AdirondackFarmer
Charlie StrossRight-libertarians are all sociopaths. No exceptions.
(It's taken me decades to settle on this opinion—I dislike generalizing about groups of people—but there's nothing tentative about it any more.)
Skrynesaver@cstross
It's a reasonable diagnosis
“Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.” - Mrs. Mulverhill (Transitions - Iain Banks)
Hammancheez@skrynesaver @cstross but what if I WANT bears on my town council
GreengordonI also like this definition of libertarianism:
"Libertarians are like house cats: absolutely convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand."
Christian Graus@skrynesaver @cstross I always say libertarians are mentally handicapped children. Tax is theft!! I won't share!!
My other quote to libertarians is;
But what if the child consents??
Ancient libertarian proverb
Nemo@cstross
I agree. I'd say it's because they're not capable of being libertarians.
Now I don't like libertarianism, it's based on a host of delusions and at its core is callous because it refuses to engage with failings.
But right-libertarians, to a man (and I mean man) can't even conceive of letting others be.
Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)And their self-delusion is amazing. They drive on roads paid for with public funds, hire workers educated with public funds, use electrical and phone systems built with public funds, and think, "I did all of this myself."
Worse: they see how EVERY large-scale libertarian community ever created has failed, badly, and use the "no true Libertarian" fallacy.
Final Round Player 😷🇪🇺🍸
𐌘𐌄𐌓𐌔𐌖@cstross I think Robert Nozick may have been the exception but I admit it is a conjecture.
Frankie Saxx@cstross
Or we could not attribute politics we dislike to mental illness
sauce: I have a pal diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder ("sociopathy") and he's had to work really hard to learn normal human behaviour, why you can't treat people in certain ways, etc.
entertainingly, my little pony is apparently a useful therapy tool for teaching sociopaths about the magic of friendship
Tuftears@frankiesaxx @cstross 'unrepentant sociopaths' maybe?'
toolbear#🪧@cstross former left-libertarian here, can confirm this is essentially correct. Would be fair to describe left-libertarians as having sociopathic lapses if I'm honest.
@cstross this also lines up with the adage about Silicon Valley being a place where sociopaths and idealists find a way to cooperate. The adage is false in my experience. It's more about idealists having their idealism exploited until they reach crisis or burnout or both.
@[email protected] @cstross
tl;dr — centrism is bad rn, m'kay
> Can I just be a little left of centre
The way I've come to see it, No.
Graph on the right is what I personally believe to be a more accurate mental model for thinking about the political center's continuing drift rightward.
Ah, yes. There's centrist as in sitting near the centre of the traditional Left-Right, Authoritarian-Libertarian matrix. And then there's Centrist as a political position that floats with the Overton window. And is a term of abuse.
@[email protected]
These are all variations of the graph on the left. So no, you are missing the point. Your irony poisoned replies are tiresome, too. Good luck 👋
These are all variations of the graph on the left. So no, you are missing the point. Your irony poisoned replies are tiresome, too. Good luck 👋
Hughster@cstross I would probably separate naïve, relatively well-off young libertarians who haven't been around enough yet to appreciate the realities of how other people live from older, committed libertarians who have no such excuse.
I was in the former camp for many years in my youth, even being high-up in national libertarian campaign groups, but after a few years of immersing myself in national politics on Twitter I realised how simplistic and divorced from reality the dogma was.
milotha
The Lone Apple 🍎@cstross I remember when the word for "libertarian" was simply "selfish". Although it does have the added bonus of meaning everything the believer wants should be untaxed and unlegislated while everything they don't like should be abolished.
M Horstmeier@cstross They also have a grossly distorted view of the role they would play in their professed libertarian society.
It's all fabulist BS, exposed as soon as a neighbor takes offense to you continuing to pile lawn waste on your shared property line.
Leszek KarlikBest summed up by the famous Twitter quote of "During my research I interviewed a guy who said he was a libertarian until he did MDMA and realized that other people have feelings, and that was pretty much the best summary of libertarianism I've ever heard" (by @hilaryagro@twitter )
Justin Dearing@Leszek_Karlik @cstross I'm not sure how suddenly developing empathy would make you think a political philosophy built around maximizing letting people do whatever the hell they want is bad. Other people have feelings. We should therefore let them feel them and express them as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else seems like a more logical conclusion.
Libertarianism is not a political philosophy built around maximising freedom, it's built around maximising negative liberty for rich people to do whatever they please with poor people using indirect violence of threatening them with starvation and homelessness. (Which is why the US, one of the richest countries in the world has such a large population of working poor who are not able to afford housing despite working full time)
A philosophy of maximising positive freedom would be democratic socialism or something akin to it.
