Why are many libertarians so brainwashed?

If anything is dying it is socialism, look at US unions or socialist countries today.

 

Oh I think I must have misunderstood your earlier posts. I am always arguing libertarians need to turn out for republicans in the general even if our guy loses in the primary.

 

A type of fascism that benefits the state and never the citizen is taking root.

Cut programs here, add programs over there. No matter.

What will remain true is the State will make all actions necessary to defend and preserve itself.

 

Ya. And go stock up on ammo. Oops, the state cleaned out the market.

 

Never ceases to amaze me how the people who are seduced by the ridiculous promises of Big Brother government, and are so easily swept along with the majority - that it is those same people that accuse others of being "brainwashed".

As each generation of Amerikans is seduced further and further to the left, they never make the connection that it is they who are incapable of independent thought and critical thinking. It is an amazing process to watch as it takes hold of feeble minds.

And there are so many of them - they are legion, and always have been. It is only in those brief, intermittent periods in history when rational, informed citizens are able to chain government down, that freedom has been allowed to flourish.

Sadly, eventually, inevitably... demagogues rise to power, and the decline begins. America had a pretty good run, but history is repeating itself - and the fools who are cheering on the decline and collapse see none of it; indeed, they are incapable of seeing any of it as they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated.

It's so sad to see our country and freedom being killed off like this.

 

I mentioned this a while back, conservative parties need to get more libertarian values and libertarians get onboard with those fighting against the collectivists. Admittedly some of the conservative parties as just as bad in being globalist control freaks that will sell out its people.

For example, things such as abortion and gay marriage the Marxists use time and time again to tell large segments of society theres a war against them. For arguing against gay marriage on religious grounds, argue the govt should have nothing to do with it or that it should be left to the states to vote on. Abortion however is a killer, 50% of the population is female, many im sure who would like to make their own choices. Abortion will never be outlawed so why keep giving the left ammunition, they simply play conservatives on this issue its laughable. Many libertarians are pro open borders, free drugs, no welfare ect - only the Marxists will agree on open borders and they want to take all your stuff and pay more welfare! You guys need to give ground too.

Conservatism with libertarian values should be the way ahead imo - Milton Friedman types im thinking. But for the US if amnesty gets through it might be too late - small govt types simply cant buy votes, the Marxists would be more than happy for you to try. They'll always out bid you and then thankyou for for moving things to the left for them.

 

Never said that i was an anarchist.

 

Right, but your definition of "brainwashed cultist" is a person who is not doing what the majority is doing. In Russia in 1950, that would have meant that you'd be calling anyone NOT a Communist "a crazy cultist", or if you'd been a German in 1937, you'd have called people "crazy cultists" for saying that Jews might not be all that bad. I agree that we haven't started a literal holocaust yet, but there's another side of that.

Ever heard of the "Overton Window"? or "Creeping Normalcy" You almost never go directly for the throat in politics. If you wanted to change what's acceptable, you don't start at the end point, what you do is start small, get people to agree to a small shift in the political possibilities. Nazis didn't start with gas chambers for Jews, they started with making Jews wear stars, and making Jews mark their businesses. They didn't start with killing healthy people, they started with euthanasia. You have to make the radical mainstream before you can make the unthinkable thinkable. Once people got used to the idea that disabled people should be painlessly euthanized, it became thinkable to say other people should have the same fate. Once people got used to seeing Jews as not citizens, it became easier to further remove rights, to the obvious end point.

The point of course being that all I have to do to make a person with no guiding principles agree to the proposition that people should be killed for being who they are is to take relatively small steps in that direction. Once you agree that Jews are not equal citizens with Germans, you'll agree with the prospect of labelling them for convienience. Once you agree to labels, you'll probably agree to ghettos. And once you agree to ghettos, you'll agree to work camps.

Or you could go with religion. There's already a minority of people who believe that Islam is not a religion. So perhaps we should treat Islam differently. Perhaps mosques should register with the government? But once you agree to the principle behind that, it's easier to take the next step (perhaps that muslims should be forced to get permission to open a mosque) and on we go, until we have muslims wearing green moons and painting moons on their businesses. All from a small start.

That's why I side with the libertarians -- if you have a firm line beyond which you will not go, there's no way you can be manipulated into supporting abuses. I agree to the natural right to self-rule, so when someone tries to convince me that some behavior is "bad" but there's no victim, it's no-go land. I don't get to say "that's something I don't like, so we should ban it", so I'm not prone to taking the first steps. I'm not going to agree to making muslims wear green moons because I don't accept the principle that some beliefs are more equal than others. Once that happens, you will eventually agree to whatever the Overton window is forced into.

 

"...evaluated on a case-by-case basis..."

Taxcutter says:
Case-by-case is exactly how government expands and freedom diminishes.

