You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

blacktrance comments on Open thread, 9-15 June 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Tenoke 09 June 2014 01:07PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (239)
Tags: open_thread

Comments (239)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: blacktrance 12 June 2014 09:55:30PM 2 points [-]

What the political compass calls "Libertarian" would more accurately be described as "Socially Progressive". Actual libertarianism is the political compass's bottom-right quadrant.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 June 2014 07:30:08AM 0 points [-]

I think the use of “libertarian” to refer to right-libertarian specifically is a mostly US thing.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 13 June 2014 01:49:25PM 4 points [-]

Once there was a confusion about what "liberal" really means, so some people decided to call themselves libertarians instead. Now there is a confusion about what "libertarian" really means.

Seems to me we have some kind of ideology-name treadmill here, which works like this:

  • start a political movement
  • become popular
  • many people will use the name of your movement, even if they disagree with a few (or later: many) points
  • at some moment those people will complain that you want the definition to include you, when you are obviously merely a fringe member of this movement
Comment author: pragmatist 13 June 2014 02:28:00PM *  1 point [-]

And it's not even universal in the US. Or at least, it wasn't at some point. Noam Chomsky has often referred to himself as a libertarian, and he is certainly not a right-libertarian. Glenn Greenwald is also sometimes called a libertarian, and he doesn't have right-wing economic views either.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit