Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Big Think"
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I don't agree with his ideology, but he DOES make some good points about intolerance. We're finally starting to see some indoctrinated liberals who are willing to listen, for a change. That's a major break-through.
And there's a BROAD middle, who agree on probably 50% or more of the issues - like government spying, interventionism abroad and free speech - and the rest is something we could compromise on, for instance the welfare state.
I think most liberals would agree that charity starts at home, in the community, and NOT in Washington, DC. And if we can't get OUR shit together, in our communities, there's nothing that the feebs (feds) can do to change that, by edict, from the throne in Washington, D.C.
Well, they can - unlike everybody else - write checks with an empty bank account. This creates the false impression that everyone can somehow take OUT more than they put IN. Throw in a few guilty white liberals and you have a working majority that will ask for more and more government interference, even though it's ultimately destructive to everybody.
Liberals' (and neocons') policies are destroying any hope of economic success for our next generation, because they (we?) never see anything they don't think the government should spend money on, be it preserving generational poverty or killing people we don't like, overseas. This profligate spending has each and every one of our children saddled with a $50,000 debt, from the cradle, and growing every day.
Liberalism seems to like nothing more than taking a shit on future generations, with stupid policies that are - at root - sheer selfishness on the part of all us grown-ups voting ourselves a living. And if we don't change our ways, we're all rushing towards the cliff of economic and societal collapse.
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I dunno, Paul. To my eye, we're looking at a red-pill awakening by a growing fraction of a once-captive segment of society, and the hysterical sky-is-falling reaction by the still-captive, still-indoctrinated, still-brainwashed so-called liberal left is creating a short-term period of bitterness and hate. Their nice little utopia is breaking down, because people see that the more they listen to them, the worse things get.
And when I cruise YouTube, I keep stumbling across more and more people of color who actually GET IT. They're not just haters. They actually understand what's going on, and are listening to (and sharing with one another) the best minds on the Classical Liberal side, like Jordan Peterson and Thomas Sowell.
It's an awakening. And the education our kids have been denied in public schools is all there for the taking on the Internet, for instance, asshat teachers giving instructional videos away for free:
http://www.harryzaims.com/
Don't like the way I lay it down? Khan Academy. Don't like Khan? There're a million other places to get the knowledge, if you want it.
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iii: What you don't understand is that the groups you place ABOVE individuals are no better than the character of the individual members. YOU don't suddenly become a math whiz, because your teacher put you in a group with a genius geek. But in modern education, that's enough to get a passing grade, with your INDIVIDUAL competence in the discipline is subsumed into your ability to work well with others and copy the smart kid's work.
When your worship of arbitrary distinctions between groups becomes paramount, the system you create can not account for, nor respect, the individuals within your arbitrary groups, and it ends up crushing everybody, except maybe the technocrats and bureaucrats calling the shots in a new form of aristocracy that ALWAYS ends up dominating everybody.
Modern-day liberals, in their love and worship of the BORG, reject the values that filled their bellies and allows them to dissent in the first place. They don't even realize it, but they're taking us BACK to the days when all wisdom and power was in the hands of the local warlord, and the people get the stick.
Yes, there were always socialists associated with getting the worker a more just share of the pie. But all the workers wanted was fairness, and a fair wage for a fair day's work, commensurate with the value provided by the worker. What neither the socialists nor the working class understood was they were NOT under free-market capitalism, but under an essentially fascist hierarchy, where the robber baron OWNED the local government and was aided and abetted in their misbehavior by fascists.
They just don't understand that replacing fascists by socialists is just another recipe for the same entrée. It's not the capitalism that was corrupt. It was having the local law enforcement and city council in the hip pockets of the local robber baron. You REALLY fight the robber baron by offering competitive alternatives, and choosing to buy from somebody else.
The left, rather than seeking to open up competition, always subvert their own cause by asking for MORE government interference. This just ensures that the robber baron stays in business, as long as he follows the new rule set. What people MISS is that the new rule set inhibits new competition, because only the existing big boys have the resources to follow the new regs. What people MISS is that the robber barons go from BREAKING THE LAW to ensure their pre-eminence, to having the law on their SIDE, when the regulations - written BY the robber baron - somehow only keep new competition from rising.
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HeyLena: You bring up a good point. Change can be good. In nature, most changes are bad and quickly eliminated, because they don't work as well as the original. Also, change means that individuals who WERE flourishing may no longer flourish, so anyone making conscious change to the political system better be damn sure they're right, and have more than speculation and pseudoscience backing their proposed remedies.
As for the whole gay marriage thing, we haven't even stopped and asked ourselves why marriage became an institution in the first place. It was probably invented by the collective to keep a lid on unwanted and unaffordable new members being created and needing to be provided for.
If you have a male-female tag team, and both appear to be competent, then their offspring generally have a good chance of surviving and not dragging down the tribe with them, or just causing the tribe to incur extra costs.
Say what you will about what went before, but the reason it became tradition is because is SUCCEEDED and was passed on as a trait/behavior to the following generation. If it's sustainable, it persists. So when you poke holes in an institution like that, you better have a pretty good idea of exactly what you're replacing it with, or you're going to create negative feedback systems that can grow out of control and put the tribe at a disadvantage in some fashion.
