#libertarianism

[bryanharryrombough]

Presented Without Comment

#Twitter #Elon Musk #Antisemitism #Libertarianism

[eternal-echoes]

I was talking to a law student and he said something that absolutely destroyed libertarianism for me:

"Is an alcoholic free if he's allowed to take another bottle or if he's prevented to get another drink?"

Nowadays we value freedom so much that we forget what it's for. It's so we can willingly pursue, truth, goodness, and beauty.

So doing pornography, drugs, and binge drinking would be an abuse of freedom.

#politics #libertarianism #text

[reasonandempathy]

Shocking fucking nobody, Argentina's "Libertarian" president Javier Milei has now made protesting illegal. The military will break labor strikes, create databases of anyone who protests, and sanction parents of children who protest.

Also unsurprisingly, his economic policies have somehow made inflation and economic instability/chaos in Argentina literally twice as bad (400:1 to 820:1 to the USD).

Pricecs have skyrockets more than 100%, monthly inflation is set to be 30-40% with the new policies, and he's shutting down what social safety net Argentina had.

Don't worry though. He's "redrawing the ideas of freedom." Like reimagining a country where you're not allowed to protest or strike.

There is no such thing as a fucking Libertarian. I don't know how many national and international figures have to show their whole ass before people understand that. They're lying about how far-right they are.

#Argentina #Libertarianism #fascism #Javier Milei #politics #original content #labor rights

[odinsblog]

I was stunned to find the number of people in the tech industry who are all-in on the theory of scientific racism and eugenics. They've been out about that for years, though.

There's a sort of complex where this was the birth of, whether you want to call it the intellectual dark web, I think that was the moment there. They've sort of been radicalized gradually, as happens with these things, where they started with, like, Slate Star Codex was a really big key central point for them to gather and sort of say, well, we have to interrogate and question a lot of these (egalitarian) assumptions. They were very actively courted by the neo-reactionary movement.

So you have things like Peter Teal holding dinner parties with the founders of the movement, and sort of people who have explicitly endorsed slavery, explicitly endorsed disenfranchising women, and people of any non-male gender from being able to vote.

And I always resent it because I sound like a crazy person by just merely accurately describing what they have publicly said. I sound like a conspiracy theorist who's pinning up red strings on a cork board by literally being like, “This is a thing they said out loud, in public, multiple times.” And people are like, “There's no way.” And I'm like, I don't know what to tell you, but it's all out there. We have receipts for ten years.

They are way out there, and they have an explicit agenda of normalizing, really radical, really hateful agendas.

And for me, it's like, it's just a very simple thing.

It's like I have to care about my kid’s safety. I have to care about my friend's safety, I have to care about, you know, basic moral values that we used to agree on.

And that's the other thing too, is because I knew these people 10 and 20 years ago. Like the first blog that Marc Andreessen ever had, I set up. It was on a platform I helped build. So I know that there was a point in which, at least from the public visible face, this was once a reasonable person. And for them to embrace the sheer intellectual dishonesty, along with the hatred… the fact that they're just like, they don't care that they're lying because it's an effective tool to get what they want.

That stuff is… I don't know.

It really soured me on the traditional tech industry.

This is what their tech is for. The things they fund are meant to carry out their agenda.

Let me give you a clear example: To the people who believe in this extremist racist ideology, Elon Musk being willing to lose tens of billions of dollars in value of his own money, presumably, in Twitter, turning into “X,” is a principled person who puts his values ahead of the dollar. He is so committed to advancing this reactionary movement that he's willing to forego tens of billions of dollars of personal wealth in order to advance it.

And what rational people see as the destruction of Twitter is rather, the destruction of the ability for anybody to ever again make a Black Lives Matter hashtag, or to make a Me Too hashtag. And that is because he's not a dumb person. Like the thing that a lot of progressives and reasonable people want to just say, well, he's racist and evil, so he must be dumb.

He's not a dumb person.

Peter Thiel's not a dumb person.

So if we assume they're smart people who understand how systems work and have virtually unlimited resources, then why would they choose to do this?

Well, there must be a reason.

And there is a reason.

It's just one we don't like to confront.

Even more insidious is the fact that these tech moguls own huge companies with enormous influence, and wielding that kind of power over their employees creates a herd mentality within their workforces.

So if, for example, Facebook's board includes both Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen. They don't have to give somebody an order to say what kind of content they want to promote on the newsfeed, on Facebook.

Everybody who works there knows this is who our bosses are. This is what we got to do, because they're smart. Everybody's smart, everybody's very reasonable.

And so you don't have to imagine, like I said, I don't have to be a conspiracy theorist that's putting up some red strings on a cork board to connect the dots and whatever. You're like, “Oh, I'm a midlevel product manager at a company. I'd like to make a name for myself and make the share price go up. And I know the boss's boss has been on every podcast in the world saying we need to promote more voices that are calling for ethnic cleansing,” okay?

