We know what the progressive, gun-controlled, safety-helmeted, calorie-restricted, carbon-neutral weenie dictatorship looks like. But, if you could take a little chunk of America; say, 5 million steely-eyed missile men and 5 million sleek, capable and naughty librarians and make your own little State what would it look like?

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Quote from: Camnator on October 28, 2014, 02:35:22 PM

Abolish government.

Terrible idea, really.

Lol, Icy

don't be dumd

you shouldn't be a dirty genocidal pig-loving fascist

gubment just wants your monies

Quote from: Meta Cognition on October 28, 2014, 02:17:20 PM

Wait, what the fuck are you doing on your original account?

this is the same one I've always had?

Don't make me fucking kill you.

I declare this thread Halal.

You're presenting me with a false dichotomy.

The point is that you can't be a "little bit" socialist. Socialism means the social ownership of the means of production and the co-operative management of the economy. The point is that, in order to be socialist, it has to be total and characteristic of an entire nation's economy.

By repudiating measures of socialism, I'm not at all claiming everything in every nation is privately owned. However, when you reach a majority of the economy being privately owned you can call it "capitalist" because it isn't a total definition.

Technically, you should be claiming that some economies are more nationalised than others.

China IS Communist.

You're ridiculously ignorant if you believe that.

>not using incognito

China is a left-wing nation that utilizes socialism and communism

Just going to jump in here and say that, while China is left-of-centre, it isn't socialist. It's State Capitalist.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on October 28, 2014, 01:09:35 PM

Quote from: Iberian Husky on October 28, 2014, 01:07:38 PM

and you can neither prove nor disprove a philosophy

Well that's evidently false.

How so? You can debate it, but you still can't prove it.

You could say the same about anything.

It depends what threshold you're willing to place as needing to be crossed. At the very least, you can say a lot of philosophies are so inconsequential - solipsism, nihilism - as to be not worth believing in. I'm fairly confident you could take some philosophies - relativism, perhaps idealism - and reveal them to be wrong or, at the very least, falsifiable.

To be honest, the partition between philosophy and science shouldn't be there, and kind of isn't. Both are ultimately searching for the same thing, and the latter is essentially an extension or growth upon the former.

A couple of years ago, NPR assembled a group of 5 economists who ranged from Austrian schoolers to registered Democrats and asked them to come up with a bunch of policy proposals they could all get behind. They did, and you'll never find any of these ideas on a presidential platform.

You can listen to it here, but it's about 30 minutes long so I posted a summary below.

One: Eliminate the mortgage tax deduction, which lets homeowners deduct the interest they pay on their mortgages. Gone. After all, big houses get bigger tax breaks, driving up prices for everyone. Why distort the housing market and subsidize people buying expensive houses?

Two: End the tax deduction companies get for providing health-care to employees. Neither employees nor employers pay taxes on workplace health insurance benefits. That encourages fancier insurance coverage, driving up usage and, therefore, health costs overall. Eliminating the deduction will drive up costs for people with workplace healthcare, but makes the health-care market fairer.

Three: Eliminate the corporate income tax. Completely. If companies reinvest the money into their businesses, that's good. Don't tax companies in an effort to tax rich people.

Four: Eliminate all income and payroll taxes. All of them. For everyone. Taxes discourage whatever you're taxing, but we like income, so why tax it? Payroll taxes discourage creating jobs. Not such a good idea. Instead, impose a consumption tax, designed to be progressive to protect lower-income households.

Five: Tax carbon emissions. Yes, that means higher gasoline prices. It's a kind of consumption tax, and can be structured to make sure it doesn't disproportionately harm lower-income Americans. More, it's taxing something that's bad, which gives people an incentive to stop polluting.

Six: Legalize marijuana. Stop spending so much trying to put pot users and dealers in jail — it costs a lot of money to catch them, prosecute them, and then put them up in jail. Criminalizing drugs also drives drug prices up, making gang leaders rich.

Catholicism has been relatively accepting of contemporary science for a while now.

Call me when they stop with the expensive grandeur.

And when they finally stop preaching against contraception, for fuck's sake.

I'm disgusted you think you can claim such findings for Catholicism, especially when the first man on your list was declared a heretic and deprived of his liberties. We don't "owe" these people as Catholics anything at all. We owe them as rationalists, empiricists and scientists - no creed or person can lay claim to such things.

There is no truth in Catholic cosmology, just as there is no truth in Deutsche Physik or Islamic mathematics. The truth is the truth, and while religion has been inexorably intertwined with massive cultural leaps throughout history, it has often been in spite of modernity as opposed to alongside it.

Now it's 5:15.

knows that religion is a joke and that god is not real

You're incredibly ignorant if you think you can make such metaphysical claims.

it feels different insulting muslims than christians tho

That's probably because insulting a muslim is usually followed by a shockwave and then a fireball.