Seems like there has to be a significant overlap between people who self-identify as politically apathetic, who say "why do we have to talk about politics," "why does everything have to be political" and people who would call themselves Libertarian if they felt like they had to call themselves something.

That certainly sounds right to me. Maybe libertarian ideology is something idealists who (Jon`C would say, and I am inclined to agree) can't accept certain negative economic conclusions that would limit this idealism. So then maybe apathetic people are somewhat similar, but instead of doubling down on their idealism, they are paralyzed by it.

And then there's the whole "I'm not usually interested in politics, but I'm pretty sure that Bush brought down the twin towers to get the oil."

Actually, in my experience it's not actually idealism, but rather relative cynicism about the alternative to a purely voluntary economy (that is, one regulated by a central authority, i.e., government). But then it's just out of the frying pan and into the fire. Or, the case of the Senate candidates suggestion, perhaps into the firefight.

I think the scope of Brian's remark makes sense in context. He's not saying we should arm little kids or violent criminals. Just that it is silly for activists (like the libertarian candidate for Senate) to argue the point of gun ownership going down the line, group by group, since the argument for gun ownership is the same for all of them. So why not make the argument simply in the general sense?

But my point was: clearly there are groups should not have guns. And the Senate candidate clearly hasn't thought clearly enough on this point to realize that he is being blinded by libertarian ideology, and that this is why he has allowed himself to say something comically stupid.

Now maybe the bigger question is: does libertarianism cause you to say stupid things, or does it just attract idiots?

saw this and thought of u guys

I wouldn’t say libertarians can’t accept certain inconvenient economic outcomes. I’d say they are basically unaware of those outcomes in the first place. Take from Saberopus the generically apolitical and ignorant, the childish idealism for people and systems from Jones’s first post, and the cynicism and contempt for complicated answers from Jones’s second post, and you have libertarianism. A kind of slothful, mean-spirited naïveté masquerading as political opinion.

“Regulation is unnecessary because the market will solve the problem” ~= thinking is hard and I’d prefer if I didn’t have to do it anymore.

Can't justify material assertions? Just call them self-evident and bundle them under a name that sounds intelligent.. I know, praxeology.

[quote=John Paul Stevens]Rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday. These demonstrations demand our respect. They reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society.

That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms. But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.

Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.

For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated militia.”

In 2008, the Supreme Court overturned Chief Justice Burger’s and others’ long-settled understanding of the Second Amendment’s limited reach by ruling, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that there was an individual right to bear arms. I was among the four dissenters.

That decision — which I remain convinced was wrong and certainly was debatable — has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power. Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.

That simple but dramatic action would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform. It would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States — unlike every other market in the world. It would make our schoolchildren safer than they have been since 2008 and honor the memories of the many, indeed far too many, victims of recent gun violence.

John Paul Stevens is a retired associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.
[/quote]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/john-paul-stevens-repeal-second-amendment.html

This is an interesting response to Stevens -- especially considering the source.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-27/second-amendment-repeal-suggested-by-justice-stevens-is-a-mistake

Incidentally, the picture at the top of the article (not a musket) is a stupid, commonly argued point. They didn't have twitter or television in mind when they wrote the first amendment, either.

Apparently some woman shot up YouTube HQ because they demonetized her videos.

Edit: Probably in poor taste. Oh well. More serious version:

When people lash out like this, I always think back to a time when someone asked me "when is violence appropriate"? It was in the context of revolution, I think, but it probably applies anywhere. My response was "when there is no other option". Violence is acceptable when change is necessary, when your vote is ignored, when you don't even have the right of petition or appeal. There's a deep-seated outrage in our culture when someone can't even communicate to their leaders that there is a problem, let alone demand that the problem be solved. That's why we celebrate when people raise arms against their oppressors, topple dictators or overthrow captive democracies. They had no choice. It was the only way for their voices to be heard.

So now a woman uses violence to retaliate against YouTube for censoring her. YouTube is an important channel for public participation now. It's also a monopoly. Being censored by YouTube would feel a lot like having your public voice taken away, I think. Worse, though, is the fact that YouTube's workers - Google's workers, in a larger sense - are completely unaccountable. That Google is, itself, totally unaccountable to its users and content creators. A frequent point of criticism is that it's generally impossible to get any problem with Google resolved, even if you're a paying customer, unless you know someone on the inside who can get it fixed for you. This official policy of ignoring the public leaves an awful lot of people in a frustrating situation, where they seemingly have no way to rectify the problem, are offered no explanations for what has happened or why it's happened, and without any way to communicate with a real person to tell them that maybe they've made a mistake, or should change their policies.

In other words, this woman had no real choice. She was denied speech, had no vote, and was given no possibility for appeal or petition. So she communicated with YouTube's employees in the only remaining manner: violence.

I'm not posting this to excuse what the woman did. She was obviously a mentally disturbed person. I also don't personally think the ability to post and monetize videos is worth dealing harm to any other person. Some people clearly do, though, and that's something Google and YouTube need to learn to expect. When you are unreasonable in your dealings with people, the people you've abused are going to act unreasonable back.

