I know y’all are sick of hearing me say how busy I’ve been lately. Sorry, broken record, yada yada.
I know I’ve been neglecting you, but this wonderful piece by R.J. Eskow, whom I’d never heard of before now, has crossed my path, and I pass it along as a peace offering. It’s the 11-question Libertarian hypocrisy test, including such gems as,
Is a libertarian willing to admit that production is the result of many forces, each of which should be recognized and rewarded?
and
Is our libertarian willing to acknowledge that workers who bargain for their services, individually and collectively, are also employing market forces?
and
Does our libertarian use wealth that wouldn’t exist without government in order to preach against the role of government?
(… the latter directed at PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel).
This is good stuff. Enjoy.
Southern Beale 
!. You might want to read “I, Pencil” written in 1958 by Leonard Read. which explains market forces pretty well.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html
2. Basically, organized labor is a response to corporations. Corporations are created by and for the state. Without government, corporations would not exist at all.
3. There is no real wealth that exists due to government other than things made, for example, the military/industrial complex. Government has no wealth or money that it does not steal from others. Government don’t create wealth, they destroy it.
…Peter Thiel? Is that you?
Corporations are not ‘created’ by the state. The state regulates corporations to protect contracts, to meet various public policy ends and to otherwise ensure the smooth operation of commerce.
Unions owe their origins to guilds which existed to represent skilled workers. Craftsmen had a rational interest in controlling the competition in their fields. As late as the 19th century in the steel industry certain skills were limited to a specific group of workers which set them apart from the general work force.
SB,
All this is legitimate material for annoying libertarians, particularly Randians, something that people from W. F. Buckley Jr. to Jonah Goldberg to myself enjoy greatly.
The author could have gone back a step and asked libertarians what debt they owed the society that gave them the Ideas and Values that they wish to perfect by dismantling that same society. After all, no matter how much libertarians wish to deny it, without a society filled with laws and customs and other restraints on absolute freedom, they might well not have the opportunities for living their independent {so they claim} lives.
In a sense. libertarians, even ones who really have lifted themselves to higher positions in life, act as if they started on first or second base and think they hit home runs. The most disturbing aspect of libertarian belief is their rejection of a balance between the individual and the society. If some on the left and on the right side too much with the power of the state over the individual, the libertarians reject almost any responsibility for the individual to his or her society.
The whole ‘spontaneous order’ concept is an odd recognition of the libertarian link to anarchism. Classical anarchists of the 19th century were bedeviled by the question of what happened when the Revolution came. Would the people organize or would the revolution be sort of a spontaneous event?
Now libertarians are not overt revolutionaries but they do have an intellectual understanding of the question of how to organize a society with as little government as possible. Spontaneous order sounds like a term for the result of everyone in a society acting in his or her best interest. If you wanted to do some reading on the topic, and I cannot imagine why you would, I think you will find that the process involves some sort of process of creating organizations based on location, profession, philosophy etc that will function like various sorts of government, only voluntary… {ironic smile here}.
To understand Rand, it does help to know that she was a student in the Soviet Union and saw the worst of totalitarianism at close range. The denial of freedom for the good of the State, the executions, the endless regulations. That does not make her views gospel but it makes her fears more reasonable.
In the 1950s Buckely had Whittaker Chambers read Rand out of the Conservative movement for various reasons, her rejection of religion, particularly Christianity.
True.
I find there’s more than one type of Libertarian. You get a more “true” Libertarian in your wonkish Julian Sanchez-type wing. But the majority of Libertarians I know are just phonies. The Ron Paul/Rand Paul wing, who think government regulation is fine for things like abortion and banning teaching evolution in the schools, but not fine for things like anti-discrimination and making sure Christianity isn’t rammed down everyone’s throats.
… oh and also, even Ayn Rand accepted Social Security.
And Paul Ryan attended college courtesy of Social Security after his father died when he was in high school. Now he wants to abolish it. The old climb-the-ladder-then-kick-it-away scheme. A variation on kiss up, kick down, a regular conservative maneuver.
I glanced at Read’s essay. It’s full of that which makes the green grass grow. Read speaks of the “freedom” of the railroads to carry passengers and freight and the “freedom” of the producers and distributors of gas and oil to find, process, move and sell their product without gummint’ giving them the ENORMOUS FUCKING SUBSIDIES THAT THEY STILL GET. Yeah, that’s a piece of propaganda that prolly makes libertarians get a major league hard-on. Of course, like porn, it’s fiction for the most part.
