Article OP refers to assumes libertarians have to defend and live in the US.
Sure, immigration is gonna cause all these problems. Well, it’s not necessarily reversible. Get ready for the inevitable crash of reality.
We’d better hope we have a libertarian haven going before the fit hits the shan.
We can’t gather enough political capital to end the welfare state in the US: true.
But we don’t have to remain in the US.
@Serpentis
So white’s relatively higher future time-orientation and sucess has nothing to do with cognitive function? You’re merely reorganizing the chain of causality and cutting IQ out.
@Groucho
I seem to have been rather vague on this point. From The Closing of the American Mind:
Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness – and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of the various claims to truth and the various ways of life and kinds of human beings – is the great insight of our times.
Openness to different human beings has the underlying presumption that we are all basically the same. It’s merely a matter of the data that’s being input that differentiates us.
Where I was mistaken (and you seem to be too) is believing that because I saw the light, so would (or could) everyone else. I don’t think it is as simple as people simply not having access to the truth because of the lying media and politicians. Liars prey on the stupid.
Those numbers are mean IQ.
cultural paradigm…underachievement and self-destruction
What of the Latino or African countries where their lives are basically the same? You will owe that to trashy pop culture too?
Secondly, IQ is does not measure such things, it measures cognitive ability. You could certainly be underachieving, self-destructive and quite smart. It doesn’t hurt your chances of being successful though.
white people who have doomed white people’s future.
A vexing problem, I agree. Realize humanity is struggle. Your error is framing the idea in such mythological terms as if this fate is our cross to bear.
Secondly, it wasn’t an error of all whites. Most whites are just trying to live their life and aren’t bothered with politics and all that noise. How is it their fault? We’re blessed with the leisure to look at these ideas to see the errors and above all, the majority of whites fall on the center line of that bell curve.
If there is such a thing as “whites,” it’s been a failure of the whites on the right of that IQ curve who should have led them properly. Do you believe in the division of labor? If Joe plumber installs a leaky sink, do you blame whites? Hardly. This brings us back to the insanity of the egalitarian, multicultural project, where just anyone can vote and anyone can come to this country.
Where to? The U.S. was once that place. As I said, I don’t think the costs of uprooting are worth it in terms of resources, nor is the lost of that sense of heritage going to do anything for sustained health of a people.
I contend the libertarian ideal can only grow in an organic fashion, not manufactured in some fanciful underwater city as a certain author of fiction might say.
Why is that so?
To pose it in such terms- that it is karmic, just deserts, cosmic justice for the white race (how I interpret such a statement), is as I said, wrong from the division of labor point of view and I presume you are young like me- we didn’t cause this mess.
It is the same old “white guilt,” that tendency to blame all of the ills of the world on whites.
Why is it an ill? It is the ultimate white guilt to extinguish themselves. 500 years whites might not actually be much of anything.
Who is doing this?
I also fail to see how it is “wrong from the division of labor point of view.”
Are you familiar with the genealogy of guilt?
I personally see the mistakes of the past in terms of overall struggle, not the events of some sort of apocalyptic tragedy. If the only two options are heaven and hell, of course things will appear quite grim.
I figured you were about to go all religious with it.
Yes, it is. Same as it is ahead of most of the world in technology so it is ahead in libertarian theory. That is not surprising. You would expect political thought to be the most advances in places which are advanced in other respects as well.
I would add, however, that there is no reason to believe the number of pepole acquianted with or supportive of libertarianism is any measure of freedom-mindedness of a given society (or a segment of society). Potentially you could have a society where almost everyone had turned into a philosophical libertarian, but who would be timid and compliant and where therefore the control the government had over their lives would not be threatened in the least. While on the other hand you could have a society where nobody had ever heard of Rothbard, but which had to go only on the most unsophisticated and underdeveloped notions of freedom, but which was rebellious and combative and which therefore crashed down and curtailed their governments all the time.
Where I was mistaken (and you seem to be too) is believing that because I saw the light, so would (or could) everyone else.
Do not involve me in a strawman of your own making - that we all think libertarianism is enchanting enough to make “converts” of anyone it is explained to. I can’t speak for others here, but I sure don’t think that and thought I had been clear about it:
“nothing is guaranteed to triumph over individual stubbornness and willfull ignorance.”
