Boycott Google

[Serendipper]

Taxing the rich to pay for the poor would likely never affect you, except that it might raise your wages and make society a healthier, smarter, and happier place.

Anyway you slice it, the rest of society will have to, not only pay more tax, but work harder.

Nope. I've been through the numbers on this. Raise taxes on the top, cut taxes on the middle, institute negative tax on the bottom. Most people are better off than before.

But the point I really want to highlight here is that even though my plan involves a taxcut for any class you could ever aspire to inhabit, and raise your wages, and increase the health and education of society, you STILL wouldn't go along with it because the principle has been completely overlooked, which is to make the poor suffer; that's all you care about and that's all the Right cares about. Just like the baby video showed that the kid was willing to take less tokens for himself if it meant the other kid gets even less.

You will make your own life harder just to make the poor suffer.

I want to make things fairer, not differently unfair.

Your definition of fair is who licks the most boots gets the rewards. Ones who refuse to lick boots gets no reward.

We shouldn't tax employees to pay for the voluntarily unemployed, and if employers are paying employees a fair wage, than they shouldn't be taxed either.

"Fair wage" here has the meaning of a wage determined by the most desperate worker underbidding all others.
"Fair wage" here does NOT mean a fair division of the value of the final product. Nor does "fair" mean that the employee agreed to any such divisions, but the terms are "fairly" shoved down his throat.

Some shouldn't have to worker harder to feed, clothe and take care of society because others won't pull their weight.

Yes, get to work licking those boots you feckless maggots!

I don't just want a more equal distribution of money, I want a more equal distribution of work.

Oh goodie... a corner for everyone to stand on.

But you need to punish the lazy.

Yes, how diabolical of me.

Indeed.

Sexual selection is a natural process. There is no one who determined what primitive humans should consider sexy in order to advance the species in the right direction.

Altho genes play a major role in determining us, I'm not a genetic reductionist, our genes are dynamic and help determine our (sub)conscious behavior, and our (sub)conscious behavior, including sexual, is dynamic and helps determine our genes.
Our culture and environment shapes us, but we in turn shape our culture and environment, it's a two way street.

Sure, but who shaped the environment to specifically favor white people? Who said, "We need to rally together to shape our environment to favor the white humanoids. This must be teleological because if left to chance, blacks might become smarter and we can't have that!" Like I said, no one gets any credit.

The only reason whites are being oppressed is that they're uneducated and proud of it.

even liberal whites supposedly have white privilege and are racist, I'm not making this stuff up, believe me I really wish I was, I couldn't even if I tried:

I can't imagine that's prolific.

What has people pissed is the arrogant old white men who think they can, for example, tax tv in order to be fair to corporations. Old white men are being replaced by brown women all across the country because what they lack in brains they more than make up for in having heart and consideration. That's a trade I'd make any day. It's a standing offer: I'll trade 1 redneck for 10 mexicans. All day, every day. Good riddance!

Now, you can shove your head in a hole in refusal to see my point or continue thinking it's irrational white guilt like the video you posted. It really makes no difference to me since I'm just doing you the favor of cluing you in.

I don't feel guilty for slavery, but I can't stand those arrogant codgers thinking everything is common sense. Zero to do with guilt.

[Serendipper]

The point isn't that a utopia can be created, the point is that servitude can be eliminated. It could have been 40 years ago.

Servitude can't be eliminated, either it can be equal, fair, unequal or unfair.

What evidence do you have to support the assertion that servitude cannot be eliminated? What? Because machines are making so much more work to do? That by the year 3000 we will be working 24 hrs a day because of such scarcity? Pft.

Friedman visited one of those statist countries back in the 70s and said "Why not replace all those shoveling workers with a machine?" The reply was, "Well, we're not really trying to accomplish anything but to provide jobs." Friedman replied, "In that case, why not give them spoons to shovel with?"

The point of jobs is not to provide jobs, but to do a job. Once the job is done, it's done. Everyone can go home now. We don't have to work just because you say so because we need some justification for our handouts. 90% of the jobs done are just digging holes and filling them in so that people can suffer for money. That's what it's all about.

The job of the machine is to make drudgery unnecessary.

Agreed.

How can you agree without suffering cognitive dissonance? If drudgery is unnecessary, then how can anyone be compelled to do it?

The job of the machine is to reduce drudgery as much as possible, but in 2019 and the foreseeable future, drudgery is still necessary.

But each year, less than before. Tick tock the countdown to a scarcity of scarcity. How will you make people suffer when machines have taken every job? There is no job that a machine can't do. Machines can even do artistic work like writing music, painting.

There are 150 million tax returns filed and 330,000,000 people, so I don't know how to divide the numbers, but the rate would be closer to 50% than 5%.

It's not more authoritarian than taxation now (or ever) and it's not compelling anyone to work harder or softer or compelling anyone to do anything except pay a % of their profits back into the system. Other than that, they're free to do what the hell ever: get a job, don't get a job, get rich, live in mom's basement, go to school, jump off a bridge,,, whatever.

Okay, let's say we improve working conditions and increase wages to make them fair, whatever we as a society decide fair is, which's what we should do.

How are you going to do that? "Let's say"? That's dictation. You cannot dictate wages higher. The only way to raise wages is to increase welfare. Give people more options so the corps have to compel them to work.

Let's say 25% of people provide superfluous goods (and services) for everyone, and 25% of people provide necessary goods for everyone.

Now if 12.5% of the people that provide superfluous goods for everyone, and 12.5% of the people that provide necessary goods for everyone, quit, and live off UBI or go on welfare, what does that entail?

I've asked oodles of people if they would quit their job if the gov sent $10k per year whether they work or not. Only one woman said yes because that's more than she gets now and would rather stay home with her kids. Everyone else would work and get the UBI.

I know a woman who has to work with the flu (food service no less, spreading it to the customers) because if she doesn't, she'll lose her job. But with the UBI, she could tell her employer to suck it since if she loses her job, she doesn't starve. And since every other employee can also say that, then the employer would have to be more considerate of people. UBI adds to the power of people.

Wages are a function of people's willingness to work. Prices are a function of people's willingness to buy. I don't know which will drop more.

So if wages fall less than prices, it'll be a good thing for workers and consumers, and if wages and prices fall equally, it'll be a neutral thing.
So it could be a neutral or even a good thing, so why're you worried?

Prices can only fall because people do not have enough money to spend. Well,,, competition and automation also lowers prices, but this wouldn't happen in response to elimination of welfare. In response to no welfare, demand would fall off a cliff and prices would follow. Wages would then follow prices down the abyss and who can tell which would be lower.

They'll just pay less for the shorter week.

They can't really, because we've increased the minimum wage, and we'll continually adjust for inflation.

Then everyone will get the minimum and no raises. Or they'll move to another country.

How else do you expect companies to hire people to make stuff that no one has the money to buy?

Or they might not lower wages in the first place, because they know it'll just mean people won't be able to buy their goods.

Companies usually fire people when sales start to drop. Then their stock shoots up because of the elimination of employees. The insiders sell out before sales drop more and the company files bankruptcy.

The minimum? That's $7.25. I don't call that "setting wages". A bump up to $15, I would.

I just want to increase the minimum, not set every wage, altho perhaps we should lower the minimum wage small businesses have to pay.

I agree.

Well, setting prices, wages,

Prices are secondary, wages are primary, if it gets too complicated, we don't have to set prices.
And I only wanted to set them for food and housing.
And I wanted to set them higher for big food and housing than small.
We could also nationalize or unionize big food and housing, and run them more in the interests of workers, consumers and residents.
Just an idea, but the main thing is wages.

It seems much easier to regulate the amount of welfare and the minimum wage. Everything else will be in response to that in a free market.

One more thing about prices, I wanted to have maximum prices for foods and housing, so businesses could charge whatever they want so long as they don't exceed them.

I don't think price caps work either. I haven't researched it, but just took it for granted.

forcing companies to hire, and generally micromanaging the economy is essentially what the communist dictators tried to do.

I don't see why my plan has to entail that.

I think you'll be pushed into micromanaging since every meddling will require more fixing.

[Gloominary]

@Serendipper

What evidence do you have to support the assertion that servitude cannot be eliminated? What? Because machines are making so much more work to do?

I think you're exaggerating how productive we've become.
A modern farmer feeds 100-150 people, whereas a medieval farmer fed himself, his family and maybe several others, but the medieval farmer and his wife made their own ceramics, clothes, built their own house and so on, they took care of almost all of their own needs, whereas the modern farmer is totally reliant on others.
While I agree modern technology has made us more productive, It's not so much as we're that much more productive, as we're that much more interdependent.

When machines have made us so productive, a man can not only use them to feed, clothe and shelter himself without relying on other men, but feed, clothe and shelter 100s or 1000s of others, well, at that point we won't even need society anymore, it'll be optional, because we can use machines to take care of all our needs just by pulling a lever and pressing a few buttons, but we're lightyears away from that.

That by the year 3000 we will be working 24 hrs a day because of such scarcity? Pft.

Many scientists are predicting an ecological collapse before the end of this century, because we've become too reliant on globalization and technology.
Many are telling us it's not enough to make our technologies greener, because making them more efficient just means we'll produce even more with them.
They're telling us we have to localize our economies, that we don't need to get fruits and vegetables from China and India, it's absurd, and that if we don't, we'll collapse back into the dark ages, where we'll have to work 12-16 hours a day.

But you know what, again I think our productivity has been greatly exaggerated.
Many native American tribes were able to take care of their needs just by laboring 4-5 hours a day, the early European migrants regarded them as lazy by their standards, so maybe getting rid of globalization and technology will make our lives more leisurely after all.

Friedman visited one of those statist countries back in the 70s and said "Why not replace all those shoveling workers with a machine?" The reply was, "Well, we're not really trying to accomplish anything but to provide jobs." Friedman replied, "In that case, why not give them spoons to shovel with?"

The point of jobs is not to provide jobs, but to do a job. Once the job is done, it's done. Everyone can go home now. We don't have to work just because you say so because we need some justification for our handouts. 90% of the jobs done are just digging holes and filling them in so that people can suffer for money. That's what it's all about.

I agree some jobs are meaningless, but it's nowhere near as many as you're suggesting, it's probably more like a 3rd of jobs are meaningless, a 3rd make stuff that makes people happier, but isn't needed, and a 3rd makes stuff that's needed.

How are you going to do that? "Let's say"? That's dictation. You cannot dictate wages higher. The only way to raise wages is to increase welfare. Give people more options so the corps have to compel them to work.

In Canada, we're increasing the federal min wage from about 10 dollars to 15.
Well, I say just increase it from 15 to 20, or 30, and adjust for inflation annually, so the working class can either support their families themselves, without relying on government, or save some money, or work part time and live a more leisurely life.
Or go to college or university without having to borrow money or work full time.
Or entrepreneur.

UBI has never before been tried on a large scale, it's something radical and experimental, whereas just increasing minimum wage is something we already do, just increase it more.

I've asked oodles of people if they would quit their job if the gov sent $10k per year whether they work or not. Only one woman said yes because that's more than she gets now and would rather stay home with her kids. Everyone else would work and get the UBI.

Inaction speaks louder than words.
I know several people who're on disability for depression, and while these people are depressed at times, they admitted to me that they could work full time if they had to, they'd just rather not.
Part of their depression probably stems from low self-esteem, from feeling useless, lack of exercise, poor diet, drug abuse, these people all have terrible life styles.
They need to get their shit together and go out there and contribute.
I suspect 10s of millions of Americans will abuse UBI if it should ever become option, to the point where the economy may collapse.

As for single moms, while I have empathy for widows and women fleeing deadbeats and physical and mental abuse (as I have empathy for men fleeing such conditions), most single moms are selfish, spoiled rotten and just want to raise their children their way (i.e. 0 discipline/respect), while relying on the state, alimony and child support from the father, meanwhile they gold dig, stay home, stuff their faces and watch reruns of Orpah and other daytime talk shows (i.e. misandrist propaganda).
And the stepdads almost invariably treat the kids like shit, but they'll put up with it to multiply the number of men they can leach off of.
The vast majority of single moms are a plague, a scourge on society.
Unnecessary single motherhood is child abuse.
We need to get rid of no fault divorce to encourage families to stay together.

Prices can only fall because people do not have enough money to spend. Well,,, competition and automation also lowers prices, but this wouldn't happen in response to elimination of welfare. In response to no welfare, demand would fall off a cliff and prices would follow. Wages would then follow prices down the abyss and who can tell which would be lower.

So it could be good, could be bad, could be neither, so you don't have a point.

Companies usually fire people when sales start to drop. Then their stock shoots up because of the elimination of employees. The insiders sell out before sales drop more and the company files bankruptcy.

Sales may not drop, in fact they may increase, if prices fall lower than wages.

Then everyone will get the minimum and no raises. Or they'll move to another country.

No, the working poor will be lifted out of poverty, but the middle and upper class will still earn more than them.

And middle class won't get raises because of UBI, for none of them will be tempted to quit and go on UBI.

And UBI only raises the wages of the working class if they sometimes make good on their threat to quit their job, but if too many of them do, the economy may collapse as a result.

[Gloominary]

@Serendipper

Nope. I've been through the numbers on this. Raise taxes on the top, cut taxes on the middle, institute negative tax on the bottom. Most people are better off than before.

But the point I really want to highlight here is that even though my plan involves a taxcut for any class you could ever aspire to inhabit, and raise your wages, and increase the health and education of society,

My plan does all that, without having to take care of 10s of 1000000s of lazy people.

You will make your own life harder just to make the poor suffer.

I don't want to make my life harder by taking care of lazy people.

Sure, but who shaped the environment to specifically favor white people? Who said, "We need to rally together to shape our environment to favor the white humanoids. This must be teleological because if left to chance, blacks might become smarter and we can't have that!" Like I said, no one gets any credit.

By and large, smart, strong people, many of whom happened to be European, but some of whom happened to be Asian, native American and African, shaped their environment to improve the lives of people, especially smart, strong people irrespective of race.

What progressives are doing is propping up the dumber, weaker members of the African race at the expense of the smarter, stronger members of the European race, which'll just help lead to the de-evolution of both races.

I can't imagine that's prolific.

This would've been unthinkable in 1989, or 1999.
This is just the beginning, anti-white sentiment is growing at an accelerating pace.

If you accept the premise that an individual can be held responsible for what some of the ancestors of his race did, or for what some (more like a few) members of his race do now, if you accept the premise that through some combination of ecological advantages and malevolence, white people have done far more harm to the world than good, and that we have an ancestral debt to pay because of it, it becomes clearer how we got to where we are now, as well as where we're headed.

They say until our collective debt to other races is paid, some of our rights should be revoked, the only question is, how many, and for how long?
Where do progressives draw the line?
When will we have made amends for enslaving and supposedly genociding millions of blacks, Jews, natives and others?
every year they draw it farther and farther ahead.
The answer has become clear, as far as they think they can get away with drawing it.

The only way to truly counteract this growing anti-white sentiment is to totally reject all of their premises, not merely argue over minor details.

[Gloominary]

@Serendipper

It's no trouble to distort christianity as people do it daily and have been for centuries. I can make the bible say anything you want. Remember Jonestown?

Christianity, whose founder extolled the virtues of charity, forgiveness and pacifism, has also inspired a lot of good in the world.
It's easier to use figures like Darwin, Nietzsche, Odin and Thor to commit atrocities than to use Jesus, or the Buddha or Lao Tzu for that matter.

He said those latter things near his death. Most of his life, like me, was spent as a Christian.

No he said them on and off all throughout his reign.

How come he never stopped paying the church tax?

Religious expediency, opportunism.

I've only been out of Christianity maybe a year or two. Maybe historians will argue whether or not I was a Christian. If they do, then they're both right.

