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.)
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.