This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
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Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
@Tomas C
Only if you assume everyone starts with equal opportunities, which is not remotely true in the real world.
I mean, yeah, I COULD boycott.
It seems far more efficient to just co-own the company with my co-workers, from the janitor to the CEO, and vote equally on the direction the company is to take. It would take care of the continuous recurring problem in capitalist economic systems where companies act in direct opposition to the interests of the workers who are generating the value that creates the company’s profit.
Why can’t I do that, Tomas?
What mechanism do YOU have to correct for the continuously recurring problem of companies acting in opposition to the interests of its workers?
Now, are you going to admit that it is a falsehood to state that EVERYONE is capable of participating in a free market?
How is a boycott from people who’re being discriminated against (with no access to the market) going to have any impact?
How are groups that are universally despised – say, trans people or atheists – going to get enough support for a boycott?
Bullshit. What if the company in question is the only place where it’s affordable for me to shop for whatever they sell?
Seven of Mine 504
Indeed, what if they have a monopoly? Or does Tomas C not think anti-monopoly laws are interference with the market, I wonder.
I had a professor once, born and raised in communist China, explain how twisted Christianity seemed to him, and how Communism was a religion in all ways. He shut off my tape recorder first — I think he was scared of both groups.
Seven of Mine, formerly piegasm, I cannot boycott Walmart because it is the only store in town. I have to drive miles, instead of biking or walking, and spend more money. I don’t like it, but I don’t care anymore.
By the way, love the ‘nyms. May I suggest … piedolatry.
I’m a little late to the poll, but mom was liberal lutheran and now mostly indifferent. Douche has been “when it suits me” catholic (faux news, limbaugh, nra, “cheats on wife, when confronted responds: ‘what? I already went to confession'”, etc.) for 30+ years, but was supposedly not so godbotty before his parents died.
Forced to attend 8 or 10 am mass every sunday plus most every extra mass for ~14 years, and sometimes dragged to atlanta for traditional latin mass with excommunicated priest. Attended catholic K~8, went through the motions for confession/communion/confirmation, and selected revelation for an 8th grade ‘stained glass’ project. Only made it through a couple pages of that trip before it threatened my remaining sanity, so I just bullshit my way through it with a focus of the horsemen.
Held a powerful belief in santa longer than the grand fuckwit (6~10 years). All attempts to force myself to believe and connect with it ended with silence and a complete lack of any feeling beyond extreme boredom. Occasionally think it would be worth it to read the entire bible, but only get through a couple passages of genesis before my brain threatens to implode and/or I pass out. Have enough knowledge of the various genocides and atrocities to know yhwh is an even more horrible and terrifying character than Pennywise the Clown.
OT: Holy fuckballs. Tim Curry is disturbingly good at portraying monsters. ‘Poet Man’ from LEXX was one seriously creepy little shit whose image pops into my mind during any discussion of/with certain segments of the internet.
Another quick link showing how obscene wealth concentration has become. According to this article 147 companies control 40% of total global wealth. Did this just happen by chance.
http://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/10/21/350172/graph-147-companies-control-40-percent-of-global-transnational-corporate-wealth/
Thanks!
I randomly named a character Pie in The Sims Online a million years ago and ever since then I’ve been riffing on it with other online ‘nyms, because “Pie” by itself is almost always taken. I was trying to think of a “pie” name in World of Warcraft for a new character, around which time I encountered a character named Sargasm and thus was Piegasm born. Never thought of Piedolatry though…that’s brilliant! <3
Sorry, I messed up the quote:
I am confused about this whole eclipse thing. Are you arguing that a solar eclipse can be caused by something other than the moon, or that we don’t have the slightest clue what the moon’s orbit is? Because one of these would have to be true for there to be an eclipse to happen at a time it shouldn’t happen.
I briefly thought libertarianism was a viable system for some part of either high school or college, but then I grew the fuck up. “Greed is creed”, plain and simple. I’m now even more viciously anti-RWA and mostly socialist/social democrat, but I could, in theory, be convinced to change my mind on the economic bit. It will require a hell of a lot of crystal clear evidence for improving life for everyone and not produced by a fucking spreadsheet error, but it could happen…
Also, I’m somewhat surprised no one used ‘John Frum’ to smack down John A. His cult was created within living memory in territory occupied by modern western powers and even then we cannot say with much certainty who he was or if he actually existed. Yet, somehow, books and letters written and edited by followers many decades to centuries after the life of a jewish preacher are perfectly accurate in describing everything about that preacher’s life/death/lich?
No. Where did you get that idea? It’s rank stupidity to even suggest that if you know anything about science.
Individual people aren’t immune no, but methods and tools can take it into account. Which is what the scientific method does. It’s a bit odd that you never learned the basics of science tbh.
No, that hasn’t been apparent at all from anything anybody has been telling you, that’s just your bias projecting things and overpowering your reason.
People have spent hundreds of comments here lampooning the absolutes of the presupper crowd, and here you are, trying to pretend we’re on a quest for “ultimate truth” like a proper dumbass.
If you would bother to actually engage what people here have been saying you’d know that science doesn’t give a shit about absolute or ultimate truth, it doesn’t claim to get you there either. If you aren’t going to listen, and instead just continue to project your own insecurities at us, you will never be taken seriously.
MattP said:
Damn, I should have thought about that. I suppose there would likely be some hand waving about how this example is so different. In the same region there is also the Prince Philip Movement. Of course, we know Prince Philip exists, but I rather doubt he is the brother of John Frum or is a divine being. It is amazing how easily religions can start and be maintained.
Not me. Nominal Christianity for me, though it was more a matter of having a kid’s book about Noah’s Ark and going to sunday school, which I think was more about my parents getting a little time to themselves than getting me to belieeeeve. The sunday school thing, combined with one of my friends’ parents being pushily Christian convinced me to get baptised at around 9 or 10, but even then it never took root. Apparently I was a good student, though – they were entirely willing to let me keep going to sunday school after I’d aged out of the group… maybe they saw a future for me in the ministry or something?
@Tomas C, 450
Many rabid squirrels are rabid, so it’s unclear whether refusing to cull squirrels is a good idea.
And these non-discriminatory employers make a point of paying a fair wage to their captive labour force, don’t they? Indeed, throughout history, whenever we see that a group is discriminated against and denied work in most places, the places where they find work are always fair and equitable, and they are never expected to demeaning things for insulting pay, simply because they have nowhere else to go.
I don’t deny that the fantasy is attractive, but it is not enough to dream about the fantasy – you must also consider the reality. Leaving the rights of the employed to the whims of the employers may well provide a tiny minority of employed people with decent working conditions and passable reimbursement, relative to the rest of society, but the vast majority are little more than serfs. You’re arguing for plutocracy and eventual feudalism, so fuck your “threatening peaceful people with violence for money” bullshit when you’re arguing for threatening poor people with starvation based on the whims of the rich. I know you think you’re not arguing for feudalism, at least I think I know you think that, but the only way to avoid that is to expect rationality and decency from enough of the rich and powerful to make it unprofitable to be irrational or greedy, and that’s just naive.
@Ingdigo Jump
I know, sorry if I sounded angry about it, I’m just very used to being misunderstood and that looked like a really easy vector for confusion.
@Seven of Mine, 486
Well, they can just jump in a car and drive on the toll roads to find him. (Which are reasonably priced, because why would anybody ever gouge prices? That just wouldn’t be in the road owner’s best interest! Besides, the drivers wouldn’t be paying taxes, so they’d be rolling in the munny. No, people would be free to travel as far as they wished to find The Perfect Employer.)
@Tomas C, 488
Government officials are accountable. Businessmen, without “big” government to make them accountable, are not.
Given that they have no power over businesses except to strike (and, without government or unions to protect them (and without government to protect their right to unionise) they have no protection from strike breakers “threatening peaceful people with violence” if they don’t get back to work) or refuse to buy food or pay rent, what difference would the clamouring of a significant portion of the population about injustice make to the free market?
Given that the citizenship of a democratic society have the power to oust politicians who have “no stake either way, as long as he gets re-elected” on a fairly regular basis, what difference would the clamouring of a significant portion of the population about injustice make to government?
Hmm? Government is not perfect, it certainly needs to be better than it is, but at least it’s better than a plutocracy – at least we have a voice.
You’re assuming that the businessman views the world through a rational and objective lens, such that he is able to recognise when a member of a group that his upbringing has taught him to view as inferior is more productive than a member of his ingroup. What reason do you have to make this assumption? What evidence supports it?
@SallyStrange, 496
Oh, come on! Children can work. They’re perfect for getting in amongst the machinery and picking out the loose fabric because they’re so small, which is also why so few of them get caught up by the machinery and killed. It’s win-win, basically.
@Daz, 505
Oh, no, most government backed monopolies are government backed. Didn’t you see that on the previous page? Without government, there would be no monopolies, because reasons.
It was many years before I realised that some of the real live actual human beings I met at school weren’t just joining in a vaguely silly but harmless enough traditional cultural thing when they sang hymns and prayed, but actually, genuinely, really believed in a bunch of myths – just like we studied in lessons about Ancient Rome! Amazing! And to be honest, deep down I still have real difficulty getting my head round this. I know intellectually that lots of people are religious; I just don’t get it.
I know this sounds like I think I’m frightfully intellectually superior or something – and of course I know I’m not. Nobody is born religious, obviously – why else would cults the world over (like xtianity) be in such a tizzy about getting ’em young and teaching kids what they’re supposed to believe – but as we all know, we have evolved such that we are born disposed to be taught by our elders how to survive and disposed to see purposefulness whether or not there is any (the whole is-that-a-predator-or-is-it-the-wind thing; better a lot of false positives than to miss the real positive). Like many (most?) people I had the whole childhood thing of feeling like there must be an external viewpoint from which to see/understand the existence I was in; of wanting to be seen/understood; of wanting the reassurance that my existence was seen/understood/taken care of. I do realise I was just lucky to be born and brought up in a milieu where religion was essentially a non-issue, so nobody was forcing these common feelings into any particular religious mould; I got the chance to simply grow out of that childish illusion.
I never read the bible or any “holy” books until I was, um, probably in my teens. I love some of the language in the KJV, in the bits and pieces of it I’ve dipped into, some of it is utterly lush and rich and gorgeous, it leaves us a legacy of marvellous metaphors and striking similes and pretty poetry (hey, I never bothered with the boring bits which I gather is most of it by sheer volume). I always thought it was a great curiosity of human cultural history. I thought as a child that religious wars and religion-based torture and oppression was ancient history, that hardly anybody really thought such fantastical myth was real any more.
And then I grew up a bit more and realised that not only do vast numbers of people actually believe this fairytale, they want and are actively working to force their beliefs into law and into schools; they want to be allowed to discriminate and bully and force their myth onto everyone else in the world. They want to use it as an excuse to prevent access to contraception and reproductive healthcare. They use it as an excuse to kill people. The people who massacred half my ancestors for their religion are effectively still around – that is to say, their moral and intellectual heirs are around and are powerful in many parts of the world (such as the USA).
Which is why I have the greatest respect for people like those here who have the knowledge and tenacity and generosity tirelessly to list and demonstrate the flaws in religious “argument” (I love the expression “scripture pong”, btw :-) ) and to call out the evil done in religion’s name.
Damn, I apologise for the wall of text. But this is to say a heartfelt thanks to you all, and to take my hat off to you!
Athywren @ 516:
It’s those damned child labor laws that forced them to use Little People to buck rivets inside the wingtips of the B-24. There are a lot more children than there are Little People. We would have won WWII much quicker if it weren’t for this nanny-state do-gooderism. </liberturd>
How’d I do?
I also notice Tomas’ advocacy of boycott as a “Free Market” tool to enforce good behavior from corporations. I assume he’s unaware that during the libertarian heyday of the late 19th C., publicly advocating a boycott was a crime, as found by Supreme Court rulings.
If you didn’t think the pay you were being offered, you were “perfectly at liberty” to withhold fro the market the only thing you had to sell, your labor (and starve), but advocating anybody else do so (i.e. call for a strike) was a crime. Similarly, you could refuse to patronize a certain business, but advocating anyone else do so (i.e., call for a boycott) was also a crime. Both were “illegal combinations in restraint of trade”, and sent many men to prison, including Eugene V. Debs. (A socialist, notice, not a libertarian.)
(Huh. My spell-checker doesn’t like “combinations”, plural. But that’s the term in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act that was used against these practices.) Also, in the same era, no corporation, no matter how big their monopoly, was ever found to be in violation of the act. I firmly believe this was absolutely against the intention of Senator Sherman, because I’m a big admirer of him and his brother Uncle Billy….
Please replace “think” with “like” in the sentence about pay above. Need more coffee….
@The Very Reverent Battleaxe, 520
Well, to be fair to him, how could they be crimes if there was no government to pass the laws to make them so? Much easier to send the strike breakers in to crack some skulls than to bother with laws.
