I think it is more useful to describe these as different clusters that use the “libertarian” label rather than as different elements of the libertarian movement, because there isn’t a unitary libertarian movement.
Telling someone that you are “a libertarian” doesn’t tell them very much, because there are so many distinct groups using that label.
Apologies for linking to a politics blog, but I think the point contained therein is actually rather anti-mindkilling, in the vein that politics isn’t about policy… The name that is most-closely associated with libertarianism in the minds of many Americans today is not really espousing views likely to lead to more liberty in the long run.
Anti-mindkilling?! You are linking to an article that represents nothing but a salvo in a bitter and long-standing ideological war. This is true regardless of whose position in this conflict (if anyone’s) one favors.
The element that I am suggesting is anti-mindkilling is the assertion that short-term partisan battles bear limited relationship to meaningful long-term social change, and that one can potentially recognize the degree to which tribalism obscures this by looking at political battles in a time and place sufficiently removed from one’s own.
I understand the argument you’re trying to make, but the problem is that “liberty” is not a term with a universally agreed-upon definition on which you could base uncontroversial assertions that something is “likely to lead to more liberty,” or even that a particular state of affairs involves more liberty. This word is first and foremost a strong applause light, not a precisely defined term that would enable us to consider any hypothetical states of the world X and Y and make an uncontroversial and universally accepted claim that X means greater liberty than Y.
In this case, there is an ideological dispute in which both sides would claim to be in favor of more liberty, however the disagreement is not just about what policies are likely to lead to more liberty in practice, but also about the very definition of “liberty” that one is supposed to be striving for. And you can’t support any side in this disagreement—at least not casually and without a very careful justification—without going way out into the mind-killing territory.
Ok, I better understand your objection now. I’m not sure that I see, however, why this objection wouldn’t apply equally well to Eliezer and Michael Shermer (or anyone else) using the term “libertarian” to describe their views. (I take “libertarian” to mean “in favor of more liberty,” more or less)
I have no idea what kind of libertarian Shermer is, but I know for sure that there are some kinds of libertarians who would take issue with the sort of libertarianism from Eliezer’s self-description. Promoting the “wrong” kind of libertarianism in front of people who belong to either kind is not at all unlikely to lead to bitter and mind-killing ideological disputes.
The important difference however is that Eliezer’s article presents his views in a reasonably non-confrontational way, whereas the article you linked is straight-out ideological warfare. The latter is much more likely to induce mind-killing.
I sense that I again did a poor job conveying something here, so let me try again. I am not arguing whether or not self-described libertarians of differing stripes would deny each other the libertarian label if they could—I’m well aware how bitter the disagreements between beltway “cosmotarians” and Mises types get.
Rather, what I am saying is that I think anyone of any political leaning has a valid objection to self-described libertarians using that moniker, because the label itself is an applause light (it’s not really functioning as one in the current US political context, but that is because it is already serving as a tribal marker).
It’s somewhat similar to the annoying tendency in the US to refer to politically active people with puritanical sexual mores as “values voters”, as if it were not the case that everyone believes their vote is an expression of their values.
I see what you mean. People don’t care much about etymology when it comes to ideological labels. Once a word becomes a standard designation for a party, ideology, or movement, few people ever stop to think where that name came from or what meanings it has otherwise. (Though of course there are bitter disputes if multiple groups lay claim to the same label as their primary identification.)
Also, ideological labels that are great applause lights for (practically) everyone lose this characterisic when they’re used as designatons for concrete political/ideological groups. (A mention of the Democratic Party, for example, is hardly an applause light for anyone except its most passionate partisans, even though the general meaning of this adjective is possibly the greatest universal applause ligth of all nowadays.)
Rather, what I am saying is that I think anyone of any political leaning has a valid objection to self-described libertarians using that moniker, because the label itself is an applause light (it’s not really functioning as one in the current US political context, but that is because it is already serving as a tribal marker).
Do you think this applies even more so to people using “liberal” as their moniker?
My understanding is that application of the terms “liberal” and “conservative” to politics dates to revolutionary France and has more to do with attitudes regarding the pace of social change.
