Governments do useful things, and they acquire funding for that through taxes. Eventually, online goods and services were going to be taxed - everyone knew that. Nobody thought the state was going to just wither and die, leaving us an ugly return to barbarism..
You wouldn't steal a handbag You wouldn't steal a car You wouldn't steal a baby You wouldn't steal a policeman, and then steal his helmet You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet, and then send it to the policeman's grieving widow And then steal it again!
You *could* keep using batch files, but you're missing out on the ability to really structure your code, you're missing out on nice libraries that can handle some stuff you'd otherwise need to write yourself, and you lose the ability to easily do reasonable data manipulation. I was initially inclined to just suggest Perl (it's what I use), but really any of the three would be just fine. Batch file programming is too limiting - I'm sure you have at least some inclinations towards this as you're asking/.
Not really, it's just pragmatic. The GPL leads the world closer to where it would be without intellectual property protections. Those of us who don't respect intellectual property lose nothing substantial by the GPL's terms - we ignore the mechanisms as we would any other license. Practically, we gain in that the "encumberance" in the license is for things we consider illegitimate, and the people who believe in IP find the board begin to tilt towards where we wanted it to be in the first place. We already have a big enough viral amount of software to exist comfortably - if we can get the GPL on enough things (and eventually abandon the LGPL) and make it so useful as to be indespensible, we'll be able to have the next best thing to real IP abolition, and on the way we'll sink enough money out of the pro-IP industry (at least in software) to make it easier to fend off legal and other threats. That's the idea, anyhow.
I can understand why people might be uncomfortable with the idea of using mechanisms that we don't think should exist - it's murky waters in most cases, particularly in politics. In this case, it's almost entirely benign because the license terms don't take away anything we think people should have in the first place. To repeat a nice quip,
The "freedom to encumber" works is like the "freedom to punch someone"... They are both 'freedoms' that only exist at the expense of others. -- Gregory Maxwell
That "contract" was a political slogan that didn't really achieve anything. It might be worth covering in a political history class at the college level, but it's too small a detail to be worth noting in the primary school curricula.
Fair criticisms. I suppose one could go with an alternative of having centalization and use voting to guide the clauses rather than letting every developer roll their own license - that might be more workable. Still, the potential for confusion is still there and it might be more trouble than it's worth.
I understand that that's the case now, although I imagine anyone who wanted to venture into that realm would have targeted optional parts of a license with a triggerable twilight for those clauses (e.g. "this license has the following clauses that may be limited in scope, see $this_website for any loosening of this restrictions"). I don't know how legally workable that kind of thing is.
For a number of us, such things would be potentially acceptable if it worked well, but the mess of a simple implementation (like as you mention) is not worthwhile, just as the mess of the PETA license is not worth it at this point. There are ways to make things easy without a lawyer - creative commons did a good job in providing model licenses that are easily understood.
Still, I can understand that all this is maybe not worth the mess, and that it saves a lot of potential hassle and confusion by sticking to the licenses that address the particular harms relating to IP claims. I would be maximally happy if the socially conscious parts of the geek community would stick to the GPL (and its other FSF-written cousins) and possibly the BSD-sans-advertising-clause license. This whole "Open Source Definition" you've promoted might not be helping with the proliferation of licenses (although I should note that I do respect you as a public intellectual on the topic).
Exactly - these are reasonable concerns you raise. I don't think they're watertight, but there's a lot to be said for them as intuitions. The only area where I think you make a point that's a bit weak is the note that consensus is hard to reach - this is true, but people manage (and argue, and schism) this all the time, more or less.
It's possible to be speciesist without taking it to this extreme - we might imagine granting rights progressively as one approaches human-level intelligence, for example, or some kind of "respect interests of natural systems as a whole when and to the extent that they exhibit X properties". "Lesser concern" and "No concern" are not the same position.
I think you're confused about history - the Nazis were primarily recruited out of the Freikorps and found the socialists (SPD and leftwards) profoundly threatening to German society. They sold themselves to the German public as being the best hope against socialism. They never were "best buds" or even remotely friendly. Philosophically, the Nazis were reading Herder while the SDP were reading Voltaire (well, not exactly Voltaire, but you get the picture).
