Years back I did a very unscientific analysis, gathered as much as I could regarding the convictions of politicians for crimes in the United States, and separated their crimes by political party. To my surprise the Democrats had more corruption convictions, while republicans excelled in sex-related crimes. Their respective leads were negligible, at best, so the analysis was fruitless, but the moral development seemed to be lacking in both just about the same.

I object to the left/right paradigm in general because left and right are so nearly identical in their underlying philosophies. They both hold to the republican belief in the sovereign power of political machinery, that so long as their people are allowed to tinker with it long enough and send it off running in the direction of their choosing, everyone will get The Good Life. Once their power is threatened they act as a praetorian guard. Sprinkle on top of this activity some surface-level rhetorical content and one might be able to convince others there is a distinguishing mark between these two factions, but on the whole it is all similar. Perhaps, the only differences are the incidence of the beneficiaries. At any rate, this specious divide is what we get for modelling a political spectrum after the seating plan of the National Assembly.

I also object to the social categorization at use here and for the same reasons I would do so for all sorts of identity politics. There are as many political beliefs as there are people, and the term “Left” and “Right” are by now slurs meant to impugn another, or otherwise to signal one’s political purity, and not much else. A whole host of fallacy results.

Let's stop the obfuscation - what is your answer to my question? Do you as a libertarian/liberal have a responsibility not to benefit from the exploitation of others.

Absolutely.

Suppose there are two methods by which man’s economic needs and desires can be satisfied, through production and exchange, or through the appropriation of the production and exchanges of others. One is diligence, the other exploitation. Government employs the second method.

Do you believe you have the same responsibility?

When given the opportunity, powerful people will enslave others. Will use violence to prevent organizing. Will pay less than livable wages to people with limited choices. Will allow their employees to work in life-threatening conditions. Same as it ever was. To the extent that it isn't, it's because of government and labor unions.

I hope it is merely irony to advocate for the regulation of everyone’s lives just in case powerful people were to enslave us. Maybe if the government appropriates enough from the fruits of my own labor it will help stop the powerful from taking my things.

I’m curious, though, that if given the opportunity, would you enslave others? If not, why do you assume others will?

Your moral purity is maintained based on the lives and misery of millions of people.

One thing is for certain, my morality is maintained based on my actions towards others, not on my political beliefs and voting patterns. It’s clear to me, at least, that one is unable to judge another’s moral character from what he says about government regulation or what box he marks on a ballot.

Clearly there are many good people out there advocating and voting for higher wages for workers, for more protections and better conditions, and so on, but how many of those good people are out there providing them? Providing those things to workers can be moral, no doubt, but voting to force people to provide those things cannot be moral.

In my experience, libertarians don't really have much interest in "our obligations to our fellow man and to our communities." Take environmental protection - a typical libertarian recommendation of what to do when Dupont dumps tetraethyldeath in the river where I get my drinking water is to take them to court. If you don't see how laughable that is, there's not much more I can say.

Most libertarians are not interested in the welfare of their fellow citizens. Many of them see themselves as rugged individualists who deserve all the credit for what they have accomplished. They don't recognize what has been given to them just by living in our society.

Libertarianism is just another name for anarchy. I'm not using that as an insult. I mean it as a description. This from the web - Anarchy - the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government. And it won't work, can't work, for any large modern society. It's pie in the sky.

There is plenty anarchist and libertarian literature showing that the opposite is the case. I’ll accept your experience in good faith but I’m going to defer to my own experience.

They just have a little more faith in human nature and their fellow man, that if the government disappears tomorrow not everyone will go to war with one another. They believe people will largely cooperate, as they do already.

But most of all they are taking a moral stance. They refuse to rely on an instrument of exploitation and coercion to achieve cooperation with others. To do so, to me, is a sign of moral poverty. At any rate, it’s a sign that one doesn’t have much else to offer but his fealty to some class of politicians.

Speaking of pie in the sky, the vain hope that we can elect a bunch of angels to run the government is an absurd one. But, I guess we’ll keep trying anyways.

I agree with everything you've written, but what's the alternative? I would be more sympathetic to the libertarian view if there were any acknowledgement of a societal obligation to create a society where people can live decent, secure lives. Fact is, I don't think it ever crossed most of their minds. They don't really care. Do you?

