If the war was simply over culture, the liberals would already have won. The liberals have Hollywood and the Internet, the conservatives have AM radio and church. It's really a war between America's culture and America's military-industrial complex. The conservatives have no culture, but they do have guns and money.

The only legitimate types of societies are either perfectly rational or perfectly altruistic. All societies that fail to live up to either ideal may be dissolved or exploited with moral impunity.

is the desire for acceptance. That's seriously all you really need to know about them. And that's all you really need to know about religion as a whole.

People are drones.

People got to choose between two options: making $60,000 a year while their neighbor made $80,000, or making $50,000 while their neighbor made the same. Most people chose the latter. People (rightfully) see this as a sign that people measure economic success relatively rather than absolutely.

But what if they got to live next to, say, their favorite author? Wouldn't a lot of them willingly choose to make even less than $50,000 a year to do that? Wouldn't a lot of people love to camp out on his/her lawn instead of living in a house?

I think what this experiment really shows is that people don't usually respect their neighbors as being better than themselves, which is natural and not to be discouraged. But I also think that people generally have somebody they look up to.

Dreams promise nothing.

I define evil as the simple, untarnished desire to do harm to people for the sake of doing harm. By this definition, Hitler wasn't evil; he simply took several then-popular ideas(nationalism, white supremacy) and merged them with faulty science. Nazi ideas on racial supremacy weren't simply evil; they were also wrong and narrow in scope. They were developed in the complete absence of any sort of skepticism, and they would be rejected as unscientific by any faculty today. The premise of the Holocaust was intellectual failure rather than operatic malice.

For every Zodiac Killer, there are millions of soldiers conditioned to follow orders, a thousand mediocre academics striving to make a name for themselves, and multitudes of single mothers whose babies just WON'T STOP CRYING. Much more suffering is caused by sheer laziness, lost tempers, and misguided, short-sighted ideology than by simple malice. The enemy of the good isn't the mustache-twirling villain but the god-fearing village idiot, the oblivious soccer mom with a blood diamond, and the manager who has to, just has to, ensure third-quarter profits.

There are no sins, there are only mistakes.

Nobody ever seems to kill anyone over clubbed baby seals or prisoner's rights. Terrorist causes are always one of the following: religious fundamentalism (duh), nationalism, racism, regional autonomy (Chechnya, Southerners), or international capitalism (The mujihadeen, the Contras).

Libertarians believe that property is an essential human right. Because of this, they maintain that taxation is an unjust and unnatural violation of their rights. Property, after all, is a natural extension of the idea of self-ownership.

Here's the problem, though. You control your body so completely that even assuming Cartesian dualism, it may as well be YOU. The same is not true of, say, a gold mine, your house, or your car. Property doesn't exist without the same sort of coercion inherent in taxation.

The natural state of things is for there to be no ownership. Nobody can lay claim to a patch of virgin forest until someone picks up a weapon and kills anyone who challenges that claim, or convinces someone else to help them do this, like the government or a group of hired thugs. Until that happens, it's free. Anyone can cross it, anyone can have their sheep graze, anyone can mine the ground under it, etc. Yes, property is ultimately needed to prevent chaos, but practical necessities are completely separate from moral rights, and even the necessity of property is ultimately theoretical.

Property (and the market) is a convenience, nothing more. When you fail to see this, you descend into totem worship and lose the argument.

Incidentally, I may have figured out why conservatives hate nature. Nothing they believe in exists in nature. Not God, not the State, not property, not the military, not even race.

Marx's theory of capitalist accumulation can be more or less summarized within the following paragraph:

The introduction of industrial machinery means that over time, production processes improve and grow more efficient. Because of this, less labor is needed in proportion to the amount of output. Rational self-interest means that this development of the mans of production will be constant. "Capitalist accumulation" does not necessarily denote the rise of large firms, it means a fall of the demand of labor alongside a growth in production. Any cursory glance at recent history will show this to be the case.

Of course, if demand for output is to grow as quickly as efficiency, unemployment will not occur. If productivity grows two times from one decade to the next and demand does the same, then the same number of people will continue to be employed. According to economic theory's basic tenet, that human wants are infinite in contrast to finite means of production, this will never be a problem.

Recent economic history does not support the idea, however, that this is true with regard to quantity. Assuming quality remains constant, there is always a cap on demand for quantity. People will only buy so many Ford Tauruses and so many Domino's Pizzas before they get bored/full. Once this cap on demand is reached, then demand on labor will begin, inevitably, to fall due to improvements of the means of production.

