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@zedvictor4
So in the UK we have approximately 36 million vehicles plus agricultural machinery, all demanding to get from A to B as fast and as safely as possible.It is logistically and financially impossible to provide and maintain 260000 miles of public roads in a constant state of perfection.Annual budget is approximately £1.2 billion, backlog is approximately £16 billion, so that roughly equates to a 15 year backlog in road maintenance.And roads are but one requirement of an overdemanding population.
The international postal company called "UPS" is fully private. It operates nearly 350,000 vehicles, employs over 0.5 million people, and makes over 21 billion (yes, that is a "b") deliveries per year across 200+ countries worldwide. Providing and maintaining 260,000 miles of public roads on a few islands is nothing next to that.
I forgot to say that the UPS annual budget is over 80 billion USD - and all this money is obtained from willing customers and investors, not taken at a gunpoint. That your government has to resort to robbery to fund itself shows just how little value it actually has for people: buying its services voluntarily is not worth it to anyone.
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@Debunker
You need to stop paying taxes to separate the government from the economy.
Abolition of taxes is just one thing that needs to be done; there are more. I would argue that taxes are not even as hurtful to people as things like licensing laws, minimum wage laws, zoning laws, etc. I would certainly prefer a flat income tax of 50% and no other intervention from the government whatsoever, over zero tax and all the current regulations being held in place.
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The concept of free will detached from any cause is a metaphysical impossibility. Let me grant you for the sake of the argument that, indeed, you have some kind of an independent will that is not caused by anything outside of it. In that case, you have no control over that will either - after all, it has no causes outside of it, including you - hence you do not have free will: you have to obey whatever will you have. On the other hand, if you do have control over it, then our assumption is contradicted. Whichever the case, you do not have free will.
Even if you brush all of it away and insist that you have free will because you can make your own choices, and I accept that... Even then we still are left with the problem that you having that free will was not your choice in the first place. Your free will is whatever it is, and if you end up choosing to drink coffee instead of tea tomorrow morning, then your choice was caused by you having this iteration of free will - and not, say, the iteration that I have, that had me choose to drink tea.
However you square it, "free will" implying genuine indeterminism is an absurd concept. Even more absurd is the idea that free will can be granted by another being, usually "god"... That is a contradiction in terms. As Christopher Hitchens aptly put it, "I have no choice but to have free will".
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@AdaptableRatman
That is even sadder: you were unhappy with being enslaved by your impulses, and the only way you found to escape that condition is to resign to another slavery.
That is a very common story among Christians: they come to Christianity seeing some kind of redemption, escape from something. This is a philosophy of slaves, as I said earlier, of people who cannot find a way to deal with their problems in a healthy way and have to join a cult and outsource their problems to their new masters.
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@AdaptableRatman
Your worldview is horrible: you see yourself as a slave to the needs of others, even to the needs of immaterial things like countries and imaginary things like gods. This is pathetic.
But that is Christianity for you, a philosophy of slaves and cowards. Kings and churches have robbed you blind with this stuff for millennia - and made you feel guilty over not being robbed enough. Well played!
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@WyIted
My demonstrably true claim is that they are spending far more than they can afford, as usual, and that the cut is more than offset by extra borrowing.
Earlier you expressed your hope that I live in a place that has freedom. I strongly suspect though that I hope for the opposite: that the definition of "freedom" you use characterizes places I want to stay away from. You want a government nanny to take care of you as much as Soviet socialists did - celebrating a trillion (part of which comes from your pocket without your ability to do anything about it) spent by the government in a single year to defend you from evil enemies outside.
For that matter, I am a bit confused as to who you want to be defended from. Apparently one Korean girl saying something you disagree with on a college campus is "dangerous", as you said - but Russia with thousands of nukes is not? If Russia is nothing to be worried about, then how can you be afraid of a little girl with a big mouth? What I think is more likely is that you do not care about either, but your tribe does, and they would judge you for deviating from the party line, so you have rehearsed the lines and now cannot help but recite them whenever the subject comes up.
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@WyIted
So the Doge cuts are happening and wasteful spending is being curbed. Nice.
Sure. As nice as a husband stopping buying his daily Starbucks coffee to cut unnecessary spending in the family, then returning home with a new Rolls-Royce and a $150,000 credit card debt.
Trump's previous term resulted in the growth of the national debt higher percentagewise than either of Obama's terms or the Biden's term. Your beloved Republican politicians love calling those people socialists, but themselves do not shy away from taking even more money from the taxpayers.