I don't think "liberal" or "conservative" apply very easily to political philosophies so alien to modern ones -- we'd be making a huge mistake considering either the Nazis to be close to Republicans or the SPD to the Democrats - Fascism and Socialism have always been minority philosophies in the US.
I don't think even your definition of the left versus the right is adequate - left and right are relational and more traditionally represent the forces of novelty versus tradition on any issue. If we move back to the time of the founding fathers, the Federalists were considered right-wing (conservative) and the Democratic-Republicans left-wing (liberal) despite the issues you mention hardly even being on the radar - they were considered such because the Federalists wanted a government that was more in line with European traditions while the D-R wanted to experiment with new social forms that emerged from contemporary philosophy. It took quite some time before we even settled on democracy and market systems.
I don't think PETA should be wading into the waters of making a new license - the mess they make in doing so is not worth the negligible benefit for the cause of animal welfare they're trying to serve.
If we had a time machine and could hop back in time to make initial versions of the GPL involve a broader cultural conscience, *maybe* this kind of thing would be appropriate, but it's too late now and adding another license that's likely to be incompatible with the GPL means that this is the license equivalent of "straight to videocasette".
Interesting - I wasn't aware of a French tradition for it. I've read Paine, but I assumed he was more of an isolated firebrand than part of a working tradition (not meaning firebrand in the entirely negative sense, but he offered a very forceful atheism that I both happen to mostly agree with and I note that his argument style was as forceful as his actual positions on the matter).
If you have any recommendations on other people in the French classical liberal tradition worth reading, I'd be happy to hear them.
Interesting. I haven't looked much at S3, and I was curious as to the origin of Google's terminology. Still, with APIs this nice, it doesn't look like it'd be hard to dive right into writing basic apps - kudos to Amazon for *not* doing what OP claims they did:)
Do you know if Google's APIs are exactly identical or just similar in spirit to Amazon's? Source-compatibility would be pretty nice.
The only nonintuitive thing is the name "bucket", which might be better called "zone" or "filesystem". Other than that, it looks like it provides just about what I'd expect of a high-level filesystem representation.
Sheesh, just think about what the complaints would be if they provided something closer to VFS-type mappings so people ended up commonly rewriting half of FUSE to get their data where they like.
I don't think it would be hypocritical - the idea that there's no principled objection to confiscation doesn't mean that there isn't one at all.
I didn't mean to say that you couldn't object at all, just that you couldn't consistently respond with force to resist the removal of a privilege, unlike the infringement of a right. If it really is a privilege then it can be revoked one way or another, even if certain procedures must be followed—if nothing else, those procedures are always subject to revision.
That's fair. I'm prepared to deal with that and I think it's right for society - too much enactment of other values hinges on it. I would prefer it be used sparingly and as predictably as possible, of course, in good and effective service of these other values.
I think society does make decisions and can be said to act as if it has a mind, for legal purposes.
That's an interesting perspective. I've never known "society" to be the defendant in a lawsuit, and when "society" acts it always seems to be some group of individuals who actually do the acting—often against other members of society, no less. I would be willing to recognize the possibility of collective decision-making, but only between voluntarily cooperating individuals, not society as a whole. I still reject the idea that society can "compromise", since the idea of getting true consensus from every member of society is laughable, but that's mostly a matter of semantics. My main point was simply that a decision accepted by a majority, but not by all those affected, is not voluntary in the manner which "compromise" would imply.
In this case we're working from different foundations. I doubt we can go any further on this point.
If regulation... would make a private abuse impossible or less likely, then not having that regulation is a potential demerit...
Agreed—but how do you define "abuse"? The whole idea of libertarianism is that property rights are strictly enforced; no negative externalities are permitted. So the only persistent negative externalities that would exist in a libertarian society are the ones which could not be prevented by private security, and were not repaid with full restitution after the fact. I acknowledge that such situations could exist, but the same can be said of other societies. Would the expected decrease in uncompensated crime be enough to offset the uncompensated aggression required to bring that about? I'm skeptical.
