Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Donald Trump, welcome to your everything, everywhere, all at once.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Not all heroes wear capes.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

I was promised a recession.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

I really should read my own blog.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Come on, man.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

There’s always a light at the end of the frog.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

The revolution will be supervised.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

You are here: Home / Politics / Glibertarianism / In My Best Horseshack Voice, I Yell “OOO OOO CALL ON ME!”

In My Best Horseshack Voice, I Yell “OOO OOO CALL ON ME!”

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This post is in: 

Mistermix:

This case was decided by the usual 5-4 vote, with the inevitable Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas dissenting votes. Reading about a case like this, I wonder how anyone can justify voting for Republicans on libertarian principles. If we had one more hard-right Republican appointee on the court, it would be just fine for cops to essentially coerce (is there any other word for it?) confessions from kids without parents present.

This is easy. Some libertarians are crazy:

Some of them are lazy and smug, but smart enough to know where the money is in punditry:

Some of them are actually Republicans, but get really heated up about drug legalization and robot sex:

And some of them were apparently raped by a union member as a child and just have no sense of proportion whatsoever:

dan at #15 makes a conjecture:

    A libertarian is someone who thinks that a mandatory helmet law is for motorcyclists is a greater infringement on liberty than arbitrary detention, torture, warrantless searches. . . .

and kth at #23 also contributes:

    [for libertarians] no-knock raids and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are categorically the same in terms of tyranny.

We now have a hypothesis. How shall we test it?

Lo! Who’s there? Why, it’s Matt Welch bringing proof!

    Actually my opposition to the bailout was much stronger—I never came out one way or another on the Iraq war, until it was far too late.

Absolutely beautimous.

And then there are the ones who are Republicans but realize how uncool it is to admit that, so they call themselves libertarian and vote for every Republican they can.

However, some libertarians manage to balance some of the inherent contradictions, and really do come across on the side of freedom and individual liberty in almost every case. Radley Balko, who has taken principled stands across the spectrum and who has done incredible work on the drug war, police, and prosecutorial excesses, springs to mind (even though he hates me for pointing out that many of his colleagues are fools).

Reader Interactions

79Comments

  1. 1.

    Daddy-O

    “…they call themselves libertarian and vote for every Republican they can.”

    Sometimes, I see myself in that very enlightening quote, only from the other side of the fence.

  2. 2.

    DFS

    Even Balko has the whole “somebody at the VA made a mistake one time, therefore health care reform will kill us all” thing.

    Mostly a decent guy though.

  4. 4.

    me

    (even though he hates me for pointing out that many of his colleagues are fools).

    He also gets his undies in a knot when it’s pointed out that his (former?) paymasters are Milo Minderbinder in reality.

  6. 6.

    AAA Bonds

    A libertarian who didn’t come out “either way” on the Iraq war isn’t a libertarian. Sorry, Matt.

  7. 7.

    Bill Murray

    Who the heck is Horseshack? Arnold Horshack was the character on Welcome Back Kotter that went OOO! OOO!

  8. 8.

    Paul in KY

    Quote from post: ‘And then there are the ones who are Republicans but realize how uncool it is to admit that, so they call themselves libertarian and vote for every Republican they can.’

    IMO, that’s the great majority of them.

  9. 9.

    Trinity

    Our internet access has been out all week. Having returned this morning to this post…well, Bravo Mr. Cole. Bravo.

  10. 10.

    Brian R.

    I call bullshit on Libertarian Voltron. There’s no way those Galtian individualist assholes would ever join forces to accomplish anything.

  11. 11.

    Chris

    The nice thing about being libertarian is that unlike “liberal” and “conservative,” it isn’t a synonym for one of the political parties. So you’re not actually tied to either one of the messy, corrupt, you know, real sides of the aisle – you get to be above it all and you get to tell everybody that if people would only listen to you, everything would be perfect. Plus, it’s “libertarian,” so it’s all about “liberty.” Liberty’s cool, isn’t it? Who’s against liberty?

