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Lumifer comments on LINK: In favor of niceness, community, and civilisation - Less Wrong Discussion
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Nice. This is another confirmation of something that's becoming increasing apparent to me, and raises the same issue I've been thinking about.
I'm of the rationalist libertarian persuasion. We value truth, honesty, and a lack of coercion in human interaction. When you argue, you argue honestly. You don't lie, you admit when the other side scores points, etc. Politically, you respect the freedom and equal rights of others, and don't use force to violate those rights. But we live in a world of people who do not share those values. By our lights, these people are engaged in war against us. Yet we don't respond in kind. We're in a war, we're being shot at, but we never shoot back.
For all the talk of guns and self defense, rationalist libertarians are basically social pacifists. You could add the nerd persuasion to the list of pacifisms - in this case pacifism in the near politics of negative sum social status wars.
All this pacifism, from people who generally think it's moronic when actual bullets are involved. It's rather peculiar.
Whatever we might think of the best way for humans to interact, surely that is contextual, and the fact that another person is shooting at you should count as a relevant part of that context. If we never make such people pay a price in violating what we consider the ceasefire of the war of all against all, why would we ever expect them to stop?
Libertarians in the US are fond of the quote (variously attributed) that "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance". Vigilance is just the start. The true price is making violators of that liberty pay.
It's nice to get those occasional windows into an alien mind. Probably worthwhile to go to various ideological walled gardens on the internet disguised as a native.
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 something.
If all their "eternal vigilance" amounts to is bitching and moaning when their liberty is infringed, what good are they?
Remember the context -- we're talking about persuasion in the social setting, about meme and value propagation, basically. In this context "pacifism" means "tolerance" in the sense of "you don't believe the same things as I do and that's fine".
And my point was that not only in that context, but in other contexts as well, rationalist libertarians are pacifists until the bullets flying at them are actual bullets.
I don't believe this to be true. At least according to my understanding of rationalist libertarians.