“2. Basically, organized labor is a response to corporations.R”
Bullshit, as well. Organized labor came about in response to unfair labor practices carried out by the owners of numerous industries. Corporations may have been the owners of many of those businesses but it was the PEOPLE in the boardrooms and factory managers who were fucking the workers.
Libertarianism is, like communism and fascism, a good idea gone way the fuck off course.
Ah yes, the Peter Thiel argument, or as Eskow puts it, “using wealth that wouldn’t exist without government in order to preach against the role of government.” Because without the U.S. government doing such unpleasant things as clearing the land of its native occupants, that railroad would not exist.
“All this is legitimate material for annoying libertarians, particularly Randians, something that people from W. F. Buckley Jr. to Jonah Goldberg to myself enjoy greatly.”
Jonah Goldberg? You have to be kidding. Jonah Goldberg is a jerk and a moron and would be asking if people want fries with their burger if it wasn’t for nepotism. Ditto Tucker Carlson. Jonah Goldberg is a fraud, a hack and a fucking liar.
I knew that Jonah Goldberg was a jerk and a moron. I hadn’t known he was the product of nepotism. Who is his overkindly uncle?
His mother is Lucianne Goldberg, another lying sack-of-shit ReiKKKwinger who poses as a journalist–and, onetime confidant of Monica Lewinsky.
Demmo, I mentioned Goldberg only because he is someone on the right who had dared to be critical of some of the wackier views of Rand’s acolytes. Their responses ran the gamut from A {for Angry} to Z {for straight out out of the Twilight Zone, the Good One, not the John Landis one.
There must be at least a few THOUSAND other people that are critical of Rand’s views (ALL of which are pretty fucking whacky)–and 99% of whom have some credibility and integrity.
Jonah Goldberg is almost as ridiculous as Bill Kristol, another member of the nepotism brigade.
Kristol is nepotism squared. Both mommy and daddy are power right-wing players. The apple rotted right there next to the tree.
“The apple rotted right there next to the tree.”
Or as has been said by several characters in various “Dave Robicheaux” novels (James Lee Burke):
“His mother must have been impregnated by a leaking colostomy bag.”.
To address the three questions posed in the original post:
1) Production is the result of a mutual relationship between employee and employer. Each is due what was agreed through the relationship.
2) Libertarians don’t necessarily object to unions. But, libertarians object to closed shops. The freedom of one group of employees to unionize must not infringe on the freedom of any other employee to form his own relationship with his employer. Closed shops are not free market devices.
3) This question supposes that dislike for one part of government equates to dislike for all of government. Nothing could be further from the truth. We all understand that some amount of freedom is lost in civil society. For example, you are free to swing your fist through the air — that is your right. As long as you don’t hit or injure anything or anyone else, you have the freedom to do this. But, when you hit someone with your fist, you’ve violated someone else’s right to go about his day without getting hit. As a society, we’ve decided that a person’s right to not be acted on by others trumps a person’s right to act on others. This is the basic protection that libertarians seek. They advocate protection of rights, not forced allocation of resources.
So my right to go to work, the supermarket, a movie theater or any other public place and not get shot should therefore trump someone else’s right to carry guns wherever they want when they’re not on their own private property. Correct?
Any my right to not be forced to carry a fetus to term and undergo the physically dangerous process called childbirth is not trumped by someone else’s religious beliefs?
Correct?
If this is the case then it proves yet again that 99.9% of self-professed “Libertarians” are frauds and charlatans. Because every one of them is anti-choice and pro-gun.
Let’s make sure we understand the true situation before we ask these questions, and not jump to conclusions before the question is asked.
1) Someone else’s possession of a firearm is not infringing on your right to move freely. If they used it to harm you, then it would be infringing on your right to move freely. Remember, you still have the right to swing your fist, but you don’t have the right to hit someone else with it. You are not being acted on if you’re not shot.
2) The fetus is a human being with a functioning brain, heart, and other organs. If you abort it, you have swung your fist and hit the child (in the parlance that we’ve been using for this discussion). You have acted on the child and violated its right to not be acted on. For most libertarians, religion has nothing to do with abortion.
