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It also seems easy to be a libertarian when you have literal superpowers.
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Nov 25, 2021 18:32
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It'd solve one of those eternal libertarian conundrums, at least: If you can survive the hard vacuum of space, you actually could go homesteading, for example on the Moon.
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Nov 25, 2021 18:40
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It also seems easy to be a libertarian when you have literal superpowers. This was a big theme in the Incredibles. In fact, the villains in both movies were non-super humans who resented the potential that supers had and sought to bring them down a peg. You see a recurring narrative "everyone is special, Dash." /"That's just another way of saying no one is" and Syndrome's "When everyone is super, no one will be." It might have been less explicit in the sequel where the motive was about not wanting to feel dependent on supers. But the recurring pattern was that you have this ubermensch protagonist and nearly everyone around him is inferior in some way and striving to drag him down to their level. Libertarians seem to really closely align with Mr. Incredible in that they believe having "superpowers" should entitle them to be superior and everyone else should just Know Their Place in society. It doesn't matter that none of the Supers 'earned' their powers through hard work, if you point that out they'll just shrug and be like "equal opportunity does not guarantee equal outcomes. Everyone has a chance to be born a super and supers owe people nothing for being born superior". 
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Nov 25, 2021 21:21
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Being 'inherently better', though a myth, is widely accepted in society. People decry racism, sexism etc, and rightly so, but it's a fantastic justification for appalling, colour-blind inegality and classism, which is perfectly acceptable to the vast majority of society. The powerful (read: wealthy) can't get on without other people to do the work, but wage slavery is a thing so people have no choice but to prostitute themselves to the ubermensch or die. It's a great system, all sarcasm intended... monopolise the wealth and resources in society, make people all stab each other in the back for the very basics of survival and then talk about how everyone is so lazy and they're so great. That is quite lierally how people like Peter Thiel look at the world. Oligarchs like him hate government, while still needing it, because government only lets them do almost everything that they want instead of absolutely everything.
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Nov 25, 2021 22:25
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I don't think it is a very significant factor today among humans, but it is easy to envisage a time or place where it could be, where some people could just be born with a super good brain that can think about really useful stuff that other people can't think about. Or if you were born with no arms during a time when everyone had to do manual labour just to survive. People aren't necessarily created equal, but the biggest omission from that idea that I think is present among the right is that greater capability also carries greater responsibility. Of course they only trot it out to justify after the fact why they can just do whatever they want so obviously they can't envision it, but in a world where some people were just born "better" in the sense of somehow being far more capable than others to do things that people need doing, then it would necessarily be incumbent on them to do that thing they are very capable of more than others. The right wing approach is that supposed greater capability is simply license to do whatever, even if what you do is manifestly wasteful and harmful to others, but the better outlook I think is that if people aren't created equally then those who are created very capable need to do more than those who aren't. And if that's unfair, well life isn't fair.
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Nov 25, 2021 22:36
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OwlFancier posted:I don't think it is a very significant factor today among humans, but it is easy to envisage a time or place where it could be, where some people could just be born with a super good brain that can think about really useful stuff that other people can't think about. Or if you were born with no arms during a time when everyone had to do manual labour just to survive. This is the key difference between old-fashioned pre-1975-ish conservatism and the modern neoliberalism sort. When you believe people aren't equal, that puts a moral compunction on those who have been ordained to be at the top of the pyramid to look after the helpless proles on the bottom - it's not their fault they're only fit for manual toil. At the very least it means that no one earned their place in the system, it's just nature/God's mysterious ways. If you accept that everyone is inherently equal but don't do much to shape society to reflect that, you still have poor people and rich people, but now the poor can be blamed for their lowly lot in life because there's no good reason why they couldn't be rich - just individual moral and personal failings. It also means the rich are under no compulsion to look after or help the poor, plus all the Just World crap about just deserts and all that stuff.
