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Yesterday I met an actual libertarian royalist, live and for the first time. It was like a fever dream. It was in the brazilian context, with him defending both the Imperial family (because we were an EMPIRE, I'll have you know!) and the fact that they still get generous stipends and reparations from the government. According to our dear shitheat, "It all belonged to them, so it's fair that we pay them to use it. We pay for reservations for natives, why not to them?" I actually wasted breath explaining to him that even the concept of a royal family legitimately owning a whole country as property is not just wrong but ridiculous in our modern context, it being stolen from others in the first place, and that we are not renting it from them or anyone. He was clearly not convinced, but stopped contesting after a while. It shook me how powerfully they believe in things based on the flimsiest justification. One of his points was "See, if a ruler's family -owns- rthe country, he'll take good care of it because it's his property, something to leave to his children and lineage." I offered him a list of monarchs who beggared their countries, starting with our own, and he blinked as if it had never ocurred to him to even check.
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Oct 5, 2018 18:07
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Dr. Stab posted:gently caress john locke tho Locke is bargain-bin Hobbes.
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Oct 5, 2018 18:21
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Locke is the first big entry in the genre of "economists doing political philosophy to justify their bullshit," which hit its peak with Bentham and his "goodness basically works like money" version of utilitarianism.
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Oct 5, 2018 18:31
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Sephyr posted:Yesterday I met an actual libertarian royalist, live and for the first time. It was like a fever dream. I'm really disappointed with myself that, in my decade in ancapism, it never occurred to me that the *only* functional difference between libertarians and others is over who "legitimately" owns the land and thus functions as lord king over it. So, someone who bought land which was bought from someone which was bought from someone ... x10 ... who killed Indians to get it, well, that's 100% legitimate, how dare you even question it. If a state claims it? Holy poo poo, that's beyond any realm of possibility!
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Oct 5, 2018 20:14
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Sephyr posted:Yesterday I met an actual libertarian royalist, live and for the first time. It was like a fever dream. My understanding of Brazilian history may be a bit off, but wasn't the Brazilian Empire created at the stroke of a pen in the 1820s simply because a bunch of royals got kicked out of Portugal and felt they had to have somewhere to rule, so turned Brazil into an independent monarchy? I can kinda grasp why you'd be all-in with the Divine Right of Kings if you were a) an idiot and b) from somewhere like Britain, where the royal lineage recedes into history for thousands of years. It does give it a stupid sort of legitimacy on its own terms - there has been a monarchy in-situ for 1000 years or more, which to all intents and purposes in the present means it has always existed. But Brazil's monarchy came and went within a lifespan. If that doesn't make it obvious how non-existant the intrinsic rights of monarchy, or the natural bond between monarch and nation, are, then I don't know what does. Golbez posted:I'm really disappointed with myself that, in my decade in ancapism, it never occurred to me that the *only* functional difference between libertarians and others is over who "legitimately" owns the land and thus functions as lord king over it. That can be levelled at pretty much any strand of libertarian thought. When a state imposes taxes on its citizens to fund services it's "theft" and "like slavery" and "men WITH GUNS" but their response to this unacceptable, debasing crime against the santicity of the rights of the individual is to propose a system whereby you pay money to a non-state organisation, at pain of being cast out from society and made an un-person that can be legally murdered. Because this is a CHOICE. Full-on libertarians are fine with all sorts of bad poo poo being done to people, so long as it's not being done by anything that calls itself a state or a government. It can look and act exactly like one, but it can't be called one.
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Oct 5, 2018 20:34
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It seems to me that the libertarian tendency goes at least as far back as the English Civil War, when all these landowners pissed off at the king defined "liberty" as the government having no right to your property or your person. But these same people want a public infrastructure of roads, courts, money, police, defense, etc. so that they can prosper. So who pays for it, if taxes are slavery? The solution is apparently to replace the state with a network of purely voluntary relationships. But how is that not a state? And what if someone doesn't want to pay up? It's a contradiction that can't be resolved without accepting the role of government. Sorry if this is stupidly basic. I've been aware that libertarianism is contradictory and stupid for years, but when I started actually reading about Charles II it all sort of clicked. Halloween Jack posted:I find ancaps funny because they're endlessly arguing that a private entity that owns land, makes the laws of that land, and enforces those laws with an army is somehow magically not a state. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Oct 5, 2018 |
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Oct 5, 2018 20:38
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BalloonFish posted:Full-on libertarians are fine with all sorts of bad poo poo being done to people, so long as it's not being done by anything that calls itself a state or a government. It can look and act exactly like one, but it can't be called one.
