511–520 of 703 posts
Shorter HN: Would you all just think of the poor superrich for a minute? Clearly they are the ones in our society who need special protections and immunities from journalism.
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the paradox of the deeply conservative anti-federal government types who work for the government - directly or as a fed contractor Those are the people who have a realistic, first hand understanding of the government innerworkings. Also, a contradiction between believing that allocation of capital would be more efficient under a less centrally-influenced system, and being willing to accept higher pay and benefits fro…
I think a lot of people seem to be confusing Libertarianism with Anarchism. Libertarians typically do see roles for SOME government, and those roles are typically the military, judges, roads, police, and the like. Not other things though, so no Social Security, no Obamacare, no National Endowment for the Arts, and no space program (other than for space weapons, so get rid of NASA and establish some sort of "US Star F…
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In this case, it's actually not hair-splitting; see my reply to your comment's sibling. You both demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how Social Security works.
I may well misunderstand how Social Security works. However, the point of my comment is that it's hardly the only system to which one might contribute funds, incurring some future obligation of (re)payment on the part of that system, which is later discharged using funds that were most recently in "someone else's pocket". Either it's a trivial point that applies pretty broadly outside of SS, or you meant something mo…
> There are several Satoshi Nakamotos living in North America and beyond - both dead and alive I too would like to be living in North America when I'm dead.
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ITYM "no government-sponsored space program".
Right. The whole SpaceX/Armadillo Aerospace/etc. situation that is developing now is almost definitionally Libertarian.
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the paradox of the deeply conservative anti-federal government types who work for the government - directly or as a fed contractor Those are the people who have a realistic, first hand understanding of the government innerworkings. Also, a contradiction between believing that allocation of capital would be more efficient under a less centrally-influenced system, and being willing to accept higher pay and benefits fro…
Nationalist and libertarian are not orthogonal in practice. Try talking to any self professed libertarian about free movement of labor. On the theoretical side it goes back to the whole Trotskyism/Stalinism debate.
I self-identify as a libertarian (with qualifications, if you want details). If you try talking to me about free movement of labor, I think you'll find that I advocate it fully.
Doxing as journalism, kind of surreal. Not sure I get the point though. (I understand why irc enemies do it, but I don't get the journalistic value of 'outing' Satoshi)
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That's what you've heard? Couldn't the argument be made that the other side is rooted in racism too since it appears their goal is to keep a large percentage of African Americans completely dependent on the government fixed-income for their whole lives? That's what I've heard, anyway.
That's clever, but it's silly to dispute that the Right in the USA has relied on racism as a tool of political power for, well, decades. Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr. all relied on heavily on racist tropes (see the wiki entry on the Southern Strategy for a basic introduction to this, which has been admitted by the principals of the time), and you can see very distinct racial patterns and reflections of Confederate heri…
Or, in another words, Obama outperformed Kerry in non-white demographics. Statistics is a wonderfully spinnable, isn't it?
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I think what your proposed cognitive model of anti-government government workers is missing is something Upton Sinclair pointed at: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I've worked for financial trading companies and for advertisers before, but I can't do that work anymore because I think those industries mainly make the world worse. Not won't d…
>>And I think that would be especially true of the libertarians I have known. If I were to generalize about them, I'd say that on average they're unusually thoughtful and unusually principled. Most people don't even try for a coherent political philosophy. Libertarianism will look like a "coherent political philosophy" only if you're a young white kid from an affluent family.