цитата дня

[ded_maxim]

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Comments

[wsobchak.livejournal.com]

I don't think the smug asshats of the financial industry ever portrayed themselves as John Galts. That's not the image I remember Bernie Madoff and Donald Trump projecting.

[ded-maxim.livejournal.com]

Maybe not explicitly, but they did (and continue to) view themselves as indispensable to the economy. They still continue to act as if without them the whole thing will grind to a halt. Hence all the posturing regarding bonuses for the assclowns at AIG.

[wsobchak.livejournal.com]

What's that have to do with libertarianism or Ayn Rand? There were plenty of party officials in the soviet union who viewed themselves as indispensable to the economy-were they John Galt wannabes, too? Whenever you have an entrenched structure with uniforms and an elitist accessions system, middle and upper level management will always view themselves as indispensable, even if everything they do actually runs counter to the institution's stated goals.

[ded-maxim.livejournal.com]

What, indeed? Does the name "Rick Santelli" ring a bell?

[wsobchak.livejournal.com]

I'm not a big fan of Jon Stewart because he's a glib jackass. The guys behind Santelli are guilty of nothing more than doing their jobs. I've met the guys Santelli is ranting about. They bought stuff they couldn't afford on their paycheck, hoping that through the audacity of hope they would be able to keep it and live like the people on TV. And now you and I are going to pay for this. Why is Santelli the object of your distaste?

[ded-maxim.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't need Jon Stewart to tell me about Santelli, I've got John Cole (http://www.balloon-juice.com) for that. The problem I've got with Santelli is exactly the same one I've got with the entire glibertarian, "fuck you, I've got mine" crowd: blanket contempt for everyone less fortunate than you. Are you comfortable making the claim that every single person currently finding himself in a dire financial situation is guilty of living beyond his means? You may have met plenty of guys Santelli is ranting about, and there are plenty of these guys out there. But are you sure that's the whole story? For some reason Santelli isn't really bothered by the fact that the taxes you and I pay are going to keep his Wall Street buddies afloat until they come up with some other fucked-up and wildly inaccurate model for pricing some other fucked-up financial "instruments". I guess you could say that those douchebags were guilty of nothing more than doing their jobs, right?

And as long as we're on the subject of Santelli and CNBC, you may think all you want of Jon Stewart, but he was quite right to call them on the fact that, while the above-mentioned douchebags were busy overleveraging themselves, Jim Cramer, Santelli and the other assclowns on CNBC were cheerleading what you've recently referred to as the "mass suspension of disbelief". If no one else is willing to call them on it, well, I'll take the glib jackass Stewart.

[wsobchak.livejournal.com]

I don't need to make the claim that every single person currently finding himself in a dire financial situation is guilty of living beyond his means. Rather, it's incumbent upon these people to individually come to me and convince me that the situation they find themselves in is not their fault if they want some of my money. The burden of proof is on the beggar.

If you have a more accurate model for pricing, put it out there. I'm sure it will make you a lot of cash. Wall Street did what it could with what it had. I am against bailing out anybody, corporation or individual, and there seems to be a lot of arrogance on the corporate side. However, blaming suits and corporations and ignoring the role of individuals making idiotic personal financial decisions is cheap populism, and I won't play that game.

Cramer and Stewart are about equal in my book, and I'm not gonna cheer for either one. However, Stewart's arrogance really grates on me. He likes to have his cake and eat it too with the whole "look, pseudo-intellectual sociopolitical commentary! Whoa, don't call me out on my bullshit, I'm just an ENTERTAINER." Yeah, OK. Also, shallow cheesedick sarcasm might go over well in today's cultural environment, but it leads absolutely nowhere.

One last thing. I don't know how you make your money. Everything I have, I have earned either through training (which was mostly fun, sometimes incredibly unpleasant, and occasionally pure drudgery) or through deployments, where I put my cock'n'balls on the line almost every day and was responsible for the safety and health of my subordinates and accomplishing our mission. I have put all kind of stress on my body through parachute jumps, carrying an eighty pound ruck, jumping in and out of vehicles, kicking doors and climbing buildings with body armor on, breathing burning Iraqi waste, and so on. My back is fucked up enough that I have to do physical therapy twice a week for the rest of my life. I lost my two front teeth in training and now have implants. I am not complaining-I did all this willingly as have many others, and there have been a lot of people who gave much more. I would do it all over again if given the choice. I'm just saying that if you know some unfortunate who has a better claim to the money in my bank account than I do, please point them out to me.

