It's an interesting question--perhaps it was popularized by that movie The Matrix.  My problem with that movie is that, with all the energy in the universe, why would some advanced robotic species waste time enslaving humans for their energy, which likely wouldn't even power the very simulation they participate in.  The universe is full of suns which are far more efficient to harvest energy from.

As far as the simulation theory goes, my thoughts are this: if there's no evidence of it, then it's unwise to assume it's occurring anyway.  How does one show that this is a simulation?--we would need to be able to enter the "real world", and be able to view the simulation from outside of the simulation.  We would also need to be able to be certain that this experience of exiting the simulation into the real world was actually occurring, but there's limits to what the human experience can guarantee (empiricism gets us only so far.)  If we "break" the simulation from the inside, we could also just as well assume that we can break the real world.  Anything which occurs in the "simulation" can just as easily be attributed to occurring in reality.  Why limit yourself to one simulation?  Why not have every human being in existence be in their own simulation which combines into a supersimulation that we experience together.  Again, no evidence of this occurring.  What if, outside of the simulation, we're all brains in jars?  No evidence of this occurring.  What if we're all actually just souls lost in limbo and this is all a hallucination of post-death?  No evidence.  What if there's an tentacled alien demigod somewhere in another dimension who is having a multi-billion year long dream about our universe and that's what our existence is?  No evidence.

It's the same as questions for the tooth fairy and santa clause: we can make up as many reasons as we'd like as to why anything is happening, but if we can't actually experience the evidence of it, then we must assume it's not real.

I don't like the mindset of crabs in a bucket.  Taxation wastes money hardcore, and more taxation wastes more money; whatever you're trying to pull off through taxation can be solved much more cheaply and cleanly through the market.  It would be better to lower both taxes and governmental influence (can't have one without the other and expect fiscal health.)  That the rich get tax breaks doesn't change the fact that they pay the most taxes, and also further pay politicians the most bribes to work for the rich, to make the rich richer.  The state is basically a whore for the highest bidder and the highest bidder is typically the wealthiest around.  The state is essentially a big gun that can be pointed at anyone to try to get them to do something.  It was intended to be a big gun to point at our enemies but this was perverted into what it is now.  You are paying for the wealthy to control you.  The logical conclusion is a Soviet Russia or North Korea situation where the wealthy pretend to be the saviors of the proletariat (propaganda which they paid the state to feed to the kids so they'd grow up to accept it--we're seeing this manifest in our latest generation, esp. noticeable in college students who are just begging for it.)  Whatever the rich pay, how much or how little, is ultimately irrelevant; in fact you would want them to pay nothing, and make the poor have to pay for the extreme levels of governmental expense, so that they would get pissed off and dismantle the state apparatus sooner to remove the most unfair advantage the rich get in society.  In the opposite direction, if the rich wind up paying, say, 100% of taxes, then they wind up becoming the state (many already are; I first became aware of this watching the documentary Food Inc., which pointed out that many members of major corporations also serve as members of the federal government, the so-called "revolving door" phenomenon.)  So what's the difference?  Well, the state is the only organization in society with free reign to enforce law, and can do so while also breaking its own laws (simply by exempting itself)--especially problematic when the state has barred guns from society, which gives them no resistance at all.  In other words the rich can do whatever they want without any oversight whatsoever (certainly not God, which they always remove immediately during such "revolutions"--wouldn't want anyone practicing a culture that may go against the new rulers and their vision.)

In short, the state enables to rich to weaponize their wealth against the rest of society, rather than make them do something useful to get more wealth like reinvesting or issuing loans (although some will say loans are evil, but those same people will say they have no money to pursue their dreams--well what do you think loans are for?)  I could not care less about tax breaks for the rich, it's a red herring.