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Nov 26, 2021 02:51
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BRJohnson posted:Adam warlock as the apprehensive cosmic philosopher is pretty cool. No need to wonder, just engage with any of them about marginal tax rates and they will instantly turn red in the face and shut down
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Nov 26, 2021 03:00
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BalloonFish posted:This is the key difference between old-fashioned pre-1975-ish conservatism and the modern neoliberalism sort. I think it's also a pretty necessary conclusion if you actually believe in the idea "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" If some people had extraordinary ability and others had need of that ability, then that same conclusion would follow. Really so much of the modern right's worldview is tied up with individualism that I think almost everything else is just about justifying that, a complete rejection of the idea that a person has any responsibility to others and to society, down of course, to denying that society exists at all. I get why they have the instinct, the idea that people have those responsibilities just by existing does raise a lot of unpleasant questions (which I continue to answer always with "if you don't like that then the best answer is to stop making more people") but just outright rejecting that idea because you don't like the conclusion, as a lot of people do, really doesn't work in the long run. If we are going to have people exist then something like a social contract has to exist as well. What's weird is that I tend to believe that most of the time this has just naturally sorted itself out for the most part. It seems like a quite particular product of our time that so many people are so outright hostile to the notion to the point they are basically hostile to any sort of functioning society whatsoever. I'm tempted to just blame the various factors that cause boomer brain for the whole thing but I blame everything on that so it might not be accurate.
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Nov 26, 2021 03:16
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OwlFancier posted:denying that society exists at all. No-one would ever do such a thing.
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Nov 26, 2021 04:51
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JustJeff88 posted:No-one would ever do such a thing. Ancaps absolutely do. They would say, "society" doesn't exist, it has no special rights or contracts, it's just interactions between individuals.
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Nov 26, 2021 11:05
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Pretty sure the joke is Thatcher.
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Nov 26, 2021 12:37
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JustJeff88 posted:No-one would ever do such a thing.
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Nov 26, 2021 15:11
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Libertarians can have a weird constellation of beliefs. Like how they aren't opposed to charity, and act like everyone would be better off if it were strictly voluntary instead of compelled like taxes. They like to act like they are more proactive and noble about it than leftists are and I hear a talking point about how conservatives give to charity more than leftists. Like taxation, military service and a few other things they like to imply that it's more efficient if it is voluntary. Expanding on that, Libertarians have a very cynical view of human nature. To them the default state of a person is this barbaric opportunist bent on putting their survival above everything else. So to them socialism is at best naive and misguided. They think people will take without contributing, and when contributors see how one sided things are becoming they'll get discouraged and also stop trying. This is also why they think socialism is somehow anti innovation; they think that people won't invent things if there's no financial or social benefit to it. They also envision socialism in a very Harrison Bergeron kind of way; can't be too smart, or too strong, or too ambitious as it would be unfair to the lazy people. So ultimately they think that socialism will just screw itself over and even the lazy disabled people will be doomed because they'll run out of other people's money to live off of. Conversely they think their ideology is much more pragmatic. People are selfish unless they decide not to be. Force them to share and they'll never be altruistic on their own accord. Keep them from stealing or they'll never stop taking from others. People are going to jump in here and be like "lol that's capitalism though and we don't do anything to stop it from stealing/ruining everything". But it's important to note that while Libertarians will natter on about human nature they really don't see it on a systemic level regardless. Rather it's a basic truism to them, like saying "we can't live underwater like merpeople because we can't hold our breath for very long".
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Nov 26, 2021 16:19
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Pretty sure the joke is Thatcher. In every sense of the word.
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Nov 26, 2021 16:24
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Libertarians seem to have a utilitarian theory of labor. That is, your job's pay should be based on the SKILL required to perform the task. Not surprisingly, a lot of the conservatives /Libertarians that strongly support that tend to have high paying niche jobs; underwater welder on an offshore oil rig, crane operator, neurosurgeon, etc. They feel justified in their compensation because they feel like not everyone is capable of doing the job and it is highly needed for critical tasks. Conversely, they don't believe a 'simple' job deserves high pay because the task is easy to learn and lots of people can do it. Where this falls apart is when you have a simple low paying job and nobody wants to do it. So let's take an imaginary job: a widget polisher. Albeit tedious, polishing widgets is simple to master. Nearly everyone is physically able to do it. But if nobody wants to voluntarily do that task, what happens? Libertarians believe everything in their world is voluntary. Okay, so how do you persuade people to do a boring job if they have better options? How will the work get done? Another problem: what if you have ten equally skilled jobs but one is way more unpleasant than the rest? Libertarian logic (lol) dictates that the most skilled among a cohort will take the most desirable job in that skill(pay) tier and so on down the line. Which means the least desirable job will always have the least motivated and skilled people doing it, even though on paper everyone in that job is as skilled as people with nicer yet equal paying jobs. So even if you get parity in pay you're still going to have breakdowns in job satisfaction which will create a downward pressure on pay and staffing. How do you make an awful job worth doing if you aren't willing to offset it with pay or other desirable perks?