If they’re carrying it around in a public place, where accidental discharges and intentional shootings put me at risk, then yes, my right to move freely has been infringed upon. Not to mention if they are negligent in the maintenance, storage, and use of said weapon, they have done likewise. People cleaning firearms in their own homes have negligently discharged their weapons into neighbors’ homes and apartments, wounding and killing them. I run a weekly report of such incidents. So, yes, they have infringed upon my right to move freely.
Not until it’s reached a certain point in gestation. Certainly not at blastocyst stage when those organs haven’t even developed yet. And there is no scientific agreement on when a fetus becomes a “person.”
So you’re in the 99.9% of Libertarians who are a fraud. Thanks for playing.
I’m not endorsing one side or the other — I’m just explaining the value system. I’m not saying that one thing is right or wrong. All I’m doing is explaining the libertarian view and correcting some of the misconceptions. If you think you’re going to catch libertarians in hypocrisy, then you have to know their ideas in the first place and how they would respond to different scenarios.
A libertarian doesn’t consider potential and action to be equal, like what you’re doing here. You’re saying that the potential for something to go wrong is just as bad as the actual action of something going wrong — it should be just as illegal to carry a firearm as it is to use it in a harmful manner, because it could kill someone. Should it be illegal to drive a motor vehicle, since it can kill people during accidental mishandling? The libertarian would say those examples are illustrations of the same concept. (BTW, some societies agree with your view and others don’t. I’m not declaring either right or wrong, but just laying out the logical framework).
On the abortion topic, the American Academy of Pediatrics says that the heart begins beating at 4 to 5 weeks of gestation. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends pregnancy testing at 6 weeks of gestation (2 to 4 wks after the first period is missed), because that timing gives the lowest chance of false negative or false positive readings. So, the child has an active heartbeat by the time most women have a definitive test. Regardless, most abortions are performed well after that point. The libertarian would say that abortion is infringing on the right of the child to live, but that birth, because it is a natural human process, is not a case of the child infringing on the rights of the mother.
You are perfectly free to disagree with these views. But, if you don’t understand them, you can’t determine if they’re hypocrisy or not. It would be like the libertarian saying that liberals are hypocrites because they think its OK to hurt a defenseless unborn child that can’t speak for itself, yet they claim to stand up for the weak and defenseless. The libertarian might call the liberal a fraud for that.
I’m not sure what my position is in all of this, but I like exploring everyone’s rationales for their positions.
WTF? That’s fucking retarded. I’m not pulling something out of my ass. I’m dealing with reality. These things happen ALL the damn time. It’s not some fantasy, like maybe creatures from outer space will land on earth. It’s a high probability.
It’s why insurance companies are refusing to cover those schools where teachers are carrying weapons on campus. Insurance is pure “free market” principles at work, they deal with actuarial data and they reject guns on campus, that trusty NRA talking point. Insurance companies are also rejecting conservative “climate change is fake” talking points.
For that matter, I say let’s require gun owners to be required to carry insurance. That way if some irresponsible idiot accidentally shoots me I can at least have my medical bills covered. That’s a free market solution, where are the Libertarians? They’re all, “Second Amendment! Whaaah!”
I love it when conservatives come over here telling me what liberals are supposed to believe. I never said I gave two shits about the weak and defenseless. You’re assuming I do. Somehow that’s the framing for liberals now, that we claim to care more for the weak and defenseless than anyone else? Where does that come from? I find that fascinating. I mean, I’ll take, it sure — but I’m not sure facts are in evidence there. But whatever. Hey like the bumper sticker says: “ObamaCare beats I Don’t Care!” Ha ha ha.
As a purely social experiment it tells me the cultural narrative is now “conservatives don’t care about anything but money,” but liberals “care about people.” I’d say we liberals have won another message war.
Anyway, I reject your take on the abortion issue. A beating heart doesn’t mean life, unless you want to tell every woman who miscarried at 6 or 8 weeks that she’s a murderer. I love these “Libertarians” who are all so “my free will” and “my autonomy” but when it comes to a woman’s body, suddenly they want all the control. Because an unborn zygote/blastocyst/fetus is more important than a born, grown, educated, living, breathing adult woman. Fuck you. You’re a fraud. Grow a uterus and then come talk to me. If men gave birth abortion would be a fucking privilege.