Ah, but that’s demonstration of the problems with Big Government.
See, if there was no government to decide whether something was criminal or not, nobody would ever commit a crime! And hence there’d be no crime! And there would be freedom, and puppies, and jam tomorow.
(What? No! In the absence of any government, no other large powerful organization would ever use economic or social coercion to benefit itself at the expense of others! And it would certainly never step into the shoes of government and use force to benefit itself! Because reasons. Did I mention there’d be jam tomorrow?)
Supply and Demand and the Free Market are all very nice. But a basic introductory economics course should also show you that the Competitive Market that would keep it in check is really very rare. Most industries have huge barriers to entry and economies of scale mean small sellers cannot compete, actors in the market do not have perfect information about their choices and competitors, things on the market are endlessly differentiated.
So the free market naturally tends toward the monopoly end of the scale.
And I’ve never heard a Libertarian give a good explanation of how to regulate businesses so they don’t ruin the economy for everyone else. Dumping pollution into the atmosphere/rivers hurts that individual business less than it would cost it to stop, so there’s no reason to not pollute. Pollution controls would only help them if everyone else was using them.
In the absence of government, you get the large company to step in and play the part of government.
And while effectively in our government the people with the money have the most votes, in a company town the people with the money explicitly have the most votes.
The only fun thing about the bible is that it is a source to analysis of rivalry and back-stabbing among the various factions, frozen in the text like fossil footprints.
“Who Wrote the Bible” by Friedman is about the OT, and reveals the various authors (called the E source, the J source, the P source, the D source and the Redactor) as rival groups (Levite priests vs. Aaronite priests, north vs. south) and how they have all done “retcons” to bias the text in their favor and against their rivals.
Tomas C., @494:
You might say my vote doesn’t count for much overall relative to the business’ total income, but only if you were perfectly honest.
Let’s discuss exactly what the relative power is in the market. The median household income in the US in 2012 was $51,000. However, over 30% of households in the US made less than $30,000. Hell, over 25% made less than $25,000, meaning a full quarter of the population makes less than half of the median.
Now, the average cost of living in 2014 is about $55,000 for a family of 5. It’s a little difficult to compare medians and averages, but you can still see the outlines of the problem. For a typical household, the cost of living pretty much eats up any income. It’s impossible for the majority of Americans to accumulate any kind of wealth. They’re too busy just getting by. After they’ve purchased those things they absolutely need (think Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, here), they don’t have a lot left over with which to “vote.”
So tell me, my little economics expert, exactly what is the relative value of economic influence between a family making $55k a year and spending it all on necessities that they have to buy from whatever place will sell to them, to, say, Charles Koch, who is worth $36 billion (or about 650,000 median yearly households)? Can you tally up the disparity in economic power?
Assuming you can, would you like to explain again how an unregulated market is a better proposition than a regulated market?
Athywren:
That totes explains Microsoft, who got to their market dominance through secret exclusionary contracts and using their market power to regulate the market in their favor. That was all government mandated.
And the government required Starbucks to run mom-and-pop coffee shops out by buying up the buildings they were in and refusing to renew their leases.
In all of history, there was never once a dominant player who didn’t use their dominance (rather than their superior products or better services) to destroy the competition. In fact, history is not totally rife with examples of that.
Also Walmart’s predatory pricing technique, whereby they’d outcompete local stores by taking a loss several years running (and survive doing so because of their ridiculously deep pockets) and then establish a local monopoly. That’s due to the Fuck You Grocery Stores Act (1989) and the US government’s Support A Multinational Megacorporation program.
I have to give Tomas C. props, though. He’s still bringing the “Everyone will be better off!” propaganda. Usually the libertarians have reached the, “Sure other people will starve to death, but that’s a sacrifice I’m prepared to make!” stage by this point.
He reminds me of a pullstring toy.
*pulls string*
“Everyone will be better off!”
*pulls string*
“There’s a SNAKE in mah boot!”
*pulls string*
“Did you watch the video I linked?!”
opposeablethumbs,
This is exactly my life. And even now I just don’t get it. The utter inanity of Jeebusism is to me as likely as anything Douglas Adams ever devised. Arkelseizures? Holy ghosts? Fuck me, they’re equally likely.
Well done, Horde. You fight harder and smarter than any other group I’ve met.
Congratulations also on having the patience to debunk libertarians. I am incapable of being selfish enough to consider that a valid theory, or seriously debate the sort of social Morlocks who think we should live in an untaxed, ungoverned, the-rich-shall-voluntarily-support-the-poor entopia.
Problem: the apparatus of government is often co-opted as a tool of oppression by rich greedy people.
Glibertarian solution: cut out the middleman and let people be oppressed directly. Freedom!
PoG @(you KNOW where from):
Dear Proof, you can stop being so polite. I finally understand what you have been telling us. I just got lost by your polite wording. Just say it. This is the Thunderdome. We are allowed to be rude and blatant here. I know now, what you mean, when you say, “[we] KNOW…”; you mean, “[we] are DENYING the truth, that [we] KNOW the truth, and are just *claiming* to not know it, that atheism is just _denialism_”. Maybe just saying it outright will break the endless loop of:
.
(1) You: Read the Bible
(2) Us: We read it and disagree with it.
(3) goto (1).
.
ProofOfGod: We fail. Don’t waste your time with us fools. You try very hard. You are already #SAVED#; so why waste your time with us Denialists? We are very obstinate, adamant, in our denials of The Holy Truths. Go your own way. Have fun in Heaven watching us burn in Hell.
You know, something that John A said just triggered a thought…
John A claims Paul saw the real-live-in-the-flesh resurrected Jesus (not a vision of Jesus — which directly contradicts what Paul himself said, but go with me on this). And, as Paul himself attests, Paul was born “out of time” to see the real-live-in-the-flesh pre-resurrected Jesus — well — doesn’t that count as the “second coming”?
So, Jesus came back, chatted with Paul and then said, “sorry, have to go up and do heaven-type stuff now. Thanks for all the fish.”
Worst second coming ever! And that means, of course, we can stop worrying about everything else — because whatever was supposed to happen has already happened, or isn’t going to. (The magic mushroom trip of Revelation aside.)
Thanks, John A! You just completely eliminated the need for religion! Bravo!!!
Jagwired:
Received and responded.
Tomas C
You really are a disingenuous fuckweasel, aren’t you. You’ll really look a lot less of an ass if you actually read for comprehension. I mentioned three problems in my critique. Monopolies, although they are also a problem with libertarianism, were not mentioned at all. How does the market fix redlining, Tomas? (Not sponsored by the gov’t, btw) Real-life examples, not silly contrafactual hypotheticals. How does the market fix company towns, Tomas? (Not sponsored by the gov’t, btw) Real-life examples, not silly contrafactual hypotheticals. How does the market fix discrimination and exclusion from the market based on immutable characteristics Tomas? Real-life examples, not silly contrafactual hypotheticals.
Missing the point.
My vote counts exactly as much as anyone else’s.
My money does not.
Libertarianism: “You know what would be so much than a democratic government? A non-democratic government with a profit motive!”
In past “free” markets, when someone tried to “get people to boycott companies”, those companies responded by hiring goons to intimate them with the THREAT OF VIOLENCE.
It is ONLY because government exists and uses the implicit threat of EVEN GREATER VIOLENCE if necessary that you even have the opportunity to get other people to boycott a company.
@ Inaji,
In response to this comment in the “Do You have to shove…” thread. (Please keep in mind that I’m European and thus am not 100% up-to-date with everything US-related that most regulars in the comments find obvious.)
When you are referring to “not all Indians are American” are you using “American” as short-hand for living in the US (or “Estadounidese” as my Ecuadorian ex used to call people from the States), or are you referring to the original inhabitants of both Americas?
If you’re referring to the Americas, could you please elaborate which other regions have original inhabitants that we would colloquially consider to be “Indians”? I had never heard of originally American tribes living far beyond the Americas and their associated islands. (Hawaii is Polynesian, and so are most other isles in the Pacific AFAIK)
The difference between a Republican and a libertarian is that the Republican won’t kill you for your kidneys, if you both went to the same prep school.
Alex the Pretty Good @ 541, NA is used to refer to Indians of various nations within the U.S. There are Indigenous peoples in Canada, Mexico, etc., who obviously do not live in the U.S., and a lot of Indians who do live in the U.S. don’t much care for the term.
@ Dalillama #537:
Also, beside those problems, there is what I said before, which Tomas has also ignored. Namely: the alternative everyone else uses, where the public represented by government takes money, is not some unusual form of using force to extort money, it’s the regular requirement that people pay their bills.
Skipping out on taxes may be keeping money that’s in your pocket, but amounts to the same thing as shoplifting; it’s taking the benefits that come from living in a functioning society, and refusing to give the money it is agreed you owe for them. In short, not paying your share of taxes is theft, as much as libertarians want to pretend the opposite is true.
@SallyStrange
Everyone can participate in the free market. Stephen Hawking is disabled and people still buy his books! Gerber baby models make money.
But realistically , the people who you mentioned will have their participation limited to some extent.
To ask you-
1)Is it moral to coerce peopel to give up money with threats of violence?
2) Why do you support coercive state policies that do that? Shouldn’t we seek a more peaceful and non-aggressive solution?
From what I read, in the free market , employers are in competition for labour. The employers will have to give compettitive salary packages in order to retain their workers. I think this is a better policy.
@everyone
From what I read in the libertarian sites ,monopolies come about when gov’t regulations make the barriers to entry so high that only a few people can compete. If there were no regulations there’d be less startup costs and more poeple could compete and more freedom and money for everyone.
@Tomas 545
And just when we were giving you credit for at least not being the garden variety “well some people will starve to death but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make” glibertarian.
Out of curiousity , does anyone here identify as feminist?
The Georgeoughttohelp videomaker posted a critique of feminism and the idea of a wage gap here.
What do you guys think about it ? It seems the assertions of some feminists are not supported by the facts.
I definitely consider myself pro-equality and for equal rights for women. I don’t think criticising the assertions of some feminists with facts makes someone a sexist
Annnnnd bad block quote. Everything from “1) Your bullheaded…” is me obvs.
Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Fuck you.
@ Tomas C #545:
It’s not moral to take things without paying for them, whether it is food from a restaurant, goods from a store, or services from the public.
You have said you accept people’s right to defend their property, and I think you would accept charging people in the first two cases as examples of that, rather than pretending it’s coercion. But somehow you have a terrible blind spot about the third case.
Not paying the agreed taxes is stealing from the public. So yes, I think it is entirely moral for the public to protect itself from that, in the same way it is moral to “coerce” you into not shoplifting.
Tomas C
Redlining. Company towns. How does the market fix them? These are not thought experiments, these are real things that really happened, and really continue to happen where not prevented by government. Answer the question, you disingenuous fucker. Don’t blither about the evils of taxation, don’t try to climb on a moral high horse, explain how a market fixes those problems.
It’s snowing. I would like it to stop, so all you goddists out there, shout out a prayer, it’s your chance to show me.
@Seven of mine
Peopel were taking care of disabled fiends and relatives for thousands for years before big gov’t came in to coerce everyone.
2) With teh free market there will be more money and freedom for everyone , and so almost no poor people.
@ Inaji, 543
Thanks for the clarification. I wasn’t aware that NA was (mostly?) used to refer to the indiginous people in the US alone. I always assumed it was the English term to refer to all the Americas (which only goes to show again … Never assume. Ask.)
So what is the preferred term in US English if you don’t know the exact tribe (yet)? My ex described herself as “indigena” but I guess that doesn’t work as well up North.
I haven’t hear much about company towns. I don’t know. I’ll see what I can can find.
Tomas C.
Wow. You really are fucking dumb as a rock. Are most babies raking in cash? Are most disabled people famous physicists with book deals? No? Then how that prove that EVERYONE can participate in the free market, you dumbfuck?
1. Is it moral to coerce people to give up money with threats of starvation and disease?
2. Why do you support coercive business strategies like that?
What did you read? “Economics for Republicans and Third Graders”? Your understanding of the issue is so ridiculously simplistic that I simply cannot fathom why you aren’t embarrassed with yourself right now.
Using propaganda to support propaganda. Wooo. Garbage in, garbage out.
We’ve already given you examples of that being utterly false, you dishonest fucking hack.
Your abject ignorance would be adorable if your idiocy wouldn’t mean fucking over the poor even more, making virtually every industry far more dangerous to buy from or work in, and forking over even more cash to the 1%.
Tomas C:
Vague generalizations are also not going to impress anyone. Actual market solutions that have actually worked at some time, which you can show evidence of. Show your work.
It’s the only practical option. “Should” implies “can.” You might claim all day long that we should do things which can’t be done. But it’s utterly pointless.