I will disagree with Imfinnabeon; I will argue that the pursuit of democracy is what got us into this position in the first place.  First, you say that the public eats up propaganda willingly (though I don't think politicians are the only party here feeding propaganda, I think the mainstream media is the primary source of propaganda which is in turn owned by the wealthy.)  In the very next sentence you want the public to be able to vote directly for what they want.  Well, what do you think they're going to vote for?--what they were propagandized to vote for.  They'll have some abstract notion of what they want--we all know what we want out of society--but what isn't clear is how those desires are manifested, and that's where the manipulation occurs.  For example, many people are under the impression that by growing the welfare program, people will have a better safety net in life and will be able to worry less about their finances, enabling them to get out of poverty more easily and to soften the blow of hardships.  In reality people wind up becoming addicted to welfare, and fail to develop skills and look for work since hey--they're already getting paid.  This means less money for the rest of society to spend on useful things like entrepreneurship, which would create the jobs that the welfare recipients aren't taking.  This is in a republic--in a more direct democracy, for example, people are inclined to vote for the easy life, without worrying about the fiscal end of the equation, because while everyone can show great concern over themselves, they typically don't express much concern (if any) over society as a whole.

The primary issue with democracy is that it pushes the average voter IQ to the national mean--that is to say, if your national IQ is 100, then your national leadership will be operating on an IQ of 100.  Your nation will act as a whole only as intelligently as the average person.  This is true also for a republic which has an egalitarian (i.e. democratic) voting system--no matter who smart, no matter how dumb, no matter how insane or evil, every single vote has the same exact value, and those people are going to opt for politicians who they like the most, whether or not those politicians are of good moral character or whether they are remotely intelligent.  Because the poor can easily be manipulated to support the rich even against their own benefit, it's obvious that you wouldn't want a democratic system to prevent the chaos involved with the shortcomings of Joe & Jane Schmoe.

You'd want some kind of system which gives greater voting power to the smartest of society (although that may not be enough to stop weaponization of the state against one's own society, but it would at least put some caps on it, like, for example, a real budget due to a lack of a central bank which would mean a lack of inflation.)  Democracy is antithetical to this: for the pursuit of equality in the value of man, we get mediocrity.  This occurs everywhere egalitarianism is pursued, but as pointed out before, the Soviet Union is a great example of where absolute egalitarianism takes you: absolute mediocrity.

With all this said, I don't think the rich are necessarily trying to enslave the poor by the virtue of their being rich--of course, if you get rich through manipulating the state, then you'll want to pursue that more.  Wealth is a great incentive to pushing people into work, and this is true both for the poor and the rich.  When it no longer becomes profitable for the rich to manipulate the state, they will stop.  Demanding the rich to stop without removing their incentive to do so is like demanding a river to stop without removing its source--it doesn't really matter what you want, it's going to happen.

Available for work!

"To defeat climate change, we need to change the climate."

Mmmkay

Has anyone considered the possibility that the climate changes anyway, and has since the earth's inception

Also has anyone considered the possibility that this is an excuse for more state power that can never be revoked due to the previous observation

"The climate is changing, we need to change the climate again to combat the changing climate"

[Does a lot of expensive and limiting things which may or may not have impacted the climate]

"Oh look the climate changed again, we need to change the climate again to combat the climate changing again"

Only thing that bugs me are all the people who buy into this nonsense who will never admit they may have been wrong.  There will be the new thing they can be useful tools for, and as soon as climate change ceases to be effective to get you to give up your power, it will go down the memory hole.

I just want some consistency.  If you're going to say alcohol is OK, despite it causing many deaths while driving, by overdosing, or long-term damage to the liver and a person's intelligence, or to a woman's baby while in the womb, then you can't turn around and say drugs like marijuana and LSD are worthy of banishment, especially when their effects aren't as severe.

It's horseshit and everyone knows it.

I don't think they're going to have a choice.

Genocide is a particular thing.  In order to classify as genocide, the attacker needs to be doing so with the explicit purpose of absolutely eliminating another identity of people.  As far as I am aware, the US had no intention of killing off all the Japanese people in existence, but that the point was to send a message to them to stop attacking and attempting to conquer everyone else.


The Japanese Empire

If America wanted the Japanese people absolutely dead for the quality of being Japanese, then they would've continued to drop more and more atomic bombs until there was no more Japan, then they would've continued to kill any Japanese outside of Japan until there were no more Japanese in existence.  This did not occur; once the Japanese surrendered, the killings stopped.  It's evident that it was not an act of genocide, even if as a result a number of Japanese people died; nations attack other nations all the time, they don't necessarily do so because they want to genocide each other, it's usually because there's some other goal they're aiming for.  I don't think anyone here is too naive to believe America was incapable of completely annihilating Japan if they really wanted to.

