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Ain't gonna happen. It's so hip and cool to make twatter posts laughing about LARPers and beauty and the beast reenactors, but the fact remains that cops aren't harassing and beating the **** out of them, while the statist parasites in the capitol buildings they walk into are at least forced to listen to them protest. The rest of us? Heh. I'll bet they are real worried about these angry posts popping up in places like forums.obsidian.net. But hey, at least we didn't die from corona. And that's the only metric that matters, right?

I can read my friend, I'm claiming that you can't call someone a statist if you believe in the necessity of a state. This is ribbing on GD (and right-libertarianism in general), who has previously used statist as a negative. https://forums.obsidian.net/search/?q=statist Anyways, "penultimate utopia which is probably indistinguishable from any number of paradise afterlives" is meaningless, the same can be (and usually is) said to dismiss anything that seeks to change the status quo in a meaningful way.

Then you don't have any business calling anyone else a statist. How does this not equally apply to capitalist society? Not only does the state enforce property at the barrel of a gun, but for the vast majority of people housing, food, and labor are not exclusively theirs and can be taken at will. By your logic living imperiled is natural and liberty is a pipe dream.

But we do. Anyone running for office at even the local workers' council level is a statist at heart and not really interested in "changing the relationship between the government and the people" in a fundamental way. Anyone running for office while also censuring the state's monopoly on violence is just a statist who thinks his **** don't stink. Minarchism is your jam. Okay. Even the smallest state requires that people are deprived of the right (if not the ability) to exercise their discretion with regards to the use of force in general and especially against it because ultimately any law is useless if there is no way to physically ensure compliance. That and your other bane, the prerogative to raise taxes, are the indispensable foundations of any state—even those which aren't actual states on paper, such as territories ruled by warlords. Sorry my dude, it's either full-on egoist anarchism or statism.

Well right now there is only one. Alito. When he makes a pick then I'll comment. The conservative and liberal labels don't really apply to judges they way they do politicians. A justice should look at an issue and ask "Ii this legal?" And that is it. Far too often people want their justices to ask "Is this moral?" One is subjective. The other isn't. But a lot of people think subjective standards are OK as long as they like the standard. I don't. Sotomayor has become a consistent champion of the 4th Amendment. In the American definition of the word liberal (meaning deferring to the State over the citizen) that is an illiberal position. Alito in the same cases tends to favor the state position on the 4th Amendment. In the American political definition of Conservative that is an un-conservative position. They all tend to speckle the spray chart on different issues. Alito, Kagan, and Breyer are the most consistent in one orthodoxy or the other. Heck just last week in Pereira v. Sessions they went 8-1 against a government position on immigration. Most notably refusing to apply the "Chevron Deference" (short definition is when the law, in application of a regulatory agency, is ambiguous the court defers to the agency's interpretation of that law). Now, I don't know what was in the minds of the 8 who decided against the government but deferring to the power of regulatory agencies is a decidedly statist and liberal position but all four "liberals" went to other way and the one "conservative" Alito dissented. The point being, the political labels just don't apply real well to judges. You really have to look at their background and history ans even then you don't know.

You're not touching my recreational nukes statist.

"​The fact that a liberty-hating statist like Trump is so adamant to releasing it reinforces that it MUST not be released." ?

The fact that a liberty-hating statist like Pelosi is so opposed to the release reinforces that it MUST be released.

