ISIS in Libya; Seizes Gaddafi's hometown

[knickballer]

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/w...cle4355153.ece


BUT BUT the US were just helping peace loving rebels who just wanted to plant trees all day in 2011!

Saw this coming from the minute the insurgency came up in 2011. Let's just overthrow the country with the highest standard of living in the continent as that makes perfect sense!

[zoom17]

[daily]

I'm pretty sure Libya is a French concern

[KingBeasley08]

yea the French fcked up here. Rest of the world got involved and started crying till the US finally helped

[Dresta]

Still don't understand why people in the West are so obsessive about 'spreading Democracy' - we're destroying the world with this idealistic claptrap.

Documents like the Constitution which limit state power, and things like trial by a jury of your peers, are about 1000x times more important to liberty than democracy. Democracy, more often than not, means less liberty, but alas, most people are so deluded by the times that they think Democracy is the cause of all good things in the world

For a long time it's been obvious that most of the negative things people attribute to capitalism, are actually more consequences of democracy than they are capitalism (which has always been around, and is basically an expression of the human personality, it's just that democracy has degraded this), but obviously people don't want to know about that, so they shuffle off to their voting booths, thinking their selecting from 2 pro-approved and near-identical candidates makes them 'free'

[sweggeh]

Still don't understand why people in the West are so obsessive about 'spreading Democracy' - we're destroying the world with this idealistic claptrap.

Documents like the Constitution which limit state power, and things like trial by a jury of your peers, are about 1000x times more important to liberty than democracy. Democracy, more often than not, means less liberty, but alas, most people are so deluded by the times that they think Democracy is the cause of all good things in the world

For a long time it's been obvious that most of the negative things people attribute to capitalism, are actually more consequences of democracy than they are capitalism (which has always been around, and is basically an expression of the human personality, it's just that democracy has degraded this), but obviously people don't want to know about that, so they shuffle off to their voting booths, thinking their selecting from 2 pro-approved and near-identical candidates makes them 'free'

True

Democracy is a fraud. Not much different from having dictator, except instead of one individual or family having all the power, all the power is held by a slightly larger group of people, most of whom you will never see and don't know exist.

[Bandito]

Still don't understand why people in the West are so obsessive about 'spreading Democracy' - we're destroying the world with this idealistic claptrap.

Documents like the Constitution which limit state power, and things like trial by a jury of your peers, are about 1000x times more important to liberty than democracy. Democracy, more often than not, means less liberty, but alas, most people are so deluded by the times that they think Democracy is the cause of all good things in the world

For a long time it's been obvious that most of the negative things people attribute to capitalism, are actually more consequences of democracy than they are capitalism (which has always been around, and is basically an expression of the human personality, it's just that democracy has degraded this), but obviously people don't want to know about that, so they shuffle off to their voting booths, thinking their selecting from 2 pro-approved and near-identical candidates makes them 'free'

So what would you recommend to govern the US?

[Dresta]

So what would you recommend to govern the US?

Well, you'd certainly be better off with an unelected upper house, so a repeal of the 17th Amendment would be a start (implemented 1913). It unsurprisingly led very quickly to alcohol prohibition, and also the precursors for the drug war (and also enabled Wilson's push for US entry into WW1), pursued by religious "progressive" fanatics like William Jennings Bryan, who also tried to outlaw the teaching of Darwinism (the fact that the early progressive movement was driven by nativist demagogues like this is often ignored by the 'progressives' of today).

The thing with unrestrained democracies is that they can be easily panicked into throwing away their liberties and Constitutional protections, hence the unaccountable superstate of today. It is because of Democracy that we now have no Constitutional check on the laws, as shown when the Supreme Court decided to ignore whether the ACA was actually Constitutional or not, and simply accepted it because it's what the people wanted. That is to effectively tear up and piss all over the Constitution and everything it stands for (division of powers, the restraint of democratic power, etc.).

Local politics is the most important thing in a democracy, and this has been more or less done away with as more and more government functions become centralised in a power the citizenry really has no actual control over, in fact, the politicians have become masters of getting people to vote against their own interests, usually through fear-mongering, almost always driven by moral crusades (against booze, against drugs, against zee Germans, against the Japs, against profanity, against flag burning, and so on).