I wonder if it was even a human that de-monetized her videos. It could have been an algorithm. Maybe she should have shot the servers and spared the humans. (Edit: not that I'd condone that either)

The logical conclusion of which, dear quasi-redditor, is that a monopoly acting like a business is indistinguishable from a state censor.

Then again, disturbing images demonstrating animal abuse aren't family advertiser friendly.

Can somebody remind me why one of the world's largest platforms for free speech is completely and unaccountably controlled by a publicly traded corporation?

(Note that I would like to point out that despite my snarky comments here, I think this woman was nuts and don't condone her violence.)

YouTube is a private business. They've worked hard to build their product and their audience, and they're entitled to execute whatever policies they want. If you don't like it, you're free to start your own video streaming service to compete against them.

And when the last-mile ISP refuses to carry your data under reasonable terms, because they view streaming video as a competitor for their own services, or choose to auction streaming bandwidth to your richer competitors, well, they're private businesses and they're entitled to do that. If you don't like it, you can build your own ISP to compete against them.

Of course, the government also gives preferential treatment, construction grants, and monopolies to the incumbent ISPs. In the few markets where they don't, they at least turn a blind eye to sabotaging their competitors' equipment. Unless you're already an S&P 500 CEO, you probably haven't slobbed enough knobs to get those kinds of favors out of the government. But that's okay, because the government is a private business and they're entitled to do whatever they want. If you don't like it, you're free to start your own government to compete against them.


...

Maybe this is the real problem.

If we didn't depend on corporations to force feed us entertainment, and the corporations which have made money doing this have grown large enough to take over platforms for self-expression and free speech, then there would never have been a conflict between the self-expression of content creators and advertiser profit-motive. Of course, advertisers have always exerted influence over the creative direction of content creators, often in ways similar to what I'm describing here.

The problem is that capitalists are gonna capitalist. You own vital infrastructure, you're gonna find all kinds of new rents to extract from it. That's why every developed country has common carriage laws. Those laws aren't just for internet or phone, they're for couriers, shipping companies, taxi companies... rules that bar companies from engaging in acts of censorship and discrimination that, while beneficial for them, are harmful for society as a whole. Even if it's not a toxic business model like YouTube/Google, it could be something that seems initially benign like banning people who've publicly criticized the company, something with the potential for real hardship and social damage later on.

Invoking an earlier post I made in another thread, what you've pointed out is a bug in capitalism. Cultural output can be owned and monopolized. Common carriage is a hotfix for that bug. If you want your **** hack job of a socio-economic system to keep running, you've gotta keep it patched. That means common carriage. Not just for ISPs, but for Google Search and YouTube as well.

Today I was thinking about the woman who shot people at Youtube: she didn't pick a very effective method of attack, and she didn't even manage to kill a single person. Which makes me think: she only did this because it is easy to get a gun. Had it been harder, and she were still serious, she might as well have made a bomb instead.

Which leads me to think: she may well have been mentally unstable. But you know what? It was mentioned in this thread that in the limit, capitalism permits corporations to transition into state-like entities. But before I get ahead of myself, let's look at what an actual state could have done in a situation like this, such as China. In China, the government is building a social credit system, which likely would have prevented this woman from ever owning a firearm. Now, this is admittedly rather totalitarian: just because somebody j-walks, doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed to open a line of credit (but my impression is that just this happens in China).

But let's go back to private corporations converging to state-like entities for a minute. This woman had a bunch of nutty videos, which were somehow deemed inappropriate by the judgement of Youtube's algorithmic and humans censors, causing her channel to be demonetized. But that's all the private corporation can do! It can't take her guns away.

On the one hand, then, Youtube is at a disadvantage compared to a totalitarian government like China: Youtube can't take away this woman's guns. On the other hand, have we forgotten why conservatives are always clamoring for the Second Amendment? If Youtube were to control entire country the way it controls its users, wouldn't that be the point at which conservatives would be saying: it's time to overthrow the tyrannical government by force of arms! And I don't doubt that if the Chinese government were to control the US, that conservatives would start shooting them.

But as you guys cede the right to subject Americans to totalitarian control from government and to corporations, and so long as you've implemented this firearm free-for-all philosophy across the board, I don't think you are going to be able to stop nuts from aiming the business end of those firearms at private entities that resemble totalitarian governments.

And although it feels super ****ty to point out the following analogy, let's not forget that in a lot of cases, public schools feel a hell of a lot like a totalitarian state for estranged kids... many of whom (apparently) have ready access to firearms (has a private school ever been shot up in the US? Not since I can remember).

USA: "Let's trap winners and losers in the same space, give them guns, and hope for the best"

Jones, congrats on unpacking the realpolitik of rich liberal gun control.

This is one of the reasons why liberals and conservatives can never see eye to eye on gun control.

Conservatives’ll dig their heels in and say **** like “if you ban guns, only the criminals will have guns”. Like it’s some grand epiphany, like the liberals don’t know that.

But that’s not the kind of gun violence the liberals really care about stopping. Crime doesn’t affect liberals, or in general the middle class or the wealthy. Crime is a highly localized problem, a problem for poor people who live in bad areas. If you need to own a gun for self defense, it means you are either poor or slumming it. Lord’s truth. Liberals don’t care about the poor, so by extension they don’t care about the kind of gun violence perpetrated by actual criminals.