It is full of stuff like: “People take the idea of women’s equality more seriously than they did 50 years ago, but not seriously enough.”
Now if someone was so sexist as to point out that females going to college substantially outnumber males despite underwhelming SAT scores, and that when one interviews female job candidates who graduated in STEM fields it looks suspiciously as if they were graduated on gender rather than ability, that doubtless would be called hate speech and flame bait, whereas saying we are “not taking women’s equality seriously enough” is not flamebait at all but what all intelligent right thinking people agree and no one could possibly question—and if someone was so insolent as to doubt it, he needs to be silenced.
And lo and behold, eight seconds after posting “and if someone was so insolent as to doubt it, he would be silenced” that post got voted down to minus three points.
It is characteristic of sam0345 (James A. Donald, I believe) to express his own views in the voice of an imaginary opponent who is outraged at them, with the implication that the imaginary opponent is a distillation of his actual interlocutors.
In the other venues where I have seen him post, it is a very effective technique for fanning flamewars.
with the implication that the imaginary opponent is a distillation of his actual interlocutors.
The downvote reveals that the imaginary opponent is an accurate distillation. Had the comment been allowed to stand, would have looked silly, would have been self refuting. There is nothing as ludicrous as the martyr soliciting martyrdom, and no one martyring him, as for example Andres Serrano earnestly seeking death threats and failing to get them.
It’s clear what the narrative in your own head is, but the narrative in mine when I see this sort of thing is that you’re wearing one of these t-shirts.
Pre-empting other people’s rejection is, always and everywhere, a low status action, an acknowledgement that everyone around you is higher in the pecking order. It may not feel like that when you’re doing it, but that’s what it is. Yes, it’s even lower status to not even get taken notice of when you ask to be pissed on, but getting pissed on is not much of a step up, especially if some of the people pissing agree with the rest of what you have to say.
The thing is, you do actually have sensible things to say, when you aren’t playing the “kick me, that’ll show everyone” card. Mencius Moldbug, with whom your views have a lot in common, and you have mentioned favourably, has also been mentioned favourably here. I don’t see him saying “kick me”, and neither do you on your own blog. But every time you enter a public forum you put on the “kick me” shirt, and the more you get kicked, the more you lap it up.
Why are you here, anyway? So far you have only exercised a few of your own hobbyhorses. They may be interesting and important matters, and not only to you, but you obviously aren’t here to refine the art of human rationality. (Have you ever read anything by Eliezer Yudkowsky, for example?) You’re here to talk politics and get a warm glow of validation from hostile reactions from this bunch of people you heard of who are so arrogant as to call themselves Less Wrong.
Had the comment been allowed to stand, would have looked silly, would have been self refuting.
Trolls get downvoted even if they say “You jerkfaces can only prove you are not jerkfaces by not downvoting me.” (which is what you essentially did)
But I knew you lot would predictably respond.
Yeah, you’re like an artist, craving the contempt of your contemporaries, because you think that proves you “edgy”.
PHOEBE BUFFAY: “I would give anything to not be appreciated in my own time!”
-4 with the last point being me. So at least once it wasn’t downvoted for dissent or doubt, it was downvoted for the pitiful hero-martyr attitude of being silenced for your intellectual bravery. Before, you know, you were actually silenced at all.
That attitude reminded me of Mel Gibson in South Park “Torture you?” “So you do intend to torture me! Well, go ahead!”
So at least once it wasn’t downvoted for dissent or doubt
People are unreliable judges of their own motivations. Someone, however, who can reliably predict another person’s behavior is likely a reliable judge of that other person’s motivation.
Ah, you reliably predicted a single bit of behaviour (upvoted or downvoted), and from this you extrapolate a complete motivation?
Here’s how it looks to me, when I look through your entire history of posting in LessWrong: You are consistently downvoted for your attitude, not for the claims you make. In many places you say essentially the same thing as here, but you’re only downvoted only you are acting like a rude jerk or when you play pity games.
Someone, however, who can reliably predict another person’s behavior is likely a reliable judge of that other person’s motivation.
You are using the word “likely” in a manner that is inconsistent with the probability calculus.