The alternative is to do it ourselves. Even the most limited, night-watchman state, does not preclude our obligations to our fellow man and to our communities.

I would argue that delegating those duties and responsibilities to a bureaucracy or voting for a political party is the very least one could do in that regard, so much so that’s it’s tantamount to doing nothing, save that it allows us to signal our bonafides and allegiances. I don’t think that any of this crosses the statist mind.

Your discourse is unobjective. You do show American theory. The problem has to do with the maintenance of an objective and official State, an apparatus of welfare, coercion, and compulsion that is perpetually accountable to the citizens.

If by “accountable to the citizens”, you mean citizens get to vote out a few people in power every few years, then exactly what part of the state are we holding accountable?

The welfare, coercion, and compulsion remains, the only things changing are the beneficiaries. Posturing for the power to wield an instrument of economic exploitation such as an official State doesn’t seem to me to be an objective worth taking part in.

I care. The investigation is the punishment in American jurisprudence. It can bankrupt people.

You’re right, save for the conflation of conservatives and libertarians. I understand the close relation of the two in the United States, but they ought to be distinguished.

Conservatives are not unlike progressives in their application of government intervention into the lives of others. Arguably the first welfare state was a conservative invention, for instance, but also militarism, subsidizing, and taxation comes to mind.

One of the arguments in libertarian literature is that conservatives cannot offer an alternative direction to the one that we are heading, that is, to the enlargement of the state and the ever-growing positive encroachments into the lives of others.

See Hayek’s “Why I am not a Consevative” as an example.

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/hayek-why-i-am-not-conservative.pdf

I don't follow the bolded part. Property dualism would allow for a seperate soul that all infants have (and arguably fetuses too) that would protect them against any abuse, regardless of age, awareness, or intellectual capacity.

It’s much the same. In my understanding Property dualism is like dualism except it uses non-physical mental phenomena instead of souls and spirits.

In an act of sweet revenge, it looks like Letitia James is getting treated the way she treated Donald Trump. Now she’s being investigated for mortgage fraud. I’m under the mind that she’s getting what she deserves.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/nyregion/trump-letitia-james-mortgage-fraud.html

The notion that infants are not self-aware, therefore it is acceptable to end their being, illustrates the utter disregard for the material human body in favor of one’s own abstractions. That one can look at an infant and make such a calculation in order to justify eviscerating that human being is a calculation that ought to be condemned as evil, but is the logical ethics of property dualism. The infant lacks an undefinable property, does not act as my ideal person would, therefore he is inhuman, a zombie, or otherwise not a person. It is perhaps the logic of all atrocity and genocides.

The question boggles me, too. Thoughts and verbal or written expressions are perhaps the least consequential and harmless actions a person can make in his life time. So it is a conundrum why people get so worked up about beliefs and words and often respond with some very consequential and harmful actions, like censorship, ostracization, or even violence.

Can such an inconsequential act, like the imperceptible movements of the brain and making articulated sounds from the mouth, be evil? I don’t think so. I believe the reactions to acts of speech, though, undoubtedly are, and represent some sort of superstition of language, though I no argument for it yet.

“No one is above the law”.

Racist anti-Trump prosecutor Letitia James appears to be in hot water for possible mortgage fraud and for living in Virginia while serving as AG for New York, which would mean her AG office is vacant according to New York law. The Trump administration hit her with a federal criminal referral yesterday.

https://www.newsweek.com/letitia-james-attorney-general-new-york-residence-2060152

It’s great seeing people get what they deserve.

Good read, Tim.

I’m against the idea that liberalism is the problem because I do not believe liberalism has really taken off in the first place. I believe that when the proponents of an ideology completely violate the root word of that ideology, they are merely nominal liberals, or otherwise not liberal. So with that I get to side-step the common criticisms of liberalism. Rather, the problem of liberalism is that it is not liberal, and it never was. It is, and always has been, illiberal. We saw this most recently and clearly during the previous pandemic, how quickly a self-proclaimed free country can turn into a totalitarian hellscape. But we’ve seen it in times of war or other moments where its reign is threatened by disorder and conflict or even contrary opinion.