DOGE has saved $105 billions of waste according to Trump himself... Well, the guy's "Big Beautiful Bill" increases just the National Defense budget alone by more than that. In combination with all the other spending sections, $105 billions is a drop in the bucket.
If this country had a better education system, then, perhaps, you would know enough math and economics to see how easily you are being scammed.
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@WyIted
I cannot answer your question, for I disagree with its premise that "cuts are not happening at all".
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@WyIted
"You guys"? I think that Social Security should be abolished. Confusing me with someone, mister freedom-lover?
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@WyIted
Nothing speaks freedom louder than separating people into owners of the country and guests and kicking out those "guests" who have controversial opinions. Louder than building walls, barring foreigners' entry to the market, closing hospital doors before women who do not believe that the creature inside them was created by a fairy, "Big Beautiful Bills", subsidies all over the place.
The way I see it, Republicans just offer a different sauce to the same meal as Democrats. I was actually excited about DOGE initially - "finally, someone, at least, is talking about shrinking the government" - and then it turned out to just be another scam, where a lot of big words were said, some pitiful amount of money was saved, and that then was used as an excuse to waste an order of magnitude more extra taxpayers' money.
Foolish of me to have hoped that these big government hawks were seriously intending on accomplishing something of the kind. That is a mistake I openly admit to.
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@WyIted
As opposed to deporting students who dare to publicly express a political position that the Dear Leader dislikes? ;) I guess, Hitler instead imprisoned them, so your guy loves freedom more than Hitler. *applause* Well done indeed. You have convinced me, sir, that Republicans detest freedom less than Hitler did.
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@WyIted
Cannot think of one off the top of my head. And if Rand Paul was in the White House right now, instead of the bloated toad, then you would be approaching making a point. What fraction of the votes does the guy typically get in the so-freedom-loving party? ;)
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@WyIted
"My guy"? I sense that you have absolutely no idea what my views are, despite me pretty clearly indicating what they are above. If you think that I am a "leftist", then you must be on crack. What I am is someone who is not a hypocrite and who holds everyone to the same standard, regardless of which "camp" they are in.
"Love freedom like a republican" - that is a nice joke, but I am here for somewhat serious debates, not for jokes.
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@WyIted
Russia has thousands of nukes, my friend... It is okay to oppose foreign interventions - I do myself - but it is silly to hide one's head in the sand and pretend that what happens over there has no impact on people's lives here.
It is one thing to focus on criticizing one's own government, and another to accuse it of everything and always assume that foreign dictatorships are in the right as long as one's government is involved there. Yaron Brook does the former, but acknowledges at the same time that most foreign governments are worse still, and will not come up with wild conspiracy theories and weird justifications of Russian invasions (as if Russia has ever needed any justifications to go somewhere and pillage). Ron Paul is one of those wackos who get a lot of publicity for making outrageous statements about the government, but underneath cool slogans there is nothing there.
Which brings me back to education: in the US ignorance somehow is not condemned. An idiot like Destiny will have millions of followers, while a hardcore expert on multiple geopolitical issues like Douglas Murray will be panned for daring to suggest that Joe Rogan's comedian guest might not be the best guy to speak on the situation in Gaza. People are sneering derisively at the word "expert" even.
With all of their flaws, in Russia and China, there is a real universal respect for intellect. People may condemn someone's ideas (word "condemn" does not do it justice), but condemnation of being knowledgeable and deep-thinking itself is not really a thing there. Here, something is seriously screwed up in this respect.
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@WyIted
He is a useful idiot because, like many self-proclaimed libertarians in the US, he only seems to care about the misdoings of the US government - and other governments get a free pass from him (unless they are strongly allied with the US government). In the Russian-Ukrainian conflict his position is clear: it happened, you see, because the US meddled with the Russian expansionist plans and Putin did not like it. The US government offended the poor dictator and he snapped...
Earlier, during the protests in Hong Kong, he suggested that they were sponsored by the US government. The guy is a nutcase. But, again, people in Russia love him. Not sure about China - my guess is they would love him too, if they knew who he was.
A principled liberal (I use this word in its actual meaning) would be consistent in his criticism of abuses of power by governments. This guy is not principled at all, as I said earlier. I am, on the other hand: I can criticize the US government while acknowledging that it is still a far gentler government than the most - and I will not scoop down to defending foreign dictators' actions just for the sake of sticking it to the domestic ones. But then, I am a thinker, while Ron is a politician. I have come to not expect much from politicians. His son though is quite reasonable.