He wrote a book before he rose to power, without knowing that he would rise to power, and in that book he said he was a Christian. I wrote a post in the past saying I was a Christian and at the time I was. Same with Hitler.

But if we discovered in your PMs with close confidants, you were telling them you're still a Christian and only feigning atheism, expediently exploiting it for a Christian cause, and furthermore we could see evidence of this opportunistic exploitation in your deeds, we would know your atheism is a ruse.

What's the difference?

Reminds me of the question: Do you have more faith in god or science. I thought the question should be: Do you have more faith in faith or science? Faith has two meanings. I have more confidence in science than faith.

exactly, there is no practical difference, they're both equally deluded in different ways.

No, authoritarianism is controlling the population based on the opinion of the elites. P is controlled by E.
Democracy elects representatives to control the population based on the opinions of the population. P is controlled by P.

E is the authoritarian. Authoritarianism is top-down. Democracy is bottom-up.

For me, while democratic authoritarianism is preferabe to dictatorial or plutocratic, it's still authoritarianism, it's still coercive (tho I also believe coercion can occasionally be justified).

I bitched to dad that hillbilly republicans want to tax tv now. He said NY democrats tax soda. I said there's a difference: the dems tax unhealthy things to discourage their use and fund education; the right taxes innocent things to be fair to corporations. One is noble (though misguided) and the other is malicious. He hasn't responded yet and is probably has his head in a hole.

Firstly, those aren't real American conservatives, they're corporatists, conservatives in America are free market.

Secondly, hippie democrats want you to pay for other peoples drug addiction, sex change and laziness.

Thirdly, they want to impose carbon taxes, and while more carbon may be unhealthy for the planet (most climatologists say it is), most people are just trying to get from point A to point B, from home to work, school and the grocery store.
Why punish them?
Carbon taxes are something only the elite like Al Gore, who fly all around the world should pay.

The right is authoritarian. The left is not. P cannot be authoritarian to itself. Only E can be authoritarian: the church, fascists, communist dictators, corporations, etc.

The majority can exercise authority over minorities and individuals, or its present self over its future self.

Also, the deep state can dupe the majority into tyrannizing itself.

"Helpful" here having the meaning of assisting the slave system. If you're a good little minion, we'll let you live. If you protest servitude, you're a disease to be eradicated. You're definitely WAY on the right next to Hitler and Stalin.

For what?
For not wanting UBI?
For not wanting to support the lazy?
When it comes to the economy, I'm mixed, I'm socialist on some things (education, healthcare, minimum wage), free market on some things, and corporatist on none.
When it comes to social issues, I'm libertarian.
And I'm in favor of more direct democracy, not less.

Any jew who didn't believe he was their king (god) and still clung to the Law of Moses. Hmm.. that sounds familiar.

Jesus was a pacifist who believed it was God's right alone to distribute spiritual justice, not man's, not even Christian men's (tho man could still distribute secular justice, hence the partial separation of church and state in late antiquity and the middle ages, and the full separation in modernity).

'My kingdom is not of this world, or my children would fight'.

And Jesus chastised all people who believed they could earn salvation (he even warned of fake Christians), not just Jews who wouldn't convert.

No, he was more like you who hates the poor and: neutered them, enslaved them, and killed them. The only difference in you two is that he actually did it and you wish you could.

I am poor, and I want to increase our wages and what welfare pays for people who genuinely need it, as well as reduce the workweek.

They may care marginally more, but are far less equipped to raise a child.

Leaving kids in the hands of well-intentioned idiots only breeds more idiots (myself the fortunate exception). How many people are able to escape their childhood indoctrinations such that they can truly "choose this day whom ye shall serve"? I probably align closer with Hitler on this who recognized that parents have no clue how to raise a kid. Spreading legs in the back of a Camaro does not qualify one to be a mother.

No parents care far more about their own children, and are far more equipped to raise them as they share their genes.
Sounds like you have no respect for ordinary men and women and their capabilities.
In that case, why have democracy at all, if people can't even look after their own kids?

So you want to abduct peoples kids and institutionalize them, and yet you have the gall to accuse me of being on the far right with Hitler and Stalin?
You're the elitist, not me.

[Serendipper]

@Serendipper

What evidence do you have to support the assertion that servitude cannot be eliminated? What? Because machines are making so much more work to do?

I think you're exaggerating how productive we've become.
A modern farmer feeds 100-150 people, whereas a medieval farmer fed himself, his family and maybe several others, but the medieval farmer and his wife made their own ceramics, clothes, built their own house and so on, they took care of almost all of their own needs, whereas the modern farmer is totally reliant on others.
While I agree modern technology has made us more productive, It's not so much as we're that much more productive, as we're that much more interdependent.

Technological progression doesn't justify having to do exponentially more work as time goes on. And probably the only reason a farmer today can only feed 150 people is capitalism. If humanity eliminated money completely and simply focused on production of resources, then 1 farmer could feed the planet.

When machines have made us so productive, a man can not only use them to feed, clothe and shelter himself without relying on other men, but feed, clothe and shelter 100s or 1000s of others, well, at that point we won't even need society anymore, it'll be optional, because we can use machines to take care of all our needs just by pulling a lever and pressing a few buttons, but we're lightyears away from that.

Nah it could be done now, but we need the people who say it can't to die off. They are the only ones holding humanity back and they can't be reasoned with, so funeral by funeral we progress. A good flu pandemic would do wonders for humanity as it would probably kill disproportionately more old dogmatists while leaving the young green shoots to thrive.

That by the year 3000 we will be working 24 hrs a day because of such scarcity? Pft.

Many scientists are predicting an ecological collapse before the end of this century, because we've become too reliant on globalization and technology.
Many are telling us it's not enough to make our technologies greener, because making them more efficient just means we'll produce even more with them.
They're telling us we have to localize our economies, that we don't need to get fruits and vegetables from China and India, it's absurd, and that if we don't, we'll collapse back into the dark ages, where we'll have to work 12-16 hours a day.

What scientists? They don't seem too bright to me.

But you know what, again I think our productivity has been greatly exaggerated.
Many native American tribes were able to take care of their needs just by laboring 4-5 hours a day, the early European migrants regarded them as lazy by their standards, so maybe getting rid of globalization and technology will make our lives more leisurely after all.

Well, they didn't have much to do and they had a lot of people to do it. Now we've made all sorts of chores to do, like updating google perpetually, as if that were imperative. 1000s of jobs could be eliminated by simply making the tax code less complex. Most of the work done in the world is just digging a hole and refilling it... and it's because people exist who demand other people suffer for money.

I'd prefer the gov seize google, fire everyone, and preserve its current form and function forever and ever. Maybe retain one guy who can fix what breaks. All of silicon valley can go on permanent vacation. All the bankers can be fired as well. We could do this right now, today, with no robots. Millions would be jobless and nothing would change, except that millions would be jobless and would require handouts.

Friedman visited one of those statist countries back in the 70s and said "Why not replace all those shoveling workers with a machine?" The reply was, "Well, we're not really trying to accomplish anything but to provide jobs." Friedman replied, "In that case, why not give them spoons to shovel with?"

The point of jobs is not to provide jobs, but to do a job. Once the job is done, it's done. Everyone can go home now. We don't have to work just because you say so because we need some justification for our handouts. 90% of the jobs done are just digging holes and filling them in so that people can suffer for money. That's what it's all about.

I agree some jobs are meaningless, but it's nowhere near as many as you're suggesting, it's probably more like a 3rd of jobs are meaningless, a 3rd make stuff that makes people happier, but isn't needed, and a 3rd makes stuff that's needed.

I bet it's closer to 70-90% of jobs that are irrelevant. Fire all insurance agents. If you want insurance, go online and apply; it's automated. All bankers can be fired. If you want a loan, go online and apply; it's automated. Cut the police force in half; we don't need cops handing out seatbelt tickets and cameras can issue speeding violations in the mail. I bet I could whittle the workforce down to 10% of what it is now and not change anything, except that those people would need handouts. A few smart guys putting their heads together + robots + about 1 year and we'd have the workforce down to 1% of what it was.

How are you going to do that? "Let's say"? That's dictation. You cannot dictate wages higher. The only way to raise wages is to increase welfare. Give people more options so the corps have to compel them to work.

In Canada, we're increasing the federal min wage from about 10 dollars to 15.
Well, I say just increase it from 15 to 20, or 30, and adjust for inflation annually, so the working class can either support their families themselves, without relying on government, or save some money, or work part time and live a more leisurely life.
Or go to college or university without having to borrow money or work full time.
Or entrepreneur.

UBI has never before been tried on a large scale, it's something radical and experimental, whereas just increasing minimum wage is something we already do, just increase it more.

If you handout money for free, then you won't need to bother with min wage laws because corps will have to pay ungodly wages just to get people to work. You could control everything by the amount of the UBI. A computer could do it. Hell, Friedman said that in the 70s: a computer could control the money supply and run the whole show.

I've asked oodles of people if they would quit their job if the gov sent $10k per year whether they work or not. Only one woman said yes because that's more than she gets now and would rather stay home with her kids. Everyone else would work and get the UBI.

Inaction speaks louder than words.
I know several people who're on disability for depression, and while these people are depressed at times, they admitted to me that they could work full time if they had to, they'd just rather not.
Part of their depression probably stems from low self-esteem, from feeling useless, lack of exercise, poor diet, drug abuse, these people all have terrible life styles.
They need to get their shit together and go out there and contribute.
I suspect 10s of millions of Americans will abuse UBI if it should ever become option, to the point where the economy may collapse.

People are depressed due to the capitalist system (and being so far north doesn't help their vitamin D status). A guy who used to work for me got SSI while he was working, but I had to get him out of bed and wait for him to shit before we could go to work. He's just mentally incapable of supporting himself and if left to himself, he peddles drugs and his wife works 2 jobs in addition to the SSI. Some people just can't do it and they're a victim of the system. We can't fix those people, but we can fix the system to prevent more of those types from forming.

I mean, he'd rather drop a bowling ball on his toe so he could be prescribed more opiates to sell than to get a job. A job is too much work, requires too much discipline, doesn't pay enough, and the reward is too slow. Much easier to spill hot grease on his arm. His daughter and his whole family are pillheads because they have no hope of anything and are slowly committing suicide to escape this fucked up system. $10/hr isn't enough. $15 isn't enough. $30? Ok maybe they would stop the pills and have hope of some type of life worth living. I'd rather suck a tailpipe than prostitute myself for $10/hr.

As for single moms, while I have empathy for widows and women fleeing deadbeats and physical and mental abuse (as I have empathy for men fleeing such conditions), most single moms are selfish, spoiled rotten and just want to raise their children their way (i.e. 0 discipline/respect), while relying on the state, alimony and child support from the father, meanwhile they gold dig, stay home, stuff their faces and watch reruns of Orpah and other daytime talk shows (i.e. misandrist propaganda).
And the stepdads almost invariably treat the kids like shit, but they'll put up with it to multiply the number of men they can leach off of.
The vast majority of single moms are a plague, a scourge on society.
Unnecessary single motherhood is child abuse.
We need to get rid of no fault divorce to encourage families to stay together.

Deserve has nothing to do with it. We cannot allow kids to be raised in squalor. Period. If we do, then we're just making more problems that can't be fixed.

Prices can only fall because people do not have enough money to spend. Well,,, competition and automation also lowers prices, but this wouldn't happen in response to elimination of welfare. In response to no welfare, demand would fall off a cliff and prices would follow. Wages would then follow prices down the abyss and who can tell which would be lower.

So it could be good, could be bad, could be neither, so you don't have a point.

It could be that you have reading difficulty. Wages and prices WILL certainly, without a doubt, be in the abyss. But, I cannot tell which will be FARTHER in the abyss.

If you jumped into a cauldron of molten steel, I can't tell if your left or right leg would be hotter. Since I can't tell that, you decide jumping into the magma might be a good idea.

Companies usually fire people when sales start to drop. Then their stock shoots up because of the elimination of employees. The insiders sell out before sales drop more and the company files bankruptcy.

Sales may not drop, in fact they may increase, if prices fall lower than wages.

The reason prices are falling is because nobody has money, so how could that ever be construed as a good thing?

What we want to see is prices rising and why it's the mandate of the fed to keep prices rising at 2% forever. We never ever want to see prices fall because it can only mean people do not have any money. (Unless of course the falling prices are coming by way of competition and automation).

Then everyone will get the minimum and no raises. Or they'll move to another country.

No, the working poor will be lifted out of poverty, but the middle and upper class will still earn more than them.

And middle class won't get raises because of UBI, for none of them will be tempted to quit and go on UBI.

And UBI only raises the wages of the working class if they sometimes make good on their threat to quit their job, but if too many of them do, the economy may collapse as a result.

It's mechanically impossible for the economy to collapse if the poor have money. There is absolutely no way for it to happen. Economic collapse is the state in which the poor are broke.

[Serendipper]

@Serendipper

Nope. I've been through the numbers on this. Raise taxes on the top, cut taxes on the middle, institute negative tax on the bottom. Most people are better off than before.

But the point I really want to highlight here is that even though my plan involves a taxcut for any class you could ever aspire to inhabit, and raise your wages, and increase the health and education of society,

My plan does all that, without having to take care of 10s of 1000000s of lazy people.

The only way to achieve lower taxes for yourself + higher wages + healthy and smart society is to take from the rich to give to the poor. If your plan doesn't do that, then your plan cannot achieve that; the mechanics simply are not there (ie it's mechanically impossible like a square circle).

You will make your own life harder just to make the poor suffer.

I don't want to make my life harder by taking care of lazy people.

"lazy people" here has the meaning of people who do not want to be slaves of the rich.

So you said "I don't want to make my life harder by freeing slaves."

But that still is not correct because freeing slaves would make your life easier.

So, you want to make your life harder by enslaving people.

If there is such a thing as evil, that is it.

Sure, but who shaped the environment to specifically favor white people? Who said, "We need to rally together to shape our environment to favor the white humanoids. This must be teleological because if left to chance, blacks might become smarter and we can't have that!" Like I said, no one gets any credit.

By and large, smart, strong people, many of whom happened to be European, but some of whom happened to be Asian, native American and African, shaped their environment to improve the lives of people, especially smart, strong people irrespective of race.

What progressives are doing is propping up the dumber, weaker members of the African race at the expense of the smarter, stronger members of the European race, which'll just help lead to the de-evolution of both races.

I disagree, but I'm tired of arguing with a recording.

I can't imagine that's prolific.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxXS3_aesTQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_g9uIHCAZs

Still not prolific. I don't know why they can't understand inclusiveness doesn't mean segregation.

This would've been unthinkable in 1989, or 1999.
This is just the beginning, anti-white sentiment is growing at an accelerating pace.

Well, it's the fault of the whites for being arrogant in the first place. As I said, I'm happy to see them go. Not sure what I'm getting into, but seeing the decline is recompense. If whites were humble, I'd take their side, but I can't sympathize with the arrogant.

If you accept the premise that an individual can be held responsible for what some of the ancestors of his race did, or for what some (more like a few) members of his race do now, if you accept the premise that through some combination of ecological advantages and malevolence, white people have done far more harm to the world than good, and that we have an ancestral debt to pay because of it, it becomes clearer how we got to where we are now, as well as where we're headed.

It has nothing to do with slavery, but being boneheaded. All boneheads need to go extinct, regardless of color.

They say until our collective debt to other races is paid, some of our rights should be revoked, the only question is, how many, and for how long?
Where do progressives draw the line?
When will we have made amends for enslaving and supposedly genociding millions of blacks, Jews, natives and others?
every year they draw it farther and farther ahead.
The answer has become clear, as far as they think they can get away with drawing it.

That's a red herring. It's not about prior slavery; it's about being a jerk right now.