Riddle me this: do you support the fact that I don’t have magical superpowers? Shouldn’t I have them? Explain to me why I shouldn’t have magical superpowers. This time, I’ll play the role of the broken record player in the conversation, and you’ll be the one doing all of the actual work. Let’s see how it goes.
Like what? Be specific and show your work.
Alex the Pretty Good:
Indigenous people, native people, or first nations all work. First Nations is primarily a Canadian usage, but it’s a fucktonne better than the smarmy, insulting Native American.
And anyway, competition is hard. Much better to collude, monopolize, and price-fix.
Oh my Christ. Tomas at 547….really, go fuck yourself. For adding support of anti-feminism to the list of your idiocies, and topping it off with an inane “just disagreeing” defense. Just fuck right off, you clueless, amoral fuckwad.
I didn’t ask you to restate your bald assertion for the millionth time, shitwit. I asked you to explain how. That means answering all the questions everyone has put to you about how to deal with situations which actually happen.
You know it’s really hi-fucking-larious that you entered the Thunderdome criticizing me for saying that Libertarians never have answers to real world problems and here’s you just bleating “FREE MARKET” over and over and over again. Color me completely and totally not surprised.
The problem with taxes isn’t so much that we’re obligated to pay them, but that the money doesn’t always get used for purposes beneficial to taxpayers. Seeing as we only have a limited ability to control how taxes are used, this brings up the issue of abuse and waste. Also, there’s the issue of autonomy. Providing services via taxation has its benefits, but it also decreases the amount of control and responsibility one has over their own income. The question is, at what point do you get to say “leave me alone, and let me do my own thing”?
@monad
This is a poor analogy because a shoplifter chose to steal the stuff. You cannot refuse the gov’t services , its completely involuntary. A beter analogy wopuld be a shopkeeper forcing something into your bags and then threatening you with violence if you did not pay.
Well, my gob is utterly smacked.
Have you tried to enter the job market lately?
@Alex the Pretty Good, 541
Maybe I’m being overly literal here, but… India?
casesar:
Then that isn’t a problem is taxes! It’s a problem with how politicians decide to spend government funds, you fucking shitweasel.
Around the same point as the government becomes totalitarian. Until that point, it is just libertarians pining for Corporate dominion in the name of their imaginary ideal of independence and “liberty”, opposing even the slightest amount of structure that doesn’t immediately benefit them, and dismissing the significance of infrastructure that they do benefit from in less blatant fashions. Your question is nowhere near relevant to the actual reactions and beliefs of real libertarians.
This isn’t an answer, but rather saying you don’t give a fuck about the disabled, or how it effects their caregivers. You are one callous asshole, which is the problem with liberturds. Emphasis on the turds.
Sorry, you may an any time refuse government services. You don’t have to sign up for medicare, for example. But you do have to contribute to the general welfare through your taxes. If you don’t pay taxes, you aren’t innocent, you aren’t peaceful, you are just an uncaring egotistical turd.
Gee, abuse by people who want to abuse others, by not paying taxes for the general welfare…. Your duly elected representative should be held accountable, but the problem with “abuse”, is that it often costs more to end the “abuses” than is saved in total monies spent. You aren’t very realistic, as your head is up your ass smelling your turds, which you smell as ambrosia.
Tomas C, if you don’t want to pay to be a country, then go live in the fucking ocean so we don’t need to fucking whining about how you are required to give a fraction back to the country that provides you with an income. Shut your fucking privileged, myopic, idiotic mouth until you actually UNDERSTAND the principles and facts involved. Regurgitating shit you picked up from other libertarians proves nothing aside from the fact that you have virtually no knowledge of the subject on your own, and that you are bafflingly credulous and incapable of the slightest amount of skepticism outside of the issue of the zombie christ. Start thinking or walk the fuck away.
People used to “take care” of their disabled friends and relatives by storing them in lunatic asylums.
@antepropo
Are any of the facts he listed false? I would love to know if they were . If you have seen studies contradicting his statement that eg. men receive capital punishment more than women or men make uo the majority of those KIA or men make up teh majority of rape victims, I would love to see them and change my mind.
Thomas:
It is more like a store charging a parking fee, or a bar with a cover charge, both of which happen all the time without anyone calling it “coercion” or “threats of violence”
Liberturd sights contain lies, bullshit and utter distortions of reality. Just like somebody saying “read the babble”. If your want real information not iditologically skewed, try using http://scholar.google.com and see what academics and the real world thinks about your religion.
Fuck, went out to put more seed out for the birds (those lazy, shiftless, do-nothings!), had rolled up my jeans, had my wellies on, and the godsdamned snow came up past my knees, got inside my wellies…aargh.
Jesus Christ on a flaming stick. Anyone who thinks that laissez-faire capitalism will fix all of the worlds ills simply wasn’t paying attention during history class.
@Inaji #559
In that situation I tend to go with “Indiginous [insert geographical area here]”. That way I can differentiate between indiginous people in the US, Canada, Central America, South America, Hawaii etc. I figure if I don’t know the specific tribe or nation I’m talking about, I should at least try and narrow it down as much as I can. Apologies if you’re sick of answering question, but since you and Alex are already discussing it I figured I’d take the opportunity to find out if that’s acceptable.
What do any of those examples have to do with feminists being wrong, Tomas? And no, men do not make up the majority of rape victims! That’s an outlandish claim. Citation fucking needed, Tomas. Are you an absolute fucking moron on every fucking subject, Tomas?
BWAAAHAHAHA*snort*hahahalololsrsly no that was a good one.
@TheBlackCat #572
No, you see, that’s not the government so that’s just the Free Market™ at work! Ditto gas companies, electric companies, water companies…
@Inaji #574
Damn, where do you live that’s still got knee-height snow in March? #temperatezoneprivilege
Challenge to the liberturds:
Show me 30 years use of liberturd principles in the century by a first world country.
When you can’t do that, read history from period from the Civil War to about 1900, from the perspective of the average worker, not the industrialist. Also look at the monopolies, trusts, and cartels that sprung up in that period. Look at the boom/bust cycles and their effects for the average worker…
@anteprepro #576
The evidence suggests yes.
Have we been presented with Tomas’ views on climate change yet? I suspect they would be interesting.
These facts being true is not an argument against feminism.
Show me that women are not receiving capital punishment for crimes equivalent to those for which men do receive capital punishment. Then show me a feminist who even supports capital punishment.
Men KIA? Are you fucking kidding me? If men hadn’t made regulations PREVENTING WOMEN FROM SERVING AS INFANTRY, those numbers might be more equitable.
Men only make up the majority of rape victims if you count prison rape which is a silly thing to do because single sex environments aren’t exactly representative of the population at large. That is of course leaving aside the fact that those prison rapes are still committed by…guess who? Men.
Ugh. My sympathies, Inaji. I was just coming on here to gleefully say the sap is running here. It doesn’t look like spring and we can expect some more snow, but it’s starting finally.
@Nerd
Well Sudan seems to be oh no wait…
Thumper
I suspect they’d be almost impossible to distinguish from those of Torwolf and Ed Barbar.
@Dallillama
Ah, do we suspect a sockpuppet? PZ can check IP addresses and stuff can’t he?
A better analogy would be you living in the shop, using its facilities and leaving your garbage and waste strewn about the place (but maybe not taking all of the shop’s “merchandise” or fucking up every conceivable thing in the shop as you go about living your life in the shop). Then you expect everyone else to just put up with your shit and leech of the shop’s infrastructure at no cost to you.
But a society isn’t something you enter into simply for the purpose of buying an item, only until you go back out on your own to live as an isolated individual somewhere outside of a society and independent of anything in it. However, you can and should be able to leave that particular “shop” if you want. That choice is entirely up to you. In other words, you’re free to fuck off and go to some other country (or to use democracy, not “the free market,” to make the one you’re living in better and fairer). But you’ll only go to some other society where the same sort of rules apply, because there is no society which actually exists that can be like your libertarian fantasyland.
Please, one or two or three streams of bullshit is quite enough.
On the subject of prison sentences, I wonder it Pterryx is aware of numbers showing what percentage of female prisoners are in jail for crimes relating directly to domestic abuse, i.e. killing their abuser. I’m sure it’s impressive.
@ Tomas C #564:
No, that’s a stupid comparison. Because if you don’t want to receive the benefits of living in our society – and government services are one type of those, but not the only one – you certainly don’t have to. You can leave.
If you go out into some untamed wilderness, and live by yourself without depending on anything the public has made, and I will accept that you don’t owe the public any bill for what it does for you. Or there’s a reason people keep telling libertarians to move to Somalia; there you can live without enjoying too many of the benefits that we would be charging you for.
But if you do want to stay in a society that keeps you relatively comfortable – with available food, shelter, protection from violence and so on – I’m not going to feel bad that it insists you pay your share of the upkeep. That’s not stealing. You enjoying the privelege of living in such a place without paying the required contribution is stealing.
I wonder how many companies are competing for Tomas’ valuable labor. Or if he, like the rest of us, is endlessly competing with the rest of the labor pool for the crumbs that fall from the Free Market table.
Thumper #585
No, no, just theology. The liberturds don’t really show any more variation in their ‘arguments’ than the godbots, so when you’ve heard one you’ve heard them all.
Late to the party:
I was a non-believer til 12, when I became an Evangelical Christian (see: Calvary Chapel of Philadelphia.) I quickly became a conservative libertarian and kind of an asshole up until I was 20 or so. I continued to go to church after college, but it just felt wrong – and very mean – so I waffled about with a kind of theism until 24ish, when I dropped into a pantheism and found the various skeptical sites around here. I changed my tune to be a liberal. At 25 I officially said – yea, I’m atheist. Took me a few months more to stop being an asshole.
Seven of Mine:
Well this source says that 17.7 million women were raped in their lifetime, compared to 2.8 million men. According to wikipedia, the entire male prison population is roughly 2.2 million, and the percent of those men who have been raped is 20% (!). But that still totals 450,000, nowhere near enough to bridge the gap between women raped and men raped.
@Rey Fox #587
You’re right, I shouldn’t encourage him.
@Dalillama #591
Ah, I see. Yeah, that was partly my point; I’m willing to bet money that I could predict his “views” (read: entirely parroted and completely unoriginal opinion) on the subject fairly accurately. But you never know, he might surprise us…
@antepropo
The capital punishment thing is relevant because many feminists are fighting for lighter prison sentences and in some cases no prison at all for criminal women.
as for teh rape victims thing , there are too many links to studies to post here , but if you look at the link and go ctrl +F “rape victims”, you’ll see all the links and the studies on female-male and male-male rape and reporting rates.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha oh wow
Which once again raises the question of worship in my mind. I really wish that those who so want me to worship their pet deity would more clearly define what that is, ’cause I just don’t have a frame of reference. I mean, it sounds like a stupid and undignified waste of time, but maybe that’s just my narrow selfish atheistic perspective talking.
And a ridiculous thing for a supposedly grown-up deity to demand of his subjects, but…
Let me guess, male rape victims are unlikely to report because of the severe social stigma against losing one’s “masculinity” in such a way? Here’s a clue for you: getting rid of toxic masculinity is very much a feminist ideal.
And the Gish Gallop is on…
Seven of Mine
Well it doesn’t really answer the question, but it gives you a picture
In the UK:
And as we all know, feminists are monolith, so feminism fails.
Jesus Christ, I feel more stupid just reading this shit.
@Vaiyt #596
I too laughed. Like I said earlier, anyone who thinks that laissez-faire capitalism will fix all of the worlds ills simply wasn’t paying attention during history class.
It’s patently clear that Tomas hasn’t read word one of the many detailed and clear explications of the numerous problems with gLibertarianism that very knowledgeable people (Don’t worry, I’m not including myself!) have given him over and over again.
The icing on the cake though, is: “I don’t know much about company towns. I’ll see what I can find out.” After the helpful link with a long quotation that somebody* left for him a page or three ago—well, I at least am done with him. Bring back the god-wallopers—they were more fun to play with.
*My sincere apologies, but this site takes so long to load (especially a 500-comment page like that one would be), that I can’t bring myself to try to find who that was. I’m really sorry.
@ Tomas C #564:
And actually, now that I think about it…
I shouldn’t have even put this in here. The fact that it is stealing to take food from a restaurant without paying doesn’t depend on there being some other place they you could eat for free. It depends on you receiving benefit from them, and the society (which defines property in the first place) agreeing that means you owe it to them.
And now Tomas is using a Daily Mail affiliated tabloid as a citation. The hits keep coming.
In order for a true competitive market to exist, there must be equal opportunities, fair rules and vigilance against abuse. Those don’t enforce themselves.
What liberturds do is look at a lopsided sports match, and propose that removing the umpires will make the game more fair!
And now from mises.org to MRA crap. Maybe he’s just fixated on the letter “M”?
@567:
The problem with the restaurant analogy is is that the restaurant owner is the rightful owner of the property.