Responding to WoD OK, let's wave a magic wand and make Bernie Sanders President for the rest of this term. Will we be more like Sweden in 2020 or more like the US in 2016? The reason why you shouldn't worry too much is even if it happened he would not be all powerful. He would still have only a third of the political power of the federal government. If 218 Bernie Sanders get elected the house and 51 Bernie's in the Senate it still would not be the end because the States have their own political powers. And even if all of that fails the final redoubt of the United States is and has always been insurrection. And if you don't win at the very least you won't have to be subjected to what comes next. I really would not worry about this. Yes it's fun to talk about and I am not at all ashamed to engage in a little harmless hyperbole myself. One of the big things I hear from people is "I like some of the things the Libertarians stand for but..." nobody likes everything. But here is the thing, electing a libertarian President in 2020 and even a few LP candidates to congress will not make the US a libertarian paradise. At best it will more the needle away from the current statist trend a little bit. If the magical Sanders administration happened at best they would move the needle a little. You are not going to go from the USA you know to gulags, secret police, and nationalization of everything you own with a few mass murders for good measure. Right now you can drive from Key West to Pocatello Idaho and not pass through a single state or even county where the Democrats have any power at all. In 2008 it looked like the GOP was on the verge of extinctions. These things are cyclical. Four years from now it will be all different again. The only difference between now and ever in our history is the cycles are coming faster and faster. Maybe people are beginning to realize there is little difference between the two after all. I can always hope.

If they turned on me just with their Glocks, how long do you think I'd last? Also local police is usually pretty reasonable as far as political activity is concerned, it's the feds you've got to worry about. And they got all the fire power they want already. Actually I'm counting on Texas to protect me from the fed deep state and their ANTIFA ilk allies. That probably explains this: https://www.facebook.com/TurnTexasBlueCampaign/ It's because once Texas goes blue it's the end of America as we know it. I think you will find it far less different than you're willing to credit. There will still be a big, expensive, and wasteful government that intrudes on our liberty and disregards the constitution. The only difference will be which liberties they intrude on more than others. So once you realize Democrats and Republicans are two sour apples hanging on the same statist tree you see it really doesn't matter which one you are forced to eat.

It's a good idea actually. We'll cut out gubbermint jobs and use the newly unemployed gubbermint workers to do the same thing but much cheaper, and hire out newly unemployed people to work for private firms to replace workers who may be asking for a raise, thus creating a steady supply of low-wage labor to circumvent the tyranny of minimum wage and worker's rights. If you disagree with me you're an evil statist who hates freedom.

I choked on my drink of water reading that. That was ****ing hilarious. Thank you! "Foreign Policy" is a tax-feeding, statist, Neoconservative rag. They never met a region they didn't want to bathe in war--hence, their affection for Killery. Their comments are damning in exactly the opposite manner they intend.

The problem with anarcho-whatever suffix you wanna put here, is of course that violence is a very effective coercion tool. So as history has shown you very quickly degenerate into have and used-to-haves. And then it starts all over again. Excuse me statist scum, but the NAP will prevent all of that.

Hate this attitude and pattern of thinking. To me, people have absolutely nothing to lose since both outcomes are terrible, so wtf might as well try for a third party candidate, because if Johnson or Stein were to pull in an abnormal amount of votes, better believe next election the USA might have a new party. Winning this one? Probably not, but a lasting impression for the future? Totally possible amidst all the discontent with Democrat and republican. I understand your sentiment but the first past the post vote distortion and the immense costs of running in so many simultaneous and parallel elections make it impossible for a third party to establish itself. Literally impossible. The fringe parties and candidates that exist are no more than a safety valve for the system, so that it can supports its claim to "democracy". Even within the UK, which has a much more ideological variety than the US ever had (the US has never even had a genuine Left/Right split, what is called the Left/Right in the US would in Europe be basically two center lib/capitalist parties with a slant toward either side), the best a third party can do on occasion is play kingmaker. The fact is, most political ideas fought their way into parliament (the key of these being socialism and other mass politics movements) from the street, usually through years of blood and sacrifices. It was never a case of simply being voted in and "slipping in unannounced." In the US they tried and were shot down. 80's and latter FBI (and mafia etc.) clampdowns against Unions accounted for the rest. The flip side, the various right "anti-statist/anti fed" movements unique to the US are a bunch of retards living in their own version of a 19th century fantasy capitalism, with no clue how a modern government actually works. Abolishing taxes, minimal state etc. in 2016, indeed. Lol! They have even less chance of success. The elites that hold power in the US have a much tighter hold on society than any government in Europe can ever dream of, even the ones described as practically "authoritarian".