The only way to truly counteract this growing anti-white sentiment is to totally reject all of their premises, not merely argue over minor details.

There is no way to counteract it because arrogant narcissists cannot change. Extinction is the only way forward, funeral by funeral.

The vikings died of their own arrogance leaving the Inuit to thrive in their wake. Whites have the propensity to beat their chests as they march to oblivion.

Whites (ie conservatives who are exclusively white) could prevent their fate by immediately taking care of the poor through min wage and ubi, ending the war on drugs, ending cash bail, and essentially taking up the liberal line, but they won't... not a chance, because they relish the suffering of the poor... it's dear to their hearts and gives meaning to their lives, so extinction is their future and I'm cheering their demise as a noble act.

[Serendipper]

@Serendipper

It's no trouble to distort christianity as people do it daily and have been for centuries. I can make the bible say anything you want. Remember Jonestown?

Christianity, whose founder extolled the virtues of charity, forgiveness and pacifism, has also inspired a lot of good in the world.
It's easier to use figures like Darwin, Nietzsche, Odin and Thor to commit atrocities than to use Jesus, or the Buddha or Lao Tzu for that matter.

I think it's easier to use christianity than anyone you listed. The church didn't denounce antisemitism until 1964. Racists are overwhelmingly christian. The darwinists have too many jews to be allied to any racial purity goal. There is no way to rally a bunch of atheists to commit atrocities.

He said those latter things near his death. Most of his life, like me, was spent as a Christian.

No he said them on and off all throughout his reign.

The evidence I saw indicated he ridiculed religion only near his death. What did you see that I missed?

How come he never stopped paying the church tax?

Religious expediency, opportunism.

So religion is a tool? That was my point.

I've only been out of Christianity maybe a year or two. Maybe historians will argue whether or not I was a Christian. If they do, then they're both right.

He wrote a book before he rose to power, without knowing that he would rise to power, and in that book he said he was a Christian. I wrote a post in the past saying I was a Christian and at the time I was. Same with Hitler.

But if we discovered in your PMs with close confidants, you were telling them you're still a Christian and only feigning atheism, expediently exploiting it for a Christian cause, and furthermore we could see evidence of this opportunistic exploitation in your deeds, we would know your atheism is a ruse.

Where are Hitler's PMs contradicting what he said in his book? Those PMs didn't happen until 20 years after he wrote his book.

What's the difference?

Reminds me of the question: Do you have more faith in god or science. I thought the question should be: Do you have more faith in faith or science? Faith has two meanings. I have more confidence in science than faith.

exactly, there is no practical difference, they're both equally deluded in different ways.

Well, no, faith in science is faith in reason and faith in god is just blind hope.

No, authoritarianism is controlling the population based on the opinion of the elites. P is controlled by E.
Democracy elects representatives to control the population based on the opinions of the population. P is controlled by P.

E is the authoritarian. Authoritarianism is top-down. Democracy is bottom-up.

For me, while democratic authoritarianism is preferabe to dictatorial or plutocratic, it's still authoritarianism, it's still coercive (tho I also believe coercion can occasionally be justified).

Can't coerce the willing. Can't have authoritarianism without coercion. Democracy cannot be authoritative. Republicanism can be authoritative because it coerces the many to the will of the few.

I bitched to dad that hillbilly republicans want to tax tv now. He said NY democrats tax soda. I said there's a difference: the dems tax unhealthy things to discourage their use and fund education; the right taxes innocent things to be fair to corporations. One is noble (though misguided) and the other is malicious. He hasn't responded yet and is probably has his head in a hole.

Firstly, those aren't real American conservatives, they're corporatists, conservatives in America are free market.

Corps are simply taking advantage of a free market. What are you complaining about?

Secondly, hippie democrats want you to pay for other peoples drug addiction, sex change and laziness.

No they don't, they want Bezos to pay for them. Hippie dems want to lower your taxes along with other goodies that you don't want because what's important is being sure that nobody else gets freebies.

Thirdly, they want to impose carbon taxes, and while more carbon may be unhealthy for the planet (most climatologists say it is), most people are just trying to get from point A to point B, from home to work, school and the grocery store.
Why punish them?
Carbon taxes are something only the elite like Al Gore, who fly all around the world should pay.

All taxes on the poor and all flat taxes are conservative ideals; it doesn't matter what label they wear.

The right is authoritarian. The left is not. P cannot be authoritarian to itself. Only E can be authoritarian: the church, fascists, communist dictators, corporations, etc.

The majority can exercise authority over minorities and individuals, or its present self over its future self.

Right, majority rules because less people are inconvenienced.

Also, the deep state can dupe the majority into tyrannizing itself.

Only if the people are uneducated.

"Helpful" here having the meaning of assisting the slave system. If you're a good little minion, we'll let you live. If you protest servitude, you're a disease to be eradicated. You're definitely WAY on the right next to Hitler and Stalin.

For what?
For not wanting UBI?
For not wanting to support the lazy?

Again, "lazy" means "people who do not want to be slaves." Why can you not understand that?

You are forcing people into the workforce, against their will, specifically for the purpose of making the rich richer. There is no other reason.

When it comes to the economy, I'm mixed, I'm socialist on some things (education, healthcare, minimum wage), free market on some things, and corporatist on none.

No, you are as conservative as rush limpbone. Making the poor suffer is first priority.

When it comes to social issues, I'm libertarian.
And I'm in favor of more direct democracy, not less.

Democracy includes letting racially inferior people vote.

No, he was more like you who hates the poor and: neutered them, enslaved them, and killed them. The only difference in you two is that he actually did it and you wish you could.

I am poor, and I want to increase our wages and what welfare pays for people who genuinely need it, as well as reduce the workweek.

You want to force people to work against their will which will drive wages down.

They may care marginally more, but are far less equipped to raise a child.

Leaving kids in the hands of well-intentioned idiots only breeds more idiots (myself the fortunate exception). How many people are able to escape their childhood indoctrinations such that they can truly "choose this day whom ye shall serve"? I probably align closer with Hitler on this who recognized that parents have no clue how to raise a kid. Spreading legs in the back of a Camaro does not qualify one to be a mother.

No parents care far more about their own children, and are far more equipped to raise them as they share their genes.

How does possession of genes confer intellect of how to raise a child?

Sounds like you have no respect for ordinary men and women and their capabilities.

If you don't share that disrespect then you haven't left the nest yet. The average person is stupid and half the population is dumber than that.

In that case, why have democracy at all, if people can't even look after their own kids?

The public may agree that parents could benefit by some compulsory education on parenting.

Vegan parents charged after starving their baby by switching from formula https://www.foxnews.com/us/vegan-parent ... ic-formula

Parents force their dumbassery on innocent kids. Raise kids objectively and let them decide whether to be vegans or religious nuts.

Since I was born into christianity, I never had the opportunity to "choose this day whom ye shall serve" until now, and only because I was able to get out into a neutral position.

So you want to abduct peoples kids and institutionalize them, and yet you have the gall to accuse me of being on the far right with Hitler and Stalin?
You're the elitist, not me.

Yep, the evil government abducted those kids the parents had locked in dog cages with shit all over them. Bad gov! https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/13/us/texas ... index.html

Parents doing stupid shit lose their kids. I want to expand what we consider stupid shit. The public is on my side, so it's not authoritative.

[Gloominary]

@Serendipper

There is no way to rally a bunch of atheists to commit atrocities.

Firstly, how do you know, since no country has ever had a majority atheist population?

Secondly, China comes closest to having a majority atheist population, nearly half are atheists and the other half are Buddhists/Daoists, and many or most Buddhists/Daoists are nontheistic, yet that didn't stop, nor slow the Chinese down from committing some of, if not The biggest atrocities in world history, massacring tens of millions under chairman Mao, nor does it stop them from acquiescing to authoritarianism now, not the oppression of hundreds of millions of Han Chinese, nor the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities such as millions of Tibetans, Muslims and Falun Gong.

Fundamentally human nature remains the same, in spite of its institutions.

Thirdly, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and other communist dictators and their regimes were atheists, yet that didn't stop them from committing atrocities, because they were sociopaths, or had strong sociopathic tendencies.
Many or most soldiers are sociopaths or have strong sociopathic tendencies too, so I don't see why atheism wouldn't stop communist dictators and their regimes from committing atrocities, but would stop their soldiers, and as for most civilian populations, they would just frightfully and passively submit to tyranny like they nearly always do.

Finally, rural people, which tend to be more religious, tend to be less violent than urban people, and it takes a violent person to commit atrocities.

The evidence I saw indicated he ridiculed religion only near his death. What did you see that I missed?

If Hitler pretended to be a Christian during the last several years of his life, which's when he committed his atrocities, why do you suppose he wasn't pretending to be a Christian all along?

No either he didn't believe in God at all, or he believed in some sort of spiritual force, but it wasn't Christian, it was Germanic, pagan, he just used Christianity while trying to purge it of everything contrary to his war God, his true spiritual belief.

Hitler was mired in the occult, secular philosophy and science from a very young age.

So religion is a tool? That was my point.

Yes, a tool, for good or ill, just as secular ideology and politics are.

Well, no, faith in science is faith in reason and faith in god is just blind hope.

Actually faith in reason isn't reasonable.
We shouldn't overestimate our ability to reason, nor other's, and we shouldn't overly rely on reason.
We need a certain amount of intuition and instinct, as well as cultural deference.
Additionally, it's not so much progressive's faith in reason, as progressive's faith in the goodness of man and his works, and from what I and many others have witnessed, progressives have way too much of it, they're far too humanistic and optimistic.

Corps are simply taking advantage of a free market. What are you complaining about?

No, mega-corps coercively fix prices, regulations and wages in ways that benefit them at the expense of their competition.
They assassinate whistle blowers, rely on bailouts/corporate welfare, bust unions, hire illegals, ship jobs to places where they can practice slave labor, bribe courts and politicians and exploit tax loopholes, all sorts of shady, sketchy dealings.

No they don't, they want Bezos to pay for them. Hippie dems want to lower your taxes along with other goodies that you don't want because what's important is being sure that nobody else gets freebies.

In practice, dems care very little for the working class, and they want to wipe out the middle class by overtaxing them, whereas republicans care very little for the middle class, and they want to wipe out the working class by cutting necessary social services.

All taxes on the poor and all flat taxes are conservative ideals; it doesn't matter what label they wear.

In theory, conservatives (or at least libertarian conservatives) are for fewer and flatter taxes (capitalism), progressives for more and progressive taxes (socialism), but in practice both republicans and democrats are in favor of more and flatter taxes (corporatism), they only differ in the details of how their plutocratic agenda is implemented, on the big picture they converge.

All taxes on the poor and all flat taxes are conservative ideals; it doesn't matter what label they wear.

Conservatives aren't in favor of environmental taxes, progressives are.
You say it's a conservative idea because it's a flat tax, I could just as easily say it's a progressive idea because it's an environmental tax.
In reality it's a hybrid tax, with conservative and progressive components, tailored to hurt both the middle and working class.
Again, in practice both dems and republicans are corporatists.

Right, majority rules because less people are inconvenienced.

Inconvenienced is one way of putting it, oppression is another, it depending on the circumstances.

Only if the people are uneducated.

Which is much or most of the time, relative to how educated they need or ought to be.

Again, "lazy" means "people who do not want to be slaves." Why can you not understand that?

You are forcing people into the workforce, against their will, specifically for the purpose of making the rich richer. There is no other reason.

If society provides able people with goods and services, they should provide goods and services in exchange, otherwise they can go to hell for all I care, along with their idiotic apologists.
Whatever capitalists would've been taxed to pay to them in the form of UBI or welfare, they can instead give directly to workers in the form of higher wages, and/or lower prices (if feasible *shrugs) and/or improved education, healthcare and working conditions.

My plan doesn't help the rich get richer, on the contrary, doubling or tripling the minimum wage, improving education, healthcare and working conditions hurts the rich.
Furthermore, workers will now be able to save money and invest in the economy and become owners themselves, so they'll no longer be able to be exploited.

You see I want to help people help themselves, whereas you want them to remain dependent, if not on corporations than on the state, and the state isn't that much more trustworthy than corporations, what it gives it can just as easily takeaway and then some when it goes rogue, and sooner or later it will, it's only a matter of time.

You want to force people to work against their will which will drive wages down.

It won't matter for the poorest jobs, which's what most people on welfare will be taking once they're kicked off, because corporations can't pay less than minimum wage, which'll be doubled or tripled under my plan.
Again, we can either reduce the workweek, or we can gradually cut people who're abusing welfare off, giving businesses sufficient time to find something for them to do, or, we can just leave welfare as it is, but we shouldn't improve it so long as many or most people are abusing it. And forget about UBI.

How does possession of genes confer intellect of how to raise a child?

People understand their own biological children and what's best for them better than they understand other people's children, because they're very similar to themselves.

If you don't share that disrespect then you haven't left the nest yet. The average person is stupid and half the population is dumber than that.

People just need higher wages, for the most part otherwise they're perfectly capable of looking after themselves and their children.

The public may agree that parents could benefit by some compulsory education on parenting.

Vegan parents charged after starving their baby by switching from formula https://www.foxnews.com/us/vegan-parent ... ic-formula

Parents force their dumbassery on innocent kids. Raise kids objectively and let them decide whether to be vegans or religious nuts.

Since I was born into christianity, I never had the opportunity to "choose this day whom ye shall serve" until now, and only because I was able to get out into a neutral position.

The state should only intervene in black/white cases where the damage is severe and undeniable, like starvation, physical or sexual abuse, or extreme mental and emotional abuse, and I wouldn't classify most religion as that.

The bottom line: I trust people to look after themselves, I think they just need a little help here and there, whereas what I think you're ultimately gunning for, is dictatorship.
I can see you have nothing but contempt, and outright hatred for most people.
Why have a democracy at all, in that case?
I'm sure our financial, intellectual and moral superiors will take much better care of us than we ourselves.
But if that doesn't work out, they can just liquify us/turn us into biofuel, two birds...

[Gloominary]

Well, it's the fault of the whites for being arrogant in the first place. As I said, I'm happy to see them go. Not sure what I'm getting into, but seeing the decline is recompense. If whites were humble, I'd take their side, but I can't sympathize with the arrogant.

Because blacks, Hispanics and Muslims love liberal democracy, that's why Africa, southcentral America and the middle east are shining beacons of liberal democracy.

[Gloominary]

Well, they didn't have much to do and they had a lot of people to do it. Now we've made all sorts of chores to do, like updating google perpetually, as if that were imperative. 1000s of jobs could be eliminated by simply making the tax code less complex. Most of the work done in the world is just digging a hole and refilling it... and it's because people exist who demand other people suffer for money.

I'd prefer the gov seize google, fire everyone, and preserve its current form and function forever and ever. Maybe retain one guy who can fix what breaks. All of silicon valley can go on permanent vacation. All the bankers can be fired as well. We could do this right now, today, with no robots. Millions would be jobless and nothing would change, except that millions would be jobless and would require handouts.

Keep dreaming.

According to google, 2% of the total population, or 4% of the employed population, since only 50% of the population is employed, is involved in agricultural production, and while the average American could stand to lose 10 pounds and eat at home more, that doesn't even include food distribution and prep.
So close to 5% produce, distribute and prep our food, that's 1 out of 20 working people.
Do you really think the remaining 19 are digging ditches with spoons?
Sure, many of them are, but certainly not all of them.
Many of them are manufacturing and distributing our clothes, houses, computers, phones, furniture, appliances, vehicles and so on, educating, medicating and protecting us, electricians, mechanics and plumbers, and while we could certainly cut back on some of these things and most of the banking, bureaucracy and service industries, it's not as if the vast majority of jobs are meaningless, luxuries or stuff no one benefits from.
I think we produce and consume way too much, but it's absurd to think only 0.1, or 1% of the population has to work.
And as long as there's some work to be done, it should be divvied up in some way.