And that’s something else your side never wants to address: how are you going to enforce your anti-choice position? Throw women who get abortions in jail like they do in Mexico and Guatemala? The reality is, for thousands of years women have always known how to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy. It’s not always the safest way, or the healthiest way, or the most compassionate way. But they will do what needs to be done, and there will always be someone out there to help her along. THAT’S your free market at work, asshole.
I’m finished with you and your sanctimonious shit.
This:
“The fetus is a human being with a functioning brain, heart, and other organs.”
In George’s first comment was basically the “off switch” for any conversation that one might have had with him.
Southern Beale:
You only cite two of the three Libertarian virtues, fraud and charlatanism. You forgot hypocrisy and lying.
I’ll address Southern Beale’s comments later this morning when I have more time, but I think this one from democommie is central to this discussion. Science tells us that a fetus has these things — the functioning heart, brain, and other human organs. These things aren’t deniable. You can use that information however you like. The libertarian uses that information to mean that an unborn human being has the same rights that other human beings have. If you think that’s wrong, you can simply say so. But, there’s no hypocrisy, fraud, lying, or charlatanism in that statement.
The libertarian might say that the hypocrisy is on the liberal side, since they want equal rights for everyone, but not for unborn humans. He might say that the liberal is a hypocrite when he slams climate change deniers as not following science, but ignores the scientific evidence that an unborn child has a human heart, brain, and other organs.
Again, I’m not saying that your view is right or wrong. But, if you don’t know how a libertarian views things or would respond to your statements, you can’t show him that your view is better.
BTW, to answer one of Southern Beale’s comments earlier: I *AM* a woman. I write under the name George so my posts get read differently than if I had a female screen name. I have had two miscarriages and two children to term (two boys, ages 2.5 ad 8 months). I am very familiar with childbirth.
An embryo doesn’t become a fetus until about 8 weeks. That you appear to be using the term “fetus” to discuss all stages of pregnancy shows you have no clue what the fuck you’re talking about.
I really don’t give a shit what the Libertarian thinks about “unborn humans” or anything else for that matter. I’m not trying to convert Libertarians. I’m not trying to show him (not her? Only him?) that my view is better. Why would I? Libertarians are a closed-minded bunch with a two-dimensional, adolescent view of the world and smug, self-satisfied belief in their own unimpeachable logic. Most of us grew out of that stage when we graduated from college and got some experience in the real world.
Reality is a lot more complicated than the Libertarian worldview allows. The whole “I can swing my arm until I hit you” thing is cute, but the real world is not so cut and dried. Abortion shows the perfect fallacy to the Libertarian view. When a woman or girl is raped and gets pregnant, what then? Is she forced to carry her rapists’ baby to term? Whose arm connects with whose body at this point?
Your “I’m not saying your view is right or wrong” schtick is nice but it rings hollow, since clearly you do have an agenda. Fuck off.
Despite your harsh language, you bring up an interesting point with the “pregnancy by rape” scenario. I’m not an expert on libertarian philosophy, but from what I know about it, I think the libertarian might say that the rapist has violated the woman’s freedom and will be dealt with in the method prescribed by law, but that doesn’t justify ending the unborn child’s life. He would argue that two wrongs don’t make a right. (BTW, I use the pronoun ‘he’ a lot, because it is the neutered form of the third person pronoun used when referring to people. Some languages have different personal pronouns for masculine, feminine, and neutered verbs. In English, the neutered form just happens to be the same as the masculine form. Or, at least that’s what I was taught. I wouldn’t want Mrs. Achterberg to know that I did it any other way).
On the embryo thing, it looks like you’re playing semantics and trying to rationalize a position that you’re not sure if you believe, but it wouldn’t fit your political dogma if you didn’t say it. I’m just repeating what two scientific organizations (American Academy of Pediatrics and American Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology) have said. You are certainly free to deny their science if you like.
Besides, if you’re not concerned with what libertarians think and you’re not trying to show them (or maybe yourself) why your view is better, then why even post the original article in the first place? It doesn’t make sense to care enough about it to post it, then say later that you don’t care about it at all.
But, you don’t have to care about or even be aware of what other around you think. Although most of us outgrew that stage after leaving high school, some folks still like to set up strawmen (or should I say strawwomen) and tear them down to make themselves feel better.
