People who enjoy quantitative analysis of current events and social policy tend to get irritated by the fact that most people don’t know what “average” means. In fact, most people don’t know the difference between the words “some”, “all” and “many”, treating them as if they are synonyms. The easiest way to activate the nearest outrage machine is to say something like “Some women….” and you can be sure a local gal will clutch her pearls and tell you she is nothing like whatever you described. It’s madness.
Something similar happens to people when discussing social policy or describing a cultural phenomenon. What is good for society, may not always be good for each member of society. Similarly, what you like may not scale up very well. Open borders fanatics fall into this trap. They look at the quaint ethnic eateries around their college campus and think, “This is how it should be everywhere!” They never stop to think if it should be something we attempt and they never think about what actually will happen.
It’s not just liberals and libertarians that get confused by this. Lots of people say they want America to return to its constitutional founding, never stopping to think if we should actually try to do it. If we tried to roll back the 19th Amendment, there would be endless protests, even if every state promised women the franchise. Rolling back the Reconstruction Amendments would launch a civil war. You may like the idea of going back to the original, but we shouldn’t attempt it, which is why we will never try it.
This circles back to the topic of internet commerce. Lots of people like the convenience of ordering on-line and having their goods delivered to them. Some people like the fact they can buy on-line from cheaper foreign sources, thus saving some money. That’s perfectly understandable, but that does not mean we should, as a society, let Amazon monopolize the retail marketplace. There may be ugly trade-offs. Even if we can figure it out, that does not mean we will act accordingly. Instead, we will plow ahead and learn the hard way.
The easy thing to get right is what you like. The old maxim about being conservative about what you know best applies here. All the people screaming at me for questioning the wisdom of letting Amazon own the marketplace are doing so because they know how much they like shopping on-line. They don’t want any discussion of changing it. They know their tastes and habits better than anyone so they are the most conservative about those things. As a result, they instinctively recoil at any criticism of the internet economy.
To be clear, we all do this to some degree. I reject any and all efforts to impose regulations on gun ownership. I know the gun laws better than most and I know the gun statistics better than most. The only changes I favor are repeals of existing laws, but any mention of “gun laws” or “gun crimes” puts me in a defensive crouch. The most conservative position is to resists any discussion of changing gun laws so that is my default position. As a result, I probably have a few things wrong about the gun debate.
Where things always get squirrely is when the topic moves into what we should do as a society. Libertarians, of course, leave the room at this point because they think “should” means “must” and they are against coercion. This is one of the reasons I have so little patience with libertarians. Politics is about what will be done and that results from the debate over what should be done. The libertarian impulse to retreat into proselytizing about their principles makes them worse than useless in the war with the Left.
Liberals claim to hold the moral high ground so all of their proclamations about what should be done are invested with moral authority. It is why they frame every debate in moral terms. That way, they avoid the granular analysis of what they are doing, so the focus shifts to the morality of their intentions. It is often assumed that this is a deliberate tactic, but it is instinctual. Progressivism is a religion. The adherents naturally frame everything in terms of their faith, in the same way Muslims rely on the Koran for their authority.
Buckley conservatives abandoned public morality long ago, so they are reduced to turning everything into a math problem. This appeals to many libertarian-ish people which is why you see so many of them hanging around the Official Right™. It would be nice if public policy could be decided, at least to some degree, by mathematics, but there’s no history of that ever happening, which means it will most likely never happen. It’s why the Buckley Right has lost every fight over the last 25 years. You don’t beat morality with math.
Of course, no matter what your conception of what should happen is, the odds that it will happen are fairly low. Even the most modest plans have unintended consequences and most of us are easily deluded by our sense of righteousness. It is why Progressivism has devolved into a madhouse of lunacy. They stand on their soapboxes sermonizing about what should happen, only to see the opposite happen. The recent string of elections has them thinking the gods have abandoned them, which is why they are so distraught.
This is not a post with some great important point to make so I’ll wrap it up. The one take away here is that when I write about some public phenomenon, I’m usually looking at it from the various angles of the “should” position. Is this something we should embrace? Is this something we should tolerate? That sort of thing. You may like midget porn, for example, but we should not have it on television. On the other hand, you may hate paying your taxes, but we should enforce tax laws, even the terrible ones.
Your views on shopping local vs. Amazon changed my mind.
Quite seriously.
