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Facebook Follies of Friends and Families

Started by Syt, December 06, 2015, 01:55:02 PM

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Savonarola

Quote from: dps on September 21, 2017, 05:45:41 PM
Quote from: Savonarola on September 21, 2017, 04:10:08 PM
Yesterday, on Facebook, one of my friends compared the Federal governments reaction to hurricane Maria to Katrina; and demanded that Trump restore power right away.  She lives in Michigan.

Did she think that the President was going to start personally stringing back up downed power lines, just 'cause she said for him to?

Now that would make for a wonderful television: obese billionaires stringing power lines.

I think that she, like many people outside hurricane zones, thinks that hurricanes are like tornadoes.  Catastrophic, but in a relatively localized area.  In truth the wind damage is significantly less (flooding can be like that), but it's over a much larger area; so power can take a long time to come back.

During Irma it took us a week to get power back, even though we were 100 miles from the eye, the storm was only a CAT 3 by the time it made landfall, and Florida is well prepared for hurricanes.  Expecting it to come back in Puerto Rico six hours after a CAT 5 storm left is more than a little unrealistic.
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock

derspiess

"If you can play a guitar and harmonica at the same time, like Bob Dylan or Neil Young, you're a genius. But make that extra bit of effort and strap some cymbals to your knees, suddenly people want to get the hell away from you."  --Rich Hall

dps

Quote from: Savonarola on September 22, 2017, 12:23:34 PM

Now that would make for a wonderful television: obese billionaires stringing power lines.

Celebrity Utility Company Linemen.  Sounds like it should be on Fox.


grumbler

Quote from: Jacob on September 22, 2017, 12:29:39 AM
Yeah that's potentially true - it somewhat depends on the things you think are legitimate applications of governments.

In my view, there are broadly few different broad ways to be libertarian:

1) Proceeding from a broad principle of minimal government, except in a handful of specific areas - typically (I think) some set of  key infrastructure parts, foreign policy, military (for self-defence), a legal system to arbitrate and enforce contracts and criminal law, plus a handful of others depending on flavour (education, disaster relief, basic research, maybe some other ones). The idea here being that the abundance of liberty creates the best possible outcomes in the long term, and where it doesn't it's your own fault so that's a just outcome as well. I don't mind it as a philosophy - and it's definitely possible to hold to it as a decent human being - but I think it's impractical and will lead to pretty terrible outcomes if applied strictly.

2) A milder version where maximizing liberty is seen as an important value - especially in a few key areas (usually idiosyncratic to the holder of the belief) - and it is general the default starting position. Nonetheless this kind of libertarianism is willing to be pragmatic and prioritize better outcomes over ideological purity.  This kind of libertarian can cover a wide range of positions and actual beliefs. Ultimately here it comes down to how pragmatic they are and, probably even more importantly, which things they consider "better outcomes".

3) This is really a variation of 2) above where "both better outcomes" and "liberty" seem to mean "benefits me or people like me directly" and/ or "inconveniences or hurts people of whom I disapprove". In this case, "libertarian" seems more of a hollow label.

This is a pretty classic example of painting things as only three alternatives, with the two extremes despicable, so that the preferred option is not really a choice among three options, but the only option.

I think that classic liberalism (i.e. libertarianism in the US) is, ideologically, simply the idea that people generally (but not always) make better decisions as individuals than as groups.  Some people (like Raz and DGuller) don't like that idea at all, but I suspect that the majority of people here believe this to be true.  The rationalizing expressed in the quoted post is just, I believe, an attempt to evade the dichotomy between what people know to be true and what their favored political parties choose to implement as policies.

It's too bad, IMO, that the concept of externalities wasn't understood before Adam Smith and John Locke wrote their works, because classical liberalism would be a lot more useful if it wasn't based on a too-simplified idea of how the world worked and what the consequences of individual decisions actually were.
The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.   -G'Kar

Bayraktar!

Jacob

A classical liberal or libertarian position with a coherent way to handle externalities could be very compelling.

I suspect that for some who subscribe to the classical liberal/ libertarian position the lack of response to externalities is a feature.

In any case, I can agree that starting from the position of individual choice is ideal. The trick is figuring out where it isn't, how to manage that, and reach some sort of agreement.

citizen k

Wouldn't Anarchism be a more "pure" expression of individual choice than Libertarianism? While also emphasizing mutual cooperation.

Eddie Teach

Quote from: citizen k on September 23, 2017, 02:11:17 AM
Wouldn't Anarchism be a more "pure" expression of individual choice than Libertarianism? While also emphasizing mutual cooperation.

No. Rule of law prevents the strong from taking the liberty of the weak.
To sleep, perchance to dream. But in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?

Tamas

Quote from: Jacob on September 22, 2017, 11:46:55 PM
A classical liberal or libertarian position with a coherent way to handle externalities could be very compelling.

I suspect that for some who subscribe to the classical liberal/ libertarian position the lack of response to externalities is a feature.

In any case, I can agree that starting from the position of individual choice is ideal. The trick is figuring out where it isn't, how to manage that, and reach some sort of agreement.

:thumbsup:

DGuller

#4959
Quote from: grumbler on September 22, 2017, 08:44:32 PM
I think that classic liberalism (i.e. libertarianism in the US) is, ideologically, simply the idea that people generally (but not always) make better decisions as individuals than as groups.  Some people (like Raz and DGuller) don't like that idea at all, but I suspect that the majority of people here believe this to be true.
The problem with this definition is that it is useless, because it fails to narrow down much of anything.  Pretty much everyone on US political spectrum believes that for the most part, myself included, the disagreement is on how often externalities happen and what they are.  When I judge libertarians, I judge real people that identify as libertarians, I don't judge a theoretical libertarian from this uselessly broad definition.

grumbler

Quote from: citizen k on September 23, 2017, 02:11:17 AM
Wouldn't Anarchism be a more "pure" expression of individual choice than Libertarianism? While also emphasizing mutual cooperation.

As I have argued, anarchism is, in many ways, the extreme expression of liberalism.  I think it makes too many unwarranted assumptions about the nature of humans.

End-state communism, remember, is anarchy, according to Marx.
The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.   -G'Kar

Bayraktar!

grumbler

Quote from: Jacob on September 22, 2017, 11:46:55 PM
A classical liberal or libertarian position with a coherent way to handle externalities could be very compelling.

I suspect that for some who subscribe to the classical liberal/ libertarian position the lack of response to externalities is a feature.

In any case, I can agree that starting from the position of individual choice is ideal. The trick is figuring out where it isn't, how to manage that, and reach some sort of agreement.

The reality of externalities is acknowledged by modern classical liberals, I believe (look at British Liberal party policies from the late XIX/early XX centuries).  The degree to which government functions should be limited to dealing with necessary government functions (which liberalism has acknowledged as far back as Smith) and externalities, and the extent to which government has additional utility in creating social justice is the real dividing line between liberalism and socialism, as I see it.  I don't think that a final consensus is possible or even necessary, but the argument should be couched in terms of what has been shown to work, not in terms of namecalling and blind loyalty to tribes or parties.
The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.   -G'Kar

Bayraktar!

Berkut

Quote from: Jacob on September 22, 2017, 11:46:55 PM
In any case, I can agree that starting from the position of individual choice is ideal. The trick is figuring out where it isn't, how to manage that, and reach some sort of agreement.

Careful, Raz is going to call you a racist and crazy if you keep spouting of libertarian ideas like that!
"If you think this has a happy ending, then you haven't been paying attention."

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Ed Anger

Stay Alive...Let the Man Drive

Maladict

Remember when this thread was about weird shit on Facebook?
I miss Syt  :(