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@WyIted
"Conservatism" refers to the tendency to hold on to the customs and traditions and be extra-careful with allowing massive change to take place. "Liberalism" refers to preserving and advancing liberty. These are orthogonal concepts, and it is not my fault that most people on the West do not stop for a second to think about the meaning of the words they use.
As for Ron Paul, I do not think he has any policies at all. Just talking points that somehow lead him to thinking that every war in the Universe is the US' fault. He actually is quite liked by the current Russian regime: they still call such people "useful idiots". So I think he would have fit quite well in the Soviet Union. If you were an American critical of the US government, then in USSR you could get away with saying pretty much anything. Why do you think Bobby Fischer liked spending time there so much?
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@WyIted
I think there is something wrong with the language people use on the West. Soviet Union was not a liberal country, not in the slightest. :D Putin's regime is a liberal paradise in comparison. And, ironically, the current president of the country I am in seems to have a very strong affection for Putin, so I am not so sure about the freedom part either.
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It is just bad teachers. The reality is, most school teachers simply have no business teaching and have no idea what they are doing. To a great extent it is true even at universities, for, as it turns out, a good scientist does not automatically make for a good communicator/educator.
Look, my dad grew up in freaking Soviet Union, with the level of brainwashing no Western kid will ever experience - and yet his teachers in non-political classes were awesome. Why? Because, as lousy as that regime was, teachers there (in the capital, at least) were respected, and becoming one was pretty hard: you had to demonstrate extraordinary leadership qualities to even be given an interview. And once you got the teaching job - especially at one of the better schools - you would be pressed to take it very seriously and work on your skills actively.
What I see in American schools is very different. The school near me has a couple of obese teachers running physical education classes... I grew up in post-Soviet Russia where most people become teachers because they cannot get any other job... Needless to say, most of them really sucked - yet even there I have never seen a physical education teacher who was out of shape.
Teachers' unions really have done a number here, but they are just a symptom of the real problem. The real problem is that people do not have high expectations of the teachers: it is somehow assumed and accepted that most teachers are going to suck and people are okay with it. I am not even talking about the creationist weirdos teaching kids Christian nonsense (this kind of thing does not fly even in most totalitarian dictatorships), but just about teachers who treat teaching like a frustrating job and have zero passion for it. No one would hire a running coach who does not run - but physical education teachers who do not exercise and eat junk all the time? Hell yes, bring the elephants in! This is what you get when you do not pay for something directly, but hand your money over to the government and let it decide what services you are going to get.
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@Lemming
I highly recommend that you try out Baldur's Gate 3. The game it most reminded me of was exactly Dragon Age: Origins, only with a full D&D system and incredible combat. I do not have much time to play games nowadays, and Baldur's Gate 3 plus Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader were the only new games I played and finished over the past couple of years. Both are stunningly good, regardless of whether you are into D&D and Warhammer 40K (I knew nothing about the Warhammer universe when starting out Rogue Trader, and after finishing the somewhat dull first act, I was hooked).
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@Castin
Well, first, there is an option to refuse to do anything and tell the AI that the organics will decide their fate on their own. That leads to the cycle being complete and Liara planting some data for the next civilization to uncover.
Second, Shepard was near-dead, certainly having higher priorities than arguing with a machine. It makes sense to hear the machine out and decide what to do with this input, rather than engaging in a debate with a glorified ChatGPT minutes away from dying. I do not think that in that situation anyone's priority will be figuring out why the AI chose this particular hologram, when the fate of trillions is at stake and the clock is ticking.
This may be unsatisfying from the perspective of a player who has been curious about the truth behind the Reapers since the first game - but if I put myself in Shepard's shoes, I do not find anything wrong with how he approached the conversation. I was in a near-death situation once, and I know well that in such a situation you are not going to satisfy your curiosity and your priorities are very different.
The Reapers mocking you, I imagine, is just an intimidation tactic. Or just a generic "villain's speech" stuff which Bioware writers have never shied away from.
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@Castin
I did not have such strong feelings about it: if anything, it all made perfect sense to me. Think of the genocidal AI as a futuristic iteration of the "paperclip maximizer": an AI that did not receive the parameters that its creators intended it to receive and found an unexpected way to maximize its objective function. And what options does one have when an AI like this run amok? Only to negotiate with it and try to exploit its logic.
