Nice smugness and missing of the point.
No, or else your social philosophy is incoherant.
i have a great social philosophy thank you very much. its called libertarianism. the theory that there should be a voluntary society. a society where insitutionalised justice is not tolerated and justice is maximised through the competition of agencies whose reason d’etre is to provide for a justice consuming public.
i dont give a damn who is friends with who, in the just society.
As has been explained to you before, left-libertarianism’s use of the term “left” is not in referance to the typical left-right/dem-rep spectrum. As for your weak point about there not being an organization that literally names itself “the alliance of the libertarian right” - there doesn’t need to be, because the mainstream libertarian movement already is constituted by that without the label. As a matter of simple fact, in America libertarians have generally been associated with conservative think tanks and have overwhelmingly associated themselves with the Republican party.
There also is not an absence of people that identify as “right-libertarians”. Rothbard, in “For A New Liberty”, identifies himself as a “right-libertarian”, in contrast to geoists and “civil libertarians”. Hans Hoppe, in “Democracy: The God That Failed”, identifies explicitly as a conservative libertarian and explicitly calls for a conservative-libertarian fusionism. What’s more, I have encountered plenty of Republicans that identify as “libertarian” - hell, even Ronald Reagen once said, “the essence of conservatism is libertarianism”. If anyone is being dishonest here, it’s you.
Just because you don’t have an affinity for the word “right”, doesn’t mean that there is no such thing, in substance, as a “libertarian right”. We can play around with semantics all day, but you know exactly what I’m refering to - especially with respect to the “paleo-libertarians”.
Now you’re explicitly being dishonest. Kinsella has made many blogposts both here and at LewRockwell in which he is essentially bitching about left-libertarians. Furthermore, linking to people’s works in a criticism of them isn’t “promotion” or endorsement. I’ve also personally interacting with him at his google group, in which Kinsella was acting incredibly erratic and I was quickly banned for persistantly being a left-libertarian.
The fact that libertarian promotion has been funded by “capitalists” isn’t a talking point in your favor. It gives reason for an explaination of bias.
“Capitalists” don’t have a paricular cultural simply by virtue of being “capitalists”. And left-libertarians don’t hate “exchange”.
Nonsense. One’s social philosophy only has to provide value to themself. And the typical left/thick position is that if one doesn’t share in certain pseudo-objective values, then the philosophy is not sufficient.
It’s all a sad joke really. You claim your extra-NAP preferences make you thick, but my extra-NAP preferences make me thin because they differ. You see anti-racism as being thicker than racism or racial neutrality. But at the end of the day, it’s just your value judgment, held by a group of people with similar judgments that somehow makes your conception of what racism is and how to oppose it, more thick than mine.
Again, intelligent people are not fooled. There is one thing that is consistent about ancap. I am constantly amazed by how individualistic, intelligent, open-minded and relaxed (but alert) ancaps generally are about the conditions around them. I met several of them on the LF, and I meet more everyday (not within the narrow libertarian blogosphere, C4SS, LvMI, LRC orbit). They ooze purpose and clarity, even when they are at rest.
LLs on the other hand, seem to be constantly haranguing, attacking, protesting, begging for money and crying about something or the other. From a zen point of view, there is a lot of action, but very little result from the LLs which is predictable when one is at conflict not just with his environment, but with his own values.
I never claimed that alternative extra-NAP preferances are “thin”. That’s simply either a strawman or a misunderstanding on your part. In fact, I’ve maintained that Hoppean conservatarians are “thick” - but I reject them, not on the grounds of “thin-ness”, but on the grounds that their values suck and have bad consequences.
You’re conflating racism and racial neutrality. Racial neutrality is “thin”. Both anti-racism and racism are “thick” commitments. Except I would object to racism on the grounds that it’s simply a bad value based on false epistemological assumptions, not because it’s “thin”. What’s “thin” are those libertarians who, while not explicitly being racists, say “who cares about racial separatism, so long as the NAP is respected” or “so long as there is no state”.
The whole mantra about things being just a value judgement is loopy subjectivism. Yes, such and such is a value judgement, but the subjective theory of value in economics should not be conflated with a meta-ethical relativism. Hence the distinction between “agent-relativity” and normative relativity.
I’m sorry, but you’re making an unfounded assertion about the connection between people’s characters and their ideologies. By virtue of being an “ancap”, this does not determine one’s character. I thought we rejected polylogism here?
