r-libertarian on Leaning Blue

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:18:15 -0400

Everyone’s rhetoric veers off into flights of fancy. Team red or team blue, every argument spins wildly into some hot take completely detached from reality. It’s like one group compiles a list of facts which are neither here nor there, and the next group weaves it into some rhetoric designed to rile the mob and crystalize some false narrative.

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Wed, 10 Nov 2021 21:09:52 -0400

I don’t know if the divide here is actually left or right. I think any reasonable person can see the complexities here. What seems to have a party divide is the interpretation of these complexities.

What really strikes me most about the whole matter is that we seemed to have tripped over some loophole - where if you’re feeling particularly predatory one night, and you hear about a riot breaking out, you can grab a gun and see what kind of trouble you can get yourself into. If you wait for the right conditions you could have some murderers wet-dream. This shouldn’t be allowed to stand.

It’s hard to determine if this is what Kyle was thinking, but it seems his intentions here would speak to the heart of the matter. I suppose, even with my typical liberal repulsion to someone carrying a gun and defending a store that’s towns over, I can understand that his actions could fall under self-defense, or that he came to this situation without an intention to cause harm.

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Mon, 08 Nov 2021 16:15:06 -0400

These things get complicated. Personally, I figure he was hoping to shoot someone and so I hope he gets the book thrown at him. But, that’s a personal opinion based primarily on media recountings during our ongoing culture wars.

At the end of the day, I don’t know what happened here, nor do I know Kyle or what was going through his mind during this. It’s entirely possible that, legally, he was in the right. It’s also possible that authorities will determine that, from his perspective, he was justified in what he did. On these, I can’t really speak, but while I personally feel he’s a murderer, I know if I were in his shoes I’d want a fair trial that gave a ruling based on established law and precedent.

That’s the problem with discussing cases like this, I know how I feel from the facts explained and my general sense of outrage that someone would drive to a riot and shoot people, but real life is always more complicated than we understand from the outset. It’s best to let the system run it’s course, and trust that the group looking into this is on the level.

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Sat, 30 Oct 2021 14:07:05 -0400

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter that Musk is right and he can manage the money better, the other billionaires need to be brought to the well and Elon is just going to have to take the hit.

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Fri, 22 Oct 2021 04:43:20 -0400

Yeah, I’d say they are. I personally think the Democrat’s war is the more correct one - mail-in, early voting, automatic registration are all things that seem OK to me, but I can put myself in a red hat and see how they could see that as an out-and-out attack.

From my perspective, Republicans pushing Voter ID, the constant recounts, and the insistence that everything is doomed constantly sure seem like an attack to me. So I think this is all largely a matter of perspective, and I think a fair read of both sides would point out they have some basic and obvious points in their favor.

What I outlined above provides more than enough distraction to prevent any kind of substantive political discussion about a proper future state here. I think that’s likely the real goal behind a lot of this rhetoric. Republicans especially like to “starve the dragon” as it were, and while that’s fine tactically, I think it’s telling of their mindset.

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Sun, 18 Jul 2021 10:06:28 -0400

No space, biology, chemistry and time aren’t good enough reasons to justify forcing others to keep you alive. You’ve no objective reason to force others to pay for your healthcare beyond “society” and “everyone else is doing it”, you’re just appealing to bandwagon and authority.

Objectively speaking, healthcare is a universal need as it’s something every living person needs. Logically, since we know everyone needs it, and we understand morally that barriers such as the ability to pay for help shouldn’t block someone from receiving help, the only reasonable thing to do is off-load the cost away from the individual. Otherwise, you have immediately built a system where only certain classes of people (those who can afford it) get good quality of care, and the rest go without.

To your point about how nothing is a good enough reason for you to keep someone else alive, this is a horrible worldview that has led to the near-collapse of our society. A better approach here would be for us to agree intellectually that there’s no good enough reason TO LET SOMEONE DIE and to charge the government with building institutions towards that goal. It turns out that through taxes, we can abstract away from individual healthcare costs and frame a system where every single person in need can be covered. For a government charged with securing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I’m not sure I even see another way forward.

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Mon, 12 Apr 2021 19:28:14 -0400

Hot take, but I think it’s within the realm of reason that the officer did mean to go for their tazer but was confused in the heat of the moment. This reaffirms my belief that an armed police force so willing to meet escalation with escalation mostly serves to make tense situations worse.

If you’re looking for a libertarian view to latch onto here, consider that I (and any criminal not sentenced to death) have a constitutionally guaranteed right to life. The idea that some officer of the state can just ride on up to you, shoot you, and consider it justified because you said something provocative or moved a certain way flies in the face of the whole thing. We should expect people in such positions to do everything possible to prevent death, not sanction it as our default position.

If anything, we should be asking the police to assume way more risk (pay them more, but end qualified immunity), and basically make the bar so high that it would extremely hard for any state actors to ever justify killing a citizen. Perhaps in most cases, they wouldn’t even possess the means because ideally the expectation that a police officer doesn’t kill would be reinforced by not having them carry a killing device at all times. The current way things are structured, no wonder this shit happens constantly.

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Sun, 28 Feb 2021 13:46:17 -0400

Greedy capitalists play woke on TV but do business in China against all morality and decency, this should outrage us all. How would a Libertarian non-interventionalist policy help end Chinese re-education camps?

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Sun, 27 Dec 2020 10:17:34 -0400

Yeah, but what do you people know? You voted in a man with no experience to fix the government and brought us to the brink. Now the same people are calling Biden the boogeyman, what a joke.

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Sat, 25 Jan 2020 16:26:34 -0400

> How do people flip from mocking everyone as snowflakes to being the ultimate victims and snowflakes themselves and not bat an eye? Not have an ounce of cognitive dissonance?

Because it’s a strategy. They understand that the overriding goal for everyone on their side is to win. So they can swing wildly from preaching accountability to mustache-twirling because it’s all just a means to an end. When you experience the cognitive dissonance, it’s softened by the fact that your team is kicking their asses.

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Sun, 22 Sep 2019 10:52:47 -0400

Wait, what evidence? Nobody has presented evidence. All I’m aware of is an allegation. What we have evidence of is Trump trying to coerce an investigation of a political rival out of a foreign power. If the Trump camp had _evidence_ they wouldn’t need this underhanded investigation.

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Sat, 21 Sep 2019 14:41:43 -0400

I like how Trump’s takedown of Biden is beat-for-beat what they accuse Joe Biden of doing. Can’t we just arrest them both and call it fair?

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Wed, 17 Apr 2019 11:47:33 -0400

The double standard from the right is intense, it’s hard to believe they don’t see the hypocrisy. FOX news tried to hit him with this last night. “You can elect to pay more in taxes, why don’t you?” type of argument is so weak I can’t believe they tried to hang a whole discussion on it.