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not directly about libertarians, but I feel like the trend of home schooling is a some sort of time bomb of brain drain. there's going to be some fun times when we have a large crop of new 18 yearolds with home school "degrees" PhazonLink fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Oct 26, 2023 |
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# ? Jun 12, 2024 04:53 |
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PhazonLink posted:not directly about libertarians, but I feel like the trend of home schooling is a some sort of time bomb of brain drain. Don't worry, a ton of them are using A.C.E. (Accelerated Christian Education) material to homeschool their kids, which is totally fine stuff that never once crushed the soul out of its students with the aim of creating unthinkingly obedient soldiers for future culture wars! Wait.
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PhazonLink posted:not directly about libertarians, but I feel like the trend of home schooling is a some sort of time bomb of brain drain. They have such blatant selection bias about it. Every anecdote about homeschooling is about providing a freer, more customized curriculum that has kids spending less time regurgitating facts or studying for standardized tests and more time exploring and learning. They'll contrast how some public school district in Oregon no longer requires graduates be literate because it's "racist" to expect black students to be literate, and compare it to their own wunderkind who was reading The Fountainhead when he was two.
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I remember that libertarian responding to something said about Cuba's successful literacy program with "I'd rather be illiterate than only be allowed to read commie propaganda" and I'm having similar thoughts about ACE worksheets and The Fountainhead.
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PhazonLink posted:not directly about libertarians, but I feel like the trend of home schooling is a some sort of time bomb of brain drain. I mean, Libertarians are Republicans who don't want people to know and this is part of their movement. Going to public school means you MIGHT be exposed to different ways of thinking. You might be told that the US was founded by mere mortals who were flawed and that there are other communities out there that disagree with how we do things for good and bad. And you can't have that. The US was founded by the grace of the Christian (you know REAL Christian) god and has never done anything wrong (unless it was a Democrat who did it after 1865).
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Guavanaut posted:I remember that libertarian responding to something said about Cuba's successful literacy program with "I'd rather be illiterate than only be allowed to read commie propaganda" and I'm having similar thoughts about ACE worksheets and The Fountainhead. Wow, that's so lazy. I figured a more pedantic Libertarian would conclude all government education is flawed and terrible, so if you were to tout Cuba's literacy rate they'd just argue that Cubans set the bar really low (like that one district in Oregon) to lie about how great socialism is. I've tried challenging libertarians on academic success across different levels of public school participation since I'm a little curious about it and if it were so damning then it would support their claim that government school=bad, right? The places where most people use private school/homeschool would have great results, the places where everyone goes to public school would have terrible results. Jrod would probably shrug and dismiss the claim on the basis that the median IQ of Cuban Communists is simply not high enough to be consistent with their claimed literacy rates. My assumption about their examples of successful homeschooling involves self motivated kids that would excel in spite of homeschooling, not because of it. I mean, seriously, what burnout of a 4th grader is going to go on to breeze through UC schools because some Rand Paul type parent homeschooled them for 8 years?
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Guavanaut posted:I remember that libertarian responding to something said about Cuba's successful literacy program with "I'd rather be illiterate than only be allowed to read commie propaganda" and I'm having similar thoughts about ACE worksheets and The Fountainhead. I don't think reading anything by Ayn Rand would make you literate though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFh9vdxtDPQ
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Mooseontheloose posted:I mean, Libertarians are Republicans who don't want people to know and this is part of their movement. I think the Trump time has really shaken out all of the ones who aren't. The older libertarian movement was more varied, and included a lot of people who liked the 'minimal government' idea or parts of the philosophy or other things. There wasn't nearly as strong of a Republican ideology or party split back in the day. For example Nixon would be far left by the standards of the modern Republicans, and probably wasn't especially attracitve 70s libertarians since he created the EPA, was fine with tax rates higher than AOC is called a commie for, favored a handgun ban but decided not to push it, and floated proposals for UBI and UHC though they never got off the ground. (the 1972 LP platform called for lower pollution controls, abolition of taxes, zero gun control, no government aid, and no interference in the healthcare market). Meanwhile both major parties opposed gay marriage (and were generally fine with anti-gay-existence laws) while the LP favored it. I think it wasn't really until the 1990s with the Tea Party move of the Republican party that you really see it start to move to 'republicans who like weed' or 'republicans who don't want to say THAT', and even then there were a lot of people who definitely weren't republican-lite. The 1990s also didn't yet see a strongly unified Republican party, notably Bush Sr. resigned from the NRA over their 'jackbooted thugs' comments and pushed for and signed the Assault Weapon Ban, which would be anathema to the modern party. While I haven't tracked it really closely, the move of Libertarians to be more and more purely republican-lite seems to followed the same timeline as 'Republican' becoming more than just a loose party affiliation and embraced a very unyielding set of ideals.