Message received.

That's what a person who has no moral context would do. And there are a cohort of people in the technology industry that have come up entirely consuming media owned and created by these people, because they know the programming site Hacker News, which is owned by a venture capital firm and run by Paul Graham, is one of these guys.

They read blogs written explicitly by these guys. They consume it. They were on clubhouse. They're in a Discord chat with others that are sort of buying the stuff. They have a full wraparound media bubble. If they just read substacks and listen to the blog posts or read the blog posts from these folks, you can have what feels like an entire media diet shaped solely by this dialogue.

And this is why they're trying to own the media outlets and the distribution, like Twitter, alongside owning the platforms. And the fact that they can control more parts of society, right? The leverage of owning the distribution networks, the leverage of owning media outlets, the leverage of owning the platforms is very, very different, because we do have a lot of historical precedent.

If we go back 100 years ago and we say you're reeling from coming out of a pandemic, you are reeling from economic precarity and inequality at unprecedented levels, and you see the rise of, again, a direct parallel, virulent antisemitism. And you have things like the oil barons giving way to the Henry Fords of the world, the labor crackdown of the Pinkertons, Ford's embrace of, you know, to the point where he's pen pals with Hitler, and IBM building the technology.

The first person that ever asked me to do technology work for him was a neighbor of ours, and he had a tattoo on his wrist. And I was a little kid and didn't know what it meant. And I asked him what it was. It was his concentration camp tatoo. And what people don't realize is those are database entries in an IBM database.

And IBM's stance at the time was that they were neutral.

This is what technology does to enable the rise of fascism and victimization around the world. And we have a direct precedent less than 100 years ago, of how these technologies are used.

And I don't say that lightly.

I'm not saying we're there yet, but that is how you get there. And I would be surprised if the pattern doesn't play out in some ways, in terms of if you have tycoons of industry at a moment when the world is reckoning with massive social change, cultural change, along with recovering from things like economic destruction, inequality and pandemics… And you have rising military threats around the world.

That is exactly where we were a century ago.

—ANIL DASH shares his thoughts and experiences on Richard Hanania and rampant neo-fascism in Silicon Valley

#anil dash #richard hanania #peter thiel #elon musk #silicon valley #eugenics #fascism #twitter #white supremacy #antisemitism #racism #anti blackness #misogyny #transphobia #homophobia #conservatism #libertarianism #libertarians

[meli-r]

Small government promotion by Javier Milei

#javier milei #libertarian #libertarianism

[libertarian-druid-in-greater-vt]

Turns out there's a better way to say that taxation is theft.

"The state is financed through coercion"

That slaps so much harder and sounds more dignified

#ancap #libertarianism #Quote from Javier Millei

[kentonralphtoews]

#free speech #freedom of speech #liberty #freedom #libertarian #libertarianism #voluntaryism #anarchocapitalism #voltaire #voltaire quotes #daily quotes #quote of the day

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

#us politics #memes #shitpost #tv shows #x-men #free market #libertarians #lolbertarians #fuck libertarians #taxes are theft and other lies by lolbertarians #hierarchy #authoritarianism #libertarianism

[andythecorsair]

Tumblr made me think about US-Americans and guns. I haven't done that since twitter ceased to be culturally relevant. Bad tumblr, no!

#2a #second amendment #2nd amendment #guns #gun nuts #gun crazy #usa #jim jeffries #gun control #libertarianism #libertarian #mass school shooting #gun violence #etc

[whereserpentswalk]

Made this political comic then forgot about it. You deserve to see it.

#political comic #libertarian #liberalism #libertarianism #leftist #leftism #left #socialism #libertarian socialism #socialist #marxism

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

#class war #class warfare #classism #libertarians #libertarianism

[libertarianneko]

There’s no meaningful difference between these two pictures unless you have an intense fear and hatred of men.

“WhY woUlD a mAn wwAnT tO wEaR a DrEss anD hEeLs tO rEaD tO kiDs”

Idk why does Dolly Parton? She wants to entertain kids & help them get into reading. It’s only because of stereotyping men (especially gay men) as predators that people lose their minds over drag queen story hour. Or they’ve mistakenly labeled it as trans and they fear trans women (usually also because they view them as men who they view as predators)

#drag queen #drag bans #drag queen story hour #lgbt rights #misandry #mens rights #feminism #egalitarianism #anarchy #anarchist #libertarian #libertarianism #voluntaryism #freeblr #liberty #free speech

[eternal-echoes]

Just to clarify some confusions brought on by this post (especially since it has reached outside my usual Christian tumblr clique a lot of implicitly agreed upon context is lost), Catholics do not seek to make every sin illegal. St. Augustine even stated that we shouldn’t make earthly human laws banning every single sin because some good may be wiped out as a result.

