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As the days go by our hard won freedoms and liberty are slowly being eroded. In Europe a crushing blow has been made to freedom of speech with a European Court of Human Rights upholding a conviction for saying that the person known as Muhammad ten centuries ago was technically a paedophile based on information in historical texts. The statement was made in reference to Muhammad's marriage to a six year old child name called Aisha. The court found that “Presenting objects of religious worship in a provocative way capable of hurting the feelings of the followers of that religion could be conceived as a malicious violation of the spirit of tolerance, which was one of the bases of a democratic society.”. In giving its ruling that "Muhammad was not a worthy subject of worship" the court has additionally demonstrated a complete misunderstanding as to the religion involved which worships "Allah", a word meaning 'God', not 'Muhammad' who claimed to be a prophet of this god. Freedom of speech is dying.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday November 14 2018, @02:00AM (3 children)
TMB makes sense if you are libertarian enough to consider any authoritarian be a monster.
And he's not wrong about them being authoritarian. If the government is required to provide healthcare they will necessarily try to control it. They may tolerate a parallel private system of insurance/healthcare, as in AU and I believe in UK and Canada, but they will still exert authority over it.
Whether you consider that control to be a reasonable trade-off for having a functional health system is probably a philosophical discussion.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday November 14 2018, @09:45AM (1 child)
No, does not follow. In Europe (the countries I know), government controls the fact that everybody is health insured. The terms of the contracts are negotiated between insurance companies and the medical profession. As far as I know, no government bureaucrats. The only strong political influence might be that the premiums must not become, well, too premium. On this part the libertarian would wholeheartedly agree. That makes them being authoritarian then, right?
(Score: 3, Informative) by deimtee on Wednesday November 14 2018, @12:01PM
Depends on what you call authoritarian I guess. Authoritarianism isn't necessarily bad.
The system I am familiar with is Australia's.
The government controls who can practice medicine, how much it costs the patient, the price of drugs, who can buy/sell those drugs. There is actually a constant pressure between the medical groups and the government bureaucrats over these things which helps avoid the worst aspects of authoritarianism.
If the situation is as you describe, the government is not providing healthcare, they are merely enforcing the purchase of insurance and participation in a private system.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday November 26 2018, @07:12PM
Anyone that "libertarian" is actually an anarchist. :)
Libertarians almost uniformly agree that government is needful. They're about liberty; not a complete lack of an authority structure. In fact, some of their precepts are non-starters without an authority structure. For instance, if "my right to swing my fist stops at your face" is to have any meaning at all, then said right must be subject to enforcement, and therefore, authority. Otherwise said "right" is just meaningless babble.