Quite the argument there. Maybe you could point out a single instance of liberalism not being "subverted" if you are so certain that it is a viable ideology.
You ask the impossible of him, fellow AIDS person.
Trying to put arbitrary bounds on liberalism, as he does, has always failed and will fail. Since he doesn't want to accept that liberalization is an unboundable process, his mind is simply forced to sanitize liberalism by positing that every conclusion that liberalism has reached with which he disagrees is simply the fault of 'subversion' by some other force, the 'Left'. Having persuaded himself of this, he can then live a life free from guilt for what it is doing today.
The 'Left' is simply the wastebasket into which classical liberals and libertarians dump their more modern, updated counterparts.
What they will never understand is that a clear line can be drawn from Locke through Marx to today. Positing that Locke, Paine, etc. belong to a different line altogether from Marx and his acolytes is remarkably disingenuous: Marx was all about expanding the Enlightenment and the ideals of the French and American Revolutions, that is, about expanding liberalism to include more than just landowning men. The last few centuries have simply witnessed its yet further expansion; having expanded now to encompass almost all that fits under the human umbrella, it is now expanding to the animal kingdom and beyond. Hence rivers with human rights, marriages between humans and trees, and so on.
Painting a line from Locke to Rawls, Rothbard, etc. without going through the 'socialists' is simply to paint a false view of history. Dewey and Popper are just two of those in the last century who seriously blur that faint line, the trivial differences, between the fraternal, deeply overlapping ideologies of liberalism and Marxism.
That was my intention. I was hoping he would attempt a rebuttal and come to the same conclusion you just so eloquently laid out. There are still way too many people on our side clinging to the "liberal" label due to their conditioning that it is synonymous with "good person".
If you start from the same assumptions, you are gonna end up in the same place. Tabula Rasa + NAP = communism, every time.
If you believe that all people are created equal, and then observe that they do not end up equal, you are half way to communism. It must then be some violation of the NAP that has occurred to induce this inequality. Thus your libertarians are just communist.
Compare that to the other alternatives: If the Tabula Rasa is invalid, then who cares if there is inequality? If the NAP is invalid, then who cares if people end up unequal, might makes right.
Could you point to a single instance of a government that has existed in perpetuity without changing from it's ideological foundation, by destruction from outside forces, or by collapse?
There is no political structure that wins all of human history.
Or are you going to point me to a monarchy that never became a tyranny and exists to this day?
Quite the argument there. Maybe you could point out a single instance of liberalism not being "subverted" if you are so certain that it is a viable ideology.
You ask the impossible of him, fellow AIDS person.
Trying to put arbitrary bounds on liberalism, as he does, has always failed and will fail. Since he doesn't want to accept that liberalization is an unboundable process, his mind is simply forced to sanitize liberalism by positing that every conclusion that liberalism has reached with which he disagrees is simply the fault of 'subversion' by some other force, the 'Left'. Having persuaded himself of this, he can then live a life free from guilt for what it is doing today.
The 'Left' is simply the wastebasket into which classical liberals and libertarians dump their more modern, updated counterparts.
What they will never understand is that a clear line can be drawn from Locke through Marx to today. Positing that Locke, Paine, etc. belong to a different line altogether from Marx and his acolytes is remarkably disingenuous: Marx was all about expanding the Enlightenment and the ideals of the French and American Revolutions, that is, about expanding liberalism to include more than just landowning men. The last few centuries have simply witnessed its yet further expansion; having expanded now to encompass almost all that fits under the human umbrella, it is now expanding to the animal kingdom and beyond. Hence rivers with human rights, marriages between humans and trees, and so on.
Painting a line from Locke to Rawls, Rothbard, etc. without going through the 'socialists' is simply to paint a false view of history. Dewey and Popper are just two of those in the last century who seriously blur that faint line, the trivial differences, between the fraternal, deeply overlapping ideologies of liberalism and Marxism.
That was my intention. I was hoping he would attempt a rebuttal and come to the same conclusion you just so eloquently laid out. There are still way too many people on our side clinging to the "liberal" label due to their conditioning that it is synonymous with "good person".
Name a single ideology that doesn't require a boundary condition.
Hint: look up Goddel's Incompleteness Theorem.
If you start from the same assumptions, you are gonna end up in the same place. Tabula Rasa + NAP = communism, every time.
If you believe that all people are created equal, and then observe that they do not end up equal, you are half way to communism. It must then be some violation of the NAP that has occurred to induce this inequality. Thus your libertarians are just communist.
Compare that to the other alternatives: If the Tabula Rasa is invalid, then who cares if there is inequality? If the NAP is invalid, then who cares if people end up unequal, might makes right.
Could you point to a single instance of a government that has existed in perpetuity without changing from it's ideological foundation, by destruction from outside forces, or by collapse?
There is no political structure that wins all of human history.
Or are you going to point me to a monarchy that never became a tyranny and exists to this day?