Late to the show b/c off the grid. The question of what we should tolerate came up. Five years ago I would never have dreamed of saying this, but one thing we should learn to tolerate: Nazis. Not just the larpers. People who seem to be that way without really knowing it, too. We need to acknowledge that they are on the right side of this fight, at least for now, and that we have common ground. Trump has proven that they can be pragmatic and accept less than perfect solutions as long as things point in the right direction. Which is better than we get from the stinking libertarians.
Retreating our way to Victory!
Boring people to death is the libertarian A-bomb. No wonder they’d rather shoot us on sight.
What an awful thing to say! Didn’t National Review just warn you that some truths should not be spoken? Otherwise, I might think that a National Socialist is at least human, however I compute his legendary vices; while the international socialist is anti-human, and enthusiastically so.
Conservatives like the 2nd Amendment because it enables them to eliminate the others, along with inherent rights.
The Right is the Armed Left.
Harrumph. What about poptarts?
Everyone knows poptarts are a gateway to gun violence.
Our elites are rotten because they have little at risk. The Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, the English Aristocracy and Hanoverian dynasty were as nasty as the Zuckerbergs and Bezos, but owned real property easily taken by foreigners, leaving them with nothing. For Bezos and Zuck, not so. I don’t require and its futile to demand virtue in rulers, I merely want their interests generally aligned with mine. So I don’t have half of Africa moving into my neighborhood, or a quarter of the Middle East.
As for Amazon, it is a bad monopoly, but not the one you think. It makes the bulk of its revenues by complete accident — AWS is the leader in cloud servers and even Heroku runs on it. Bezos built a massive infrastructure that he found profitable to rent out; Microsoft’s Azure and Google are distant players.
Amazon in retail is: A. companies like my employer dumping excess inventory out there, to avoid a total write-off; B. taking over the lack of retail choice forced by lowest common denominator Mexicanization of retail.
I used to be able to buy my aftershave at drug stores (Pinaud Citrus Musk and Lilac Vegetal) and now can only find it on Amazon. Ditto my digital over the air box and PVR (enabling me to ditch cable) and also the antenna. Try buying an antenna at Home Depot — they don’t have any (at least not the classic YAGI models needed for good reception). The same goes true for Doc Martens (not available anywhere here in Orange County) and a host of medical supplies for a family member and double edged razors and safety razors (the only way to shave IMHO — get yourself a Merkur or Edwin Jaegger and a sample pack of razor blades and thank me). I can buy weirdly the shaving soap at Stater Brothers. And do so.
Amazon is NOT the cheapest. By far the cheapest stuff I’ve found is at Wal-Mart. That’s not a surprise — they have lower transport costs and buy in global quantities; Amazon acts as a drop-shipper, a giant E-bay, for lots of vendors like my company taking a middle man cut and thus is generally more expensive.
Point being is that I can’t find much of anything I buy at a small shop; its either Amazon or a supermarket or some other online retailer. [I avoid Wal Mart as much as possible] Amazon is probably not competing with Kroger or Wal-Mart in grocery stores; but rather timed delivery of stuff at your doorstep that you will pay a hefty extra fee for; just to save you an hour at the grocery store on the way home. Hence the purchase of Whole Foods; a specialty upscale retailer not Kroger or Albertsons.
By all means break up Amazon, it owns far too much of web services and retail. But people will still purchase mostly online because its the only way to get choice. Choice taken away by the mass Mexicanization that makes retail what a Mexican peasant finds attractive. So goodbye old Bananna Republic (when it had funky offbeat stuff, not the GAP crap it has now) and old Trader Joes (when they had Ghiradelli chocolate chunks and Mocha Java coffee).
Whiskey,
First of all, it is good to find you back on the web again. Second, I think you are right about Amazon. It provides choice. I think of it much like the old Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs were for our peasant ancestors. except you can’t use it to wipe yourself. Internet shopping brings you stuff otherwise unobtainable at any price.It is also true that Amazon does not have everything, there are soe specialist items which I have found only at other specialist websites – such as Advanced Book Exchange for out of print. Russia also has two online booksellers “kniga.com and Ozon.ru which do unencumbered online business for those who can read Cyrillic.
I think you presume far too much intelligence, thoughtfulness, and volition in regard to the individual members of our species who behave with habitual incoherence and stupidity. This malady is a root level dysfunction, e.g. the toolbox that evolution endowed us with has been utterly corrupted and, had these idiots been born 10,000 years ago, nature would likely have disposed of them long before they could reproduce and poison the gene pool.
