WAB
Veteran Member
Dave Rubin for POTUS, John Stossel for VP.
A new beginning for the USA.
??
This could start a shitstorm?
A new beginning for the USA.
??
This could start a shitstorm?
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untermensche
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Anything is better than what we have now.
Stossel has been around a long time. He's great at what he does but his ideas on economics are off the wall.
Stossel has been around a long time. He's great at what he does but his ideas on economics are off the wall.
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Bill, do you really expect us to sit through an hour long program to discuss something? How about a synopsis.
Jimmy Higgins
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Who?
Well, since obviously none of us is going to watch the video let me kick the debate off TFT style by throwing out that Baurle is a racist, Rubin is a neo-con stooge of the Zionists, and Stossel is literally Hitler.
LordKiran
Veteran Member
Right?
WAB
Veteran Member
I will give you a drive by, which may yield some results, or it may not:
Both of these guys were, by their own candid and documented admission, garden-variety liberals, once upon a time. Both gentlemen, Stossel on the slower learning curve, as he admits early on in this video, through independent study, merciless introspection, diligent self-analysis, and laudable ego-squashing, not to mention good humor and simple human decency, found their way to what might be called Libertarianism.
Rubin is far too sharp and level-headed to align himself to any label just yet, but Stossel has apparently, and begrudgingly (after YEARS of Emmy-award winning journalism and street-stomping effort), latched onto Libertarianism as the most sane and civil court of intellectual ideas a knight of the Mind would want to flourish in (ending my sentence purposely a preposition with
).How's that? I say just listen. If, after ten minutes, your interest has not been pricked, then bail, and come back and tell us what you think.
LordKiran
Veteran Member
I will give you a drive by, which may yield some results, or it may not:
Both of these guys were, by their own candid and documented admission, garden-variety liberals, once upon a time. Both gentlemen, Stossel on the slower learning curve, as he admits early on in this video, through independent study, merciless introspection, diligent self-analysis, and laudable ego-squashing, not to mention good humor and simple human decency, found their way to what might be called Libertarianism.
Rubin is far too sharp and level-headed to align himself to any label just yet, but Stossel has apparently, and begrudgingly (after YEARS of Emmy-award winning journalism and street-stomping effort), latched onto Libertarianism as the most sane and civil court of intellectual ideas a knight of the Mind would want to flourish in (ending my sentence purposely a preposition with
How's that? I say just listen. If, after ten minutes, your interest has not been pricked, then bail, and come back and tell us what you think.
Nah, no thanks. Libertarianism is just the same old supply-side conservative mindset without all the social baggage that holds conservatives back in the modern world.
Why would anyone want to watch a Libertarian video for ten minutes? If it doesn't hold up well enough in the marketplace of ideas to hold our interest for at least fifteen minutes, it deserves to be ignored based on its own merits, or lack thereof.
WAB
Veteran Member
I will give you a drive by, which may yield some results, or it may not:
Both of these guys were, by their own candid and documented admission, garden-variety liberals, once upon a time. Both gentlemen, Stossel on the slower learning curve, as he admits early on in this video, through independent study, merciless introspection, diligent self-analysis, and laudable ego-squashing, not to mention good humor and simple human decency, found their way to what might be called Libertarianism.
Rubin is far too sharp and level-headed to align himself to any label just yet, but Stossel has apparently, and begrudgingly (after YEARS of Emmy-award winning journalism and street-stomping effort), latched onto Libertarianism as the most sane and civil court of intellectual ideas a knight of the Mind would want to flourish in (ending my sentence purposely a preposition with
How's that? I say just listen. If, after ten minutes, your interest has not been pricked, then bail, and come back and tell us what you think.
Nah, no thanks. Libertarianism is just the same old supply-side conservative mindset without all the social baggage that holds conservatives back in the modern world.
You've got me curious. What is your definition of "conservative"?
I consider myself a centrist, in that I judge each issue individually. I don't have a party. I have no affinity to any political body. I vote Libertarian because it's the closest to my particular views, which I call, for lack of a better term, Spinozan.
