Freedom is not safe

Tish

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." John Rogers

 

In today's news (1) 66% of southern states Republicans support leaving the union to set up their own country. (2) The Guardian is reporting they now have leaked Russian documentation which says Russia does have Kompromat on Trump, which was acquired during "Certain Visits" and "Certain Situations" related to his travels.

 

simply incorrect I have no idea how you got that out of anything I wrote , which is why I argue hard for semantics and definitions and attempt not to assume

my view is that true altruism does not exist , but what that DOES NOT mean is that people dont do good things, people do good things for others because it makes them feel good OR they would not do it, acts that appear selfless aren't really
Is there such a thing as a truly unselfish act? | HowStuffWorks
BBC - Earth - There is no such thing as a truly selfless act
Is there such a thing as selflessness? | Debate.org

it can/could be an endless philosophical debate
or it could boil down to some people suck more than others
to use an example posted earlier "A person whose tastes for fast cars and loose women takes precedence over concern for others in need is basically in the pig category" however that person is helping those who build fast cars and fulfilling the desires of the loose women that he chooses to associate with so in essence he is (albeit probably not intentionally) "helping" others.

and as I mentioned earlier those who would kill/rape/pillage are morally bankrupt and more than likely mentally deficient/unstable

 

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are great stories but thats what they are stories, Lord of the rings is just boring, which is funny as the movie The fountainhead is rather boring wheras the movie of LOTR is moderately entertaining

 

Wrat

Sorry but have you been reading my posts, you seem to have missed by explanation? Did you read the bit I quoted from the BBC piece you linked to it was in one of my posts?

Here is a slightly edited version of that

As I’ve said I have encountered the everything is self-interest argument before pushed by evolutionary minded Social Darwinists

In simplistic terms much of right-wing thought is based on personal selfishness the idea that the great motivator is personal self-interest, left wing thought is more about community interest helping the community as a whole less motivated by personal selfishness and so more altruistic.

You like those evolutionary minded Social Darwinists seem to be using the philosophical argument of ‘pure altruism’ to undermine the idea that left wing ideas are less driven by selfishness and are therefore left-wing ideas are based as much on personal self-interest as right wing thought.

I disagree with that

The idea of ‘pure altruism’ seems to be that if someone acts in what seems like an altruistic way and if there is the smallest possibility of the smallest ‘reward’ (that the person might not even be aware of) then that act cannot be ‘purely’ altruistic and some therefore claim ‘altruism’ doesn’t exist and everything is motivated by selfishness - it’s is a viewpoint even warned against in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy piece you linked to.

We have no reason to suppose that human behavior is so uniform in its motivation. A far more plausible hypothesis about human motives is that they vary a great deal from one person to another. Some people are never altruistic; others are just as this weak form of psychological egoism says: they are altruistic, but only when they think this will not detract from their own well-being; and then there is a third and large category filled with people who, to some degree or other, are willing to sacrifice their well-being for others. Within this category there is wide range—some are willing to make only small sacrifices, others larger sacrifices, and some extraordinarily large sacrifices. This way of thinking has the great advantage of allowing our experience of each individual to provide us with the evidence by means of which we characterize him. We should not label everyone as an egoist on the basis of some a priori theory; rather, we should assess each person’s degree of egoism and altruism on the basis of what we can discern of their motives.

*

Those that push the evolutionary theory in politics (back to those the Social Darwinists again) therefore argue that altruism doesn’t exist just self interest BUT I’d argue that humans don’t live in a society of natural selection and can think beyond the constraints of the natural world. Basically we can think beyond our direct and immediate personal survival to see a bigger picture, we can think for ourselves and act accordingly

It is something explored in a BBC article

There is no such thing as a truly selfless act

"Of all the differences between man and the lower animals," wrote Darwin. "The moral sense or conscience is by far the most important." Does Platt's evidence that links our "true" altruism with the apparently selfish instincts of animals devalue this "moral sense", and the charitable actions that result from it?

"Some people have suggested that evolutionary explanations of morality show it to be a kind of illusion. After all, natural selection doesn't care about right and wrong," says Birch. "But I think a lot of this involves overselling the role of natural selection, and underselling the role of cultural evolution."

More than any other animals, we are products of our culture, and the addition of cultural evolution to the mix makes comprehending our own behaviour that extra bit more difficult.

