I've made the same journey myself. Well, I don't know if I'd self-describe as socialist exactly, but Trump sent me lurching wayyy left from my prior claims of being a libertarian.
All of us were teenagers once, with politics best summed up as "fuck you mom, I won't clean my room". Most of us grew up. Sadly, some of us refused to.
Well, I’m an Atheist, so I was allergic to a lot of the social conservatism even back in the aughts… but I went to a business school in the south, so I was taught a lot of free market principles that don’t actually pan out in real life, which led me at the time to economic conservatism. So I’d attribute it to the info available at the times in my life. But I’m sure what you’re saying applies to many.
Unfortunately being an atheist isn't a vaccine against bullshit. A huge amount of the far-right youtube set got their start dunking on Christians. Many of them are now openly Christian themselves, or at least "culturally Christian" which is simply an excuse for racism. Dawkins is a classic example of that.
The problem that the “let me do whatever I want!” motivation more often than not misses the “let everyone else do whatever they want” part. Some people are self centered enough for that to happen
Same thing happened to all those southerners in the 60s who said that there was harmony before those protests and that there was no racism in their town and that they were not racists and never judged anyone by their color. Sure, they believed that they had good reasons, that there was no violence before, because they honestly were so self centered that they could easily ignore other people’s experiences and just focus on all the good that they personally felt. Like a man beating his wife who says that domestic violence is awful but that what he did was different because he was angry so he had a reason.
Another part of the problem is misunderstanding what the original libertarians were actually about. They generally were for cooperative self-governance, not every man for himself self-governance.
Oh wow. That’s crazy. Shocking how far that is from what you’d guess Libertarianism is all about from listing to socks media or public speakers. Now I want to read old books to see what people who influenced the early stuff thought they were doing and what they thought it all stood for!
Yeah, they would not have been fine with the existence of billionaires or their disproportionate influence over politics and governance, considering they largely weren't even okay with the equivalents from their day and billionaires blow them out of the water. Libertarians fought alongside liberals in waging the anti-monarchist revolutions throughout Europe, which were also in part against the economic elites of the time, as well - especially the French Revolutions.
It is liberal and libertarian principles expanded to apply more broadly to economic bases that the socialist and communist theories are founded on.
I’m from a very libertarian state (New Hampshire) and grew up like half an hour from the Free Stater compound in Keene. Nazis like Chris Cantwell keep spawning from their pool because their beliefs are fundamentally opposed to things like civil rights. It’s a feature, not a bug. They are Republicans who smoke weed and always have been.
What I mean is the form libertarianism took back in the 1700-1800s, which opposed conservatism and had some of the earliest and most prominent abolitionists. What you describe is the result of conservatives since then infiltrating, astroturfing and twisting the libertarian ideology from within to turn libertarians against their own self-interests. The Mises Caucus infiltrating the American Libertarian party and taking most of it over in most states was an exercise in doing just that. Modern [American] libertarianism would be strange and unrecognisable to the original.
You'd be surprised. There is actually a libertarian to left pipeline(although narrow). It's often social issues that seperate them from the broader conservative movement. I know because....ahem....nevermind...
Uhh, I don't know if libertarians in real life are different than the ones online but the ones online are just MAGA with a different name and one look at /r/libertarianmeme and other libertarian subreddits reveals that
Wow, they are shameless. One of the top posts on Hot right now isn't even a meme, but sincerely comparing Kyle Rittenhouse to Renee Good, blaming her for her own murder.
Conservatives see good and bad people, not good and bad acts. Rittenhouse is a good person, therefore it's fine when he kills two people. Good is a bad person, therefore it's her fault when she's murdered by an armed agent of the government.
Yeah, everyone does this to a degree, but let's not pretend it's 50/50.
Also on their front page is some blatant thirst pic to which they added the caption "black lingerie matters", which really drives home the "incel loser dude" reputation.
The account that submitted that also posts interracial bbc cuck/cheating porn despite having racist posts against black people. You can't make this shit up.
