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You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Glibertarianism

Glibertarianism

Late Night GOP Clown Car Open Thread: There Are People You Can Count On

by Anne Laurie|  December 18, 202012:32 am| 53 Comments

This post is in: Glibertarianism, GOP Death Cult, Republican Venality, Trump Crime Cartel

… when it comes to being the Worst of the Worst. Like anyone in the Trump Crime Cartel:

The White House just named Andrew Giuliani, son of Rudy, to the Holocaust Memorial Council "in part because Trump has known him since infancy and also the president is said to enjoy golfing with the former New York mayor’s son." https://t.co/Aqk2JCuXOM

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) December 16, 2020

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Every single Republican who ever raises any stink about the qualification of any Biden nominee for anything must be, by statutory order, whipped with a urine-soaked sock and laughed out of the halls of Congress forthwith. And hereby. https://t.co/HsnPAU20J2

— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) December 16, 2020

Or Little Prince Rand, once again letting slip the mask on ‘Libertarianism’:

If people are moved to vote when ordinarily they would not be, we be fucked, says the shitbag libertarian for whom an active democracy with an engaged, pluralistic populace is dangerous indeed. As for Bartolomo, the ghost of Joey Ramone called and he wants his song back. https://t.co/ksYTxaASYC

— David Simon (@AoDespair) December 17, 2020

This is a personal insult to 81 million Americans, telling them that their vote shouldn't count. https://t.co/SOhs8PyrrG

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) December 17, 2020

Rand Paul almost never disappoints, if you are hoping for the worst.

— AlternativeGroupOfHats (@Popehat) December 17, 2020

Or, just go down to the nadir, see who’s looking for his chance to sell pardons, no questions asked beyond Has the check cleared?

EXCLUSIVE: President Trump is weighing granting clemency to Ross Ulbricht, the founder and former administrator of the world’s most famous darknet drug market, Silk Road, The Daily Beast has learned https://t.co/HOSChZVxLJ

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) December 16, 2020

Late Night GOP Clown Car Open Thread: There Are People You Can Count OnPost + Comments (53)

Late Night Anti-Social Media Open Thread: Who Funds Parler?

by Anne Laurie|  November 14, 202011:31 pm| 69 Comments

This post is in: Glibertarianism, Goddamned Traitors, Information Warfare, Our Failed Media Experiment

WSJ: Hedge fund investor Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer are financially backing the social media company Parler.

The Mercers previously financed a number of conservative causes, and have not disclosed their involvement with Parlerhttps://t.co/uRW6Ili87F

— Hamza Shaban (@hshaban) November 14, 2020

“Interesting“, as far as it goes, which probably isn’t far enough. I can’t see most of the article, because I’m not gonna buy an exorbitantly expensive Wall Street Journal subscription for pap like this:

As Facebook Inc . and Twitter Inc . have taken a harder line against unsubstantiated claims of a stolen presidential election, prominent conservatives on both platforms have responded with anger and a frequent retort: Follow me on Parler.

Launched in 2018, the libertarian-leaning social network was the most downloaded app on both Android and Apple devices for most of last week, according to data from Google and analytics firm App Annie. Its leaders envision it as a free-speech-focused alternative to the giants of Silicon Valley.

The platform also has some deep-pocketed investors. Rebekah Mercer, daughter of hedge-fund investor Robert Mercer, is among the company’s financial backers, according to people familiar with the matter. The Mercers have previously financed a number of conservative causes…

ICYMI (as you probably did, what with all the more pressing news out there), this breathless scoop comes hard on the heels of a widely circulated twitter thread…

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Parler is funded by FSB? This is the most surprising development since the sun came out this morning. https://t.co/Zfyrpyx9Sg

— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) November 13, 2020

Interesting background on Parler: https://t.co/Re2ThmDigA

— Tanya Eckert Grasser 💜 (@treg313) November 14, 2020

The Verge adds:

… Parler turned into a kind of de facto home for conservatives’ protests against the election— including the persistent “Stop the Steal” campaign— after the race was called for former Vice President Joe Biden. Several high-profile conservative social media personalities encouraged people to abandon Twitter and Facebook because of their moderation policies, and instead follow them on Parler.