“I’m not familiar with that utopian picture of the voting public. Vast blocks of them “vote the line” and do not bother to scrutinize what they’re told by politicians and the media.”
And don’t be deceived into thinking it is only the stupid who can be fooled or that hearing the truth makes a lie go away. Liars prey on people’s trust, ignorance, and uncritical thinking. They also prey on people’s emotions - the fearful, the desperate, the angry, the disappointed… And what about a good stage magician, or better yet close-up magician? Most of their tricks can fool almost everyone, and some nobody can figure out. And those are all presumeably normal healthy people (the audience…).
But magicians are honest liars for the most part. Consider the game of gaining and maintaining political power. Imagine what manipulative skills have been developed and honed through thousands of years of the business of politics. They cast their nets a lot wider than to just get the stupid.
If you don’t recognize at least a dozen instances of propagandized stories on the evening news your’re not paying attention. Don’t have any illusions about it - it’s a long uphill battle. Look at how many times Ron Paul was the ONLY one to vote a certain way in Congress.
“IQ is does not measure such things, it measures cognitive ability.”
Completely wrong. “IQ” is nothing more than an ordinal scale of various “g” factors (derived from test scores) that have been normalized with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Results are not useful outside of the population demographics the test was normed for. Intelligence testing owes much more to the magic of statistics than to any inherent measurement precision. It certainly correlates, to a degree, with cognitive ability. But it is a huge leap to say it measures it.
you think the OWS people are supportive of central banking? Or, rather, that they would be if they knew that cental banks create all of that money for their welfare programs?
In my experience, the social democrats only object to the central bank insofar as it’s “private” and serves the banking interests. Take Kucinich as an example. He wants to abolish the Fed and hand its power to Congress. As with all things, they have the naive belief that State power can somehow be wielded by disinterested technocrats working in the common interest. They’ve been saying this for over a century…I don’t see them changing their tune. We might be able to ally with them against the Fed, but if we ever got rid of the Fed, we had better hope to God that we (and not the social democrats) get to determine the next step.
I think the best basis for cooperation with the social democrats is foreign policy.
@ Marko
Wouldn’t you expect to see S. Korea and Japan experiencing strong libertarian impulses?
@Groucho
If you don’t recognize at least a dozen instances of propagandized stories on the evening news your’re not paying attention.
But isn’t the only thing that separates you from the masses is that you’ve heard the gospel of Ron Paul? It’s just that you’ve heard the right propoganda and they have not? You are implicity making a claim of homogenity between people, that they are tabula rasa to be filled with the right ideas. It is quite like the egalitarian notion that there can be equal outcomes from equal inputs which any libertarian would agere is stupid when applied to other spheres of life.
Ron Paul’s message sounds good because it makes sense and fits into a comprehensive system. When the right person hears the message, it clicks because they can process reaching implications. Some messages sound good because it makes them feel special or something. So answer this: why is it some of us aren’t fooled?
You seem to be the one trying to maintain two different beliefs. On the one hand cocksure of your own ability to see through lies and on the other, the belief that the people are stupid as a result of propoganda, rather than the propoganda a reflection of the state of the people. Your belief that their stupidity is the result of mere data is a variation of the utopian view of humanity that I pointed to which is that humans are all interchangeable vessels of information.
There has been analysis on the reading level of presidential speeches and it has steadily decreased. Why is that? I suspect it is because originally only white men voted. As the net widened, the tricksters no longer had to appeal to their intellects. The stage magician’s tricks became more and more flagrant. There was less emphasis on the philsophical, more and more on the hopey, changey and sexy saxophone playing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTkUeb6zQFA. The stage magician is limited with what he can get away with by the composition of its audience.
“We found that, compared to liberals and conservatives, libertarians show…a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional intellectual style…”
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1665934
Hearing Ron Paul speak was what made us cerebral, or are the cerebral more able to decipher the truth? If it were a matter of propoganda you would not expect to find any correlation between ideology and biological tendencies because “their tricks can fool almost everyone, and some nobody can figure out.”
What if the libertarian impulse has always existed as a heritable tendency? The growth of a new identifiable group called ‘libertarians’ is actually a result of the conservative party moving away from its roots while the constituent itself remained static.
