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gaan kak posted:Someone on facebook is claiming that the free market is the solution to all our problems; I responded by pointing to the industrial revolution era as an example of what an unregulated free market brings: "worker conditions were abhorrent, consumer safety was abysmal, environmental responsibility was utterly nonexistent, and, at the top levels of management and organization, the trend was towards monopolization and conglomerization." His response is that It sounds like what he's trying to say is that even without government intervention, private industry would eventually have reformed itself based on pressure from workers and consumers. But he hasn't proved that counterfactual at all. Ask him to explain in detail, citing real-world examples, how that process is supposed to work.
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Aug 15, 2012 05:21
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FadingChord posted:I'm trying to convince someone who basically thinks that guns should be freely sold on street corners with no restrictions that his opposition to gun control and his support for Voter ID laws are irreconcilable. Help? So, what's his response when you ask something like "Why should one right be harder to exercise than the other?" I think it's unlikely you'll sway him on guns, and it's possible he's truly resistant to having his own contradiction pointed out.
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Sep 27, 2012 05:11
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CommieGIR posted:I had posted this in the Freeper thread, but figured I'd find more help here... You're not suggesting that to 'prove you care,' you're suggesting that to stop people from dying in easily avoidable ways.
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Sep 27, 2012 18:13
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blakout posted:I'm debating with a friend after I posted a sorta progressive manifesto were talking about the role of government "Greece is failing because their government outspent their income (sounds -- $16 trillion). The most booming economy in the world is Hong Kong which has no national regulations or taxes. That is how to make people prosperous. Not by coddling everyone. Our constitution is clear about the responsibility of government. It is to protect us and provide a structure (roads bridges post office etc) Not to play robin hood and take from the ones who worked their butt off and give to those who dont." http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2084971/Hong-Kongs-cage-homes-Tens-thousands-living-6ft-2ft-rabbit-hutches.html
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Sep 30, 2012 06:29
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More seriously, this is a hard one because you're going to have to break him of the idea that success and wealth correlates perfectly with effort, and that the poor thus necessarily deserve their lot in life for not "working their butt off."
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Sep 30, 2012 07:32
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The Casualty posted:Does anyone have a map or chart of American gun crime vs. gun ownership by city? This is a tricky thing to ask; I'm not aware of any city-specific studies on gun ownership rates. Do you mean legal gun ownership or just gun possession? The latter is obviously pretty hard to get a handle on.
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Oct 17, 2012 06:26
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The Casualty posted:There's a blog post I ran across while searching for the graph I was after that basically claimed, with statistical evidence, that bans on handguns actually correlated with an increase in gun murders, especially if those cities (D.C. and Chicago in this instance) were near areas with lax gun laws. While the blog post incorrectly argued that the best way to reduce gun crime was to just reduce gun control everywhere (instead of, you know, cracking down on gun migration and arms trafficking, or tightening restrictions on sellers in these gun-friendly states), the statistics pretty much deflated my perceptions and I couldn't in good faith continue my line of rhetoric, that cities with harsh gun control have lower crime rates. In general, you're going to have a hard time building a statistical argument for (or against) gun control--there's always a study out there that says the opposite of what yours does, and your opponent will find it.
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Oct 18, 2012 10:49
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:Is "They only did it because they thought they could get away with it" supposed to make the banks look better? Because to any sane person, it really doesn't. I honestly don't get how that's supposed to be a good thing. It's basically just saying they're not greedy, they're greedy and cowards. The libertarian counter to this might be that if you can get away with something, why shouldn't you do it?