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Oct 5, 2018 20:42
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Baronjutter posted:"That is the thing about subsidized housing. It disincentivizes construction. Instead of making money from it they make a loss. The city can't sell land for profit, they have to build houses and subsidizes them. Give this person an economics textbook. To the spine. I recommend Wealth of Nations. It's got the mass to do some real damage.
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Oct 5, 2018 20:43
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Halloween Jack posted:It seems to me that the libertarian tendency goes at least as far back as the English Civil War, when all these landowners pissed off at the king defined "liberty" as the government having no right to your property or your person. But these same people want a public infrastructure of roads, courts, money, police, defense, etc. so that they can prosper. So who pays for it, if taxes are slavery? I think it's liberalism writ large that you're looking at when you look at the English Civil War, where the fight was essentially a contract dispute over various agreements made between the King and Parliament over the centuries. The roundheads didn't chop Charles' head off because they thought taxation is slavery, and they had no qualms about ruling as a government and crushing all opposition. It's the first bourgeois revolution, but not a libertarian one. In my mind, libertarianism doesn't really become a distinct strain of liberalism until basically right after WWII, emerging out of a mix of anti-fascist writings repurposed as anti-socialist for the cold war, anti-New Deal propaganda, and resistance to the first hints of the civil rights movement. Specifically I'd pinpoint its birthday at 1947 with the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, which counts Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman among its founders.
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Oct 5, 2018 22:06
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Halloween Jack posted:The solution is apparently to replace the state with a network of purely voluntary relationships. But how is that not a state? And what if someone doesn't want to pay up? It's a contradiction that can't be resolved without accepting the role of government. The relationships actually aren't purely voluntary if you dig a little. The issue is that if you take it to its logical conclusion then whoever owns the land in a given area is the state. What they won't tell you is that it's popular among the wealthy as they look at a high traffic road and drool over how much money they could get by making people pay to use it. That isn't voluntary as you have to deal with poo poo like if all the highways into the city are privately owned whoever lives in that city has to pay for road use to get things shipped in. If that turns out to be one guy or one company then you have one entity that can use that to extort mad amounts if money for even basics like food. So the farmer outside of the city and the person who wants food in the city have no choice but to pay to get stuff shipped between them. This was a massive problem in the 19th century when rail roads were happening as rails woykd give discounts to their own companies or those that were owned by friends of whoever owned them. It leads to favoritism and loving up competition. If the road owner also owns farms then he can say "my farm ships free which the lets his farm sell more cheaply. Hard to compete with that and also lets him punish those that displeased him by jacking their rates up or just plain banning them from roads. This is why anything other than public ownership of infrastructure is a horrid idea. This is also why Wal-Mart being so huge is terrible. Incidentally this is also why regulations exist, why the same people hate the post office, and why property rights are so central to everything.
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Oct 5, 2018 22:23
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The relationships actually aren't purely voluntary if you dig a little. The issue is that if you take it to its logical conclusion then whoever owns the land in a given area is the state. What they won't tell you is that it's popular among the wealthy as they look at a high traffic road and drool over how much money they could get by making people pay to use it. That isn't voluntary as you have to deal with poo poo like if all the highways into the city are privately owned whoever lives in that city has to pay for road use to get things shipped in. If that turns out to be one guy or one company then you have one entity that can use that to extort mad amounts if money for even basics like food. It's fun how pretty much any time you take libertarian arguments always collapse into "property is theft" the second you step away from the suburban white guy biases they're usually paired with.