You seem to be conflating two separate, although related, issues. Foreign goods and online retailers. Wal-mart has long sold imports from China and anyplace else that gives them a price edge. They have also moved into the online market space, but shutting that down is not going to affect that fact that most of the goods they sell come from outside the US.
I would argue that online retail is an easier market to enter for a new competitor. No need to lease expensive retail space. All you need is bandwidth and warehouse space.
Trade policy should be the focus, not whether or not the good was sold online or in a traditional retail outlet.
Midget porn? Ive heard theres an Italian porn movie based on Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. May fly on modern cable TV…
No hope of political salvation by democratic means (repealing women’s suffrage, anti-discrimination laws), no hope through civil war (which would be horrible and quite likely lost), no hope through military coup (won’t happen); only hope I see is that someone like Trump does a sort of political “swamp-draining” coup through appointments and firings — not that this would Make America Great Again, just that it would give us a couple of extra centuries. Maybe he was right to bullshit people about the Wall and the Muslim Ban — he had to get into position to do the hiring and firing that needs to be done to keep things sort of livable for a while longer.
Two centuries? Shit, man, we are out here praying for twenty years.
It’s also important to understand the significance of, say, a calculated statistic such as an average.
After all the “average” American adult wears a one cup bra and has one testicle.
Or, if a room contains 200 people, exactly half of whom are 6 feet tall and the other half are exactly 5 feet tall, then their average height is 5 1/2 feet tall.
Oft times statistics are tossed about to provide proof of something or other, but are used merely to fool people.
For example, say that today in City X, USA, they recorded the hottest high temperature in the last 100 years; ergo, its global warming caused by your SUV and cow farts.
But it also means that 100 years ago, the high temperature in City X was even hotter !! And that was before the dreaded rise in man caused CO2; but how is that possible if CO2 was lower 100 years ago?
Oh, that’s right, the CO2 / global warming thesis is total bullshit.
Forgot to mention that my first two examples demonstrate that an “average” can represent total nonsense.
The problem with liberals is not what they want, but their idea that a simple policy change (even if it violates separation of power principles and human rights) will accomplish the good they desire. They don’t fight for the good, they fight for the policy. They want people to make a living wage so they raise the minimum wage. And the minimum wage is raised successfully. But as everyone from Bastiat to Hazlitt to Hayek noted, the unintended and sometimes unseen effects can not only negate the intended good, but multiply the evils. Yet the liberal will somehow be stuck on stupid with “But I didn’t intend these other things to happen”, and at best now, hydra decapitation like, proposes nine new laws to address the bad effects of the first, and Hayek said in “The Road to Serfdom”.
This is the true problem with the 19th Amendment. Government with power over my person, liberty, and property is dangerous. Women are liberal and liberals don’t want any limits on government.
As to those still Libertarians, I think they will dwindle and wither like Cuckservativism, Inc. Many who were energied by Ron Paul in 2012, but saw how the system is rigged went alt-right in 2016 and are moving further. To have liberty we first must rid ourselves of the Tyrants, even if they are tens of millions of moochers on the dole.
“It would be nice if public policy could be decided, at least to some degree, by mathematics”
But isn’t reality itself determined by mathematics ?
Detroit, Greece, Venezuela, USSR, etc show that ultimately politics submit to mathematics.
Internet, social medias, bitcoin dictate different aspects of society.
Would Donald Trump have won without social medias ? Probably not.
Principles should not be forgotten, but also not pretext to inaction. Conciliating what is, and what should be is extremely difficult, we can only do our best to choose wisely.
You’re not wrong about the gun debate, because there shouldn’t even be a debate.
No existing gun regulation is enforceable as it contradicts our natural right to defend ourselves.
It’s as logical as trying to regulate the clothes people wear.
Libertarian types are rationalizing things like Amazon’s increasing retail hegemony by saying that over time it will be weakened by counter social trends that will be deemed “cooler”.
These arguments make no sense to me since I don’t know anybody who actually thinks shopping at Amazon is “cool” right now. Yet people still do it and they do it because it’s easier and often times cheaper. Also, shopping online is inherently anti-social since you’re not going out and being seen in public, thus no status upgrade comes with it.
Living as I do in a place just a tad west of the middle of nowhere in South America, I get a great kick out of the concerns posted here. Although I don’t think I need ’em yet, I’ve got a stashed street sweeper 12 gauge and a 9mm Bersa, just in case. As for consumer items, barely buy any, so I don’t much care about that. It’d be kind of fun to be able to buy more “stuff” through the internet if I cared about having any, which I don’t, but I guess the bottom line is that I’m more than content having decided to leave the US for good 20 years ago and assimilated into a backward society in which at nearly 71 I can help raise my grandsons and seduce good-looking young women with my painfully acquired savoir-fare derived from many years of experience. You younger guys up there have a tough roe to hoe!