For example, it’s a mortal sin to use contraception during sexual intercourse whether within or outside of marriage. However, if we were to make it illegal, we would have to violate people’s right to privacy in order to find evidence to prosecute people due to this prohibition. Hence why Catholics shouldn’t seek to make it illegal.

The point of the statement:

"Is an alcoholic free if he's allowed to take another bottle or if he's prevented to get another drink?"

is to show that an alcoholic isn’t really free; he’s a slave to his carnal desires. An alcoholic reaching for another drink is only hurting himself; he’s not fulfilling his best potential. If you love someone, you would prevent them from hurting themselves. Because the definition of love is willing the good of another. And the logic of love is the basis of Christianity.

Just as an athlete restricts himself certain food in order to achieve his best performance in a marathon, so too Christians follow certain rules and regulations so we can be purified and be worthy in uniting with God in the afterlife; because nothing unclean can stand within the presence of God.

We Christians abstain from pre-marital sex and pornography so we don’t settle for the kind of “love” that reduces people to sexual pleasure. And also so we can have the unconditional love and see the real soul of the person in his/her naked body after genuine and honest courtship and receiving the sacrament of marriage.

Because freedom is not an end on itself, it’s a means to an end, which is to achieve man’s purpose. And the purpose of human life is to love and serve God.

Since God made everything in the universe, everything exists to serve Him. Catholics believe that the purpose of the government is to lead people to God, not just preventing ourselves from killing each other.

Having said that, the kind of human laws that we should have that only forbids certain sins and not the others requires another blogposts (more like another book) so I’ll just end this right here.

#Catholic #Christianity #politics #libertarianism #text #libertarian

[samueldays]

Score one for libertarianism as principle.

The less-micromanaged artbots were better.

Google's AI effics-fafety-and-biaf team lobotomized their artbot because they were concerned that somewhere, someone might generate an image of a straight white male looking good. This wasn't mere failure or sidetracking, it was some combination of echo-chamber and Orwellian inversion that resulted in the opposite of the claimed justification for such regulatory meddling.

#all #gpt stuff #libertarianism

[odinsblog]

Billionaire fossil fuel mogul David Koch died August 23, 2019. Though he will rightfully be remembered for his role in the destruction of the earth, David Koch’s influence went far beyond climate denial. Ronald Reagan may have uttered the famous words, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” back in 1981—but it was David Koch, along with his elder brother Charles and a cabal of other ultrarich individuals, who truly reframed the popular view of government. Once a democratic tool used to shape the country’s future, government became seen as something intrusive and inefficient—indeed, something to be feared.

“While Charles was the mastermind of the social reengineering of the America he envisioned,” said Lisa Graves, co-director of the corporate watchdog group Documented, “David was an enthusiastic lieutenant.”

David Koch was particularly instrumental in legitimizing anti-government ideology—one the GOP now holds as gospel. In 1980, the younger Koch ran as the vice-presidential nominee for the nascent Libertarian Party. And a newly unearthed document shows Koch personally donated more than $2 million to the party—an astounding amount for the time—to promote the Ed Clark–David Koch ticket.

“Few people realize that the anti-American government antecedent to the Tea Party was fomented in the late ’70s with money from Charles and David Koch,” Graves continued. “The Libertarian Party, fueled in part with David’s wealth, pushed hard on the idea that government was the problem and the free market was the solution to everything.”

In fact, according to Graves, “The Koch-funded Libertarian Party helped spur on Ronald Reagan’s anti-government, free-market-solves-all agenda as president.”

Even by contemporary standards, the 1980 Libertarian Party platform was extreme. It called for the abolition of a wide swath of federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Bureau of Land Management, the Federal Election Commission, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Federal Trade Commission, and “all government agencies concerned with transportation.” It railed against campaign finance and consumer protection laws, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, any regulations of the firearm industry (including tear gas), and government intervention in labor negotiations. And the platform demanded the repeal of all taxation, and sought amnesty for those convicted of tax “resistance.”

Koch and his libertarian allies moreover advocated for the repeal of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social programs. They wanted to abolish federally mandated speed limits. They opposed occupational licensure, antitrust laws, labor laws protecting women and children, and “all controls on wages, prices, rents, profits, production, and interest rates.” And in true libertarian fashion, the platform urged the privatization of all schools (with an end to compulsory education laws), the railroad system, public roads and the national highway system, inland waterways, water distribution systems, public lands, and dam sites.

The Libertarian Party never made much of a splash in the election—though it did garner almost 12 percent of the vote in Alaska—but doing so was never the point. Rather, the Kochs were engaged in a long-term effort to normalize the aforementioned ideas and mainstream them into American politics.

(continue reading)

#politics #republicans #libertarians #koch brothers #koch bros #libertarianism #conservatism #ronald reagan #reaganism #charles koch #david koch #libertarian party

[meli-r]

#economics #anti socialism #anti communism #libertarianism #libertarian