[tpaine]

You troll:

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is a duck: you folks have a fearless leader who serves as a 'fountainhead' of indisputable truth, you make up your own specialized terminology to capture concepts peculiar to your, er, philosophy;

Your, "er", bit reminds me of another peculiar FR anti-libertarian, -Mojo-, long since banned. He too loved snide asides. -- Any relation?

Caught the implied threat when you brought up Mojo.

You did? A threat? Weird.

I guess you're implying that I'll be booted from the forum should I insist upon taking issue with the irresponsible laissez-faire morality of the libertarians--particularly when it comes to the legalization of drugs--or the downright wackiness of the Objectivist crowd.

Not at all. Mojo was booted because he couldn't control his pejorative trolling of ~everyone~. He was slightly, 'er', wacky that way.

e.g., 'communitarians', you shrilly cry foul when forced to argue that philosophy on its merits,

Not true, I welcome debate on libertarians vs communitarians, as do most of us here at FR.

and--just as Scientology, for example, claims legitimacy by describing itself a religion--Ayn Rand acolytes claim legitimacy by framing themselves as Constitutional conservatives.

I've yet to see anything posted by you that counters such libertarian legitimacy.

As an aside, your piling on of previous posts with every response is getting rather tiresome.

It is necessary because you like to mischaracterize what was actually written. If you would learn how to present your counter-arguments, this could be avoided.

Is wearing your opponents down with sheer repetition a a debating tactic encouraged by the high command at Objectivist Central?

No, its a way to keep trolls honest, and on point.

That's what, twice, three times you've made the troll accusation? Why?

Because that is what you're doing. This is a WOD thread, and you're trolling for a flame war about libertarians.

Because I think Ayn Rand is full of baloney? Whatever it is that her worshipfulness preached, it wasn't remotely conservative.

So you claim, an admitted 'majority rules community standards' type anti-conservative yourself. -- Our Constitutional principles 'rule' in the USA.

I've been on-point, sport, consistently throughout.

Bashing libertarians is on point?

If you truly believe I'm a troll (although a troll for whom, I'd be curious to know), then take action. Threats bore me.

No "threats" to you have been made. And calm yourself, as I don't use 'abuse' to win arguments.

[Rembrandt_fan]

You wrote, "Bashing libertarians is on point?"

In my view, libertarians occasionally have something to bring to the party--their staunch defense of personal liberty and loathing of big brother-type governance is refreshingly free of internal contradictions--they're nothing if not consistent; however, libertarian insistence upon freedom as an idealized absolute ignores the point of government and governance in the first place--an arrangement wherein boundaries upon behavior are established for the good of the whole. It's all or nothing with a libertarian, who--at least in this regard--has more in common with socialists than they would like to admit. The thing is, Americans as a people don't like extremes, left or right, which pretty much explains the electoral appeal of socialists and libertarians.

I look at the Ayn Rand-worshipping crowd, on the other hand, as a radical fringe group that calls itself conservative in order to cloak itself in mainstream respectability. Their ideal--at least from what one can gather from Fearless Leader's essays and novels--resembles a kind of technocracy led by Hank Reardon- and John Galt-like ubermenschen. Which is fine, I suppose, if one is a John Galt or Hank Reardon in such a world, but few are. So what about the rest, the not-so-bright and the not-so-inventive and the not-so-beautiful? More importantly, what about those who disagree, should an Ayn Rand-inspired polity somehow come about? I would imagine the same thing that has happened to malcontents and misfits in authoritarian states throughout history. So much for freedom in such in a world.