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Oct 5, 2018 23:28
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BalloonFish posted:My understanding of Brazilian history may be a bit off, but wasn't the Brazilian Empire created at the stroke of a pen in the 1820s simply because a bunch of royals got kicked out of Portugal and felt they had to have somewhere to rule, so turned Brazil into an independent monarchy? IIRC the brazilian empire was actually created when royals mostly went BACK to portugal. Brazil started chafing under no longer having home rule, so the crown prince who had been left behind declared it independent as an empire.
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Oct 5, 2018 23:46
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I would probably suggest that "arguments over who legitimately owns things" encompasses virtually all political thought. Who owns the land, the means of production, the ideas, or the self.
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Oct 6, 2018 00:28
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Capsule summay of brazilian Empire: Napoleon kicks rear end across Europe, makes his way toward Portugal. Portuguese crown and nobles delay with talk of surrender, then with the help of the british scrape the royal coffers clean and high-tail it to their biggest colony. They come back after Napoleon loses, but by then their standing home was very comprimised. Lots of talk of republican reforms, or limiting the powers of royalty. They left behind the royal heir in Brazil, and when things began to also bubble up down here, it was decided that having the royals knocked down on both continents was too great a risk, so he declared independence and set himself as Emperor. Pedro I was a spoiled brat and a nasty number by most accounts (most historians agree that he caused the death of his empress by kicking her in the stomach while she was pregnant), and tried to centralize power old-school style. Thankfully he croaked relatively early after drowning the country in debt borrowed from England, leaving a son too young to take the throne, resulting in a regency controlled by wealthy landowners. Said landowners were grabby and corrupt even by the lax standards of the caste, so a small cabal decided to hasten the heir's coming of age to 14 years old to get a better grip on things. Pedro II was actually a very learned, progressive fellow...but also smart enough to know that his power depended on utterly conservative and corrupt sectors, so those were the ones he supported and courted, so in the end it made no difference. The Paraguay War cost the crown absurd amounts of money and strengthened the military as a federal institution (before that it was mostly local militias controlled by 'colonels', meaning private farmers), who then kicked him back to Portugal at the earliest convenience.
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Oct 6, 2018 01:02
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OwlFancier posted:I would probably suggest that "arguments over who legitimately owns things" encompasses virtually all political thought. Who owns the land, the means of production, the ideas, or the self. Ownership conceptions of politics break down when you deal with collective issues like the environment or workers rights, and going through the problems with "rights as self ownership" in this thread would be being a dead horse.
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Oct 6, 2018 01:20
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Goon Danton posted:Ownership conceptions of politics break down when you deal with collective issues like the environment or workers rights, and going through the problems with "rights as self ownership" in this thread would be being a dead horse. I mean "nobody" is also a valid position on some of those. As, arguably, is "everybody". I could probably work out almost all of my political positions from the concept of ownership, I think. Certainly I find they necessitate certain concepts of ownership. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Oct 6, 2018 |
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Oct 6, 2018 01:41
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https://twitter.com/LPNational/status/1055862078265876480 Some great replies in there
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Oct 27, 2018 02:51
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Mr Interweb posted:https://twitter.com/LPNational/status/1055862078265876480 Thanks for the smile - I needed one. I'm not proud of myself here because I didn't acquit myself well in the "discussion", but someone managed to killed the Retail Deathwatch thread recently, shortly after Randian Ubermensch Eddie Lampert drove the biggest retail giant of the 20th century to bankruptcy. He (a forums poster, not Lampert) insisted that the government imposing carbon taxes was a form of market self-regulation, a remark so profound that its incredible stupidity utterly killed any discussion. It's literally been days since everyone stopped posting despite the totally expected but still remarkable Sears Chapter 11. It was the online equivalent of that time that a libertarian, after I quoted him a bunch of statistics on health care costs and outcomes in Everywhere But the US, told me that if everyone drank green tea then all would be well. I was utterly speechless in both cases and am not joking in the slightest about either. Thread participant Quark Jets, who has the patience of a saint, actually managing to try and inject some intelligence into the recent discussion was the only highlight. Hell of a try, Quark, but nobody can overcome that level of idiocy. JustJeff88 fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Oct 27, 2018 |