It isn’t as if Ron Paul is the first incarnation of these ideas. He’s saying things that have been around a long time and had a comfortable place in the old right. Consider also that the state until relatively recently had been keeping a safe distance from the people and the parties were not so completely polarized in outlook, making a more radical platform less urgent.
Libertarians became irrelevant because there is more of them than us. The parties moved away from the principles of limited government because they no longer had to listen. They simply invented new groups who could vote: government dependents, minorities, special interests, etc.
There is so much wrong with thinking that IQ has anything to (well, first those IQ numbers I’m guessing are bunk) with libertarianism. Or “seeing the problems.” There is no tradition in America…maybe that is why there is more of a mindset for it. The Asians have a “respect your elders” mantra that is deeply engrained in their culture. America has none of that. We have a “knowledge encyclopedia” of our past and none of it means that much to us. Have you ever read Tocqueville? Democracy in America? It’s pretty good. And he was white.
This is the problem with supremecy groups. They are always looking for genetic and mental differences that set them apart. Truly libertarian…
What about Jews? Do you attribute Rothbard and Mises and Friedman to the same line of IQ reasoning argument that you’d put Marx and Rothschild in? Why wasn’t Rothbard successful in the investing market?
We are all fooled in one way or another, vdare.
If you read Bernays or Lippmann it is pretty obvious that people are virtually tabula rasa. Any belief can be programmed into people with the right methods.
This is very shallow way of thinking. The decline in language has to do with more than your whiteness, bro. You sound like a fucking nut.
hahahaha, is “magician” your word for “a manipulating white man.” All of what you said still holds and from your point of view it would make sense. White people are the smartest intellectually and philosophically, right? And they know this and use their intellects and philosophy to control the dumber people. And now that white people, ahem, I’m sorry, the “magician” has dumbed down others, he has dumbed down himself.
Here’s a story..
Are you going to get all SPLC on my ass for not staying PC?
There is so much wrong with thinking that IQ has anything to (well, first those IQ numbers I’m guessing are bunk) with libertarianism.
He said libertarianism was associated with technological advancement. Those are technologically advanced countries, are they not?
We are all fooled in one way or another, vdare.
Getting to the bottom of things does not have anything to do with intelligence? That is my point.
If you read Bernays or Lippmann it is pretty obvious that people are virtually tabula rasa. Any belief can be programmed into people with the right methods.
Markerters are keenly in tune with demographics. This only reinforces my point. Nobody is knocking on my door trying to sell me makeup or rap music. I guess I haven’t been “programmed” yet?
You sound like a fucking nut.
You on the other hand are very ‘with it,’ that you’ve almost managed to exchange ~5 posts of dispassionate discussion without slinging any obscenities or sharing with us a host of conspiracy theories. I’m quite impressed.
“magician” your word for “a manipulating white man.”
I was contiuing with his metaphor. While we’re on the topic of reading comprehension, I’m not particularly imperssed by yours.
White people are the smartest intellectually and philosophically, right?
Where did I say that? Are you unable to infer that I’d be more than able to come to terms with differentiation among individuals given I’ve been talking about IQ distributions?
As I already said, whites have a lower mean IQ than Asians and Jews. But where you draw the line is pointing out that whites might, on average, be superior to other races. Spare me your white guilt. I’m primarily concerned with the truth, not patting myself on the back.
I do not think in black and white terms as you do, so please do not project your own ignorant outlook into what I am saying.
What I’m saying isn’t particularly controversial outside the PC hysteria zone. There are already many smart people, many libertarian, who’ve already tackled this issue like Charles Murray. Here is Hans Hoppe sitting on a panel with Richard Lynn discussing race:
No, I am not PC.
You were programmed when you were a toddler.
I’ve already stated that you are programmed to your demographic. It makes no sense to market to people outside of things that will be effective. The point i was making is that people can be made to believe anything. You are programmed to what the marketers want within your demographic.
RE: Tabula rasa: In a vaccuum you could be made to like rap music and dress like a woman. If you were born and raised with the intention of propagandizing certain ideas in you, it could be done. Most people aren’t in that situation, though. Lippmann and Bernays simply say that the cultural norms provide the slate for programming. It has to do with income, race, suffrage, culture, etc. But anything can be programmed into anyone.