The life of every individual who occupies space in a self-proclaimed liberal country is highly regulated from birth until death, from cradle until grave. I would argue that liberalism’s discontents are unhappy with what the individual has become with his decreasing margin of existence.

iIlliberalism has always been the dominant ideology. Any rare inroad to freedom was the mere concession of a far mightier and dominant love of manorial order that has reigned since the time of Rome and beyond. Even the communist and fascist revolutionaries built republics, and on the ruins of what was there before. Mixed constitutions, the rule of positive law, federal judiciaries, taxation, the political oligarchy we like to call representative democracy, clamoring for state rights rather than natural ones—this is not the project of liberalism and never has been.

I have declared zero successes, to be sure, nor have I made any predictions of future events. That’s a fool’s game, yet it is absolutely pertinent to the lucrative anti-Trump racket.

The racket goes like this: predict a future Trump calamity, like a depression or nuclear war or fascist takeover. When it never arrives, promote oneself and one’s own failed prophesies as part of the efforts that helped stop it. Rinse, repeat.

I don’t know you, and haven’t followed most of your previous comments on politics, so I dont know what your political perspective is in general. There has been much written about the New Right, which is a big tent including Peter Thiel, J.D.Vance, Curtis Yarvin, Blake Masters, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk. Some of them, like Musk, Thiel and Mark Andreesen, are enamored of the ‘technocracy’ movement which believes in government by a technocratic elite. Others (Yarvin) are in favor of something more like a monarchical leadership. A. inner of them have high respect for Victor Orban? What do you think of him, and where you do stand with respect to these figures and this movement? Is there one among them who is a kind of guiding light for you? You certainly don’t sound like someone who considers the Reagan or Bush neo-liberal free market vision to be an inspiration for you.

I can’t say I have any guiding lights and don’t silo myself into any particular brand of this or that political philosophy. I like to know what others think so my readings have spanned the entire spectrum and I am comfortable gleaning insights from all of them. My political perspective is always changing but I tend towards anarchy and individualism; and if I had to put a label on it, the only one I would wear comfortably is “individualist”.

What is your perspective in general?

All that being said, I haven’t read anything of the figures you’ve mentioned save for some of Elon’s X posts. I don’t know Orban, have never seen him speak, nor have I read anything he’s written. All I know is that, according to some, I’m supposed to fear him because his name is often evoked with some frightening words.

It doesn’t look like your prediction panned out, much like the one you made about the collapse of the FBI. It appears that the opposite is the case: a deal, a partnership, with the United States acknowledging Panamanian sovereignty. That could all still collapse and fall apart into war and annexation, but so far nothing like it.

Next up, cartels and Iran. Both of these will need to occur to get you back in the green. I read you often and enjoy your efforts, but I’m still trying to assess whether I’m being given insight or fear-mongering.

How about your fears? Do you fear that we now have our first dictator as president? Do you not find this EO terrifying:

No way, I love it. I remember this guy attempting to subvert the duly-elected president from the inside, and being rather public about it. Instead of resigning, like an adult, he wrote gossipy articles and leaked information for his friends in the beltway and among the resistance racket, which was lucrative at the time. It was pure deep-state dinner theater and he should have lost his security clearance years ago.

Thom Hartmann is certainly afraid:

But why are you afraid?

I remember you predicting that of all the wars that Trump is lusting to have, a war with Panama was the second likeliest one. Given that the US and Panama recently partnered to secure the canal and deter China, with a special nod to Panama’s sovereignty, I’m curious if your fears abated or if they still remain.

About a quarter of the working-age population is “economically inactive” or unemployed in Britain. I would propose that the welfare state is unsustainable without all that labor to exploit. Multiply that loss of revenue by the amount which the “economically inactive” receive from the coffers, and it’s only a matter of time.

As for the workers, their exploitation also becomes unsustainable. When the theft of their income is used mostly to the benefit of others, including those who have yet to pay into the system, it becomes less-and-less beneficial, and more-and-more unfair, to find employment or otherwise let oneself be exploited by the welfare state. This is perhaps a reason for the British “brain drain”, as younger talent seeks better working conditions and more tax incentives abroad.

