-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DISCLAIMER: if you have a disagreement or problem with my writings or other content, contact and talk to me, NOT the people I link to. The people I link to do not endorse my views or content unless otherwise stated.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some people, particularly on the left, say that they wish that the United States of America was more like Europe. Some other people, especially on the right, do not support this.
I am here to address both of these views, mostly in ways that very few other people or anyone else would do. Rather you are on the left or on the right, I think that we all can learn something from this.
Countries such as Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, will be excluded from this article's definition of Europe due to economic and political conditions. However, many of the issues that this article will cover can be applied to Canada, and to a lesser degree, Australia, New Zealand, as that they all speak a European language, descended from a European culture, use a European-based government and legal system, and the largest religion was exported to these places by a European nation.
This article will be broken up into 4 parts. Part 1: a few things that Northern and Western Europe does better than America, both politically and culturally, Part 2: 17 ways Europe is more Conservative than America, Part 3: The America Lecture: Addressing Common European Objections About America, and Part 4: Closing.
I suggest bookmarking this article and reading it over time due to its length. Whenever I write, I either do it right (no bars held) or not at all.
You can definitely read Part 2: 17 ways Europe is more Conservative than America, as that it is the shortest real part here.
Watching long videos are not required if you do not have the time or do not understand English. If you can understand English, I suggest listening to videos instead of reading for the sake of time. I've written out the points of videos if they're under 9 minutes or so long.
Regardless, if you're going to respond to this, please dedicate yourself completely and read the whole book (not including videos or linked articles). Especially if you're going to write your review on Quora or a forum.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part 1: a few things that Northern and Western Europe does better than America, both politically and culturally.
I do not get into everything that I think that Europe does better than America (such as less use of private prisons), just a few things that few other people get into the same way that I do.
In this part of the article, my criticism of America seems harsh, but trust me, I have good things to say about America, and I will criticize Europe, while I will have a lot of good things to say about Europe, too.
1. Europe is, for the most part, more secular and less religious than the U.S.A.
I can never, ever truly describe how much I HATE the effects of religion on my country. There is nothing more that I hate about my country's culture than how religion effects politics and child rearing.
I'll link to three Ryan Dawson videos for good measure:
Black Pigeon Speaks Atheism and makes no points
Dawson vs Fuentes (debate.)
Ryan's Analysis of The Taylor vs. Jones Debate
The idea that Christianity is needed to fight Marxism simply falls flat on its face.
The Eastern Orthodox Church failed to stop the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union.
The Catholic Church has failed to save Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia.
The whole of Latin America is Catholic, but that did not stop stop Cuba from becoming a Marxist-socialist state, or Venezuela from becoming a Marxian command economy, or Marxism from becoming popular in the rest of Latin America. (Not to say that the Catholic Church never did anything good.)
Most Hispanics/Latinos are Catholic, and in the past mostly voted Republican, but today mostly vote Democrat.
Black Americans are the most religious ethnic group in America with the vast majority being Christian, but most Blacks vote Democrat.
While I am not a social conservative or a traditionalist, it is untrue that Christianity (or any religion for that matter) is required for society to be conservative/traditional. As I've mentioned in Countries underrated by conservatives and the right wing, people in east Asia, particularly in Japan and Singapore, tend to be traditional/conservative even though they are by and large irrelegious (or at least not Christian), while the Czech Republic and Estonia are two of the world's least religious countries, yet also some of the most the most skeptical countries towards immigration, and have shall-issue licenses to own firearms (including handguns and semi-automatic assault-weapons) and are two of the five countries in Europe that have shall-issue licenses to conceal carry firearms (the others being Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania). The State of New Hampshire is one of the least religious states in the union, but is one of the best in terms of standard of living when you look at almost any statistic, and even has permissive weapon laws as well.
Prostitution is legal in Poland, a country that has a reputation for being conservative with a Catholic supermajority, but illegal in countries that have a reputation for being socially liberal such as France, Canada, and Sweden. In the U.S., prostitution in only legal in several countries, none of which with a Democrat majority (Prostitution in Nevada - Wikipedia 2020 United States presidential election in Nevada).
Members of the Christian right credit Christianity with ending child marriages and making pedophilia a taboo. This again just falls flat on its face, as that Wikipedia points out that age of consent laws did not exist until the 20th century (I've read something age of seduction laws existing, but I don't know much about them, or even if age of seduction laws even existed).
Ages of consent in the United States #History - Wikipedia:
"While the general ages of consent are now set between 16 and 18 in all U.S. states, the age of consent has widely varied across the country in the past. In 1880, the ages of consent were set at 10 or 12 in most states, with the exception of Delaware where it was 7. The ages of consent were raised across the U.S. during the late 19th century and the early 20th century. By 1920, 26 states had an age of consent at 16, 21 states had an age of consent at 18, and one state (Georgia) had an age of consent at 14. Small adjustments to these laws occurred after 1920. The last 2 states to raise its age of general consent from under 16 to 16 or higher were Georgia, which raised the age of consent from 14 to 16 in 1995, and Hawaii, which changed it from 14 to 16 in 2001."
Child marriage in the United States - Wikiepdia
"In many cases, minors in the U.S. may be married when they are under the age of sexual consent, which varies from 16 to 18 depending on the state. In some states minors cannot legally divorce, leave their spouse, or enter a shelter to escape abuse."
If you are really curious about child marriage in America, the best article to read is
Child Marriage, Common In The Past, Persists Today By Andrea Dukakis - Colorado Public Radio.
Perhaps the best book about child marriage in America is
American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States - by Nicholas L. Syrett
Zionist Occupation Government isn't real, but tiny fringe factions of evangelicals lobbying to keep child marriage legal isreal;
Banning child marriage in America: An uphill fight against evangelical pressure
The only reason why child marriage is tolerated in America is because the vast majority of people are ignorant about it because the media does not report on it. If the media reported on child marriage en mass, it would stop.
Pedophilia being made taboo was a positive social development of the 20th century that had little if anything to do with Christianity.
YouTube channels Red Shark Intelligence and soph (neither of which are left-wing) has mentioned this issue:
Legal Pedophilia in the US: a True Story of Child Brides in America
For any Christian who still opposes same-sex marriage, here are the types of marriage recognized by the Bible:
. Man + Woman.
. Man + Woman + Concubines.
. Man + Woman + Woman's property (man could aquire his wife's property, including slaves). Genesis 16.
. Man + multiple Women (polygamy). Genesis 38:6-10.
. Man + Brother's Widow. Genesis 38:6-10.
. Rapist + His Victim. Deuteronomy 22:28-29
. Male Soldier + Female Prisoner of War. Numbers 31:1-18, Deuteronomy 21:11-14.
. Male Slave + Female Slave. Exodus 21:4.
This issue is depicted in the Darkmatter2525 video Atheist Comedy- Family Values.
All of this, plus child marriage and martial rape being perfectly legal in Christianity, but something wrong with two consenting adults who love each other if they are of the same sex.
The Catholic Church's covering of sexual abuse of children is so infamous that it has became a Trope in Television.
I've seen a Christian conservative blame athiests for prostitution. Not all athiests believe that prostitution should be legal, and not everyone that thinks that prostitution should be legal like prostitution on a personal level.
Prostitution was actually allowed and tolerated by the church until the 19th and 20th centuries, and the actual traditionalist position would be to have prostitution be legal. Prostitution legalization and the Left Wing
Prostitution - Bad News About Christianity
I've seen religious conservatives associate transgenders with atheists. In reality, you do not need to be religious to disagree with transgenderism. Ryan Dawson, an atheists, has made a video called "Is Transgender sexist?", along with others videos. Kothorix, an atheists, has a video called "What Is A Woman". Styxhexenhammer666, also an atheists, criticizes transgenderism. The animated sitcom South Park has made fun of transgenderism.
Videos about transgenderism playlist.
Socialist Whores: What did Karl Marx think of prostitution? - Slate
Amnesty International says prostitution is a human right – but it's wrong - The Guardian
I would argue that Christian fundamentalists were the predecessor to social justice warriors. Wikipedia articles about Christian fundamentalist groups and individuals is just the start;
National Center on Sexual Exploitation
Study of Women who have had an Abortion and Their Views on Church
70% of Women Who Get Abortions Identify as Christians, Survey Finds
Why Do Christian Women Continue to Have Abortions?
If you want to argue against abortion, I suggest using philosophy like My 2 Cents did with his video series and playlist
Dave Smith is not a Christian (he is Jewish, but I think he is a non-practicing Jew), and he made some pretty good arguments against abortion;
Dave Smith’s Part of the Problem – Ep. 775 – The Texas Taliban (YouTube version)
Ironically, abortion just might actually reduce the number of people who would vote for welfare and big government.
That being said, I'll write about abortion in a separate article.
edit
The reason why there is not so much right-authoritarianism anymore is not because the right supports liberty, but because the Christian right has lost power at the Federal and, in many cases, State level, so the authoritarian Christian right has retreated into rural counties and small towns, where Churches still have power. The biggest reason why social conservatives trust the church more probably comes from the losing influence in higher institutions and not from rational thought.
Putting this into other words, just like how the left's authority is academia (particularly college professors), the media, and government (sometimes), the right's authority is the church, preachers and religious teachers such as pastors.
All of this being said, I know that religion can be helpful to a lot of people. It is common for people to feel that they need meaning in their lives, and religion can be helpful for them.
I politically have more in common with Christians such as Ron Paul, Tom Woods, and to a lesser degree, Thomas Sowell, than atheist progressives. Many people who fought the American Revolution, the War of 1812, fought against slavery, fought for equality between sexes and races and so on, were Christians. I can disagree with someone's religion but still agree on politics.
Though to be fair, Christianity came from the middle east, it was really spread by Europeans, and not to mention how the callus and puritanical American brand of Christianity can trace the roots of its philosophy, ideas and attitudes back to the Puritans who got their ideas from the Calvinists, who were Europeans.
This is reason number one why I say that am am grateful to be an American citizen as opposed to being proud to be an American, along with the points made in the video Are You Proud to be an American?, in which it only makes sense for one to have pride from accomplishments or contributions to accomplishments as an individual and not an accident of birth.
2. How Europe treats teens and children compared to America.
Northern and Western Europe are less bad about infantilising teens, and treating children and teens like property, and running schools like prisons than America.
Why Dutch teenagers are among the happiest in the world
Chris Romer's answer to What are some interesting facts about Switzerland
This is the close second thing I hate the most about my country's culture, and is somewhat of an extension of my hatred for my country's Puritan/Calvinist heritage, which expects the worst in people, not to mention the idea of Original Sin in Abrahamic religions.
When it comes to why teenagers (I refuse to use the word "adolescent") should be treated more like adults, I'll refer to the article The Myth of the Teen Brain by Doctor Robert Epstein.
However, the writing that I recommend the very most is Doctor Robert Epstein's Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families from the Torment of Adolescence.
Teen 2.0.com
Adolescence & Adultness - Dr. Robert Epstein.
Trashing Teens | Psychology Today
Other authors that I support are Suparna Choudhury, Dr. Adriana Galvan, John Bruer, Dan Romer, Valerie F. Reyna, and Theodore D. Satterthwaite. Joseph Bronski is also an honorable mention.
"If the fires that burn inside youths are not intentionally and lovingly added to the hearth of community, they will burn down the structures of culture, just to feel the warmth." -Michael Meade.
(Image made with PictureQuotes.com and Michael Meade brings timeless tales to his hometown.)People really need to take those words to heart.
"EXCERPT: "These are the teens we have created: mindless consumers, dressed from head to toe in the garb prescribed by specialized divisions of the music and fashion industries, isolated from their heritages and their elders, producing nothing of value for their families or their society, obsessed with non-issues fed to them by waxen heroes. The young men next to me seemed content in their ignorance, but many of their peers want more, and they often don’t know how to express their legitimate needs and desires. Based on my interviews with teens, my experience as a father and teacher, research I’ve conducted and a wealth of data in several fields, I no longer have any doubt about what disenchanted American teens need, no matter how inappropriately they may sometimes choose to express what they want. They need to be reconnected with the adult world—the world they will inevitably join before that skateboard even reconnects with the ground." (from Chapter 13, "How Society Must Change")
"Teenagers already live in a dystopia. Their lives are controlled by the government and their parents. If legal adults were treated like American teenagers, that government would be considered one of the most oppressive on Earth.
The government requires 6-16-year-olds to attend a government institution that subjects them to unconstitutional searches. Here, in public schools, they must ask permission to use the bathroom, eat when they are told, and not speak unless called upon.
If you are under 18 you cannot work without government permission, and cannot even walk on public sidewalks at certain times of day, like during school hours or after a certain time of night.
And the age that you have all your rights keeps creeping up. 18 is a legal adult who still cannot buy or drink alcohol legally."
"Perhaps politicians have the best intentions, but their programs are coercive. For over a hundred years, the government has been stripping “children” of their rights, and artificially extending childhood.
And this is the cause of the tumultuous teens. Freedom makes people happy, and freedom fighters of any age will go to great lengths to resist oppression."
"Teenage Dystopia
Robert Epstein argues in his book Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families from the Torment of Adolescence, that age has nothing to do with competency. Some people are capable of running their lives at 14, and some will never be responsible for themselves.
Through most of human history, young people were integrated into adult society early on, but beginning in the late 1800s, new laws and cultural practices began to isolate teens from adults, imposing on them an increasingly large set of restrictions, and artifically extending childhood well past puberty. New research suggests that teens today are subjected to more than ten times as many restrictions as are most adults, and adulthood is delayed until well into the twenties or thirties. It’s likely that the turmoil we see among teens is an unintended result of the artificial extension of childhood.
The increasing authoritarian view towards adolescents is a vicious cycle. The group is perceived as acting out, so restrictions increase. These restrictions in turn cause resistant behavior, which is met with even more draconian measures.
The suicide rate of teen girls is at an all-time high. For teenage boys, the high was in the early 90s but it is once again climbing. The teenage male suicide rate is almost three times as high as females.
And kids are increasingly diagnosed with ADHD and fed drugs to make them more compliant with authority. Again, this happens while they are captive in schools which they are required to attend. Coercion which leads to mental illness.
Efforts to guide teens into work or higher education are always sold with the best intentions. Authorities want to make sure that teens have the education that allows them to seize opportunities. Ironically, before mandatory public schooling, teens had no trouble finding work. Many started apprenticeships at young ages and learned their future trade while earning a wage.
And a quick look through history will reveal that the child labor laws were not always “for the children.”
The 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act made 16 the minimum age to work. This was during the Great Depression. The law was meant to remove competitors from the worker pool. Same goes for the reforms championed by labor unions during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
In 1905, about 40% of 16-year-olds were in school, and 40% were working. Now about 90% are in school.
Most states require public schooling to age 16, but fourteen states have compulsory education until 18. What this does is separate teens from an actual working environment where they would be exposed to people with the skills they want to learn.
State restrictions originally destroyed the opportunities teens had to learn valuable skills and join the labor force. Now they think they can reverse this trend with more legal requirements for higher education.
The choice and responsibility are taken from the teens. Instead of learning how to shape their own lives, they learn to follow the orders. This lesson is taken with them throughout life, giving the government more and more power over society as each generation gets more restrictive.
Legislation like that in New Mexico to force high schoolers to apply to college does not solve any issues. It only feeds into the increasing restrictions that have led to severe problems among teens and young adults.
The solution is for the government to lay off, and ease restrictions. Parents can immediately help by supporting their teens in any efforts to separate themselves from traditional schooling. If you think your young adult is self-directed enough, you could officially homeschool them, while allowing them to pursue their own education, or even find an internship or apprenticeship.
But public high school, and increasingly college, does not set people up for the modern economy. The system is outdated, and even when it “works” it trains people to be obedient mid-level office workers, not free thinking independent value creators."
- Teenage Dystopia: The Cycle of Oppression and Resistance
For more resources, see Teen/Youth Rights resource list: Teen advocates that you should know.
I think the reasons for this are partially the pharmaceutical industry that profits off of drugging children and teens, teachers and other people who have cushy white-collared, unionized, and usually government careers in schooling and, the Christian doctrine of original sin, and especially the Calvinist/Puritan attitude of expecting the worst out of people AND Black And White Thinking which does not allow for nuance.
I feel that conservatives are more likely to be ageist than leftists because the average age of conservatives is higher than leftists (when generation gaps started to happen after the two industrial revolutions), and maybe the guilt of Boomers who rebelled against their elders.
The articles Christian Abuse of Children and Children as Chattel–The Common Root of Religious Child Abuse and the Pro-Life Movement is one of the few articles that I know that talk about the religious origins of child abuse.
I'm willing to mention the article Texas GOP: Children are property, not people / The Texas GOP Platform’s Horror Show for children. While it comes across as partisan and a little hyperbolic to me, it does have a few good points nonetheless.
Maybe if we did not treat school children like prisoners, they would not act like prisoners. Children who go through alternate education philosophies such as Waldorf, Montessori, unschooling, and so on, seemingly tend to be better behaved than those who go through the Prussian schooling philosophy. Many children who go through the Montessori philosophy of education actually do better than their counterparts who went through the Prussian schooling philosophy.
I know that every individual child is different and that there always have and always will be children who misbehave, but maybe children would act out less if they are not treated almost like prisoners.
Granted, not all schools are like this, and that is worst case scenario, but still.
Television shows like World's Strictest Parents, Teen Trouble, and Dr. Phil also disgust me for what I see as anything ranging from unnecessarily restrictive parenting to borderline child abuse.
It disgusts me how children and teens have, in some ways, less rights than incarcerated felons. Children and teens can be practically beaten even for extremely petty offenses which are behaviors that are not even particularly problematic. This embarrasses me as an American. Americans preach liberty and individualism, but deny said liberty and individualism to their own young people.
