Whats with the leftwing bent of Wrongplanet?

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Awesomelyglorious
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04 Aug 2008, 8:24 am

nominalist wrote:
Well, I am an antifoundationalist. However, aside from that, my objection to rational apologetics (Van Til) and rationalist foundationalism in general is that they reduce a religious system to a series of rational postulates. Rational apologists, in particular, insist that their framework alone is rational. (That was Cornelius Van Til's view.)

Well, ok. Yes, rational apologists due insist that their framework alone is rational, Van Til argued that the unbeliever actually knew the truth of the Christian system but he would never accept it until it was proven to him, that his preexisting system failed without Christian presuppositions. I don't see what the problem of this really ends up being though other than the notion that some of these apologists really seem to clutch for straws.



monty
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04 Aug 2008, 1:33 pm

history_of_psychiatry wrote:
I'd have to say that the majority of people on these boards are moderates


Now watch what you say
Or they'll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh fanatical, a criminal
Oh won't you sign up your name
We'd like to feel you're acceptable,
respectable, oh presentable, a vegetable



nominalist
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04 Aug 2008, 4:43 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
I don't see what the problem of this really ends up being though other than the notion that some of these apologists really seem to clutch for straws.


The only problematic I mentioned is dialogue. I have tried dialoguing with rational apologists in Christianity (Calvinist presuppositionalists), in Islam (those influenced by Harun Yahya), and in Judaism (the kuzari principle) and found it to be nearly impossible.


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Cyanide
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05 Aug 2008, 3:52 am

We need more Centrists here!


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05 Aug 2008, 8:46 am

Griff wrote:
You people and your whining over taxes. If you don't like taxes, cut military spending.


If we don't want taxes, we need to cut handouts to parasites.



Haliphron
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05 Aug 2008, 10:33 am

Dogbrain wrote:
Griff wrote:
You people and your whining over taxes. If you don't like taxes, cut military spending.


If we don't want taxes, we need to cut handouts to parasites.


:lmao:



nominalist
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05 Aug 2008, 3:27 pm

Dogbrain wrote:
If we don't want taxes, we need to cut handouts to parasites.


Who is "we"? These days, Exxon-Mobil seems like the biggest parasite to me.


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Dogbrain
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05 Aug 2008, 3:38 pm

nominalist wrote:
Dogbrain wrote:
If we don't want taxes, we need to cut handouts to parasites.


Who is "we"? These days, Exxon-Mobil seems like the biggest parasite to me.


And your point is? Handouts to corporations ARE STILL HANDOUTS. Cancel subsidies, cancel welfare, cancel ALL the handouts.

Let's be consistent and make no exceptions.



nominalist
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05 Aug 2008, 4:07 pm

Dogbrain wrote:
And your point is? Handouts to corporations ARE STILL HANDOUTS. Cancel subsidies, cancel welfare, cancel ALL the handouts.

Let's be consistent and make no exceptions.


I am consistent - a consistent socialist. ;-)


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Dox47
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05 Aug 2008, 6:36 pm

I think any slant is more contextual than anything. On some issues, the board is pretty left, on others, more moderate. To be honest though, I can't recall off hand a thread where the majority of the posts were really right wing, though I also haven't really been looking for one.


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Dogbrain
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06 Aug 2008, 7:39 am

nominalist wrote:
Dogbrain wrote:
And your point is? Handouts to corporations ARE STILL HANDOUTS. Cancel subsidies, cancel welfare, cancel ALL the handouts.

Let's be consistent and make no exceptions.


I am consistent - a consistent socialist. ;-)


Then you want handouts to everybody, including corporations, which become nothing but arms of the government. How well did that work in the Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics?



Awesomelyglorious
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06 Aug 2008, 9:33 am

Dogbrain wrote:
Then you want handouts to everybody, including corporations, which become nothing but arms of the government. How well did that work in the Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics?

If the entire system is one of external control, then would hand-outs be the proper way of phrasing it? Allocation of money within the firm(a small planned economy of a sort) is not considered to be a hand out.



monty
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06 Aug 2008, 11:41 am

Yes, Payday is a celebration of handouts.



dongiovanni
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06 Aug 2008, 2:53 pm

Dogbrain wrote:
Then you want handouts to everybody, including corporations, which become nothing but arms of the government. How well did that work in the Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics?


I don't know. Didn't they go from archaic farming methods in 1918 to the launching of the world's first spacecraft in 1957? Didn't they give women access to birth control for the first time? Didn't they eradicate unemployment and extend the life expectancy? Yes, the U.S.S.R. was far from perfect, but to paint it as absolutely dystopian is inaccurate. The U.S.S.R. had significant issues in that it was not democratic (free speech/press, dissent control issues), but to paint it as a wretched dystopia is not correct. I'm not even arguing that it's preferable here (I do believe it is), but, given the rest of Russia's history, it certainly wasn't the biggest atrocity.

OP,
I haven't noticed a left-wing bent here as much as an anarco-capitalist/libertarian/minarchist/objectivist bent. Maybe that's just because as a far-leftist (i.e. Socialist, see also Communist), I don't see moderate left is being much of leftists.


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06 Aug 2008, 2:58 pm

Mussolini made the trains run on time...



Awesomelyglorious
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06 Aug 2008, 3:07 pm

dongiovanni wrote:
I don't know. Didn't they go from archaic farming methods in 1918 to the launching of the world's first spacecraft in 1957? Didn't they give women access to birth control for the first time? Didn't they eradicate unemployment and extend the life expectancy? Yes, the U.S.S.R. was far from perfect, but to paint it as absolutely dystopian is inaccurate. The U.S.S.R. had significant issues in that it was not democratic (free speech/press, dissent control issues), but to paint it as a wretched dystopia is not correct. I'm not even arguing that it's preferable here (I do believe it is), but, given the rest of Russia's history, it certainly wasn't the biggest atrocity.

Well, the issue is that painting anything as absolutely dystopian would be false, and heck, nobody would deny that Russia overall has had a terrible history. The issue is that the USSR was all in all a failure. Yes, it did begin with massive economic growth, large improvements, things like that, but when one keeps in mind that it had massive killings by the government(literally millions of people by many accounts), misallocated resources(as noted by shortages in the USSR), extremely high inequality(the USSR was more unequal in resource distribution than the US, despite the fact it wasn't supposed to be unequal at all), high levels of pollution, poor quality of consumer goods(readily displayed by Nixon in the kitchen debate with Khrushchev), was totalitarian, AND eventually failed and is believed to do so due to it's inability to handle information(a point brought up against the planned economy in the Socialist Calculation Debate), or at best due to problems with mechanism design where good economic activities by controllers were not as encouraged as necessary to achieve goals. I mean, really, the duration in which the planned economy has remained and the results we have seen from the planned economy(including China's pragmatic defection from economic planning to positive result) so far do tend to indicate that the system used either does not work well compared to other options, or that it does not work at all. Either way, Dogbrain seems vindicated for his comments.