I love Dave Rubin, because time after time, the more I watch him, he shows pure grace under fire, and even when confronted with an idea he finds irrational, he digs into his guest with an honest desire to understand them, with ZERO hostility. Ayn Rand would have hated him, because she lacked his ability to put the ego on the back-burner. He's not a fence-sitter. He knows what he thinks about each issue, individually. He doesn't waffle, he weighs, and determines, methodically, and he's not weak. He's as strong as it gets. IMO.
WAB
Veteran Member
It's holding up quite well in the marketplace of ideas, Tom. In fact, due to people like Rubin, Stossel, Penn Jillette (sp?), and a host of others, many of whom were card-carrying liberals at some point, interest in different ways of thinking is growing. YouTube is choked with videos from people of all different races and backgrounds, and genders, M, F, TG, whatever, who admit to once being on the Left and, due to the recent violence from the radical left, like Antifa, are becoming disenchanted with the Left and creeping into the middle.
There seems to be a blind spot to centrist thought, as if it really doesn't exist. I am not a conservative, nor a liberal. I consider myself a centrist, or a moderate, classical liberal. Rubin calls himself a classical liberal, and is not a conservative. The radical Right is just as bothersome to me as the radical (regressive - I know that word pisses people off but I think it's apt in many cases) Left.
What's even sillier is the linking, in a lot of people's minds, of Libertarianism with Objectivism, Ayn Rand's school of thought. Ayn Rand detested Libertarianism, and hated the fact that many of them were hitching their wagons to her movement. Her major complaint was that their political views were arrived at without any grounding in philosophy, ie: She claimed their metaphysical and epistemological views were contrary to their political views, OR, that they had no metaphysical or epistemological views at all - which, for a lot of people, could very well be true.
By the by, I'm NOT an Objectivist, and in fact have HUGE disagreements with Objectivism and Ayn Rand.
Everyone thinks they're a centrist. True centrists like me know that most of them are wrong.
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Ayn Rand was a terrible writer and bat-shit crazy.
WAB
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What's a "true centrist"? Or are you just being Tom Sawyer the funny guy?
WAB
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Wrong, bigly.
Ayn Rand wrote one of the best novels of C20, with We the Living. Her next novel, The Fountainhead, was not so great, as she tried to rationalize two major blunders: first, that there could EVER be such thing as a "moral rape" (I was ousted from one Objectivism board because of my vehement hatred of that ridiculous concept); and second, that arson could be justified in any way, shape, or form. Atlas Shrugged was marred by the comic book silliness of it. There are scenes at the end that are high comedy, accidentally.
She became an embittered old woman in later life, due to making a cuckold out of her husband and the falling out between her and her lover, Nathan Branden, I think his name was. Her literary executor and acolyte, Leonard Piekoff (sp?) has embarrassed many O'ists with his stupidity.
All that being said, she made a massive impact on Western thought, and her metaphysics and epistemology were quite sound. She was fluent in at least four languages, and was a major force in explaining the folly of Marxist/statist/collectivist thought and its monstrously fatal, catastrophic influence in the world.
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Well, I was trying to be. Clearly, I failed miserably.
In fact, I failed so miserably, I may as well have been trying to implement liberatarian theories in the real world.
WAB
Veteran Member
Sorry, it's not you, it's me. I'm a numbnuts. Just ask my dad.
But Libertarian theories have already been implemented in the real world. Small government, focus on the individual as opposed to the collective, theory of rights, self-empowerment, self-motivation, autonomy, and the negatives of those: accountability (big one), and responsibility (another biggy). Sound familiar to anyone? These are NOT new ideas.
The modern, egalitarian fixation on the TEAM!!!!!! is destroying accountability, and the welfare state, identity politics, absurd PC, is busy destroying responsibility.
It's only a matter of time. Huxley and Orwell - dystopia, the big brother looking into everything we do, is almost inevitable.
Unless more and more people, independently, and free from university brainwashing, begin to wake up.
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You're right, we should all come together as a collective and work as a team to implement individualist philosophies.
braces_for_impact
Veteran Member
Nothing is worse than Trump, but Rubin would hardly be a step forward. What would he do in office? Ask a bunch of questions from the worst the conservatives have to offer with absolutely no push back whatsoever? Maybe he could entertain us all with yet another sad, tired, "trigger warning" joke.