Glibertarians.com 2018 Archive

Category: Not So Easy Pieces

  • The Problem with Aggregation, Part 2 of an… Aggregation

    TW: No funny pictures, and you may well think I’m somewhere between naive and insulting by the end of this.

    You are what you eat.  Obviously true for actual food for our physical body, but I contend that it is even more true for our mental and spiritual bodies as well.  Probably even more so. If you deny yourself carbs, your body undergoes a process called gluconeogenesis where it turns protein into glucose.  If you deny important inputs to your mind or your spirit, I don’t think there is a similar process to turn garbage in into anything but garbage out.

    In the previous post in this series, I promised that I would put forward a way to use the insight of that post (that aggregation and transitivity isn’t universal,) to make yourself a better person.  Here is the long, round-about way of getting to that suggestion.

    There is a saying that is the answer to the nature / nurture question.  That saying is “Nature loads the gun, the environment pulls the trigger.”  What that means is that ‘nature’ aka your genetics, your inborn instincts, and your physical limitations, they have created you as this machine that reacts to certain things in certain ways.  In one environment, you will act in one way, and in another environment, you will likely act in a very different way to produce a different end result. Take, for example, a big burly man with limited abstract intellect, a distrust of machinery, but with great willpower.  Put him in the workforce in a coal-mining town decades ago, and he will be remembered for generations as an American Hero. Put him in the workforce in a modern metropolis, and he is going to have a hard time holding down a steady job. Same traits, different environment, different outcomes.

    Alla yall nerds, did you read Jim Butcher’s Brief Cases?  Before the story about Marcone, Jim says that in another world, Marcone would be an ideal and humane landlord.  But in wizard-and-magic Chicago, he’s a ruthless crime boss. Same traits, different environment, different outcomes.

    Another example.  Take the world’s most literate, religious, and educated population on the planet.  Put them in a small town with no electronic communication facilities and a low enough level of wealth that many take for granted can only be made as communal property.  A town usually has one oven, and all the ladies get together for bake days. The town has one mill, and all the men get together to for milling days. The town gets one newspaper and everyone gathers together when the mail comes so someone can read it out loud.  Do you know the origin of the title Professor? He was the guy at the university who made up for the fact that there were more students than books. You couldn’t study in the library because there weren’t enough books to go around. They had a job called the reader where a bunch of people sit in a classroom and listen to someone read the books aloud.

    This is a time of very cosmopolitan mixing.  Anabaptists and Lutherans share dinner instead of the sword and the flame.  Brewers sold yeast to Puritans. This happens because of the social environment.  When two ladies are standing around waiting for the oven temperature to drop from “pie” to “bread,” it’s not likely that they’ll debate the scriptural validity of Calvin’s teachings.  They’ll gossip about what sort of social disease the town strumpet gave to the preacher. Men around the millstone, slowly pouring in grain, don’t usually debate the value of the teachings of the Physiocrats vs that of the Scottish philosophers in developing the wealth of a nation.  They talk about how preacher should apply a tincture of lead and witch-hazel to pants and stop riding the town bike.

    Face to face, they’ve got a life to lead with more pressing and immediate concerns than abstract political economy.  Or politics. Or whatever -ism you can think of. And having just seen what a circular firing squad it is when people of different faiths choose to go oppressing others, they opt to find a way to make friendly relations instead.

    This has a drastic impact on what happens when a political disagreement comes up.  I’m of course talking about the Colonies. Former-Loyalist or former-Patriot, early Americans knew that once the war was over they still had to live with each other and they had to work together to overcome the problems of slow communication and honest differences of interest.  First time around, it worked pretty well.

    The second time around…  Well, it didn’t work so well.  The economy and the social fabric of the nation had changed.  Industrialization started in the north. The south became more stratified.  People had less face to face time with each other. Rounded human beings became names, and names became labels.