Nah, even if libertarians suddenly woke up one day and realized the fascism they've been backing for decades flies in the face of libertarianism, I'd still mock them for being the most self-satisfied Ayn Rand lovers who missed the fucking point of BioShock by still believing Andrew Ryan had a great idea that wasn't properly executed.
That's not a joke, some of these Grafton, New Hampshire rejects actually believe Rapture would've worked if not for...[insert mad rambling about leftists].
missed the fucking point of BioShock by still believing Andrew Ryan had a great idea that wasn't properly executed.
Me at 14. I wasn't really politically engaged and that's probably why I was one of those morons who actually believed Gamergate was about ethics in gaming journalism and not harassing women. 2009 was a dark time.
Hey, at least you grew as a person. It's embarrassing to remember our stupid days, but take heart in the fact that you changed enough to remember those days with some sense of shame.
I was raised Mormon by two uber-Reaganite Republicans, and because I was so young, I believed my parents had to be right about their ideologies; wasn't until I was 22 that I finally said, "Holy fuck, I cannot be aligned with these people. There's just no way!" I was watching Birtherism take hold of the people who always said, "I'm not a racist" but never actually proved as much with their actions/words, and that was when I stopped labeling myself a conservative.
Thankfully, the GOP and Republicans I personally knew kept reinforcing that ideological shift in me by getting more and more fucktacularly stupid with each passing month. And they could never succinctly tell me why they hated Obama so much without repeating all the bullshit that eventually lead back to "black man bad".
Yeah, always find the above response from libertarians endlessly amusing/infuriation.
Because "That wasn't real libertarianism." and "They just did it wrong, it would have worked if everyone acted according to libertarian ideals." are word for word the responses they always claim left wingers have for the failures of communism/socialism/whatever-else-they-dislike-ism.
A bunch of house cats.. Libertarians think they are strong and independent but are clueless to the outside world and societal factors that keep them alive
Yeah that’s actually fair, just trying to contrast to the present. At least outwardly they professed these views, even if only to mask their racist and prejudiced worldview.
The last "libertarian" I had the misfortune of talking to told me the only things the government should do is military, border patrol, police, and courts. The mental gymnastics these people do to justify their selfishness astounds me.
That's actually far closer to their ideal than most I've had the displeasure of talking to. The only thing that person was off on was border patrol - libertarians don't believe in international borders because they don't want barriers to the 'free market' of goods and labor. The pure libertarian believes the only role of a government is to provide a military for defense and courts to enforce property rights. They're legit delusional psychopaths, but they should be anti whatever this current administration is.
I used to call myself a libertarian, but was horrified when I learned about people at a Libertarian party convention who claimed to be against driver's licensure. It's possible for people to be more or less extreme in their political alignment.
ETA: I see you said "pure" libertarian. Just emphasizing since this comment section is very lacking in nuance generally.
Spoke to a libertarian, they were so excited someone would listen to them 😆
Took all of 15 minutes to go from principals to how they let the feds place illegal hardware monitor devices on private networks he ran in exchange for favors
Ron Paul is speaking out against Trump. And Rand Paul was one of the deciding votes to (try) to restrain Trump from further Venezuela involvement.
And locally, I've met some libertarians at the No Kings protests.
Like I wish libertarians opposed economic tyranny as much as they oppose political tyranny. But I think they have an opportunity to differentiate themselves from MAGA and make some real gains
I already have several family members who switched to Libertarian in 2016 and haven't gone back to Republican.
I think it would be a nice improvement if they were to supplant Republicans. But I'm not holding my breath there, since most have remained Republicans in opposition to immigration and LGBT, and Libertarians would be seen as too lax on both of those.
I might have a better appreciation of those "don't tread on me" flags if it wasn't for the fact that the message for like 95% of them is that they just want to tread on others. So many of them aren't for individual liberty after all--just their own liberty and screw everyone else.
they voted for him anyway, even after raising a stink at their convention. cannot produce any reasons that haven't been debunked ad infinitum. bunch of lying clowns. will probably vote for republicans next time too. moronic.
Before we get to the SAW criteria... is your content from Reddit?