I came to you property and set up rules for you to follow and wanted to collect a tribute , you would rightly ignore me because that was your property you purchased or homesteaded and I had no right to collect funds from you. If you wanted me to follow rules while on yoru property you have a point.
You would have to prove the state is the rightful owner of the land.
@593 anteprepro
I could be wrong about that statement…I don’t have a source…just remember seeing it said around here somewhere. But still, you’re trying to compare prison population at a given moment to rapes over the course of a lifetime. That doesn’t track.
@Tomas C…………….A UK Govt report from 7 years ago = feminists are advocating for no prison at all for women. Right.
Any time now, I’m expecting “if we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”
Wake me when it gets to Nazis.
Actually, don’t. Wait until zebras. I like zebras, but I think I can handle him getting all sorts of shit wrong about them.
Propertarians.
Pure gibberish liberturdian sloganeering. Either respond properly, with legitimante sources outside of yourself, or shut the fuck up as you have nothing to add but more inane slogans and non-sequitur analogies. Which shows to the world the lack of intellectual rigor in liberturdistan…
@Thumper
The point GOTH was making in his post was pointing out many instances of thinsg feminists advocated that hurt men. Maybe you identify as feminist , but you support equal legal rights and protection, equal custody rights , equal prison sentencing,…etc . That’s fine. That doesn’t negate the fact that there are many feminists advocating these policies that hurt men.
A $20 donation to the National Abortion Access Bowl-A-Thon says you can’t name one.
Do you have some problem with participating in the democratic process, to make a government that most closely represents your own interests and respects everyone else’s?
Is it because libertarianism is such an enormous failure in democratic systems, so you can’t do anything but whine incoherently?
Maybe Wal-mart should claim it all instead. Teach the controversy!
@ Tomas C #609:
See, you don’t have the slightest idea where property comes from. It exists by public agreement. Everything in a society has no owner except to the extent that people agree it is owned by something; a democratic state represents that society.
They are the ones who deem that a restaurant owner owns some of what exists within a particular four walls; the food in the pantry, and the money in the register, but not other things, like the people inside – even if they are children he created – or the items customers carry in and out. They are the ones who deem he is entitled to ask for a bill, as well as when you don’t have to pay it, like if he made a secret $1000 surcharge on the napkins.
And in the exact same fashion that they have declared him owner of the restaurant, and owner of a certain amount of money for every meal he gives out, they have decreed that the public as represented by the state is owner of a certain amount of money for all the benefits of living in that society. It’s the same principle, and if you don’t like it, you can go eat and live somewhere else.
@Thomas: define “many”. How many, specially, (or what percentage) do you think “advocate these policies that hurt men”? How did you arrive at this estimate?
Seven of Nine: Let’s try to make the comparison apples to apples then.
Bureau of Justice says: 8,763 assaults in prisons reported in 2011.
U.S. Department of Justice says: 237,868 assaults per year.
Prison rape is not sufficient in quantity to turn men from 10% of rape victims into the majority of rape victims. Period.
Oh my god, you fucking dipshit.
You were making false statements. You said that everyone can participate. Now you recognize that you were wrong to say that. Is it really so hard to actually also acknowledge at the same time that you were wrong? Maybe… you know… apologize for lying, even if you were doing it inadvertently?
AND, the POINT: what is your free market going to do for those who can’t participate in it whether temporarily or permanently? What mechanism do you propose to prevent such people from starving or becoming malnourished or dying of preventable disease since they have no access to wealth to pay for food or treatments?
I retract my assertion that you seem like a rational person. Especially seeing the bullshit you posted about feminism.
@monad
I guess.
But usually we agree you own land when a)you homestead previously unowned land b) you buy it from the rightful owner
The state didn’t do either of these things , it just claims ownership of teh land by force , which gets back to the point about whther its legitamate to just claim things with force and threats.
Unevidenced assertion, dismissed without evidence. Typical of liberturds, who argue like godbots. We must accept their word for everything as absolute truth. To counter that, I don’t believe an unevidenced word they say.
Liberturds, stop your sloganeering and bigotry. It only makes you and your idiotology look bad.
@anteprepro
Fair enough. As I said it was just something I thought I saw. Either way Tomas is full of shit.
Tomas C 621
In that case, no white person in the United States or Canada can be said to legitimately own any land whatsoever.
Note: Just fyi, Seven of Mine, my 619 is just my attempt to reassure you that Tomas C and his MRA pal are ridiculously wrong, and I’m not actually arguing against you. Just in case I came off that way.
Example of liberturd fuckwitery:
The only force applied is your eviction due to non-payment of your taxes. And in not paying those taxes, your were applying force to the rest of society due to your selfishness and greed.
@SallyStrange
These people will likely be cared for by their loved ones and relatives, just like they were before big gov’t came in.
I feel you’re just having a knee jerk reaction. Just look at the link. Does make he make any reasonable points ? What do you think of the studies showing the wage gap doesn’t really exist when other factors are adjusted for?
Oh Dalillama, don’t be so naive! It doesn’t matter if there were people before us we occuppied the land we now Own. Because even though they were using the land, they didn’t Own it. They just lived on it, and didn’t think of it as Property! So how did the Europeans magically turn occupied land into this distinct thing known as Property, using this magical thing called Ownership? Why it was their gov….I mean….umm….their law…no..civil…oh crap. Well, they just did, alright!
Bullshit. We usually agree that when we live in a territory we are required to pay our fair share of the upkeep of said territory. If we don’t want to, we can move to a territory where there is no upkeep and thus no fees. Which particular set of fees we agree to pay depend on which territory we choose to live in. But by moving into that territory, or deciding to stay there, you implicitly agree to pay your share.
Unevidence assertion, dismissed as fuckwittery. Your word is questionable at all times without a link…
Tomas, quit being an idiotic, sycophantic fanboy. We all know that you are too mindless to make your own argument, but we aren’t going to watch youtube videos from your favorite libertarian so that we can import his arguments into the discussion for you, because you are too fucking lazy to express your own stolen ideas, to say nothing about being too lazy to read and learn.
Are you going to shut your ignorant, arrogant gob any time soon? Or are you still waiting for the opportunity to wrong on more topics?
The right that is conferred on the owner by…
I’ll give you three guesses here…
Any argument from liberturds with “force”, “coerce”, “violence” and derivatives thereof will be automatically dismissed as fuckwitted sloganeering.
Use reasonable arguments with reasonable words. And never, ever, consider yourself as “innocent” or “peaceful”. Only then, can a rational discussion follow.
@Thomas: even if we assume your totally counterfactual statement was true, what about people whose loved ones died?
@627 Tomas C
They all fail to consider what reasons there might be for the fact that so many of the higher paying fields are occupied mostly by men and why fields occupied mostly by women pay less beyond bullshit gender essentialist “women prefer those kinds of jobs” handwaving.
I think it’d be an interesting experiment to create a Libertopia MMO and see how players would deal with griefers. Or not deal with them.
Wow, you really are dense enough to gravitationally attract light.
What about the people who don’t have loved ones or relatives?
The market didn’t take care of them before.
NOW we’ve finally gotten to the part where Tomas is like, “Yeah, some people will starve to death and die of preventable and curable disease, but I’m okay with that.”
Go ahead Tomas. It won’t shock us, we’ve seen it before. It will probably help you to be more honest about who you are and what you support.
No, it doesn’t. I never said the state claims to own the land at all, that’s you trying to fit it into the broken understanding you have. The public as represented by the state defines what property is.
Without such an agreement, it’s no more or less natural to say you can buy and sell a homestead you found unoccupied than it is to say you can buy and sell the children you made, or the food you found on a momentarily unattended table. Property is a social agreement.
And in every single place that hasn’t been an utter failed society, part of that has been that you owe a certain portion of your money to keep things running. The same agreement that says you have a right to keep squatters from your home, to not have people take your things without saying, says that taxes were never yours to keep.
It’s that simple. Again, if you don’t like it, go find a society without such an agreement. By strange coincidence, they’re all disasters, but it’s not up to us to make sure you can stay someplace nice for free.
In the city where I live, we have a single option for broadband internet. They deny that it’s a monopoly, “there’s nothing stopping the other companies from coming in and providing internet for you,” they tell us, but it is a monopoly. The country I live in has more more ISPs than I can name, most of them are local companies, but there are a few nationwide providers. Not a single one of them can compete in my area. The local ISP is not supported by the city council, there are no government mandated charges that keep small businesses from starting up, but nobody, not even the national companies, is able to provide broadband to my city. Why is this? The local ISP owns all the telecom lines in the area, and the price the other companies would have to pay to provide internet to us makes it impossible for them to provide a competitive product and still make any profit. This is the free market at work, and this is not from what I’ve read, but what I’ve lived. I will grant you that a broadband monopoly is hardly the greatest horror that has ever befallen humanity, but it’s still a monopoly, and it’s still utterly unrelated to startup costs or government mandated barriers.
(It’s also worth noting that, where government regulations exist, they’re usually for things like making sure you’re not dumping toxic waste on people’s gardens. Inorite? Those monsters!)
Hi!
I haven’t read it yet, and I’m unlikely to do so until at least this evening, but I’ll comment on those that I have read previously.
Mostly, they only bother to critique a small portion of the claim being addressed. When the claim is that women are paid less than men in equal positions, they compare a man and a woman who have worked at similar companies for a similar time period, note the fact that, while the woman is paid less, she did time time off for maternity leave at some point in the past, therefore she’s paid less because of a choice she made to concentrate on family, and the point is considered made. They seem to make a point of never comparing the man with a woman who didn’t choose to concentrate on family – on an actually equal case.
I saw one “rebuttal” which dealt with an infographic image that claimed that women did 66% of all the world’s work while earning something like 10% of the world’s income (numbers may be incorrect, I don’t recall the exact figures). Personally, I don’t know how accurate that data is, but I do know that the rebuttal was bullshit. Firstly, it concentrated only on America, expecting that this would spread out perfectly well to the rest of the world. Secondly, rather than dealing with the entire nation’s income, it dealt with personal income only, which is not the claim. It may be more reasonable to focus on only personal income, but the original claim does not do that – it says, “the world’s income,” which may well be a problem with the claim, exaggerating the issue for effect rather than presenting a comparative claim of men’s to women’s wages. Thirdly, while he proudly asserted that he had disproven the claim of the wage gap, his data still showed a gap.
I’ll also point out that it’s incredibly easy to simply list 37 links. I used to be a moderator on an atheism page on facebook (flashin’ mah credentials!) and you wouldn’t believe the number of comments we got that were simply “go read all these pages!” and which were all Hovind level drivel. Maybe they’ll prove to be worthy links when I read them.
I picked one at random, just so I can respond to some extent to it… http://social.dol.gov/blog/myth-busting-the-pay-gap/ … yeah, he didn’t read it. Or, no, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt – he did read it, and is being honest and unbiased in his sourcing. Either way, though, it’s a blog, not actually an official document of the US dept of labour, even if the author does seem to have been thorough about sourcing – though I can’t speak to the validity of the sources.
His claims beneath the links are pretty standard.
“Men die more often in war” followed by a link showing that the majority of people who die in the majority male American armed forces are male, which is apparently a shock. Doesn’t bother listing the civilians killed in armed conflicts, though he does show that only a handful of women are on the Vietnam memorial wall, which tells us nothing without knowing how many women were serving in Vietnam, where they were stationed, and whether they were allowed in combat situations. It seems, though I’m not certain, that all the women listed are nurses, so it does seem to make sense that their numbers would be significantly lower as, even in warzones, hospitals are rarely directly on the front line, despite still being at threat.
“Men die at work” where his only source is a History Channel program, where he completely fails to consider the reasons why men die more often than women. (Hint: it ain’t lady like to work the mines, li’l missy!)
“Men die by murder or suicide more often” again, making no attempt to explain the causes.
And a new one to me – “Men are the overwhelming majority of rape victims” which he ‘proves’ by comparing estimated rapes to reported rapes.
“Men get screwed in divorce” supported by “it’s the woman who wants to get divorced!” The fuck? “Women receive custody in ~84% of custody cases” with no comment on how often men try for custody.
It’s fucking tedious. I’ll make sure to read it thoroughly this evening, including all links, but I have serious doubts about the value of it.
And seriously if you go to that blog post: 1st thing is the wage gap. 2nd things is combat deaths.
How fucking disengaged from reality do you have to be to think that men comprising the vast majority of combat deaths has fuck all to do with feminism? As if it’s women sitting around refusing to serve in the military because feminism.
Without government, what do you use for “money” to “purchase” “property”?
Oh yeah, and…
Fuck you too, you condescending jackass. You can see that your arguments don’t convince, so you’re trying to pretend it’s a problem with me, not your arguments. Stop making excuses, make better arguments.
