Comments on: Tolerance Camp, Libertarian Edition

By: Iram hasan

Iram hasan — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 10:47:10 +0000

injuria sine damnum means injury without damages
damnum sine injuria means damages without injury

By: Kim du Toit

Kim du Toit — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 17:51:08 +0000

X, if you’re a libertarian, then so am I.

[exit, laughing]

By: Anwyn

Anwyn — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 07:06:41 +0000

On a somewhat unrelated note, what is it with the comments over there having “Anonymous Coward” in the “Name” field by default? That’s … inviting.

By: nk

nk — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 00:09:44 +0000

Gus Van Horn seems like a nice guy. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how much Objectivism sounds like “Nietzsche for Girls”.

By: Dave Munger

Dave Munger — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 21:44:32 +0000

The first priority, if they want to maintain the integrity of libertarianism, is to stop letting a political party use the name of their philosophically pure intellectual movement.

By: Inactivist

Inactivist — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 18:17:55 +0000

The “libertarians” Whose Prince has Come…

It would seem that my guest post at Unqualified Offerings, initiating a discussion of what bottom-line principles a person would adhere to before they can be considered libertarian in any coherent sense of the word, has continued apace. Persons who s…

By: Charlie (Colorado)

Charlie (Colorado) — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 16:59:03 +0000

I’d think its pretty obvious that if anyone is asking to be purged from libertarian-ism and shunned and ostracised by libertarians, it would be the authoritarian who is trying to set up organized purges and shunning.

By: Xrlq

Xrlq — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 16:15:01 +0000

Nothing, but there’s plenty wrong with doing so according to a standard that is comically overinclusive (in that it includes most liberal Democrats, few of whom are champions of individual liberty and many of whom are openly hostile to it) – and underinclusive (in that it excludes all libertarians who take national security seriously). The Mona test is a wonderful litmus test if all you’re trying to measure is the degree to which a given individual agrees or disagrees with Mona on her pet issue. It’s absolutely worthless for determining anything else.

By: Charles Hueter

Charles Hueter — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 16:08:13 +0000

…an ideology ostensibly based on tolerance…

Yes and no.

Libertarianism certainly endorses individuals to tolerate individual differences among others. If your neighbor wears hot pink all the time, it would be “tolerant” to leave your aesthetic disagreement at the verbal level. It would be “tolerant” to debate racists rather than beat them up on sight.

However, libertarianism is NOT based on tolerance because there are a few things (far more central to the philosophy) that cannot be tolerated. To those who’ve been listening to them speak rather than sneering and smearing, one of the most important of these is the prohibition on the initiation of physical force. Those who murder, rape, assault, steal, and defraud do not deserve tolerance in the above sense. Those who advocate those crimes don’t, either.

So therefore, the litmus test isn’t about being holier-than-thou, it’s about determining which actions fail to uphold the non-aggression axiom, free market exchange in private property, and human reason (which I’d name as other crucial and, really, interdependent cores to the philosophy).

People can label themselves what they want. What matters is the accuracy of those labels. What’s wrong with analyzing the claims people make regarding what political philosophy to which they adhere?

By: Striving For Average » More On Political Labels

Striving For Average » More On Political Labels — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 13:40:27 +0000

[...] Evidently there’s a food fight over who is and is not a libertarian, and some think there should be an effort to cull the herd of those that don’t qualify. It’s entertaining when it happens, watching people fight over the definition of a label, and who should be allowed to use it. It’s also frustrating because it seems like that’s a huge amount of our political discourse these days. [...]