feotakahari

I’ve seen multiple Libertarian sources joke that you shouldn’t be afraid vaccines might have negative effects on your body, because you don’t worry about negative effects when you put meth in your body. I feel like this expresses something deeper about Libertarians.

 I want to take this one section out of context: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/

“The feminists who constantly argue about whether you can be a real feminist or not without believing in X, Y and Z and wanting to empower women in some very specific way, and who demand everybody support controversial policies like affirmative action or affirmative consent laws (bailey). Then when someone says they don’t really like feminism very much, they object “But feminism is just the belief that women are people!” (motte) Then once the person hastily retreats and promises he definitely didn’t mean women aren’t people, the feminists get back to demanding everyone support affirmative action because feminism, or arguing about whether you can be a feminist and wear lipstick..”

On the one hand, this is a very, very good way of expressing what bugs me about “feminism” as a concept. On the other, I think the author is slightly misdiagnosing the issue. The arguer doesn’t change between two separate definitions of feminism. They think some specific feminist idea, say, equal pay, is not just a logical outcome of believing in women’s equality, but such an obvious throughline from women’s equality that you couldn’t possibly be obtuse enough to believe in women’s equality and not see how that includes equal pay. Therefore, if you don’t believe in equal pay, you must be lying when you say you believe in equality.

A good point of comparison here is those libertarians who think there’s a specific set of principles by which you can conclude that open debate is a good thing. They think all of those principles also prove that libertarians are correct, and the proof is so simple and obvious that denying it is obtuse. Therefore, by choosing to openly debate them, you’re revealing that you’re a libertarian who just doesn’t want to admit it.