That's fair (or at least consistent) - I suspect there's some mix of broad categories of things that I would recognise as harms that you would not, or you would consider efforts to correct for them not worth the harm of coercion that would be needed. For example, I believe that the state-level restrictions on landlord-tenant contracts are a form of collective bargaining between prospective tenants and landlords and that they serve the public good, even should they effectively modify contracts after the fact. I suspect you'd disagree - I could iterate over the long history of English common law (that we've mostly inherited) that were designed to shape contracts to prevent specific abuses, but I believe you could plausibly and by your values fairly say that what I call abuse is not by your values abuse.
Thanks for satisfying my curiosity on you positions on those other matters - as I said I wasn't expecting to argue about them, I was mainly curious.
I like your approach. One of the strongest ways to defend our (complex) common law legal system from those favouring absolutely private contract is to examine the abuses that common law adapted itself to deal with - some of these are (mostly) in the past like company towns, but some are still topical today (like landlord-tenant relationships). In modern times most people don't need to read contracts as much as they might have had to do in the past because they're protected from many possible abuses, particularly depending on what goods/services are being exchanged - people might at first be tempted to agree with the libertarians on contracts until we can show them the specifics of how they benefit from the public system.
It's unfortunate that we have to do this kind of whirlwind tour of civics to people to help them have more "buy in" to modern society, but I think it's necessary to stave off ideas that would reenable abuses we've long put behind us.
I don't think you should be so quick to call libertarianism and classical liberalism the same thing. Classical liberalism is considerably more mild and loose than the very tight derivation libertarian (or anarchocapitalist) thought tends to have from its central logic. There's a certain similarity, and in comparison to other political philosophies they may seem reasonably close, but the style of thought and actual conclusions are different enough that they should generally be discussed as distinct entities.
Oh, as another friendly aside, in case you follow British politics, it's interesting to contrast the positions of Margaret Thatcher (a former British PM known as the "Iron Lady", who as a member of the Tories privatised a reasonably large portion of the British economy) and David Cameron (recently elected British PM, also of the Tories) on these matters - Thatcher was of a faction of the Tories that was like a moderate form of Libertarianism (this is a gross oversimplification) and famously took a stance against political language that referenced society. Cameron is of a different faction (more of a euroskeptical social conservativism with light leanings towards markets). The faction relations in the Conservative party are like a soap opera. The Liberal Dems too - they're a rather weird party consisting of a mix of socialists and lassiez-faire free market types (very pro-Euro).
Collapsing it down to these dimensions is a bit parochial though - they have issues and political divides that we don't, just as the current alignment of US politics is over issues quite different than those over which the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans fought initially.
I don't think it would be hypocritical - the idea that there's no principled objection to confiscation doesn't mean that there isn't one at all. Having legal traditions that state that property is a default and one needs a compelling social interest to merit its partial or complete surrender, with some associated legal traditions stating how high that bar has to be, is a very workable solution. This is reasonably close to what we have in practice in the US - while eminent domain is occasionally abused, it is usually pretty benign.
I think society does make decisions and can be said to act as if it has a mind, for legal purposes. It's significaltly more complex how it does this, usually through some mix of a mediated democratic process and legal traditions to temper that further. I recognise that you might prefer to phrase it that the system "effectively decides" these things rather than say that society decides it - I know that there's a distinction but I choose to use the terms knowing that there are caveats that separate them from actual individual decisions. Additionally, I recognise that democracy is not based on complete consent. This doesn't bother me that much (I am not in fact entirely committed to democracy - a perspective I've carried over from my libertarian days), largely because I don't see libertarian strong autonomy as a default position.
I think that if we're to fairly compare free market libertarian-autonomy societies with their alternatives, we should be willing to knock off points in any comparison for activities permitted by libertarian-autonomy societies that would be forbidden in others. If regulation (or different structure) would make a private abuse impossible or less likely, then not having that regulation is a potential demerit for the specific form of capitalism being considered even though it is private actors rather than the system itself (which is conveniently thinner by having little state control and thus unintuitive to blame for these failures - we have to (perspective-wise) reincorporate libertarianism with the structures it enables to judge it fairly).
