Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
― Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
Bastiat’s words have been quite obviously true from the day he wrote them, but the socialists and statists of today have laid bare their complete inability to distinguish between society and the State. The Orwellian newspeak of the modern left has rendered the distinction between the public sphere inhabited by the State and the one inhabited by culture difficult to describe. One example highlights an old semantics battle fought and won by the left. Over a decade ago, 17 year-old me struggled with the question posed in civics class: “What is the difference between civil rights and civil liberties?” A quick flip in the dictionary to “Civil Rights” yields this answer:
Personal liberties that belong to an individual, owing to his or her status as a citizen or resident of a particular country or community.
Another quick flip to “Civil Liberties” yields this answer:
rights or freedoms given to the people by the First Amendment to the Constitution, by common law, or legislation, allowing the individual to be free to speak, think, assemble, organize, worship, or petition without government (or even private) interference or restraints. These liberties are protective in nature, while civil rights form a broader concept and include positive elements such as the right to use facilities, the right to an equal education, or the right to participate in government. (See: civil rights)
Needless to say, the competition this question was based on didn’t go well for me. However, this question has stuck in my head for years. It wasn’t until studying 14th Amendment jurisprudence in law school that the answer dawned on me. There is no difference between civil rights and civil liberties . . . but there was!
In the original formulation of the 14th Amendment, the politicians and thinkers of the time split rights into three relevant categories: civil, political, and social. Civil rights were what we would recognize today as negative rights (1st Amendment, etc.). Political rights are those limited positive rights (voting rights, etc.) that are focused on the procedural aspects of running the government. Social rights are recognized as positive rights (no private discrimination, welfare, cultural identity, etc.). However, this all seemed foreign to somebody like me who had no exposure to these classic definitions. Today, they are all lumped together as civil rights, giving us libertarians no easy “handle to grasp” when discussing these issues. It would be an easy mantra for us to say “legislate civil rights, not social rights,” but the phrase has no meaning to a modern audience.
Reflecting back on Bastiat’s quote from The Law, it is clear that libertarians have just as difficult of a time separating society from the State as statists do. Many times we jump to the conclusion that the only hurdle for “goodness” or “morality” is that something should not be legislated against by the State. We’ve all heard the slur that libertarians are just libertines. Many libertarians take a weak stance (if any at all) against encroaching cultural changes. Some even hold open disdain toward participation in the “Culture War.”
This is exactly the wrong tactic to use in defense of liberty. While the abstaining libertarians spend their time and effort staying “above the fray,” the Culture War wages on beneath them, dragging them further and further away from their end goal. Prominent libertarian thinkers sprint full-speed, grasping and lunging for the elusive Libertarian Moment. All the while, they’re stuck on a bullet train headed straight for Statist Station. Without addressing the elements of our society most hostile to liberty, any handful of progress made will be fleeting, meaningless, and overwhelmed by the dump truck load of totalitarianism that has accumulated in the same duration.
Andrew Breitbart observed that politics is downstream from culture. I believe this to be very true. The statist shift we have seen in the last 100 years isn’t because politicians have tricked well-meaning citizens into supporting growth of the State. The cause and effect is flipped. Our culture has created these politicians. Only when we internalize this can we understand the importance of the Culture War. Libertarians will be nothing until we engage in evangelism, organization, disruption, and institutional control to the level that the Progressives have for the last 100 years. No standard libertarian disclaimers apply here. We need to seize the positions of power for our culture, and we need to exert our influence on society.
This feels dirty and unlibertarian. It feels downright statist. However, this is because the line between society and the State has been so blurred. We can influence culture without abandoning our principles. Usually, this is where libertarian thinkers fall flat on their face. In courting the libertarian feels, they’ll say things like: It’s as simple as challenging somebody when they mindlessly spout off about how “there should be a law!” It’s as simple as giving a few dollars to a liberty-loving non-profit that supports victims of the State. It’s as simple as teaching your children to view government with a healthy skepticism.
If the last 100 years have taught us anything, it’s that winning back liberty isn’t that simple. Liberty loving individuals aren’t ones to use the Alinskyite playbook to get our way, but we’ve been eaten alive for a century. It’s time to ratchet things up. We need to establish the organization and infrastructure required to mount a counter-assault against the Statist-held institutions of society and the State. We need to organize on local levels to make sure that things like unfair zoning, over-restrictive HOAs, and abusive eminent domain are met with protest. We need to establish a cost-effective alternative to the public indoctrination centers so that families aren’t forced to choose between sending their kids to a daily Progressive church service and having enough money to eat. We need to offer entertainment and news that is completely detached from the legacy media, especially their agenda-setting powers. We must cover events that actually matter rather than the ones personally groomed by Statist elites. We must free the studies of history, economics, and philosophy from the shackles of postmodern leftism by better promoting libertarian academicians.
The answers to many of these problems are not imminently forthcoming, but putting our fingers in our ears and chanting “shouldn’t be illegal, not my problem” is going to lead to only one place. . . totalitarian ruin. It’s not only okay for libertarians to wade into the Culture War, it’s necessary. If we don’t, we’ll wish we were only as irrelevant as we are today. Only, we won’t have the words to describe what happened.
Creating alternatives in the market, academia, entertainment venues, etc. Sounds good to me. Struggling for control of institutions to use to “nudge” or coerce….not so much.
It may not sound good or feel good, but ultimately the group that wins is the one in control of the institutions. This means we either have to infiltrate and subvert existing institutions or create our own.
If it means getting into a dominant position inside an institution and NOT using it to force people to do or not do things, fine. Go ahead and get in to prevent the institution from being used to coerce.
I am hoping this is what I will see in a limited fashion with the FCC – Pai gets in charge to take power out of the hands of the FCC.