"It's less clear that cultural evolution is a fundamentally amoral process," says Birch. "So a story of human altruism as the product of cultural evolution is potentially more 'morality-friendly' than a story based solely on genetic evolution."

*

So in political terms

1) A right winger that votes for tax cuts because they want to directly benefit from personally having more money even when they know that causes other hardship.

2) A left winger that votes for tax increases because they want it to go toward building a better society.

You cannot say that the selfishness of the two are equal because the left winger although gaining no direct benefit (even personally losing out) might gain some indirect or tangential benefit from living in a better society.

What I’m saying there isn’t equivalence (not all selfishness is equal selfishness) and that it might not even be the governing imperative (an evolutionary taint) as humans have consciousness and can examine and be aware of the reasons for their actions.

So someone might say left wingers are only doing something for selfish reasons and they could legitimately reply NO I’ve done it because I’ve though this through and it makes more sense to do these things to have a better world.

 

ok and you are on the losing side of that argument

Is there such a thing as selflessness? | Debate.org

31% agree
69% disagree

I grow bored with this around and around, you have your views which are just as stubborn as anyone from the other side, nothing right wrong or in the middle is going to effect them in any way
you misconstrue, spin things and post walls of text to support your views

I will say the world needs MUCH less of left wing/right wing and much MORE of center

I just dont care enough to continue this

 

Wrat

OK

Then my last word is that after looking at this my view is that people can choose to be selfish or not, they can choose to be very selfish or slightly selfish or not be selfish in any rational definition.

But I would point out once again that a lot of right wing political thought and ideas are based on the idea of selfishness (that selfishness is good) while those of the left wing are not – I think those that have chosen to follow right wing or left-wing ideas have made their choice on selfishness.

 

Wrat

So can you please describe what you mean by 'centre'?

I mean depending on where someone stands one person’s ‘centre’ could seem left wing and anothers right wing.

So without a description and explanation it is difficult to know what you mean by centre.

 

if one were to take this test
The Political Compass

and came out somewhat centered

 

btw I came out between Nelson Mandela and Milton Friedman
bottom center right

 

To say that there is no such thing as selflessness is a cynical pile a' horseshit, IMO. IE: to enter a body of water to save a drowning fellow human is is essentially a selfish act? Piffle!! To hold a door for a fellow human is selfish? I am not denying selfishness exists. I would question --what the fuck is wrong with people that would espouse a philosophy like that, though? Also would aver that they could possibly be some miserable motherfuckers to be around. Ahhh--but what do I know---please agree with me and love me. It will make me feel so good.

 

did you look at the figure you are closely aligned to that may help you decipher it
for example
Fidel Castro is center upper left, Hillary Clinton Center upper right
Bernie Sanders center lower left , Friedrich Hayek center lower right

and centrist but diametrically opposed are Jill Stein on the left and Andrea Merkel on the right

Trump is Upper authoritarian right, above Hillary but same quadrant

 

Its not simple as that, as soon as you realize that it becomes very easy to understand
its very far from what "U.S Libertarianism" is

 

Thank you granite45, and thank you MeAgain.

I was a securities analyst and covered the Tokyo Market, then later advised investors in the US Market. I was covering the Tokyo Market in the exciting and high flying '80's. In fact in the fall of 1988 I predicted the downfall of the Japanese economy and that the peak of the Nikkei would hit at the end of 1989 with the Nikkei between 38,000 and 40,000. The Nikkei ended 1989 at 38,900 and the first trading day of 1990 it collapsed. My prediction on the peak of the Nikkei was based on charts, and how markets end, a bit of gut feeling, and a lot of luck, but my prediction on the credit crisis and collapse of the Japanese economy was based on economics, market psychology, and I believe my education in philosophy played a role of some sort. I was very vocal about what should be done to resolve the problems in Japan, even going into the early 90's.

Which brings me back to a major problem with Libertarianism----The Credit Crisis.

In late 1988 and 1989 I warned of the possibility that the Japanese government may need to intervene if things get out of hand as I predicted their credit crisis. In the early 90's, I warned first that the Japanese government and its citizens were making a mistake by not taking the unfolding crisis seriously. (They generally felt that it only applied to the financial and real estate markets and thought it would be contained to that.) I was no longer an analyst but was setting up my own investment firm (a whole another story I've shared on these forums before---my ex-wife serves as the evil villain), but I sold several articles on the subject to various publications in Japan and to the Mainichi Daily News. As things got worse I preached for the need of the Japanese government to take action by supporting the banks.