I was kind of curious on your take regarding that last matter - it wasn't meant as a sparring point, just something I've been curious about. Libertarian philosophers (like Nozick in his early works) have never solidly agreed on the point and many libertarians I've known have had interesting discussions on the topic. Intellectual property, privacy rights, and a few other topics are interestingly divisive among libertarians, I've found. If you'd like to express your opinions briefly on those, I'd be interested to hear it (although I'm not sure I'd spar on those topics in response).
Slashdot Mirror
Sestak criminal? Do you know something we don't?
Governments do useful things, and they acquire funding for that through taxes. Eventually, online goods and services were going to be taxed - everyone knew that. Nobody thought the state was going to just wither and die, leaving us an ugly return to barbarism..
I think you can get a trophy on Steam for doing it.
It's from the IT Crowd - it's a parody of a well-known anti-pirating advert.
Looks like I messed up the quote a bit while typing that repetitive text .. "shoot a policeman".. oy.
You wouldn't steal a handbag
You wouldn't steal a car
You wouldn't steal a baby
You wouldn't steal a policeman, and then steal his helmet
You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet, and then send it to the policeman's grieving widow
And then steal it again!
You *could* keep using batch files, but you're missing out on the ability to really structure your code, you're missing out on nice libraries that can handle some stuff you'd otherwise need to write yourself, and you lose the ability to easily do reasonable data manipulation. I was initially inclined to just suggest Perl (it's what I use), but really any of the three would be just fine. Batch file programming is too limiting - I'm sure you have at least some inclinations towards this as you're asking /.
Not really, it's just pragmatic. The GPL leads the world closer to where it would be without intellectual property protections. Those of us who don't respect intellectual property lose nothing substantial by the GPL's terms - we ignore the mechanisms as we would any other license. Practically, we gain in that the "encumberance" in the license is for things we consider illegitimate, and the people who believe in IP find the board begin to tilt towards where we wanted it to be in the first place. We already have a big enough viral amount of software to exist comfortably - if we can get the GPL on enough things (and eventually abandon the LGPL) and make it so useful as to be indespensible, we'll be able to have the next best thing to real IP abolition, and on the way we'll sink enough money out of the pro-IP industry (at least in software) to make it easier to fend off legal and other threats. That's the idea, anyhow.
I can understand why people might be uncomfortable with the idea of using mechanisms that we don't think should exist - it's murky waters in most cases, particularly in politics. In this case, it's almost entirely benign because the license terms don't take away anything we think people should have in the first place. To repeat a nice quip,
The "freedom to encumber" works is like the "freedom to punch someone"... They are both 'freedoms' that only exist at the expense of others. -- Gregory Maxwell
That "contract" was a political slogan that didn't really achieve anything. It might be worth covering in a political history class at the college level, but it's too small a detail to be worth noting in the primary school curricula.
We either need the DOE to take control of this kind of thing, or we need the other states to be willing to go through this process for themselves.
Fair criticisms. I suppose one could go with an alternative of having centalization and use voting to guide the clauses rather than letting every developer roll their own license - that might be more workable. Still, the potential for confusion is still there and it might be more trouble than it's worth.
I understand that that's the case now, although I imagine anyone who wanted to venture into that realm would have targeted optional parts of a license with a triggerable twilight for those clauses (e.g. "this license has the following clauses that may be limited in scope, see $this_website for any loosening of this restrictions"). I don't know how legally workable that kind of thing is.
For a number of us, such things would be potentially acceptable if it worked well, but the mess of a simple implementation (like as you mention) is not worthwhile, just as the mess of the PETA license is not worth it at this point. There are ways to make things easy without a lawyer - creative commons did a good job in providing model licenses that are easily understood.
