I never noticed this guy before today, but he appears to be everywhere all of the sudden. Has he recently come out of hibernation, or have I just been ignoring his idiotic postings?
You get post of the year - and it’s only January 6!
Lib has gone on record as saying that in this paradigm, an individual’s body, with its capacity to work, earn and create wealth, is his property.
There is at least one very good reason: When you’re an American making claims about an American to an audience comprising a majority of Americans regarding American politics and history in order to claim that something is ironic, it makes no sense to use words in a way that aren’t reflected by American usage.
It’d be like talking about contemporary British politics and pretending that “Tory” meant a person who believed in Queen Elizabeth II’s divine right to rule North America.
This kind of analysis essentially renders language and analysis meaningless.
We have no idea where people like Jefferson, Hamilton, Burr, and Wilson would fall on our modern political continuum. The social, political, environmental, scientific, educational, historical and other circumstances don’t translate from one era to another. Invent a time machine and bring bring Jefferson to the present, educate him about our modern society, and then ask him what he thinks. That’s the only way to reach any meaningful conclusion. Maybe he’d choose to be a liberal in the contemporary sense; maybe he’d choose to be a conservative; maybe a libertarian; maybe something else, like a socialist or communist. We have no way of knowing.
I wondered exactly the same thing. A search reveals he used to be Happy Wanderer.
Do you remember Happy Wanderer? He returned in November I think as Stan Shmenge. He’s been banging around a lot since December. I don’t recall him being too bad and I still don’t think he is but then I haven’t really been reading many of his recent posts.
I knew Sarahfeena is conservative (though I know that conservative women can have some tales to tell, and that we all want to hear, if you know what I mean 
), I can understand why eBay sellers might like to make enough off a sale to pay for the gas to the post office (I buy crappy old computers, bid appropriately, but know shipping costs and typically pay more for shipping than I do for the old shit I buy), and recognize that Schmenge is an idiot who could tar all conservatives with the same brush, but does anybody here do that?
On some items S&H can really vary. I always check if the seller combines and it is pretty common for smaller items. I noticed** SS** was bitching about losing money on shipping. I’ve had that happen but it’s my own fault. You can do the proper homework and find out how much shipping is. Guess a little high if you must to prevent getting burned. If you guessed too low who’s fault is that. I agree with him that the fees add up. The ranting was just childish.
And DON’T bid if the shipping is left unsaid. It can fuck a rookie.
I got the impression he was ranting about a winner bidder that demanded he combined shipping even though he never offered to in the listings. Later he appeared to have got mad and got childish.
Agreed.
Cite for the assertion that the world extends beyond the borders of the US?
When I sell on eBay I’ll set S&H on the high side of reasonable, but I put a note in the item description that I will refund (via PayPal) any amount in excess of the actual postage, and I do so. Since I’m only an occasional seller and reuse boxes that stuff I’ve bought comes in, it isn’t a big deal to do the right thing, and it sure makes my feedback shine.
Dear OP,
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Thanks for listening. It’s nice to know that at least one person does.
I’m glad you posted that because it gives me an opportunity to vent about debating people like you. It’s like Poster A demanding a cite that says Obama advocates a middle class tax cut, and Poster B providing one from Obama himself in which he says, “I’m proposing a middle class tax cut.”
“But wait!” your kind decries, “Proposing is not the same as advocating!” You can take your mobile goalposts and play with someone else.
He’s not talking about an inherent dignity, but a magisterial dignity. For heaven’s sake, just look at the Civil Rights Act. Could there be a more dispensative proscription of rights? The classical conservative believes that rights inhere to the chief magistrates who may then dispense them according to their pleasure.
Not even remotely. You might as well have interpreted Von Mises to mean that private property is the source of gravity and magnetism.
He never quoted the buyer, so perhaps the request was worded more strongly than I realise, but he did say
From that, I gathered the guy just asked if he would combine, and how much he wanted for combined postage. I see nothing in that thread to indicate that the buyer **demanded **shipping be combined, but perhaps I missed something?
He went on to say that he was hoping to make extra profit from his shipping and handling fee, and to cover expenses such as gas to drive to the post office and his time standing in line and the time he spent creating and posting the auction despite these things being specifically prohibited by eBay’s own policy. He then insulted his buyer’s morals for asking if he’d combine shipping and called him a moron because of his purchases, threw around some gratuitous insults towards housewives, other eBay sellers and Beanie Baby collectors and closed by dismissing eBay as a ripoff and concluding that it’s simply not possible to make money selling there.
All in all, it was a pretty distasteful reaction to a simple, reasonable question. 90% of sellers in my experience would have offered without being asked, and 9% would have agreed to do it when asked. He was under no obligation to combine shipping and only had to say no. If the buyer had continued to agitate after that then his reaction would have been easier to understand.
Rights are a matter of political philosophy; gravity isn’t. (Specifically, rights are a matter of ethics.) The link I gave you is to the entire book, if you’d care to read it. If not, here’s the summary.
Von Mises argues, basically, that a man is born with original property (his body and his mind) that cannot be taken from him without destroying him (and thus is unalienable). His living body entitles him to the right to life, and his mind entitles him to the right to give or withhold consent. Therefore, his rights are natural (imbued by nature).
Using his original property, a man may acquire more property. As long as he does so peacefully and honestly (meaning, without usurping the rights of other men), he has just as much right to the property he has acquired as to the property with which he was born. His body and his mind are the tools of his labor and struggle, and therefore extend to acquisitions.
These premises form the basis for the entire liberal ethic. You should not harm me because you have no right to my life. You should not deceive me because you have no right to my consent. You should not steal from me because you have no right to what my body and mind have produced for me.
It is only when ownership of property is vague or in dispute that claims to rights conflict. If we have “public property”, then who can call the shots with respect to it? The chief magistrate? The majority? The strongest man? No one can build a house in a public park because who owns it is unclear.
Therefore, every man has the same rights as every other man. It isn’t that a wealthy man has more rights than a poor man, just as it isn’t that a fat man has more humanity than a skinny man. If you disagree, fine. But don’t act like liberalism is your personal purview or that philosophers have not studied the ethic of liberalism for centuries.
If you care to provide cites showing a deductive development of liberalism, feel free. If you just want to continue harping and stomping and snorting, feel free. But I’ve given you what you asked for. The least you can do is acknowledge it, and stop acting like a spoiled child who hasn’t been given what he’s screaming for.
I think it was just “Stan Schmenge.” Sorry it wasn’t a more interesting misspelling! 
Oh, fuck off you bedwetting liberal! 
Well, sure, some people do (not naming any names here). But most of them I don’t worry about too much. And other folks might not be so black-and-white about it, but we all have our little prejudices and I hate to see them reinforced. Plus, I think the thing that irritates me more is dropping it into a thread where is is SO off-topic and irrelevant. As I said in the OP, this board is so polarized it’s ridiculous…comments like that just make it worse.