No, I’m not going to look at your fucking link. If you’re representing it accurately, it’s full of immoral bullshit and outright lies. Why would I want to expose myself to MORE of that? Anyway, if you’re linking to someone to present evidence for an argument YOU made, I’ll click on that. But I’m not going to click on a link to read someone else’s ENTIRE argument. That shows me that you don’t care enough to actually present me with a convincing argument. Why should I indulge your intellectual laziness?
Do libertarians think objects contain “ownership particles” like vitalists think organisms contain a life force?
@Seven of mine
But shouldn’t the goal be that women get to freely choose their professions?
Are you saying that there are certain barriers to entry to women in certain professions?
If so why don’t the feminists talk about that instead of citing a wage gap as a talking pt. as if it proves wage discrimination?
Thumper, saying something like Indigenous Hawaiians or Indigenous Dakotans, etc., is fine, especially when you don’t know details. I live in North Dakota.
MM:
Oh, sap running! How wonderful. We had a good start on mud season the last couple of weeks, but April is always the danger time for massive storms. I hope this one doesn’t develop into something worse. We have to get into town tomorrow, so here’s hoping. (Had an appt. with our vet clinic today, but we got a call this morning that they had to close down today. 18 inches in Bismarck and counting.)
Athywren 639
I suppose one could argue that it is related to startup costs, in that no-one else is willing/able to pay to install a parallel network to compete, but leaving aside that no-one’s doing it, it would be a heinously inefficient way to provide internet service.
Tomas C
I’m still waiting, Tommy boy. Three things, that are real problems that really exist, were not solved by the market, but have been partially solved by government interference (and could be more thoroughly solved by more of it). Make your case.
@644 Tomas
What color is the sky on your planet? Feminists do talk about barriers to entry to certain fields. A lot. We also talk about how, the instant a field becomes female dominated for whatever reason, wages plummet. Stop listening to what MRA shitheads say feminism is about and start talking to actual feminists.
Tomas C.
Wait.
What?
Now you’re just trolling.
No shit, Sherlock. Why do you think people have been saying over and over to you in this thread that part of the reason for the wage gap is that women have less access to high-paying professions?
In cases when men sue for custody, guess what? The split is fifty-fifty.
It must have been Ebil Feminists who convinced men that a man’s place is at the office, not at home with his children. Right Tomas?
Come on, I’m waiting. If you can’t name even a single position advocated by feminists that ends up hurting men then you owe $20 to the National Abortion Access Bowl-A-Thon.
@Athywren
Thanks!
It probably is a lot of material. So it probably wasn’t good to post it all. I didn’t mean to have a ‘wall-of-text” effect that it probably has.
I think the most compelling points were the one abotu the wage gap not existing and men’s jobs overall being more dangerous. Also the stuff at the end about how feminists fought for measures to protect female domestic abusers , protect female rapists , get female criminals special treatment in the prison system , take away custody rights from fathers , imprison fathers who could not afford child support, and take away money in the stimulus package from male dominated fields like construction that were hti hardest in the depression.
I think feminists do fight for female rights , which is a good thing , but sometimes the things they advocate harm men , which is a bad thing. What’s your view?
@Thomas: so who gets to determine what is and is not a “man’s job”?
And you still haven’t answered my question about how many feminists tried to do such things, or even other people’s request to name just one feminist who called for such things.
Yes fuckwit. The misogyny present in certain professions, like a lot of STEM professions. You are not very observant if you think we are in a post-feminist and post-prejudice society. There are those like liberturds, ready to reinstate Jim Crow laws using property rights as their excuse. Pitiful display of bigotry it is.
Where is your mother fucking citation for the harm? Claim dismissed as unevidnced fuckwittery.
Tomas C
YES, WE ARE, YOU COMPLETE IGNORANT SHITHEAD! In fact, the third part of the lengthy post (remember those three problems I keep mentioning) I put at 658 in the previous thread goes into what those barriers actually are. Try fucking reading it, understanding what the words say, and then, if you can, providing an actual example of how the market fixes it.
@SallyStrange
2 things I’ll start with
1)Feminists suppress evidence of female domestic violence on men
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V74-gender-symmetry-with-gramham-Kevan-Method%208-.pdf
http://i.imgur.com/aob5k.jpg
2)Feminists try to get women special treatment in the penal system
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/womens-prisons-should-all-close-within-a-decade-7240659.html\
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13666066
Nope, not real evidence Tomas C. Your conspiracy and misogyny roots are showing.
Think about why you call those jobs “men’s jobs”.
@Tomas C, 595
Do you have any evidence that Baroness Corston is a feminist? Or that she is many of them? And roughly how many of those women who would receive lighter sentences were previously likely to receive a death sentence? (Hint: There is no death sentence in the UK.)
@621
Actually the government took the land by treaty, force or deceit from the previous owners. Then it allowed its citizens to claim that land while retaining certain rights to it.
If you want to hire an army to go conquer some land for you, you can then choose to sell it to new landowners with no obligations. But that’s not what the US government did.
Am I the only one who thinks that Tomas C’s posting history here to date has earned a sad trombone?
*fingers crossed for formatting*
Actually, libertarians provide the best argument against libertarianism. They’ve always struck me as the sort of people who would run out on a bar tab if they could figure out how to do it.
@vaiyt
That was a misspeak on my part. I meant male-dominated jobs.
If a woman is a contruction worker , more power to her and she should get equal pay to the men who do equaivalent work.
Tomas C, you have officially sunk to a new low.
Do you truly fucking think feminists AREN’T talking about barriers to entry? Or are you projecting your pathetic one-track mind which can only maintain one idea at a time within it, on to them?
BOTH are fucking important, BOTH are fucking real, and BOTH prove discrimination.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
You’ve never actually read a single word of … of anything outside your fantasyland “economics”, have you? Much less read a single word of anything any ordinary run-of-the-mill feminist has said about anything ever.
In words of one syllable:
a) Yes.
b) We do.
Sheesh. Now my brain hurts from facepalm-headdesking.
@SallyStrange
I don’t know what will happen to those popel. There are charities that can help them. Mutual Aid societies, private insurance. I don’t think they’ll starve.
Are you really convinced the only way to help them is to give them , say a disability check from teh government?
@ Athywren, 566
Now that I think of it in English … yeah, I can see that.
I was thinking in my native Dutch where “Indiaan” (as in the indiginous tribes in the Americans) is different from “Indiër” (person living in India) so I just didn’t think of the alternate meaning of “Indian”.
@666 Tomas C
Oh, well, if you don’t think they’ll starve I guess we can all just go home! *toddles off to gather up everyone’s coats*
Go away until you know enough to actually answer questions rather than make vague statements of what you think will happen. You are beyond ignorant but so very sure of your position. Charity has been tried, charity was the predominant method used in the past, and guess what, it failed miserably. It does not work and people do indeed starve, they don’t get the medical care they need. Their needs are not met.
He lives in a bubble…
Inspite of those in the past, people starved. Which is why you need to read history from the perspective of the working class. There is a reason governments took over the dole, etc. Private charities weren’t up to the task. Learn something other than liberturd slogans if you want to make your arguments better. And at the moment, they stink of stupidity and lack of empathy.
If feminists were actually advocating suppressing this evidence, then you’d have a point. However, this link is not evidence of feminists supporting the suppression of data about research on domestic violence by women against men. It is evidence that Murray Straus says that they are doing that. However, he doesn’t back up his assertions either–he just ends up with a failed critique of the methodologies on domestic violence. See: http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2008/02/08/faq-but-doesnt-evidence-show-that-women-are-just-as-likely-to-batter-their-partners-as-men/ for a detailed discussion of those studies and methodologies.
I see no evidence that Baroness Corston is a feminist (excepting inasmuch as any person who thinks women should be able to vote and own property is a feminist). It seems to me that she is proposing a sex-specific solution to a sex-specific problem. If you would like to argue that non-violent men who are victims of domestic abuse who end up in prison should also be able to live in halfway houses instead of jail, you’ll get no argument from me. But I’m not seeing anywhere here that such a measure would be forbidden.
Anyway, you’re probably just trolling for reactions now. Why else would you start bashing feminism out of the blue? It’s a Gish Gallop of assholery.
Unless they are receiving compensation from their old company for injuries on the job, yes. The Redhead’s disability wasn’t job related. She also didn’t work enough to qualify for social security disability. Fortunately, I make a decent wage. But there are also other things that can help caregivers, like paying for someone to be there once a month for a few hours so that the caregivers can relax a little, and get personal things like haircuts taken care of. It wouldn’t cost that much if funded by the public, and it would mean a lot to those of us with the task.
But you don’t give a fuck whether your thoughts reflect reality. Don’t forget to mention that part.
The only way a society can guarantee they get help is with government assistance. That is what societies can do for themselves: they can agree upon laws and taxes which will provide for everyone. If someone doesn’t want to “freely donate” to assist a person in some way, because they’re greedy, or because they hate black people or Hispanic people or women or short people or atheists or the religious, or because they’ve never personally interacted with that person so they don’t even know about the problem they ought to be fixing, none of that matters.
Are you really convinced that not doing a fucking thing (expecting the free market to do everything) is the only way to help people? I’m not sure that you are. I’m pretty sure you haven’t thought about it at all.
It should bother you that your preferred economic system has NOTHING to say about what will happen to orphans, ill or disabled people whose families are already tapped out from dealing with some other family catastrophe, and elderly people who have no children to take care of them. “I don’t know what will happen to them” without a line of questioning about what actually will happen to them clearly shows you don’t really care what happens to them, which is pretty monstrous on your part.
The last time we tried this, people did starve, die, grow up stunted from malnutrition, catch and die from preventable and curable diseases. On what evidence do you assert that it will be different the next time around? Your vague, hand-waved personal opinion–“I don’t think they’ll starve”–is not enough.
I’m convinced that it is a better way to help them than anything YOU are proposing.
You are pathetic.
As has already been told to you over and over again, these HAVE ALREADY BEEN TRIED.
They FAILED.
Governments were asked to step in BECAUSE THESE PRIVATE MECHANISMS FAILED.
The verdict of history is IN. And PEOPLE REALLY DID STARVE.
You “don’t think”? That is your problem.
Yes. Because we have HISTORICAL EVIDENCE that it is the ONLY WAY that has been tried so far THAT WORKS.
I am pretty sure Tomas hasn’t thought about this much at all, but they have particularly ignored anything that they do not view has helping themselves. A callous and selfish person. Then again, I also think that Tomas is largely making this up as they go because the depth of their knowledge is so low. Endless questions they have never really considered so they have to scamper off to the school of Google to quickly find a link that might be used as evidence, explaining why they have been so poor quality and misrepresented.
This is also a problem. Why does it always come down to throwing money at someone? Money is but one way to help support people. Services, programs, and other aid also help those in need. There are plenty of other options rather than directly throwing money at people.
I find it so annoying when people who’ve obviously spent less than 5 minutes thinking about a position decide to argue passionately on the subject.
@Tomas C, 644
¬_¬
The real question is why atheists don’t talk about prejudice they face in theistic nations, rather than citing the lack of evidence of god as a talking point as if that proves the illegitimacy of theism?
Because people can only talk about one thing, and if you’ve made no attempt to check whether someone is talking about something else? Then they aren’t.
Fucking seriously.
@Dalillama, 646
Hmm… true, and I suppose the dreaded government regulations do come into play there.
“What do you mean I can’t run this cable through Mr Eldritch’s bathroom?!”
@Tomas C, 651
My view is that you didn’t bother to read my comment. Nor did you bother to read the link that you posted in any detail. Nor did the author of the linked post read his links before sharing them. I picked one of his links proving that the wage gap doesn’t exist at random. It argued that the wage gap does exist. Now, I’m not going to pretend that this means that the other 36 also fail to say what he thinks they say, but if I pick a link at random out of 37, I have a hard time believing that it’s the only example of a source that disagrees with the desired result.
My view of feminism is that it’s a necessity for a just and rational world. My view of feminists is that they’re human, which means that some of them are irrational or prejudiced, which means that some feminists do advocate for harmful things. My view is that the same is true of atheists, scientists, and tennis players. My view of these small number of irrational feminists are soundly criticised by most other feminists, as MRAs would be well aware if it actually mattered enough to them that they’d pay attention.
My view is also that it’s “fight for women’s rights” and “things they advocate harm men” or “fight for female rights” and “things they advocate harm males.” Maybe that seems innocuous to you, but it’s… questionable.
My view is that, in the two years since stumbling across “Men’s Rights” Activists, I have never heard an anti-feminist argument that stood up to the most cursory scrutiny, never seen a quote that wasn’t obviously mined, nor an accusation that wasn’t misleading. My view is that it is revolting that the dishonest, wilfully irrational, and usually ignorant people who parrot these arguments claim to be activists for my rights, using me to justify piling hatred upon people whose only crime is to fail to be male and wish to be treated with the basic respect that any man expects. It disgusts me that they claim to be my defenders when any defence I need is unrelated to my gender.