    Take the same humans out of the colonial environment and put them in Reconstruction.  You have Yankees and Carpetbaggers, not Hank and Cynthia. Instead of a memory of the futility of warring over differences, you have a memory of a war where brother went to war against brother and shit got done because of it (either emancipating the slaves or perpetrating northern aggression and control, depending on which side of the Mason Dixon you haled from.)

    Same traits, different environment, different outcomes.

    The difference in the environment is a social difference.  People knew more people but not as deeply, they cataloged others with labels, and they operated in an environment of labels.

    The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was making you think you can only have tacos on tuesday.  The second greatest trick was to get you to replace people with labels.

    Because the human mind is lazy.  Once you understand something, you won’t go any further to define that thing if we don’t have to.  It has to be beaten into our heads. You have to stand next to someone working a millstone or loading bread into an oven day-in and day-out to see them as a human being instead of a label.

    In short, labels are a way to aggregate people into types.  It happened less in the Colonies, more in Reconstructions and…

    And now, its out of control.  Our social environment is becoming mediated by platforms and trends that reduces the standing-around-next-to-people time and increase the labeling tools at your disposal.  Social media is making us evil, because remember, aggregation of humans is the root of evil these days. Your ability to spend more and more time plugged into your phone means you are spending less and less time being bored next to people you don’t have much in common with.  Fewer and fewer kids are spending time running around the neighborhood with whoever happens to liveby, and more and more time being shuttled around to activities full of like-minded families.

    And it’s making us worse off.  On this website, lots of you call it derp.  Posting links to show just how out of touch some idiot progressive or statist is.  Progressive. Statist. These are labels and they do their damage even when, especially when, they are right.  

    Using labels like this makes someone a foot soldier in the culture war.  “SJW” is used as a knowing insult. It’s a poke at people who are warriors when there’s no war to be waged.  Its an assertion that these people are Mad Online in the real world. They can’t meme because they take everything to serious.

    And in a lot of cases, it’s a rhetorical blow that strikes true.  But it’s a blow in the culture war. It’s a fight in the war fueled with labels.  It’s a blow in a battle that doesn’t need to be fought. Not by the SJWs. And not by us.

    There’s names for people who fight battles even when it’s not appropriate.  Different names in different times and places, but it’s an old idea. In one time, in one place, they were called ber-serkir.  They were so useful in their society that they were treated like divine gifts. But that’s not what we call them now in modern culture.  Now, if you go and you fight a battle without provocation, it just makes you a maniac.

  • Japanese Loanwords

    You’re 10% of the way to speaking Japanese with this one trick

    Now that we’ve got the click bait headline out of the way let’s get down to today’s lesson – basic Japanese pronunciation and how English is used and pronounced in everyday Japanese. One study suggests anywhere between 5% to 10% of modern Japanese is derived from English.

    For a refresher on the needlessly complex writing systems used in Japanese I refer you back to fellow Glib straffinrun’s 5 Minute Japanese Lesson and Another 5 Minute Japanese Lesson.

    We are just teaching Japanese pronunciation and loanwords so we are just going to use katakana and the western derived romaji. Romaji is the Japanese word for the roman characters that western language speakers already know. In the context of Japanese romaji is what is used to teach the gaijin and for signs and such within Japan to assist westerners.

    Naturally, the Japanese couldn’t be bothered to use the same version of romaji that is used to teach foreigners, Hepburn, and created their own version called Kunrei-shiki. For our purposes, the two are mostly the same.

    For those keeping count that means that are four “official” ways to write Japanese – kanji, hiragana, katakana, and romaji.

    It sounds like what?

    To an English speaker Japanese doesn’t share much vocabulary with English compared to Romance languages. It also has very different grammar and sentence construction. However, for an English speaker the pronunciation is very straightforward. Almost all the sounds in Japanese are already used in English. That means with a relatively short lesson we can have you able to read and pronounce Romanized Japanese words like names, places, movie titles, etc.