According to the WSJ, the Mercers, known for giving financial support to conservative causes and organizations, including Cambridge Analytica, have not previously revealed their connection to Parler.

In a “parley” (what Parler calls its posts) on Saturday, a user with the handle Rebekah Mercer and a yellow “verified” badge said she and “John,” an apparent reference to Parler CEO John Matze, “started Parler to provide a neutral platform for free speech as our founders intended,” and that “the ever increasing tyranny and hubris of our tech overlords lead the fight against data mining” and online free speech…

As a devout Cynic, I suspect the distinction between Mercer funding and official Soviet funding is very much on the Why buy a cow when milk is so cheap? spectrum, myself. But then, all the most significant capital-L libertarian thought leaders seem to have had a strong Russian influence: Ayn Rand, the Koch brothers, Edward Snowden — it’s a tradition!

Late Night Anti-Social Media Open Thread: Who Funds Parler?Post + Comments (69)

Late Night Open Thread: Not An Election Season for the Childish

by Anne Laurie|  October 28, 20201:56 am| 68 Comments

This post is in: 2020 Elections, Glibertarianism, Open Threads

alternate take; even children know not to take the Libertarian Party seriously https://t.co/FtesEGhsQ2

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) October 26, 2020

… or the perpetually adolescent.

To quote John Rogers:

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

Late Night Open Thread: Not An Election Season for the ChildishPost + Comments (68)

Excellent Read: Bears vs. Libertarians

by Anne Laurie|  October 17, 20203:33 pm| 124 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Glibertarianism, Nature & Respite

In New Hampshire, the forces of libertarianism clashed head-on with the primal forces of nature, and the latter kicked everybody's ass with the well-trained shock troops of the primal forces of nature: bears. https://t.co/biOR2hy4e0

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) October 16, 2020

Courtesy of Mr. Pierce, the New Republic reviews Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’ book on “The Town That Went Feral”:

… Hongoltz-Hetling is an accomplished journalist based in Vermont, a Pulitzer nominee and George Polk Award winner. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) sees him traversing rural New England as he reconstructs a remarkable, and remarkably strange, episode in recent history. This is the so-called Free Town Project, a venture wherein a group of libertarian activists attempted to take over a tiny New Hampshire town, Grafton, and transform it into a haven for libertarian ideals—part social experiment, part beacon to the faithful, Galt’s Gulch meets the New Jerusalem. These people had found one another largely over the internet, posting manifestos and engaging in utopian daydreaming on online message boards. While their various platforms and bugbears were inevitably idiosyncratic, certain beliefs united them: that the radical freedom of markets and the marketplace of ideas was an unalloyed good; that “statism” in the form of government interference (above all, taxes) was irredeemably bad. Left alone, they believed, free individuals would thrive and self-regulate, thanks to the sheer force of “logic,” “reason,” and efficiency. For inspirations, they drew upon precedents from fiction (Ayn Rand loomed large) as well as from real life, most notably a series of micro-nation projects ventured in the Pacific and Caribbean during the 1970s and 1980s.

None of those micro-nations, it should be observed, panned out, and things in New Hampshire don’t bode well either—especially when the humans collide with a newly brazen population of bears, themselves just “working to create their own utopia,” property lines and market logic be damned. The resulting narrative is simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and deeply unsettling. Sigmund Freud once described the value of civilization, with all its “discontents,” as a compromise product, the best that can be expected from mitigating human vulnerability to “indifferent nature” on one hand and our vulnerability to one another on the other. Hongoltz-Hetling presents, in microcosm, a case study in how a politics that fetishizes the pursuit of “freedom,” both individual and economic, is in fact a recipe for impoverishment and supercharged vulnerability on both fronts at once. In a United States wracked by virus, mounting climate change, and ruthless corporate pillaging and governmental deregulation, the lessons from one tiny New Hampshire town are stark indeed…

If the Libertarian vision of Freedom can take many shapes and sizes, one thing is bedrock: “Busybodies” and “statists” need to stay out of the way. And so the Free Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.” Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.” Enter the bears, stage right…

