He… he doesn’t comment at all, or explain why that’s, whatever he thinks it is.

I admit, I don’t understand Sullivan’s mind enough to have idea what that’s supposed to me. You big fatty.

Just take it as a complement.  Andrew Sullivan disagrees with you.  How many times has that guy been right about anything?  Either way, he could have at least followed the quote with an obligatory “Heh” or “Indeed”.

And I bet you didn’t even need to get waterboarded to know that it’s torture.  If that doesn’t qualify you for a special award, I don’t know what does.

Congratulations!

To be thought a fool by an idiot is a sure sign of wisdom.

You should have said that libertarians won’t want government funding of AIDS research. For some reason, Sullivan thinks that taxation and spending is very important. Wonder why.

How many times has that guy been right about anything?

Quite often!  It’s just that it happens about two years about he was completely wrong about the same thing.  Amanda can look forward to favorable Atlantic linkage in Spring of 2011.

Feministing also mocked Thiel for that piece—where’s Jessica Valenti’s Moorie?

Sullivan is a douche, but he seems to be referring to the part where you dismiss Libertarians as “modern day feudalists who object to any government functions that don’t involve taxing the middle class to create an army to ransack other nations and take their wealth”.  Considering they want to eliminate most (all?) taxes and are non-interventionist, your statement is Moore-esquely hyperbolic.

It’s ‘cause your last name also starts with an “M.” Duh. (Fatty.)

You weren’t nominated for the award for the reasons you have listed, but rather for your comment that he referenced:

“...his essay really drives home how much libertarians shouldn’t own the word “liberty”, because they are actually modern day feudalists who object to any government functions that don’t involve taxing the middle class to create an army to ransack other nations and take their wealth…”

Not the most fair and balanced characterization of libertarians I’ve seen.

Most libertarians I’ve talked are all against social spending but maintain that we should keep military, presumably so that we can, as Sullivan supported, ransack oil-rich countries on imperialist missions aimed at improving the wealth status of our elite.  Some are non-interventionist—-a few fools who actually think they’re intellectually rigid at Reason, maybe.  Mostly, libertarians are Republicans who want neo-feudalist state that somehow still has a ban on abortion.

Yeah, I never said I was “fair and balanced”.  I’m not kissing anyone’s ass.  I’ll describe libertarians as they are, not how they’d like to be described.

Seriously, though, his problem with you was that you claimed the military was used to loot resources from other countries. Everyone knows that defense is only about protecting the national interest. That Iraq was about anything but defeating a dictator and striking against Islamism is conspiracy mongering of the highest order.

Yeah, the modern strain of libertarianism seems to hold that spending is good as long as a Republican wants it. The entire eight years of Bush’s reign featured a shitload of Libertarians who were wildly in favor of anything Bush wanted to do—at least until he got unpopular.

Imperialist missions?  Ban on abortion?  To paraphrase Inigo Montoya—you keep using the word Libertarian, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Libertarians believe in government for defense-only.  They would immediately withdraw our troops from the 100+ countries, oil-rich and otherwise, in which they are currently stationed.  And they would get the government out of the business of telling people which surgeries they could and could not have, abortion included.

I really appreciated the characterization of libertarians.

I have an ongoing debate with two of them and that’s where the debate always ends up—except, they protest, that it won’t be a feudal nightmare after you take away peoples’ ability to protect themselves collectively through the state, because of ponies.

Describe the basics of supply and demand to one of these guys, in the context of health care, and you either see their heads pop or expose just what monsters they really are.

Whatever you say about him, Justin Raimondo at anti-war.com pretty accurately demolished the noble self defense argument using libertarianism. Since there are only individuals, and no commonweal or groups, there is no “national” interest. Only particular interests. And those are the ones truly commanding the guns. Of course, in his mind, it’s usually Israel, but the point is interesting.

“The entire eight years of Bush’s reign featured a shitload of Libertarians who were wildly in favor of anything Bush wanted to do”

Wow, nice revisionism.  Actually many Democrats voted in favor of invading Iraq.  Libertarians were wildly opposed.

You weren’t nominated for the award for the reasons you have listed, but rather for your comment that he referenced:

“...his essay really drives home how much libertarians shouldn’t own the word “liberty”, because they are actually modern day feudalists who object to any government functions that don’t involve taxing the middle class to create an army to ransack other nations and take their wealth…”

Not the most fair and balanced characterization of libertarians I’ve seen.

ryanx115, did you read Thiel’s essay?  The man says that while he’s still a strongly affirmed Libertarian, he doesn’t believe democracy and freedom mix.  He says the country went to shit b/c women and minorities got the vote.

What the fuck is that?

His idea of freedom and liberty is just for him to do as he pleases without paying a cent in taxes.  Anyone not so lucky as to be born or luck into wealth can fuck off and die.  And since there are so many more people who have to work for a living, and since in a democracy they can force everyone to pay for government services, his solution is to go into outer space or Waterworld where he could be FREE.

It’s one of the stupidest, shallowest, and most self-serving while in denial pieces I’ve ever read.

If you take Thiel at his word that he’s a libertarian, then Amanda’s comments are dead on.  Go on, read Thiel.  Dick extraordinaire.

And they would get the government out of the business of telling people which surgeries they could and could not have, abortion included.

And yet, there are still people who call themselves libertarians who also want abortion banned. It’s almost as if the term is wildly misused by some who still take the label for themselves. Or something.

What do we mean when we say “Libertarian”? Some of them backed up Bush, some of them didn’t. Some of them believe in armies for national defense, some believe the private sector can handle it. Some of them are just Republicans sans any social agenda. Some of them are radical individualist anarchists.

Stop debating what the “libertarians” are and tie specific arguments back to specific people or policy goals.

If any Libertarians ever expressed opposition to the Republicans’ war, they did it very quietly, in the dark, to make sure no one heard them. Otherwise, Big Poppa Libertarian Instapundit would delink them.

Yeah, yeah, “real” libertarians don’t believe X or Y.  And no true Scotsman would read Andrew Sullivan.

Heard it, libertarian whiners.  Now kindly fuck off.

Considering they want to eliminate most (all?) taxes

No, they want to eliminate all taxes that bear any semblance to fairness.  They don’t even support a flat income tax.  They want sales, property, and poll taxes—in short taxes that put most of the tax burden on the poor.  Not the middle class, I’m afraid, since middle classes effectively don’t exist in countries that have the kind of tax system libertarians want.

And since there are so many more people who have to work for a living, and since in a democracy they can force everyone to pay for government services, his solution is to go into outer space or Waterworld where he could be FREE.

John Galt at least disproved the theory of thermodynamics and ended energy shortages through cultivation of perpetual motion.

Thiel made PayPal. Indispensable person indeed.

Radicals tend to be against democracy.

Left wing: The process is so infected by the influence of the elites that elections do nothing more than ratify political inevitabilities. The masses must take action themselves.

Right wing: The process is so infested by weak-minded, weak-willed parasites that government and society are both collapsing under the tyranny of whining babies. The strong must restore discipline to the country.

This guy is just a right wing radical with an extra dose of white male supremacy. Really, there isn’t a thing novel about it.

I think people are giving Sullivan too much benefit of the doubt, suggesting that it’s only a defense of libertarianism and not a defense of Thiel.  Isn’t Sullivan the guy who brings up The Bell Curve from time to time?  He may be fond of the idea that democracy won’t produce the best outcome.

Considering they want to eliminate most (all?) taxes and are non-interventionist, your statement is Moore-esquely hyperbolic.

Clearly we’ve met completely different libertarians.  Amanda’s description is much closer to the ones I’ve encountered both online and in real life than yours does.

D’oh!  Sub “is” for “does” above.

Actually many Democrats voted in favor of invading Iraq.  Libertarians were wildly opposed.

It’s true: try as you may, you won’t find a single Libertarian in Congress who voted in favor of invading Iraq.

“If any Libertarians ever expressed opposition to the Republicans’ war, they did it very quietly”

Well, Libertarians do everything quietly, there aren’t that many of us.

“No, they want to eliminate all taxes that bear any semblance to fairness.  They don’t even support a flat income tax.  They want sales, property, and poll taxes—in short taxes that put most of the tax burden on the poor.”

I think Libertarians tend to lean more towards excise taxes and tariffs.  These taxes have a built in limitation because people can always substitute non-taxed items for taxed items.  The problem with sales and property tax (and income tax) is that there is no governing mechanism to limit them.  No matter the tax rate, you still have to go have a job, live somewhere, buy things.

Libertarians are communists of the right. Once the government shrivels away, the true individualist paradise will be born. At least the communists had a scholarly work of Marx to base their philosophy off of. Atlus Shrugs is a novel. She couldn’t even find a real person to base the work on.

Mocked by someone who looks like he’s permanently smashed on cheap Victory Gin?  The horror.

Sully himself wants to be known as a radical and gets very angry when characterized as liberal or anything else he doesn’t approve of.  And he hands out these little bon mots?  You’d think that being a multiple nominee for The Poorman’s Golden Winger award, Sullivan would be a bit more . . circumspect.

The one really outspoken, Randian libertarian I know supported the Iraq war.  It was going to maximize liberty, was his argument, and that was a legitimate goal.

That Iraq was about anything but defeating a dictator and striking against Islamism is conspiracy mongering of the highest order.

If we were striking against Islamism, why did we strike a secular dictator who oppressed the Islamic fundamentalists in his country?  If you’re going to strike against Islamism, striking the Wahhabist-dominated country that 14 out of the 19 hijackers were citizens of seems a little more logical.

Unless, of course, you’re invading Iraq for reasons other than “striking against Islamism” and are just grasping for a cover story.  But, no, it’s a silly conspiracy theory to point out that Iraq had nothing to do with Islamic extremism except in the most marginal way, isn’t it?

Seebach: Its true. Most of these guys haven’t even read Adam Smith. If they did, they’d realize that Smith was actually pretty scared of what might happen if the capitalists take over.

I think there are two flavors:

1) Idiots who believe that there will be ponies after we dismantle government.

2) Assholes who know exactly what will happen after we dismantle government.

