Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

This fight is for everything.

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

No Justins, No Peace

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

The revolution will be supervised.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Ah, the different things are different argument.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

You are here: Home / Politics / Glibertarianism / Some Late Night Glibertarianism

Some Late Night Glibertarianism

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I think he and the free market should make a competing rail system and let the market decide:

Shorter Glibertarian douchebag: “I had a shitty one-off experience with public transportation, therefore it all sucks.” Most rational people would have walked the 1.6 miles in 10-15 minutes, but in fairness to the Fonz, he may have been chewing gum at the time, so it was kind of an either/or situation.

Wait a minute- didn’t Ayn Rand love trains?

Reader Interactions

111Comments

  1. 1.

    Spaghetti Lee

    If I was DC Metro and knew Nick Gillespie was on one of my trains, I’d intentionally slow down. Maybe that’s his problem.

  4. 4.

    MikeJ

    I don’t remember DC prohibiting private rail lines. He should have taken one of those.

  5. 5.

    tofubo

    This past weekend in our politics, it was look-how-far-over-to-the-dark-side-we’ve-crawled time. Just as the various celebrity journalists, celebrity politicians, and celebrity celebrities were about done yucking it up at the White House Correspondents Dinner — and can I just say, for the record, that this is the biggest circle-jerk for the largest circle of jerks that there ever has been, like Guinness-level? — we had an unrepentent torturer shilling for his new book, baring his fangs on 60 Minutes and daring someone to throw him into the clink at The Hague, and another drone strike on behalf of the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. If there is one thing that would possibly get me to vote for Buddy Roemer and/or the Hemp Party, it would be the dozens of ways, tacit and otherwise, that this administration made peace with the savagery of the previous one, and then proceeded to find ways to be savage itself that seem more capable of stroking the liberal-hawk G-spots.

    http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/jose-rodriguez-cia-book-8484289

    wheee

  6. 6.

    Suffern ACE

    Yes. And having lived there, it’s on purpose. Same on all trains. Like last month, I was taking the train up here and there was like this 2 hour delay because someone tried to end their life on the tracks, but the train didn’t run over him and he decided not to die right away so they had to stop running the train when they should have kept on going.

  8. 8.

    AA+ Bonds

    Toot toot Nick Gillespie, if the public transit systems in major American cities shut down, this country would be economically paralyzed and there would still be no money to be made in replacing them

    Libertarians have a very hard time dealing with reality if they do not like what has already occurred

    I sometimes wonder what the scenes of public anarchy during “adjustment” look like in these people’s minds, these people who think current economic policy should be decided based on an amateur’s reading of the Edict on Maximum Prices (year of our Lord 301)

  13. 13.

    Nylund

    If I remember Atlas Shrugged correctly, not only did she love trains, she loved alternative energy as well.

  14. 14.

    Marcellus Shale, Public Dick

    meh this is nothing, wait until gillespie’s dream of a life unburdened by the occasional temptation of public transportation actually comes true. wait until he sees what happens when the people who actually need public transportation to go do the jobs he doesn’t even think about, can’t use public transportation because assholes like him won’t fund it as a shifted and socialized cost of gillespie being gillespie.

    wait until he realizes how long it takes for him, even him, to go get another fucking doughnut when the workers who make that possible can’t travel. its happening, or is about to happen elsewhere, what with all the austerity and the koch class of destroyers docked in the state capitols.

    and guess what, yeah, that wait? the bitch about it is, you COULD start out on foot, but what if the next train is just around the track? once you are committed you are committed…as a user. but 61 mins for 1.6 miles…shit goes that way sometimes

    /former long time public transp user.

  15. 15.

    trollhattan

    What would a jacket crafted from Reardon metal look like? What would Gillespie look like stuffed welded into one two sizes too small?

    Saw him once on Maher–he do think he be pretty tuff. Definitely has a punchable neck.

  16. 16.

    patroclus

    Compared to virtually every subway I’ve ever ridden, the D.C. Metro is pretty slow. When I lived there, it was almost always a better idea to walk if the distance wasn’t that great and the weather was okay. The buses in D.C. have better designed routes but are no picnic either. The Metro was good, though, to go out to the burbs or to distant Northwest places.

  17. 17.

    4tehlulz

    The problem was the Fonz’s constant snapping of fingers, causing doors to open and music to play, slowing down the train.

  18. 18.

    Xecky Gilchrist

    Jackholes who are determined not to like public transpo always think the whole thing is about speed.

  20. 20.

    max hats

    “Wait a minute- didn’t Ayn Rand love trains?”


