I thought I was smart. I’m not. I’m clever and good at figuring things out, but there is a difference.
I thought libertarians were cool. Then I learned about the “fiscally conservative “ parts.
Libertarianism is only viable if you have the ability to effectively evaluate every option you were presented with, so as to maximize your benefit.
Unfortunately, this excludes the lower-90% of the population. Only the top-10% are wealthy enough to afford the mental headspace to do this.
It’s not just thinking that’s required. You also need the resources to hold out for the best option. When you’re going to be homeless and starve next month if you don’t have a job, you take what they’re offering regardless of if they would have accepted a better offer later. Libertarianism works if there’s no coercion. That’s not a world that exists though, so we need the government to protect people from it.
I’m all for government not controlling people’s lives, by more importantly nobody should be controlling people’s lives; whether that’s the state, a corporation, or someone with a gun to your head. We need government to enforce this. They should not tell people what they can/can’t do, but they should protect then from other entities doing that.
It’s not just thinking that’s required.
Oh, absolutely. It’s just an exclusive first step that needs addressing before anything else. As such, it becomes an insurmountable barrier for the vast majority of people long before the resource aspect comes into play.
That’s not a world that exists though,
And with how Capitalism is violently coercive (“be profitable to someone else or suffer poverty, destitution, homelessness, and even death”), this also means that it will likely be impossible to achieve until we eradicate greed from our society and make wealth accumulation a mark of deep shame instead of something admirable. Because until that happens, the Parasite Class will continue to find violently coercive ways to maintain and increase that labour-free stream of wealth they have stolen from the working class.
We need government to enforce this.
And until we develop benevolent AGI that have no “skin in the game” (no ways of being coerced and no desire to pick sides) to do the job of administration for us, we will continue to have inadequate governance. Because it isn’t so much that power corrupts, but rather that power attracts the corruptible. Exhibit A: Orange siphilis-dementia’d man with the incoherent talk.
“jojoba oil” is apparently pronounced different than i thought 😭
Except for school I never went to any institution as a kid. No nursery, no kindergarten, no after school programs. Both my parents worked part time, so there was always an adult at home. For most my life I felt sorry for the kids who had parents working 9-5 and having to be in institutions and getting institutionalized.
I was well into my 30s before my wife explained to me why I was wrong. She was studying for these kind of pedagogical jobs, and while following her education on the side line, it really turned on a light bulb in my head: I was wrong.
While the home-raised method might have worked decently when I was a kid when more people did it, it would absolutely not work today. Most of my own issues throughout childhood and later basically also comes from not socializing enough as a kid. My own kids have been through the whole institution process because both my wife and I have had 9-5 jobs. Due to this, my kids are much better developed to tackle the world that they live in, and they have not lost any off the ability to think freely or anything that I previously believed was the negative effects of being raised in institutions. Of course there are some institutions that are better than others, but overall, their personel are a lot better educated to handle it than someone who has no education on this and only believes in “what was good enough for me…”
Even today, I sometimes meet people who want to home school their kids and such. While that might be a good idea in certain cases, it’s almost always done for the wrong reasons and without regard to how difficult it actually is if you want the best for your kid.
I think this is compounded by the fact that many of the social institutions that used to exist are also greatly reduced, and children are expected to be much more structured now than they were. Used to be that kids could reasonably be expected to walk to a library or playground on their own, or play with neighborhood children, without being constantly supervised. (And yes, bullying happened, and yes, so did the Atlanta Child Murders. But the former was a much more realistic problem than the latter.) Kids were also going with parents to church, parents probably had some kind of social outlet, etc. There was, in general, more community. (I’m not bemoaning the loss of religion, since I think religion is trash, but I do miss the community that religion helped build.)
And yeah, most people I know now that home school kids are doing it to ensure that their kids aren’t exposed to ‘dangerous’ ideas.
You don’t actually smell burnt toast when having a stroke.
Joked about it to my roommate who was in med school once that “I might be having a stroke, or someone burnt their toast again.” To which he responded “WTH are you talking about?”
So I explained the meme and he debunked it for me right there haha
