This one quote shows what angry white guys mean when they talk about government overreach
An Interesting discussion on a weird topic tha actually meshes deeply to the root of all the social angst we have, as well as an Ayn Rand question. Do you have the right, to modify your truck to "roll coal" or emit heavy black smoke, as a way to express your discontent and outright hatred for a system that imposes it self upon yu? Do you do unto others as they have done unto you? How does perception of wrong, vs actual wrong (and how would you ever determine it?) fit together with today's manipulation and deciet?
Since the only public spaces would, in Objectivism, also be government facilities, then police, military, or judicial rule would govern those spaces.
Regarding the public sphere polluting the private sphere, yes, you are absolutely correct; it is a violation of rights.
It seems to me, that pollution, including noise pollution is a only a charge to others, a involuntary servitude, and that cost should be paid by the user (creator of the pollution) to the affected, in accordance with a market price. Is that what you mean?
A second point: ownership is not a one-way street. You pay for people to take your garbage away and put it in landfills because you don't want disease in your house. You basically pay someone to dispose of what you own. That some large chemical conglomerate pollutes a river doesn't mean all that waste doesn't belong to them. They have still not legally transferred that property to another party. They need to clean up their own dog shit. And I believe most cities have laws against not picking up after one's dog.
I go back to a cost to me, and many others. This action encumbers me. The person encumbering another without agreement, has essentially assaulted them. There should be a cost associated with this in some manner. Plaintiff in court with a precedent for the cost could work.
I personally view this as a role for government to play. However, it should just be to assign that a cost should be attributed, and let the market proceed. My metric for government action is where a completely unregulated market will converge on a local minimum (e.g. a large company burning boat hulls). This is such a case.
Maybe we are saying the same thing.
Just another article portraying people in the Midwest or South as ‘idiots’, like their panic over the Whitefish Energy thing and $462/ hr. I kind of laughed at that one too (linemen do actually earn that much in most disasters). Whitefish is also a small business, and preferred under the laws that liberals crafted. It’s as if they are shocked that a small business in Montana could win against high margin / high overhead competitors.
I think it’s passive aggressiveness - these types are pissy because they struggle to make their Prius payment, and big diesel trucks are expensive... I’m at a loss.
I tow a 30' ultra-lite travel trailer right now (much lighter - probably 6,000 lbs), so it's not an issue right now and I didn't want to daily-drive a dually, but I'll need the dual wheels and bed payload for the retirement setup. I have a Ram right now, love everything about it, except the dumb trailer mirror setup - it's either 3 feet out with the ghost-trailer look, or completely useless when folded in.
same with preferring milk chocolate over dark chocolate.
Its truly nuts about this racism stuff. As long as one grants people of all races the same human rights, whats so bad about preferring people of one race or another ?? Anyway, most things that are declared "racist" today really have to do with cultural background and beliefs, and not DNA
You didn't know its all your fault that the Vegas shooting happened? You look just like him... Oh right, profiling based on race, gender, etc. really does suck.
Here's the good news! We can profile the author of this article as a racist liberal, and we wouldn't even be telling him something anyone else didn't already know.
Why? Because the offshore winds blow their shit into the Central Valley... so the Central Valley residents have much higher standards to meet because their air quality is so poor. The voters in the Central Valley are also generally more Republican (actually California is very, very red if you take off San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles). There are people that also keep a mailbox account in Alpine or Modoc County or some other non-populated area, just to register their car there and avoid the smog standards.
But the libs have always taken a "do as I say, not as I do".
This gets the gov't out of the business of determining what's worthwhile pollution: my 15 year-old car, cracking a window while the furnace is running to reduce humidity in the house, going to a water park, jet travel for pleasure, lighting a bonfire for the Solstice, riding an ATV, flying a Cessna for pleasure --- we should be out of the business of judging and just make people pay for their mess. I think intentionally making an engine pollute is incredibly stupid, but my opinion shouldn't stop people from doing whatever weird things they enjoy.
Until this piece I had never heard of “coal rolling”. Seems to me that if we focus on coal rolling itself, we miss the point.
Like so many other pieces written about those who are upset at where the country is going, this piece attempts to apply the drive-by media’s standard labels: white male, white nationalism, ethnonationalism, and the like, going so far as to say that at the core of the GOP is White Nationalism. Oh but that it were.
So what is Black Lives Matter if not populist/socialist/nationalism? What is the LGBT movement if not nationalist and populist? What is La Raza if not an Hispanic nationalist/populist movement? Seems that all these groups and more can be populist or nationalist and it’s OK. But be white, and stand up for your rights and you are suddenly fascist, populist nationalists; the reason is that the leftist populist/nationalists want to classify whites with Nazis and the KKK.
Most Republicans and nearly all conservatives do, in fact, stand for small government. Most stand for economic freedom, and, yes, the nuclear family and national defense. (Interestingly there was a piece I saw today where a college professor says that the white nuclear family promotes White Supremacy! http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/10/31/... )
The media portrays Trump as a white populist/nationalist. Maybe that’s true. If so, is it not an appropriate reaction to Obama’s populist/multicultural globalism? And what makes Trump’s populist nationalism evil and Obama’s good? Again, Nazis and the KKK.
