My favorite thing about the Matt Welch piece in Reason that DougJ discussed earlier was the title:
Salon: “Libertarianism is juvenile,” “stupid,” “silly,” “bratty”
Reason magazine just had a two week long “Everyone draw Mohammed Wankfest” and then shut down the comments to avoid gratuitous insensitivity and went on to choose drawings that no self-respecting jihadist would even notice. Assuming any jihadists are paying attention to a little read glibertarian magazine. Pro-tip: they aren’t.
I’d say “juvenile, stupid, silly, and bratty” about covers it.
gbear
They forgot “so gay”.
Fred Wertham Jr
“Juvenile, stupid, silly, and bratty” describes Salon pretty well, too.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Careful, or they’ll start a “Draw Tunch” contest.
beltane
Can the folks at Reason point to a single instance of a successful libertarian system occurring at any time in recorded history? The libbies remind me of hippie anti-vaxxers who think childhood disease should be handled the old-fashioned way, failing to understand that the old-fashioned way involved 50%+ childhood mortality.
I have no patience for any of these people.
beltane
@kommrade reproductive vigor: Cats are all libertarians. They demand service all the time yet won’t share their mice with you.
freelancer
@beltane:
Don’t say that at Huffpo, you’ll get mugged by the anti-science left.
me
PROTIP: To defeat Reason, ignore it until it dies.
cleek
@me:
and if you must refer to it, use its full name, “The ironically-titled Reason“.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@beltane: And like gibbertarians cats also can’t stand criticism or being made to look ridiculous. A Draw Tunch contest would result in Cole finding the corpses of Reason staff on his front porch.
DougJ
Even Althouse is making fun of them for choosing such non-offensive pictures.
MikeJ
@cleek: I always use Reason (sic).
JGabriel
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
You say that like it’s a bad outcome …
.
LindaH
@beltane:
Oh, if only. My cats were always utterly determined to pull their weight in supporting the family and worked their little hearts out to make sure our pantry was stocked. I can’t count the number of moles, squirrels and other creatures that my hunters would plop at my feet when they were done hunting. If we weren’t home, they kindly left them on the doorstep, so we could get them while they were fresh. And they were so proud of themselves too!
Kobie
I frequent a political forum where I often find myself at odds with the self-professed libertarians. It never ceases to amaze me how utterly selfish those people are.
I dig the whole civil liberties thing. But that’s about all libertarianism has to offer, other than a “fuck you, I got mine” approach to, you know, other people.
And the attitude that comes from them is just disgusting. Only they are the ones who work. Only they believe in “freedom.” Paying taxes is tyranny. If you support any government program, you support “slavery.” You know, that kind of nonsense.
Quiddity
Libertarians are totally oblivious to the hassle of getting information. Information about product safety, discrimination by a restaurant, etc, that they presume is out there in their idealized “market”.
toujoursdan
My cats often bring my mice to me… sometimes when I am half asleep in bed. They don’t understand why I don’t want to share them with them.
Ed Marshall
The “worldview” of libertarianism suggested, back in the early 1970s, that if you got the government out of the business of setting all airline ticket prices and composing all in-flight menus, then just maybe Americans who were not rich could soon enjoy air travel. At the time, people with much more imagination and pull than Gabriel Winant has now dismissed the idea as unrealistic, out-of-touch fantasia. They were wrong then, they continue to be wrong now about a thousand similar things, and history does not judge them harsh enough.
Really? That’s his stunning success? What do libertarians make out of the fact that the government just winds up bailing out all the airlines every five years or so? Or that it pays about jack shit to be a pilot now with rare exceptions that are being retired as fast as possible to make way for someone who will work insane hours and make less than your average OTR trucker. Sometimes these overworked people who are just in it because they love to fly fuck up and kill everyone. That’s the great success of the libertarian world?
maus
@beltane: Lies, mine are socialists and give me gifts because they think I’m a poor hunter and would have starved in the wild
:3
Brachiator
Yeah, libertarians are stoopid blah, blah, blah.