Apparently I’m just not provocative enough. I mock libertarians all the freaking time, including this very essay, and, as Homer Simpson would say, “Where’s My Parade?”

Seriously, though: libertarians who think they’re being treated unfairly would do well to note that Thiel’s entire argument is that “freedom” can only survive in some mystical land without women and poor people.

Estimated time before his utopia fails when no one knows how to change the oil in the space car/floating city of Freedom: fifteen minutes. Five minute before that they’ll be arguing over who should have to clean up the garbage.

Unless, of course, you’re invading Iraq for reasons other than “striking against Islamism” and are just grasping for a cover story.  But, no, it’s a silly conspiracy theory to point out that Iraq had nothing to do with Islamic extremism except in the most marginal way, isn’t it?

Just to make clear, I don’t believe this. It’s just what set Sullivan off, I bet. I used to subscribe to the New Republic before I knew who he was. It was what his “Idiocy Watch” was all about.

These taxes have a built in limitation because people can always substitute non-taxed items for taxed items. 

For example, Thiel only buys his booze in duty-free shops when he travels internationally.  People can do that or go blind drinking homemade solvent vodka like the Russians do, whatever, point is people got options.  I myself will just chose to pay my fucking sin taxes.

Shorter schadenfreude:  The word libertarian has no connection to the beliefs of the majority of people who call themselves libertarian, but rather conforms to what I personally believe, and you’re a bigot because you don’t use my definition.

“Clearly we’ve met completely different libertarians.  Amanda’s description is much closer to the ones I’ve encountered both online and in real life than yours does.”

I cannot say that the Republicans-who-want-to-smoke-pot Libertarians do not exist.  I just think if you base your opinion of an entire group on one or two people you have met, you might not have the full picture.  If you really want to know about Libertarianism, go to cato.org or reason.com, between them there are thousands of articles with specific policy recommendations.  If you can find one that endorses invading oil-rich countries or raising taxes on anyone, I would be surprised.

If any Libertarians ever expressed opposition to the Republicans’ war, they did it very quietly, in the dark, to make sure no one heard them.

To be fair, the Cato institute pretty much out and out opposed the Iraq war.

Your everyday “I call myself a libertarian” types (eg, Glenn Reynolds) were full-throated Bushfollowers when it came to Iraq and other issues.

Pretty much in the context of Thiel’s essay, Amanda was right-on when it came to her assessment of libertarians. At heart, it’s a philosophy for people who believe that they should have power over others and that the government shouldn’t interfere. That belief frequently extends to foreign policy, as they believe the US military should be used to further their financial interests abroad.

In 2005, I think it was, there was a Harper’s article about the Iraq reconstruction, that described all of these young Republicans pouring into Iraq like a right-wing Peace Corps. They really thought that deregulating the entire place WOULD create an Eden, and that the project with justify their entire ideology when the ponies appeared.

Really, though, the Iraq War supporters were NeoLiberals, not Libertarians. Granted, there is a lot of overlap between the two, but they aren’t the same thing by any stretch.

Remember when Cheney said that he had underestimated the psychological damage Saddam did to his people? That’s why the reconstruction failed. He still believes that using privatized armies, privatizing the entire economy, eliminating the state completely, should create an Eden.

Thanks to him, the entire NeoLiberal agenda has been largely discredited.

no jrod, as I put in the post that came after yours, I would put up Cato or Reason as mainstream libertarian thought.  And I don’t think you are a bigot, just misinformed.

In 2005, I think it was, there was a Harper’s article about the Iraq reconstruction, that described all of these young Republicans pouring into Iraq like a right-wing Peace Corps. They really thought that deregulating the entire place WOULD create an Eden, and that the project with justify their entire ideology when the ponies appeared.

That was September 2004. The entire article in Harper’s is available for free at “Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia”.

If you really want to know about Libertarianism, go to cato.org or reason.com, between them there are thousands of articles with specific policy recommendations.  If you can find one that endorses invading oil-rich countries or raising taxes on anyone, I would be surprised.

If you check out the international socialists or American communist party, you can see much of the same thing. Policy recommendations, no taxes, no imperialism.

Thank you, Tyro.

Everyone: That was a great article. Must read.

I think I’ll reread it. Thanks again!

From Sullivan’s glossary of awards:

The Moore Award - named after film-maker, Michael Moore - is for divisive, bitter and intemperate left-wing rhetoric.

It is paired with the Malkin Award:

The Malkin Award - named after blogger, Michelle Malkin - is for shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric. Ann Coulter is ineligible - to give others a chance.

Because, you know, women are shrill.

Just to make clear, I don’t believe this. It’s just what set Sullivan off, I bet.

Ah, okay, gotcha.  It wasn’t clear that you were channeling Sullivan.

It’s interesting how sensitive he still is about being reminded that not everyone fell for the Big Iraq Con, isn’t he?

Thiel’s entire argument is that “freedom” can only survive in some mystical land without women and poor people.

No, women, minorities, and the poor exist, they just know their place—and they’re grateful for it.

Andrew Sullivan is so odd.

(re: BABH.)

I think this qualifies as a badge of honor.

I would put up CATO and reason.com as prime examples of the idiocy of mainstream libertarian thought, if I thought that even their internally consistent and sometimes even reasonable ideas were the mainstream.  Sorry your name got co-opted by warmongering fuckwits.  Perhaps your group of nimrods could come up with a new name so I could mock that as well?

Basing a mode of governance solely on haughty ideals is ridiculously stupid.  I prefer to pragmatically work toward outcomes that include high quality of life as well as maximizing freedom.  You know, for everyone, not just those with money.

As for Sullivan, I will never forgive his “fifth columnists” post.  He is a fascist at heart, and deserves nothing but scorn.

I just think if you base your opinion of an entire group on one or two people you have met, you might not have the full picture.

It’s more than one or two.  Try more like 20 or 30.

Oh, and a taste of the oh-so-reasonable Reason.com:

“Stages of Denial:  Take pity on the left as it grapples with the tea party revolt”—because apparently Reason can’t distinguishing between people fearing them and people laughing at them.

And I love the headline about “George Bush’s disaster socialism”—because if there’s one thing that Bush was known for, it was socialism.  He and Karl Marx were practically indistinguishable. 

Sorry, Reason is a lot more nutty than you seem to realize.

“Perhaps your group of nimrods could come up with a new name so I could mock that as well?”

My group of nimrods has noticed the same thing.  We are leaning toward “Classical Liberal”

“I prefer to pragmatically work toward outcomes that include high quality of life as well as maximizing freedom.”

How’s that working out for you?

My group of nimrods has noticed the same thing.  We are leaning toward “Classical Liberal”

Libertarians have been using that for decades, so you won’t fool anyone with it.

Mnem.

I didn’t expect you to agree with the articles, but at least now you can argue against Libertarianism from a position of knowledge.  Rather than saying Libertarians want to impose feudal war states with bans on abortion.

Not only is Andrew Sullivan an idiot, he’s also a scumbag. I haven’t forgotten how he started calling liberals a ‘fifth column’ literally days after 9/11. If at some time in the future there is another president who wants to become a dictator, Sullivan will jump at the chance. I have no respect for him.

Rather than saying Libertarians want to impose feudal war states with bans on abortion.

There are a lot of Libertarians who actually want that.

How’s that working out for you?

Now you’re gonna tell me the New Deal and the Great Society were failures, eh?  And national health care is a failure too, right?

It’s not working out well for me, but then again it’s your ilk that’s been running my country lately.  The last ten years were a libertarian free market paradise when it came to high finance.  Thanks for helping bring that about, by the way.  Glad we have reasonable libertarians like you helping to reason our way into ruthless exploitation and disaster time and time again.

You complain about being called a feudalist, but what do you expect when your ideals inevitably lead to a tiny minority of men holding absolute power?  You people balk at any tiny limit to your right to do whatever the fuck you want when it comes from government, but when free men use their wealth to limit the freedom of others you call it the free market and say that everything is working correctly.

I find it very telling that the libertarians are expressing more shock about what Amanda wrote than about the ridiculousness that Peter Thiel wrote.

Thiel’s philosophy, and much of libertarianism in the USA, is more properly called Propertarianism.

I’ve been debating an anarchocapitalist over at Daylight Atheism for the past 2 weeks, and he actually DOES advocate a feudal model.  Seriously: he advanced the Icelandic Commonwealth of the 10-12th Centuries as his ideal society.  So yeah.

Sullivan is a twat.  And, yes, Libertarians are delusional, self-important quasi-feudal wankers.

Andrew Sullivan is somebody.

Guess who wins this? Disparaging Mr. Sullivan will not save you

Because Andy is currently lowering Amanda into a tank of sharks with laser beams attached even as we speak.  Bwahahahahaha!

Seriously, dude, WTF?

The problem with Franklin Raines is that he’s a shallow thinker who’s convinced himself he’s a genius.

Or a troll.  Maybe both.

“It’s not working out well for me, but then again it’s your ilk that’s been running my country lately.  The last ten years were a libertarian free market paradise when it came to high finance.  Thanks for helping bring that about, by the way.  Glad we have reasonable libertarians like you helping to reason our way into ruthless exploitation and disaster time and time again.”

Yes, the Bush years were a walk in the park for Libertarians.  The fuck?

The problem for Franklin Raines is that his politics are so unpopular that one needs to imagine a post-politics world where 60+% of the population are disenfranchised in order to conceive of his politics ever being realized.

May I offer a defense, as someone who has both blogs on their rss roll and enjoys them both (even though I frequently disagree with Sullivan)?

As BABH pointed out, the Moore award is the left/liberal counterpart to the Malkin award, dedicated to hyperbolic generalizations of the ‘other side’ (his use of the word ‘shrill’ only in the malkin award and not the moore award does appear to be at least latently sexist. I won’t defend that). He isn’t objecting to what you said, but how you said it. And that’s his prerogative. He tries to maintain a certain serious tone in his writing (its the reason he doesn’t allow comments and instead picks the best dissenting emails and posts them), while Amanda prefers a looser, more snark-filled environment. Its just personal style and I don’t think its something to get all worked up about.