For 8 years Americans watched while Obama and his minions attacked every traditional value that exist in this country. The message was: Yes, we are going to destroy that, but not for “people of color”, illegal immigrants, the poor, the “under-privileged”, blacks, women, etc., etc. So you take out all of these populist groups and what’s left? White Males. And the writer wonders how our government can adopt this socialist, egalitarian, racist, sexist globalism and not expect some kind of reaction from those who are the targets.
Both Obama and Hillary Clinton made what is probably the clearest statement ever made by either one when each said they were going to war against coal, and were going to put them out of business. So who works in the Coal Industry? Far and away White Men. So why shouldn’t they respond?
According to TheAlternativeHypothesis.com those in the economic top 40% of taxpayers in the US, the group which pays 97.7% of taxes paid to the US Government are overwhelmingly white at roughly 77%, and a huge proportion is white men. So why, again, should they not react and respond when they see their tax dollars being used to promote an agenda that ultimately marginalized them in favor of illegal immigrants who take the jobs of the white “working class”, women who take their white collar jobs, other “people of color” who get the bulk of college scholarship money, preferences in hiring and services, and all the rest.
Coal rolling seems to be just a symbol of white male anger among working whites, primarily because the government HAS been co-opted to favor Other groups against them, they HAVE been ignored and marginalized, and the war on them is being conducted by the political establishment using their own hard earned money.
What they should do is go Galt.
I must, for the record, correct a statement made in the piece. As a founding member of the Tea Party, I can state without qualification that the Tea Party was NOT formed as a result of Obama’s election, but was a grass root reaction to the continuous failure of the entire government to address the country’s financial problems - the national debt and deficit spending. It was only in the sense that Obama’s populist agenda to “spread the wealth around”, and that at public expense, was seen as additional deficit spending was the Tea Party anti-Obama. However, the people who support the Tea Party were and still are equally opposed to deficit spending and increased national debt under George W Bush, and will also be opposed to such policies under Donald Trump.
The link to the self-hating professor is quite telling of the liberal hate all white people racial ideology. It seems to promote white self genocide. Actually, if you take her quotes and substitute the word "white" with any other race/ethnicity the results is just as asinine. She's definitely brainwashed into the new Jim Crow.
By doing this, Obama has done us a great favor by having them come out of the shadows and expose themselves. We now see more and more of them in all their hateful, hypocritical glory. Like Hollywood now falling apart due to sexual misconduct, or the Antifa fighting fascism by being fascist and beating people up in the streets. And like the author of this piece who wants to believe that all white people have no right to fight back or stand up for their rights and liberties.
We see these people more and more, and find out just what lunatics they are.
So thank you, Barack. You have at last been of some service to your country! Oh........wait. That’s Kenya. Ok, so you’ve done that service for MY country. Works for me either way!!
And when did we become sworn enemies of Russia anyway? The Cold War ended in 1989, and while they have a scheming foreign policy - so do we.. hell, Obama was actively engineering the Israeli election to oust Netanyahu because he wouldn't play ball with the Iranian deal.
My long memory recalls when the dems and Hillary were hugging Russia with a "reset button", and Hillary was approving strategic commodity sales (uranium) to a Russian owned corporation while her husband pulled in a million-dollar speaking fee 24 hours later... The only reason I can actually see that the Russians would NOT want Hillary as president is because it might have gotten expensive having to buy her smile or signature at a million dollars a pop. Let's be honest, she was a political vending machine, there is not much to not like about that if you are a special interest or foreign power...
Having been a Cold Warrior, I can speak from experience the Russians are very much like the US. They value their families, they value their culture, and they want to keep on living their lives. It's what navigated us through the Cold War. They don't necessarily agree with our viewpoints (very often), but they respect our right to exist and when push comes to shove, we can make a deal with them. Above all, they really do value stability around the world, and good or bad (for them), a strong United States equals world stability and economic growth. The world has lurched for 16 years through the strongest organized fighting force in the history of the planet (the US military) struggling to defeat rag tag bands of fanatics hiding in caves with RPGs, an obscene growth and reach of US intelligence, and the growth of a corrupt political class.
Maybe, just maybe, they were doing the world a favor by deciding that "enough was enough".
The sure-fire way to end the global war on terrorism, is if American, Chinese, and Russian forces worked together to end this. Russia has not been "untouched" by terrorism either, and it's economy still needs rebuilding. It's very possible their goals and interests are not "evil" in their intent. These problems have basically cropped up following the collapse of colonialism and the strong spheres of influence of the Cold War.
The Democrats - on the other hand - are monolithic and consumed by lust for power. The revelations about the Uranium One deal now implicate everyone with any power during the Obama Administration for outright treason.
