Sorry, but I just stopped reading those guys. Was not worth it. And I refuse to watch that video.
Besides- libertarians are just irrelevant, and when you realize that Republican economic policies are simply glibertarian bullshit + tax cuts + jesus, why bother with the glibertarians?
Ajay
I stopped paying attention to these guys long time ago. They are irrelevant and mostly lack common sense in simple matters.
Rook
What gets me is the number of men I’ve ran in to through the years that find her sexy?!?!?!?! Makes my puck a little in my mouth.
joe from Lowell
Good for you, John.
I scrolled through their blog yesterday, for the first time in months. What a load of garbage. I used to consider Reason one of the smartest blogs on the web, even as I disagreed with their philosophy.
Was I kidding myself all that time? Were they always this shallow and glib?
Or have they really gone downhill has much as it seems since Obama’s election?
Miss T
I read somewhere that the definition of a libertarian is,
“I’ve got mine, f**k you!”
The Grand Panjandrum
Instaputz was wrong about one thing.
Even money? Puhleez … it was money in the bank.
geg6
@joe from Lowell:
Yes. SATSQ.
jibeaux
Better than even money Soros giving a kabillionty dollars to fund skeptics of free market zealotry incurs the wrath of bloggers who name themselves after penises by, mmm, brunch.
ts
Disappointing! We were really looking forward to you stripping off whatever bark remains on Nick Gillespie.
jibeaux
Sigh. Better than even money Soros giving a kabillionty dollars to fund skeptics of free market zealotry incurs the wrath of bloggers who name themselves after p-e-n-i-s-e-s by, mmm, brunch.
NobodySpecial
Best definition of a libertarian I’ve ever heard is someone who demands police protection from their slaves.
Kennedy
Glibertarians are basically those people that we all know – the type that don’t like to identify with either major political party. Instead, they try to offer up some kind of bull shit, vacuous middle ground, saying things like, “lol both parties are corrupt/dumb/incompetent/.”
Well that may be, but sticking your tongue out and holding your head high against the status quo doesn’t amount to much. And no one is impressed with the sanctimonious manner in which you attempt to rise above the fray and declare that we are all screwed.
I often imagine stereotypical glibertarians as trendy, hipster douche bags. The kind that would wear a Jonas Brothers-style get up. But maybe that’s just me. It makes sense: Republicans as chest-thumping rednecks, Democrats as DFHs, and glibs as condescending hipsters who think they know everything and that their shit doesn’t stink.
geg6
But…but…John!
Ayn Rand was the smartest and most sexy and bestest economist that EVER WALKED THE FACE OF THE EARTH! I mean Alan Greenspan fucked her and became the Wizard of Wall Street! By osmosis, I think.
MattF
I think it’s possible to make very plausible-sounding libertarian arguments on a lot of specific subjects– the catch is that the arguments all turn out to be provably wrong. When your response to this is– A) ignore it, and B) move on to a Grand Unified Theory of Libertarianism– you’ve got a problem.
The Grand Panjandrum
@ts: I guess Cole doesn’t want to piss on the “tree of liberty”, as is it were.
asiangrrlMN
@NobodySpecial: Nice. I would only add that the libertarian then demands that no public money goes to funding cops.
Cole, you have to watch the video now! instaputz is double-dog daring you.
ellaesther
You know, I don’t know what just this second brought this to mind for me, but my grandparents — who were lovely, loving, welcoming, fair-minded people — voted Republican their whole lives (on my Mom’s side. I don’t know about the other side’s voting patterns!).
But I cannot imagine what they would make of the current GOP. Because it really, but really is “simply glibertarian bullshit + tax cuts + jesus” these days, isn’t it?
I think they were financially conservative, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps types, but hell, my grandmother was a flapper, and they raised two very liberal, socially conscious daughters, and helped raised me and my siblings, and we positively bleed blue.
I suspect they may well be spinning dervishly in their graves.
Leelee for Obama
@geg6: I watched the 1990 PBS program about the Crash the other night. How the hell, having gone through such a similar scenario back then, did the brilliant minds of Greenspan and others think they wouldn’t suffer the same fate. It was so much the same that I actually felt nauseous. Then, they ran a Herbert Hoover bio, and you really felt kinds sorry for him-he deserved to be defeated, no doubt, but he wasn’t the complete asshole I’d always been taught that he was. He was wrong, but he also got blamed for stuff that he didn’t cause.
Kryptik
Libertarians. A.K.A. Economic Anarchists.
Hrm…actually, that doesn’t really quite fit. Actual Anarchy actually implies some kind of communal cooperation in the absence of any formal government. Libertarians are essentially Social Darwinists, with said Social Darwinism extending economically as well.