I think the key here is to understand that the AI is not some omni-wise being that has figured it all out, but, in contrary, it is a severely limited intellect that is stuck on following one directive and interprets everything through the lens of that directive. It is very likely that organics and synthetics absolutely can coexist peacefully - but the AI may severely overestimate the difficulties of achieving that due to its biased programming and data.
As for why he looks like the kid... I would imagine that the kid represented the grief Shepard felt over losing the Earth, Shepard's mind held the image of this kid (hence why he kept seeing him in his dreams), and either the AI knew that and chose this form to appeal to Shepard, or Shepard's mind interpreted the image that way.
A lot of questions were unanswered, but I think that generally the story was quite coherent.
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@ResurgetExFavilla
Companies come and go. Bioware was great when it was run by the people full of passion, but something changed, the passion faded away, and they tried switching to making mainstream blockbusters appealing to a wide audience - something that they just were not great at... Much like what happened to Bethesda - except those guys were making mainstream games to begin with but felt that they were not mainstream enough. And at this point only a husk remains. Larian Studios, Owlcat Games, Warhorse Studios, CDPRojekt Red and others are now where CRPGs are at.
I liked the Inquisition a lot for what it had to offer. And that was, probably, the last game from Bioware I truly felt was special. Andromeda had a fun gameplay, but something did not feel right about it, as if it was a mishmash of ideas - the game could not find its identity. And it was just downhill from there.
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@Castin
@Lemming
I honestly have never understood the blowout over the ending. Not particularly original, true, but functionally very similar to that of Deus Ex: Human Revolution - which came out just a few months before and had its ending praised. And with all the DLCs it made a lot of sense and, I thought, brought a fitting end to the trilogy.
Also, the game (especially ME1) has gotten significantly better with the Legendary Edition update. Totally worth replaying!
I love other Bioware series as well. KOTOR was what got me into CRPGs in the first place, and I loved all Neverwinter Nights and Dragon Age games (except for the latest one which, let's pretend, never happened), as well as the hidden gem called Jade Empire. And Baldur's Gate 1/2 - well, those are classics.
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I do not think that it is either a real fight or a pretend fight. It is not a fight at all, it is just two guys who have lost their minds a while ago expressing themselves. They do not love each other or hate each other, and their minds are too messed up to be able to even operate in such concepts.
Trump is like a kindergarten bully in an adult's body, and Musk just seems to have some weird mental illness that exploded after his exposure to big politics and fame. I said it back in December or whenever Trump said he was appointing Musk to lead DOGE: that people like this (and Musk was much more coherent at the time than he is now) do not stick together for long. I am actually surprised that it took them half a year to start throwing cheap insults at each other; thought it would happen around March.
These people have no business running the country.
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I do not see an oxymoron in this. People talk about planned exercise, even when the plan for this week is to take a rest after a hard competition: the idea is that when one does initiate an exercise session, it is a planned one, not a spontaneous one. Moreover, a system of planned exercise may include periods of training spontaneously. There is no contradiction here.
Where there is contradiction is in this: all Republican Supreme Court nominees voted one way and all Democratic ones voted the other way - and it seems to be how 99% of the votes go. This does not sound like a court to me, let alone a supreme one. Sounds more like a mafia "court" where whichever boss can install the largest number of his people always has his way.
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@AdaptableRatman
Well, you said this:
A classic example of the right wing is they accuse
If I said, "A classic example of Jews is they are greedy...", then it would be very clear to everyone what I meant. If I wrote "some of them", rather than "they", then it would be a different matter.
As for the illegal immigrants, this is the full sentence, with the relevant part highlighted:
A classic example of the right wing is they accuse all immigrants of being criminals and I do not mean simply for being illegal immigrants.
I am not being unnecessarily pedantic here. We are talking about strawman debates, and one great way to strawman someone's position is to omit important details. This way you get to make them come across as buffoons making indefensible statements without having to commit to attributing positions to them that they do not hold.
As for me, I prefer to engage with real arguments and take on the strongest version of my opponent's position. In this case, for instance, something you omitted was that the reason they attribute highest crime rates to illegal immigrants than to the general population is that they have demonstrated by their willingness to move into a country illegally that they have a lower regard for the law. Having committed one offense, they have demonstrated their statistically higher propensity to commit offenses in general. I do not know if the crime statistics support this theory or not, but, at least, it is a reasonable conjecture to make.
I personally am a fully open borders guy. But it seems to me that not engaging honestly with valid objections to your position does nothing to strengthen or validate it.