One (very capitalistic, even aristocratic, and un-Marxist) solution to this problem is to for demand for quality to continuously rise. Higher quality products will generally need more labor than standard quality products. The cap for the demand on quality, I think, is much less easily reached than the demand on quantity. In fact, the desire for quality may be quite insatiable. The problem with the current consumer paradigm is that quality is set aside or even denigrated, which creates a culture in which there is an artificial cap on this demand with the attending problems with unemployment.

If this is the case, then setting fire to malls and fast food bins may become a public service as the economic crisis worsens. Assuming it isn't already.

They're not a radical political movement. They don't seek to liberate anyone. The only authority that they seek to destroy is the federal government, easily the most remote and irrelevant authority figure for the vast majority of people. Every other form of authority, the church, the corporation, and the family, they seek to legitimize. Why should you listen to your boss? Because he's the guy appointed by the people who own the company. Why should you listen to the church? Because they own the church. Why should you listen to your parents? Because you live in their house. In other words, they should be obeyed simply because they exist, because they possess deeds.

Libertarianism is just conservatism without the presence of a centralized authority to keep the various ideologues in check.

is that everything happens for a reason. The first problem with this idea is that it's simply not true. Very few things even in human society have what humans would deem purpose. The second problem is that it makes people complacent. If everything happens for a purpose that you don't understand, then who are you to oppose it? The third and final problem is that inevitably, the vast majority of people impose THEIR purpose on everything else. Few can envision other people thinking fundamentally differently from themselves. Those who share this (very common) handicap will be prone to dogmatism.

In any field that is sufficiently nuanced, only the experts will be able to evaluate the ability of other experts. This is why both the free market and the government can not be truly meritocratic with regard to the arts and sciences. In the first case, the "elites" are selected and promoted based on their appeal to the people, and in the second case, they're selected based on their appeal to bureaucratic standards made or selected by people who aren't themselves experts. In neither case are the criteria for selection very well informed.

Don't take this as an endorsement for trade unions. I don't think very many, if any, organizations that live up to this standard exist or ever have existed. The closest thing that i can think of would be the university system, and that has its own problems and bureaucratic and ameritocratic tendencies.

Most of the time, people're paying to assuage their own prejudices. They pay into their churches because they're Christian, or they pay into the NAACP because they're black, or they pay into the Republic Party because they're white, or they pay into a symphony orchestra because they're rich, etc. etc. That's about as charitable as fortifying the walls of your castle.

is the will to improve myself. I can't do anything meaningful until I get it back.

Corporations are unions. They exist to represent the collective economic interests of the shareholders. There is absolutely no avoiding the fact that corporations are collective entities. This gives them incredibly large economic advantages over individuals that aren't represented by the corporations, such as its own workers, its customers, or pretty much anyone that isn't a shareholder. Given that corporations are inevitable and probably even necessary, this collective representation afforded by the corporation is unavoidable. Without opposing corporate entities, corporate interests would quickly overwhelm the interests of all groups that do not similarly organize, leading to economic imbalance.

There is absolutely nothing neo about it. The reason they pretend that conservatism got a reboot in the 90's is that conservatism has been a failed ideology since the end of World War II. It gave us the Korean and Vietnamese wars, suburbia, and 42 years of impending nuclear apocalypse. If they didn't relable their ideology, the people would realize they were heading into their Cold War failures all over again.

and other assorted con men. They profit off the stupidity of others, and little else. I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that. I hate stupidity, and anything that punishes it is a public service in my book. As long as they don't fuck the environment, I'm okay.

Everyone the Joker manages to get killed is a minority. The judge who gets blown up? Hispanic. Police commissioner who gets killed poisoned with acid? Black. The corrupt banker who squeals? Asian.

The Joker is a closet white power militant.

Sweatshops are not progress. The reason why Henry Ford is still respected despite the bad rap industrialism's gotten is because his line workers were able to buy cars. This is not true of textile workers in the third world. Henry Ford did not bulldoze workers' farms to build his factories. He did not pay them subsistence wages. And he did not work them 14 hours a day, or hire children.

Move them all to Texas. Texas is a billion times as expansive and fertile as Israel ever could be, and they won't have suicide bombers attacking them constantly.

Plus, this would please both liberals and conservatives. The Texans will be scattered to the four winds and forced to move into the large cities, where they'll have to learn to integrate or be massacred by multiethnic mobs. Liberals like myself would LOVE this. Meanwhile, we could pay New Israel to become a militant garrison state like in the old country and work to keep out the Mexicans, which should be a fucking cakewalk for Mossad.