This exactly why the people must fight every single attempt by government to increase for every millimeter. Government is so big and so counterproductive that failure to diminish it is a failure of the people.

 

Why does an attention to fundamentals get a bad name?

In football an attention to blocking and tackling leads to competitive teams.
In engineering it is the fundamentals that determine success or failure.

So why are libertarians and Tea Partiers castigated for sticking to their fundamentals?

 

Most people who have ever lived throughout history are feeble minded and easily led. Prone to superstition, groupthink, and ostracization of anyone who doesn't go along.

These same groupthink democats/liberals/progressives/neocons would have been the same people involved in accusing people of witchcraft and hanging them; the good people of Germany who either turned a blind eye, or outright cheered on the extermination of "undesirables"; the good folks of the French Revolution who laughed while they watched the priests drown; on and on...

The average democrat/liberal/progressive of today is no different than every other ignorant citizen from history. Different time, different culture... the people are the same though.

Human nature is what makes the principles of freedom timeless - human beings are prone to grotesque acts of butchery against their neighbors - if given the chance. It is why government must always be constrained by the rule of law.

 

Why do “liberals” always seem to resort to thinking of brainwashing when they meet someone whose ideology would cause a Godzilla Class nuclear sub to surface in San Francisco bay, which was in response to unregulated MoonSack corporation’s genetically engineered grain causing billions of deaths, and the world wants reparations the Libertarian President Flacal in the White Quonset Hut cannot pay?

 

Have you met democrats and/or republicans?

 

Sounds about right in many circumstances, not just Libertarian... "For the greater good" is often quoted when dealing with Conservative policies which I support. Quite often there will be people that suffer through the use of a policy that aids many others.

Perhaps the philosophies are correct [regarding any ideal], and if there is a negative outcome then the path is wrong... but to test that, can you supply a specific example?

 

The real problems foisted upon our society by do-gooder liberals (the do-goodism really nothing more than cover for their real goal - which is to do as much damage to our society as possible), and neo-cons can only become universally destructive by way of centralization and top-down distribution of the misery.

Liberals/progressives/neocons/socialists, et al, want to centralize everything - of course that is decidedly anti-American, anti-freedom, and completely negates the circuit breaker approach of federalism.

If the lefties want to communize a state - have at it, but if our Federal Republic were still intact the damage would be contained to that state.

Look at it like circuit breakers or the water-tight compartments on a ship. They'll eventually hold sway with enough people that they will inevitably do a lot of damage, but if our Federal Republic were still alive, we could contain the damage they do. Eventually the people of that state would reject their nonsense and right their own ship.

As it is - their power is increasingly centralized, everyone will suffer, and collapse is inevitable.

 

Damn well said!! I actually think the leaders of the majority are not as mindless as the sheep they lead. They breed fear and hate for the Libertarians because they see the pattern history has told. None of the uprisings that ultimately lead to changes in power are ever initially embraced by the mindless masses. People swallow and regurgitate whatever propaganda that comes from their media outlet control boxes. But the leaders become more afraid as more and more people open their eyes and realize what is actually happening, and the movement continues to grow in popularity. More and more people are rejecting the power of the corrupt majority in favor of thinking for themselves. We are rejecting the idea that you must believe and vote how the majority leaders tell us to. We have different ideals and beliefs, and they don't always fit the mold we have been told is our only option. We are doing what neither party is capable of, and embracing diversity and using it to our advantage. We don't demand you believe like us. We WANT you to think for yourself and believe what you want based on your own thoughts about issues. We only want the freedom to do the same. Wow. Crazy radicals.

 

This is my opinion on the matter. I think there are two parties simply because the majority of people find themselves somewhere in the middle and those two parties simply play off the middle. Then you have the extremist on both sides of the aisle, from the socialists, communists, Tea Party, Libertarians, etc. Those are groups that do not hover around the middle. You have to have an extreme ideological mindset to sit in one of these groups. Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama... they are all pretty much the same that hovered around the middle. They all compromised, they all made intelligent decisions, and they did not follow any extremist ideology.

People know what Ron Paul's philosophy is, the media does not force us to choose one side or the other. People simply do not agree with diverging that far away from the middle.

 

This is all fear mongering extremist thinking. Just because we have the majority does not mean we will end up like the Nazi's and start killing people. That's irrational fear. We are normal educated people that believe in having an efficient economy that does not make extreme decisions based off other peoples ideologies.

 

No, I don't base intelligence off of a percentage. I base it off education, research, and credentials. And I think America has enough intelligent people to be able to understand an extremist group versus a party that makes more educated decisions. I'm just pointing out that you guys talk like it's so obvious that you are right, yet barely anyone agrees with you. It's almost a cult like belief.