Most people agree that we do not need police officers to pull light machine guns on jaywalkers and send jaywalkers to prison, or have countries going to war because a soldier tripped over a border or a helicopter accidentally crossed a border for a few seconds. Likewise, I think that children should not be beaten with an implement for trivial offenses.
When it comes to spanking, I'll just give you a sample of my
4 most recommended sites (these are goldmines for arguments against spanking):
"20" Reasons NOT to Spank (""20" Reasons NOT to Spank" is the single best site, full of arguments against spanking and using the Bible.)
Project NoSpank external links (archived to fix dead links)
A notable article:
Robert Green Ingersoll on Corporal Punishment (1891)
Overlooked articles by ""20" Reasons NOT to Spank":
Does more spanking = less crime and delinquency?
What happens to kids if you don't spank?
Links for Christians:
Christians for Nonviolent Parenting
Christians for Nonviolent Parenting links
Recommended videos (I consider these to be more like audio, as that there aren't any necessary visuals.)
Corbettreport:
Stefan Molyneux:
The Science of Spanking! A Conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Gershoff
Why Spanking Does Not Work | Elizabeth Gershoff and Stefan Molyneux
Negative Effects of Spanking | Murray A. Straus and Stefan Molyneux
Ending Corporal Punishment | Robbyn Peters Bennett and Stefan Molyneux
Parenting Without Punishment - Dr Elizabeth Gershoff Interviewed
Study: Children Assaulted 936 Times Per Year!
Less recommended (since much of the following material goes far beyond spanking):
Psychohistory In Perspective | A Conversation with Lloyd deMause
The Origins of War in Child Abuse | Lloyd deMause and Stefan Molyneux
The Origins of War in Child Abuse | Full Audiobook
Ryan Dawson:
Horrible Japanese Propaganda about Corporal Punishment
Before some conservative or Youth's Rights critic comes and talks about Australian and British teens from "World's Strictest Parents", remember that television shows only show those extreme cases because such cases are the exception and not the norm, and I feel that the behavior displayed by the British and Australian teens actually come from American teen culture due to language connections. This makes me think of the copycat effect, which is an actual subject in psychology, particularly the subjects of copycat crime and copycat suicide.
I love how Scotland has 16 as the age of majority and giving juvenile offenders a chance to work instead of incarceration, which are enormous improvements for a place where striking children with the tawse (one of the most painful spanking implements) was normal.
Even in Germany, the birthplace of Prussian authoritarianism, the Prussian schooling philosophy, and National Socialism, has made leaps and bounds in making its schools humane. School uniforms are not even required in Germany and Finland.
I would rather go to a German school today than a German school in the Prussian era much like how I would rather go to a Federal Prison Camp, a minimum security type of prison where living conditions are bearable and there is little to no violence, than a United States Penitentiary, a more restrictive and harsher high-security prison with more violence from both inmates and guards alike (in English, "penitentiary" is a different word from "prison", and often refers to high-security institutions for individuals convicted of serious crimes).
There is a difference between a minimum-security Prison Camp there you are physically free to walk around the premises, have decent food, and good living conditions, and a high-security Penitentiary, where you are locked in a cell, required to go through locked doors to exit your cell block (area), have barely edible food, have no privacy in the restrooms or shower, and have to worry about having a guard use you as his personal punching bag just because he wanted to take his bad mood out on someone.
In other words, while you are not free in either a High-Security Penitentiary or Minimum Security Prison Camp, some prisons are worse than others.
Circumcised Penis Effect On Sex and Love Making/Circumcised Sex Lessens Feelings of Love for One's Partner
Marriage and Divorce Affected by Penis Circumcision/Circumcised Sex Can Deteriorate the Relationship
Notice how many wars are going on in Africa, the Islamic world and the Philippines, all circumcising cultures. Also remember how the United States of America has a one of the highest violent crime and especially homicide rates among developed countries, and is one of the few first world countries where circumcision is routine, other than Israel and Turkey.
People should do more to stand up against unnecessary child circumcisions. We should stop being politically correct to people who are barbaric and backwards enough to think that it is okay to cut on a child's genitals outside of a medical emergency or medical last resort.
Republicans/conservatives are not helping themselves when they treat their own children like dogs that need to be tightly controlled, beaten for minor infractions, and genitals cut up out of tradition.
If you are worried about your children becoming weak, then take them hiking.
"Humans are really tough beings when pushed. Having hiked the Appalachian trail from personal experience (sic), I have seen the shocking transformation of relatively soft city people turning into people who can handle shocking amounts of suffering and discomfort."
"I know comparing the Appalachian trail to a nuclear war is silly, but you'd be shocked how people you'd consider to be "basic frat girls" can in a matter of weeks transform into badasses who can walk 30 miles a day, entirely live off ramen, deal with bears and horrifying weather, live without any civilization for a week, improvise failures in equipment and still have the energy to help other hikers in need"
- Whatifalthist, What if the Cold War Went Nuclear?
Not everything is doom and gloom for American teens, though. All States states allow individuals who are under 18 years of age to have instructional or learner permits to drive, some allow 16 or 17 year olds to have full driver's licenses, and some even have hardship licenses that are available to 14 or 15 year olds. Even better, some states allow minors to emancipate and be freed from control of their parent(s)/guardian(s).
I've also stumbled across pages from a few schools that have students read Robert Epstein's "The Case Against Adolescence" or "Teen 2.0", which gives me a grain of optimism.
That's enough of me talking about parenting for this article, though I will say that combining empathy and common sense goes a long way. You will not be perfect, but you will probably do fine.
People who have neither empathy nor common sense should do the following 3:
1. Get themselves permanently sterilized.
2. Remove themselves from child-rearing, education and politics.
3. Have a steel cactus forced up their ass.
I try to avoid being too graphic, but come on, am I not allowed to get emotional about shitty parenting?
Don't take this as me saying that child abuse and generally bad child-rearing is a British, German, or American problem. It is a human problem.
This is reason number two why I say that am am grateful to be an American citizen as opposed to being proud to be an American, along with the points made in the video Are You Proud to be an American?, in which it only makes sense for one to have pride from accomplishments or contributions to accomplishments as an individual and not an accident of birth.
3. Sex.
When it comes to teen birth rates, look at the 2 graphs below.
As shown in the infographic, many of the states that have a teen birth rate of 30.0 to 39.9 are actually in THE BIBLE BELT!!! How come such socially conservative places get such high teen birth rates while more socially liberal places such as New Hampshire (my favorite state in the union) has comparatively low teen birth rates?
Despite things such as the social liberalization of sexuality & growth in popularity of pornography, teen birth rates have actually gone DOWN. Also, see Fewer American Teens Are Getting Pregnant, and No One Knows Why, & Teen pregnancy rates level off in Canada, study shows. Likewise, rape has also decreased as accessibility to pornography has increased.
Defending Tucker In Japanese culture, men marry a woman to do the housework, and have a mistress on the side for lust and romance. While a lot of people would not approve of that type of relationship, Japan has a far lower divorce rate than many other wealthy western countries.
4. Less regulatory capture & cronyism.
European countries often have less regulatory capture & cronyism.
5. Proportional representation.
I support proportional representation because it allows for more diverse ideas and viewpoints than non-proportional representation, and allows minorities more of a voice in the legislative branch instead of having absolute majority rule. It's also the reason why Europe has less regulatory capture than America, and is why European welfare states work better than America.
While the specific types of proportional representation I favor, being Schulze single transferable vote and Psi/Harmonic proportional representation are different from what is currently used in Europe (my favorites being Mixed Member Proportional representation, Dual Member Proportional Representation, and Single Transferable vote), I support proportional representation as an addition (but not a replacement) to single-winner local representation because it allows people to voice more issues, ideas and viewpoints than just two parties. I like having local representatives to give people living in sparsely populated areas a voice in government instead of having a few big cities run roughshod over everyone else, which, in extreme cases, may spark a civil war as rural people feel that they lack a voice in politics.
If the party-agnostic forms of proportional representation have scaleability problems with large populations, such as in the case of India or China, and party-based proportional representation is required, then I would use open party-list proportional representation with the modified d'Hondt method that favors smaller parties.
I hate how much (but fortunately, not all) of the Anglophone world is missing out on proportional representation.
I also support score voting for single seat elections, though I'd also be happy with approval voting, which is a simpler system.
6. Europeans have easier access to diesel and other fuel-efficient cars than Americans and Canadians.
A little bit of this is due to the market, but it's more like regulatory capture. Unlike, say, Singapore, in which car makes and models are already street legal in Japan, the European Union, or North America can be legally imported and owned, by contrast, in the U.S.A. (and Canada, which uses U.S. regulations), car makes and models that are already street legal in Japan or the European Union have to conform to a different fuel economy, crash-test (such as small overlap), and especially, pollution control standards to be street legal on government roads in the United States and Canada.
7. France gets a higher percentage of its electricity from nuclear power than America, and many European countries are better with waste-to-energy incinerators than the U.S.A..
8. Exceptionalism and foreign policy.
I am not an American exceptionalist. I do not support any of the wars my country has engaged in since the War of 1812. I am anti-war. I do not endorse Israel.
BUT, I will get into detail, expand on and explain my positions on part of this article.
End.
I know that there is going to be a conservative that will complain that I am making my country look bad in front of the world. That is not my intention. Every country has its flaws. Almost no country in the world lacks a dark side. Anyone can do what I did to almost any country in the world.
If you had a cancer cell growing in your body, would you rather have your doctor tell you that you have a cancer cell in your body, or tell you that you are okay when you are not okay? It sometimes takes bad news to know that you have a problem and to get said problem fixed.
One of the biggest problem I have with a significant portion of conservatives is that they are so reluctant to lose face and admit that their culture can be wrong on things. They are stuck on cultural dogmas, and are too emotionally invested in their nation and culture to admit that some cultures do some things better. They lack humility. It is as if admitting that someone else does something better is akin to pulling teeth. This probably comes from the more particularist and tribal psychology of conservatives, in contrast to leftists, who tend to be more cosmopolitan and universalist.
Though we could see a change with younger generations who grew up with the internet and older generations dying off, as that things like gay marriage and marrijuana prohibition are less of an issue for the right than they used to be.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part 2: 17 ways Europe is more Conservative than America / 17 ways Europe is more right-wing than America / 17 ways America is more left-wing than Europe / 17 ways the Left opposes making America more like Europe.
The claim that the United States of America is more politically right-wing than Europe or that the Democratic party would be a right-wing or center-right party in Europe is such a red herring. People mention taxpayer-paid healthcare, a more generous welfare state, taxpayer-paid college/university and weapon laws, but not other issues.
I got most, but not all of my points from the following article and video:
7 ways Europe is more Conservative than the U.S. | by Swaroop Bhagavatula | Medium
6 ways the Left opposes making the US more like Europe (18:08)
Virtually every single democracy in the world requires people to present some form of identification before they vote. The two exceptions to this that I am aware of are Uganda and some States of the United States of America.
If hundreds of millions of poor and even illiterate people in India can obtain voter identification, I am pretty sure that the poor and members of minorities in the United States of America (where the poor are better off than most of the Indian middle class), can find the Department of Motor Vehicles office just fine. Not to mention how there are dozens of things in life that require identification, such as driving a car, writing a check, buying a firearm, and so much more.
2. Corporate taxes and regulations.
Before Trump was sworn into office, the United States of America had one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world at 35%, higher than any European country (with the exception of Greece, which had the corporate tax at 58% for "year 1" and 29% for "year 2").
No wonder why it was hard for many American businesses to get investments, especially small businesses which can not afford accountants or legal teams to make tax credits or write-offs for such businesses.
Wikipedia's article List of countries by tax rates as it appears on January 16, 2017 is my source for this.
Also, some, but not all European countries have simpler regulations than the United States Federal Government and some State Governments.
Liechtenstein, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have not adopted the Euro as their currency.
3. Apprenticeships.
Many conservatives and libertarians believe that college is not for everyone, and that there should be programs for people who need job training but not a college degree. Apprenticeships are common many European countries, particularly Germany, a world leader in manufacturing.
4. Unlicensed Physicians.
Physician assistants and Nurse Practioners in America are typically not allowed to diagnose patients or prescribe medicine like their European counterparts. In Europe, less expensive procedures can be done by lower-skilled, less-expensive doctors while freeing up more expensive procedures by higher-skilled, more-expensive doctors. Also, European countries tend to be more permissive foreign trained and educated doctors to work in their juristiction than American States, which often require doctors to be educated in the United States, licensed in the United States (or in their particular state), or at a minimum do a complete residency to be licensed to practice medicine. This is a reason why Europe spends less on healthcare than America, and that is before I get into the regulatory capture, regulatory red-tape, and convoluted payment system.
5. Drug Approval Process.
Drugs take longer to get approved for sale in America than in Europe. Europe has a more decentralized drug approval process than America, not to mention the fact that Europe has less regulatory capture and many European countries have simpler and easier to understand regulations than America. European governments have more or less realized that market forces alone does a lot to prevent bad drugs from being placed on the market.
This is a reason why Europe spends less on healthcare than America, and that is before I get into the regulatory capture, regulatory red-tape, and convoluted payment system.
6. Infrastructure spending.
To quote from Swaroop Bhagavatula's article,
"Europe uses something called an Infrastructure Bank which leverages private capital to fund large scale infrastructure projects such as bridges, airports, etc." (Infrastructure and the European Investment Bank). "The private companies are obviously not doing it for free, they charge fees and tolls to cover their capital cost. Compare this to the U.S. where most infrastructure projects are funded by government money and for which you can’t contract out the work, it has to be done local union labor" (The U.S. Has Forgotten How to Do Infrastructure - Bloomberg)(Why U.S. Infrastructure Costs So Much - Bloomberg). "Europe has basically adopted a conservative, free market idea of privatizing infrastructure, whereas “free market” America builds infrastructure in a socialist way."
Freedom Alternative himself disagrees with Trump on the issue of infrastructure spending, but finds it surprising that many leftists disagree with Trump on infrastructure spending as well. When asked about the issue, Trump spoke like a classical European social democrat politician, seeing infrastructure spending as a job scheme to help the underprivileged, believes that local businesses should be used, and being open to government-private partnerships in rehabilitating and/or expanding American infrastructure.
7. Cutting waste in college campuses.
Many European college are actually no-frills compared to their American counterparts. European college students live off campus more often than their American counterparts.
8. Tort reform.
Many American states do not penalize people for being found wrong in civil court. Some European countries, however, has adopted the idea of "loser pays" as a way of discouraging frivolous lawsuits.
However, I personally have other ideas. I've read about the "lowest bidder" idea, in which neither party in a court case can spend more money on a trial than the other party. I have also read about another system called the "Oceanic system" (a reference to the imaginary country of Oceania, Constitution of Oceania), which is similar to the "lowest bidder", but instead both parties must agree to a court budget, and the richer party may contribute money to the poorer party if it so chooses, and anyone caught cheating with their budgets can be convicted for contempt of court by the jury. I favor the Oceanic system the most.
9. Restricted or no birthright citizenship.
The United States of America and Canada are the world's only two countries that practice birthright citizenship, called Jus soli, with almost no restrictions. Other western countries do practice Jus soli, but with varying restrictions.
10. 20 week abortion ban.
With the exception of Sweden (where the limit is set to 16 weeks), the United Kingdom (where the issue is unclear), and the Netherlands, no European country permits abortion after 14 weeks at the latest, and many are lower than that. Countries such as Poland, Malta, and Ireland set the limit at 0 weeks. Meanwhile, the authoritarian regimes of Vietnam, China, and North Korea seemingly have no limits.
Freedom Alternative is more anti-abortion than I am. I tolerate abortion for the first trimester (12 weeks), or for dead or deformed fetuses, though I really prefer that people use other forms of contraception.
11. Official language and language requirements.
Almost every single country in Europe and most countries in the world require immigrants to learn the official language or an official language.
Also, in countries like Mexico and Finland, being born in Mexico or Finland does not automatically make one a national or citizen, and Mexico goes to great lengths to differentiate between Mexican Nationals and Mexican Citizens (I know that Mexico is not part of Europe, but Freedom Alternative mentions Mexico).
12. Having one's documents in order and being identifiable.
In many European countries, having an identification card is compulsory by law, and law enforcement regularly conduct raids to arrest illegal aliens. There are factions of the left that oppose law enforcement like Immigration Customs Enforcement enforcing immigration laws.
I hate forcing people out of countries, but I reluctantly support immigration restrictions out of pure pragmatism.
13. Government-funded churches and monarchy.
European countries with state churches are:
. Denmark.
. England.
. Greece.
. Hungary.
. Iceland.
. Liechtenstein.
. Malta.
. Monaco.
. Norway.
I am one way opposed to monarchy, as that I am against gaining positions by birthright and not merit, or giving resources to people by birthright, and I am also a strong supporter of the Separation of Church and State.
14. Burka ban.
The Constitution of the United States, for the most part gives the States control over their internal affairs. This means that the Federal Government of the United States can not introduce or enforce a burka ban off of federal property or off of federal documents, and can not do a national burka ban. Other than that, only the States may enforce anti-mask laws and that is if, and only if, both the state's constitution AND judicial branch allow the enforcement of anti-mask laws.
European countries such as Romania, Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, and even the Muslim-majority countries of Chad, Morocco, and Tajikistan all have a national burka ban. Even Muslim-majority countries have Algeria, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey all have restrictions of face coverings or even headscarves in at least some public buildings or public workplaces, which is still more than the United States Federal Government, which lacks such powers thanks to the Constitution.
Even in some states with anti-mask laws, wearing a mask is essentially only illegal if someone is trying to intimidate someone else, threatening someone else, or otherwise committing a crime, and wearing a mask for religious purposes is 100% legal. Even in in in a lot of conservative states, wearing a niqab, burka, etcetera, is perfectly legal, and even in states with anti-mask laws, anti-mask laws were written and passed as to combat criminals and the Ku Klux Klan, decades, or even over a century before America's modern problems with the Muslim world.