    Let’s review the following chart:

    The first row is katakana and the second row is romaji. We are only focusing on the reassuring roman characters at the bottom of each box. Focusing on just the “vowel” section the first row goes – a, i, u, e, o. The next row is ka, ki, ku, ke, ko. Are you beginning to see the pattern? It’s generally consonant (or consonant with a “y” sound) plus a, i, u, e, o.

    Japanese generally doesn’t have the same concept as consonants and vowels in English. Instead Japanese’s building blocks are mora, essentially syllables. The chart above contains essentially every basic sound in Japanese. If you can pronounce these syllables then you can say anything in Japanese.

    Don’t read Romanized Japanese as English!

    The biggest mistake English speaker make is reading Romanized Japanese as English. There are no “long vowels” and “short vowels”. The vowels sounds for Japanese are:

    A – sounds like the “a” in father
    I – sounds like “ea” in “seat”
    U – sounds like “oo” in “boo” as in what you say when you want to startle somebody
    E – sounds like the “e” in “set”
    O – sounds like “o” in “so”

    English:

    • Ban – prohibit (short “a”)
    • Bane – a cause of great distress or annoyance (long a because of the “e” at the end)

    Japanese:

    • Bane (ばね)- spring (e.g. coil, leaf). It’s pronounced “bah neigh”. Notice unlike ban and bane that the Japanese is TWO syllables.

    That’s really the biggest obstacle to reading Romanized Japanese – remember to only pronounce the vowels one way and to make the consonant and vowel pairs form syllables.

    All the other stuff…

    Naturally, it’s not quite that simple there are few other quirks and things to keep in mind.

    • The “R” sound. Surprising few people, Japanese speakers have trouble distinguishing between “R” and “L”. Part of that reason is that depending on the word the sound fluctuates between what an English speaker hears as an “R” and “L”. In Japanese, the ra, ri, ru, re, ro row isn’t pronounced like an English “R”. The tongue starts at the top of the palate. I’m not a Spanish speaker, but have read it’s very similar to a Spanish “R”.
    • Intonation and stress in Japanese is very different from English. It most certainly DOES exist, but for an English speaker trying to not sound ridiculously wrong in Japanese you are better off pronouncing everything “flat” and give equal weight to all the syllables. You’ll pretty much be wrong 100% of the time, but you will sound much more natural and mostly be understood. Much more so than using English stress.
    • The “tsu” sound. This one just doesn’t exist in English. You are probably familiar with the word “tsunami”. It sounds a bit like clicking your tongue and saying the name “Sue”. Touching your tongue to the roof of your mouth is the key here and it is important as that is how you distinguish from the Japanese “su” sound. This distinction can be quite difficult to hear initially.
    • The one “consonant” in Japanese ン or ん “N”. It’s a bit of an oddball, but the sound is the same as English. You are probably familiar with it from “hello” or “good day”, こんにちは or koN ni chi wa. Notice how this word doesn’t read or sound the way you are used to hearing it. That “N” attaches to the first syllable and phrase is FOUR syllables long.
    • The small “tsu” or ッ. The small “tsu” in romaji is written as doubled consonant. I honestly have no idea how this crazy double consonant convention came to be. It’s used to signify a pause and has no effect on pronunciation. For example, ブック or bukku which can be used for “book”. In this you say “bu” briefly pause and say “ku”.
    • I’ve saved the trickiest one for last. You will read doubled vowel sounds in romaji. Like the small “tsu” above this has nothing to with how the vowel sounds, instead it means you prolong the vowel sound. For example, ビル or “biru” means “building”. But ビール or “biiru” means “beer”. To say the word imagine it taking THREE syllables worth of time, but said as only TWO syllables – BII RU with an extension of the first sound.
      • Tokyo – English spelling for the capital of Japan
      • 東京- kanji for Tokyo and normally what you see in public signs
      • But Tokyo can be properly written as とうきょう – in hiragana. Note the う character here. That’s telling you the Tokyo is pronounced “toukyou” (Hepburn) or Tōkyō (Kunrei-shiki). The marks over the “o” here tell you to extend the length of the vowel, but NOT to change the pronunciation. You’ll note here the doubled vowel is two different vowels o and u, but the sound is still “o”.