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No Tea party in the 90s.
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Jesus III posted:No Tea party in the 90s. Yeah, probably meant the militia movement.
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My big question for the libertarians is if there is no government then who enforces all these law suits and contracts?
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the moose posted:My big question for the libertarians is if there is no government then who enforces all these law suits and contracts? National defense and contracts are basically the only things that classical libertarians think a government should do. Radical an-caps think everyone should abide by contracts voluntarily within the non-aggression principle.
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the moose posted:My big question for the libertarians is if there is no government then who enforces all these law suits and contracts? Sam Seder frequently asks this to his libertarian debate bro callers and the common explanation is some form of privatized binding arbitration between the parties involved. Often their convolution solution is literally "government with a bunch of extra steps". "OK so we'll pick a neutral location to work out contracts together" "Uh huh sounds like a courthouse" "No, no it's not necessary for the building to be government controlled" "Oh ok so we'll make sure to unravel all the gold fringes off the flags before we start" ' ![]()
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Jesus III posted:No Tea party in the 90s. You're right; I think of the big idealogical tightening of the Republican party that included things like the Contract With America as something that lead to the Tea Party, but TP is a group that didn't exist until the 2000s, didn't take off until around 2008, and now has mostly faded out so it's really just a side thing and not a good shorthand to use.
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:You're right; I think of the big idealogical tightening of the Republican party that included things like the Contract With America as something that lead to the Tea Party, but TP is a group that didn't exist until the 2000s, didn't take off until around 2008, and now has mostly faded out so it's really just a side thing and not a good shorthand to use. the Tea Party was a 100% astroturfed movement and hasn't faded out so much as become the mainstream Republican party ideology
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the moose posted:My big question for the libertarians is if there is no government then who enforces all these law suits and contracts? Traditional libertarians believe in government, it's just in the extreme case one that's limited to enforcing contracts, enforcing laws against initiation of force, and handling national defense and basic relations with other countries. Some people who call themselves libertarian don't even go that far down the path and have some other minor government functions. Anarcho Capitalists would have no 'country' structure and all contracts and laws would be handled by private arbitration and private security companies. How they'd actually function has no good answer, it pretty much relies on people not acting like people do. There was a thread on these boards (maybe buried back in this one?) where people pointed out that there's nothing in an Ancap setup that prevents you from creating "Valhalla Private Protective Services" that would run around raiding non-members who's protective service wasn't as powerful for loot.
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Valhalla has some unfortunate connotations. Unless you're Heinlein libertarian, but that has its own problems.
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Yeah they'd just go with Wagner Private Protective Services now.
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The original founders of the Libertarian party are all old enough that they're mostly gone and inactive, and it seems like most of the people who were goaded into joining the party when they were young and impressionable have developed a lot of conservatism with age as the world has moved past what the founders of the party ever thought of. The fact that Reagan for a while was the face of any kind of blathering on about small government always put them more over towards the Republicans' side, and there's plenty of bait on the line to draw Libertarians into the conservative news ecosystem. On an actual administrative organizational side of things, it might be a more complex picture. The Libertarian Party nationally isn't very unified, and a little while back there were a number of incidents of individual state parties apparently cutting ties with the national party, so while the dominant forces of the party are definitely on the far right side, there might be a number of regional differences. I know that there's that Louisiana Libertarian Party twitter that is really into furries apparently? No idea what's up with that. I do wonder if the Libertarian Party might get any boost of support from the business Republicans that have very clearly been pushed out of influence by feral maga-ites, but it seems more like the party is on the trajectory to fade from existence, even if a lot of the concepts will survive in one way or another.
