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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Hannania, Iowa State Fair, and Vivek. Vivek’s response to LGBTQ made the rounds on twitter mostly with positive support on how it can be handled.

https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1690890371398836224?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

Vivek says a lot of words but if I had to summarize it’s basically libertarianism for adults - you can do what you want - but no pride for kids and restrictions on female sports and bathroom usage.

I use to share these type of opinions and perhaps I still do. But I no longer find these as stable positions. It comes down to well why don’t you want pride in schools? It’s because I believe in social contagion (and the broad right) that pride is bad and I don’t want the next generation of children to be more gay and transexual. Basically I don’t want grooming for those lifestyles. I think the left knows this. And won’t settle for the right thinking pride is bad. And then it’s well your a homophobe/transphobe. Masks off yea I am. That is why I don’t want pride in school because I think it’s bad for people.

Of course I think the same problem exists with Hannania’s new position on race. Treat everyone the same. Be tough on crime. Do I think being colorblind will be accepted by the left when it ends up with whites always on top and blacks on the bottom with a lot of black men in prison? No.

I feel like we have discussed these issues a lot. Even a mod thru in a post on why can’t we just be colorblind (perhaps bad summary from memory). I think it’s interesting seeing the third leading GOP candidate making similar arguments. And in all honesty my guess is Vivek’s position is likely the preferred position of mosts on the Motte. None of the pride everywhere but adults can do as they please. The race issues I think perhaps we could get back to the old equilibrium of ignoring disparate outcomes and just treating blacks as if they are white. But I doubt it. The Pride issues I think are harder because not wanting children exposed more directly says we think it’s bad and don’t want our children taught this stuff. The positions I’m laying out are likely the preferred position of most of the GOP establishment. I think Desantis would even accept these positions if offered. I don’t expect the left to offer these compromises because they are true believers that disparate outcomes are proof of racism or because a lot of supporters find the moral superiority of getting to call red tribe “your a racists/transphobe” etc enjoyable so no reason to stop.

While I think these positions are unstable I’m not sure the right could move the country to the stable positions. Which would be widespread knowledge that a great deal of disparate outcome is from hbd and on pride matters getting the country to agree that lgbtq lifestyles are not desirable (which was the world pre-2008). As it is the current positions seem unstable to me and easily attacked by the left and to a great extent makes the right look like hypocrites afraid to say the quiet part out loud.

Also, might be a good place for anyone to posts anything they found interesting at the Iowa State Fair.

Libertarianism for adults. I.e. Your rights end where my feelings begin, but for vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives.

In a moment of clarity, I would hope everyone who is libertarian minded can recognize that the guy stripping naked at the LNC or the guys ferociously arguing against drivers licenses are much better freedom fighters than you are insofar as you oppose 'protecting trans kids' and helping children learn about gender and sexuality beyond a stilted binary.

The most salient argument against libertarianism remains libertarians being faced with what people who are not vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives do with their freedom.

But this is a song and dance that has been done before. Hans Herman Hoppe laid down the law on this stuff years ago. Insofar as libertarians want to live in nice societies (they do) the only functional tool against the kind of people who destroy nice societies is physical punishment. You quickly stop being a libertarian in a universalist sense and turn into a Civic Nationalist.

My question for libertarian or libertarian leaning people would be, why bother with this song and dance? Why ground your arguments in some abstract first principles relating to freedom and whatever else when you truly do not want freedom for everyone to do what they please? Why not just say the things you want society to be and stand on those grounds?

I mean, just imagine the genuinely impressive amount of energy and work libertarians managed to pool together in the past decades being spent on pushing an image of a society libertarians actually want to live in. Instead they work to lay the groundwork for the individual freedom enjoyed by convicted sex offenders dressing in drag and reading to 5 year olds.

"Libertarian" is not trademarked. Anyone can use the term. I consider myself libertarian, and many other people would agree I fit the common conception of that term. But I'm not gonna defend anyone and everyone that uses it for themselves.

You also seem to have some personal beef with "vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives". I'd suggest dropping it. This is not the kind of discussion forum for your personal grievances.


I was attempting to write up a longer post, but I'm tired and sick so it was turning into low quality crap writing. So I'm just gonna do short responses to your questions.

But this is a song and dance that has been done before. Hans Herman Hoppe laid down the law on this stuff years ago. Insofar as libertarians want to live in nice societies (they do) the only functional tool against the kind of people who destroy nice societies is physical punishment. You quickly stop being a libertarian in a universalist sense and turn into a Civic Nationalist. My question for libertarian or libertarian leaning people would be, why bother with this song and dance?

