You didn’t even read what I said, did you? And, of course, there is only one really true truth. No idea if we’ll ever find it, but the universe is objective, when you get down to it. Or are you going to argue that reality is consensus-based?
Good on you for the copwatch. Needs to be done. The police, however, don’t belong to the rich. No, no, no. They most certainly don’t. They belong to the police. Their bosses may belong to the rich, but when the leather meets the pavement, they only belong to themselves. And what they like is for things to be quiet and orderly. As for the rest of it? From the descriptions you’ve given of your triumphs, you’re Ignatius J. Reilly, baby.
Sweetheart, you’re cute, and I’m sure you mean well, but you’re still a rebel without a clue, let alone a pause.
What is it with this criticism of things for being “white?” You realize that white people contribute money to help the homeless? White people contribute money to socialist causes. Socialism was created by white philosophers. For that matter, slavery was abolished by white Englishmen, and then later abolished by white Americans. (The Africans never abolished slavery and they still practice it today. By the way, do the nations of Africa, free and clear as they are of the corrupting white man, have good programs to help the poor and the homeless?) Whites in America fought a horrific and bloody civil war over the issue of black slavery. Then white civil rights activists risked their lives alongside blacks during the 1960s. Then whites voted for a series of Democrat politicians who instituted policies specifically aimed at helping non-whites.
What the fuck is so evil and wrong with white people?
Why is it OK to generalize about them, but if you generalize about ANYBODY ELSE you are branded a racist and lose all credibility?
The core of the issue, to me, is that if you’re trying to make a political point, don’t needlessly drag race into it. And please don’t trash your own race, whether it be out of guilt or out of an attempt at humor or trying to apologize for what your forefathers supposedly did or whatever. Don’t trash your heritage. NOBODY respects someone who does this. I’ll repeat that, NOBODY respects someone who trashes their own heritage.
I for one would have more sympathy and understanding if you didn’t consistantly come across as some sort of anarchist racist lunatic living on the fringe of society. “Smash the state” means what? You want to dismantle the institutions and social infrastructure of society? So everyone can live like the homeless you represent? Great plan.
Yes, we get that there are poor and homeless people in the US and Canada. But your “reality” is the exception, not the rule.
They can brag about what they’ve done in the arts and sciences and industry. They have their epic poems, which are still enjoyed today. There’s more than enough there to brag about.
Again, it is painfully obvious that you have no idea what folks in a Third World nation experience. Hell, I just went to India, a fucking paradise compared to Third World nations. There were places there where canvas stores were turning a brisk business in selling material so families could make their own tent-houses. Dozens of people crammed into one-room hovels. People with no access to health care. No access. Unless one is out in the fucking wilderness, everyone in Canada and the US can get help at a hospital. There are soup kitchens, homeless shelters and government protections to look out for everyone.
And those Indians are lucky. They have a somewhat stable government with some controls and protections. The could use a public hose to bathe in. Other nations have fighting going on, undetonated explosives scattered around, rampant disease washing through the whole of society, lack of food to properly feed the population, not form of sanitation, electricity, heating or running water.
Stuff that ignorance up your ass, you pompous, bourgeois fraud. You dabble in hardships but you have no idea how fucking good you have it. You have access to a FUCKING COMPUTER!
Do you have any idea how many corpses they pull out of the street every year? When you’re hungry, diseased, and dying in the street with blacktoe and tuberculosis, does it matter whether you’re in Karachi or Toronto? Your naivete is galling because it shows you are totally oblivious to the suffering going on right under your nose. One of my comrades wrote her doctoral thesis on street mortality and while I don’t have the paper to hand at the moment, if memory serves, the average lifespan of a man on the street is about 50, while the average lifespan of a woman on the street is 36.
“Dabble in hardships”? Ahhh, I see what this is now. It’s a dick-waving contest. Because you’ve taken the stand that extreme poverty and privation doesn’t exist here, it’s now impossible for you to admit that there are people right here in North America living in Third World conditions. And of course, you hold the typical middle class view that the Third World is “made of AIDS and fail,” as if every person in India or Guatemala is a leper living in a tarpaper shack. You can’t even imagine people on, for example, a native reservation living in utter squallor, without heat or running water or basic sanitation. I assure you that cold and hungry is cold and hungry, no matter where you happen to live. And that such poverty exists in the midst of such plenty here in North America is an indictment against our society.
Of course, the only way to permit such atrocity to exist is to be, like you, willfully blind to its existence.
“Stolen any wealth” not by the penal law definition of theft/larceny, but by the Objectivist/libertarian definition, which regards compulsory taxation for the benefit of others, among other things, as “stealing wealth”. It was my intention to demonstrate to RR that by his own Objectivist views, neither his production nor his consumption were generators of wealth. I see I failed in doing that, but I admittedly cannot think in Objectivist terms, and I tried to give it my best shot.
Out of curiousity, what is it about Objectivism you are unable to wrap your brain around?
It seems pretty straighforward to me. If I build a company that employs a thousand people and makes me a multi-millionare, I don’t owe anything to anyone other than my investors if I have any. I should not be penalized if my inginutiy allows me to provide a superior product that drives my competition out of business. My employees, vendors and customers have entered into financial transactions with me out of their own free will and no one should tell me what I have to pay them or how much to sell my products for. My benefit to society is the products I produced and the jobs I provided to my employees and the vendors who do business with me.
Objectivists don’t allow sentimentality, wishful thinking, religeon, mysticism or voo doo to influence their decisions. Charity given to the poor based on “need” is wasted money that could have been used to engage in productive business transactions. Protectionism and industry subsidies are wastful because it props up unsuccessfull and unsustainable businesses at the expense of businesses that could have used that capital to provide the goods and services people actually wanted with it.
IOW, every dollar given to a starving kid on the street is a dollar not going to some entrepreneur who was creating an invention that could have improved the lives of a thousand people.
Or in even simpler terms, business and wealth and profit are not “evil”.
I would go even further, or maybe just simpler and say POWER (of whatever form) is not evil in and of itself. They are tools. It’s all in how the tools are used.
Or a squirrel eats through your wiring. Or a derecho rips off your lightning rod shortly before a thunderhead hits & lightning strikes & sets your roof on fire.
Hey, feudalism was better than what we’re likely to get these days. The serfs had rights from being bound to the land. Too much of the modern right buys into Hayek’s utopian anti-conservative optimism, where all change is good so long as no one in authority planned it.
We need a smackdown between Burkeans & Hayekeans, but they’re both too scared of the Gay Buddhist Taxman (or some other bogeyman) to honestly have it out.
