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So you're not a libertarian, but you feel resentful that you've been labeled as less than a principled libertarian. No doubt you'll also resent not being called an observant Muslim, or an implication that you had a less-than-stellar academic record at the University of Padua.
So let's address one of your examples. I honestly lost a track of who deserved how much tat so I'm just gonna stick with the first one.
This assumes that your opponents are the children, while you picture yourself as the adult. This strikes me as wishful thinking. At best, these are two co-equal parties, neither of which has strict escalation dominance. At worst, this scenario is the reverse: a child, tired of being spanked, sees that just this once, his father has bent over to pick something up, and now he has the chance to spank his father and see how he feels getting spanked for a change! Do you think that any father, spanking a child he found to be acting out, has been hit back by the child and thought "Now I understand how it feels, I guess I should stop spanking him, peace has been achieved in our time."
Because this isn't a permanent turning of the tables, it is a momentary advantage to the right. For completely random reasons, for this moment, the right has a limited power to hit back. What scalps have they taken in the process? Not nearly enough to deter their enemies, but enough to lose the moral high ground in the eyes of people who think it is acceptable to make any kind of joke you please. I'm cancellable either way for a party with sufficient surveillance of my life: I've made nigger jokes and I've made jokes about politicians deserving death. Hell, I've made serious philosophical arguments about trans people and justifying the assassination of politicians, call the thought police! I may not be the perfect Libertarian, but I am going to note how people behave.
When the child hits his father, he won't cause his father to change his mind about spankings. He won't inflict enough pain on his father that his father will be deterred from hitting him in the future. What he will do is convince onlookers that his father was probably correct to hit him, even retroactively, because clearly a kid that would hit his parent is acting out and needs to be put in line.
Well, sure, if you intentionally cut out the part where I say I do somewhat identify with libertarianism regardless (in that I by no means discount the abundant importance of liberty as a crucial value), even if I don't consider myself an absolute dogmatist (though realistically I'm probably still more libertarian than much if not most of the US population), then I guess my words do sound somewhat stupid, don't they? I'm not a dogmatic "animal rights" supporter either, but yeah I'd probably chafe as well if you suggested that my viewpoints mean that I'm not generally a principled opponent of random dog slayings too. (But yes, if left-wingers came specifically at right-wingers' dogs, part of the solution would be...)
And in fact, though I'm certainly not a communist to any degree, I would still object if you suggested that "principled communists" should oppose something for spurious reasons that have nothing to do with communism. That's just called defending reason.
In any case I will note for the record that other than trying to snark at me with a "gotcha" about me not wanting to box myself in as whatever your definition of "principled libertarian" is (which you probably aren't either for many definitions I could come up with, as I'll demonstrate below), you did nothing to challenge my claim that retaliation is perfectly compatible with and in fact necessary in libertarianism.
It's rather humorous that you ask this as if it's inconceivable, because in a more accurate (as an analogy) and only very slightly tweaked formulation of your scenario, the answer is absolutely... yes! Many physically abusive parents have definitely been chastened by their children showing them that they are grown enough to now beat the parent's ass instead. It's as common of an anecdote as it is a media trope, the 13-17 year old boy who gives his rough stepdad his first black eye to fiercely let him know that he's never going to hurt him or mom again.
Now you may protest that you were talking about presumably justified spankings (assuming spanking can be justified, as much research on childhood discipline says it can't) here, not physical abuse, but since the referent in the analogy is leftist "cancellation" (which I believe even your own argument admits is unwarranted), my change for it to be physical abuse instead of mere spanking (which would be more akin to some neutral, order-keeping activity of an official authority like a cop or judge) is more accurate to the real case the analogy references. (It's worth nothing that in the real scenario there is also nothing analogous to the right coming after the left merely because it happened to come across themm innocently bent over (unlike the innocent gamers who really were doing not much other than enjoying their preferred medium when leftists attacked them in one of the earliest shots of the culture war, Gamergate) as opposed to, you know, openly cheering on the assassination of their current political leader...)
So yes, if you're a child who is unfairly physically abused a parent, whether it's in the ostensible form of spankings or not, you should absolutely, definitely beat that abusive parent's ass in return as soon as reasonable to try to deter them into stopping. And I certainly question the morality of anyone who is against that statement on a moral level (as opposed to saying on a tactical level that it's not a wise time for it yet).
Along the lines of my parentheses, you might further object to this that the right cannot be sure that it has truly become a big enough child to hold off its parent for good. A little temporary retribution now, no matter how satisfying, might just lead to a bigger, angrier ass whoopin' from daddy later, right? But that is merely a question of tactics, not ethics. Who is the parent, who is the child, and if the child has become large enough to challenge the parent-- that is all still to be decided. Yet it's a well-known fact of martial strategy that you can lose a war by being too passive and not taking advantage of a situation just as much as you can lose it by being too eager to take advantage of one. Evaluating the risk/reward, I think the opportunity here is worthwhile. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but again that's not a moral judgment.
Again, I completely question not only the morality but in fact the "principled libertarian" bona fides (given the inherently hierarchical and coercive nature of parental authority over children, though I won't be as much of a shit (yet) as to question you if you're allowed to consider yourself a "principled libertarian" if you're not against it) of anyone who sees a child driven to physical violence against their own parent and automatically assumes the child is 100% in the wrong without appropriate additional context.
Yes, we've apparently lost the "moral high ground" in the eyes of "principled libertarians" who, in my reckoning, seem to think something at least like the equivalent of that you should be allowed to physically assault your kids with impunity and them fighting back at all is merely automatic proof that they deserved it in the first place (which I think is a reasonably fair interpretation of your words in the quote above the most recent). Somehow I think we'll live.
Well, I guess we'll see what happens then. One set of facts about the world will turn out to be correct, but not for years.
Okay, great, as long as you're not sticking to your story that retaliation is incompatible with any notion of libertarianism. Also don't automatically assume the child is wrong in conflicts between child and parent; some parents are legitimately abusive.
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It is probably also worth pointing out that, for males, the ability and willingness to do this (to parental figures or to authority more generally) is the ultimate dividing line between child (who can't and aren't) and adult (who can and will).
For females, this dividing line comes when they can successfully convince an adult male to exercise that capacity for violence on their behalf.
If your opponent has more capacity for violence than you it will result in your subhumanization/demotion to child (relative to the more powerful) 100% of the time given infinite time, though whether anyone happens to care is another question entirely.
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