Libertarians have set out the rules pretty clearly. Property is a thing. Property implies ultimate ownership. You and only you can have ownership of your body and person. That ownership can be expanded to physical objects. The rules of how that ownership can be expanded do not have to be set in stone, or handed down by the gods of libertarianism. Violations of property are considered initiations of violence and will likely be met with violence. Libertarians have never expressed a full story of non-violence. So there has never been a contradiction with libertarians using physical violence against thieves, rapists, and murderers.

Why ground your arguments in some abstract first principles relating to freedom and whatever else when you truly do not want freedom for everyone to do what they please?

Some of us are true believers. I want you to do whatever you want. Just don't violate me or mine.

Asking for the golden rule treatment is apparently a horrible thing for libertarians to do. "Well yes, you can want to have your freedom to live in peace and not have your stuff stolen, but I also want my freedom to enact endless social problems with wealth I don't have, so I need you to pay taxes first, oh and go along with my social programs when I want".

Why not just say the things you want society to be and stand on those grounds?

Because I don't think everyone else has to live in the same society as me. I'm hoping they can live in the society they want. So how would my vision of a good society convince anyone? The idea of imposing your vision of society on others is a fundamentally statist way of looking at things. For example, I don't want to live in Amish society, but I support their right to exist. When the government tries to say "no Amish, you must do X" my thought is to push back against those government intrusions. If you ask me to defend Amish society, I'm gonna shuffle my feet and say 'well they want to live that way, so let them, yeah I agree it looks boring as hell and more than a little silly'.

The issue is the real world has commons. Things like providing schools which I believe almost every libertarian thinks a smart poor kid should be provided with an education.

There isn’t a strong libertarian argument against open borders. Which would then make Democracy incompatible with unlimited immigration. The voter base would change and you would be voted out. So I guess you need a dictator to maintain your politics.

Or say a community of libertarians have good well supported and agreed to schools. The current way to keep the poors out is to ban property density. But that isn’t very libertarian. If you let people do whatever they want with their property than one person sells to a developer who builds low-income housing. And the commons you did agree with is suddenly underfunded.

I think libertarian is good within boundaries. But it easily falls apart without something above it enforcing something for the commons.

I feel like I’m a libertarian when I think society is broadly good. But turn a bit fascists when it seems the system is working.

I believe almost every libertarian thinks a smart poor kid should be provided with an education.

There are methods of obtaining education that do not depend on property taxes. For example, income-based repayment income-share agreements (selling a share of all your future earnings to the school [note: link changed]) presumably could be extended all the way down to kindergarten.

That link says "sure there are problems with it, this is a book after all so it has to show problems, but it could work out" without stating how to solve the problems.

Better link

An income-share agreement (or ISA) is a financial structure in which an individual or organization provides something of value (often a fixed amount of money) to a recipient who, in exchange, agrees to pay back a percentage of his income for a fixed number of years.

That's not convincing. It doesn't even cover the most obvious flaw, which is that procedures that are no problem for corporations are big problems for individuals because they don't scale down; a corporation can afford having a corporate lawyer on call, while just the threat of a lawsuit can be ruinous to an individual. A corporation can also go bankrupt; would an individual going bankrupt void the agreement?

It also claims

However, advocates of ISAs contend that since students have no legal obligation to work in a particular industry, and since it is illegal for investors to pressure them into a certain career, students are no more “indentured” than those with a student loan.

But the whole point of the scheme the way it's presented in the first link is that investors can make you act in financially beneficial ways. To the extent that that actually alleviates the problem, it also makes the scheme not work at all.

To be clear, I provided the first link only because I couldn't remember what the real-life version was called. I'll remove it now. Just ignore it and focus on the second link.

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Kindergarteners can't meaningfully agree to give up their future earnings

Kindergarten isn't education. It's a daycare service.

Schooling is a service. It needs payment. Private schooling is way more efficient already, and the funds gained from cutting education taxes would certainly provide more of a service for the average "poor" family.

Can't afford an education as it stands but know that it will help you monetarily long-term? Take out a loan. The current issues of student-loan stem from the governments mismanagement of state-assigned loans, which were in of themselves a mistake.

A parent is the trustee/owner of his child. Therefore, he is empowered to sell to the kindergarten a share of that trusteeship/ownership.

In the unlikely event that the child disavows the contract with the kindergarten when the trusteeship is terminated (whether at adulthood or at some earlier date), the parent is obligated by the same contract to repay to the kindergarten the lost expected value of the child's future earnings.

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