Professor attacked during lecture

[aikimo]

@jetfx

While libertarians would correctly say it wrong for the state to determine who you can or can’t marry, they usually defend an employer’s ability to do that for you. And the awful irony being that it still requires the state to enforce the discrimination of private tyrants.

Playing libertarian’s advocate, a libertarian might say that there’s a big, big difference between the voluntary relationship with an employer and the mandatory relationship one has with the government. A libertarian believes it should be legal to be an asshole, because people are free to associate with whomever they want. That said, many libertarians support laws forbidding workplace harassment, while many others do not.

@jetfx

Drug legalization may be consistent with libertarianism (and often touted by libertarians to appeal to others) , but deregulation offers much higher returns to the big libertarian donors, so resources are concentrated there.

Again, as libertarian’s advocate, based on what I read and see, libertarians are just as active in lobbying against the drug war, criminal justice reform, foreign policy reform, and civil rights as they are in economic matters. There are lots and lots of poor and middle-class libertarians who have put a lot of thought into their beliefs.

I think it’s a problem when we pretend to understand the motives behind one kind of thinking and that we understand them to be nefarious. And while there are nefarious libertarians, just as there are nefarious Democrats and Republicans (Democrats have been much less liberal than libertarians in many instances, after all), there’s just nothing to suggest that people with libertarian tendencies are inherently more self-interested than other folks, because, like I’ve said, there are all kinds of libertarians.

I’m a secular liberal who has homeschooled his son for 11 years now. The only people who have ever called me a freak or a child abuser for doing this were Democrats. But that doesn’t mean that Democrats are more reactionary than other groups. Lots of my fellow homeschoolers are Democrats, too. We all have positions on certain things to which we tend to react without thinking.

If libertarianism meant just one thing, it would be easy to lump libertarians together as being more reactionary than other people. But since libertarianism means many things, and libertarians are, like communists and pacifists and Islamicists and militarists, etc., human beings, it means that they have different beliefs within the labelled umbrella they’re under. It means that, like all of us, some of them are selfish and shallow and some of them are kind and thoughtful and some are mixtures of both.

[Advocate]

you can’t do that here. you’d have to also assume the person attempting a citizen’s arrest was innocent, which means the professor had to have been guilty of something worthy of arrest. this is why i say there’s no determination possible until you know that fact.

[anon26940528]

Sure I can: It’s called the burden of proof. I don’t have to prove the professor didn’t commit a crime. You have zero information about what this person alleges, and there’s a classful of eyewitnesses as to what he did to the professor. He maced him. I would stake my life on that being a thing that actually happened. Is he guilty of a crime? I dunno, he could be legally insane. But in a case like this, the burden of proof is on him to justify his actions. Imperfect information is the rule, not the exception. It’s not an excuse to suddenly be obtuse.

[jetfx]

Sorry for the late reply. Was unable to get to it over the weekend.

@aikimo

Playing libertarian’s advocate, a libertarian might say that there’s a big, big difference between the voluntary relationship with an employer and the mandatory relationship one has with the government.

That is basically the boilerplate libertarian response, although as defense it’s more of a dodge, because it’s ignoring some relevant details. While the relationship between employee and employer is not legally mandatory, it is actually necessary, which makes any sort of legal compulsion to work superfluous, as the threat of penury already does that. This makes the relationship unequal in the favour of the employer, and therefore not really free association. This is where a guaranteed minimum income comes in, because employees have much more free choice who to associate with, and employers more incentive not to be an asshole. So long as circumstances force nearly all people to work for others to survive, defending private tyranny as freedom in disingenuous in the extreme.

@aikimo

I think it’s a problem when we pretend to understand the motives behind one kind of thinking and that we understand them to be nefarious.

I don’t ascribe nefarious motives to libertarians, or any other political group really. They’re quite open about wanting economic deregulation, and it is an obvious fact that more deregulation has happened than any other libertarian policy idea, and it has happened because that’s where the money has been spent lobbying.

@aikimo

[…] there’s just nothing to suggest that people with libertarian tendencies are inherently more self-interested than other folks […]

Well, other than subscribing to a philosophy that extolls the primacy of self interest, I guess there’s nothing to suggest that. But more seriously I don’t think individual self interest is a very useful way of understanding human behavior, because it would mean the existence of “lots and lots of poor and middle-class libertarians” would be inexplicable from the perspective of their own self interest.

@aikimo

If libertarianism meant just one thing, it would be easy to lump libertarians together as being more reactionary than other people.

It kind of does have to mean one thing, or the term has no meaning or descriptive use. That there is diversity of thinking amongst libertarians is a given, but they do share some core commonalities, and it is one of these commonalities where the reactionary tendency lies - the role of the market as the ultimate arbiter of human society. It is economic matters that really only distinguishes libertarians, because on the drug war, criminal justice reform, foreign policy and civil rights, they share a lot of with generic left-liberals. To declare one’s personal opposition to injustice because “it’s not my business to tell people how to live”, yet turn around and support others’ right to perpetuate injustice through the mechanism of the market and private property is reactionary.