Berkeley City Council Doing Its Anti-Democracy Bit

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

The phrase is "couldn't care less" over here too, Dana. Don't take Merc's word for anything.

Yea, ask Radar, he will tell it like it is...

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Radar

I have a better understanding of global trade and of the opinion others hold of America than you are likely to ever have.

If so, why doesn't it sound like it?

Foreign Policy and Liberty: A Manifesto – by way of a rebuttal.

Radar’s trying to claim a primacy he simply doesn’t have, and especially not in foreign policy. He can’t engage and defeat tyranny in foreign parts, what with insisting, in effect, that it’s not our responsibility. How he therefore expects tyranny to depart and libertarian democracy to arrive becomes a question he’ll never answer, bobbing and weaving and assiduously prostituting his integrity to protect his narcissistic self image.

His priorities are thereby backward: they should be his integrity first, then his self image. But a narcissistic personality can’t do that – and this will become clear as radar disputes the point. I’m very glad my mind is not so crippled, so trammeled; to be that way would disgust.

I think I’ve got a better answer.

Much depends on how important you think human liberty is. I regard it as about the supreme secular value, for with a broadranging set of individual rights, secure property rights, and an orderly but fluid social order, such as we find in the United States in particular and England and Europe to rather lesser degrees, a calm and prosperous society is assured. Nothing is absolute, but the record shows doing things this way does things well.

Assigning this supremacy to human liberty, I turn to the question of how liberty is gotten. Very often, the answer is spoken from the cannon’s mouth, by “reeking tube and iron shard.” Slavemongers and tyrants rarely give up without a shooting match, right? There is a human instinct to dominate the environment, and dominance in politics is just one more manifestation of this. It causes people to fight like mad dogs for power and privilege. Some people cannot be satisfied with any power or privilege less than absolute; their personalities range from the ambitious to the sociopathic. These people are intolerable to the rest of us, and require to be denied power by any means necessary or imaginable if the rest of us are to have good and prosperous lives. That same instinct to fight like mad dogs for power lives as strongly in the breast of those without overweening ambition, and can be harnessed to defeat the threat the overambitious and sociopathic present.

So if removing tyranny is somehow, whatever way just not our business, then whose business is it, for all love? Liberty is good for humans, is it not? Are not the nations of the Earth inhabited by humans (as a rule)? If human liberty is so important, and libertarians say it is, does it very much matter what group of humans does the liberation of any group in fetters? I can’t see that it does: you don’t have to be native born to a given patch of land to cause it to become a place of freedom, and legitimately so. Remember how much aid we got from France – an absolutist monarchy at the time – during the Revolution, and remember how decisive that aid was. The French contribution to the success of the American insurgency was enormous – not only a good-sized army, but a fleet to match. That’s a lot of louis d’or. Human liberty gained with aid is not less than human liberty gained without.

With the interconnectivity of today’s world, the idea that entangling alliances should be shunned as you would shun murder simply doesn’t work. It’s not Constitutionally objectionable either, but was a matter of policy. Nor is there only one degree of entanglement, come to that. With trade, however, inevitably comes interdependence and with interdependence a broader notion of the commonweal. I have this broad notion; radar shows he does not – and he doesn’t think I should have it either, that I might be more like him. Ho. (Shouldn’t I be the best me, rather than a secondhand radar?) So furiously does he rage against what he thinks are entangling alliances that it is clear his idea of a solution to the problem is an America that doesn’t interact with other nations. I can’t think of anything worse for business. Bad for business is bad for thee and me. It appears he thinks economics is sufficiently separate from politics and manifestations of politics that you can deal in the former without any doings in the latter. A moment’s reflection will show this is not so, never was so, and hasn’t a likelihood of ever being so.

Even the occasionally dubious practice of foreign aid is not wholly to be eschewed, as evil or even as too expensive. An absolute refusal to do foreign aid would have meant no Marshall Plan, and no Marshall Plan would likely have yielded a Communist Europe, with all the tyranny, poverty, and nastiness that would imply.

