To be fair, the thread title is a bit . . . needlessly inflammatory. Yes, the GOP has been moving more towards the radical right, but "Nazi" isn't "more towards the radical right". "Nazi" is as ugly a brush as you can paint. The GOP clearly has problems with crazies these days, but it's not like the American Nazi Party is marching into the GOP National Convention with applause.
So the question becomes one of degree, I suppose. I've never really been one for ideological purity tests, and I'm inclined to think a speech given to racists a decade ago isn't worth stripping someone of his lands and titles. But -- I do agree that the GOP is taking on unsavory allies. I wonder where the lines will be drawn.
What a partisan sh*thole this board is.
I count you as a friend and am sorry if you're having a bad beginning to 2015 but that's pretty out of line.
But -- I do agree that the GOP is taking on unsavory allies. I wonder where the lines will be drawn.
They've been taking them on for 50 years now. You don't have to wonder; just look at all the examples we've run into over the years. It's pretty blatant.
I'm inclined to think a speech given to racists a decade ago isn't worth stripping someone of his lands and titles.
I don't know. Making a donation to Prop 8 was enough to get a CEO fired. I would rank giving a speech to racists much worse than making a campaign contribution to a ballot initiative that passed with 52% support.
Makes me wonder if society is more ambivalent towards racism than homophobia nowadays.
Seth wrote:I'm inclined to think a speech given to racists a decade ago isn't worth stripping someone of his lands and titles.
I don't know. Making a donation to Prop 8 was enough to get a CEO fired. I would rank giving a speech to racists much worse than making a campaign contribution to a ballot initiative that passed with 52% support.
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I would not - but I would agree that society may be a bit more ambivalent toward racism, given the clear failures in Ferguson and New York recently.
Seth wrote:I'm inclined to think a speech given to racists a decade ago isn't worth stripping someone of his lands and titles.
I don't know. Making a donation to Prop 8 was enough to get a CEO fired. I would rank giving a speech to racists much worse than making a campaign contribution to a ballot initiative that passed with 52% support.
Makes me wonder if society is more ambivalent towards racism than homophobia nowadays.
Hint: Totally is.
See GOP losing younger voter support over candidate position against gay marriage while the country practically ignores laws on disenfranchisement for minorities, barely notices laws that discriminate against anyone of hispanics with the assumption that they are here illegally, etc...
I don't know. Making a donation to Prop 8 was enough to get a CEO fired. I would rank giving a speech to racists much worse than making a campaign contribution to a ballot initiative that passed with 52% support.
Does the bolded part matter? Is public sentiment sufficient for moral high ground?
burglebup wrote:I don't know. Making a donation to Prop 8 was enough to get a CEO fired. I would rank giving a speech to racists much worse than making a campaign contribution to a ballot initiative that passed with 52% support.
Does the bolded part matter? Is public sentiment sufficient for moral high ground?
Given that those who oppose equality in this regard still consistently talk about how the people oppose it, probably for some.
What's funny is that any one who is has been on here for 10 years may recall that P&C was over run with Conservative posters until they all started to get fed up with the Republican side and just stopped posting.
Now a lot of those that have stayed on post on the other side of the table.
And funny enough, some of us that have been here all that time have moved from being rabid liberals to more moderate liberals (*raises hand*).
Partisan sh*thole, indeed.
One of the things I picked up from this board was realizing that a lot of libertarianism is about externalizing costs onto other people; the ethos strongly rejects theft, but profiting by inflicting costs on others is a very popular idea in that framework. It's a fairly glaring hypocrisy right at the very core of what most libertarians seem to believe. Very few of them seem to recognize it.
One of the things I picked up from this board was realizing that a lot of libertarianism is about externalizing costs onto other people; the ethos strongly rejects theft, but profiting by inflicting costs on others is a very popular idea in that framework. It's a fairly glaring hypocrisy right at the very core of what most libertarians seem to believe. Very few of them seem to recognize it.
That and exploiting existing power imbalances in government structure. A sort of theft by privilege. What gets me is that they (accurately) blame the government for creating these institutionalized barriers to success, yet happily exploit them while doing dick-all to correct them.
Hard core Libertarian screeds sound to me like:
"We're basically trying to recreate Feudalism, but with our version you get to shoot your neighbour if they have ever cashed a government cheque.'
Hard core Libertarian screeds sound to me like:
"We're basically trying to recreate Feudalism, but with our version you get to shoot your neighbour if they have ever cashed a government cheque.'
To me, it starts to sound like Andrew Ryan announcing how awesome Rapture is over loudspeakers while everyone else eats each other.
Hard core Libertarian screeds sound to me like:
"We're basically trying to recreate Feudalism, but with our version you get to shoot your neighbour if they have ever cashed a government cheque.'
Honestly, I think 'hard core libertarianism' is really Rand's Objectivism. I'm suffering a bit from No True Scotsman here, but I personally think of libertarianism as being very close to what was called 'classical liberalism'. It seems to me that corporate types have used Objectivism to hijack those people into something that's kind of alien and dangerous. (Witness the Tea Party, which I watched grow from zero, around the idea that we fundamentally need to pay our bills, stop living beyond our means, and hold bankers to the same laws as everyone else. I was as 'there' as anyone could be, without actually being a part of it, and saw it get taken over by some very, very nasty people, with altogether different agendas.)
The core ideas of libertarianism have been around a long time, and I think a lot of folks here would support them pretty strongly. The part that many would, I think, object to most strongly is the idea of small government being better.
Bruce wrote:Hard core Libertarian screeds sound to me like:
"We're basically trying to recreate Feudalism, but with our version you get to shoot your neighbour if they have ever cashed a government cheque.'