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@AdaptableRatman
Your example itself is a strawman, for, first, not all "right wing" people do that, and, second, those who do only accuse illegal immigrants of being criminals - not "all immigrants".
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Diversity your investments - preferably geographically. Have assets in multiple currencies, a broad portfolio of stocks, some precious metals... If you can afford and manage it, some land and real estate. Make it so even the worst worldwide catastrophe cannot take you out.
But most importantly - improve and diversify your skills and resilience. The best safety net you can create for yourself is the ability to support yourself even if you lose everything. This means staying in a great physical shape and mental health, constantly learning new skills and improving existing ones, being curious about the world and keeping up with the technological trends.
If you drop Bill Gates or Elon Musk somewhere in Papua New Guinea with nothing but a pair of trousers on them, you bet in a year they will be doing fine. In contrary, some random grandma from rural Pennsylvania who just won $200 million in a lottery is almost guaranteed to be broke in 5 years.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
The most basic premise "you pay me if I produce, if I don't produce you don't pay me" takes you very far, creates the invisible hand; but it's all to easy to stray beyond its protection in large organizations both public and private.
There is a lot more to economics than this premise. It does not take into account human psychology, without which we might as well be talking about economics of a virtual world that does not exist.
And yet renting and leasing is an ancient practice that has allowed utilization in many circumstances where it would otherwise be impossible.Is the problem with the idea of renting or is it the fact that Lime didn't have a mechanism to motivate good treatment?
And this exactly illustrates that. Even when there are strong financial motivators, people still treat something they plan to hold on to for years better than something that tomorrow someone else will hold. If I lease a car for 3 years, I obviously will take a better care for it than if I just borrow it from someone for one day - but I still will treat it much more poorly than I did if I planned to drive it for 20 years to come.
This is a manifestation of the "tragedy of the commons": if your actions give you a lot of benefit while strongly dispersing the costs, then you will be likely to take that action. Humans must have a very high culture to rise above that, and I do not think that relying on a high culture is the way to go about economics.
That was what I was pointing out. I don't care about the difference between private and public ownership of a project. I don't care if the shareholders 100% overlap with workers and customers, in fact I think that is probably for the best.
I do not think that thinking like this flies out in the real world. Economics is not just raw money flaws: it is also psychology, interactions between people, all kind of unfulfilled desires and so on. That coffee maker at your office that everyone uses is going to be less precious to you than the coffee maker at your home, regardless of how much you care for your officemates. Same is true for the company ownership: if you are a sole owner of the company, you will have much more stake in its success, than if you are just one of a hundred shareholders.
I personally thrive in small start-ups where tiny groups work on very specific projects. I feel the sense of strong ownership of my work, can see its results with my own eyes, and largely pay for my own mistakes and do not pay for others' - this incentivizes me to give it my best, to avoid cutting corners, to proactively ask where my boss wants my project to go and so on.
I strongly believe that this if the future of the developed market. Feeling of ownership of your work is crucial. Ironically, Marxists - who pretty much repeat this sentence word to word - get it exactly backwards and propose a system in which ownership is completely obliterated. They think that, as long as it is not the "evil capitalist" who owns the enterprise, every worker will own it - but that is a contradiction in terms. It is impossible to own something that someone else owns too. If multiple people own something, then no one owns it.
People are afraid of what they call "greedy" search for unlimited profits, and while in many cases they are quite wrong about statistics I am certain that the invisible hand will still operate with capped profits and categorical limitations on shareholders.People have a right to try and construct such organizations and I think they could work and they may be more efficient than a pure profit motive company for certain services and products.
Profits reflect the value of the company to the market players, and there is no such thing as maximization of profits at the expense of the customer - with the caveat that customers may have psychological weaknesses that the company can exploit (and for which, I would argue, the customers are fully responsible). But organizations are built by flawed humans, and more often than not when they think that they have found a better goal than profit maximization, they are deeply mistaken.
To think that one knows better than the market - which is dissemination of knowledge of millions of market players and thousands of expert analysts - what is good for the customers is to be incredibly arrogant and impractical. Of course, anyone has a right to try out any model they want. My point is simply that if the society as a whole starts preferring dispersed ownership and "stakeholder capitalism" ideas - even if not enforced by the government - then we will likely end up living in a much worse world than most people expect.
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@FLRW
When I was around 11 years old it took me about 30 minutes in my head to work out that god likely isn’t real and is a figment of human creation.
