LibertarianSA Google Group

RE: [Libsa] Re: Liberal or Conservative?

s...@mweb.co.za (Sid Nothard) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 06:12:30 UT

Laws of physics existed long before man discovered them. They are absolutely
rigid, and if not adhered to, televisions & any other electrical device will
not operate.

Sid

Colin Bower
Sent: 05 January 2010 07:43 AM
To: libsa@googlegroups.com

1.) "Max Planck said that no one had any right to believe that physical

Re: [Libsa] Re: Liberal or Conservative?

princealbertco...@gmail.com (Colin Bower) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 05:42:59 UT

*1.) "Max Planck said that no one had any right to believe that physical
laws exist"*
Do the physical phenomena that we observe "create" the so-called laws that
they appear to conform to, or do the laws exist separately from the
phenomenon that conform to them, independent and antecedent to those
phenomena? If they do, then it must be supposed that there is a law-maker.

Re: [Libsa] Re: Liberal or Conservative?

sjaarsve...@absamail.co.za (Stephen vJ) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:33:42 UT

Sure, but we have to be at least somewhere in the same ballpark in order to make the conversation meaningful... and the closer, the more meaningful. My view is that asking people to rate themselves is inherently flawed and thus outside the general vicinity, due to everyone considering himself to be certain things... one of those things being average / moderate / in the middle, when almost no-one actually is.

Re: [Libsa] Re: Liberal or Conservative?

bas...@gmail.com (Trevor Watkins) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:57:39 UT

Michael says we can be certain of nothing (I am not even certain what that
statement means), and I agree with him (See
[link]
).
Colin says we cannot be certain of the meaning of each other's words, nor
even of our own meaning for those words. He's probably right.

Re: Liberal or Conservative?

m.odo...@btopenworld.com (Michael) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 20:08:33 UT

Devotion to provable facts as opposed to irrational faith. The
intelligent ‘we’ and the numbskull ‘them’. The rot set in with
Bernhard Riemann who showed that Euclidian geometry was only one of an
infinite number of geometries, all equally true. But which is our
geometry?. In fact many are now used to explain different aspects of

RE: [Libsa] Liberal or Conservative?

s...@mweb.co.za (Sid Nothard) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 05:05:23 UT

The majority of people are still living with vestiges of the bicameral
mind##, and as a result are seeking guidance from outside authorities.

So they run to government and theologians to provide them with guidance.

Violence against the government gets one nowhere. In any case, the
government has a monopoly on violence, and in a direct con-

RE: [Libsa] Liberal or Conservative?

s...@mweb.co.za (Sid Nothard) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 07:22:25 UT

Yes, don't bother us with the facts, we're believers.

Leon Louw (gmail)
Sent: 31 December 2009 08:35 AM
To: libsa@googlegroups.com

Regarding whether people in general are rational, have any of you watched
the Darwin series on BBC Knowledge? It's really excellent.

The point of immediate relevance is Dwarkins' experience in the series

Re: [Libsa] Liberal or Conservative?

sjaarsve...@absamail.co.za (Stephen vJ) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:14:42 UT

I haven't seen that one, but will look out for it - sounds interesting. Reminds me of another series also from the BBC a few years back about the brain. There was a lot of impressive stuff in it, but one particular experiment surprised me.
They asked volunteers to come to some university to sign up for experiments. At the reception, volunteers were met by a young man behind a counter who greeted them with a friendly hello-can-I-help sentence or two. The subjects then said they were there for the advertised experiment and the young man said that they needed to fill out a form.

Re: [Libsa] Liberal or Conservative?

leonlo...@gmail.com (Leon Louw (gmail)) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 06:34:48 UT

Regarding whether people in general are rational, have any of you watched the Darwin series on BBC Knowledge? It's really excellent.
The point of immediate relevance is Dwarkins' experience in the series presenting the anti-religion evidence of science to people, including science teachers, and how incapable most people are of accepting conclusive hard evidence, how they simply assert without credible evidence that science is just one way of seeing things. As he points out, that's like saying history is just one way of thinking Napoleon really existed, and the bald assertion that he didn't has equal weight. Or that the existence of germs is merely one hypothesis, not proven because we can't see them, and asserting that there are no germs is equally credible.

Re: [Libsa] Liberal or Conservative?

sjaarsve...@absamail.co.za (Stephen vJ) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:52:03 UT

Another belated response... but I find this particularly fascinating. I agree with Leon... at the same time one would imagine that libertarianism is in fact most pro-progeny... yet that does not seem to be a natural conclusion for any majority, relative to alternatives or otherwise. People simply don't seem to be very logical, rational or consistent in general.

Re: Increasingly liberal intellectuals out of step with everyone else 2

leonlo...@gmail.com (Leon Louw (gmail)) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 21:14:40 UT

Having mentioned Penn & Teller in my earlier email, and having met them in NY a month ago, I looked them up and they're really interesting. Here's the Wikipedia item on their "Bullshit" bashing.
[link]
Here's the regular entry on them:
[link]

Re: Increasingly liberal intellectuals out of step with everyone else

leonlo...@gmail.com (Leon Louw (gmail)) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:21:02 UT

You're quite right of course, Dawie. I try avoiding the terms and waded in so late I didn't address the issue, assuming they were using the term in the perverse American sense, where 'liberal' is illiberal (left) and ;conservative' is also illiberal (right).
For addressees who may be unaware of this bizarre linguistic mangling, the US, where Charles Murray is, has a binary political system (left-'liberal', and right-'conservative'). We're more like Europe where it's roughly triangular {left, right, liberal), in which 'liberal' has the economist's meaning of 'classical liberal' - that's what our kind of liberal calls themselves in the US. Hard-core liberals (in our sense), like myself, call themselves 'libertarian', which just means very classical liberal.

Re: Increasingly liberal intellectuals out of step with everyone else

sjaarsve...@absamail.co.za (Stephen vJ) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:49:38 UT

It's out of place, but I need to have a go at this anyway...
1. Maggie Thatcher... the woman who said something to the effect of "we can privatise just about anything, but never ever the national healthcare system" and then proceded to protect each privatised entity from "collapse" under merciless capitalist competition. She was pretty far left if you ask me.

Re: [Libsa] Re: Increasingly liberal intellectuals out of step with everyone else

ivoveg...@gmail.com (Ivo Vegter) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:33:46 UT

Not at all. I'd wager most libertarians -- consciously so or otherwise
-- would recognise that splitting the vote is rarely a clever voting
tactic, however pure your principles. Absent major moral objections,
they would always choose the least socialist candidate with a realistic
chance of winning. This is why a two-party 50-50 split tending towards

Re: [Libsa] Re: Increasingly liberal intellectuals out of step with everyone else

garth.ziets...@gmail.com (Garth Zietsman) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:15:51 UT

The GSS uses the Liberal-Conservative picture so I guess Murray was limited
to that. In terms of what I posted just now I would say that intellectuals
(theoreticians) are moving toward embracing and advocating greater social
freedoms, gay marriage, freedom of speach, porn, while intelligent
practitioners and everyone else seems to be resisting them. There probably