The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

Elodea, surely you've got better things to do than create men from straw. Gorbles neither said antifa are the only ones helping nor did he say that all the conservatives were being racist. He posted one image showing a headline about the alt-right/nazis being racists (and I'm sure most conservative would resent being lumped in with those people, as you just did and Gorbles did not), and another image showing a headline about Antifa putting aside politics to help out in relief efforts that in no way implied they were the sole group helping out.

You've created so many strawmen in this thread I'm beginning to wonder why you have enough straw for them to begin with.

You do have a point about not being lumped with them. Which is why it blows being lumped in with them or the alt right when you try to consistently enforce freedom of speech.

ACLU and libertarians are not Nazis or even sympathizers. They just consistently defend words from one group, just as they were violent crime encouraging rap music or the like. I don't support prosecution of media, nor do I of groups based on speech.

There are simply better ways to prosecute scum, if they truly are scum, besides denying due process or for their assembly prior to causing any trouble.

"i resent gorbles' post because i think it unfairly demonises a group of people"

Five seconds later:

"here is a video demonising a group of people because of a totally exclusive interview from someone who is totally real"

No mention at all of:

Conservative outlets and media personalities demonising people grabbing food from flooded stores as "looters" based on the colour of their skin. Applying political spin, in a natural disaster.

But we wouldn't expect elodea to even give that kind of bias a passing thought

I feel it's time for something completely unrelated!

https://www.thebeaverton.com/2017/09/antifa-dangerous-group-world-rest/

He didn't really explain much here, except to reiterate what I myself said and explain the background to net neutrality. Net neutrality's principles are sound - it's the way the FCC chose to handle it that makes very little sense to me.

You got me confused. So you agree with the need for net neutrality?
But that reddit post explains exactly why that need now needs government support even though it was "fine" in the past. If you let the telecom giants run wild as they please now they'll certainly not just adhere to net neutrality by themselves. There is no gain in doing so for them, they'll rather push their monopolies further.
So what to do against it if not write rules against it? The old rules won't work anymore, as the situation has changed too much.

And yeah sometimes anti monopoly legislation backfired. Everything has bad and good examples if you look into history. For things related to the internet I'd rather compare, given my location, with the German laws that force the main owner of most telecom cables in Germany, the Deutsche Telekom, to rent them out cheap to competitors. These laws were put in place after the Telekom tried to abuse their monopoly by charging insane prices from competitors for access to the cables. It's the reason I and most people in Germany can chose from a dozen or more competing internet providers.
That's not exactly the same as net neutrality, but it is an example of the government fixing monopolies that it created itself, as the Telekom was originally state owned and later privatized, so had a rather unfair headstart before everyone else that had to be corrected, and corrected it was.
Now not everything is perfect with this as well for sure, for example the resulting market of many competing internet companies has given rise to a massive race to the bottom in terms of pricing. Which makes internet access cheap, which is great, but which has also taken away much income from the big players in the field and made it harder for them to invest into expensive new stuff, like fiber glass connections. We're kinda behind some other places of the world in that regard.
But still it sorta works decent enough imho. My parents in a quite rural area will in a few years finally get a fiber glass connection, build by a local ISP that just got the contract from the local authorities. Without the anti monopoly laws that local ISP would not exist at all. It'll take time, but it'll happen.

*Sighs*

Apparently the deep state is using these hurricanes for its agenda, or something.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/09/06/rush-limbaughs-dangerous-suggestion-that-hurricane-irma-is-fake-news/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_irmalimbaugh-145pm:homepage/story&utm_term=.aeac580d8037

Here's the thing: The old rules DO work, and he explains why they work in his post. In every instance, the telecom companies were punished for their overreach, and that's how it is supposed to work. There were no extreme cases that needed to be reigned in, and no ongoing issues that needed to be resolved. The news media and some other interests in the government began the campaign for net neutrality under false pretenses. The system was working fine before the 2015 vote by the FCC. They were attempting to fix something that wasn't broken.

Anti-monopoly legislation has failed a ridiculous amount of times because the government keeps breaking its own rules and creating monopolies with other laws. Unnecessary monopolies, mind you - they would have never been created from an open free market. In fact, I can't recall a single instance of Antitrust or Antimonopoly legislation doing the job it was originally intended - to prevent monopolies from arising in the free market. It's always been about preventing government-created monopolies from running amuck over local businesses.