Took me about 5 minutes when I was 6. When my grandmother who tried to introduce me to Christianity could not answer basic questions, I figured it was just another Santa story for kids... Was a shocker for me years later when I learned that millions of adults actually believed this stuff.
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@FLRW
What is the best way for China to be the World Leader? Get the USA to elect a downright moron as President and a foreign sex worker as First Lady.
China does not have brilliant people in charge either. Jinping praises Mao regularly, despite his own father having been sent to Mao's political prison camps... A guy like this is not going to run the world any time soon.
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It absolutely is a socialist program. Private programs are not run by the government, and it is illegal to not pay the "social security tax". Do not compare it to a private retirement account at, say, Capital One which you can open or not open without any legal consequences.
The objection that the money that it is paid for from is private is just bizarre... Any time you pay any tax whatsoever, you part with your private money. Does it make all money the government holds private? That is ridiculous.
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"Good" and "evil" only makes sense in the context of a conscious experience. Pretty much, by definition unpleasant experiences are bad for the consciousness, while pleasant experiences are good for it. Morality therefore must be maximizing the latter and minimizing the former. Even religious people accept that: in Christianity, for instance, immoral people go to hell and suffer for eternity, very directly connecting morality to one's experiences.
Where many people go wrong with this is they suggest that such a position necessarily leads to some kind of selfish exploitation of others. But that is a very poor and lazy analysis. Selfish and exploitative people may get something in the short run, but in the long run they will be missing on genuine human connection, on mutually beneficial partnerships and so on - not to mention what it will do to their own psychology: looking at the world as a free for all battle for gold is going to be incredibly stressful. Scarcity thinking is mentally taxing, and people like dictators who have gotten on top through political manipulation and deception are some of the most miserable individuals on the planet.
One can arrive at much of the same general morality as most people would consider to be "good" purely through logic, by starting with the premise that their goal is to maximize personal happiness - and realizing that it involves being good, kind and honest towards other people.
Religions fail at this on two accounts. First, their conclusions rest on the assumption that certain unverifiable truth claims are true - which is already a lousy foundation to build anything on. But even worse, by telling its followers that the morals were dictated by supernatural forces, religion blinds them to the actual reasons the morals work as well as they do. Without understanding of why it actually is good to be kind and honest, he will make countless mistakes in life without realizing that they even were mistakes. For example, many religions vilify homosexuality - so now a person who thinks that it is generally good to be kind and honest will make an exception towards homosexuals... And if homosexuals are not to be treated with kindness and honesty, then who else isn't? How far does the set of exceptions extend? How about members of a different religion - maybe they are also to not be treated like this? The whole thing becomes a huge unprincipled mess.
If your only principle is "everything X said to me is right", then you are screwed.
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@Greyparrot
@<<<MayCaesar>>>I think democracy only becomes a real problem when the government gets so powerful that your day to day freedoms depend on government whims. In a smaller government, neither democracy nor tyranny would matter much. When those American freedoms get redefined by centralized interests is when tyranny of the majority becomes a personal individual issue.
And is there any mechanism in the system that should prevent the government from getting this powerful? The Founding Fathers cautioned against democracy in favor of a republic for this very reason: democracy is bound to descend into various political factions fighting for the vantage point up the hill. Republican institutions were supposed to be the barriers preventing the barbarians from getting to the gates: "No matter what you guys want, this is a hard rule that will never be violated". But when the culture overall starts favoring democracy over republic, then maintaining those barriers becomes impossible. Ultimately, the rules are, at best, words on paper, and if nobody accepts them, then they have zero power.
I think that the whole idea of a centralized government is rotten to the core and is a remnant of the tribal times, with chiefs and shamans. A democracy is better than an outright dictatorship - at least, the government cannot do whatever it wants without major repercussions for its members - but we are till talking about two forms of top-down tyranny. Humans should not organize themselves in a central way, but should self-organize by choosing who to interact with and on what terms. This is how the free market is supposed to work, this is what makes it so efficient - and this extends to all areas of human life, far beyond just economics.
As long as "the government of the United States of America" has any meaning, the United States of America will, at best, feature a softcore tyranny. Which is still better than anything any other country has to offer, to the best of my knowledge.
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@n8nrgim
There is this what I call "the Nostradamus effect" where someone makes statements that sound prophetic and turn out to be true, but those statements in reality were very likely to be true just by their nature.
For example, I can say, "Tomorrow you will have a very nasty event happen to you". There is a very high chance that my statement turns out to be true: after all, who ever has a perfect day?