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Nov 26, 2021 17:03
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I have said it before, but I don't think Libertarianism is a real ideology. You have neo-liberals and post-neo-liberals throwing out empty phrases about how actually brutal dictatorships in the colonies, atrocities, privatisation and grifting are good for freedom and democracy somehow. Libertarians are the people who actually believe those arguments. Because their thought is derived from advertising phrases they can never actually form a coherent description of their own alleged thought.
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Nov 26, 2021 17:08
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Libertarianism is an aesthetic, not a coherent ideology. If you try to make libertarians' rambling and whining coherent, you're putting in way more effort than they did.
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Nov 26, 2021 17:17
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Pretty sure the joke is Thatcher. “If nothing else goes right for me in a day, Madame Speaker, I can at least count on the fact that Margaret Thatcher is still dead.” EDIT: ^^^ It's a lifestyle thing, they want to be free to do whatever they please with no consequences, and don't give a poo poo about anyone else's rights to live their own lives. hooman fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Nov 26, 2021 |
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Nov 26, 2021 17:29
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I saw some YouTube videos that talked about libertarianism in Sci fi and how the only way they are able to make it work is to set up a contrived fictional premise to get around all the glaring flaws it has in reality. divabot posted:Libertarianism is an aesthetic, not a coherent ideology. If you try to make libertarians' rambling and whining coherent, you're putting in way more effort than they did.
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Nov 26, 2021 17:54
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I might call it a personality or debate style, but I agree that the whole point of it is people looking for an excuse to only care about themselves and who maybe get off on making other people angry, or who like to feel superior to those they consider weak, which definitely includes “intellectuals” and their professor in college who only gave them a bad grade because they were biased and jealous of being not as smart as the libertarian.
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Nov 26, 2021 18:11
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Panfilo posted:I saw some YouTube videos that talked about libertarianism in Sci fi and how the only way they are able to make it work is to set up a contrived fictional premise to get around all the glaring flaws it has in reality. 
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Nov 26, 2021 18:15
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theshim posted:I mean this goes back to Ayn Rand's infinite free energy machine being the only way her story worked A lot of works of fiction also do this in regard to justifying authoritarianism or fascism. They use an existential threat like zombies or bug aliens to explain why such a way of governance is necessary. I gotta wonder how heavily the cold war played into the themes of these stories since the adversaries were depicted as collectivist and/or devoid of individuality, indiscriminately malevolent, and actively exploiting human flaws of empathy, introspection, and pacifism.
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Nov 26, 2021 18:44
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VictualSquid posted:I have said it before, but I don't think Libertarianism is a real ideology. It's really not. So much of time, I go back to something towards the beginning of the thread, where somebody said that libertarianism is kind of transitory as a worldview. There may be a number of people who casually ascribe to it, but anyone who gives real thought to things will either discover that the system is broken and unfair or discover empathy, or they'll drift into further right and conservative justifications for things. There's extremely few dedicated libertarian thinkers to maintain the concept of it as a coherent ideology and keep it relevant. Some people don't care much about the philosophical side of things, but try to just pragmatically find a camp to best serve their own interests, in which case they'll usually eventually move onto a real political party for the sake of actually having a chance of being in a winning camp (or because they'll find in themselves some stronger beliefs). Possibly the most dedicated faction of libertarians are the sovereign citizens, who are sort of only tangentially related to libertarianism, since while they share the idea of being anti-government, their driving force is either crass pragmatism or a weird pseudo-religious reverence for the specific documents they base their weird legalistic interpretations on.
