"Freedom" thread or something

Gold is not so much a great investment as it is a great store of value. If you lock in money for a good 20 years or so in gold, maybe more, you are very unlikely to lose money on it and you'd probably be sitting on a 20% return for the whole period or something like that.  You can't say that positively about equity or real estate.  In India, passing on gold jewelry as an inheritance is a long standing tradition, esp mothers giving some or a lot of their jewelry to their daughters when they get married. 

Hey look I'm contributing to this thread:

Myth of the Hero Cop

Also, I don't think we needed any more proof but, here's a lot of boring sh*t, and a graph, simply plotting the relationship between austerity and growth. 

Edited by JJLehto - May 29 2015 at 14:34

JJLehto wrote: Also, I don't think we needed any more proof but, here's a lot of boring sh*t, and a graph, simply plotting the relationship between austerity and growth.  As it says, one should be hesitant to make bold statements, but it seems safe to say there is absolutely no evidence austerity helps the economy...and I don't think it's insane to say this shows quite plainly it's probably a negative experience for the economy. He even excluded Greece from the chart, which the inclusion of would make the results even more negative.  http://www.economonitor.com/dolanecon/2015/04/08/did-austerity-work-in-britain-one-chart-tells-it-all/ Of course, the supporters of austerity have long dropped it's good for the economy, and switched to "It's necessary" "We have to pay off the debt" but I believe most euro nations have seen their debt ratio rise. So I am not sure what justification they use now.  Pat is busy with his PhD/life, Rob I guess has stopped caring/gotten pre occupied, Logan is busy doing his thing and MoM I think finally left for good because he couldn't stand me. I'd love to have some debate but if not, I'll keep occasionally posting mainstream and/or leftist econ stuff

Blacksword wrote: I bought into the gold thing a few years back (not literally - just the arguments for investing) but I'm inclined to agree with some of the comments here. If it all goes Mad Max, gold will be as much use as a marzipan d1ldo.

rogerthat wrote: My take on the link, if there's any, between regulation and libertarianism: http://https://rothrocks.wordpress.com/2015/05/28/the-need-to-differentiate-cronyism-from-libertarianism/

Edited by JJLehto - May 30 2015 at 23:41

JJLehto wrote: I can't respect the ones who basically are out to just create some Ayn Rand fantasy land, and support cronyism.  I of course think even the good libertarians fail to realize their beliefs will create a crony state anyway, but the ones who outright want that, I have much disdain for. (My take: some have said they want to take apart the state so that way the very structure for abuse is lessened, but I feel they do things in reverse: giving the keys to the castle to the upper class/business sectors but arent removing gov, thus feeding the crony state. In theory,they should want to work on dismantling the gov first.)

So... what's up 

Time to resurrect this thread. I've found an interesting article on the oft-forgotten shared philosophical overlap and common historical roots between the anarchist left and the libertarian right. The webzine publishing it belongs to the latter faction, but I've noticed there's a good deal of shared theory between those two camps with many of the disagreements coming from the practical implementation regarding to whether follow a market economy or a socialist one. As a matter of I know a couple people who have switched sides from one to the other.

For the record, this criminally underrated feminist webzine also seems to be covering gender issues from that particular ideological grey zone, with Donna Haraway-style transhumanism being what holds it together in their specific case.


Edited by Toaster Mantis - July 20 2015 at 04:36

That's something I've noticed as well, that I find the problem in a good deal of right-wing political philosophy that the prescribed specific policy proposals don't appear to follow by necessity from the underlying theory.

See the case of American urban planner Sarah Perry, who actually contributed a couple articles to that feminist webzine I linked but also blogs at The View From Hell and The View From Hell Yes... she started a second blog at Wordpress since it allows longer posts than Blogspot. At first she started out as some kind of right-libertarian, but now she seems to have drifted into a decidedly collectivist take on political decentralization. Perry's current political standpoint been sometimes been categorized as "secular conservative", but I don't think that's really accurate at all since she considers many traditional social structures and moral values practically impossible to conserve in today's. Her real point is that many of those social structures, even when they appear impractical now, evolved to fill some kind of innate human psychological desire that a functional society needs to take into account in its workings. The fact that fulfilling these psychological needs has to take different forms as the economic and technological nuts and bolts of society changes explains most of the directions cultural evolution takes, as this essay Perry wrote for a philosophical group blog called Carcinisation argues.

The strange thing is that Perry appears to have taken quite a bit from far-right philosophy (as in ultra-nationalist/fascist) in the Mircea Eliade/Martin Heidegger/Oswald Spengler tradition regarding the importance of collective consciousness to maintaining a stable community, but attempting to divorce that orientation towards the primacy of cultural identity from nation-state and religious institutions as we know it... because how easily that collective identities tied to centralized organizations with become not just totalitarian, but vulnerable to abuse of power subverting the organization's declared purpose. An essay titled Weaponized Sacredness she wrote for Ribbonfarm, a philosophical/social-science web journal she edits, with a co-author who wishes to remain anonymous explains this further in detail.

Her specific approach to urban planning looks like it's based on the creation of localized cultural identities that are tied to the smaller local community rather than nationality or religion by allowing the cultivation of a strong level of "ritual consciousness" through active social life. That was a bit of a side tangent, but I just linked to one of the publications that Perry has written for.. and the idiosyncratic path her sociological worldview has taken specifically came from her at first belonging to the libertarian right, only then to attempt finding a way out from the weaknesses of that ideology. 


Edited by Toaster Mantis - July 20 2015 at 04:37