Where is the Government Skepticism Forum?

[Borodog]

Greetings, I'm new here.

I was perusing the structure of the forums, catching the layout of the land, and noticed the "Business Skepticism" forum, which I think is a fantastic idea. Beautiful little illustration of the market working.

But where is the "Government Skepticism" forum? I've been a skeptic and fan of critical thinking my entire adult life, and the number one thing I am skeptical of is government.

 

[Lurker]

You're at the right place in "Politics".

 

[Borodog]

Are the forums always this slow? It's practically intolerable. While posting the OP the page timed out on me (but I see it still posted).

 

[Lurker]

I'd say 90% of the time the forums are fine. Every once in a while they slow down like now.

 

[Kopji]

Might be looking for the conspiracy theory forum...

 

[Borodog]

Conspiracies generally require secrecy. Government mostly just sucks right out in the open.

 

[NeoRicen]

Eck... Another Libertarian I see.

 

[Tailgater]

Well, this is the politics forum, but I don't know about this skepticism you speak of.

 

[Beerina]

Eck... Another Libertarian I see.

Because this is Randi.org, almost everybody here is a skeptic...about things like ghosts, flying saucers, and even religion itself.

In religion, most skeptics are athiests. They take the reasonable stand that you go ahead and believe in what you want, and I will believe what I want. You are free to believe people in Jesus, or Mohammed, or whoever. But you are not free to jam those beliefs down my throat.

With respect to politics, it's much the same. Libertarians believe you are free to believe whatever you want, but you should be limited to what you can persuade people to do freely. But you may not jam your beliefs down other people's' throat.

This upsets many religious and ufo-only skeptics, who, like a religious person, have a massive, life-long emotional investment in the feelings of power they have in their political beliefs. They feel, no, they know they are onto something, onto the Correct Way Of Living, and they are so sure, so gosh darned sure, that they feel justified ramming it down everyone's throat.

No freedom for you. You Shall Live As I Think. This upsets them as they don't like to think of themselves this way.

Oh. Well.

The Evil Ayn Rand once said, "There should be separation of economics and state, the way there is separation of church and state, and for exactly the same reason."

I invite people to come on over to the Dark Side.

 

[GreNME]

The Evil Ayn Rand once said, "There should be separation of economics and state, the way there is separation of church and state, and for exactly the same reason."

I invite people to come on over to the Dark Side.

You know, more often people tend to consider Rand's overarching ideas wrong, not evil. The ideology you describe is fine, as long as one sits in the 51% section.

Honestly, though, I think you're just putting the horse before the cart in your description.

Instead of the Libertarian Party proselytizing (because nearly anything can be considered 'libertarian' with the proper caveats), I tend to go with the Chris Rock school of thinking: "Everybody's so busy wanting to be down with the gang 'I'm conservative, I'm liberal, I'm conservative'. <edited>! Be a <edited> person! Lis-ten! Let it swirl around your head. Then form your opinion. No normal, decent person is one thing, ok?" Ironically, even that can be argued as a libertarian stance. I point that out in reference to the popular internet 'test' that gets brought up from time to time, with nearly every result of the test turning out, predictably, to be Just Right^TM for the Libertarian Party. Well, of course that would be so when the other options are communist, authoritarian, or fascist.

I'm all for arguing that the Libertarian Party is a valid alternative that could likely be a better fit for some out there who swing to one of the big two parties. Your post describing skepticism as a logical progresion for Libertarian thinking is, in my opinion, a little bit biased in the very same 'Think Like Me' way you describe in your own post. The reality is that there is plenty of room for numerous schools of thought politically. That one group posting more often than another is less a sign that the school of thought is more prone to fit the general description of the type of person who would fit that description (in this case, skepticism), and more a situation of circumstance. Maybe it's just that the name "James Randi" turns up more often in circles a Libertarian might be searching on the net. Maybe a few keywords in some of the subforums over the last couple years have been more commonly searched among certain demographics (to which Libertarians might be a majority), or maybe it's because we're closer to an election year and the inclusion of a normally Libertarian candidate on the Republican ticket attracts more people who are Libertarian to speak out their opinions in discussion forums than in previous occassions. Since we're not dealing with specific analytical data here-- that's the skeptic in me speaking-- I'm a little incredulous to ideas that any of the aforementioned possibilities hold significantly more likelihood than another, and this includes your own suggestion. Libertarians might be skeptics, and most posters here might be skeptics, but that does not logically lead to most posters here being Libertarians, nor does it logically lead to the attribute for being a skeptic fitting only the Libertarian Party ideals.