But I don’t understand this glib BS that tries to reduce the Reason wankfest into an nothing more than an unsuccessful attempt to rile jihadists.
I tried to read all the posts on this topic, but I missed the one that noted that the Reason goons hijacked a protest of a blogger, who “drew a cartoon in April to protest against the decision by a US television channel to cancel an episode of the popular show South Park because of a contentious depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. ”
The blogger has since apologized for sparking an unnecessary controversy. Too bad.
Equally juvenile, stupid, silly, and bratty is the idea, apparently now a core liberal value, that freedom of expression is OK fine as long as nobody is really, like, you know, offended by something that you say or write, unless you invoke the “truth to power exception.”
So while jihadists may not be upset, it certainly upset the Pakistani government, which has shut down Facebook for typically dumbass reasons, according to various news sites.
The one good thing that has come of this is that debate within various Muslim communities is vigorous and open (for now) with some disputing the idea that they have to be protected from uncomfortable expressisons of ideas.
And in South Africa, the cartoonist Zapiro has weighed in on the controversy with a bit of wit and whimsy.
Those with a delicate sensibility can now go back to clutching their pearls.
William
Of course, as such self-proclaimed reasoners, they’re going to follow up on the effectiveness of this, right? Surveying artists to make sure they are now free from their fear of religious suppression, checking in with Muslims to make sure that the 99% of good ones understood and that the few bad ones are chastened?
Kobie
@Brachiator: I think the objection to the little “contest” was less about Muslims being offended and more about the spirit in which it was presented and handled.
Using your freedom of expression doesn’t mean you have to go out of your way to be an asshole, and that’s exactly what the Reasonoids were doing.
Perhaps it started off as a drive for free expression, but it transformed (via the comments) into a “let’s piss off the Mooslems for the lulz” circlejerk that, in the end, accomplished nothing but to reinforce the notion that the glibertarians are juvenile little brats. Not that it was going to accomplish anything anyway.
Brachiator
@Kobie:
Misguided hand wringing over the “spirit” of the was just as meaningless as excessively faux concerns over whether Muslims would be offended.
For example, another thread cautioned against labeling Rand Paul a racist because we don’t know what’s in his heart. On the other hand, bashing the Reason crew is acceptable precisely because we supposedly know what’s in their hearts. And by the way, for the record, I think that both Paul and the Reason crew are full of shit.
One of the biggest failures of modern liberalism is its inane need to reject moral and ethical judgment for ludicrous and meaningless social opprobrium. So, the worst thing for a person to be is an asshole. Big whoop.
On the one hand, I think that discretion might lead people to avoid stuff like these cartoons. On the other hand, I absolutely reject any idea that religious leaders or religious adherents can demand that their foolish little superstitions be accorded any special respect.
And by any reasonable measure, one of the whole points of rights is the understanding that they belong as much — even more — to assholes to the nicely behaved. Liberals have forgotten this as they try to domesticate progressivism.
So what? Who said that freedom of expression is supposed to be simplistically utilitarian, that free speech is meaningless unless it seeks to accomplish something?
And you know what? Somebody should be pissing off Muslims. And Catholics. And conservatives. And everybody else.
Including liberals.
Alex K
@Brachiator:
This reminds of the underlying argument to libertarianism itself, that it doesn’t matter if their version of economic freedom and justice results in bad consequences, because the economic freedom itself is the goal, the end of the equation. It is itself a good, so only good can come of it. In reality, of course, bad, even disastrous things come of it, like the oil spill, the WV mine disaster, this recession, etc.
Of course, nothing even remotely “bad” has come from this contest, and I’m not weeping and wringing my hands over the possibility that a Muslim somewhere got offended. But that doesn’t stop me from making a value judgment that this contest was pointless and stupid. No, not everything has to have a purpose, but I think pretending that they do have some great purpose, a purpose that even supersedes things that affect the real world, is silly and self-indulgent, and if I may say so, the sort of inward-looking thought that kept the left down for so many decades.
