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Thursday, August 14, 2014

Libertopian Indifference to Actual Tyranny

Atrios calls them out:
[M]ost self-identified libertarians [are] completely full of shit. At best, they're in the "I've got mine screw you" and "freedom for me but not for thee" crowds, at worst they're complete sociopaths. But leaving behind the degree of fullofshitness, there is a liberal view of abuse of state power which self-described libertarians often mention but rarely get that passionate about... Unwarranted mass incarceration, unaccountable police brutality, authorizing the state to kill its own citizens, absurd civil forfeiture procedures... these are all clear abuses of state power! Much of the rest of it is just a debate over what should be appropriate policies, not whether they're abuses (though glibertarians tend to call anything they don't like an abuse of state power). There are people such as Radley Balko who take this stuff on! Good for them! Liberals would like libertarians more if they spent more time on the militarization of the police and the approved abuse of (especially) minority populations rather than, say, seatbelt laws and top marginal tax rates.
Of course, I suspect the fact that American Libertarianism Is Racist Through and Through is part of what is afoot here. Whiny white guys with money or (possibly deluded) expectations of getting big money someday whining about having to pay for the civilization they depend on with taxes. Sure, as Atrios says, there are exceptions (Rand Paul is making noises), but the history and the thrust are quite clear.

7 comments:

Esebian said...

Libertarians are just the shills and marionettes of Thiel, the Kock bros and other plain malevolent onepercenter plutocrats who work towards their overlords' goal of preventing fair taxation and dismantling regulation so they can reduce the workers to slaves and sell their cheap, poison-contaminated food-shaped objects in exchange for a chance to climb up the career ladder.

The other half are disgusting scum who want to crush the heinous government intrusion that prevents them from putting all 'em negro subhumans in the gas chamber.

The other big hypocrisy is that while they all pretend to run on some kinda Hannah Arendt Lite philosophy, nobly protecting the individual from the deprivations of the collective, they only recognize governmental organizations as the collective and remain suspiciously quiet about the deprivations corporations inflict on the individual employees and unrelated citizens.

Where are the libertopians when a little child recycling electronics trash has to die through heavy metal poisoning to satisfy the industry's demand? Where are the libertopians when the corporations force Zero Hour Contracts on the worker and deprive him of planning ahead his financial future, plummeting them into precarity?

Dale Carrico said...

Hannah Arendt Lite philosophy

This is interesting, I wasn't aware that Arendt was a go to philosopher for any libertarian types. She sometimes had comparatively nice things to say about mid-century liberal Republicans who don't exist anymore and weren't libertarian in the least (and were often much better than Democrats on race questions at the time), but who were more or less equally proximate and distant to the political arrangements and judgments she would ideally prefer as a Weimar epoch German intellectual with in radical circles. I mean, I know that her anti-totalitarian theory got selectively quoted by right wing Cold Warriors and I guess some superficial readers of the right might take comfort in her critiques of Marx... but, I mean, she was pretty social democratic on the basics and happily hob-nobbed (and married) Marxists and revolutionary leftists after all. It seems something of a bizarre leap.

jimf said...

> At best, they're in the "I've got mine screw you"
> and "freedom for me but not for thee" crowds, at worst
> they're complete sociopaths.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/steve-jobs/8853147/Steve-Jobs-The-Exclusive-Biography-by-Walter-Isaacson-review.html
---------------
In 2008, with [Steve] Jobs already in the grip of the pancreatic cancer
that would kill him, Fortune magazine began preparing a story
on Apple’s mysterious, cult-inspiring figurehead. In unsparing
detail, the piece recounted Jobs’s legendary “personal abuses”:
his vicious tantrums, his habit of reducing employees to tears,
his binary view of a world in which people were either “heroes”
or “s---heads”, and his habit of parking his Mercedes in disabled
parking spots. On hearing of the article, Jobs peremptorily
called Fortune’s managing editor to Apple HQ in Cupertino, California,
to demand that it be spiked. Leaning into the man’s face and
fixing him with his unblinking stare, Jobs said: “So, you’ve
uncovered the fact that I’m an asshole. Why is that news?”
====

http://justnotsaid.blogspot.com/2013/07/sociopath-alert-steve-jobs.html
---------------
Steve Jobs used to be spoken about in the same hallowed, reverential
manner that Saint Lance (Armstrong) was. Even Jobs's obvious
flaws were couched in a complimentary context. Temperamental?
C'mon, he's just a **perfectionist**.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/technology/steve-jobs-defended-his-work-with-a-barbed-tongue.html
---------------
“Amidst the oceans of enforced mediocrity in the bland, deflavorized
culture of managed-by-committee corporate behemoths,” the entrepreneur
Perry Metzger posted on his Google+ page, Mr. Jobs “showed that
the real path to excellence was excellence — that you could do
great things by, who would have imagined, being smart and having
excellent taste and not ever settling for second best.”
====

Esebian said...