I agree with requiring people to show their face for identification purposes. But otherwise, I don't care much for burka bans. I see burka bans as window dressing for immigration problems (no pun intended), and actual immigration restrictions and enforcement of said restrictions are leaps and bounds more effective than banning people from covering their faces.
15. Whale hunting.
Norway, Iceland, and Denmark still permit whale hunting.
16. Conscription.
Austria, Finland, Greece, Switzerland, and Turkey all practice conscription. Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, and Sweden also practice conscription, but less than 20% of young people are recruited.
17. LGBT rights.
A lot of people forget how late many European countries are when it comes to rights for queer people"
LGBT rights in the European Union #Member State laws on sexual orientation
Same-sex marriage in the United States #Local laws prior to Obergefell v. Hodges
Hate crime/speech laws: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Italy, Latvia.
Some anti-discrimination laws: Italy, Latvia, Poland.
Adoption: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Hungary (constitutional ban), Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia. Czech Republic has additional restrictions.
Marriage: Bulgaria (constitutional ban), Croatia (constitutional ban), Czech Republic (pending), Greece, Hungary (constitutional ban), Latvia (constitutional ban), Lithuania (constitutional ban), Poland (constitutional ban), Romania, Slovakia (constitutional ban), Slovenia.
Civil union: Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Slovakia, Romania.
Unregistered cohabitation: Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Romania,
Conclusion.
So tell me again, who is more right-wing? And is the American Democratic party really a centrist, center-right or right-wing party now?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part 3: The America Lecture: Addressing Common European Objections About America.
1. The conflicting definitions of freedom.
Today's culture wars partially stem from the different definitions of freedom. There are seemingly four most common definitions of freedom. My commentary on this will be based on The Academic Agent's Why Rousseau is the Problem [to Sargon of Akkad].
Definition 1. Self-actualization. This is the Ancient, Aristocratic, and often right-wing/social conservative definition of freedom. You are freest when you are "your best self". For example, "if you studied hard, worked out at the gym, watched your diet, cultivated good and virtuous habits. This is you achieving self-actualization." This definition of freedom can be traced back to Aristotle and Fredrich Nietzsche. Many social conservatives argue that vices, such as pornography, prostitution, gambling, and drugs, prevent self-actualization.
Definition 2. Freedom from coercion. This is the classical liberal definition of freedom. You are free to walk down the street, but not to make anyone else carry you down the street. Your freedom to throw punches ends where someone else's face begins. This definition of freedom can be traced back to John Locke, Herbert Spencer, and F.A. Hayek. This definition seems to be more popular among parts of the United States of America and maybe even the Czech Republic and Estonia.
Definition 3. Convenience, lack of personal responsibility, and/or lack of boundaries. I am free to do whatever I want without boundaries. I am free to make you carry me down the street. In the words of YouTube user MAD Robot, "freedom is being unconstrained by responsibility... not having to worry about food, housing, education, transportation, healthcare, etc. not having to suffer the consequences of their own actions, playing the victim and blaming society or others for their own inadequacies." This definition of freedom is promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and Jaques Derrida. This is the leftist definition of freedom.
Definition 4. Group self-determination. My tribe or my nation is free to govern itself. This is probably the definition of freedom outside the western world, though is a definition of freedom in the west.
I do support localism, local autonomy, self-governance and decentralized government, but only if the rights of the individual are respected. For example, should a group of people be free to beat their children for no reason at all or for minor offenses, or even worse, perform animal and human sacrifices? For a less family-friendly example, should people be allowed to commit marital rape, mutilate the genitals of their tribe's members for being members of the tribe, or torture animals, or kill endangered or threatened animals when doing so is not absolutely necessary just because it's part of their culture? Real examples of this would be the Plymouth Colony, which was a totalitarian theocracy, and even better examples would be Afghanistan, North Pakistan, rural Yemen, and parts of Northeast Africa, with totalitarian fundamentalism, genital mutilation, and honor killings.
Here is an excerpt from the Thomas Sowell book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy;
Thomas Sowell - Human Livestock
"Overcoming adversity is one of our great desires and one of our great sources of pride. But it is something that our anointed deep thinkers strive to eliminate from our lives, through everything from grade inflation to the welfare state.
The anointed want to eliminate stress, challenge, striving, and competition. They want the necessities of life to be supplied as "rights" -- which is to say, at the taxpayers expense, without anyone's being forced to work for those necessities, except of course the taxpayers.
Nothing is to be earned. "Self-esteem" is to be dispensed to the children as largess from the teacher. Adults are to have their medical care and other necessities dispensed as largess from the government. People are to be mixed and matched by race and sex and whatever else the anointed want to take into account, in order to present whatever kind of picture the anointed think should be presented.
This is a vision of human beings as livestock to be fed by the government and herded and tended by the anointed. All the things that make us human beings are to be removed from our lives and we are to live as denatured creatures controlled and directed by our betters.
Those things that help human beings be independent and self-reliant -- whether automobiles, guns, the free market, or vouchers -- provoke instant hostility from the anointed.
Automobiles enable you to come and go as you wish, without so much as a "by your leave" to your betters. The very idea that other people will go where they want, live where they want, how they want, and send their children to whatever schools they choose, is galling to the anointed, for it denies the very specialness that is at the heart of their picture of themselves.
Guns are completely inappropriate for the kind of sheep-like people the anointed envision or the orderly, prepackaged world in which they are to live. When you are in mortal danger, you are supposed to dial 911, so that the police can arrive on the scene some time later, identify your body, and file reports in triplicate.
The free market is a daily assault on the vision of the anointed. Just think of all those millions of people out there buying whatever they want, whenever they want, whether or not the anointed think it is good for them.
Think of those people earning whatever incomes they happen to get from producing goods or services for other people, at prices resulting from supply and demand, with the anointed cut out of the loop entirely and standing on the sidelines in helpless rage, unable to impose their particular vision of "social justice."
The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
One of the most dangerous things about the welfare state is that it breaks the connection between what people have produced and what they consume, at least in many people's minds. For the society as a whole, that connection remains as fixed as ever, but the welfare state makes it possible for individuals to think of money or goods as just arbitrary dispensations.
Thus those who have less can feel a grievance against "society" and are less inhibited about stealing or vandalizing. And the very concept of gratitude or obligation disappears -- even the obligation of common decency out of respect for other people."
Thomas Sowell has a theory, in which there are two main visions of human nature and possibilities in our world. In the Unconstrained vision, human nature and the world are perfectible. In the Constrained vision, human nature is limited, selfish, and unable to change, and the world will always have problems.
The first 2 definitions of freedom are highly correlated with subscribing to the Constrained vision, and the 3rd definition of freedom, Rousseau's definition, is highly correlated with subscribing to the Unconstrained vision.
Ep. 1823 Our Irreconcilable Division, and What Should Happen Next
The popularity of Rousseau's philosophy is probably a major reason, and possibly the main reason why French people are unhappy and constantly complain;
Glad to Be Unhappy: The French Case - The New Yorker
Maybe French people need to read "A Conflict Of Visions". French people are always complaining and protesting about pensions and the welfare state. If they read the book, it could influence them to have more realistic expectations both from government and from life in general.
To end this part about John Locke's Negative Rights definition of freedom versus the welfare state Positive Rights definition of freedom, I have what I call The Prisoner and The Bird Analogy. Most people don't think that The Prisoner is free because he is given a bed, toilet, food, water, and shelter. Most people don't think that the Bird is unfree because the bird needs to build his or her own nest and find his or her own mate, food and water. But if we purely use the Positive Rights definition of freedom, The Prisoner is freer than The Bird, and if we purely use the Negative Rights definition of freedom, The Bird is freer than The Prisoner.
Also according to the positive rights definition of freedom, in its pure form, a prisoner in solitary confinement has more freedom than his hunter-gatherer ancestors or primitive people like the Trobriand Islanders, as that the prisoner does not need to work to have a roof over his head and water and food on his table unlike his hunter-gatherer ancestors or primitive peoples.
I think that it would be accurate to say that Americans view themselves as a bunch of people living under a flag, while Europeans, by comparison, see themselves a part of one big happy family, of which the nation is an extension of, and view government almost like parents.
Freedom vs. Force – The Individual and the State
Collectivism and Individualism
How the “Greater Good” is Used as a Tool of Social Control
Some people still want the U.S. to be more like Europe, rather it be with a generous, high-tax welfare state, more centralized government, or stricter weapon laws. I differ on this from both a philosophical (liberty before security) and even a pragmatic standpoint.
Here's an excerpt from Twelve Lies about Reality by Whatifalthist;
"Humans are Purely Material."
"Culture really matters. Anyone whose worked with people from different countries or even different subcultures of the same country knows this. We can even quantify how much culture does matter.
For example in the 1970's the, Italian central government gave equal amounts of money different regional governments and we saw the results with the south scoring far higher than the north on measures that demonstrate corruption, wastage, ineffectiveness, and inefficiency. This was also correlated with the measures above with the north having higher amounts of people in social clubs, people working in larger companies, and having more friends, or to say it differently, a more cohesive and trusting society.
We find this in wars, with the historian Dupree having made the calculations on troop and weapons levels came to the conclusion that the Germans in World War II were 45% more effective due to intangible cultural and leadership variables than the British. This would mean that for the British to beat the Germans, they'd have to bring an additional 50% more men at the same technological level as the Germans."
The reason for this myth:
"The Enlightenment and Scientific Method are all about focusing on variables we can document and prove. Culture, emotion, and human relationships however, are very intangible, messy and difficult to measure. Thus we ignore it since we don't know how to deal with it."
Suggested books:
War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin, "A fabulous book about the science of culture".
Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, "A very good book about how bureaucratic organisations often fail since they fail to deal with the intangibles mentioned above".
"What's good for one is good for the rest."
"It's foolish that the U.S. set up democracy in Iraq. Anyone who would have looked at the situation from a non-ideological lens would see that this wouldn't work. The main thing you need for democracy to work is public trust, that people will accept losing the election and peacefully step down from power, and also a national identity that's stronger than the tribal so the largest tribe doesn't just use a democracy as a tool to oppress the rest. Iraq has neither of these.
The Iraqi government became a tool for the Shia plurality to oppress the Sunnis, which resulted in the Sunnis rebelling and forming ISIS as a theocratic state. The government that came out of it was extremely corrupt, inefficient, and an Iranian puppet. If anyone was asking me, I would have setup a constitutional monarchy in Iraq. Monarchy is the form of government with the best track record in the Middle East, with Jordan, the Arab states and Morocco all having histories of stability, and with the exception of the Saudis, less repression.
Confucius was known for giving different advice to different people asking him the exact same question since their personalities and situations were different and thus demanded different solutions. I'm a huge fan of stoicism for example but I wouldn't recommend stoicism for everyone since if you're naturally wired to be really high in extroversion or derive a lot of pleasure in your life from having strong emotions, stoicism will just appear insane to you.
We have to be nimble thinkers. Try not to make everyone in the world be exactly like you. You have flaws and having people who aren't you exist lets you balance out your own flaws."
Reasons for this myth:
"1. We would like to believe that our way of doing things is inherently better rather than just working for us.
2. It's easier."
A suggested book is, again, Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.
This crosses over with the points I've made on 6. Unitary state/centralism vs federalism and localism.
The 6 Most Extreme Societies Ever(We’re One).:
"The society most concerned about harm is the modern west.
How often do you end up tying up your words to prevent yourself from saying something that everyone in the room would know to be true for fear that someone who wasn't in the right frame of mind might get offended? How many of you grew up in a world in which you couldn't play outside for fear of being kidnapped? How many of you would design miles of paperwork to do the most basic activity like white water rafting for fear on the company's part of being sued for someone getting hurt?
These are the signs of society that's deathly afraid of people getting hurt so much so that society ends up getting hurt on a much greater scale from lack of strength.
This is the story of the west since World War II. Harm is obviously a belief that hurting others is bad and comes from the biological need to keep children safe. Christianity starts the moral assumption that hurting other people is bad. Similarly, the enlightenment strengthened this by prioritizing things that can be measured like people getting hurt rather than things that can't like a nation's honor.
The World Wars meanwhile were so horrifying that it destroyed all faith and belief in things that existed beforehand like religion, honor, and progress, and these are the things that have made pain tolerable. Without them, pain had no meaning.
The death toll of the World Wars was so horrifying that it caused a knee-jerk reaction that all war and causing others suffering, even if rationally justified, was wrong. The west was also wealthy enough that it could afford to care about helping and protecting other people.
The culture of fear and harm can be seen everywhere. Look at Vietnam and Algeria, where the French and Americans would have won if they kept fighting but had their populations lose the heart to fight which in turn caused downwards of 5 million deaths in Southeast Asia.
The culture that was scared of the infinitesimally small chances of a kidnapping and preventing children from playing outside and experiencing the world unchaperoned has caused massive depression and psychological issues among Gen Z as they try to face the world but have no experience of doing so. Over-regulation has slowed down technological progress and tremendously neutered Europe's economic and technological growth.
Social justice philosophy is a bizarre manifestation of this in which our culture is so terrified of hurting others emotions that it makes it taboo to mention disagreeable subjects and will fire people for saying things that are factually true but members of various oppressed groups wouldn't want to hear. You can see the child origin of the harm function clearly in the modern left's treatment of oppressed groups as veritable children that aren't responsible for their own actions and are purely held down by systemic issues. Look at how rappers are never held accountable for the misogynistic statements they make that would get pop or country stars cancelled, or even discussing the gender pay gap might be due to inherent characteristics as taboo.
This creates real issues. Fear of harm isn't a coherent ideology to motivate people and is terrible at making priorities. Harm doesn't unite people but divides them into countless little groups. Harm's a negative motivator against achievement rather than a positive one towards doing something. If America was to ever fight a war with China, it would likely have to pull on the whole western world to survive but the harm function basically neuters most of Europe, Canada and parts of America from waging war. Effectively, this ignores the beauty of harm and why once called the social justice movement in orchid in it's a beautiful hot house plant that demonstrates an already empathetic and successful society, but must exist in the good times."
Whatifalthist also mentioned in his video Twelve Lies about Reality., "if you look at the modern world, we are terrified of death and pain".
Which brings me to my next point.
2. Gun control.
Facts about gun control you need to know: American, Australian, and European myths about gun control.
Reading that article would be more convenient for you, as that the graphs are bigger and I get into detail about American and European gun laws.
Do more guns cause more death? Let's look at a few graphs.
Homicide Rates in US States and Canadian Provinces (FBI - Violent Crime, Homicide offences, number and rate, by province and territory - Statistics Canada):
Map:
There are clear regional differences in many cases. States in the far north and far northeast of the United States report very low homicide rates while certain homicide "hotspots" apparently in Missouri, Maryland, Illinois, and the deep South are driving up US rates." - There's No Such Thing as an "American" Homicide Rate
. The United Kingdom. After the United Kingdom tightened its firearms laws in 1997, with the latter virtually banning the private civilian possession of handguns in Great Britain (the mainland), the homicide rate still increased until it peaked in 2003.
Source: Standardized homicide rates per 100,000 population, four English-speaking countries, various years to 2012. See "Why Crime Rates Are Falling Throughout the Western World" by Michael Tonry.
In fairness, a review of the literature from Harvard did find that states that had more guns bought back experienced more rapid declines in homicide. However considering Australia was experiencing a decline in non firearm homicide at the same time, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how much of an effect the NFA actually had. Even the review admits that no study was able to explain exactly why gun deaths were falling.
U.S. Homicide Rate per 100,000 Population.
Just for good measure, I also went in and looked for a correlation between mass shootings and gun ownership rates. Here, I took the total number of mass shooting victims in all states so far in 2015. This is updated constantly by Mass Shooting Tracker, and includes the most recent Oregon mass shooting. Mass shootings here include a shooting involving 4 or more people, and do not necessarily mean school shooting. They can mean someone went nuts and shot his wife, her lover, and two bystanders at a birthday party when the shooter personally knew all the victims. There are not just cases of random public shootings. If we only included those, the total numbers would be microscopically small. Even with all mass shooting data together, it's obvious that your odds of being involved in one in any given year are vanishingly small, and less than 1 per 100,000 in 48 states. I've included all victims, not just fatalities here. If I used only fatalities, the mass shooting numbers would be much smaller (x axis = gun ownership percentage; y axis = mass shooting deaths per 100,000):
There's even less of a correlation here: -0.006.
Chicago's ban 1982 ban on new handgun owners has completely failed to lower Chicago's murder rate. The murder rate fluctuated between 1982, when the handgun ban came into effect, and 2010, when the handgun ban was lifted.
I’ll also mention Northern Ireland. While sure, the U.S.A. has gang violence, social authoritarians and religious rivalries, the U.S.A. virtually never has armed religious warfare.
But in Northern Ireland, despite a smaller population to cause trouble and less landmass to hide in, there has been open ARMED religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants, with tension lasting to this day, and virtually every law enforcement agent is armed with firearms, unlike the most of the U.K. which has dedicated Authorized Firearms Officers and Advanced Firearms Officers (the latter of which are the equivalent of SWAT/Special Weapons And Tactics).
I would attribute the root of Northern Ireland’s violence being their culture, which affects politics. Unlike the U.S., which is founded on religious liberty and relatively heavy individualism, Northern Ireland’s conflict between Catholics and Protestants dates back centuries, and it seems like that there are a number of people who won’t let go of hard feelings, and worse, believe that it’s okay to hurt others for being too different.
"Generally, there are two ways of collecting homicide data. We can collect it from the law enforcement agencies, and we can collect the "mortality" data from medical examiners and other medical personnel.