It really is hard to make any real comparison that encapsulates just how utterly batshit the ideology is, isn’t it?
anonevent
Except Jesus is a weapon you go to church every Sunday to recharge, to use against those who don’t believe in tax cuts.
Libertarians just don’t like the American definition of freedom, which requires you to be a responsible member of society. They would much rather live under the old Greek ideal of freedom, which means you have the power to enslave others, because if you can’t do that then you’re not truly free.
Mojotron
I could swear that they used to spend more time railing against the drug war, police state expansion, the patriot act, homeland security stupidity, etc… and less about Ayn Rand, but sometime in 2008 that changed and they started putting out crap like this. Pick a random Moynihan column and see if you can find what makes it “libertarian” instead of neocon agitprop.
slag
@joe from Lowell:
Yes, they’ve always been libertarians.
gwangung
Hm. If they were doin’ that kind of diabtribe against the Obama administration, I could respect that. I might even agree with them.
What DID happen???
neill
I keep telling these god damn arrogant, selfish, herniated egocentric bullshit artists to stay off my sidewalks, out of my streets and highways, and if i catch one of ’em in my public library i’m gonna kick their ass right out…
gnomedad
PUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUTZ!!!
gnomedad
@gnomedad:
Now it eats exclamation marks?? FYWP, etc., etc.
jenniebee
The vid gave a pretty good definition, actually. “Rand was a capitalist, which pissed off the left, and she was an athiest, which pissed off the right.” That’s pretty much political libertarianism at its core right there: oppositional defiance of all ethical systems, regardless of their foundation.
noncarborundum
Better links please.
jibeaux
Glibertarians are infuriating because they don’t know or don’t care that their clean little philosophies, when applied to the messy realities of life, do not work at all or have idiotic results. I also strive to be a logical, analytical thinker, and to me, acknowledging reality is a pretty damn big part of that. So example. There was some R wanker in Congress, I don’t remember who, talking about why should he have to buy an insurance policy that covers childbirth when he isn’t going to need childbirth, and there was much glibertarian agreement, yes, yes, we should not have to pay for things we do not need, mmm hmm, not fair. On the surface, this would appear to be a somewhat logical argument, setting aside the fact that I don’t think any female Congresscritters would stand up and start bitching about why should they have to pay for insurance that covers testicular cancer, but anyway.
Now we shift to the real world. The effect of this is that women have to pay more for insurance because, in part, of the possibility of childbirth. If you set up men’s insurance plans and women’s insurance plans, the women’s are going to cost more. And I’m sorry, but women do not impregnate themselves. So even setting aside all questions of fairness and good public policy as we know these to be irrelevant, setting aside the relentless hypocrisy of a party that claims to be pro-family, pro-baby as we know that they are oblivious to hypocrisy –it is not even logical. Why should women bear the full cost of having a child that is one-half hers and one-half a man’s? You certainly would not have any luck with that argument in a child support hearing, why is it any more logical before the child is born?
/descending podium
Billy K
It’s remarkable what happened to Reason. They were daily reading for me once, but the site/mag is unrecognizable now. At least I think so. I don’t think I changed that much.
Svensker
@jibeaux:
Soshulist womens do.
malraux
Moreover, why should just the parents bear the full cost of having/raising a child, when the benefits of that child accrue to so many others? The benefit of children growing up and becoming doctors, scientists, hell, even the cable guy who climbs up the poll to fix your cable is a benefit to the older generation.
I personally see glibertarianism as a rejection of the idea of a social contract.
Thunderbird
A friend of mine once described libertarians as “people who want all of society’s benefits while paying none of its costs. In other words, the most selfish, naïve, and sociopathic people you’ll ever meet.”
latts
Y’know, for years I took flack for my intuitive dislike* of political conservatives & libertarians– why couldn’t I just agree to disagree, and appreciate people for their more important personal qualities? I couldn’t really articulate my reasons for a long time, but essentially the issue is that politics is about how we see ourselves in the world, especially in relation to others, and therefore reveals some pretty important things about our character & thought processes. To go back to a very useful Jane Austen quote, conservatives & libertarians are IME disposed “to think well of themselves, and meanly of others,” which wasn’t a recommendation then and isn’t now. Or to put it another way, public character counts.
*this doesn’t mean I have no friends or friendly acquaintances of the more conservative persuasions, just that they’re not people with whom I’m willing to get mired in big-picture discussions about life in general, because it frustrates everyone and often makes me think less of them (and quite possibly vice-versa). And since I tend to enjoy that kind of exchange quite a lot, it does place some pretty severe limitations on our ability to socialize freely.
