1. Insistance on the sanctity of property, which strikes me as especially cheeky coming from people who have not been on American lands for more than 200-300 hundred years. If they truly respect property, they should give it back to those who were here long before them and who certainly administered it better than most of them ever did.

2. Lack of compassion toward the handicapped, the old, the poor, all of which is manifest in their refusal of universal health care. Along the lines: “As a capable, hard working male, a superman in spe, I should never be held responsible for someone else’s problems. Why should I pay taxes for your child if I do not intend to procreate?”
I view those who would refuse healthcare to children as murderous, full stop.

In short, it is sometime benevolent or opportune to work with libertarians, but they remain attached to a heavily racist and supremacist practical form of social darwinism (at best, they’re indifferent). Once they stop gazing at their navel, and realize that the suffering of other people may have something to do with them, then, and only then, perhaps…

[moderator: hear ya loud and clear, but noting that this describes right-libertarians, not left-libertarians/anarchists such as Bookchin who wholly support “the irreducible minimum” and our responsibility to care for each other… unf the right-libertarians have claimed — practically copyrighted — the word “libertarian” in much the same way that pimps and pornographers (also propertarians) have copyrighted “sex”…]

STAN: Eh? Where is my reference to “knees” here, or any chivilrous defense of anyone? That damn Stan… he’s gone over to the other side… captured body and soul by those crazed PC feminist harpies.

I see that the shit-house lawyering is still a preferred solution (along with hi-bye, hit-and-run point-scoring attempts…). Since seeking to understand and deconstruct the subjugation of women in society is such an amusing distraction (ever since the 70s, when those bad feminazis were also put in their places by this intrepid Leftyboy), we are left with nothing more than (sigh, once again) (1) misrepresentation of what was said in paragraph 1, (2) claim to reverse victimhood in paragraph 2, (3) the “sticks and stones” defense in paragraph 3, and (4) a good ol’ boy-2-boy thrust (couldn’t resist) at Stan’s gender treachery. Do y’all keep a playbook for this stuff?

The subordinate position of women (52% of the population), it seems, still doesn’t qualify for inclusion “in formulating a cohesive plan of action to confront the problems of the day.” What clearer statement can we get that on the orthodox left the position of women is not a problem.

And I hope you’ve been reading Glenn Greenwald over at Salon.com. He has been critically examining this phenomenon lately. Between Glenn and Digby it is becoming quite a topic of discussion among those who were not even conscious of participating in it. Consciousness has more to do with it than politics, I think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Altemeyer

My friend Paul Rosenberg has summarized Altemeyer’s work here:

http://patternsthatconnect.blogspot.com/2006/03/rightwing-authoritarianism-and.html

No joke. That puts you in the same camp as Noam Chomsky, DeAnander. Good company, I’d say and that’s precisely his description of his political views. I like to simplify it this way. Left and right are plots on the continuum of economic dimensions and policy, libertarian and authoritarian are plots of the continuum of liberty and freedom vs. totalitarianism and control. These guys have done that rather nicely.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

It appears that, according to Altemeyer, leftist authoritarians are as rare as “hens teeth”. Stalin was not really an economic leftist and he was certainly no libertarian.

Now if you want to delve into integral politics, you can explain that one to me. According to Ken Wilber, Buddha was the Ultimate Republican.

PS: If Chip Berlet, the stalinist, says that Paul is
no good, then that is in itself a good argument in
favor of Paul. Berlet’s purpose (one of them) is to
keep us split up in little ineffectual factions, and
to violently oppose any orthogonal/synthetic formations
of the sort Stan has just suggested — the sorts of
formations that stand a real chance (if anything does!)
of upsetting the established order. Berlet participates
with other left gatekeepers (Michael Moore, Amy
Goodman, etc.) to keep everyone in the doomed
duopoly game. “Keep votin’ Democratic! Lesser of two
evils! Only game in town! Anybody But Bush!” etc., etc
ad nauseum.

one can “believe in taxation for the public good” (a Left position according to cartoon Randians such as, er, Maggie Thatcher :-)) and yet differ wildly on what should be taxed or even what “the public good” means. meanwhile the US is so far into the neocon lalaland (”the libertarianism of fools”?) that everything looks Left from here and the distinction between forcible oligarchy and Something Else seems the only relevant one at times…

and then there are near-universal fault lines like race and gender, or the militarism that is a product of racism and male supremacy interacting with wealth and power… which can make all the “boys clubs” of political faction look the same if you are female, or all the whitefolks clubs look the same if you are a PoC… how to divorce various populisms from racism is a big issue; how to divorce various libertarianisms from masculinist swagger another…

I’m just rambling here… political taxonomy is something of a new hobby (I’ve spent some tine deconstructing the shared misogyny and masculinism of Left and Right partisans, but am still learning about the many flavours of libertarianism, populism, etc). thanks for opening windows onto new and confusing vistas