Much of the time, however, what counts as a homicide, can be rather subjective. In fact, as The Los Angeles Times noted back in 2007, Japanese officials are often biased against autopsies and tend to minimize the number of deaths that are declared homicides for purposes of padding the percentages of "solved" cases:
Police discourage autopsies that might reveal a higher homicide rate in their jurisdiction, and pressure doctors to attribute unnatural deaths to health reasons, usually heart failure, the group alleges. Odds are, it says, that people are getting away with murder in Japan, a country that officially claims one of the lowest per capita homicide rates in the world.
"You can commit a perfect murder in Japan because the body is not likely to be examined," says Hiromasa Saikawa, a former member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police security and intelligence division. He says senior police officers are "obsessed with statistics because that's how you get promotions," and strive to reduce the number of criminal cases as much as possible to keep their almost perfect solution rate. Japan's annual police report says its officers made arrests in 96.6% of the country's 1,392 homicides in 2005.
But Saikawa, who says he became disillusioned by "fishy" police practices and in 1997 left the force in disgust after 30 years, claims that police try to avoid adding homicides to their caseload unless the identity of the killer is obvious.
"All the police care about is how they look to people; it's all PR to show that their capabilities are high," Saikawa says. "Without autopsies they can keep their percentage [of solved cases] high. It's all about numbers."
(This article also details some of the corruption behind Japan's highly suspect 99% conviction rate.)
Moreover, one is likely to find suspiciously low homicide rates in many authoritarian countries in Asia, such as China which is clearly manipulating official data on a variety of issues.
Even in Canada, there are issues around reporting and compiling homicide data (although there is no indication of deliberate deception.) This document notes that there are persistent differences between the mortality data and the data from law enforcement agencies.
In the US as well, it is important to remember that the mortality data put out by the Centers for Disease Control includes justifiable homicide simply as "homicide." In other words, if a violent maniac breaks into your house, and you shoot him dead, that will be included in the CDC's official "homicide rate."
In practice, it is likely that the US is far more liberal in its counting of homicides than numerous countries. For example, infanticide in the US is generally counted as homicide, although that is not the case in some other jurisdictions. The UNODC reports:
Nonetheless, the challenges of cross-national comparability are considerable. National legal systems may have different thresholds for categorising a death as intentional homicide.Whilst intentional homicide usually requires that the perpetrator purposefully intends to cause the death or serious injury of a victim, in some countries a death that occursin the act or attempted act of another serious crime may also qualify as ‘intentional’ homicide or murder. Infanticide, assault leading to death and killings carried out by law enforcement officers (acting legitimately in the line of duty or not) all may or may not be included in police recorded statistics.
In addition,differences in police recording practices such as differences in counting units (offences, suspects or cases), whether or not attempted homicide or non intentional homicides are included in published figures,and the point in the investigation at which a suspicious death is classified as homicide all vary as between countries.
If it was not for the graphs, half the article would be explaining and comparing the gun laws of many European countries to significant U.S. gun laws before I get into statistics.
Now, would you feel safer in the countries Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, or the U.S. states of California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York?
What do these states and countries have in common? All the aforementioned countries have shall-issue licenses to carry a concealed firearm, while all of the aforementioned states have may-issue licenses to carry a concealed firearm. In other words, it is easier to get a license to carry a gun in 5 European countries than it is 8 U.S.. states. And in Poland, it is legal to carry black powder guns without any license (as long as the weapon was designed before 1885, and can not use metallic cartridges), and in the Czech Republic, it is legal to carry single-shot or double-barrel black-powder guns without a license as well, making both the Czech Republic and Poland 'constitutional carry' or 'permitless carry' for black-powder guns.
While the process to legally buy a gun in Europe is lengthier than most of America, legally buying a gun in many European countries is not as hard as people think, and saying that it is harder than legally buying a gun in America is not that simple, either. Let me explain.
According to Overview of gun laws by nation - Wikipedia, 21 European countries, the largest of which are France and Poland, are “shall issue” for issuing licenses to own firearms, with the strong majority of them allowing centerfire, semi-automatic rifles and pistols, and another 2 countries, Norway and Hungary, seem to be shall-issue or close to it. 4 countries allow some firearms to be owned even without a license.
I can forgive being ignorant about statistics, but I will not say the same about being ignorant about laws in which the basics you can easily learn from Wikipedia.
Weapons exports will be a separate section, as it ties in with the issue of war and peace, a foreign policy issue, as opposed to weapon laws, which are a domestic issue.
3. Healthcare and college/university.
We already have some government healthcare, though the system is not as simple and straightforward as it is in many other countries. The Federal Government already provides Medicare and Medicaid, along with Veteran's Affairs hospitals, state governments have their own Department of Public Health/Public Health Department, sometimes with their own hospitals, and some counties (county hospital system) and cities have their own hospitals as well.
The rich don't have a problem with paying for healthcare. The poor are covered by programs such as Medicaid. It is mostly the middle class that is being made to pay exorbitant prices for healthcare. But why?
Listen to these videos. If you insist on reading or need to read, keep reading.
The number one problem with healthcare in the United States of America is how expensive it is. The reason why its so expensive is because it is so heavily regulated.
In 1965, the single-payer health insurance programs, Medicare & Medicaid made poor people less dependent on private charities & more dependent on political institutions & pharmaceutical companies. The healthcare industry gets money from said programs, which makes things more expensive because they can charge almost as much as they want.
That same year, the government also took over the training of new doctors, & as of 1997, the number of available spots for training is limited at 110,000 per year, & it has not increased since. Even doctors from developed Western countries are required to go through this training. Plus, the American Medical Association has lobbied Congress & state governments to give its members de-facto monopolies on the licensing of doctors, which is done to limit the number of doctors, which increases the prices charged by doctors.
When it comes to healthcare insurance companies, they face regulations such as not being able to compete across state lines & being required to give coverage for things that their customers don’t need, like maternity care coverage for men, infertility coverage for couples who don’t want to conceive children, & alcohol addiction treatment for non-drinkers.
Between mandates, price-controls, & third-party payers such as government, employers, & insurance companies acting as middlemen, no one knows what they’re actually paying for their care, & no one has much of a reason to be concerned.
When it comes to the FDA, it may as well be privatized. There have been many cases where even if a drug has been used in other countries & is proven to be safe, the FDA won’t even let dying patients take it while the FDA tests the drug for efficacy, not even safety.
Compare the FDA to product safety & certification organizations such as Underwriters Laboratories. UL has an excellent track record, getting testing done quickly & accurately. If they don’t, companies would go with UL’s competitors. If a UL certified product hurts you, you can sue UL. The same can’t be said for the FDA, a government agency.
As for the FDA being made beholden to pharmaceutical companies, its already happened. The FDA acts “carefully” to not upset its corporate sponsors, which provides about half of its budget for drug evaluation.
Privatizing the FDA would also save taxpayers 3+ billion dollars.
In a free market, there is an incentive to lower prices & increase the quality of goods & services because doing so would earn one more money & a better reputation, & not doing so would mean that one does not earn money & they get a worse reputation.
With government, the government can just make people pay through taxes, & if there isn’t real competition, government made goods & services turn out to be low quality.
Look at parts of the medical business that aren’t (yet) heavily regulated, such as cosmetic surgery, lasik & retail clinics. For the first two, prices aren’t raising exorbitantly (they’re actually falling) as that the patient pays directly, which is seen when a breast job, a cosmetic surgery, costs say, around two-thousand dollars compared to, say, an appendectomy which costs tens of thousands. And retail clinics, because they provide care that does not require a doctor or full-fledged doctor’s office or hospital but does provide medical care at much lower prices. The American Medical Association doesn’t like this, & wants to have more control over those parts of the medical business.
We see the same thing about technology. When defibrillators were deregulated, they became less expensive, more advanced, & overall better. Same with smartphones (which are even in reasonable reach of many poor people), & so on & so forth. Even if lifting price caps means that equipment will become more expensive, this is only in the short term, as that in the long term, prices will go down.
edit
Similarly, with college, the biggest reason why college in the US is so expensive is partially because of guaranteed student loans. (I will update this part in the future.)
College a series of scams and a debt maker
Colleges, why are they so expensive?
Why is college/university higher education so expensive
4. Unbridled capitalism.
The assertion of unbridled American capitalism is complete and utter nonsense.
Here are a couple of charts from
Total Pages Published in the Code of Federal Regulations (1950-2019)
Total Pages Published in the Federal Register (1936-2019).
Those charts did not come from corporations, a libertarian group, a right-wing group or any of the sort. Those charts are from George Washington University of Washington, D.C., an accredited university which was charted by the United States Congress.
I'll get a little bit into specifics.
How Many Federal Agencies Exist? We Can't Drain The Swamp Until We Know - Forbes
Unbridled capitalism? Let's see:
Economic features and programs such as:
. Federal reserve.
. Regulatory capture.
. Subsidies and bailouts.
. Fiat money.
. Multi-trillion dollar deficit.
. American Dream Down Payment Act.
. Internal Revenue Service, Income Tax, Capital Gains Tax, Corporate Income Tax.
. Sarbanes Oxley.
. Clinton's National Home Ownership Strategy.
. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare.
Departments, Agencies and government companies that either regulate portions of the economy or otherwise manipulate the economy:
. Food and Drug Administration.
. Environmental Protection Agency.
. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
. Securities Exchange Commission.
. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
. Federal Aviation Administration.
. Federal Trade Commission.
. Commodity Future Trading Commission.
. Occupation Health and Safety Administration.
. Federal Housing Administration.
. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
. National Labor Relations Board.
. National Household Travel Survey.
. Fannie Mae/Federal National Mortgage Association.
. Freddie Mac/Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation.
. Ginnie Mae/Government National Mortgage Association.
. Federal Communications Commission.
The cronyism and corptorporacy that the left fears so much is already here, with its roots being traced to the Lincoln Administration and taking its current form in the latter 20th century.
The Separation of Business and State by Ryan Dawson. Dawson has stated that not all regulations are bad, though, and supports regulations such as Glass-Steagull legislation, which requires the separation of commercial and investment banking.
Despite their rhetoric, the Republican party does not support smaller government.
Are Republicans Really for Smaller Government?
Transcript:
Are Republicans Really for Smaller Government? - Transcript Vids (also available on archive.org and archive.is.).
5. Welfare state, low taxes, and inequality, and how to fix welfare.
I choose not to get too deep into addressing Marxism, since history proves that complete command economies do not work.
Healthcare Is Not A Human Right
We already do have a welfare state.
Most of the homeless that you hear about are in a few big cities in the west coast states, with the specific areas being southern California, Portland, Oregon, and to a lesser degree, Seattle, Washington.
Americans are the most charitable on Earth. But I wouldn't say that this is because Europeans and everyone else is more greedy, but that many Americans have more disposable income than almost anyone else in the world, and are not bogged down by the high costs of living in microstates.
Scandinavia (and many European countries), have several advantages that America doesn't, such as:
. Proportional representation. Proportional representation lessens the need for the support of special interest groups , and incompetence and corruption are more likely to be called out by lawmakers. This is a big reason as who why America has more problems with regulatory capture than Europe.
. Smaller populations spread out over a smaller area.
. More homogeneous populations. Some European countries, Denmark and to a lesser degree, Norway, has became somewhat less accepting of immigration. In Denmark's case, they literally have less room to expand than even the mainland United Kingdom. Scandinavia's permafrost and extremely cold winters make developing land difficult and makes people reluctant to move far from the southern coasts.
. Most European countries are not landlocked, and all of the Scandinavian countries have long coast lines, giving them the ability to easily trade with the outside world. 1/3 of America's entire population lives over 100 miles from the coast or international borders, 27 U.S. states are landlocked (that is over half of the states), 16 of them are double landlocked (you need to pass through 2 states to get to the sea), and Nebraska is triple landlocked (no country in the world is triple landlocked). Most of the wealth in the world is concentrated on or near the coastlines, and America is no exception.
In terms of development, Nevada will probably not catch up to California. Oklahoma will probably not catch up to Texas. And West Virginia will probably not catch up to Virginia. Even in Europe, Hungary, Serbia, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia are all a little poor by European standards. Austria and Switzerland both have populations that are under 9 million people spread out over an area under 84,000 square kilometers, neither of which are particularly large, Austria is mostly homogeneous, and Switzerland is not known for being welcoming to immigrants. Also, most European countries do not border poor, crime-ridden countries the same way that America borders Mexico.
. European countries, especially countries other than the United Kingdom and France, are not involved in geopolitics and war to the same degree America is. America also has a military strong enough to discourage the Soviet Union and now Russia from attacking Europe and Canada and protect Australia and New Zealand from the likes of China. Many European countries also spend little on their military forces, which tend to be far smaller than they were during or before World War 2.
Mutual aid (organization theory)
Milton Friedman - Health, Education And Welfare
In the late 1970's, The United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare once had the largest budget in the whole world, exceeded only the total budgets of the Soviet Union and the United States Federal Government itself. It directly employed approximately 150,000 people full-time, and indirectly and part time employed over 1,000,000 people. It spent more and more on healthcare and education, raising the price without raising the quality of either. The Social Security budget is colossal, but it is still insufficiently funded, the young are taxed to pay for the old, while the old still struggle to maintain the standard of living that they expected. Social Security was supposed to keep the old from becoming charity cases, but more old people go on welfare anyway.
The United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare admitted to, in one year, losing through fraud, abuse, and waste, enough money to build more than 100,000 houses that cost $50,000 each in 1978 dollars, which is over a HALF BILLION dollars.
Today, adjusted for inflation, that is well over 20 BILLION dollars, and WELL OVER 16 BILLION Euros. Imagine if all of the money in Iceland just disappeared. That is to give you an idea of how inefficient the American welfare bureaucracy is.
I would argue that charity is more efficient. 7/10 of the money spent on welfare goes into the pockets of government employees or are lost in bureaucracy, and not poor people in need. Only 30% of the money government spends on welfare actually goes to the people that welfare programs are supposed to help. This is the other way around for private charities.
Statistics - philosophyroundtable.org
How Effective is Government Welfare Compared to Private Charity?
WELFARE AND POVERTY - NCPA POLICY REPORT #107 - NATIONAL CENTER FOR POLICY ANALYSIS
The Wonderful Life of Private Charity
Social security/pension systems require an ever growing population to pay for the elderly, and are ultimately unsustainable, even during peacetime.
In the words of Whatifalthist from his video The Crisis of the 21st Century., "Europe will have to make brutal decisions on whether they maintain ever more burdensome welfare payments and effectively become the world's dying museum, or they restructure their entire worldview and philosophy in order to have more kids and to stop funding the elderly after a certain age. The next few decades will be soul-crushing for Europe." "Europe will have a crisis of identity as the Americans become less willing to militarily and financially them." "It'll absolutely be horrifying for many Europeans to realize how really weak they are on the world stage. There is no way the European Union, a dysfunctional creation of the good times, will survive this".
There are mass differences in economic output across the continent as well. Southern Europe(Portugal, Spain, Southern Italy, and Greece) has collapsed into economic insolvency with unemployment rates rivaling the great depression. Central and Eastern Europe are likely to undergo demographic collapse in the coming decades as well. The parts of Europe with functioning economies have every incentive now to peel away and restructure their economies to the outer world. The UK is doing this with Brexit keeping its relatively competitive economy in tact and reaching out to the US . Germany, the Nordic countries, the low countries, France, Switzerland, Northern Italy, and Austria are the countries on the continent that have good economies. They don't have any incentive to pay for the discord of Spain, Greece, or any in eastern Europe and they won't! You simply can't collectivize the problems of all these diverse regions. Sadly the countries without functioning economies will be demographically shelled out as their young people are incentivized to leave to those with better economic prospects. - YouTube user sigmadeltagamma, from the video Just FEDERALIZE Europe Already!.
When it comes to welfare for able bodied adults do what Japan does; require that people do busy work so that they do not keep their leisure time, and will be incentiveised to find real work. I found that idea through the video Looting why some places and not others answers.
When it comes to social security/pensions, I have two ideas to fix it.
Idea number one is do what Japan is doing, and allow foreigners to work and pay taxes to pay for the welfare of citizens without foreigners receiving welfare themselves. Even foreigners benefit from this, due to high wages in the country that they would be working in with the low cost of living in their poorer home countries.
Idea number two is to have a free market economy with low taxes, and have people put their money into savings accounts and private social security/pensions. Sweden already has partially privatized pensions/social security.
6. Unitary state/centralism vs federalism and localism.
Smaller Is Better: Why Countries Should Be Broken Up
"Imagine a country where the people are divided over what some government policy should be. Half favor Policy A, and half favor Policy B. Whichever policy is implemented, only half the people will get to live under the policy they want, and there doesn't seem to be much the government can do about it.
However, suppose that in the western half of the country, a small major favor Policy A, while in the east, a small majority favor Policy B. By splitting the one country into 2, each can choose a different policy, and immediately more than half of the people get to live under the policy they want. And, those in the minority can migrate if they feel strongly enough about it.
Within each of the 2 new countries, the same principles apply. By splitting them up further, each small region, city, or community can have its own policy, based on what the majority of people within that small region want. This way, even more people get to live under the policy they want, and migration becomes even easier because everyone is closer to a border.
With many small countries, some of them may reject both Policies A and B, and go for Policy C instead. Or Policy D. Increasing diversity, choice, and competition between countries. People can start to see the impact of each government policy in practice. Good policies will be copied and spread as people see what works and what doesn't. Two countries that have the same policy on one issue might have different policies on another issue. Whether it benefits to policy alignment across a large area, neighboring countries that cooperate with each other on a voluntary, bottom-up basis. There is no need for them to surrender their sovereignty, or merge their political institutions.
Smaller countries have further benefits. Votes become more meaningful, and political campaigns become cheaper. In large countries, the base of the government can be far away, while in small countries, it is always close by. This means that the politicians are more likely to be from the same culture ro class as the citizens, and meeting or protesting against them becomes easeier. Governments become more accountable to their citizens.