It could be that you have reading difficulty. Wages and prices WILL certainly, without a doubt, be in the abyss. But, I cannot tell which will be FARTHER in the abyss.

If you jumped into a cauldron of molten steel, I can't tell if your left or right leg would be hotter. Since I can't tell that, you decide jumping into the magma might be a good idea.

What does it matter if the average wage pays 1 10th of 1 penny an hour, if the average meal costs 1 10th of 1 penny?
Just introduce new units when needed e.g. a jenny is worth 1 10th of a penny.
A kenny is worth 1 100th, a lenny 1 1000th...

[Karpel Tunnel]

There is no way to rally a bunch of atheists to commit atrocities.

Stalin and Mao managed. Pol Pot. If you want to say that many fo those the rallied were not atheists, the rallying and the ralliers did not use any appeal related to God. And the elites would not hesitate to cull for secular reasons.

[Serendipper]

@Serendipper

There is no way to rally a bunch of atheists to commit atrocities.

Firstly, how do you know, since no country has ever had a majority atheist population?

It's an argument from ignorance: because I can't think of a way to rally atheists together to commit atrocities. All conditions for atrocities are antipodal to atheist attributes. It's also an argument from ignorance that elephants can't fly. Perhaps they can, but characteristics conducive for flying are antipodal to elephant attributes.

Secondly, China comes closest to having a majority atheist population, nearly half are atheists and the other half are Buddhists/Daoists, and many or most Buddhists/Daoists are nontheistic,

Yes but Dear Leader is god in those asian places.

Why would you obey an order to go torture and kill some poor peasants if the guy in charge didn't have the powers of god and you were acting righteously? All those dictators were to be considered gods and all we're narcissists having statues unto themselves, banning speech against themselves, and generally punishing those who don't praise them, just like yahweh does. Authoritarianism is an old model.

yet that didn't stop, nor slow the Chinese down from committing some of, if not The biggest atrocities in world history, massacring tens of millions under chairman Mao,

Well apparently 10s of millions were following him, so they were the problem and not mao. If I walk off a bridge and you follow me, is it my fault or yours? If I tell you to kill 10 million people, are you going to obey me? Why not think for yourself? Mao was one guy. Everyone could have laughed at him and told him to get bent, but they didn't because he was their savior.

nor does it stop them from acquiescing to authoritarianism now, not the oppression of hundreds of millions of Han Chinese, nor the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities such as millions of Tibetans, Muslims and Falun Gong.

The first thing religion does is attack other religions. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Fundamentally human nature remains the same, in spite of its institutions.

And human nature is to create gods.

Thirdly, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and other communist dictators and their regimes were atheists, yet that didn't stop them from committing atrocities, because they were sociopaths, or had strong sociopathic tendencies.
Many or most soldiers are sociopaths or have strong sociopathic tendencies too, so I don't see why atheism wouldn't stop communist dictators and their regimes from committing atrocities, but would stop their soldiers, and as for most civilian populations, they would just frightfully and passively submit to tyranny like they nearly always do.

The religion of the dictator is irrelevant. What's relevant is the religion of the people. It would be a cinch to get the conservative robots of the religious right to all band together and obey orders, but you couldn't orchestrate liberals to do anything except show up late and blow off responsibility, among 100 other attributes that interfere with committing atrocities.

Finally, rural people, which tend to be more religious, tend to be less violent than urban people, and it takes a violent person to commit atrocities.

You may get mugged in a city, but that's not an atrocity. The election of Trump was an atrocity to poor wrought by the hands of the religious rurals. City folks would never do that. City folks ended slavery by kicking the inbred southern bumpkins' asses.

The evidence I saw indicated he ridiculed religion only near his death. What did you see that I missed?

If Hitler pretended to be a Christian during the last several years of his life, which's when he committed his atrocities, why do you suppose he wasn't pretending to be a Christian all along?

Because he said he was in his own book, hello! And in scores of speeches. It wasn't until 15-20 years later that he had anything bad to say of religion.

It's much more likely that he started out christian and lost the faith like I did. It's less likely that he wrote a book in 1925 with the prescience needed to know that he'd better lie and pretend to be the christian in order to become the fuhrer one day and then continue the facade until 1941 when he finally let the cat out of the bag. He truly believed god saved him in ww1 for a purpose.

Hitler was mired in the occult, secular philosophy and science from a very young age.

Where is the evidence of that?

Well, no, faith in science is faith in reason and faith in god is just blind hope.

Actually faith in reason isn't reasonable.

Then it's not reasonable for you to have faith in your own statement.

We shouldn't overestimate our ability to reason, nor other's, and we shouldn't overly rely on reason.

Faith isn't overestimation, but simply confidence.

We need a certain amount of intuition and instinct, as well as cultural deference.

That seems reasonable.

Additionally, it's not so much progressive's faith in reason, as progressive's faith in the goodness of man and his works,

I'm not nice to jerks because I have faith in the goodness of man, but because it's the only way to break the cycle.

and from what I and many others have witnessed incorrectly surmised, progressives have way too much of it, they're far too humanistic and optimistic.

FIFY

Corps are simply taking advantage of a free market. What are you complaining about?

No, mega-corps coercively fix prices, regulations and wages in ways that benefit them at the expense of their competition.
They assassinate whistle blowers, rely on bailouts/corporate welfare, bust unions, hire illegals, ship jobs to places where they can practice slave labor, bribe courts and politicians and exploit tax loopholes, all sorts of shady, sketchy dealings.

All is fair in love, war, and laissez faire markets. I still don't see your complaint. If I were a corp, I wouldn't want ANY laws impeding my progress of taking 100% of the money on earth. Having ALL the money is winning the game, right?

No they don't, they want Bezos to pay for them. Hippie dems want to lower your taxes along with other goodies that you don't want because what's important is being sure that nobody else gets freebies.

In the main, dems care very little for the working class, and they want to wipe out the middle class by overtaxing them, whereas republicans care very little for the middle class, and they want to wipe out the working class by cutting necessary social services.

Dems don't want to raise taxes on the middle class. That's republicans who insist that if the rich are taxed, then it's only fair that everyone else be taxed. Dems compromise with republicans.

All taxes on the poor and all flat taxes are conservative ideals; it doesn't matter what label they wear.

In theory, conservatives are for fewer and flatter taxes (capitalism), progressives for more and progressive taxes (socialism), but in reality both republicans and democrats are in favor of more and flatter taxes (corporatism), they only differ in the details of how their plutocratic agenda is implemented, on the big picture they converge.

If taxes were zero, money would instantly flow to the top and the economy would crash. So, just to maintain equilibrium there needs to be progressive taxation; therefore progressive taxation is actually neutral taxation. And therefore taxation less than neutral is regressive. The republican's job is easy: just make the progressive taxation less than neutral and money is transferred quietly and surreptitiously to the top with no one being the wiser. Only a handful of people on the planet seem smart enough to see that, and most are nobel laureates.

All taxes on the poor and all flat taxes are conservative ideals; it doesn't matter what label they wear.

Conservatives aren't in favor of environmental taxes, progressives are.

Macron is a conservative wearing a socialist label (like Hitler was super-ultra-hardcore conservative under the socialist banner).

Macron.... later became an investment banker at Rothschild & Cie Banque.

where he pushed through business-friendly reforms.

The budget replaced the wealth tax with one targeting real estate, fulfilling Macron's campaign pledge to scrap the wealth tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_ ... mic_policy

So, he cut taxes on the rich and raised taxes on the poor. That's a conservative.

Again, in practice both dems and republicans are corporatists.

Maybe, but republicans are vastly more so.

Only if the people are uneducated.

Which is much or most of the time, relative to how educated they need or ought to be.

Merely being educated in something trains people to exercise their brains which should also help them make better political decisions and decisions in general.

Again, "lazy" means "people who do not want to be slaves." Why can you not understand that?

You are forcing people into the workforce, against their will, specifically for the purpose of making the rich richer. There is no other reason.

If society provides able people with goods and services, they should provide goods and services in exchange, otherwise they can go to hell for all I care, along with their idiotic apologists.
Whatever capitalists would've been taxed to pay to them in the form of UBI or welfare, they can instead give directly to workers in the form of higher wages, and/or lower prices (if feasible *shrugs) and/or improved education, healthcare and working conditions.

Are you for some reason neurologically unable to understand that employment is slavery??? I mean, what's the impediment? I don't understand why this is so hard for you to get your head around (once you pull it from the sand).

Here, watch Chomsky make a fool of this guy (read the comments; they get it.)



Your argument for wage-slavery was an actual argument proposed by George Fitzhugh in order to defend chattel-slavery. Talk about ironic! The system we have now was considered so terrible that it was an actual argument for the continuation of slavery.

Whether or not wage-slavery is better or worse than chattel-slavery is beside the point of you forcing people into slavery and patting yourself on the back in celebration of your righteousness for the noble deed of helping corps enslave your fellow man for their own profit. Such theistic loyalty and divine devotion you have to your masters that you'd take a whip to the backs of the poor no differently than if you were serving Mao or Stalin. "Get to work you lazy bums!"

You see how conservatives and religion go hand in hand?

My plan doesn't help the rich get richer, on the contrary, doubling or tripling the minimum wage, improving education, healthcare and working conditions hurts the rich.

If you are not distributing money from the rich to the poor, then you are helping the rich to get richer.

Furthermore, workers will now be able to save money and invest in the economy and become owners themselves, so they'll no longer be able to be exploited.

Then who will they exploit? If everyone is a boss, who are the workers? Just like trading stocks, not everyone can make money because money flows from one person to another.

You see I want to help people help themselves, whereas you want them to remain dependent,

You want to make slaves of them by forcing them into positions where slavery is their only choice. I want to free them to pursue whatever they want.

if not on corporations than on the state, and the state isn't that much more trustworthy than corporations, what it gives it can just as easily takeaway and then some when it goes rogue, and sooner or later it will, it's only a matter of time.

Just make conservativism unconstitutional and that will end it forever. Forbid the rich from serving in government and end campaign contributions.

You want to force people to work against their will which will drive wages down.

It won't matter for the poorest jobs, which's what most people on welfare will be taking once they're kicked off, because corporations can't pay less than minimum wage, which'll be doubled or tripled under my plan.

If you end welfare, there will be millions of extra people competing for jobs. Employers will simply pay under the table, $5/hr and the people will be happy to find any job. Or they will move overseas. Or they will fold their tents and forget it because there is no way you can expect companies to pay $30/hr for $15/hr in productivity. Not only is there no profit, but it's a huge loss.

Better to hand out welfare with no min wage and then everyone will sit at home until wages rise to the point that they are compelled by money to voluntarily work. Easy peasy. Everyone is happy, sales are robust, profits are high, wages are high, prices are high, interest rates are high (just like from 1930-1980). The only one unhappy is you because you won't be able to stand it that someone is getting something for nothing.

Again, we can either reduce the workweek, or we can gradually cut people who're abusing welfare off, giving businesses sufficient time to find something for them to do, or, we can just leave welfare as it is, but we shouldn't improve welfare so long as many or most people are abusing it. And forget about UBI.

UBI is coming and you'll probably live to see it.

How does possession of genes confer intellect of how to raise a child?

People understand their own biological children and what's best for them better than they understand other people's children, because they're very similar to themselves.

So, a retarded girl has a baby and because she's genetically similar, she knows more than the combined knowledge of everyone on earth about how to raise her child? Most people don't know much of anything, let alone how to raise a kid.

If you don't share that disrespect then you haven't left the nest yet. The average person is stupid and half the population is dumber than that.

People just need higher wages, for the most part otherwise they're perfectly capable of looking after themselves and their children.

Yeah just park the kid in front of a video game and go to work for those high wages. Yeah, raising kids is easy as growing weeds; there's nothing to know.

The public may agree that parents could benefit by some compulsory education on parenting.

Vegan parents charged after starving their baby by switching from formula https://www.foxnews.com/us/vegan-parent ... ic-formula

Parents force their dumbassery on innocent kids. Raise kids objectively and let them decide whether to be vegans or religious nuts.

Since I was born into christianity, I never had the opportunity to "choose this day whom ye shall serve" until now, and only because I was able to get out into a neutral position.

The state should only intervene in black/white cases where the damage is severe and undeniable, like starvation, physical or sexual abuse, or extreme mental and emotional abuse, and I wouldn't classify most religion as that.

The bottom line: is I trust people to look after themselves, I think they just need a little help here and there, whereas what I think you're ultimately gunning for, is dictatorship.

Yes a dictatorship where the dictator consults the popular opinion of the people. "Hey people, do you think we need a law mandating parents attend compulsory parenting education? Yes or no?" If the people say yes, then I start dictating. Problem?

We force kids to go to school, so why not parents?

[Serendipper]

Well, it's the fault of the whites for being arrogant in the first place. As I said, I'm happy to see them go. Not sure what I'm getting into, but seeing the decline is recompense. If whites were humble, I'd take their side, but I can't sympathize with the arrogant.

Because blacks, Hispanics and Muslims love liberal democracy, that's why Africa, southcentral America and the middle east are shining beacons of liberal democracy.

I think the US had a lot to do with that. Anytime anyone starts to get a little prosperity, we smack them back down again in order to retain global control.

The only thing america is a model of is the virtues of having two vast oceans on either side.

[Serendipper]

Well, they didn't have much to do and they had a lot of people to do it. Now we've made all sorts of chores to do, like updating google perpetually, as if that were imperative. 1000s of jobs could be eliminated by simply making the tax code less complex. Most of the work done in the world is just digging a hole and refilling it... and it's because people exist who demand other people suffer for money.

I'd prefer the gov seize google, fire everyone, and preserve its current form and function forever and ever. Maybe retain one guy who can fix what breaks. All of silicon valley can go on permanent vacation. All the bankers can be fired as well. We could do this right now, today, with no robots. Millions would be jobless and nothing would change, except that millions would be jobless and would require handouts.

Keep dreaming.

According to google, 2% of the total population, or 4% of the employed population, since only 50% of the population is employed, is involved in agricultural production, and while the average American could stand to lose 10 pounds and eat at home more, that doesn't even include food distribution and prep.

Condense it to one farm and increase efficiency. Gardening can only be for fun because there is no way to compete on a small scale with the big industrial farmers.

So close to 5% produce, distribute and prep our food, that's 1 out of 20 working people.
Do you really think the remaining 19 are digging ditches with spoons?

Yep

Sure, many of them are, but certainly not all of them.
Many of them are manufacturing and distributing our clothes, houses, computers, phones, furniture, appliances, vehicles and so on, educating, medicating and protecting us, electricians, mechanics and plumbers, and while we could certainly cut back on some of these things and most of the banking, bureaucracy and service industries, it's not as if the vast majority of jobs are meaningless, luxuries or stuff no one benefits from.

Those aren't anything that have to be eliminated, but eliminate what we can and then send people $10k per year. If you can live on that, great, but if you'd prefer a better life, then perhaps become an electrician. We could do this right now, today.

I think we produce and consume way too much, but it's absurd to think only 0.1, or 1% of the population has to work.

There is no job a robot can't take. None, zip, nada.

Check it out: https://willrobotstakemyjob.com/

And as long as there's some work to be done, it should be divvied up in some way.

Offered to volunteers who want to work for extra money.

It could be that you have reading difficulty. Wages and prices WILL certainly, without a doubt, be in the abyss. But, I cannot tell which will be FARTHER in the abyss.

If you jumped into a cauldron of molten steel, I can't tell if your left or right leg would be hotter. Since I can't tell that, you decide jumping into the magma might be a good idea.