Lastly, the steady increase in state power comes at the expense of social power. This transfer of power is the cause of a lack of community. One needn’t care for his neighbors when the government will do it for him. One needn’t be charitable if the government does his charity for him. And so on.

During a recent speech at the American Bankers Association, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said this:

"For the next four years, the Trump agenda is focused on Main Street. It's Main Street's turn. It's Main Street's turn to hire workers. It's Main Street's turn to drive investment. And it's Main Street's turn to restore the American dream."

"For too long, financial policy has served large financial institutions at the expense of smaller ones. No more. No more. This administration aims to give all banks the chance to succeed, whether it's JP Morgan or your local mortgage and loan."

"It aims to get capital to Americans who need it by getting bureaucracy out of the way. For the last four decades, basically since I began my career in Wall Street, Wall Street has grown wealthier than ever before, and it can continue to grow and do well.

(I would post the video, but these kinds of facts are now verboten).

Given that wealth inequality has been on the lips of progressives for who knows how long, if this plan bears fruit for the working class, will it change some minds here? Or is it anti-Trump all the way down?

Do you believe that Victor Orban is a dictator? How about Putin? If so, tell me in detail what qualifies these men as autocratic rulers? What strategies and tactics did they use to gradually change a system with checks and balances into an autocracy? What signs would you look for in Trump to convince you that he thinks in similar ways about power as Orban and Putin?

Is it your theory that since Trump “thinks in similar ways about power” to Orban and Putin—something that cannot be proven—he is a dictator like Orban and Putin? For me that doesn’t follow.

Trump cannot become a dictator. All the checks and balances are working, and have continuously been invoked against his authority. Two impeachments, uncountable lawsuits, and so on. The only reason someone would seek to go around these checks, and choose assassination to depose the chosen representative of a majority of Americans, is because the checks and balances have checked them instead. Just take the knee.

I would empathize with those who wanted to assassinate Hitler, but not because he had a different view of power. But the only reason I’d kill a politician is if he was trying to kill me or my family.

Hitler and the Nazis are all gone. The only swastikas I see these days are the ones carved into someone’s Tesla. And the overuse of false analogies such as these only reveal to me how far they have to reach to justify their acts.

The unprecedented danger are the reactionary forces willing to take it upon themselves to kill the people’s chosen representative, and all because they fear some future conditions that never seem to arrive. I do not empathize with this brand of madness.

Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute released a new report on so-called “assassination culture” online, with Anti-Trumpism figuring prominently.

I’ll posted a brief quote below to give a sense of the undercurrent of political violence we’re dealing with.

A broader “assassination culture” appears to be emerging within segments of the U.S. public on the extreme left, with expanding targets now including figures such as Donald Trump and Elon Musk. NCRI empirically assessed this shift with original survey data and open source intelligence analysis to assess how normalized and justified violence against the administration has become in public discourse. The findings signal a threat to political stability and public safety. Key data points include:

• Murder Justification: 31% and 38% of respondents stated it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively.
  
  These effects were largely driven by respondents that self-identified as left of center, with 48% and 55% at least somewhat justifying murder for Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively, indicating significantly higher justification for violence against these figures.
  
  
• Property Destruction: Nearly 40% of respondents (39.8%) stated it is at least somewhat acceptable (or more) to destroy a Tesla dealership in protest.
  
  
• Psychological/Ideological Correlations with Assassination Culture: These beliefs are highly
  correlated with one another, as well as with the justification of the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and hyper-partisan left-wing ideology.
  
  This suggests that support for violence is part of a broader assassination culture, underpinned by psychological and ideological factors.

https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-Assassination-Culture-Brief.pdf

Given that human history’s greatest atrocities are rooted in our ability to dehumanize people from other social, political, or cultural groups, a moral person’s ears ought to ring around such rhetoric and behavior, in case it’s used to justify action.

But even on this humble forum, authors are promoting or are otherwise cheerleading for the ostracism of human beings on the basis of whom they voted for. They’ve made routine assumptions about the other’s mental states, their cognitive abilities, and how well the other has conformed to government education, and so on, in order to justify the treatment of human beings they now champion.