    OK, let’s put our knowledge to work

    Surprisingly, Wikipedia has lengthy page on gairaigo and wasei-eigo which mean “foreign words” and “Japanese-English words” respectively. I’ll pull some highlights here that you might find interesting. Naturally there are many, many more than what I’ve highlighted here and on the Wiki page.

    For extra credit

    I’ve selected an especially “useful” YouTube video for you to practice your newfound Japanese language skills. Like lots of J-Pop it contains actual English choruses to be “trendy” plus the English that has become part everyday usage in Japanese. Both English and Japanese subtitles are available if you click on the CC symbol.

    I’d recommend watching it with English subtitles first so you can hear how Japanese people pronounce English. Big issues for Japanese speakers are the “th” sound and the final “t” sound in English. So for example. “thank you” becomes サンキュー or “san kyuu” and “heart” becomes ハート or “haato”.

    If your stomach can take it I’d suggest watching it a second time with the Japanese subtitles. In the Japanese subtitles where you see English sentences and characters that’s an intentional insertion of English to be cool. Where you see English written in katakana that’s English that is in everyday use in Japanese language.

    MV full】 ヘビーローテーション / AKB48 [公式]

  • Suicide: Libertarian Style

    NB: This piece speaks about suicide in an abstract and philosophical manner and should not be construed as advocating for or endorsing suicide.  If for whatever reason, you have stumbled upon this page and are actively considering suicide, please go here or call 1-800-273-8255.

    Preamble

    This is probably not going to be a happy or fun piece.  Death is sad. It represents the great unknown; the termination of our fragile existence into something we know not what.  It is permanent; more permanent than anything else we deal with in this world. And it causes overwhelming emotions of loss, grief and sadness.  Suicide adds many additional dimensions to this. When someone chooses to die, the typical emotions of grief are compounded by a whole host of other emotions; confusion, anger, guilt and helplessness all come along for the ride.  Perhaps most pernicious, suicide seems to be contagious in that friends and family of people who have committed suicide are more likely to experience suicidal feelings and even carry it out.  Along with criminal acts like rape, incest and murder, suicide is one of the most taboo actions we have in our (read: Western) culture. I struggled with whether or not I should even write this piece lest the unlikely event of someone reading it was driven to commit suicide (hence the disclaimer above).  That fear and the stigma surrounding suicide makes it a difficult topic to discuss dispassionately. Why should this be? What goes into a person making the decision to self-terminate? Can it really ever be called a rational decision? These are the questions I’m going to try and tackle.

    Who Commits Suicide?

    Before getting into this, first I think I better define what I mean when I’m talking about suicide in this piece.  There is a somewhat fine line between suicide and euthanasia. When I think of euthanasia, I think of someone with a terminal illness for whom death is imminent regardless of what action they take.  They are also suffering greatly and would prefer to “get it over with” rather than suffer through a few more weeks or months of pain before expiring. As is wont to happen, this definition is expanding in places where euthanasia is legal to include people with mental illnesses or non-terminal but painful conditions.  After all, we’re all terminal, it’s just a matter of the timescale right? That further blurs the line between suicide and euthanasia. The difference, as I see it, is that someone who is depressed is not going to experience depression as an imminent proximate cause of death. It may be horrendously painful, but there is at least a somewhat decent possibility that that person can receive treatment and return to some kind of baseline level of health.  The same cannot (usually) be said of someone with Stage IV brain cancer. There is plenty of debate about euthanasia and its ethical and moral implications as well, and it certainly is related to suicide, but it’s not what I want to talk about here. To that end, when I refer to suicide, I’m talking about a person making a conscious decision to end his life when there is no physical condition that will otherwise cause imminent death.  (I can already see you saying “depression is a physical condition!”  Yes it is, but if you lock a severely depressed person in a room without the means to kill himself and force feed him to keep him from starving, he’ll certainly be miserable, but the depression on its own won’t cause him to keel over).    

