$ jlc (10,317)

That is fine. That was a good CO.

Jan, laughing

I am stunned by the comments listed below. Do you not have any liberal friends? Or perhaps I should ask, "Don't you have any liberal friends you respect?" I have a ton of highly intelligent friends who are flaming liberals.

These people are incredibly honest (proof against blackmail or bribery - we have a very good business reputation with the CDC in the Carib because of this), incredibly intelligent and well read, charismatic, scintillating conversationalists, well dressed, and have a great sense of humor (including about themselves).

What are their standards? Several of them are Christian, and they believe in the Christian principle of giving to the poor and sometimes turning the other cheek. They are willing to give to the poor themselves in equal proportion to the degree that they latch onto my income and force me to do this too. The ones who are atheists have about the same ethos as the Christian liberals, but without the religious underpinning. I agree with these liberal friends on almost all social issues.

But the difference is that they do think that it is moral to force me to live by their standards. They think that if They give to the poor, so that poor people do not have to inconvenience themselves with jobs, that it is OK for them to make me do the same. Were the shoe on the other foot, and I were King, I would not consider that my not giving to the poor meant that they were forbidden to do so themselves. (This goes back to my comment on the thread about the clerk not signing marriage licenses: the difference between force and permission.) They would certainly be welcome to give their own income to the poor, according to whatever parameters they designed.

As I have said before, liberalism and even socialism and communism 'nest' well inside a freedom based society; the reverse is not true.

Jan

It is completely in error, and very dangerous, to think that freedom equates to subsistence-level-autonomy. There are abundant studies that show that there is a huge value in specialization and trade. The affluence of our entire technological civilization depends on this, and the Gulch is no exception.

If we require, or even imagine, a Gulch in which everyone grows their own corn and hunts their own deer we are doomed to shed the technology we have gained over the last 5000 years. We desperately need chefs, gardeners, and mechanics. We need professional farmers and ranchers. We need programmers and engineers and doctors.

What we do not need is to carry the burden of bureaucracy and the weight of the willingly unproductive on our backs whilst we are trying to run briskly into the future.

If I have not made it clear enough: WE NEED CHEFS!

Jan

My knowledge of law is scant, but I recall (as the hingepoint of several fiction plots) that a marriage license is not marriage. It gives permission, it does not marry the two people. (I agree that one should not have to have this permission; I am just trying to state what the current situation is.). Two people can get a marriage license and then decide not to get married.

I think that there is a difference between using authority to make something happen and using authority to not prohibit something from happening. I wonder if the clerk considered that she was 'marrying' these people, when actually she was just allowing the couples to decide whether or not they wanted to get married. (Granted, they probably would have.) Her activity was a link in the chain, not the whole chain.

My opinion: And no government should be able to prevent people from getting married. That is not anyone's business but their own.

Jan

The police may not be bad guys...(?)...but I am afraid of them. I can fight back against a criminal, but I am not allowed to fight back against a cop doing exactly the same thing.

Down this thread, there is a comment and a link by IamtheBeav. I think that if cops wore cameras, as the experiment in Rialto shows, then they would behave in a better manner.

Jan

Thank you for your analysis.

Jan

Let's make sure that we imagine him totally ripped! But he can wear a hat, as JCLanier suggested.

Jan

Thank you for the improptu tour of the Mexican dialect! I will save you a cerveza but do not bring a bruja with you because I do not have a cauldron out for her to stir.

Jan

Thank you MikeMarotta. That is very helpful. So if Ayn Rand says that we can look at an environmental situation at a workplace and predict a likelihood of harm to a worker and then take action against the employer - before harm to an employee has occurred, then that implies a set of standards external to the workplace against which the employer's environment can be compared. If fault is found with the results of that comparison, then action may be taken against the employer (even in absence of a actual case of injury) for the crime of 'having generated a dangerous environment'.

Hmmm.

Jan

Yes. It is what family and friends and tribes and nations are for.

Jan

I like the image, but will add to it: But not totally nude - wearing a revolver. And drinking a beer too...

Jan

When I embezzle a roll of toilet paper from the office, I generally run through the halls, yelling, "MWAHAhaha! I am embezzling toilet paper!" People pop out of their offices to applaud/shake their heads sadly. I often get comments on what an embezzlement piker I am.

Jan

I agree with Mamaemma. I think that if someone wants to let lethal cobras swarm all over their own property, that is their business.

