Camaro wrote:QUOTE (Camaro @ Aug 12 2012, 01:37 AM) Anyone who thinks otherwise has some blinders on or frankly just doesn't value liberty.
Liberty is a great slogan, but not everything can be distilled to that.
Liberty to starve? Liberty to walk everywhere if there is no organised society to maintain complex infrastructure? Liberty to do as you please while climate change grows worse and worse?
Freedom from actual tyranny is an essential goal, but liberty as a catch all slogan for having no constraints on behaviour what so ever is a dangerous and unsustainable fantasy a planet with 7 billion people can't afford.
<bp|> Maybe when I grow up I can be a troll like PsycH <bp|> or an obsessive compulsive paladin of law like Adept
Someone from Finland obviously doesn't understand what Camaro meant. His point is that BOTH candidates and parties are owned by big $$ and if we don't do something about it soon, the country will have lost all of it's liberties.
Here's a few guys for Elzam:
Wait...that's Romney. OK, how about this guy:
Last edited by raumvogel on Sun Aug 12, 2012 12:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
Adept makes a good point about liberty. This idea, just like everything else, has been poisoned and distorted by the reigning parties to become something it never was, in my opinion.
This isnt a failing of an individual ideology, its the fruit of our labors in social psychology and evolution in my opinion. As we come to understand humans as more of meat-chemical machines rather than thinking breathing human beings we start to treat them as such. Campaigns use social science, psychology, and extremely expensive mass market research to find out exactly what they need to say to get the most votes.
This is still in its infancy! What do you think is going to happen in 20 years when most of the guesswork and research is over? How can we have a fair election when the candidates are manipulating human nature itself?
We are rapidly approaching the singularity, and i think we will see it in our lifetimes. We are going to see technology and science make breakthroughs that will completely change how we live our lives day-to-day. Just imagine how it will change our elections! What will we do when we know exactly what it takes to influence a person into believing what we are saying, regardless of whether it is true or not?
Several media wizards are saying that Romney not only gave away Ohio (for sure) and Florida (much more likely) with his VP pick. They saying its bad strategy to think of Ryan in a national strategy when its the electoral votes which matter, and that means Ohio and Florida need to be thought of more than any other state (since we can already assume how they will vote) Paul Ryan is not very popular in those states because of his extremely widely publicized budget plan where he tried to basically crucify medicare/medicaid and give an increase to defense spending.
For those unfamiliar with the type of people that live in Florida, well, its known of like a retirement community with Miami there somewhere. Old people, despite being conservative, generally dont like seeing their benefits decrease. After all, they voted them up in the first place, and then paid for them in their taxes... why shouldnt they?
So thats the narrative developing now, lets see how the polls end up in a few weeks (after the fanfare and convention) I'm sure Ryan's love of Ayn Rand is going to come up too. I've read Atlas Shrugged twice.... yes TWICE all the way through each time (both on deployment) so im not jumping on some kind of bandwagon. Ayn Rand was always known as having being almost completely driven and influenced by her bitter childhood in communist Russia. She is more like Captain Ahab in the relentlessness of her novels, than any kind of romantic dagny taggart or howard roarke.
So the pretentiousness of him (reportedly)(and myself for writing all this, ironically) making his employees read Atlas Shrugged shows a kind of naivety that worries me.
Last edited by germloucks on Sun Aug 12, 2012 8:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
