Well yeah. The U.N. has fucked up nearly every place it has ever been. Not sure what that has to do with free will and markets. If the diamond miners are cutting crooked deals with the mutilating social cleansers, we’re already miles away from free markets.
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Well it’s a given that roughly half of people disagree with premise 2. Hence the split in politics. That was my take based on how I view the role of government.
Not sure who would disagree with premise 1 (that parents are responsible for their kids). Wait a minute, something sparked in this old noggin of mine… Socrates would. Been a while since I read him. He was the first fascist lol.
“Socrates then discusses the requirement that all spouses and children be held in common. For guardians, sexual intercourse will only take place during certain fixed times of year, designated as festivals. Males and females will be made husband and wife at these festivals for roughly the duration of sexual intercourse. The pairings will be determined by lot. Some of these people, those who are most admirable and thus whom we most wish to reproduce, might have up to four or five spouses in a single one of these festivals. All the children produced by these mating festivals will be taken from their parents and reared together, so that no one knows which children descend from which adults. At no other time in the year is sex permitted. If guardians have sex at an undesignated time and a child results, the understanding is that this child must be killed.”
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I actually read his post probably 10 or more times before responding, because I was so sure I was missing something.
I thought this was interesting.
Why talking to @NickViar (or someone further along the libertarian spectrum) is more likely to make me moderate my political opinions than talking with someone on the far left. From personal experience, I think this is true. When I’m around more socially conservative family members, I end up being the most liberal person in the room.
In case of paywall.
Dear Dan,
I recently learned about research showing that when people hold extreme beliefs, giving them data that contradicts their basic opinions actually strengthens those beliefs! Does this mean that there is no way to change the beliefs of people with extreme opinions? —Jordan
Changing people’s opinions is indeed difficult, but there is hope. With people who hold extreme views, one paradoxical finding is that presenting them with even more extreme arguments in support of their beliefs persuades them to moderate. In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, Boaz Hameiri and colleagues describe a citywide intervention in Israel where they used this approach in an ad campaign about the Israel-Palestine conflict. The ad campaign was designed to try to change the opinions of right-wing Israelis who oppose peace.
The ads presented the participants with absurd claims about the benefits of the conflict—for example, that it’s good for camaraderie and morality and helps to create the unique culture of Israel. The results showed that the campaign changed minds: From what they said and how they reported voting, those with right-wing views became more conciliatory and cut back their support of aggressive policies, compared with residents of a comparable Israeli city without the ad campaign. The researchers hypothesize that the intervention succeeded because the ads caused people to more deeply consider their own beliefs.
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This is the reason for what I posted. Everyone has a choice. Even slaves have an option: suicide. When you post “if they choose to” and the other option is death or extreme poverty yeah, they have a choice and no one is putting a gun to their heads but, if the reason why death and extreme poverty exist in the first place is because of what those introducing sweatshops did then is that not a form of coercion?
Creating poverty to profit from poverty then acting like you’re doing those people a favor. The point is that it goes beyond physically forcing people to work in sweatshops but creating the environment in which the sweatshop becomes the preferable option.
This is so true. I’ve made reference here before about this, but with the abundance of strawmen arguments being flung by both sides, those on the receiving end just seem to retreat further into their own tribe. I know I’ve been guilty of this.
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The sweatshops create that environment? Could it be that many peoples around the world just expect poverty and suffering, and those dreaded sweatshops actually offer an improvement over what their ancestors have been able to expect for hundreds or thousands of years?
Appropriately timed for this thread:
100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead
The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history.
By David Satter
Nov. 6, 2017 6:43 p.m. ET
667 COMMENTS
Armed Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd—now St. Petersburg—100 years ago this week and arrested ministers of Russia’s provisional government. They set in motion a chain of events that would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization.
The revolutionaries’ capture of train stations, post offices and telegraphs took place as the city slept and resembled a changing of the guard. But when residents of the Russian capital awoke, they found they were living in a different universe.
Bolshevik fighters pose with a captured vehicle in Petrograd, Nov. 7, 1917.
Bolshevik fighters pose with a captured vehicle in Petrograd, Nov. 7, 1917. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Although the Bolsheviks called for the abolition of private property, their real goal was spiritual: to translate Marxist- Lenin ist ideology into reality. For the first time, a state was created that was based explicitly on atheism and claimed infallibility. This was totally incompatible with Western civilization, which presumes the existence of a higher power over and above society and the state.
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The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors.
But the Bolsheviks’ influence was not limited to these countries. In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day.
In a 1920 speech to the Komsomol, Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped to build a “new communist society.”
This approach separated guilt from responsibility. Martyn Latsis, an official of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, in a 1918 instruction to interrogators, wrote: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. . . . Do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question should be to what class does he belong. . . . It is this that should determine his fate.”
Such convictions set the stage for decades of murder on an industrial scale. In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies. This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them.
The victims include 200,000 killed during the Red Terror (1918-22); 11 million dead from famine and dekulakization; 700,000 executed during the Great Terror (1937-38); 400,000 more executed between 1929 and 1953; 1.6 million dead during forced population transfers; and a minimum 2.7 million dead in the Gulag, labor colonies and special settlements.
To this list should be added nearly a million Gulag prisoners released during World War II into Red Army penal battalions, where they faced almost certain death; the partisans and civilians killed in the postwar revolts against Soviet rule in Ukraine and the Baltics; and dying Gulag inmates freed so that their deaths would not count in official statistics.