> Libertarians are just the shills and marionettes of Thiel,
> the Koc[h] bros and other plain malevolent onepercenter
> plutocrats who work towards their overlords' goal of. . .
> reduc[ing] the workers to slaves. . . in exchange for
> a chance to climb up the career ladder.
>
> [T]hey all pretend to. . . [want to] protect. . . the
> individual from the deprivations of the collective, [but] they
> only recognize governmental organizations as the collective
> and remain suspiciously quiet about the deprivations corporations
> inflict on the individual employees and unrelated citizens.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/13/investors_apple_wagefixing_drama/
---------------
"Jobs's conduct is a reminder that even widely respected
businessmen can knowingly commit unlawful acts in the
zealous pursuit of profits," the suit alleges.
====

Say what? Get with the Future, you whiners and losers!
You people of low IQ and poor taste will be swept away
come the Singularity!

jimf said...

(via
http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2011/08/rich-are-different-from-you-and-me.html )
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ub/competent_elites/
---------------------
[T]he last news your readers want to hear is that this
person who is wealthier than you, is also smarter, happier,
and not a bad person morally. Your reader would much rather
read about how. . . the upper echelons got there by cheating,
or at least smarming their way to the top. If you said anything
as hideous as, "They seem more alive," you'd get lynched.

But I am an independent scholar, not much beholden. I should
be able to say it out loud if anyone can. [I]t is the truth
as I see it, and an important truth which others don't talk
about. . .

When you make it to the power elite, there are all sorts of
people who want to talk to you. . . [I]t's just more expected
fun to hang around people who've already proven themselves
competent. . .

There's another world out there, richer in more than money. . .

I'm pretty sure that. . . there's a lot more cream at
the top than most people seem willing to admit. . .
====


“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft
blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty,
that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”

―- William Gibson, Count Zero

Chad Lott said...

I think you're discounting the Libertarians who are not obsessed with racism and instead devote their time to tin foil millinery and exposing the chemtrail enabled conspiracies of our transdimensional reptilian overlords.

You'll be sorry you didn't listen to Alex Jones when you're sipping Soylent from a human sized hamster bottle in a FEMA camp.

jimf said...

> I think you're discounting the Libertarians who. . .devote their time
> to tin foil millinery and exposing the chemtrail enabled conspiracies
> of our transdimensional reptilian overlords.
>
> You'll be sorry you didn't listen to Alex Jones when you're sipping
> Soylent from a human sized hamster bottle in a FEMA camp.

"I'm sorry, so sorry
That I was such a fool. . ."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGF41ZSr0cI

Hey, does this count as "tin foil millinery"?

The day is coming!
http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2008/06/warren-ellis-singularity-indivisible.html
----------------------
The day is coming, my friends, when Singularity denial will seem
as outrageous and irresponsible as the denial of anthropogenic
global warming. And I think the comparison is fair; environmentalists
are often chastised for their "religious-like" convictions and
concern. It's easy to mock the Chicken Littles of the world.

And like the foot-dragging on climate change, there are consequences
to inaction. The bogus and unfair memetic linkage between
millenarian beliefs and the Singularity is a dangerous one,
and the sooner this association is severed the better. . .

Posted by George [Dvorsky] at 6/03/2008
=====

jimf said...

> > I'm pretty sure that. . . there's a lot more cream at
> > the top than most people seem willing to admit. . .
>
> > “[S]he. . . knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty,
> > that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
>
> The day is coming!

The Pathology of the Rich
Chris Hedges on Reality Asserts Itself (1/2)
On RAI with Paul Jay, Chris Hedges discusses the psychology of
the super rich; their sense of entitlement, the dehumanization
of workers, and mistaken belief that their wealth will insulate
them from the coming storms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6unS2JF8TA