So the collective decided to put the brakes on adolescent lust, but give advantage to those who did decide to marry and have children. As a strict individualist, I'm not sure I like the state getting that involved, but it's the tradition, and it's all about making and supporting more children, essentially for the purposes of the state.
Still, I do think it's a decent idea to enable an individual to confer "family" status to their family, intentional or biological. A gay couple who cohabitate and split the family chores like a family for 20 years, then it's only common sense that benefits similar/identical to those accruing to the surviving spouse of the breadwinner in a hetero couple.
But I still question whether in an advanced civilized society that the government should need to put its imprimatur on ANY family arrangement. If you want to partner up, then plan accordingly. If you want babies, then that's your choice, unequivocally, and it's nobody else's say whether they're yours by blood or by adoption. But you chose to make them or adopt them, and your choice to do so doesn't entitle you to the money from other families. That's the thing. No say on how you run it, but in return, it's up to you to make it work.
With paternity tests removing all doubt, I don't see why we need marriage as an institution. We can hold the baby-makers strictly accountable for their responsibilities quite easily. Maybe better. How many cucks are bound by law to raise up some other SOB's babies, because a married woman fooled around?
I want more babies raised by parents who planned for them and cherish them and who KNOW it's a sacrifice. I want zero babies from teen-age girls who only had them because the government would set them up in a household of their own, as an escape from the welfare mom and all the boyfriends that she had to grow up being victimized by. Now I know we'll never have a perfect world, and I shore wouldn't throw away a living baby. But I shore would like there to be a system that didn't incentivize negative behavior, and in my lifetime, those are the only remedies Democrats have offered, and we know the results.
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It's the left who deny reality. Their fruits are manifest in the education system, which is failing, inner cities, which are blighted, and lack of reason and outright lies to push a collectivist agenda. History proves that the ultimate result of collectivism is the crushing of the individual. Deny history and the historical rise of humanity. Deny the main obstacle to such: authoritarian government. Then insanely push for more authoritarian policies, attacking free speech and the right to keep and bear arms.
If ANYbody's in a religious cult, it's the empty-headed consumers of establishment propaganda that's been force-fed Americans through the major media since major media were invented. The Internet has finally offered a voice that is NOT controlled by elites, and so of course, the Establishment reaction is to paint everyone who doesn't wish to live under fascism a religious cultists.
You guys are the real cultists. You ignore and suppress any science that isn't in line with your ideology. It's very transparent, unless all you do is listen to lefties, who are very clever at plastering over the contradictions, such as "We want freedom" offered side-by-side with "We want government to run our lives for us!"
Unfortunately, there remain people who want - and DEMAND - authority over their own lives, and REFUSE to just roll over while elites try to turn us into herd animals.
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She has some good ideas and understands quite a bit, but she's letting her facts lead her thru a chain of reasoning that ends by concluding that we need to give power to the state in order to deal with problems in the world that are mostly created by the state.
Yes. Climate change is real. That does not mean I give my life up to bureaucrats and carpet-baggers of the Al Gore variety.
Yes. Nuclear proliferation is real. That doesn't mean the globalists running foreign policy got or are getting it right.
Yes. Poverty is real. That doesn't mean that the answer is just a hand-out. Maybe you can make a case for free education, but public education has been failing for decades, and the costs go up, while the marginal cost of transmitting all knowledge is effectively ZERO.
Yes. Illness and accident are real. That doesn't mean government should therefore take over health care.
Top-down approaches to social engineering are very heady, and the Leontief model was good stuff for beating equally planned-economy types in World War II, but we remain in a state of perpetual crisis that KEEPS us on a war footing and essentially fascist solutions (government edict) to the human condition.
We see all around us in nature how natural feedback systems work and how the incentives are always obvious and harmonious. We see all around us in society, where we ignore positive incentives and implement destructive incentives, because we haven't thought through the consequences of the use of compulsion to fix all of society's problems through laws, rules and regulations.
She's right on the cusp of a big epiphany by recognizing how fast things are changing but she misses the obvious conclusion that our old bureaucratic ways of dealing with things can't evolve as rapidly as the culture, itself, but in the end, she brings an Establishment message.
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Left and right make the same mistake, nowadays. Straw man the most insane and radical members of either side, and paint the entire "other side" like the most ignorant Trump voter who's just sick and tired of working his ass off to pay for parasites.
It's the LEFT which has curdled from originally well-intentioned ideas that, when implemented into law, create the OPPOSITE of the intended effect. If government programs really WORKED, then poverty would'v been solved 40 years ago. Instead, we see an alarming number of Americans who do nothing but suck on the federal tit, with no end in sight.
Unlike"regressive alt-righters," I don't blame those people. I blame the government that trapped them into dependency to secure their vote. Many in the middle class have been trapped by the same dependency, by being convinced that they can't afford their own health care. If the average person can't afford their own shit, what hope is there for the government, relying on those same people for all its funds, magically cure the human condition.
To me, contemporary liberalism is all about infantilizing the populace, from Safe Spaces that protect you from thoughts not your own, to false guarantees that you will somehow live forever, if you would just let government run your life for you. So called "conservatives" understand that the human condition ALWAYS ends in tragedy, and the SCIENCE OF GOVERNMENT is all about the best ways we can think of for the best situation possible.
Liberals can always point to winners, when they set gov't up to PICK winners and losers. But they always miss the sinking tide on which they put all boats, by governmental edict. They're like children, unaware of consequences.
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