    Because of stigma and shame surrounding suicide, it’s notoriously difficult to get quality statistics on it.  Often, surviving families, if there’s any ambiguity, will try and get the cause of death to be classified as accidental to avoid that shame.  For example, it’s estimated that the majority of opiate overdose related deaths are actually intentional, but it’s very likely that most/all of them get classified as accidental.  With that caveat, best quality studies put incidence at around 1% of the population or 12 out of every 100,000 people. This number puts it at about the same prevalence as schizophrenia, though the real number is likely higher.  About 75% of all suicides occur in the developed world and are overwhelmingly male. Although women are more likely to attempt suicide, approximately four times as many men succeed (some regional variation exists). It’s hard to peel apart “suicidal gestures” and “calls for help” from authentic suicide attempts so that even further muddies the statistical water.  Speaking generally, suicide is most common in Europe (especially Eastern Europe), Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. It is least common in East/Southeast Asia (Japan and South Korea being notable exceptions) and Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa. There is a pretty solid inverse correlation between the level of collective religiosity of a population and prevalence of suicide.  Most religions put a very strong prohibition on suicide, Catholicism going so far as to classify it as a mortal sin on par with murder. Most of these prohibitions stem from the view that life is a gift from G-d and rejecting that gift is the ultimate contemptuous rebellion toward the Creator. Along with explicit prohibition on suicide, religious people are more likely to be members of tight-knit communities of like-minded people; a suicide preventative.

    Why?

    This is the question that invariably haunts friends and loved ones in the aftermath of a suicide.  Very occasionally, people will commit ideologically motivated suicide as a political statement (think Buddhist monks self-immolating during Vietnam) and their purpose is pretty clear.  These are outliers, however. It is far more common for the reason to be, if not a complete mystery, then opaque at best. Even in the presence of a detailed note, people left behind are often flummoxed about the reasoning of the suicidal individual.  However, this is one of the key things to understand about suicide; the suicidal individual’s thinking is often distorted and the reasoning leading to the conclusion that suicide is appropriate only makes sense to said individual. This is important because it calls into question the assumption that suicide is a rational decision.  Is distorted logic somehow inferior to “consensus” logic? What does “distorted logic” even mean?

    One thing is for certain: suicide almost always leaves a trail of destruction behind it.  The shattered families, inconsolable grief, confusion about motive and unanswerable questions will haunt those left behind forever.  As stated before, it can be contagious. I have personal experience in which family friends experienced the suicide of the father, then both daughters within a 5 year span, leaving the mother alone.  Needless to say, this was an unparalleled tragedy that resulted in nothing but misery, pain and nihilism. After seeing that kind of shitshow, it’s very hard to be dispassionate and logical about the ethical implications of suicide.  However, as a group of people driven primarily by principle, such an analysis should be done.

    Self Ownership

    A keystone of libertarian philosophy is the axiom of absolute self-ownership.  What you do to yourself, as long as it doesn’t violate the NAP, is permitted unquestionably.  This goes for drug use, sexual behavior, obesity etc. All is not fun and games, however, as you are expected to bear the burden of responsibility for the consequences of those decisions.  Don’t smoke 3 packs a day and then expect the taxpayer to bail you out when you get cancer.

    That said, is suicide a violation of the NAP?  I’m inclined to say no. You are hurting your loved ones and the people around you, but are you engaging in aggression toward them?  Not in the sense that you’re endangering their physical safety or liberty directly. One could argue that smoking 3 packs a day is suicide, just in slow motion.  If we agree that’s acceptable behavior, then giving a blow job to a .357 is equally acceptable.

