Diatribe

The top ten reasons that Libertarians talk down aren't nice to you has really put a burr under my saddle.

I am not sure where to begin.

I guess for openers, most "libertarians" are anything but.  Most of the sites I used to read are anarchist sites (including the one linked notice the anarchy A in his tab-icon).  While there's a lot of freedom in anarchy, the day I decide to keep you distracted while Harvey shoots you in the back means the anarchy is over and the tyranny of Thag has begun.

There's a clue there.  When we band against you, we're stronger.  When they band against me, they're stronger.

Anarchy falls apart at a touch and it's a shitty way to do things because it's might makes right.

Banding together against danger is a very simian way of dealing with it.  Humans are simians.

Our tasty chess club brains and superior banding abilities allowed us to become superior tool users too.

The question I keep coming to about libertarianism is "who is the enforcer?"  Who keeps me honest?  Who keeps YOU honest?  What happens when we both claim to have been cheated?  What happens when we both refuse to agree about an arbitrator?  Fight it out?

The non aggression principle is kinda neat, but...  Lets say you cheated me in a deal.  I'm pretty sure that's rated as aggression on most libertarian sites.  What recourse do I have?  What if you're too strong for me to take what is owed?  What if I convince my neighbor to help?  My neighbor you did not cheat or harm in any way.  Is my neighbor now guilty of aggression?

Look, you're claiming both that you're smarter than I am and that this is simple; why can't you explain it to me so I understand?

Then it hits me!  The person generating that ten point list is dishonest!  They're at least lying to themselves and because they are unable to be true to themselves, they cannot be true to us.

#10:  Ridicule only works if your victim is worried about what you think of them or that your words matter to someone else who matters to them.  Ridicule primarily serves to mask a lack of position or standing on the part of the person being insulting.  The main response to being ridiculed is an entrenchment of their position, not abandonment.  By mocking people you are making yourself look foolish and making it harder to convince anyone.

#9:  If you're not trying to convince anyone, why are you talking; always talking?  Why is it that you're so ineffective at convincing the people who've no ideology already if you're not trying to convince someone like me who has one?  You are literally conceding that any ideology is superior to yours by not attempting to change anyones mind.

#8:  Then stop running candidates.  Stop campaigning.  Otherwise you're lying about winning or lying about convincing people.

#7:  Back at you.  If it didn't come from your team, the "great" libertarian theorists, you reject it out of hand.  I did spend a lot more than ten minutes on this and YOU WERE FOUND WANTING!  It showed me that you haven’t taken so much as 10 minutes out of your miserable life to even make the slightest effort to understand how people really work.  I understand what you are proposing, what you're refusing to see is why it really won't work no matter how hard you wish it were otherwise.  Yes, Virginia, there is no utopia.

#6:  Why are there no answers to these questions then?  "What if" is the damn near the most paramount question a person can ask and your response is "because choices"?  Did you spend more than ten minutes on this?

#5:  I can't teach you economics in 140 characters or less either.  Oh wait, YES I CAN!  "Supply and demand, that's it."  29 characters including spaces and punctuation.  See how unsatisfying cop-out answers are?  Actually studying economics really underlined the portion that I'd seen over and over in anarchist site after libertarian site.  Libertarian economics is very selective about it, and a lie of omission is still a lie.

#4:  I refused membership in Mensa.  "Society of people who should have their IQ tattooed on their forehead" is a more apt description.  What the tests for such organizations actually test for is an ability to learn.  An ability that very few of them seem to apply to anything at all; or apply too narrowly.  What good does calculus do when you need to change a tire?  Besides, if you're smarter than me, why can't you manage to teach me?  Why can't you formulate a convincing argument to get me to abandon my ideology?  You're smart?  Start proving it.  By the way, exactly how valid is a universal moral philosophy that requires a minimum IQ that's three standard deviations above the norm?

#3:  I will agree here.  What's not justified is the smug sense of superiority.  Especially since so very few of you are willing to live your morals.  Paid any taxes once you became enlightened?  If so, you've compromised your moral principles by the mere threat of force, no real force needed to be applied to you, did it?  With all the compromises and concessions you've made, it's no wonder nobody takes you seriously.

#2:  No, you're asking for everything.  Yes you are.  What you are demanding is the abandonment of a basic structure of human interaction that has been hammered into a working system since before we had a way to store knowledge outside of living memory.  To ask people to abandon a flawed, but functioning, system requires you be very convincing.  Your arguments need to be air tight, and account for all of the variables (including "what if?").

#1:  While it's not something I'm proud of, it's human nature.  Something that libertarians flat refuse to fully take into account.  Sooner or later any system of interaction between people is going to resort to force and violence.  It's because we're people.  Divide and conquer works and if you come pre-fragemented you're not even making your conqueror work for the divide part.