think progress Archives - Stable Genius Liberal

That Time Newt Gingrich Tried To Take Kids Away From Welfare Recipients And Put Them in Orphanages

That Time Newt Gingrich Tried To Take Kids Away From Welfare Recipients And Put Them in Orphanages Bryce Covert Jul 20, 2016, 12:00 pm SHARE Facebook Twitter Email SMS WhatsApp Share Newt Gingrich at the Republican National Convention on Monday CREDIT: AP PHOTO/MATT ROURKE After widespread speculati… That Time Newt Gingrich Tried To Take Kids… Continue reading That Time Newt Gingrich Tried To Take Kids Away From Welfare Recipients And Put Them in Orphanages

House Republicans want to make it harder for people with disabilities to access businesses

This week, Congress is expected to vote on a bill that would significantly weaken the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act and let businesses off the hook for failing to provide accommodations for accessibility. The ADA Education and Reform Act was introduced by Rep. via House Republicans want to make it harder for people with disabilities… Continue reading House Republicans want to make it harder for people with disabilities to access businesses

Oops! White House admits it has zero evidence of voter fraud in 2016 election

In a court filing on Tuesday, the White House announced that it had not uncovered any preliminary findings of voter fraud in the 2016 election and that it would be destroying confidential voter data initially collected for President Trump’s controversial voter fraud commission, which was disbande via Oops! White House admits it has zero evidence… Continue reading Oops! White House admits it has zero evidence of voter fraud in 2016 election

Oklahoma Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Advanced Placement U.S. History

This is what censorship via political correctness actually looks like. It’s not college kids yelling in front of the administration building. It’s state legeslatures forbiding discussion because it offends them.

Political correctness is a right wing phenomena.

Major Libertarian Thinker On Human ‘Failures’: ‘It Is Best They Should Die’

The fact that Cato and Reason both reacted so swiftly is a testament to the central place Spencer holds in the development of libertarian thought. According to Rothbard, who the elder Paul describes as the “founder of the modern libertarian movement,” Spencer’s Social Statics is the “greatest single work of libertarian political philosophy ever written.” Yet this foundational libertarian text does not say what Root and Cato claim that it said. Indeed, if Social Statics is, indeed, the “greatest single work of libertarian political philosophy ever written” then that is the most damning indictment of libertarianism imaginable.

This is why it’s a waste of time to argue with libertarians. Both Cato and Reason just flat out denied the text of the book said what it clearly says.

This is exactly how Reason reacted to being called out of publishing Holocaust denials. The PDFs are online but they claim they didn’t publish what you can clearly see they published.

Why not admit you were wrong; apologize and move on?

Rand Paul’s Favorite Philosophers Think Poor People Are ‘Parasites’

Spencer’s own philosophy can safely be described as genocidal libertarianism. In Social Statics, the book Rothbard raises up as the “greatest single work of libertarian political philosophy ever written,” Spencer argues that “[i]nconvenience, suffering, and death are the penalties attached by nature to ignorance, as well as to incompetence.” They are also, he adds, “the means of remedying” these traits. “By weeding out those of lowest development” Spencer explained, “nature secures the growth of a race who shall both understand the conditions of existence, and be able to act up to them… . Nature demands that every being shall be self-sufficing. All that are not so, nature is perpetually withdrawing by death.”
Rather than proving nature’s cruelty, Spencer believed that this deadly game “purif[ied] society from those who are, in some respect or other, essentially faulty.” If a man or woman is “sufficiently complete to live,” then they should live. But if “they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.”
Needless to say, Spencer saw no place for what he labeled “[a]cts of parliament to save silly people.”

The good old days when libertarians didn’t bother to pretend to care about the poor. These days they pretend that government programs are the cause of poverty. Because poverty didn’t exist in pre-new deal America. And something-something didn’t you read Atlas Shrugged?

The standard defense of this is to claim that that isn’t libertarianism or to claim a straw man. Or that the free market magic will somehow prevent this.

Satanists Demand Religious Exemption From Abortion Restrictions, Cite Hobby Lobby Ruling

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, the Satanists point out, it strengthens their own quest to opt out of laws related to women’s health care that go against their religious liberty.

When the Satanists seem more reasonable than you, maybe you need to start rethinking your position.

House To Vote On Bill That Would Impose $5,000 Fee For Protesting Drilling Projects

Awful.

Gun Homicides Increased 25 Percent After Missouri Repealed Background Check Law

research suggests that universal background check legislation of the sort currently being debated in Congress has had an enormous impact on gun violence in the past

Why do only 10% of states have universal background checks when they are popular and work well?

Romney’s Former Company Under Investigation For Tax Evasion

Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by presidential candidate Mitt Romney, is under investigation for questionable tax practices, according to the New York Times. Since July, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been issuing subpoenas to private equity firms including Bain, which he believes intentionally changed management fees into capital gains as a way of hanging onto millions of dollars that would have otherwise been taxed at a higher rate.