  12. 12.

    Ghanima Atreides

    Some libertarians are crazy:
    Some of them are lazy and smug, but smart enough to know where the money is in punditry:
    some of them were apparently raped by a union member as a child and just have no sense of proportion whatsoever:
    Some are Republicans but realize how uncool it is to admit that, so they call themselves libertarian and vote for every Republican they can.

    And yet you support them. You gave a libertarian front page privs to lie and spew bulshytt propaganda for a year.
    Why is the LoOG not moved to the mock column yet?

    But thank you for contributing to my Unified Field Theory of Libertarianism.
    My current hypothesis is that there are only two main classes of libertarians, inspite of EDK’s and others attempts at creating a random name generator for crypto-conservatives and ‘freed’ market fucktards; liberaltarians, bleeding heart libertarians, classical liberals, bottomup liberatarian liberalism, civil libertarians, etc.
    There are only liberty as means libertarians and liberty as goal libertarians.

  13. 13.

    Amir_Khalid

    If he wins a Senate seat, that bluish-skinned guy just needs to persuade two more Senators to start taking colloidal silver. Then they can be the Blue Man Caucus.

  15. 15.

    Ghanima Atreides

    Here is Dr. Manzi’s explanation.

    One thing that has become clear to me through these dinners is that there are two strands of libertarian thought. In somewhat cartoon terms, one strand takes liberty to be a (or in extreme cases, the) fundamental human good in and of itself; the other takes liberty to be a means to the end of discovery of methods of social organization that create other benefits. I’ll call the first “liberty-as-goal” libertarianism and the second “liberty-as-means” libertarianism. Obviously, one can hold both of these beliefs simultaneously, and many people do. But in my observation, when pushed to develop a position on some difficult issue, most self-described libertarians reveal a temperament that leans strongly in one direction or the other. Again, in cartoon terms, I’d describe the first temperament as idealistic, deductive and theory-based, and the second as practical, inductive and experiment-based.

    Dr. Manzi is the Head Bulshytt Talker in Chief of the Temple of Libertarianism.

    Liberty-as-means libertarianism sees the world in an evolutionary framework: societies evolve rules, norms, laws and so forth in order to adapt and survive in a complex and changing external environment. At a high level of abstraction, internal freedoms are necessary so that the society can learn (which requires trial-and-error learning because the external reality is believed to be too complex to be fully comprehended by any existing theory (translation- choo stoopid)) and adapt (which is important because the external reality is changing). We need liberty, therefore, because we are so ignorant of what works in practical, material terms. But this raises what I think of as the paradox of libertarianism, or more precisely, the paradox of liberty-as-means libertarianism.

    Liberty as magic.

    Start with a practical question: should prostitution be legal? The canonical libertarian position is that this is a consensual act between adults, and should be legal. The liberty-as-means position is far more tentative. We don’t know the overall effects of legalized prostitution. Some people have the theory that it will make people happier, provide incomes and stabilize marriages. Others think it will lead to personal degradation, female victimization and societal collapse. It is very hard to know which theory is right, or if there is only one right answer as opposed to different best answers for different social contexts, or if the relative predictive accuracy of various theories will change over time as the environment changes. What the liberty-as-means libertarian calls for is the freedom to experiment: let different localities try different things, and learn from this experience. In the best case this is literally consciousness learning from structured experiments, and in the weaker case it is only metaphorical learning, in that the localities with more adaptive sets of such rules will tend to win out in evolutionary competition over time.

    aka, localized mob rule, or my term for it, Distributed Jesusland&#0153.

  17. 17.

    superluminaR droid

    Ahh…John Galt Cole fluffing for the libertarians again. Not much of a surprise you’d approvingly quote Balko and GG any chance you get…

  20. 20.

    Omnes Omnibus

    Ahh…John Galt Cole fluffing for the libertarians again. Not much of a surprise you’d approvingly quote Balko and GG any chance you get…

    Didn’t actually read the post, did you?