Someone who "remembers" some details of his family dinner which he was not present at may absolutely have hallucinated the dinner, but because he knows his family so well, his hallucinations may turn out to be quite accurate. Maybe his family typically discusses the same topic at a dinner, and he hallucinated them talking about it based on the history of them talking about it.
It would be nice to consider also the cases where the person allegedly having had "out of body experiences" got a lot of things wrong. The nature of such sensationalist stories is that only the parts fitting the theory are mentioned. If the person said 10 things about the aforementioned dinner and 6 of them turned out to be wrong, then it is the 4 correct ones that the proponent of the theory will point at - and ignore the other 6. Even if statistically virtually anyone who knows his family well enough is bound to get a few things right.
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@Lemming
@ADreamOfLiberty
@<<<MayCaesar>>>
It is obvious that lockdowns save lives when a massive deadly epidemic is aboundIt is not obvious to me at all.Quarantine is sometimes practically justified.Everything that distinguishes "lockdown" from "quarantine" is exactly what makes "lockdown" utterly useless and therefore impossible to justify.It's like amputating a limb beyond the point of septic infection. You lose a limb, and you still don't stop the infection. The worst of both worlds.The only way for "lockdown" to be rational is if the goal was not saving lives but prolonging disruption and crisis.
The less close contact there is between people, the less deadly the epidemic. A lockdown is an extreme form of quarantine. In the most extreme case, where everyone is forced to spend a week without leaving their room, with carefully vetted government representatives bringing them food, the pandemic is guaranteed to die out - as long as one week is enough for one contaminated person to be completely recovered. It is impossible to reach it with a regular quarantine where a region is divided into quarantined and non-quarantined zones: in the quarantined zones the epidemic may thrive.
I do not find such authoritarian measures to be acceptable in any way, as I said, but I do not see the point in denying the obvious. Unless it is really not obvious to some people because their intuition differs from mine so drastically?
Ought not disease be seen a bit as punching someone in the face?Sometimes with an 'axe, deadly as some diseases are?Take of instance people with STDs, maybe they ought not be allowed to have sex with unknowing people?. . .I suppose I would be against regulating society and people whose medical status we did not know, (In current society)But depending on 'how much of an STD problem there was, (Depending on how many lives it saved)
No-no-no. Punching someone in the face is done consciously, with the reasonable understanding as to what the consequences of such an action would be. Going out on the street and contaminating someone with something you did not know you had is an honest accident.
One could argue that the victim of such contamination deserves a proper compensation of damages, and I would not dispute this. But to treat it as a crime is unacceptable. Unless the person has serious reasons to suspect that he in particular has the virus, it cannot be the default assumption.
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So how does your theory explain all this? The "soul" jumps of a body thinking it is about to die, flies around for a bit and observes the world - then goes, "Oh, shoot, the body is still alive!", and quickly jumps back, before the world can notice the break in the causal chain? :D
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@zedvictor4
Taxation is a form of robbery, so the terms have different relation to reality. One is a subset of the other.
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I think grouping people into "classes" in this way in the first place fails basic logic. There is no "class of labourers", and there is no "class of employees". There are people who negotiate mutually beneficial arrangements, and there are people who use force to acquire one-sided arrangements - and that is a much more meaningful distinction. I am not threatened by my employer who pays me for my work, and I am not threatened by other employees who have separate arrangements from mine - but I am threatened by a thug with a gun who tells us all who we are allowed to work for or employ, how much we are allowed to pay or be paid, and what the toll for our peaceful interaction on the king's turf is.
And people understand this intuitively. Someone may complain about his manager or boss, but he will not be tempted to "rebel" against them: they are providing him with work and pay. He knows that the boss and the manager have no real power over him, and he can quit the job at any moment. He cannot "quit" paying taxes or obeying regulations, and only the government or mafia can really threaten his freedom and life.
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@zedvictor4
Perhaps it is selfish. Robbing a selfish person still constitutes an act of robbery, and it is not a metaphor: it is the nature of the act.
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@WyIted
The title of this thread is "Is supporting illegal immigration the same as supporting slavery?". The answer is no, and nothing in what you wrote has anything to do with either the question or the answer.
The contradiction in the position of "the left" is obvious, and pointing it out makes for a valid argument. Starting with dubious comparisons though is not the way to make it.
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Slavery, by definition, is involuntary labor. When someone braves the Sonora desert in July to get here and work, you know that they REALLY want to work here. Comparing them with slaves who were forced to move here and labor is stupid.
