aesthelete

This story is the most Ohio thing that ever Ohio'd.

You're an idiot.

Most of us vote for the candidate that best upholds our interests no matter the letter on the lapel.

This also isn't true. Hypothetically, rational voters would vote their own self-interest or using other rationally explicable criteria, but those are hypothetical voters. Those "thought exercise" voters are just as hypothetical as the "invisible hand" that magically makes markets fair, or the hypothetical economic rational actor in the economy that always has perfect information and behaves rationally to maximize their own self-interest. They're more fictional than the "spherical cows" involved in introductory physics problems.

A lot (or maybe even most) of the people that vote Republican vote against their own interests. That's why Cory Doctorow talks about them being "turkeys voting for Christmas".

Farmers that vote Trump are voting against their own interests. People from small towns with decaying infrastructure and social security recipients that vote Trump are voting for a circus clown that will not do anything to improve their life a single iota.

If you have to type fifteen responses complete with diagrams about your ideology, then everything I'm saying about it not being straightforwardly definable is 100% correct and you're proving it right now.

Gallup found that voters who identify as libertarians ranged from 17 to 23% of the American electorate.

Exactly, "identify as"...do you really think 17-23% of the American voting populace actually has consistent, definable meanings about what it means to be a libertarian? I'm willing to bet that they do not. Relatedly, I have never seen the Libertarian Party get 17-23% of the vote in my lifetime. So, sure, you have a bunch of people that "identify" as libertarian (as I once sort of did in college despite always voting Democratic) but in reality, they are not part of the organized party at all. The Libertarian Party gets up to the low single digits in national elections which is a pathetic showing and is why they do not even get to debate the candidates of the two main parties.

They show up every couple of election cycles, take their "conscientious objector to the 'duopoly'" single digit voter percentage, occasionally cause spoiler effects, and then fuck off back into the wilderness. They're basically the "Green Party" equivalent for right-leaning people, exactly as I was saying above.

American politics is akin to the aisles in the grocery stores here: lots and lots of different labels and colorful packaging, and very little actual choice.

I read the linked article, and noticed that verbiage: "considered by some". That's exactly my point. Nobody has the ability to define what exactly libertarianism is in this country because there are so many little feuding factions, and it's a 1-5% movement in the first place.

It's essentially a thing you can pretend to be when the Republican candidate is too repulsive to openly support and that's about it.

Are you going to change the definition of pacifist or are you going to call me a violent non-pacifist.

If you and all of the other pacifist movement people are really violent then I'd say the same thing about your movement, you're running a naming scam.

In this particular case, it's difficult to even call libertarianism a set thing, because the "movement" spends much of its time discussing what is and isn't libertarianism, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that individual liberty versus collective responsibility is largely a more difficult balance to strike than they're pretending, and there's no clear and fast way to cut it for every scenario. Pacifism, on the other hand, is much more straightforward to define.

George Will can eat shit.

they’re just using that moniker because it fits whatever they’re really trying to accomplish.

That's what Libertarianism is. The same naming con also applies to the so-called Green Party. I don't know why we are so easily fooled by names of things, especially when we live in a country full of scams where people constantly try to fool you like this. You'd think we'd develop a tolerance considering it's a constant thing, but nope, we're still just as stupid and naive as we were decades ago. If anything, we've gotten more naive.

Yes, and they do.

This is Twitter equivalent to fucking yourself down the bar skank ladder. I knew of Laura Loomer exclusively from Twitter when I was there and she was in a similar but less illustrious category as that guy who got caught pretending to be a black man, that weirdo whose profile pic looks like he bought a shirt too small in order to roid rage out of it, or that former Hercules idiot.

I think the step you're missing is 4chan

So, we’re not doing Section 230 anymore ?

That's a part of a US law, and as such doesn't throw a shrimp on the bar-b in Australia, mate.