Comment by moffkalast
5 days ago
You know I didn't use to understand libertarians, but after years of watching boundaries being overstepped again and again I think I see the appeal of burning it all down and living in a cabin in the woods.
Like, in Europe we already live in a completely safe society in historical and geographic terms, what more do you fucking want? Security is beyond a laughable excuse for things like chat control. Power tripping elitists will never be happy until they have the entire population under 24/7 camera surveillance and can read every thought in our heads as it occurs. If you make crime impossible, you make free will impossible.
> I think I see the appeal of burning it all down and living in a cabin in the woods.
AFAIK, you're not allowed to live in a cabin in the woods in Europe.
Except in Finland :)
Unfortunately summer cottage can't be your primary residence in Finland either
The same reason there's only more regulations being piled on top of previous ones. Sadly only wars and similar catastrophes work as reset buttons for these things historically. A peace as long as the current one is somewhat of an untested ground
The libertarians that want to live in the woods have a point.
The problem is the libertarians that want to burn it all down and build a corpo-state.
"... the appeal of burning it all down and living in a cabin in the woods."
I hope that's not what you think libertarianism is about. I'm sure there are libertarians who DO feel that way, but it's not a core tenet to personally isolate and live off the land.
Libertarianism sees not left vs right, but instead the people against the government. Libertarians focus on personal liberty and solving problems together, voluntarily, as individuals cooperating. A libertarian would say, for example, that if I think a bridge should be built, then I should either build it myself or convince other people to help me out voluntarily - but not use government to force people to help (via taxes, etc).
Libertarians are against force/coercion, and see government as the ultimate expression of force.
There are some loony libertarians, as there are of any political party, but most of us have pretty ordinary and mainstream beliefs and priorities.
Libertarians reject governmental force but provide no barriers to corporate force. There are innumerable documented examples of corporate force having greater control over the population than a government. These examples are not just historical but also include the time we are currently living in.
I don't think this is true of libertarianism. Libertarians reject use of force, except to prevent other use of force. I.e. I can use force to stop someone else from using force on me (or others).
Corporations are not exempt from this. A libertarian would support using force to stop a corporation from using force to coerce people to do something.
But Libertarians reject a premise that a corporation is required to serve you. You can opt-out and the corporation should leave you alone. But you are not entitled to service or employment from that corporation. Your rights cannot depend on the performance of another. I have a right to produce or purchase my own food, but I do not have an right/entitlement to food that I have not purchased or produced.
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I agree with your overall sentiment, except:
"Like, in Europe we already live in a completely safe society in historical and geographic terms"
Russia. Putin.
The chances of Russia invading a NATO country are essentially zero simply because it would, almost certainly, lead to nuclear war. The idea that nukes wouldn't come out is contradicted both by decades of wargaming. In fact this is exactly what led to the end of the Cold War.
At one time the US thought we could end the Cold War by waving a bigger stick. But Proud Prophet [1] was an extremely elaborate war game played out in the 80s that demonstrated that literally every single aggressive strategy, regardless of how innocuous, invariably spiraled rapidly towards nuclear war and the depopulation of the Northern Hemisphere.
This led the US to sharply scale back rhetoric against the USSR, drop ideas of successfully fighting a nuclear war, and a sharp shift towards de-escalation and away from strong-arming. 7 years later the first McDonalds would open in the USSR. The next year, the USSR would collapse.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Prophet
This has nothing to do with anything. Nobody said anything about nuclear war or formal invasion.
Let's review.
Russia shot down a civilian airliner, killing all 298 people onboard, mostly Dutch nationals.
Russia performed a radioactive poisoning attack on British territory, contaminating British civilian areas and
Russia also used a deadly nerve agent twice within a few months on British territory, including poisoning two non-Russian British nationals, killing one and injuring the other.
And they actively fund far right and white supremacist organizations in western European countries and blatantly interfere in local politics, and also run active bot farms for the purpose of undermining social solidarity and democratic governance.
Those are just a few things we know about.
The threat from Russia is not external or invasive. It is internal and ongoing.
The fact that they haven't nuked and won't nuke the entire western hemisphere is a bit of a strange bar to set.
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none of the countries that Putin could and would invade, e.g. Finland, the Baltics, Poland, have nukes.
It would depend on the UK, France, and the US to back them with nuclear weapons. Would the UK electorate be willing to trade their existence -- potential nuclear holocaust -- for Latvia?
And the US is under Putin's puppet, so they're not launching nukes.
Would Britain and France go to war over an invasion of Poland? They did once, and didn't have a great time...
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I'm talking about our society internally, not potential external attacks on it. It's reasonably high trust and crime is rare outside a few outlier cities. We could not be further from warranting these sort of fascist style crackdowns. Ironically yes we could be spending funding used for domestic surveillance and bureaucracy on buying more Himars.
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What a surprise a 2 hour old throwaway post parroting barely coherent Russian propaganda.
This "joke" is neither funny nor original as it comes up on social media everytime someone mentions Russia as a threat to Europe.
Oh, look at that. A fresh account just to make this comment. What a coincidence.
try it, like these people https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7iJDMU43iUk
It’s important to defend libertarian values even when things are good. Small violations of civil rights have a tendency to stick around and snowball into something worse.
The katamari will grow until morale improves.
> in Europe we already live in a completely safe society in historical and geographic terms, what more do you fucking want?
For people not to get killed, abused, and exploited? You don't sound like a "libertarian" you sound like an anarchist.
You know who has a large part of the population under global 24/7 surveillance right now? Google, Facebook, Microsoft.