The second point: the United States may have a lot of Christians, but that someone is a Christian does not mean their behaviors are performed in the name of their religion.  As far as I am aware, the US did not bomb Japan with the purpose of fulfilling their Christian faith.  You could just as easily say, because the people who did this were white, then that means whites are responsible for this, then you could also say that because the people who did this were male, then that means males are responsible for this, then you could say the people involved mostly had dark brown or gray hair, so that means dark brown hair and gray hair people are responsible for this, furthermore most of them were taller than the rest of the population, so that means tall people are responsible for this, also you could say the people involved were well nourished, therefor people who aren't starving are responsible for this, also the people involved were alive in the 1900's, therefor people who lived in the 1900's were responsible for this, blah de blah etc. etc. etc.

Correlation does not imply causation, and not all members of these groups are responsible for the decisions of a few who happen to share some of their qualities.

if you can provide evidence that the people responsible for the two atomic bombs on Japan did so in the name of a Japanese genocide and that by a Japanese genocide they would be fulfilling their Christian faith, then you would have a point.  Otherwise you're just practicing sophistry.

God is all 30-million genders that Tumblr has created, including the ones they haven't thought up yet.

Pro: All those people you hate will starve to death
Con: All those people you love will starve to death

Pro: You'll make as much as your neighbor
Con: You'll make as much as your neighbor

Pro: You know what your life prospects are
Con: Your life prospects are shit

Pro: Everything is free
Con: The lines are free too, and they extend beyond your precinct's limits

Pro: You won't have to worry about those pesky student loans
Con: The job lottery gave you a job that has nothing to do with your specialization, also you want to die at all times of day

Pro: Nobody is richer than you
Con: Just kidding O Glorious Leader is infinitely wealthier than you are

Pro: Criminals can't get guns to kill people with
Con: The government has all the guns and kill people with them if they don't show up to work

Pro: You won't have to worry about buying your own books
Con: All the books are communist propaganda

Pro: No obesity epidemic
Con: You'll have to eat your own daughter when the food is "accidentally" distributed incorrectly

Nobody is born with hatred.  It's through repeated mistreatment which hatred arises, or at the very least the perception of mistreatment.  It's the natural response towards detriments to one's own existence; I hate these flies that always buzz right by my fucking ear when I'm trying to concentrate, I hate all the traffic on the road when I'm trying to get home from a long day, I hate it when people lie to me esp. when I know they're lying to me, I hate it when I stub my toe.  I could explain why I feel the way I do about these things--and the list is quite extensive--but it should be evident as to how these things can be a detriment to my existence, even if only marginally.

I think the allegory of the two wolves is a very two-dimensional understanding of relationship ethics.  You are going to experience a wide range of emotions in your life and they are all there to help direct your behavior towards something productive for yourself, assuming you don't try to discard them under the false pretense that certain emotions are always inappropriate to hold.  If you hate something, you would do better to understand why you hate, rather than throwing the emotion away under the pretense that it's replacing another emotion you could be having.  Through understanding the hatred, you learn more about yourself and your own needs, you better understand what you want out of this life.  Hatred repels you and love attracts you: both are necessary to guide your behavior, two faces of a coin.

I feel like they should be tolerated but should not be aided or appeased in any form on a national level (of course, if you personal want to use your resources to help them out, I'm not going to object.)  If you wanna LARP as another gender, then fine, have your fun, just understand you make yourself an outcast by the very nature of your being.  But once I am threatened with jail time for failing to call you by your preferred pronoun, that's when I get angry.  Once I am encouraged to shame others or feel shame myself for failing to have a sexual desire for these people, that's when I get upset.  When I am disallowed from even criticizing their decision without being labeled a bigot or a *-phobe, that's what gets me.  Once businesses are expected to have a minimal amount of these people to ensure "diversity", that's just way too far.

It's beyond tolerance now in the west, it's over representation in all aspects of life (what percentage of the population are these people again, <1%?) and outright supremacy in many cases, where these people have even more rights than anyone else--why?  What is the purpose?  Is it a form of punishment on all others?  Is it a gift to them?  We were doing just fine with tolerating them, but those who fight for social justice never seem to be satisfied, they must create the injustices to then fight.  Just stop meddling!

