SJ0

Now part of that basket is also going to be popular social programs whether I like it or not -- for example, the fact that the current government of canada is evil and incompetent doesn't have any bearing on the fact that the single payer healthcare is quite popular. There are public goods that are worth pooling resources to create, and even libertarians believe in some common goods such as military.

That being said, there are good arguments against government too.

Single payer healthcare doesn't mean government run healthcare. It means that the market provides insurance and it is paid for by the government. The individual actors are private entities with their own freedom.

Progressives believe that capitalism creates greed, and that's backwards: Greed always exists, under every single system. The thing capitalism does is it systematizes it. If you want more, then under capitalism you have to do something to get more, and that usually means serving others in some way. Under most other systems, if you want more then you just need to step on innocent people.

Free market capitalism without the burdens of government tend to be blind. Minorities got power through commerce long before governments or universities recognized that those people could be useful if empowered. Women got jobs before they got the vote, and so on. People talk about the "Jim Crow south", but Jim Crow laws were laws, not anything imposed by capitalism or business. Just getting out of the way was what needed to happen.

Often the people who do a thing are the people who know the most about how to do a thing. State planning has in eras like ancient egypt and ancient sumer been able to engage in large scale planning that worked for a long time, but first, the megastates that formed were unable to deal with changing conditions such as we saw during the bronze age collapse, and when those states fell the individuals were powerless to help themselves, leading to mass suffering. We also know that many times bureaucrats aren't competent, and so the most manmade deaths in history didn't happen during some war, they happened due to central state planning by incompetent bureaucrats. When left to their own devices through mechanisms like liberalism, instead of being harmed, individuals found ways to thrive.

Many people think our anti-libertarian utopia is perfect, but in reality there are some very bad indicator -- according to many scholars, we're facing birthrates well below replacement levels in the majority of the world's countries -- asia, europe, australia, north and south America, with the only region with lots of population growth being Africa, and I've heard reasonable arguments that such conditions are going to be temporary and are being bolstered in part by material conditions brought about by the massive amount of capital held by baby boomers who are slowly having to liquidate that wealth to live off of. Some really rough times are going to be ahead, with relatively tiny youth populations having to support multiple retirees, and an overproduction of elites who are all jockeying for power in a system that's already top heavy. We're in an era where Gen Z (and presumably Gen Alpha after them) are facing historic levels of mental illness and historically low levels of wellness by several measures. The whole world order is about to change, and it'll probably be into something completely different in response to the catastrophic failures of the bureaucratic state.

My hope is that the next phase will look at the eras of massive governments and reject that, bringing something considerably more libertarian. People cannot live by money alone, and we need connections to the people around us, to our local communities, to our spiritual sides, and I don't think you get any of that by reliniquishing control to a heartless soulless bureaucratic machine.

That being said, you can't just eliminate government. The times libertarianism works is when you don't need government, and that happens when you have institutions other than government that are strong, such as religion or other social institutions that can bring people together and help support prosocial actions and oppose antisocial actions.

Libertarianism works as a general philosophy that sits in a basket of governing philosophies, but can't work well on its own.

First, we live in the least libertarian era of all time. Taxation at the level we see would be considered tyrannical, kings would hang for the level of taxation we see. Governments micromanage our lives to an extent previous eras couldn't possibly imagine. When people try to imagine a more libertarian world, it isn't really possible at this point because government is so baked in.

Second, corporations are government entities. They exist as entities because government created that superstructure. It could change that superstructure and has, to make them more powerful. When people say "government need to control everything because corporations will otherwise" it's a misnomer since they're both government.

The world would be a lot better with much less government. There's been times when more than one dollar of government money is spent for every dollar spent by the private sector. This has a destructive effect on the world. Even in the so-called "private sector", the largest companies are the companies best able to leverage government largesse, not the companies best able to sell products and services to customers. People are pissed off at Elon Musk, but internet companies like PayPal grew on government, Tesla was built by government dollars and its stock price is puffed up by inflation, SpaceX is almost exclusively selling to governments, it's a veneer for taking taxpayer dollars. Same with most other massive companies. (More later)

This isn't 1918 when everyone was highly patriotic because their countries had brought them unheard of wealth freedom and quality of life. It's an age of inequality, of corruption, of people feeling disconnected from the nation and the government. Of course they aren't willing to die for some plastic politician on the other side of the world.

