I hesitated to respond to you because we live in entirely different worlds, and I don't think any number of Slashdot posts is going to fix that.

However, to be clear, I wasn't implying that Reagan or Thatcher had a problem with violence.

On the contrary; they had a problem with South Africa becoming a communist satellite. When the communist agitators resort to violence, that just makes it easier to convince the domestic public that the communists are bad. Obviously when it is bin Laden fighting the Soviets, violence is just fine. We both understand how it works.

Regarding your last point: South Africa of today is one of the most dangerous and violent places on earth; Mandela did next to nothing to address black on white or even black-on-black violence. There was a huge white-flight out of SA during the 90s.

Perhaps you think this is a positive outcome. I don't.

No racial reconciliation is perfect, of course. I would say that the US probably didn't do enough to help re-enfranchise blacks, and that South Africa may have done a bit too much.

The bottom line is this: I very much enjoyed living in the Reagan years America. I very much would NOT have liked living in the Mandela years SA.

I think Reagan and Thatcher were both great, as far as people who have actually held office go, and I am disappointed that the Reagan we got was nowhere close to the Reagan that campaigned. I was all for abolishing the Depts of Ed, Energy, and the ATF. Very disappointed with Reagan on that score...

The other transgressions in his career (military adventurism) bother me, but I don't think they actually bother Reagan detractors that much. The people who bitterly hate Reagan tend to hate him for reasons that his supporters like him. Similarly, if you accuse Thatcher of being a union buster or for cleaning up free loaders on the dole, people like me will say "bravo Thatcher".

The bottom line is that you and I probably agree that Reagan/Thatcher supported a bunch of wars and terrorists that they shouldn't have. But you shouldn't pretend like that is the basis for your displeasure with them. Especially not when every other US and UK leader since (some of which you've certainly hated LESS, if not mildly supported) has done the same exact shit...

Not that you're interested, but for the benefit of people who come across your posts, I offer this clarification:

Read the Wikipedia article on Mandela. All of it.

ANC/Mandela supported economic nationalism. He was honored by the Soviet Union for his pro-communist affiliations. In 61-62 he participated in a _bombing campaign_ to put pressure on the apartheid government.

Mandela was anti-capitalist. Not as in, "bmajik says so", but as in, Mandela says so.

Reagan and Thatcher were hesitant to cut off South Africa not because they gave a shit about Mandela or because they loved sticking it to black people; they saw SA as a pawn in the cold war. They didn't want a bunch of African Nationalist Parties starting communist and Russia-aligned states all over the untapped African continent.

To Manela's credit, while he advocated for nationalizing of banks, gold production, other mining, and the abolition of private property, he didn't enact these policies when he eventually took control of the government. He was smart enough to understand that SA badly needed foreign investment, and nationalizing industry and destroying property doesn't get you investors.

Mandela is a mixed bag. As terrorists go, he was a pretty pleasant one -- MK (the militant wing he was part of) only attacked infrastructure at night, hoping to minimize civilian losses.

But, he was willing to resort to violence to bring about a communist revolution in Africa.

You think Reagan and Thatcher were against that? You're right.

Again -- read the WP article. I just summarized it here.

You're actually missing an important aspect of sea-steading.

One implementation of seasteading calls for smaller groups (nuclear or extended families, lets say) to have their own independently float-able barge/ship/unit/whatever.

One of the key problems with soil-based governments is that your neighbors (and hence, their bad politics) are "sticky" -- its hard for you to control who your neighbors are, and since they always manage to impose their will upon you, this is the practical limit to freedom for land-based societies.

But this isn't necessarily true in a cluster of sea-steaders.

Imagine 100 families that have tied their rafts/boats together (like something out of Snowcrash). You liked your new neighbors for a while, but over time, they became more and more a hinderance to your lifestyle.

If we're talking about a land-based community, you have to sell your house and find a new place to live -- which is going to have the same problem.

But if we're talking about sea-steading, you just untie the ropes and sail off. Maybe a few likeminded people follow you.

The interesting possibility with sea-steading is that people groups can constantly form and split and reform and split and reform at a very granular level. Nobody needs to fight over who stays and who leaves; nobody needs to suffer a neighbor they don't like.

Yes, we've seen your fallacious "it has to be presented on the floor to matter" argument. But we've already shown that the Republicans have done that, and when they have, the Democrats and media ridiculed them for wasting time presenting a bill that wouldn't pass the Senate.

So a. it has been on the floor, and b. you assholes complain if it is on the floor, and if it is not. So, c. Profit!

True, Ace did incorrectly say this didn't help the poor. However, that's about the only "good" (and I use the term loosely, because the help it provided came in a wrong form and in a wrong way) thing that the ACA did. By far, the ACA has done and continues to do more harm than good, and this was its design, and we knew it from the beginning. We knew millions could, and likely would, lose the insurance plans they liked. We knew many would lose their doctors. We knew prices would continue to increase, and that many would have to pay a lot more money because they were forced to buy services they didn't want and didn't need.

We also knew that we could have found other ways -- that didn't make insurance policies worse for millions of people -- to help the people who didn't have insurance, and, to some extent due to that fact, didn't have good medical care, including simply raising taxes to pay for Medicaid expansion. I'd choose that over increasing the cost and scope of health insurance, and massively increasing government control over the industry.

The final thing we've known all along that I'll mention is that Obama has been lying about this from the beginning. He knew his promise that people would get to keep their coverage was false, when he said it (I know this simply because, without talking to any experts, *I* knew it, through simple deduction; it's inconceivable that he didn't know it, as he isn't a dummy and has lots of experts to talk to, and all of them knew it).

