Best products from r/ShitPoliticsSays

Glad to help. :) For anyone interested in conservative economics, here's a list of resources (off the top of my head, so apologies if I forget something obvious):

• Friedman's Free to Choose--the video series that /u/marzBigL posted, as well as the book.
  
• Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom (Thanks to /u/jac5 for reminding me that Free to Choose and Capitalism and Freedom are different books).
  
• This rap video (no, really!). It's a surprisingly well done explanation of Keynes and Hayek in the form of a rap battle between the two.
  
• Thomas Sowell's book Basic Economics
  
• Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (less economics, more philosophical, but the economic implications are clear)
  
• This episode of the Firing Line with Bill Buckley. Friedman is his guest for the night. If you have amazon prime, then you can watch it for free. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure there are clips from the show on youtube.

I don't even think we'll get that far. I honestly believe that once we create proper A.I. it will snowball out of control in a matter of months and it will turn against us. Their communist plans are mere fever dream when it comes to A.I. "Well, if the robots are nice to us, don't destroy the human species, and actually are subservient to us, then our Communist fever dream could work"

Yeah, okay, it's like trying to decide whether you want chicken or fish for the in-flight meal while the plane is going down.



I recommend reading Superintelligence if you want to get more theroies about it.

Also, check out the little-known history of "How the Church Aided 'Heretical' Astronomy". If you think this sounds fringe, the book about this was written by a distinguished historian of science who taught at Berkeley, Oxford, and Yale, and was published by the Harvard University Press.

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"Between 1650 and 1750, four Catholic churches were the best solar observatories in the world. Built to fix an unquestionable date for Easter, they also housed instruments that threw light on the disputed geometry of the solar system, and so, within sight of the altar, subverted Church doctrine about the order of the universe.

A tale of politically canny astronomers and cardinals with a taste for mathematics, The Sun in the Church tells how these observatories came to be, how they worked, and what they accomplished. It describes Galileo’s political overreaching, his subsequent trial for heresy, and his slow and steady rehabilitation in the eyes of the Catholic Church. And it offers an enlightening perspective on astronomy, Church history, and religious architecture, as well as an analysis of measurements testing the limits of attainable accuracy, undertaken with rudimentary means and extraordinary zeal. Above all, the book illuminates the niches protected and financed by the Catholic Church in which science and mathematics thrived."

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674005365

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"To set a date for Easter Sunday years in advance, and thus reinforce the church's power and unity, popes and ecclesiastical officials had for centuries relied on astronomers, who pondered over old manuscripts and devised instruments that set them at the forefront of the scientific revolution.

According to Dr. Heilbron, the church "gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and probably, all other, institutions."

Dr. Heilbron, 65, is professor emeritus and vice chancellor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley and a senior fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, England. He lives in England and travels widely to study old solar observatories...

...In the book and an article in The Sciences, a journal of the New York Academy of Sciences, Dr. Heilbron shows that the observatory findings (usually made in sight of a cathedral altar) often contradicted church dogma of that time.

The Jesuits, for instance, used observatories to confirm theories about Earth movement, which they were forbidden to teach...

...Dr. Richard S. Westfall, a historian of science, in 1989 wrote that Rome's handling of Galileo made Copernican astronomy a forbidden topic among faithful Catholics for two centuries.

Not so, Dr. Heilbron claims. Rome's support of astronomy was considerable.

"The church tended to regard all the systems of the mathematical astronomy as fictions," Dr. Heilbron wrote. "That interpretation gave Catholic writers scope to develop mathematical and observational astronomy almost as they pleased, despite the tough wording of the condemnation of Galileo."

http://movies2.nytimes.com/library/national/science/101999sci-astronomy-cathedrals.html

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What Time Is It in the Transept?
An introduction to the astronomical instruments in some of Europe's greatest churches.

"Nor was the church the monolith it pretended to be. The Bologna Academy of Sciences learned as much when the cardinal-president of the Index itself gave them an elegant model of the heavens to display in their quarters -- with the sun at the center! He had a taste for Copernicus himself, but it made them so nervous that they made two earth-centered models to go next to it.