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Oct 21, 2012 07:02
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:And my response to that is if I was alone in a room with a random person and could get away with murdering them, should I do it? It's a weak rear end defense that shows a lack of self-critical thinking from the person employing it. [libertarian]Don't be so facile and histrionic. Murder has a clear victim (the dead person); with the economy the whole point is that there were no victims save those who had made poor economic decisions of their own free will--the employees of the financial agencies knew that the government would step in to prevent complete disaster if necessary, allowing them to take normally inadvisable risks without real fear of consequences. It's the presence of these kind of governmental institutions that allowed the people with the power to take those risks to reasonably take them. Remove the institutions and no large financial company would take such risks. No government, no crash, no recession.[/libertarian]
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Oct 22, 2012 08:51
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gaan kak posted:I'm debating with an Israeli who is under the profound belief that Obama (due to his 'weakness' on Iran) doesn't support Israel enough, and is convinced that Iran is relatively close to a nuclear weapon, with which they will proceed to attack. I've asked exactly what more Obama should be doing (in light of sanctions and cyberattacks), but is there a credible source on a realistic timetable until Iran actually could have a functioning weapon? I was under the impression that their uranium is barely enriched over research grade and is years away from weapons grade. It is the consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran suspended its pursuit of a nuclear weapon in 2003 and has not resumed it. They continue to pursue nuclear energy, but aren't working towards weaponization. Mossad largely agrees with that assessment. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/world/middleeast/us-agencies-see-no-move-by-iran-to-build-a-bomb.html?_r=0
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Oct 23, 2012 19:15
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Golbez posted:Sounds like, on a per capita basis, we should be complaining more about Japan than China. Of course, no politician would do that. We used to bitch about Japan owning all our debt in the same way, actually.
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Oct 23, 2012 22:59
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What are the direct, practical everyday differences between a very strong social democracy and actual socialism? This is something that I've never managed to get quite clear on, so I don't know quite which side I fall on.
Pirate Radar fucked around with this message at 11:20 on Jun 6, 2013 |
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Jun 6, 2013 11:05
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Quantum Mechanic posted:A social democracy still relies on the mechanisms of capitalism to function. Land, factories and machines are still privately traded, stock in companies can still be owned privately, but legislation is used to account for the inherent instability of capitalism by redistributing money through taxation and welfare. The state sits parallel to the economic system to pull it back into line. What if the jointly-owned company performs poorly due to faults other than the worker's performance? One problem with capitalism is that it's not actually very good at allocating resources 'fairly', and making wages a slice of the profits of a company doesn't seem to solve that problem. Now, any socialist or strong social-dem country would have social safety institutions that would alleviate some of the relation between a company's performance and worker compensation, but I don't really see how a jointly-owned company would be so incompatible with social democracy.
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Jun 6, 2013 13:02
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Accretionist posted:Anyone have good arguments or essays on why it's important to have a word for something? As in, why it's a problem that Leftism and Leftist doesn't refer to Leftist politics and its adherents anymore, merely whatever is to the left of the still-defined Right Wing. What argument is being made as a counter to yours above?
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Aug 16, 2013 01:21
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:I was thinking that we should put together some sort of program for people who really want to be a "Good Guy With A Gun." The best part of this post is that because police officers have to be trained to do a million other things, their weapon skills are often horrible. But the rate of street crimes in the US means that we probably can't follow the British model and not arm beat cops at all.
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Sep 20, 2013 10:30
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KernelSlanders posted:I was talking to a cop about the ESB shooting where the NYPD hit nine bystanders. Without batting an eye he said, "taxpayers don't like paying for range time." Well, they don't. And departments don't like committing the time for more frequent shooting qualifications and higher standards. Which is how you get things like the ESB shooting, the Times Square shooting, and any of the million times when cops making traffic stops think they see a gun and unload a full magazine in a rush into some guy coming back from a wedding reception.
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Sep 20, 2013 20:06
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Accretionist posted:Anyone know of a good analysis on specifically the relationship between gun crime rates and crime rates? Taking the statistical track when arguing about guns and crime is essentially always a dead end. The question itself is endlessly complex--maybe impossible to actually answer, at least right now--and that means that reputable sources have at times produced work that supports either (or neither) position. Bringing statistics into it is basically setting yourself up to go around and around endlessly to no resolution.
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Oct 11, 2013 13:35
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:You are literally arguing with someone who said, in no uncertain terms, that they'd rather knowingly make children suffer than fund welfare. Arguments based on the need for family structures and personal responsibility aren't going to be beaten by mere facts. The ideology is far too secure in people's minds to let reality threaten their convictions.
