Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Anonymity?

Someone just sent me this message:

I just learned something interesting that you probably don't know, Kent.
You cannot post to your blog using an anonymous proxy.
More piggery from the government!
Perhaps you should inform your readers that posting "anonymous" will still show their IP address to the pigs.
I always assumed there was no such thing as real anonymity on the internet anyway, but you might want to be aware of this tidbit of information.

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Stay leaderless, my friends

Unlike "liberals" or "conservatives", libertarians don't have real leaders.

Oh, sure, there are those who "everybody knows", and are followed with interest, but they aren't like a Glenn Beck or a Rachel Maddow, or even like Obama or Ron Paul.

I always see others posting the latest talking point from their leaders. But not so much with libertarians.

The "prominent" libertarians tell you what they are thinking, and expect you to go through it with a fine-toothed comb and reject it if it's crap (even if they don't like your conclusions).  They may still try to convince you they are right, but it isn't easy for their opinions to become widely accepted among liberty lovers without being picked apart and found to be correct.

The "mainstream" folks don't do that when their leaders tell them what they should think.  They suck it right up and repeat it everywhere.

Even of those libertarian thinkers I admire, if they say something full of crap I'll say so. And they do the same for me.

It's because libertarians don't just yap to be saying something.  We think first.  And we never stop thinking about what we are saying and what we'll say next.  We can back up what we say with reality and evidence, even if statists reject the reality for the comfort of their delusions. Makes it very hard for statists to actually disprove what we say, so they resort to other tactics.  At that point, the best thing to do is to ignore them- it's not going to end nicely.

If I were offered position of "king of the libertarians" I would turn it down.  Nor would I ever blindly follow a "king of libertarians", even if I liked the person.  There's no way that could help bring on more liberty.  Having a leader would set libertarians back and make us as vulnerable to basic foundational errors as the others are.

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