He also continues to lie every day, saying Republicans want people to not have health care, or that anyone has gotten health care for the first time in their lives because of the ACA. Both of those lies are insane. There's not a serious way to make either of them into even plausibly true. But he keeps saying this shit anyway.

As to the latter, not a single person ever has gotten health care for the first time due to the ACA, unless you're going to make the case that because of the ACA, some couples had babies that they otherwise wouldn't have had. Otherwise you're SOL on this claim: every single person in the U.S. not only had access to health care before the ACA existed, but actually got health care, even if it was self-care. This is part of the fundamental conceit of Obama and his policies: you equate two different things (health insurance vs. health care) and convince people that without the former, the latter doesn't exist, and make the case that only government can provide the former, and hence, the latter. It's insanely stupid, but I guess it works on a lot of people.

You're lying. I made no such statement.

Pull the other one.

No source was provided, in fact. Since he didn't provide a source, and neither did you, I'll stop reading this comment now.

I am completely shocked that you refuse to present a case, just as he so refused.

Such as?

You're obviously lying. Why?

I'd ask you to quote me doing this, but I know you won't bother to try, because you know you can't, because I never did. All I said is that they opposed the ACA, when he falsely claimed otherwise. I am gratified, though, that you -- an anonymous coward who is friends with the leftists here -- see being opposed to the ACA as being saintly. That speaks well of you, at least.

I do wonder what you hope to gain by lying, though. Are you like damn_registrars, merely hoping that by telling a lot of obvious lies, he's being clever?

Cite him doing so. (I expect you won't, of course, because you can't, because he didn't.)

Line-stealer.

Then why has not everyone, or anyone, cited an example?

If by my "team" you mean "people who aren't stupid," and by "win" you mean "make your case," then sure. I made the case, very clearly, and with no rebuttals, the case that Obama is liberal and Coolidge is conservative.

If you disagree, present a case. damn_registrars refuses to ... because he knows he can't.

No kidding.

I understand that this is the twitter generation, and it has left me in the dust, but when one criticizes you based on an obvious failure to read the entirety of what you've written, well, it almost comes off as the oft-misapplied "irony" when we're having a conversation about people who may not be bright enough to vote.

You are very upset with the arguments I haven't made, but you say very little about the ones I have made.

That's a difficult discussion, but it's not one you're really making. You're just stating the nebulous, "people stupider than me shouldn't vote".

Actually, no. What I think is that _nobody_ should vote. I would expect this be abundantly clear where right up front, I say that I am an anarchist, and later on when I say I've become disillusioned with the entire notion of government.

Based on your reading comprehension, you might be one of those people who has no business helping me run my life.

But irrespective of if someone has the mental capacity to manage my life better than I do (and I imagine such people exist), I am not convinced that any individual or group has the ethical or moral right to do so.

Rather, I am convinced that they do not.

It's worth pointing out that the fastest growing socio-cultural group is socially conservative Islam.

It's really not worth point out. I mean, I guess it's helpful for letting us know that you're a racist/religious asshat on top of your other flavors of crazy, but it really wasn't part of the discussion.

My contention -- and its certainly a debatable one -- is that there is currently an impending culture clash, and the two main actors are the socially progressive democracies, vs. the religious fundamentalists.

It turns out that amongst the religious fundamentalists, Islam is the dominant group from a growth perspective. It also turns out that rightly or wrongly, that group seems to get a lot of negative attention for practices we might say are barbaric, like FGM, preventing girls from learning to read, murdering people for blasphemy, etc.

Now then. "Our" progressive social democracy isn't reproducing at the replacement rate. Our survival relies indoctrinating others.

Correspondingly, the forces of acid-face burning and honor killings are reproducing rapidly.

Why do I mention this conflict here?

Some of the best and brightest of our social democracy (affluent technocratic geeks) are giving up on our social democracy. Call this mutiny near the top of the stack.

And our social democracies are being overwhelmed by religious fundamentalists at the bottom of the stack. It's not clear how much of this is refugeeism from oppressive places vs how much of this is attempts to assimilate social democracies and make them more oppressive.

The point I was making is that social democracy is undergoing a squeeze at the top and the bottom. If you like social democracy, you should be concerned.

I apologize for not making this clearer for you.

Exactly so, sir! To the great displeasure of the people who financed the campaigns, on both sides.

False. The Republicans wanted it to NOT pass, as did most of their constituents and funders. That's why they got even more funding in 2010, because they wanted to kill the ACA.

Please explain, without sounding crazy, whaty it is that I deny.

The funny thing is that you pretend I am the one who doesn't want to have a discussion, when it's clear to everyone that you're full of shit, that when someone -- especially me -- actually provides arguments you think you cannot rebut, you refuse to engage, and resort to bullshit, getting your jollies on parodying my arguments and pretending that you're making a statement to your little friends. From here, it's amusing to watch you flail around, but it's also sad because it appears that you think you're being clever.

The Benghazi discussion was a great example of this. You really thought you had a point at the beginning. When it was clear you didn't, you stopped addressing my points and declared victory. Here, you cannot even begin to defend your idiotic claim that the tax policies under Coolidge were not conservative, so you just bullshit. And again, you think you're being clever, and that's the sad part.

And everyone knows you're lying. And we all know you know we know you're lying. Again: it's just sad.

I remember the good old days when you just lied about the facts. Lately you've been lying about having done things you've never even attempted to do. Again: sad. You're not clever, you're not making a point, you're just making yourself look pathetic.