ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP
"I think you've forgotten which side wants more laws and which side wants fewer. Traditionally it is the conservatives who identify laws they don't support and advocate for their repeal, and the progressives who try to legislate their will until others. It's more difficult to think of anything more grotesquely paladin-esque than SJWs on the warpath, or a more idealized devotee of chaos than a supporter of laissez-faire free markets. That said, I think it's true that conservatives tend to be stronger supporters of the few laws they believe in than progressives are of the many they advocate for. That's because they actually believe in them. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
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To be fair, Scrotie, some people are 'conservative' or 'progressive' on specific issues, rather than as an aggregate whole.
I mean, you are by now painfully aware of my views on market/economic regulation. Heh, but as discussion in other threads should also have made clear, I'm more one to swing the other way when it comes to personal/citizen-level laws. Beneath all that I'd probably label myself a radical, if labels are required - I believe it's time and past time to flip the table, burn all the existing needless morass of obtuse legal code down, and rebuild a cleaner, leaner, lighter, tighter version that does what it needs to do and ideally not a lot more than that. I don't know what D&D class that makes me, but that's kinda the point. Individual people and their viewpoints are rarely so clean-cut as to fall neatly into a two-word descriptor. | |
" Chaotic Nuetral |
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"Very true. I think one of the biggest dangers to our society at the moment is the pressure to gather under one of two ideological tribes and mindlessly subscribe to a broad platform of policy positions, rather than unpacking the issues one by one and evaluating each separately. I gained a lot of respect for you when I saw that, despite your left-leaning inclinations on many issues, you're a fierce advocate for gun rights — and while I'm sure some of that is right-wing bias on my part, I assure you that's not the majority of it. It's increasingly rare these days to find outspoken people who don't follow the two-party orthodoxy, and I can't help but feel some respect for anyone who has the degree of free-thinking you've displayed. Also, I don't mean to convey that the Left is the only side of the political divide that's ever wanted to legislate morality. It wasn't all that long ago that evangelocons dominated the GOP and were actively pushing for prohibition of gay marriage, etc. (Technically, I don't think the state should recognize marriage at all, regardless of sexual orientation, but the point is that evangelocons were seeking unequal recognition under the law for straight vs homosexual people, which I can't endorse.) To this day, one of the great divides in the Right is between the social/alternative right and the more mainstream economic/libertarian right, although I'm personally thankful that Trump populism has mostly taken the wheel of the GOP and forced evangeloconservatism to a passenger seat. I'm far more comfortable among the cult of Kek than among the acolytes of Billy Graham. Historically, both Democrats and GOP are parties of continued expansion of government power. Regardless of their "small government" talk, the US government and its has budget have always grown regardless of which party has been at the wheel. In this way both parties are "lawful" in the D&D sense; the only question is who's more lawful than whom. Both attempt to coopt the "chaotic" populist movements around them and twist them towards their corporatist ends. At least until Trump. Don't get me wrong, I don't think he's actually chaotic anything. I think he's more True Neutral, to be honest — and when it comes to regulation vs deregulation I genuinely believes he gives zero fucks ideologically and only cares about results. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
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Heh, I appreciate that sentiment, actually. Thanks, Scrotie.