That's true. I didn't mean to suggest there were monolithic. I was saying that authoritarian-govt zero-sum group struggle thing defines their brand for me, even though they have libertarians and other groups.
"The Democrats - on the other hand - are monolithic "
They're only monolithic in being disgusted by President Trump's antics and the alt-right. They have many huge disagreements. The most obvious example is Sanders vs Clinton.
I think the Uranium One deal is a total nothingburger, pure politics. I'm glad people have a political motivation to look into things like this. I wouldn't want a one party system. Right now I see nothing at all there. The two parties are supposedly deeply divided, but the main thing they're divided on is that they see the other has having committed some crime on technicalities like undisclosed conflicts. It sounds like nothing to me.
"I think the Uranium One deal is a total nothingburger, pure politics."
CG: Pull your head out of the sand. There is a five-alarm fire blazing on this one. You really shouldn't so casually disregard it. It is the blackest of stains on the Democratic Party because it is the very corruption and foreign-government influence peddling they accuse of Trump and his campaign - and it was covered up far worse than Watergate. And the one prosecuting the Trump campaign was right in the thick of things when it was happening.
I don't follow this. Weren't they actually different? You could couldn't say all believers in Communism at that time were essentially a monolithic force.
"There is a five-alarm fire blazing on this one."
I'll be shocked if I one-day realize I was wrong and there was something to this. If there is, I am completely fooled. I see nothing at all there.
Same principles, just different people trying to implement it. That's why I don't see a huge discrepancy between Hillary and Bernie. Did Sanders get jobbed out of the nomination? Absolutely. I just shake my head at Democrats who are complaining that somehow it should be fair when their own system is so obviously rigged by the inclusion of super-delegates.
"I'll be shocked if I one-day realize I was wrong and there was something to this. If there is, I am completely fooled. I see nothing at all there."
Selling raw uranium to a political and ideological enemy is bad enough, but 1/5th of the entire US raw storage and to an entity which knows exactly how to turn it into the very weapons to destroy us? And that that sale had to be approved by the State Department - who was run at the time by Hillary Clinton and who not-so-coincidentally was receiving large donations to the Clinton Foundation and who's husband was paid $500,000 to speak to the Russians and none of this even smells the slightest bit fishy to you? And then the revelations that the FBI knew all about the Russian who was bribing to gain influence and get the deal done, and then covered up and whitewashed the investigation - even threatening a whistleblower with Federal prison time? And the chain of who knew about the deal covers EVERYONE of any substance in the Obama Administration.
If you can look at all that and still say you see nothing wrong, then to put it quite bluntly, you are a fool.
I am such an isolationist right now. If the choice is between maintaining a standing army plus permanent weapons industry or pulling an armaments industry together as needed as in WWII, I'm unequivocally for the pre-WWII model.
"you can't PROVE they didn't send you a check, right?"
What does this analogy mean? Does it mean you know to a preponderance of the evidence that major politicians are blatantly corrupt, but our institutions are unwilling or unable to put together a case, so they continually get away with it? I don't think that's true. If it is true and only part of the population that I'm not part of sees the problem, I wish they'd put together a fix. I wish they could explain it in a way that doesn't sound like just echoing politicians' self-serving claims that their opponent is a crook. The simplest explanation by far is that the claims are just politics, and our institutions for catching corruption are decent. I'm more concerned about all the money in politics that's legal but gives the appearance of impropriety. I don't know how to get rid of it. I think the whole idea of a gov't that's a big chunk of the economy is fundamentally the problem.
Your last statement reinforces that, it is the reason there IS such a huge corrupt edifice called "The fed" followed closely by 51 little corrupt, evil children called "state governments".
"the "Republicans" may not all endorse the stupidity behind rolling coal"
Yes. I agree. The important claim of this article is not about blowing black smoke but that Republicans stand for a zero-sum struggle between identity groups to wield authoritarian gov't powers to hurt other groups. That's why I say the article reads like Democratic propaganda, but it also rings true. I don't mean the coal stuff but rather President Trump speaking on policy issues.
President Trump's supporters who are not his redneck idiot base say those of us who think that have been manipulated by the media who try to sabotage Trump by wrongly associating him with racism, nationalism, etc. Okay. If that's true the media are doing a good job of it. The tie to rolling coal is a stretch for me, but the conclusion seems true.
taurants; but in a place owned by all people there, such as a jury room, that would be different). I do not go along with the "nationalistic" attitude. Irving Berlin, who wrote "God Bless America", was a Russian-born Jew.
And so, for that matter, was Ayn Rand.
The historical presence of certain races in the country does not constitute any part of the American dream. It is, rather, the spirit of individualism and sense of life that distinguishes America from all other countries.
Let those who seek to engender racism against minorities , "racialism" against non-minorities, or accuse other's of racism for judging behavior rationally be damned.
Wanted: a means by which to define property rights, and damages, relating to pollution of air, land and water. Land is the easiest to define; water next; air hardest of all. Difficult, but scarcely impossible.