If we add to this list the deaths caused by communist regimes that the Soviet Union created and supported—including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia—the total number of victims is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history.
The effect of murder on this scale was to create a “new man” supposedly influenced by nothing but the good of the Soviet cause. The meaning of this was demonstrated during the battle of Stalingrad, when Red Army blocking units shot thousands of their fellow soldiers who tried to flee. Soviet forces also shot civilians who sought shelter on the German side, children who filled German water bottles in the Volga, and civilians forced at gunpoint to recover the bodies of German soldiers. Gen. Vasily Chuikov, the army commander in Stalingrad, justified these tactics in his memoirs by saying “a Soviet citizen cannot conceive of his life apart from his Soviet country.”
That these sentiments were neither accidental nor ephemeral was made clear in 2008, when the Russian Parliament, the Duma, for the first time adopted a resolution regarding the 1932-33 famine that had killed millions. The famine was caused by draconian grain requisition undertaken to finance Soviet industrialization. Although the Duma acknowledged the tragedy, it added that “the industrial giants of the Soviet Union,” the Magnitogorsk steel mill and the Dnieper dam, would be “eternal monuments” to the victims.
While the Soviet Union redefined human nature, it also spread intellectual chaos. The term “political correctness” has its origin in the assumption that socialism, a system of collective ownership, was virtuous in itself, without need to evaluate its operations in light of transcendent moral criteria.
When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, Western intellectuals, influenced by the same lack of an ethical point of reference that led to Bolshevism in the first place, closed their eyes to the atrocities. When the killing became too obvious to deny, sympathizers excused what was happening because of the Soviets’ supposed noble intentions.
Many in the West were deeply indifferent. They used Russia to settle their own quarrels. Their reasoning, as the historian Robert Conquest wrote, was simple: Capitalism was unjust; socialism would end this injustice; so socialism had to be supported unconditionally, notwithstanding any amount of its own injustice.
Today the Soviet Union and the international communist system that once ruled a third of the world’s territory are things of the past. But the need to keep higher moral values pre-eminent is as important now as it was in the early 19th century when they first began to be seriously challenged.
In 1909, the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote that “our educated youth cannot admit the independent significance of scholarship, philosophy, enlightenment and universities. To this day, they subordinate them to the interests of politics, parties, movements and circles.”
If there is one lesson the communist century should have taught, it is that the independent authority of universal moral principles cannot be an afterthought, since it is the conviction on which all of civilization depends.
Mr. Satter is the author of “Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union” (Yale).
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No, the sweatshops do not create the environment but those behind them do.
Phrasing it the way you did, yes, anything is possible. However, I referenced historical fact when I brought up Cecil Rhodes and the Glen Grey Act. I would also argue that sweatshops do not offer an improvement but seek to maintain the poverty they need in order to exist. A poverty that exists because of the very people who brought in the sweatshops.
The U.N. is behind sweatshops? Those opening sweatshops are the cause of thousands of years of primitive conditions? Are those your positions, or am I misunderstanding you?
Edit: How did extra taxes hurt anyone? Dat social contract, etc.
Yeah man. It’s likely why I argue more from a political philosophy standpoint than a political reality one. At least then, it’s a lot more black or white.
100% this…
I must be blocked lol, I don’t see wtf you guys are talking about…
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Dude deleted his post.
*I’m 100% confident you agree with us. Dude was talking about how Capitalism is about the greedy 1% exploiting the poor and leaving scraps for the rest of us while socialism is about creating jobs for everyone… That was only part of it. 9/10 for derps.
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lol @ “scraps”.
I’ve gone from food stamps being the only reason my little ass had food to a member of the evil 1%. In high school I had a job that paid me $6 (I think it was $6, may have been $7…) and never felt exploited in my life.
Shit, at 14 I was washing windows for $4 an hour and didn’t feel exploited.
True, because you are executed if you refuse to work lol.
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Had a high school teacher explain how communism actually works: If you have 20 million refrigerators and 21 million families that need refrigerators, kill 1 million families. Then supply equals demand. The joys of central planning.
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I think you confuse quality of life and primitive conditions. And I don’t think sweatshop conditions would qualify as being the opposite of primitive conditions. Also, if you look around the world, many places with sweatshops and brutal manual labor were not primitive beforehand.
If you are referring to the labor tax that was introduced by Rhodes I would say it hurt the people it taxed. Forcing people to pay a tax, simply for existing, so they will be encouraged to work like slaves in order to pay the tax in the first place, seems like stacking the deck.
Hold on to your ass, because I am going to say something I don’t usually say. CNN has an excellent and I do mean excellent article on this very topic. It’s worth a read.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/14/health/kentucky-last-abortion-clinic/
Obviously, I am more conservative than not. All the way until we talk about drug policy and labor policy which then I switch sides. However, my political temperature is cool at the moment.
I am over the election hysteria from both sides. The country is not as divided as we are being told we are and I think people need a hot bath, with bubbles, some candles and a margarita.
In other words, people need to chill the fuck out. People need to turn off the news for at least 1 day a week. And if we want a better country then we need to work harder to be better people, part of which is not boasting about how good you are and how bad the other person is.
If you want a perfect country then be perfect people, everybody want’s everybody else to improve but nobody wants to be better themselves. Sooooo, we aren’t perfect we’re not going to be perfect and if you are waiting on perfection to give respect to where you stand you will always be disappointed.
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They need to delete Facebook and Twitter.
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Holy shit - something I can not argue with you about lol