If it's from Conservative, or some other toxic right-wing sub, then please delete it. We're sick of that shit.
Have you thoroughly redacted all Reddit usernames? If not, please delete and resubmit, with proper redaction.
Do NOT link the source sub/post/comment, nor identify/link the participants! Brigading is against site rules.
Failure to meet the above requirements may result in temporary bans, at moderator discretion. Repeat failings may result in a permanent ban.
Now back to your regular scheduled automod message...
Reply to this message with one of the following or your post will be removed for failing to comply with rule 4:
1) How the person in your post unknowingly describes themselves
2) How the person in your post says something about someone else that actually applies to them.
3) How the person in your post accurately describes something when trying to mock or denigrate it.
Thanks!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
If they're willing to fight the magats, I can temporarily stop mocking them. But I'm not holding my breath.
If there is such a thing as a socially conscious lolbertarian, I have yet to see it.
I like the worst lolbertarian. Seems fitting. They are pretty lolable
I met one. She's a socialist now. That's not because of me, that's because of her seeing Trump and grappling with her beliefs.
I've made the same journey myself. Well, I don't know if I'd self-describe as socialist exactly, but Trump sent me lurching wayyy left from my prior claims of being a libertarian.
All of us were teenagers once, with politics best summed up as "fuck you mom, I won't clean my room". Most of us grew up. Sadly, some of us refused to.
Well, I’m an Atheist, so I was allergic to a lot of the social conservatism even back in the aughts… but I went to a business school in the south, so I was taught a lot of free market principles that don’t actually pan out in real life, which led me at the time to economic conservatism. So I’d attribute it to the info available at the times in my life. But I’m sure what you’re saying applies to many.
Unfortunately being an atheist isn't a vaccine against bullshit. A huge amount of the far-right youtube set got their start dunking on Christians. Many of them are now openly Christian themselves, or at least "culturally Christian" which is simply an excuse for racism. Dawkins is a classic example of that.
Grifters gonna grift. They just found a more receptive market. But too true, no one is immune.
best thing is many 'free market principles' don't involve a free market at all
If they're actually libertarian and not just an astroturfing conservative, then yes. Usually.
The problem that the “let me do whatever I want!” motivation more often than not misses the “let everyone else do whatever they want” part. Some people are self centered enough for that to happen
Same thing happened to all those southerners in the 60s who said that there was harmony before those protests and that there was no racism in their town and that they were not racists and never judged anyone by their color. Sure, they believed that they had good reasons, that there was no violence before, because they honestly were so self centered that they could easily ignore other people’s experiences and just focus on all the good that they personally felt. Like a man beating his wife who says that domestic violence is awful but that what he did was different because he was angry so he had a reason.
Another part of the problem is misunderstanding what the original libertarians were actually about. They generally were for cooperative self-governance, not every man for himself self-governance.
i.e. anarchism
Oh wow. That’s crazy. Shocking how far that is from what you’d guess Libertarianism is all about from listing to socks media or public speakers. Now I want to read old books to see what people who influenced the early stuff thought they were doing and what they thought it all stood for!
Yeah, they would not have been fine with the existence of billionaires or their disproportionate influence over politics and governance, considering they largely weren't even okay with the equivalents from their day and billionaires blow them out of the water. Libertarians fought alongside liberals in waging the anti-monarchist revolutions throughout Europe, which were also in part against the economic elites of the time, as well - especially the French Revolutions.
It is liberal and libertarian principles expanded to apply more broadly to economic bases that the socialist and communist theories are founded on.
I’m from a very libertarian state (New Hampshire) and grew up like half an hour from the Free Stater compound in Keene. Nazis like Chris Cantwell keep spawning from their pool because their beliefs are fundamentally opposed to things like civil rights. It’s a feature, not a bug. They are Republicans who smoke weed and always have been.
What I mean is the form libertarianism took back in the 1700-1800s, which opposed conservatism and had some of the earliest and most prominent abolitionists. What you describe is the result of conservatives since then infiltrating, astroturfing and twisting the libertarian ideology from within to turn libertarians against their own self-interests. The Mises Caucus infiltrating the American Libertarian party and taking most of it over in most states was an exercise in doing just that. Modern [American] libertarianism would be strange and unrecognisable to the original.