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Oct 27, 2018 03:36
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Thank you that's a very nice comment I think that dude was ESL or something because something definitely wasn't getting across. "Capitalist countries need to use the long arm of the law in order to do anything about climate change" should not be a controversial statement
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Oct 27, 2018 04:42
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QuarkJets posted:Thank you that's a very nice comment The guy with a Japanese name who lives in France? Most definitely working in a second or third language, but I have seen him make decent contributions elsewhere and I was surprised at how thick he was. I personally was referring to Leon Trotsky 2012, who was the dumbfuck who killed a thread that admittedly gone to poo poo; I'm surprised that it wasn't locked, honestly. While nobody could actually refute my factual statement that "Capitalism is inherently incapable of dealing with climate change and indeed any externality due to the absolute need to always seek the most immediate profit", I didn't express myself well. I'm not looking for the approval of the dumbfucks trying to justify the unjustifiable, but I didn't want to sell myself short either. Eventually I realised that this was a rubbish fire that wasn't worth pissing on to try and put it out. Again, Quark, good on you for trying to be the better
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Oct 27, 2018 05:56
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You too, Jeff
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Oct 27, 2018 06:45
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https://mises.org/wire/we-need-metoo-movement-political-consent bahahah
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Nov 2, 2018 01:42
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Ah the good old standby: to a Libertarian everything is slavery and rape, except actual slavery and rape
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Nov 2, 2018 07:15
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I'm impressed that they mostly stuck to actual abuses of power like the TSA or stop and frisk, despite it being so obvious between every line that they wanted to start screaming "I do not consent to the 8% sales tax unilaterally imposed on this pack of doublemint!"
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Nov 2, 2018 09:25
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R. Guyovich posted:finally found it. basically it boils down to "minjok" meaning both "race" and "nation," which undermines his entire thesis. I'm finally getting around to this. First, Suzy Kim's critique of Myers kicks off with some basic misreadings, or rather lack of reading: Kim posted:To prove his argument that North Korea’s brand of “racist nationalism” has nothing to do with Korea’s anticolonial history or the more general history of the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century, Myers begins his first chapter by arguing that there was no concept of the Korean nation-state at the beginning of the twentieth century and that myths and symbols were created in opposition to as well as in emulation of the Japanese, who were the first in East Asia to embark on founding a modern nation-state. Myers posted:It was not until the late nineteenth century, and under Japanese sponsorship, that a reform-minded cabinet undertook measures to establish Korea’s independence and imbue the people with a sense of national pride. Kim posted:It is clear that Myers’s argument is an antinationalist account of Korean history, downgrading if not throwing out all of the traditional nationalist accounts whether it be the history of the March First Movement or the Kwangju Student Uprising. Myers posted:Public opposition to Japanese rule grew until patriots read out a declaration of independence on March 1, 1919 in Seoul, setting off a nationwide uprising. She goes on to claim that "Myers’s problem in analyzing North Korean propaganda stems from an inadequate understanding of Confucianism." First, because the parent-child relationship that features heavily in North Korean propaganda maps onto Confucian patriarchy. (Myers has addressed this claim and taken pains to justify his stance that it does not; his principal argument is that DPRK propaganda explicitly emphasizes the mothering, nurturing character of the Kims and of the Party.) I find it ridiculous on its face to claim that an ideology which barely mentions Confucius and Confucianism in its official text (and then critically as often as not), and maintains contempt for the landlord class historically, is a natural continuation of a Confucian dynastic tradition. For all that she accuses Myers of being Orientalist, Kim is yet another scholar arguing that North Koreans' actual ideology can't be found in anything that they actually say to us or to each other, but is something arcane and ineffable. Second, because Juche Thought and Confucianism both contain an inherent "duality of the subject" and that Juche "embodies the contradiction inherent in the subject." This sounds like nonsense because it is nonsense. Myers has discussed the definition of chuch'e/"subject" at length, and in North Korea's Juche Myth he insists on calling Subject Thought, arguing that leaving it untranslated was a deliberate attempt to mystify sympathetic foreign observers, making Juche into more of a flexible