Over time, the size and role of government in each of these small countries could diverge greatly. Big government, small government. Left wing, right wing. Capitalist, communist, socialist, corporatist. The role of government in each country will be broadly determined by the preferences of the people in these countries, which could change rapidly when they see the sucess or failure of different governments in neighboring countries.
Not only government policies and roles, but also forms of government would be subject to experimentation and competition. Some countries may opt for representative democracy. Others direct democracy, monarchy, or theocracy. Some may reject the state altogether and choose voluntarism.
Most of us which that we could change some government policy, or change the role or form of the government we live under. Instead of endless debate and disagreements at the level of national politics, a better strategy for more of us to live in the kind of country we want, would be for all of us to support the general principle that countries should be smaller."
"Economy of scale refers to the cost advantages of large purchases such as buying in bulk. It can refer to production as well where a firm's output is so large its average cost of production falls below the marginal cost.
But it's a fallacy to think that you can apply this concept to an entire economy. Socialists, for example, believe they can make programs like universal healthcare work because of economies of scale when in reality they make the system so unmanageable they invariably resort to some form of rationing. The reason why is that healthcare isn't a single product or service. Any country will experience an economy of scale with, say, insulin, because there's a significant portion of the population that has diabetes. But you have a problem when you have people with more rare diseases." "People suffering from all of these diseases put together might outnumber the diabetics, but you can't apply economy of scale to them because the treatments are all different.
And its even worse in a single-payer system. They actually end up with with an even smaller representative pool if they have any pool at all. They're just simply out-lobbied and out-voted by the bigger pools. To make matters worse, most of us as individuals exist in overlapping pools. We need some treatments that can be generalized to a large portion of the population, and can thus benefit from economy of scale, and need some more unique treatment as well.
This applies to most public policies, not just healthcare. If you have a giant oven, you can cook a lot of turkeys at the same time. But if you need to cook turkeys, and chicken, and pot roast, and bake some bread, and bake some apple pies, you can't do it all at once because they all require different temperatures and cooking times. Economy of scale can't apply there.
It's just one more reason why socialism will always fail. Human beings are not products on an assembly line. Mass produced decisions do not work for us. They might work for groups large enough to lobby policy makers, but those special interests will benefit at the expense of the rest of us. And there is really no way to change that other than just getting the government out of it."
Quickie: Diseconomies of Scale
"Do you that there was such a thing as diseconomies of scale? Probably not, since politicians really don't want you to know that these exist. There are disadvantages that both firms and governments accure when they get too big, and this results in increasing per-unit costs. Economies of scale will be a benefit up to a point, but beyond that, you just get too big.
One reason is the difficulty of a large number of people communicating efficiently. If you remember the handshake problem from the last quickie, you know that this increases geometrically as you get more and more people involved. At some point, the difficulty of all of them communicating will counter any advantages that you get from your big size. You also get a lot of duplication of effort. With a small firm, this really isn't an issue. But once you get thousands of employees, you end up with people and even entire departments working on different solutions to the same problem, unaware that someone else in the firm is doing the same thing.
There's also something called the Ringelmann effect, where individual members of a group become less productive as the size of a group increases. Also, things just get topheavy as you need more managers and bureaucrats to try and keep control of everything. This will be good up to a point, but beyond that you are just spending so much on managers, you're not getting as much production out of the deal.
We've seen plenty of cases where governments and large corporations have been unable to change with the times, trying to keep the inertia of their old business model going becuase it's just too difficult to shift to the new way of doing things. Politicians and pundits only want you to know about economies of scale, both for how they can supposedly manage the economy and also how larger companies will supposedly dominate a free market and prevent compitition. But neither of those are true. There just comes a point where you get too big and try to do too much. So universal healthcare will never be efficient, and no big multinational corporation will be able to compete with a smaller company that's more efficient. Economy of scale only works up to a point. "
Some European countries do have some form of localized police. Germany is a Federal Republic, though state's powers are intended to prevent dictatorships rather than give the states local autonomy, but I still consider this to be a step in the right direction.
The best example is Switzerland. The cantons do have their own courts and armed police, and municipalities can have their own armed police.
When it comes to defense, a federation can have the central/federal government handle military matters as is the case for the United States and the United Kingdom with her overseas territories. Members of a federation may raise their own military forces, as in the case of State National Guards and State Defense Forces in the United States, Home Defense Units of British Overseas Territories, and State Military Police and Firefighters Corps in Brazil. Countries can also form relationships for military alliances and standardization, such as in the case of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and have trade and customs agreements, such as the Schengen Area.
I think that Euroskeptic types may relate to this more, as that someone from Bister, Switzerland or Planken, Liechtenstein identifies with their own local community and nation in contrast to cosmopolitans in Stockholm, Sweden or London, United Kingdom, who view themselves more akin to being world citizens.
Some people think that America would be better off under a unitary government like their own country. Actually, America is a big and diverse place, more like the whole of Europe than a single European country.
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard
Somewhere vs anywhere divide. Not the same as, but directly related to the urban-rural divide.
A big reason why the America is so socially conservative and tribal is due to being more rural than continental Europe and being geographically isolated, sharing only 2 real land borders with other countries. If you look at any socially liberal place in the world, chances are they are urbanized metropolitan areas, and if not, they are probably on the coast. The most socially conservative and tribal parts of the world are outside of these areas and especially in mountains, such as Afghanistan.
7. Weapon exports, and war and peace.
I am anti-war, and I oppose Israel's imperialism and influence. That being said, European governments are not 100% innocent, and there's more than the United Kingdom's support of America's wars for Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the military-industrial complex.
Canada.
Let's not kid ourselves, Canada is in the war business - Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News
France, and to the lesser degree, the United Kingdom, still practice neocolonialism.
France, one of the wealthiest and most liberal democracies in the world, historically has a habit of selling weapons and military hardware to 3rd world hellholes, which it continues to this very day;
France has become hooked on weapons exports
Here’s what’s behind France’s 72% jump in weapons exports
France, exporting weaponry to third world hellhole countries and to an overpopulated one-party police state does not support liberté, égalité, and fraternité.
Germany, another one of the most liberal democracies in the world, is a huge arms supplier for Saudi Arabia, an unbelievably backwards hellhole of a borderline totalitarian monarchy that is waging war on brown Muslims in Yemen, and exports Wahabism and Salafism, ideologies of terrorists, many of whom's victims are brown and/or Muslim.
There are reports of Russian special forces (including SWAT teams) using the HK416 assault rifle and more credible reports of using the HK417 battle rifle.
I also wonder if the German government authorized the export of machinery to make Heckler & Koch G3 battle rifles, MP5 submachineguns, and HK33 assault rifles to 3rd world hellholes such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Myanmar/Burma, Sudan, and Iran, which allows foreign entities (governments, specifically) to evade arms export controls.
And to close this off, Diensteinheit IX (9. Volkspolizei-Kompanie) - спецназ полиции ГДР. - все про оружие человечества, the East German Volkspolizei special unit Diensteinheit IX has at least one West-German HK33 assault rifle, during the cold war when one would assume that there is a complete arms embargo against the Warsaw Pact countries, especially West Germany's next-door neighbor, East Germany (though it could have came from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, probably capture the rifle(s) from the Republic of Vietnam). Vietnam apparently also has at least one HK33 rifle (judging from the small magazine well), as seen in a picture in the article Vietnam Agents Are More Like The PLA - China Military Report, which very possibly came from East Germany (or was was captured from South Vietnam) and then (either way), modified into a designated marksman/sniper rifle. Though that HK33 could also have been imported from Myanmar, or less likely, Greece or Turkey, where the HK33 is/was produced under license.
Germany, your self-flagellation for crimes your ancestors did over three quarters of a century ago does not help anything if you keep selling weaponry to the borderline totalitarian Wahabi fundamentalist monarchy that is Saudi Arabia. You are missing the forest for the trees, or should I say, you are so obsessed with the holocaust that you end up selling some of the world's best weaponry to some of the worst human rights abuses in the entire world. In Germany, one can get into legal trouble for writing mean things about minorities online, but the German government hardly cares if Saudi Arabian soldiers, airmen and naval sailors murder brown Muslims in Yemen on a daily basis.
Italy, another liberal democracy, sells artillery shells to Saudi Arabia, which uses said artillery shells in its war in Yemen. The Italian government has also authorized the sale of the Beretta ARX160 assault rifle and its complimentary GLX160 grenade launcher to the government of Turkmenistan, one of the very worst human rights abusers on the planet that rivals North Korea. So that means that 1,680 agents (such as soldiers) of the totalitarian government of Turkmenistan have a potentially better assault rifle than some of Italy's own allies (such as the United Kingdom with its SA80), with 150 of them having a grenade launcher as an added bonus. In contrast, it is almost impossible for civilians, even Italian citizens to legally own machine guns in Italy, I do not know if armed security guards can carry long guns (let alone machine guns), and many, probably most, Italian police officers do not even have access to the Beretta Arx160, with even fewer, if any, having access to grenade launchers unless they are a member of an anti-riot unit (though the Guardia di Finanza and maybe the Carabinieri being probably the only two agencies that have lethal grenades). The government of Turkmenistan has ordered at least 120 Beretta Px4 Storm semi-automatic pistols.
But wait, there's more! The Italian government allowed the Turkmen government to buy 7 AgustaWestland AW139 utility helicopters, 3 AgustaWestland AW109 utility/attack helicopters, 3 Selex ES Falco drones, 6 Alenia Aermacchi M-346 Master jets. 2 of these jets are trainers, and 4 of them are fighters. Would you sell NATO-grade helicopters, surveillance drones, and jet fighters to North Korea? Like I said, Turkmenistan's human rights records rival that of North Korea.
Turkmen Air Force #Current inventory - Wikipedia
Yet another reason to oppose the Afghan War is so the west would not need to appease central Asian dictatorships to allow the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to operate in Afghanistan.
The governments of Belgium and Austria routinely permit the sale of firearms to countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Indonesia, and Venezuela. I've also read reports of Glock pistols being used by Vietnamese and Chinese law enforcement agencies, along with Russian law enforcement agencies and special forces.
West Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy allowed the Panavia Tornado to be sold to Saudi Arabia. Germany, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Italy allowed the Eurofighter Typhoon to be sold to Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.
If I was to get into all of the specifics of whenever Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Germany and France exported weaponry to 3rd world countries, that would be another article by itself.
As a bonus, I'll mention that the Vietnam Coast Guard has Spanish-manufactured CASA C-212 Aviocar series 400 patrol/cargo planes and Dutch-engineered Damen salvage tugboats. This do not seem like a big deal until they are used to chase down dissidents and people trying to escape the authoritarian oligarchy.
If European governments sincerely cared about Muslims and people of color, they can put an end to neocolonialism and cut off the sale of weapons to governments that do not respect human rights. Then again, maybe European governments need to find some ways to pay for their welfare states.
At one point, the Swedish government cut foreign aid and opted for more immigration, even though foreign aid would ultimately help more people, and do so without requiring that they leave their homes, come to a cold country with long, dark winters, get into confrontations with locals and other immigrants, and having limited opportunities due to having a poor, if any, education, competing for a limited number of jobs with one of the best-educated populations in the world, and the growing population making real estate more expensive and straining public services and infrastructure that are already expensive with some of the highest taxes in the world.
What should immigration policies be like? The truth about immigration exposed.
18:00
Sweden's Government is Lying about Sweden
Higher Taxes = Less Welfare - Angry Foreigner on Swedish Socialism
However, not everything is bad. I am glad the the European Union, along with the United Kingdom and United States of America has put restrictions on the sale of military and law enforcement hardware to Hong Kong after the passage of the Hong Kong national security law. Germany has interrupted arms sales to Saudi Arabia, but as far as I know does not have an arms embargo on Saudi Arabia. I do have mixed feelings about Germany restricting the exportation of firearms to countries that are not members or close allies of NATO, as that I do not want to arm criminals or states that abuse human rights, but at the same time I do not want to harm states that are trying to fight corruption and are legitimately trying to fight crime and terrorism (such as Mexico and Brazil) or law abiding civilians and security guards who are responsible and are not involved in crime or terrorism.
As much as it is my responsibility as an American citizen to raise awareness, campaign and lobby against selling arms to tyrannical and/or imperialist governments, it is your responsibility as a citizen of your country to do the same and not just deflect with "America does x bad thing". Do more than shame America for arming Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates; raise awareness, campaign, and lobby your own government to stop arms sales and collaboration with governments that do not respect human rights.
One Idea that I have heard from Ryan Dawson is to offer lifting sanctions on Russia if the Russian government would place an arms embargo on Saudi Arabia.
I am disappointed on how western governments have no problem with selling military hardware (weaponry) to the likes of Saudi Arabia, but are apprehensive about even recognizing the liberal democracy that is Taiwan as a country (and Taiwan is a flourishing democracy and has one of the very best human rights records in Asia), let alone selling military hardware to it just because of diplomatic pressure from a hyper-authoritarian one-party oligarchy turning dictatorship-esque and now an Orwellian nightmare state that is China.
8. Democracy.
Which is more important to you, minority rights or majority rule? Minority rights is incompatible with unlimited democracy.
Let's say you are boarding a hypothetical ship, the Unlimited Democracy. On board the Unlimited Democracy, 51% of all of the passengers are relatively well-educated and relatively well-off heterosexual Caucasian Christians.
Beating your children and torturing animals are allowed.
Unpopular? Thrown overboard.
Poor? Thrown overboard.
Atheist? Thrown overboard.
Queer? Thrown overboard.
Not white? Thrown overboard.
Muslim? Thrown overboard.
Jewish? Thrown overboard.
Socio-politically left of Adolf Hitler? Thrown overboard.
So any minority or unpopular individual has no rights and gets persecuted, which I represent by people getting thrown overboard. With space ships it gets worse, as in getting blasted out of the airlock, though a milder version of this is being left behind on some planet, space station or forced onto a different space ship.
Do you know what is also unlimited democratic/majority rule? A gang rape.
Do you see can happen if there is unlimited democracy with no constitution with rules to regulate it?
Now, contrast that with the
Constitutional Liberty.
Anyone who beats children or tortures animals will automatically get locked in the brig (on-board jail) and handed over to the appropriate government authorities as soon as possible.
Unpopular? Get to stay on like any other passenger.
Poor? Get to stay on like any other passenger.
Atheist? Get to stay on like any other passenger.
Queer? Get to stay on like any other passenger.
Not white? Get to stay on like any other passenger.
Muslim? Get to stay on like any other passenger.
Jewish? Get to stay on like any other passenger.
Socio-politically left of Adolf Hitler? Get to stay on like any other passenger.
Should we allow 51% of the population to own and enslave 49% of the population? How about 100% -1 of the population owning and enslaving you?
In Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, should well-educated and well-off heterosexual Caucasian Christians be able to do what they want to everyone else (including indigenous peoples) by simply being the simple majority?
In China, should the Chinese Communist Party be allowed to imprison, enslave, and genocide Uigirs and other minorities by simply being the simple majority?
In Israel and Palestine, should Israelis do whatever they want to the Palestinians and everyone else who is not both Jewish AND Zionist by simply being the simple majority?
I can go on forever.
We've seen this plenty of times. One group conquering and subjugating the other.
And lacking a strong constitution makes it even easier for one party rule, dictatorships and authoritarianism to happen.
We have actually seen this kind of thing happen.
Do you see what absolute and unlimited democracy can lead to? The implication that anyone who does not support absolute and unlimited democracy supports fascism, oligarchy and/or autocracy is a complete and total false dichotomy. In mob rule, being unpopular or in the minority would be indistinguishable from fascism. Remember that Hitler and the National Socialists were democratically put into power in Germany.
Also, a reason why we have representative government and little to no direct democracy (especially outside of minarchy/minimal state) is the issue of merit, or more precisely, the lack of merit.
If you were on a ship, should the people who are merely the most popular be the captain and officers, or should the people who are the most competent about being nautical officers should be the officers and captain? If you were riding on a plane, should everyone take turns being the pilot, or should the individual who is the most competent pilot be the pilot? Would you want to hold a popularity contest on who gets to be your dentist, doctor, or surgeon?
That is why we do not see democracy in business, utilities services, the health ministry/health service, emergency medical/ambulance service, the fire service, law enforcement (police), or the military. Democracy is merely majority rule, not meritocracy.
The market is closer to meritocracy. For example, the automobile market is dominated by private car makers (except for the French Renault Group, which the French State has 15.01% ownership of and I have heard that in China, it is required by law that the state own at least 50% of a business, though I am not sure of this). The East German Trabant series is famously bad, and is considered the worst German automobile and even the worst automobile in the world.
Despite German culture's success in high-quality manufacturing and engineering, East Germany's automotive industry was so bad that government officials imported cars from the Soviet Union and even the mixed-market economy west, specifically brands such as Volvo and Citroen. North Korea's Kim Dynasty and government officials also ride in imported Audi, Mercedes-Benz and Lexus cars, despite North Korea having its own automotive industry.
Official state car - Wikipedia
If it was up to me, I would implement something similar to the Constitution of Oceania (which I would classify as a constitutionally minarchist republic with direct-democracy). While I find it to be very idealistic (I feel like it was optimized for an artificial island country), it still does have some flexibility, with the ability to change with a strong majority through referendum if doing so is vital (use the key alt + f4, and search "95%" "80%", and "66%" for examples).
Examples of changes I would implement are:
Restrictions on legislation:
. Line-item veto.
Elements of government:
. Government law-enforcement agencies.
. Prosecution Branch, with its own law enforcement.
. Bailiffs for the judicial branch.
. Auditing and Anti-Corruption Branch, with its own law enforcement.