That is one way to do things, and perhaps the least bad way. It is however incredibly difficult to do from a management standpoint. Shelves are filled with volumes dedicated to effecting organizational change. I’m not sure the ideal endgame is merely organizational change, for lack of a better term we might call it organizational suicide. I’m not sure anyone has written a playbook like that and It might be useful, as a thought exercise, for us to consider how it might be accomplished tactically.
Presumably as a junior functionary you could pass yourself off as dedicated to the organizations goals, be lucky in selecting right mentor to rise with through the hierarchy management, and perhaps end up as the ultimate decider. That is probably a 20~30 year task. What then? Successful organizations have a number of self preservation systems. How do we overcome those? My hunch is individuals will not be dedicated to executing a 20-30 year strategy requiring them to adopt organizational principals at odds with their core principles. To borrow a phrase, doing so wouldn’t be their “cup of bullshit.” What acts can be taken at a junior level to undermine and shift the goals of a large organization? Can they be done in such a way as to not provoke an organizational reaction to prevent the damage?
If you are successful at any of this, how do you prevent a successor from undoing your work? Presumably the solutions to this problem will involve legal force.
A supreme court that enforced the 9th and 10th amendments and stopped using the commerce clause to enable federal overreach would probably be a good start.
Or take down the exiting institutions without replacing them.
I feel you Kinnath, I just want to know how we can operationalize that without coming off like we’re shouting “Destroy the Four Olds.” Personally I struggle to find a practical solution that is not cribbing from the same playbook. The people who depend on the institutions and whose identities are tied to them will resist politically at the least, violently at the most.
That’s why I’m hoping things like Kahn university start to take off. I would love for Kahn to start doing some kind of certification program. Pay a nominal fee, pass a test, show competence in a subject, get a certificate.
Getting employers to buy the idea of an alternative accreditation body composed of actual employers might be a good start, assuming we can’t convince them to start doing corporate run schools again.
I fear corporations have realized it’s cheaper to throw out requirements to have hirees be fully trained, and when that fails, jawbone government at various levels to provide that training (the current STEM madness) or trained people (H1B).
In many instances yes, why internalize a cost you don’t have to? There are still some outliers though. The left has done such a thorough job of obliterating the trades that there are decent private trade schools and no real central accreditation aside from guilds. There are even corporate trade schools around still, IIRC General Electric actually had to open a school on its own a few years back just to produce welders with ASME qualifications for nuclear pipe work.
I don’t think it should be too difficult, as this already exists in the IT realm. The value of the certification fluctuates by the company doing the cert and the level of the cert. This blew up in Microsoft’s face a bit back in the 90’s when you had “paper MCSE”‘s going through a week long boot camp, without having any real understanding of the tech, and the market adjusted. There’s hope that some companies are going this way, with Ernst and Young announcing they will no longer require college degrees.
I’d missed that in my feeds! Offhand you know of anyone who has followed suit since or is it localized to their industry? Either way, a positive sign.
The scary thing was that the EY news just came through my feeds, even though the story is from 2015. I’m in IT, so for a long time the job requirements have had: “X degree or equivalent work experience” on them.
Honestly one of the few left. Its also my goto example when arguing with the “virtues of college / public schools / credentials” set. I just point ’em to my friends who dropped out or got a GED, have no debt, and still make six figures working for AmEx, GoDaddy, etc. because they learned on their own time how to code or handle InfoSec/IA.
I think there are two notable impediments to breaking the current reliance on college degrees:
1. Occupational licensing laws that mandate a college degree for certain trades. Sure, in complex trades like medicine and nuclear engineering, employers are probably going to ask for college degrees forever – law or no law – but if we could give the ax to occupational licensing, we could open up job opportunities in fields like cosmetology, finance, personal counseling, etc.
2. The history of court cases that decreed employment skills testing to be racist based on the screwy “disparate impact” notion. Freedom of association would solve this in one fell swoop, although we might have to settle for some bill merely stating that make employers immune from lawsuits based on their skills testing.
nice one.
I agree, it’s a nice article.
I do confess a bit of confusion. In this article is a call to action that has already been heeded by many. You and I discussed it yesterday, even if that wasn’t what you realized we were discussing.
No. As trshmnstr pointed out at the end of that conversation, you and i were apparently talking entirely across purposes.
You were extolling the “idea” of memes* as a transformational social-device; i was criticizing their lack of significance in a particular, specific example
(*i also think you misuse/misunderstand the term, taking Dawkin’s very-broad notion of “Ideas as memetic units” and then acting as tho ‘cartoon-frogs’ slung around in narrow corners of the internet among politically-insignificant populations of people are the shining and sole example of what Dawkins meant)
One thing memes are good at is ridicule. I’ve said before that social justice will lose its cultural appeal the more we ridicule it by emphasizing its asinine conclusions. It can be something as simple as a joke in conversation that I’ve heard:
Person 1: Where did he go?
Person 2: Did you just ASSUME my gender?
Younger generations will see this and be averse to becoming the target of ridicule, and social justice will fade away into academic obscurity yet again.
I agree with that.
I think something Milo said is very much underappreciated (and which I think Reason sort of obliquely tried to touch on earlier, tho i cant remember exactly where)….
….which is that “being conservative is the most counter-cultural thing you can do right now”
I think that’s right. The only problem there is that the people (re)defining what “conservative” means are mostly complete douchebags.
Damn skippy they are! And they should be.
Have you not noticed that the left doesn’t give a fuck if anyone calls them douchebags in the open?
Refusing to use ready weapons that are effective is pointless. It is self-defeating. It is weak. It is what losers do and, as much as we hate to have to stomach this idea: we have been losers. We suck up to whoever is in power and play lap-dog for the dethroned in a weak power play in the hopes that anyone will give us the scantest positive attention for our efforts.
You may as well stand and deliver a rousing, articulate speech to the tank battalion of leftist cultural engagement as it rolls right over you.
