I, in fact, see very clearly that humans are social animals, and how important society is to us, how critical it is for our ability to thrive.

What you dont see is that the state is not the same thing as the society. Since you attribute all the benefits of society to the state, it's easy to see how you can view it as mostly benevolent, but this is a great miscalculation. Society, voluntary cooperation, community, all those things were old in our species long before the modern state was dreamed up.

"The farmer can and should be forced to give a small portion of his sellable produce to fulfill someone elses right not go hungry."

Not enough. I had a very bad year, broke my leg and been out of work for months. Got me an the missus and 7 kids. A small portion aint gonna do it buddy. Now where's our food?

Again, I dont contend that the farmer should be prohibited from contributing what he can afford (and in my experience, they do, constantly, and no one goes hungry around here because of that.) What I object to is your transformation of one mans hunger to another mans *obligation* to take positive action to satisfy that hunger no matter what. That path leads to total breakdown of society, to bloodbath and 'anarchy' in the very worst sense of the word. In highly status-conscious societies like Germany as an example, there is some natural resistance and the path gets trod more slowly, while in certain areas of the US and large parts of the third world it goes much faster, but ultimately it is the same path.

One of the most basic parts of becoming human is learning that you are not omnipotent. And one of the most common failings of humans is refusing to accept that. We keep trying to create a world where nothing can ever go wrong, either through religion (do what we say and no matter how bad it gets here it wont matter, because you're going to heaven) or the state (give us the power to tax and spend, to kidnap and imprison, and we will use it to create paradise on earth) doesnt really matter, because neither can actually provide what they promise, no matter how much is given to them.

So you want to guarantee no one will ever go hungry. Good! I consider that a genuinely worthy goal, and I have spent many a night working on that problem myself as a result. It seems, at first glance, such an easy problem to solve, right? Because we know we produce far more food on the planet than we would actually need to keep everyone alive, right? It's not a production problem, it's a distribution problem. See a nail, grab a blunt object, you have a distribution problem and a government empowered to tax and spend and shoot people, so just have the government gather up some 'excess' food and redistribute it to the people that need it and we have solved one of the big problems of humankind and can give ourselves a great big pat on the back.

If only it were so easy. But in fact it isnt. Hunger isnt a production problem, and it's not a distribution problem either. It's a *political* problem.

Just because people keep repeating it doesnt make it any less bunk.

The only real 'dump' from WIkileaks was in a case where it was the banality of the majority of the information that was really the story. Hundreds of thousands of documents that had no possible national security sensitivity that had been simply classifed by reflex. You could (and IIRC they actually did) go through and pull out a handful of documents that were evidence of other, specifically illegal, behaviour, and that's one story. But the larger story here that also needed to be told was how the government is reflexively classifying *everything* without any regards to whether there is any legitimate reason to do so or not. That's fundamentally contradictory to the basic assumptions of the classification system, and it indicates an absolute breakdown of government function here.

And you just cant make that case without being able to pull out the whole 'dump' and go through it document by document.

At first they only allowed selected people from major newspapers to go through them, iirc, and only later after they had been analyzed and the contents was known, one of the newspapers, not wikileaks, dumped the whole stack.

The whole meme of 'wikileaks just dumped everything irresponsibly' is what us old-timers used to call disinformation. They probably have another word for it today.

We all know how it would work out if someone did something similar to this for men instead.

As you say, separate but equal isnt the way to go here.

I dont agree with this groupthink that somehow women choosing to go into other fields is somehow a horrible phenomenon that "WE" somehow are obligated to remedy. That's bullshit. Most women dont want to be programmers. The ones that do, are not in any way prohibited or locked out of all the same resources the guys use.

So what's the message this group and others like it are putting out? Are they trying to tell us that women arent good enough? They have to have all this special gender-specific help or they will fail? They just arent smart enough? Is that really what they are trying to say?

Cause I think that's bullshit too. Plenty of women I know with plenty of brains. Most of them dont go into programming for perfectly rational reasons - there is something else that interests them more.

If something else interests you more, you should go do that instead. Man or woman, doesnt matter.

"No man should have more rights than any other."

100% correct. Now you just need to apply it consistently.

The sort of 'positive rights' you are advocating cannot even in theory be made to work out so that this is true. 'Rights' as unearned claims to someone elses product is entirely antithetical to this goal, in fact. You simply cant have a 'right to health care' without infringing on the rights of those who provide health care.

The only way you can actually fulfill this goal is to define rights strictly and properly. You COULD have a right to seek and receive health care freely without THAT interfering with anyone elses liberty, you see?

"No man should be denied a fair job with fair pay."

Sure, in a perfect world that would be true (and in a perfect world people would have more opportunity to work for themselves instead of having to get a job from someone else as well) but you cant elevate that to the level of a right without big problems. Jobs, and labor, are economic goods and the most effective way to work towards your goal here is to remove all the interference and allow the market to work properly. Artificial unemployment would be all but eliminated.

"The point is that liberty is about freedom, and freedom is founded on rights. "

Absolutely true.

" The right not to be hungry. The right to healthcare. The right to education. The right to vote. The right to work. The right to warmth, clothing and shelter. The right to be protected and looked after when you are flooded, your home destroyed, or your land invaded, or you or your family merely get old, or sick."