Anyway, as far as being a transgender goes, considering just how much natural stigma there is against those who pretend to be a gender they are not, there really must be some unquenchable internal desire to act on one's impulses to become a transgender.  At the same time, I have to wonder how strong that desire really is nowadays, considering the natural stigma is being artificially lifted via the concentration of leftos in the media who attempt to normalize what is obviously not normal.  I've heard of (horror) stories about men who have whacked off their willies and have to insert a dildo into the gaping hole their hoo-haw used to be to ensure the wound doesn't close up (as wounds are wont to do), who then regret it and cannot return to a state of normalcy any longer--they were miserable before and they're miserable now, even more so in fact, if the suicide rates among transgenders is correspondent to reality.  From that point forward your whole life revolves around being a transgender--no, not being a fireman, or a father, no, it's now about being a transgender, it's the most pertinent part of your character, and it consumes your entire life as you will never be just a man or just a woman with a variety of other qualities but as some sort of revolting freak of nature, the conceptual stench of which overpowers any other quality you may have.

As far as my advice goes--you may be happier being a transvestite rather than a transgender, since a transvestite can easily stop LARPing as the other gender whenever they want to.  Transgenders are just playing with fire, with the end goal explicitly being getting burned.  So you were born with a sausage, you got other holes, you don't have to make a fake hole!


Look at this perfectly happy transvestite


And poof, back to normal!

North Korea would crumble on itself without mountains of support from actually profitable nations.  They wouldn't stand a chance against the full might of the US, not any more than a sick child stands a chance against a roided young Mike Tyson.  Only thing they might be useful for is as a martyr for China & Russia to have an excuse to retaliate.  North Korea is not a threat to anyone, let alone the US, if not a threat to themselves.

Poland is my guess.  I think the pendulum is swinging pretty hard in the other way however, I think white nations are waking up to the Marxist nonsense, but those who have been drinking the kool-aid aren't giving up easily.

The great paradox: to truly know what there is after death, you must first die, and there's no returning from that AFAIK.  Anyone who tries to sell you on something different is full of it.

As far as anyone can actually tell, what's left after death is what you've done in this world, i.e. your legacy.  Most people are completely eradicated from history, they have no names, no faces, only a lineage if that; very few people are worth remembering, and of those who are remembered, are often not even known by most people: you are fortunate to be remembered by anyone long after your death, and sometimes it's just for infamy; I'm sure Hitler didn't want to be remembered as a villain but alas.

If you want to be remembered, you have to do something great.  Everyone knows who Mozart, Bach and Beethoven are, and everyone knows why they are remembered; everyone knows Plato, and Socrates, and Aristotle, though they may not know precisely why they stick out--these guys are several thousand years old and their works are still studied.  I could go on.

As far as anyone can actually tell, the conscious is tied to the passage of time and the senses as perceived by each individual; our thoughts and feelings are a stream, one after the other, and that is who we are; I can say these thoughts are mine, but once I die, I lose the ability to recognize these thoughts are mine and the ability to recognize that I have the ability to recognize these thoughts are mine, and of course I lose the ability to have thoughts at all.  If the conscious is tied to the mind and the mind perishes upon death, and if the world exists outside of our ability to sense it, then one can conclude that the world will continue on without this one eye in the galaxy to perceive its happening, and perhaps perceive this one eye posthumous too, as we perceive other eyes in our history.  Where can the consciousness go without its shell to generate the stream of "me"?--if the ego is tied to this shell and the shell perishes, so does the ego.  Experience depends on a vessel to experience with; no vessel, no experience.

So some say there is a vessel within a vessel that is released upon death, they call this the soul.  Of course there is no evidence of such a thing empirically but I suppose one could make any sort of logical argumentation that a soul is potentially existing.  Some take it on the authority of holy documentation that there is a soul, but I don't think this is any such way to get closer to the truth.  Some feel better knowing they will continue on after death, and take it an offense that one such as myself argues against its existence, but what can you do about that.