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What was the deal with Grafton’s bears? Hongoltz-Hetling investigates the question at length, probing numerous hypotheses for why the creatures have become so uncharacteristically aggressive, indifferent, intelligent, and unafraid. Is it the lack of zoning, the resulting incursion into bear habitats, and the reluctance of Graftonites to pay for, let alone mandate, bear-proof garbage bins? Might the bears be deranged somehow, perhaps even disinhibited and emboldened by toxoplasmosis infections, picked up from eating trash and pet waste from said unsecured bins? There can be no definitive answer to these questions, but one thing is clear: The libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”

Grappling with what to do about the bears, the Graftonites also wrestled with the arguments of certain libertarians who questioned whether they should do anything at all—especially since several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could. One woman, who prudently chose to remain anonymous save for the sobriquet “Doughnut Lady,” revealed to Hongoltz-Hetling that she had taken to welcoming bears on her property for regular feasts of grain topped with sugared doughnuts. If those same bears showed up on someone else’s lawn expecting similar treatment, that wasn’t her problem. The bears, for their part, were left to navigate the mixed messages sent by humans who alternately threw firecrackers and pastries at them. Such are the paradoxes of Freedom. Some people just “don’t get the responsibility side of being libertarians,” Rosalie Babiarz tells Hongoltz-Hetling, which is certainly one way of framing the problem…

The bear problem, in other words, is much bigger than individual libertarian cranks refusing to secure their garbage. It is a problem born of years of neglect and mismanagement by legislators, and, arguably, indifference from New Hampshire taxpayers in general, who have proved reluctant to step up and allocate resources to Fish and Game, even as the agency’s traditional source of funding—income from hunting licenses—has dwindled. Exceptions like Doughnut Lady aside, no one wants bears in their backyard, but apparently no one wants to invest sustainably in institutions doing the unglamorous work to keep them out either. Whether such indifference and complacency gets laundered into rhetoric of fiscal prudence, half-baked environmentalism, or individual responsibility, the end result is the same: The bears abide—and multiply…

It will probably surprise no one that my sympathies lie mostly with the bears.

Excellent Read: Bears vs. LibertariansPost + Comments (124)

Late Night ‘Glibertarian’ GOP Open Thread — Little Prince Rand: The Peasants Are REVOLTING!

by Anne Laurie|  September 2, 20201:51 am| 35 Comments

This post is in: Glibertarianism, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Assholes

Peak gaslighting. Posting a video clearly showing that there was no “attack” while insisting Rand Paul was attacked. https://t.co/Tf2rqJAIsb

— The Hoarse Whisperer (@TheRealHoarse) September 1, 2020

BREAKING REPORT: Rand Paul has called to SUBPOENA ANTIFA plane records, hotel records, all travel records & all funding….

— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) September 1, 2020

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The Little Prince showed up at Trump’s RNC rally speech, because that’s what passes for glitterati must-be-seen-at among the GOP ‘elite’, and he’s been milking the after-reaction from DC natives ever since.

Republicans with media access will claim that Rand Paul was attacked while everyone else with no media access will correctly see that a cop used a bike to push a protester and the protesters pushed back on the cop who wasn’t prepared to follow thru with his assault. https://t.co/80cpoDqmk6

— Goad Gatsby (@GoadGatsby) August 28, 2020

You blocked an anti-lynching bill, you walking bird’s nest. https://t.co/V3IPZ2MVhz

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) August 29, 2020

I would be super worried for my safety if surrounded by an angry crowd, as likely intended. However, the video does not appear to support Rand Paul’s characterizations, let alone demands for FBI investigation and prosecution.

— EveryoneGetsHatEventually (@Popehat) August 28, 2020

I have a feeling Senator Rand might feel differently tonight about anyone shooting at the government when they have a beef with it. pic.twitter.com/TiQrkzbR8H

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) August 29, 2020

FINALLY, he gets to really stretch himself on the important Wingnut Wurlitzer outlets, and not just his dad’s online-newsletter…

Libertarianism is arresting people without cause so you can find out their mailing address. https://t.co/Je7oR6sLyq

— Charles ?. Davis (@charliearchy) August 29, 2020

At long last, validation!