Often times, multiple people will reliably predict that a comment will be downvoted, though each attributes a different motivation to the downvotes. They can’t all be “likely a reliable judge” of that motivation. The respective probabilities of their being correct have to sum to less than one, so all but one (at most) is probably wrong.
I think it is more useful to describe these as different clusters that use the “libertarian” label rather than as different elements of the libertarian movement, because there isn’t a unitary libertarian movement.
Telling someone that you are “a libertarian” doesn’t tell them very much, because there are so many distinct groups using that label.
Apologies for linking to a politics blog, but I think the point contained therein is actually rather anti-mindkilling, in the vein that politics isn’t about policy… The name that is most-closely associated with libertarianism in the minds of many Americans today is not really espousing views likely to lead to more liberty in the long run.
Anti-mindkilling?! You are linking to an article that represents nothing but a salvo in a bitter and long-standing ideological war. This is true regardless of whose position in this conflict (if anyone’s) one favors.
The element that I am suggesting is anti-mindkilling is the assertion that short-term partisan battles bear limited relationship to meaningful long-term social change, and that one can potentially recognize the degree to which tribalism obscures this by looking at political battles in a time and place sufficiently removed from one’s own.
I understand the argument you’re trying to make, but the problem is that “liberty” is not a term with a universally agreed-upon definition on which you could base uncontroversial assertions that something is “likely to lead to more liberty,” or even that a particular state of affairs involves more liberty. This word is first and foremost a strong applause light, not a precisely defined term that would enable us to consider any hypothetical states of the world X and Y and make an uncontroversial and universally accepted claim that X means greater liberty than Y.
In this case, there is an ideological dispute in which both sides would claim to be in favor of more liberty, however the disagreement is not just about what policies are likely to lead to more liberty in practice, but also about the very definition of “liberty” that one is supposed to be striving for. And you can’t support any side in this disagreement—at least not casually and without a very careful justification—without going way out into the mind-killing territory.
Ok, I better understand your objection now. I’m not sure that I see, however, why this objection wouldn’t apply equally well to Eliezer and Michael Shermer (or anyone else) using the term “libertarian” to describe their views. (I take “libertarian” to mean “in favor of more liberty,” more or less)
I have no idea what kind of libertarian Shermer is, but I know for sure that there are some kinds of libertarians who would take issue with the sort of libertarianism from Eliezer’s self-description. Promoting the “wrong” kind of libertarianism in front of people who belong to either kind is not at all unlikely to lead to bitter and mind-killing ideological disputes.
The important difference however is that Eliezer’s article presents his views in a reasonably non-confrontational way, whereas the article you linked is straight-out ideological warfare. The latter is much more likely to induce mind-killing.
I sense that I again did a poor job conveying something here, so let me try again. I am not arguing whether or not self-described libertarians of differing stripes would deny each other the libertarian label if they could—I’m well aware how bitter the disagreements between beltway “cosmotarians” and Mises types get.
Rather, what I am saying is that I think anyone of any political leaning has a valid objection to self-described libertarians using that moniker, because the label itself is an applause light (it’s not really functioning as one in the current US political context, but that is because it is already serving as a tribal marker).
It’s somewhat similar to the annoying tendency in the US to refer to politically active people with puritanical sexual mores as “values voters”, as if it were not the case that everyone believes their vote is an expression of their values.
I see what you mean. People don’t care much about etymology when it comes to ideological labels. Once a word becomes a standard designation for a party, ideology, or movement, few people ever stop to think where that name came from or what meanings it has otherwise. (Though of course there are bitter disputes if multiple groups lay claim to the same label as their primary identification.)
Also, ideological labels that are great applause lights for (practically) everyone lose this characterisic when they’re used as designatons for concrete political/ideological groups. (A mention of the Democratic Party, for example, is hardly an applause light for anyone except its most passionate partisans, even though the general meaning of this adjective is possibly the greatest universal applause ligth of all nowadays.)
Do you think this applies even more so to people using “liberal” as their moniker?
My understanding is that application of the terms “liberal” and “conservative” to politics dates to revolutionary France and has more to do with attitudes regarding the pace of social change.
It is full of stuff like: “People take the idea of women’s equality more seriously than they did 50 years ago, but not seriously enough.”
