We are seeing an unbelievably embarrassing and disgusting (though not altogether unpredictable) betrayal of principles with “libertarian” organizations choosing to simply ignore military rule, gestapo raids, concentration camps, and the rest of the fascist takeover of the US. I decided to check in on my old stomping grounds, the organization I volunteered for (alongside a plethora of fellow left-libertarians) from 2014 to 2020, to see what bold and thoughtful takes they had about our current fascist government and, uhhh... well...

This is a deeply impoverished worldview which uses sparse data to argue we live in the best of all worlds. Slavery was defended similarly. In regards to social practices, the forces of "selection" are not some external agent interfering with us. WE are the forces of selection.

https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/1559644828094197760

"Bad things can't happen because evolution would've filtered them out for us" is both 1) a depressing mirror of religious-conservative arguments about divine will and 2) a recipe for dogmatic relativism which contains no real viewpoint of its own, only deference to what is.

The nagging ambiguity in "state capacity" is particularly apparent in discussions of "delegitimizing state capacity." A lot of critique, skepticism, or imagining of alternatives simply gets dismissed as not necessarily wrong, but nevertheless unacceptably delegitimizing. Of course acknowledging the bad things states do can delegitimize them, but it's a strange sort of worldview that says we better not acknowledge those things lest states do even more bad things.

The struggle against scarcity is vitally important but also never-ending. "Post-scarcity" is an incoherent concept conflating a technical problem (how to make more stuff until we have enough) with a coordination problem (how to reconcile our rivalrous projects through time). This mistake especially applies to a very niche idealogical subgroup that I often overlap with: people who are market anarchists in the short-term (until we reach post-scarcity) and communist anarchists in the long-term (after we reach post-scarcity).

Don't be so open-minded your brain falls out.

https://twitter.com/MazMHussain/status/1504951342309294080

A lot of skeptics are sincerely trying to be epistemically responsible. They just confuse being responsible with being neutral, so they feel compelled to give all possibilities equal credence. Without convictions, our views end up being pushed and pulled by mere currents.

The gradual mainstreaming of Alex Jones-esque conspiracy mongering (instead of cogent institutional analysis) amongst radicals of all stripes is incredibly regretful and counterproductive. This is anecdotal but it seems pretty confined to *new* radicals, people (both young and old!) who only recently had their trust in institutions whittled down to nothing and who are desperately looking for some trustworthy voices to again feel relevant and impactful.

On the one hand, this is a beautifully consistent anti-carceral vision of tolerance and freedom which everyone should agree with.

On the other, it's an untenable distinction that sometimes obscures the deeper commitments anti-statism should absolutely be accompanied by.

https://twitter.com/lpwa/status/1465762067542003723

Statism, coercion, police, and prisons all deserve the harshest moral condemnation and stigmatization. They shouldn't be normalized. But they're also not these discreet things Over There, separate from culture. Freedom has tolerance built in, but not self-undermining nihilism.

This fundamentally misunderstands the freed market anti-capitalist view in two ways: No one thinks cooperatives are illegal, only disincentivized. It's about structural market distortions whereby state interventions (IP, land theft, licensing, capital requirements, etc.) forcibly separate workers from capital and artificially promote hierarchical production.

For a decade the joke was "they call themselves left-libertarians because they left libertarianism" and now a bunch of right-libertarians have unironically become "post-libertarians." Bob Murphy is out here fighting the good fight against hordes of straightforwardly anti-left reactionaries who seem to have only ever cosplayed as libertarians, but unfortunately it's precisely what has been reaped by his colleague Hoppe's embrace of alt-right fusionism.

Minarchism is so weird. One the one hand, it straightforwardly implies that no state ever has been remotely legitimate and on the other it seeks to legitimize the aspects of the state that most violate its principles (the systemic coercion of prisons, police, armies, & borders). I was a minarchist for about a year, back in like 2011. I thought it was the logical implication of the view that "force is only justified in defense." I never stopped thinking force must be defensive. I just stopped thinking the minarchist vision had much to do with it.

The fact that MLs see this conception of anarchy as relevantly similar to ML states points to their more sophisticated market abolitionism, including the understanding that maintaining a hierarchical bureaucracy as described here requires brute force and vast coercive powers. It's very, very, very easy to start off thinking really hard about how society might be wildly better and much more free and then, before you even step back to notice, end up envisioning a deeply totalizing system.

Folks have asked me for essays on Left-Rothbardianism.

Here are some of my favorites: Kevin Carson has a great historical survey:

theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-…

Libertarianism as I understand it is opposed to coercion and in favor of freedom, so:
1. Abolish militaries.
2. Abolish borders.
3. Abolish prisons.
4. Abolish police.
5. Free markets.

https://twitter.com/LPLiberation/status/1439972130725187589

I see all 5 as united by the single, simple principle of freedom. 1-4 are just variations on the same underlying systemic violence pervading society and 5 is in my view the main institutional lever for expanding freedom and ultimately displacing the very existence of 1-4.

The marginal tax rates faced by the very rich is of very little consequence either way. The prospect of transferring slightly more or slightly less money from some plunderers to other plunderers is strangely obsessed over, likely because it's simply a very useful mood affiliation heuristic.

It's weird how Twitter seems to simultaneously promote both rote simplification and minute hairsplitting of the discursive territory. There's an abundance of both one-line dunks or dismissals AND of detailed, even charitable, explanatory threads for EVERY SINGLE tradition, thinker, or idea.

A 90% increase in about 50 years. What 90% shifts might we see 50 years from now?

https://twitter.com/RiverTamYDN/status/1436318951080869889

I both expect and very much hope it's factory farming. Such evil should never have existed in the first place and the quicker it disappears the better. Our circles of moral concern and of viable alternatives to eating meat are both rapidly expanding and converging.

I do appreciate Marx in his more Aristotelian and/or libertarian moments but at some level it's hard to disentangle his authoritarian prescriptions from his (however potentially liberatory) diagnosis. In stressing property/prices far more than violence/domination in his analysis of exploitation, he completely misses the main flaws of capitalism, provides blueprints for authoritarian-in-everything-but-name states, and encourages effective complacency in the fight against power.

Likely my biggest disagreement with leftists is that I think money prices tend to reflect costs, not create them. That's why I think suppressing prices mostly hurts the worst off and why helping them requires abolishing monopoly privileges and artificial property rights. That's why I'm 100% on board with descriptions of socialism as "stateless, classless, moneyless" societies up until that very last one. Unless socialism means severe impoverishment, inequality, and waste, it REQUIRES a means of impersonally conveying tacit, distributed knowledge.

As far as human problems go, distribution severely pales in comparison to coordination and production. Aggregating the amount of goods and the amount of people in need of them in a given area doesn't tell us how to get actual goods to actual people. "Give the homeless homes" or "give the hungry food" are empty aims in need of knowledge concerning the goods and people in question.

If you mean anarchism and fascism are our fundamental choices because they're the only conceptually stable ideologies (with everything else a confused centrist view), then yes.

But if you mean (as Rand mistakenly did) that anarchism and fascism are more alike than different, no. This mistake is rooted in the idea that anarchism and fascism are united by opposition to rule of law, thereby endorsing rule of men. But anarchism promises the ultimate rule of law, the total abolition of the distinction between law-makers/enforcers and law-followers.

Three down.

https://twitter.com/corymassimino/status/1327029165074358277

Both Jeff Tucker and Ed Stringham are gone from AIER. I was interviewed by a Buzzfeed reporter looking into Tucker's misconduct and while I've been told that story is being indefinitely put on hold, I have to imagine the whole of house of cards is starting to collapse.