In the end the Japanese government did not take action until it was way too late. But I got a front row seat to their credit crisis in real time. (Coincidentally I had done a lot of research into depressions of the past, mainly the depressions of the US, and I must admit that part of my interest was spurred by the gold bugs and their predictions of economic collapse and a failing dollar. I wanted to see 'how' they were wrong.) I was also working on a book at this time that predicted a very bright future for the US and that the US would be the economic leader going into the 21st Century. I started the book as a project to see where I wanted to go next career wise, and with my plans to start my investment firm. Unfortunately the book was never finished and published, though many of my ideas made it into another book written by a director of the arbitrage firm, KKR. (I think the title was something like The Coming American Boom or something like that.) He credited Shearson Lehman's Director of Global Research with the information, He was really just the Liaison of research from Shearson's global research departments and I was in the Tokyo research department. We had some really good conversations about my book, and I shared notes and chapters with him, which was a stupid mistake---I didn't know that he would take my work as his own. But there was still some satisfaction in seeing my work in print.

Anyway, it was a perfect time for me to have all that research. But of course, the Japanese government was not going to listen to some long haired foreigner, even if they did happen to read any of my articles. I was a member of the Osaka International Forum, which was composed of a number of foreign professionals and Japanese business leaders including CEO's and presidents of major Japanese companies. I did have their ear on the subject. But I often felt like I was at a disadvantage because of my youthful appearance. On the other hand, many of them were aware of my prediction of the 1990 crash and how that played out exactly as I said it would, and they seemed very receptive to what I said.

Jump ahead to 2007, I was warning of another credit crisis here in the US. This time I was focused more on technical analysis, and I didn't venture to guess the peak of the market, just that there was a very significant long term trend line on the Dow, S&P 500, and the Nasdaq, that went back to the 2002 bottom. Rather than try to guess the top, I warned that if we break that line, it is time to get out. We broke the line pretty close to the top in the first few days of 2008. Once again I had a front row view of an unfolding credit crisis, and as things got bad I preached that we will need government intervention to prevent a depression. I preached, and preached as I watched the Bush administration make one dangerous mistake after another. I even preached at Starbucks when I would hear people say, "I don't want to bail out no banks!" or, "Why do I have to bail out Wall Street?!"

I watched helplessly as the American public pushed to vote down the bail out. Now people can say things like, 'Who knows what would have really happened, if we bailed out Wall Street that first time.' And that's true, anything can happen, but I will say that the markets were expecting the bail out, and technically the market was set up exactly as it was as it came off the bottom in 2002. I am convinced that if it had passed, the markets would have surged and we would have found our way out of the crisis in the same way we saw it happen a little later in March 2009 after the bail outs did take place. I am convinced that it would also have been far cheaper to the taxpayers if the bail outs had happened then. Instead the bail out was voted down, and as I described in an e-mail I sent out to the firm I worked for, "...the markets fell off a cliff. It is as if we we are seeing the crash at the beginning of a bear, rather than a sharp drop you'd expect later in the bear or even near the bottom."

People did not realize how serious the credit crisis was. Just like the Japanese, many people thought it was just a problem with real estate and the stock market and that they would not be affected. If you recall, the following Monday after the bail out was voted down, people woke up to reality---auto dealerships could not issue auto loans, and there was all kinds of signs of economic collapse. (I am sure that I wrote about this at the time on this forum and have certainly written about numerous times since.)

The thing is, it wasn't really the money that was pumped into the economy. The key factor that turns a credit crisis into a depression is the psychology. If you remember back to those days, in the following weeks everyone became convinced that we were heading for depression. I talked to CFO's and purchasing managers, and other people in company after company and over and over I heard things like, "We still have many orders coming in, and we have a huge backlog which would take us months to fill. But we are cutting down manufacturing, and are cutting back on our raw material inventories because everyone in upper management is convinced that we are headed for depression." Left and right I heard of companies that still had plenty of work and were doing well, but were cutting workers or slowing down purchases because they were convinced the economy was crashing. You can't talk to these people and tell them it will work out. They had orders coming in that would keep them busy for months to come, but they were still convinced this is the end and acted accordingly.