  21. 21.

    Head Bulshytt Talker in Chief of the Temple of Libertarianism(superluminar)

    @GA
    But what about liberty for the abused Horses? Are you so cruel that you would deny their freedom just to spite your ex, EDK?

  23. 23.

    Whiskey Screams from a Guy With No Short-Term Memory

    August J. Pollak: One and done. That is fantastic.

  25. 25.

    chopper

    @m_c:

    My current hypothesis is that there are only two main classes of libertarians.

    Manzi:

    I’ll call the first “liberty-as-goal” libertarianism and the second “liberty-as-means” libertarianism.

    so it isn’t your hypothesis, it’s somebody else’s.

  27. 27.

    Roger Moore

    @Brian R:

    There’s no way those Galtian individualist assholes would ever join forces to accomplish anything.

    Sure they would. As long as it’s a voluntary association taken on for their individual self interest banding together is just fine. Unless, of course, the people banding together are workers parasites trying to negotiate for better salaries and working conditions extort their Galtian overlords. In that case, voluntary associations pursuing selfish interests are worse than broccoli and the Stalin mandate put together.

  28. 28.

    Head Bulshytt Talker in Chief of the Temple of Libertarianism(superluminar)

    @Omnes
    I shall send you a working snarkometer forthwith. You should mention when your current model is broken, next time.

  29. 29.

    Ghanima Atreides

    chopper, Manzi is calling those “two strains of libertarian thought”, not two classes of libertarians. Surely you have waded through a few EDK posts here– it is very difficult to deduce what libertarianism actually is. It seems to be Many Things.
    I am working on a pragmatic taxonomy of libertarianism, a Unified Field Theory of Libertarians, kind of like TS Eliots Book of Practical Cats.
    hmmm….perhaps I’ll make it rhyme.

  31. 31.

    joeyess

    Ahh…John Galt Cole fluffing for the libertarians again. Not much of a surprise you’d approvingly quote Balko and GG any chance you get…

    Reading is fundamental, peanuthead.

  32. 32.

    RSA

    @Ghanima Atreides:

    I’ll call the first “liberty-as-goal” libertarianism and the second “liberty-as-means” libertarianism.

    Funny how if you get rid of the word “libertarianism” in those extended quotes, they don’t actually lose anything. Yeah, people like the idea of having liberty, and people think that liberty helps make other good things possible.

  33. 33.

    chopper

    @Roger Moore:

    that’s the libertardian voltron’s true weakness. just before it’s about to whip out the flaming sword to finish the evil liberal monster off, the monster says ‘BTW, i just think it’s great that the five of you are able to come together in a union. do you have dues?’ and the voltron self-destructs.

  34. 34.

    chopper

    @chan:

    wow, so your great addition to the idea was to take ‘there are two strains of libertarian thought’ and turn it into ‘there are two strains of libertarians’.

    that must have kept you up all night. you gonna be first author cause of that bit?

  35. 35.

    eemom

    libertarian libertarian libertarian libertarian

    I am SO. FUCKING. SICK. of the word LIBERTARIAN.

    I am even sicker of that than I am of Anthony Weiner’s dick.

  36. 36.

    Ghanima Atreides

    @chopper
    nope, ima synthesist, not an originalist. And the UFTL is a mock anyways. just for the web, not a real theory.

    @Pollack
    wow, that was awesome! keep it comin’ please.
    i think ive read your stuff before.

  37. 37.

    Ghanima Atreides

    @RSA
    yah, its all a fake. like market-based economics. its just a way for the overclass to spoof the underclass.

  39. 39.

    Xenos

    I am working on a pragmatic taxonomy of libertarianism, a Unified Field Theory of Libertarians, kind of like TS Eliots Book of Practical Cats.
    hmmm….perhaps I’ll make it rhyme.

    Who should be Mungojerrie, Rumpleteaser, Groweltiger, and so on?

    Jellicles? ‘Stossicle cats, come out tonight!’

  40. 40.