As to your last sentence:

Without the monopoly created by law, you wouldn't need the anti-monopoly laws that gave the local ISP a chance.

Who is gonna punish them then this time? Even Google gave up on their "lets build fiber everywhere" project.
Google. A company that has absurd amounts of money and certainly also have a huge amount of know how about internet tech. If companies like google have a hard time fighting the cable companies monopoly, who else could possibly do it? How?
And even if Elon Musk magically manages to get that satelliete internet running and pwn the industry you'll still have a monopoly on your hands. It'll just change who is in control.

And who asked for those laws in the first place? The government keeps making laws that are basically written by Comcast if you just let them lobby and influence as they want. That's the flaw I see in your theory of "we need no government intervention".
It's not if the government will intervene, it is only on whose behalf. Will it be Comcast that makes the government write a rule "if your name starts with com and ends with cast you may **** your customers" or will it be digital rights groups that write a rule "you may not **** your customers and you may not change this law any time soon" first?

Or you could just amend the constitution to say "The government shall not impose on the economic practices of its citizens with any law or regulation or amendment to this Constitution."

Problem solved. Competition reigns in an open free market, companies can't screw over their customers because there is competition, and any unlawful attempts to force competitors out of business will be handled by the courts.

Google gave up on Fiber because it wasn't profitable, not because they had a fiber Savings Account that Comcast bled dry with legal fees and by being an ******* in local markets. Just because a company has a lot of assets doesn't mean they can basically ignore how capitalism works. How do you people not understand this?

try this on :

Politicizing hurricanes :

You do realise how laughable naive you sound with all this, right?

How do you, and anybody / everybody else that espouses the perfect free market of sainted godliness, not realise that governance arose out of the basic fact that people can't be trusted? You don't even have the excuse of it being a handover from feudal monarchy because you folks never had that.

Companies can screw over their customers. There being competition doesn't change that. It might change how the customers are screwed over, but there will still be ways to screw customers over regardless. Fees for leaving, fees for cutting contracts early, fees for faulty hardware . . . these are all ways to lock poorer customers into a package because they won't be able to afford to switch in the event that the service provider screws them over.

Stupidly naive.

The entire worldview of this libertarian (which is what this is, even if you're not) mindset seems to revolve around the false truism that a) everybody can always switch any provider of any service at will and b) that all competition will be equal and not interfered with in unjust or otherwise nefarious ways.

"but the courts"

The courts cost money. If you're a startup trying to challenge an existing service provider they can bury you in court fees before you even get to debate anything of worth. This is how the courts work (and why often the only recourse is going to the papers to get visibility on the case which is usually how you force larger companies to back down - bad press).

Yeesh. Get a grip. It doesn't sound like any of you live in the real world. It's nice to theorise an economic model from the confines of your house, and believe that the Gubberment is the only big bad out there to get you, but the real world isn't like that. There are greedy unscrupulous assholes everywhere, from the courtroom to your local shopping chain management.

Exactly. So if even for Google something is not profitable to whom should it ever be?
If you want to see a solution to the net neutrality problems that does not involve the government telling the monopolistic cable companies to stop doing **** than you need a decent competition that will offer customers an alternative, so they can vote with their pocket. As long as you have large amounts of people who basically have only one choice for an ISP that ISP will screw them over.

But where is that competition gonna come from if even a giant like Google failed to provide it?
You've not answered my question: Let's assume the FCC just gives in to comcast and takes away all the regulation. What then? Comcast and co. will start screwing with the market hard, resulting in massive net neutrality violations.
How will the free market solve that? You say the free market has solutions, what is the solution for this specific example?

"the basic fact that people can't be trusted?"

If this is true, this is precisely why we can't have a governement. You are forced to obey the laws and can ultimately end up in jail, or killed if you resist.

Meanwhile, you can chose to do business / buy or whatever with a company. So even if they are corrupt, you're not forced to deal with them.

"So if even for Google something is not profitable to whom should it ever be?"

As it has been said, this is not profitable because of all the regulations against it. Doesn't mean it can't be done tho, just not with the current state of things...

"How will the free market solve that? You say the free market has solutions, what is the solution for this specific example?"

This is a common argument against freemarket or libertarian ideas in general, and is easily rebuted :

We don't know. People invent new things everydays.

