Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/19/libertarians-exit-pursued-by-bears.html
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Funny how “rugged individualist” Libertarians are completely at a loss for problems which requires communal pooling of resources and manpower.
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“Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”
For someone like me who’s seen the consistently destructive influence of [ETA: capital-L AynCap] Libertarians and Objectivists on Internet message boards going back to the days of Usenet, this is my favourite pull quote from this dryly hilarious article.
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I had to read a couple of sources before I satisfied myself that this was a work of non-fiction.
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Yes, this exactly. It’s the unexamined story of libertarian praxis in a nutshell. “Who cleans the bathrooms in Galt’s Gulch?”
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These sad saps. They come to Rapture thinking they’re gonna be captains of industry, but they all forget that somebody’s gotta scrub the toilets. What an angle they gave me… I hand these mugs a cot and a bowl of soup, and they give me their lives.
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I figure the bears were libertarians too, fed up with government wildlife officials they moved to a place where they could be free and do as they pleased.
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Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.
I see that @gracchus already pulled this, but I need to again because it’s so important (and hilarious).
There should be a libertarian summer camp that all angry white men are required to attend in their teen years. Let them see that all civilizations started that way and we all moved away from it because libertarianism is really terrible at solving actual problems.
Someone funnier than me once said that “libertarians all have five minutes of good material”. They start sensible, like “nothing that doesn’t hurt other people should be illegal”. Then 4.5 minutes later it’s all “money is a lie and civil contracts solve everything”.
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I have a theory that libertarians are actually LARPing feudalism. Of course, they imagine themselves as the nobility, not the serfs.
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Trying to decide if it’s more poetic for the “let the free market fix everything” folks to get scared off by bears or bulls.
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Nice “The Winter’s Tale” reference.
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What a bunch of boneheads (not the bears).
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That’s why some libertarians become monarchists and neo-reactionaries.
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How many libertarians does it take to fend off bears? Who cares, it’s survival of the fittest anyway right?
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You’re onto something.
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Well, in my experience they tend to think their shit don’t stink so it’s always somebody else’s problem…
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Niven&Pournell in “Oath of Fealty” is a good example. When I read it I couldn’t decde f it was intended to be taken seriously or a parody, but apparently you are supposed to take it seriously. The managers of the arcology may have cameras in every apartment, but since they are just good capitalists its for your own good and will absolutely not be abused. It’s just part of the contract for renting the apartment.
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As someone (@doctorow or @markfrauenfelder maybe) often sums up libertarianism: “Got mine; fuck you.”
As a corollary, a necessary condition for being a libertarian is the former (or belief that one has the former within reach).
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“You don’t have to be faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than at least one fellow libertarian.”
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