. Representative government, with a tricameral system of regional representatives elected through score voting, and two other chambers with one using Schulze Single Transferable Vote and another using the Psi/Harmonic system. In a Federal system, have a quadricameral system, with Senators appointed by the legislatures of constituent political entities (equivalent to a U.S. state).
. Premier, to head the executive branch in domestic policy, especially with the oversight of law enforcement.
. Department of Foreign Affairs and Political missions (embassies/consulates).
Additional powers (a few examples):
. Taxation in 1 of 3 ways: FairTax, land tax, or flat income tax.
. Eminent domain for border (including coastal) defenses or air defenses or during wartime or emergencies.
. Ability for military and law enforcement agencies to respond to disasters.
Feel good mythology: "Democracy is fundamentally good"
9. Homeschooling and education.
"The schools must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will."
"Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished."
"The new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied on with confidence and certainty."
“Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.”
- The Philosophy of Education, by William Torrey Harris.
“In our dream…the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand…We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply…For the task that we set before ourselves is a very simple as well as a very beautiful one: to train these people as we find them for a perfectly ideal life just where they are…an idyllic life under the skies and within the horizon, however narrow, where they first open their eyes.”
- The Country School of Tomorrow, by Frederick Taylor Gates.
“I maintain that the civil authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school…. If the government can compel such citizens as are fit for military service to bear spear and rifle…and perform other martial duties in time of war, how much more has it a right to compel the people to send their children to school, because in this case we are warring with the devil, whose object it is secretly to exhaust our cities and principalities of their strong men.”
- Martin Luther.
“Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.”
- Public School Administration, by Ellwood Cubberley.
"Luther understood that compulsory schooling could be used to indoctrinate young minds into the Lutheran Church, and sought to use State power to achieve this end. As a result of his pleadings, numerous German states created the first modern public schools.
In many ways Martin Luther can be thought of marking the birth of the modern schooling system. Not only was he the first advocate of compulsory schooling, but his conviction that the State should use its power to indoctrinate its citizens into a specific worldview, helped stimulate in Germany a climate of increasing subjugation to the State.
The great historian Lord Acton wrote of Martin Luther that he “impressed on his party that character of political dependence, and that habit of passive obedience to the State.”
Another important step in the rise of modern public schooling arose under King William I of Prussia who ruled from 1713 to 1740. Integral to the maintenance of Prussia’s powerful army during his reign was the national compulsory schooling system he established in 1717, the first of its kind in Europe. Subsequent schooling reforms throughout the 18th century built on this foundation and paved the way towards the development of what came to known as the factory model of schooling."
"The factory model of schooling emphasizes standardization of teaching, testing, and learning rates, respect for authority over the exploration of truth, and uniformity and orthodoxy over innovation and progress.
This schooling model developed by the Prussians was so efficient at inculcating into its citizens a worldview which benefited the Prussian State, that in the 19th century educational reformers in the United States caught wind of it, and quickly sought to implement it in their home country."
Some of that came from Public Schools, the Fixation of Belief, and Social Control - Academy of Ideas
"Let's talk about education.
In most western countries school is compulsory, and state enforced.
Truancy can result in fines or even jail time for parents.
This isn't just a result of state coercion.
On a cultural level education holds a sacred status much like that of religion.
This is an institution that most never question, and that's a problem.
Did you ever wonder how it is that kids spend 13 years from kindergarten to high school
supposedly being prepared for life, yet when they get out they don't have any real skills.
Thirteen years and kids aren't taught how to grow a garden, how to build a house,
how to fix a car, how to balance a checkbook, or how to cook a healthy meal.
Thirteen years and kids come out without even rudimentary concepts of how to organize or lead groups of people,
without even a glimmer of understanding of how to resolve conflicts non-violently,
and we call this an education?
Yes we're taught how to read and write and perform some basic math,
but we aren't taught how to think for ourselves,
we aren't taught the principles of logic, or how to question an ideology.
What we are taught is how to sit in a desk and listen obediently
as the world is packaged into a neat little box that we are to accept without question.
We're taught to regurgitate that information for tests,
to give the answer that those in authority demand, but most of all we're conditioned to conform,
and the reward for faithfully jumping through all of these hoops for 13 years
is a worthless piece of paper that no employer even asks to see.
Kids exit high school barely qualified to flip burgers at McDonalds
and even for that they have to be trained.
Thirteen years is a long time. That's most of our childhood.
To have this much time taken by force with such pathetic results is unacceptable.
The problem here isn't a lack of funding,
the problem here isn't poorly trained teachers, lax regulations, or low quality curriculum.
the problem is our entire educational paradigm.
The system isn't designed to prepare children for the real world.
It's designed to format their minds and condition them for a life of subservience.
It's designed to create a population of individuals just smart enough to fill out paperwork and punch a time card,
but too stupid to question the system itself or the authority of those running it.
If we want to change course we cannot ignore this aspect of our enslavement.
There is no point laboring to wake up other adults in our lives if we send our children to be programmed by the state.
The revolution of the mind must include a revolution in education."
Here's Quora writer Dennis Pratt's answer to the Quora question Why are schools politically liberal? (the word "liberal" has been replaced with "leftist" in order to avoid confusion):
"A Different Master For The Schools
Imagine that the NRA had the political power to “school” our children.
- The NRA opened NRA schools in every town.
- The NRA compelled our children to attend their NRA schools.
- The NRA forced taxpayers to pay for them.
- The NRA created the curriculum for teacher colleges.
- The NRA decided the requirements for teachers to graduate.
- The NRA selected which teachers went where.
- The NRA decided promotions and raises.
- The NRA decided the curriculum for our children.
- The NRA decided what should be in the texts.
- The NRA required students to pledge allegiance to the NRA every morning.
- The NRA posted pictures of past NRA presidents in every classroom.
- The NRA gave days off to celebrate NRA holidays.
- The NRA regularly had NRA speakers at the school.
- The schools tracked NRA news.
- Every student took heavy doses of NRA Civics.
- Every student learned about the important role that the NRA plays in protecting our freedoms.
- The students memorized the cities in each state where the NRA had its state headquarters.
- Human history was taught through the scope? of guns
- Essay questions often ended with,
“Describe how guns could solve this problem.”
What Result Would We Expect?
Would we be surprised to find all schools generally pro-guns? Would we be surprised to find graduates of their schools with major gun purchases and with lots of practice firing? Would we be surprised to hear the next generation talk to us passionately about the importance of guns in our life?
Whose pictures would an NRA school display for revering?
So When Government Does This Today,
What Should We Expect?
When schools are owned and run by the government, on government property, paid for by the government, staffed by government workers, overseen by government, and we have no say in whether our child or our money goes to them, we should not be surprised that they rationalize government control over our lives."
We expect that religious schools will indoctrinate their religion.
Government is just another religion. Yet we act confused when we see government schools producing wave upon wave of pro-government drones. It’s almost like our brains had been programmed not to see a connection. (I wonder when that might have happened.….)
That government schools teach allegiance to the government was no surprise in Sparta, where young boys were taken from their parents and raised in Spartan schools to be fully indoctrinated as warriors for the Spartan state. It was not a surprise when Prussia reinstituted government schooling on the Spartan model, because Prussia was tired of losing wars and wanted to instill blind obedience to the Prussian state. (Just a few decades after the introduction of Spartan schooling into Prussia, tens of millions of young men were willing to become obedient cannon fodder for their Fatherland, enabling the carnage of both WWI and WWII.)
And it was this Spartan-Prussian model that Horace Mann consciously brought over to America to impose on our children:
I get the most sad when I hear people saying that we need government schools to “teach our children about freedom”. There cannot be two concepts further apart. And yet, somehow people schooled in government schools parrot it back.
I wonder how that happened?"
Here's a comment that he made:
The same mechanism would be used to make schools politically conservative. I think I was talking only about the mechanism, and not how leftists, in many instances, won control of the mechanism.
I’ll have to take your comment under advisement. The mechanism of government-imposed, government-run indoctrination camps is available to any authoritarian. Look at the conservative method that Sparta and Prussia used it — to create drone armies happy to die for their leader.
Perhaps it is that in the US, leftists are much more authoritarian than conservatives. I was actually playing around with some political grids, and the old school fundamentalists are much less powerful today. However, there are places (e.g, in the south) where the same mechanism is actively used by the local fundamental conservatives for the analogous outcome. There the question would have to be, “Why are schools politically conservative?”
I had a revelation one trip around the South. I came upon group after group of leftists who were so angry that their schools were politically fundamentalist conservative. I thought that I had an in-road to talk about freedom of choice in schooling — allowing lots of alternatives and parents choosing the best school for their child and their family (always based on their values.) Of course, this would allow these leftists minorities to have a choice for their child which matches their values.
However, and this was the eye-opener for me, the leftists rejected freedom of choice. Instead, they were bound and determined to capture the indoctrination mechanism themselves in order to “save” the children from the values of the children’s parents.
Just so you know, I had a similar result in conservative minority communities who were upset by overwhelming leftists schools!! They seemed to be less interested in “a thousand lights” than they were in making sure all the lights were red, or blue, or whichever color they wanted everyone else to be.
The mechanism is effective, and that’s why we have these great battles over who should control the school experience of my child and of your child. My solution is to allow many different types of schools such that no sub community feels oppressed, but I fear that many people want to oppress. Government run schools are the perfect mechanism. :("
And another comment:
"I find it amazing, Barbara, that the people who are supposed to be teaching our children how to take their place in (what is a business) world, cannot solve the problem faced by every single company, (and by every one of their teeny tiny competitors battling the big monopolists). The only solution that they can come up with is using threats of violence to get their money — artificially keeping out alternatives and forcing parents to pay even when they don’t want the service?
Let’s be glad that a few of the graduates of those schools were able to figure out what seems to be such an intractable problem for government bureaucrats!
If they can’t figure out such a common invariable cost problem, how can we ever expect them to solve the demand problem of serving customers so much better that they don’t want to escape?"
Schooling and Indoctrination:
"Libertarians are quite concerned with government’s intrusion into the raising of our children.
Authoritarians see our rulers as being kind, helpful, and concerned for our children’s welfare
Libertarians see instead indoctrination, separation from the family and its values, submission to state authority, bullying, monopolization, crushing children into one-size-fits-few schooling, and inculcation into anti-wealth creation and pro-wealth confiscation.
A libertarian society would allow any entrepreneur to open up any type of school. It would allow families to select whichever schools they preferred for their individual child. Fees would be negotiated between parents, schools, and, if needed, voluntary charities and private financing. There would be a far greater diversity of schooling approaches that better matched the diversity of children.
Rulers would be kept as far away from our children as possible."
For those of you who still think that not sending children to government schools is child abuse/neglect, let me run a test.
Now, I want you to open up these three links, and take a good look through them;
VIOLATED SCHOOLCHILDREN Corporal punishment-induced trauma
Schoolchildren’s corporal punishment-related injuries - People Opposed to Paddling Students
WARNING - These images may be deeply disturbing to some viewers. Do not open these pages if young children are present.
Would you want your child's buttocks to end up like that?
But wait, there's more!:
School Made 11-Year-Old Girls Pull Down Their Pants for Disgusting Inspection
Forced Genital Exams of Children--Nothing Strange or Unusual Here? - The Ruthorford Institute
Girls say school forced physical exams - Pocono Record
Genital examination badly traumatized girl doctor testifies - Pocono Record
Doctor denies forcing exams on schoolgirls - Pocono Record
In case you thought this only happens in American schools:
Canadian Schools Are Strip-Searching Teens And That’s Cool with the Government – Reason.com
As Whatifalthist once said, "Evil doesn't exist if you've lived a comfortable life".
And as I would say, comfort is not the same as freedom.
To go with all of this at the same time, there is a mandatory dress code, negative reinforcement, rules that fail to fully respect our real constitutional rights (particularly with zero-tolerance & restrictions on free speech/expression), an authoritarian structure with little to no real input in decision making, & there is emphasis on silence, order, & most of all, obedience. And all of that is before you are made to do homework.
No wonder why kids hate school so much, & feel like it is a factory prison.
It does not need to be like this. There are already educational philosophies that supports true learning and not conditioning obedience, such as Montessori, Peninsula School, and unschooling.
While one can strawman opposition to permissive to no regulations on education as useful idiots for teacher's unions and book companies or as cowards who are afraid of responsibility, I do recognize a legitimate concern to unregulated education as that there will be children who "fall through the cracks", or in other words, receive inadequate education. I would argue that it is better to let some people fail instead of forcing everyone down to the lowest common denominator and be equally mediocre.
I believe that sometimes planning around the worst case scenario can cause more harm than good. For example, mandating that the state raise children to protect children from child abuse will save a certain percentage of children from neglect or abuse, but will harm all children who could have grown up under decent parents, and thus making a child a ward of the state should be the last resort solution almost like a law enforcement officer firing his gun (or a country going to war) should be the last resort solution (the harm that I am described is actually demonstrated with Romanian orphanage children. Also, the state raising all children would require more employees, which would mean more incompetent, corrupt and abusive employees, and inspectors and the bureaucracy being less responsive or even potentially corrupt itself, especially considering the power dynamic when dealing with children).
Many people believe that people who are better educated will behave better.
But this ignores the fact that the Puritans who carried out the Salem Witch trials were some of the best educated people in their hemisphere.
National Socialist Germany was one of the very best educated nations in its day, and it was a racial supremacist totalitarian police state that went out of its way wasting resources to persecute minorities during a war and in the end failed its intentions with Europe being destroyed, half of Europe having communism forced upon it, and traumatizing western civilization and creating scars that have not healed to his very day.
I'll close this part off by addressing the belief that Americans are the world's dumbest people.
I don't think that Americans are the dumbest people in the world, but rather, we have a wide bell-curve in terms of intelligence (maybe the widest thanks to combining a large, diverse population with an individualistic culture). In other words, America has both some of the dumbest people in the world AND the most brilliant people in the word. Our cultural father, Britain, is the same way. Japan, by comparison, has a tighter bell curve, in which hardly anyone is pathetically dumb, and at the same time, hardly anyone is outstandingly, exceptionally brilliant.
I got that from Dawson & Illingworth on China, starting at 57:00 and ending at 1:02:40.
10. Donald Trump and Ron Paul.
Here's Matthew Bates' answer to What is something that needs to be said that nobody wants to hear?:
"Trump supporters have a point."
For many of them, the America their parents and grandparents grew up in was a lot better. And no, that’s not because other groups were oppressed. It was because the economy was better for working-class people back then. If your grandparents raised a large family on a single income, while the media and politicians cared about what your grandparents cared about, and now, 50 years later, you and your wife can’t get by on your dual incomes, and the media and politicians spend more time talking about transgender bathroom usage than the fact that families like yours are falling further behind each year… then yes, you have a point, and Make America Great Again makes sense."
"I find it so horrifying that any politician let alone president and all that associated power would be a “referendum on gender.” For the love of all that’s good do so many people not get the concept of “priorities?” I know people who are great CEOs and Attorneys who are real jerks, and I wouldn’t want them to marry into the family, but if I need someone really good and they are, I very well might hire them for that job. This idea that national politics should be run like a sorority needs to end."
- Quora user Palyne Gaenir in response to another Quora user's comment.
Ron Paul comparison at DuckDuckGo
We could have had Ron Paul, a nice doctor who was against the following:
. Wars.
. Aid to dictatorships.
. Corporatocracy (especially with subsidies and regulatory capture).
. Bailouts.
. Federal Reserve manipulating the economy.
. International Monetary Fund, which puts African countries into debt and keeping them poor.
. North American Free Trade Agreement, which prohibits mexico from putting tariffs on taxpayer-subsidized American agricultural goods.
. War on Drugs, which is responsible for approximately half of the incarcerations in America, broken families, and corrupting and ravaging Latin America.
. Patriot Act, which violates people's civil liberties.
. Warrantless surveillance.
. National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which allows the U.S. government to indefinitely detain or kill anyone, even U.S. citizens.
. Deficit spending.
. SOPA/PIPA
But instead, we end up with an egotistic, narcissistic asshole of a multi-billionaire.
Oh, and Obama? Let's see....
. Continued all of Bush's wars.
. Drone striked Pakistan 3 days after entering office, killing many innocent people and creating more terrorists.
. Helped overthrow Muammar Gaddafi, replacing a secular government that it rebuilding Africa with a failed state largely controlled by Islamist terrorists and bringing back slavery, which also is a large reason behind Europe's migrant crisis.
. Aided Islamist Syrian rebels, which destabilized a stable and secular Syria, creating millions of refugees, murdered around half a million people, and wounded many more.
. Backed Saudi Arabia's War on Yemen.
. Would not close Guantánamo Bay, and if anything, more people were imprisoned there under his watch than before.
. Spending TRILLIONS of dollars on bailouts, using taxpayer's dollars to bailout big corporations.
. Stimulus package, which didn't stimulate much except for inflation.
. Supported everything Ron Paul opposed, which I don't want to mention again.
The TPP What You're Not Being Told
When it comes to crediting Obama with the economy being fixed
11. Climate change/global warming and COVID-19.
"Doomsday cultists love to show you this graph;
It's the same one that Al Gore used in his movie with the clips plagiarized from other fictional movies. It shows the years from 1850 to about 2000, and nothing from before 1950, and nothing from the past 10 years because its been getting cooler. Now here's some graphs that you don't see;
When you look at all the data, which is about 100 times more than the slice that Gore used. You see that this is a normal cycle, and it's been going on since before humans were even on the planet."
"The proposed government solutions don't even lower greenhouse emissions. All they do is create an expensive middle man. The normal process as it stands now, goes like this; raw resources are processed by factories and businesses into consumer products, which consumers buy, so their money goes to the factory, and some pollution will be made in this process. The government solution is the exact same thing, only they allow more pollution so long as these factories and businesses buy carbon credits from the IPCC, which is just a clique of elitist control freaks that say 'you have to buy carbon credits from us' so that you have an allotment of how much you can pollute, how much you can produce, which means it's going to cost more for factories and businesses to make finished products, which means that it's going to cost more for consumers to buy these products.
