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> The god they're sacrificed to? “Technological progress"

They're wannabe-Morlocks.

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> I lived in SF for a few years and found the tech community's disinterest in art to border on allergy.

That has to do with the crowd you ran into. Burning Man is many things, but among those, it does have a lot of art. Did you go to SF Museum of Modern Art? or any of the art anything's? Same with sports. There are a ton of nerds that call it sportsball and think they're clever, but at the same time, the Superbowl is this weekend and there's a lot of sport-related things happening around the Bay Area that you wouldn't know about if you didn't look for it. So I'd be wary of drawing conclusions from such a limited sample set.

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Libertarianism doesn't mesh well with reality; the government doing less is part of it, but it also requires a way for people to efficiently protect their property.

So you get to a point where mass surveillance is justified by the anti-crime angle; there is no contradiction, libertarianism logic where you can live and let live requires no crime...

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> Libertarianism doesn't mesh well with reality; the government doing less is part of it, but it also requires a way for people to efficiently protect their property. > So you get to a point where mass surveillance is justified by the anti-crime angle; there is no contradiction, libertarianism logic where you can live and let live requires no crime...

Whatever technical definition of Libertarianism you're using is very narrow. Nobody is under the delusion that Libertarianism requires no crime.

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It does if you don't want a worse privately owned government. Either the government will stop crime, or Palantir and the Pinkertons will stop anything they seem to be crime, or there never was any crime.
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>technical definition of Libertarianism

You see, that's the great thing about Libertarinaism, it can be whatever you want, and when there's something you don't like you go "but that's not real Libertarianism"

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There’s really two types of people that tend to be drawn to libertarianism at some point: humanists and narcissists.

Those who are fundamentally humanist want to tear down systems of oppression because it pains them to see their fellow humans abused and brought low by corrupt laws and regulations. They (perhaps naively) imagine that if the system was dismantled or at least shrunk to minimum size, basic human decency will step in to fill the vacuum and people will thrive. Folks like Penn Gillette are the face of this group.

The narcissists are drawn to the movement because they feel like “if only everyone would get out of my way, I can do GREAT THINGS™ “. They like ideas like social Darwinism because they are already privileged enough to not be worried about losing in a survival of the fittest contest, and don’t tend to concern themselves with the second order effects of dismantling the system because it is simply an immoral impediment to their greatness. Peter Thiel and folks like him are the face of this group. This is largely the strain that has taken root in SV.

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I see a whole lot more that end up at libertarianism as almost the default answer to "what philosophy most emphasis less government".

It's a generational thing I think, you see public money being spent on junk, and laws used to entrench and make competition hard; and you think "why do we want the government to do these things at all?". And if you look at common ideas around 20 years ago, the default answer was libertarianism.

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fwiw Penn Gillette no longer calls himself a libertarian.
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> I ask myself every time I hear that Thiel is a "libertarian" _while also_ being the founder of the biggest surveillance dragnet ever created: what about surveillance is libertarian?

Surveillance does not directly violate the non-aggression principle, and a myopic adherence to minimal principles without any consideration to where they lead is the central feature of libertarianism.

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Surveilance means stealing intellectual property of surveiled people. If you're a TRUE libertarian, then you need to make sure that you arrange some kind of a contract with the people you surveil.
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> a myopic adherence to minimal principles without any consideration to where they lead is the central feature of libertarianism.

Your definition, maybe. Redefining that idea and assuming it is accepted as fact is a touch arrogant.

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Libertarianism itself it a touch arrogant.
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I'm not assuming or defining anything, just summarizing my observations of how self-proclaimed libertarians behave.
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