Right, cause Obama's really being courageous with all his foreign policy changes, health care overhauls, bailouts and budget cuts to low-income heating assistance programs & the like.

When are you gonna stop supporting this "foo" Netrunner.

(You're still gonna vote for him in 2012 aren't you?)

Yeah, this guy's a lying joke. I can't believe anything he says.

Moving this video to NetRunner's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

Right, cause Obama's really being courageous with all his foreign policy changes, health care overhauls, bailouts and budget cuts to low-income heating assistance programs & the like.
When are you gonna stop supporting this "foo" Netrunner.
(You're still gonna vote for him in 2012 aren't you?)


People have been calling Ryan courageous for calling for a cut in high-end tax rates that's funded by eliminating Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. I don't see why, and Obama does a good job of pointing out that it's anything but.

As for stopping supporting Obama, I'll stop when there's actually some better alternative. I'm happy to criticize him for being timid and not having gone nearly far enough, but that doesn't translate into me deciding that the world would be better with a Republican in the White House.

>> ^NetRunner:

As for stopping supporting Obama, I'll stop when there's actually some better alternative. I'm happy to criticize him for being timid and not having gone nearly far enough, but that doesn't translate into me deciding that the world would be better with a Republican in the White House.


Maybe there's more to voting for POTUS than just voting within the two party system. You're basically resigning yourself to a vote between two people, which isn't really an effective choice at all. Broaden your horizons and vote for Green Party or something else entirely.

"I don't like Pepsi.. but Coke is even worse. Sooo, I'll just let Pepsi rot out all my teeth until I find a different sugary soda drink, Mountain Dew perhaps. "

(It's at this point, I would walk up and point out the jug of water sitting on the counter.)

'You know, this is free. You can get it yourself, and it doesn't rot your teeth.'

i.e. something like voluntaryism.

>> ^NetRunner:
but that doesn't translate into me deciding that the world would be better with a Republican in the White House.

also,

A Game Called "Countries"

>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

"I don't like Pepsi.. but Coke is even worse. Sooo, I'll just let Pepsi rot out all my teeth until I find a different sugary soda drink, Mountain Dew perhaps. "
(It's at this point, I would walk up and point out the jug of water sitting on the counter.)
'You know, this is free. You can get it yourself, and it doesn't rot your teeth.'
i.e. something like voluntaryism.

So what are you suggesting I do exactly? Stop paying attention to politics? Stop voting? Vote for some other candidate? Declare myself a sovereign citizen and refuse to pay taxes or obey laws, and pretend like that's going to change anything?

Also keep in mind, I'm not at all interested in trying to implement some radical right-wing philosophy no matter which label you put on it.

>> ^blankfist:

>> ^NetRunner:
As for stopping supporting Obama, I'll stop when there's actually some better alternative. I'm happy to criticize him for being timid and not having gone nearly far enough, but that doesn't translate into me deciding that the world would be better with a Republican in the White House.

Maybe there's more to voting for POTUS than just voting within the two party system. You're basically resigning yourself to a vote between two people, which isn't really an effective choice at all. Broaden your horizons and vote for Green Party or something else entirely.


I'm not interested in voting as an exercise in personal expression, I'm using what tiny amount of direct power I have to influence the world in the way I think will help the most.

Keeping Obama in the White House is the best outcome I see from 2012. If polling says a better option is possible next November, I might choose to vote another way, but I'm not too big on the whole "don't blame me I voted for <insert losing candidate here>" thing.

But hey, the last thing I want to do is encourage you guys to vote Republican instead of whichever 3rd party candidate you guys like best. More to the point, I really hope you guys peel off a good solid 10-20% of the Republican base for whichever pet cause it is you guys are working on.

@NetRunner

I'm suggesting you join the No State Project and support the thousands of other people who have realized that governments are nothing more that controlling, self-important groups of monkeys playing some game with arbitrary rules.

If you don't like this game of Monopoly you & I were dropped into..
..draw down your pieces and quit.

[Cause seriously, both you & I know that voting has absolutely no effect on the outcome of Monopoly.]

>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

I'm suggesting you join the No State Project and support the thousands of other people who have realized that governments are nothing more that controlling, self-important groups of monkeys playing some game with arbitrary rules.

Like I said, I'm not really all that interested in implementing some radical right-wing ideology.

Even if I were to grant the central flawed premise (government is the root of all evil), no one's ever given me a plausible reason to believe that any stateless society wouldn't turn into one with a state rather quickly.

I have the a similar view about the people far to my left who want to abolish money and markets. Even the Soviet Union wasn't able to prevent a black market from forming -- the incentives to trade are too great, and the means to execute a trade too simple to ever stop it.

