University of Virginia’s Jonathan Haidt has shown that libertarians are the most masculine among conservatives and liberals and that liberals care more about a “generic other” than even members of their own families.
Why is this so?
Also it appears that libertarians are less disgusted by gross things than even liberals, and that libertarians rely more on reason as opposed to conservatives and liberals. Are libertarians a subset of the human species - a more perfect and ideal form? Are libertarians the Platonic form of homo sapien sapien?
If the Libertarian media thinks the study praising Libertarians is solid, then yeah, I guess I’m sold: Libertarians are the Platonic form of homo sapien sapien. All bow before Nozick!
I doubt that libertarians score anywhere nearly as high as Dopers on the non-gross-outable scale, and we know this place is chock full of left-leaning socioanarchists, not to mention lumberjacks, IT specialists and other manly men.
Rather than get as sarcastic as I’d like to - this is some pompous stuff, IceQube - let’s discuss why you think a commitment to reason and reason alone would make libertarians superior.
I never said reason alone. I said reading comprehension, masculinity, individualism, and the ability to suppress feelings of grossness, which I suppose would be a subset of reason.
This can basically be debunked pretty easily - libertarians are less likely to have people who don’t care about politics, because they’re not one of the defaults. Thus, people who are libertarian are people who have put thought and care into politics more on average, even if that thought is bad.
You’d need some sort of “how much into political and moral thought” slider in order to effectively judge how “rational” libertarians vs others are.
Mind you, this study is pretty useful to help show libertarians are bigots, so it does have some use.
Homosexuals are the manliest men. They’re so manly they don’t need to pollute themselves with women and their irrational emotions. Once you’re that manly only other manly men will do. The Spartans had this all figured out.
Almost. The actual answer would be the Cynics. Then maybe the Ascetics. Anti-natalists are pretty manly too, if you think about it.
For the sake of argument, taking the idea at face value, I think it’s just a matter of how our culture defines masculinity and feminitity. The cultural meme is that that women are emotional and men are rational, men who are emotional are sensitive or even sissies, and women who aren’t are tomboys or whatever. Running with this, this could easily explain why libertarians are more masculine, because the philosophy is essentially completely rational, which proponents would argue is it’s strength over other philosophies and opponents would argue is it’s greatest weakness.
Even where libertarian philosophy agrees with others on policy, usually the arguments behind those differ in the motivation. This is why they can agree on something like gay marriage with liberals, with a rational “not my business, doesn’t hurt anyone” reason for libertarians, but then appear callous for using the same sort of approach in other areas.
Ultimately, even if we associate certain ways of thinking with certain political associations and certain genders or other stereotypes, I don’t think either way is inherently better or worse than the others. It’s really not all that much different than the T and F in the MBTI. But, at the very least, I think it could be why this sort of thing would associate libertarianism with masculinity and liberalism with femininity.
…The article that says libertarians are more manly begins with a dismissal of stereotypes and strawman before delivering them in horse doses. You have to give libertarians this: they’re way better at self-congratulation than liberals or conservatives. They’ve elevated it to an art. The WSJ piece is less laughable. I can believe that libertarians have different tendencies than conservatives and liberals, but if you’re going to say they make libertarians homo superior or a Platonic ideal, you’re unlikely to get any response beyond derisive laughter. I’m not sure how you reach a “correct, rather than intuitive” answer to a math problem, but I’ll let that go.
And I’d argue that we already knew libertarians are less likely to feel disgust: after all they’re not disgusted by Ayn Rand.
And that “stereotypically masculine” things like aggressiveness, anger, lust and greed aren’t emotions. At least when a man displays them; as the joke goes, “PMS is when a woman gets in trouble for acting like men do all the time”.