Also, as a side. You don’t have to forgive Sullivan for his post-9/11 views, but he is one of the few people to recognize how wrong he was, admit it, and regain a defensible and consistent world view. You could argue that he did it out of political expediency, but from reading him regularly I find him to be genuine.

Remember when Cheney said that he had underestimated the psychological damage Saddam did to his people? That’s why the reconstruction failed. He still believes that using privatized armies, privatizing the entire economy, eliminating the state completely, should create an Eden.

Oh, it does. For people like himself and those he cares about.

Or it would if those pesky masses would just roll over and accept their assigned role as peons. If there are problems (for them) it’s all our fault, you see.

It’s meaningless to say the state ever gets eliminated, of course. Concentrated power still exists, it’s just that it abandons all pretense of public accountability. It’s really a way of trading a corrupt sham of a democracy with a government based on open corruption—which is pretty much like what “absolutist” monarchies actually were, except they had some pretense to both a woo-based Divine election of some kind, and more seriously (see Hobbes for instance) the support of the upper classes broadly in the name of order.

Back when I was taking some history classes on the “Early Modern Period” at Caltech, I wondered why were spending a lot of time on the theory and practice of governance in such absolute monarchies as the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia—weren’t they a dead end historically? (The class was focused on the development of modern institutions of government; of course you have to pay attention to these regimes as powerful players on the scene, pre-French Revolution. And of course I didn’t question study of the practices and theory of the French monarchy).

Ah, said the professor (one Dr. Hilton Root)—this is pretty much how modern private corporations are governed. The board of directors of a corporation, and their appointed CEO, rule absolutely within the company in the name of the owners, the stockholders, just as absolute monarchs claimed to alone represent their entire nation as opposed to some partisan faction within it. And you get similar dynamics—the Prussian monarchs for instance were generally careful to divide responsibilities and knowledge up among rivals, often with built-in conflicts of interest leading to deadlocks only they could break, with their privileged access to all relevant information. (Hitler and Stalin were both infamous for similar divide-and-rule methodologies as well).

Thanks to him, the entire NeoLiberal agenda has been largely discredited.
ha on 04/29 at 03:29 PM

Well, among the majority, sure. But these people don’t believe majorities should ever rule.

It’s the job of Libertarians to convince us that what the Cheneys of the world want, on behalf of the magnates they serve, is what we should want too. Or failing that, to drop out of the whole governance game completely so the “grownups” can handle things without our interference.

I think there are two flavors:

ha on 04/29 at 07:25 PM

I agree, especially with #2.  Which, I think, goes a long way to explain the “gold and guns” fetishes you see espoused by the majority of Libertarians.  Here’s just a sample of a Libertarian Screed praising Ron Paul and whining about Bush II and Obama:

Truth is, the car wash libertarians will be the ones cowering in a corner the day they come for our guns (under a massive, federal gun control act) and our children (under federal, child “protective services” laws or a national service act). But they may have a post or two at some tiny township, with such important duties as arranging for an annual dinner at the VFW or setting up the car wash fundraiser to pay for new lamp posts along Main Street. The car wash libertarians tend to have scant knowledge of history, monetary policy, constitutional disputes, and the political philosophers who have, over the years, defended states’ rights and the natural rights of the individual against the totalitarian, centralized state. In fact, they tend to shy away from the intellectual life because it’s not as fun, or as social, as the monthly meetings and supper club invites.

The Feds are engaged in a sweeping series of measures to take complete control of the financial system (which is forever destroyed) and selected business entities; ratchet up plans for perpetual war; socialize health care; further implant federalized education and criminalize homeschooling; grab guns and ammo; remove children from the homes of dissenters; commence race wars and class wars; force young adults into mandatory state service camps; send protesters to FEMA camps; and on and on and on.

This is not the first “bat-shit-crazy” Libertarian screed I’ve read.  (See Ron Paul, pretty much all of his economic theories at as bat-shit crazy.)  And gold was in there too, but much further down the screed:

Gold, as such, is a tool for protection against the collapse of the dollar, which is why opponents of the Federal Reserve desire to buy it and hold it. Guns are the tools with which you defend yourself, not only from the local criminal who wants what you have, but even more so, they provide free men with the capability for physical resistance from a federal government whose expansion of powers and oppressive tactics are out of control. Think Rahm Emanuel and Eric Holder, and ask why it is that they champion an agenda that puts guns only into the hands of the government and its approved agents.

And she’s a libertarian and seems to be one of the more popular ones.

So they can whine about “unfair characterizations” all the want.  This is how they act on their home turf.

I’m sorry, so high finance wasn’t stripped of pretty much all governmental oversight during those years?  I seem to recall lots of talk from Republicans about how deregulation would increase freedom and cause ponies to sprout from the ground.  They were very, very concerned about making the tax system more fair and putting a stop to the evil of wealth transfer (from rich to poor, of course, because when it goes the other way that just more free market freedom).  Or are you the kind of libertarian who believes in government oversight and regulation of industry?  We’ve already established that you have an unusual definition for the word.

Isn’t our current health care system a marvel of the free market in action?  Why, if we got the government involved, the 20% or so of the population who can’t afford medical care might unjustly survive a serious illness or not wind up destitute because of a broken bone, and that wouldn’t be very free at all.

Hey, don’t be too hard on Sullivan—I wouldn’t have found this cool site if it wasn’t for him (Amanda—you rock!).  And he does post interesting items, such as this humorous libertarian riff by Julian Sanchez, which Sullivan recently linked to in his blog: 
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2009/04/20/the-market-will-solve/

Frankie, go to hell.

Clearly we’ve met completely different libertarians.  Amanda’s description is much closer to the ones I’ve encountered both online and in real life than yours does.

Same here.  Dozens on dozens IRL encounters over the years, from all walks of life.  “A rose by any other name”...  There’s definitely enough of a critical mass.

How’s that working out for you?

Your policies and beliefs have been on the ascendant for 29 years and have ushered in a new gilded age.  One of the by-products was to bring us the worst financial calamity since the Great Depression.  Another was a crushing national debt.  A third would be a backwards, inhumane medical system that’s not even good enough for a second-world country.

So, don’t preach about “things working out.”  Your ideas are demonstrable failures.

I think it’s really simple for the small-l, “real” libertarians to be taken seriously. All they have to do is either a) convince all the glibertarian/propertarian/republican-stoner types to stop using the term or
b) begin everything they say with a ritual denunciation of every false libertarian who has ever spoken on the question, just to make sure we know where they’re coming from.

I didn’t expect you to agree with the articles, but at least now you can argue against Libertarianism from a position of knowledge.  Rather than saying Libertarians want to impose feudal war states with bans on abortion.

Ahem.  You mean the libertarians that you personally agree with don’t want to impose feudal war states with bans on abortion.  The problem is that the libertarians you personally agree with are not the only ones in the world.  Libertarianism is a much bigger world than you seem to think.

“Your policies and beliefs have been on the ascendant for 29 years”

Bullshit.  The number one goal of Libertarians is to reduce the size of government.  All that talk about guns and gold is a means to that end.  The influence of Libertarian thought can be measured by the size of the government and the government has done nothing but grow since, well, since the founding of the Republic.

You are nobody.

With few exceptions, the internet libertarians I’ve encountered are the most ignorant, entitled people I’ve ever met.  For the most part, they don’t know shit about what government does or should do—least of all how they benefit from it on a daily basis.  Their beliefs usually begin and end with not wanting to have to pay taxes. 

It’s political philosophy for two year-olds—which is unfair, because I have known plenty of two year-olds who are perfectly delightful if they’ve had a nap recently.

Your update is truly an amazing exercise in pot meet kettle dramatics given that in the content of the post you were being an overly sensitive bed-wetting crybaby.  If you act like a hyperbolic asshole, you can expect people to call you out on it.  Buck up and stop whining about it.

And this is coming from a longtime pandagon reader, not an internet libertarian.

Bullshit.  The number one goal of Libertarians is to reduce the size of government.  All that talk about guns and gold is a means to that end.

It is precisely libertarians’ tendency to cling to this phantasmagoric, absurd, and dangerous goal that has convinced me, as well as many liberals, that libertarians are either refusing to look at reality, or have a bad agenda.

I’ve known a great many Libertarians in science fiction and fantasy fandom.  Most became Libertarians after reading one or more works by Robert Heinlein, particularly the Lazarus Long books and their spin-offs.

The sheer lack of RL experience was often quite amazing.

Your update is truly an amazing exercise in pot meet kettle dramatics given that in the content of the post you were being an overly sensitive bed-wetting crybaby.

No. In her original post she was taking a good long look at a whackaloon and his beliefs.

Hey congrats Amanda.  Sully is an imbecile and libertarians are juvenile half-wits.  You’re right on both counts.

Oh, and Ellid, please don’t blame Heinlein for libertarianism.  Heinlein wrote fiction.  Most rational, intelligent of Heinlein realize this.

Bullshit.  The number one goal of Libertarians is to reduce the size of government.  All that talk about guns and gold is a means to that end.

Nice armed rebellion you guys had. You couldn’t use your guns and gold if you tried. Each of you is too obsessed with his own importance to dare put your lives on the line for anything. Bunch of cowards pretending they’re kings.

“Libertarians are easily the most sensitive, easily offended, bed-wetting crybabies on the entire internet, which is a real achievement”

This whole website exists to pick off the low-hanging fruit provided by the right wing nuts and then whine and complain about their existence and all the hurtful things they say about left.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a loyal reader and a big fan, but you are also describing yourself here.  No one is asking you to kiss any ass, but don’t get offended when you are compared to Michael Moore and effectively called out for an unbalanced viewpoint.  I would think it a badge of honor.  Your unbalanced viewpoint is why I come here several times a day for god’s sake.  I agree with your assessments of Thiel, I simply disagreed with your characterization of Sullivan’s original call-out.

Seriously, though: libertarians who think they’re being treated unfairly would do well to note that Thiel’s entire argument is that “freedom” can only survive in some mystical land without women and poor people.

