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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Space exploration is awesome, for a variety of both practical and ideological reasons, and it's honestly criminal that NASA has been allowed to languish for as long as it has. With uncertain funding (the uncertainty being more important than the level itself — they can adjust their programs to use the budget they have available, but you can't plan anything if you can't trust that your budget won't be slashed in the future) and lack of focus since the space shuttle program ended, they're sort of spinning their wheels. I'd love to see someone make a campaign issue out of it, but the subject pretty much never comes up in political discussions.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.- 97% Sanders
- 94% Jill Stein
- 91% Clinton
- 82% John McAfee
- 68% Gary Johnson
- 41% Cruz
- 7% Trump
See, this makes me wonder why the bloody hell libertarians and disaffected libertarians like me don't try to form a bloc in the Democratic Party. Aside from, y'know, the fact that identified libertarians tend to be allergic to compromise (as David Brin has repeatedly complained).
edited 9th Apr '16 5:47:39 PM by Ramidel
Well, with NASA, I suspect that it's due to it being kind of a bipartisan issue that's not really a part of either party's platform. Since pro-NASA sentiment is spread out between both parties relatively evenly, you can't really use it as a rallying cry for you own party or against the other party. This makes it effectively useless in partisan politics.
Leviticus 19:34I generally believe in funding science For Science! However, I don't see anything special about space, especially if you want to put boots on the extraterrestrial ground.
There was one thing on that survey I have never heard of. Is the US launching a new trans-oceanic free trade agreement?
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They did tend to have progressive stances on gay rights issues, though.
Anyway, here's what I got:
98% Sanders
96% Clinton
92% Stein
57% Marc Allan Feldman (libertarian)
39% Gary Johnson (also a libertarian)
17% Trump
10% Cruz
Buncha Sanderistas in here, I guess, clogging up the place with our conspiracy theories and sexism.
Out of curiosity, I checked out issues by ethnicity. Turns out Asians are most likely to have progressive stances, while whites are the most conservative on average.
edited 9th Apr '16 5:59:55 PM by majoraoftime
I'd certainly say that calling Libertarianism inherently bigoted is a strawman (even more so than calling Republicans that). Their views are largely along the lines of "everyone should mind their own business", "legalize everything except assault and theft and cut all government programs aside from the ones responsible for those!". If anything, racism is very much against their ideology-as any policies pertaining to race are too restrictive for Libertarianism.
edited 9th Apr '16 6:02:54 PM by Protagonist506
Leviticus 19:34![]()
The issue is that libertarianism in America tends to get tied up with the neo-Klan movements - see, "sovereign citizens." That guy who was mentioned a while back who wanted to arm all the blacks in Ferguson to fight back against the police was stunned when the rest of his militia went "are you crazy? You want to arm black people?"
Libertarian candidates, though, don't seem to be part of that mess - they seem to be professing the academic version.
edited 9th Apr '16 6:05:05 PM by Ramidel
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Well, libertarians tend to defend secession as a right, which gives them ties to Confederate apologists, which in turn gives them a link to the KKK. But it's more accurate to say that racists have no better options than to pretend to be libertarians than that libertarians are racist.
edited 9th Apr '16 6:23:10 PM by Protagonist506
Leviticus 19:34Libertarians may not be racist as a necessity, but they tend to oppose attempts to use the State to enforce equality of opportunity, meaning that they are de facto abetting racism. At a certain point, the distinction becomes irrelevant.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Well, if you look at the actual statistics on American libertarians, the majority are against gay marriage and are big on anti-immigration.
Not only that, even when you exclude those people, there's a near-absence of "liberaltarians": They don't really seem to care too much as a group about things things they theoretically support which might inspire liberals to sympathize with them.
Now, there are some "liberaltarians" and more consistent libertarians who aren't just bullshit apologists using the word liberty as a smokescreen for prejudice, but they're so few in number an alliance seems at best symbolic.
Ironically, the people most encouraging of an alliance seem to be progressives, even if it's a minority of them, but libertarians as a whole seem to have deliberately shunned grabbing the olive branches out of disdain.
"Stop telling me I can't cheat my neighbor."
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Someone I know from college who is strongly libertarian is very pro-immigration (and I think actually works as an immigrant-rights attorney) and correspondingly hates Trump. He doesn't like Sanders either but sees him as better than Trump, since Sanders (from his perspective) at least plays within the system.
On the other hand, another libertarian guy (also an attorney) I knew refused to acknowledge that any government regulation could be good (was trying to argue with him that government was on the sign of the angels in terms of net neutrality and food safety standards but he insisted their had to be some evil motive).
Also can't recall specifics but he seemed to be at least borderline racist- the idea that Democrats won minority votes by getting them addicted to government.
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If that's "keeping the balance" True Neutral, then it might have something to do with each other. If that's "not anything else" True Neutral, it's probably coincidence.

It does for me. Space is our ultimate destiny.
Plus it's cool. And so many technologies are here because of space travel.
Oh really when?