Steeplejack
Okay, I took one for the team and watched the video so you don’t have to.
It’s a one-minute ad for a Reason.tv “video series” starting November 2 called Radicals for Capitalism: Celebrating the Enduring Power of Ayn Rand’s Ideas. The ad consists of pictures of Rand with (unidentified) audio comments saying how great she was. At the end you find out the series will feature “exclusive interviews with Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden and the founding editors of Reason magazine.”
The Brandens, 79 and 80, respectively, have been Ayn Rand acolytes since roughly age 20 (they met her in 1950). I’m sure this will be a hard-hitting, intellectually rigorous series, and I look forward to not watching it.
I can’t resist throwing in the VH-1 Behind the Music dirt: Nathaniel’s longtime affair with Rand eventually led to the breakup of the Branden marriage, although supposedly the affair was accepted by Barbara and by Rand’s husband at the time. Rand broke with Barbara Branden, her biographer, supposedly because Barbara didn’t tell Rand that Nathaniel also had been seeing a third woman for several years.
Nathaniel Branden went on to write a couple of genuinely good books about self-esteem. Go figure.
bemused
John, you hurt their feelings.
liberal
Most so-called libertarians are avowed enemies of liberty, and, in fact, are crypto-feudalists.
Steeplejack
@Leelee for Obama:
And I believe Hoover somewhat redeemed himself later with his work in Germany in the aftermath of World War II.
joe from Lowell
What irritates me is how libertarians express absolute certainty in the success of a set of never-attempted ideas, and then scoff at others as naive.
bemused
@Steeplejack:
I don’t know people celebrate “the enduring power of Rand’s ideas” which is fiction & has never been implemented in practice but whatever.
jibeaux
@malraux:
Right, I definitely agree with that. Those people who say, “I don’t have kids, why should I pay for schools?” make me simultaneously want to scream but yet slightly grateful that they don’t have kids. But at least our obligations to the next generation as a society is a slightly more ambiguous, a somewhat more tenuous relationship. There is nothing whatsoever ambiguous about the requirement for people of two different genders in order to create a child. But, yes, completely agreed.
I’m getting lunch, but maybe later I will share with you guys a fascinating anecdote I read in Kristof’s book involving the Huichol Indians, childbirth, boy parts, and string. Believe me, I could totally make it be on topic in a thread about instaputz.
Parrotlover77
Or a serial killer, thief, Jerry Springer guest, or the glib Republican a few cubicles down. Not every child is a boon/benefit to society. That’s not why the risk/payouts are pooled evenly, despite uneven usage. I’m snipped, so the chances of my wife and I conceiving is infinitesimally small. That said, our premiums should not be lower simply because we have cut our risk of pregnancy related medical care to nil. We have other risks, for example, we are also both overweight. I wouldn’t want skinny mofos to not pay for my impending heart disease due to my personal love of nachos! The social contract pools all our risks. Not because somebody might birth the next generation’s doctors (or whatever), but because we all have different risk factors and by pooling all our risks and splitting the cost, we all end up saving money!
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Jesus was a Commie. If the GOP can misappropriate the guy who told rich people to fuck off, they’d certainly figure out a way to misappropriate Karl Marx if they saw any advantage in it for them.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
Fortunately, when glibertarians grow up they generally just become well-armed liberals.
Which will be a good thing if the knuckle-draggers pull off the second civil war/race war/revolution they’ve been calling for…
Llelldorin
@joe from Lowell:
Yes, but there was a time when liberalism wasn’t much better.
What’s fundamentally changed is that liberalism has spent the last twenty years getting its act together, and is now proposing solid plans to handle real problems. Gliberalism–which was rampant in the late 1970s and early 1980s when libertarianism was in its heydey–is now mouldering in its grave. That makes the contrast with glibertarianism sharp and depressing–one side is trying to solve problems, the other is playing an endless succession of smug little word games.
Dave S.
I was going to say “Gee, John, it’s only a minute long, just watch it” but now I really want that minute back.
Ash Can
Of course they have enduring power. They give people permission to be selfish assholes. That guarantees Rand’s crap immortality right there.
tc125231
Well, no duh. Stupid is stupid. That’s why I cancelled my subscription to Atlantic several years ago.
tc125231
@joe from Lowell:
No, people like Megan mcArdle have always been fact averse and generally full of shit.
bemused
@malraux:
Interesting how the people who bitch the most about paying taxes for education are the same people, if they have to spend some time in a hospital, who complain about what they feel is substandard or incompetent care from nurses or nurses aides. The idea that a good education & a decent wage directly affects the quality of services we need everywhere we go seems to escape a lot of people.
