Posts matching tags 'libertarianism'
2008/2/13
Libertarian Troll Bingo; print it out and cross it off the next time Randroids invade your favourite discussion site:
(via 
reddragdiva) ¶ [no comments]
2004/2/7
According to the Political Compass (you know, the are-you-a-good-Libertarian-or-an-evil-fascist/stalinist test), virtually all Presidential candidates are right-wing authoritarians; or at least all the ones remotely likely to get elected. Bush is, of course, the most extreme in both right-wing and authoritarian dimensions, though current Democratic frontrunner John Kerry is shown as being almost near the centre; i.e., only a tiny bit right-wing and authoritarian. Oddly enough, the most libertarian candidate is Al Sharpton (isn't he meant to be some kind of extremist black-nationalist, and/or funded by the Republicans as a spoiler?).
2003/10/27
20,000 Libertarians to move to New Hampshire, vote as a bloc, create anarchocapitalist utopia, where Man can smoke dope, fire guns and be free of the depredations of evil collectivist parasites. (via bOING bOING)
Although Jackie Casey had voted for Wyoming, she just moved from Portland, Ore., to Merrimack, between Nashua and Manchester, renting a basement apartment with her cat, Soopa Doopa Hoopa, and her two 9-millimeter handguns. (She wants a machine gun "or at least a rifle" for Christmas.) She has already hung one wall and her bathroom with framed posters of Frank Zappa, who was a libertarian himself.
Dr. Sorens wrote that "within about 10 years after our move, we should have people in the state legislature and we should have entrenched political control of several towns and counties." He added that "once we have control of the county sheriffs' offices, we can order federal law enforcement agents out, or exercise strict supervision of their activities," and "once we have obtained some success in the state legislature, we can start working on the governor's race."
(Why does the name "Clearwater, FL" come to mind at this point?)
Libertarianism, of the American Ayn Rand-influenced Propertarian bent, is weird; in particular, the part about putting property rights above all other concerns. I half suspect that, had Libertarianism as we know it existed during the American Civil War, most Libertarians would have sided with the slave-owners, whose sacred and inalienable property rights were being threatened by the evil statist Abraham Lincoln (the "American Lenin", as some Libertarians call him).
2003/8/6
What happened to the Extropians, those space-bound, cryogenics-obsessed children of Ayn Rand and the WELL, after the WIRED Long Boom came crashing down? Well, they've swallowed their anti-statist convictions and mutated into Strangelovian neo-conservative think-tanks, which have the ear of the President and were behind things such as the aborted terrorism futures market. Or so Andrew "blogs are killing Google" Orlowski says anyway.
2003/8/1
Much has been said about the recent trend of libertarians turning into (neo-)conservatives as a result of (the collapse of socialism/the collapse of libertarianism/September 11/the aging process in general). I was wondering whether there was a sexual dimension to this trend, with libertarian/progressive kinks giving way to more conservative/reactionary alternative lifestyles without passing through the mainstream. I.e., are we likely to see Heinleinian polyamorists and hot-tubbers becoming Goreans or old-sk00l-Mormon-style polygamists en masse?
2003/6/25
Is the new Harry Potter book a thinly-veiled Libertarian diatribe against government interference and gun control? Maybe J.K. Rowling is not so much the next C.S. Lewis as the next Ayn Rand. (via Reenhead)
2003/4/16
A survey of Anarchist and Libertarian Societies in Science Fiction; encompassing everything from Stateless to Libertaria to Port Watson, including pirate anarchist utopias, Randian-Heinleinian gun-toting anarcho-propertarianisms, the psychedelic milieus of Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson, H.G. Wells' Fabian socialism and the "fascist-socialist" utopias of H.P. Lovecraft's alien races.
I found this on this page of essays, which is a few links away from Ken MacLeod's blog. The page has a number of other intriguing essays, including one on Christian symbolism in Blade Runner and Iain M. Banks' notes on the Culture, his post-Singularity anarchosocialist utopia.
2003/4/15
If you were a neo-Trotskyist libertarian, you would probably have to be a Scottish science-fiction author. And now you'd have a blog here. And his commentary is as sharp as his novels.
