TeaEarlGreyHot wrote:
Perhaps. It does seem to fit my thought pattern, though some of the extreme Libertarians kind of put me off.
Yeah, that's the problem with labels, anyone can use them pretty much any way they want. Just about every ideology has it's share of wingnuts, and it's sort of the price of the convenience of a label that you'll have to disassociate yourself from them sometimes in debate. I certainly have been through it a few times, when I showed up here as some guy with anti-government views and an interest in firearms I had to beat back a number of militia accusations from different people. Of course in my case, being articulate and informed and having a black wife help take the wind out of those sails pretty quickly, and it certainly seems to happen less often these days. Libertarianism seems to draw an inordinate amount of guilt by association accusations; you can see this going on in some of the Ron Paul threads right now here in PPR.
You could do what I do and describe yourself as an unorthodox libertarian or a non doctrinaire libertarian; that usually provokes enough of a pause and question that I can explain where I differ from the stereotypes and move on without getting bogged down with the disavowing and such.
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“The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.”
-- Robert Anton Wilson