    Ash Can

    @ chopper: Can you imagine her essay exams? Her teachers probably don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  42. 42.

    chopper

    @Head Bulshytt Talker in Chief of the Temple of Libertarianism(superluminar):

    you have to remember how ideas moving through the libertarian mind approach a finite impulse response similar to a SAW filter, although in this case instead of classic rayleigh waves the memes penetrate the crystal structure such that large-scale granulation and cooper pairing of memes according to BCS theory allows free flow of ideas concerning liberty.

    these bosonic mind-pairs of memes cause a repulsive memetic field in the libertarian mind allowing the filter mechanism to float a distance from the mind itself ala the meissner effect, which is the main problem in libertarian thinking – the mind physically separates itself from its own filter.

    now, this effect can be put to good use in classrooms and trade shows, but it makes for bad politics.

  43. 43.

    Ghanima Atreides

    @Xenos
    im not sure i can one-to-one the names– perhaps ill just ape the style.
    everyone knows felines are more noble and interesting than libertarians.
    Eliot had affection for his cats– i loathe all libertarians with the fire of a thousand suns.

  44. 44.

    Ghanima Atreides

    @chopper
    heh, that was pretty good.

    @Ash
    i dont write essays for exams.

    @superluminar
    I’m sorry you all got pranked by EDK, but its not my fault choo stoopid.
    I tried to warn you.
    He was always a libertarian pundit farming clicks.

  45. 45.

    The Tragically Flip

    Mocking libertarians is one of my favourite things about this site.

    Although it pisses me off that we spend so much time talking about a fucking lunatic fringe ideology. If that lunatic fringe didn’t include a few billionaires funding a noise machine, libertarianism would be as discussed as communitarianism.

    Thanks libertarians for keeping the failed ideas of the 1850s alive in the discourse. You know why the “classic liberals” went away? Because liberals actually notice when stuff doesn’t work, and change that stuff. This is why I hate contemporary libertarians who call themselves “classic liberals” – no, you’re not a liberal at all. Liberals want to better the world, and libertarian policies don’t do that.

  46. 46.

    chopper

    experimentation is difficult, as unification of the strong and weak memetic forces occur at 100 gigaChans of whackadoodle. the strong memetic force is SU(2), remember, so it’s diffeomorphic to the crazy-sphere.

    the SU(2) is good tho for representing symmetries in the bosonic mind-pairs of memes in the unified field.

  48. 48.

    Howlin Wolfe

    @28. Head Bulshytt Talker in Chief of the Temple of Libertarianism(superluminar): perhaps if the snark weren’t so stealthy, it would be detected by working snarkometers.
    I dont’ have a reply button anymore, either. Not sure why.

  49. 49.

    liberal

    However, some libertarians manage to balance some of the inherent contradictions, and really do come across on the side of freedom and individual liberty in almost every case.

    Nope. Most so-called libertarians are crypto-feudalists.

  50. 50.

    chopper

    @arguingwithsignposts:

    yeah, i have that as a corollary, i’m still having trouble renormalizing away the infinities of libertarian memetic field interations.

    this is hard.

  51. 51.

    Cris

    Fun fact: Neil Peart claims he is not a Libertarian because he doesn’t care either way about helmet laws. Okay then!

  52. 52.

    liberal

    The Tragically Flip wrote,

    You know why the “classic liberals” went away? Because liberals actually notice when stuff doesn’t work, and change that stuff.

    Actually, in one fundamental sense (we) modern liberals have regressed from the classical liberals.

    The latter understood that the wealth accruing to landowners is a form of legalized theft, and that the solution is to tax land value heavily. OTOH, most modern liberals don’t have an understanding of why government in the absense of heavy taxation of economic rents is a machine for massively redistributing wealth upwards.

  53. 53.

    Zach

    Thanks for posting that picture — once or twice a year I reference the blue libertarian candidate for Senate and it’s getting harder and harder to find the picture online.

  54. 54.