That’s a very unconvincing argument that “Therefore being douchebags will be a roaring success”
As is universally the fate of those who take Twinkies to a gunfight.
Case in point: the country just elected one to the highest office.
I think you’re confusing “despite” and “because of”
Best way to get the kids to do something is to tell them how bad it is.
yep.
the way you get them to keep doing it is to build a community around it.
It was apparent that he missed the post from a week back that you and I were discussing.
If memes are a unit of culture, using memes as weapons is waging culture war. There are many. I have said this repeatedly. This is nothing less than adopting the left’s strategy and turning it to our own use.
Diatribes do not convert people alone. We need more tools than telling people to read Bastiat so they’ll understand us. We need a literary hook to bring them in first, and memes are those.
There is a dearth of strictly libertarian music, art, film, poetry, and so on. The left gets interested in war, they make anti-war songs to rile up the base against the right. They make posters and share them obsessively. They make art specifically for political reasons. The right does practically nothing in kind and neither do libertarians. We argue in books, newspapers, magazines, radio, and Television that the left won’t read. Kids don’t engage with any of that shit at all. We lose whole generations to the left because the left subverts culture in every way that is easy to engage with.
Memes are not image macros. Image macros are one form of memes.
Paul Graham has called this idea the “Fluff Principle.”
In reality, he’s just pointing out that if humans are making choices of what to share and what gets ranked higher and gains popularity faster in social media, the closer to a meme you get, the greater the impact and reach. The left has been much better than us at this for a long time, but we’ve begun fighting back. We need to continue to do this. We must win the culture war, and already Generation Z is engaging with us.
That wasn’t a discussion either; that was you writing a long disquisition on the nature “internet racism” some time after i’d made a passing reference to it.
(and which i didn’t even notice until the following day)
We had a bit more discussion of it later on because a bunch missed it. It’s sort of dragged out over the course of days. From my perspective, it’s a discussion because I’ve been involved in it even dating back to TSTSNBN. If you’d prefer it to be called a disquisition instead, fine, I’ll concede that if it makes you happy.
You don’t like my opinions on this matter. Fine, I can respect that. What I don’t understand is the vibe of hostility I’m getting here. I’m trying to present an overall picture, a tapestry of ideas that have been wound through several discussion threads (some of which have been missed), because it’s a lot to discuss.
This last response to me really is not a part of a conversation. Look at it dispassionately and isolated. It’s an attack. A discussion involves questioning and expounding ideas. I don’t like this, but I do like you, and I’d rather not have a disagreement come between us.
turn your vibe-meter off entirely. When i discuss matters of substance i tend to be pretty dry and harsh. Its nothing personal.
Gilmore likes his political discussions like he likes his women.
And, FWIW, i agree with you when you make your broader case ; but your broader case is actually no different than Trshmsters
the point of disagreement is about the relative significance of “people slinging pepe-memes on social media /pretending to be racists on Youtube” etc. the “Meme-war” stuff you were suggesting ‘mattered’ so much.
…. oh, god no. That means someone’s going to start crying and blaming me for marginalizing them.
I’m well aware of it. The rest of this has been missing a forest by focusing on individual trees.
Rawr!
I wish I could understand this conversation. It’s about the usefulness of trolling or drawing logos?
We’d like some logo drawings, please!
Your case amounts to “we need to do something. This is something. therefore we need to do this”
My only comment re: your extolling the wonders of Pepe-memes was that they really only serve to convince like-minded people like yourselves that you’re all on the same team. they don’t actually ‘change’ anyone else the way you imagine they do.
You make passing references to Generation Z , as though you are certain that the side-effect of your activities will have some tangible and predictable results 20 years from now. I think that’s a bit naive and silly; kids are influence by bazillions of things and i doubt the flapping-butterfly-wings of Harambe+Pepe are going to guarantee any Future Tornado of ‘libertarian skepticism’.
You cited ‘pepe’ as being significant of a growing distrust in media among young people. My point was that there were thousands of other more-significant forces causing that same distrust. Having all the major media outlets call the election entirely wrong, was one example. But there are many.
My point was that your concept of a meme-war is limited to a small population within an already small-corner of the internet social-media.
You seem to think this amounts to some campaign of “Culture Change”, when all it really amounts to is small tribal skirmishing on the fringes of civilization. You have confidence it will have wider effects ‘sometime down the road’. My own experience suggests that you’re pretending that Hackey Sacking is somehow going to unseat Pro-Football, because *you’ve got the ear of the youth, maaaan”.
*sigh* Forget about Pepe. That shit is just an example.
I’m talking about total memetic war, by any and all means possible. Please stop trying to distort that message. It’s distracting. It’s a red herring. You’re smarter than this.
You minimize my argument, demean me personally, distract with strawmen of what I’ve actually said. What is the purpose of doing any of that? Your disagreement (and clear misapprehension of the greater points I’m trying to make) is already stated.
I don’t think there has been a single point here where I’ve treated you disrespectfully. If you feel that I have, I apologize, for that was never my intent.
Let me start by saying I agree with the need for a weaponized narrative and continued campaign for such. Practically, how do we overcome the limitation – broadly speaking – that libertarians aren’t artists and artists aren’t libertarian?
Im not ‘minimizing’ your argument. I’m taking a very specific example and unpacking claims made about the efficacy of the type of activity you had earlier praised.
I’m not demeaning you personally (it isn’t my intent). I don’t even know what you think is doing that.
If i ignore (not ‘misapprehend’) the attempt to broaden the claim and say, “well, its all really just part of a larger effort”…. its because when you get super-broad and evade examples, there’s nothing to really discuss, is there?
i.e. Of course there’s a constant battle of ideas between political tribes. and that conflict takes myriad forms. Of which ‘social-media meme-slinging campaigns’ are just one
My point was only ever about that very last bit = the actual broader significance of people engaging in meme-warfare on social media. which i think is “‘very little at best, and what little is ephemeral”
if Pepe is “just an example”… do you have a better one?
