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?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
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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've been a non-Catholic Distributist for the past several years and have made comments to that effect even on the old reddit. Given what you've just said, I highly recommend looking into that philosophy - and at the very least it means you get to read more G.K. Chesterton, which is always a treat.
Wow thanks for mentioning this philosophy. Seems excellent to me. Like a less crazy version of anarcho-syndicalism.
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