Narrator: That was when the post realized that there was no different between a libertarian and a kkkonservative....
Left libertarianism is a thing. But none of them associate with state or federal libertarian parties
You'd be surprised. There is actually a libertarian to left pipeline(although narrow). It's often social issues that seperate them from the broader conservative movement. I know because....ahem....nevermind...
I've heard Penn Jillette ended up reconsidering his libertarian views following COVID and other libertarians' reaction to it
Socially conscious libertarians are just Socialists.
Uhh, I don't know if libertarians in real life are different than the ones online but the ones online are just MAGA with a different name and one look at /r/libertarianmeme and other libertarian subreddits reveals that
Wow, they are shameless. One of the top posts on Hot right now isn't even a meme, but sincerely comparing Kyle Rittenhouse to Renee Good, blaming her for her own murder.
https://reddit.com/r/libertarianmeme/comments/1q9399g/remember_they_said_kyle_shouldnt_have_even_been/
Conservatives see good and bad people, not good and bad acts. Rittenhouse is a good person, therefore it's fine when he kills two people. Good is a bad person, therefore it's her fault when she's murdered by an armed agent of the government.
Yeah, everyone does this to a degree, but let's not pretend it's 50/50.
Also on their front page is some blatant thirst pic to which they added the caption "black lingerie matters", which really drives home the "incel loser dude" reputation.
The account that submitted that also posts interracial bbc cuck/cheating porn despite having racist posts against black people. You can't make this shit up.
The world would be so much better if these idiots accepted themselves instead of trying to fit in somewhere they don't belong.
Gotta love the post a little down saying "leftists don't care about logic or facts just emotion and their utopian ends"
Yeah that's about the level of bad faith arguing and projecting I expect from these people.
Libertarians are MAGA who want to smoke weed. That's pretty much the difference.
And have sex with kids
That's regular MAGA too.
"I'm not like a regular Republican, I'm a cool Republican."
Nah, even if libertarians suddenly woke up one day and realized the fascism they've been backing for decades flies in the face of libertarianism, I'd still mock them for being the most self-satisfied Ayn Rand lovers who missed the fucking point of BioShock by still believing Andrew Ryan had a great idea that wasn't properly executed.
That's not a joke, some of these Grafton, New Hampshire rejects actually believe Rapture would've worked if not for...[insert mad rambling about leftists].
Me at 14. I wasn't really politically engaged and that's probably why I was one of those morons who actually believed Gamergate was about ethics in gaming journalism and not harassing women. 2009 was a dark time.
Hey, at least you grew as a person. It's embarrassing to remember our stupid days, but take heart in the fact that you changed enough to remember those days with some sense of shame.
I was raised Mormon by two uber-Reaganite Republicans, and because I was so young, I believed my parents had to be right about their ideologies; wasn't until I was 22 that I finally said, "Holy fuck, I cannot be aligned with these people. There's just no way!" I was watching Birtherism take hold of the people who always said, "I'm not a racist" but never actually proved as much with their actions/words, and that was when I stopped labeling myself a conservative.
Thankfully, the GOP and Republicans I personally knew kept reinforcing that ideological shift in me by getting more and more fucktacularly stupid with each passing month. And they could never succinctly tell me why they hated Obama so much without repeating all the bullshit that eventually lead back to "black man bad".
Yeah, always find the above response from libertarians endlessly amusing/infuriation.
Because "That wasn't real libertarianism." and "They just did it wrong, it would have worked if everyone acted according to libertarian ideals." are word for word the responses they always claim left wingers have for the failures of communism/socialism/whatever-else-they-dislike-ism.
[insert Spider-Man pointing meme]
You know they aren’t
No they won't. They are MAGA. Don't let them squirm out of that. They just have no consistent views.
They are cowards.
Every last one of them is one
Right, at least they are willing to speak up unlike most libertarians.