    Chris

    Thanks libertarians for keeping the failed ideas of the 1850s alive in the discourse. You know why the “classic liberals” went away? Because liberals actually notice when stuff doesn’t work, and change that stuff. This is why I hate contemporary libertarians who call themselves “classic liberals” – no, you’re not a liberal at all. Liberals want to better the world, and libertarian policies don’t do that.

    Liberals are pro-individual rights, libertarians are anti-government.

    A few hundred years ago when “government” mean “centralized authoritarian European-style monarchy,” that was the same thing. As liberal experiments like the U.S, grew, it eventually dawned on liberals that guaranteeing the individual his freedom from government meant nothing if you were just going to let someone else step in and take over the oppressing. Those liberals who didn’t make that leap of understanding are now called libertarians.

  56. 56.

    Ghanima Atreides

    @AWS well…all im asking for is consistency.. IFF libertarian == BAD why is the LoOG on the blogroll and not in the mock column?
    sorry you retards fell for EDK’s schtick, but why keep the LoOG on the blogroll?
    They are all libertarians, Elias Isqueef included.

  57. 57.

    chopper

    @Chris:

    really, classical liberals were anti-government because they were pro-individual rights, whereas libertarians are pro-individual rights because they are anti-government.

    you note that classical liberals were originally reacting to authoritative regimes, and neo-classical liberals had to do a bit of soul searching when industry and corporate power started rising. modern liberals came out of the process by realizing that corporate power can be just as destructive to individual liberty as an oppressive government, whereas libertarians stuck to the anti-government guns and welcomed corporate power with open arms or at least stuck their fingers in their ears and ignored it.

  58. 58.

    JohnGa1tCole

    Bahahaha. John Galt Cole at it again. Same old same old.

    First 9 lines…”Libertarians are icky”

    Last paragraph..”but some of them are my heros”

    What a naive backasswards sad sad person.

  59. 59.

    Ghanima Atreides

    @Chris
    its more than that, Hayek was wrong.
    The growth of the welfare state doesnt lead to serfdom, it leads to secularism.
    In the beginning, when, federalism worked, the local engines of civil welfare were the churches. But when blacks and women got the vote and the White Patriarchy Social Cohesion model began to degrade, the feds were forced to intervene to deliver civil rights and civil welfare, in the South especially.
    Federal welfare is cheaper in the social capital sense; churches demand tithes, behavior comformanty, church attendence….and in the South an impossible price for entry…white skin.
    haha, federal welfare is destroying church welfare in the open market, because federal welfare is free and anyone can get it.
    “the innovation of the market”, lol.

    /sideways smile

  60. 60.

    Ghanima Atreides

    @chopper

    libertarians are pro-individual rights

    but they aren’t.
    libertarians are pro-localized mob rule, like I explained via Manzi’s post.
    they are pro-individual rights for a LOCAL set of individuals.
    thass the definition of federalism.
    libertarians are anti-individual rights in the universal or national sense.
    liberals are pro-individual rights in the universal and national sense.

  61. 61.

    chopper

    @Chan:

    yeah, you missed my point.

    libertarians really aren’t pro-individual rights, they just are on paper as a means to an end, the end being being anti-government. when individual rights started being threatened by corporate power they didn’t lift a finger.

  62. 62.

    Kyle

    [for libertarians] no-knock raids and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are categorically the same in terms of tyranny.

    Not exactly. They think the CPB is Stalinism, while no-knock raids on brown people they don’t like in neighborhoods they never go to are a non-issue.

    Libertarians = anarchists who demand a strong police to protect their stuff.

  64. 64.

    b-psycho

    A few hundred years ago when “government” mean “centralized authoritarian European-style monarchy,” that was the same thing. As liberal experiments like the U.S, grew, it eventually dawned on liberals that guaranteeing the individual his freedom from government meant nothing if you were just going to let someone else step in and take over the oppressing.

    So now government and corporate take turns oppressing us. Except when they cooperate. Which occurs way more than most liberals seem willing to admit.