Put briefly, you can’t fight tyranny – which is important – if you haven’t got money.

That tyrannous, oligarchic regimes can find ways to siphon off aid money goes without saying, but does not invalidate the above. We can and do still aid the Contras of our time, as we of course should, being human beings after all.

So, assuming as I do that we are the freedom people, where do the troubles of the freedom people come from? Do democracies regularly get in shooting wars with other democracies? Have democracies ever shot at other democracies? Where do our troubles come from? Do they not spring from places of no democracy? Are not terrorist movements engendered in undemocratic failed states? Point out on the globe which states are failed states – you won’t find a democracy among ‘em. You won’t find security of property rights either.

Property rights get messed with generally in the name of organizing scarcity – in this case a scarcity of wealth. Whether this is only perceived or it is actual, it is a view that there is somewhat less wealth to go around than there are people to surround with it. Some political philosophies are based around dividing it up as a sort of ration and distributing it – a scarcity, organized.

And it’s stultifying, stagnating, and without creativeness.

That is where socialism in any of its variants from Stalinism to Swedishism falls right on its face. Socialists get all excited about wealth disparities and how some people are bad off. Trouble is, the solutions Socialism finds for the badly off are all anti-wealth. What?!

Your choices boil down to two: you can create wealth, or you can organize scarcity. In an organized-scarcity system, to rise in the world, to improve your station, one way or another you have to cheat the system, either by defrauding it or by rigging it. Concentrating on a system to create wealth, on the other hand, places no such requirement – the improvement gets spread around in and by mutually beneficial transactions.

Non-democracies have fewer mutually beneficial transactions in their economies, of course.

So there you have it: if you aren’t a capitalist democracy, you ain’t shit. Become a capitalist democracy in full, and you’re both golden and in clover. Look at those Chinese, emerging from the dark night of that narcissist Mao Tse-Tung. How many years does the Communist dynasty have left?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

And in the place of proof of his view of whether our military has any role in our foreign policy, radar offers repetition and only repetition of his idée fixe. Noted.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by Sundae Girl

And, what is more, is the type of criminal most loathed in your country with the possible exception of paedophiles.

I think we've let the extremists rant about illegal aliens too much without calling them on it. The hate you see promoted on the net probably doesn't accurately reflect the view of a nation of immigrants.

[BrianR]

Actually, being a bit of a grammar nazi, "couldn't care less" implies that one does not care at all, while "could care less" implies some level of caring.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Griff

I think we've let the extremists rant about illegal aliens too much without calling them on it. The hate you see promoted on the net probably doesn't accurately reflect the view of a nation of immigrants.

First it is not an extremist view to deal with the issue of illegal immigration. If you think there is no problem you have your head in the sand.

We are a nation of immigrants. Legal immigrants.

[Sundae]

Originally Posted by Griff

I think we've let the extremists rant about illegal aliens too much without calling them on it. The hate you see promoted on the net probably doesn't accurately reflect the view of a nation of immigrants.

Actually my American date-non-date said much the same thing. He was surprised at my perception of the mood of the country and pointed out that America was a nation of immigrants. It was a new perspective for me (and I wasn't basing my opinion wholly on the Cellar).

[classicman]

Originally Posted by BrianR

Actually, being a bit of a grammar nazi, "couldn't care less" implies that one does not care at all, while "could care less" implies some level of caring.

The expression is "couldn't care less" and it means exactly that - ''I do not care at all.''

[dar512]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Given his extreme positions on a number of issues...

Hello, Pot. What were saying about Kettle?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by dar512

Hello, Pot. What were saying about Kettle?

Dude, you can't take me that seriously.

[classicman]

well...why not? We only know of you what we read, just like radar or any other poster.

[TheMercenary]

Because you only read what I am posting to Radar. (oh, and to tw). Rarely to the rest of you...

[classicman]

you post to us too? I was just bustin on ya.