We don’t necessarily need it. We’ve lost for so long that we can’t attract what we need.
I think what we do need is anything that attracts youth. That is where we attract what we need to win. Youth have copious free time. They are trying to win approval, and we can turn that into civic engagement.
Engage in verbal judo. Any time you are insulted, try to find a way to flip that back on them. Libertarians are childish and naive? Guess that’s why we need mommy government to take care of us as adults, oh, wait that’s the authoritarian position, not ours.
Piss them off and rabble rouse. Guerrilla cultural engagement. If your enemy is bigger and stronger than you, don’t engage him on an even field of battle. Force multiply everything that works, discard that which doesn’t. Grab every cultural weapon you can, even if it looks childish, even if it looks mean-spirited, even if you think it makes you look dumb or unsophisticated. Getting beaten to death with a club leaves you just as dead as getting hit with pinpoint precision by a high-tech railgun.
And, expanding on “force multiplication”, I mean specifically to engage wherever you’ve got a better chance to increase the virulence of your ideas. Yes, that means engaging SJWs and other annoying proggies in enemy territory.
Twitter is annoying as fuck. It is full of retarded virtue signalers. But it’s also popular with young people, and the whole platform is designed around creating viral engagement. That’s literally the only thing it is good at, which is why there are so many fucking politicians, media, and celebrities there. It’s a jungle, and the place is practically perfect for the kind of guerrilla cultural engagement I’m referring to. You can hit with speed and reach that is otherwise out of your reach. And the more Twitter tightens the censorship, the more we win. It martyrs popular contributors. It catches up friends and foes of their political views alike with soft bans and hard. It has the stink of the sort that kids are already annoyed with (authority telling you what you can and cannot say).
That all sounds very nice but its not very specific
It doesn’t really address my point about how Social Media really only affects tiny-slices of the population, and where it does, its mostly ephemeral and disposable.
I honestly don’t see how your extolling ‘verbal judo’ (which is just a content-less tactic) as a method really does much to spread ideas about ‘improving people’s confidence in self-organizing systems’ (e.g. free markets, etc)
It doesn’t, and it doesn’t need to!
Does an anti-war song specifically target the opposition? Most of them don’t name their adversary. The whole point is agitation. “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” as the saying goes. Confirmation bias isn’t a perfect, unassailable bunker.
There are a lot of the afflicted comfortable right now. That’s not enough. Increase it. Have you lost “friends” on Facebook (assuming you use it, I don’t) over something stupid politically? If you genuinely like them, fine. Go piss off their friends downstream, the ones you have no connection to and plausible deniability for ever messing with, so those people start to agitate them regularly. Use the anonymity of the Internet. Don’t waste a lot of time with them. Just hit and run and make them feel like they’re assaulted from many sides.
Every one of them who disconnects from the network, isolates themselves into a bubble with no dissenting voices, who cries loudly and publicly from the scantest prick of their sensibilities helps radicalize moderates against them. It disrupts the social fabric, and people cut free of it all start looking around for better options.
What you describe sounds mostly like highfalutin rationalization for social-media behavior the vast majority of people have absolutely no interest in
Heh, in one of those examples I gave (Twitter), there’s a huge concentration of exactly every type of bastard we despise: Government, media, celebrities. And there’s a huge concentration of kids watching and engaging too.
Being the cool, counter-cultural asshole who delivers the coup-de-grace to the heroes of the left, sending them off into spluttering, retarded Twitter tirades that then get covered by the “real” media is force multiplication. Yeah, it’s childish, but it’s also winning.
What do you propose to do instead? Everything else we’ve tried hasn’t been working. Wanna write another John Galt speech that puts Gen Z to sleep? Knock yourself out. I’ll write here, but I’ll piss people off out there too. My tactics are flexible.
I think one of the hardest pills to swallow with social media engagement is the ephemeral nature of it. You can’t establish any momentum, and once you do, people have moved on to the next one. I don’t know hardly anybody who has an active twitter account anymore. People have moved on from snapchat in droves. Facebook has been a wasteland for years. When people view youth engagement through the narrow lens of memes on twitter or trolling on 4chan, it misses the larger point, which is that continued engagement on social media and other internet fora is required if we are to have any hope of influencing the next generations.
Have better policies?
And, I should note, this argument alone may well claw its way in to some brains. There are a lot of very smart people here. If I’ve managed to radicalize any of them to attack the system with culture, my time was well spent in furthering it. What better group of people to give very little concrete direction to and rather metastasize the kernels of some basic ideas? Centralized command and control? That’s what the left is mobilizing, and against what? A pissed off rabble who seem to have no specific aims. Do I need to lay it out for clever people how to be grit in the machine that brings the thing to a halt? Sabotage the culture in your own way.
All this may irritate you. But you may carry it with you and think about it later on. Did you not suspect that I’m using everything I mentioned right even as we speak, right here, right now? Some of us are way too comfortable with the losing tactics we’ve always pursued. I came here today to afflict some of you. I don’t have to win them all. 😉
Ain’t that more or less what Milo said in his book? You’re arguing to the observes, they’re the real target and not the SJW currently engaged.
ok there Derrida jr.
Here’s a link to the Cato institute then. Could link you to Mises or some other think tank with plenty of good ideas and philosophical sophistication for policy formulation.
Zzzz. I’m already asleep. If I were a teenager I’d be comatose.
I dunno, I didn’t read it. I came to this conclusion long before I even paid any attention to his existence.
More importantly, though, probably nobody else here read it either. TSTSNBN doesn’t want you to. The left especially doesn’t. Read a book? Too much work, man. Back to books and periodicals and other yawners like we already have tried for far too long. Those things need to exist, no doubt, and they’ll all still be there while some of us are off waging a different kind of intellectual warfare.
