I hate that the only viable "third party" are these chucklefucks.
Fuck you, you dipshits. "WhAt iF tHe cHiLd CoNsEnTs" bullshit. Also, there is no such thing as more competition with less regulation. Fucking morons.
Can you imagine hearing "the individual is the smallest minority", and being like "oh wow that is a smart and meaningful statement"?
I've never met a smart Libertarian. Literally every response to any meaningful criticism is "the market will sort it out."
You occasionally pin one against the wall about some particularly egregious market failure and get them to mask off and say "The orphans deserve to die, they failed the market"
If they didn't want to die in a building collapse they should have hired a private building inspector to see if their building was on the brink of collapse
Oh I've met smart libertarians, they're just selfish, privileged assholes is all.
Smart libertarians exists but they tend to be smart in a very narrow sense like "good at solving math problems". Libertarians who have a broad knowledge of the world, knows how to view things within a wider context and has an interpersonal understanding are extremely rare though.
They all become socialists. You cant be a libertarian an actually have any level of friction in your life that cant be solved by writing a check.
Libertarians who experience friction tends to become fascists way more frequently.
Libertarians are people who think humans are all naturally selfish and greedy and that's why the "free market" deciding everything is the best way to do things, but at the same time they believe that people will selflessly adhere to the NAP against their own self-interests.
Probably the most annoying Libertarian belief though is their insistence that capitalism is just any "voluntary" market exchange between two parties and nothing more.
Even if everyone is "selfish" in society, how does a free market combat mega-corporations like Walmart or Google? The second you prove some amount of viability in the market, they have the resources to undercut your operation, wait until you bankrupt, and then take your shit for pennies on the dollar. Or, straight up just buy you out before you're actually competitive.
How is that efficient? How is that good for the consumer?
They sidestep that by claiming the only reason Walmart and Google are as big as they are is because of government regulation. When you ask them which regulations specifically they never have an answer though. They unironically think that with no government competition would ensure companies never get too big.
It's just magical thinking to assume that there is a magical entity called government that is separate from other spheres of human action.
it's pure idealism. They think every problem in the world stems from "government bad" and work backwards from there
Oh god, I used to identify as a "voluntarist". One of the things that started turning the wheels in my head was talking to a leftist friend of mine from college when we were on a trip, and him asking me how withholding food and water from someone who's literally dying is "voluntary" and "non-aggressive". I hadn't done real hard critique of my worldview until speaking with a socialist who really understood what they were talking about. It didn't take long for me to drift left after that.
Celebrating the free market and our founding fathers by going to the bathroom of a seedy gay bar
There are 2 kinds of libertarians, those who are still in school, and those not allowed within a thousand feet of one
I don't know the actual numbers, but the demographics of libertarians in the US says it all. I bet it's something like 95% white and 90% male. Meanwhile the left in the US - for all it's problems - is pretty diverse and I think that's a testament to our commitment to equality and liberation.
But yeah, US libertarians are mostly the types who benefit tremendously from privilege and are assholes about it. I should know, I was a libertarian in college and shortly after. Got really into Milton Friedman, von Hayek, all those guys. I'm a white dude raised in the suburbs in relative privilege. And you know what, I am fully ok admitting I was a real asshole who refused to question my privilege, who looked down on poor people, and didn't care about anyone other than myself w/r/t politics and society. I sucked, I own that. I was the kind of person who would have been ruthlessly mocked in c/the_dunk_tank and for good reason. My material conditions absolutely led me to libertarianism. I'm just thankful that something inside me pulled me out of all that and led me to socialism eventually.
I've known two other libertarians IRL. Both are white Americans who grew up in privilege. One is set for a 7 figure inheritance and the other is "working" for his dad's sizeable construction company that he will inherit when his dad retires.
I'm a white dude that was raised poor as fuck and I still understand privilege. There are two times in my life I am certain I would have been murdered by the cops without question if I weren't white.
I have to add to this that I also sort of drifted toward libertarianism in my early twenties because of anti-war libertarians like Ron Paul and because I had no real ideological framework outside "America bad".
The American propaganda machine is terrifyingly powerful.
The American propaganda machine is terrifyingly powerful.
Grow up around hispanic people with illegal immigrants parents, some of the things they say will blow your fucking mind
this is how you get ICE agent Sanchez shoving a baton up the ass of someone who literally was their parents decades ago
Yeah I live in California. Mexican reactionaries are something else for sure. Most of the people I know that are of latam descent are comrades but the ones who aren't are like :jesse-wtf:
Real pulling up the ladder behind you vibes
I’m just thankful that something inside me pulled me out of all that and led me to socialism eventually.
Something inside you, instead of the material conditions again?
Hmm... that's a good question. And tough to answer. Like, I know what were the things that pushed me left. I guess a lot of them were semi-material? Climate change was one. Actually getting out into the world experiencing the grinding, exploitative nature of capitalism was a big part of it, too. I guess my libertarianism came out of place of living a privileged life as a kid, and never even challenging that once I got out on my own? Would that really be a "change" in my material conditions? I don't know.
But I also know I was raised in a very sheltered environment that viewed pretty much everyone as an "outsider" (thanks evangelicalism!). And taught that everyone basically gets what they deserve in life. And actually living among other people and seeing how capitalism brings suffering to other people really softened my heart and changed me. That doesn't seem very material (at least relating to my material conditions) but I know without a doubt that was also part of it. I have Marxist Jesus in my heart now and I'm very down with materialism, but I struggle to explain this aspect.
A lot of this, including climate change, is you choosing to care about things. Perhaps there are things that prompted you to care, but it's not like you had a vested interest in caring, or something that forced your hand. You could possibly say downward class mobility, but I think caring about things out of principle is more important and trustworthy than caring about things out of your own personal interest.
