I use to watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. He was likely the harshest and most persistent critic of the Bush administration. For a sampling of his opposition, view some of his early Special Comments. However, he did not display the same anger toward Obama. During the 2008 campaign, he targeted the McCain campaign in multiple special comments, but he didn’t target the Obama campaign. Browse the FactCheck.org or PolitiFact.com archives and you can find material critical of both Obama and McCain. Instead of criticizing both candidates for being misleading, he only targeted one.
Countdown? I used to watch The Big Show with Keith Olbermann, when he was the antithesis of what cable news was becoming amidst the Clinton scandal. He was very even-handed about the issues and demanded that people act respectfully on his show; and I still remember him cutting Christopher Hitchens off when he couldn’t help but become belligerent. He was an icon of understatement in a shout down world, imagine my dismay when Countdown came around and he had fully embraced the culture he had fought so hard to stop.
Well of course. He’s a shill. And an asshole. They have a real knack for hiring those kinds of people on that network.
Anyway, does this mean you used to admire Olberdork?
“Anyway, does this mean you used to admire Olberdork?”
He sounded more like a civil libertarian during the Bush administration than a welfare statist. His bias in the 2008 election and his misunderstanding of markets, in the aftermath of the housing bubble, disappointed me.
I used to love Jello Biafra… The punk singer turned green party politician. I heard him the other day ranting about how we need rent control.
I think he’s clueless now of course.
Rent control indeed.
I take that as a “yes”. That’s what I figured. This is a great topic for a thread. I’m interested to see what kind of list emerges.
I guess the first person I think of is Friedman. This is of course not to say I don’t still admire him (so I guess this doesn’t totally count), but I was disappointed when my positions moved to less and less government, and no central bank, etc., and I went back and read through his positions from that perspective it was just disheartening. But in reality, it’s almost a disappointment that he wasn’t perfect, I guess, and I suppose it’s not fair hold a lot of those positions against him, especially considering how far he blazed the trail. But then again, he was a contemporary of Rothbard, and basically debated him on more than one occasion, so I suppose there’s no reason he couldn’t have come around.
But even more than that, I was actually considerably more disappointed with Hayek after reading Block’s assessment (PDF). And of course Block wasn’t the only one who pointed it out.)
When you think about things like the Hayek “Beck bomb”, and then realize that’s what all these people are getting…I mean, it’s great they’re discovering the economist and probably getting introduced to the Austrian School and free market ideas they never heard, but still. It’s a pretty big drawback when the “solution” is so similar to the problem.
It was a hard pill to swallow to see Hayek’s pro-state views all laid in a row like that.
Friedman came to my mind too. Its not that he isnt worthy of admiration, its just that he has been outdone as an economist by Rothbard and the Austrians.
As a defender of the free market, friedman is still cool.mfree to choose was great. His appearence on Donehue was great. He has (logically speaking) chopped up quite a few socialists. Oh yeah… Still admire Friedman.
P.J. O’Rourke was the one who introduced me to libertarianism. Now… meh.
This is probably not going to be a popular response, but Walter Block. I thought he was the best thing ever when I first got into anarcho-capitalism, just taking the NAP to its logical conclusions. It seemed like he had the right solution for all those tough cases, and he was funny to boot. Plus, he has written so damn much that you couldn’t read a single issue of the JLS without coming accross one of his articles.
But now, I think his whole outlook divorces the NAP from the grounds that we would accept it on in the first place. It’s like he supports the NAP for its own sake, regardless of how absurd or undesireable the conseqences are. And since he is so influential, there are a lot of libertarians out there who adopt this way of thinking, which causes them to oversimplify issues. Look at any thread on abortion, and you’ll probably find 10 pages of the same 4 people trying to apply the NAP and property rights over and over again, each of them coming to a different conclusion. No one is thinking “hmm, maybe we should try a different approach,” and I think its because they are really attached to the very strict kind of views espoused by Block.
Bill Maher.
Abe Lincoln.
Not so much as “fomerly admired,” but more of “moved on” etc. I guess the two major people who come to mind are Rothbard and Rand. When I first got into libertarianism and Rothbard it was sort of like “all that I’ve been missing out on!” and eventually I broke out of that mold and moved into deeper material. With Rand when I finally read her I thought she was pretty awesome, but I suppose like Rothbard if you follow back to the “core” material that inluenced them you find that more admirable (difference with Rand is all the other crap she and said outside her fiction books that is rather unappealing).
Two people I currently “admire” would be Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung (non-political, but whatever).
Bert, I’m curious who exactly it is you “moved on” to with this “deeper material” after leaving Rothbard behind.
to op:
Noam Chomsky, I listened to several of his lectures and read his books, only to find out that he was unsure of himself in some ways, although i did learn a lot from him.
There was another but i can’t recall at this point.
Bert, I’m curious who exactly it is you “moved on” to with this “deeper material” after leaving Rothbard behind.
Rothbard was sort of introductory to me, but as I read more books I sort of “grew out” of “Rothbardianism” so to speak. I didn’t leave him behind, but he’s not as influential on me as he once was.
I say again, who exactly is it you “grew into” after “growing out of” Rothbard and “moved on” to “deeper material”?
Well I can’t speak for Bert but the more I read Rothbard and Mises, the more I agreed with the latter over the former where they disagree. Rothbard’s economics and history are great, but I think Mises’ conception of ethics and politics are superior to those of Rothbard. Same goes for Hayek in my opinion.
I never was really all that into the whole Rothbardian/Block/Hoppe thing all too much.
Anyway, more to the point:
I can’t think of a person who I like/ respected as a person or thinker and just abandonded them as absolutlely worthless. I guess I am no longer a Hamiltonian - but I still like the guy. The same goes with John Locke.
Krugman used to be fun to read in the early 00’s in high school - I remember liking book Pop Internationalism too. Keynes is still worth thinking about and addressing more than ever - even though I seldom spend time doing it.
Oh,
I may have lost some respect to for Bertrand Russel, AJ Ayer, August Comte, Hans Reichenbach, Carnap, Popper, Herbert Spencer, J.S Mill, and Behavioral Psych. Though something tells me I had little liking for some of those thinkers anyway - I just accepted their lines of logic.
Interestingly enough, due to Austrianism I may have gained a certain respect for Marx, Hegel, Feurerbach, and Freud even if I may completley disagree with some of them - and think the end results of Marxism would be barbaric.
Note: I do not mean to disparage the names of Ayer, etc in any way - they are thinkers worthy of attention.
Well… yeah. I don’t get this.
What absurd or undesirable consequences come from NAP?
That’s not the problem with NAP. Block uses NAP to come to evictionism, which makes sense.
What other approach would a libertarian take? NAP is what makes us libertarians.
I think Rothbard got a needed polishing, but I, along with JJ, await your answer to his questions.