Maybe a mistake on my part, but the irony is just too much.

Really, the details are important... And if the woman is physically healthy then yeah -- she shouldn't be Canadian healthcareing herself.

Pop quiz: what form of government is in Israel, and what form of government is in Palestine? When were the last elections held in each region? What percentage of Israel are Arabs, and what percentage of Palestine are Jews?

Something definitely doesn't smell right. Russia is in the same geopolitical sphere as many Middle Eastern countries, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to do a terrorist attack against one of your country's allies.

I tend to agree with you on this point.

As free speech has become more limited, it seems that relations between different groups has gotten markedly worse. In spite of legal protection against so-called "hate speech", it seems that hate has increased. I think it's in part because hate is ugly and so bringing it out into the open is how you show how ugly it is, while hiding it hides how ugly it really is.

One of the death knells of the KKK was a reporter going in and explaining it in detail, which immediately showed that it looked like the scribblings in a notebook of some 14 year old boy with no sense of irony. The group ended up not needing to be banned because it was self-refuting once people understood what they were looking at in its entirety.

Especially on a subreddit whose raison d'etre is ostensibly to criticize the banning of books.

I don't know if it's dead, but it's definitely unresponsive and in a deep coma. We're just waiting to see when they pull the plug entirely.

The mention of her "beautiful daughter" is sus as fuck given the context.

Massive cultural and systemic issues.

1. The racist cultural belief that to excel in school is "acting white" that teachers brought up in neomarxist colleges actively agree with. (The academic term 'whiteness' is evidence of this) -- this obviously only applies to regions that are majority black.
2. The active destruction of the family by the state such as through policies that actively encourage single motherhood and discourage men from acting as fathers.
3. Teachers more interested in being activists than teachers. They'll teach you to go vote for whatever the teachers union supports but don't care so much about reading and writing.
4. Teachers using non-evidence based teaching methods that don't work. For example, we know phonics is the best method for teaching reading and writing at a basic level, but it's boring to teach compared to other methods that are less effective but more fun.
5. Gangs and gang culture leading to kids acting like criminals and seeking that lifestyle instead of the more boring and less glamorous stuff like getting a boring 9-5
6. A percieved or actual lack of opportunities for gainful employment in their local areas leading kids to completely disregard excelling academically as a potential pathway for a good life.
7. I really need to mention again that teachers are being more interested in their social causes than doing their jobs. What is the biggest issue in the US with respect to schools right now? Is it the appalling lack of literacy? Is it something from the above list? No, it's teachers want to be able to inculcate kids into weird sex stuff without informing parents. The "banned books" they're complaining aren't political books like the communist manifesto being banned for being unpalatable politically, they're sexually explicit books with pictures and language so explicit it gets people banned from schoolboard meetings just for reading them out loud, and kicked off of TV, and banned from Youtube. If you're not teaching kids to read, then that should be the #1 priority. Parents rights or academic freedom are red herrings when kids are graduating without the basic skills to exist in society.
8. Standards are just low in general because of a focus on the diploma over the knowledge one should have to get the diploma. It isn't Baltimore, but a couple years ago Portland was graduating more people than ever before -- an 86% graudation rate -- while only 30% of students were at grade level for math skills. Why try if you're going to 'succeed' whether you try or not?

Two important things to note besides this: First, 13 schools failed to create a single literate student, but many of the schools in the same region are not far behind. Second, this isn't a "Baltimore" problem per se, the same problems occur in many schools across America. Remember that video that went viral a while back of the black high school girl beating the white high school student into convulsions? You look it up, that school only produced something like 13% of students at an expected level of literacy and many schools in that city (I don't recall what it was off the top of my head) were not much better. It's a common problem in many regions in the US, particularly cities like Philadelphia, and Chicago.

So it's corruption and it's incompetence all the way down.