Libertinism & Libertarianism are separated only by a bowl of car keys.
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No. No everyone.
People who read the Daily Mail and the Daily Express (or whatever the US equivalents are), maybe.
People who watch I, Daniel Blake, not so much.
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Considering that the legal limit on campaign contributions is $2,700. The claim that someone contributed $1,250,000 demands documentation.
Couldn’t he set money aside for PACs since that’s not a direct donation? Buying Ads for your favorite politician isn’t the same as donating to the campaign, right?
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It doesn’t seem odd to me. It seems like those are the two most natural reactions (for people who at least try to value having beliefs consistent under reflection) to noticing just how rarely the conditions necessary for unrestrained capitalism to work hold in practice. Markets require some strong assumptions to be efficient, even in theory, externalities and transaction costs are everywhere and usually hard to calculate, and individuals humans just flat out aren’t smart enough to learn enough or think fast enough to make good decisions in general.
I agree with your sentiment and conclusion, but on its own terms wanting immortality isn’t a bad thing. The mocking tone of the linked article regarding cryonics (which it called “cryogenics”) may be common, but always baffles me to some degree. I’m not sure whether future-me will always want to continue living, but I am sure that if medicine reaches the point that 80-year-old-me still has 30-year-old-me’s body, I won’t be ready to die yet.
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It’s a great way to get the next new virus or prion disease that comes along.
In a few years he’ll be shouting Mad cow!
I’m confused by the “Atlas Shrugged” imagery. Ayn Rand despised Libertarians and their ideas. As well, his beliefs do not coincide with Objectivist ideas so why the image relationship? It is the same as if someone was in favour of the government regulating food quality and superimposing an image of Marx behind it.
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Sure, but a lot of them do believe their ideology and think that it would through some strange alchemy lead to a perfect society. Thiel not only doesn’t believe the ideology, but doesn’t even pretend to anymore, except in the most casuistic way imaginable.
You do realize that modern libertarians pull much of their ideology straight from Rand’s objectivism? Libertarianism no longer means leftist anarchists for the majority of people, it’s the anti-tax and anti-regulation wing of the GOP. They are pretty much uniformly influence by her. What she thought of libertarianism as defined prior to her death is rather immaterial.
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The two quotes above are not mutually exclusive 
Please note: this is meant as an ironic aside 
I totally agree. If she hated libertarians, it was likely because they were still understood as left-wing anarchists, not right wing capitalists. It always seems to surprise people when the meaning of words change with changing circumstances, but there you have it… human life is messy.
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Yup. Peter Thiel is basically who Gavin Belson was based off of in Silicon Valley. Was how I learned about this thing initially.
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So that’s the mind of an Aristocrat;
Disturbing, yet fascinating.
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I may regret coming back to this but it is stuck in my head and I need to get some kind of reply made, even if it isn’t a proper reply to the points made (That will have to wait until at least April).
I can’t give a proper reply to this, but I can at least explain my background, which might give some insight into what I believe.
When I was growing up in the 80s, I watched as the policies of Margaret Thatcher attacked the parts of Britain she didn’t like, even if they were only tangentally connected. a lot of it affected me personally like Section 28 (a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. This also included anything transgender.)
My experiences left me roughly in Bennite Labour territory. However the Labour party was heading away from that toward the Blairite Third Way. I admit that I celebrated the Labour landslide in 1997 (I was a few months too young to vote and would have voted Labour), a lot of us did, but that didn’t necessarily mean we agreed with Tony Blair. I admit that I had some anarchist sympathies at the time but I also had Lib Dem sympathies too, and they were to my right (but not as right wing as they are now).
The next election I was disillusioned with the Labour leadership, but there was no way I would vote conservative to get them out. I lived in a relatively safe seat anyway, so I voted for the Legalise Cannabis Alliance candidate, a former Labour party mayor of where I lived. He didn’t get in, Labour did. My politics hadn’t changed much but that was about to change.