In the end, the cleric-astronomers at their meridians never had to forswear the Copernican hypothesis, precisely because that was the church's only hard and fast rule: the sun-centered universe had to be treated as a hypothesis. As long as one said somewhere that one was not dealing in absolute truth, one was largely free to get on with the business of technical astronomy"

http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/99/10/24/reviews/991024.24burnett.html

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https://www.amazon.com/Sun-Church-Cathedrals-Solar-Observatories/dp/0674005368

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/catholics-built-secret-astronomical-features-into-churches-to-help-save-souls

Anyone going to buy Hillary's explanation for the 2016 campaign 'What Happened'?

Looks like it'll be really great to read, I'm sure it'll be completely honest and not at all a blame fest.

Better is Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign.

Actually discusses some of the hubris and poor strategy employed during the campaign. Would recommend reading, even if you're pro-Trump (which I think a good portion of this subreddit is, or at least conservative-leaning) it's a good look at what actually happened.

>For some reason they went absolutely insane when he won.

I can't speak to why the base lost their minds in such a drastic fashion (outside of just regurgitating the hysteria they get from the media), but the party leadership is losing it because Trump winning put a pretty big dent in the whole Demographic Destiny idea that they've been building up for the last 15 years. They honestly thought by now they'd be ruling a 1 party state in all but name, at least at the federal level.

You can track the Democrat strategy of silent approval of increasing illegal immigration and doing everything they can to appeal to ethnic minorities to riiiight around the time this trash was published.

Asking redditors to explain conservative goals and values is the perfect political Turing test. The answers are always awful.

The more time I spend online, the more I keep agreeing with Jon Haidt's research. He's a self-described liberal that uses his moral foundation theory to explain the underlying moral values of each party, and why it leads to the "Conservative Advantage" - that conservatives are way better at understanding liberals than vice versa. In other words, conservatives generally think liberals are naive and misguided, while liberals generally think conservatives are evil, insane, etc.

He wrote a whole book about it called The Righteous Mind, but this is a good intro if you're interested in learning more. I've never been able to look at politics the same way after reading Haidt's work. He was a life-changer for me.

"At least I'm not black" is what you white, bourgeois, socialist, racialist say all day long.

Let me put it like this: what's the difference between "White Privilege" and "White Supremacy"? Nothing. I couldn't fucking tell the difference between "White Privilege" as it was being described to us by left wing racialists, and the rhetoric that Bob Dylan was re-iterating made by pro-segregationists.

Look and see what I mean:

>A South politician preaches to the poor white man

>“You got more than the blacks, don’t complain.

>You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,” they explain.

>And the Negro’s name

>Is used it is plain

>For the politician’s gain

>As he rises to fame

>And the poor white remains

>On the caboose of the train

>But it ain’t him to blame

>He’s only a pawn in their game

"You've got more than the blacks, don't complain" is the same fucking line that we here today from the left. Maybe Dylan could modernize it by saying, "You've got more than the blacks, stay in your lane."

Here's another good one? What do you call, "Separate but equal?" ... Equality of outcome.

Social Justice, Racial Justice, it's been used by Nazis, Fascists, Theocrats, Islamsits, Communists, and every other scoundrel in history. You bastards never changed. The Democratic Plantations must be liberated.

The lie started taking over the party when this book was published. After 2004 they more-or-less gave up reaching out to the white working class in favor of trying to turn growing minority communities (Muslims, Latinos) into another captive Democrat voting bloc like the black community.

> If you are an Amazon prime member, buy a $50 Amazon gift card and you get $10 for free. One book I really recommend buying with that $10 is Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations For Working Through Grief

L O L
O O
L O L

Better men than me have already done that, but certainly no sickle-wielding communists are going to read them, much less assent to their conclusions.

Dr. Stephen Hicks wrote a very good book on the subject of how the failures of Marxism in the 20th Century gave rise to the postmodern philosophical tradition wherein its adherents eschew rationality and logic, aphoristically embodied by quotes such as:

>Postmodernism “seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.” —Frank Lentricchia


>“the normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation” —Andrea Dworkin


>“everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political.” —Fredric Jameson


Dr. Hicks posits that only through the postmodernists’ assertion that reason and logic have failed and by appealing to people’s visceral emotions can they hope to usher in a politcoeconomic system that has been thoroughly disproven.

Postmodernity has gradually engendered the subversive notions of identity politics, political correctness, hate speech, radical feminism, transnormativity, and useless pseudoacademic institutions such as “gender studies,” all of which pervade academia.