    FREE MARKET TRAINS

    (Ayn Rand is dumb)

  21. 21.

    srv

    Actually, thinking about it, his twit reminds me of Atlas Shrugged.

    600 pages to say what could have been said in six. And it still would not have made any sense.

  22. 22.

    amk

    Typical rethug conman.

    Between the early 2000s and 2010, a man using the alias “Bobby Thompson” collected millions from unsuspecting donors for the charity U.S. Navy Veterans Association (USNVA), which claimed to provide support for members of the U.S. Armed Forces. Officials believe that very little, if any, of the money was ever used as intended, according to the U.S. Marshal Service.

    To help legitimize his charity, Thompson allegedly donated part of the ill-gotten funds to Republican candidates like former President George W. Bush, former Republican presidential candidate John McCain and House Speaker John Boehner.

  26. 26.

    MoeLarryAndJesus

    Nick Gillespie or Ed Gillespie –

    Which one is the bigger Gillasshole?

  27. 27.

    gex

    The BIL, whom I’ve griped about on this blog many times, constantly bitches about spending $2K more per year now that his boys drive. All I know is he wouldn’t spend $100 per year to have public transit that would save him the $2K.

    In the name of “efficiency”, free marketeers will waste away all our resources and maximize single occupant cars burning up as much oil as possible. Then they have to pretend that our every decade or so war in the ME is unrelated and they have to pretend AGW doesn’t exist or that there’s no point in trying to do something about it.

    Grrr.

  28. 28.

    KCinDC

    The only objectionable bit is the #transitsucks tag. The rest seems like a typical complaint that I might even tweet myself on one of the many occasions when Metro is not performing well. It’s really deteriorated in the past several years.

    And 1.6 miles in 10-15 minutes sounds like a jog, not a welk. It’s more like 25 minutes if you’re a relatively fast walker.

  31. 31.

    Rupert

    @KCinDC: Yes. The 1.5 mile walk into town takes me 25 minutes there and 35 minutes back. The difference is because of the 250′ difference in elevation, not because I walk less steadily on my way home! A least, not always.

  32. 32.

    AA+ Bonds

    The cool thing about trains is how you can have an active private sector that competes along the same routes simultaneously and train freight companies are renowned for their competitive nature due to the highly mobile, anything-goes spirit of railroad enterprise

    There has never been a problem with railway monopolies for exactly this reason

  33. 33.

    Kathy in St. Louis

    And if he really is a glibertarian, he resents the hell out of any tax dollars that subsidized his little ride. After all, the gubmint is really only there to provide for the coomon defense. This is one of their fav arguments.

  36. 36.

    AA+ Bonds

    I think probably the best situation for our nation’s capital would be like two, three Metros down underground, competing for Nick Gillespie’s dollars

  37. 37.

    slag

    Thanks HENRY FORD! My car broke down on the freeway (6 hours to go 3 miles and hundreds of dollars to get a tow truck)! #automobilessuck

    ETA (Technically not my story but it works better in the first person here)

  38. 38.

    rob!

    To be fair to Gillespie, I think the, ahem, reason the train went so slow was because the passengers kept shoving the other Glibertarian assholes onto the tracks.

  39. 39.

    wetcasements

    I’m not a Libertarian because I’m an adult.

    Seriously dude, shit happens. DC has one of the best Metro systems in the world but even the better ones have fuck-ups from time to time.

    These people are unbelievable. Get a horse, you glibertarian fuckwit.

  41. 41.

    Elizabelle

    OT: Whitechapel on BBC America at 1:00 a Eastern. (Forgot about it earlier this evening. Happily, there’s a rebroadcast.)

    Preparing to be skeered.

  45. 45.

    Richard Shindledecker

    Quick scan of comments so this one is safe (I think)
    Rand loved trains in tunnels as long as she owned the tunnel.

  48. 48.

    Hill Dweller

    @Anya: Politico has an article up analyzing Obama’s take(in the letter) on “The Waste Land”.

    As expected, they ask some scholars for their thoughts on Obama’s analysis. But they also asked Bill Kristol for his opinion. What the fuck does Kristol know about poetry(or anything, for that matter)?

  50. 50.

    amk

    @Hill Dweller:

    media’s obsession with everything and anything about Obama is disgusting. The fuckers couldn’t stand to ask mittbot about his tax-returns and his ‘I’ll do the exact opposite of what Obama has done’ plans for america.

    Fucking, filthy fifth columnists.

  51. 51.