America: a country where ridiculous proportions of the population believe they were created by god, abducted by aliens, and attacked by Iraq. Also where some people believe that someone who burns a paper drawing of a US flag is as good as asking to be crushed under a bulldozer. It's not just the Right. Every political persuasion in the US contains many more stupid people than it or its equivalent does in Europe. On the Left Bank of the Seine you see poststructuralists smoking, flirting, and eating veal. Poststructuralism in America gave us La-La Land liberal toytown totalitarianism. French Maoism gave us Sartre and Althusser. American Maoism gave us Klonsky and Avakian. (I could go on.)
2002/10/8
Via Graham and others, a very lucid critique of what's wrong with libertarianism. Or in particular, the market-fundamentalist, Ayn Rand-quoting, gun-toting, all-taxes-are-evil strain that's popular in the US. The argument there is pretty much the same one that shoots down Communism.
By the way, Russia is the answer to those testosterone-poisoned folks who think that guns will prevent oppression. The mafia will always outgun you.
2002/9/26
Want to do your bit for the moral defense of capitalism? Why not buy a copy of the Libertarian Girls calendar; each month has a different latter-day Dagny Taggart in a patriotic pose (and showing lots of flesh too). And proceeds go towards the Libertarian Party's campaigns, so rich people can smoke dope without government interference. (via die puny humans)
2002/6/16
Open-source identity and guns-and-Ayn-Rand-libertarian whacko Eric S. Raymond has a righteous rant about Liberals and Conservatives, and why they are inpardonably unappealing. To which, Charlie Stross offers a reasoned response. (Note: link corrected.)
(My beliefs on the last two questions would be fairly similar to Charlie's; I find legislating to control human behaviour based on some theory repugnant (whether it's Christian Fundamentalists, Marxists, copyright absolutists or any other stripe of true believers doing the legislating), but don't like the dog-eat-dog social-darwinism of what passes for "libertarianism" in the US. And I think Ayn Rand is one notch above L. Ron Hubbard in terms of credibility.)
Also on ESR's page, an essay applying the scientific method to why porn is so ugly and unstimulating; keeping in mind that he's a libertarian polyamorist of the Heinlein stripe with a keen interest in all things bootywhangular, you can probably guess that it's not written from a puritanical angle.
2002/5/31
Eric Raymond has written a smug Libertarian critique of Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod, rooted in the fundamental notion of the total bankrupcy of socialism and indeed the undeniable supremacy of the Free Market. No Ayn Rand quotes though. And here's Charles Stross' rebuttal.
(IMHO, the Randian/Propertarian argument of the supremacy of the Free Market is somewhat naïve, for the reasons Charlie describes (markets are good for some things but not all); the recent fashion of defining everything as being, in its basic sense, a market is rather daft. OTOH, I don't think the future belongs to any variant of Marxism (which was, after all, constrained by its 19th-century backgrounds).)
And then there's the "Cowboys vs. Eurotrash" subtext that usually emerges in the whole recurring argument, with predominantly American Libertarians making smug digs at the bankrupcy and impending collapse of Eurosocialism (usually coming down to how the ultimate oracle of the Market has shown that Big Macs and Britney Spears are inherently superior to baguettes and Johnny Hallyday, and any argument to the contrary is just the elitism of sore losers in the global cultural marketplace), and left-leaning Europeans pointing at rampant obesity, firearm deaths and other aspects of the Ugly American stereotype in response.
2001/12/24
An interesting (if somewhat old) interview with Ken MacLeod where he talks about his books and the political/social systems speculated on therein:
I think a lot of people who are libertarians now are just libertarians because the stock market is going up, frankly. As long as the market is booming, they'll be pro-market. If there was another depression or something like that, they'd probably change their tune pretty damn quick.
(from the archives of a mailing list, from about a year ago.)
2001/2/4
Seen on Plastic: Are America's lunatic-fringe capital-N Nazi groups trying to make themselves more relevant by rebranding themselves as the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party, or is this a hoax of some sort?
2000/7/19
2000/6/16
The classic libertarian-anarchist temporary autonomous zone travelogue Visit Port Watson! is online here. (via bOING bOING)