Honestly, I think 'hard core libertarianism' is really Rand's Objectivism. I'm suffering a bit from No True Scotsman here, but I personally think of libertarianism as being very close to what was called 'classical liberalism'. It seems to me that corporate types have used Objectivism to hijack those people into something that's kind of alien and dangerous. (Witness the Tea Party, which I watched grow from zero, around the idea that we fundamentally need to pay our bills, stop living beyond our means, and hold bankers to the same laws as everyone else. I was as 'there' as anyone could be, without actually being a part of it, and saw it get taken over by some very, very nasty people, with altogether different agendas.)
The core ideas of libertarianism have been around a long time, and I think a lot of folks here would support them pretty strongly. The part that many would, I think, object to most strongly is the idea of small government being better.
I think the problem is that "small government" sounds dangerous. What sane Libertarians want is "efficient and small government". But that's an easy sell - who's going to say "no what I want is inefficient government!"
In any case, libertarianism has the same problem of communism: scale.
I feel like there are two different ingredients involved in making a libertarian beyond the small government thing: greed for property, and horror at violence. I've come to understand the role that the latter plays once you move beyond the caricature. The more I see that what a libertarian is really motivated by is what the kids are calling "problematic carceral solutions" (I guess?) these days, the more I can respect them. Of course you get a lot of poorly thought out party line type thinking, but you get that everywhere from everyone, liberal or conservative or whatever (one video game loving libertarian put is something like, 'so much of what passes for debate on the Internet is just people throwing bumper stickers at each other'), so you really can't hold that against them. All that reveals is that it's populated by humans, just like every ideological stripe. #NoMagicBallot
I have to say, a lot of the respected political thought that I'm reading lately comes from self-described libertarians. Radley Balko has been on this police militarization thing long before the cool kids were into it. I want Connor Friedersdorf to reinterpret every sordid internet squabble, because he always manages to find just the right line between both sides. I'm not actually sure what "libertarian" is supposed to mean these days. It's a long line stretching from Ted Bundy morons to pretty smart people like Balko and Friedersdorf who are more about accountability from government than less government at any cost.
Bruce wrote:Hard core Libertarian screeds sound to me like:
"We're basically trying to recreate Feudalism, but with our version you get to shoot your neighbour if they have ever cashed a government cheque.'
Honestly, I think 'hard core libertarianism' is really Rand's Objectivism. I'm suffering a bit from No True Scotsman here, but I personally think of libertarianism as being very close to what was called 'classical liberalism'. It seems to me that corporate types have used Objectivism to hijack those people into something that's kind of alien and dangerous. (Witness the Tea Party, which I watched grow from zero, around the idea that we fundamentally need to pay our bills, stop living beyond our means, and hold bankers to the same laws as everyone else. I was as 'there' as anyone could be, without actually being a part of it, and saw it get taken over by some very, very nasty people, with altogether different agendas.)
The core ideas of libertarianism have been around a long time, and I think a lot of folks here would support them pretty strongly. The part that many would, I think, object to most strongly is the idea of small government being better.
I'm inclined to agree here. The terms, liberal, conservative and libertarian are so confused through misuse that they are all essentially meaningless. Libertarianism is definitely at its root a growth of classical liberalism, but what people today call Libertarianism is far more of an offshoot of conservatism.
Part of the problem is that in the US, "small government" has become code for "eliminate taxes, cut all social programs, eliminate all regulations and put Federal authority below that of the state, which in turn should be below the county in authority". In other words, just simply asserting "I'm for a smaller government" places a person on the far right of the political spectrum.
But I think a lot of people would be happy simply with a *reformed* government - reduced WFA, more transparency, and probably *more* services rather than less. (This is ignoring the county/state/Federal dispute, which most people don't usually take as needing reform). But there's really no constituency today for *smarter* government in politics, even though, functionally, it's something that's been going on in the bureaucracy since at least the 90's, and we've seen plenty of benefits for it (which no one outside the Beltway would even understand as changes, even as efficiency increases).
We've seemingly internalized the idea that, magically, government alone of all human organizations can *only* be corrupt and inefficient, which is blindingly stupid. I'd even argue that putting government as a special case has harmed us, because we don't think we can apply the usual tools of organizational improvement and progress to it. We assume all politicians are amoral criminals out only to harm their constituents, even as we laud those who do reasonable things as if we expected that all along. We assume all government is massively inefficient, even when much of it has been improved to the point that it out-performs private industry. We assume government workers are lazy and overpaid, even after we've cut so many that they are doing the work of several people and being paid less for it than they'd get in the private market.
As long as we treat government itself as a problem rather than an opportunity, it will be a problem. We are essentially beating it, starving it, cursing it, then wondering why it doesn't make things better at the pace and in the way we want it to. There's a huge disconnect these days between our perception of government and what it actually does, and that is part of what is preventing us from improving the things it does well and fixing the things it does poorly, because all we do is hack away at it no matter whether that part of it is doing a good job, or a bad one.
Until we get past the idea that government is our natural enemy and less of it is always better, we're going to have problems with it, and the more we reject actually *dealing* with the problems (as opposed to simply cutting funds), we're going to get *worse* abuses and waste and fraud, because oversight is one of the first things to go when the money goes away. If we want the small government of a poor country, we'll get the same authoritarian abuses seen in other countries whose citizens neglect or can't exercise their rights.
(And this also happens to suit the rich and powerful, who can more easily pull the strings of power when there's less government in their way...).
tl;dr - If we continue on the small government path we've set, we'll just see worse and worse abuses, most of them benefiting corporations and pushing the 99% to the side with violence.
Libertarianism outside the modern US is generally associated with some flavors of anarchism or socialism. In the US, it's primarily neoliberal conservativism. So it behooves one to state one's position when claiming to be a "libertarian", lest assumptions be made that are wrong.
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