I thought this was a place to have an intellectual conversation. If all you’re concerned about is a children’s shouting match with foul language, maybe I’ve come to the wrong place.
Of course it would be a “He.” That makes so much sense, a man forcing a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, especially one resulting from violence.
It’s all so neat and tidy and logical, makes perfect sense, of course it does. With absolutely no grounding in reality, of what it means physicially, psychologically or emotionally for a woman — especially one who’s been sexually assaulted. Too bad!
Pregnancy and childbirth are not real to men, they’re academic experience; in point of fact, pregnancy is very hard on a woman’s body, so is childbirth. Not to mention the economic ramifications, the medical expenses, the time off of work, and what it means to have a child, to actually raise it. Let’s just ignore all of those realities and blithely decree that a woman who is raped has to just suffer the consequences for nine months. Sorry but, two wrongs don’t make a right! That’s not a policy, that’s a bumper sticker.
Yes, there’s a reason Libetarians are referred to as misogynist assholes with no interest in reality.
As for my children’s language? Deal with it. I say fuck a lot. I enjoy it, especially when someone trots over here with an argument lacking any intellectual heft. If you don’t like, leave. I make no apologies for my use of foul language. I blog to vent and when I vent I cuss. Boo fucking hoo.
Abortion is the perfect foil for Libertarians because it’s a real-life issue with lots of shades of gray to it that just refuses to fit in that tidy little box. Oh and let’s dispense with the Libertarian moral superiority here. I’m pretty sure any Ayn Rand fanboy who got his girlfriend pregnant would be running off to the nearest Planned Parenthood office in a fetal heartbeat.
Ayn Rand was an atheist who thought belief in God was a sign of moral weakness. Today’s Libertarians are 99.9% of the time religious wackjobs trying to justify their selfishness and greed which is so antithetical to true Christianity. Straddling that fence just never, ever works, though.
Remember, the ‘he’ part is only because I (a woman) was taught that it was proper English (by another woman who learned it from another woman). I understand that pregnancy is hard — I’ve had 4 of them and lost the babies from 2 of them. I don’t recall you saying how many you’ve had. The libertarian women I know understand the same way. They tell me that it is childish to think that life is always going to be easy and that you should always get to choose whatever selfish end you want, regardless of who gets hurt along the way. One of my libertarian friends was raped, carried the child to term, and loves her and raises her to this day. She is convinced that it wouldn’t be right to hurt that defenseless child, no matter what inconvenience it put herself through. From your posts, it looks like you value your personal convenience over someone else’s, even an innocent child who did nothing to you. Psycologists call that childish selfishness. Most of us understood that in middle school and grew out of it in high school.
You’re right that there are a lot of gray areas in life. To this day, there is no perfect way to deal with all of them. Libertarians are convinced that the greatest amount of freedom for the greatest number leads to the greatest outcomes. So far, you haven’t disproven that. You’ve only proven that you’re stuck in the “me me me” of 6th grade haven’t grown up yet.
You’re a woman and your handle is George?
Calling bullshit. In fact, I’m calling bullshit on your entire little diatribe.
I’m really glad you have some (probably imaginary) friend who had a (probably imaginary) rape which resulted in a (probably imaginary) pregnancy that turned into a (probably imaginary) deeply loved and wanted (probably imaginary) child and a happy (probably imaginary) family. But guess what, that’s just one scenario. There are hundreds of different scenarios that aren’t like that. And really, just because you have a (probably imaginary) friend who had this (probably imaginary) wonderful scenario is not a real world basis for everyone else. Because every situation is different and really, it’s not up to you and your imaginary friend to tell anyone otherwise.
And once again we get back to how false your little “arm swinging in the air” analogy is when it plays out in the real world.
Oh the unbearable intellectual lightness of the Libertarian worldview.
Yeahhhh riiight. Okie dokie, you outted yourself right there, buckaroo. Not a womnan, never been raped or pregnant, never had to live with any real life situations. What are you still in college or something? It’s cute. Come back when you’ve had some experience in the real world.
If you don’t think that the libertarian view applies broadly, then under which situations do you find it acceptable to kill another human being and under which situations do you find it unacceptable?