What they care about are mass shootings. They almost never happen, really. But when they do happen, the victims are pretty damn white and pretty damn middle class. So they’re pretty damn liberal. The places that get shot up are government institutions, schools, universities, workplaces, parties, all places where you’ll find rich classical liberals or their workers. The perpetrators, in turn, are usually the mentally ill or the disaffected, and usually got their firearms legally. And that’s why making it harder to buy guns legally is the priority.

I had a long discussion with an idiot in one of my classes the other day after class about this. I tried to explain to her how uncomfortable it makes me feel when people discuss banning AR-15s, or 'assault weapons' or whatever, because like 2% of gun deaths in the US are from rifles and I understand the majority are not any of the rifles they are scared about, because most of their 'mass shootings' they list are poor non white people shooting each other over local economics with pistols. But nobody cares about that because white kids aren't dying, so I constantly hear stuff like 'I think people should maybe be able to have pistols, but who needs a kalashnikov?'

But it's not like this is the first time gun control has been racist as ****.

I've been astounded by how disconnected our discussion on guns is from reality. The current way in which the issue is being framed is as a school safety issue, and teenagers are demanding that gun control be implemented to protect them. "How many teenagers have to die before you will implement gun control laws and keep us safe?", they say. Do the people who are sympathetic to this argument have no idea that so few Americans die in mass shootings, that if you frame it as a school safety issue, teaching kids CPR would almost undoubtedly save more lives, because significantly more die from choking than from guns? Or are they being cynical, and framing the issue this way, because it's politically exigent? I expect it's the former and not the latter, but either way it's massively hypocritical, because it shows complete contempt for "the facts," which liberals supposedly care so much about than conservatives.

The real reason why liberals are socialized to want guns banned is, of course:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

Not entirely relevant, but I can't help be reminded of this song.

I’m not cynical enough to believe most liberals are using school shootings as an excuse for an anti-guillotine agenda. I think they sincerely believe in the value of what they’re proposing for their expressed reasons.

That said, no, they don’t believe in it because of the numbers. They believe in it because they trust the corporate media and the liberal politicians who affirm classist biases against lawful firearm owners. Those are the people who aren’t being honest. Well, to be clear, they’re being honest about what they want. They just aren’t being honest about why they want it, or how they intend to achieve it.

Liberal realpolitik is something even the freshman contrarians from r/neoliberal couldn’t pretend to like.

I must confuse the **** out of left-right horseshoe theorists, huh?

Between politicians and the media, I'm inclined to believe that a greater share of the responsibility falls on the media. But I think the real culprit here is actually civil society. Increasingly in American politics, "lived experience" and victimhood give a person legitimacy to speak on an issue if they're directly affected by it. And alternatively, lacking lived experience and victimhood status means that a person does not have the right to speak. The teenagers of Parkland, subsequently, were perfect spokesmen for this issue: advocates of gun control have mobilized around them because the fit the template that the left has come to see as fitting, and their critics can't really criticize them, because who can tell a victim of a mass shooting that they're wrong to want gun control, and who can criticize a teenager? Gun control advocates love that there are so many conspiracy theories about the teenagers on the right: it confirms their view that, to disagree with the liberal consensus, you'd have to make things up. I'm sure protestors are totally sincere when they see the issue as a school safety issue. But somewhere down the line, there's a donor, or someone else, who saw in these teenagers all of the ingredients for a populist movement that could mobilize the masses. Somewhere down the line, there's a person, or a group of people, who saw on Parkland an opportunity to move their agenda forward by framing the issue in a certain way. It didn't just happen by itself.

Which is to say: there's no debate here. It's all emotion, based on deference to charismatic leaders (or spokesmen, in this case).

I blame television and that "zero marginal cost of production" thing. People have lost their purpose in life and are reduced to attaching emotional significance to simulation. (Recently I've seen it said that many people use Twitter in a way that is tantamount to Orwell's 15 minutes of hate.) The rise of identity politics in the vacuum of an economic discussion doesn't help.

Who shouldn't have known that unleashing networked computers on an idle society inculcated in the medium of television would reduce us to **** slinging primates.

What if the pretense of actual meaningful public discourse in the United States was itself part of the show?

Ban the cable news media circus

And if you buy my contention that it's the media which wants this, that donor / political party / cable news channel / other entertainer might as well be a promoter.

Civic discourse, or show business?

I really think this is true.

OK, not really, since it's hardly an epidemic, and they're not all white males, but just look at how the alt. right and incel crowd glorify Eliot Rodgers and inspire guys like the Toronto van guy.

Low IQs? Really?

OK, it's 4chan. I didn't take that part literally.

Seems like an another version of the status argument. Right? Like, the argument is: some white guys feel entitled because they're white, and they also feel a sense of superiority, but when they look at their lives, they don't see themselves actually in a position of superiority, and they don't get the recognition they feel like they deserve despite being entitled to it, so they lash out. Right? That's the argument?