What does it matter if the average wage pays 1 10th of 1 penny an hour, if the average meal costs 1 10th of 1 penny?
Just introduce new units when needed e.g. a jenny is worth 1 10th of a penny.
A kenny is worth 1 100th, a lenny 1 1000th...

It doesn't matter. Price should be in terms of hours-worked. 100 years ago a person had to work 10 hours for 100lbs of sugar. Today it's only 1 hour. Another 100 years it will be 6 min (assuming linearity).

But how price is determined is not the issue, but the fact that people will be out of work and that is the reason prices will fall: because no one has money to buy anything.

Why does the Federal Reserve aim for 2 percent inflation over time? https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/economy_14400.htm

The simple answer is if prices are not rising, it means people are broke.

Price is determined by supply and demand. If prices fall, then it either means supply is too high or demand is too low or both. Why would demand be low? People are broke.

[Serendipper]

There is no way to rally a bunch of atheists to commit atrocities.

Stalin and Mao managed. Pol Pot. If you want to say that many fo those the rallied were not atheists, the rallying and the ralliers did not use any appeal related to God. And the elites would not hesitate to cull for secular reasons.

Ok, let's say Pol Pot is the god ruler and you find yourself in a rice patty torturing and killing peasants. Why do you suppose you'd be doing that?

[Gloominary]

@Serendipper

It's an argument from ignorance: because I can't think of a way to rally atheists together to commit atrocities.

Really?
I can think of several.

All conditions for atrocities are antipodal to atheist attributes.

Atheists don't necessarily have common attributes, they necessarily have a common attribute, they believe God doesn't exist.
Other than that they're not necessarily different than theists.
It's like you're trying to turn atheists into a different species (homo-atheist).

Belief in a supreme being doesn't necessitate belief in the superiority of some men over others, in fact, next to a supreme being, all mortals may appear equally insignificant.

It's also an argument from ignorance that elephants can't fly. Perhaps they can, but characteristics conducive for flying are antipodal to elephant attributes.

I've never met this group of lions before, perhaps they won't bite me, I shan't be prejudice.

Yes but Dear Leader is god in those asian places.

Or a mere mortal who happens to be (one of) the strongest, wisest man (or men) in the country, not necessarily supernaturally so, and in a position of power and authority.

Sometimes atheist Asian peasants rebel against atheist Asian dictators.
They wouldn't do so if they believed they were anything more than men, unless they believed they were devils, which's the other side of the theist coin.
If God exists, than so too does the devil, and if God isn't on the kings side, than the devil is, which means he must be overthrown, whereas atheists may be more lukewarm about such things, as there exists neither supreme good, nor evil for them.

Why would you obey an order to go torture and kill some poor peasants if the guy in charge didn't have the powers of god and you were acting righteously?

Firstly, do soldiers in the mafia follow the caporegime because they think he's righteous or doing God's work?
Do the peasants they're extorting?

Secondly, the self-righteous atheist army may follow the self-righteous atheist dictator into battle because they believe he's, well, righteous, and he has sufficiently dehumanized whatever group they mean to vanquish (death to archaic, homo-hillbillius!).

See what I mean about progressive's faith in man?
They blame the environment, guns or religion instead of man collectively and individually.
Conservatives may be irrational for believing in the divines, but at least they have fewer illusions about man.

Well apparently 10s of millions were following him, so they were the problem and not mao. If I walk off a bridge and you follow me, is it my fault or yours? If I tell you to kill 10 million people, are you going to obey me? Why not think for yourself? Mao was one guy. Everyone could have laughed at him and told him to get bent, but they didn't because he was their savior.

Yes, 100s of millions of atheists and apatheistic Buddhists/Daoists.
Some of them believed he was their savior, but others were just terrified of him and his regime, or believed they could gain power over others by submitting to him.

The first thing religion does is attack other religions. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Before atheistic communism: Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism and CFR (Chinese folk religion) lived together in peace and harmony.
I wouldn't impose my occidental, or modern for that matter conception of religion on the east, or antiquity if I were you.
All religions were welcome in Rome, save Christians, Manicheans and a few others for they were exclusivist.

And as I said earlier, the ancient Greeks and Romans were steeped in religion, yet they practically invented (representative) democracy.
For 5 centuries Romans had a constitution of sorts, elections, liberty, property, welfare and even something like democrats and republicans (known as populares and optimates).
Blood would run in the streets should one or both of Rome's two consuls (Rome's equivalent of president and prime minister) declared themselves to be a God.
After the collapse of the republic it took generations of orientalization for Roman emperors to dawn the purple toga (the color of Roman priests), never mind declare themselves to be a God, Julius Caesar didn't dare!

And human nature is to create gods.

Yes, it's human nature to create, and destroy Gods, and humans.

The religion of the dictator is irrelevant. What's relevant is the religion of the people. It would be a cinch to get the conservative robots of the religious right to all band together and obey orders,

Not American conservatives, they believe in their God given constitution, in life, liberty and property (as they conceive them), it'd be difficult for any would be dictator to get them to forsake their values.

but you couldn't orchestrate liberals to do anything except show up late and blow off responsibility, among 100 other attributes that interfere with committing atrocities.

Unless they continue down this path of radicalization and dehumanizing the right that they're on.

You may get mugged in a city, but that's not an atrocity. The election of Trump was an atrocity to poor wrought by the hands of the religious rurals. City folks would never do that. City folks ended slavery by kicking the inbred southern bumpkins' asses.

Trump hasn't committed any atrocities, he's just another jester in a long line of both republican, and democratic jesters.
Not good, but not especially evil like Hitler or Stalin.

Because he said he was in his own book, hello! And in scores of speeches. It wasn't until 15-20 years later that he had anything bad to say of religion.

It's much more likely that he started out christian and lost the faith like I did. It's less likely that he wrote a book in 1925 with the prescience needed to know that he'd better lie and pretend to be the christian in order to become the fuhrer one day and then continue the facade until 1941 when he finally let the cat out of the bag. He truly believed god saved him in ww1 for a purpose.

When Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, he wasn't some apolitical philosopher like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche who had the luxury to say whatever he pleased, he was the leader of the Nazi party and in prison for unsuccessfully staging a coup.
He knew he had to hold his tongue, and pen when speaking and writing publicly about certain sensitive topics like his thoughts about Christianity if he wanted to be Fuhrer one day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf

https://www.historyonthenet.com/hitlers-religion

Where is the evidence of that?

The swastika itself was an occult pagan symbol.

Look into it, occult paganism and the third Reich.

Actually faith in reason isn't reasonable.

Then it's not reasonable for you to have faith in your own statement.

It's never, intrinsically reasonable to have faith in anything, faith and reason are antonyms, altho I suppose it can be extrinsically reasonable.
I don't have faith in my statement, I know it to be the case.

Faith isn't overestimation, but simply confidence.

I'm not sure if progressives are more reasonable than conservatives, they're less superstitious, but more naïve in other ways.
Libertarians are the most reasonable of the three in at least one regard: they're more apprehensive about resorting to authoritarianism, intimidation and violence to get their point across.
Progressive's don't seem to be as aware of the fallibility and corruptibility of government, human nature, psychology, sociology and science.
They always seem to believe technocratic utopia is right around the corner.

All is fair in love, war, and laissez faire markets. I still don't see your complaint. If I were a corp, I wouldn't want ANY laws impeding my progress of taking 100% of the money on earth. Having ALL the money is winning the game, right?

Flat and regressive taxes and some laws help big business at the expense of small business and workers.
Real capitalists want to remove such taxes and laws, altho I will concede merely removing them is woefully inadequate, but still no or low flat taxes are better than high flat or regressive taxes.

Dems don't want to raise taxes on the middle class. That's republicans who insist that if the rich are taxed, then it's only fair that everyone else be taxed. Dems compromise with republicans.

Spin it any way you like, anything to keep dems from having to take responsibility, we know many or most of them shirk away from it as much as they can.
Meanwhile I'm holding them both accountable.

If taxes were zero, money would instantly flow to the top and the economy would crash. So, just to maintain equilibrium there needs to be progressive taxation; therefore progressive taxation is actually neutral taxation. And therefore taxation less than neutral is regressive. The republican's job is easy: just make the progressive taxation less than neutral and money is transferred quietly and surreptitiously to the top with no one being the wiser. Only a handful of people on the planet seem smart enough to see that, and most are nobel laureates.

As I said near the beginning of this thread, the working and middle class shouldn't be taxed at all, whereas the upperclass should be progressively taxed, the lower upperclass should be taxed 10-50%, and the upper, upper class 50-90%.

Macron is a conservative wearing a socialist label (like Hitler was super-ultra-hardcore conservative under the socialist banner).

Macron.... later became an investment banker at Rothschild & Cie Banque.

where he pushed through business-friendly reforms.

The budget replaced the wealth tax with one targeting real estate, fulfilling Macron's campaign pledge to scrap the wealth tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_ ... mic_policy

So, he cut taxes on the rich and raised taxes on the poor. That's a conservative.

There's different schools of conservative economic thought, ranging from capitalism (no or low flat taxation) to corporatism (high flat or regressive taxation), to a mixed economy with capitalist, corporatist and socialist components (progressive taxation).

Again, in practice both dems and republicans are corporatists.

Maybe, but republicans are vastly more so.

If you want real socialism, you'll have to think and vote outside the republicrat box.

Merely being educated in something trains people to exercise their brains which should also help them make better political decisions and decisions in general.

The right kind of education will help.

Are you for some reason neurologically unable to understand that employment is slavery???

Insofar as it's an unnecessary evil, big business should be nationalized and/or syndicated, but insofar as it's a necessary evil, we should all partake in it, some shouldn't work a lot more, so others don't work at all.

Are you neurologically incapable of understanding that money all by itself doesn't produce a thing and is worthless, that it should be thrown in the furnace to keep warm???
If millions of people quit their job and live off UBI, millions of people will have to be incentivized to work much harder to take care of them, and it'll be harder to incentivize them because there will be less luxuries for them to consume, to the point where more and more of them may quit, resulting in a chain-reaction/domino-effect culminating in economic collapse and mass starvation, but even if the economy doesn't collapse, it's unfair for those who choose to work to be burdened by those who choose not to.

Furthermore, it's not as if all jobs are wage slavery, there's also the self-employed and small businesses, and small businesses aren't really exploitative for they're normally not making a hell of a lot more than their employees, and they're heavily involved in working themselves or managing, whereas big business owners are obscenely wealthy and typically far removed from production and management.

If you are not distributing money from the rich to the poor, then you are helping the rich to get richer.

There's more than one way to redistribute money, UBI is not the only one.

For example, I just came up with what I'm calling CBI (conditional basic income).
Government could tax the rich and give an additional 20 grand to every employed and involuntarily unemployed person, but 0 to the voluntarily unemployed.
Or government could double your income, so for e.g. if you make 20 grand a year, government will give you an additional 20 grand, or if you're making 80 grand a year, government will give you an additional 80 grand.

Then who will they exploit? If everyone is a boss, who are the workers? Just like trading stocks, not everyone can make money because money flows from one person to another.

The market will correct itself.
As people make and invest more, they'll have to work less, as they work less, stocks will fall, compelling many of them back to work.
It's best if we all have some stake in the economy, so we all have to work a little, than if some of us have a ton and don't have to work at all, and some of us have none and have to work a ton.

You want to make slaves of them by forcing them into positions where slavery is their only choice. I want to free them to pursue whatever they want.

No you want to trade one group of parasites for another, I want to do away with parasites altogether.

Forbid the rich from serving in government and end campaign contributions.

Agreed.

So, a retarded girl has a baby and because she's genetically similar, she knows more than the combined knowledge of everyone on earth about how to raise her child? Most people don't know much of anything, let alone how to raise a kid.

Well I guess we need a license to buy groceries, drink beer, have sex, marry or do just about anything in your world for that matter.
Going to need an awful lot of laws, resources, taxes and micromanagement for all that.
No I just want to improve wages and working conditions, that's it, and maybe have optional government backed courses for some things if the people want them, but not obligatory.

The vast majority of girls aren't retarded, and know how to take care of their kids better than the state.
If someone is legally retarded, below 70 iQ and dependent on government, than sure, it will be necessary for the state to intervene, but even then it should be minimal.

Yeah just park the kid in front of a video game and go to work for those high wages. Yeah, raising kids is easy as growing weeds; there's nothing to know.

No most parents value their kids more than anything.
Moms and even dads will stay home if they can.
It's low wages that force both of them to work full time and leave their kids with their grandparents or shitty daycare.

Yes a dictatorship where the dictator consults the popular opinion of the people. "Hey people, do you think we need a law mandating parents attend compulsory parenting education? Yes or no?" If the people say yes, then I start dictating. Problem?

We force kids to go to school, so why not parents?

If people are that dumb, than we can't even trust them to know how dumb they are, or elect the right person to educate them, they will just elect a tyrant who will use the pretense of education to enslave them.

Besides wages stagnating while prices soar, people are alright.
Seriously what's wrong with people?
They just need help fighting mega-banks and corporations, other than that they're fine, far from perfect, but not in dire straights.
I'm much more apprehensive about the so called experts.
I say let the free market decide how important the experts are to people.
They will have plenty of money to consult them if need be under my plan.

And I'd like to do away with compulsory education.
Parents can teach kids to read, write and arithmetic, and kids can teach themselves about anything else they want to learn via the internet.
education should be free, or dirt cheap, but voluntary.

[Karpel Tunnel]

Well apparently 10s of millions were following him, so they were the problem and not mao. If I walk off a bridge and you follow me, is it my fault or yours? If I tell you to kill 10 million people, are you going to obey me? Why not think for yourself? Mao was one guy. Everyone could have laughed at him and told him to get bent, but they didn't because he was their savior.

They followed the atheist for many reasons people follow leaders. The leaders have power. The leaders control the army and police. The leaders control the education system which tells people who deserves to lead - directly or implicitly. IOW there is no need for theism in any of that.

[Gloominary]

@Serendipper

Condense it to one farm and increase efficiency. Gardening can only be for fun because there is no way to compete on a small scale with the big industrial farmers.

I don't want to takeover small businesses, I don't care how inefficient many of them are, I want more variety and middleclass ownership and management of the economy.

Those aren't anything that have to be eliminated, but eliminate what we can and then send people $10k per year. If you can live on that, great, but if you'd prefer a better life, then perhaps become an electrician. We could do this right now, today.

I'd rather have CBI (conditional basic income), where the employed and involuntarily unemployed get an additional 20 grand a year, and the voluntarily unemployed get 0.

There is no job a robot can't take. None, zip, nada.

Check it out: https://willrobotstakemyjob.com/

Man goes through periods of innovation, followed by periods of stagnation.
For example I think the early 20th century was more innovative than the early 21st.
Other than computers, the internet and phones, what's starkly changed in the last few decades that we use daily?
We were told in the mid 20th century we'd have flying cars by now.
Not only do we not have them, but cars today aren't that much different than cars a few decades ago.
Concerning the automobile, we seem to have reached a plateau.
We picked all the low hanging fruit, and it may take us centuries or millennia before we build an intellectual ladder tall enough to reach the higher fruit, if there are any.

Why should beings of rigid metal and plastic be superior to beings of malleable flesh and blood?
There're reasons why flesh and blood beings evolved on their own naturally, and beings of metal and plastic had to be artificially constructed.
But if they will be superior, than they're something be apprehensive about.
They may be our unraveling.

Humans may be able to improve themselves by genetic modification, but I'm apprehensive about that too, as we'll be losing some of what makes us, us, and we made such a mess of the environment, that I shudder to think what mess we'll make when we start meddling with ourselves.
I am not that optimistic about technology, especially cybernetics, genetic modification and robotics, as we're recklessly tinkering with the very fabric of life itself.
There are some doors man would be better off keeping closed for now, or forever.