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Oct 16, 2013 05:26
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It would probably be an interesting--though depressing--poll to ask Americans whether they'd rather live in a country where everybody got the median income or a country where you have a 1/10 chance of making a million dollars while everybody else eats rat burgers and sleeps in disused freight trains.
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Jan 4, 2014 03:48
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Churchill was pretty well involved in the establishment of the NHS in the UK, which makes him a dirty little commie by modern standards even despite the rest of his life.
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Jan 20, 2014 22:15
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WWII.5 might have come down to a contest of whether the Soviets could kill all the "US/UK/Free French/probably any Nazis who were still able to hold guns, gently caress it" forces before running out of gas and bullets because a lot of the supplies, logistical needs, what have you of the victorious Red Army were being supplied by the western powers in a great little scam where they just pumped out materials and let the communists do the dying. Supporting their troops on their own would have required a massive retooling by the Soviets, while conversely the numerically inferior Western powers would have a supply surplus and be trying to crank out men and equipment for the front fast enough to replace the losses taken against the larger Russian army. I have honestly no idea how the math would have shaken out on that but I'm gonna put a guess on the Soviets just based on momentum. Nuclear bombs in this scenario wouldn't play a strategically significant role because after the first three (the Trinity test, Hiroshima, Nagasaki) the next nuclear bombs weren't ready until early '46, so unless you divert one of the bombs destined for Japan you wouldn't have anything to use on even a tactical scale against the Soviets.
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Jan 22, 2014 06:04
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VitalSigns posted:If a study came out showing that laws against rape don't reduce the rates of rape, would it logically follow that rapists shouldn't be punished? To complete this analogy, the study would have to show that laws against rape did not reduce the rates of rape and also increased the rate of rape-murder within existing occurrences of rape.
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Jul 31, 2014 01:37
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on the left posted:Exactly, people send their kids to private schools so they don't get stabbed or beaten up while the administration does nothing. Being able to select your student body is the entire point of private schools. Wait, what exactly is it about private school that makes you less likely to get stabbed or beaten up?
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Aug 8, 2014 07:57
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esquilax posted:It requires at least a little bit of extra effort to send your kid to a private school. All the kids that go to private school necessarily have at least one guardian who gives a poo poo. All the kids that don't only go to public school. I'd like a citation for this, actually. I don't believe the parents of private school children are more likely to be involved in their kids' lives than public school.
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Aug 8, 2014 18:47
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esquilax posted:I think it's sad that you're resorting to "source plz" on an argument as simple as this one, rather than putting forth any kind of counterargument. If purposely doing more than the default for your child's education doesn't count as parental involvement than I don't know what does. My counter argument is that attendance at a private school is a strong indicator that a child's parents have money, not that they are more involved in the child's life, since financial cost is the actual gateway to admission. Edit: Also, I disagree that there's anything sad about simply asking someone to source an assertion. I'm trying to express that the argument isn't actually as simple as you take it to be. Pirate Radar fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Aug 8, 2014 |
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Aug 8, 2014 19:23
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on the left posted:Why spend lots of money if you don't care either way? You could pocket the extra 20-30k a year and buy a boat or a vacation house if it's all the same. Because you use money as a replacement for giving a poo poo, not an expression of how much you care. You send your kids to private school because then you can pretend you're an involved parent.
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Aug 9, 2014 03:48
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wateroverfire posted:The moral argument "You own what you own by ILLEGITIMATE MEANS and therefore we should TAX IT AWAY" that rscott was trying to convince his friend of failed to convince and he wanted to know why. The answer I'm offering to help explain that is "dude your fringe leftist rhetoric relies on an interpretation of how the world works that is at odds with reality and capital accumulation is pretty much our collective ticket out of poverty and not something to strangle, which is a thing most people understand." Sorry, color me confused--don't you need to already not be in poverty for estate taxes to apply?