Those things need to exist, no doubt, and they’ll all still be there while some of us are off waging a different kind of intellectual warfare.
Here’s my main criticism. I think there’s a huge danger in egging on a subculture that is primarily a broad based cynicism and consists of elementary level refutations of ideologies based on mockery. It threatens to turn back and bite the “good guys.” When you can make mocking memes and troll accounts of any ideology, then nothing separates the truth from falsehood, which plays right into the postmodern left’s hands.
What things? Is this some kind of new coded language that only the young understand, like that jizzle for shizzle thing?
As well you should be. You’re the one who thinks trolling w/ teenagers is the uber-sophisticated political act.
My only point was that has nothing to do with actually making an argument in favor of anything.
Acting as though “if you simply discredit the SJW’s on social media”… why, magical wonderful things will happen!” … seems naive.
It’s their weapon. If it can work for them, it can work for us.
We are surrounded by authoritarians, besieged by them in fact. Nothing else we’ve tried has gained us ground. Who is there left on our side to get bitten back? There are far more enemies than there are friends.
I’d love for us to have the momentum and numbers to take back education. Betsy DeVos will be there to try a top-down approach, but I don’t have to tell you guys how viciously the left is going to resist that (and probably succeed). We simply can’t fight bottom-up.
But we can be in the kids’ smart phones. They’ve pretty much all got them now. They’re reachable via culture.
If the left weren’t so damned scared that this will be successful, they wouldn’t be turning the screws of censorship on all of social media. They wouldn’t need to. They were fine before, and now they’re not because now they’re not assured of winning, of dominance of the narrative, of control of mind-share.
If it can work for them, it can work for us.
Is it working for them? My impression is that most people are turned off by the SJW idiocy on social media.
No, I’m talking there about counter-culturalism, the left’s bread and butter (until now). Being the cool guy who assails the system they hate too. Is it cheesy? Yeah, but if it didn’t work then why are there so many attracted to Marx’s ideas? I want to stoke a fiercely libertarian Gen Z who is so sick of SJWs by the time they get to college that they are as opposed to them as we are.
As an impartial observer of the dialog between Gilmore and Zero Sum Game, I have to point out how impressed I am. I know I come as gushing but damn, this is a great place; at that other place a conversation like that would have (I think) either devolved into vitriolic shit-slinging or be unreadable because of troll participation (or maybe both). Carry on lads; I’m enjoying and learning from it.
With Tulpa sealioning or John gaslighting the entire time.
Shit…thanks, commodious…you just ruined my cunning gaslighting plan.
*stomps off in a huff*
I’m not sure queef gas is flammable, Swiss.
Oh, you said cunning. Carry on.
I’m not sure queef gas is flammable, Swiss.
I swear we’ve had this discussion before. Groovus came along and said something about fisting the vagino-anus, resulting in methane queefs.
Also, that should read as “come off as gushing”. “Come as gushing” brings to mind a different image entirely and is far more appropriate for a link from beloved HM (and the occasional Sugarfree story).
Careful, ‘bot… HM might invoke the Cummybot!
Oh please no! I saw the 1st few seconds of that video and it disturbed for a week or so.
l0b0t,
And thanks for chiming in, btw. It’s a mantra of mine to remind myself at all times that discussions such as this tend to have far more observers than participants and to sometimes point it out to make others acutely conscious of the fact.
For those who like to lurk, we salute you.
Exactly my point. I don’t know why people are so concerned about “Winning” when the contest is so stupid, and participated in by so few
It all seems to just take for granted that somehow social-media is *vitally important*, when the point i keep making is that its really not.
Social media is “vitally important” because it’s the biggest battlefield left to be contested. If we really wanted to ensure that the next generation was more libertarian, we’d take over the school systems and the entertainment media. Unfortunately, those are way out of our grasp. Instead, we’re fighting over the scraps: social media.
^^This^^
fine – but as i said above, ZSG’s self-congratulation on “trolling as a political act” (roughly summarized) doesn’t actually add up to actually doing anything for ‘libertarians’. its just a form of systematically discrediting someone elses posturing.
Which, of course, they’ll just do right back at you. creating increasingly tribal cohorts engaged in perpetual skirmishes.
oh wait i just described all social media.
It’s the weapon we keep discarding because… actually, why did we discard it? Oh, yes, decorum. Playing nice with the fucking enemy.
Have we not noticed how much both old and new media covers stupidity going on in social media now? Strike a match and burn some proggies out, and they’ll spread it virally to attack you back, and your side will spread the shit that worked best at getting the attention.
As legacy media dies, what is it really being replaced with? Where are all the left’s culture warriors? Mock them. Make them respond with buffoonery. Someone’s got a camera, a microphone, a notebook. Live in their heads. Be the bogeyman in their closet or under their beds.
Where are all the left’s culture warriors?
In truth? Sitting in tenured positions at elite universities, in positions at influential non-profits, in the leadership of trade unions, in the leadership of California companies, etc. That’s where the bullshit that will be churned out in 2 years to the useful idiots is being created now.
I’m not convinced that engaging the useful idiots does anything more than provide them a larger platform than they already have.
“We” would probably actually be better off with the assurance that no group in particular had control over those things, but I don’t know that there have ever existed such institutions not driven by ideologues of some sort.
Well, then we might as well pack it in. We’re not getting those things back anytime soon. They’ve got a lock on them, and they’ve formed ranks to protect what they see as theirs.
You’ve quoted it yourself. You’ve said you agreed with it. If politics is downstream from culture, then take the culture and the politics will follow. They can sit in their ivory towers, but if we’re already in the heads of youth before they get there, it’s going to be harder to drill the libertarian streak out of them. And a lot of our politics are socially liberal anyway, so they can’t even win them over with appeals to that, especially if all their SJW nonsense already chaps the students’ asses because they grew up dealing with those nannying, uptight assholes, telling them what they can’t say, what they can’t think, who they can’t talk to, who they must punch.