My view is that, if MRAs gave a single, solitary fuck about men dying in dangerous jobs they would support unions. That if they cared about male rape victims, they would support, instead of reviling campaigns to spread awareness of the importance of consent. My view is that MRAs are nothing more than anti-feminists, grasping for rationalisations to support their unsupportable ideas.
My view is that they do not, never have, and never will speak for me.
My view is that this is not a topic to spread lies and misinformation about.
I’d far rather spend my time setting fire to my own tongue that listening to more of this nonsense, and yet it matters. Why the hell is it that people throw rationality out of the window as soon as they embrace this shit?
Indeed, it is so frustrating. I think it is clear that is what is happening here. It is likely the reason Tomas does not argue their own points, but prefers to simply link to someone else. People that know their material are able to argue for themselves and use other sources to back up their claims, not simply toss links at everyone.
Heh. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that all libertarians are annoying….
@Tomas C, 666
“Are there no prisons? No workhouses?!”
@Alex the Pretty Good, 667
Nonsense! There’s only one language in the world!
… *cough*
Well that’ll teach me to never again think I’m free of British arrogance. :P
*hides head under a pillow*
Can you stop parroting the same points again and actually address a rebuttal, fuckwit? There are problems with mutial aid and charity that were addressed before. Both fail to reach out in accordance to what people really need and turn scarce precisely when people need them the most. Charity is worse because it depends on the whims of the donors.
As for private insurance, it’s shown again and again that the most effective business plan for private insurers is to DENY service when people need it. And well, when you’ve got cancer or pneumonia or chronic migraines, waiting for a lawsuit so you can get the treatment you’ve been paying for can be fatal.
Apropos of nothing: Ben Radford’s legal defense fund: http://www.rockethub.com/projects/41435-ben-radford-legal-fund
*snicker*
vaiyt (#684)
Seriously, why isn’t this dumbshit banned yet? They clearly have zero interest in engaging honestly with things others say.
At least 8 days, raised $475. Well, that certainly is working out quite well. Quite impressive.
A. Noyd @ 686:
I have a feeling Tomas is just a 16- or 17-year-old kid who has recently decided to embrace contrarianism as a philosophy of life. He thinks he’ll fit in here because: “Hey, Atheism!”
I also suspect his English is not good enough to take in all these detailed rebuttals. He’ll sometimes recognize a keyword and activate “canned response #3” he’s got ready for that.
In any case, I’m through with him.
I said I would, so I’m reading through the links from GOTH until I reach the end of the page or my tether, whichever comes first. Here are my opinions of the first three.
Wage gap links
1) http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/04/16/its-time-that-we-end-the-equal-pay-myth/
One valid criticism – some measures of the wage gap don’t make an apples/apples comparison, instead simply noting the difference between median pay. Fair point.
Never bothers to make an apples/apples comparison to support the claim that there is no real wage gap.
Says women simply choose family over career, and lower paid jobs that are more comfortable, giving no thought to the effects of being raised in a society that teaches girls that women just aren’t meant for men’s jobs.
Opinion piece. No citations. No supporting evidence. No value as an evidential source.
2) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704415104576250672504707048.html
Same content as 1, same author as 1, some lack of citations or support as 1. Same value as 1.
3) http://money.howstuffworks.com/gender-gap.htm
Agrees that the wage gap exists, only that it’s not simply a result of sexism – racial and class issues are also involved. People in male dominated sectors earn more than those in female dominated sectors. Men in female dominated sectors earn more than the women in those sectors. Women in female dominated sectors earn 25.9% less than women in male dominated sectors, while men in female dominated sectors earn 12.5% less than women in male dominated sectors.
Recognises social pressures; notes that scientific sectors are making efforts to close the gap with some degree of success.
Recognises that men work more overtime, but that a percentage of women work the same number of hours.
Notes that parenthood does impact women’s wages negatively, without showing an obvious effect on men’s wages, but also claims that deferred parenthood and higher educated nullifies this effect, suggesting that there may be causes other than simply time spent parenting rather than at work. Sources and citations galore.
Links read: 3
Links proving that the wage gap doesn’t exist: 0
Links supporting the existence of the wage gap: 1
It’s clearly too early to say, but it’s not looking good for the MRA case so far.
Just got Terry Pratchett’s latest, Raising Steam. It shall be a good reading night.
@Inaji
…trade?
Athywren, just downloaded the e-book, can’t get a paper copy when we go into town tomorrow, it’s a vet run, so have to be quick.
I got my copy from the library last week. Great fun.
4) http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-08-13/don-t-blame-discrimination-for-gender-wage-gap
Recognises that, despite claiming that the wage gap is an exaggerated “staple of feminist rhetoric,” it does exist. Gives a 5-7% difference, after other factors are accounted for. A few sources, but only one study and a couple of cited reports. Seems like decent, if slim evidential value.
5) http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidgreen/9666597/The_gender_pay_gap_does_not_exist/
Opinion piece, no sources or citations, no evidence, no value.
6) http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf
Report cited in 4, making the 5-7% claim.
7) http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gender-pay-gap-is-a-complete-myth/
Essentially, “there is no wage gap – women just choose lower paid jobs.” Cites link 2 as evidence. Cites 6 to support the idea that women simply choose lower paid jobs, ignoring the 5-7% gap claimed. Cites an unsourced article that states that college educated women earn more than blue collar men in order to claim “unmarried women who’ve never had a child actually earn more than unmarried men” (emphasis theirs).
Garbage.
8) http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-gender-wage-gap-is-a-myth-2012-07-26?pagenumber=2
Two sources. One showing that some scientific employers try to remedy the gender imbalance, one listing a handful of apparently equitable businesses. Nothing defending the idea that “the wage gap is a myth,” despite the title asserting it.
9) http://www.businessinsider.com/actually-the-gender-pay-gap-is-just-a-myth-2011-3?op=1
7. Verbatim… more pictures.
Fucking hell, this is tedious.
Tomas C. @ 545
(Because nobody’s mentioned this bit yet.)
This only happens if there’s a significantly higher demand for labour than there is supply.
Guess what? Labour has been in surplus of demand for a long time. Centuries, even. The last time labour was strongly in demand was after the Black Death. As it is, _labourers_ are in competition for _jobs_, not the other way around, and this pushes down the value of labour.
10) http://oratorasaurus.tumblr.com/post/41131660349/the-so-called-pay-gap
Are.
You.
Fucking.
Kidding.
Me?
I don’t know how many of you have ever played a board game called Hero Quest… but there’s a quest included with the original game where, upon walking through a door, you would roll a die to find out where you came out. Sometimes that meant leaving a room through one door, only to enter it through a door on the other side, seeing your own back leaving through the door across the room.
THIS IS THAT QUEST. THIS IS THAT EVENT.
It’s a fucking collection of links. Each of which correspond to the links in GOTH’s post. Oh, that’s not true – it has one to the men’s rights reddit that GOTH didn’t include as far as I can tell.
Fucking hell.
Tether. End. Reached.
I’m off to shoot some Kerbals into space.
Fucking hell.
How does this pass as rational at all?
Fucking, the fuck, hell.
Fuck.
Just to clarify when I’ve heard the 73 cents per dollar claim, it was claimed that the gap was directly due to employer discrimination. I kind of accepted it as gospel and did not check it out. When I saw those links that pointed out the gaps were largely due to more sociological factors and women’s choices to what jobs they will take , its different from how the claim was presented as when I heard it.
Looking for stuff where they were able to control all the sociological factors the found there was little to no gap.
here
If you want to say as someone suggested that there are barriers for women entering certain fields , that’s a fair point.
@Athyren
You don’t have to go through the whole list of links. If you can cite some studies as positive evidence of a wage gap, (that controls for factors like continuous time spent working , time taken off the job,marital status , different fields of work and experience level and finds a statistically significant gap ) that would be great. if it concludes this gap is directly due to employer discrimination , even better. Thanks.
@SallyStrange
I saw teh post on GOTH’s blog and it seemed like strong counter to some of the popular feminist talking points I’ve heard in the media. I wanted to see what people here thought of it and how they would respond. i’m not trying to be an asshole , and I’m strongly in favor of equal rights.
Inaji, I hadn’t even heard of _Raising_Steam_. I will look for it after I finish _Dodger_.
@697 Tomas
Your link = blah blah men choose higher paying jobs, women choose to stay home and have baybeez. Also, if you succumb to the call of selection bias you can find narrow slivers of the population in which women out-earn men in the same demographic.
Also, read the analysis Athyren did that you couldn’t be bothered to do that shows that a number of your links that you consider such strong counters don’t even argue for the position GOTH claims they do while most of the rest are unsourced opinion pieces.
Snoof @695
Actually the last time labor was strongly in demand in the First World was during World War II when large numbers of people (mainly men) were in the military and governments were buying large amounts of pretty much everything.
The thing that most angers me about libertarians is their insistence they have the right to squat in my country, sucking up public goods and services, and not pay for those goods and services. They whine about “coercion” and “initiation of force” and “men with guns” but what they basically want is everything they can get without paying for it. The concept of the social contract is anathema to libertarians, who are all rugged individualists.
The libertarian motto: “I got mine, fuck you!”
But I didn’t ask for those services! :(
Why no, I wouldn’t consider not using them. Why do you ask? *innocent confusion*
Is Tomas happy to let the US military step aside and let foreign powers come take his land like his land was originally taken from its original inhabitants?
Stone me, can you really not see the statistical problem here? What sort of women, once you’re talking about age 30 or more, are most likely to be unmarried and childless? (BTW, note that the “who’ve never had a child” qualification is not applied to men according to you.) Nuns, well yes, I suppose so. Lesbians, yes, a good point, at least until recently. But surely women dedicated to their careers and highly successful in them are likely to be considerably over-represented – a tendency which will be so to a much lesser extent for men. By and large, a man can both have an extremely demanding and high-paid career and a family, far more easily than a woman can. Hence, Marty Nemko is not comparing equivalent sub-populations and his statistics should be discarded as the ideologically-motivated crap they are.
Tomas C.:
I’m assuming this has already be covered (go away for a day, and everything spins all widdershins on you), but:
Are you fucking kidding me? Do you think the only barrier to entry is the government? Dude, I used Microsoft as an example for a reason. They were singularly placed (by IBM, who had market dominance at the time) to place their own barriers to entry. And that’s what they did.
Hell, Standard Oil placed literal barriers to entry, by buying up railroads, and not allowing other oil companies to cross the tracks. That is, at railroad crossings, other oil companies would have to haul barrels one by one, by hand, across the tracks, from one cart to another.
Are you really that naive, that you can’t look at the actual historical corporate control, and imagine it’s only the government that’s at fault?
and to those of you who asked about evidence for societoies suing a free market
See Hong Kong and how prosperous and free they were
http://archive.mises.org/4988/the-free-market-in-hong-kong/
Memyambal #698
It’s the latest Discworld book, third starring Moist von Lipwig, the prior two being Going Postal and Making Money. I strongly recommend reading at least those two if you haven’t, and also familiarizing yourself w/the Discworld series if you’re not. I can recommend a course of familiarization if you want :)
Tomas C
Are you ever going to actually address anything that anyone has said to you, you pathetic shitstain? Produce an argument, maybe? Some evidence? Anything other than the same dumbass slogans and links to idiotic videos? (A hint: I usually don’t even watch the videos PZ posts, in the actual blog, as the focus of a post. I’m definitely not going to watch a video linkspammed by a disingenuous jackass who wouldn’t know an argument if it bit them on the ass).
@Nick Gotts
The point is that if the gap was solely due to employer discrimination , we would see it in teh difference between unmarried men and women. (Are you claiming that unmarried men are less devoted to their careers than unmarried women?)
@Tomas C, 697
You think it’s immoral to tax people, right?
What are your thoughts on the morality of wasting a person’s time? Bear in mind that, as we are finite beings with only a few decades with which to work, time is far more valuable the money could ever be.
Firstly, your GOTH fella already provided some studies that show positive evidence. Whether this is incompetence on his part, or if it was the cynical assumption that nobody would check, I can’t say, but he did. If you had bothered to read what I wrote, you would see that.
Secondly, I’m using my kindle to write this. That’s awkward enough, without adding various tabs and collating searches.
Thirdly, I’m far too busy constructing a detachable heatshield to allow safe re-entry for the Mün lander I’m currently using, and then I have an interplanetary space station to design. Far more important.
If you want me to do anything for your benefit now, I expect to see proof – in advance – that is is Worth My Time.
I want to see pie charts.
Tomas C
MAKE AN ARGUMENT YOU PATHETIC FUCK!!!! TYPE IT OUT IN YOUR OWN WORDS RATHER THAN EXPECTING US TO WADE THROUGH WHATEVER BULLSHIT YOU”RE LINKING TO. BEFORE POSTING A LINK, SUMMARIZE THE CONTENT IN YOUR OWN WORDS AND EXPLAIN WHY YOU THINK IT IS RELEVANT. THEN BASE AN ARGUMENT ON IT.