    Anya

    @Hill Dweller: They first tried to cast him as the next James Frey, and when they were challenged they now moved to Kristol. What’s next? Speculating whether Bill Ayers wrote the letters.

  53. 53.

    Hill Dweller

    @Anya: To be fair, which is more than Kristol deserves, he was complimentary of the 22-year old Obama’s take on the poem. But I still don’t know what Politico thought Kristol would bring to the table.

  55. 55.

    Gordon, The Big Express Engine

    One of the funnier threads on this site in a long while. Agree with KCinDC, the transitsucks tag is the most objectionable. I lived in NYC for three years and if twitter existed back then (mid 1990’s) I could have offered up three dozen tweets along these lines. Most of the time the subway worked great. The occasional bad rides are part of deal. When did conservatives/libertarians become such wussies?

    Or I could have had a bad experience and worn a sign around my neck for the next day and walked around in public showing it off which is basically what twitter is now for idiots like Nick Gillespie.

  57. 57.

    Martin

    The last free market transportation system in this country was the horse. And I bet it’d take the fonz more than 61 minutes just to get on it.

  58. 58.

    RossInDetroit

    Most rational people would have walked the 1.6 miles in 10-15 minutes, but in fairness to the Fonz, he may have been chewing gum at the time, so it was kind of an either/or situation.

    THAT made me laugh!

    FTR, a fast walking speed is 3 MPH on level ground, so you’re looking at 30 minutes or so. Why does Gillespie want government transportation to do for him what he can accomplish with his own feet?

  60. 60.

    Hugely

    hey i just took amtrak and then light rail AND then walked 3.5 miles home in transit challenged San Diego and im not complaining (more like looking for an attaboy heh)

    the answer is to walk that 1.6 miles u doosh

  61. 61.

    Martin

    @RossInDetroit: Yeah, a mile and a half in less than 30 min is pretty reasonable.

    That said, given his likely endpoint, 1.5 miles would almost certainly involve walking past black people. So, that’s why he wasn’t walking.

  64. 64.

    MattR

    @Martin: But how many flights of stairs were at the end of that walk? Boy do I not miss my seventh story walkup apt in Manhattan.

  65. 65.

    Warren Terra

    Obviously we can’t have free market train lines; the good spots are taken, and digging tunnels takes time and money. We need to just open the existing lines to competition. Don’t like the speed of the train you’re on? Switch to a company offering faster, more reliable trains on the same track!

  67. 67.

    Petrocelli

    Too bad he took the Train on the one day they allowed McCain to drive …

  68. 68.

    Martin

    @MattR: I hear you. I lived in a 5th story walk up in Queens 11 blocks from the N. That was a long drunk walk on New Years. Even got lost once. Heh.

  70. 70.

    Xenos

    Unless Gillespie know why the train was delayed, how can he have any point to make?

    Just last week I was left waiting two hours for an overdue train in Germany. After joking with some friends about it (‘what is the world coming to when the German trains are running this late?’) I found out that the reason for the delay was that someone had committed suicide further down the line, so the line was shut down while they cleaned the mess up. So I felt like an asshole, getting all bitchy about a couple hour delay on a Sunday afternoon.

    Gillespie seems to be unable to realize he is, or at least can be, an asshole.

  71. 71.

    Arclite

    Most rational people would have walked the 1.6 miles in 10-15 minutes

    1.6 miles in 10 minutes is a 6 minute mile. Fonzi may be free, but he ain’t THAT free.

  72. 72.

    Another Halocene Human

    Amtrak should sue the producers of Atlas Shrugged for defamation of character.

  73. 73.

    Another Halocene Human

    @tofubo: Buddy Roehmer comes off as an altogether decent feller, but look at how many votes he got.

    Yet the shameless self-promoter Ron Paul has a whole army of Ronulans to make his fake candidacy pop.

    Re: Ron, Lyndon LaRouche is probably dying of envy. But he’ll have the last laugh when the LaRouchies petition to put him on the ballot after he’s dead (LaRouche lives! Like Frodo and Rabbi Schneersohn). Now that’s [cultlike] dedication.

  74. 74.

    Warren Terra

    @Martin:

    That said, given his likely endpoint, 1.5 miles would almost certainly involve walking past black people. So, that’s why he wasn’t walking.

    It’s 1.5 miles as the crow flies. Assuming he’s taking John Derbyshire’s advice and crossing the road to avoid encountering dusky people, we could be talking marathon distances here.

  75. 75.