The only thing you can do to change this psychology is something big that has an immediate result----like a bail out of Wall Street with all the fanfare that causes a sharp bounce up in stock prices. And it has to be a government bail out---with this air of authority that we as a nation are going to do whatever it takes to turn things around. In the Great Depression for example, the Rockefellers and Morgans and the other big names got together and tried to support the market by buying, but the effect was only temporary. The money is important and it has its role in turning the tide, but the real impact, the real thing that saves us, is the impact it has on the psychology of the nation.

We are not talking about a recession here, or a bad economy. What we are talking about is a credit crisis, and a credit crisis always leads to a depression. There are now only three cases of when that has not happened. Japan, the US, and another example I can't think of (but it too involved market intervention). The US did bail out Wall Street under Obama and that marked our turning point. Japan was very lucky---the only thing that saved them was that the Japanese, especially after World War II, had a very high propensity to save. The banks held huge savings accounts to prop them up and minimize failures. But as I said, the government bail outs in Japan happened too late. and their impact was minimal. They provided an example of what not to do. While they avoided an actual depression, they did suffer from some periods of deflation, and while their credit crisis began in 1990, they were only starting to get back up economically in 2008, just as the next credit crisis hit. Thanks to America exporting all its bad debt, 2008 was a global credit crisis, and yet we managed to start climbing out of that in 2009! We provided the example of what should be done. I don't think many people realize how amazing this feat actually was. People also don't realize how close we came to creating a global depression like the 1930's. There were so many people that wanted to 'see what happens if we let the markets take care of themselves,' or, 'Let's let it run its course and start all over.'

We got a taste of what would happen if we just let it play out: the Bush Administration's handling of my old firm, Lehman Brothers. (And Geithner has been making excuses and changing the narrative ever since about how the government played a role----so you know it was a mistake. He thinks people don't remember.) This was one of the times when I watched helplessly. The Bush Administration really wanted to see what would happen if we let Lehman try to work it out on their own or fail. So they let it fail, and overnight global credit markets froze. We were lucky. We took action to stem further collapse, but the 7-Day Credit Market was destroyed and is gone forever. I am sure there are still many people holding seven day paper and will probably not see their money for decades, if at all.

This is one big problem for libertarianism. First, the very thing that led to the Credit Crisis, as it always is, was an easing of credit restrictions and regulations. he number In the case of 2008 one of the biggest things was the removal of the Chinese Wall between banks and brokerage firms. This was all done under the rallying cry of Laissez Faire capitalism. The Chinese Wall as it was called prevented banks from engaging in speculative brokerage/investment bank activities, and prevented brokerage firms from engaging in Banking activities such as home lending, savings, credit cards, etc. The first thing that happened after the Chinese Wall was lifted was Enron. That was a practice run for what became the Credit Crisis. Now before someone says, 'But if we listen to Ron Paul...!' No! His ideas are worse, beginning with ending the Federal Reserve. There are many ways that a credit crisis can happen, and they do happen from time to time, and it always involves some kind of easing. The Federal Reserve was created not to prevent inflation, but to prevent deflation, and therefore depressions. They have done a very amazing job at this. All you have to do is look at a long term chart that shows deflation and inflation over the history of our nation and see what happened after they were created in about 1913. But the thing is---problem number one---easing of credit and financial regulations (which follows along Libertarian ideals) leads to credit crisis. I am not saying there should not be easing, it can be a good thing. But credit crisis happen.

The second problem is that to prevent a credit crisis from turning into a depression, there has to be government intervention massive enough to change the psychology of the market/economy. Libertarians are very adverse to such a thing. In fact, a very libertarian style government could probably not even have the resources or structures in place to even begin such an intervention, if it achieves its libertarian ideals. But even if they did, to take such an action of market intervention blatantly goes against Libertarian policy.