He’s right, actually. “Freedom” as he understands it can only exist in a world where:

- everyone starts out with the same resources, and the only difference between individuals is their innate abilities and their drive to succeed
- no one is disproportionately burdened by the need to reproduce

So the new people in this society come from… magic, I guess. Or Thiel isn’t concerned with where the new people come from, ‘cause he’ll be dead so who cares?

Libertarianism is an *excellent* philosophy for androids, and I fully support the right of androids to live in a society where there is no reproduction and all disparity between individuals is caused by their initial programming and design, not by whether or not their parents were rich. Of course, the androids might be in trouble once they start breaking down, because the android-run factory that makes androids would own any androids it makes, in the absence of government regulation that says they’re not allowed to own people, or, if it cannot own the androids it won’t bother to make them because that’s a burdensome cost they can’t recoup. So there still won’t be any reproduction, but at least the androids could keep it going for a few hundred years, as opposed to the about thirty or so that the libertarian paradise of humans would last.

As long as people (whether androids, as in my example, or humans) must be created, and require resources to be created, people cannot be “free” of the need to give back to the society that created them. I think libertarians would be opposed to the idea that they are property of their mothers, who can own the fruits of the libertarians’ labors for the mothers’ lifetimes, but given that their mothers made them out of waste discarded from a human male’s excretory organ and resources that the mothers had to work to acquire (food, for instance), at personal cost, it’s hard to see how children *aren’t* property of mothers under a libertarian philosophy (everything else you make with your own labor out of materials that you either work to acquire, are freely given, or would otherwise be worthless, is yours to do with as you please), or, if children are the one exception, what incents women to ever get pregnant? They’re never going to recoup the loss of the time, energy and health that went into the pregnancy, so the hard-nosed rationalist Ayn Rand worshipping women who would *want* to live in a libertarian paradise will just never have kids, and thus the society dies out in a generation.

At least Thiel wanting to remove women entirely from the equation makes it obvious that the society will die out pretty much immediately. Although I get the suspicion that it’s not that he wants women to not come along to his libertarian paradise, it’s that he wants them to be slaves to men, not granted the freedom that the actual *people* get to have, because women aren’t people.

And to be honest, you could solve most of the problems with creating a stable libertarian society by making women the slaves of men. Suzy McKee Charnas’s “Walk to the End of the World” describes how to do it well enough. But I think most men would balk at living in a society where men are not allowed to know their fathers or their sons, not allowed to fall in love with women, and are generally so miserable that attendant of a suicide parlor is a valid career path.

Doesn’t he recognize satire?  Or maybe it hits too close to home - criticism of another Log Cabin Republican?

Aw, you’ve gone and hurt the Libertarian’s delicate fee-fees, Amanda. Now they will unload their mighty libertarian rage upon you through longwinded posts to try and convince you that Libertarianism is all sparkles and rainbows, even if you’re a girl with icky girl parts.

Look, Libertarians: I understand that in the past, you had the choice between voting for a fiscally hands-off party and the socially hands-off party.

Except the last 8 years Bush was NOT fiscally hands-off while he was very much socially hands-on. He ran up a big credit-card debt in your name because he thought he’d toss you a few stale milk-duds in the form of minor tax breaks while he pursued two wars. He finished off deregulating all industries so that they had a huge cash-grab, which left a large % of the population jobless, homeless, and without health care.

But why is it you ALWAYS throw in with the Republicans?

Oh right, because of the GUNS.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against guns. In fact, most Dems don’t, despite your popular mythology. But it seems like when Libertarians are offered anything resembling a choice between the freedom to OWN things and the freedom to BE things, they always side with the freedom to OWN. And why is this?

Oh right, because they’re all straight white men who have never met resistance for being who they are.

They will never have to worry about abortion, so even when one party goes so far as to not only tell us “not only must you do with your body what we say you are to do with your body” but they go so far as to suggest that you cannot even get in a car and drive to another state where you are allowed to do with your body what you would like to do with your body, they shrug. It’s no big deal, this government attempt to control bodies. It’s not like I’ll ever be controlled like that, with my mighty penis! As long as I get to keep my assault weapon, I could give two shits.

They will never have to worry about sodomy laws or hate crimes. So even when one party says to us “you can’t marry the person you love, and don’t even think about adopting one of the thousands of children in this country in need of a good home,” they shrug, because hey, it’s no big deal, this government imposition on our hearts and the very fabric of our lives. I got mine! As long as I get to wave around a $300 rebate check like it was an order from the King of France declaring “Returned to Life,” they can lock all you fags in cages.

Libertarians need to just be honest and call themselves the GUNZ & MONEY party. The fact that you caucus with the Republicans speaks worlds about the “liberties” you value. Stop pretending like you give a rat’s ass about any other freedoms: the freedoms of the very self, because all you care about, when you’ve supported the Republican party throughout the life of your own party, is objects. You’re like toddlers throwing a temper tantrum when your mom hands the toy you weren’t even playing with to your sister.

But it seems like when Libertarians are offered anything resembling a choice between the freedom to OWN things and the freedom to BE things, they always side with the freedom to OWN. And why is this?

Oh right, because they’re all straight white men who have never met resistance for being who they are.

This describes libertarianism succinctly and excellently.

Oh god, the libertarians have no idea how much they suck and they are going to wank and whine until you give up and make fun of them offline.  And then, because they’re stupid, they’ll think they won.

God, having libertarians show up at your blog is like having roaches show up in your house.  You know you can beat this eventually, but they still wear you out—-relentless, brainless, disgusting, and did I mention relentless?

Resilient too.  No doubt after the bombs fall and wipe out civilization there will be a handful of libertarians left hiding in the CATO Institute’s basement, writing scholarly justifications for murdering and eating the other survivors.  It’s the only way to maximize freedom, you see.

I must admit that I was rather stupidly surprised by the libertarians. I mean, I always knew they were man-children, but I honestly expected when their philosophy not only publicly failed, but failed in such a way that it BROKE THE WORLD, plunging the entire world into a recession and global crisis while deeply entwining raw scams into our most crucial of financial levers that they’d by sheer desire to prevent anyone cluing in on where the blame lied, shut the fuck up.

But no, we’re probably in Great Depression 2.0 and they haven’t slowed down at all and seem completely oblivious to the fact that their philosophy’s guts are splayed out for everyone to see, the fruits so plain and so constant in its failure that it is fundamental indistinct to outright theft and they just can’t help themselves. Hell, they tried to erase the Great Depression, are still trying to erase the Great Depression and go on national television acting like letting the Bush tax cuts lapse is somehow the worst aspect of the crisis.

I’m still staggered by the willful ignorance demonstrated. Almost makes one think that the whole thing isn’t even rooted in their greed-based statements, but is entirely about hating women, minorities, and fags and getting hard over the idea of owning someone and how everyone who used to make fun of you in high school will totally weep over your super-duper geniusness and they’ll be the one banging the head cheerleader.

And then, because they’re stupid, they’ll think they won.

Fuck them. It’s just a little too facile, how they went from finding ways to coexist with the conservative movement when it looked good and strong, to claiming that they hated the conservative movement after it started to look wack. I don’t trust them.

Really any anger against them is wasted, good emotion after bad. They will continue to believe in their fantasy. I will continue to try and deal with the real world. We speak to each other but do not really communicate. And that is fine.

Oh right, because they’re all straight white men who have never met resistance for being who they are.

This is essentially the reason I had to take all the Heinlein books to Half Price when I started to look at my own internalized sexism and racism.  Because, ew.  Dude had some seriously fucked up ideas about, well, humans.  “No, seriously, the future’s gonna be awesome.  There won’t be any taxes and all the brown people will be exactly like me and I can fuck my daughters.  And then I’m gonna build a time machine and go back and fuck my mom.  ‘cos she’s completely hawt.  Dude, pass me that bong, I think I’m coming down again.”

Yes, Libertarians suck. Very. Very. Hard.

Considering they want to eliminate most (all?) taxes

In the sense that no longer will you be forced to pay taxes to the government, but will be “asked” to pay a fee to Tony Soprano’s Neighbourhood Private Police.  Purely voluntary, of course.  Nice blog you have here - it’s be a pity if anything happened to it.

Wash, rinse and repeat for fire services, food hygiene, environmental protection etc etc etc.

“Caterwalling”, “nailed”, “smacked”.

What an interesting subtext there.

Hey, Franklin, perhaps she’s just down on Libertarians because they’re lousy lays…

Nice blog you have here - it’s be a pity if anything happened to it.

Awwwww! See, my brother’s clumsy, Colonel. When he gets upset, he breaks things.

Keep fapping, Frankie. Keep fapping, and use a different tissue to mop up the tears.

Franklin, people might buy what you and your ilk are saying if you didn’t have to keep coming back here and insisting upon it over and over again. Who’re you trying to convince?

Franklin, I would like you much, much more if you were more articulate.

You give the distinct impression of one who is writing above their intelligence. You lack rhythm and flow. Your voice is scattered and inconsistent.

Let me give you an example: in this last post, you start with a third person, as if having a conversation with general readers, say, Phoenician, or Me. That’s casual, conversational.

You immediately switch voice and who you are addressing, without really forming any clear reason why you were speaking to the first audience in the first place. Instead you’re jumping all over the place.

Allow me to rephrase your post in such a way as to be more effective:

With the amount of caterwalling, you’d think that Sullivan cut off her arm or something.

I wish Amanda would give it a rest. Sullivan nailed it. Many people will read his post. Few if any will read any rebuttal she may post on this blog.

Do you see how consistent voice makes a difference? Dispassionate and condescending all the way through? Speaking to the same listener, showing distance and authority? I removed that bit of childishness from the end, because it was, well, childish. Poorly worded, lacking in substance, and CAPSLOCK FOR EMPHASIS IS DISTRACTING.

I give you a troll score of 3/10 for determination, but God damn man, take pride in your work. I’m going to assume you’re using your real name there. That’s good. An adult should be willing to stand behind his words. But unless you’re teabagging gunshot victims on XBoxLive, no human being talks the way you just wrote.

Karpad, I’m new here, but I think I might love you.

Blanket statements that all or even most libertarians support aggressive foreign wars are highly inaccurate and indicate a real problem telling different political groups apart. 

Libertarians != Neocons. 