The tenancy on my flat in a nice neighbourhood had expired, and I had to find somewhere else to live. I had recently transitioned (nothing to do with the tenancy expiring, my landlord was supportive of trans issues), and was struggling to find somewhere safe for me to live. In the end I chose the least worst option I could find, which still turned out to be a bad idea. I attracted the attention of the local fascists who targeted me for the next year. I knew I needed to get out, but I kept hearing the same thing “I would like to help, but it is out of my hands”. This seemed to be genuine most of the time (there were only a couple of occasions where this was not the case). When I was trying to find a way out of my situation I also ended up trying to find a solution to people (including myself) not having the power to fix problems because of hierarchical issues. This was when my anarchist sympathies became more than just sympathies. In the end I was effectively chased out of the town where I grew up, I tried starting a course (effectively equivalent to a foundation degree, but marked to Oxford University standards) but my mental health was that fucked up I barely managed to get to the end of December before I dropped out. A friend let me couch surf when they realised that I was intent on sleeping on the streets rather than go back to where I came from. The next election I voted for the Green party (also my first encounter with the Sanders family, although it turns out it was Bernie’s nephew and not his brother like I previously claimed).
The next five years were more progression on my experiences of feeling disempowered, becoming physically disabled though illness, and watching as people wanted to help but couldn’t. As a result of disability I got my first real experience of dealing with the Department of Work and Pensions. Now the mantra was “I would like to help but I have government targets to meet”. In 2010 I took a gamble and voted Lib Dem, not because I believed in most of their policies but because they were the only major party talking about changing the voting system to something other than first past the post. They didn’t win where I lived, but they became the junior partners in the coalition government.
If I thought the Blairites were a disappointment then the Lib Dems took that to a whole new level. The voting referendum didn’t work out. What was bad under Labour became worse under the coalition as the Lib Dems failed to stop the Tories from carrying out austerity. I watched as my neighbours struggled and had to go to the food bank and clothes bank to make ends meet. I was OK because of my disability benefits, but I was never happy with saying “Fuck you, I’ve got mine” even before that. In 2015 I voted for the impossibilist Socialist Party of Great Britain, surely a warning sign that my belief in the government was crumbling away. In 2016 I voted remain, not because I believe in the EU in it’s current form, but because I believe that leaving will only make life harder for everyone.
I only consider myself borderline anarchist because I still vote, but I end up asking myself why. The answer always ends up being “because you are voting for the least worst option”. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of having to fight through hierarchies when everyone knows what the solution it but has to go though the correct procedures. Finally, my observations are that far too often those hierarchies and procedures are there for the benefit of the capitalist class, not everyone else.
I get some hope from seeing what is happening in Rojava where, despite being being in a warzone, they are showing how things could be. I believe that their form of self governance takes Dunbar’s number into account. I like how they make efforts to make sure that the voices of the marginalised are heard. I like how they are running their society on something other than the pursuit of ever more money at the expense of those who labour to provide it.
Ultimately I believe that anarchism isn’t about there being no government, it’s about making everyone the government.
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Maybe he is just ashamed of being gay. That is pretty common for men of a certain again group and older.
“Got mine, fuck you.” is a concept with wide appeal.
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Libertarians are all about the protection of capital, er, private property, so anything done in defense of it is perfectly fine! Surveillance of others? Preemptive observance of people who may hurt your revenue stream! Monopolies? They can’t exist, and if they do it’s just the natural result of the free market! Censorship? People pointing out bad things about your product or service are violating the NAP by affecting your income!
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That’s the keystone tenet of anarcho-capitalism, one school of Right-libertarianism, itself only one-side of anarcho-libertarian thought, and even soi-disant upper-case Libertarians don’t really get that correct. Ideologues gonna ideologue - buying into a single sociopolitical ideology hook, line and sinker is daft - but it doesn’t erase the wider philosophies of anarchism.
To be clear, the fight for the word libertarian was lost long ago and it isn’t a semantic hill worth dying on, but it doesn’t mean Cory and I and others can’t snark at it’s modern misappropriation.
Which libertarian school of thought assumes all people are rational actors and removing authority structures will cause everyone to participate in a utopian manner? Was it left or right? I can’t remember.
At any rate, anybody discussing libertarianism in the US is talking about the prosperity gospel version as that is the type that is currently ascendant, and complaining people aren’t using the specific correct and perfect terminology is fart huffing wank.