Sorry, just a quibble on my part.

 

[egslim]

In religion, most skeptics are athiests. They take the reasonable stand that you go ahead and believe in what you want, and I will believe what I want. You are free to believe people in Jesus, or Mohammed, or whoever. But you are not free to jam those beliefs down my throat.

With respect to politics, it's much the same. Libertarians believe you are free to believe whatever you want, but you should be limited to what you can persuade people to do freely. But you may not jam your beliefs down other people's' throat.

Scepticism means basing your beliefs on evidence, instead of ideology, wishful thinking or a host of other motives.

Libertarians are not like that, because they base their beliefs on free-market ideology. This ideology ignores both strategic considerations and clear evidence from corner cases that government intervention can be very beneficial: For example, food rationing prevented starvation during and after WWII, import restrictions and high taxes post WWII allowed speedy reconstruction in Western Europe.
The difficulty is determining when the conditions necessary for the free market to be more efficient at producing the desired results than other systems are met. Debate over what these desired results should be, the absence of repeated experiments, and a changing environment makes this a perpetual debate. With some people preferring to err on one side, and everyone lacking sufficient information for a completely rational decision.

Oh, and if food and other essential imports are significantly threatened by enemy torpedos, I will have no moral objection whatsoever against shoving my belief that we need government rationing down your throat.

*My definition of a libertarian is someone who believes the free market is always best, except for national defense, foreign policy and perhaps law enforcement. With the exception of an exceedingly small number of hardline communists everyone supports free market policies to at least some extent, so that alone is not a sufficiently stringent definition.

 

[GreNME]

I should have specified that there is a difference between 'libertarian' and 'Libertarian' in my post. I forgot that.

 

[UserGoogol]

With respect to politics, it's much the same. Libertarians believe you are free to believe whatever you want, but you should be limited to what you can persuade people to do freely. But you may not jam your beliefs down other people's' throat.

This upsets many religious and ufo-only skeptics, who, like a religious person, have a massive, life-long emotional investment in the feelings of power they have in their political beliefs. They feel, no, they know they are onto something, onto the Correct Way Of Living, and they are so sure, so gosh darned sure, that they feel justified ramming it down everyone's throat.

Politics has absolutely nothing to do with belief. When the government implements a progressive income tax, they aren't forcing any beliefs down anyone's throats, they are forcing actions down people's throats, which is completely different. The government taxing your money in no way prevents you from believing that they really shouldn't do that.

(Except in the sense that when there is an income tax, you are forced to spend more of your time working to make the same income and less time philosophizing about the economy, but that's not really what you're talking about, since by that logic, to really promote freedom of belief, the government should provide various subsidies to allow the less fortunate to be able to spend their time pontificating, which is not a terribly libertarian idea.)

In fact, there are certain aspects of skepticism which can be used to argue for rather unlibertarian things. Skepticism tends to be focused on empiricism, that experimentation is the way that knowledge is gained. Thus, experiments are good, and thus, society-wide experiments are good. Of course, there are arguments to be had on both sides, since mass society-wide social experiments can "crowd out" other social experimentation, but if skepticism is about experimentation, then it seems odd to suppose that forcing experiments down people's throat is necessarily unskeptical.

If laissez-faire capitalism is the "skeptical" position to hold, it is because it is simply right, and thus the belief system that skeptical people will eventually converge to, not because skepticism as a methodology has some relationship with it. (Although I admit that comparisons can be made between economic competition and the competition of ideas, so it's not like the two are completely unrelated.)