Tomas C @708
But didn’t you tell us that reasonable employers would never discriminate? Or are you saying that most employers aren’t reasonable?
Jesus fuck.
“Why should we hire a woman/give her fair pay? She’s just going to get married and quit anyway.”
°~°
It isn’t solely due to any one thing.
Why the hell are you wasting our time?
@708 Tomas
Would you PLEASE for the love of Bob, beg, borrow or steal a clue from somewhere? First, your example was unmarried men, compared to unmarried CHILDLESS women. Right there, right on the surface, it’s not comparing apples to apples.
But it’s more than that because women are by and large raised to believe that a) marriage and family are the ultimate goal and b) that, if you have one, you must necessarily forego the other. The vast majority of women who make it to their 30s and beyond still unmarried and childless are so precisely because they’ve chosen career over those things with the result that women who fit that description are going to tend to be far more career driven than women who don’t. When you look at unmarried and childless women you’re also going to be looking at women who are far more career motivated than the general female population.
Men, on the other hand, don’t experience that pressure to marry and have kids. If they do marry and have kids, they don’t have to give up their career to do it. Which means a man being unmarried really doesn’t indicate much of anything about his motivation. Add to that the fact that your dude deliberately didn’t apply the criteria of being childless to men which indicates that it was required of the women he looked at specifically because narrowing their demographic produced a higher average wage.
The short version is that Nemko specifically rigged his sample to produce the result he wanted, i.e. it’s bullshit.
This should read something more like “if you get married and have children, you must necessarily forego a career.”
Tomas C:
Actually, unmarried men who are over 40 make far more than unmarried women who are over 40. So, by your own reckoning, that fact is due to discrimination.
Words: I can do dem I swear. What I meant here is that looking specifically at unmarried men doesn’t have the effect of filtering out lower earners that looking at unmarried, childless women does.
What Nemko did was rig his sample such that he filtered out the women who earn the least while not filtering low earning men out which resulted in an inflated average wage for women. In other words, bullshit.
Tomas, do you have any of your own opinions? And is a self serving opinion piece from the Mises Institute really convincing to you because it tosses a few numbers around? You might want to consider delving deeper into those numbers and understand that reality is more complicated than the simplistic picture they paint. Nearly 50% of the population of HK lives in highly subsidized public housing due to the relatively low wages they are paid. This has been going on since the 1950s (that other bastion of laissez-faire capitalism, Singapore has 85% of people living in subsidized housing). It also provides a large number of social services, health care, etc. While taxes are low and they only recently brought in a minimum wage, the administration has had their hand in plenty of things that make it possible for the economy to work. The only reason it has been able to get away with these policies has been because the state props people up and makes it possible. In addition, Hong Kong has only been able to have low taxes as it owns almost all of the land and is able to make up for the lack of taxes in land sales. Also, much like Japan and South Korea, Hong Kong has been involved in helping to shape its economy through quota systems and subsidies. In essence, it is sort of a veneer of laissez-faire capitalism propped up by land monopolies and subsidies to both business and people.
@Athyren
If we agree its not solely due to employer discrimination, we can stop there and say we agree. We can drop this.
@Al Dente
1)That does not contradict what I was saying. The gap was not solely due to employer discrimination. If employers really could pay women less for the same work , they’d fire most of the men and get female replacements. They’d save a lot on their wage bills
2)I said they had an incentive not to. that’s a straw man.
@Dalilama
I was more responding to people who asked for evidence that a a society based on libertarian/austrian economics principle would be successful. ( I remember Redhead did ask specifically)
A good example is Hong Kong
It clearly backs up my claims about teh laissez faire free market raising the standard of living for everyone
http://archive.mises.org/4988/the-free-market-in-hong-kong/
Like an article from AIG for a creobot, this is dimissed as liberturdian fuckwittery. Cite the real academic literature, or shut the fuck up idiologicalpath.
@719 Tomas
For fuck’s fucking sake…that assumes that there are enough qualified women in the given field. Women are strongly discouraged from pursuing careers in fields that are currently male dominated. Do you actually read anything or do you just scan for certain key words/phrases and then regurgitate a canned response?
And in case you are intested fuckwit, China funneled stuff through Hong Kong until they finally opened their borders. Idiotlogical propergander always ignores such minor (actually major) trivialities, and you are too stupid to read through that and get to the truth.
Tomas C, Travis @ 718 punctured your fantasy bubble about Hong Kong by pointing out that *DUN DUN DUN* THE GOVERNMENT *GASP SHOCK HORROR* provides a significant social safety net. From that alone Hong Kong cannot be held up as an example of Libertarianism working, as Libertarians like you will say that a completely free market is better and people “Probably won’t starve” to use your words. If people aren’t starving in Hong Kong and it’s because of a Social Safety Net then it isn’t Libertarianism by your own definition.
Speaking of which Tomas, have you managed to find anything on Company Towns like you said you would @555? Or did you give up because it presumably wasn’t on Mises so you might have to engage your own brain and instead of walking in lockstep with the Libertarian Establishment (incidentally a wonderful irony considering how independent Libertarians like to talk themselves up as being)? Of course I doubt you actually bothered to use the links provided for you, if you had you’d probably be saying “The Free Market would solve them/prevent them from happening because the Free Market is faultless and always better”.
As a tangent on Company Towns let’s ask a question no Libertarian has ever managed to answer satisfactorally: If Libertopia came about how would you pay for goods and services? What would be your legal currency? If you managed to shrink/destroy the US government would you use US Dollars still? I ask because with no central authority what would stop individual corporate fiefdoms from demanding all serfs who lived and worked in their businesses to use their own individual currencies. If there is no government to REGULATE *GASP SHOCK HORROR* currency than how do you stop a powerful company from decreeing a monopoly even on money to further cement their control?
@Avo
Is that non-married and childless women vs non-married and childless men?
@Seven of mine
I’m not sure what you’re arguing
We agree there’s a difference in average earnings between women and men.
(1)Are you saying these differences are primarily due to employer discrimination , where employers pay women less for the same work that a man who has equal experience , work hours..etc puts in? (2)Or are you saying they’re partially due to career choices women make where they decide to take time off/work less hours/work less overtime to care for children and forego a demanding career ?
From what I’m seeing Nemko is trying to filter out the effect of (2) , so he removes the kind of women (married women and women with children) who would make those kind of choices. As you point out , most men don’t think they need to forego a demanding career to have children.
You do realize that the idea of it being solely due to to employer discrimination csme from you and you alone, right? This is not me agreeing with you, it is me correcting your misrepresentation. We have not reached a consensus – you have been corrected.
If own-brand products really were just as good quality, they’d stop buying branded goods. They’d save a lot on their shopping bills! Because people never get false correlations between quality and price in their heads.
Also, that would be discriminatory hiring practice. Despite the tooth-gnashing wails of MRAs, men are protected by those laws too.
Libertarians that come here sure to seem to love using GDP per capita an awful lot. Tell me Tomas, do you understand why that values is rather problematic when discussing whether people are seeing the benefit of a growing GDP? You do realize that Hong Kong’s gini coefficient is 0.537, the highest in the developed world, right?
@Seven of mine
Your totally talking past me. I agree with what you said.
If women are being discouraged from pursuing certain careers (like say a garbage man , contruction worker or engineer) , then that’s an issue with our views of those jobs and we should push to try to make women realise these are viable fields .If they choose to go into these fields , great for them!
That’s not a violation of any non-discrimination laws or equal work for equal pay laws though and is not an instance of employer discrimination
Seriously, Tomas never heard of company towns? Do they not teach kids anything any more?
omnicrom @723
It was usual in company towns for employees to be paid in company script, redeemable only at the company store and suchlike businesses. An employee could buy dollars (or other national currency, company towns were not solely American) but at a high discount.
“You do realize that the idea of it being solely due to to employer discrimination came from you and you alone, right? ”
That actually comes from the liberal talking point the piece was addressing
For example , Obama in talking about it said that it was due to “simple and plain discrimination ”
https://mises.org/daily/6276/
I guess we’re actually in agreement.
…is today the first day you’ve heard of feminism, Tomas?
Did you really go through all this bother, waste so much of my time, just to say that feminist should stop doing what they do and do what they do instead?
@Travis
IDK
I don’t know much about GDP
That’s why I brought it up. If Libertopia were applied in the real world you’d see lots of company towns that paid in money only usable in those same company towns. Ironically this would basically gut the Free Market that Libertarians fawn over.
Nope, you cited the liberturd propergander site, and said we were in agreement. Only a stupid fool without cogency would attempt two such blantant lies in as many paragraphs. Nothing you say, or quote the mises.org for, is evidence….
In other words, employers have an incentive not to discriminate but do so anyway, probably because discriminatory practices have an even greater incentive. So you actually admit employers will screw over their employees because of the bottom line. Which is one of the objections us normal, rational people have against your ideology.
Libertarianism, just another synonym for selfishness.
Or economics. Or human behavior. Or feminism.
Then shut the fuck up about it, until you do. Try a year or two of study. Short of that, you don’t have a feel for it….
Tomas C. @732
It appears you don’t know much about anything, much less knowing about basic economics.
Tomas said:
Then stop talking, stop this right now, because you are incapable of understanding even the most basic discussion on this topic. Seriously, you are so ignorant of the topic you want to discuss that you are unaware of it. It boggles my mind that someone would even think they can strongly hold an opinion on this matter and not really know anything about this. It is clear you simply find articles that agree with you but you are unable to analyze them and critique them. Stop this foolishness now.
Then go the fuck away. What a fucking entitled little douchebag you are. “I dun know nething about nething but I really think u guys are rong about dis stuf.”
Tomas you are no different than the anti-vaxers that throw out links to papers they do not understand. You are every bit as sure of yourself, but just as ignorant of the very basics.
@travis
I do undertsand
I was only a recent convert to libertarianism. I was mostly talking about the basic morals and principles of libertarianism.
How can you be a convert (funny that you use that word, I guess it is a religion) if you don’t even understand the basics of economics? Or is it all about some beautiful principal, reality be dammed (you know, like a religion)? If you want to talk about real economic policies, and real problems you have to know the basics. To pick and convert to side without that knowledge is amazingly silly.
No, there are no morals to liberturdism. It is an amoral religion. The principles don’t work in the real world, as is shown by the lack of first world countries trying it out, as they did that 200-150 years ago with disastrous results. Which is everything we are telling you happens. Boom/bust cycles, company stores, no social safety net, monopolies, trust, and cartels, and all those things your theology doesn’t acknowledge happens. Read history, not liberturd propergander.
@Travis
I know the basics.
I was on youtube and saw some great videos by GeorgeOughtToHelp and TokenLibertarianGirl. I thought the principles of liberty and independence and questioning big gov’t were really cool. I’ve mostly been reading about the moral philosophy behind it , so I know less about the other aspects. That’s mostly what I tired to discuss here.
Like I said, it’s completely obvious that you haven’t thought this through in ANY depth whatsoever. You owe us an apology for pretending to be someone who actually cares about intellectual honesty, you dishonest dirtbag.
I say dishonest because if you were being honest with yourself and with us, it would be clear that your “conversion” (interesting choice of words) was a mistake.
I don’t suppose there’s any hope of “big government” being defined and measured, is there?
I never watch political speech or anything like that on youtube. Youtube is for cat videos and looking for Ren & Stimpy clips. Why? Because it’s much easier when reading something to stop and check on the claim a person is making, or to quickly peruse the article to determine whether citations are included, etc., etc. Makes it much less likely that I’ll be taken in by a con–which is exactly what libertarianism is. It’s a con by extremely rich people to get poor people to support staying poor and keeping the rich rich.
Its actual history bears this out–something you should have studied BEFORE converting, you fuckwit.
Why should idiologist just giving us their evidenceless views impress us in any way? We are an scientific, meaning evidence based, blog. The views of True Believers™ impress those here NOT. Just an any creobot/godbot giving testament, or linking to videos of people giving the same testament. Whereas, linking to the academic, or for creationism, the peer reviewed scientific literature, means something.
You don’t know the basics. Throughout all of this you have done more than simply state moral theory (a troubled one at that as many have shown), you have tried to demonstrate why it would actually result in superior results. But you clearly have too little knowledge to even begin to understand real economies and outcomes. No one cares that you thought it was cool, this affects real people.
Look on the bright side, Tomas. You will not have wasted much of your life believing these “basic morals and principles” apply in any straightforward way to the real world, hurting yourself and others as a result of this misunderstanding. You’ve seen many reasons why libertarianism doesn’t work and should be rejected, however good or reasonable it might have seemed at first glance. This is the lucid part of your libertarian dream, so now you can wake yourself up and learn about reality.