propaganda tool meant for foreign consumption than a real philosophy. But more importantly, not a bit of her analysis is echoed in any passages of Juche texts that I can remember. Juche texts aren't the least bit concerned with dialectical arguments regarding the individual's dual identity as a subordinate of the Party and an active agent of the revolution. Granted, it pairs droning declarations that the people writ large are the masters of revolution with slavish devotion to Kim il Sung, but it's simply not intellectual. Anyway, I believe the original accusation was that Myers entire body of work is built on a translation of minjok as "race" instead of "nation." Kim's article doesn't actually spend much time on that point; she's more interested in this claptrap about how the word "subject" can mean different things. As a matter of fact, I've never read Myers translate the word minjok as "race" instead of nation, and he has written on the subject of the context-sensitive racial connotations that the word carries as opposed to minguk. It does have a long history of being used in an ethnic/racial context, and I think Myers is aware that Baedal Minjok isn't a conspiracy to raise race-consciousness by delivering pizza. None of his claims in The Cleanest Race nor North Korea's Juche Myth rest on a racialized translation of the word. This sounds like something somebody half-read and then expounded upon wildly.
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Nov 2, 2018 20:38
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E: nm, misread
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Nov 9, 2018 09:38
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Question for the thread: I am trying to find a specific article, which I believe that I first saw mentioned here, but I cannot remember the title and only some of the basic content. I found it very interesting reading and am trying to find it again. To be brief, I have been revisiting the now-archived thread on Communism/Socialism etc and it reminded me of what I'm looking for here. To summarise, this article talked about communist vs. capitalist atrocities and how just because a certain social system commits an atrocity does not mean that it's a result of the system. For example, the monstrous activities in the Belgian Congo can be attributed to capitalism because it allowed business interests to make more profit, but despite propaganda to the contrary some of the bad things that the "communist" USSR did were not due to communism, it was just people acting badly and blaming it on "the horrors of communism" rather than bad actors. It would be the equivalent of a roommate eating something that I left clearly marked in the fridge and blaming it on "the atrocities of cohabitation" rather than just saying "the roommate was a twat who didn't respect personal space." This petty theft has nothing to do with the idea behind cohabitation being about stealing from flatmates and more to do with someone acting selfishly. If I'm in the wrong place and nobody knows what I'm talking about my apologies, but I vaguely remember seeing it here.
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Nov 14, 2018 03:34
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JustJeff88 posted:Question for the thread: I am trying to find a specific article, which I believe that I first saw mentioned here, but I cannot remember the title and only some of the basic content. I found it very interesting reading and am trying to find it again. Wooo boy. That's a doozy of a subject. You can approach it via purist Marxist readings, which claimed that Socialist/Communism would appear first in the world's most developed industrial powers when the ever-greedier upper class took more and more of the wealth until the masses got pissed enough to take over. In reality, those countries stable enough to ride out the early crises of capitalism and/or share some of the goodies to keep the plebes sweet for a few generations more. Where they were NOT able to do this were backwards/failing old empires that had an excess of decrepit nobles and a lack of food/hope to go around. Those regimes could likely have been toppled by any ideology that picked up enough steam, but Socialism was fashionable among the literate factiosn who were not already in bed with the system, so that's where it got to flourish in the modern age. Funnily enoigh, such places rarely have stable/developed backgrounds, so any power obtained usually had to be defended via even greater violence (and as long as you are being violence, why not go the extra mile and get rid of a few other hurdles, someone will always think). I mean, Russia is where the term Pogrom got its sweet start, and their fundational patriarch basically killed/starved half the country. As for China, it already had civil wars with body counts in the -tens of millions- while Europe was trying to figure out gunpowder. So it's basically a perfect storm: industrial nations are stable and still fat with wealth from the New world/colonies, meaning that the aggrieved that actually had realistic chances to take power were not the working class of the First World but either exploited former-colonies or the crumbling losers among the Great Powers. The capitalist powers band together like never before against this shared menace, helping to deny the communist countries any oxygen to develop organically; they end up having to seek support of the only moderately functional pair (Cgina and USSR), which also means having to emulate their mistakes and invites further ire from the other side. That said, there were a few close misses. Germany almost had a strong