He didn’t say this about the Charlottesville horde that marched with swastikas and guns, preached white supremacy, beat people up, fired a gun into a crowd and murdered a woman with a car. But, sure, let’s lock up folks he doesn’t like for rude yelling. https://t.co/odxBwIl2kt

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) August 30, 2020

(If Rand follows the usual Bubble Conserva-Baby arc, he’ll be discovered with one or more sex workers — some caprine — and a small suitcase full of illicit substances by next January at the latest.)

Late Night ‘Glibertarian’ GOP Open Thread — Little Prince Rand: <em>The Peasants Are REVOLTING!</em>Post + Comments (35)

So About That Third Party Spoilers Thing… The Libertarian Presidential Candidate And A Possibly Rabid Bat Edition

by Adam L Silverman|  August 7, 202011:13 pm| 104 Comments

This post is in: 2020 Elections, America, Domestic Politics, Faunasphere, Free Markets Solve Everything, Glibertarianism, Healthcare, Humorous, Nature, Nature & Respite, Open Threads, Politics, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It)

The 2020 Libertarian Party presidential nominee has been bitten by a possibly rabid bat.

— Jim Antle (@jimantle) August 8, 2020

I will not be able to attend the campaign rally tomorrow morning. I will be getting a rabies vaccine as a precaution after having been bitten by a bat near the start of this campaign tour! I have every intention of participating in the FLAME march and I will deliver remarks at…

— Jo Jorgensen (@Jorgensen4POTUS) August 8, 2020

What effect might his have on Ms. Jorgenson’s views on the US healthcare system? Well let’s just say kvetching was involved!

Not with the health care system we have now!

And I'm not stopped…I'm just pausing for a few hours.

— Jo Jorgensen (@Jorgensen4POTUS) August 8, 2020

Or maybe we should have a free market in which doctors could travel to the patient outside of a hospital or their offices.

— Jo Jorgensen (@Jorgensen4POTUS) August 8, 2020

There is, as of 11:10 PM EDT, no word on the condition of the bat and whether it has contracted anything serious or life threatening from coming into contact with Ms. Jorgenson.

Open thread!

Obligatory:

So About That Third Party Spoilers Thing… The Libertarian Presidential Candidate And A Possibly Rabid Bat EditionPost + Comments (104)

Repub Stupidity Open Thread: Rand Paul, Objectively Pro-Lynching

by Anne Laurie|  June 5, 20205:30 pm| 201 Comments

This post is in: Glibertarianism, Kamala Harris 2020, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Racial Justice, Republican Stupidity

Oof, right in the ribs his neighbor broke. https://t.co/EsKUOHmZNe

— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) June 4, 2020

The Senate is at an impasse over a widely backed bill to designate lynching as a federal hate crime. Raw feelings were evident as Sen. Rand Paul — who is single-handedly holding up the bill — sought changes as a condition of allowing it to pass. https://t.co/ZSGBeUHkuD

— The Associated Press (@AP) June 5, 2020

Rand Paul always figures out a way to asshole his way into an insane news cycle.

— Schooley (@Rschooley) June 4, 2020

Senator Aqua Buddha's gift for seizing upon even the slightest chance at being a colossal public dick is positively otherworldly. https://t.co/RdimPAA6xS

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) June 4, 2020

… (It’s worth noting that Aqua Buddha’s standard for what constitutes “lynching” is taken almost word-for-word from the Bush Administration’s standard for what constitutes “torture,” and we all know how well that standard worked out.)

This, of course, is precisely the right moment in time to block an anti-lynching bill, given what happened in Minneapolis and subsequent events. And, of course, the Congress has been trying and failing to get its act together on an anti-lynching bill for only over a century. How freaking hard can this be in 2020? Don’t answer that.

"Minimum government, maximum freedom! Taxation is theft! Legalize everything! Don't tread on me! Murdering black folks is whatever."

— Peter Wolf (@peterawolf) June 4, 2020

Lynching isn’t just a part of our past. Ahmaud Arbery was murdered just 3 months ago. And Senator @RandPaul is blocking our bill to make lynching a federal crime. pic.twitter.com/p5Lk8PJUph

— Kamala Harris (@SenKamalaHarris) June 5, 2020

Repub Stupidity Open Thread: Rand Paul, Objectively Pro-LynchingPost + Comments (201)

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