Who’d think that money extraction would necessitate propaganda that could convince Hispanics and Blacks to follow the same patterns of consumption that whites have followed.
Are you familiar with Plato’s Cave?
And again, Tocqueville talks about these things…it didn’t have to do with race to him…
Look at the Blacks that were freed and sent to Liberia. What was the first thing they did? Enslave the native blacks. After all of the oppression they saw…they went back and imitated the structure of money and power that the whites had for themselves…
You are the one who brought Nietzsche into it…I thought he was framing the metaphor around your intiation.
Like you theory of how colored people have fucked up your country? And how colored people’s lower IQs have brought down the linguistic prowess of the other white men that have run the country?
Right. You already said so much that indicates this statement’s truth…and even with it as a given you still implicitly say that you will continue your prejudice until “another one” proves itself to you…
I’m also curious what a Hispanic or African would need to say to you for you to think that they have an “enlightened” worldview?
ha, yeah. I’m white…
Jesus was white too wasn’t he?
This I don’t buy. You are actively looking for reasons to blame colored people (even through eugenic arguments) for the ills of society. White people are just incidentally there not causing problems themselves, but giving the colored people opportunity to cause poroblems through their freedom to do lower minded activities.
It has nothing to do with corporate advertising. Nothing at all. Not the ages of people involved. All of those youthful white kids that listen to ghetto rap like it because they relate so much to it not because corporations and ad-men tell them that it is popular and those same ad-men help to create that popular image. It is the IQ variation of the races...
I’m sure you don’t. You’ve said nothing that indicates that you are a white supremecist.
And Thomas Sowell!
Why go through the extra effort of programming when you could appeal to innate desires?
Research by Baron-Cohen who shows from birth, boys and girls have differerent preferences in toys. Boys skew toward abstract objects, girls toward faces (dolls, fluffy objects). http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=KQ2xrnyH2wQ#t=1283s
You didn’t answer the question I asked a while ago. What of the Latino or African countries where their lives basically fit the same patterns? You will owe that to trashy pop culture in America too?
You say you’re not PC, but what you are saying is lifted straight ouf of the politically correct sociology textbook.
Completely misunderstood what I wrote.
Politicians lowered their standards in order to appeal to a different group because they could. They would much rather answer to constiuents who are easier to manipulate and who lack the foresight to oppose massive deficit spending.
As such, it disenfranchised mostly white men who made up the old right which has been splitting into the libertarian party. When the immigration act of 1965 was passed, the U.S. was 85% white. As the parties massively accelerated toward big government, the librtarian party broke off, particularly with the left which became the party of welfare.
Oh, I have Sowell’s Ethnic America right here on my shelf. Does this boost my PC street cred?!
Why must they choose between the two?
I’m doing other things, what exactly was it?
haha
No, it wasn’t.
Thiank about what you wrote there.
(1) “Politicians lowered their standards in order to appeal to a different group because they could.”
(1a) There is not much of a reason given for this sentiment. If there was a reason you could have simply stated it. But, instead they did it because they could.
(2) “They would much rather answer to constiuents who are easier to manipulate and who lack the foresight to oppose massive deficit spending.”
(2a) Because of (1a), (2) still doesn’t necessarily follow. And given (2), it would seem that they did it on puropose, no? So what is the problem? The white people in charge wanted to manipulate the people who didn’t have IQs high enough to figure out the syntax of English. “White people, in dumbing down others, have dumbed down themselves…” How is that a misinterpretation of what you said?
Further, what temporal interim do you have in mind, the last 50 years? I’m trying to picture your sentiment from evidence of the last two centuries or so. Black’s and Women’s sufferage came a significant amount of time before deficits blew up into the realm that they are today.
You being so worried about PC is kind of funny. You don’t know wat race I am. You also must not have seen my perspective of the Arab/Israel thing. Which, if you did, would assuage your PC disposition towards myself.
I was referring to Sowell’s Race and Culture. And it never hurts to find white apoligists for the racialism you are pushing.
Have you read Rousseau’s first discourse? Or the second one? They talk about this in them.
