Penn Jillette wants to talk it all out
cracked.com
cracked.com
These are all things you will find people believing in the wild: Good outcomes for yourself is an inevitable consequence of a free market. Equitable outcomes are an inevitable consequence of liberal policies. Peace is an inevitable consequence of trade. Democracy is an inevitable consequence of being an American. Morality is an inevitable consequence of being a christian. Democracy and Liberalization are an inevitable consequence of capitalism. Rule of Law is an inevitable consequence of having a constitution. Freedom is an inevitable consequence of gun ownership.
You can pick your ideology/identity, and there is a good chance that there is a belief of an inevitable outcome of it, an outcome determined primarily by following the ideology, not doing the actions required by it.
People are waking up to the idea that outcomes are a result of actions, not beliefs. Democracy is not a belief you have, its a set of actions you perform. Democracy is not something you are, it is something you do.
You can only be a libertarian (the ideology, not the identity) until you understand the collective action problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem).
Ehhhh
> outcomes are a result of actions, not beliefs
Just because someone identifies as Christian it doesn't make their actions moral - even though they themselves may believe that. Their actions have to be moral in order for the outcome to be that they are moral.
So their actions could be moral to them, and also immoral to you. But the ethics of their actions would not be subject to much personal interpretation (within your/their culture).
There's definitely some things that ring true (government is inefficient and too much government can lead to authoritarianism and massive human suffering), but their beliefs typically go too far IMO and they treat a huge amount of grey areas as if everything is black and white. Regulation freaking stinks, but is necessary in a lot of cases. We're much better off with the EPA and FDA than without them despite their significant flaws. They seem to ignore the fact that our actions have consequences, and thus your freedom can encroach on my freedom.
I might be on a bit of a stretch here, but the after-effects of a car crash involving people not wearing seatbelts could be quite a fair bit worse for witnesses and bystanders than if seatbelts were worn. Being at fault for a car crash where someone is killed because they weren't wearing their seatbelt will weigh psychologically no matter the logic. First responders dealing with a non-seatbelted puddle of recently-functioning-human. Public roads are public.
To the nth degree, however, everything is interconnected, so everything we do can affect everyone else. Government gets the (what should be) unenviable job of choosing where to draw that line.
it's the same thing with smoking. even ignoring how it affects bystanders it does raise the cost of healthcare
For the public good, it's valid to have the regulations that say the manufacturer must include seat belts and that they must actually meet a testing standard, and even that kids and others who are not responsible for themselves must be protected from the random judgement of parents until the kids reach an age of taking over responsibility for themselves.
But that's it.
There is even a possible argument that the feeling of safety given by a seatbelt makes drivers more dangerous to everyone outside the car, similar to how bicycle helmets have an element of actually increased risk from a reduction in care taken by both cyclists and drivers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qugb5aGZbEo
"he wasn't one to sacrific torque or horsepower for easy starts or other such petty concenrs"
"an impossible arc across the night sky"
[sfx: frogs, Eartha Kitt on the radio]
I was just waking up when the front tyre went.
At the same time a horse appeared, the headlights blew and the horizon came through the windshield.
I kissed Ertha Kitt and left the road like a jumbo jet diving into a swamp.
Some time later I regained a level of consciousness more ugly than the one I just left.
I'd seen some strange movies on the insides of my eyelids again and now I was wide awake.
my liberty ends where your liberty starts.
as far as i know new zealand is phasing out smoking completely
There is even a possible argument that the feeling of safety given by a seatbelt makes drivers more dangerous
that can be measured and policy be changed accordingly.
personally, i'd go as far as banning private car ownership. instead replace that with better public transport, and smaller mobility devices and taxis for the last mile.
i don't drive and the liberty i get from not having a car that i have to park somewhere is huge. better public transport would increase my liberty to move around even further. so this would not reduce my individual agency, but it would increase it.
>i don't drive and the liberty i get from not having a car that i have to park somewhere is huge. better public transport would increase my liberty to move around even further. so this would not reduce my individual agency, but it would increase it.
To your point, who cares about the justification to your liberties? I drive. Yours end where mine start.
how about the car accident statistics?
or this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39191767
but what i was trying to point out is that not having a car does not reduce your liberty to move around. it actually increases it. now you can argue the specifics, but you can't argue that without a car your general freedom to move around is reduced. because it isn't. (unless of course you make up some specific example that probably does not apply to the majority of the population. i am sure, for any specific case that you can come up with we can find a workable solution. being that there are cars for rent for the few cases that you need one or something else)
This stance intrigues me. I'm curious how much it would cost--economically--to provide every citizen in the US (or even just a single state) with public transport. I'm not so sure it would be more beneficial--macroeconomically--than letting everyone own their own car.
The biggest problem being that, unless you live in a densely-populated area that was planned with public transport in mind, you're going to have a whole lot of people spending a ton of time waiting (e.g. for the bus). And all that time spent waiting is going to have negative economic side effects similar to the negative consequences of people being stuck in traffic.