If the choices for advancing my views are violence and cultural subversion, I choose cultural subversion.
The former attacks my core principles. The latter is merely distasteful. The third, unstated option (doing nothing at all) is unacceptable.
“It would be an easy mantra for us to say “legislate civil rights, not social rights,” but the phrase has no meaning to a modern audience.”
I think it does have a meaning, though not necessarily a good one.
From our friends at the United Nations:
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – This contains a lot of valuable rights, but then there’s this joker (which fortunately the U.S.A. exempted itself from when ratifying):
“Article 20
“1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.
“2. Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.”
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights – Trigger warning: Libertarians won’t like it.
Let me guess: every country signed it and every country ignores it.
I sure as hell dont like it. It is gibberish. All they have done is put a bunch of platitudes in a bucket and stir it up. In the end we just have the constitution of the USSR made more vague and open to interpretation. It is a recipe for totalitarianism.
I like my laws like I like my cancerous growths, small, benign, and easily removable.
As far as I know, the Covenant was signed by the US but was never ratified by the Senate?
Social and Cultural rights treaty – signed by Pres Carter, never ratified by Senate
Political and Civil Rights – Duly ratified by President and Senate, with reservations (like respecting the 1st Amendment, see above)
There is no such fucking thing as society. Society is an illusion (delusion) that appears when you step so far back you can no longer discern the living, breathing individuals that walk the planet.
Exactly. It’s one of those words like “diversity”…many use it, no one can define it.
So there is a wide variety of meanings for it?
Society: an ancient and effective con that compels otherwise rational people to act against their self interest, resulting in enslavement, misery and progressivism.
We must free the studies of history, economics, and philosophy from the shackles of postmodern leftism by better promoting libertarian academicians.
But none of them live up to my exacting expectations. You can’t be a true libertarian unless you hew to my every expectation, and even then I can’t be sure you’re not just telling me what I want to hear.
I must say, it is pretty obvious that no one writing here has been to journalism school.
The articles are better than I find anywhere else.
Very good trshmnstr.
more betterer
Nice article.
I struggle with this, as many libertarians do. I wish to be left alone by the state. I want the state to have as little impact on my life as possible. I dislike and mistrust the state. It would be awfully hypocritical of me to try and become an agent of the state, no matter how pure my intentions.
“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions”
– GK Chesterton
rights or freedoms given to the people by the First Amendment to the Constitution, by common law, or legislation
Wrong.
Rights are not created or granted by the State. The State can, and does, usurp and destroy rights as it obtains the opportunity.
Should say “recognized or acknowledged as belonging to all people…”
And here we see a good example of how the cultural struggle becomes a legal struggle:
When asked “if a church community has a church hall that they rent to couples who want to have that wedding reception in that hall … should that church hall and church community be forced to rent that to someone who wants to use that building for something that’s against that church community’s belief system,” an Equality Ohio spokeswoman said, “Sure, I would say that if that space is open and generally available to the public for a fee, yes that should be available to everyone.”
Ohio LGBT Group Announces Plans to Target Churches for Homosexual Weddings
I agree. Right now, libertarians too often look like stone age tribesmen faced with a modern army. If we don’t take up arms sufficient to defeat our enemies, we will lose.
Who, exactly, defines what “civil rights norms” are? The government? Then the bill shouldn’t be a problem. “The people”? What people? Besides, we don’t live in a pure democracy.
It’s like Through the Looking Glass. Words and phrases mean what the user says they mean.
“Sorry, we only rent the church hall to church members.”
What you have given there RC is a pretty transparent example of how the left is out to destroy social values. There is nothing in that effort for the LGBTs to win. There are suitable spaces available to them now. They won’t gain anything. They are attacking churches with the intent of destroying them and their efforts in the field of youth sports are for the same purpose. Both of those institutions are sources of traditional values and self-reliance and the inherent worth of individuals is no small part of those values.
In a word they are engaging in demoralization.
Yesterday someone pointed out that the current babbling of the SJWs is indistinguishable from the 60’s hippies drivel which is indistinguishable from the 20’s and 30’s Soviet propaganda which is indistinguishable from 19th century radicals ranting. Leftists are the same always and everywhere. Same tactics, same rhetoric, same goal. Their stated goal is to destroy western civilization. Blow all the smoke away and it really is just that simple and diabolical.
Indeed they are. Whether they realize it or not, they are trying to destroy civil society, so that the Total State rules all, without rival. What frightens them about Trump is that he gives them a glimpse of the Iron Law coming back to bite them:
Me today, you tomorrow.
They have spent generations building a machine to subject every corner of society to government control, and now they see somebody they loathe climbing into the driver’s seat. They know how powerful and pervasive their machine is, and they fear nothing more than having it escape their control.
RC, do you plan on rehashing the Iron Laws in a piece here at the GLB?
They have ascended to the Resources/FAQ page. *cue choir of angels*
In the meantime, they’re in the site FAQ, in the top menu.
The cause and effect is flipped. Our culture has created these politicians.
Exactly. I have heard, with my own ears, people say, effectively, “Well, I don’t mind surrendering some of my freedom, as long as *that guy* is prevented from doing as he wishes” too many times to pretend there is some sort of libertarian groundswell building. Even in the so called “free-er” regions of the country.
I am not optimistic.
Should say “recognized or acknowledged as belonging to all people…”
That was me quoting and responding to the dictionary definition, not nitpicking trshmnster’s words.
I hear people relay stories all the time (both on here and in real life) about how some prog went off and made a fool of themselves in public or around their friends, and the story invariably ends with “and I just sat there thinking about how absolutely wrong they were.”