I want to structure the economy around what technology can do today, not what it might be able to do in the unforeseeable future.

It doesn't matter. Price should be in terms of hours-worked. 100 years ago a person had to work 10 hours for 100lbs of sugar. Today it's only 1 hour. Another 100 years it will be 6 min (assuming linearity).

But how price is determined is not the issue, but the fact that people will be out of work and that is the reason prices will fall: because no one has money to buy anything.

Why does the Federal Reserve aim for 2 percent inflation over time? https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/economy_14400.htm

The simple answer is if prices are not rising, it means people are broke.

Price is determined by supply and demand. If prices fall, then it either means supply is too high or demand is too low or both. Why would demand be low? People are broke.

So, you're saying it doesn't matter.
So what's your problem?

And wouldn't you think prices and wages would come to a screeching halt at some point?
That they wouldn't permanently plummet?
I mean It's not as if the supply of workers is being permanently expanded.

[Gloominary]

Well, it's the fault of the whites for being arrogant in the first place. As I said, I'm happy to see them go. Not sure what I'm getting into, but seeing the decline is recompense. If whites were humble, I'd take their side, but I can't sympathize with the arrogant.

Because blacks, Hispanics and Muslims love liberal democracy, that's why Africa, southcentral America and the middle east are shining beacons of liberal democracy.

I think the US had a lot to do with that. Anytime anyone starts to get a little prosperity, we smack them back down again in order to retain global control.

I'm sure western imperialism had something to do with it, but everything?
Western imperialism couldn't stop Japan, South Korea and Taiwan from becoming liberal democracies, nor Brunei, Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore, nor some countries in Latin America and other parts of Asia from becoming quasi-liberal democracies.

Are we to believe all the countries that're authoritarian and totalitarian dictatorships are so solely due to western imperialism?
That race, and even culture have nothing to do with it?
Aside from North America, Europe and Oceania, how come the most successful liberal democracies are all in east Asia, while there's virtually no democracy to speak of in Subsaharan Africa, save south Africa, which was built by whites, which seems to be rapidly devolving since blacks took over?
Do whites arbitrarily favor east Asians, or is there something different about them that makes them more capable of aping us?
Maybe it has something to do with having larger brains?
even impoverished Mongolians share this trait.
Or with being more civilized?

The only thing america is a model of is the virtues of having two vast oceans on either side.

Why don't you move to Brazil, Russia, India or China?

[Serendipper]

@Serendipper

It's an argument from ignorance: because I can't think of a way to rally atheists together to commit atrocities.

Really?
I can think of several.

Name one.

All conditions for atrocities are antipodal to atheist attributes.

Atheists don't necessarily have common attributes, they necessarily have a common attribute, they believe God doesn't exist.
Other than that they're not necessarily different than theists.
It's like you're trying to turn atheists into a different species (homo-atheist).

Whatever it is that makes people reject god also makes people reject absolutes and embrace relativity.

You could potentially organize atheists to exterminate theists, but they're probably too smart to reduce themselves to the level of their enemy.

Surveying more than 63,000 participants online who indicated whether they were atheists, religious or agnostic, each person had to complete a 30-minute set of 12 cognitive tasks that measured planning, reasoning, attention and memory.

Overall, the research found that atheists performed better overall than the religious participants even when demographic factors like age and education were taken into consideration. Agnostics mostly placed between atheists and believers on all tasks.

While strength of religious conviction correlated with poorer cognitive performance, the data did show that there were only few small differences in working memory compared to tasks that required reasoning.

As such, rather than having poor general intelligence, the researchers say that religious people's lower IQ test results may be a result of bad performance on tasks only where intuition and logic come into conflict.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-styl ... 83131.html

So, we could say that religious people aren't religious because they're stupid, but they're stupid because they're religious. When dogma meets reason, dogma prevails. Atheists don't have that problem.

Atheists will do the reasonable thing.
Theists will do the "right" thing. (Where "right" could be exterminating races or whatever.)

Belief in a supreme being doesn't necessitate belief in the superiority of some men over others, in fact, next to a supreme being, all mortals may appear equally insignificant.

It's a mindset or worldview one chooses to hold where dogma trumps logic and not the actual belief that god exists, but the belief that god exists tends to correlate to dogmatic people.

You can't exterminate people unless you believe in good and bad, better and worse, superior and inferior, righteous and unrighteous, etc. Those types tend to be theists.

Yes but Dear Leader is god in those asian places.

Or a mere mortal who happens to be (one of) the strongest, wisest man (or men) in the country, not necessarily supernaturally so, and in a position of power and authority.

No. North Korea for instance is a necrocracy.

Kim Jong-un of the Kim dynasty is the current Supreme Leader or Suryeong of North Korea.[110] He heads all major governing structures: he is Chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea, Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of North Korea, and Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army.[111][112] His grandfather Kim Il-sung, the founder and leader of North Korea until his death in 1994, is the country's "Eternal President",[113] while his father Kim Jong-il who succeeded Kim Il-sung as leader was announced "Eternal General Secretary" after his death in 2011.[111] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Kor ... d_politics

Those dead guys are still god, even though they're dead.

Emperors are gods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor

The Chinese emperor was considered the Son of Heaven and the autocrat of All under Heaven. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_of_China

Sometimes atheist Asian peasants rebel against atheist Asian dictators.

I doubt the peasants were atheist, especially if they were peasants. Poor and primitive people usually look for gods to explain what they can't explain.

They wouldn't do so if they believed they were anything more than men, unless they believed they were devils, which's the other side of the theist coin.
If God exists, than so too does the devil, and if God isn't on the kings side, than the devil is, which means he must be overthrown, whereas atheists may be more lukewarm about such things, as there exists neither supreme good, nor evil for them.

Why does the devil have to exist if god exists?

Why would you obey an order to go torture and kill some poor peasants if the guy in charge didn't have the powers of god and you were acting righteously?

Firstly, do soldiers in the mafia follow the caporegime because they think he's righteous or doing God's work?

The mafia is not interesting in exterminating their customers, but only in breaking legs to get their money owed to them.

Why would anyone exterminate a whole village people? What profit can come from that?

Secondly, the self-righteous atheist army may follow the self-righteous atheist dictator into battle because they believe he's, well, righteous, and he has sufficiently dehumanized whatever group they mean to vanquish

Going to battle is one thing, but genocide is another. I may even concede greed-wars fought by atheists, but not righteous wars where the goal is to annihilate the enemy on ideological grounds.

(death to archaic, homo-hillbillius!).

That's funny! I like that... homo-hillbillius! Calling them homo adds further insult lol

See what I mean about progressive's faith in man?
They blame the environment, guns or religion instead of man collectively and individually.
Conservatives may be irrational for believing in the divines, but at least they have fewer illusions about man.

Conservatives blame drugs instead of people. They blame government in principle instead of a particular mismanagement of government. Republicans are the prohibition party that bans everything including guns.

Well apparently 10s of millions were following him, so they were the problem and not mao. If I walk off a bridge and you follow me, is it my fault or yours? If I tell you to kill 10 million people, are you going to obey me? Why not think for yourself? Mao was one guy. Everyone could have laughed at him and told him to get bent, but they didn't because he was their savior.

Yes, 100s of millions of atheists and apatheistic Buddhists/Daoists.
Some of them believed he was their savior, but others were just terrified of him and his regime, or believed they could gain power over others by submitting to him.

I was watching a video on Pol Pot or Mao (I forgot) and he instructed the people to forsake the rice patties and start making steel, so all the people dropped the farm implements and headed to the factory. Then they all starved because no one was growing rice. What would cause masses of people to do such nonsense? If Trump gave a similar order, most people would give him the middle finger. Those people were not coerced, but willingly obeyed who they regarded as god. The people were neurologically wired to take orders from divinities and act collectively.

The first thing religion does is attack other religions. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Before atheistic communism: Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism and CFR (Chinese folk religion) lived together in peace and harmony.

Peace and harmony? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_C ... nd_battles

I wouldn't impose my occidental, or modern for that matter conception of religion on the east, or antiquity if I were you.
All religions were welcome in Rome, save Christians, Manicheans and a few others for they were exclusivist.

Heck, the christians, muslims, and jews can't stand each other and they all serve the same god. If they served no god, then they'd get along fine.

And as I said earlier, the ancient Greeks and Romans were steeped in religion, yet they practically invented (representative) democracy.
For 5 centuries Romans had a constitution of sorts, elections, liberty, property, welfare and even something like democrats and republicans (known as populares and optimates).
Blood would run in the streets should one or both of Rome's two consuls (Rome's equivalent of president and prime minister) declared themselves to be a God.
After the collapse of the republic it took generations of orientalization for Roman emperors to dawn the purple toga (the color of Roman priests), never mind declare themselves to be a God, Julius Caesar didn't dare!

Boy, you've studied rome more than I have, but what you say seems similar to the founding fathers being theists (or deists) and creating a democratic government with freedom of/from religion. Hitchens describes the US as the closest humanity has come to a secular government, but the people are theistic.

The religion of the dictator is irrelevant. What's relevant is the religion of the people. It would be a cinch to get the conservative robots of the religious right to all band together and obey orders,

Not American conservatives, they believe in their God given constitution, in life, liberty and property (as they conceive them), it'd be difficult for any would be dictator to get them to forsake their values.

Then explain the war on communism (vietnam, korea) and the war on terror. They were led around like good lil robots. Christians never pass an opportunity for a war.

but you couldn't orchestrate liberals to do anything except show up late and blow off responsibility, among 100 other attributes that interfere with committing atrocities.

Unless they continue down this path of radicalization and dehumanizing the right that they're on.

Maybe, but they'll still get up late and not show just like they do when it comes time to vote.

You may get mugged in a city, but that's not an atrocity. The election of Trump was an atrocity to poor wrought by the hands of the religious rurals. City folks would never do that. City folks ended slavery by kicking the inbred southern bumpkins' asses.

Trump hasn't committed any atrocities, he's just another jester in a long line of both republican, and democratic jesters.
Not good, but not especially evil like Hitler or Stalin.

He didn't commit an atrocious atrocity, but chucking people off healthcare and raising taxes on the poor while doing nothing about drugs prices except giving the drug companies a massive tax cut is still an increase wide-spread suffering.

Because he said he was in his own book, hello! And in scores of speeches. It wasn't until 15-20 years later that he had anything bad to say of religion.

It's much more likely that he started out christian and lost the faith like I did. It's less likely that he wrote a book in 1925 with the prescience needed to know that he'd better lie and pretend to be the christian in order to become the fuhrer one day and then continue the facade until 1941 when he finally let the cat out of the bag. He truly believed god saved him in ww1 for a purpose.

When Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, he wasn't some apolitical philosopher like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche who had the luxury to say whatever he pleased, he was the leader of the Nazi party and in prison for unsuccessfully staging a coup.
He knew he had to hold his tongue, and pen when speaking and writing publicly about certain sensitive topics like his thoughts about Christianity if he wanted to be Fuhrer one day.

If that's the case, why did he mention christianity at all? If he had to hold his tongue, then he should have held it, but he chose not to. Your theory is very far-fetched. It's much more likely he was christian and changed his mind like every other atheist I've ever heard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf

Hitler began Mein Kampf while imprisoned for what he considered to be "political crimes" following his failed Putsch in Munich in November 1923.

But in April 1922 he said:

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice. And as a man I have the duty to see to it that human society does not suffer the same catastrophic collapse as did the civilization of the ancient world some two thousand years ago—a civilization which was driven to its ruin through this same Jewish people. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Religious ... itler#1922

Why say that if he didn't believe it? Why not just omit it?

Whether he really believed it is beside the point that Hitler found an ally in Jesus:

Matthew 23:33 Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?

Where is the evidence of that?

The swastika itself was an occult pagan symbol.

Look into it, occult paganism and the third Reich.

Yeah, people used to say he had a chair made of human bones too. I think a lot of that is just Hitler haters making things up.

Actually faith in reason isn't reasonable.

Then it's not reasonable for you to have faith in your own statement.

It's never, intrinsically reasonable to have faith in anything, faith and reason are antonyms, altho I suppose it can be extrinsically reasonable.
I don't have faith in my statement, I know it to be the case.

How can you know anything? Knowing = 100% confidence.

Faith isn't overestimation, but simply confidence.

I'm not sure if progressives are more reasonable than conservatives, they're less superstitious, but more naïve in other ways.

How do you type that i with 2 dots? My keyboard doesn't have that symbol.

Libertarians are the most reasonable of the three in at least one regard: they're more apprehensive about resorting to authoritarianism, intimidation and violence to get their point across.

Chomsky characterized libertarians as the most authoritarian of the bunch and I definitely agree with him. People usually are the opposite of how they say they are. For instance, if a woman says she's tired of playing games, then she likes playing games; if she's an open book, then the pages are blank. Or like the governor of OH who criticized his opponent for wanting to raise taxes and after his victory, he immediately proposed raising taxes. http://www.statenews.org/post/after-rep ... s-tax-hike (Taxes on the poor no less.)

Or like Jefferson who held dear the idea of smaller government, but then used unprecedented overreach to expand the federal government.

I guess it's not that everyone does the opposite but more that reality isn't ideal. That and conservatives are lying assholes.



"Here libertarian means extreme advocate of total tyranny. That's what libertarian means here: it means power ought to be given into the hands of private unaccountable tyrannies, even worse than state tyrannies because there the public has some kind of rule."

Progressive's don't seem to be as aware of the fallibility and corruptibility of government, human nature, psychology, sociology and science.

Amazing that someone so highly regarded as chomsky would miss something so obvious. I'm sure he could learn a lot from you lol

All is fair in love, war, and laissez faire markets. I still don't see your complaint. If I were a corp, I wouldn't want ANY laws impeding my progress of taking 100% of the money on earth. Having ALL the money is winning the game, right?

Flat and regressive taxes and some laws help big business at the expense of small business and workers.

Yeah I guess so. The gas tax paid by the poor fixes the roads that the corps use to transport goods to make profits on. The privatization of profits and socialization of costs. That's capitalism!

Real capitalists want to remove such taxes and laws, altho I will concede merely removing them is woefully inadequate, but still no or low flat taxes are better than high flat or regressive taxes.

If they removed the taxes then who'd fix the roads?

Dems don't want to raise taxes on the middle class. That's republicans who insist that if the rich are taxed, then it's only fair that everyone else be taxed. Dems compromise with republicans.

Spin it any way you like, anything to keep dems from having to take responsibility, we know many or most of them shirk away from it as much as they can.
Meanwhile I'm holding them both accountable.

It's not spin. Why on earth would you tax the poor to give welfare to the poor? That makes no sense. The only reason the poor pay any tax is to placate republicans bitching about fairness.

If taxes were zero, money would instantly flow to the top and the economy would crash. So, just to maintain equilibrium there needs to be progressive taxation; therefore progressive taxation is actually neutral taxation. And therefore taxation less than neutral is regressive. The republican's job is easy: just make the progressive taxation less than neutral and money is transferred quietly and surreptitiously to the top with no one being the wiser. Only a handful of people on the planet seem smart enough to see that, and most are nobel laureates.

As I said near the beginning of this thread, the working and middle class shouldn't be taxed at all, whereas the upperclass should be progressively taxed, the lower upperclass should be taxed 10-50%, and the upper, upper class 50-90%.

Add a negative tax to the bottom and I'm down with that.

In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman advocated policies such as a volunteer military, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax and school vouchers and opposed the war on drugs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman

You know who Friedman is right?

Macron is a conservative wearing a socialist label (like Hitler was super-ultra-hardcore conservative under the socialist banner).

Macron.... later became an investment banker at Rothschild & Cie Banque.

where he pushed through business-friendly reforms.

