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I’ve had a lot of luck directly recruiting libertarians, they’re actually the group I’ve had the most success with. You can usually get them to entertain the difference between private property and personal property, and if you spend a couple months paying attention to that then suddenly you’re a socialist. And explaining the difference between modern unions and historic radical unions (casting all anti-union propaganda as the fault of modern unions being small) works super well on libertarian tech-bros.
I’ve just stopped talking about private property at all except when someone specifically uses it. I usually just say “private ownership of the shit we need to make shit”. I guess it probably depends who you’re talking about.
I suppose this is where I came from. Though, I never thought ill of women, POC, or LGBT+ so maybe I was just always a socialist and didn’t have the right ‘language’ for it.
Thinking ill of women, POC, and LGBT+ people isn’t really in the “pitch” of libertarianism. But…
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They’re the first groups that suffer under a libertarian ideal, so a certain degree of callousness towards them is required to stay libertarian if you’re not completely head-in-the-sand about it
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Libertarianism is often used as a cover for stealth chuddery
I’ve had a lot of luck directly recruiting libertarians, they’re actually the group I’ve had the most success with.
They’re on the upper end of the pipeline to fascism, which makes them among the easiest to turn away.
You can usually get them to entertain the difference between private property and personal property, and if you spend a couple months paying attention to that then suddenly you’re a socialist.
This is a good entry point. Two other ones I’ve had luck with are:
- The sub is focused on capitalism far more run-of-the-mill conservative subs (and certainly more than white nationalist groups), so critiquing the places where capitalism fails most egregiously fits in pretty naturally. You don’t have to be the “but the real problem, of course, is capitalism” guy all the time because they’re discussing it so fucking much already.
- They spend a lot of time re-litigating whether we need public schools or public courts (lol) and there are just overwhelmingly good arguments for all of that stuff and more. You get lots of space to put those arguments out there, so anyone dipping their toes in and thinking “my public school wasn’t great; maybe we should just privatize all of this” can get connected with why that’s a horrible idea.
Besides derailing fascist pipelines, there’s also the benefit of sharpening your own critiques of capitalism (and your own alternative solutions).
Plus Libertarians have already somewhat revolted against the neoliberal world order (even if they basically agree with all of the basic principles), so they’re more open to structural critiques than liberals are.
They’re on the upper end of the pipeline to fascism, which makes them among the easiest to turn away.
Disagree actually. I’ve had a lot more success with libertarians than I have had with liberals. (I’ve also had more luck with chuds than liberals.)
Though I’ve spent no time on /r/libertarian. Most of the libertarians I talk to are on Hacker News.
I suppose I don’t see liberals as being on any sort of pipeline to fascism in the first place. The liberals I know are largely in agreement with leftists on the danger of America’s proto-fascist elements (e.g., militarized police and mass incarceration); they just want shitty, half-assed reformist solutions and are reflexively (but not militantly) pro-capitalist. If they object to a policy like Medicare for All, it’s for some complex macroeconomic budgeting reason they don’t really understand, not because they genuinely despise people at the bottom rungs of society. I don’t see them as a few nudges away from supporting an ethnostate.
I do see many libertarians as a few nudges away from supporting an ethnostate; that’s why I view them on a pipeline to fascism. Many of them do genuinely despise anyone at the bottom rungs of society, and at best they’re oblivious to all the racial coding that’s built into that. If left in a seamless container of like-minded thinkers, they’re the type who would easily conclude that anyone who’s poor should just be left to die, and from there it’s only a short hop to “and if they get in my way at all I have the right to kill them.”
As shitty as liberals are they generally have a level of fundamental human decency that libertarians either don’t have (these folks are unreachable) or need to be reminded of.
I have the exact opposite experience of talking to libertarians unfortunately. It gives me some hope that you’ve had some success with them though.
The libertarians I deal with are those weird ones that overly criticize “liberals” and leftists at the drop of a dime but shrivel up and piss themselves when I deconstruct IDW bullshit or mildly push back reactionary rhetoric. These two people revolve their anti-govt attitude around George Orwell (one is obsessed with 1984 and nothing else), Ayn Rand and Thomas Sowell. Throw in the typical IDW guy videos and they become this impenetrable wall of libertarian horseshit that is almost impossible to deconstruct.
I’m not really even trying to “recruit” or convert any of them. I just get caught up in being an online guy (I mean we’re posting here ffs lol) and sometimes can’t help but fight back against the bullshit.
I probably need a new approach but god damn it is tiring
Sucks.
I guess my advice would be to try to agree with them about things being Orwellian, then immediately pivot into complaining about corporations and how the government is too beholden to them to do anything about it. Credit scores, Google/Facebook having eyes everywhere, every website runs on AWS, that sort of thing. If you really get them going then try to talk about how your boss has his job because of nepotism and you and your coworkers don’t have a say in getting rid of him, but that’s pretty advanced.
Yea… honestly, in most people’s day-to-day lives, assuming they aren’t actively out protesting or organizing in leftist spaces, private corporations are way more Orwellian than the government. Both of the main mobile OS’s are designed to funnel shit loads of info about you to private entities with no accountability, and there is virtually 0 competition to those two.
I’ve tried appealing to the Orwellian nature of his obsession and I end up scratching my head wondering if he has even read 1984 at all.
He unironically linked a Tommy Robinson Parler post cheering on the feds “stickin’ it to those antifas” in his Discord channel “2-minutes-of-hate”. I simply made the comment that the feds sweeping up protestors seems a bit authoritarian and Big Brother would be pleased. It actually shocked me that he wanted to debate the definition of authoritarianism and asked to what degree is this authoritarian to illicit my comment.
I kept the topic of the federal govt doing heinous as much as I could but it eventually got derailed cuz he would wouldn’t stop whining about how he was the fool and I know everything.
Like how do you deal with this level of brainworms lmao.
they’re further along the pipeline than the newbies being described. they’ve already started swallowing the first few layers of propaganda. the shock doctrine approach above of just like calling for genocide way before they’re ready to hear it or making them sit with the discomfort of illiberal feelings (always from a source that’s “just like them”) will land better.