Life’s really simple in the final accounting: keep it that way!
Enjoy the wine. I hear they have good ones down there.
Not every libertarian is a non aggression principle political anarchist. The other faction believes in minimal government, maximal individual liberty and personal responsibility. Those principles guide our decision making as to what is a desirable public policy – which provides for learning from experience and taking corrective measures in order to optimize results.
there is no such thing as believing in small government or personal responsibility. you are describing a mysterious thing known to the rest of us as being an adult.
NALALT
Mean and median are often used as synonyms. Blame it on the failed education state. Scary but true.
“Rolling back the Reconstruction Amendments would launch a civil war.”
Very probably any leadership advocating this course of action would be swiftly repressed long before the onset of a civil conflict. However, another civil war may very well be in the cards for completely different reasons. And if at the end of that conflict our side is victorious, what would hinder us from pursuing a radical elimination of post-1865 amendments? After burying the bodies, we would be free to pursue any course of action, just as the other side did subsequent to that 19th century civil war.
Re Amazon, Facebook, Hollywood et. al.: Time to actually apply anti-trust law and change from being a toothless shakedown threat. As evidence for that latter assertion, it’s been pretty quiet over the last 8 years of Hollywood – Silicon Valley – Wall St. Prog funding.
The advantages are several: Attacks the Prog ecosystem; Promotes economic efficiency; Sends the message to back off the insanity; etc.
The Progs represent the “free stuff” at all levels, including being cronies of government officials and getting a lucrative piece of public policy, tax breaks, and funding. Ask Elon Musk how that works. These companies all support the side that gives them free stuff, and also the “strong horse”. Break the “free stuff” cycle and also demonstrate that the “strong horse” is the normals, and these guys will change their stripes very fast.
The normals also have a huge advantage right now. The Progs, at all levels, are acting crazy, and most people want nothing to do with crazy. Today, Turtle McConnell introduces a health bill and the Progs announce the end of the world, along with a rent-a-mob, on cue, invading Congress. Nobody knows what is going on with health care, so all of this is posturing on all sides, but few people want anything to do with crazy. May as well credit Trump’s tweets with keeping the crazies all riled up, it works to the favor of the normals.
I’ve thought since mid 2016 that Trump’s Tweets were a deliberate strategy to keep the enemy center of gravity, the MSM, off balance by moving the public discussion to another topic before they could all get the the DNC talking points, coordinate their sound bites and then gin up the outrage machine. Since it takes them about 3 – 4 days to start up their cycle, a tweet every 2 days keeps them continuously trying to play catchup.
Subsequent events (the rolling coup) have shown how wise he was to reject the establishment’s demands the he stop tweeting. He’s going to have to keep it up for the entire four years, so we ought to settle down and enjoy the show.
You’re onto something. Trump’s tweets are a legal substitute for the Slick Willie strategy of keeping the enemy off balance with a new scandal every day, to make they let go of yesterday’s.
Wait till Alibaba gets a real foothold in the US.
Given the proximity of Bezos to the Deep State I’d expect ISIS cells to begin cropping up all over China the moment Alibaba got that foothold.
Republicans in Congress should reform, cut, and simplify the tax code. They should also embrace Trump’s budget proposals like cutting Federal spending and the number of federal employees.
Like you theoretical libertarians, the Republicans got offended by these suggestions and left the room.
repeal the ammendment that introduced the income tax. gop almost has enough states to do it unilaterally. big vote earner too.
You might not beat morality with math, but that’s a little like saying you don’t beat morality with gravity. Gravity always wins. As the People of Illinois are learning, math is winning there too. I’m sure somebody will swoop in to save them from the math, but it cannot be argued that their morality has triumphed over math.
As far as internet shopping goes, I like it. I should support local businesses and local citizens, which I do, in the form of the fleets of local truck drivers who deliver products to my door. When I can, I will buy from vendors other than Amazon. We like Wayfair.com, for example.