Personally, I think arguments against this sort of behavior mirror the arguments against unrestrained capitalism: just like we’ve all got to share one economic and physical space, we’ve all got to share one social and cultural space. We can wall ourselves off to an extent, but it’s all still out there. Furthermore, the alternative is also a sort of mirror of objectivist hero worship, but instead of the rich and powerful being accorded the worship, it’s the nasty, “transgressive” types, as sort of guardians of freedom against the force of authoritarian power. Is there some benefit I’m missing to a society where people who like being rude and loud dominate those who prefer not to speak up? I see a lot of alienation and suspicion and intergroup conflict, as well as a lack of understanding between groups who are so busy making fun of each other. Can this sort of deference go to far? Absolutely it can. But I can’t think of one group that holds the sort of sway where respecting them is done only out of fear, and I think your statement that “somebody should be pissing off everybody” is simply stupid. The consequences don’t end with you, and in any circumstance where the consequences don’t end with one person, other people have a right to weigh in.
No one’s stopping you from doing anything-draw Muhammad all day for all I care. But am I supposed to celebrate these libertarians as some sort of guardian of my own freedom? Why the hell should I?
NickM
@<a href="#comment-17
81008″>Brachiator:
I’m not going to cite authority: I’ve reasoned my way to that conclusion. Having the right to say something doesn’t imply that you should – other value judgments come into that question. One has the right to offend everyone one meets but I ‘m glad I live in a society where this is frowned upon. I guess the Golden Rule is not a libertarian value.
John Cole
Much shorter Brachiator- Reason’s draw Mohammed contest was a healthy expression of free speech, but you mocking the wankfest is liberal hand-wringing.
Liberty60
I was reminded of libertarianism back during the BJ threads on Leo Strauss, and someone commented to the effect that the Straussian worldview was one whispered to gullible schoolboys in hallways, and was untested by being reviewed, critiqued, improved and strengthened by open debate and examination.
Libertarianism has been around about half a century, yet has never had a critical airing in front of anything other than a friendly crowd of gullible college sophomores who each were convinced he was the living embodiment of John Galt/ Howard Roarke.
So when I watched Rand Paul, I also sensed his surprise, like he was shocked that questioning the Civil Rights Act would be met with anything but grave nodding and goatee stroking approval.
Rachel may in fact have been the first person ever to seriously challenge his worldview.
blogreeder
This sounds like liberal hand wringing to me.
With any action there will be some bad consequences. Grownups are supposed to know that. Your argument here is black and white; Libertarian’s version of economic freedom only leads to bad consequences. No. There are good things too.
For instance, a saving account is good. We hear all the time how Americans don’t save enough. Now for argument’s sake, Alex you say you want to build up a nice saving account. This is called a hypothetical situation. I can help you out there. Under my plan you can save half your income. Just give me all your money. All of it. I’ll decide what you need. You’ll lose your freedom to spend but you’ll gain a fat savings account. Maybe, I’ll try my best. This is a small example of the importance of economic freedom against the tyranny of Blogreeder who only has your best interest in mind.
That should be “too far”. I don’t know if I can take a person who can make that kind of grammatical mistake seriously. I’m kidding. I just wanted to be the first one to point out that slip up. There are sharks here that would strike if I made that kind of mistake.
Alex K
@blogreeder:
Are you for real? And you accuse me of seeing things in black and white? Something I never actually said?
Yutsano
@blogreeder:
Your point? It went that way. I suggest you go look for it.
Shell Goddamnit
@LindaH:
I’ve had cats decide they wanted to live with me, and start dropping mice at my front door as a kind of teaser.
It worked, too. Those mice were delicious!
joe from Lowell
So, which is it? Was this “free speech” not meant to accomplish anything? Or is a great idea because it was meant to piss off Muslims?
Pick a story, and stick with it.
JenJen
I agree, but I tend to prefer “childish.”
blogreeder
I was quoting you. How could I not be using what you actually said? You started your comment with an assessment of the libertarianism underlying argument, didn’t you? Economic freedom leads to bad consequences? (I would have used the @ sign doohickey to point to your original comment but I can never get that to work.)