    Break the rampant collusion first, then we’ll talk.

  65. 65.

    The Tragically Flip

    @Chris:

    A few hundred years ago when “government” mean “centralized authoritarian European-style monarchy,” that was the same thing. As liberal experiments like the U.S, grew, it eventually dawned on liberals that guaranteeing the individual his freedom from government meant nothing if you were just going to let someone else step in and take over the oppressing. Those liberals who didn’t make that leap of understanding are now called libertarians.

    Yes, this is fantastic. Classic liberals were trying to unwind merchantilism and hell, even a good bit of feudalism was still latent in the system. Tariffs were mostly used to protect the interests of existing rich people, and the State was almost entirely a servant to their interests.

    But once the Corn Laws and Poor Laws and all that stuff was repealed, we had the Gilded Age and the robber barons, and children falling exhausted into machines and thugs beating down unionists and liberals had themselves a good rethink about where the bad stuff in society really comes from.

  66. 66.

    Ghanima Atreides

    @chopper lol, copacetic.
    But libertarians are only anti-government in the sense that government seeks to uphold NATIONAL individual rights, and to regulate the rapacious hobbesian untrammeled greed of the “freed” market.
    Libertarians seek to enforce localized mob rule, the rights of the states, counties, cities, etc to impose localized white conservative christian rights.

    Many libertarians support military spending and foreign interventionism. This is again, a conflict between UNIVERSAL human rights and the localized (america vs the world in this case) human rights libertarians are in favor of.

  67. 67.

    trollhattan

    @ 49. liberal

    Nope. Most so-called libertarians are crypto-feudalists.

    Ugh, those folks sure torture themselves with how many private land-holding angels can dance on the head of a free-market pin.

    We condemn the taxation of property improvements, and of all activities, productive, consumptive, or recreational, as invasions by the state into the private affairs of free individuals.

    Sing it, brother!

  68. 68.

    Teddy Salad

    I’ll stick with Doghouse Riley’s definition of libertarians: “Reagan Republicans who smoke dope.”

  69. 69.

    kth

    Hey, I resemble that quoted commenter! But just to quibble a little with the OP: the important thing isn’t that Balko’s compatriots are tools, but that Balko himself is a useful idiot, a decorative accessory, for an agenda that has very little to do with restraining the police and very much to do with the right of Koch Industries to take a shit in the backyards of ordinary Americans.

  70. 70.

    Ghanima Atreides

    but that Balko himself is a useful idiot

    Agree with kth.
    Cole once told me that EDK was “a good guy”.
    The only “good” libertarian is an ex-libertarian.
    I think i will go look for some Balko to deconstruct.

  71. 71.

    Ghanima Atreides

    very much to do with the right of Koch Industries to take a shit in the backyards of ordinary Americans.

    well, the free market has to be free. or freed or w/e the glibertarian snake oil buzzword du jour is.

  72. 72.

    Mandramas

    Why the american political lingo uses the same words that the rest of the world, but with a complete opposite meaning?

  73. 73.

    Ghanima Atreides

    asalam brother.
    I will let Priss from Bladerunner explain it.

    Then we are stupid, and we will all die.

    America is a ginormous scam…and now the House of Cards is collapsing.
    The Founders and Framers mistakenly believed the Stupid should have self-representation too. That is the origination of the republican base.

  75. 75.

    Linda

    I think Roy Edroso hit it on the head: libertarians are what Republicans call themselves when they want to get laid.

  76. 76.

    Ghanima Atreides

    and the Dance.

    And all the kids they dance, all the kids all night
    Until Monday morning feels another life
    I turn the music up
    I’m on a roll this time
    And heaven is in sight

  78. 78.

    Caz

    You don’t really seem to know what a libertarian is. You equate libertarians with republicans, which couldn’t be farther from reality. But this is balloon juice, so reality isn’t really a very important thing. It’s more about bashing conservatives, regardless of facts. But this site sure is entertaining though!

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