For all the talk of guns and self defense, rationalist libertarians are basically social pacifists.
Well, two points come to mind.
First, libertarians are by definition social pacifists if "social pacifism" is defined as refusal to the use coercion to propagate your own memes and values.
Second, rational libertarians who happen to be upper-middle-class college kids living in big coastal cities -- these might be social pacifist. But I bet I can find some pretty rational pretty libertarian guys somewhere in Wyoming and they won't be pacifist at all.
Libertarians are supposed to refrain from initiating force, while pacifists refrain from using any force. That's theoretically the distinction between pacifists and libertarians. In practice politically, very little difference.
As for the boys in Wyoming, I don't think they're much better. Maybe worse. Sure, if you show up with an actual gun and shoot at them, they're likely to shoot back. But for all the huffy talk about how government initiates force against them, what do they actually do to retaliate? At least City Beta Boy Snowden actually did somethin...
Scott, known on LessWrong as Yvain, recently wrote a post complaining about an inaccurate rape statistic.
Arthur Chu, who is notable for winning money on Jeopardy recently, argued against Scott's stance that we should be honest in arguments in a comment thread on Jeff Kaufman's Facebook profile, which can be read here.
Scott just responded here, with a number of points relevant to the topic of rationalist communities.
I am interested in what LW thinks of this.
Obviously, at some point being polite in our arguments is silly. I'd be interested in people's opinions of how dire the real world consequences have to be before it's worthwhile debating dishonestly.