It's just like a sales tax. What happens when the sales tax goes up? Let's say it goes from 6% to 8%. Does the factory actually pay anything more? Not really. You do. [The price of] Every item in the store goes up 2%. It's whatever the price was plus the tax. If the tax goes up, then the tax is higher, and all that happens is that you have to pay more when you go shopping. It's not really a punishment on the factory. It's mostly a punishment on you, the public. That's who's really going to have to pay for the carbon credits. These people (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) will make trillions because there are so many products and transactions, and if they (the public) have to buy carbon credits, because government forces it, then they have a nice middle man that can profit from pollution. That doesn't mean that they're going to make less pollution if they're making profits from it, you have carte blance to make as much as you want, double the pollution we have now by 2030, no problem.
There is an extra layer of evil here, though. Smaller businesses, and agribusinesses especially, you've all heard the cow farts motif, they have to decide whether they want to sell their allotments to a 3rd party, or purcahse credits themselves but they're only allowed to produce x amount. Well, these bigger businesses are happy to buy from the smaller ones, rather than from the IPCC, which they're allowed to do. But that would give them a tighter monopoly around distribution, because (when it comes to) these smaller factories and businesses, why should they produce and work when they can just sell their allotment and make money from that? And so ranches and all your agribusinesses are going to get more and more monopolized, which takes out competition, which means the prices are gonna go up, (and) in addition to that, they're going up because of this carbon credit system, so they're going to make more money, and you are either going to have to buy less stuff, have less stuff or pay more, and you usally going to have to pay for things that you can't say no to like gasoline. Not many people just drive around for fun. They drive to work and back, they drive to school and back. They're not just driving for the sake of driving. Most people don't even like to drive. They do it because it's a necessity.
It will not curb pollution. It has nothing to do with the environment. This is about creating a middle man so that they can enrich themselves off of the process of people buying things. They're using Chicken Little tactics to scare you into saying that the end is near, and they have government funded pressure groups to get the Paris Accords signed by different nations. Pollution is not reduced. Pollution and consumption are simply made more expensive by creating a do-nothing middle man under the theme of environmentalism."
- Climate alarmist debunked in minutes
Climate Change "science" has POLITICAL bias
"Climate change!!! Don't be Anti Science!! There is a consensus! But science!... It's false dichotomy to assert that skepticism in a scientific claim is anti-science. No one is questioning the validity of the scientific method, they're questioning the corrosive influence of politics in science. Climate change has political bias. Denying that there is a political push behind this is to deny reality.
Controlling gas emissions means control over energy and agriculture. It's the new way to oppress the third world. Politics effects what we are told science says. They used to say smoking cigarettes was healthy too and they knew it wasn't. Admitting it led to cancer took pulling teeth. But the tobacco lobby got the results it wanted for decades. Lobbying had marijuana painted as "reefer madness" and it was not. That doesn't mean it is healthy but it was certainly not what it was exaggerated to be. It wont make you blind, jump out a window, or play the piano too fast. Over and over again agriculture lobbies have created the latest dietary fads about foods and which are health and what is so bad for you. Dietary fads change like the direction of the wind.
It's about money not science especially when you are relying on correlation studies and statistics. Statistics can be stretched and fudged (faked). They are not at all a hard science like chemistry or physics. We can't even predict daily weather much less a hundred year scale. The warming and cooling cycle has existed longer than people have been on the planet. Cherry picking a graph that starts at the industrial revolution and ignoring everything before it, is not science. It's government. It's as honest as saying Iran is enriching uranium for a bomb. They are not and we know they are not. You need over 90% for a bomb and they were in the 3% range. Again science has been brow beaten by government.
Universities need government funding. It's easy to get people to fall in line when you equate skeptics to global warming as anti-science. It's like saying opposing the war is makes you against the troops. No one wants that stigma so they stay quiet. A lot of smart people fear voicing support for Donald Trump because the media branded him a sexist racist xenophobe. And no leftist especially, wants that stigma. The odd thing is the very opposite is true. It's the extremist leftist identity politics obsessed left who is prejudice and witch hunting. They ignore science when it comes to things like there being only two genders. Again that ordeal is political not scientific. Based on Biology one can not simply deny physical reality through the magic of self identification. Well at least not unless enough people scream at you and call you prejudice unless you comply.
I'm telling you science is not pure. It is polluted by politics. Climate change is a gambit to control the third world. Now just because politics influences science that doesn't mean we should doubt every issue. But it does mean that we should be allowed to within reason. In History, consensus has been broken many times in science. Even saying the earth is flat was something that had been debunked for ages, but the belief was promoted for as long as it was for political reasons. The Church had said the earth was flat and religion and government were one in the same. A round earth undermined the Bible and the validity of the religion. And so naysayers had their books burned or were put in prison or were even killed. Eventually commerce won the day and so the belief in the round Earth for trade sake was finally allowed to disseminate.
If you want to talk about climate change with a skeptic of political purity not of science, then do it. But don't be smug and dismissive. You may know about science. but if you dont know about Politics and History too then you dont really understand at all why people are doubting the new chicken little, Noah's Ark story."
More content:
Mike Rivero and Ryan Dawson on Climate Change (39:41 long)
Why Would People Lie About Climate Change? - Questions For Corbett
altCensored playlist Climate change
CLIMATEGATE: A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY/THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE
If you are super-interested in the details, listen to these 2 videos:
Economic rape under the cover of pandemic crisis
12. How to fight the rise of fascism and Neo-Nazism.
The National Socialists did not rise to power just from mesmerizing people. The National Socialists were voted in as a reaction to the allied powers' collective punishment of the German people, and the horrible economic situation in the Weimar Republic. Instead of trying to rebuild and reintegrate Germany back into Europe and the world as quickly as smoothly possible, which would have made it unlikely for totalitarian ideologies such as National Socialism to gain power, the allied governments forced the Treaty of Versailles onto Germany, which restricted the size of the German Military, put Germany into deep debt that would take three quarters of a century to pay and initially wrecked the economy, and took chunks of German lands where German people lived, and abused them.
All of the humiliation, combined with post traumatic stress disorder, created a situation in which the German people were willing to vote in anyone who will make them feel strong again.
Here's a comment from the Foundation For Economic Freedom:
Flemming Rose:
"This European narrative is based on a widely accepted interpretation of what led to the Holocaust. It basically says that anti-Semitic hate speech was the decisive trigger, that evil words beget evil deeds, that if only the Weimar government had clamped down on the National Socialists' verbal persecution of the Jews in the years prior to Hitler's rise to power, then the Holocaust would never have happened. I was confronted with this argument during the Danish cartoon crisis, in 2006. People condemned the cartoons as Islamophobic, and warned that the demonization of Muslims might trigger mass violence. "We know what happened in the twenties and thirties," critical voices argued, referring to the seemingly inevitable link between speech and violence.
Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher's campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.
I have yet to be presented with evidence for the proposition that hate-speech laws are an effective instrument to prevent violence."
And another comment:
I had to take my own advice and come back to my comment because after thinking about it and reading some more: the situation around Hitler wasn't as simple as him having 'the freedom to spread his ideas'. There was a lot of opposition to him at the time, and when he was able to take over the German parliament and control the debate, effectively eliminating freedom of speech, that is when he really gained power - so yes, you're right that more freedom of speech and equal, open debate would have been better for society.
Here's something I write from awhile ago.
"To me, people should see history AS IS, NOT as a POLITICAL THING. In my opinion, censorship actually politicizes history because it's usually politically motivated (unless one doesn't count moralists wanting the government to make decisions for the people).
As for the rise of Neo-Nazis, so what? How many people do you know take them seriously? I think that a lot of Neo-Nazis on the internet are trolls who do little more than muddy the waters on any political issue that can possibly have anything to do with Jewish people, historical revisionism, and/or immigration.
Not only do they already alienate people who don't perfectly agree with them, but also, they barely have real unity among themselves. I've seen a lot of people in those circles debate which race is truly "white" or rather or not Christianity should be practiced or things like that.
I can even show you members of the alt-right who don't identify with Neo-Nazis, as they see Hitler as controlled opposition to the central banks, a contributor to the creation of Israel or something in that manner.
If you don't like the current trend in racism in Europe that stems from immigration issues, then stop messing up countries worldwide with wars and IMF predatory loans, rebuild countries that need help, get control of borders, deport troublemakers, and make legal immigrants assimilate.
If you dislike Nazism, teach people to question what they read, and to adopt the non-aggression principle and individualism with the rule of law.
Sheesh. It's 2017, we have the internet, and I can't believe humans have such a hard time figuring this stuff out."
Reasons for the rise of the NSDAP, other than the trauma of WW1 and the humiliation from the Treaty of Versailles, is the collectivism of German culture, as explained in the video The Validity of Nazi Comparisons - feat. Three Arrows, and the child abuse prevalent in German and Austrian cultures;
The Childhood Origins of the Holocaust | The Association for Psychohistory
The Political Consequences of Child Abuse | The Association for Psychohistory
A Suicidal Embrace: War as Self-Punishment and Suicide | The Association for Psychohistory
The Origins of War in Child Abuse | Stefan Molyneux Reads Free Full Audiobook
With the worldwide decline of child abuse, along with predictions from Whatifalthist's The Four Trends of the 21st Century., I have cautious optimism for mankind becoming more tolerant and peaceful.
13. Freedom of speech, political correctness, racism.
A fascinating map of the world's most and least racially tolerant countries
Historically, Irish and Italians were discriminated against in the United States of America and the United Kingdom, but no one has a problem with talking about the Irish mafia or the Italian mafia or accuse you of being a conspiracy theorist for talking about the Irish mafia or Italian mafia (besides, it is a small minority of Irish and Italians who are involved in any type of crime).
The suicide rate for young men is high in the United States of America, but no one has a problem with mentioning the fact that young men commit the most crimes (again, it is a small minority of men who commit serious crimes on the level of rape or murder).
Active duty military combat personnel and combat veterans have rates of suicide and mental disorders, but that does not mean that we can not acknowledge the wrongdoing done by the governments that they work for or question rather or not some military actions are justified.
Why is it any different when it comes to ethnic or religious minorities?
Owen B. Ry Dawson Collaboration
"Let me teach you how the left enables the migrant crisis and basically give carte blanche for minorities to do whatever they want to anyone else, because when you criticize what they're doing, you will be accused of intolerance, racism, sexism, et cetera.
In the left circle, I have "Muslims", within it, "Wahhabi". In the right circle, I have "Jews", and within it, "Zionist Jews".
Now when someone criticizes Wahhabi fanatics that are incompatible with west society, forcing women to dress like beekepers, and tend to be prone to crime and low education, the left will run to their defense and say that you're not criticizing Wahhabi, you're Islamophobic and criticizing Muslims in general. That shuts a lot of people who don't want to be accused to being Islamophobic down. But people who really do hate Muslims come and don't just crises Wahhabi, but hate on all Muslims in general, and they do not care about being called "Islamophobic" because they really do hate Muslims. This alienates people who hates Wahhabism, but not all Muslims.
Same thing with Jews. When someone criticizes the ideology or actions of the State of Israel, the Israeli lobby or pro-Israeli media, someone else will call them anti-Semitic and say that whoever is criticizing Zionist Jews hate all Jews in general. Then someone will come along and hate on all Jews in general instead of just the extremists, and get mad at people who just say "Zionist" or "Wahhabi", alienating people who talk criticize Wahhabi Islam or the policies of the Israeli government.
We can make another bubble of migrants in general, and within it, refugees. In this case, the actual refugees are the minority. There are a lot more people coming as economic migrants, and there are a lot of Wahabis or otherwise backwards people among the economic migrants. What the left will do when someone criticizes economic migrants is accuse the individual criticizing economic migrants of not caring for refugees, and the best friend of the aforementioned faction of leftists are actual xenophobic bigots who really do hate foreigners, then the Zionists come in, take advantage of a migrant crisis, and spin it into causing resentment and hatred towards Muslims in general, which generates sympathy for Israel, Israel's apartheid state, bombing Palestine killing Palestinians, and waging war on Israel's neighbors.
On one side, there are right-wing assholes who are the only people criticizing excessive immigration and general political correctness, and on the other side, are spineless, wimpy leftist cucks who are scared to death of being called "racist" or other names, and are no better than the people they criticize. But where is everyone else? Surely, you can criticize illegal immigration and excessive immigration without being a racist, xenophobic asshole. Surely, you can have a nuanced position and criticize Islam, Judaism, or other ideologies without hating all Muslims or all Jews are individual people.
The Zionists and Wahabis have an alliance. The governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia are united in their imperialistic desires, and have common enemies which block their expansion, such as Iran and Syria. The biggest victim group of the Wahabi Muslims are normal Muslims in Syria, Iraq, and other parts of the world, who are victims Wahabi terrorists.
Now its really hard. Basic bitches always chose A or B. They do not understand nuance. With the widespread use of heroin and alcoholism in the United Kingdom, there is a large portion of males walking about with some degree of brain damage. Britain does not have thinkers anymore, and instead, has hooligans who get drunk and argue about football. That is why we need to make little pictures and graphs to explain to them how they're being manipulated and what to change about government policy."
Freedom of Speech: Is Offensive Speech Good For Society? - Learn Liberty
"Freedom of expression matters precisely because it allows us to voice and hear unpopular and controversial views. You don't have to live offensive speech. In fact, you should feel free to vigorously denounce and criticize speech that you see as wrong. But when people resort to force to prevent or restrict expressions that they disagree with, they undermine the very principles of freedom and tolerance that they claim to defend.
When he allow the open expression of hateful opinions, we create opportunities to publicly refute them. When the U.S. Supreme court has upheld the right of Neo-Nazis to march through Jewish neighborhoods, expressing acutely offensive and distressing views. But, when such ugly demonstrations have taken place, much larger counter-demonstrations have arisen in opposition. The result, the greater awareness taking a stand against hate.
Allowing offensive speech also matters because it promotes the progress of human understanding. Some expressions, once widely denounced as offensive or even dangerous, have won vindication and become received truth, rather it was scientists such as Galileo challenging religious dogma about astronomy, abolitionists calling for the end of slavery, civil rights leaders demanding an end to Jim Crow laws, or gay magazine publishers, whose work was labelled 'obscenity'.
Speech that authorities once tried to censor has instead contributed immeasurably to our culture. When authorities seize the power to silence offensive views, they also have necessity seize the power of dissenting and minority views. In effect, censors peruse a policy of ignorance by design. That's why smart societies respect freedom of expression, even when, especially when, it causes discomfort and offense."
Some more recommended listening:
Feel-good mythology: Hate speech
14. Why America is going to war in the middle east, why America supports Israel, and why political correctness is not compassion.
Just to let everyone know, I am opposed to Russia as well.
Everyone knows about Russia's bad human rights record, and how opposition parties are not allowed into real power in Russia.
But very few people know about Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin, who supports blending Orwellian totalitarianism with Russian imperialism through subversion to create another Soviet Union or Eurasia from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (I am not exagerating). The Insane Russian Plan to Conquer the World summarizes Dugin's ideas, but What is Duginism and why it matters, while one and a half hours long, far better explains his strategy and end goals;
Aleksandr Dugin is the epitome of a Vatnik, the Russian Boomer.
What is a VATNIK? (The Russian BOOMER)
Here in Russia we have always had and still have plenty of the most weird characters one could imagine. Dugin is one of them. The 19th century theosophist P. Chaadaev was the first and only who explained where all this insane Russian thinking and behavior comes from (check out his booklet called "philosophical letters"). - YouTube user Niem Fpmak - Nied Fpmak, Duginism - Scapegoat or Legitimate Threat?.
That goes out to either anyone who would support Putin or Russia.
Let me debunk the claim that America went to war for oil with some charts and articles;
(The above image comes from the video MIC and Mass Media (maps and voice by Ryan Dawson) which I was able to get from using Awesome Screenshot Minus & the crop tool.)
Before you read this, read point #13 if you did not do so already. Please do take a break before reading the rest of this part.
Ready?
A lot of people, especially leftists, think that Israel is an American puppet state. Let me show evidence as to why Israel is NOT an American or western puppet state for that matter.
China–Israel relations:
People's Liberation Army Navy destroyer Qingdao (hull number 113) docking in Israel:
File:Flickr - Israel Defense Forces - 20 Years of Cooperation with the Chinese Navy (1).jpg
"The Israel Navy congratulates the Chinese Navy on docking at the Haifa port. On August 13, 2012, the Chinese vessels arrived at Israel in order to celebrate 20 years of cooperation between the Israel Navy and the Chinese Navy. RADM Yang Jun-Fei was welcomed by the Haifa base commander, Brig. Gen. Eli Sharvit, upon his docking."
File:Flickr - Israel Defense Forces - 20 Years of Cooperation with the Chinese Navy (2).jpg
20 Years of Cooperation with the Chinese Navy - Israel Defense Forces
Here is footage of that exact visit, again, from the Israel Defense Forces itself:
20 Years of Israeli-Chinese Cooperation
While the People's Liberation Army Navy Ship Qingdao flying the Israeli flag while docked is not unusual, as that it is a maritime tradition for ship to fly the flag of a country she is docked in, notice how many Israelis were carrying flags of the one-party totalitarian state that is the People's Republic of China. How many Australians, Americans or Mexicans do you see wave Chinese or Russian flags whenever a Chinese or Russian navy or coast guard ship visits an Australian, American or Mexican port?
And for good measure:
The banner says "CHINA LOVES ISRAEL".