It seems like you want society to accept your personal reason for what you do and not hold you responsible for your actions. I bet that if someone wrongs you, you are quite vocal in seeking restitution (or maybe retribution, as well). But, you are steadfast in advocating moral relativism for yourself, in which no one can place restrictions on your freedoms, but you can place all sorts of restrictions on other people’s freedoms.
Define human being. I’ve asked you this question about three times and you haven’t answered it.
I don’t consider a zygote, a fertilized egg, or an embryo a human being. I have nooo problem with Plan B — a shot of hormones preventing a fertilized egg from implanting on the uterine wall. This is not murder to me, this is common sense.
I accept the generally agreed-upon (outside fundie worldview at least) third-trimester demarcation, i.e. abortion up until the 12th week. I make an exception for those rare cases where the mother’s life is jeopardized or a fetus is so horribly deformed that it is not viable outside the womb. I happen to think a real, live, breathing woman’s life is more important than an unborn fetus. In those cases where a choice must be made, the woman’s life should be the priority.
I also know that allowing abortion does not stop it, it just makes it less safe and humane for all involved. It creates a blackmarket for illegal abortions and causes even more horrors of the kind we all can agree do not belong in a civilized society — the kind of stuff we saw in Philadelphia. As I wrote back in June, if you want more Kermit Gosnell horror factories, by all means, continue to deny women access to birth control, healthcare services, and legal abortion services. It’s not like the country hasn’t been down this road before.
I DO draw the line at forcing my opinion on others, something the other side can’t say. If you think a fertilized egg is a human being who should have a social security number and start paying taxes from the moment of conception, knock yourself out. But by all means, don’t force that view on me.
Maybe you missed one of my earlier posts. I post under the name ‘George’ (not just here, but on other boards, too) because I find that sometimes people respond to my posts differently when I have a masculine screen name vs a feminine screen name. BTW, when I use the androgenous ‘Pat’, things can get really crazy.
Again, I’ve hard 4 pregnancies — 2 miscarriages and 2 term births. Hayden (boy) is 2 yrs 6 months and Eli is 8 months old.
I’m sorry that I didn’t catch your kids’ names. Who are they again?
You never asked me to define ‘human being.’ I told you that is something has a human brain and a beating human heart, it certainly means more than if it were something that didn’t have those things. I’m not going to push that view on you. You obviously don’t think the possession of those things makes this group of cells different than the group of cells that we call ‘you,’ and your writings reflect that. But, by focusing on that, you’ve drawn us away from the main conversation points on this thread.
Saying that allowing abortions makes them more safe is severely flawed logic. The Gosnell case was in the presence of legal abortions — they weren’t banned at all. Using your logic, should we conclude that guns should not be restricted because that will drive gun procurement and use into more unsafe situations? You may be on to something here. It just so happens that areas with severe gun restrictions do have more gun violence than those places without those restrictions.
But, getting away from all the distractions and getting back to the three main points that you posted in the original post from Sept 12, you haven’t addressed how those points are true or how the libertarian rebuttal of them is false. You keep running away from those harder questions and hiding behind hypotheticals that you believe are safe ground for you.
I’m pretty sure I asked you what you considered life, but if I didn’t my mistake.
My post on the Gosnell case which I linked to lays out the case for why Gosnell was the predictable result of making abortion illegal. I’m not going to rehash that here. You can read it and do with it what you will. Abortion may be technically legal, but putting roadblocks and obstruction to accessing one for women at a certain economic scale is making it illegal by default. That is indeed why forced-birthers are foisting these rules and regulations on state houses from coast to coast. The Supreme Court has made it’s case so they are chipping away at access.
As for the original post on Libertarian hypocrisy, I think the case is laid out pretty well. I’m not running away from anything. You’re the one who came up with the elegant “arm swinging” analogy which I proved false with the issue of abortion. Not really sure what your problem is? Maybe you need to re-read the post. You’ve also misrepresented who you are and what you believe. You keep saying, “I’m not saying I believe these things, just saying that’s what some Libertarians probably believe!” Well then maybe you’re not the best spokesperson for the philosophy. Maybe someone who really does believe these things can explain them better.
The bottom line is, Libertarianism died out as a philosophy in the 50s because it’s stupid and it failed. It was resurrected by corporate plutocrats hoping to use it to exploit the uneducated plebes. They’ve done a masterful job of pulling the wool over some folks’ eyes, but only a moron would think what’s good for Koch Industries is good for America.
