Quote: (04-29-2017 02:14 PM)BrewDog Wrote:
Quote: (04-29-2017 12:26 PM)Alsos Wrote:
It's noteworthy that nobody seems to be arguing against the premise that libertarians do act like autists/spergs.
This thread itself demonstrates that they do so. Any discussion of how libertarians behave, how they alienate people...
Democrats and Republicans alienate from each other constantly. But they always have the other half of the room that's on their side. But then there's just the one libertarian guy in the same room that everyone disagrees with.
More people disagree with libertarians because, you're right, they don't understand us. If being on a higher playing field of thinking makes us uppity, then I guess a good way for the rest of the room to "win" is to simply call us weird or racist or selfish or retarded.
Congratulations, you've missed the point of my post and embodied it at the same time.
Quote: (04-29-2017 02:14 PM)BrewDog Wrote:
What I can never figure out is the fascination of the two major parties with libertarians. If we're all of no account and mentally deficient, then why are you all here trying to prove how silly we are? Why spend the energy explaining to a retard how stupid and worthless his ideology is? Why spend the time explaining to a retard that he's mentally ill? And if we seem arrogant, it's because we get tired of the little people encroaching our space.
Oh now you're just trolling me.
I see part of the fascination Republicans have with l/Libertarians as similar to an older, jaded adult looking at a young adult who has great promise but chooses to squander it, while part of it is an approach-avoidance conflict of seeing so many things they like but being put off by the rest of what amounts to a package deal. I'd guess 80% of the Republicans I know hate the GOP (the party) with a passion, but can't accept the LP as an alternative because of the aforementioned sperg/gamma behaviors and the ideological purity testing that shuts them out from the get-go. They like libertarians and even call themselves small-l libertarians, but refuse to switch to a party where they'll constantly be derided and belittled as "statists" for any deviation from ideological conformity, purity-tested on every single thing they say or believe, and generally made to feel unwelcome, stupid, and evil for having their own opinions on anything, however immaterial.
Quote: (04-29-2017 02:14 PM)BrewDog Wrote:
Further, if you think we're all keyboard warriors that would be afraid of a bit of fisticuffs out in the real world, then you've certainly never spent a night out drinking with me.
Now I really think you're trolling me. But now I'm picturing meeting up with you in a bar, standing toe to toe with you, each of us bellowing at each other about some abstruse political principle, calling each other the most offensive and verbally-abusive names possible...but not ever coming to blows because neither of us will initiate force.
Libertarian standoff.
Okay, so I'll grant you can find the occasional Libertarian who might set aside the NAP under some convenient rationalization (akin to that SJW chestnut: "Mean words are literally violence!"). But this is a huge problem in my social circle at the moment, with the Libertarians popping off on social media on anyone who doesn't sufficiently hate on Trump and the GOP, launching into over-the-top emotionally incontinent rants, ridiculing them, calling them chickenshits and fascists, and generally being aggressive and abusive - online. Then they can't understand - cannot comprehend at all - why they don't get invited to real-world social gatherings, and why when they do get included the people they've publicly insulted and tried to shame and ostracize shun them and won't socialize with them.
They're lambs in person in their normal personas, but they've morphed into raging pricks online behind the safety of their keyboards. This strikes me as a moral hazard of fetishizing the NAP: expecting everyone to naturally abide by the non-initiation of force like they do makes hard-core libertarians less hesitant to mouth off, in an inversion of the observation that "an armed society is a polite society" (or maybe a parallel to the injunction that "you can't hit a girl!"). There is no incentive to rein yourself in when you anticipate no violent consequences for your (non-violent!) verbal belligerence. In contrast, someone who doesn't fetishize the NAP might be a little more circumspect in how they treat others, lest one of their friends take sufficient offense at something they say online to do more than shun them - that is, they're not so blind as to rely on others sharing their philosophy to protect them from the consequences of their assholery.