And then there are those who think this is all a simulation, and perhaps on death you are awakened from the simulation much like in The Matrix, but again, without empirical evidence of such a thing existing, only logical reasoning, it's not something anyone can really say for sure.

IMO you shouldn't waste life thinking you'll be going somewhere after death; the most certain thing is that you get one life and one chance to do something with it, so don't waste it writing long posts of forums contemplating the potentials of posthumous living.

I've seen Venezuelan cannibalism (thanks socialism), it's not pretty, and it didn't look like the cannibal was really enjoying it either, looked like he was doing it out of absolute necessity, taking little nibbles out of the recently deceased victim.

I do have a morbid curiosity to know what people meat tastes like, but there's a moral side of me that's far too strong to let it happen--and it's not as if I'll ever be in a position where someone just happens to have some cooked people meat, unless of course they don't tell me it's people meat in which case I'd probably vomit upon realization.  If there's anything I hope I never have to do, it's eat human.  I wouldn't even want to eat monkey meat.

Over here in Texas, all you need is a federal background check and you can buy a gun.  My dad owned some, I've fired them before.  I have perhaps twice in my entire lifetime heard gunfire outside of the firing range, and I don't live in a very wealthy part of the state either; I have no idea what the context of the shots were.  Most people I know own guns, and use them solely for home defense.  Some conceal carry, that requires an extra permit.  My little brother and sister were once held at gunpoint while an obese black man robbed them of their game consoles and games; IIRC the gun wasn't even loaded, and it was performed by a nearby neighbor, so...dead simple to file charges, but paradoxically not so easy to get one's things back.  I don't think they ever got their stuff back.  Naturally the people too incompetent to do that job, are the same ones expected to regulate our guns.  But that was back when we had no guns, and I doubt a couple of kids would be brave enough to use one (though I've seen some who are.)

True gun control--to completely bar guns from the nation, like China does--seems entirely unnecessary, expensive, not to mention a disarmed population can hardly defend itself against political pressure: just look how the Chinese are treated by their government, it ain't fun.  The gun is a very inexpensive way of gaining a whole lot of power over the decisions of life or death; I believe most people aren't criminals, at least not the kind who will kill, and I think those people who don't feel confident with guns will neglect to purchase them; plenty of other things in this world you could put 500$+ towards.  Those who do buy the guns are, more often than not, going to be normal people with no ill intent, who may think guns are cool, and who would certainly rather have one in the event of a criminal act against them than without; some try to claim that the police will suffice but the police aren't going to be able to make split-second decisions while it takes them 15 minutes or more to arrive at your location.

There is a sense of powerlessness when you are without a gun, where you play the odds that, more than likely, your day is going to be just fine, and there will be no incidents at all--this is by far the most common situation for most--but there's always the possibility that things will go wrong, and maybe not against you, but against someone around you, and you'll wish you could do something to stop it from happening but you can't; it doesn't have to be that way, however.

More importantly, however, is the general perception by criminals of the area they are in.  When the to-be criminal knows they will most likely be outnumbered in firepower--or even just run the risk of being shot as an unarmed individual--they will tend to turn away from such activity: everyone considers whether or not a certain action is worth the risk, whether the odds of you getting away with something are in your favor, whether the negative impact of the behavior is outweighed by the gain.  If you know you'll get a gun pointed at you by pulling a knife or gun on a clerk at the corner store, you're probably not going to try it; even the average criminal has a sense of value over his own life.  As the saying goes, an armed society is a polite society.

The major issues I see with gun control:
A. There's always someone who thinks there's not enough gun control
B. There's never fewer regulations
C. Who gets to say who gets the guns

Once there are increased controls on the sale of guns--on top of the controls already in place, don't let anyone tell you Americans have no gun control--there will inevitably be more.  Compromise always shifts us left.  Further, I don't trust the government to always be partial on who should have guns and who shouldn't; it wasn't that long ago the IRS was found to be targeting people of very particular ideological standing points.  Who's to say those who oversee the distribution of gun sales will not bar people on similar grounds?  Consider this line of thought: "Liberals/Conservatives are crazy, therefor unfit to have a gun; liberalism/conservatism is a mental disease."  Surely you see this all the time, depending on where you regularly frequent on the internet.  It's a dangerous game, as is every other time we've given up a little bit of our own governing power to the state; we always think they'll do the better job and then complain when they perform far worse.  But surely this time...