But I think (and perhaps Mamaemma does not) that the moment that one of them wiggles a scale over the property edge, the owner is At That Moment guilty of having released a harmful animal into the environment. You do not have to wait for the snake to bite someone - right then, you go after the owner with the demand that he pay for a competent search for the reptile until it is captured or until he runs out of money. The owner is still legally responsible if the cobra bites someone - but that is a criminal charge.

I think that you can do anything that is legal on your own property, but that 'it' cannot transverse the border of your land.

Jan

You would buy into a HOA because you have a limited set of options. It is the only thing you can afford to buy in the path to your eventually owning a ranch in the wilderness.

Jan

Way to go!

Jan

I agree, but I do not think that any of our solutions will work well until we understand and resolve the underlying problem. Certainly making welfare and citizenship (via baby) unreachable will slow the influx. Tightening up on welfare for US citizens will also help - Someone needs to pick strawberries and many of the folks on welfare are perfectly good strawberry-pickers. The final solution to massive influx of immigration may be the increased roboticization of jobs.

I had a young Norwegian woman tell me that among her contemporaries, the USA was like "Atlantis". (Yes, she used that word.) There will be people who want to come here just because we represent Hope to them. But I think 'that many' immigrants is not the problem. I think the problem lies with people coming to pick strawberries, work construction, and - yes - get on welfare.

Jan
edited for clarity. I hope.

Something that 'works' may not function because of the ideologies of the people who thought it up, but the rational behind something that repeatedly 'does not work' is certainly suspect for no more reason that its inability to function.

A good example of this is Lamarkism: A perfectly reasonable theory, but it does not 'work'. Quite reliably, it does not work. Pragmatism suggest that one 'reexamine one's premise' when this happens.

Jan

I have been somewhat perplexed by the discussions on immigration because it seemed to me obvious that the purpose of a border around a country was like the purpose of a membrane around a cell: it allowed reactions to occur within the cell that could not take place in the environment. We (ourselves and our ancestors) have invested in the infrastructure that fills the cytosol of our country: roads, power, water, starbucks. These are all things that we need in order to innovate without having to chip our computers out of flint each morning. (This 'our stuff' and no one should get to mess with it unless they are our invited guests.)

Like a cell membrane, the border is semi-permeable. It lets through those things that the cell finds to its advantage and keeps out substances that would destroy the cell, or even decrease its efficiency. Someone who is going to contribute to the cell of my country is welcome to come through the semi-permeable border - legally - and pick strawberries or invent immortality. But someone who is going to just dilute the substructures already present should be kept outside.

I will add that substances seeking to cross a membrane also respond to the concentration of their like forms within the cell. I think that we will not stop illegal immigration until we solve the problem of 'why' people come here. (It is not always for welfare...it may be just so that no one will shoot at their family for the fun of it.)

Jan

Thanks for the link. I have seen that clip (!) before, but it was worth watching again.

Jan

I got a 404 Page Not Found when I clicked on your link. Nice brown couch. Classic.

Jan

I like 'strange' and don't have much use for family values, but otherwise I agree with what you said.

Jan

When I was in the USAF, we had a good cafeteria line in the mess hall. Why not implement a similar set of menu items in schools?

Jan

Paleo Diets include LOTS of veggies, though not so much fruit (which contains fructose in addition to the nice vitamins). Of course, chimps eat mainly fruits during certain seasons...and don't get fat.

Jan, eats Paleo but sometimes laughs at it

From a social point of view, I think that privacy is an evolving right - something that we would not have considered important until recently.

Cast your imaginations back to a small hypothetical Czech town, at some time between about 3000 BC and 1930 AD. Your family has lived in this town for millennia, as have the other members of the town, which is filled with aunts and 2nd cousins. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing as a matter of course. The town is one giant extended family. The idea of an anonymous life is outside of your social expectation.

Now imagine NY in 1950. You are surrounded by millions of strangers who are indifferent to your welfare and possibly inimical to it. Privacy becomes an issue.

Until post-WWII, most of the world was rural and privacy was moot in that context because the scope of interaction was small and personal. The FF (Founding Fathers, not Fantastic Four) were much closer to the Czech town than to the Internet and I think that while personal rights were important to them, it did not really occur to them that privacy was one of these rights.

We are evolving into a society that needs and values privacy and while we can rely on the durable foundation of personal rights to base our laws on, we are really building a new structure and should look at it in that light.

Jan

At least the skeptics are starting to talk about the farce of global warming - right out loud. They are still getting shouted down by the liberals who treat EPA edicts as religious pronouncements...but for a long while there was just silence. Now we are increasingly hearing disputes on global-daily-renaming.

"Settled Science". Bah!

Jan