Hollande is the one who's dangerous, and he's teaching us? https://pjmedia.com/blog/statist-france-collapsing-it-simply-no-longer-works/

Yeah, I don't get it. He's butthurt about having a referendum to begin with, and the perspective that elected officials will have to... do work? Gotta love these (super-)statist leftards. Democracy is only cool when it goes your way, hmm?

More like "My ancestors didn't travel 4000 miles to see a nation of promise, opportunity, and liberty overrun by a horde of non-white, non-Christian, statist-minded Third World barbarians hell bent on turning the USA into the same general sort of cesspool from whence the Third Worlders came." And, no, this isn't at all "funny", but neither was your disingenuous post.

Quite an interesting thread with lots of good points. My two centimes - 1. Britain was right in the early nineties to warn the Europeans that a non-tiered Club Med entry into the Euro would be a disaster. So it has proved. 2. Greece, an agreeable place with lovely people, was still culturally a post-Ottoman satrapcy, a nest of baked-in corruption and cronyism. Their entry into the original Eurozone was like giving a baby HIV. 3. Europe. Europe never changes (the polity, not the continent) 4. Did the founding fathers *really* imagine a day where small European nations would have to suffer German-installed technocratic governments, a la Italy? Edit : Obvs I use the term 'founding fathers' in a genuinely ironic context. They were statist morons. 5. The Left. The Left never changes (see 3, above). This is government by student union, not a mature democracy. Of course, voting for Syriza was a massive Greek lemming-joke, a frenzied death-phuck of epic proportions 6. Et tu, Podema? 7. Rock the Drachma (apologies to The Clash) I'd vote NO too, by the way. My heart, quite seriously, bleeds for the Greeks. A flawed, magnificent nation laid low by hubris.

Yep. I posted something similar a while ago, where a London School of Economics professor dirty hippie discussed a facet of this. I'm still skeptical that we will see a comprehensive reorganization of the economy to accomodate for increased automatization and disappearance of human manual labor. Ideally, work hours would be reduced in average or altogether eliminated without an actual loss of purchasing power, which would supposedly increase demand for the kind of services that non-sentient machines cannot provide. In practice, we have a reduction or altogether elimination of work hours with a corresponding reduction in purchasing power (minijobs and unemployment), and an increase in the ratio of non-jobs dedicated to the non-economy to actual productive jobs. For example, machines are really good at counting, and despite high-speed trading accounting for roughly half of all equity transactions, the financial sector keeps on growing. You wonder whether it's possible for a society to function with a 25% unemployment rate. The answer is a very emphatic yes. Spain currently is close to that figure (~23%) and what this means is simply the destruction of the traditional middle class that works for a living — we currently have an underclass that live off of a conditional government subsidy that is equivalent to roughly two thirds of minimum wage, and an upper class that has has grown by 27% since the 2008 crisis began. I'm not even getting into what this means for social stability, ecological sustainability, freedom and justice, and some other stuff nobody seems to give a toss about. As far as I know, no credible effort is being made to correct any of these problems. As Rosbjerg pointed out, some "new" political movements are popping up that at least talk about these issues, but they propose the same old solutions with a strong statist slant that haven't worked as advertised in the past and are doubtful to work in the present where nation-states are very much depowered in the context of global economics. Of course, anyone who talks about global economic imbalances and financial meltdown is likely to be branded a crank, despite the fact that we're still recovering from the last crash, and urgent suggestions are immediately made to cease pondering these things and to think about ponies and pretty flowers instead. Good luck.

And surely one could point out which one is Anita's and how its been "scientifically and statistically" disproven? Because that just sounds like you're repeating some kind of GG dogma rather than any kind of concrete facts. I don't really dwell in GG circles that much, have they too fallen into the cult-mindset? I will let mr. Nonek answer that himself. As for dogmas and cults, it has been quite difficult when everybody is mostly anonymous on 8chan and there's little to no moderation. I've tried to tell them what they should think, but they are only telling me to **** off; either because i am a shill, a femi-nazi, statist, authoritarian, jew, goiym or corporate shill. It quite difficult to shame someone into submission when they have no identity, only arguments Maybe Bruce can help me to make people think and argue as i like them to.