Begging for money? Come now. You’re simply making sweeping declarations about people’s characters because they have a different ideology than you. That’s lame and unfounded, and ultimately has nothing to do with truth value. What’s more, both “ancaps” and “left-libertarians” (which isn’t even an absolute dichotomy for some; Long considers himself both an “ancap” and a “left-libertarian”) sometimes bitch about other ideologies and various events in society. They just have somewhat different targets or approach it from somewhat different angles.
hey, check it out, im the good kind of racist.
I didn’t claim that taking such an attitude makes one a racist. What I most strongly do claim, however, is that it is a wishy-washy and enabling attitude towards racism that functions to legitimize it on value-neutral grounds.
are we calling non-interference ‘enabling’ now?
yes
Nice red herring. I’m not talking about non-interferance (by which you presumably mean non-aggression), I’m talking about attitudes. My claim is that neutral attitudes can have the effect of enabling or legitimizing things.
well juan. im assuming that you didnt interfere when http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/8215925.stm this man committed a murder.
hence you enabled it.
good luck sleeping nights [8-|]
(sorry buddy, but you walked into that one… you know i love you really.)
oh, my attitude needs reforming if i dont care if people do things that arent criminal…
will you be my guru? looks like im in need of one
Values are subjective.
Then how does one suck for holding Hoppean values?
Yeah, it’s sad.
Et tu?
I wasn’t talking about Long, but thanks for bringing him up. As to what he calls himself, I really don’t care. He could be a purple elephant. I judge him on the substance of his posts and comments. I’m not in anyone’s fan club.
Who other than “conservatives” could libertarians ally with?
No worries =P
I made a half-sloppy remark on purpose, but I do think that seeing collectivism as ‘neutral’, as long as the collectivists apparently abide by the NAP, is not a good idea.
it might be risky but its not wrong. we would need another thread…
Speaking of attitudes: drop the smug attitude.
The concept of “right and wrong” cannot be simplified to “legal and illegal”. There are plenty of things that I may think should be legal, but seem downright wrong. There plenty of ways in which people can be mistreated that do not constitute formal negative rights violations. I don’t consider an ideology that only cares about negative rights violations, while completely not caring about how people are treated in general, to be very sensible.
If I see someone excluded from an entire community and denied the ability to meaningfully function in society simply because they belong to a particular identity group, I am going to rather intuitively think that that’s horrible. I certainly would not like to be treated in such a way, let alone those that are close to me. I’m not going to just shrug my shoulders and think to myself, “Who cares? Noone stole their property. They got what they deserved”.
If one’s libertarianism only functions as a rationalization for not giving a shit about people, then something is wrong with how it’s being conceptualized; one is being a libertarian for incoherant, if not self-contradictary, reasons.
why are you smuggist? how come anti-smuggism isnt on the LL agenda?
oh, appeal to sensible. you know. thats so uncommon i dont think its been officially classified as a fallacy. or in otherwords. how about making a point instead of just reporting to me the content of your personal intuitions.
you are reporting that you empathise and sympathise, big whoop, you’re not the only one.. but i thought we were going to talk about social philosophy and what is right or wrong… you surely arent conflating your emotions with your ‘social philosophy’?!?
As the rest of the statement explains, which you conveniently left out of the quote, agent-relativity should not be conflated with a meta-ethical relativism. The subjective theory of value is an economic concept, not an ethical one.
I’d like to see what “money begging” you’re talking about, because your claim seems to be full of shit. Are you refering to when Roderick Long was asking for money? He was doing so because the state cleared his bank account, not as some sort of rent-seeking escapade, you douchbag. If you’re refering to C4SS asking for donations as an organization - all organizations do that, including LVMI. Nothing about is peculiar to left-libertarianism.
The holding of certain values (such as racism) tends to stem from an epistemological falsehood, which can objectively be condemned as a cognitive error. In either case, this doesn’t contradict by claim that being an “ancap” qua “ancap” doesn’t determine one’s character. It’s more like the other way around, if anything: that one’s character will determine the kind of ideologies that one gravitates towards. But, more generally speaking, one simply can’t evaluate people’s characters mply by virtue of the label associated with them. That was my point.
well i’ll have to deny the antecedent and see if you have anything to say to me