Though it isn’t clear whether such rhetoric is evidence of a physical threat or simply a public act of catharsis, we can magnify this by the size of social media sites like Reddit or Bluesky and I suspect we’ll find it isn’t long until they take to the streets for violence, as they’ve done with Tesla.

Not enough to offset the tax from his tariffs and the gutting of government programs from DOGE. But hey no taxes on tips... if we're lucky.

Decreased government spending and tax cuts will certainly offset the cost of tariffs to the American public. Whether they can pass the tax bills is the problem.

The world is flipping out with retaliatory tariffs but the tariff is a tax on Americans. So it’s odd that they spin around and tax their own citizens, and in a Trumpian way. It’s astounding.

Oh, you're talking about his tax cuts from 2018, due to be extended. And now we're talking about benefits to the top 20%. Do you think the tax policies he campaigned on in this term on might benefit the lower 80%?

I thought you might want to show where no tax for anybody who makes less than $150,000 a year is proposed. I couldn’t find it.

I guess use your imagination then. How would that tax cut benefit the 1% in your view?

A bold move on the national debt?

Absolutely. No one has utilized so many tariffs, no one has proposed an External revenue service, no one has created a department of government efficiency. Your image says “if not offset”. The offsets just mentioned are far bolder than just taking people’s income.

Btw, I haven't heard of a proposal to eliminate taxes for those who make less than $150k a year.

Figures.

The president’s proposals for tax cuts include no taxes on tips, no taxes on social security, no taxes on overtime, and more recently, no tax for anybody who makes less than $150,000 a year. How do those tax cuts favor the 1% in your view, given that to be in the top 1% you have to make around $800000 a year?

Trump doesn’t believe in trade. He has said he thinks trade is ‘bad’, that there is always a winner and a loser. As a mercantilist, the last thing he wants is tariff-free open trade.

“Mercantilist” is little more than a pejorative, these days, and in that sense quite meaningless. It’s not like we’re dealing in gold bullion.

Neo-mercantilist? Maybe, though I would argue his policies resemble McKinley more than Hamilton. In any case, with the decline of neoliberalism, neomercantilism stands to be the next paradigm.

But you’re right. The only way I could see this being a good thing is if it is the only way to combat the neomercantilism of China, who aims to form asymmetrical trade. I’m not too sure, but to me the theory is a sound one. The difference is that Trump aims for symmetrical trade, at least if you consider statements he’s made about fair trade over the past 40 years.

I just want to submit the following for discussion.

Talks are now occurring in Canada in regards to zero tariffs, which is exactly what the president wants.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he spoke with Prime Minister Mark Carney about that prospect on Wednesday morning ahead of President Donald Trump’s ominous Liberation Day announcement on sweeping new tariffs.

Ford suggested that Carney told him a zero-tariff situation was possible if Trump agreed to drop all tariffs.

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2025/04/02/could-canada-and-the-u-s-strike-a-zero-tariff-deal-ford-says-carney-is-open-to-idea/

It would be ironic if protectionism ends protectionism, on both sides of the border, but this is the best outcome in my view. Let’s hope cooler heads prevail.

The president’s proposals for tax cuts include no taxes on tips, no taxes on social security, no taxes on overtime, and more recently, no tax for anybody who makes less than $150,000 a year. How do those tax cuts favor the 1% in your view, given that to be in the top 1% you have to make around $800000 a year?

On the other hand, tariffs are taxes, and those are rising. Whether this and other schemes (like his golden visa) works, I have no clue.

The debt is what, around 36 million? That means each American is six-figures in the red. “It would take about $8 trillion of ten-year savings to stabilize debt as a share of the economy and about $15 trillion to balance the budget”, according to the Congressional Budget Office. So the battle is uphill, requires all branches and sides to participate, and requires massive reductions in spending. If history is any indication, very little of this will be occurring soon, but maybe Trump can set the ball rolling.

It’s “liberation day”. Trump’s tariff gamble begins and we’ll find out soon enough whether it pays off or sends the world into another depression.

Already at the table are Vietnam, who announced lower tariffs on American goods, and Israel, who cut tariffs on American goods across the board. But if the rhetoric is any indication, the trade war is poised to continue with other governments.

