Edwin Lyngar, Salon contributor from Reno, talks about his bad breakup with Libertarianism after a trip to Honduras where he got to see those ideals in practice: My libertarian vacation nightmare: How Ayn Rand, Ron Paul & their groupies were all debunked - Salon.com
I find it amusing that he comes right out and says it, even admitting he fell into the same trap:
"In America, libertarian ideas are attractive to mostly young, white men with high ideals and no life experience that live off of the previous generation’s investments and sacrifice. I know this because as a young, white idiot, I subscribed to this system of discredited ideas: Selfishness is good, government is bad. Take what you want, when you want and however you can. Poor people deserve what they get, and the smartest, hardworking people always win. So get yours before someone else does."
I agree. Just about every libertarian I know personally or have dealt with online is a gun weilding person insisting that I owe my freedom to the fact they have one, insisting that they're such a humanitarian and I should be thanking them for their selflessness. As though they personally have wrestled enemies who are coming for my freedumbz and taken them out of the hands of the Hamburglars and returned them to me with a, "Just doin' mah job, sir." And yet they're all wobbly as I am and look like the last thing they wrestled was a triple cheeseburger.
Look, you're not that guy from 24. That guy from 24 isn't even that guy from 24. He's a Republican douchebag who acts, says lines, and bitches little people out if they don't bring him his latte in a timely manner.
And yes. They're all white guys. All of them. One was a woman long ago who I called a sister until the day I wouldn't go along with the lie about our president being a Muslim man, nor her bigoted insistence that all Muslims want her head on a stick. I watched her descend into a feral thumb-sucker as the rest of the south horded guns and prepared for secession.
All of them also join in the McCarthyist conga line as they make fun of liberals. Usually it's because liberals assume they're Republicans, and isn't that just so last century! Except that's all they really are. Republicans. Of last century. Now pretending to be ashamed of the name yet saying all the same shit. Oh, except they're okay with gays now, so shouldn't I just be all ashamed of myself for confusing them or something. (They all try this tactic as though it somehow discredits you instead of them.)
What should scare you about Libertardianism is how much Lyngar describes it, and it sounds like everything going wrong in this country right now, in these selected gems from the article:
...the police ride around in pickup trucks with machine guns, but they aren’t there to protect most people... You can see the evidence of previous decades of infrastructure investment in roads and bridges, but it’s all in slow-motion decay... Welcome to an Ayn Rand’s libertarian paradise, where your extra-large pepperoni pizza must also have an armed guard... The closer you get to totally untamed, uncontrolled privatization, the nearer you approach “Lord of the Flies.”
Lyngar makes a point that I find most ironic. You see, when gun-wavers talk to me, they insist to me that I just don't get it because I've not been out there, meaning out of the country. Like they have. Where there are none of them freedumbz. So it's hilarious that Lyngnar says:
Part of the reason this discredited, libertarian bullshit still carries any weight for Americans is because so few of us travel. Only 30 percent of Americans have passports, and if Americans do go places, it’s not often to Honduras. On the mainland of Honduras, we saw no more than a handful of Americans... It has nonstop flights from the U.S. directly to the island so you can skip all the needless reality.
I guess if you've only gone to war, or you've only gone somewhere with the mindset that everything else must be horrible, you probably are going to see nothing but horrors outside of this country's borders. But you can't tell me that the rest of the world is horrible because they don't haz the guns and you do. If anything so many places are horrible because they don't have regulations that bring freedom to all rather than just to a strong few who then deny it to everyone else, as happens in Libertarianism.
So as I made this graphic a couple nights ago, I shall share it one more time for all the Libertarians who think that I'm the fool for assuming that you're Republican, even though we all damn well know ya are, Blanche... ya are...
Yeah. I'm the one who feels silly. Sure.
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