 

When discussing political belief systems and when one side finds themselves unable to successfully assail the others position using reason and logic, they commonly resort to ad hominem attacks resorting to words like "paranoid doomsday cultists", "ranters", "paranoid schizophrenics", "cult " and "radical". Uncanny, as this is the most base of unreasonable and illogical fallacy which leaves such attacks impotent and without substance.

I would suggest that if people wish to have a discussion about libertarianism, actually discuss libertarianism instead of railing fallacious arguments against it.

 

It's not fear mongering. It's simply the truth of human interactions. If you have no principles you will not violate, you have no principles period. That's my line of reasoning -- once I can get you to agree to violate a principle for a "good cause", I've won. That's what's been true for millenia -- once I get you to agree to let me sleep with your wife for 10 million dollars, then I can offer one dollar on the same principle. We've both agreed that for a good enough price I can sleep with your wife, the rest is just negotiations over the price. If i can't ever make you agree to allowing me to sleep with your wife, that will never happen no matter how much money I throw your way. Your wife is not for sale.

I didn't say that having a majority automatically means we'll go nazi. We probably won't right away. What I said was that the nazis got to the death camps slowly, by getting people to compromise on their principles. Principles are the stop signs of society. If I have the principle that you may speak your opinion without harassment, then it's a stop sign against things like controlled press or arrest of dissidents or arrest of protestors. If I compromise and say "well, except when you say something bigotted", it sounds good, until you realize that if I can get you to agree that a certain opinion is bigitotted, then whole swaths of ideas are made illegal because they're considered racist or sexist. In fact, I can give you an opinion that is already considered sexist -- a dean got in trouble some years ago for suggesting that women had a somewhat lesser ability in mathematics and this was the reason that women didn't major in maths based sciences. Whatever you believe about the actual ability of women at math, I think it's dangerous to preclude an investigation into any idea in science just because it makes the "rights crowd" uneasy. Chances are the man would have been proven wrong, but in a free society, we are allowed to ask any question. But without the principle of free speech, there's no way to guarentee that, in fact, it probably wouldn't be possible to ask even marginally related questions -- the risk is too great.

Go down the constitution, and you'll see the stop signs we've placed in the way of government doing everything it wants -- the right to own a gun, the right to freely assemble, the right to say what you want. Everything in there is meant to place stop signs before the government so as the government doesn't just make up some reason to do what it wants to anyway. Without the protection for freedom of the press, we could wind up with Pravda America that merely parrots what the government wants you to think, because other forms of speech are not protected under freedom of the press. Could you have investigated Watergate without freedom of the press? Probably not, simply because the government could shut down any paper or TV station that covered the story. Without a 5th amendment, you would not be able to avoid looking guilty even if you're not. That's why the protection against self-incrimination exists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4UfAL9f74I

 

Are you saying then that all the Germans were uneducated? Do you really believe the entire country was stupid, without education or religion? Group thought is a powerful thing. Though many had some moral problem with the Nazi regime an entire country went along rather than buck the system...they propagated the message of an evil man..because he had charisma. And the more power he gained, the more helpless they became to do anything to stop it. The more power you give one entity the weaker the people become. And with ultimate power inevitably comes corruption. The founders knew this...saw it firsthand..which is why all the separation of powers and checks and balances exist. And as those disappear so do our freedoms. Consider this..The majority of Libertarian/Tea Party members do not wish to stifle ANYONES beliefs or freedoms. They do not wish to impose their belief on others nor elimination of other parties. They simply want to scale back government to a size where states again have their freedoms and people are allowed to make choices. Yet to the "majority" party, they are an enemy..a threat to be eliminated. They do everything possible to stifle Libertarian ideas. Why? Why in a supposedly free country would you ever try to stifle a persons beliefs? No matter what they may be, or whether or not you agree..isn't that the way a free country works?? .if you aren't worried about the piddly little 1%...why not just let us do our thing? Its the fact that it is growing so fast and with such passion that scares you..

 

I do not believe the country was in the position we are in today and I do not believe we have any similarities to Hitler or the Nazi regime. That kind of fear mongering tactic is what the Libertarians are accustomed to.

It is not growing "so fast". Your Libertarian candidate received 1% of the vote this year. In 1980 the record for a Libertarian candidate was 1.1%. You didn't even break the record from 30 years ago.

You guys are the 21st century hippies.

 

We have more information and more freedom to do and say whatever we want than any time in American history. I'm not sure what you are talking about. You are talking about issues that don't even exist. If you want to make a website or do a study that women aren't good at math, feel free. No one is stopping you. If you want to make a website that talks about how much you hate and despise the President, feel free... the black helicopters will not come to kidnap you. Go buy your guns, buy your ammo, no is stopping you.