Hey, I’d like to present you with this invitation. (Check out the engraving and the gold-leafed edges.) That’s right; you are now an esteemed member of the group, populated by Der Trihs, RedFury, et al., of those whom it is best to ignore rather than debate. You may not quite live up to the standards of those masters yet, but you are well on your way.
It’s not because I dismissed you out of hand. On the contrary, when I first saw you on these boards, in the Intellectual Property thread, you disagreed with me, but you didn’t seem unreasonable at first (although your handle was a clear label of where you stand). But you soon proved your qualifications by showing an almost fanatical opposition to the free market and lack of government regulation. You have an obsession with the idea that Libertarians (and conservatives in general, from what I’ve seen) don’t live in the “real world”, and you react to any argument against you with claims that people are somehow twisting your words around as if they were in (to use your favorite turn of phrase) “Yale sophomore bull session” and are not being making legitimate arguments (which apparently would mean dumbing themselves down to your level). And most of all, you have this amazingly self-righteous idea that everyone has to live their life according to your convoluted understanding of their principles, even if their principles do not require an individual to do this.
Gems like this:
which demonstrates that you possess absolutely no understanding of Libertarian ideas, this:
which demonstrates why you completely fail to comprehend any arguments against your positions. You have this Sophist, skeptic (in the original sense of the word) idea that nothing taken from one source can be applied to anything else, and this:
which demonstrates why you can’t have a legitimate discussion with anyone who doesn’t share your views. People *have *to reframe your arguments because they are complete BS, full of strawmen and logical inconsistencies. You have this obsession with the idea that it is impossible to arrive at the ideal of anything. No, all we can do is throw it all away or stick with what we’ve got. Forget trying to come up with a sound ideological basis for our laws, so that we can apply them consistently; that’s “verbal masturbation”. We have to concentrate on the “real world”, the understanding of which is presumably known to you as the received word of God. According to you, the only way to go about making laws is to listen to the mandate of the “people” for our frame of reference and accept the resulting magisterial mandate as the absolute law. (Although you’ll be glad to know that that makes you a Conservative, as our poster **Liberal **will be happy to point out.)
And more than anything you’ve said in particular, it’s the general attitude you display. You seem to take absolutely zero content from anyone else’s posts. Debating you is like playing tennis against a wall; anything you send at it is just going to come right back, unchanged, until you get bored and decide to go do something else. While I’m not often completely changed in my way of thinking by other people’s posts, they do often point out holes in my train of thought and help me refine my understanding. Your posts do not do this because your posts are the same broken record playing over and over.
I could go on, and I could talk about something besides Libertarianism, but that’s all you ever talk about. You’re on some kind of misguided crusade against it, like Der Trihs against religion (and he is not nearly as single-minded; he actually has some useful things to say), and there’s nothing left for the opposition to do but ignore you. So I’m just posting this here to vent against you and to serve as advice to others not to bother.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Note: this does not apply to anyone else who happens to disagree with me on Libertarianism or any other political issue. Most of you have been quite reasonable, and you don’t fill your posts with strawmen and logical fallacies. This is just directed against haymarketmartyr.