Yesterday, I was walking in the neighborhood, and I encountered one of our neighbors whom I know. I have a friendly relationship with him, and I like him, and he and his wife have been here for some time and are friendly with other BP residents I know and like. I don't know him well, but enough that he and I recognize each other, greet each other, and enjoy talking together, for the short intervals that present themselves.
The last time I saw him, he happened to mention that his sociopolitical leanings and identification are "libertarian." I tried to keep it in mind to stop by his house one day, to ask more about this, but I got busy. I never got around to it until we encountered each other yesterday. I told him I wanted to ask him at some point about libertarians (by which I intended to mean he and I should meet up some time -- over coffee, wine, dinner, or whatever --- but we wound up having a substantial piece of our conversation right there. I ran out of time to finish my walk, because I had appointments, and he continued on with his. But we talked about a number of things, and he took my e-mail address to send me some things he thought I might be interested to consider. He's opposed to the government, and especially to agencies whose initials are three letters, as he put it. He dislikes the FDA more than most or all. We got to talking about COVID, which he believes is not real, and he asked me what I thought of ivermectin as a treatment (for a condition he doesn't think is real anyway?). I'm not in favor, but he mentioned studies that have been done. We talked about other drug studies, and I told him that meta-analyses have special value. He said he would send me an e-mail about a meta-analysis of ivermectin.
I really do like this guy. I appreciate him, and I respect his opinions. As he and I said, that doesn't mean we have to agree with each other. So he did, in fact, send me several e-mails that came from youtube. They were about various things.
So, back to libertarians. As I said, I don't really understand their theory. I told that to my friend, and he explained it as he himself understood it. I know libertarians are generally opposed to the government, and that they caucus with Republicans. This is a curiosity, because Republicans, who say they, too, are opposed to the government, are really in favor of very big government. They like a government that can tell you if you have to have children, whom you can marry, who can vote, who can't live in this country (now that they live here), and they invent the idea that Americans are free to own guns. They want a government big enough to invent that idea. They want a government that likes to execute Americans, often under extremely questionable circumstances. My friend and I were standing in the street, pausing our neighborhood walks, which were in different directions, so we didn't get a chance to talk about these areas.
But my friend did say that libertarians do not think the government should make the rules it does. I asked him if that would mean, for example, that people should not have to honor setbacks when they build on their properties. This, according to my friend, would be an exception. Oh, so it's a matter of degree. I wonder who libertarians think should decide which issues are exceptions. The same, apparently, is true of speed limits, traffic lights, and STOP signs. Yes, of course someone -- the government -- has to make those assessments and rules.
But not necessarily many more. According to my friend, the government should not control health and safety aspects regarding private businesses. For example, according to my friend, suppose he wants to open a restaurant. The public can choose if they like the meals he serves. And if they don't, they don't have to come back. But I asked what if it's not that they don't like the taste of the food, or if they get a stomach ache -- an example my friend gave of a reason not to choose to come back. What if his restaurant is unsanitary enough that patrons die? It will be little comfort to the survivors and family of diners who died just not to eat there any more. (We were getting into the dreaded FDA territory.)
I also explained that the public -- consumers -- cannot evaluate the "health care" system, because they are not trained to know enough about it. I agreed that the system we use, which includes the FDA and CDC, is imperfect, but it's better than no system, or pretending to educate yourself by watching TV advertising, or looking things up online, and if we took out the private money that corrupts politics, we'd have a good system.
It was a few hours later that I received some e-mailed videos. I watched about three or four of them, which was almost all of them. One was an Australian woman who had been a conventional medical doctor for about 20 years, until she traded in her medical career for a youtube channel, and was explaining that polio is not caused by a virus, but by DDT, and the whole polio virus scam was the product of the Rockefellers. She showed graphed timelines. She said everything the Rockefellers, and the American health care industry, said was wrong. It was all lies. But she seemed to be confusing viruses with bacteria, and dismissed the idea of a virus as the cause of polio because you can't see viruses. (True. They're extremely small, and require an electron microscope to be seen. So, since they're hard to see, and are not bacteria, which are also too small to be seen without a microscope, then they can't cause illness?) It turns out that this woman, and featured people in the other videos, were all conspiracy theorists. As is always the case, they counter commonly accepted beliefs with something else. You either believe them -- about polio really being caused by DDT, or HIV not really being the cause of AIDS (that was another video) -- or you don't. The guy who won a Nobel Prize for possibly/reportedly discovering polymerase chain reaction, and who believed in astrology and the paranormal, but who didn't believe HIV caused AIDS, and who used his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to complain that his girlfriend broke up with him, was another video. And then, there was a British guy, who talked like he might have been a medical doctor, and who presented the promised meta-analysis about ivermectin. Actually, he sort of presented three or four of them. The one on which he spent the most time had a lot of flaws in it, and he wasn't sure how valid it was. Another was dismissed as "rubbish." Two others, from the NIH and WHO (right, two organizations, one from the US government, that have three letter initials) took a very dim view.
So, the question still is what fuels the libertarian movement. Mistrust of government, for sure. And frankly, I don't disagree, in large part. As I told our neighbor, the problem with government is that electeds get bought off with lobbying and campaign contributions, and their constituents are the donors, not the public. But once you dismiss the government, what do you have left? People who run for office campaign (not in BP any more, but generally). You can know about them. They find themselves in debates with other people, and you can judge who comes across better, and makes more sense. But for the tiny sample of libertarians I know (one), that gets displaced by people who are either unknown, or they're one or another form of crackpot. And of course, the endless world of conspiracy theories.
I think I lost an acquaintance/friend yesterday in an unrelated discussion. He is enraged at Hamas, because of a video he sent me talking about Hamas' shocking sexual and physical abuse, and mutilation and murder, of Israeli women starting on October 7, and it's perfectly fine with him if all Palestinians are annihilated. The video was very disturbing, although not for the reason you might think. The video was centered on a woman who was the moderator, and she was interviewing a number of Israelis, some of whom were women who themselves had been abused on or after October 7, and some of whom were a version of first responders. The degree of composure was beyond creepy. And at one point, one of the first responder-type men showed the moderator photographs taken on his phone, of Israeli women mutilated and murdered in various ways. (He took photographs?) The moderator, still largely disturbingly composed, said "oh, my 'god'" a couple of times. But the photographs were never shown on camera to people watching this documentary. The guy who reportedly took the photographs saw them. The moderator saw them. Why not show them to the people you want to inform, influence, recruit? When I told my apparently former acquaintance/friend that the documentary looked staged, he became enraged, and said he never again wanted to talk to me about this. He dismissed me as "delusional." (Interestingly, toward the end of the video -- it's possible my erstwhile friend missed this -- they said that 1) over 100 hostages held by Hamas were released at the end of November, during a ceasefire, and 2) that according to the women who told their stories in this documentary, the women who were not released were more mistreated than the ones who were released. My erstwhile friend asked me what I would do. I said that if I could get back over 100 hostages by having a ceasefire, and if I should worry even more about the hostages I didn't get back, and if my real goal wasn't simply to annihilate all Palestinians, and if I didn't want to sacrifice any more hostages, I would have extended the ceasefire, or immediately begun another one, or have one now. He didn't respond.)
It's not a lot different, it seems, about things like libertarianism, or the MAGA cult. You attach yourself to something fringy and fragile, and disqualify everything else.
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