Something like a free or low-cost, government-run taxi service might work if carpooling was implemented via a decent traveling salesman algorithm but I've never heard of anyone even proposing such a thing. It certainly would make a lot of sense with self-driving, electric vehicles though.
this argument does not consider that if there are no cars, we would need a lot more busses and trains, and then even in a less populated area, public transport makes sense.
only extremely sparsely populated areas would need individual transport.
planned with public transport in mind
why does it have to be planned ahead of time? you take any area, count the traffic, and replace every 20 cars with one bus. you'll find that in many areas that's enough to need a bus every few minutes.
then you take every busy highway and replace it with trains. again, you'll need multiple trains per hour to accommodate everyone.
even in a country with very good public transport like germany, public transport is only 10% of all personal traffic. if all cars were removed, there would have to be 10 times as many trains and busses to make up for that.
a local train that now runs every 20 minutes would then have to run every 2 minutes. instead of an hourly long distance train, you'd need that same train to run every 5 minutes. a small village that only has one bus per day, would still be able to now have a bus per hour. probably in that village many would still keep their car, but they would use it less.
more public transport means a higher frequency, and the whole problem that makes public transport unattractive goes away.
the problem is not the end scenario. the problem is how to get there from where we are now.
This true statement is irrelevant, since one person's seatbelt does not impact anyone else's liberty.
"I don't like cars anyway" is even less relevant.
and i didn't say i don't like cars. i said (maybe not very clearly): cars impact my freedom to move around. see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39192495
in particular read the linked discussion in how cars negatively impact peoples lives.
Alternatively he believes that refusing to wear a seat belt guarantees that a person stays inside a vehicle (through sheer force of liberty and grit) during an impact
Only a wise genius can simply gaze serenely at the moon when asked “does your right to murder people with your corpse rocket impinge on the rights of your human targets?” for only the enlightened know that answering it is a violation of the non aggression policy
In other words, if you want to make seatbelts mandatory as a result of that reasoning, you must first:
- set a threshold for impact that is applicable to everything
- demonstrate that you are applying the threshold everywhere (and not just arbitrarily)
- demonstrate that the effects you mention exist
- that the effects are more impactful than the threshold
- that there is no other way to reduce the impact below the threshold without such a mandate (or that the mandate is the least oppressive way to do it)
Sadly, none of this has been done, so there is no justification for the mandate
Writing the above has distilled a previously nebulous feeling: Politics is emotion, not facts.
That's probably sufficient to justify a mandate for the driver and possibly front seat passengers (since a sharp swerve toward the passenger side could cause an unbelted front seat passenger to hit the driver).
It's why a lot of young technical-minded people are attracted to it. You need to be quite smart to understand the premises of libertarianism, but simultaneously, insufficiently educated in fields like history and economics to grok why it'd be a set of failed ideas in the actual real world. High idealism, low wisdom.
A lot of modern right-libertarian thinkers realize their ideology will never get voted in, so they're turning to neoreactionary thought and are doing away with any pretence of wanting democracy.
The other thing I’d add to your excellent comment is basically another social science gap (media studies) where it’s easy to read things which provide that quick hit of smug satisfaction and not ask how, for example, Reason has an entire business running stories about excessive government regulation and there are entire groups funded to generate academic-style publications supporting that mission. If you’re a 20 year old techie, you probably spend a lot more time sharing the “look at this idiot thing someone at the EPA did” post than checking the sources to learn what really happened, or that the writer gets a paycheck funded by donations from that industry.
The LP is full of nut jobs and for 3/4 of them the only political problem they want to solve is the legalization of weed. The libertarians who don’t identify with the party tend to be pragmatists with a preference to try maximize personal liberty as much as possible, but realize that the maximum may not be obtainable due to the nature of managing a diverse society.
One of the most interesting parts of the show is how Penn has a post-presentation conversation with the magician to determine if P&T know how it was done without giving the trick away to the audience.
When someone's inner monologue is so full of derisive irrationality that buzzwords pushed with an agenda are the first "opinions" they share, its somewhat of a moot point to engage with them as the point of their post wasn't about having a civil discussion. I generally consider it an indirect act of kindness when people like this immediately show their cards, because it's pretty easy to spot and ignore (if the loud sound of their mouth breathing doesn't already give it away).
> So, if it’s not A.I., what do you worry about?
Without being overly dramatic — but, I think, being accurate — there’s a small chance, but still real non-zero chance, that we’ve destroyed our country with monetizing hate and monetizing aggression and monetizing outrage. What makes you the most money is outrage and hate.
> For so long, you identified as Libertarian. What changed?
I completely have not used the word Libertarian in describing myself since I got an email during lockdown where a person from a Libertarian organization wrote to me and said, “We’re doing an anti-mask demonstration in Vegas, and obviously we’d like you to head it.” I looked at that email and I went, “The fact they sent me this email is something I need to be very ashamed of, and I need to change.” Now, you can make the argument that maybe you don’t need to mandate masks — you can make the argument that maybe that shouldn’t be the government's job — but you cannot make the argument that you shouldn’t wear masks. It is the exact reciprocal of seatbelts because if I don’t wear a seatbelt, my chances of fucking myself up increase — if I don’t wear a mask, the chance of fucking someone else up increase.
Many times when I identified as Libertarian, people said to me, “It’s just rich white guys that don’t want to be told what to do,” and I had a zillion answers to that — and now that seems 100 percent accurate.
> So how do you identify politically?
Well, let’s go to empirical evidence: I’m going to vote Democrat, maybe that’s all you need to know. I will not vote for a third-party candidate. I believe all the clichés, I believe they’re true — I believe that Trump and MAGA might make the United States unrecognizable enough that it’s not a beautiful place to be.