How will the coton get picked after slavery ?
How will people who sell horses survive with all those new cars ?
But what about the roads if there is no governments ?

The point is : we can admit that we don't know, instead of pretending to now. Allow people, ideas, companies, to fail and learn from it.
Central planning is exactly this : pretend to know, pass laws, and force everyone to do what you say is best.

You can't argue against the freemarket just by saying "how this specific issue will be resolved"

The general point is : not by force. But by volontary interactions.

Because the truth is, no one knows how to best organise a society of millions of people.
So allow different ideas to compete and see what works best.

lemme break up what you're missing here :

how do you all of the sudden KNOW that that is the right solution and would have us immediately apply what's the hurry? didn't you just demonstrate that we knew NOT how to go about it? how are you absolving THIS from being one of the many ways to go about it? you really skipped a beat in your logic there.

We did for a few thousand years and ended up with a social democracy.
The US tried for a few hundred years and got shady corporate paradise.

You are saying "just trust me, it is gonna be great", "yeah I don't know how it will work, but it will. Just trust the magic powers of the free market".

That isn't a very convicing argument, especially since few if any examples of it really working out exist in all of history.

I doubt that was the issue. The issue was that putting cables into the ground all over the US turns out to be an investment of proportions so big not even google could do it.

So before slavery, we had few to none example of society working without it.
Did people had to figure out every aspect of life without it before finding out it was immoral ?

The state is based on the same principle. It is immoral because it is a monopoly on the initiation of force against others. Do we have to figure out every possible way to live without it, for pointing out its immorality ?

The difference is, i don't care how you want to organise your life. You want to live in a communist commune ? go for it, as long as people want to do it and none is pointing a gun at you, i don't care.

But if i don't want to participate in taxation for example, people are going to point guns at me in the end.
Basically, you won't allow me to live as i want to. Obviously, if i wanted to kill you for example, i'd understand. I'm not against self defense.

But why is it that just wanting to freely trade with people instead of being forced to give almost half my income for questionnable reasons is considered unreasonable ?

And i don't say "do this, this is the best" what i'm saying is precisely, allow people to figure out better ways instead of forcing everyone to do what the state says. I don't have a big plan to organise society.

I'm just saying, forcing people is evil. We shouldn't do it.


I have not studied the google fiber in great details, and i'm probably wrong about it, so disregard my uninformed opinion.

NO! history freaking happened you absolute buffon!

It wasn't overnight and it wasn't a decision and it had fuckking nothing to do with free market.

I'm sorry for this but it's exasperating how you're reducing everything to generalized dumbed down and shortcuted versions of themselves and then wonder why none of history or science applies anymore. if it doesn't make sense to you when you look at it that way it's actually all your doing. please realize that!

context matters!

details matter!

But you don't exist in a vacuum. Unless you spend your time in solitude in some desert you'll have to make amends to the group you exist in.

Society was dumb back then. Limited cases of claiming life was acceptable back then, duels, wars, slaves out of war prisoners, unbridled whim really. None of it ever should have transpired, we could have easily done things differently. The biggest setback wouldn't have been lacking slavery, we'd just have less giant triangles in Egypt, no... the biggest setback would still have been the Dark Ages.

We advanced technology as a civilization to what it is now. We should have been capable of fair work for fair value, liberty, protecting humans and their one shot at life, and equal treatment. When you let a civilization like Japan tech-up, rather than enslaving them, then they do mostly alright a hundred years later, even before the internet.

Now that we have the internet, there's no excuse not to let nations have the nearly free resources of communication and improvements it offers.

Let's just hope the Middle East can eventually catch up, because they're being stubborn and if they'd comply then warhawks would have a lot less to use as argument for the war budget and globalization policies.

Honestly, good taxation, shouldn't even make you question it. However, there is a LOT dipping into the tax funds these days, that should be reviewed, especially for "cost effectiveness", because everyone in charge is making more a year than I make in 10. I'm not jealous, it's just they're making it off MY tax dollars, so they could limit it to "triple what I make", you know, some SANE salary...

It's not taxation, it's inefficient government spending and salaries, atop of crony capitalism regulated to keep corporations safe rather than invest in new ideas or keep the market efficient and competitive for pricing's sake. Regulations, give a lot of businesses, blank checks because they're already over the regulation hurdle, and no other business can compete AND make the hurdle simultaneously.