Those stories, in my telling, generally end with, “and nobody even laughed out loud. WTF?”
I think laughter is the best, most subversive and irreverent force we have. This is why the progressive left and the SJW mob try so hard to squelch it.
I hate to bust up the kumbya, but I’m not sure that being seen as disruptive assholes is going to be the positive force for liberty that we would like it to be. If logic and an Aspberger’s level disregard for social norms were going to drive liberty, this group would be personally responsible for the freeing of America and quite possibly Canada. Hate society or collectivization all you want, but getting in people’s faces isn’t working. There aren’t enough of us. Its like crying out, “People who hate people! Unite!”
“I’m not sure that being seen as disruptive assholes is going to be the positive force for liberty that we would like it to be.”
Why not? Dialing it up to 11 seems to be working for the Democrats.
*looks at red/blue map*
Or not.
“People who hate people! Unite!” Did you just concoct that or is it another one of those things everyone knows about but me? Either way I will be using it.
Bill Hicks used to do bit about it. It has always resonated with me.
So, another one of those things everyone has heard but me. Well, now I have. Thank you.
Awwww, I find that a rather inspiring rallying cry.
I’m not sure that being seen as disruptive assholes is going to be the positive force for liberty that we would like it to be
It won’t be. But, you don’t have to be a disruptive asshole to be a cultural player.
Compare and contrast pictures and accounts of the civil rights marches of the ’50s and ’60s, with the anti-Trump riots/protests.
I’m not sure that being seen as disruptive assholes is going to be the positive force for liberty that we would like it to be.
You don’t have to be an asshole to be disruptive (I fucking hate the way “disruptive” is used these days). Some of the simplest things can completely derail a garden variety prog without stepping even close to the line of decorum. A simple “meh” stabs at an activist’s heart harder than a thousand refutations.
I over use meh. But it means so much!
But it means so much!
meh
Meh, agreed.
*gaze, narrowed, one each*
/DoD gaze
My first *narrowed gaze*. I knew when I woke up this morning that today was going to be a good day.
In the months leading up to the first Reagan/Mondale debate, the press spent hours talking about how Mondale would make a major campaign issue of Reagan’s advancing age.
During the introductory remarks at the first debate, Reagan joked “I promise not to make a campaign issue out of my opponents youth and inexperience”. The audience broke out in laughter and thunderous applause.
Mondale said not one thing about Reagan’s age the entire election.
The most important thing libertarians can do is expose the massive joke that is modern progressive philosophy. This does not require being an asshole.
But, can I be an asshole anyway?
Can you choose not to be?
You know who else used German words and wanted to sculpt society…
Karl Marx?
Ariana Huffington?
Merkel?
Dr. Strangelove?
Arnold Schwarzenegger – duh.
Joke’s on you!
Arnold speaks Austrian, not German.
Austrian is a Language
G’day mayte.
+ 1 drop bear
Cartman’s mom?
Max Ernst?
Rammstein?
Rand Paul is trying to get a copy of a new healthcare bill.
I am afraid they are going to take what he gave them and turn it into Obumblecarelite.
Sitting in the computer lab between classes. Some jackass here is sneezing time and again and making no effort to stifle himself. Full-throated open-mouthed cartoonish honking sneezes right into his hand. Is it violating the NAP if I pelt his face with a roll of toilet paper?
That deserves a throat punch.
Pretty clear self defense.
Do it.
As penance, I’ll relate a story from high school. One day I was napping in class, as you do. Well, I woke myself up needing to sneeze. I tended to accumulate freakish quantities of snot, all of which would propel out into whatever receptacle I had handy. We’re talking two or three tablespoons of neon green nostril gum. Well, having just woken up the only receptacle I had handy was my hand. And the sneeze was so sudden and so forceful that I lost control of my anus and farted loudly. I was left sitting in a stink cloud of my own making, surrounded by stunned and disgusted classmates, with a fistful of runny snot. Which I shoved in my pocket.
You must have been irresistible to the girls.
Fling away!
Name that author for $200…
Ezra Klein?
DAAAALLMIAAAAA
It’s funny. I get the urge to head back over and take a peak every once in a while only to come away happy that the Glibertarian moment arrived.
Its like quitting smoking in reverse. I used to just chew on my nicotine gum, but now I get stogies from the Glibertarian Cigar Shop. Why would I go back to nicotine gum?
I only go there for the articles now, ironically.
Me too. Its a much healthier form of engagement.
The same “rule of law” argument that was made to forcibly return fugitive slaves to bondage in the 19th century is now being made to
Force churches to perform gay weddings?
Arrest pot smokers?
Close small businesses who don’t have handicap bathrooms?
I mean, seriously, you could do this all day.
pull people over for 41 in a 40? (no joke, I framed my written warning for it)
FineTax people for not having insurance?force bars to close at 2?
Keep that guy on the woman’s wrestling team?
Yes, I hate “rule of law” arguments. I really hate when people say shit like “libertarians highly value the rule of law.” Ok, they mean that the law should be applied equally under all circumstances, but I don’t want bad laws being applied equally under all circumstances. I want them applied as seldom as possible. “But people will fight back if it’s enforced to the hilt.” Maybe, but they won’t win and in the meantime peaceful people are being harmed.
I usually take that as an opportunity to explain the difference between what I mean by ‘the law’ and what they mean by ‘the law.’
Edvard Beneš?
‘Subtlety’ and ‘nuance’ don’t seem to be words that exist in Dalmia’s head. As much as I enjoy the “fuck off, slaver” catchphrase, I don’t expect it to convince anybody of anything, it’s an insult. Dalmia just called everyone who wants to enforce immigration law slavers, and seems to actually think that’s a convincing argument.