Here’s an Amazon link to his book, Explaining Postmodernism

And here’s a fun web application called the Postmodernism Generator that uses abstruse terminology to randomly generate papers reflective of the garbage pumped out by postmodernists. The generator creates papers bearing titles such as The Defining characteristic of Sexual identity: Constructivist
libertarianism in the works of Burroughs that are utter hogwash, but humorous nonetheless and ironically calls to mind a Nietzschean quote:

>Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.

It's not about morals at all. All insurance does this and in many non-complicated insurance systems like cars, you can choose your deductible quite easily because people don't actually get any "utility" from having their broken car fixed other than the fixing of the car.

With health insurance, especially with health insurance, people will do retarded shit like go see the doctor 3x a month because they're lonely or will imagine things are wrong with them that aren't really an issue, doctors have to treat/diagnose them any way driving up overall costs to higher than it would otherwise be on average for a total population with a co-pay/deductible system.

I could probably find a bunch of studies on the topic, but I can assure you it's well documented and has nothing to with "morals". "Moral hazard" is a technical term, it just refers to the person bearing the risk/benefit being separated from the party bearing the cost.

If you really want to understand the insurance market this book is a good start, but you don't, no one does, that's the problem.

https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Health-Care/dp/0132773694/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1494224035&sr=8-9&keywords=healthcare+economics

>the state does not control the media

I suggest you do a little basic reading in media studies. Your belief that the US media system is not controlled is quite naive. In fact the US invented the industry of media manipulation. Edward Bernays is a famous name -- the guy that was hired by tobacco companies to convince women that smoking was the same as women's lib, was also hired to sell the public on entering into WWI. etc etc

https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Edward-Bernays/dp/0970312598/


the state and the ever-fewer corporations that own the media (and are also defense contractors) are hand-in-glove. The myth of the heroic journalist and media organization diligently digging out the truth etc is exactly that -- a legitimizing myth. Do you think it was an accident that the WaPo and NYT were pushing the WMDs in Iraq lie? No, they're part of the state.

http://billmoyers.com/story/twenty-years-of-media-consolidation-has-not-been-good-for-our-democracy/

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/democracyondeadline/mediaownership.html

Our entire media system is owned by 5 or 6 corporations. Radios, newspapers, TV stations ... all of it. They set the framing, what is going to be covered and what is not. No need to resort to throwing people in jail in those circumstances. The media is happy to go along with the state.

> Memphis barbecue is the best.

-_-

Them's fighting words!

I'm not originally Texan... but I took up the barbeque when I moved here, because it's so good.

https://www.amazon.com/Franklin-Barbecue-Meat-Smoking-Manifesto-Aaron/dp/1607747200

Good guide. Also have Raichlen's Project Smoke book.

https://www.amazon.com/Meathead-Science-Great-Barbecue-Grilling/dp/054401846X/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=H87A4VHWKNSF2FK8EX2J

I should get that one.

It sure sounds a lot like an alcoholic trying to rationalize. And it seems to be from a book about a private investigator with a drinking problem.

>Milo once had a thriving divorce-case business in the small town of in the Pacific Northwest, but because of liberal new divorce laws he has taken to drinking and staring out the window. He's up to his third drink of the morning when an attractive young woman walks into his office...

The Gospel According to Harry Potter: The Spiritual Journey of the World's Greatest Seeker https://www.amazon.com/dp/0664231233/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_eS16AbG82SCEB

It would be better to defend our country, not go instigate conflicts overseas.

https://www.amazon.com/Fools-Errand-Time-End-Afghanistan/dp/1548650218

I wouldn't claim that conservatives are universally logical and rational, but all people resort to emotion. We're more or less built to deal with morality and politics via intuition, not reasoning (see The Righteous Mind). And I'd say this applies to liberals quite a lot as well.

https://www.amazon.com/What-Happened-Hillary-Rodham-Clinton/dp/1501175564

This may not be the exact one I'm looking for, but it looks close thumbing through it.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027266

The works of Jonathan Haidt are what you wanna focus on though. As he said in his book, The Righteous Mind,

> In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Qyestionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

> The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan [i.e., conservative] narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people, and gay people. He’s more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.