You know, I wonder if feudalism would've happened had the peasants had swords.

I think those who appreciate or advocate communism have given very little thought as to the practical application of this system, and think of only the promised gains; boy wouldn't it be great if everyone was even and wasn't self-interested, if everyone gave what they could and got what they needed--but these are humans we're talking about.

Everyone's looking out for themselves: it's how our ancestors made it, it's how their ancestor's made it, it's how every single chain of evolution down the line managed to make it: every altruistic being to have ever existed has perished as an individual entity, for those beings which were self-interested took more than those being which were not: the altruistic beings gave but did not get back, and the power gained by the self-interested organisms made it very easy to control the altruistic organisms.

Consider the history of communism: the idea, when it was first gaining traction, was that the communist society would be populated by the "new socialist man": this man, as described, would be the altruistic individual who, through cultural training, would be fully accepting of the gateway between capitalism and communism: socialism.  In the societies in which socialism was attempted, in the pursuit of communism, this "new socialist man" never sprouted: it was the same old self-interested genes which every living being needs to thrive.  The system was not designed for this manner of being, it was designed for some other non-existing creature, and as such problems arose: for example, in Soviet Russia--a failed socialist state--you were assigned by the state to perform a given job; people were not paid any more or less based on their performance, nor did they personally own any of the organizations they worked for (ironically), so wound up giving the absolute minimal effort required to get through the day.  Usually this was not a job you particularly enjoyed; the state was not interested in you as an individual, you were simply a cog in the collective.

Performance levels of farms and factories plummeted; necessary parts to make things worked were of terrible quality, as the quotas being met were technically fulfilled, just not very well.  Productivity plummets; all the capital gained from capitalism is drying up, and since people cannot simply go out in a market and fix what needed to be fixed--that was abolished, after all, along with money, and even if it wasn't abolished they were promised 'what they needed' anyway.  Without a price system, nobody knows what's worth what anymore--this makes it impossible to care for finite resources: normally as supply dwindles and demand rises the price rises with it, a natural deterrent to overconsumption, but no such indication existed, so those resources were often spent frivolously, and that's compounded with poor worker performance.

The economy suffered tremendously; people were dropping like flies: if they weren't dying from starvation, they were being killed by their own governments, dying in wars of desperation, and even being genocided just because the men in power could.  Needless to say, they had to go back to some form of partial free market activity to survive, and thus the Soviet Union is no more, and "communist" China is not communist, though its head political party claims to be, and a whole list of other socialist nations stopped being socialist; one would think socialism would've finally died there, but with the magic wand of public education, the lesson was lost on resulting generations who are yet ignorant of the horrors born from the abandonment of capitalism and its principles.

Whatever the methodology is to achieving communism, it's certainly not going to be met politically; politicians necessary demand more power to run a communist society, and the power difference goes entirely against the communist principle of a classless egalitarian society.  The state isn't going to simply melt away, after all; once power is consolidated (i.e. monopolized) under one entity, why would they ever give it up?  Again, the altruist loses, and the self-interested thrive.  Just look at the political classes of North Korea and Venezuela: they thrive while their slaves perish.

But I'll be frank: even if communism were achievable by some other means--say, you create the "new socialist man" in a lab tube who is genetically programmed to act altruistically--they would be demolished by the self-interested people, just like the altruist's ancestors were before their lineage even got started.  Altruists will always be taken advantage of, and from an evolutionary standpoint, it's a quality of weakness.  A strong society is one which is full of self-interested individualists, as there is mutual respect between these "masters": a group of self-interested people create rules to help themselves--and thereby everyone else in the process.  For example, if everyone agrees to the respect of each person's private property, everyone has the incentive to improve their own lives, to keep what they have rightfully earned, which vastly improves their productivity over the notion that their earnings will be seized "for the greater good."  There is no stronger motivator for the base human brain than the notion that it will be overall improved.

