I think you may have misunderstood the way "socialist" was being used there.

They talk about the elimination of the state, and in the same breath (or at least the same Wiki article) of collective ownership of the means of production. The idea seems to be that it isn't a "state" when it's Us, only when it's Them. Since it's Us, and therefore good and right, everyone will voluntarily agree to it. Anyone who does not is Bad, and therefore not one of Us, but one of Them. Liberty is liberty to do anything that is right, that is, to agree with Us. You can have anything you like, and do anything you like, as long as it's what We think you ought to have and do. We are truly democratic, since everyone voluntarily supports Us, but They are undemocratic, even if They have elected government, because if They had truly democratic government They would be organised like Us.

But this is politics.

With the magic of economics.

How would we compare these hypotheses?

1. The ancients achieved less science because they were less scientific in ideology or culture; because they had mistaken ideas about the relative virtue of experiment and philosophy.
2. The ancients achieved less science because they lacked the precision equipment that modern scientists have.
3. The ancients achieved less science because they lacked the generations of accumulation of information that modern scientists benefit from.
4. The ancients achieved less science because there were fewer of them, population-wise. Fewer people → fewer Einsteins.
5. The ancients achieved less science because they lacked a large-scale scientific community; developments were isolated to their developers' city-states.
6. The ancients achieved a lot more science than we know, but it has been deliberately suppressed by political and religious censorship and so we haven't heard of it.
7. The ancients achieved a lot more science than we know, but it has been accidentally lost in fires, floods, wars, or other disasters where they hadn't taken adequate backups.

I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it. -George Carlin

Europe!"liberal" means "strongly for economic freedom"

Not ... particularly. We're all over the map on the economy in my experience. I don't even know what you mean by "social regulation"; are we talking abortion?Freedom of speech? What?

"left-libertarian" just sounded meaningless.

"The version of left-libertarianism defended by contemporary theorists like Vallentyne, Steiner, Otsuka, van Parijs, and Ellerman features a strong commitment to personal liberty—embracing the libertarian premise that each person possesses a natural right of self-ownership—and an egalitarian view of natural resources, holding that it is illegitimate for anyone to claim private ownership of resources to the detriment of others.[17] On this view, unappropriated natural resources are either unowned or owned in common, believing that private appropriation is only legitimate if everyone can appropriate an equal amount, or if private appropriation is taxed to compensate those who are excluded from natural resources. This position is articulated in self-conscious contrast to the position of other libertarians who argue for a (characteristically labor-based) right to appropriate unequal parts of the external world, such as land.[18"

Depends on the size of the stone. You might not even notice it if it's small enough.

You can't get blood from a stone. So sometimes it pays to be a stone.

EDIT: Anyway, this is missing the point. Diogenes is preaching self-sufficiency and a variant of keeping your identity small. Sycophancy isn't a reliable way to hold onto one's vegetables and one's dignity.

Meh. 'But' is just 'and' with a case of incongruity. That's what it is, so I don't see a problem with using it for that... though of course dark arts applications would be problematic.

That's Blake again. Tim Freeman is the author of the quote before the Blake quotes on this page.