AnCaps will do Soveign Citizen bullshit when they get a ticket for being double parked in a pair of handicapped spots, then turn on a dime and cheer a police cruiser that drives over a homeless man.
Literally the most selfish, foolish, bloodthirsty assholes all corralling themselves into an ideology that exists to massage their bloated egos.
"Everything should be buyable and sellable... except legislation, it would be corruption and violation to buy and sell that"
He's a nice guy
Met him in person during the Before Times
Smells exactly like how you expect him to
respect. for the real performer odor is as much a part of a costume as one's headgear
Then I like him even more! Why does he run on the libertarian party though?
Gary Johnson's "What is Aleppo?" on live TV was a sleeper hit of 2016.
Most people aren't all that familiar with world geography, besides USA, Canada, Mexico, China, Japan, India, Australia, and a few EU countries- let alone places that pop up once in the news.
Most people would look at "Aleppo Pepper" in a supermarket and think it's just some foreign word. The type of people who think "that's a city in Syria" are the people who end up getting bachelor's degrees (just over 1/3 of people), and the type of people who think "that's a city near the Syria-Turkey border, thousands of years old, which was a trading center as early as the first Persian empire" are the ones who get advanced degrees (just over 1/8 of people).
The funny part is that he wasn't able to come up with a quick parry like "I'm not sure that matters to most Americans".
Fun to see MAGA chuds fuming about "Libertarians who cost Trump the presidency", though.
"I'm a fiscal conservative, social liberal" means "I'm cool with marginalized people, as long as the systems remain in place to keep them marginalized." -- this is from a tweet I read years ago
For a less wordy leftist take there's the old:
"Libertarian means I want poor gay people to starve because they're poor, not because they're gay"
Every single libertarian in my family has become a blood and soil white nationalist with wacky religious beliefs. I've never witnessed a libertarian stay that way longer than 5 years
Years ago, when I first moved to the US, there was a guy in my office who wore a sweatshirt that had LIBERTARIAN written on it. Naturally, believing that libertarianism was basically a meme and not something someone could actually take seriously, I told him I liked his funny sweatshirt. He eventually started literally ignoring me when I said that I missed having universal healthcare.
He was known around the office for having “funny” views on 9/11, Alex Jones and Sandy Hook, but was held in much higher regard than me.
Last I heard he was CEO for some startup involving security alarms. I fucking hate the tech industry.
Edit: I just remembered having to pair program with him one day and him going on about “do you like Reddit? It’s my favorite website, it’s the best website”. :picard-direct-action:
i only ever identified as a libertarian (with the left- qualifier) because it was the only ideology that said i didn't deserve to be a felon for possessing a substance. liberals (my only real exposure at the time to 'left') would tell me the same thing as conservatives, that it was personal responsibility, law is the law, and i deserved to suffer.
Almost every Libertarian has a Comp Sci Engineering mindset.
Even the ones who aren’t in comp sci still think that way. Engineering schools indoctrinate.
Remembering all the hot takes I heard in my college's CS lounge (or overheard because rooms sadly weren't soundproofed) makes my blood pressure go up. I'm so glad I didn't end up like that, despite being "apolitical" for most of college.
It’s a wild indoctrination of telling people they are smarter and deserve more than everything else combined with sort of showing a bit of how systems work and some shorthand systems.
Basically it flattens everything in their worldview and breaks them of trying to consider many perspectives. It’s part of why UI design is so fucking bad for a lot of engineering made apps.
A few of the 100-level courses I had outright hit you with that in the first lecture. "You're part of a rapidly growing field reserved for society's higher-brains that will pay the big bucks yada yada". From the same industry that's hard at work devaluing degrees.
And yes, it doesn't occur to most people in the field to... actually put yourself in the user's perspective? Maybe use a UI that doesn't look Windows 98-ish? Paint.net isn't that hard to use, folks. Then again, I blame how most courses are structured for that.
when does the brainwashing start? I'm about to transfer to a four year soon
If libertarians had their way and got the perfect stateless world they dream of, it would immediately be taken over by new privately owned states run by whoever was able to use the most physical violence. Nobody would give a shit about all the silly little principles of libertarians. What are they going to do once the guys with guns initiates aggression against them or takes their property? Tell them they are violating natural law? Their utopia would be a violent and oppressive nightmare.
Libertarianism, both in the extremist "an"cap variant and in the more realistic "cops should protect my right to pay my child labourers in heroin" ultimately relies on thought experiments and hypothetical scenarios for its arguments. You never hear them talk about the real world it is always some bullshit about how "what if two people lived on an island and one of them had all the coconuts and the other one had all the bananas, then they would agree to trade one coconut for three bananas and they wouldn't need an age of consent". In order for their ideology to look reasonable they have to apply it to a fictional fantasy world where they can remove all those real-life factors that makes libertarianism impossible.
"If libertarians had their way and got the perfect stateless world they dream of, it would immediately be taken over by new privately owned states run by whoever was able to use the most physical violence."
Some of them are aware of this, actually. In Anarchy, State, Utopia, Nozick argues explicitly in favor of a justice system ran by multiple competing private security firms. He even walks through some of the insane ramifications of that system but then concludes that it's good actually
I thought libertarians were against bureaucracy? That sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare.
Which means it's super efficient as is. But also needs disruptors at the same time to give it competition. And competition is good for the consumer. Even though competition can be totally dismantled by undercutting, merging with, or buying out competitors. Then stocks go up and somehow that's good for the consumer, too.
Really, when you think about it: it's just the Invisible Hand being awesome at everything.
If libertarians had their way and got the perfect stateless world they dream of, it would immediately be taken over by new privately owned states run by whoever was able to use the most physical violence.
Or just by bears, lol
https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project