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The Mass Effect games (the original trilogy; let us pretend that Andromeda never happened) will forever remain the ones I recommend first when someone asks me for game recommendations. They have absolutely everything one needs in a game: great story, dialogue and characters, extremely detailed sci-fi elements, killer soundtrack, fun gameplay, constant sense of epicness... Nothing else that I have played comes close to offering this much in one game series.
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I did a PhD in physics and moved to the industry. I will say this: doing a PhD is only worth it if you are really passionate about science and research - and, chances are, by the end of your undergraduate program you have had no experience doing serious research and have no idea how frustrating it can be. If you are really into learning hard things and can handle a lot of frustration, low pay, sometimes months of no research progress at all, and genuinely find your research fun - then you are going to have a great time.
Bad reasons to do a PhD (or, less so, a Masters):
- "I want to learn more". 95% things you will learn will be very specific to your field. You will learn far more practical skills doing a real job.
- "I want to have better career prospects". Unless we are talking academia, you will have far better career prospects if you work for the 5-6 years it will take you to do a PhD, and most employers do not particularly care about your PhD, but they do care about your lack of experience.
- "I don't care about money". You WILL care when you grow up and start thinking about your future and all the cool things you can do in the present.
- "I don't know what I want to do in life, so might as well do a PhD". Better take a gap year and do some travelling and odd jobs here and there. A PhD is too big a commitment to make when you have no idea about your desired future.
Just my 7 pennies.
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@zedvictor4
Aside from the gun pointing at my face, this all sounds very benevolent. The gun makes it a little difficult to feel under no obligation whatsoever though. Makes me feel like I am being robbed, rather than asked nicely.
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I am not sure what the point of the Bible is if a believer can just interpret inconvenient sentences however they want. The Bible contains many commands to take or, at least, keep and maintain slaves - and not a single passage plainly condemning it (to the best of my knowledge). If, given all that, a Christian somehow concludes that slavery is evil, then the claim that the Bible is a word of god is bunk.
It is as if someone read Marx' Das Kapital and concluded that, in communism, private property is good and public ownership is evil. Why read anything at all if words can mean whatever you want them to mean? Just generate a bunch of random symbols and pretend that it is a Shakespeare's novel.
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"Theft" implies a certain degree of covertness of the action, but the government takes money away openly and under a threat of violence. So taxation is not an act of theft, but it is an act of robbery, or "plunder", as Frederick Bastiat aptly called it.
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@yachilviveyachali
I am open to good answers to my questions. I am not open to metaphorical answers to concrete questions. If I ask whether 1+1=3 and you say yes, then you are speaking a different language than me. If everyone else speaks English and Jordan speaks Dragon, then he is a fool.
What I wrote is a basic logical conjecture. Its validity does not depend on what anyone believes. If you believe that A does not follow from A, then your belief is simply wrong.
Nobody said anything about proving something on the spot. You said that there are things that cannot be proven, and I said that they can be rejected on the spot.
"Before giving an answer"? In most cases he never gives the answer, and people have to press him hard to finally give one.
Does he believe in god? I have not seen him answer this one single time, even though "god" is what he nowadays talks about more than anything else.
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@yachilviveyachali
When asking whether dragons exist, people do not ask whether they exist metaphorically. You know it and Peterson knows it. So please stop dodging the real issue.
Meaning beyond one's existence is a contradiction in terms. Something can only mean something to a conscious being, and outside of said consciousness the concept is inapplicable.
That which cannot be proven can be rejected on the spot. Otherwise, feel free to accept all kinds of invisible massless unicorns and descend into madness.
"Do you believe Jesus rose from the dead?" is a simple yes or no question. There are two options: "Yes I do", and "No I do not". If neither, then "I do not know". "What do you mean by 'believe'?" is a stupid response.
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@yachilviveyachali
Dragons clearly are not real: I do not need to elaborate on that, and I have already talked about differences between fantasy and reality. As for atheism -> nihilism, this is just a Christian projection: Christians tend to think that a finite life is meaningless, while more... rational people focus on enjoying the finite life that they demonstrably have.
On the Great Flood, we can hypothesize that it happened, suggest what evidence would confirm or reject it, and look for that evidence. The results of such searches have been very conclusive: there was no "Great Flood" or "Noah's Ark". This is all religious fiction.
Peterson is not doing a therapy session when talking to Harris or O'Connor. And even if he did, what kind of a psychologist cannot answer a simple yes or no question?
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