    Batocchio

    The DC metro has traditionally been quite good, but since I’m not living in the area currently, I take KCinDC’s point about its recent decline. But hey, they even stayed open late for Capitals fans tonight, which was nice.

    You can find Koch flunkies attacking everything in the Commons – public education, public libraries, public media/news, public transportation… Since Gillespie hates all things public anyway, why didn’t the asshole just take a cab to begin with? Or pay that expensive limo service his pal McArdle was shilling?

  77. 77.

    bago

    The Metro itself is a BART design coated with ads for pentagon contractors. If Nick wants any authority on this issue, he would complain about the escalators. Seriously. They are huge, many moving parts prone to failure, Have to live in the rain at the top of the tunnels, etc. However the worst red line delay I ever had was a suicide. Cops have to come in, track the body parts, yadda yadda yadda. It takes a while. I was on a train once where a double track suicide took two and a half hours to clear up how far everybody’s body parts flew, match arm to corpse, etc.
    The most amusing bit was when the smokers needed to sate their addiction, and stepped outside. It took about 30 minutes before the train crew realized that they should shoo the passengers back on board.

    What I am saying is that the density of passengers on public transit will make anecdotes about random occurrences more prevalent, and your judgement should reflect that fact.

  78. 78.

    Peter A

    Some acquaintances of mine from Moscow were just complaining how they keep getting stuck in mammoth traffic jams – one woman recently spent 6 hours to travel about 8 miles across town. That’s life in a city where the government abidicates all responsibility for traffic control and refuses to adequately fund public transportation. Bangkok is another beautiful example. Maybe Nick should move to one of those libertarian paradises.

    Ironically the true “libertarian paradise” glibtards are always going on about – Hong Kong – has excellent public transportation and taxes the hell out of private car ownership.

  79. 79.

    alex milstein

    I remember once how bad traffic made my 12-mile drive home from work take almost an hour. I blame the horrible system of publicly funded highways for that. Yeah, that was it. It certainly wasn’t the three car accident that had all the lanes blocked. Nah, it was the big bad guvmint.

  80. 80.

    tjmn

    I guess I lead a charmed life. Don’t know who the twitterer is and I don’t care.

  83. 83.

    lou

    @KCinDC: And we can thank people like Sen. Tom Coburn who put holds on the federal funding for Metro. I have an occasional “Everyone who takes Metro” should drive one day, particularly a day when there is a crucial vote on a Republican bill to show our overlords on the Hill what would happen here if everyone drove.

  84. 84.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Kolohe: Wait, you found someone on the internet who said something sucks? I am truly shocked. That almost never happens.

  85. 85.

    kindness

    Well consider the source. Nick probably couldn’t walk the streets of DC because there are scary black people there and in DC they won’t let you shoot them for being black, unlike Florida.

    @lou: Did you see Colburn on The Daily Show last night? Jon was too polite to him.

  86. 86.

    ericblair

    @lou:

    And we can thank people like Sen. Tom Coburn who put holds on the federal funding for Metro.

    Funding for Metro is a mess, because of all the organizations involved and general Republican bullshit. Now the Silver Line extension to Dulles (which would be real fuckin useful) is being held up because gooper douchebags in the Virginia state government and Loudon County (classic exurb assholes) don’t like the pro-union contract provisions. You simply can’t work with goopers on any level anymore because of random ideological objections they get in their heads and the total inability to stick to an agreement.

    For supposed bidnessmen, these guys can’t stick to a deal ever. Actively ignorant, won’t listen to reason, can’t deal with anything they don’t like, and welsh on agreements. Like everyone’s worst nightmare clients.

    And Gillespie, if he doesn’t like Metro he doesn’t have to use it. Nobody fucking cares what he does with his little life, you know.

  87. 87.

    Downpuppy

    Did nobody else read

    walked the 1.6 miles in 10-15 minutes

    and wonder whether JC is a champion race walker, or never walks anywhere?

  90. 90.

    chopper

    next time he’ll try driving in DC.

    “Thanks DC traffic! 2.5 hrs to travel 1 mile!”

  91. 91.

    superdestroyer

    What will actually reduce the need for public transportation is the reduced need for commuting. As offices have become digital, there is not need for anyone to actually come to an office. Many companies in DC have figured out it is cheaper to give workers a notebook computer with VPN and let them work from home. No more need for offices, file cabinets, or a mail room.

    Why ride the metro downtown to sit in a cubicle and work on a computer all day. Computers, digital meetings, conference calls ,and file systems like SharePoint make more sense than renting office space in downtown DC.