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Nov 26, 2021 18:50
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I actually understand the cynicism aspect that someone mentioned. I'm a commie/socialist/freedom hater/whatever-the-gently caress out of an abiding cynicism in human nature. I realise that power imbalance arises from wealth imbalance, that people will do anything and everything to get more wealth & power, and imbalance of wealth & power leads to abuse, therefore material equality is vital. I'm not a comocialist out of any abiding belief in the underlying good of humanity; totally the opposite. I believe that material equality is necessary to avoid abuse of power, but that people will do everything possible to get more power. The question is how so to do. I have no problem in theory with a Soviet-style rationed/planned economy, especially in this age of burning the planet at both ends, I just think that such a system inevitably leads to power imbalance of another sort. That said, I think that the reason people fear that type of scenario is twofold: partly it's out of a fear of autocracy, which is a valid concern, but mostly people just hate the idea because they loathe the thought of being brought down to the same level as everyone else. It's easy to prattle on about equality until it starts costing people money. Then, suddenly, people become a lot less egalitarian. hooman posted:“If nothing else goes right for me in a day, Madame Speaker, I can at least count on the fact that Margaret Thatcher is still dead.” Basically this. If there is one principle by which we can define right-wing economic idealogy, it's ruthless self-interest.
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Nov 26, 2021 19:18
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Pretty much got it right in that libertarianism can only exist because of the exact set of circumstances that led to boomer brain; primarily, people who were handed everything they got on a silver platter and told they earned it, or watched that happen and still have their hand out waiting for their turn.
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Nov 27, 2021 05:56
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:I might call it a personality or debate style, but I agree that the whole point of it is people looking for an excuse to only care about themselves and who maybe get off on making other people angry, or who like to feel superior to those they consider weak It's this, it exists as a justification to be an rear end in a top hat to everyone else. It's why every time Libertarians move somewhere and take over a town they wreck it immediately (assuming the whole endeavor wasn't a scam in the first place) Like that New Hampshire town where they just constantly had bear attacks because someone thought it was funny to feed pastries to the bears. Why was someone teaching bears to break into houses looking for donuts? To be an rear end in a top hat! quote:One woman, who prudently chose to remain anonymous save for the sobriquet “Doughnut Lady,” revealed to Hongoltz-Hetling that she had taken to welcoming bears on her property for regular feasts of grain topped with sugared doughnuts. If those same bears showed up on someone else’s lawn expecting similar treatment, that wasn’t her problem.
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Nov 27, 2021 06:21
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The New Hampshire town where the world-famous crying nazi got his start as a stand-up comedian?
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Nov 27, 2021 06:37
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Pretty much got it right in that libertarianism can only exist because of the exact set of circumstances that led to boomer brain; primarily, people who were handed everything they got on a silver platter and told they earned it, or watched that happen and still have their hand out waiting for their turn. The thing is that a ton of these modern libertarians did not have everything handed to them. I'm not saying they earned anything, and yes the white males have privilege, but a ton of these guys really are the stereotypical weirdo loser nerds who live in their parents' basement. And I honestly don't hold living with parents as a bad thing because times are tough for a lot of people but these are dudes who are espousing white protestant work ethic and rugged individualism and Randian self-sufficiency and all that poo poo while living off their parents which makes them hilarious hypocrites. The ultimate temporarily embarrassed millionaires. They're just delusional weirdos who think they're way smarter than they actually are because they got good grades in our lovely rear end public school system.
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Nov 27, 2021 06:37
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Elephant Ambush posted:The thing is that a ton of these modern libertarians did not have everything handed to them. I'm not saying they earned anything, and yes the white males have privilege, but a ton of these guys really are the stereotypical weirdo loser nerds who live in their parents' basement. And I honestly don't hold living with parents as a bad thing because times are tough for a lot of people but these are dudes who are espousing white protestant work ethic and rugged individualism and Randian self-sufficiency and all that poo poo while living off their parents which makes them hilarious hypocrites. The ultimate temporarily embarrassed millionaires. They're just delusional weirdos who think they're way smarter than they actually are because they got good grades in our lovely rear end public school system. That's why I added the second part; they're almost entirely those stereotypical loser nerds who have absolutely no understanding of why they don't have the success that their parents' generation lucked into, and said parents are completely unable to explain it either. Everything from incels to the full on alt-right is wounded, failing privilege because massive effort has been made to make them oblivious to why they aren't married with 2.5 kids and the house paid off at 30.