When I buy local, it’s usually food. Nearly everything in the store was shipped there from someplace else, with an intermediary – a store clerk, a shop owner, etc. – to help me with the purchase. Sometimes, as when I had to ship some packages, I have a choice of which local shop I’m going to work through. The Post Office is basically hell on Earth. The local mail shop down the street is owned by a husband/wife who operate it as a gift shop. Last week when I stopped in, their small daughter was playing on the floor behind the counter. I will continue to shop there because they’re nice people, and they provide a service that I use. There are restaurants we visit more frequently because they are locally owned and operated, not chains, like this excellent all-you-can-eat sushi place near my business. I, of course, run a “family owned, local, small business”, and the human element of my job is central to its success. What I struggle with is how really BAD people are at communicating these days. Sometimes I can tell if a customer has not actually spoken with another human being for several days. They have this sort of “dazed” look, as they search for their words. Once they get going, it’s hard to shut them up! But getting there is always a challenge.
There are elements of our society which are not going to change. Internet shopping is one of them. I believe the new emerging market that is going to be spawned by things like Amazon, Facebook, etc. is going to be something reactionary…sort of “anti internet”…places where people unplug and interact. I think people are starting to figure this out, that the internet is basically convenient loneliness. People kneel before the computer because they no longer kneel in church. I think that pendulum will swing back towards normal over time.
So, having said all this about loneliness on the computer, and personal interaction, off to work I go to work face to face with real people. It’s messy and frustrating, but that’s what makes it fun.
At the rate it’s going, the internet will be unusable in five years. It’s fun to interact with folks on blogs, but blogging seems to be dying. I ran a link checker on my list of Delicious bookmarks. Over half are dead links, and some of the links that are live are 404 errors.
Commercial websites tend to be poorly written. I can’t use the Daily Caller on my phone. Do they understand how hard it is to clear their useless popups on a phone? I don’t even bother at that point. In fact, some of these sites seem to think that you go there just to read the ads. Even email seems to be fading away.
I think the parts of the internet that are vestiges of the 1990’s and early 2000’s will be gone soon. Email is an example. Social media and texting have overcome email. Email is becoming basically “bulk mail” like all the stuff you throw away without looking at it after you empty your mailbox for the one thing (of 20 in there) that you actually needed. If I want to contact somebody, I text them now. I usually don’t try to voice call because everybody call-screens now.
People have retreated into one-off types of blogs like at a large party where everybody moves off into smaller groups of their more intimate friends. That makes the blogs less interesting, at least for me, because I like to mix it up with people are argue. Most people don’t really like having their ideas, or their core beliefs, challenged. As a result, the one interesting thing about blogs has been moderated away into vanilla pudding.
People like a free and intelligent exchange of perspectives, in a predictable and accessible format, without all the pop-ups, and a regular calendar of new topics. Like this site. Now, how it translates to anything other than a nice intellectual exercise for Mr. Z, I am not smart enough to figure that out.
The upvote/downvote feedback is important, too, as it allows the commentariat to test drive their ideas in front of an intelligent audience.
Get the instapaper app for your phone or table (or both) and configure your phone/tablet/browser to save the articles you want to read.
Game changer for those who prefer reading over fighting bad design & ads.
Is it the laws of gravity or ISIS that is killing homosexuals in Iran and Syria? Is it the laws of chemistry and physics or terrorists that are killing people from Manchester to Mogadishu?
As Milius famously wrote, “What is steel compared to the hand that wields it? Look at the strength in your body, the desire in your heart, I gave you this!”
Is that morality or math? I say those killings are math dressed up in morality. They know the morality alone won’t get the job done, but body counts can get the job done. That’s why the Left is such a joke around the world. While they hash tag kidnappers, the people “on the wrong side of history” are doing the math.
Or, take something a little less violent, like climate change. Morality isn’t getting it done, so they’re faking the math. The problem, of course, is that they have to keep revising their predictions as the math models fail timevand again. Meanwhile, the public watches Science Channel and finds out that the Earth has been hotter and colder 1000x over and again.
Morality won’t trump the math.
Last time I checked – “morality” told me that lying is bad.
Which is why I think that math IS morality – because no matter what your progressive college professor told you – 1+1 still equals 2. Trying to convice people that it now equals 3 – is a lie.
When states like Illinois engage in the budget lunacy they have engaged in – they suffer the consequences of violating the rules of math – AND morality. Because the math says you’re only going to be able to extract so much in taxation from the subject population – and the morality says that the only way to break the rules that math imposes on you – is to engage in some very heinous behavior.
IMHO math and morality and inextricably linked together.
Welp, math is the language of the universe, and the universe has a Creator from whom we derive our sense of morality. So, yes.
Btw, lying – falsehoods – are derived from logic. Highly logical people, people who are good at math intuitively, are very, very hard to lie to. They have very high bullshit detectors.
