My beliefs summarized
       |           

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?
March 28, 2024, 09:13:56 AM
News: Election Simulator 2.0 Released. Senate/Gubernatorial maps, proportional electoral votes, and more - Read more

  Talk Elections
  General Politics
  Individual Politics (Moderator: The Dowager Mod)
  My beliefs summarized
« previous next »
Pages: [1]
Author Topic: My beliefs summarized  (Read 1432 times)
Richard
Richius
YaBB God
*****
Posts: 4,369


Political Matrix
E: 8.40, S: 2.80

Show only this user's posts in this thread
« on: October 01, 2005, 08:50:10 PM »

http://isil.org/resources/introduction.swf

Smiley
Logged
Gabu
Atlas Star
*****
Posts: 28,388
Canada


Political Matrix
E: -4.32, S: -6.52

Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #1 on: October 01, 2005, 08:52:08 PM »

Bono posted this before.  I said in that topic, which is still true, that I wasn't really able to watch the movie in a serious manner because I found that movie completely unintentionally hilarious due to its completely inappropriate use of clip art, such as the disembodied hands and the guy in a pimp suit representing "action".
Logged
Alcon
Atlas Superstar
*****
Posts: 30,867
United States


Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #2 on: October 01, 2005, 09:20:59 PM »

HANDS OFF MY CIRCLE
Logged
Max Power
Junior Chimp
*****
Posts: 6,182
Political Matrix
E: 1.84, S: -8.09

Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #3 on: October 01, 2005, 09:31:22 PM »

Hmm.... I like it!! Grin
Logged
??????????
StatesRights
Atlas Superstar
*****
Posts: 31,126
Political Matrix
E: 7.61, S: 0.00

Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #4 on: October 01, 2005, 11:43:14 PM »

This video describes a lot of what I believe in.
Logged
Alcon
Atlas Superstar
*****
Posts: 30,867
United States


Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #5 on: October 01, 2005, 11:45:47 PM »

This video describes a lot of what I believe in.

Except the not intervening with social policy part?
Logged
??????????
StatesRights
Atlas Superstar
*****
Posts: 31,126
Political Matrix
E: 7.61, S: 0.00

Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #6 on: October 01, 2005, 11:47:05 PM »

This video describes a lot of what I believe in.

Except the not intervening with social policy part?

The social policy I believe in intervening in is for the betterment of society as a whole.
Logged
Alcon
Atlas Superstar
*****
Posts: 30,867
United States


Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #7 on: October 01, 2005, 11:51:15 PM »

This video describes a lot of what I believe in.

Except the not intervening with social policy part?

The social policy I believe in intervening in is for the betterment of society as a whole.

Which is the same reason economic liberals believe what they do, for the most part.

Your social views are no more in tune with the video than liberals' economic views are.
Logged
© tweed
Miamiu1027
Atlas Superstar
*****
Posts: 36,563
United States


Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #8 on: October 02, 2005, 08:40:56 AM »

I like the flying hands across the screen.  I was so focused on them I didn't get the point of the video.  Maybe I should watch it again.
Logged
Richard
Richius
YaBB God
*****
Posts: 4,369


Political Matrix
E: 8.40, S: 2.80

Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #9 on: October 02, 2005, 10:30:53 AM »

I like the flying hands across the screen.  I was so focused on them I didn't get the point of the video.  Maybe I should watch it again.
No wonder you're a liberal if you're unable to get the message of such a simple animation.  What is your IQ?  85?
Logged
Schmitz in 1972
Liberty
Jr. Member
***
Posts: 1,317
United States


Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #10 on: October 02, 2005, 01:54:05 PM »

My favorite part was the sweet background music! Interesting points although  the idea that such theories will work on an international scale is outrageous. The entire assumption that the presentation operated on was that people will be ethical when left alone with their life, liberty, and property. This is just not so.i
Logged
Bono
Atlas Icon
*****
Posts: 11,699
United Kingdom


Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #11 on: October 02, 2005, 02:37:18 PM »

My favorite part was the sweet background music! Interesting points although  the idea that such theories will work on an international scale is outrageous. The entire assumption that the presentation operated on was that people will be ethical when left alone with their life, liberty, and property. This is just not so.i

I posted this before, but here it goes:

That's an example of the falacy of turtles all the way down that stem's from an anecdote Stephen Hawking used in A Brief History Of Time:

A well-known scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?”
“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down.”