The budget replaced the wealth tax with one targeting real estate, fulfilling Macron's campaign pledge to scrap the wealth tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_ ... mic_policy

So, he cut taxes on the rich and raised taxes on the poor. That's a conservative.

There's different schools of conservative economic thought, ranging from capitalism (no or low flat taxation) to corporatism (high flat or regressive taxation), to a mixed economy with capitalist, corporatist and socialist components (progressive taxation).

Either money flows from the poor to the rich or the money is recirculated. There isn't another way of doing it, so however it's mixed up, the end result determines what system it should be considered.

Again, in practice both dems and republicans are corporatists.

Maybe, but republicans are vastly more so.

If you want real socialism, you'll have to think and vote outside the republicrat box.

I'm not sure I want socialism. I think I just want to go back to the 1930-1980 period, but with a negative tax at the bottom. I don't think I want state ownership of companies or even co-ops. Just put it back how it was and issue negative tax.

Are you for some reason neurologically unable to understand that employment is slavery???

Insofar as it's an unnecessary evil, big business should be nationalized and/or syndicated, but insofar as it's a necessary evil, we should all partake in it, some shouldn't work a lot more, so others don't work at all.

Well what defines necessary? Bread and water is all that's necessary, and sure, I'll do my .05 microseconds of labor to pitch in. There, I'm all done for the year. Where's my bread?

But if you want cars and iphones, you'll need volunteers to pitch in. You can't force people to make those kinds of things.

The only reason people are forced to work is you don't want to take the money from the 1% and issue a negative tax. So people are forced to work so that someone else can have a few extra billion dollars. And you call yourself a libertarian. You see chomsky's point now right? The opulence of 3 guys is more important to you than the freedom of millions to decide for themselves whether to enter the labor force.

Are you neurologically incapable of understanding that money all by itself doesn't produce a thing and is worthless, that it should be thrown in the furnace to keep warm???

I'm incapable or at least ill-equipped to see what you're meaning by that.

If millions of people quit their job and live off UBI, millions of people will have to be incentivized to work much harder to take care of them,

No, it means that wages will have to rise to lure people into work. If you get $10k UBI, are you going to quit your job? I asked everyone I could and only 1 person said she'd quit (because $10k is more than what she's making and she'd rather stay home with her kids). Most people laughed at the idea of quitting a decent job for a paltry $10k.

Furthermore, it's not as if all jobs are wage slavery, there's also the self-employed and small businesses, and small businesses aren't really exploitative for they're normally not making a hell of a lot more than their employees, and they're heavily involved in working themselves or managing, whereas big business owners are obscenely wealthy and typically far removed from production and management.

Small businesses don't make enough money to be subject to the tax and if they did, then they aren't small businesses.

If you are not distributing money from the rich to the poor, then you are helping the rich to get richer.

There's more than one way to redistribute money, UBI is not the only one.

For example, I just came up with what I'm calling CBI (conditional basic income).
Government could tax the rich and give an additional 20 grand to every employed and involuntarily unemployed person, but 0 to the voluntarily unemployed.
Or government could double your income, so for e.g. if you make 20 grand a year, government will give you an additional 20 grand, or if you're making 80 grand a year, government will give you an additional 80 grand.

I can't agree to forcing people to work. I'm a libertarian.

You want to make slaves of them by forcing them into positions where slavery is their only choice. I want to free them to pursue whatever they want.

No you want to trade one group of parasites for another, I want to do away with parasites altogether.

Goodness... you still haven't understood. Wage-slavery! Hello! Parasites is the name you're giving to those who protest being slaves. Good grief man, because people choose not to prostitute themselves for the benefit of the rich, you characterize them as parasites. After all our exchanges your continued inability to get your head around this is astounding. I'm at a loss for how to snap you out of this idea that people must be forced to contribute profits to the elites in order to survive.

I can help make Bezos richer or I can help make Buffett richer or I can help make Dimon richer or I can starve. Hmmm... what's wrong with this picture?



If you eliminate all concepts of profit so that no one could profit from the slavery of people, then I might concede that everyone should pitch in, but that's communism, ya know. Are you a closet communist?

No you're much worse because not only do you want everyone to contribute to the workforce, but you want the fruits of their labors concentrated into few hands. So it's the bad parts of communism + the bad parts of capitalism = your system. Force people to work and steal their fruits and give it to the lazy rich who do nothing.

So, a retarded girl has a baby and because she's genetically similar, she knows more than the combined knowledge of everyone on earth about how to raise her child? Most people don't know much of anything, let alone how to raise a kid.

Well I guess we need a license to buy groceries, drink beer, have sex, marry or do just about anything in your world for that matter.

How do you arrive at that? We go from people being ignorant of how to raise a kid to needing licensing to buy groceries?

The vast majority of girls aren't retarded, and know how to take care of their kids better than the state.

What substantiation could you possibly offer in support of that assertion?

If someone is legally retarded, below 70 iQ and dependent on government, than sure, it will be necessary for the state to intervene, but even then it should be minimal.

You said genetic similarity is all that mattered, so therefore iq is irrelevant and a woman can be retarded, but still better at raising kids than the state by virtue of genetics. That is your position. Now if you retract that position and center it around knowledge, then you'll be up against the combined wisdom of academia. Most girls in my area have a whole litter before 18, so what does a 100 iq trailer park chick know about raising 3 kids before being legally able to drink? Not a damn thing which is why those kids never leave the trailer park, except when they go to prison.

Yeah just park the kid in front of a video game and go to work for those high wages. Yeah, raising kids is easy as growing weeds; there's nothing to know.

No most parents value their kids more than anything.
Moms and even dads will stay home if they can.
It's low wages that force both of them to work full time and leave their kids with their grandparents or shitty daycare.

My mom worked 2 jobs: one at the hospital and one at the nursing home. I came home from school and cooked for myself then sat in front of the tv. When I got older, I'd take off on my bicycle looking for trouble. The reason I had to raise myself was so the rich could have money they didn't need or even use.

Yes a dictatorship where the dictator consults the popular opinion of the people. "Hey people, do you think we need a law mandating parents attend compulsory parenting education? Yes or no?" If the people say yes, then I start dictating. Problem?

We force kids to go to school, so why not parents?

If people are that dumb, than we can't even trust them to know how dumb they are, or elect the right person to educate them, they will just elect a tyrant who will use the pretense of education to enslave them.

Surely they are smart enough to answer a simple direct question. It looks like democracy scares you.

Besides wages stagnating while prices soar, people are alright.
Seriously what's wrong with people?
They just need help fighting mega-banks and corporations, other than that they're fine, far from perfect, but not in dire straights.
I'm much more apprehensive about the so called experts.
I say let the free market decide how important the experts are to people.
They will have plenty of money to consult them if need be under my plan.

The first thing an authoritarian does is kill the intellectuals.

And I'd like to do away with compulsory education.
Parents can teach kids to read, write and arithmetic, and kids can teach themselves about anything else they want to learn via the internet.
education should be free, or dirt cheap, but voluntary.

Watching tatted up floozies who can't read or do math teaching kids who to read and do math ought to be fun.

You and I may have been able to educate ourselves, but most kids would drift listlessly from game to game. Beside chess, the last game I played was pacman. I won't go near games because I'm scared I might like them and then my life is over.

[Serendipper]

@Serendipper

Condense it to one farm and increase efficiency. Gardening can only be for fun because there is no way to compete on a small scale with the big industrial farmers.

I don't want to takeover small businesses, I don't care how inefficient many of them are, I want more variety and middleclass ownership and management of the economy.

Desiring inefficiency is stupid. I'd rather put farmers out of business and then send them the money they would have made if they were farming and that money comes from the increase in efficiency from the consolidation of farms. They can still farm if they choose to, but it wouldn't be required to live.

I support the liberty of people to do anything they want to do so long as it's not making slaves of other people.

Those aren't anything that have to be eliminated, but eliminate what we can and then send people $10k per year. If you can live on that, great, but if you'd prefer a better life, then perhaps become an electrician. We could do this right now, today.

I'd rather have CBI (conditional basic income), where the employed and involuntarily unemployed get an additional 20 grand a year, and the voluntarily unemployed get 0.

Of course you would rather that because you relish the suffering of people. I understand completely.

There is no job a robot can't take. None, zip, nada.

Check it out: https://willrobotstakemyjob.com/

Man goes through periods of innovation, followed by periods of stagnation.
For example I think the early 20th century was more innovative than the early 21st.
Other than computers, the internet and phones, what's starkly changed in the last few decades that we use daily?
We were told in the mid 20th century we'd have flying cars by now.

We do have flying cars. We don't even need a license. For a couple grand you can fly to mcdonalds too:

Not only do we not have them, but cars today aren't that much different than cars a few decades ago.

Wut? Cars are vastly different today.

Concerning the automobile, we seem to have reached a plateau.
We picked all the low hanging fruit, and it may take us centuries or millennia before we build an intellectual ladder tall enough to reach the higher fruit, if there are any.

Well, we still have the elimination of disease and conservatives to tackle.

Why should beings of rigid metal and plastic be superior to beings of malleable flesh and blood?
There're reasons why flesh and blood beings evolved on their own naturally, and beings of metal and plastic had to be artificially constructed.
But if they will be superior, than they're something be apprehensive about.
They may be our unraveling.

Idk what you're going on about there.

Humans may be able to improve themselves by genetic modification, but I'm apprehensive about that too, as we'll be losing some of what makes us, us, and we made such a mess of the environment, that I shudder to think what mess we'll make when we start meddling with ourselves.
I am not that optimistic about technology, especially cybernetics, genetic modification and robotics, as we're recklessly tinkering with the very fabric of life itself.
There are some doors man would be better off keeping closed for now, or forever.

I won't be around to see it.

I want to structure the economy around what technology can do today, not what it might be able to do in the unforeseeable future.

Today we can make life a right. The only impediment is too many people like you who get their kicks from contemplating the suffering of the "lazy" who won't indenture themselves for the profit of another.

It doesn't matter. Price should be in terms of hours-worked. 100 years ago a person had to work 10 hours for 100lbs of sugar. Today it's only 1 hour. Another 100 years it will be 6 min (assuming linearity).

But how price is determined is not the issue, but the fact that people will be out of work and that is the reason prices will fall: because no one has money to buy anything. <-- Look Here!

Why does the Federal Reserve aim for 2 percent inflation over time? https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/economy_14400.htm

The simple answer is if prices are not rising, it means people are broke.

Price is determined by supply and demand. If prices fall, then it either means supply is too high or demand is too low or both. Why would demand be low? People are broke.

So, you're saying it doesn't matter.
So what's your problem?

Are you trying to be frustrating or what? Read it again.

And wouldn't you think prices and wages would come to a screeching halt at some point?

Price is a function of supply and demand. Period. If price does anything at all, it can only be because of supply or demand or both. Essentially price = demand/supply. If demand = 0, then price = 0. If supply = infinity, then price = 0.

Wage is a function of supply of workers and demand for workers. Welfare decreases the supply of workers and therefore wages rise. If demand for workers = 0, then wages = 0. If supply of workers = infinity, then wages = 0.

Easy stuff. Econ 101.

That they wouldn't permanently plummet?

I hope so. When energy is free, supply is infinite and prices are 0. Conservatives want to fight that at all costs because when things are free, how will they make people suffer?

[Serendipper]

I'm sure western imperialism had something to do with it, but everything?

Yes I think so. Without those oceans the US wouldn't have had the shielding to break loose of Britain in the first place.

Western imperialism couldn't stop Japan, South Korea and Taiwan from becoming liberal democracies, nor Brunei, Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore, nor some countries in Latin America and other parts of Asia from becoming quasi-liberal democracies.

They didn't need to because the hulls are bursting with swag pillaged from the plunder of plenty of people already.

Are we to believe all the countries that're authoritarian and totalitarian dictatorships are so solely due to western imperialism?

Probably. Chomsky noted that democracy exists in places where the US has least influence. Democracy is essentially a function of the absence of US presence.

That race, and even culture have nothing to do with it?

Maybe, but I'm not sure to what extent.

Aside from North America, Europe and Oceania, how come the most successful liberal democracies are all in east Asia, while there's virtually no democracy to speak of in Subsaharan Africa, save south Africa, which was built by whites, which seems to be rapidly devolving since blacks took over?

https://www.quora.com/Wouldnt-it-be-a-v ... -the-world

Blacks are still the slaves of whites.

The only thing america is a model of is the virtues of having two vast oceans on either side.

Why don't you move to Brazil, Russia, India or China?

They don't have oceans on either side.

[Gloominary]

@Serendipper

It's an argument from ignorance: because I can't think of a way to rally atheists together to commit atrocities.

Really?
I can think of several.

Name one.

Xenophobia, Supremacism, Lebensraum.

Whatever it is that makes people reject god also makes people reject absolutes and embrace relativity.

You could potentially organize atheists to exterminate theists, but they're probably too smart to reduce themselves to the level of their enemy.

Surveying more than 63,000 participants online who indicated whether they were atheists, religious or agnostic, each person had to complete a 30-minute set of 12 cognitive tasks that measured planning, reasoning, attention and memory.

Overall, the research found that atheists performed better overall than the religious participants even when demographic factors like age and education were taken into consideration. Agnostics mostly placed between atheists and believers on all tasks.

While strength of religious conviction correlated with poorer cognitive performance, the data did show that there were only few small differences in working memory compared to tasks that required reasoning.

As such, rather than having poor general intelligence, the researchers say that religious people's lower IQ test results may be a result of bad performance on tasks only where intuition and logic come into conflict.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-styl ... 83131.html

So, we could say that religious people aren't religious because they're stupid, but they're stupid because they're religious. When dogma meets reason, dogma prevails. Atheists don't have that problem.

Atheists will do the reasonable thing.
Theists will do the "right" thing. (Where "right" could be exterminating races or whatever.)

Firstly, while most theists are probably moral absolutists, some theists are moral rationalists and relativists.

Secondly, while I prefer reason and relativism to absolutism, absolutism can be good if it promotes rational and what I deem to be good values.

You can't exterminate people unless you believe in good and bad, better and worse, superior and inferior, righteous and unrighteous, etc. Those types tend to be theists.

Most atheists don't believe in good and bad, but they believe in my and our good and bad.

No. North Korea for instance is a necrocracy.

Kim Jong-un of the Kim dynasty is the current Supreme Leader or Suryeong of North Korea.[110] He heads all major governing structures: he is Chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea, Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of North Korea, and Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army.[111][112] His grandfather Kim Il-sung, the founder and leader of North Korea until his death in 1994, is the country's "Eternal President",[113] while his father Kim Jong-il who succeeded Kim Il-sung as leader was announced "Eternal General Secretary" after his death in 2011.[111] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Kor ... d_politics

Those dead guys are still god, even though they're dead.

Emperors are gods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor

The Chinese emperor was considered the Son of Heaven and the autocrat of All under Heaven. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_of_China

Theism is only bad when it's used to sanction dictatorship, when it's apolitical or used to sanction democracy it's tolerable or acceptable.

Sometimes atheist Asian peasants rebel against atheist Asian dictators.

I doubt the peasants were atheist, especially if they were peasants. Poor and primitive people usually look for gods to explain what they can't explain.

The urbanites were atheists.

Why does the devil have to exist if god exists?

He doesn't have to, but most monotheist and polytheistic religions have a devil or demons, and most pantheists have 'negative energy'.

Going to battle is one thing, but genocide is another. I may even concede greed-wars fought by atheists, but not righteous wars where the goal is to annihilate the enemy on ideological grounds.

Well, hundreds of millions of atheist and apatheist Chinese did and do.

Conservatives blame drugs instead of people.

They blame both, whereas democrats only blame drugs.

They blame government in principle instead of a particular mismanagement of government.

I don't like conservatives because they blame government in principle.

I don't like liberals because they mismanage government by propping up minorities, the underclass and women at the expense of the majority, the working class and men.