I'm not going to be lectured to by Scandinavians. It's utter apples-and-oranges. You can't even begin to compare the socio-economic and cultural underpinnings of Scandie Social Democracy and what happens in the UK. Cradle-to-grave statist, high-tax coalition government obviously works for Scandinavians. That's great. It won't forever, in a globalised world.

Yeah, I saw that. However you couldn't resist taking a potshot at your friendly neighbourhood commissar (seriously, outside of philosophy and polsci undergrad circles, WHERE are these people?), hence my comment. I don't really agree that "the left" (I guess you mean contemporary leftards) get a free pass. Left-leaning totalitarian regimes do enjoy the advantage of not having been utterly destroyed in a world war, so there's generally much less open debate and criticism going on in countries that suffered said regimes where their heirs are still directly in control. Other than that, I think just about anyone with half a working neuron outside of those countries will agree that statist genocide and oppression are bad, regardless of what banner you wrap it in. Using "the left" label to lump together everyone who isn't happy with the status quo and then pulling the Red scare card is just cheap, man. Anyway, I thought this was about UK elections (a discussion I find way more interesting), and not a thinly veiled attempt to rehash the same old topics for the billionth time. Can we let old ghosts in the past and discuss the present situation instead? I understand if the left really are as pathetic in the UK as they are in my country you'd be right to point and laugh. You don't need to drag Uncle Joe out of his grave for that, right? Right?

This is a simplistic picture of a phenomenon that is quite complex. In addition, you are working from some assumptions. Chiefly, a) that thieves act rationally, in the sense that that they can accurately judge the optimal risk/reward ratio in the different courses of action available to them, and b) that thieves are pushed to thievery out of choice and not need. We know that (a) is simply not true. Prison inmates are known to have a lower IQ than average (1) (2), which translates into a markedly worse ability to judge the idoneity of a given course of action. This can lead to people making seemingly "dumb" choices that land them in prison. In addition, Dunning-Kruger is a mechanism which may help explain why less intelligent people consistently believe they can get away with crime. Now, the most controversial point is by far b). Please understand that I'm not a crime apologist — I'm simply trying to discuss whether the huge drain on resources that a prison system entails has any effect on crime rates. You might argue that there is always an alternative to stealing. Even if we accept that, that's not the point. Rather, the point is whether people who steal are able to see that alternative. Owing to the intelligence argument, we know that people with lower IQ or developmental disabilities have more trouble negotiating difficult situations. That should be enough to give you an idea of why prisons don't serve to deter the majority of criminals* — they simply don't think they'll end up there! *remember, you are only a criminal if you are caught and convicted. An argument could be made that very few really intelligent criminals are caught. Considering that intelligence is mostly inherited, how fair is that? I'm not a sociologist, but untested suppositions and tradition aren't enough to convince me that crime rates are affected by their legal consequences more than they are by, say, economic causes. So, you are saying that statist oppression is a necessary evil to defend against... foreign statist oppresion. This is the line of thinking that almost plunged the world into nuclear war in the 60's and 80's, and the line of thinking that has enabled tyrannies to take hold since, well, forever. I can turn this argument around and suggest that unified resistance may encourage the enemy to use even more force to achieve its aims than it would otherwise, as exemplified by the US nuking Japan into submission, for instance. The truth is you can resist a foreign oppressor exactly the same way you resist a native one: as passively or actively as circumstances allow. There is functionally no difference because oppression is oppression is oppression, and once made a second-class citizen the causes and means by which this is accomplished matter little. Going to die in a war to resist foreign invasion because that's preferable to dying at home being accused of treason and shot is a proposition I find difficult to defend, but, eh.

If Anarchy destroyed the State, Bob Saget wouldn't have been accused of raping and murdering a girl in 1990. Checkmate statist scum. Ps, private property in an anarchist world would be impossible to enforce without violating the idea of anarchy. If you kept the principle of private property, you would be creating a feudalist environment.

What do you mean by liberal capitalism? Cuz' we strayed from laissez faire a while ago. Most of the instability in the US stems from statist campaigns like the drug war. We would be more stable if we were more liberal.