Dan@Leszek_Karlik @cstross yuuuup.
Me? I have never met a libertarian with a sick or destitute family member. Strangely every single one suddenly changes beliefs.
Me? I have never met a libertarian with a sick or destitute family member. Strangely every single one suddenly changes beliefs.
Simson Garfinkel@Leszek_Karlik @cstross The amazing thing about both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is that that science, politics, and economics all align to show the superiority of Libertarianism over all other forms of moral philosophy and economics.
Of course, both of those books are works of fiction.
Grumpy Grimnir 
@cstross that wouldn't surprise me at all. There's a theory that the more right-wing someone is, the smaller the "us" in "us and them" is. It's not a huge leap from a small "us" to "me".
Rob Landley@cstross "So what was your parents' total bill for raising you, with interest and adjusted for inflation, and how long did it take you to pay it off?"
Then again it does explain why so many libertarians are spherical. And frictionless.
Thorne Lawler@cstross I’d make an exception, but it would be a very academic one:
Some teens go through a phase of profound emotional dysfunction. Some of those do the right-libertarian thing without being irredeemably pathologically broken. In most cases though, they stay broken.
Some teens go through a phase of profound emotional dysfunction. Some of those do the right-libertarian thing without being irredeemably pathologically broken. In most cases though, they stay broken.
Enema Cowboy@cstross
"Since 1973, however, free-market theorists had re-emerged, vociferous and confident, to blame endemic economic recession and attendant woes upon ‘big government’ and the dead hand of taxation and planning that it placed upon national energies and initiative."
1/2
@cstross
"In many places this rhetorical strategy was quite seductive to younger voters with no first-hand experience of the baneful consequences of such views the last time they had gained intellectual ascendancy, half a century before. But only in Britain were the political disciples of Hayek and Friedman able to seize control of public policy and wreak a radical transformation in the country’s political culture."
—Tony Judt
2/2
David Emmett@cstross the fundamental weakness at the core of libertarianism is the failure to understand that money is power, and that as a result, libertarianism is just a step on the road to (neo) feudalism. The authoritarianism is baked into the economics.
Harry Turtledove@cstross Have to agree. There are some libertarians who take freedom seriously, e.g., Poul Anderson. But the kind you mean are just Nazis in designer clothes.
The distance from "Freedom for everybody!" to "I've got mine, Jack!" is depressingly short.
Anton P. Nym (aka Steve)@hntdove @cstross The distinction I used to use was between libertarians like Anderson, who thought through the consequences of their ideology, and "glibertarians" who just wanted a society that let them do as they please while shielding them from the consequences.
I no longer make that distinction; the former are a vanishingly tiny minority these days.
Graydon@cstross I don't think you're wrong, but I do think it's more productive to think of it as incompetence.
Sociopathy amounts to having busted your innate mechanism for ganging up on problems; you can't human. It's possible to build conscious compensatory behaviours but it's an awful lot of work and it never works as well. Right-libertarians are what you get when people have enough power that they've never needed to do the work to human.
(Nobody should have that much power.)
JulesJones@graydon @cstross You have reminded me of the time one of our number stumbled across a forum for sociopaths who were trying to learn how to build those compensatory behaviours. It was both disturbing and very sad to see these people who understood they had a problem and were trying to work on it but fumbling in the dark. US right-wing libertarianism appears to consist of people who either do not recognise they have a wetware problem, or consider it a feature rather than a bug.
I haven't had that experience but can well believe it.
There's been a well-funded propaganda effort to convince them it's a feature as a side-effect of trying to convince the width of the earth that greed is a virtue. That has not improved matters for anyone in the long term and done a pretty terrible job for nigh-everyone in the short.
💉😷🌿🇺🇦🇺🇳🇪🇺Oiselarius (he/him)@cstross @jeff_schmidt I have to agree. Conservatism, at least as Americans practice it, is just a justification for selfishness.
neoluddite
Daniel Martin@cstross House cats are well-known to be murderous sociopaths, and libertarians have often been analogized to house cats, so that fits.
Martin@cstross you're only saying that because it's true
@cstross I am honestly waiting for the hard right wing of the GOP to just come out and say that their new slogan for 2023 is “f___k you, I got mine”.
Misanthropesq@cstross though I concur with the point, I’d also like to note that my willingness to generalize about groups has dramatically increased in recent years when those groups are on the fascist side of. The aisle
Jaime Robertson@cstross I’ve had that opinion since I first heard of them a couple decades ago. More recently I’ve concluded that most so-called Anarchists are far-left libertarians. They seem to come to the same bad conclusions from opposite directions.