Feel free to rip on them but at least rip on them for the right reasons .... you know, like their social policies.

Karpad, I’m new here, but I think I might love you.

You shouldn’t say that until you’ve read his series of comments about his unusual STDs.  With jpgs.

Someone named after the muse of memory should recall these sorts of cautions.

Sorry Franklin, but if I perform tasks that get my employer $300 worth of income every hour and am paid $8.25, they didn’t earn their $291.75 all by themselves. And even without that—how would their customers reach them without roads? How would their customers know about them, without the FCC controlled airwaves, so that advertisements aren’t drowned in CB chatter or pirate radio? How would pharmacies convince people to use products that aren’t FDA approved? (Although that’s meant less, thanks to failure to actually regulate)

Society builds wealth, along with the entrepreneurs. Both sides are necessary to have anything like a modern and vigorous economy.

What I’m most amused by is that they apparently didn’t catch the satirical, tongue-in-cheek aspect of the Thiel post.

Oh, and Ellid, please don’t blame Heinlein for libertarianism.  Heinlein wrote fiction.  Most rational, intelligent of Heinlein realize this.
ice weasel on 04/29 at 09:30 PM

When he wasn’t writing about Lazarus Long fulfilling his oedipal/incestuous impulses, World-as-Myth, or trying to write from a female POV, Heinlein was a decent writer.  His juveniles hold up remarkably well, and “Revolt in 2150” aka “If This Goes On….” is chillingly prescient about a religious takeover of America and its consequences. 

Unfortunately, a fair number of SF fans, regardless of how rational and intelligent they are, believe that Heinlein was a political philosopher in addition to being an entertaining writer.  If you haven’t encountered them at cons, I sure have, and it’s not easy keeping my mouth shut when they start spouting off.

Blanket statements that all or even most libertarians support aggressive foreign wars are highly inaccurate and indicate a real problem telling different political groups apart.

I beg to differ: http://thefaithfulpenguin.blogspot.com/2009/04/libertarian-whackaloons-andrew-sullivan.html

Even with the war in Iraq and threats of war with Iran, N. Korea and Syria, the Libertarians voted 60%Bush/40% everyone else in 2004.  Libertarians have been voting Republican, typically, in the 70%—80% range.  Despite the numerous wars we’ve had under Republican Presidents.

The bottom line is that if you are so principled as “anti-war” why the fuck did you vote for Bush in 2004?  Overwhelming?  What was it, 50.1% of the population voted Bush?  Yet 60% of Libertarians?

I think Libertarians just need to shut the fuck up.  Your economic theories suck.  You’re, mostly, a bunch of selfish twats who don’t give a crap about anyone but yourselves.

Oh, and Ellid, please don’t blame Heinlein for libertarianism.  Heinlein wrote fiction.  Most rational, intelligent of Heinlein realize this.
ice weasel on 04/29 at 09:30 PM

Heinlein was a libertarian, too.  Though we don’t blame him for libertarianism, your strawman.  Most of us recognize that proto-libertarianism has been around since the dawn of civilization.  Heinlein just used it, in an unrealistic Utopian fashion, a lot in his fiction.

“the main technique for the far left is to deliberately misunderstand their positions as extremism and then to ridicule”

Ah, the old “straw man battles straw man” routine.

We go from a lefty writer making hyperbolic claims about “libertarians” to a “libertarian” doing the same about liberals.

How about a dose of reality?

I tend to think of myself as a moderate libertarian. The problem is, of course, this is damn near oxymoronic. People who declare themselves to be Libertarians do tend to have fairly extreme opinions one way or the other. Its the big reason that the party doesn’t catch on though a lot of people agree with a lot of their ideas.

“Heinlein just used it, in an unrealistic Utopian fashion, a lot in his fiction.”

I love Heinlein warts and all. While he was frequently terribly unrealistic in some ways in other ways his political philosophy fell more into that Ben Franklin/Mark Twain/Will Rogers tradition of somewhat cynical realism and snide satire. What he lacked in writing skills and humour he made up for in imagination and foresight. He has a lot of my favorite plithy quotes.

Here’s one a lot of you self righteous ideologues should think about:

“I never learned from a man who agreed with me. “

-R> Heinlein

schadenfreude on 04/29 at 07:54 PM:

“I prefer to pragmatically work toward outcomes that include high quality of life as well as maximizing freedom.”

How’s that working out for you?

Well, considering the changes in life expectancy, infant and mother mortality, literacy rates, access to clean water and sufficient food, to choose just a partial list of social benefits, that have been accruing to the general population since the invention of income tax and the gradual enlargement of governments in the West - not so bad, actually.

Unless of course “freedom for the few” is seen to override “wellbeing for the many” as a moral imperative, in which case the “assholes who know exactly what would happen” definition of libertarians seems pretty accurate.

Mighty Ponygirl on 04/29 at 10:02 PM:

I got mine!

Libertarianism in three words. I salute you, madam.

—

Oh, and Frank? It’s “caterwauling”, dude. Srsly. Learn how to patronise people properly.

Using terms such as “socialist” and “fascist” to describe the current administration shows just how out of touch you are, Libertarian, and why the libertarian party will never get any traction. 

As for myself—I don’t hate libertarians.  Lord love ‘em—I find them to be an amazing source for humor.  After all, who among us didn’t burst out laughing when reading Thiel’s goofy opinions?

I’m going to miss you when you all move out to your sea platforms.  Ready the Dinghy!

Huh?

“If any Libertarians ever expressed opposition to the Republicans’ war, they did it very quietly, in the dark, to make sure no one heard them. Otherwise, Big Poppa Libertarian Instapundit would delink them. “

Sheesh, this is certianly true of some Libertarians just as it is true of some moderate Dems.

But then few were more vocally opposed to the war in Iraq and things Bush chose to do than Ron Paul. And yes, crazy Bob Barr, of all people, was consistently one of the strongest voices against the Patriot Act.

These strawmen are not becoming folks. They just make you look no better than Hannity/Limbaugh and so on.

“they apparently didn’t catch the satirical, tongue-in-cheek aspect of the Thiel post”

One quick point here, this is the same thing they say about Rush Limbaugh. In a lot of ways its true yet he is in fact a true believer and his blanket statements about “liberals” are bullshit stereotypes. Rather like “they are actually modern day feudalists who object to any government functions that don’t involve taxing the middle class to create an army to ransack other nations and take their wealth”.

That’s just a grossly wrong statement tongue in cheek or not. There are lots of things to pick on Libertarian about but this is a closer to NeoCons than Libertarians.

This is essentially the reason I had to take all the Heinlein books to Half Price when I started to look at my own internalized sexism and racism.

Poul Anderson and Neil Stephenson too.  I hated finding out that the “Prometheus Award” was ultimately just a gold star from a Libertarian think tank—suddenly ALL of the sci-fi I sucked down as a teenager was suspected Pro-White Man Propaganda.  Sad too because I think that sci-fi today could be a much stronger art form (e.g. BSG) if the Libertarians hadn’t tried to co-opt it.

The main problem of libertarianism is it doesn’t understand the threat that hierarchical thinking has to freedom…mostly. (Libertarians who recognize this are called anarchists.) It panics about perceived threats to freedom coming from government, yet it completely ignores threats to freedom that come from others around you. Libertarians want to maximize the effects of power. But power doesn’t equal freedom.

Power can be used to restrict the freedoms of others. In fact, it often is.

The reason why libertarians get pulled into the blame game with the neo-cons, is that they share the same worship of power. Some may disagree with who has it, and how its used, but the worship is still there.

I still maintain that Sullivan got his boxers in a twist due to the whole idea that having money and power isn’t the Calvinist ideal of meaning that you’re more worthy/a better person, but having more money and power will actually corrupt you and make you do bad, immoral things.

That’s just a grossly wrong statement tongue in cheek or not. There are lots of things to pick on Libertarian about but this is a closer to NeoCons than Libertarians.

In my experience of talking with libertarians about actual issues, they come down with the neoconservatives most of the time. In theory, yes, they should be against “The Global War On Terror”, state torture, and government surveillance. In reality what I have found is that a whole lot of libertarians have no particular problem with these things as long as their taxes are low. Now, maybe you can argue either that I am too suspicious of them, or that I have been watching the wrong libertarians. I admit this may be true. It is just that this is generally (not always) what I’ve observed.

Well apparently, lots of people who call themselves Libertarians are misogynist, neo-feudalist wackaloons, but no true Scotsman . . . er, Liberrtarian . . . er . . .

Amanda, can you find out what the Libertarians think now that an avowed racist skinhead has joined their ranks? The dude who runs the website that the Pittsburgh shooter was so fond of posting on swears he is not a racist (even though the motto of the site is “white pride worldwide”) but he is a Libertarian. I’d love to know what they say.

I admit, though, that there are plenty of libertarians who do actually seem to vote in line with their professed values:

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/

http://antiwar.com/

http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/

http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2007/03/blogosphere-of-libertarian-left.html

Maybe part of the problem with me assessing libertarians’ actual stances on these things is that I am simply not interested in their ideology and so don’t go around them that much.

I think Libertarians just need to shut the fuck up.  Your economic theories suck.  You’re, mostly, a bunch of selfish twats who don’t give a crap about anyone but yourselves.

1) I’m not a libertarian.  I’m just a person pointing out that Marcotte was blatantly NUT-PICKING. 

2) Any idiot can call themselves a “libertarian”, just like any idiot can call themselves a “feminist” or any other political label.  There is no test or license required and Libertarians cannot control who decides to inappropriately hijack the term any more than feminists can.  I could call myself a Feminist and then spew the kind of garbage associated with rightwing stereotypes of Feminists (“all sex is rape and all men should be put in sperm-farms”) but that doesn’t mean that AM thinks anything of the kind or agrees with me on even 1% of whatever nonsense I decide to spew (possibly with the deliberate attempt to discredit the very label I am appropriating).

Even with the war in Iraq and threats of war with Iran, N. Korea and Syria, the Libertarians voted 60%Bush/40% everyone else in 2004.  Libertarians have been voting Republican, typically, in the 70%—80% range.  Despite the numerous wars we’ve had under Republican Presidents.