That reminds me of when Glenn Beck had some surgery (hemorrhoids?) & made a video of himself recovering at home talking about his hospital stay while still loopy on meds. I think he had a moment of being unintentionally honest while hopped up. Now to find that again.
Rick Taylor
I was a libertarian in my naive younger days, around 30 years ago. Back then, you could feel there were two wings to the party; an idealistic wing that argued against government power consistently from first principles, and a right wing contingent that stressed cutting taxes and spending, except of course spending on the military. It sounds like over time the right wing contingent has taken over.
Paul in KY
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: A ‘libertarian’ is someone who’s too pussy to call themselves a Republican.
I have more respect for self-identified republicans than I do for these wannabe Galts.
Billy K
I love how all my Republican friends are now calling themselves Libertarians. I used to think that was a step up, but now I’m not so sure.
My Pal: “I’m really more of a Libertarian.”
Me: “Of course, now that Republicans have destroyed everything and they’re universally hated.”
My Pal: (crickets + stare of loathing and guilt)
Strangely enough, the ex-Republicans/new-Libertarians still tend to be bible bangers. For about 30 seconds I thought maybe Libertarians would not welcome the religious fringe into their “tent,” but that is proved wrong almost daily.
DonkeyKong
If I’m not mistaken, libertarian is latin for “common asshole”
Uncle Omar
I always thought there were several types of libertarians, not including the hybrids. There were the pot libertarians who just wanted the gummint to lay off the Colombian and the Thai sticks. There were the gun libertarians who were convinced that the NRA was selling them out. There were the economic libertarians who thought the gummint was the reason that no one would buy their used vacuum cleaners at the flea market. There were the sanctity of private property libertarians who hated the gummint until the guy next door started working on his Harley in the garage at 1:00 AM every morning and wouldn’t stop because his garage was his private property. But, my favorite libertarian was the one who worked for the government in one form or another, janitor or a-v technician at the local school for example, and bitched about the goddam gummint constantly because it was holding him down.
KRK
No. Reason’s Hit&Run blog used to be an interesting read…in 2005, when the disaster of an entirely Republican-controlled federal government was unmistakable and most of the posts were by Wiegel and Balko and probably a few decent others I’m not remembering. The commenters, too, back then were a more healthy balance. But the Democrats taking control of Congress in 2006 reminded them that the primary libertarian value is: Democrats are always worse. This coincided with the increasing blog presence of auto-skip posters like Moynihan and Mangu-Ward while folks like Gillespie and Bailey ramped up their idiot quotient. And everyone sane gradually cleared out of the comment sections, leaving only people who insist that taxation is worse than loss of civil liberties because if the government would just let them keep their money they could always bribe their way out of unlawful imprisonment. (I’m not making that up.)
Andrew
Response to #4: That’s an excellent definition. Mine is that a libertarian is a guy who’s trying to support himself, his wife, and two or three children on $50K and thinks the reason he’s unable to make it work is confiscatory levels of taxation. :-)
Andrew
Response to #41: While I agree with most of your analysis and support pooling of health care risk, I don’t agree that doing so saves everyone money. Skinny, infertile vegans would probably pay more under a risk-sharing system than they would without one. In fact, simple math says that some people will pay more and some less than they would if we divided it some other way. Like you and your wife, my wife and I are infertile, childless, and fond of fattening food. I also enjoy the occasional cocktail. If we didn’t have employer-provided health insurance, we’d be uninsurable.
Xanthippas
Ha. I so love this blog.
Oh, and here’s a better alternative to that Atlantic list of brave-ish people that DougJ was (rightfully) complaining about: Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries.”
twiffer
@ Svensker: @jibeaux:
Soshulist womens do.
only to force the gov. to pay for abortions.
SGEW
@NobodySpecial:
The quote is:
“That’s libertarians for you – anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.” – Kim Stanley Robinson
Alan
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the GOP and today’s Conservatism described so perfectly succinct.
Chuck Butcher
Libertarians seem to tend toward a self-inflated sense of intellect. I have yet to argue facts with one and have them do something other than descend into to – “you’re just a freaking leftist.” Reality is inconvenient for these idjits so they just don’t do it.
Mr. Steven Crane
@joe from lowell:
Mr. Steven Crane sends his regards!
signed,
Mr. Steven Crane.
chk
That last little equation reminded me (as does almost everything at the moment) of the book I am reading, which is terrifying: Jeff Sharlet’s The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power In it, he describes the goal of the elite fundamentalists that roam the corridors of power as Jesus+0. And what does Jesus+0 equal? Well, power, biblical capitalism, a totalitarianism of Jesus…