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SlothfulCobra posted:On an actual administrative organizational side of things, it might be a more complex picture. The Libertarian Party nationally isn't very unified, and a little while back there were a number of incidents of individual state parties apparently cutting ties with the national party, so while the dominant forces of the party are definitely on the far right side, there might be a number of regional differences. I know that there's that Louisiana Libertarian Party twitter that is really into furries apparently? No idea what's up with that. The Mises Caucus took over and did a hard-right shift which caused some state parties to split. I am glad you posted this, because I remembered something about the LP splitting but hadn't really looked into it, and a little googling found this gem: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2022/10/11/libertarian-party-loses-state-parties-donors-after-hard-right-turn I included some quotes from it below that I just can't make any funnier than they are as dry, factual reporting. splcenter posted:The Virginia Libertarian party dissolved itself after a vote on Sept. 12 over “recent statements endorsed by the national Libertarian Party, that are antithetical to our core principles including restrictions of voting rights of citizens, specifically women, reversing the LP’s 50 year history of support of non-discrimination and freedom of LGBTQ citizens, repeal of the Civil Rights Act and other statements condoning bigotry, even representative democracy itself.” splcenter posted:The Mises Caucus further pushed to delete language that condemned “bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” That plan, too, worked, though it caused controversy. Former LP candidate for vice president Spike Cohen proposed adding, “We uphold and defend the rights of every person, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or any other aspect of their identity,” and that measure passed. quote:I do wonder if the Libertarian Party might get any boost of support from the business Republicans that have very clearly been pushed out of influence by feral maga-ites, but it seems more like the party is on the trajectory to fade from existence, even if a lot of the concepts will survive in one way or another. I don't see why they would. The hard-right is currently in control of the party, and 'business republicans' are the ones who don't like the racist, anti-LGBT, anti-abortion part (or at least saying it out loud). Before the hard right took over, the party was more of a clown show than a serious party (the 2016 convention was quite a spectacle, for example). If the 'business republicans' want to split from the maga crowd, they'd be better off forming a new party without the baggage the lp has, like Perot did in 1992, or moving to the Democratic party and becoming the conservative wing of it.
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the moose posted:My big question for the libertarians is if there is no government then who enforces all these law suits and contracts? the blockchain. or AI or their 1000% loyal pmc where the guards have neck bomb collars. or magic.
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It's kind of the difference between the idealist libertarian, and the lifestyle libertarian. The first is a phase that nearly all leftists go through, and then realise the contradictions as we try to marry the ideal world of everyone's liberty to the real world of economic, social and physical coercion and the inevitable social outcomes of no governmental apparatus (warlords). They think it through they end up drawing conclusions that you need some state in some form but also need strict regulations on the power it, and businesses and individuals can wield in controlling it and end up a flavour of leftist. If you're especially dumb, or priviledged enough to never be exposed to material reality you can kind of stay here in a cloud of naive but ultimately well meaning weirdness. These are the libertarians who are pro abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights, anti-disenfranchisement etc. The second type are people for whom libertarianism isn't an actual philosophy but is instead a practical representation of "I get to do whatever I want, and you can't do anything I don't like". These people are assholes who use libertarianism (or rights) to justify whatever they personally want to do, but have no committment to the rights of others to do things that they want to do. There is no theoretical basis in maximising liberty, and pointing out any contradictions is pointless because they don't care, they just call their entirely narcissistic philosophy libertarian because they are only interested in maintaining their lifestyle and have no interest in the theoretical rights or liberties of others. I miss JROD because they were the first kind, entirely convinced that their positions would make things better for everyone and kept having brain meltdowns when it got pointed out that the people they were quoting were race scientists and nazis because they couldn't square the circle of being a type 1 libertarian with libertarian thought leaders being mostly type 2.
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![]() https://twitter.com/NHpilled/status/1717723248576594153?t=AkbgdRbBqsNDA-VNaUunRQ&s=19
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The right pretends that mass shootings are because of medications rather than the logical result of their politics and policies.