All this tells me is that, as I have often noticed, a lot of non-libertarian rightwing hacks, like Glen Reynolds, like to call themselves “libertarians” because it sounds better than “blatant rightwing hack”. 

It’s not like Feminism doesn’t have this problem too.  I’ve seen lots of misogynists, both men and “self-hating” women, who call themselves “Feminists” to make their ideas seem more appealing:  “Hey.  I’m a Feminist because I support empowering women ..... and I think women are most empowered when they are home in the kitchen with a kid on each hip”.

Like I said, ANY IDIOT CAN CALL THEMSELVES ANYTHING THEY WANT!

“God, having libertarians show up at your blog is like having roaches show up in your house.  You know you can beat this eventually, but they still wear you out—-relentless, brainless, disgusting, and did I mention relentless? “

Happens all the time at Pharyngula too.  There was a time when virtually every. single. thread was reduced to libertarians screaming “I got mine! fuck you!” couched in faux-rationalist arguments.  To the point where P.Z. threatened to start banning all of them.  Tedious roaches, they are.

__

“Poul Anderson and Neil Stephenson too”

I’ve only read one Stephenson book (The Diamond Age) - does he suffer from Pro-White Man Propaganda overall?

Like I said, ANY IDIOT CAN CALL THEMSELVES ANYTHING THEY WANT!

And thirty years from now the 5% of Libertarians who aren’t privileged white male assholes will be having to defend use of whatever new term for themselves they adopted, which had been previously co-opted by white male assholes fleeing the ruins of the Libertarian label.

Just like how the Religious Right is seeking a new label to hide behind, since the various political organizations and labels (Conservative Christian, Moral Majority, Compassionate Conservative, Christian Coalition, Family Values Voters) are now all perceived as “authoritarian Medieval nutjob”.

Or maybe those 5% non-asshole Libertarians could finish their journeys through the cognitive dissonance, by either abandoning their irrational fear of taxation and becoming liberals, or abandoning their irrational worship of corporations and becoming anarchists.

atheist—it really does come down to who they caucus with. Very few self-described Libertarians vote Libertarian on the ballot (if it’s even available). In the interest of making sure their vote counts for at least some of their beliefs, they have to throw in with either Dems and Repubs. So it comes down to which belief is most important.

Democrats
pro freedom to marry
pro bodily autonomy

Republicans
lower taxes*
<strike>reduced spending</strike> (NLA)
pro guns

Interestingly, the Democrats are not ANTI lower taxes, it’s just a matter of making sure shit doesn’t break and sometimes that means raising taxes a little, and I would say most of them these days aren’t ANTI guns, they just don’t pursue the issue with the fevered preoccupation that the Republicans do, no matter the cost (complete destruction of the economy, for example, or increase in violent crime and gun trafficking). It’s the Republicans that feverishly oppose the freedom of marriage and the freedom of bodily autonomy. So if you were to look at these items on a balance scale, you would expect any sensible Libertarian to lean Democratic. But they don’t. Because they’re privileged whiney assholes.

In Vermont during the SSM debates, a Libertarian representative actually stood forcefully for the right to marry, which was refreshing. But despite that single act of Libertarian truth, he still caucuses as a Republican, which means he’s still compromised because he had to play politics. SSM was a large enough issue that he couldn’t escape public scrutiny if he was a massive hypocrite on the issue, but people who ride the libertarian train into elected office as Republicans are the biggest friggin’ sellouts, and they have no choice, because the Republican party is THAT HOSTILE to personal liberties.

(sorry, forgot my footnote to “Lower taxes” above)

* usually Lowered Taxes are made up for via “hidden taxes” like higher gas prices, higher home prices, and higher food prices—and it’s a lot harder to track how much those prices shoot up than it is to figure out how much more you’re paying the government this year, because it’s death by a thousand cuts.

All this tells me is that, as I have often noticed, a lot of non-libertarian rightwing hacks, like Glen Reynolds, like to call themselves “libertarians” because it sounds better than “blatant rightwing hack”.

ANY IDIOT CAN CALL THEMSELVES ANYTHING THEY WANT!

angulimala, that’s exactly the problem! How am I supposed to know who is a ‘real’ libertarian and who is just a ‘slumming right wing hack’? I can only observe that a bunch of people call themselves ‘libertarians’ for whatever reasons, and that many of these people seem to be pro-war.

I have no idea what their internal life is like, nor do I actually care that much.

140 comments and going.  The libertarians will WIN THE THREAD, because they can keep going after everyone else gives up and moves on.

Eh, I didn’t think Snow Crash (or Cryptomnomicon for that matter) was very libertarian at all. It did portray a libertarian society, but not at all in a good light.

And to add on to what Mighty Ponygirl said, it’s not just about taxes. If you pay more for health care, energy, food, housing, whatever, you’re worse off. Myself, I view all my bills as being taxes. But that’s just me.

I’ve only read one Stephenson book (The Diamond Age) - does he suffer from Pro-White Man Propaganda overall?

I don’t know about the Baroque Cycle books, but you can clearly see it in both Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash.  The lead character in both novels is a “hacker” and sort of anti-hero, who has poor relationships with women, and thinks that he can rationally solve most problems, except when he can’t and then he relies on his Male Studliness to save the day.  One major thread in Cryptonomicon is about an attempt to establish a new digital currency (see also Thiele / Paypal);  a major theme in both Snow Crash and The Diamond Age is the rise of libertarian-ish city-state type governments.

Taking the three novels I have read (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age):

Stephenson writes his women very poorly, so much that it sounds like he is totally a Nice Guy(tm).  Each novel has one Strong Woman character who is basically a man-in-a-woman’s-body.  All women—including the three Strong Women—are completely irrational in their choices about who to sleep with;  in fact, NO woman in the three novels sleeps with a guy because their personalities were compatible or out of mutual sexual chemistry.  They also have bad taste in music (to paraphrase a line: “she had a large selection of women singers who deeply understand what it’s like not to be understood”), and non-primary women only use their brains to advance stupid agendas (see the two (!) women in Cryptonomicon who wanted furniture so badly).

It was fun during the dot-com era, but after the dot-bomb it looked ridiculous in hindsight.  But maybe that was me finally getting through late adolescence.

Atheist: Apart from the level of care you have for the respective demographic, that’s like saying “Feminists for Life and the Independent Women’s Forum are confusing me into not knowing nor caring what actual feminism is.” I mean, they have an actual platform which explicitly calls for an end to foreign intervention by the military and no government interference in reproductive rights/who wants to get married (my support for their platform sharply drops to near-non-existent off after 1.4).

Now it’s for a party who can’t even elect a county dogcatcher, but the problem in defining any group using a statistically insignificant sample (i.e. the jerkoffs that have plagued Amanda’s past threads) still exist.

norbizness, that’s fair enough. I should have looked at their party platform, or gotten a more definitive form of evidence than what I have observed in talking with libertarians I know (which I guess is probably a skewed sample to begin with). I guess I let my anger run away with me. Sorry about that.

Now it’s for a party who can’t even elect a county dogcatcher, but the problem in defining any group using a statistically insignificant sample (i.e. the jerkoffs that have plagued Amanda’s past threads) still exist.

Problem is that their party/platform is paid for by people like the Koch brothers.  Charles Koch wrote “The Science of Success” which is supposedly how to run a libertarian corporation, except that his corporation is notorious for stealing money from its customers and violating environmental laws (so much so that the not-crazy Koch brother went on 60 Minutes to denounce what David and Charles are doing to the family name), AND he’s planning on passing the corporation not to his most capable employee, but rather to his son (so much for meritocracy).

We’ve got choads at the top of the Libertarian heap like Koch/Thiel and vocal minority Libertarian choads on the Internet.  Where does that leave the rest?  And how many not-choad Libertarians are there really?

KL, I don’t think you’re giving Neal Stephenson a fair shake. Certainly he has sexist characters, but in Snow Crash for example he talks about the form of sexism that comes from men (geeks, in particular) who truly believe they are too smart to be sexist, and in the Big U he talks about rape culture. He has powerful, smart, tough female characters who succeed despite the pervasive sexism around them. You can argue that he fails to write convincing female characters, and that they (or he) overuse sex, or that he fails to present the sexism in a way that calls it out enough for his geek readers to object to it instead of accepting it, but I think his intentions are good.

Radicals tend to be against democracy.

Left wing: The process is so infected by the influence of the elites that elections do nothing more than ratify political inevitabilities. The masses must take action themselves.

That would be more democracy, not less. Radical leftists tend to object to the means by which the rich control the media and the political process. You can call the artificially imposed dichotomy between two pro-capitalist pro-business parties “democracy” if you want; it does loosely fit some of the dictionary definitions. But by any definition, workers bypassing this false choice and instead self-governing would be more democratic still.

Your criticism only stands if we consider “radical left” to be defined only as “vanguardist.” If a Leninist party takes control and claims to be ruling on the behalf of workers, while eliminating any means for those workers to veto or replace the ruling vanguard, then that’s anti-democratic. But now that we can see the results of the Russian Revolution, such a project is not on the agenda of most radical leftists today.

It sounds like you are criticizing the majority of radical leftism of 100 years ago. Great, but the majority of radical leftists today agree with that criticism.

For an illustration, google democracy and Chomsky, and see how much you disagree with what he has to say. Not that Chomsky is the only legitimate example, nor that all radical leftists agree with him, but he’s prolific enough that a simple google search can be instructive. http://www.google.com/search?q=democracy+chomsky

The largest Libertarian candidate so far has been Ron Paul, who believed that women shouldn’t have any choice over what to do with their bodies, and you can’t express your political beliefs via burning a flag.

“Also, as a side. You don’t have to forgive Sullivan for his post-9/11 views, but he is one of the few people to recognize how wrong he was, admit it, and regain a defensible and consistent world view. You could argue that he did it out of political expediency, but from reading him regularly I find him to be genuine.”

Except I don’t think he changed. He realized Bush/Cheny were not who he thought they were, sure, but I don’t think he sees the error of his ways. If John McCain or Mitt Romney won the election and proposed invading Iran, I think Sullivan would have gotten on board.