Now if someone was so sexist as to point out that females going to college substantially outnumber males despite underwhelming SAT scores, and that when one interviews female job candidates who graduated in STEM fields it looks suspiciously as if they were graduated on gender rather than ability, that doubtless would be called hate speech and flame bait, whereas saying we are “not taking women’s equality seriously enough” is not flamebait at all but what all intelligent right thinking people agree and no one could possibly question—and if someone was so insolent as to doubt it, he needs to be silenced.
And lo and behold, eight seconds after posting “and if someone was so insolent as to doubt it, he would be silenced” that post got voted down to minus three points.
You did not say “I doubt it.” You said that a doubter would be silenced. Try saying “I doubt it” here and see what happens.
Do not confuse levels.
It is characteristic of sam0345 (James A. Donald, I believe) to express his own views in the voice of an imaginary opponent who is outraged at them, with the implication that the imaginary opponent is a distillation of his actual interlocutors.
In the other venues where I have seen him post, it is a very effective technique for fanning flamewars.
The downvote reveals that the imaginary opponent is an accurate distillation. Had the comment been allowed to stand, would have looked silly, would have been self refuting. There is nothing as ludicrous as the martyr soliciting martyrdom, and no one martyring him, as for example Andres Serrano earnestly seeking death threats and failing to get them.
But I knew you lot would predictably respond.
It’s clear what the narrative in your own head is, but the narrative in mine when I see this sort of thing is that you’re wearing one of these t-shirts.
Pre-empting other people’s rejection is, always and everywhere, a low status action, an acknowledgement that everyone around you is higher in the pecking order. It may not feel like that when you’re doing it, but that’s what it is. Yes, it’s even lower status to not even get taken notice of when you ask to be pissed on, but getting pissed on is not much of a step up, especially if some of the people pissing agree with the rest of what you have to say.
The thing is, you do actually have sensible things to say, when you aren’t playing the “kick me, that’ll show everyone” card. Mencius Moldbug, with whom your views have a lot in common, and you have mentioned favourably, has also been mentioned favourably here. I don’t see him saying “kick me”, and neither do you on your own blog. But every time you enter a public forum you put on the “kick me” shirt, and the more you get kicked, the more you lap it up.
Why are you here, anyway? So far you have only exercised a few of your own hobbyhorses. They may be interesting and important matters, and not only to you, but you obviously aren’t here to refine the art of human rationality. (Have you ever read anything by Eliezer Yudkowsky, for example?) You’re here to talk politics and get a warm glow of validation from hostile reactions from this bunch of people you heard of who are so arrogant as to call themselves Less Wrong.
Trolls get downvoted even if they say “You jerkfaces can only prove you are not jerkfaces by not downvoting me.” (which is what you essentially did)
Yeah, you’re like an artist, craving the contempt of your contemporaries, because you think that proves you “edgy”. PHOEBE BUFFAY: “I would give anything to not be appreciated in my own time!”
No.
You are confusing levels. Practice not confusing levels.
-4 with the last point being me. So at least once it wasn’t downvoted for dissent or doubt, it was downvoted for the pitiful hero-martyr attitude of being silenced for your intellectual bravery. Before, you know, you were actually silenced at all.
That attitude reminded me of Mel Gibson in South Park “Torture you?” “So you do intend to torture me! Well, go ahead!”
People are unreliable judges of their own motivations. Someone, however, who can reliably predict another person’s behavior is likely a reliable judge of that other person’s motivation.
Ah, you reliably predicted a single bit of behaviour (upvoted or downvoted), and from this you extrapolate a complete motivation?
Here’s how it looks to me, when I look through your entire history of posting in LessWrong: You are consistently downvoted for your attitude, not for the claims you make. In many places you say essentially the same thing as here, but you’re only downvoted only you are acting like a rude jerk or when you play pity games.
You are using the word “likely” in a manner that is inconsistent with the probability calculus.
Often times, multiple people will reliably predict that a comment will be downvoted, though each attributes a different motivation to the downvotes. They can’t all be “likely a reliable judge” of that motivation. The respective probabilities of their being correct have to sum to less than one, so all but one (at most) is probably wrong.