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I was once a Libertarian, but I was never one because I thought that maximal personal rights were just a fundamentally morally good state of affairs. Instead, I always held that belief because I thought it would lead to the greatest human flourishing. As time went on though I saw that practically speaking it just led to the poorer people having few, if any, opportunities and concentrated wealth and opportunity in those who already had a head start through their wealth. That it was, as a practical matter, actually pretty bad at improving the general human condition is what had me move more and more leftward along with the stark facist shift of nearly all the libertarians as soon as Trump popped up led to me going socialist. I don't think my fundamental beliefs ever really changed, just the practical methods on how to achieve them did.
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OwlFancier posted:The right pretends that mass shootings are because of medications rather than the logical result of their politics and policies. Not that hypocrisy matters, but if their claims about Big Pharma getting people hooked on dangerous drugs is true, it refutes all their arguments that laissez-faire capitalism leads to greatest human flourishing. Nitrousoxide posted:I was once a Libertarian, but I was never one because I thought that maximal personal rights were just a fundamentally morally good state of affairs. Instead, I always held that belief because I thought it would lead to the greatest human flourishing. As time went on though I saw that practically speaking it just led to the poorer people having few, if any, opportunities and concentrated wealth and opportunity in those who already had a head start through their wealth. That it was, as a practical matter, actually pretty bad at improving the general human condition is what had me move more and more leftward along with the stark facist shift of nearly all the libertarians as soon as Trump popped up led to me going socialist. I think that happens to a lot of young libertarians. It's easy to see how government (and teachers and parents) boss you around and tell you what ro do from an early age, but it takes some more life experience to realize that corporations have power over people too. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 12:32 on Oct 27, 2023 |
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:Traditional libertarians believe in government, it's just in the extreme case one that's limited to enforcing contracts, enforcing laws against initiation of force, and handling national defense and basic relations with other countries. Some people who call themselves libertarian don't even go that far down the path and have some other minor government functions. Anarcho Capitalists would have no 'country' structure and all contracts and laws would be handled by private arbitration and private security companies. How they'd actually function has no good answer, it pretty much relies on people not acting like people do. There was a thread on these boards (maybe buried back in this one?) where people pointed out that there's nothing in an Ancap setup that prevents you from creating "Valhalla Private Protective Services" that would run around raiding non-members who's protective service wasn't as powerful for loot. Your regdate implies you weren't around for this, but years ago when this first came up we invented an entire canon of lore about the fictional Valhalla DRO. OwlFancier posted:The right pretends that mass shootings are because of medications rather than the logical result of their politics and policies. They also blame them on teaching evolution in schools
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Your regdate implies you weren't around for this, but years ago when this first came up we invented an entire canon of lore about the fictional Valhalla DRO. I've popped in to read these forums from time to time for a long time (since way back when this forum had lots of libertarians), I just didn't tend to do more than read for a while then leave, and never made an account to post anything until recently. The Valhalla DRO canon here is what I was thinking of when I wrote that.
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VitalSigns posted:Not that hypocrisy matters, but if their claims about Big Pharma getting people hooked on dangerous drugs is true, it refutes all their arguments that laissez-faire capitalism leads to greatest human flourishing. I feel like, just the existence of advertising as a concept already disproves the magic of capitalist efficiency, since it makes it obvious that the quality of a product or service is not the only thing driving demand. If they can get you to buy a lower quality product for more money, what's stopping them doing anything else with that power?
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![]() https://twitter.com/LPNational/status/1719014004876546211?t=eA5nnCgZWzaHB6NL04qmmg&s=19 Because I've had libertarians insist the opposite - "we're not anarchists, we just want the government limited in the manner we think was intended by the Constitution".
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every single person should make every single decision affecting any aspect of their own life and that's why every single person must be responsible to grow their own food and dig their own wells and defend their own territory so excuse us while we destroy literally every advancement the human race has ever made because maybe you might have to think about another person at some point
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Panfilo posted:
They said, posting to the Internet on state-provided communication protocols with state-provided electricity.