Youtube is great for casual viewing, I watch a lot of gaming videos and cat videos. I watch some documentaries, and hell, you can likely even find some real lectures on economics as well and actually learn something. But no, no, you found a few channels by some random people and latch onto them without really understanding anything. Go watch some lectures on economics, here is one from UC Berkley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7yC-5IDhKM
Not to defend Tomas here (srsly, I wouldn’t even try <_< ) but no, they really don't teach anything. I'd never heard of company towns until I saw some mention in a comment thread like this one a few years ago… and I might be *cough* looking them up right now. And that's after college and a postgrad science degree.
And I am not familiar with the online libertarian culture (far be it from me), but it strikes me that if you have any community in which someone labels herself, even jokingly, as the TokenWhateverGirl, then you got problems.
(Or TokenWhateverMinority)
The use of force in these conversations is IMO very disingenuous and weasely. They’re basically trying to do the old switcheroo using one definition while implying another. They want us to think force as in police batons and tanks but they use it as if they mean “leverage”. Of course they can’t use the term leverage because that would imply you know, everything.
Fuck by the way they use it money is a form of coercion through force. You have someone the other person wants or needs so you *force* them do something for you. Boy that sure doesn’t sound good when we put it that way!
So, Pharyngula old-timers, is this anything like Walton?
Do we have a Walton signal?
Do any libertarians really say they “converted? ^_-
I only made it through ten of the links that GOTH shared to ‘prove’ that the wage gap does not exist (which, by the way, is not the same as the wage gap existing and having more cause than employer discrimination) before I decided it wasn’t worth my time to continue.
Of those ten, zero evidentially supported his assertion, most didn’t even support their own assertions. Of those which agreed with his claim and provided sources, the sources contradicted the claim. Where the sources supported their own claims, those claims contradicted his assertion.
He may be able to talk the talk, but his walk, if that post was typical, is a little lacking. All he had to do was collect a few decent articles in support of his position, but he either failed, or doesn’t understand the idea of starting with your most convincing argument and hid his decent ones amongst crap and articles that disagree with him.
Tomas C:
This sentence sums up your support for libertarianism and the opinions you have on feminism.
Having just caught up here, I’m quite astonished at your continued “argument” by assertion, and your failure to do any proper research on either of the two subjects. You’re in way over your head talking about things you have insufficient knowledge of. Either acquire that knowledge or stop pontificating about these topics.
The same applies to caesar.
Chigau, oh gee, I don’t remember what Walton was really like back then. Sort of insufferable I think but it was so long ago I really do not know to what degree or if it was anything like this. I think he may have had a better knowledge base. Maybe someone else remembers more.
I’m not sure that one could get through and be reacted on these days….And I don’t recall Walton ever being dishonest. But then, I’m not SC who seems to remember anything anyone has ever said anywhere to anybody.
;)
Yeah, I’m kinda curious what stripe of economic theory Tomas “believed in” before he “converted”.
I think it’s more likely that he’s young and those libertarian videos were his first exposure to any economic thought. Messrs Dunning and Kruger did the rest – false narratives about conversion to appear more sophisticated, grand claims about moral philosophy without any real understanding or knowledge of the subject, wanting to discuss rather than learn.
Tomas:
Your reading comprehension suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.
Tomas can you perhaps understand our frustration? You’ve argued for days about a philosophy you yourself admit you have only a facile comprehension of. Every single person here who has written long, detailed critiques of Libertarianism has a far greater understanding of Libertarianism than you do. And appreciate that this broad understanding is exactly WHY we are morally and politically opposed to Libertarianism. The philosophy espoused by Libertarians is hurtful and damaging on a broad scale. Here’s yet another thing you should probably learn about: the Gilded Age. Do you really want to go back to those bad old days? Because that’s the vision of the world Libertarians offer.
Walton’s comments were never this content-free. He was actually doing some thinking of his own and at least trying to respond substantively to counter-arguments. There was some reason to believe that reality mattered to him and that people mattered to him. He was very passionate about this stuff, despite being very, very wrong — that’s the sort of thing that motivates a person to verify their own claims as well as rebuttals. No indication of that here. There’s very little thinking or feeling actually going on (as far as I can tell), so there’s very little thinking or feeling to improve upon. It’s like nailing jello to a wall. You can’t nail it down to anything specific, and you can’t do much else with it either. About the only thing you can do is eat the jello…..
@SallyStrange
I’m sorry I deceived you. I shouldn’t have acted like I knew more than I did.
@Rey Fox
She acdtually has a hilarious video about that (why there’s no women libertarians here). She’s actually pretty hilarious even if you don’t agree with her views. This takedown of Obama is here most popular vid.
The Walton himself would say he was insufferable and ignorant but I think he would at least have been somewhat better informed before spouting off. I just sent him a note about it, but he’s super busy and kinda stressed right now so I wouldn’t be surprised if he can’t find the time to pop in.
Tomas:
Initially, I wanted to respond with something witty, but all I can think of is libertarian morals??!! When did it become moral to be a selfish, amoral asshole?
Kid, I doubt it
yeah I imagine “hey come remind us how huge a jerk you were” isn’t going to be high on the priorities list :p
Ing #770 – Perhaps, but “you’re in a prime position to help someone who is similar to you in a lot of ways understand why the ideology they’ve recently adopted is harmful and immoral” would be pretty high up on it for him. As Consciousness Razor noted, he really sincerely cares a LOT about people. And animals.
This is a good start.
I should create some videos explaining how if Tomas gave me all his money things would be much better for him and the world at large.
About as funny as The 1/2 Hour News Hour I am sure. A laugh riot. You know, when I try to learn something, or sit in a lecture, some levity is nice but I really do not go for the jokes.
Was Walton a libertarian as well?
I tried to respond to your critiques as best as I could. I didn’t know abotu the gini coefficient , but I know about how teh free market operates and I saw a John Stossel feature on the economy of Hong Kong and how the free market helped it, which is why I cited it.
@Indgogo Jump
The point was really the leverage was because of force. If there wasn’t the threat of the policemen taking you away , you would probably ignore all the fines and be safe.
Well, hey, according to Ayn “I am why being an atheist proves nothing about your reasoning abilities or empathy” Rand, that’s the only way you can be moral!
Al Dente @ 700
Oh, of course. I’m not sure why I forgot that. Thanks for the reminder.
(If I was an arch-libertarian, I’d say it didn’t count because it was because of Government Action, and not the Free Market.)
Ingdigo Jump @ 755
I know Tomas C. hasn’t done it, but whenever I see libertarians talking about “non-initiation of force” (and thus the assumption that using force is perfectly OK if you don’t start it) I have the mental image of a gunslinger standoff. Everyone’s standing around waiting for someone else to make the first move so they can kill them and claim “self-defence”.
You folks always have such wonderfully witty and exhaustive take-downs of Libertarianism here. It’s hard for me to give a shit about my anti-theism these days when more immediately threatening delusions are running loose. I have to deal with a libertarian family member who I greatly love and who is, other than the libertarianism, a hugely respectable person. It really sucks, but these kinds of threads are very helpful in formulating and reinforcing the arguments I need to use for a later time. This is a service you should all be getting paid for.
That said, I’m sorry, but I had to start skimming when Tomas C(lueless) showed his troll colors with the anti-feminism shit. I’m really surprised that no one mentioned, in response to the “Hawking’s a handicaap who sells lots ‘a’ books!” argument for libertarianism, that Hawking has specifically credited the UK’s version of tax-funded universal healthcare as the main reason he’s alive today (and able to enjoy his book money).
I would also like to comment in solidarity with the other Calvary Chapel survivors in this thread. I was raised in that shitty doomsday cult and my parents are still enthralled.
Tomas C. @ 755
How is that any different from the threat of private security forces taking you away for violating a contract?
Come on, this has got to be a troll, no one would think this sounded sensible. If not trolling, gain some media literacy.
Either that or, like South Park’s hunter duo – *bunny* “IT’S COMING RIGHT FOR US!!”
Tomas C:
No. You really don’t.
Hint: it’s not magic.
Tomas C.:
Really? That’s where you’re going with this?
Ah. The naiveté of youth. You’re so cute when you’re that dumb.
the main moral difference is that you voluntarily and freely signed that contract
Seriously, John Stossel? You’ve got the internet at your fingertips and you decide to go with what John Stossel says?
When you have the choice of signing the contract or starving, you whip out your pen. That’s hardly voluntary.
Holy shit! The moon has gone missing!
…no need to look at your watches… none at all…
>>
<<
And you voluntarily and freely agreed to live in your nation.
(And if your choices are “Sign the contract” or “Starve”, did you really voluntarily and freely sign it?)
How is signing a contract voluntary, if say you are into debt to the company store just to keep food on the table. The market is coercive, not voluntary, unless you have the means to actually make and enforce your choices. Which is less than half the population. How do you expect that to get better when companies can take advantage of their economics to screw their workers and their families?
Why would they need a contract? If there’s no taxes, there’s no police so the private security force can arrest you for doing anything the company doesn’t want.
@Tony
The big thing is the principle of non-aggression
@Travis
The main famous libertarians I’ve watched were Penn Gilette and John Stossel. I think they’re very informative.
Tomas C:
So. Here’s something to think about.
Why would it be statistically significant if non-married women v. men had children at 40? Also, why should that matter vis-a-vis pay? I mean, at 40, statistically your children should be minor adults, right? So they should both face more-or-less the same non-40-hour work week problems, right? I mean, according to your (meaning, Libertarian) philosophy.
So. Would you mind fucking answering the problem? I notice you spend a lot of effort trying to draw in as many possible issues as you can, without actually answering the fucking issues. Why should unmarried women after 40 receive less pay than unmarried men after 40, if they are both able to provide the same work?
Seriously. Just answer the problem you’ve been given. For once.
The principle of non-aggression is a lie, pure and simple.
What they’re really saying is that some kinds of aggression are okay and some aren’t, it depends on the situation. Which is exactly what every other workable moral philosophy posits, but libertarianism lies and pretends to take aggression out of the picture entirely.
Tomas C.:
So, is it aggression when you work to have your pay increased at the detriment of others’ pay?
Seriously. Enquiring minds want to know.
And when you starve and can’t get medical care and can’t travel off of your own property (which you don’t even have, because no one can enforce your right to own that property), I bet you’ll be really happy that you were never forced by anyone to endure all of those shitty, shitty things.
Here’s your contract:
You get nothing. No one should have to do anything for you. Likewise, you shouldn’t have to do anything for anyone else. Because fuck everything and fuck everyone. The end.
Sign here: ____X____
Would you voluntarily sign that contract? And if so, what the fuck are you thinking?
Bwahahahahahahahahaha. Liberturds aggressively back what they see as their rights. Aggression, trademark of those espousing “free markets”, where THEY control what people think and do….
As I said, gain some media literacy. At this time it is clear you are unable evaluate just about anything. If those are the highlights Libertarianism has a problem. Stossel is utterly dishonest and a liar, and Penn Gilette has a huge blind spot when it comes to being critical of his own beliefs, one so big it has lead him to produce television shows he later has to appologise for.
Tomas C:
You’re aware that this blog is part of a network of blogs called FreethoughtBlogs, no? I ask bc I’m not certain you know what it means to be a freethinker, nor the importance of the values of freethought:
(my emphasis)
I really think you could benefit from using reason, logic, and evidence to analyze libertarian philosophy. You’ve latched onto this immoral, selfish ideology without much understanding of how it would impact people. Your blind support for libertarianism reminds me of the theistic godbots like John A, impact, and others of their ilk. That’s not a good thing. I really hope you decide to take a good, hard, honest look at libertarian beliefs and their real world impact. Despite your protestations, I do not believe libertarianism is the best interests of anyone who isn’t rich (and even then, it still isn’t).
Tomas:
Can you explain in your own words what the principle of non aggression is and why this is a moral principle?
Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I can’t stand internet talking heads. If you have something to say, write it down.
It’s going to seem like I’m picking nits here, and I pretty much am, but most of the time when people habitually use the word “teh”, it’s in a mocking manner. Like in LOLcats.
Tomas C:
Or more accurately, is it aggression when you earn your own very lucrative livelihood off the hard work of many others, when they receive less than a living wage?
Think about this carefully. This is the most important question of the night. And from what I can see, you’re doomed to answer it … unwisely.
So Tomas doesn’t know what GDP is, doesn’t know what a GINI coefficient, and yet we are supposed to believe that he is an authority on Free Markets and taxes? Riiiiiiiiiight.
Also: That TokenLibertarianVideo was funny like Rush Limbaugh is funny.
“Hey, if I just spout out right-wing dogma in a voice that sounds like I’m attempting humor, it counts as humor!”
NEW THREAD.
These have been filling up fast lately, haven’t they? I think we’re being invaded by libertarian Ferengi.
Avo:
I agree. I think it’s a shame too, bc Tomas appeared to have formed rational opinions about religion as seen upthread.