Same goes with government. The incentives to form one are too great, and the means to operate one are so ridiculously simple, even children do it.

That's why my interest in politics isn't to try to knock over the table, but to refine both markets and governments so they maximize human welfare.

@NetRunner, I think some people who seek a voluntary society want to do so immediately and within their lifetimes, but others know it isn't pragmatic to just jump headlong into a complete repeal of government.

It's a process with an end goal of no government (or as Thoreau said, "That government is best which governs not at all." But it's not a process of "choosing the worst of the two evils" to gain some myopic short-term benefit that will ultimately increase the scope of government. It's about continually moving toward the goal of no government, or more personal freedom.

Even voting Green Party is a move in that direction because it helps to decentralize power within the two party system.

@blankfist and I have no interest in "repealing" government, either incrementally or in one fell swoop, because like I said to Genji, I believe that a) it's impossible to abolish what you think of as government, and b) if you somehow did abolish liberal democracy you'd realize you'd actually traded a legal system in which you were pretty free for one where you essentially have no freedom of any kind.

I don't even really care about taking away power from the "two party system" per se, since that's just the natural consequence of first past the post voting. What unites them is the influence of money. The wealthy pull all the strings now, and they have no interest in either of our conceptions of freedom.

Getting rid of the state, while somehow insisting that the right to property conveys absolute unfettered authority over property, just cuts out the middle man for them. It eliminates the last vestiges of the idea that the people with power are obligated to respect the rights of the people without power. In effect, it wouldn't really abolish government at all, it'd just return us to monarchy or feudalism, but now with Orwellian names like "libertarianism" or "voluntaryism".

You'd be free because no one could tax you! Though they can still raise your rent, cut your wages, make anything a "condition of employment" or even a "condition of purchase", and they can use any anti-competitive business practice in the book to squash start-ups that don't play ball with the oligarchy.

Plus, if they do decide to use violence to compel you to do things, who's going to stop them? Random bystanders? The private security forces you hired?

I guess if you got a bunch of people together to pool resources, and raised an army that would defend a certain region from the predation of outsiders, and established some sort of legal justice system for the people who lived within that region's borders, I mean, maybe that might let people have some freedom...

@NetRunner, why do you think giving people more freedoms is trading for a system with no freedoms of any kind?

Right now, hypothetically if you made slavery legal, do you think slavery would come rushing back to the US? I'd venture to say no, because the world's opinion on slavery has changed, as it does and will do for everything we collectively see as bad.

Government is a necessary evil in the processes of human evolution, but an evil nonetheless.

>> ^blankfist:

@NetRunner, why do you think giving people more freedoms is trading for a system with no freedoms of any kind?

Because you're not "giving people more freedoms", you're talking about removing the institution that defends our freedom.

>> ^blankfist:
Right now, hypothetically if you made slavery legal, do you think slavery would come rushing back to the US? I'd venture to say no, because the world's opinion on slavery has changed, as it does and will do for everything we collectively see as bad.

Well "everyone" agrees that murder is wrong, but still people do it all the time. And frankly, I think there's less consensus on the idea that slavery is wrong than on murder being wrong.

It probably wouldn't come "rushing" back though. Our oligarchs have studied history well enough to know that they'd need to go through a slow roll out of such a thing, accompanied by some Orwellian rebranding.

My guess is that they'd start by expanding prison labor, and reinstituting the practice of sending people to jail if they default on their debts. Then they'd just continue the kind of right-wing dehumanization of poor people and criminals we see today. They'd probably couple it with how selling off prison labor contracts to private businesses will help them with the state budget or allow a new round of high-income tax cuts, but then I'm pretty sure I'm paraphrasing a Republican governor of some state when I say that already.

It's only one more step to go from selling a "prison labor contract" where the prisoner goes back to a state-run cell each night, to being allowed to be kept in bondage by the owner of his contract in a privately owned cell.

Then, voila! Slavery is back in the USA.

Alternatively, just abolish minimum wage, outlaw union organization, and crush what's left of small business with anti-competitive business practices, and come up with some snappy new name for "indentured servitude" like "work-equity debt reconstruction", and you're 80% of the way there.

>> ^blankfist:
Government is a necessary evil in the processes of human evolution, but an evil nonetheless.


Eh. I know this is one of your favorites, but it's a bit Manichean, don't you think?

People are ultimately the ones who make the moral decisions. Even then, I don't really believe in "evil" people, so much as people who do things that are morally wrong.

What's the NRA slogan, "guns don't kill people, people kill people"? Well, governments don't commit evil acts, people do.