[nnikif.livejournal.com]

I have earned either through training (which was mostly fun, sometimes incredibly unpleasant, and occasionally pure drudgery) or through deployments

In other words, you live the life of the socialist. All the money you've got was taken by the government from other people's taxes, and not a single cent of it was earned in a capitalist way. You certainly seem to think that your branch of the state socialism is very important for the society, and you may well be right, but it's really funny of you to speak about hating it when the government decides who to give money to, when you have all your money only because the government decided to give it to you.

[wsobchak.livejournal.com]

Well, you've got half a point. The government, in its role as a representative of the people, signed a contract with me which involved me providing a certain set of services to it in exchange for a paycheck. They didn't just arbitrarily decide to give me some cash. These services not being granular (capable of being broken down to the individual level,) my paycheck comes out of other people's taxes. What I mean is, you can't just pay the army when Jaysh Al Mahdi or Al Qaeda shows up in your neighborhood and hangs your uncle off the corner Amoco.

Calling that socialist is kind of like calling the fire department socialist. Now, if you want to go ahead and make the argument that having a standing army is wrong and unconstitutional and push through a referendum abolishing it, that's cool. Then you can go ahead and pay me what a guy doing my job in the private sector gets, which is about $200K a year.

[nnikif.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not a libertarian, so I don't see the point of pushing through a libertarian utopia a la Somalia in a civilized country. But yes, a standing army is "socialist", just like fire department is "socialist". You say that what your position "would lead to if taken to an extreme is not social darwinism but rather an Afghanistan-type tribal situation with a network fo social obligations". Well, from strictly libertarian point of view, a standing army has no place in society, a libertarian utopia would have a network of small armies of local warlords, which, of course, would be better for the representation of the people's interests.

This "constitution" talk has no relevance whatsoever. Libertarian philosophy comes from the general sociological and economical observations, and the mystical revelations of those great Founding Fathers are better left to mystics, not to libertarian philosophers.

As for a guy doing your kind of job in private sector, this is laughable. You work in a system that gets a mad percentage of the taxpayers money. This system is, of course, necessary, but there's no capitalistic economic mechanisms in it to ensure it's more effective. That guy in a private sector is also part of that system. As long as the system exists, his wages are not in any meaningful way related to the effectiveness of the way he's doing his job.

Notice how you talk about earning your money:

My back is fucked up enough that I have to do physical therapy twice a week for the rest of my life. I lost my two front teeth in training and now have implants.

This is a pure socialist "entitlement" talk. Does your fucked up back make you a more effective soldier? No, it does not. It only says about how much you "deserve" the money you get from the government. In a truly libertarian country veterans would be seen as an economic human waste, probably to be cared for by the private charities to make people feel better about themselves. But that would depend on the popularity of the war you fought in. If the war you fought in would be seen as "bad", and you as a willful participant in it, caring about you would probably not really make people feel better about themselves, so they'll just let you die off. This, of course, would be a great libertarian economic punishment for the wrong choices that you made.

Again, I'm not pushing for the "libertarization" of your country. I only point out the absurdity of the guy who belongs 100% to the socialist side of the American life promoting extreme libertarian principles. It's like a fish arguing that the water is bad for you.

[wsobchak.livejournal.com]

Well, if a standing army is socialist and a fire department is socialist, then the word "socialist" in the sense that you're using it is completely devalued. You're like Andrea Dworkin arguing that all sexual acts between men and women are rape.
That makes you hard to take seriously.

Since we live in America, "constitution talk" is relevant to any conversation on how our government should be set up.

What is actually laughable is you telling me what my job is or isn't worth while being completely ignorant of what it is. I am not going to get into the specifics-you're just going to have to trust me when I say that guys doing anything comparable for multi-national corporations at a fraction of the risk are raking in cash, and this is the way it will always be, even if the American government magically disappears tomorrow.