Your name is “Walden,” are you familiar with Henry David Thoureau? He was pretty well read in Indian philosophy. What make you of their IQs?
Again, you should flip tropugh Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Liberty, democracy, and equality are all discussed critically. And it makes more sense than the idiotic "white people are a metric for IQ, ‘oh, no the numbers are the mean’ nonsense.
Seriously, those numbers cannot be means without a metric. 100 is that metric. Your earlier judgements were using white people’s average IQ as the mean (the metric) to judge everyone else. You can deny this all you want, but it is a basic tenet of statistics that metrics are required. Or else you are comparing nothing. Where do you provide an objective metric for measuring IQ?
This “colonization” destroyed Africa myth is plain garbage. The African nations which were most heavily colonized are today the most modern. South Africa, Ivory Coast…If you just account for IQ, it’s easy to see why some former colonies failed and others prospered. Hong Kong was obviously a success. Australia certainly became a developed country but it was rife with tall-poppy syndrome, not a likely candidate for a libertarian movement.
Allow me to rephrase. There is a difference between colonial nations in so far as their institutions go. There are those founded with the explicit purpose of redistributing their wealth to the colonizing nation and the domestic elites.
Take for example the case of Mexico, whose main purpose was the enrichment of Spain. Upon independence the institutions were not changed. In fact the only real difference was that the Criollo (American-born Spaniards) now got the full share of the loot, as opposed to sharing it with their European counterparts. With exception, a good deal of Mexican head of states have been noticably more European looking than the population as a whole. It is true that Mexico is a rich nation, but it suffers a severe imbalance in the share of wealth between the common person, and those under the patronship of the state.
Then there is the case of nations colonized for the purpose of settlement by the colonizing people, and whose institutions were not created for the purpose of redistributing wealth to the colonizing nation, but for allowing the new colonials to create wealth for themselves. The United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc. etc. fit here.
I live in the southwest and can easily see the major difference in wealth between our end of the border and the Mexican end. The border states have significant hispanic populations, yet are very different in material wealth from their southern counterparts. Why is it that a hispanic on one end of the border is better capable of saving, building up capital, and ultimately having higher productivity than their counterpart on the other end?
Is it a genetic disposition that makes one smarter, or more libertarian inclined? I would argue not. It seems to be institutions that make these changes.
And so my initial proposal that we have an experiment where we throw in children of different races together and see who develops a libertarian framework first. I suspect it’ll show that race has little relevance in one’s political leanings versus the institutions they grow up in.
You think I wasn’t an anti-statist until I heard Ron Paul? Hahahahahaha! Buster, you make so many assumptions in your arguments it’s unbelievable.
There’s a loaded question if I ever heard one. “Fooled”? How about “why is it some us don’t agree?” Have you ever heard of the “Monty Hall Problem”? Explain it to “most people” and they think it’s a paradox. But can you figure out why it is (and indeed has to be) true - and how it would be an impossible paradox if it was not true? If you can’t (or, more appropriately, “won’t”), does that mean you are “not fooled”?
Where do YOU disagree with libertarianism? Start with the basic premise of the NAP and work your way up through levels of abstraction to see where your disagreement arises. See if you can disagree without resorting to fallacious logic, internal projection, or groupthink.
Anyone, including me, can be fooled. But by exercising the skill of critical thinking (which can be learned, btw) there are many traps that you can avoid falling into. You are doing an amazing amount of projection here. I have not said (nor do I believe) that “people are stupid as a result of propaganda.” Propaganda is merely a way of influencing people and “herding” them around. Herd behavior is extremely common in people. Watch an audience sometime and observe how standing applause or a wave (like at baseball games) evolves, it might be enlightening
And let me say this one last time - I do not subscribe to the solipsistic fantasy, which you apparently held at one time, that anyone and everyone will jump on the libertarian bandwagon as soon as they hear the “good news”. Maybe it was a cult-thing with you, and if it was I’m sorry for you. Don’t assume it was that way for the rest of us or that we all arrived here by similar paths.
Let’s assume for the time being that that analysis of presidential speeches is accurate. Your opinion is that it’s due to the darkies being allowed to vote along with the ubermensch. A short-sighted thesis that reveals the shallowness of your thinking in this matter.