Dalmia is just stupid. Or dishonest. And, really, who cares which? She is employing a logical fallacy (I think its the excluded middle):
X is Y (Returning slaves to their masters was “rule of law”)
A is Y (Deporting immigrants is “rule of law”)
Therefore, A is X. (Deporting immigrants is returning slaves to their masters)
See also, Dogs are animals, cats are animals, therefore dogs are cats.
Dalmia exists in her own little world where she and those who agree with her are the only morally correct actors. It’s why she’s so willing to justify political violence. You only do that when you claim total moral superiority over your opponents.
Nothing like minimizing the horrors of slavery while also likening anyone who isn’t pro-open borders to Simon Legree. That is sure to change people’s minds.
That’s what used to drive me nuts about “That Other Site’s” immigration coverage – if one wasn’t open borders then you were a xenophobic racist.
I mean if you want to change people’s minds, lay out some arguments and see where it leads the readers.
It’s like walking into a bar in a small town and saying: “You’re all a bunch of hillbillies. And by the way, I would like to order some fried chicken.”
Rare for this place, I lean towards being an open borders guy. If someone’s coming here to work, and we can check them out, they should be able to come in. Immigration quotas and the like are silly.
But this shit don’t help.
(and I realize that an open borders society won’t work if it’s also a welfare society)
I’m not fully opposed to open borders, but I don’t see the case for immigration restrictions being per se immoral. I generally avoid immigration topics because I don’t think either side of the issue is right.
It’s like you are reading my mind.
Huh, it’s almost a very complex issue.
^^^
I don’t think that’s so rare. I’d be willing to go out on a limb and say that the majority of the posters here are all for opening up immigration rules to make it much simpler to enter the country. While, at the same time, not wanting to reward those who broke the law at the expense of those who have been slowly going through the legal process.
For me, I’d be happy with allowing anyone in if they have no violent felonies (and would be willing to negotiate a time frame, ex: no violent felonies in the past five years), no current warrants, and if they’re coming from an area with an outbreak of an infectious disease then a quarantine period. In exchange, you don’t vote, you qualify for no government benefits, and you still have to pay taxes. Pass that simple test, agree to the rules, here’s your green card, now go get a job.
BUT MUH JERBS!!
I tend to favour a simplification of the immigration process (and a standardization of the immigration process across borders, i.e. to get into Mexico from the United States should be exactly the same as getting from Mexico to the U.S.), but I recognize that if you have a welfare state you basically require a points system in order to be efficient. Unlike the Other Site, I do want immigration policy enforced and I tend to view a failure to deport illegal immigrants to be actively damaging to Mexico.
trshmnstr,
I love you. Spectacular, well thought out, and spot on read!
Thanks for the lesson trsh.
You mention the original formulation of the 14th Amendment, as well as organizing. What is your take on the current Convention of States movement afoot?
I’m skeptical. I tend to lump it in with the term limits movement in my mind. A good idea until you think about it for more than 5 minutes.
Here’s my biggest concern: What happens when the left is ascendant again? If we pop the cork on an Art 5 convention, we’ve unleashed a tool that is able to be wielded by people who are known to abuse the Constitution for their statist gains. Do we really want to get into a pissing match with the left over introducing seemingly innocuous Constitutional amendments only to have them all interpreted by progressive courts? IMO, no amount of amendment to the Constitution is going to fix our broken judiciary.
As a quick broadening of scope, the problem isn’t that the judiciary is using Constitutional loopholes that need to be fixed. The problem is that rule of law is a farce, and protection of liberty needs to be more substantive than a piece of paper.
I have heard the argument about the run away convention and the progressives running with it. I’m not sure I give it much credence given the difficulties of ratification, but the problem isn’t that the judiciary is using Constitutional loopholes that need to be fixed. The problem is that rule of law is a farce, and protection of liberty needs to be more substantive than a piece of paper. is something I have not really considered. Good point.
No matter what was done, nothing has stopped them from ignoring what the constitution says for the past 100 years.
OT: We have to pass the Obamacare Repeal to find out what’s in it
How absurd. And of course all those Republicans ceaselessly made fun of Democrats for doing the same thing and Democrats called them morons at the time. They were all correct, of course.
Great article. It’s easy as a libertarian to think “of course those students have a right to shut down speech of someone. Its a private university.” Or whatever. Read any Robby article and you’ll see what I mean. On the other hand, the lack of respect for and willingness to hear different ideas bothers me because I know that eventually these are the attitudes that are going to go into legislation.
Excellent article, very much enjoyed it. It is really mostly about culture and libertarians and those who value individual freedom can certainly help by trying to push ideas not just in an intellectual sense but in a fun and entertaining sense. We need more art, music, film, tv, books, websites, memes, porn, and whatnot that puts forward the joy and pain of liberty. This website is a great example of that. More please…
Not a bad article, but let’s get real:
The only time when anything remotely libertarian as an ideology was culturally ascendant was 18th-19th century Europe and US. You want to see classically liberal art that had an impact on the masses? You’re gonna have to go the Louvre. The social and political changes of that place and time were very conducive to making classical liberalism popular; after that high water mark the places most likely to adopt classical liberalism are, quite obviously, structurally divergent from the dominant political and social models (e.g., Switzerland).
Structural and institutional changes were the important factors in entrenching progressivism — you pretty much made that case with your series on public schooling as an institution. So far, classical liberalism has been most effective in republics with the franchise limited to property holders; it hasn’t attracted the attention of the very rich and powerful, or the desperately poor in large numbers almost anywhere. “We need more Breitbart and Joe Rogan” is fine, but if we really want change we’re better off finding emergent institutions that suit our politics and co-opting them (just as you pointed out happened in the marriage of progressives and public schools). Waging an all-out Kulturkampf is a waste of time, when we are not at all politically or socially dominant. It would be like the Jews of Germany responding to anti-Semitism with a full-court press battle against the dominant culture: nice in theory, but can’t be done.