this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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So you haven't paid attention to those who call themselves libertarians for the past 20+ years? Their entire m o is restricting others' liberties in favor of their own. And I'm not conflating conservatives and libertarians accidentally, I'm pointing out libertarians in practice.
Hitler also called his party socialist (maybe even believed in that himself), yet you'd find it hard to find people who agrees on that
Surprisingly you can find people arguing that Hitler and his party were actually left wing (because they used the word socialist) both online and off. My usual response is to consider the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Yeah well that's another thing. Same way as many lefties are bashing borderline fash right as libertarians just because they claim so, many on the right claim Hitler was a socialist to throw dirt on socialism.
In both of these cases, I honestly believe it's the 2nd group that's actually harming the name of an ideology more than the first.
No you're not.
You're calling out a specific group mislabeling themselves and falling for it.
Since libertarianism is a long, established, and large ideology in human society with a wealth of knowledge, information, figures, and history, I'd encourage you to take a few seconds to look it up and delve into all that knowledge, rather than just go with what some redneck somewhere has touted to you.
In actual fact, an ultra libertarian would be encompassing ideologies like anarchism and far-left libertarianism.
That's not my opinion, that's just literally what it is and you can go Google that. Stop listening to idiots and falling for their words, lest you'll start misunderstanding just as they do and terms or ideas otherwise disassociated with them will get tarnished, ruined, and misappropriately loathed. That's kind of an end goal of misinformation. Don't fall for it and don't spread it here, even if it's not intentional.
It feels like you are being willfully naive of the real world and languages' etymology in practice, and hiding within academia, whether on purpose or not.
Are you sure it's me being willfully naive of the real world? The real world seems to be ipretty fucking clear on this one and has been for a very long time.
Its not academia. It's just a couple wiggles of your fingers I'm lazy, so here's just the first three to get you started...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
https://www.libertarianism.org/what-is-a-libertarian
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/
So, as you can see, your etymology at work—not that the morphemes could ever be confusing on such a term. If your view is otherwise, well that's my example of the power of disinformation and misinformation. Literally deceived into believing something that is incorrect by listening to incorrect people. Be careful of it.
So is Ayn Rand a libertarian or a mislabeled scotsman?
She's a dead fascist. The only good kind.
You’re arguing ~~pedantics~~ semantics here and words change meanings over time. Libertarian, whether you like it or not, now also represents that particular group of people.
If we're arguing semantics over a group of people, what they stand for & what the definition is, the label coming to represent a group of undesirables that you must now accept whether you like it or not....damn near everyone should be ashamed. ¯\(°_o)/¯
Oh you're totally correct on the academic definitions. For instance I'm a leftist social libertarian. But I don't tell most people that because when they think libertarian, they think of guys that drive trucks like in the post.
Like it or not, and I don't, the definition has changed in common language.
Just like how liberal now means something completely divorced from the original meaning for the vast majority of people. You can spend all day trying to explain that liberalism actually is a conservative ideology, but people aren't going to stop using liberal to describe people left of the US Democrats.