Absolutely false.

None of those are rights. None of them could conceivably be rights outside of a system which allows for human slavery and some people having rights that others do not have.

The right not to be hungry? No. The right to pursue an honest living without interference, yes. Notice the difference?

If you had a 'right' to not be hungry the only way that could be translated into reality would be as an obligation for someone else to feed you. Which would violate their rights. That farmer has a right to pursue his own living, which includes selling his produce, and he cant exactly be free to sell it if it was already forcefully taken from him to satisfy someone elses 'right to not be hungry' now can he?

"The right to healthcare." No, the right to contract for the services of health care providers without interference.

Again, the doctor has a right to pursue his living as well. He does that by charging for his services. If I had a right to his services, that would be perilously close to simply making him my slave. If I need health care and I dont want to pay for it, he just has to give it to me anyway, after all it's my 'right,' right? No.

"The right to education." No. The right to seek education without interference - not the right to force people to educate you for free.

What is preventing you from seeing where liberty lies here is nothing other than a faulty definition - one that has been pushed for many years precisely to do what I see it doing here - to prevent people from even thinking about rights clearly. Just make a list of all the things that would be good to have, and call them 'rights.' But they arent rights. Rights are very specific things. Misusing the word like this simply strips it of meaning and makes the entire conversation nonsense.

"Taxation creates jobs"

Uh, no. That's the broken window fallacy. Taxation redirects capital from productive work to unproductive, which is always going to cause a net loss of demand in the labour market. Yes, you put some people to work in the areas that you mentioned, and that is plainly visible and obvious. What is less obvious is the opportunity cost of that spending, but it's nonetheless quite real. The taxation reduces the demand for labour by more than the hiring can replace.

"I guess that there's nothing that distances the US from western europe more than the attitude towards taxation"

Having spent a few years in western Europe I am inclined to agree with you.

You talk about the money going to help the less fortunate. I can see how you might think that, in Europe where some portion of that money probably does do that, but much does not.

The more important issue, however, is one of consent. There are plenty of good charities that would be happy to have your voluntary donation. They do good works far more efficiently than any government, and they have to - if they dont those who donate can simply quit giving and the organisation will be dead.

Governments dont ask for donations, they dont need to please you or impress you or even give you the time of day, they claim a 'right' to simply take your money anytime they like, as any thief would. They've been doing it for centuries and everyone is used to it by now but if you look at it logically, what do you call someone that takes your money without your consent? A thief, pure and simple.

If you are lucky they may do some good with it. And I am told many pickpockets give to charity. It does not justify their thievery.

" I cannot believe that anyone who has substantially lived in a country that offers universal healthcare would ever dream of going back to any other system, regardless of the fact that such a system entails taxation."

Believe it. I had (still have actually, if I wanted to go back) full access to one of the top rated medical systems in western Europe. I had to use it a few times and I am quite familiar with that system. I will grant it's not the worst system imaginable (that crown goes to the current bastardized version we have here in the US) but I would still happily give it up in return for my freedom to seek medical care on my own terms without interference, a basic human right which NO industrialised nation currently respects.

I think you're horribly confused. Libertarians dont just expect everyone to do what's right (although we believe such behaviour should be rewarded rather than pilloried) and we advocate good old fashioned law enforcement to deal with those who break the rules. How this turns into what you posted is one of the mysteries of the human mind.

The free staters have nothing to do with the RNC. They're mortal enemies, in fact.

Treason? Yes. Applies to all the other people (most or all more senior and thus more culpable) that were aware of this and did NOT do what Snowden did. Those are your traitors.

Official channels are worse than useless when the corruption is top-down.

It's accurate and well placed although he could have been clearer. The traditional free market approach to pollution is the tort system. Strict liability does indeed imply everyone has a right to reasonably clean air and any person that pollutes that air is subject to civil penalties. This traditional system was over-ridden with a regulatory regime instead during industrialisation, not to protect the environment, but to protect business investment. And this is still the scheme we use today. The regulators decide what a 'reasonable' amount of pollution for a given business is and as long as that business abides those limit it is immune to being sued for the damages it is doing. A strict liability system like free-market advocates advocate for would amount to much stricter environmental protection than any system of regulation will produce.

I dont think any of these suggestions hold water looking at the total distribution and the size of the sample. This isnt a small sample, it's simply too large to see that sort of distribution without some sort of systematic explanation. It seems to me obvious that the scores have been altered systematically. It would have to have been in accord with some sort of policy and it would have to be pretty strictly enforced for there to be no exceptions in that large a data set. I dont know what the policy is or whether or not it is ultimately legit, but it certainly looks like something that bears investigating. If the national testing body is systematically altering scores it seems like something the public in that country would have a right to know about, and something they should be required to defend in public rather than simply doing secretly.

Because they imagine that they will be able to force their way into a controlling share of other markets (phone and tablets) by wielding their desktop position like a club. If they refuse to sell older OSs that people like, then people will just have to get Win8. And once they use Win8 for awhile, they will prefer a phone that runs it to one running a better OS that they arent already familiar with.

The scary thing is it might work.