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Nov 27, 2021 06:50
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The traditional theory as to why have-nots go "gently caress you got mine" is they imagine that maybe one day they could be haves and don't want to screw up that potential for them. Although maybe there could be some kind of weird acceptance on their place in life. But really, there's a lot of Libertarians who drift into the idea for a variety of weird reasons. On the weirder side of things, there's groups of black sovereign citizens who seem to have an even shakier basis for their weird legalism than their white counterparts. They were briefly in the news when a bunch of them got arrested for wandering around a highway with rifles. https://abcnews.go.com/US/rise-moors-group-affiliated-11-men-arrested-massachusetts/story?id=78731313 Wikipedia has this to say about that particular movement. Wikpedia posted:During the 1990s, some former followers of the Moorish Science Temple of America and the Washitaw Nation formed an offshoot of the sovereign citizen movement which came to be known as Moorish sovereign citizens. Members believe the United States federal government to be illegitimate, which they attribute to a variety of factors including Reconstruction following the U.S. Civil War and the abandonment of the gold standard in the 1930s.[57] In addition to the Moorish Science Temple doctrine that African-Americans are of Moorish descent, Moorish sovereign citizens claim immunity from U.S. federal, state, and local laws, because of a mistaken belief that the Moroccan–American Treaty of Friendship (1786) grants them sovereignty.[57][58] Some also believe that African Americans are indigenous to the United States[59]
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Nov 27, 2021 07:26
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Ghost Leviathan posted:That's why I added the second part; they're almost entirely those stereotypical loser nerds who have absolutely no understanding of why they don't have the success that their parents' generation lucked into, and said parents are completely unable to explain it either. Everything from incels to the full on alt-right is wounded, failing privilege because massive effort has been made to make them oblivious to why they aren't married with 2.5 kids and the house paid off at 30. I can't find it right now but there's a really good video that hbomberguy did about white supremacist type libertarians where he shows a bunch of clips from the most insufferable people about how white people have been fighting against racism for centuries or some hilarious bullshit and it's awesome because these dumb motherfuckers love to sit in dark rooms with big bookshelves and light candles and smoke pipes while trying to appear thoughtful and smart and just coming off as the most smug idiotic failsons ever. It's the best and if I can ever find it I'll post it. Hell, someone may have already posted it itt over the years. edit: Here's something along those lines I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYQo6LI3Y7c&t=466s Elephant Ambush fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Nov 27, 2021 |
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Nov 27, 2021 07:33
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Hell yeah it was
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Nov 27, 2021 14:10
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This might be trivial to most of the thread’s participants, but I just watched this long debate between a philosophy professor and a libertarian, and I find it fascinating where the libertarian retreats to the position that people can just do data entry to survive whenever he gets confused about something. He’s like a robot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbFCiweoXhI
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Feb 18, 2022 02:17
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Also I guess I should say the libertarian has a Ph.D. in philosophy from UC Davis but doesn’t have a job apart from being a professional debater with a patreon as far as I can tell.
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Feb 18, 2022 02:20
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PS holy poo poo there is an amazing Caleb Maupin cameo in the q&a section.
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Feb 18, 2022 02:44
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more like professional masturbator
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Feb 18, 2022 06:52
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moonmazed posted:more like professional masturbator You guys are getting paid?!
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Feb 18, 2022 09:23
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KozmoNaut posted:You guys are getting paid?! just set up a webcam bruv
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Feb 19, 2022 05:21
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Hello Sailor posted:just set up a webcam bruv They paid me to turn it off.
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Feb 19, 2022 14:06
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KozmoNaut posted:They paid me to turn it off. And now you're getting paid! It's that easy!
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Feb 20, 2022 05:42
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