And the Bell Curve, the Bell Curve, the Bell Curve, the Bell Curve.

I’m not the one to argue for libertarians, but I’d rather the Reasonoids as the the opposition party than the current Republicans. A lot of them do really good work, such as the invaluable Radley Balko on police and justice issues. Doesn’t mean I have to sign up to his economics.

I just want to say congratulations!  This award is an honor to any sane person.  So Libertarians don’t like you.  Is that supposed to make you sad?

you keep using the word Libertarian, I do not think it means what you think it means.

It’s Libertarians who don’t know what the word actually means.  The theory of libertarianism is completely is so different from the practice of it, I was amazed that Libertarians actually call themselves that the first time I met a real one.  Of course, they’re no different than all the other groups that claim to be for something but want the opposite.

If you check out the international socialists or American communist party, you can see much of the same thing. Policy recommendations, no taxes, no imperialism.

Wow, I never thought I’d be defending the (vanguardist) CPUSA, but this is just false. Googling American communist party gave me a very obvious link titled “Program of the Communist Party USA” where I found this understanding of democracy:

Democratic struggles take place all the time throughout the U.S. and the world. They are struggles to enlarge democracy in every aspect of life for all working people to improve their real life options. They include the struggle to prevent deterioration of living conditions. The democratic struggle is not only about democratic rights, civil liberties, and electoral democracy. It also includes struggles for peace, equality for the racially and nationally oppressed, equality for women job creation programs, increased minimum wage, adequate health care, education, day care, housing, social security, pension and other retirement benefits, environmental protection, protection of family farms and small businesses, the needs of youth, cultural programs and independent media, progressive taxation, sharply reduced military spending, and more. The struggles of all class and social forces that seek to curb the power of the transnationals are democratic struggles.

And a list of policy prescriptions:

  *  The building of a mass people’s party capable of contending for governmental power, a party free of domination by any monopoly interests;
  * Removal from the electoral system of the financial contributions of monopolies, to be replaced by public funding and guarantees of honest elections where each vote counts and all votes are counted;
  * Replacing the foreign policy of preemptive strikes and dictating to the world in the interests of U.S.-based transnationals with a policy of international cooperation to solve problems of war and aggression, poverty, education, environment, health, and development;
  * Full restoration and expansion of the Bill of Rights and all democratic rights; the complete separation of church and state;
  * Full legal protection from hate crimes and racial profiling, and the outlawing of oral and written racist propaganda;
  * Implementation of affirmative action and compensatory programs to achieve actual equality for the racially and nationally oppressed and women;
  * Prevention of the “freedom” of monopolies to move assets in ways that harm workers and communities without full compensation; the guaranteed right to a job at living wages or full income through public works and public service jobs; the growth of public ownership of industries;
  * Elimination of management prerogatives coupled with the expansion of workers and union rights to prevent socially harmful management decisions;
  * Full funding for education, affordable housing programs, day care, Social Security, a universal health care program, youth job training and recreation programs, and cultural programs;
  * Creation of a social fund starting at $200 billion to make up for past and continuing wrongs and to help achieve equality in facilities and infrastructure for communities of the racially and nationally oppressed;
  * No taxes for workers and low and middle income people; progressive taxation of the wealthy and private corporations;
  * Military budget slashed to a fraction of current spending; and,
  * All media to be free of monopoly ownership.

That could be unrealistic, depending on how they define “middle income.” But it would logically follow that if progressive taxation of the wealthy does not produce adequate revenue, less highly-tilted tax brackets would be extended down into the upper strata of the middle classes, as necessary.

As for “international socialists,” I’m not going to go to every socialist party website in the world, looking for what you claim is there. But it bears mentioning that international socialists are the ruling party in many Western European countries, and I don’t recall them proposing to eliminate all taxation. Frankly, that part of your statement is obviously false to anyone who pays attention to world affairs. Give a specific example that supports your claim, if you can.

The largest Libertarian candidate so far has been Ron Paul, who believed that women shouldn’t have any choice over what to do with their bodies, and you can’t express your political beliefs via burning a flag.

Yes, this is the person who is most publicly representing Libertarians.  The meaning of words is based on what most people view them to mean, not what some small group wants them to mean.  So, if you think you are a Libertarian and you disagree with Ron Paul’s positions, then you should find yourself a new label.  Libertarian is as Libertarian does.  You can argue about what a true Libertarian believes all you want, but what matters is what people in that group practice.

NoJoy:  It may be that his newer works demonstrate some evolution, I don’t know.

But the women in the three novels I mentioned are much more “how guys see women” characters than actual women characters.  The only women who are even close to real people are Juanita—who is a linguist super-genius—and Amy Shaftoe, who sounds really strong but then falls for Randy…why?

Randy’s aunt who is willing to ruin the inheritance arrangements for a piece of furniture, Randy’s grandmother who is too stupid to drive a car, Randy’s girlfriend who dumps him for a pinko liberal professor (who is literally a bastard because his mom was such a slut), the German spy who was conveniently used for sex, the lady who loved raunchy sex but only on expensive furniture.  YT who is smart enough to impress the Mafia, but then sleeps with Raven?  And on top of that forgets about the dentata?  Nell (who is clearly the diamond in the rough) who has essentially no feelings about being raped or killing, Fiona who runs off on a whim to be an actor, the Drummers who unconsciously sleep with women—killing them in the process—just to compute crypto keys.

I’m having a hard time in these three particular novels believing that Stephenson sees the women he wrote as people just as real as the male characters.

It’s Libertarians who don’t know what the word actually means.

How right you are. http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secA1.html#seca13

KL, I think you outline Stephenson’s problems excellently. While I haven’t read Snowcrash in a long while, there’s a strain of social conservatism in Cryptonomicon which comes across as somewhat of a disdain for liberal culture and a fetishizing (almost exoticizing) of “traditional values.” When you put it all together and realize that this is rooted in his problems understanding or writing women characters, it all makes some more sense. He doesn’t know how to make sense of women, but if he places them in a more controlled, structured, socially conservative environment, their “place” makes more sense to him, so that latter social structure is the preferred one for him.

“they apparently didn’t catch the satirical, tongue-in-cheek aspect of the Thiel post”

This was in reference to Amanda’s post about Thiel, not Thiel’s post itself.

I can only observe that a bunch of people call themselves ‘libertarians’ for whatever reasons, and that many of these people seem to be pro-war.

Atheist,  I won’t deny that that is a legitimate problem.

That is also why I usually don’t put much stock in the “Libertarian” label or assume I know what someone believes when someone calls themselves a “Libertarian”.  I usually wait until I not only know some specific positions of theirs but also their thought process.  That said, if the name “Ayn Rand” pops up in any positive context I usually write the person off as an intellectually lazy “follower” who thinks they are much more intelligent and independent than they actually are.

I’m not saying I have any idea on what a “Real” libertarian is.  I’m saying the label “Libertarian” is as useful to me as the label “Fartwhiffle”.  If I told you I was a “Fartwhiffle” it would mean nothing to you, so you wouldn’t respond by projecting preconceived notions onto me.  You would just let it slip by and wait until you heard more before you jumped to conclusions regarding my beliefs.

IMO there are several strains of libertarianism and the loudest, most numerous and most powerful self-described libertarians are Republicans who smoke dope.  You see that, for example, in the responses to this article. (which you might have to dig around to find, sorry about that).  In my opinion, coming out wildly in favour of a high incarceration rate (which at least one Cato writer did) is kind of anti-liberty, by definition, but for the bulk of people who call themselves libertarians, “liberty” = liberty for white men of property, including the right to control people who aren’t white men of property, just as in the conservative definition.  Freedom for me but not for thee.

Personally, I think that in the North American context the word “libertarian” has been so tainted by RWSD that it should be abandoned by everyone else.  But so far, it hasn’t been, so I kind of wince when liberals describe libertarians in those terms, because I know many of them aren’t like that and there are a number of places where non-RWSD libertarian ideas overlap with and could feed into liberal ones.

The problem with referencing the official Libertarian party is that most self-described libertarians have no relationship to it.  Libertarians and conservatives are roughly the same thing—-libertarianism, as it stands, is the economic “philosophy” of Republicans.  Most libertarians you encounter can’t even be pro-choice, because misogyny effectively trumps their faux values system.

“I’m having a hard time in these three particular novels believing that Stephenson sees the women he wrote as people just as real as the male characters. “

You know, this makes me want to read The Diamond Age again. It’s been years and years since I read it and I was proto-feminist back then.  I’m interested to see, knowing what I know now, how differently I will see it.

The problem with the left is they are dependent on taking money from those who earned it and give it to those who haven’t earned it to accomplish their goals.

That’s also the problem with hedge fund managers, who are dependent on taking money from those who earned it, and who give it in the form of fees to themselves. When a hedge fund’s returns are up, managers collect hefty fees; when a hedge fund loses money, managers still collect hefty fees.

Heinlein had a big influence on Boomer libertarians, especially engineers, who were shocked to find their take-home pay was much less than the gross amount they had figured on. The irony that they had benefited all their lives from tax-provided benefits was lost on them. (One guy’s parents were both public school teachers, and he had gone to one of the best engineering schools in the country, which happened to be supported by taxes.)

Consider further the irony of the tax-supported George Mason University being a center of Libertarian thought. But the Libertarian professors there are somehow able to rationalise their slurping from the public trough.

The problem with the left is they are dependent on taking money from those who earned it and give it to those who haven’t earned it to accomplish their goals.

So rich, hard-working people haven’t earned the right to have free roads, schools, police, and military protection?  We really should stop letting them use these things then, since they insist that they haven’t earned them.

Irony…  That means, like, full of iron, right?

engineers, who were shocked to find their take-home pay was much less than the gross amount they had figured on.

I think it’s also that engineers become shocked to find that their gross pay doesn’t place them that much higher on the economic totem pole than the rest of the middle classes. Since they’re so smart (they believe), they figure there must be something holding them back, and that thing is…. government regulations! and libruls with their namby-pamby demands!