socialist revolution right at the tail end of WWI; the allies agreed to leave them far more military assets than intended at first just so they could take the soviet provinces back under control. And one might wonder if the russian variety of socialism might not have been so harsh and brutal without each western power sending 10k troops to kelp the White Russians during the civil war and officially feed the Red paranoia that the whole world was out to bleed them. Of course, history is never clean; no ideology is promised a fair debut on the theater of the wold, and one could argue that none ever got one (a few had a sweeter opening roll, though). Powers great and small will commit atrocities, but only some get defined as "Caused By Ideology". England emptied Indian granaries and killed over 3 million people of starvation during WW2, but they were defending FREEDOM while doing it, so even the few people who know about it just shrugs. Stalin emptied Ukranian granaries to feed other portions of the country he deemed strategic at the expense of those disloyal troublesome locals, and he's rightfully called a monster for it. As much as it can veer close to whitewashing the crimes of monsters, there's a fair bit of truth the the charge that if someone dies on a waiting list for a public hospital it's a monstrous crime to be laid at the doorstep of Marx himself and every filthy leftist in favor of school lunches, while no crime or failure is ever caused by Capitalism unleps the perpetrator was dressed as Rich Uncle Pennybags and signed a statement saying that he's bulldozing this orphanage in the name of Filthy Lucre, notorized by his broker.
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Nov 14, 2018 04:21
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Sephyr posted:A good post quote:no crime or failure is ever caused by Capitalism unleps the perpetrator was dressed as Rich Uncle Pennybags and signed a statement saying that he's bulldozing this orphanage in the name of Filthy Lucre, notorized by his broker. I think the perpetrator gets the Presidential Medal of Freedom in such a case
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Nov 14, 2018 11:42
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Weatherman posted:I think the perpetrator gets the Presidential Medal of Freedom in such a case I wouldn't go that far. But certainly about a couple of years of fawning magazine covers and then a Very Serious thinkpiece later saying that you were so -important- that it doesn't matter if you were good or evil (but you were, like, totally good) and we actually need moxie like yours in our soft new days. It's behind a paywall, but I remember feeling bile in my throat reading this profile of the West India Company in The Economist years ago: https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2011/12/17/the-company-that-ruled-the-waves A perfect blend of whitewashing, romanticizing past exploitation and plain erasing history. I've read tankie posts defending Stalin that had better flow and sense, and they were still _garbage_.
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Nov 14, 2018 14:57
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The Economist is a magazine for sociopaths
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Nov 14, 2018 15:34
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They spoke out about the immorality of charity and food aid during the Irish Famine, so of course they have spicy British Empire takes.
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Nov 14, 2018 15:35
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not a cult posted:The Economist is a magazine for sociopaths Not even just that. Anecdote time. Back in 2006, I was working at a financial paper in Brazil and doing a ton of side jobs to try and be enough of a Good Worker Bee that the higher-ups would notice me and promote me (pffthahaha). I had spent a whole day covering a dumb event for one of the vice-president (and gently caress drat that company had a ton of them) in another city for little gain, so on the drive back I stopped to visit a friend in another town on the way. I called ahead and he said "Sure, come on over, I'm with a few friends here you should meet, there's even one coming that used to write for The Economist!" I get there, we go to a fancy pizza place and talk about stuff while i wonder when this Economist alumn is going to join us; in the meantime, we discuss elections, the economy, wars. It was when Israel was blundering around in Lebanon. One of the people at the table, a gangly guy in his mid-20s, asks a lot of...well, dumb questions, like when the US is going to join the war to help Israel and why the Invincible Israeli Army chilling in Beirut yet. Me and another guy at the table who had a clue explain some realpolitik, and some realities of war: That Israel is WAY less tolerant of taking casualties than normal armies, and that smashing through shantytowns in the world's most armored tank is not necessarily good practice for facing enemies that have actual strategic depth, proper weapons and unified morale. The guy seems really impressed by such revelations and asks plenty of other questions. By the end of the night, as people are going home, I ask my friend "So, the Economist guy didn't make it?" You already know how this goes: the clueless guy was the Economist writer. A lot of the magazine's writing and position becomes clear when you learn that instead of crusty, venerable old experts, their crew is 80% pimply dudes just out of some Econ or Admin course trying their best to affect a neoclassic liberal sensibility to impress their betters.