    This brings me back to the “distorted thinking” point from earlier.  Can someone who chooses to self-terminate really be considered to be “in their right mind” and capable of making such a choice?  I say the question is irrelevant because being in a state of “right-mindedness” does not have a clear definition. Distinct from the “reasonable person” standard of law, postulating some kind of philosophical “right mind” takes us down a slippery slope that leads to reeducation, crimethink and “enthusiastic consent” arguments re: drunken sex.  What about if someone has dementia or schizophrenia and is imagining things that are objectively false which leads him to suicide? This is a situation in which philosophical vagueness comes into play and I don’t have an easy answer (a bit of shameless self promotion, check out my discourse on vagueness here).  The distinction between distorted and undistorted thinking is a blurry one and the unintended consequences of trying to define it solidly are too great.  Besides, this goes into a question of motives, which ultimately are irrelevant. Why does someone smoke 3 packs a day when he knows how bad it is for him?  Doesn’t matter. Mind your own business. Fuck off, slaver.

    These edge cases certainly don’t justify nullifying the larger principle of self-ownership, so I feel comfortable declaring suicide to be ethical from a libertarian perspective.  (Reminder: ethics are derived from external codes of conduct and morals are principles on which an individual’s judgement of right and wrong are based; they are intertwined but not identical).  If libertarian ethics are derived primarily from the NAP, then I can’t see how suicide is unethical. I believe as libertarians, we have to reserve the right of people to terminate their own existence.  After all, your own self is your most fundamental piece of property, and you can dispose of your property however you wish. To say that you are partially owned by your loved ones opens the door to slavery.  If one really wanted to construct an ethical argument against suicide without referencing religion (which is easy: G-d said not to), you’d have to fall back on deontological arguments. One could say that implicit in a marriage contract and/or the implied contract between parent and child when said child is brought into the world is a duty to live for the sake of those people.  I’m OK if you want to make that argument; it at least seems to be logically consistent, but that’s as far as I go. I don’t believe any similar argument can be made in regards to the relationship between a suicidal person and his parents or his friends.  Taking that approach very quickly slides into “social contract” territory and we all know where that ends up (nowhere good). To be sure™, I’m not even sure how I feel about “implicit” clauses in marriage and parental relationships; if your future spouse is known to be suicidal, put a prohibition against suicide in your vows (or better yet, don’t get married to that person).

    What of morality?  Well, trshmnstr had an excellent piece about, what he called Deferentialism vs. Restraintism (see here) that sums up two opposing philosophies of how libertarians can approach the problems of moral relativism inherent to libertarian thought.  In each case, however, I think the approach to the problem of suicide is similar to the problem of drug use. Many libertarians recognize how stupid it is to shoot heroin.  They may condemn it as evil and morally reprehensible. However, no libertarian worth his salt would say using it should be illegal or a reason to be locked in a cage. Suicide is trickier because, if carried out properly, there is no one to arrest or lock up.  The only way then for it to be codified as wrong is in a personal code of conduct or with a deity. I’ve already argued that, in spite of its colossal collateral damage, suicide is not a strict violation of the NAP. Therefore, it has to fall into the same category as drug use or adultery or promiscuity or a host of other social pathologies that libertarians must tolerate in order to live in a free society.  Whether an individual considers it to be immoral likely falls on the Deferentialist/Restraintist spectrum.

    Coda

    When it comes to suicide, I fall on the Restraintist side of the aisle.  I strongly condemn it as both immoral and stupid. I recognize a person’s right to take himself out of the game, but I also reserve the right to call that person a moron making a terrible decision.  I say this not without compassion for those suffering through deep depression which distorts reality to the point that suicide seems rational. However, life is about taking personal responsibility. Part of being a fully actualized, mature human being is being capable of knowing when things in your life are going sideways, and then acting to fix them.  Some people see suicide as “fixing” their problems and I suppose in some ways it does. However, to use a cliché, it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem. It’s sending your car to the junkyard when the brakes go bad. It’s tunnel vision resulting in extreme selfishness. No matter how much you may think it, people will not be better off without you.  And if you need to find a reason to live, you can always look at boobs on the internet.