Jacob Lyles shown how this falacy is commonly used in justifying government:

Thomas Hobbes believed that humans were naturally violent, nasty, and mean. Left in a state of nature, man will constantly try to bash his neighbor over the head and run off with his money. Under anarchy “might makes right” and the strong survive by plundering the possessions of the weak.

Hobbes thought that the only way to change this was to institute a government. If its armed men were stronger than everybody else, then the government could provide a safe environment, ensuring that its citizens could go about their business without fear of being killed or mugged.

But there was a fatal flaw in Hobbes’ reasoning. The government is also made up of men. Instead of ending theft and murder, the men in government become the most flagrant thieves and murderers. Since they are more powerful than everyone else, they exploit their position to conduct plunder on a vast scale.

The bloody history of the world’s governments shows this to be true. They have slaughtered at least half a billion people during the 20th century alone. Hundreds of millions have lost their lives in wars to expand the glory and power of their government. When not killing foreigners, governments have been busy at work killing their own subjects. To cement their power, communist regimes killed additional hundreds of millions of innocents through starvation, forced labor, and the execution of dissidents.
In the United States our leaders have been mercifully slow to kill their own citizens since 1865, but we are not left in peace. Our government has become the largest den of thieves in the history of the world. It serves as a conduit for corporate farmers, arms makers, steel makers, oil companies, trade unions, and others with political pull to siphon away our hard earned money to the tune of $3 trillion per year. The old steal from the young, the rich and poor steal from the middle class, and the politician steals from us all until theft becomes so commonplace as to go unnoticed.


Scott Scheule ave a more formal analysis of this fallacy as applied to government in his guide for policy makers::

[T]here are two proper requirements to be fulfilled before implementing a policy. I will state them first casually, then in more precise economic terms.

To justify a policy you must show:

   1. Something is wrong.
   2. There is a way to fix it.

Now, in economic terms. You must show:

   1. The private market is erring.
   2. The political marketplace will yield a result that fixes the corresponding private market error.

The second requirement is usually ignored. In fact, it was for a long period of time assumed that the government was a perfect actor with perfect information. These assumptions were wrong. Once this was realized, the field of public choice economics emerged, which discussed in detail why the political marketplace has its own errors. I believe the second requirement has never once been fulfilled in the history of mankind, and that is why I am an anarchist.

The readings we’ve been assigned have a sort of “gotcha” feeling to them. Empirical study comes out, shows that people significantly overvalue risk when it’s widely publicizied, and the statists cry, “Gotcha! The private sector erred, capitalism has failed here.” Requirement one, satisfied. Time for the government to fix the problem.

Ah, but what of number two?

Irrationality will arise just as surely in the political marketplace as the private one. Every datum offered for a failure of neoclassical assumptions applies just as easily to the political marketplace. Yet the latter extension is ignored. Government is presumed perfect; requirement two is glossed over.

Classic example. It is generally presumed that monopolies are bad. Many prescribe antitrust laws administered by the government to prevent the formation of monopolies in the marketplace; without realizing that the government itself is a monopoly, and one backed up by far more force than any software giant. The market was bad because it was monopolistic, and antitrust proponents assume that an even larger monopoly will be able to fix the initial ill.

Economics is not a game of “Gotcha.” It is the study of how people make choices. And how do they do that? A person picks the most preferable of his options.
So, with regards to the big picture, it is not enough to say the market is flawed. Everything is flawed. One must satisfy the second requirement; they must provide a less flawed alternative; we have the entire field of public choice to show why government is not such an alternative.


Unlike most other errors in economics, this is one that is all too frequently made by professional economists with fancy degrees and lots of letters after their names. Why? What explains this glaring blindspot? An unwillingness to part with tradition, both social and academic? An excessive faith in the regulatory power of democracy?

The best explanation for this failure is touched upon in the following two articles: “Do Pessimistic Assumptions About Human Behavior Justify Government?“, by Benjamin Powell and Christopher Coyne, and “Do We Really Ever Get Out Of Anarchy?“, by Alfred G. Cuzan. Many of us think of the government as “conceptually external,” exogenous to the overall social system.

The founder of public choice, James Buchanan, made this critical error when he wrote, in The Limits of Liberty:

The state emerges as the enforcing agency or institution, conceptually external to the contracting parties and charged with the single responsibility of enforcing agreed-on rights and claims along with contracts which involve voluntarily negotiated exchanges of such claims.

Yet, if public choice theory has taught us anything at all, it is that governments are composed of men – the very same breed of men who compose markets – and therefore governments must be conceptually internal, endogenous to the social system. Buchanan himself seemed to recognize this fact, observing that

There is no obvious and effective means through which the enforcing institution or agent can itself be constrained in its own behavior. Hence, as Hobbes so perceptively noted more than three centuries ago, individuals who contract for the services of enforcing institutions necessarily surrender their own independence.

