Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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What things do you have very different personal preferences and policy positions on? Do you have any area that you didn't even realize that until the policy changed and lined up with your stated position?
The biggest one that I have been having a difficult time with lately is marijuana. For my entire life, I thought marijuana should be legal and that it's pretty hard to justify having a substantially different control scheme for marijuana than alcohol (tobacco is quite different and I think the comparison is pretty stupid). I still hold this position due to everything I can figure out objectively. There are a few caveats, such as the potential for marijuana to trigger schizophrenia, but really, I doubt it does more harm to a typical person than drinking. I even smoked a decent bit when I was in my younger, party years, and pretty much just had harmless fun.
Nonetheless, it turns out that I don't actually like legal marijuana much. I didn't really notice it when it was mostly illegal, but weed culture is fucking annoying. I get that some people feel that way about alcohol, and I can certainly think of all-out drunkenness scenes that I don't like, but there are big chunks of drinking culture that I do like - craft beer, good bourbon, wine-tasting, cocktails, tailgating, food-drink pairings, this stuff is all somewhere between lowbrow fun and genuinely interesting culture. Pot though? Just fucking annoying. Stupid aesthetics, lazy slobs, constant whining about how pot is actually good for you, man. I don't personally dislike the smell of pot but smelling it on my state's capitol square on a weekday morning is just utterly degenerate. None of this convinces me that it should be illegal, my annoyance doesn't suffice to want something banned, but damn, it turns out that I find stoners way more annoying than I ever would have thought when they had to just smoke at their houses.
I'm an Ancap-leaning libertarian with an overall socially-conservative bent. I don't like abortion, prefer monogamous marriage, am bullish on religion and Judeo-Christian norms, I like guns and I don't mind racial diversity. I feel much more affinity with red tribe than blue tribe.
I simultaneously think that people should be free to engage in debauchery in their private lives, and generally be free from judgment for it to the extent they don't parade it around in public...
AND that people should suffer the consequences of their decisions and externalities should be minimized.
Which is to say, I'd prefer my own local community to follow fairly traditional norms that don't need to be heavily enforced, and resists outside influence attempting to subvert them. So red-tribe norms are a natural fit... except for the parts that I don't like.
So I don't like most laws that restrict non-aggressive human behavior... but there's a laundry list of non-aggressive human behavior that I don't like being around.
This is mostly resolved by my adoption of Taleb-style localism as an ideal.
And of course a ton of smart people have proposed the concept: Nozick's Utopia of Utopias, Scott Alexander's Archipelago, Yarvin's patchwork, Weinersmith's Polystate. It's all the same idea. I'm forgetting a few others who pretty much came up with the same thing.
Thousands of different cultures can co-exist as long as there's an overarching framework that keeps them from interfering with each others' internal affairs. The internet is a living example, insofar as themotte can have our own internal culture and processes meanwhile groups who absolutely hate our guts can have their own forum and websites with their own internal culture and neither one need disrupt the other.
Never touched the stuff, but I also think that criminalization is absurd.
And yet, I also don't want to have to smell it whenever I go out in public spaces. Vapes are also up there but I find it somewhat more tolerable.
I really do think this is the answer. As long as there is freedom to leave, then almost any other freedom can be safely constrained.
For me, as a libertarian, there is all sorts of stuff I'd like to ban. But a government empowered to ban those things is also empowered to rob of us our freedoms. Better to fight against government power in general, even if it means having to be surrounded by annoying stoners all the time.
But a sufficiently local, atomized government could make all sorts of tyrannical rules, and no people would be seriously injured as they could choose a different system that works for them. In that world, I would have no problem criminalizing marijuana in my local area.
Right, but for some 'odd' reason, almost no centralized authority likes to give people the 'freedom' to leave if they can control it.
I'd highly recommend reading The Dawn of Everything. I'm not sure I totally buy into the conclusions, but freedom of movement is something considered deeply in the framework of "Three Fundamental Freedoms" when examining prehistoric and non-European societies.
One theory proposed is that many Amerindian societies in North America maintained a degree of freedom through a system of Clans which stretched between polities, forming a cross-cutting identity set from the broader tribe. Bear, Wolf, Hawk, etc clans are found within tribes stretching from upstate New York to New Mexico, with an expectation that a traveler would be able to expect hospitality from clan members in other tribes. This system, the authors argue, provided a safety valve against tyranny, as any tribe which tried to enforce brutal rules would find itself leaking members outward.
I'm not sure I entirely buy it, but systems where small patchwork principalities existed also often show evidence of extended networks between and across polities, which frequently took on religious or kinship qualities. While authoritarian governments which restrict movement successfully often feature citizens who have nowhere to go (eg German Jews in '38, or Gazans today).
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