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Angry_Ed posted:They said, posting to the Internet on state-provided communication protocols with state-provided electricity. completely coincidentally they fully and completely believe that utilities like power and the internet would continue to function in their ideal future at least as well as it does now (and will in fact be more free!!!!) despite all obvious evidence to the contrary
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theshim posted:completely coincidentally they fully and completely believe that utilities like power and the internet would continue to function in their ideal future at least as well as it does now (and will in fact be more free!!!!) despite all obvious evidence to the contrary As we know, truths praexologically derived from first principles are far, far superior to such shallow trash as "evidence" and "objective reality" and "their ex-wife's restraining order."
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Panfilo posted:Because I've had libertarians insist the opposite - "we're not anarchists, we just want the government limited in the manner we think was intended by the Constitution". I think that's part of the Libertarian Party steadily getting smaller, dumber, and more impotent, since it's easier to make these big, dumb proclamations when you're not actually trying to hold office. Towards the beginning of the founding of the Libertarian Party, there was a thing called "the Dallas Accord" where they decided to not be direct about the whole anti-government thing in order to have broader appeal. Wikipedia posted:The Dallas Accord is an implicit agreement that was made at the 1974 Libertarian National Convention as a compromise between the larger minarchist and smaller anarcho-capitalist factions by adopting a platform that explicitly did not say whether it was desirable for the state to exist.[48][49][8] This has apparently not been part of the Libertarian Party platform since 2006, when in a dumb sequence of events, party leadership deleted a bunch of the platform, in an event that was very exaggeratedly called "The Portland Massacre" (not to be confused with the recent mass shooting in Maine).
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Panfilo posted:
Reminder that if you out 10 libertarians in a room and ask about policy you will get at minimum 52 answers. It is the nature of not being a real party, much like a lot of us socialist orgs. Since there is no chance of ever holding office or engaging in actual real change, they can basically say whatever teh gently caress each individual or group wants so long as they remain under the extremely broad umbrella. I mean, look at tankies. In no sane world do they have anything to do with most modern leftists, but the tent is so broad that they get in.
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yeah, libertarians are famously able to reach a consensus on "should we feed bears on our backyard porch, y/n"
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Panfilo posted:Because I've had libertarians insist the opposite - "we're not anarchists, we just want the government limited in the manner we think was intended by the Constitution". One of the problems with discussing libertarianism is that there isn't any central philosophy but a lot of its adherents speak as though there is. When I used to argue online more, one of the most frustrating things about arguing with libertarians is that you could make no assumptions that they followed any particular belief set whatsoever, they might be a 'well we should reduce the bloated federal bureaucracy' type or a 'we should go back to something like the articles of confederation' type or a 'all forms of the state are evil, only private protective services are moral' type and often won't acknowledge that the others even exist. They also don't hesitate to use definitions that sound like they mean something but don't really. Like "a libertarian is someone who believes government should be limited to just what is needed to do it's proper job" - it sounds slick, but it describes what pretty much everyone believes - people disagree over what the 'proper job' of government is, but essentially no one thinks government purely for the sake of having a bigger government is good. Even hardcore Keynesian economists who favor large government spending fit that definition, they aren't promoting spending for it's own sake but instead to improve the overall economy.
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So a Libertarian teacher (note the Gadsten Flag on the wall) does this social experiment to prove some kind of point about how I guess Democracy is bad? https://twitter.com/CBHeresy/status/1712666108488995238?t=Z7NeD0XF_3WWS1eVqRRuPQ&s=19 quote:My scary classroom social experiment demonstrating how tyrannies arise from democracies: ![]() I also wonder how this kind of teacher would have interpreted an egalitarian approach to this experiment. Just based on this (probsbly made up) anecdote I'm guessing the girl was some teachers pet or the only one that really cared about any of this and the kids with the majority of bullshit coupons just didn't care.
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# ? Jun 12, 2024 04:53 |
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Sounds like the unequal distribution was the original problem. It's just another rehashing of the "a conservative professor told his socialist loser students that he'd average all their grades and then nobody did any work, checkmate society" story though.
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