Nor was I. My point was that the ISS is the only thing putting people out there for long enough to live with the conditions. It may benefit some Russian oligarchs more than most other rich and powerful people but I didn't even think about that much. If at all. What matters is that there is a co-operation for whatever reason, that results in people from several nations living in space, and these people spread the experience indirectly to others who will go, so long as there is a means. So the ISS's value to freedom and expansion of chances of human life beyond Earth is incalculably great, far greater than any actual expense involved in doing it. So vastly great a return for the spend that I won't even try to calculate it any more than I'll try to count grains of sand on a beach.Originally Posted by planters
Re London and cities of gangs, that may be a problem that will get worse, I don't know. In the UK, violent crime figures are falling dramatically, according to a recent news report, and while south London had a few boroughs that top the rankings, it may be falling there too, relative to what it was. In the US case, once a city it lost to this, I don't know it will fall into a depravity that nothing can fix, or whether having got that much control, those people will want to civilise things. This isn't without precedent. Look at the history of Deadwood.
The thing about libertarianism is that people are expected to be able to take their freedoms and not wait for some magnanimous hand to bestow them. Which is ok but comes with the caveat that some people might not like the freedoms that others will take. And if libertarianism is used to favour one choice over another, I'm not sure it's libertarianism any more. Whatever it gets called, it's not a new thing, but a repeat of a very old one.
We allegedly (and I have no grounds to dispute it) came from ancestry who flapped its way legless in the mud in ways that make a blind depraved drunk look like a pinnacle of life's acheivement. It's amazing what people, and life in general, will tolerate, so long as the difficulty is a result of trying for freedom and change, and not just being stamped on by someone else. So the best chances of fixing this is to live and let live. Sure, there seem to be some groups of people who want to turn themselves into nazis, even daleks or rievers (in the Firefly sense of the word, far worse than those of the old Scots borders), but the best way to stop becoming like them is to let them pass, do nothing unless directly attacked. That's the one lesson that all life seems to have to learn, so we will fail very fast if we forget it now.
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