Murray Rothbard, writing in For a New Liberty, described the system of checks and balances with which government is supposed to constrain itself:

As we have discovered in the past century, no constitution can interpret or enforce itself; it must be interpreted by men. And if the ultimate power to interpret a constitution is given to the government’s own Supreme Court, then the inevitable tendency is for the Court to continue to place its imprimatur on ever-broader powers for its own government. Furthermore, the highly touted ‘checks and balances’ and ‘separation of powers’ in the American government are flimsy indeed, since in the final analysis all of these divisions are part of the same government and are governed by the same set of rulers.

Very clever, these checks and balances, very clever. But it’s turtles all the way down.
Logged
Gabu
Atlas Star
*****
Posts: 28,388
Canada


Political Matrix
E: -4.32, S: -6.52

Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #12 on: October 02, 2005, 03:37:19 PM »


I'm curious if you actually have opinions of your own or if your entire belief system is just a bunch of articles stuck together. Tongue

You never responded to my post in another topic in which I made an argument that anarchy is ultimately unsustainable due to the nature of human beings.
Logged
Bono
Atlas Icon
*****
Posts: 11,699
United Kingdom


Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #13 on: October 02, 2005, 04:15:33 PM »


I'm curious if you actually have opinions of your own or if your entire belief system is just a bunch of articles stuck together. Tongue

You never responded to my post in another topic in which I made an argument that anarchy is ultimately unsustainable due to the nature of human beings.

I could hav wasted my time pharaphrasing them, but give me a good reason to?
And maybe I haven't sen it...
Logged
Alcon
Atlas Superstar
*****
Posts: 30,867
United States


Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #14 on: October 02, 2005, 04:19:49 PM »


I'm curious if you actually have opinions of your own or if your entire belief system is just a bunch of articles stuck together. Tongue

You never responded to my post in another topic in which I made an argument that anarchy is ultimately unsustainable due to the nature of human beings.

I could hav wasted my time pharaphrasing them, but give me a good reason to?
And maybe I haven't sen it...

Well, to be fair, most people do not base their belief system on articles, but rather their own thoughts, and are perfectly capable of summarising them in a more brief function.

I'm afraid almost all of the articles you post are verbose and seem to treat any disagreement with them as layman's syndrome.
Logged
Bono
Atlas Icon
*****
Posts: 11,699
United Kingdom


Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #15 on: October 02, 2005, 04:26:22 PM »


I'm curious if you actually have opinions of your own or if your entire belief system is just a bunch of articles stuck together. Tongue

You never responded to my post in another topic in which I made an argument that anarchy is ultimately unsustainable due to the nature of human beings.

I could hav wasted my time pharaphrasing them, but give me a good reason to?
And maybe I haven't sen it...

Well, to be fair, most people do not base their belief system on articles, but rather their own thoughts, and are perfectly capable of summarising them in a more brief function.

I'm afraid almost all of the articles you post are verbose and seem to treat any disagreement with them as layman's syndrome.

Err, I can perfectly summarize my belief system, but if I know someone who treats objections against it in a better way than I do, I think I'm only helping myself by using that way.
Logged
Alcon
Atlas Superstar
*****
Posts: 30,867
United States


Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #16 on: October 02, 2005, 04:27:47 PM »


I'm curious if you actually have opinions of your own or if your entire belief system is just a bunch of articles stuck together. Tongue

You never responded to my post in another topic in which I made an argument that anarchy is ultimately unsustainable due to the nature of human beings.

I could hav wasted my time pharaphrasing them, but give me a good reason to?
And maybe I haven't sen it...

Well, to be fair, most people do not base their belief system on articles, but rather their own thoughts, and are perfectly capable of summarising them in a more brief function.

I'm afraid almost all of the articles you post are verbose and seem to treat any disagreement with them as layman's syndrome.

Err, I can perfectly summarize my belief system, but if I know someone who treats objections against it in a better way than I do, I think I'm only helping myself by using that way.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

I wasn't trying to be rude, but people have in the past made it clear that they are frustrated by being unable to reply to your posts because of the quantity of articles you post to defend your positions, which take too much time to read.  You haven't done much to alleviate those concerns.
Logged
Bono
Atlas Icon
*****
Posts: 11,699
United Kingdom


Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #17 on: October 02, 2005, 04:33:33 PM »


I'm curious if you actually have opinions of your own or if your entire belief system is just a bunch of articles stuck together. Tongue

You never responded to my post in another topic in which I made an argument that anarchy is ultimately unsustainable due to the nature of human beings.

