Irresponsible fuckwits.

“Well, for one thing, libertarianism was a perfectly defensible proposition until it got attached to capitalism. In fact, outside the US, the word means the opposite of capitalism.”

My introduction to cooptation by agenda-thieving poseurs:

I was a libertarian for one year, in 1980, but I was all libertarian, all the time, after reading Atlas Shrugged and saying “at last I am free”. I ignored the capitalism because I needed the freedom, and when I heard a libertarian was running for president I hooked up with the Ed Clark campaign, as tri-state propaganda director for my district. For months I did all my work from home, mailings and newspaper interviews, til I took a train to Chicago and saw the ridiculous people I was bonding with. I was a punk, high-school drop out and the conventions were peopled with prosperous, white, slick Dow Chemical executives and their PTA wives, the book tables brimmed with Rothbard and Von Mises, and the conversation was all economics. I could’t figure out these ludicrous people and was very troubled by their language til the famous and truly heroic anti-psychiatrist Peter Breggin took me aside and said some people find their way into libertarianism for all the right reasons, and then there’s these jokers. That for some people “coming to liberty” is a matter of life and death and they are the ones the philosophy was made for, who know genuinally and experientally what libertarianism is about.

In a convention of hundreds of attendees Breggin gave a presentation on coercive psychiatry and involuntary commitment, about 10 people stayed to watch it as rich white men straggled in and instantly turned heel and went back to the important freemarket conferences.

If that’s libertarianism I want my money back.

I totally agree, the country has become a giant high school where many people feel the need to align their consumption habits with a group norm. “Red State” is now as much of a style as “Goth”, “Wannabe”, or whatever labels those darn whippersnappers are using these days to signify the package of clothes, music, and other consumer preferences that are displayed as a badge of membership to a particular group.

“The Trotskyite heritage of the dominant “neo-conservativeâ€? foreign policy establishment is another one of these interesting places where the far Right appears to borrow from the far Left, although, really, there’s probably less to it than some might suppose – you could probably trace the idea of violently exporting your superior society back to Alexander the Great at least.”

You are right that one cannot blame “the left” for the neo-conservatives, but I think the influence of their past on their policies is rather substantial. It does not suprise me in the slightest that radical “leftwingers” would transition to radical “rightwingers” – the basic Manichean plot remains constant and only the cast of characters changes.

Despite the protestations of the faithful that “our side is motivated by the highest ideals”, both wings have idealogical ‘hangers on’ who aren’t really onboard with the thoughtful theorists but rather identify with a message for more negative personal reasons. “The Left” Includes people motivated by concern for the poor as well as those with personel vendettas against “the rich” or “the system” just like “The Right” contains people who truly believe in the theoretical model of capitalism as well as people who are entirely motivated by racial and anti-gay prejudice, or increasingly a hatred of “hippies” and “political correctness”.
The Neo-Cons were hangers-on of the left and now they are hangers-on of the right. They are the stereotypical “radicals” who are more interested in smashing whatever exists than actually preparing for the next world – a trait on display in Iraq where their contempt for postwar planning, and absolute faith that “it will work out” because they had a special insight into the historical forces at work, were absolutely breathtaking. I was struck by the similarity of their view of post-invasion Iraq and the view frequently displayed by leftwing radicals of the post-revolution society – “smash it first and THEN figure out how to put things back in some semblance of order”.

For this libertarian, big government has always been and will always be nothing more than an institution only capable of building massive prison complexes and war machines for the priveliged few who can profit from them.

Have you no idea how many poly-saturated fats and high-density cholesterol thse things contain? When the govt. takes away our tortilla chips, we can blame it directly on irresponsible consumers like you.

sohei is not saying that his reduced taxes and insurance premiums justify restricting your freedom to, uh, drive without a strip of cloth across your chest.

The economic argument is that you pay for your freedom from seatbelt-fascism through your higher taxes and insurance rates.

Now, in a Libertarian Utopia, of course, there wouldn’t be any taxes at all, and insurance companies would have monitoring devices in your car to determine whether or not you wear your seatbelt (or alternately, you could just pay the higher non-seatbelt-wearer’s rate).

Hmm, maybe you don’t get that magic all-of-the-freedom and none-of-the-cost thing, even in Libertopia.

This isn’t the SN! I grew up with, then again *that* SN smoked two packs a day and gave me a crippling lung disorder, and wouldn’t let me wear my seatbelt.

Then again, I’m glad to see us actually having a discussion about something, rather than just becoming another echo chamber. That’s what I’ve always liked about this site, none of this “stay on message” bullshit.

It’s a very simple thing to me: you can not smoke in an enclosed space. Period. Having A/C doesn’t count. You can smoke outside (even though the mere smell on your clothes will get my stomach going once you return).

I once went to a restaurant in Liverpool and asked for non-smoking seating. What was their non-smoking section? Three tables in a corner. There was no partition, anything. So, I sat there, two feet from a man puffing away, even though I was in “non-smoking”. I had to leave a really good restaurant that supposedly made a killer rack of lamb because of that; those people could have smoked outside, but no, that would have been (in a common English phrase) “the nanny state run amok”. Tools.

That’s just my point…YOU think that restricting my freedom to do actions that do not directly harm you is justified by your altered insurance premium. I think that until I get to decide what exactly YOUR freedom is worth, you should go pound salt.

And I think people too dumb to put on their seat belts tend to get exactly what they deserve (sorry, never had a no seat belt ticket here).

Mmmmm…snickers.

I really don’t understand the scorn and derision being heaped on the idea of space exploration and colonization. Maybe it’s a generational thing – I grew up on the Space Program, science fiction, and ST:TOS, so “Should we go into space?â€? has always struck me as a silly question.”

I agree with Brad on this, but for different reasons. He seems to think that most (all? all leading?) techno-utopianism is rooted in elitism or egoism — wow, sorry about all the “ism”s — but to me, that’s beside the point. The real problem is not elitism but escapism. There’s that saying, “The best is the enemy of the good.” Some people — certainly not everyone who enjoys SF, I’m speaking as someone who has five seasons of “Stargate SG: 1″ on DVD; but Reynolds seems like this type — treat transhumanism as serious policy proposals. Why try to make health care affordable, or negotiate a solution for the Israel/Palestine conflict? Once people can upload themselves into computers, we won’t have to worry about that! Who cares about alternative energy sources? A fifty-mile-wide orbiting solar panel could solve all our problems!

The reason why those towns are filled with crime is due to their repressive laws about gun ownership.

I have a gun. I’ve been a gun owner for 20 years. It’s not difficult to get one around here. In other words, fuck off.

Bullshit, Gary. Here in Philly the state legislature overturned the city’s gun laws, and we already have had more than 200 murders this year.