The gamble is widely panned by economists. Yet Trump is the first president (as far as I can tell) to take such a bold move on the national debt, which one could argue was about to lead the country into insolvency or collapse.

Fair explanation, thank you. The move will definitely raise standards and hopefully end the harassment that was regnant there.

If you continue reading you'll notice the move was supported by other moderators.your complaint is filed under: can't read, misrepresents or is lazy.

I fully respect the mods decisions. But the “deciding factor” was your personal annoyance. I’m genuinely curious to see if this is a standard moving forward.

the deciding factor was my personal annoyance as a person interested in politics but generally really disliking commenting on it as I get dragged down into the mud as well and then upon reflection dislike the thread even more by invoking my baser nature (as it seems to do with many). In addition, there was feedback from another poster on another thread about the deteriorating moderation standards. After mulling it over I decided I agreed with him and wanted to step up and do something about it. It happens to coincide with the change in Social Media use at this site, which by and large received a positive reaction that gave me an extra impulse.

I respect the decision. RIP thread.

But are all threads and posts at risk of your personal annoyance and baser nature? I just wish to know which kinds of spaces, topics of discussion, and conversations we ought to avoid should you get these feelings again, given that other standards are already posted and easy enough to remember.

This is a lengthy and revealing article about the Biden administrations efforts in Ukraine during the war, but notably during the last days they were in power after Trump had won. Biden’s final “fuck you” to the world was the crossing of “red-lines” and the possibility (50% possibility, according to US intelligence) of all out nuclear war.

GENERAL BALDWIN, who early on had crucially helped connect the partners’ commanders, had visited Kyiv in September 2023. The counteroffensive was stalling, the U.S. elections were on the horizon and the Ukrainians kept asking about Afghanistan.

The Ukrainians, he recalled, were terrified that they, too, would be abandoned. They kept calling, wanting to know if America would stay the course, asking: “What will happen if the Republicans win the Congress? What is going to happen if President Trump wins?’”

He always told them to remain encouraged, he said. Still, he added, “I had my fingers crossed behind my back, because I really didn’t know anymore.”

Mr. Trump won, and the fear came rushing in.

In his last, lame-duck weeks, Mr. Biden made a flurry of moves to stay the course, at least for the moment, and shore up his Ukraine project.

He crossed his final red line — expanding the ops box to allow ATACMS and British Storm Shadow strikes into Russia — after North Korea sent thousands of troops to help the Russians dislodge the Ukrainians from Kursk. One of the first U.S.-supported strikes targeted and wounded the North Korean commander, Col. Gen. Kim Yong Bok, as he met with his Russian counterparts in a command bunker.

The administration also authorized Wiesbaden and the C.I.A. to support long-range missile and drone strikes into a section of southern Russia used as a staging area for the assault on Pokrovsk, and allowed the military advisers to leave Kyiv for command posts closer to the fighting.

The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine

Original:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/29/world/europe/us-ukraine-military-war-wiesbaden.html

A revealing read about America’s clandestine efforts and activities in Ukraine, a proxy war, flirting with all-out nuclear war.

Time and again, the Biden administration authorized clandestine operations it had previously prohibited. American military advisers were dispatched to Kyiv and later allowed to travel closer to the fighting. Military and C.I.A. officers in Wiesbaden helped plan and support a campaign of Ukrainian strikes in Russian-annexed Crimea. Finally, the military and then the C.I.A. received the green light to enable pinpoint strikes deep inside Russia itself.

In some ways, Ukraine was, on a wider canvas, a rematch in a long history of U.S.-Russia proxy wars — Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.

It was also a grand experiment in war fighting, one that would not only help the Ukrainians but reward the Americans with lessons for any future war.

Millions deceased. God help us.

The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine

Original:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/29/world/europe/us-ukraine-military-war-wiesbaden.html

I can only speak for myself, but my own paranoia is the compression of space, that distant events and people can influence local and regional affairs. Covid is one of the more recent examples, but also war and economy. If the men of Davos had it in them to implement an agenda, like Agenda 2030, it means that a few hundred men could decide the future of the entire global population.

Note that he won’t address what I said, won’t make an argument, or explain what I said was wrong.