A bunch of house cats.. Libertarians think they are strong and independent but are clueless to the outside world and societal factors that keep them alive
Love this analogy
Love seeing them occasionally fall face down at their own hubris..
Just like my cat! Lol
Don't tread on me. Tread on them!
I think libertarians are too dumb to realize this though.
Oh no no, they don’t like the government’s boot either… They just want to be the ones with the boot crushing others in their own personal fiefdoms. 🙃
Oh and get rid of age of consent laws
Nonono, it's different this time. This time they are the boot.
Remember when “conservative” meant community values, small government, and not masked Feds killing civilians in the street? Pepperidge farm remembers.
im 38 and it has never meant that in my lifetime.
Yeah that’s actually fair, just trying to contrast to the present. At least outwardly they professed these views, even if only to mask their racist and prejudiced worldview.
Yep, the only thing that changes is how good they are at pretending.
Yup, mask is off now.
I remember when conservatives claimed that. It was a lie then too.
True that.
Now they don’t even bother pretending to be decent
Libertarians are always right on the edge but never go over
Freedom from the state, except the one thing it violently enforces.
The last "libertarian" I had the misfortune of talking to told me the only things the government should do is military, border patrol, police, and courts. The mental gymnastics these people do to justify their selfishness astounds me.
That's actually far closer to their ideal than most I've had the displeasure of talking to. The only thing that person was off on was border patrol - libertarians don't believe in international borders because they don't want barriers to the 'free market' of goods and labor. The pure libertarian believes the only role of a government is to provide a military for defense and courts to enforce property rights. They're legit delusional psychopaths, but they should be anti whatever this current administration is.
I used to call myself a libertarian, but was horrified when I learned about people at a Libertarian party convention who claimed to be against driver's licensure. It's possible for people to be more or less extreme in their political alignment.
ETA: I see you said "pure" libertarian. Just emphasizing since this comment section is very lacking in nuance generally.
Those are all famously freedom-loving institutions, of course.
Modern libertarians only get mad and threaten to riot of they feel they're not being tread on enough.
Spoke to a libertarian, they were so excited someone would listen to them 😆
Took all of 15 minutes to go from principals to how they let the feds place illegal hardware monitor devices on private networks he ran in exchange for favors
https://preview.redd.it/zedy8czp2kcg1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1d09a589850509841cdbf27c0f960002dc4651d0
Do a double check next time. It takes 5 seconds
They might actually mean it though.
Ron Paul is speaking out against Trump. And Rand Paul was one of the deciding votes to (try) to restrain Trump from further Venezuela involvement.
And locally, I've met some libertarians at the No Kings protests.
Like I wish libertarians opposed economic tyranny as much as they oppose political tyranny. But I think they have an opportunity to differentiate themselves from MAGA and make some real gains
I already have several family members who switched to Libertarian in 2016 and haven't gone back to Republican.
I think it would be a nice improvement if they were to supplant Republicans. But I'm not holding my breath there, since most have remained Republicans in opposition to immigration and LGBT, and Libertarians would be seen as too lax on both of those.
I might have a better appreciation of those "don't tread on me" flags if it wasn't for the fact that the message for like 95% of them is that they just want to tread on others. So many of them aren't for individual liberty after all--just their own liberty and screw everyone else.
Libertarians are fine with government oppression as long as it's not them personally.
Ahhh so close
Would they have felt the same way if she weren't white though?
No they’re fucking not.
No they’re not. They’re very stupid.
they voted for him anyway, even after raising a stink at their convention. cannot produce any reasons that haven't been debunked ad infinitum. bunch of lying clowns. will probably vote for republicans next time too. moronic.
I don't know a single libertarian who isn't deep throating boot right now.
Posting this like 100% of them didn't vote for Trump
THEN STOP AIDING AND ABETTING THE FUCKING BOOT, GOOBER
We need more Parties in this country.
The Libertarian Party isnt genuine at all.
They make no attempt to win.
They just give the illusion of a third option.
Libertarians are people who are too selfish even for Republicans.
bad slogan 👎
Bonus points that their bootlicker is straight up Voldemort