  • Anarcho Capitalism, private property, bank failure and use of force

    Anarcho Capitalism, private property, bank failure and use of force

    Throughout my life, people have often wondered why I’m an anarcho capitalist. Often asking questions like “Why?” and “How about roads?” and “Why is private property not theft?” and a million other questions. This is a series of essays on the subject so that I can refer people to them, just to make my life slightly easier. So let’s start out with a small description of what Anarcho-Capitalism is.

     

    Anarcho-Capitalism is not a system of government–it’s a system of society, one which allows for the existence of whatever subsystems you want: Anarcho-Communism, Socialism, free market communes, whatever you want. The whole point is that people engage in free association and don’t aggress against each other. In fact the central tenet is the NAP, or the Non Aggression Pact, which stipulates that someone can’t attack someone else unless previously attacked or trespassed upon beforehand. There is of course a simple problem however, how does one avoid a “tit for tat” situation? Well that ends quite simply in that although others cannot punish the infractor normally, they may instead enact an effective ban on interaction with the aggressive actor. Because of this, one can’t force people to follow certain rules, unless they’re on your land or property, and you may peacefully eject people who are on your property, assuming that you can persuade them to do so.

    Is this so hard?

    So now that that’s out of the way, time to answer the meat and potatoes of this essay, “Why is private property not theft? If people are laboring and the factory owner sits in his office, why does he deserve the money and profits that they make?”

    Products rely on a few simple things, the actual labor going into them, and the organization of that labor. 20 men digging randomly with spoons is a lot of labor, but in fact very little is made, whereas if 3 men are using shovels to dig a trench with 1 man organizing it to lay a pipeline, there is far less labor but the actual product is worth far more. The private property is organized by the owner while the laborers enact the labor. The point is that the business is an agreement between the workers and the owner, the owner organizes their labor and adds most of the value to their work, thus the owner is entitled to most of the profit. Especially in situations where a single owner has accrued massive wealth by the virtue of their company, if an owner can manage to make it so profitable then they are still entitled to all of the profits. One ought to notice that playboys themselves often have very lackluster lifestyles.

    I’m on a bit of a roll, so how about another question, “How would people be protected against bank failure without insurance on their deposits?”

    Well the answer to that is simple, the banks will be organized slightly differently, or insurance companies will ensure the customers just like any other product is entitled to. But how is everything organized you might be asking? Well, allow me to explain. The insurance company will be entitled to a fee, a fee which is determined based on your choice of bank and the practices from that bank, as well as how much you are insuring under them. The worse the bank’s practices, the higher fee they charge and the lower the percentage they will return to you is. But what about the new organization of bank? Well that’s even more exciting, the bank is organized so that it may not fail, it must be organized so that in case of a severe series of withdrawals, that it may force all people who have taken loans to return those loans to them.

    Let’s throw down one more before I have to leave before this turns into a novel, “How would people be protected from attacks without an organized military or even a police force?”

    For this single question I have two answers, the first is protection without the police. Private police forces, these police forces are actually better than the current system, because if you don’t like the way your police force is handling your protection, you can easily fire them and instead hire a different force or even start your own. In fact a private police force will have far more accountability, after all if an officer shoots your dog, he can’t say “I feared for my life” and the company he works for will fire his ass to make sure that it doesn’t get out that they hired a psychopath and lose many more prospective customers. But what about the second component: protection without a military? For this I must use a small part of Machiavelli’s one book, The Prince. He states that republics and other freer states are more difficult to dominate, because the people will not submit to an outside force. So there is no reason for another state to be able to move in and expect to retain that land. But what about someone who wants to kill everyone in the area? Quite simply it’s harder to execute an entire population without encountering extreme resistance, especially if the natives are armed with high grade weaponry. There’s not even a reason to fear a nuclear attack, because nuclear weapons are only useful in destroying a state’s will to fight.