Me talking about how I earned my money is not entitlement talk. I'm not saying that I'm entitled to the fruits of my labor in any absolute way; I'm asking who exactly is more entitled to them than I. Again, since you seem to be willfuly missing this aspect of my argument, this money was the US gov't coming through on its side of a deal I made with it of my own free will. Ditto any benefits that it owes me. You continue to make unfounded assumptions, such as that I will continue to draw benefits from the gov't once I leave the service and that I would die without those benefits. The first is probably untrue. The second is completely false.

Finally, apparently you don't understand how carrying out its end of a contract benefits the government or any other financial entity. It goes like this. If the gov't signs a contract with a guy who then proceeds to get his legs blown off, it behooves the gov't to fix him up and pay him benefits even though he is no longer capable of carrying out his duties. If they do not do this, they will find it impossible to replace him, since nobody wants to work for an employer which doesn't cover its bets.

P.S. Is that you on your userpic?

[ygam.livejournal.com]

Afterwards, insurance companies formed private fire brigades to protect their clients’ property. Insurance brigades would only fight fires at buildings the company insured. These buildings were identified by fire insurance marks. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_firefighting)

So I think that a fire department that fights fires everywhere is, indeed, socialist.

[wsobchak.livejournal.com]

Well, like the military, this is one of the few economic areas where private enterprise is not sufficient, for many reasons-for instance, in any kind of built-up area, once a fire gets going, you can't just pick and choose buildings to fight it at based on who paid up. To label it "socialist" as a way of equating it with universal health care or welfare is disingenuous.

[nnikif.livejournal.com]

You're like Andrea Dworkin arguing that all sexual acts between men and women are rape.
That makes you hard to take seriously.

Again, I'm not arguing from my point of view, I'm arguing from the extreme libertarian's point of view. And yes, I believe that extreme libertarianism is just as crazy as Dworkin's feminism.

Since we live in America, "constitution talk" is relevant to any conversation on how our government should be set up.

First, I don't live in America. Second, we were talking about libertarian principles, not about constitution. Making a particular constitution a part of discussion about general principles is like talking about the taste of the apples when discussing the abstract physical problem involving the falling apple.

Your point about contracts is well made, but it has no relevance to the essential fact: there's nothing libertarian and capitalistic about a standing army. In my opinion, this is one of the proofs of the fact that perfectly libertarian society is pure fantasy. It's only good as a philosophical idea, a symbol to have in mind when judging the actual political reality.
Among other things, libertarianism is utterly undemocratic: if the government is to have no power, the votes cast in the elections become meaningless.

P.S. Yes it's me on the userpic, some three years ago. Why?

[wsobchak.livejournal.com]

Oh, so you're creating a strawman argument. Well, that's cool. Why not go all the way and say that in the extreme libertarian's point of view, if you see somebody wheeling a baby past you and you're feeling hungry, you have the right to go ahead and eat that baby?

First of all, since you live in Russia, don't you have bigger things to worry about on the political front that libertarians in America? Just saying...Second, since I don't live in a vacuum, the constitution is germane to my consideration of which political principles I'd like to see enacted on my block.

Since libertarianism and capitalism are, as far as I know, constructed with the personal liberty of all individuals as the highest goal (and not, as you seem to believe, with the abolition of government,) their personal liberty from foreign invasion and local oppression must be guaranteed. There is, right now, no feasible way to guarantee the inviolateness of national borders and rule of law beyond a military and law enforcement. If in the future there is a better way, I'll be all for it. Until then, working in the military or in law enforcement strike me as honorable options which do not conflict with the principle of personal liberty as paramount. By the way, this also answers your objection about the conflict of libertarianism and democracy. As long as the government has a function, the people need a mechanism to control it, which democracy provides.

P.S. I was wondering if you looked as much like an arrogant douche as you sound.

[nnikif.livejournal.com]

man, i actually didn't go ad hominem here, even if you could read my words that way.
i don't agree with your arguments, but they are generally intellectually sound. going for a total FAIL with your "P.S." is really not worth you.

[wsobchak.livejournal.com]

don't go breaking my heart-oh, don't go breaking my heaaart!

[nnikif.livejournal.com]

You know, Dude, I myself dabbled in pacifism once. Not in 'Nam of course.

[wsobchak.livejournal.com]

say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, dude, at least it's an ethos.

[ded-maxim.livejournal.com]

Dude, that last bit was completely uncalled for.