Given this, why do people turn to communism in the first place?  It is the exact same motivator: the individual believes they will gain from the promises made by communism; perhaps they envy the rich, and wish to partake in some of their wealth, their "deserved" slice of the pie--such payment will be enough motivation to make the communist system work, they imagine before ever having been through it.  The individual, if short-sighted and ignorant enough, will believe there is everything to gain and nothing to lose, but the individual who is well-informed and who thinks far enough into the future will realize that there is nothing to gain and everything to lose.

As a post-script: there are many ideas on how to democratically implement a public-ownership system.  The only ones I've seen which stood a chance at working out were those limited in scope to a single community (max 300-400 people.)  A small, homogeneous community may very well perform better in a system of local public ownership, but this is very far from the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of a global communist system, which is usually what people refer to when talking about some kind of nationally-implemented socialist system (a stepping stone to the global communism)...one could say such individuals were...national socialists...what was the nickname for national socialists again?  Well it seems they don't like the term Nazi and prefer to call themselves "democratic socialists" instead these days, but the ideas are all the same: tried and tired and beaten but still hanging on.  Perhaps the Internet will help us put the idea to death once and for all.

I think they'll find as much success as we have in America with our drug war.  That is, the market will go underground, the various cartels in the world will grow stronger, people who are into drugs will live in fear, drugs will be used as a way to put away otherwise innocent people which the state happens to dislike, and people who would otherwise be innocent will be ripped from their families to serve jail time.

From what I understand about drug addicts, they do them to fill a gap in their lives, where if the gap was there--such as a loving a caring family--they would not take interest in drugs.  Of course, the president of the Philippines is not taking an approach which will help the drug addicts of their central issue, but rather attempts to use fear as a method of stopping the negative behavior, much as a parent might spank their child or a dog owner may rub the dog's nose in the mess it has made.

Through this approach, the Philippines will never be drug free.  The drug users will always be underground, and the misery created by the drug war (imprisonment removes mothers and fathers from the family after all, as well as gang violence within the black market) will create more druggies.  I predict the drug problem will grow, which will require more and more power to combat the drug problem by the means the president has taken: an endless loop.  The drug war cannot end, and the stated goal of the drug war can never be met.

There are ulterior problems which need to be helped for the drug problem to be resolved (and even then perfection cannot be achieved): the happier the nation is, the less often people will resort to drugs--why would they need to, if they were already doing well?  I'm sure the president of the Philippines means well, and thinks of his behavior as tough hard love, but it's going to make the situation worse.

Eliminate the ability to inflate the currency and none of this would even be an issue, Joe Average would be too burdened immediately to allow it to happen.  Welfare sounds great until you realize you'll be footing the bill, then it's a matter of "Why am I funding someone else's family", especially when you can barely fund your own family or not at all (in the case of younger generations having to stay with their parents.)  But you don't have to feel this way when it's paid for through a watering-down of your purchasing power--sure, you'll feel it in the sense that things get more pricey, but that's not until way down the line, and you certainly aren't going to associate it with anything the state's doing (speaking of Joe Average still.)  It's harder to notice when it's gradual, thus the anger over it is sparse over a long period of time: nothing ever gets done about it, the source of the issue isn't even well understood: stealth tax.

But imagine a situation where you get a big bill one day demanding tax money over your funding of other people's families (particularly those who aren't even a part of your nation thus pay minimal taxes if any), and imagine this happened to everyone in the nation all at once.  RIOTS IN THE STREET.  Mass protests, refusal to pay the bill, demands that the system be changed, throwing people out of office, putting new people into it.  All because the state actually had to get the money directly from its citizenry to pay for its functions (well, either that or borrow the money, but that has its limits.)  This is the magic of a non-inflatable currency: it yields the gift of financial clarity.

Also has the benefit of keeping the state small, since it can't use the newly printed currency to consolidate businesses when there's no newly printed currency--you can look at China and its "national corporations" for what consolidation looks like in the end-game, born from Chinese inflation of their currency which spiraled into hyperinflation and thus was born the 'communist' incarnation of their nation--central planning looks good when you can't buy anything for yourself, but had this massive robbery not occurred to begin with, it would've never been open for consideration.

Anyway point is, bitcoin in its present state can't be inflated.  So that's how bitcoin can help this situation.

He's more active here than other users

Any other questions?