    Anyway, those are my answers to those questions, if there are any other questions about the answers of an AnCap, don’t hesitate to ask! I love answering questions about this.

  • Five minute Romanian lesson

    Five minute Romanian lesson

    Earlier on this fair blog, straffinrun senpai regaled us with a short Japanese lesson. And while learning how to say American in Japanese is useful and all, it is not the most useful thing one may know about a language. As any fule kno, when learning a language, you first learn to swear, so you know whose ass to kick while abroad. And thus begineth the five minute Romanian lesson.

    I can provide appropriate pickup lines for second grade for OMWC
    Second grade level lesson

    But Pie! you will cry. This is a family friendly website, full of wholesome individuals, who never said a swear word in their life! True. But if you ever meet a flesh and blood Romanian, you will want to know what they say. And they will. To begin… Romania is a poetic, musical language and, as such, there are many a ways to swear. In five minutes, alas, we only have time for the basics.

    Like in many countries, males swear more then females and otherkin, and males are touchy about their mothers, so many swear words ehm… touch mothers. Without further ado…

    To start with the symbol of ever present patriarchy, pula is the basic vulgar word for penis. It may mean dick or cock or what have you. But to find equivalent English swear words, it would be closer translated to fuck, based on it’s use. It is found in such swears as sugi pula (suck my cock), ia pula (“have a dick” aka fuck off), date-n pula mea (“go to my dick” aka also fuck off), ce pula mea vrei (what “my dick” do you want so basically what the fuck do you want), or imi bag pula-n mă-ta (I’ll stick my dick in your mom), băga-mi-aş  pula in ea de treabă (feeling of anger, literally: I’d stick my dick in this whole business or basically fuck this). It is also used as a comparison word, usually for something bad. Cum a mers interviul (how was the interview), ca pula (like a cock aka awful)

    Pizda (a word of I assume Slavic origin) is the basic vulgar word for the vagina. Found most often in the swear dute-n pizda mă-tii (go to your mama’s pussy, also knows as sending one to ones origins). It is also a comparison word, but this time meaning something good pizdă de masina (great car), pizdos (cool) or the superlative form miez de pizdă (miez can mean essence, in case of bread can mean the crumb, in case of fruit like walnut it can mean the actual nutmeat, it can mean middle of something, etc.)

    Fut means to fuck. A common verb in swears in many a country. Frequented uses are the fut in gat/gura (fuck you in the throat/mouth), o fut  pe mă-ta (fuck your mother) and it only escalates from here.  Futu-ţi morţii mă–tii (fuck your mother’s dead people aka ancestors). Futu-ţi dumnezeii mă–tii  (fuck your mother’s gods) and many variations of this theme.

    Muie is basically either semen or the act of fucking someone orally (the most used expression is să-ţi dau muie which means I see you are fellating me in your future). It is mostly used as a standalone swear. Sloboz (release) is another slang term for semen, used in phrases like date-n sloboz (got into semen), si ce sloboz vrei (what in the name of semen do you want).

    Now to complement the above, pronouns in Romanian:

    Old school : Eu Tu El/Ea Noi Voi Ei

    New School: xir, xer, ji, hjer, zag, zog, zig

    Conjugate the verb to be:
    A fi 
    Eu sunt
    Tu esti
    El/Ea este
    Noi suntem
    Voi sunteţi
    Ei sunt

    Conjugate the verb to have:
    A avea
    Eu am
    Tu ai
    El/Ea are
    Noi avem,
    Voi aveti
    Ei au

    Numbers to ten: zero unu doi trei patru cinci şase şapte opt noua zece

    Unde este creionul? Creionul este pe birou (where is the pencil? the pencil is on the desk)

    This concludes the five minute Romanian lesson. For homework write “pula pizda fut sloboz muie” 100 times.

    And to have some English involved, for no reason, I leave you with Monty Python’s naval medley subtitles in Italian