I could hav wasted my time pharaphrasing them, but give me a good reason to?
And maybe I haven't sen it...

Well, to be fair, most people do not base their belief system on articles, but rather their own thoughts, and are perfectly capable of summarising them in a more brief function.

I'm afraid almost all of the articles you post are verbose and seem to treat any disagreement with them as layman's syndrome.

Err, I can perfectly summarize my belief system, but if I know someone who treats objections against it in a better way than I do, I think I'm only helping myself by using that way.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

I wasn't trying to be rude, but people have in the past made it clear that they are frustrated by being unable to reply to your posts because of the quantity of articles you post to defend your positions, which take too much time to read.  You haven't done much to alleviate those concerns.

None of the articles I linked there were required to undetstand the substance of what I was saying. They served as a complement, but it could be perfectly understod by what I posted, which wasn't that long of a post.
Logged
Jake
dubya2004
Atlas Icon
*****
Posts: 18,621
Cuba


Political Matrix
E: -0.90, S: -0.35

Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #18 on: October 02, 2005, 04:33:41 PM »

I'd actually like to hear Bono explain his philosophy without using articles or outside materials.
Logged
Bono
Atlas Icon
*****
Posts: 11,699
United Kingdom


Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #19 on: October 02, 2005, 04:43:15 PM »

I'd actually like to hear Bono explain his philosophy without using articles or outside materials.

What would you like to know?
Logged
Gabu
Atlas Star
*****
Posts: 28,388
Canada


Political Matrix
E: -4.32, S: -6.52

Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #20 on: October 02, 2005, 04:47:18 PM »

I could hav wasted my time pharaphrasing them, but give me a good reason to?
And maybe I haven't sen it...

I don't mean any offense by that comment, but it's mainly that 99% of your arguments are in the form of some long article that someone else wrote.  It makes debate very difficult when we have to argue with a bunch of people who are not present.
Logged
Bono
Atlas Icon
*****
Posts: 11,699
United Kingdom


Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #21 on: October 02, 2005, 04:50:12 PM »

I could hav wasted my time pharaphrasing them, but give me a good reason to?
And maybe I haven't sen it...

I don't mean any offense by that comment, but it's mainly that 99% of your arguments are in the form of some long article that someone else wrote.  It makes debate very difficult when we have to argue with a bunch of people who are not present.

If pressed, I could make an argument myself, and I have had pretty long debates somewhere else where i made most everything, but this is a lot easier. It's not incapacity, it's laziness.
Logged
Alcon
Atlas Superstar
*****
Posts: 30,867
United States


Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #22 on: October 02, 2005, 04:52:46 PM »

I could hav wasted my time pharaphrasing them, but give me a good reason to?
And maybe I haven't sen it...

I don't mean any offense by that comment, but it's mainly that 99% of your arguments are in the form of some long article that someone else wrote.  It makes debate very difficult when we have to argue with a bunch of people who are not present.

If pressed, I could make an argument myself, and I have had pretty long debates somewhere else where i made most everything, but this is a lot easier. It's not incapacity, it's laziness.

Well, it comes off as more than a little inconsiderate to expect people to go through so much effort to read the articles and respond to them when you don't go through much of any.
Logged
Bono
Atlas Icon
*****
Posts: 11,699
United Kingdom


Show only this user's posts in this thread
« Reply #23 on: October 02, 2005, 04:56:52 PM »

I could hav wasted my time pharaphrasing them, but give me a good reason to?
And maybe I haven't sen it...

I don't mean any offense by that comment, but it's mainly that 99% of your arguments are in the form of some long article that someone else wrote.  It makes debate very difficult when we have to argue with a bunch of people who are not present.

If pressed, I could make an argument myself, and I have had pretty long debates somewhere else where i made most everything, but this is a lot easier. It's not incapacity, it's laziness.

Well, it comes off as more than a little inconsiderate to expect people to go through so much effort to read the articles and respond to them when you don't go through much of any.

I've been cutting down on articles lately...
Plus, that I posted here is kind of an adaptation.
Logged
Pages: [1]  
« previous next »
Jump to:  


Login with username, password and session length

Terms of Service - DMCA Agent and Policy - Privacy Policy and Cookies

Powered by SMF 1.1.21 | SMF © 2015, Simple Machines

Page created in 0.057 seconds with 11 queries.