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21 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury 16 Jun \ parent \ on: The Libertarian-to-Fascist Pipeline libertarian
I appreciate your elaboration. I have a plane to catch and can't engage with this as it merits, but a couple things. Caveat is that I only read this once.
My sense wasn't that he rejected it; and in fact, that he embraced it. What he rejected was the idea that the NAP is anything close to sufficient to building society around at scale. (See below wrt property rights.)
I could read this two ways: he rejects the assertion that there should be no monopoly on violence (e.g., anyone should be able to do violence, and suffer the consequences of however the world reacts), or else he rejects the assertion that nobody, including the state, should be able to do violence. My sense is that he does the latter as a matter of pragmatism -- you can't have 100k + humans living together without coercion being applied. The question is who applies it and what are the consequences of that.
I got nothing like this from the article; although if you re-state as: he rejects the idea that property rights alone form a coherent political methodology, then I would agree, he does that. And I also do that, but that's not the issue under discussion I guess.
I'd be interested to know what misunderstanding you're referring to.
Note that I have no dog in this fight other than not being Libertarian myself, for reasons you can probably infer from this and from everything I've ever said on SN. But I would like to understand what's so triggering about this post, since when I read it it all seems pretty uncontroversial.
Getting shit seems like the only way @grayruby can recognize caring, so it would be cruel to stop.
Great article! Thanks for sharing. Exactly right.
Anyway, I hope you get the mental reset you need (whether or not the cowboy hat is involved).
Gracias :)
Yeah, that's a good example -- what was originally the means to some end winds up being the actual end that you pursue, to poisonous or comic effect.
It's become increasingly clear to me that the customary political dominance of certain parts of the maxi narrative is nearing its end. I take this as a good sign. The "pure" ideologies of whatever stripe -- Libertarianism not excepted -- can't survive contact with the real world without losing their purity. The religious faithful then decry the leader[s], whoever it is or whoever they are, as failing the purity test, however that manifests. It's a cycle as old as time.
But what is really being revealed is that the world is fucking complicated. You might engineer a brief stability in a small collective, or in a somewhat larger collective, if you can make certain assumptions about shared context.
But at scale, in real life? Nope.
Btc has reached -- or is shortly to reach -- the point where it has to function in a complicated reality, serving various ends; or else die. Unlike many, I hold the prospect of it dying [1] to still be substantial. If it doesn't die, a bunch of people, including many around here, are going to be disabused about the nature of complex systems before all is done.
[1] dying in this case doesn't mean zero people running nodes, it means being largely irrelevant in the wider schemes of society, with the corresponding cratering in price that comes with that.
The podcast makes a similar point -- the bad question is "ossification or not"; the good question is "how will this change, or not making this change, affect the system as it comes to be expressed in the world, at this time?"
I think the point is that btc is a social system instantiated through technical means; the implication is that upgrades that support decentralization through their emergent expression are to be supported; those that reduce it -- or inaction that results in it being reduced -- are not.
This is a more challenging way to look at it and requires understanding lots of things more deeply, which is hard.
The only comfort I want is knowing that I'm not going to fall into the fire under my ass. I don't want a life free of fire.
This is awesome -- I'm going to steal it.
Which implies still using Dollars still as their unit of denomination
I don't agree with the spirit of this. Wanting to use your money as money, the way anyone would use any money, has nothing to do with "fiat mindset" or any such thing; it does refer to the practical reality that for the forseeable future, most of the stuff you want won't be priced in btc. Acknowledging that truth is not some kind of moral failure.
8.Everyone gets bitcoin at the price they deserve
This is the dumbest thing that I wish people would stop saying.
I think Sparrow used to get money from mixing, but they removed that future. Still, I think that was more of an add-on; really, the motivation was as you describe.
Cool idea. Seems like pretty much ideal example of a cheat code opportunity that Pete McCormack has been trying to popularize -- if you really went all-out to make a thing like this w/ maximum btc-friendliness, would bitcoiners flood it and support it? Will be v interested to follow the experiment if it develops.
I'm so glad that these folks exist and are doing their thing. What a valuable contribution to the ecosystem.