LastPommerFan

That's $10 Trillion (250 Million Adults times $40k) a year for the US, give or take, almost the entire economy.

My 7 year old is scooting around the kitchen on his butt carrying 2 mini-hockey-sticks, knocking around a little foam ball. "What ya doin', Drew?" "Playing Sled Hockey." :D

NHL.com article as been updated to read a 3rd round pick in ONE OF the next three seasons.

Hence the wink.

how will this be different than a Fantasy Hockey Draft?

Absolutely. Nothing political about more people getting work. ;)

SAMSON REINHART WILL BE FINE. I'm in.

interesting.

Interesting...

Bio, UB is hiring a Biomedical Research Scientist: https://www.ubjobs.buffalo.edu/applicants/jsp/shared/position/JobDetails_css.jsp?postingId=202809

It'll be interesting if they give him more than the two you get for punching out your fiancee on camera. Does it really matter if the cheating was successful or not? Who's the best hitter ever in baseball? what's the third? I honestly don't remember. Spygate, this, and ...?

I still think his was the best by a good margin.

now I'm back to my standard summer drink. The Bourbon Sour.

Now I'm drinking a mexican mule. Thanks weave.

Pasta joe, I don't want to make any assumptions about your activities and background so I need to make a clarifying question. How often to you sit in on the internal community dialogue of low income African American neighborhoods? Yes, Medicaid covers all fda approved birth control.

This is actually a reasonably accurate statement of the status quo. Parental involvement and nurturing is the largest indicator of educational success for students. However, many many students, particularly those from low income families, don't get the involvement and nurturing that they require to reach their potential. How would you propose changing this paradigm?

YAY MOAR ASTERISKS!!!!

This is the crux of (one of) my issue(s) with libertarianism. That self-interested human beings acting ethically would make for a good society becomes trivial as the definition of self interest is expanded. Even the strictest hive collectivism would argue that the actions taken are the best for the individual. The problem becomes one of awareness, ability, and life-span. I would contend that it is impossible for all people to detect all aggression. In fact, as interconnected as the world is through so many networks (social, economic, environmental, etc.) I would contend that the average person simply does not have the individual brain capacity to manage 100%, maybe even as low as 20%, of there own self interest all the time. Obviously, there are degrees here, but it's unlikely that the landowners in the Adirondacks in the 1950s were aware that the industry in the Midwest was killing the plant-life in their lakes and destroying the red spruce canopies on their mountainsides. As a result, many of these same homeowners bought products from Midwest factories, invested in major fossil fuel power companies, and even today, continue to act outside of their own self interest. It's very simple to view "Choice" as an absolute positive, but, as many philosophies are wont to do, this over simplifies a complex and dynamic system. This failure of the Libertarian system is very similar to so many classical economic models that assume rational consumers at every step. Sometimes people need to focus on changing diapers and finding missing teddy bears. If you stop them in the middle of this to ask for their choice on the acceptable environmental impact of a certain economic decision, your bound to get enough wrong "choices" to sustain a self defeating paradigm. The next failure of Libertarianism, as I understand it, comes from ability. Most people do not have the capacity to defend their own rights. The simple response to this is that it is in the interest of all people to secure the sanctity of individual rights, ergo the able will always act in good faith to defend the rights of the unable. While I believe that this fails the "smell test" of human experience, upon closer examination, it creates a situation where the able get to decide the choices of the powerless. This is the Charity vs. State Support paradigm. If the needs of the weak are met by the self interested voluntary support of those with power, suddenly the experience of the wealthy dictates the path for the needy. This has real world implications where the wealthy Christian United States provides immense support for communities battered by AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, but does so with missionary and moral strings attached. Entire cultures are converted and significant sources of support, such as birth control, are left out, simply because they do not fit into the mold evangelized by the powerful. Lastly, and this, I believe, is libertarianism's greatest weakness: people die. My own self interest cannot extend past my natural life. Therefore, much like the guy who totally checks out in the months leading up to his retirement, I can make decisions in my self interest that have consequences decades down the line which I will not suffer. Surely the non-aggression principle objects to this, but if those consequences are for people who do not yet, and may never, exist, and do not own property, what rights would they have in a Randian world? I could resolve this conflict by redefining self interest to include the interests of my heirs, my community, my planet, but now I've again expanded self interest into a trivial idea without much real world impact. If we expand aggression to things that MAY be, we are even further down that rabbit hole.

I'm saying the entire team, as a group, had a responsibility to stand up for Ryan, even though it was not in their own self interest to have their faces smashed in by Lucic.

I'm not interested in devolving the debate into a battle of semantics. As such, I withdraw the original statement and replace it with "allows us to place blame for weakness and marginalization on the weak and marginalized."

This and things like it, yes.

The idea that collective intelligence is so completely ineffective flies in the face of everything we've learned in the internet era. Humans are so much more successful, so much more powerful as groups than as individuals. The pace of science, the pace of industry, the pace of education growth are so massively larger now that huge networks of people operate as collective decision making, idea creating bodies. The idea that, in the face of totalitarian control, it is only single individuals that will rise up and free themselves is dangerous. It leads to assumptions about those facing severely limiting environments. It allows us to say things like "if the a woman in India didn't want to be gang raped on a bus, they would stand up for themselves." Placing the burden of freedom on the individual limits freedom to the able. But the bigger problem is that Rand interprets the primacy of the individual as the counter to Stalin as a Collectivist. We know that he was not this, he was a strongman dictator. It is not impossible to balance an individuals right to self determination and his responsibility to the social groups upon which he depends. I would grant that there are traps to be avoided when that responsibility is overblown, and a tyranny of the majority is instituted, but Rand takes a simplification to the extreme, and massively underestimates the value of social groups (both voluntary and involuntary) to the individual. When Rand writes, Americans with power are weary of the new threats they see from the ideas in Soviet Russia. The collective takeover of natural resources was a existential threat to the Captains of Industry/Robber Barons that were making a killing cleaning up the wreckage of the Great Depression that Unchecked Capitalism had caused. Demeaning collectivism is squarely in their interest. More recently, as the modern liberal democracy has become the preferred form of government for industrialized states from Finland to Japan, those opposed the the "restrictions" placed on power have again begun to cite the primacy of the individual as a reason to allow the continued subjugation of the powerless. While the Pauls et al. call for disintegration of the modern progressive taxation and regulatory regime (Collectivism Lite™), they offer no transition plan between now and the date when the weakest among us will be protected by a here-to-fore non-existent free market provided safety net.

:lol:

I put it in the spoiler tags, because I assumed it's a strong critique of a a demi-god among libertarians, and I'd rather debate the philosophy than attack or defend that particular Author, but the critique is my own. The critique stems from my assessment that the Libertarianism, the Austrian School, and the non aggression axiom are at best novelties of the academic mind which can exist only in simple thought experiments, or at worst, tools to implement social control outside of the State through colonially and imperially derived property rights.

The source for the critique of Rand?