  92. 92.

    bemused

    Gillespie reminds me of a senior citizen who had one piece of mail get lost in his entire lifetime, therefore the Post Office is totally useless. Conservatives are basically elderly knee-jerk reactive, get off my lawn crabasses. Chronic cranks.

  93. 93.

    Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937

    1.6 miles? I would have walked. What a lazy glibertarian welfare leech.

  94. 94.

    vtr

    Unbelievable! Ninety-plus responses about trains not running on time, and not one cheap joke about Il Duce.

  95. 95.

    El Cid

    Mussolini never did really get the trains to run on time. He did get all sorts of people in his governments to say that, though, which is a much easier task for a totalitarian leader.

  98. 98.

    jdrs0819

    Oh thanks, Nick. The VRE that gets me to Alexandria on time works great on the same line. You can wait in traffic if you want, I prefer the one hour train ride. The extra 20 minutes to get to the train station? Worth it.

  99. 99.

    Someguy

    The DC Metro system is in a state of near-collapse right now. It’s got more riders than it can handle, commuters from the burbs are crushing it, and it’s been breaking down a lot lately and there have been a number of serious accidents, including a bunch of fatalities, in the last 2-3 years. Meanwhile, Maryland, Virginia and D.C. refuse to fund it at the levels it needs to be funded.

    That, and Gillespie is evil.

  100. 100.

    Dave S.

    @jdrs0819: VRE (and Amtrak and MARC, for that matter) uses CSX freight trackage, not the Metro lines. They run parallel for a bit but are separate. /trainnerd

    Metro’s funding process is abysmal – they have to beg yearly from DC, VA and MD, hence all the deferred maintenance which somehow transformed into Perpetual Emergency Trackwork, funny how that works. Perhaps more fundamentally, Metro was designed on the cheap – it’s all single track in each direction, so you can’t run express trains on a separate track like in NYC – with the exception of the insane escalator fetish and the assumption that of course they’ll work fine in all weather.

  101. 101.

    jdrs0819

    @Dave S.: He was complaining about how much transit sucks, though. His example was the Metro, but he’s condemning the whole enterprise. I guess it was the “same line” comment that sparked your interest though :P

  102. 102.

    khead

    The 9 mile trip up the BW Parkway from G’belt to Laurel during rush hour would give him an aneurysm.

  103. 103.

    Dave S.

    @jdrs0819: Oh, yeah, I got his point, such as it was: “No way should I pay taxes for transit, and why is it so slow?!”

    I plead guilty to one count of Sparked Interest (note the trainnerd faux-tag).

  105. 105.

    Gabriel Bellatrix

    Yeah, the DC metro is chronically underfunded–it was never built to handle as many passengers as it does so it needs major, systemic upgrades. Unfortunately, as Dave S. pointed out, they have to beg to keep their funding stable, let alone get an increase to cover all that.

    Then again, isn’t that the right-wing modus operandi–slash funding for vital programs so they become crappy, then use that crappiness as a justification to eliminate the program entirely?

  106. 106.

    Gabriel Bellatrix

    Yeah, the DC metro is chronically underfunded–it was never built to handle as many passengers as it does so it needs major, systemic upgrades. Unfortunately, as Dave S. pointed out, they have to beg to keep their funding stable, let alone get an increase to cover all that.

    Then again, isn’t that the right-wing modus operandi–slash funding for vital programs so they become crappy, then use that crappiness as a justification to eliminate the program entirely?

  108. 108.

    chopper

    @Someguy:

    try NYC’s subway sometime. it’s getting worse every year, fares are going up every year and the hobo urine is getting more pungent.

  109. 109.

    chopper

    @Dave S.:

    it’s a badly designed system. yeah, marc VRE and amtrak all run on freight lines. the DC metro was stupidly designed on a single track in each direction, so any track issues cause the whole line to freeze up. and it’s all been at over capacity for years.

    in NYC, the subway is crumbling and breaking under the strain of rising ridership and much needed projects like the tunnel, the 2nd ave subway and east side access for LIRR are either being shut down or are moving slow as molasses.

    and these two are supposed to be the shining example of america’s best transit systems.

  110. 110.

    uptown

    DC does have a private transit system…
    they’re called taxis. Of course they’re priced accordingly.

  111. 111.

    Paula

    @Anya:

    I didn’t read the article, but I really enjoyed Wonkette’s snarkfest about the “Nerd Love” revelations.

    As an English major I’m proud/horrified that one of our own seems to have made it so far, but damn we can sure sound like pretentious weenies (myself included). :)

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