I've been examining my own assumptions and ideals more than usual of late, in part because of these talks, which has led me to a stance most people would call 'confused'. Given what I can understand/intuit from your terminology, I'd be economically left, socially centrist, and culturally(?) right. What it boils down to, really? Let people be. They can have what they want, as long as they're not hurting anybody else to do it. If they want guns? Let 'em have guns. If they want weed? Let 'em have weed. If they want same-sex life partners? Let 'em have same-sex life partners. If they want Stuff? Let 'em have Stuff. Most people just want to live their lives in peace, pursue their interests, enjoy their hobbies and their friendships, and do what gets them through the day. It's not the government's job to tell people what kind of life they should be leading. The government can keep its nose out of my gun safe, my kitchen, and my bedroom, thank-you-very-much. (Minor disclaimer: I hate drugs, of most any sort, and am leery of just about anything stronger than ibuprophen. Including alcohol. But if alcobooze is going to be legal, and we clearly can't ban it, then we may as well let folks have the rest of it, too.) My stance on corporations arises from the same fundamental principle - let people live their lives in peace and do what they like, so long as they're hurting no one else. 'Corporations' are not people, and many of them hurt thousands of people daily as a matter-of-fact result of their normal business practices. When you have as much power over people's lives as a Big Corporate entity does, the government's job to protect the people from harm (which is also why federal welfare/social support/public health programs are on my list - the government exists to support its citizenry even if that citizenry won't support itself) comes into play and you get to have ethics and morality imposed on you from outside. Because history's shown time and again that you can't trust the East India Trading Companies of the world to police themselves. If a corporation can, miracle of miracles, actually find a business plan that is beneficial to its employees, its customers, and the rest of the world in general all at once, however? Those guys are fine. They don't currently exist, which is why I don't trust them, but a strong set of regulations enforcing moral conduct on the corporate space is supposed to help people trust that Big Corporate is not fucking them over at every opportunity - i.e. not allowing them to live their own lives in peace, without harm. The fact that nobody trusts either the government or the market to not fuck them over as hard as possible every time is...sad. But indicative of why we need to do some real hard resets 'round these parts, as well. | |
"Unfortunately, that is very literally the government's job. At the end of the day, all laws are coercion, all coercion is about changing incentives, and all life choices are based on incentives. The legitimate purpose of government is to tell rapists, murderers, etc to find another hobby. And (unfortunately?) anarchy doesn't work. Human nature abhors a power vacuum, such that those who are lax in coercing others into avoiding their darker natures find themselves coerced by those who no longer have incentive to not coerce as they see fit. It's something akin to the law of conservation of energy: no matter what form a society takes or what distribution it falls under, no matter the distribution, the amount of coercive power in a system remains constant. As such, in a way there is no escaping the law. Either you advocate a system where you follow the rules laid down for you by others, or a system wherein you make the rules yourself. Where the law os external, or where it is internal. The option for there to be no statist authority whatsoever is not on the table. The question, then, is one of distribution. Should all power be wielded by a single organization, or just a few, consolidated such that it is out of reach of the unwashed masses? Or should power be broken up into the smallest pieces possible such that each person has individual sovereignty, each the monarch of their own private kingdom, free to make the rules themselves, at whim, and to see them enforced, within their own limited jurisdiction? That's the real issue here. A "lawful" world of collectivist caste systems where the paladins of privilege virtue-signal a noblesse oblige towards their inferiors, or a system of universal individual rights, enforced by individuals themselves, wherein all groups have no rights except those of their individual members. The choice is ours. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Last edited by ScrotieMcB on Mar 8, 2018, 6:33:16 PM
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I think you may've misunderstood me a bit. You're right, of course - certain hobbies, if we want to call them 'hobbies', are unacceptable. One of the government's primary jobs is to uphold peace and public health/safety. If you go around strangling Bostonians or such, you're a threat to the public peace and it is in fact the government's job to come down on you.
My argument is mostly that if someone is not a threat to the public peace, it's not the government's job to come down on them. If they want to get baked off their ass in the comfort and security of their own home (and they're an adult in a competent state of mind to make that decision), who's to say they can't? If I want to buy a modern rifle for the purpose of going to my local range and perforating some targets, then so long as the government has a reasonable guarantee that I'm not going to do anything else with that rifle, why should they stop me? Virtually everyone in this country can just go out and buy a car, without any sort of licensing or background checking or whatever required. They might ask to see your driver's license, but that's about it. Elsewise? Have at it - buy that car. Because the assumption is that someone goes out and buys a car for legal purposes of transporting themselves and others, not for the illegal purpose of flattening pedestrians like they're in a GTA bender. 'Innocent until proven guilty' is supposed to be an integral part of our criminal justice system. That principle doesn't really seem to apply universally, though. The assumption that the vast majority of people are law-abiding folk who just want to go about their lives is kinda falling off the wagon, and I figure maybe we should catch it before it slips away completely, ne? | |
" Do they have explosive collars on them that explode whenever they commit a crime? What guarantee do the government have that one of their citizen don't go bonkers and goes on a shooting spree? My assumption is they don't. The only comfort is that it is relatively a low probability event. High risk low probability event in high population density cities. |
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Peace talk with Kim Jong Un and Trump? ohhh Peace between North and south Korea. Man if this was going on during Obama's administration the MSM would be begging to give him a 2nd Nobel price for peace.
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For real!
Censored.
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