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Oct 22, 2014 03:47
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Zeitgueist posted:Shhh...pretty much any sort of argument against an estate tax relies on convincing poor and middle class folks that it's going to effect them, which it won't. Well, I'm not trying to make this a class thing, I'm just asking for some clarification.
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Oct 22, 2014 09:50
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wateroverfire posted:$5,340,000 is like a modestly successful small business + the remnant of the owner's retirement account and the family's house in the U.S. It's money but it's not a ton of money. Sorry, I guess I'm still confused, are we talking about a tax on small businesses or estates?
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Oct 22, 2014 16:42
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wateroverfire posted:If you die your business is part of your estate unless you just own shares in a C corp or something (maybe an S corp, too, idk). But as a lot of people are pointing out, these taxes don't apply to very many small businesses. And, I mean--maybe it's different in Chile, you'd know a lot better than I would, but: wateroverfire posted:Why? They've been getting paid a fair price for their labor so their share of the equity has already been paid out. And that seems sort of random anyway, doesn't it? Dude who retires after working 30 years and dies before the owner gets nothing, but dude who started cashiering 3 months ago is suddenly a stockholder? I'm not pushing for employees inheriting a business (not sure how that would really work) but if you'll excuse me for being wholly un-PC by saying so that first part isn't really going to be true in most cases in the US.
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Oct 23, 2014 05:25
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You're definitely on to something here, you should keep writing down everything you're thinking.
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Oct 24, 2014 04:54
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Who benefits from there being more overall wealth if the distribution of the wealth stays as uneven as it is?
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Oct 25, 2014 16:58
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Geriatric Pirate posted:Another general rant: I'm not sure I'm following 100%. I think your assertion is that higher estate taxes will encourage people to retire earlier, reducing overall productivity. Is that right?
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Oct 25, 2014 17:28
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on the left posted:What people do outside of the US is none of the US government's business, so yeah. When what they're doing is freeloading off the rest of us? Yeah, it kinda is.
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Oct 27, 2014 05:33
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Geriatric Pirate posted:1) "More money than many will see in their lifetimes" is meaningless when a lot of leftist D&D goons make more in a year than "many (on a global scale) will see in their lifetimes." Of course people care about what the actual amount of money is (though once again, not a linear utility function) Wait, no, you're the one who's adding "on a global scale." We're talking about America. The estate tax in the US doesn't come into play until you hit $5,340,000. If you'll pardon my back-of-the-envelope math here: If a person works from the day they turn 18 until the day they turn 65, making the average per capita income of $42,693 anually, then over their working life of 47 years they will make ($42,693*47) $2,006,571. The average American will not make, in their entire life, half as much money as the amount of money at which estate tax starts to be a thing.
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Oct 27, 2014 18:16
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Also worth pointing out: the economic distortions that make it affordable for people to eat meat every meal are unsustainable in the long term. So that's not a great example.
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Oct 29, 2014 18:56
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computer parts posted:The resources required for chicken is not that much more than soy. I admit, I thought about mentioning the vast difference in resources required for different kinds of meat, but I assumed that someone who eats meat every meal doesn't mean they only eat chicken. If that was wrong of me, then I was wrong.
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Oct 30, 2014 01:18
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Okay, I took "the economic distortions" to mean "America's weird hard-on for corn subsidies" and kinda went from there. Yeah, that's what I was trying to talk about. When somebody talks about how nice it is that they get to eat meat every meal I don't imagine they're eating chicken and rice, you know? I was unclear, it's my bad.
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Oct 30, 2014 02:13
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on the left posted:If poor countries don't like unequal trade, they always have the option of remaining a dirt poor country of farmers and other low-capital industries. Wait, if they don't like an unequal deal they can just starve? What?
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Oct 30, 2014 13:24
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on the left posted:Poor countries are typically able to grow their own food. When trading with a modern industrialized country, a whole bunch of tradeoffs are made to trade this production for cash in one way or another that causes starvation to build industrial base. Okay, yeah, but maybe I'm still not getting the logic behind "if they don't like the unfair deal they get, they can just get nothing instead."
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Oct 30, 2014 13:44
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