By the threat of conservatives being thrown in prison if they did what they wanted.
And a great many *have not *survived.
The world you physically inhabit is actually like this?
I think there’s a word for arguing against an imaginary position so that you can seem stronger in comparison.
The question was framed poorly and bedded with straw. Your vision of liberty appears to reside in a vacuum, your notion of society seems profoundly mechanistic, while the rest of us are trying to explore real-world ideas for improving things.
Your expansive freedom will eventually encroach upon my apartme freedom, leading to conflict. The Left recognized that we do not get our liberty for free, so there must be some measure of balance amongst us in order to minimize the fighting. Sometimes the measures taken do not work out as will as we might have hoped, but they are not taken without reason and are often preferable to doing nothing.
As to limiting principles, the most important one would be pragmatism. Whosoever puts these rules in place still must live in the same society as everyone else, and even if the rule makers are an not directly constrained by them, the effects are still felt. Society is made of people, and people, who are notoriously unpredictable, make society: trying to graph even aggregate human behaviour in Excel is a fools errand, in which you seem to be engaged.
Well done, you’ve discovered that a political ideology taken to absurd extremes will be extremely absurd. But this thread is about what makes a good republican. Let’s talk about that, rather than your stupid straw liberalism. So if you want to talk about limiting principles, let’s talk about limiting principles! What limiting principles prevent conservatism from locking refugee children in cages? And how did that principle fail so fucking utterly?
How do you feel about the Trump administration’s policy of locking refugee children in cages, using them as bait to deport their relatives, giving them out to strangers, and refusing to attempt to bring them back together with their families? How the fuck do you sleep at night knowing that you support this, even if the opposing party has no “limiting principles” that would stop them from doing something fucking absurd nobody supports? What the fuck is fucking wrong with you?
There is one type of good republican. “Former”. Be it because their party affiliation changed or they fucking died. Kind of like Nazis.
(And don’t you dare fucking give me that “I’m a libertarian” bullshit. You consistently argue against anything except the republican party. I have never seen you speak up about the atrocities of this administration. Take that disingenuous “I’m not a republican except in all the ways that matter” bullshit and stuff it.)
My approach to bioethics holds that a Republican becomes “good” at the time of irreversible cessation of brain function. Some, however, hold that a Republican cannot be described as truly “good” as long as the heart is beating.
Don’t dangle a straight line out there like that 
He is more like one of them “neo-liberals”. Chicago School type stuff – you know, the people who gave us the likes of, say, the noble Augusto Pinochet Ugarte
I dunno. When do you say that we’ve had enough of this scientific progress, that curing cancer is a childish dream we must not pursue, and that attempting to understand how to make better technology is a dead end because everything that should be invented, has been?
Only a puling simpleton with the understanding of a pig-headed prig would even entertain such ideas. Disagreeing with me would be ridiculous.
Well, so it is with society. We learn and understand more and more about how societies run, how humans act and fail to act in societies, and how economics, in the correct broad understanding, works and interacts with everything. Trying to halt that kind of understanding, or trying to stop it from being applied, is similarly false; it is a mistaken idea, a superstition and a misapprehension, and possibly a mendacious ploy to keep us from advancing beyond the point where certain specific people can call the tune.
Again, if you disagree with me you spit in the faces of Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Madison, and everyone else who staged a revolution specifically to implement ideas then considered radical and innovative. You know this to be true.
Sometimes I find myself wondering how many patriotic Sons of Liberty profited handsomely buying the assets of Tories fleeing to Canada.
I have to agree with Sam on this one. There really was a regulation restricting the amount of soda that places could serve. And it was presented as a regulation designed to make people do something for their own good (ie consume less sugar). And seat belt laws and helmet laws are also real. These are not hypothetical examples.
And like Sam, I don’t see any vast difference between those laws and similar hypothetical laws which would ban frappuccinos or swimming pools. As far as I’m concerned, they’re all in the same neighbourhood.
Yeah. And it’s broadly a laughingstock because it’s kinda dumb. Sometimes, this kind of thing will happen. Typically, it will happen locally, in places it is wanted by the general public (the law saw about 5 times as many letters in support as against), and it’ll be pretty harmless. Anyone up in arms about not being allowed to buy more than half a liter of soda at a time looks like a fucking moron, because it’s a really dumb thing to get up in arms about. Ban swimming pools or Starbux, and people are going to be pissed for hopefully obvious reasons.
And for every case like the soda ban, you have a case like this:
Seatbelt laws were hugely successful, saving tens of thousands of lives. Source. In fact, it’s so successful that it’s the first line suggestion on the CDC page for “prevention”.
So what’s going on here? Take it away, Scott.
But the past fifty years of cognitive science have thoroughly demolished this “revealed preference” assumption, showing that people’s choices result from a complex mix of external compulsions, internal motivations, natural biases, and impulsive behaviors. These decisions usually approximate fulfilling preferences, but sometimes they fail in predictable and consistent ways.
The field built upon these insights is called “behavioral economics”, and you can find more information in books like Judgment Under Uncertainty, Cognitive Illusions, and Predictably Irrational, or on the website Less Wrong.
[…]
The gist of this research, as it relates to the current topic, is that people don’t always make the best choice according to their preferences. Sometimes they consistently make the easiest or the most superficially attractive choice instead. It may be best not to think of them as a “choice” at all, but as a reflexive reaction to certain circumstances, which often but not always conforms to rationality.
It’s never rational to not wear a seatbelt when driving. But for some reason, in the absence of seatbelt laws, this didn’t happen. People didn’t broadly adapt seatbelts until it became clear that not wearing a seatbelt would cost them money. Yes, it’s extremely weird that people care more about the relatively low risk of being fined money than the relatively low risk of dying horribly, but that’s what happened! And this “illiberal” law stopped a whole bunch of people from making an extremely poor decision, and saved a bunch of lives.
Thank you for demonstrating your ignorance: it was the left that spawned the Nazis.
Silly, as that is, note that Chisquirrel used the present tense. He was not talking about the Weimar Republic. Please find us an existing neonazi organization that would even remotely be seen as being on the left.
I didn’t WANT to be a Nazi. You MADE ME. It’s YOUR FAULT that I hold these racist views and march around calling for death to others.
YOUR FAULT.
The governments of China and North Korea for two.
Nice strawman you’ve got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.
I didn’t mention “smoking regulations.” I mentioned smoking taxes. Sure, the risks to third parties justify banning smoking in public places and so on. That has nothing to do with my point, however.
Tobacco-specific excise taxes have been around in the US since the 1920s, long before anyone knew about the dangers of smoking (much less the dangers of secondhand smoke). Tobacco taxes have nothing to do with second-hand smoke, so the fact that cigarettes can harm others is irrelevant.