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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I'm libertarian and have a bit of experience fighting losing political battles. I have to say I'm often suspicious of any group that claims to need some form of total victory for any success to be seen. Because they tend to quickly turn towards violence when their victory is not immediate.

There should be intermediate changes in any political plan, here are some reasons why:

  1. You can verify that the underlying belief system is good and useful. If intermediate changes produce obviously bad outcomes then you need to rethink stuff.

  2. Your followers can be happy about something.

  3. Your enemies will see you going slow and they won't all fight as if this is an existential crisis. (some minority will treat it like its existential anyways, politics attracts crazy people)

As it is, that plan is basically going to wind up being "kill my political enemies, and then things will be great".

Of course one can use this as modus tollens.

As you readily admit, incremental change has been the method of losing political battles all this time, which doesn't make it an attractive proposition in the slightest to people who actually care about political goals more than peace.

Hoppe is more realistic than the LP.

Your enemies will see you going slow and they won't all fight as if this is an existential crisis.

Of course your enemies can figure out the same thing. Gun rights supporters will oppose pretty much any incremental attempt to impinge on gun rights because they know very well that their opponents are following your plan.

You can also look on this as a sort of polluting of the commons: If you disguise an extreme plan by using a series of small changes, you use up people's tolerance for actual small changes.

I'm libertarian and have a bit of experience fighting losing political battles. I have to say I'm often suspicious of any group that claims to need some form of total victory for any success to be seen. Because they tend to quickly turn towards violence when their victory is not immediate.

I have long shared this suspicion. On the other hand, it sees trivial to find examples in history where the political problems really were so locked-down that revolutionary violence was the only way out. The pre-civil war era in America for one: John Brown and Fort Sumner are examples from both sides of stepping off the brink for lack of an apparent better option. Russia, or any of the big Communist states show the pattern more starkly: once they consolidated power, there really was no fixing things in an incremental fashion.

Incrementalism is to be strictly preferred to revolution, but it requires some minimal level of cooperation to operate. Whether that level of cooperation exists is a really important question.

I'm libertarian and have a bit of experience fighting losing political battles.

I've met quite a few former libertarians in the alt-right.

What's the libertarian plan to create a society where people capable of being libertarian are reproducing?

Your enemies will see you going slow and they won't all fight as if this is an existential crisis. (some minority will treat it like its existential anyways, politics attracts crazy people)

That plan would work if a guy didn't catch multiple life sentences for having a car accident during a riot.

Before they banned another guy from the internet for making a joke about it.

Before they sent people to jail for months for 'trespassing' in a public building.

Before they shot unarmed protesters.

Before all the rest. Being moderate has been tried and the result is not much different from full-on fedposting.

As it is, that plan is basically going to wind up being "kill my political enemies, and then things will be great".

Or the political enemies can repent. They're not gonna un-sterilize the teenagers, they're not gonna resurrect their dead babies, they're not gonna turn back the slave ships, they're not gonna un-tear the statues and the old buildings and the rest.

But they could stop their current destruction.

All they wanted was to play video games after all.