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Notes -
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
Awesome! I'm flattered.
To be frank with you, I think most of these are truisms, behind which thornier propositions are hiding. The thorny propositions mostly involve the use of violence or threats of violence against our neighbors, to compel them to behave ways that we believe are beneficial. You and I do not necessarily disagree about what is beneficial. What I suspect we disagree about is the intrinsic harm in using threats of force, including government force, against fellow human beings. For example,
I'm not attacking anyone at the moment. I disagree with progressivism, while I have disdain and enmity for wokeness. For example, I probably disagree with your position on "trans rights", and on most of the topics you mentioned -- but I presume you hold those positions with an eye toward the benefit of humanity at large, that you are open to changing your mind, and that you are interested in calmly listening to counterarguments. I also presume you hold those positions in good faith, and would continue to hold them even if it cost you something.
I do not make those same presumptions about people who have shown themselves to be woke authoritarians. What distinguishes them is a feeling of being entitled to be agreed with and obeyed, concomitant resistance to dialog, and a penchant for obsequious, opportunistic bandwagoning for social and material gain.
Thank you in turn for this reply.
As I've now told others in this thread, my intent with this comment was not to launch into object-level debates on the progressive 'articles of faith' I listed. It's certainly not to rehash the Root Question of Libertarianism, interesting though I find it. It was specifically to hash out whether you genuinely thought extreme progressivism could be separated from wokeness, and whether you genuinely thought the latter a more pressing enemy to defeat than the former - in which case, again, I would recommend making sure to distinguish the ends and the means more carefully than you had done in the OP. Your last two paragraphs lay it out quite nicely.
That being said, wading into a few of these questions without quite diving head-first into them, I also doubt that my disagreements with most conservatives boil down to my being less of a libertarian than they are. Some sort of Rand-by-way-of-Kant view that climate change may very plausibly cause human extinction within a few decades; but that's still no excuse to resort to forced taxation, and if we die because the funds couldn't be raised any other way, so be it,…… is not a take I've very often encountered in the wild, I'll say that much.
And indeed, with regards to policy hot-takes on trans rights, my leeriness of state violence is essential to one of the "controversial status quo policy [I] endorse": i.e. I think trans women criminals should, in fact, go to women's prisons if they want, if we are to have gender-segregated prisons at all. "We can't do that," you cry: "they'll rape the cis female inmates". The common riposte from trans advocates is "how dare you suggest a trans woman could be a rapist", of course, but I think that misses the point by a country mile.
No - I regard the prevalence of that objection as a scathing indictment of the entire American prison system, one which calls into question its very legitimacy as an arm of the justice system. If the State is going to commit such a direct violation of the personal freedom of its citizens as "locking them in little grey rooms for years at a time", I consider "guaranteeing that more vulnerable inmates will not be raped while in custody" to be a pretty low bar to clear before I'll even entertain the possibility that such actions are morally justifiable for the greater good of society. If female prisoners truly are so totally at the mercy of a trans inmate, then they are also at the mercy of a lesbian rapist who works out, and that is flatly unacceptable. Society should fix that. Imperatively. And once it is fixed, the objection against putting trans prisoners where they want to go dissolves.
To round back to my original point, as you can see, I hold this position very strongly, and I hold it as an extension of underlying moral principles on which it seems you can find common ground. So you can probably imagine how jarring it was to see it listed quite casually in a list of "crazy ideas" which no non-mind-virus-infected progressive could possibly hold in good faith.
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