Tyro, again with the engineer-bashing?  I’m an engineer and I’m liberal and not self-absorbed.  90% of my classmates in college were the same way.  Can we please leave engineers out of this?

catgirl, sorry. I should have limited it to libertarian engineers. Most of the engineers I know (and I are one) are my close friends who are mostly perfectly wonderful people.

catgirl, I hear all the time from blue-collar operators that engineers like me are making big bucks.  They don’t seem to realize that the year’s worth of salary I owe on school debts means I have less disposable income than they do.  OTOH the seasoned engineers DO make some serious cash and have no qualms about flaunting it ... and they also lean sharply right, but that’s probably because of the chemicals industry.  Anyway, maybe that’s where Tyro is coming from.

OTOH the seasoned engineers DO make some serious cash and have no qualms about flaunting it

Maybe. But compared to a patent lawyer or a surgeon, I can’t help but see their salaries as being in the “making decent money” realm rather than “wealthy,” unless they manage to sell their own company.

The pathology of libertarian engineers always seemed to be to be one of an underlying resentment about how they should be higher on the class/monetary totem pole but aren’t. The well-adjusted engineers are the ones happy to be doing something they really like and making decent money while doing it.

They also have bad taste in music (to paraphrase a line: “she had a large selection of women singers who deeply understand what it’s like not to be understood”), and non-primary women only use their brains to advance stupid agendas (see the two (!) women in Cryptonomicon who wanted furniture so badly).

Don’t knock the lust for grandmother-grade furniture.  I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that when you reach a Certain Age, male or female, you start being drawn to real estate porn, fine rugs and really really good furniture.  It may be genetic.

I don’t think Stephenson is a libertarian at all, really.  He did an interview with Reason about 3 or 4 years ago in which he politely dissented from the idea libertarians hold that Snowcrash was some sort of idealized libertarian utopia when he’d intended it as a satirical dystopia: the collapse of rule of law that came with the collapse of government, the control of every aspect of life by corporations, the lack of any kind of social safety net, even the sea-born floating city that quickly devolved into a crime-infested ocean-going slum ruled by a single powerful and wealthy man attempting to achieve world domination through mind control.  He also describes social/political problems in terms of power and social justice being systemic- but the issue of who has power and who suffers injustice is clearly not as simple as “statists” vs. “libertarians.”

The first book of his I read was Zodiac: it’s an adventure yarn about a radical environmentalist who gathers evidence on the sly for the government to use to prosecute polluting corporations.  Not exactly a libertarian theme by anyone’s definition.

Also, Randy Waterhouse in Cryptonomicon is definitely NOT anyone’s idea of a studly man’s man.  His power, such as it is, comes entirely from his techno-geek status and he uses it to the greatest advantage that he can, pretty obviously to compensate for his lack of macho manliness.  The only really manly hero in that story is Sgt. Shaftoe in the WWII storyline- and he’s a crazy junkie. 

In the modern-era storyline, there’s his son the American-expat treasure hunter in the Phillipines, but he’s not exactly a main character at all.  His main purpose in the story is that he raised the kick-ass, tough-as-nails daughter with whom Randy falls in love.  That she is far more representative of the so-called manly virtues than Randy is Randy’s biggest problem- when he overreaches trying to compensate, it’s actually a huge turnoff for her. 

Actually, the other “manly” characters in that story are either characatures, including Randy’s other partners who are gun-toting paranoids, or villians: The Dentist, the worst sort of master-of-the-universe, and (forget his name) the back-to-the-wild survivalist.

The big mega-trilogy, the Baroque Cycle, isn’t any kind of libertarian apology either: it’s an exploration of the systems of the world, including science, finance, economics, government and how they came to be increasingly necessary as those systems became global and power centers shifted in the 17th and 18th centuries.  (By far the most interesting storyline in that cycle is the pirate ship Minerva and her international crew’s adventures around the world.)  It is, unfortunately, ridiculously fucking long and sprawling.  I got as far as the beginning of the third book and gave up.

But I totally agree that his female characters are poorly written.  They do seem more like his own fantasies of what women should be than they are believable characters.  To his credit, what they should be, apparently, is strong, smart, and independent- it’s just that in his novels, they don’t so much like actual strong, smart, independent women as they seem like men who happen to be female- and use their femaleness to sexually manipulate the men around them.

Here’s the Reason/Stephenson interview:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/36481.html

At any rate, he’s no Heinlein, that’s for sure.  And I mean that in a good way.

Wasn’t YT supposed to be a young teenager? Like 15 or so? And wasn’t the guy she slept with a big, stupid, good-looking, macho violent criminal? Like, exactly the kind of guy a 15 year old who thinks she’s immortal and totally in control of everything because she’s such hot shit might fall for? And isn’t forgetting that she has a dentata in the kind of utterly stupid mistake a 15 year old would make?

I would have found YT an implausible character if she wasn’t supposed to be a hotshot kid. If she was 25? Yeah, then she’d have made no sense. But she was a *kid*, a cocky kid who thought she was awesomeness on a stick. Of course she sleeps with awful guys and makes dumbass mistakes. Name me a 15 year old who doesn’t make dumbass mistakes.

But then I generally find the contention that a female character is “a man in a woman’s body” pretty absurd, given that I myself had much, much more in common psychologically with the males around me than the females until I had kids. A lot of “female” psychology in the world is constructed by society, and if society was different there would be a *lot* of women who act like what we think people, the default, would act like, except that right now only men get to be people.

I only ever read Snow Crash, but I thought that Hiro wasn’t any more complex or well drawn than YT, and that they were both interesting characters.

If you scrape a libertarian, you find someone who really hasn’t thought it through.

I’m serious.  Give it a try.  Find a libertarian and engage him (it’s usually a him) and press a little bit his assertions.

You find an M&M;where someone left out the chocolate.

Alara-  Point taken.  Could be I’m just projecting my own image of women on NS’s characters?  I also haven’t read any of his stuff in a few years.  And yeah, you’re right about YT: she’s a wild kid whose fearlessness and sometimes poor judgement gets her into trouble.  She’s also highly intelligent while also uneducated and far more interested in fun and thrills than, say, planning for the future.  Exactly as an unsupervised, smart, and adventurous 15 year old would be expected to be- when I read it, she seemed real to me.

I guess it’s more the Cryptonomicon and the Big Sprawling Trilogy whose few female characters aren’t so well developed.

Now that I think of it, the main female character in the Baroque Cycle trilogy is unrealistic because she’s just too perfect- politically savvy courtier and consort to Louis IVX, fantastically wealthy financial genius, anti-slavery activist, beautiful and sexy, and on top of all that, she’s a mathemetician on the same level as Leibniz and Newton, capable of composing long letters in complex codes which she invents on the fly.  And her path to this position went from peasant to slave to vagabond to prostitute to Richest and Smartest Woman in Europe.  She basically has no flaws at all.  I guess it’s less about “man in woman’s body” with her as it is “impossibly perfect in every conceivable way.”

I only ever read Snow Crash, but I thought that Hiro wasn’t any more complex or well drawn than YT, and that they were both interesting characters.

True - but Snow Crash’s real hero was Juanita.  Hiro was just the protagonist.

Interesting parallels to the story of Ishtar in her tale…

Now that I think of it, the main female character in the Baroque Cycle trilogy is unrealistic because she’s just too perfect- politically savvy courtier and consort to Louis IVX, fantastically wealthy financial genius, anti-slavery activist, beautiful and sexy, and on top of all that, she’s a mathemetician on the same level as Leibniz and Newton, capable of composing long letters in complex codes which she invents on the fly.  And her path to this position went from peasant to slave to vagabond to prostitute to Richest and Smartest Woman in Europe.  She basically has no flaws at all.  I guess it’s less about “man in woman’s body” with her as it is “impossibly perfect in every conceivable way.”

Impossibly perfect is not in and of itself an impediment to successful storytelling - look how long the Superman brand has been going. The problem with the Eliza character are not the things she’s allowed to do that are just like the boys - math, finance, adventure - it’s the feminine markers that are overlayed on top of these actions to make her a woman.

If you take away the is multiple instances when she is raped or coerced into exchanges of sexual favours, and the fact that she gives birth, there’s nothing of a real woman there. When I say a real woman, I mean the way women experience being women - often scared of physical violence, confused about the morality of their sexual behaviour, striving to please the men who have power over them and at the same time create a strong network of female relationships for support and mutual validation, fluctuating between their body as a friend, a tool and an enemy, pushing against the expectations set for them by a world of men. Just giving a character a vagina is not enough.

Look at the whole pregnancy arc and it becomes evident that NS simply has no idea what to do with an actual female character. One minute she’s inventing modern finance in Amsterdam, and not fifty pages later she’s deliberately gotten herself preggo (for some utterly mysterious reason) and is literally embroidering cushions. From that point on her character goes into a prolonged stasis as NS is trying to figure out what the hell a woman who’s squeezed a kid from down there can possibly do in his story (answer: same as a woman who hasn’t), and he finally solves the problem with great Sci/Fi aplomb by having the kid abducted. No more mothering, problem solved, Eliza a viable character again.

Another emblematic scene for me was the one where Eliza (forced into a long marriage with a sexual sadist and monster - how’s that for strong?) is flogged and humiliatingly raped by her husband - repeatedly - while Jack Shaftoe watches. Go back and read those passages: there is not one mention of what she is feeling. Not a single description of the expression on her face, no references to the pain she is experiencing, not even any dwelling on the scars and bruises these repeated beatings must inflict on her. The mutilation and molestation of her body are entirely a transaction between two men - she has no agency in it, not even victimhood. It’s unbefuckinglievably screwed up.

The problem with NS is not necessarily that he writes shallow, predictable, boy’s own fantasy female characters (most of the great SF/F writers are guilty of that) - it’s that he tried to make them sexual. The crazy confused sex bot stuff that ensues is way creepy.

What, just because Mr. Raines (presumably) loves him some pussy and hates that there are women around them that keep insisting that they have the right to keep his dick out of them, you’re not surprised?  Dan, how cynical of you.  XD

Tyro:  Clearly jealous of people who can multiply 2 2-digit numbers without a calculator.

SnowCrash was the worst novel I have ever read in my life.