And that, I believe, would be incredibly catastrophic. One of the biggest dangers I see to capitalism today is the rise of the Too-Big-To-Fail multinational corporations. In fact, I argue that these firms are no longer the problem of single nations, like the US, or Japan, or wherever they may seem to call home. They represent a global problem if they were to collapse. In around 2012 a Swiss economic think tank set out to map corporate ownership on a global basis. They made a surprise discovery in doing so---the vast bulk of global corporate ownership is concentrated into a massive supercell of too-big-to-fail multinationals. The super cell is made up of smaller big cells, but they are all interwoven by cross shareholdings and then lines of ownership and crossholdings into the smaller corporations around the world. This is not the result of a global conspiracy or a world government take over. It is a natural course of evolution. Consider, for example, if you were in charge of handling your company's investment portfolio and your job was on the line. Would you take big positions in small risky companies? No, of course not, you would take large holdings in well known, well established big companies, then you would spread out smaller holdings among smaller companies that will enhance the portfolios return. The thing is that these too-big-to-fail companies, which are much larger today than they were even in 2008, have cross share holdings with each other, and in a depressionary event it is very possible that the whole structure of global equity could implode as a couple of failures could spread like dominos. In the 1960's they used to say things like, if the US catches a cold the rest of the world gets the flu, or if GM catches a cold the rest of the world catches the flu. Economies are all interconnected, But each year as technology makes the world smaller, it becomes even more so. You also have to consider that we have become heavily dependent on technology and on each other far more so than in the last depression. In a massive economic collapse, how will you fix your car if all the shops are closed? What if the factory you need to manufacture the medicine you need to stay alive shuts down? What if the supply chains, or the producers of raw materials that feed that factory break down or the technology that manages the infrastructure needed to get those medicines to market breaks down. No one knows what would really happen if a major economic collapse were to happen today, but we can be sure that it would not be pretty. We owe it to ourselves and the whole world to not ever let ourselves into a situation where we would find out.

 

Thank you for your perspectives on macroeconomic events of our time. My specialty was economic development for a natural resource agency. I attended a meeting of international forestry research organizations in Kyoto in the mid 90’s and our Japanese hosts had been very shaken by the collapse of what they called the “bubble economy”

I was retired by the time of the near miss in America in 2007 to 2009. I don’t think many people realize how close to the brink we came. I also think government intervention came in the nick of time. Your account of those issues is very enlightening. I took my first macroeconomics class in 1964 at a State College in Wisconsin and many of the discussions by Professor Hy Sang Lee were spot on. I might add that the role of government in managing the economy was much more accepted in those days…perhaps because the horrors of the Great Depression were still fresh in people’s minds.

 

Wrat

So you are basically saying you don’t know

As someone has pointed out the Political Compass is really just a “what Friends character are you“ quiz it’s a bit of fun and should not be taken seriously.

I mean which Nelson Mandela the early one that supported terrorism or the later one that was against it and why would anyone want to be anything like Milton Friedman given the failure of free market ideas.

I’ve already talked about nationalstic libertarians that can be both for the free market and against it and you can have US right wingers that both claim to champion ‘freedom’ and support voter suppression.

And what is in-between Nelson and Milton is it Rachel, or Joey?

You said you wanted more ‘centre’ politics can you explain what you mean?

 

What I used to get was people claiming they were of the ‘centre’ in politics because they were 'right wing on economics but left wing on social issues'

But as I kept pointing out that just meant they were right wing because right wing economic policies have an effect on social policies.

A right wing libertarian might claim for example they are not against abortion and are against racism – but what they often mean is they don’t care about these issues as long as it doesn’t cost them anything.

Basically not caring about say abortion or racism is not a left wing stance – left wingers on the whole want to do something about them – better sex education, universal healthcare and properly funded clinics can help reduce the number of abortions and make the ones that do take place safer – but that means money and the taxes to raise that money and on the whole right wing libertarians are against that, right wing libertarians might not be against people having an abortion but they are not going to help to bring down the numbers or help the women involved.

Same with racism a right-wing libertarian might say they are not racist and even be against racism but at the same time say they are not in favour of regulations that counters discrimination (Tishomingo Post 210). Again left wingers want to do something about it education, regulation, police and judicial reform, targeted training and outreach.

Right wing libertarians may not like racism or not want it but as a group they aren’t going to do anything to counter it that involves regulation or money.

So been right wing on economics and right wing libertrain on social issues isn’t been centrist its been very much on the right wing of politics.

 

I should have known better that since it challenges you it would not be within your scope of approval but whatever
The Political Compass Explained – Talking Heads (wordpress.com)
Political Compass - RationalWiki

and while its not perfect nothing is I stand by it as a good generalization
and this will more than likely be my last post in this thread