Quack. George does not pass a lot of smell tests. And saying only women who have had children should have a position on abortion? Ridonkulous. I’m a gay man. My position on abortion is it’s none of my fucking business. That decision is between the woman, her doctor, and possibly her Big Sky Daddy.
Oh and speaking of religion: Judaism does not consider a foetus a child until it draws breath. Which is why abortion is legal in Israel.
I smell a sockpuppet, here.
George will, if not banned before then, eventually morph into a former democrat, former lesbian, former atheist, black person (of one or both sexes) who has found GOD and libertarianism to be the best possible combination of credos. Why,after all, believe in just one untenable load of bullshit, when you can believe in two?
Everyone here must be tired from jumping to conclusions. Yutsano, I never said that only women who had children could have an opinion on abortion. I only brought my own experiences into this because Southern Beale said “You’re a fraud. Grow a uterus and then come talk to me.” I’ve had my uterus all my life. Maybe you should ask Southern Beale why she (I assume that she’s a woman) thinks that only women can have an opinion on abortion.
Understand, too, that I never said that libertarianism was the best ideology around, or that everyone should adopt it, or that I even understood it better than anyone else. It has never been implemented in the US and I suspect that it never will. But, it appears that Southern Beale is immensely threatened by it. She tells us that she doesn’t want to understand it, doesn’t want to know what it is, and doesn’t care about it, but she is enamored with it enough to post an article about it (BTW, an article that has nothing to do with it).
So far, I’ve seen a bunch of unhappy people who do a lot of name calling and ad hominem attacks and lack the vocabulary to use words with more than four letters (see what I did there?), but who don’t understand their own ideas well enough to calmly articulate them. BTW, when you call someone else a hypocrite, we all smile, because we you’ve proven who all the real hypocrites are 🙂
I never said that. I said I don’t care to convert Libertarians to “my” views or change their views.
I think I understand it pretty well. It’s a fantasy-based philosophy admired by adolescent Ayn Rand fanboys and corporatists trying to fleece the masses. Your attempts to explain the philosophy have not held up under scrutiny.
Libertarians are a tiresome lot. When presented with a scenario that shows how false their ideology operates in the real world, they just come up with more bumper sticker superficialities and smug satisfaction in their own unimpeachable logic.
Libertarianism can never fail, it can only BE failed. Ron Paul didn’t write those racist newsletters! The modern Libertarian standard-bearer isn’t a racist fuckwad, he just thinks everyone should have a right to be a racist fuckwad and let the freee market decide!!!!
Pfft. Grow up.
“So far, I’ve seen a bunch of unhappy people who do a lot of name calling and ad hominem attacks and lack the vocabulary to use words with more than four letters (see what I did there?), but who don’t understand their own ideas well enough to calmly articulate them. BTW, when you call someone else a hypocrite, we all smile, because we you’ve proven who all the real hypocrites are.
Nobody that reads or comments on this blog, or even reads it on a regular basis, is stupid enough to think you’re being honest. That you are stupid enough to think that they might? that would be YOUR problem, Georgie.
I’ve been dealing with KKKlowns like you since at least the 1968 elections. You’re as phony as George W. Bush’s service records–nothing but a troll being a troll.
There’s a reason why people tell you and others like you to eat shit and die; it’s because you’re a brainwashed moron–or just another fucking liar for JESUS/ The RNC. Nobody that reads or comments on this blog, or even reads it on a regular basis, is stupid enough to think you’re being honest.
I’ve seen the ‘liar’ word thrown around a lot during this conversation. Can you point out the lies I’m telling? I’d like to know where you think I’m lying and what you think I’m lying about.
Georgie:
Go back to wherever they unscrew the top of your head and fill it up with the shit that you’ve been spewing here. No, really, get the fuck out.
You said I was “just another f—— liar.” Show me where the lies are. if you’re going to bring a charge like that, you should have no problem backing it up. What did I lie about?
Georgie:
You’re a Gishgallopin’goalpostmovin’ moron. I don’t debate trolls. Fuck off.
You called me a liar, but you can’t find anything that I’ve lied about. You just did the very things that you slam your opponents for.