China, the Port of Haifa and Mideast Peace - The Times of Israel
Could Chinese involvement in Israeli ports pose a security risk? - Jewish News Syndicate
Chinese company set to manage Haifa’s port, testing the US-Israeli alliance - Jewish News Syndicate 
Chinese company wins bid to run new Haifa port - Ynetnews
U.S. Navy may stop docking in Haifa after Chinese take over port - Jerusalem Post
US Senate warns Israel against letting China run Haifa port - The Times of Israel
Israel Rejected U.S. Inspection of Haifa Port Over Fear of Chinese Surveillance - Haaretz
(All of that, by the way, also goes to Muslims who think that the Chinese Communist Party is any better than the Americans. Remember that things can always be worse.)
China does not support Israel on principle, considering how it does business with other middle eastern countries, and Israel conducts business with China's enemies such as India and Vietnam, but as you could see, Israel and China are partners in crime.
Israel has also attacked the USS Liberty, and has committed the Lavon Affair, a false flag operation in which the Israeli government attempted to get the United States and United Kingdom to go to war with Egypt. Israel has also been caught spying on America too many times to count, and there has been state and local governments have even been passing laws in attempts to make boycotting Israeli products illegal.
Israel boycott ban - DuckDuckGo search
(There are literally too many articles for me to link to here.
The Israeli government has even attempted to put boycott bans on its own citizens in 2011 because some Israelis disagree with the occupation of Palestine. Oy vey!)
"In some circles it has been well known since September 11th 2001 that a group of Israeli Jews were witnessed celebrating the attacks on the WTC buildings, on 9/11. Two of them were already listed on the Counter Intelligence Database. Their story unravels a covert operation where Al Qaeda was receiving financial and logistical support form foreign state intelligence agencies. Recently some of the pictures they took on the day where they were witnesses, hugging each other, giving high fives, and flicking lighters like they were at a rock concert, have been released by the FBI albeit heavily redacted.
Not only had they been witnessed parked and celebrating just after the first plane stuck the North Tower of the WTC, other witnesses had seen them there and their van as early as 8AM which is 46 minutes before the first plane hit.
8:00 is 46 minutes BEFORE the first plane, thus proving Israeli foreknowledge."
When the Israelis were arrested a notepad with phone numbers linked to to several other moving companies one of which the Miami FBI Field office notified the Newark office about because it had moved one of the 911 hijackers from Florida to New Jersey. That is logistical support."
- We Celebrated 911 and got away with it. The Dancing Israelis
Dancing Israelis reports (shows primary sources.)
Go to that article, which contains more information and screenshots of primary source documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ryan Dawson deserves the credit here for doing the real work, not me.
Debates you should watch if you are unconvinced:
Zionist Israeli Debates Zionist Critic Adam Green
Know More News LIVE w/ Zionist Israeli Shlomo Gordon
Less important:
Debating an IDF soldier on Qallout
If you still do not believe that it is the Israeli government and its supporters manipulating the west and not the other way around, here are documentaries you should watch and an article to read:
Ron Paul calls out Neocons by Name and Israel's influence (6 minutes. Spoken version of above article.)
Israels Internet Censorship War/Cómo trabaja Israel en la web (14 minutes)
Maidhc Ó Cathail the disinformation of guilt by association tactics (42 minutes)
Exposing the pro-Israel media (these documentaries are produced by left-wing professor Sut Jhally):
Peace, Propaganda, & the Promised Land (1 hour, 20 minutes long).
The Occupation of the American Mind (original 84-minute version)
Documentaries exposing the Israeli lobby:
The Lobby - USA
THE ISRAEL LOBBY - FULL DOCUMENTARY
The Lobby:
Contrary to popular belief, today, the governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia are not enemies; they are partners in crime. They have common enemies such as Iran and Syria, which block their expansion and influence.
Dan Sanchez The Israel Saudi Alliance with US and ISIS
James Corbett discusses the nature of terrorism and the Saudi/Israeli/US role
As for why America supports Syrian rebels and sanctioned Syria, it is because Syria is a rival to Israel, and Israel wants to control a pipeline going through Syria.
Syria what is really going on and why (5 minutes long)
Syria, Israel's invisible hand (1 hour long)
To push Iran back, Israel ramps up support for Syrian rebels, 'arming 7 different groups'
Former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon met with Syrian rebels
After years of speculation, IDF chief admits Israel supplied Syrian rebels with weapons
Netanyahu meeting with Syrian rebels in hospital;
In late July of 2018, a bunch of White Helmets (who are just a supporting faction for the Syrian rebels) got up to Israel’s border. Instead of shooting or even blocking them at the border, what did Israel’s Government do? They let them in, not even arresting/detaining the rebels.
Condensed case against the White Helmets in Syria
As for why America invaded Iraq, it was because Saddam supported Palestine out of hatred for Israel (not to say that he was a good person at all).
Iraq War how and why did it really start?
Geopolitics with Ryan Dawson Iraq, Kurds ,Iran deal, and more
Walid Darab interviews Ryan Dawson about 911, Alex Jones, and Iraq
Israel is the reason why America opposed the Iran deal and keeps antagonizing Iran. In the video Major Libya Updates, journalist Andrew Illingworth, who himself is half-Persian and has family in Iran, stated that Iran would not be a theocracy if America did not keep antagonizing it. If Iran had friendly relations with the west and was more liberal, it could potentially pressure Central Asia to open up and liberalize, and be a place for dissident radio transmissions and a place for activists and journalists to operate out of.
Israel has helped arm Neo-Nazis in Ukraine;
Human Rights Activists Demand Israel Stop Arming Neo-Nazis In Ukraine
Israel is arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine
Paper: Israel Arming Neo-Nazis in Ukraine
Rights groups demand Israel stop arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine
And if you have any lingering doubts to Israel's morality:
Israelis arrested in Colombia on suspicion of sex trafficking - Ynetnews
Israeli Diplomat in Brazil Suspected of Child Pornography - Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Wanted Israeli diplomat flees Brazil - British Broadcasting Corporation
IDF's chief rabbi-to-be permits raping women in wartime - Ynetnews
Israel a Human Trafficking Haven - Fox News
Dr House and Ry on Israeli Sex Slaves and Epstein update
New IDF Chief Rabbi Says Soldiers Can Rape Arab Women During Wartime to Boost Morale
IDF colonel-rabbi implies: Rape is permitted in war
Prominent Israeli rabbi preaches rape in war time
Rabbi who urged Gaza genocide excused rape by soldiers
Israeli rabbi who advocated rape of ‘comely gentile women’ during war becomes chief army rabbi
The Spoils of War :: Israel’s corruption was inevitable
New IDF Chief Rabbi Says Soldiers Can Rape Arab Women To Boost Morale
Additional reading:
To all the morons who say Palestine never existed
I know that someone is going to say "but that's not what Noam Chomsky told me".
Noam Chomsky is controlled opposition, and practically admits it;
Damage Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Owen B. Ry Dawson Collaboration
Dear basic bitches. There are Jewish supremacists just like there are white supremacists. If you are in denial about Israeli nationals while they openly colonise people before your eyes, just because you're afraid of being labeled anti-semitic, then blame your own cowardice and ignorance. - Ryan Dawson.
Who really hates Jews, by the way? The one mocking them and bringing their crimes to light so that we can isolate the CRIMINAL Jews versus the good ones that are basically like the urban Amish trying to make a fuckin sandwich, you know, grow their sideburns and impress their moms. There's a ton of Jews who aren't criminals. - Owen Benjamin.
Israel is a state, not a people, and it has its own interests. They lobby for their ideological group inside the U.S.. Shockingly, most Jewish supremacists are Jewish, just like many white supremacists are white. Why wouldn't they be? - Ryan Dawson.
Whose the one really muddying the waters? This guy, making fun of grabblers, making fun of people doin this, greed, opioids, war, warmongers. Or the people saying you can't criticize any Jew? Guess what happens then? Three, four years later, people lump in all the Jews. - Owen Benjamin.
Opposing them has nothing to do with Jews just like opposing North Korea is not anti-Korean, or opposing the KKK is not anti-Christian. Conflating the Israeli state with the Jews in general makes you anti-Semitic. - Ryan Dawson.
What am I, anti-Semitic? Do you retards even know what Semitic means? A Semitic is a branch language that includes Arabic. So if you make fun of Muslims, you're also being anti-Semitic, making it not a word that means anything. Good times, retards! - Owen Benjamin.
When it comes to criticizing ISIS, or the Klan, or Nazism, or anything else other than Israel, people seem to see it clearly. But when it comes to Israel, some, for whatever reason, think, 'isn't that anti-Semitic'? No, its not! - Ryan Dawson.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part 4: Closing.
I think the reason why there are so many central and eastern European countries on this list is because the people of these countries know what real tyranny is. Unlike western Europeans and northern Europeans, who are privileged to be wealthy, advanced, and overall strong enough to have some control over their own policies, eastern Europe was a bunch of puppet states of the Soviet Union. Some Eastern Europeans remember what tyranny was like, and in some nations, planted the seeds of skepticism towards authority.
At some points in history, Poland was a liberal/libertarian when compared to the rest of the world. In Whatifalthist's video What if Poland was a Superpower?, Poland had a representative government with a monarch can be deposed at will by the Parliament, was the most democratic European state until the 1830's, had a market economy, tolerant and pluralistic system, and even a strong intellectual culture. Whatifalthist also mentioned "the Poles had a powerfully strong sense of personal liberty and freedom", "during the high middle ages, when feudalism thrived in Western Europe, in Poland, the average farmer was free", "Poland was a haven for tolerance for any group", and even had "a very well developed capitalist economy". I would also say that bad experiences with both Communism and National Socialism have inoculated the Polish people against them.
A lot of people today consider Poland to be a conservative country. However, I consider Poland to be a pseudo-libertarian country. In Poland, 14-17 year olds can go to vocational school instead regular school, one can drive a moped at 14, there is no age for drinking or smoking (buying alcohol or tobacco is 18. I think setting the limit at the age of majority is reasonable), medical marijuana is legal, recreational cannabis is decriminalized up to a certain amount, prostitution is legal, and Polish gun laws are very permissive by European standards. In Poland, newly manufactured blackpowder guns, even revolvers, are virtually unregulated (though they have to be designed before 1995), licenses for handguns and even "assault weapons" are shall-issue, and conceal carry is automatically legal for self-defense and even target shooting permit holders (unless the Police put a restriction on your license), and it is even legal to conceal carry black powder revolvers!
When it comes to guns, unlike in the Anglophone world, where guns were a big part of history and were a controversial issue in society, guns have played less of a role in Polish society outside of war and military matters. Polish people have many other things to worry about, and considering the lack of gun-related crime in Poland, there is little to no movement supporting stricter gun control. In other words, the majority of Poles are seemingly contempt with the way gun laws are in their country. There is also the possibility that Polish culture just lacks busybodies to support a nanny state.
I think that the reason why Liechtenstein, Monaco, and Andorra are among the most libertarian countries in Europe is because of European culture and the enlightenment valuing the individual and liberalism combined with a high-trust society in which people feel little to no need for authoritarianism for society to function. This is in contrast to Asia, where there high populations lower the value of individual human life, and philosophies such as Confucianism and especially Legalism promote collectivism.
This is in contrast to other western Europeans, who, being both wealthy and being privileged to live in an enlightenment society, have grown soft, see the state as a good thing and not a threat to their liberty, and accept the state playing the role that is closer to a nanny than a night-watchman with the state providing bread and circuses in the form of services paid for by high taxes, double-digit unemployment rates, going into debt, and mediocre military strength to keep Russia from taking over Europe and discourage China from bullying the rest of the world.
It seems that the Scottish and Irish definition of freedom is actually merely group self-determination, not individual freedom. Not to say that these countries do not have subjective positive traits, but by the objective measuring sticks that I have used, Scotland and Ireland, while I would rate as average or above average in terms of personal freedom in the world are, when I compare them to the rest of Europe, only average or slightly below average in terms of personal freedom.
Scotland lets people drive and be adults at 16, but that is about it.
Ireland is one of the best countries in the world to do business in, allows medical marijuana, allows 17 year olds to drive and allows 16 year olds to drive work vehicles, tractors, and motorbikes, but has some of the most restrictive firearms laws anywhere in Europe with discretionary classifications of "Unrestricted" and "Restricted" firearms (semi-automatic assault weapons are legal on paper, but are rarely licensed, and even a low-powered pellet rifle may be classed as "Restricted firearms"), may-issue firearms licenses and no exceptions for airguns (aside from airsoft guns if the power is 1 joule or less), antique firearms or blackpowder firearms, crossbows counted as firearms, and even prostitution is illegal.
It seems that the difference between "oppression" and "tyranny" is that "tyranny" is more often used to refer to oppression done by a state actor.
Oppression is not someone being merely saying rude things. Oppression is not having a baker refuse to bake a cake for your wedding. Oppression is not being able use the bathroom of the sex other than the sex listed on your birth certificate.
Real oppression is seeing armed, foreign troops in armored vehicles patrolling your neighborhood and demanding papers from people who are simply walking to the grocery store. Real oppression is your country's elections being nonexistent or fraudulent (without serious opposition parties/candidates, and maybe used to put potential dissidents on a list) and your country is a puppet state to one of the largest empires of the industrial age. Real oppression is being arrested, put through a show-trial or no trial at all and imprisoned, executed, or tortured because you joked out loud while drunk with your friends and someone reported you to the secret police.
I do find it interesting that countries that border Russia, had a history of being subjugated by empires or at least invaded in recent history, and/or were once authoritarian states (such as the former Yugoslav countries) have shall-issue licenses to posses firearms.
Those countries are Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Lithuania, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Serbia, and Slovakia. And most of them have shall-issue licenses to posses handguns and even semi-automatic assault weapons.
I think you can figure out what many of those countries have in common (if you are savvy about history).
Not all countries that had authoritarian regimes or were subjugated by empires have shall-issue firearms licenses, though. Countries such as Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Ireland, Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Slovenia all have may-issue licenses to poses firearms (though Slovenia has permissive may-issue, so it barely belongs here).
Then again, Portuguese Estado Novo, Francoist Spain and Yugoslavia, which Bosnia and Herzegovina used to be part of, while authoritarian regimes, were not quite as brutal and cruel as National Socialist Germany or especially the Soviet Union/Russia. The United Kingdom, a country with may-issue firearms licenses, an island that has not been invaded in centuries, had an empire that ruled over almost a quarter of the world and has invaded even more than that. Sweden, a country with may-issue firearms licenses, is flanked on both sides by stable and wealthy liberal democracies, freeing it from needing to deal with the world's biggest shithole with a history of authoritarianism AND totalitarianism that just a miserable place to exist (Russia). Germany was always collectivist and was the birthplace of Prussian authoritarianism, the Prussian schooling philosophy, Marxism, National Socialism, Frankfurt School identity politics and is just a culture of conformity and not thinking for oneself.
And all this time, Andorra, Liechtenstein and its guardian on the world stage, Switzerland, is watching the rest of Europe and its shenanigans (today, they all have shall-issue firearms licenses. They all are also some of the freest countries in Europe).
In all seriousness, I think that the correlation between being subjugated by an authoritarian regime or empire and having shall-issue firearms licenses is a coincidence, but I find it to be an interesting coincidence nonetheless.
As Officer John from the SpongeBob episode Keep Bikini Bottom Beautiful, "some people never learn" (not that I am a fan of the cartoon, but I like the quote).
What absolutely astounds me is how much easily cured willful ignorance and confirmation bias there is. Even in the age of the internet, people fail to falsify their own position, for example someone who supports more restrictive gun control checking Wikipedia and comparing the gun laws of different countries and U.S. States. I can say more about people reading on their own statistics, or if Christianity is required to be nationalistic, skeptical towards immigration, pro-life or disagree with transgenderism, or that Christianity is good at preventing leftism, Marxism or pedophilia.
Whatifalthist mentioned in his video Twelve Lies about Reality., "the truth is that our minds are inherently self-serving and irrational. We ignore information we don't like".
Maybe Doctor Theodore John Kaczynski is right. Maybe we as human beings are just not meant to handle the complexities of the modern world. As Whatifalthist said in his video Twelve Lies about Reality., "we're hunter-gatherer apes used to tiny communities in the wilderness struggling to live in massive ant-hill societies".
Economics:
1. The Separation of Business and State by Ryan Dawson
3. Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
4. How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes by Peter Schiff
If you are really serious about philosophy, then I recommend Murray Rothbard and Walther Block. However, I feel that most people are not convinced by the non-aggression principle, and that even people who are unenthusiastic about the state would prefer to have flawed rule of law over chaos with warlords as seen in places such as Somalia and the possible rise of an even bigger and more tyrannical state without the restraints of a constitution or even representation as that no Rothbardian anarchist utopia exists today. I also do not really promote anarchism because I really do not feel that the strong majority of the population are ready for the type of anarchy that philosophers promote. And lastly, there already are plenty of deontological (philosophical) libertarians arguing using the non-aggression principle, so I chose to use mostly consequentialist arguments as that I don't think that anyone writes in the argument and information-packed no-holds barred style that I write in.
However, I am still definitely sympathetic to the non-aggression principle.
I do not really recommend spending your time and energy reading Ayn Rand. Though if you ever run out of books to read on politics and economics, I suggest checking out the Mises Institute's library.
1. Did you learn anything? If So, what have you learned?
2. How did this article effect your worldview, especially with the meaning and importance of freedom?
3. Did I make arguments for or against things better than you (previously) would have?
4. If you learned something about misconceptions about American and European gun laws or Christianity failing to effect morality, then why did you not check Wikipedia to falsify your belief? Who is the ignorant person know, the American who wrote this article or the European that this article is targeted towards?
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
Great post. I was checking continuously this blog and I’m inspired! Extremely useful info particularly the closing part ?? I maintain such info much. I used to be seeking this certain information for a very lengthy time. Thanks and good luck.
ReplyDelete오피