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Nov 14, 2018 16:43
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Sephyr posted:A lot of the magazine's writing and position becomes clear when you learn that instead of crusty, venerable old experts, their crew is 80% pimply dudes just out of some Econ or Admin course trying their best to affect a neoclassic liberal sensibility to impress their betters. https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...post-1991/7415/ The cover of anonymity for the magazine's writers is an important part of its omniscient stance, among other reasons because it conceals the extreme youth of much of the staff. "The magazine is written by young people pretending to be old people," says Michael Lewis, the author of "Liar's Poker," who now lives in England. "If American readers got a look at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their subscriptions in droves."
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Nov 14, 2018 19:48
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ehh, they try hard to get things nearly right. The fact-checking is extensive and sentence-by-sentence - not a word hits print that hasn't had an acerbic eye over it. I was in the "blockchain" Technology Quarterly special, and the few sentences quoting me followed weeks of email clarification and back-and-forth. So when they get facts wrong, it's really specially wrong. "I love The Economist. It's like a really rational guy on crack" - erith
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Nov 15, 2018 11:07
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https://www.reddit.com/r/TopMindsOfReddit/comments/a4dwpf/topmods_of_rlibertarian_decide_that_free_speech/ Good ol' reddit libertarians decide they need a little more regulation in their life.
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Dec 11, 2018 01:59
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So are they regulating the "free speech" of the racist libertarians or the paedophile libertarians?
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Dec 11, 2018 13:13
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Megillah Gorilla posted:So are they regulating the "free speech" of the racist libertarians or the paedophile libertarians? Neither, it is a Hoppian libertarian censoring all the pre-Rothbardian libertarians. i.e. it is a fascist getting rid of all the left wing anarchists
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Dec 11, 2018 15:15
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Megillah Gorilla posted:So are they regulating the "free speech" of the racist libertarians or the paedophile libertarians? Neither, they’re purging all the centrists and left leaning libertarians for being too mean to Nazis.
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Dec 16, 2018 14:30
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In my occasional two minutes hate/trolling of mises.org, I hit a gold mine:quote:And, as long as landlords don't actually physically harm you, what is wrong, even with feudalism? How was feudalism bad for the tenants? In reality? Did they have absolutely no rights? Or are certain isolated instances of landlords committing tenants' rights violations, in many centuries of feudal history, singled out to imply general conditions, to "prove" that landlords are oppressive and unjust, and therefore they and the whole arrangement of feudalism are illegitimate? Emphasis added for the exact point in the conversation where it ended, because it's impossible to continue from that point. I spend my time trying to compare libertarianism unfavorably to things like feudalism, so for one of them to say "why would that be unfavorable" just cut the legs out from under it. I'm shook. I might just quit trolling them for a while. I do it, particularly to the Lew Rockwell orbit of libertarianism (which includes Hoppe) in part because I'm disgusted with how much I agreed with them in the past, and how much I let slide. I honestly don't know if I was on board for so much of it, or if I just discarded the worst aspects. But in retrospect it pisses me off immensely, and I want to atone somehow, mainly by flinging poo poo at their dumb forum. I can't confront Rockwell directly, but I can at least poke the visitors to his "educational" institution. Final edit: I note that their defense of feudalism is exactly like a Lost Causer's defense of slavery. It was good, except for certain isolated instances singled out to "prove" that slavery is oppressive and unjust. Golbez fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Dec 18, 2018 |
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Dec 18, 2018 01:46
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