is a subset of libertarian socialism. I don’t think that Anarcho-communism could work right now, so I look elsewhere for solutions. I don’t believe that will be true for all time though.
They have contracts (have you read every eula for every site and bit of software you have run every time they are updated?) and civil courts, as well as legal teams that most people can only dream of having access to. They already have enough power to make peoples lives a misery.
Give it a few months, then see where you are. I never got to garbage scraps, but in 2004 I did end up eating pasta in sunflower oil, seasoned with salt and pepper (if I had any) every other day, with a day of not eating. If I was lucky I managed to get a loaf of bread that end of life and had been reduced. I ended up with anorexia (I can save more money if you only eat one in three days, let’s try one in four…).
Yes, because it is a binary option, you must have one or the other.
I’d rather not have to pick between two dystopias, thank you.
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…sigh…
I am just suggesting that this is a world of tradeoffs.
Want a car with the efficiency of a 1972 Honda Civic? Want that same car to have the crash safety of a 2017 Civic?
Sorry, “Why not both” in this case is just a popular .gif featuring a little girl. It’s not a thing in the real world.
Nothing in reality or in my proposal prevents your legislature from changing the law to raise pension benefits. Nothing.
Nothing except the cargo cult of austerity.
Even if benefit increases were voted in this year (pensions are protected from austerity, although it is uncertain for how long the triple lock will last), then it will be needed again next year under your scheme, and the year after that, and any year when inflation is above 1% (as I pointed out earlier, that would be most years). At that point questions need to be asked about why legislative time is being taken up by this vote, which will require debates in both chambers, potentially up to three times in each.
If you want a cap on spending then propose a realistic figure (and I do mean one that works in reality) rather than one you pulled out of your arse because it sounded nice to you. The average yearly UK inflation for the last 30 years is 3.4%, maybe start there.
And the right wing will still accuse the left of being economically illiterate 
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I’m reminded of the Honda CRX I used to have. Pretty sure it had better mileage than the CRZ hybrid that resembles it. (IIRC it had a carburetor, not fuel injection.) I walked away from a head-on in the CRX but the car itself didn’t make it.
“According to their fascist splinter group, Reason writers aren’t fascists”.
Still a big gap from not-fascist to woke.
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That’s the beauty of libertarianism. You can be as woke as you want. But fascists won’t be able to force anyone to be or not to be.
It is very easy for fascists to force their views onto other people under Libertarianism; they just have to be rich fascists, as the inevitable end-state of libertarian theory in practice is plutocratic corporate feudalism.
But I suspect that our mileage might vary substantially on that point.
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This is an interesting point. You are correct that libertarians will take into consideration when someone is a minor. I would pose the question about what constitutes child abuse of a quality for the state to intervene. If parents aren’t allowed to send their children to these torture camps, but instead simply spend every day torturing their own kids (otherwise known as “raising”), which they’ve been doing anyway, should they be taken away?
I mean, this is obviously a personal and terrible topic, but I think this is a case where the cure is potentially worse than the disease in the long run. Physical abuse is obvious; emotional abuse is like terrorism; it can be redefined to mean literally anything, and I’d be wary of codifying that into law lest that be turned around onto the vulnerable at the drop of a vote.
Correct, in that it seems to get repeated around here like gospel, and I simply don’t grant that that is the case. My position is that plutocratic corporate feudalism is very difficult without the jackboots and guns of government power backing it up.
The standard counter to that is that right-Libertarian attitudes towards money, speech and regulation leave the state defenceless against subversion by the wealthy. But if you’re going full anarcho-libertarian and abolishing the state entirely, you might claim to avoid that issue (while acquiring a bunch of different problematic issues).
So long as there is any organisation with some degree of legislative/military/police authority remaining anywhere in the society, the wealthy will try to control it. If there isn’t, they’ll create their own. Private security to private armies to obedient serfs.
It is possible to stop them from doing so, but it requires eternal vigilance.
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