Also, you’re basing your definition of math and morality on what I’ll politely call our shared Judeo-Christian Western definitions of morality. The Muslims follow a very different morality. As do Buddhists and those People’s Temple (Jones cult kool-aid drinkers). We just happen to believe that there is a single truth, a single morality, and most of Western society is built around that single morality.
That’s why the culture is breaking down. Once the idea that there is a single morality, a single truth, collapses, the Institutions are quick to follow. Which is why, among other things, we see such a degradation of mathematics in our society in favor of pluralistic moral equivalencies. It’s also why so many people are so unhappy these days. They’re human animals, and so they have an innate understanding of mathematics…but they are constantly being told that left is right, up is down, war is peace, etc.
The more the contradictions, the more things break down, and it is not an accident of fate that it is happening. It’s being done to us.
This is why I’m openly, unashamedly “elitist.” As Derbyshire said somewhere, it’s not a choice between having an elite and not having one; it’s between having an elite that looks like this, vs. one that looks like that. Once we acknowledge that, even in a dorm room bull session kind of way — and that’s how I pitch it — we can talk about what we should do to make sure the elite acts in pro-civic ways.
I have been pondering the wisdom of allowing 51% of the voters to lord it over the other 49%. Our Constitution was crafted to protect the 49% from the 51%, but we have left that document by the side of the road, it seems.
As the two sides are at complete loggerheads, it seems that the national division will only get worse. I am not a big libertarian fan, but getting the authorities out of everyone’s business is something I can get behind. It was a big part of what the Constitution is (was?) about, and the only way IMO that we can help defuse the national division is to neuter the power of the authorities. That way, those who want to dictate the lives of others can fuss all they want, but the means of actually applying their demands on others in a heavy way will not exist. Not perfect, but better than where we are now.
It’s not just an issue of neutering the authorities. It’s about restraining unelected bureaucrats. Too many elected officials at the state and Federal level have handed off lawmaking to “experts”. Once the bureaucrats have power, they write their own laws. State law here says upland property owners can have a recreational dock. The problem is that DNR has the say over it and they are not obligated to approve it or even give you any information on the requirements. Somehow, they have managed to put in a rule that says you can only have a dock that you share with your neighbor. If your neighbor is State Fish and Wildlife, as ours is, no dock for you.
This government is entirely unsuited to half or more of our population. We have imported people who are not intelligent, God fearing, or honest enough by our old standards.
Our current system is not possible with our current population. No amount of information, education, or even experience will be enough during our lifetime to turn people who were not born, educated, experienced, or understand our system into the kind of citizens our system was designed for.
bring back slavery
What is much worse is when that 49% finds it can enforce its will on the 51%. All too often intransigence overwhelms math. Because rainbow.
“You don’t beat morality with math.”
Not as long as the “moral” media spins the tale. But, math can beat morality. Say a muzzie invader shouting “Iwanna snackbar” kills two dirt people. Math will not beat the pseudo morality of posing as a hate free hater. However, if a couple of muzzle cells detonate nuclear weapons in two different major cities, math will probably win. In fact, at that point, hate will become the new morality.
In essence, the vast majority of people aren’t very bright.
Ain’t it the truth!
We might want to examine rampant consumerism, the shadow being cast as overflowing closets, basements and landfills. When I feel the impulse to buy more stuff, I clean house, and usually find what I thought I needed. The task is completed by taking one bag to the garbage can and two to goodwill.
Any attempt to decide and legalized “Should” is fraught with moral hazard and unintended consequences. That’s why we have courts, juries, and judges, to work out the gray areas and migrating circumstances that arise in each criminal case. SJW’s want a society with iron clad guarantees to prevent any and all manner of injustices. Hence the inclusion of hate crime to a murder charge, as if the former is more grievous than the actual act of taking a life. The Libertarians essentially want no laws, naively trusting that people will adhere the non-aggression principle, and not tread on others. This ignores bad people take advantage of such trust and will do unto them long before they ever know what hit them. Bad people banding together for a common purpose to plunder will always beat individuals who stand alone and believe if they don’t bother anyone, no one will bother them.
No matter what better ideological mousetrap society comes up with, there will always be injustice and exploitation that eludes the external mechanism of the law. Yet without a essential framework of law, blood-feuds and chaos reigns, where might is right. Hence wisdom and good judgement should abide to bridge the difference.
the buckley right won every fight they entered into. which is zero.