Is it just me or do Libertarians tend to be Global Warming denialists.

It seems like there are a lot of Libertarians on the message boards I post and and that I talk to at my university that are died-in-the-wool denialists. Have other's have the same experience? I'm guessing they refuse to admit GW is caused by humansbecause it would force them to accept government regulation.

And most of them are hopping mad about the Oscar win. Their view -- it's a POLITICAL film, it's all BS, yadda yadda yadda.

Of course, when their children develop asthma and allergies -- THEN they will have an epiphany. It's only when it affects them PERSONALLY that they really look at things.

It's only when it affects them PERSONALLY that they really look at things.

Not a lick of compassion or understanding for anyone but themselves.

Of course they usually also have a slavish devotion to the divinity of the free market - and since there is no free market solution to the climate crisis, logically global warming can't exist, because the market can fix anything that exists.

They are like the Marxist-Leninists who disregard anything that violates their dogma as "bourgeois propaganda."

Go off the grid and don't buy stuff that contributes to global warming.

Make it economically profitable for companies to be environmentally responsible.

It's the same thing as sweatshops: if you're against them, then don't buy shit made in them.

Where the markets fall apart is in consumer interest and education. I have no clue where almost all my stuff came from, and I am too poor and/or lazy to give up my gasoline car. :shrug:

what a relief to get away from them all so full of themselves, their obvious agendas and their total denial about global warming.

They usually blame it on the sun, the cosmos and oh yes, Mars, etc. Conspiracy theories drive their rhetoric mostly and they think that IPCC is a new contraceptive device!lol. If you mention CO2 there is utter silence - they live in the dark ages vis a vis their knowledge of the subject.

Can't tell you how happy I am to be here and not there now..........:bounce: :loveya:

to pollute and eff up the world. the thing is about libits they are not about the greater good, it's all me me me.

Yep. Pretty much sums it up.

:eyes:

ultimately doomed to failure, in rather spectacular fashion. This violates their gospel.

They are as deeply in denial as the fundies are.

And they don't LIKE that.

There is a very boring character in the novel called "John Galt," who, if his speeches were more widely distributed, would drive the drug Ambien out of existence.

The novelist, Rand, describes Galt as a person who has invented a locomotive that runs on "static electricity." If you read between the lines, it is a perpetual motion machine.

It would have to move up a few notches to be bad science fiction.

The difference is that Hubbard's stories are simply and honestly BAD, farcical religious trappings notwithstanding. It's so blatantly silly that one can't help but laugh.

Rand's swill, OTOH, is the province of a million and one jut-jawed 19-year-olds who discovered the Answer To Everything within her endless pages, and many of them never have the good fortune to escape this stage.

it's as bankrupt (or outright stupid) an ideology as I've run across. They simply have NO understanding of how ecology or economics works in the real world.

And you bet- they tend to be global warming "skeptics."

Apparently I'm one of them:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/questionnaire

Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -8.75 (Left)
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.31 (Libertarian)


But in spite of my strong leanings in both of those directions I am certainly NOT a denier of global climate change (of which warming is but one highly distressing trend). I want to be able to live my own life in my own way, but I fully understand that in doing so I must not do any harm to others, and that includes conscious decisions to waste precious resources.

As for the people cited above, all I know about Ayn Rand is what I've read here on DU. I think someday I'll try and slog through Atlas Shrugged just to see what all the fuss is about, but looking at the size of the thing I gotta wonder. :) I completely agree that L. Ron Hubbard was a psycho and I feel kinda bad for those who have been swallowed up into his Scientology mess. Being on the Libertarian side of the scale, though, I doubt very much that I actually have much in common idealogically with either of these people.

I guess my whole point is that the term "Libertarian" gets tossed around a lot on DU in a very negative light, but that's not always fair. Just wanted to point that out and see if anyone agrees.

In the US, the term has been been pretty much hijacked by the right-wingers and the objectivists (Useless self-centred fuckers like Rand): It came as something of a surprise when I saw people ripping into libertarians on DU, since I've been carrying around the older European definition (which is a lot closer to a "proper" anarchist). Noam Chomsky may not be everybody's cup of tea, but at least he's a "proper" libertarian (in fact, he's a libertarian socialist, which sounds like an oxymoron these days.)

free enterprise without oversight allows capital to expand,
although labor produces that product that makes the capital for the capitalists. Which is out of their equation for discussion now.

Libertarians only think about liberty for the few, the clever and the chosen.
It is a new copout, one man, one company, one destiny we are not republicans now but man of liberty.
but corporations that rule the planet now are not liberty that Jefferson spoke about.


1775 June 26-July 6. "Our attachment to no nation upon earth should supplant our attachment to liberty." (Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, B.1.215) http://www.monticello.org/reports/quotes/liberty.html


"It's called the American Dream
you have to be asleep to believe in it"
George Carlin