And while I trust our government more than corporations in one way because at least our government is partly democratic, I trust corporations more than our government in another because a corrupt government can do more damage than corrupt corporations.
Corrupt corporations can't do as much damage without government support, as a corrupt government can do without corrupt corporations support.

Republicans are the prohibition party that bans everything including guns.

While both dems and republicans have gone after guns, dems more so.

I was watching a video on Pol Pot or Mao (I forgot) and he instructed the people to forsake the rice patties and start making steel, so all the people dropped the farm implements and headed to the factory. Then they all starved because no one was growing rice. What would cause masses of people to do such nonsense? If Trump gave a similar order, most people would give him the middle finger. Those people were not coerced, but willingly obeyed who they regarded as god. The people were neurologically wired to take orders from divinities and act collectively.

Right, "If Trump gave a similar order, most people would give him the middle finger", including most Christian Americans.

For whatever reasons, cultural, geographical, genetic, the Chinese seem more docile and domesticated than, not only most Europeans, but most Africans, east Indians, Latin and Native Americans for that matter.

Until recently, the Chinese were as or more prosperous than Europeans, yet they never had democracy there, whereas Europeans, and east Indians for that matter had it at various times.

Peace and harmony? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_C ... nd_battles

But the vast majority of these wars weren't fought over one religion trying to supplant another, but for predominantly secular reasons.

Buddhists, Confucianists and Daoists didn't declare war on other religions or the irreligious like Christians, Jews and Muslims did.

Heck, the christians, muslims, and jews can't stand each other and they all serve the same god. If they served no god, then they'd get along fine.

But Christians get along with each other real well, lol, well so long as they belong to the same sect!

Jews and Christians have by and large been demilitarized and deradicalized now, it's only Muslims we have to worry about, and progressive's coddle them, shelter them from necessary criticisms, consequently preventing them from undertaking necessary reforms, meanwhile they exaggerate the threat Christians pose.

My point was you paint religion with too broad a brush, most pagans and modern monotheists get along with everyone.

Then explain the war on communism (vietnam, korea) and the war on terror. They were led around like good lil robots. Christians never pass an opportunity for a war.

Secular progressives are almost as bad as religious conservatives when it comes to war.

And Secular progressives are worse when it comes to defending our borders, and they make excuses for minorities who commit crimes.

Maybe, but they'll still get up late and not show just like they do when it comes time to vote.

But the Muslims they're letting in get up bright and early.

The Russians and the Chicoms got up bright and early.

Harder times could further militarize and radicalize the left.

If that's the case, why did he mention christianity at all? If he had to hold his tongue, then he should have held it, but he chose not to. Your theory is very far-fetched. It's much more likely he was christian and changed his mind like

As far as I know, Hitler never spoke of a Jesus dying-rising for the sins of mankind, he spoke of a 1 dimensional, predominantly despiritualized Jesus who hated Jews.
He deliberately distorted Jesus to persuade Christian Germans to genocide the Jews.
And then in the last several years of his life, but probably much, much earlier, he discussed plans with his inner circle to ultimately annihilate Christianity after the war.

Positive Christianity (German: Positives Christentum) was a movement within Nazi Germany which mixed ideas of racial purity and Nazi ideology with elements of Christianity. Adolf Hitler used the term in article 24[a] of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform, stating: "the Party represents the standpoint of Positive Christianity". Nondenominational, the term could be variously interpreted. Positive Christianity allayed fears among Germany's Christian majority as expressed through their hostility towards the established churches of large sections of the Nazi movement.[2] In 1937, Hans Kerrl, the Nazi Minister for Church Affairs, explained that "Positive Christianity" was not "dependent upon the Apostle's Creed", nor was it dependent on "faith in Christ as the son of God", upon which Christianity relied, rather, it was represented by the Nazi Party: "The Führer is the herald of a new revelation", he said.[3] To accord with Nazi antisemitism, positive Christianity advocates also sought to deny the Semitic origins of Christ and the Bible. In such elements positive Christianity separated itself from Nicene Christianity and is considered apostate by all of the historical Trinitarian Christian churches, whether Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant.
Hitler identified himself as a Christian in a 12 April 1922 speech.[4] Hitler also identified himself as a Christian in Mein Kampf. However, historians, including Ian Kershaw and Laurence Rees, characterize his acceptance of the term positive Christianity and his involvement in religious policy as being driven by opportunism, and by a pragmatic recognition of the political importance of the Christian Churches in Germany.[2] Nevertheless, efforts by the regime to impose a Nazified "positive Christianity" on a state-controlled Protestant Reich Church essentially failed, and it resulted in the formation of the dissident Confessing Church which saw great danger to Germany from the "new religion".[5] The Catholic Church also denounced the creed's pagan myth of "blood and soil" in the 1937 papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge.
The official Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg played an important role in the development of "positive Christianity", which he conceived in discord with both Rome and the Protestant church, whom he called "negative Christianity".[6] Richard Steigmann-Gall queries whether this made Rosenberg a genuine anti-Christian.[7] Rosenberg conceived of positive Christianity as a transitional faith and amid the failure of the regime's efforts to control Protestantism through the agency of the pro-Nazi "German Christians", Rosenberg, along with fellow radicals Robert Ley and Baldur von Schirach backed the neo-pagan "German Faith Movement", which more completely rejected Judeo-Christian conceptions of God.[8] During the war, Rosenberg drafted a plan for the future of religion in Germany which would see the "expulsion of the foreign Christian religions" and replacement of the Bible with Mein Kampf and the cross with the swastika in Nazified churches.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_Christianity

Yeah, people used to say he had a chair made of human bones too.

I think a lot of that is just Hitler haters making things up.

There was some diversity of personal views among the Nazi leadership as to the future of religion in Germany. Anti-Church radicals included Hitler's Personal Secretary Martin Bormann, Minister for Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, paganist Nazi Philosopher Alfred Rosenberg, and paganist occultist Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Some Nazis, such as Hans Kerrl, who served as Hitler's Minister for Church Affairs pushed for "Positive Christianity", which was a uniquely Nazi form which rejected its Jewish origins and the Old Testament, and portrayed "true" Christianity as a fight against Jews, with Jesus depicted as an Aryan.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany

The German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung) was a religious movement in Nazi Germany (1933–1945), closely associated with University of Tübingen professor Jakob Wilhelm Hauer. The movement sought to move Germany away from Christianity towards a religion based on Germanic paganism and Nazi ideas.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Faith_Movement

Your boy Hitchens had no bloody clue what he was talking about.

either that or he was deliberately spreading malicious misinformation and lies.

Actually faith in reason isn't reasonable.

Then it's not reasonable for you to have faith in your own statement.

It's never, intrinsically reasonable to have faith in anything, faith and reason are antonyms, altho I suppose it can be extrinsically reasonable.

I don't have faith in my statement, I know it to be the case.

How can you know anything? Knowing = 100% confidence.

Well I think it to be the case (less than 100% confidence but more than 50%).

How do you type that i with 2 dots? My keyboard doesn't have that symbol.

My computer autocorrected the word.

Chomsky characterized libertarians as the most authoritarian of the bunch and I definitely agree with him. People usually are the opposite of how they say they are. For instance, if a woman says she's tired of playing games, then she likes playing games; if she's an open book, then the pages are blank. Or like the governor of OH who criticized his opponent for wanting to raise taxes and after his victory, he immediately proposed raising taxes. http://www.statenews.org/post/after-rep ... s-tax-hike (Taxes on the poor no less.)

Or like Jefferson who held dear the idea of smaller government, but then used unprecedented overreach to expand the federal government.

I guess it's not that everyone does the opposite but more that reality isn't ideal. That and conservatives are lying assholes.

Yea, every ideology looks different on paper than in practice, this is true of both conservatives, libertarians and progressives.

Amazing that someone so highly regarded as chomsky would miss something so obvious. I'm sure he could learn a lot from you lol

Right, no need to critically think for yourself, just find the most highly regarded thinker of your day, and imitate what they say without comprehending a thing, or being able to prove it to yourself or anyone.

Yeah I guess so. The gas tax paid by the poor fixes the roads that the corps use to transport goods to make profits on. The privatization of profits and socialization of costs. That's capitalism!

If they removed the taxes then who'd fix the roads?

Libertarians just want taxes for infrastructure, the military and police.
They want to keep our taxes flat and low.
I think it's a terrible idea, but it's better than having them flat or regressive and high.

It's not spin. Why on earth would you tax the poor to give welfare to the poor? That makes no sense. The only reason the poor pay any tax is to placate republicans bitching about fairness.

Once in office, overwhelmingly republicrats don't give two shits about fairness.
They're not really conservative, libertarian or progressive, they're conmen, and they will warp any and every ideology to suit their special interests.

Either money flows from the poor to the rich or the money is recirculated. There isn't another way of doing it, so however it's mixed up, the end result determines what system it should be considered.

I'm not conservative or progressive, I'm populist, I define that as wealth, resources and power flowing to the working class, not to the elite, nor to minorities, the underclass and women at the expense of the majority, the working class and men.

I'm not sure I want socialism. I think I just want to go back to the 1930-1980 period, but with a negative tax at the bottom. I don't think I want state ownership of companies or even co-ops. Just put it back how it was and issue negative tax.

Unless dems radically change for the better somehow, you'll either get more of what you have now: low-mid flat-progressive taxes, or what Nordic countries have: mid-high flat-progressive taxes.
If you want no taxes for the poor and high taxes for the rich, you'll have to vote 3rd party, independent or form your own party.
The republicrats are 100% bought and paid for by the ruling class.

No, it means that wages will have to rise to lure people into work. If you get $10k UBI, are you going to quit your job? I asked everyone I could and only 1 person said she'd quit (because $10k is more than what she's making and she'd rather stay home with her kids). Most people laughed at the idea of quitting a decent job for a paltry $10k.

Again, I know several people on disability for anxiety and depression.
They all confessed to me they were able to work full time, altho it would be difficult.
They all live unhealthily hedonistic lifestyles.
Moreover they have the option to work and make an additional 1000 dollars a month on top of the 1000 dollars a month of disability they receive, which would help them eat and live better, but they won't even work single day per week, they refuse to.
Never mind what people say, "you will know them by their fruits".

Goodness... you still haven't understood. Wage-slavery! Hello! Parasites is the name you're giving to those who protest being slaves. Good grief man, because people choose not to prostitute themselves for the benefit of the rich, you characterize them as parasites. After all our exchanges your continued inability to get your head around this is astounding. I'm at a loss for how to snap you out of this idea that people must be forced to contribute profits to the elites in order to survive.

I can help make Bezos richer or I can help make Buffett richer or I can help make Dimon richer or I can starve. Hmmm... what's wrong with this picture?

If you eliminate all concepts of profit so that no one could profit from the slavery of people, then I might concede that everyone should pitch in, but that's communism, ya know. Are you a closet communist?

No you're much worse because not only do you want everyone to contribute to the workforce, but you want the fruits of their labors concentrated into few hands. So it's the bad parts of communism + the bad parts of capitalism = your system. Force people to work and steal their fruits and give it to the lazy rich who do nothing.

If we end the war on drugs, the war on terror, cut taxes for the working and middle class down to 0, tax the upperclass @50-90%, and give it all back to the working and middle class in the form of free education, free healthcare, improved working conditions and doubling, tripling, quadrupling (as much as the 50-90% taxes can pay) everyone's salary (so again, if you make 20, or 120 grand at your job, government will give you an additional 20, or 120 grand), work will no longer be that exploitative, as the majority of profits will go to the working and middle class.
We'll all have more and work less instead of some of us working more and others less.
More co-ops and small businesses will form and rise, more big businesses will fall, and finally we'll have sociopolitical and economic equilibrium, where everyone will be richer except the 1 10th of 1%, but also at the same time, more independent.
We'll have both the best of both conservative, and progressive worlds, and that is what I meant by a brand new syncretic sociopolitical and economic system.

How do you arrive at that? We go from people being ignorant of how to raise a kid to needing licensing to buy groceries?

Well, people are somewhat ignorant about nutrition, drugs, relationships, pregnancy and STIs too, so I guess we need compulsory courses for every aspect of life.

What substantiation could you possibly offer in support of that assertion?

What could you possibly offer against it?
I don't hear mothers complaining: we have no bloody idea how to raise our kids, we demand compulsory parental courses!

If someone is legally retarded, below 70 iQ and dependent on government, than sure, it will be necessary for the state to intervene, but even then it should be minimal.

You said genetic similarity is all that mattered, so therefore iq is irrelevant and a woman can be retarded, but still better at raising kids than the state by virtue of genetics. That is your position. Now if you retract that position and center it around knowledge, then you'll be up against the combined wisdom of academia. Most girls in my area have a whole litter before 18, so what does a 100 iq trailer park chick know about raising 3 kids before being legally able to drink? Not a damn thing which is why those kids never leave the trailer park, except when they go to prison.

I didn't say it's all that mattered, they both matter, I just emphasized genetic similarity.
I think most mothers will agree with me when I say: their children should fundamentally be in their care, that the state should only intervene in extreme cases of mental deficiency and neglect.

Surely they are smart enough to answer a simple direct question. It looks like democracy scares you.

It doesn't, I'm confident the vast majority of people will side with me on this, but if they don't, I guess I'll have to move to another country, I don't want government telling me how to run my life.

The first thing an authoritarian does is kill the intellectuals.

Only the ones he disagrees with, the ones he agrees with he gives a monopoly to.

Watching tatted up floozies who can't read or do math teaching kids who to read and do math ought to be fun.

You and I may have been able to educate ourselves, but most kids would drift listlessly from game to game. Beside chess, the last game I played was pacman. I won't go near games because I'm scared I might like them and then my life is over.

Kids just need to know the basics: English and math.
If parents aren't equipped to teach them to their kids, they can voluntarily send them to school, but the vast majority of parents are equipped and realize the importance of them, the only trouble is they don't have enough time to homeschool.
History, science and so on you have to be inspired to learn anyway, and unfortunately most aren't.
Most just need to figure out how to do what job they want to do, and they can go to school or self-educate if they're inspired to.

[Gloominary]

I'm sure western imperialism had something to do with it, but everything?

Yes I think so. Without those oceans the US wouldn't have had the shielding to break loose of Britain in the first place.

Italy and Greece didn't have a single ocean, yet that's where democracy got started.
Switzerland didn't even have a sea, yet that's where democracy got rediscovered.

Western imperialism couldn't stop Japan, South Korea and Taiwan from becoming liberal democracies, nor Brunei, Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore, nor some countries in Latin America and other parts of Asia from becoming quasi-liberal democracies.

They didn't need to because the hulls are bursting with swag pillaged from the plunder of plenty of people already.

Funny how the strongest non-white democracies are all in one place.

Probably. Chomsky noted that democracy exists in places where the US has least influence. Democracy is essentially a function of the absence of US presence.

The US didn't have a great influence in Germany, Italy, South Korea and Japan?
The UK didn't have a great influence in Pakistan, India, Macau and Hong Kong?

Blacks are still the slaves of whites.

Why aren't Asians?

They don't have oceans on either side.

Why were the Americans able to extend themselves to the other side of the continent, but the Brazilians weren't?
Why weren't the Mexicans able to hold 'Aztlan', and expand?
While technically India doesn't have oceans on either side, it's surrounded by an ocean, which was named after it, because it's in a central position in that ocean between three continents, yet it didn't colonize, nor trade with them as extensively as whites.
Why didn't the Chinese colonize the Americas when they had the chance?
If you think race, or at least culture has nothing to do with this, you've got the blinders on.

Of course race and culture do, and scientists like Richard Lynn and Philippe Rushton will tell you that, in contradistinction to Chomsky and Diamond.
The only question is, to what degree?