Still, I can understand that all this is maybe not worth the mess, and that it saves a lot of potential hassle and confusion by sticking to the licenses that address the particular harms relating to IP claims. I would be maximally happy if the socially conscious parts of the geek community would stick to the GPL (and its other FSF-written cousins) and possibly the BSD-sans-advertising-clause license. This whole "Open Source Definition" you've promoted might not be helping with the proliferation of licenses (although I should note that I do respect you as a public intellectual on the topic).
Cool, thanks. I'll read up on that when I get the chance.
Exactly - these are reasonable concerns you raise. I don't think they're watertight, but there's a lot to be said for them as intuitions. The only area where I think you make a point that's a bit weak is the note that consensus is hard to reach - this is true, but people manage (and argue, and schism) this all the time, more or less.
It's possible to be speciesist without taking it to this extreme - we might imagine granting rights progressively as one approaches human-level intelligence, for example, or some kind of "respect interests of natural systems as a whole when and to the extent that they exhibit X properties". "Lesser concern" and "No concern" are not the same position.
I think you're confused about history - the Nazis were primarily recruited out of the Freikorps and found the socialists (SPD and leftwards) profoundly threatening to German society. They sold themselves to the German public as being the best hope against socialism. They never were "best buds" or even remotely friendly. Philosophically, the Nazis were reading Herder while the SDP were reading Voltaire (well, not exactly Voltaire, but you get the picture).
I don't think "liberal" or "conservative" apply very easily to political philosophies so alien to modern ones -- we'd be making a huge mistake considering either the Nazis to be close to Republicans or the SPD to the Democrats - Fascism and Socialism have always been minority philosophies in the US.
I don't think even your definition of the left versus the right is adequate - left and right are relational and more traditionally represent the forces of novelty versus tradition on any issue. If we move back to the time of the founding fathers, the Federalists were considered right-wing (conservative) and the Democratic-Republicans left-wing (liberal) despite the issues you mention hardly even being on the radar - they were considered such because the Federalists wanted a government that was more in line with European traditions while the D-R wanted to experiment with new social forms that emerged from contemporary philosophy. It took quite some time before we even settled on democracy and market systems.
I should note that I support PETA's goals and have nuanced/partial support for ALF/ELF, I just don't think this could possibly be effective.
I don't think PETA should be wading into the waters of making a new license - the mess they make in doing so is not worth the negligible benefit for the cause of animal welfare they're trying to serve.
If we had a time machine and could hop back in time to make initial versions of the GPL involve a broader cultural conscience, *maybe* this kind of thing would be appropriate, but it's too late now and adding another license that's likely to be incompatible with the GPL means that this is the license equivalent of "straight to videocasette".
Interesting - I wasn't aware of a French tradition for it. I've read Paine, but I assumed he was more of an isolated firebrand than part of a working tradition (not meaning firebrand in the entirely negative sense, but he offered a very forceful atheism that I both happen to mostly agree with and I note that his argument style was as forceful as his actual positions on the matter).
If you have any recommendations on other people in the French classical liberal tradition worth reading, I'd be happy to hear them.
Interesting. I haven't looked much at S3, and I was curious as to the origin of Google's terminology. Still, with APIs this nice, it doesn't look like it'd be hard to dive right into writing basic apps - kudos to Amazon for *not* doing what OP claims they did :)
Do you know if Google's APIs are exactly identical or just similar in spirit to Amazon's? Source-compatibility would be pretty nice.
The only nonintuitive thing is the name "bucket", which might be better called "zone" or "filesystem". Other than that, it looks like it provides just about what I'd expect of a high-level filesystem representation.
Sheesh, just think about what the complaints would be if they provided something closer to VFS-type mappings so people ended up commonly rewriting half of FUSE to get their data where they like.
I don't think it would be hypocritical - the idea that there's no principled objection to confiscation doesn't mean that there isn't one at all.
I didn't mean to say that you couldn't object at all, just that you couldn't consistently respond with force to resist the removal of a privilege, unlike the infringement of a right. If it really is a privilege then it can be revoked one way or another, even if certain procedures must be followed—if nothing else, those procedures are always subject to revision.
That's fair. I'm prepared to deal with that and I think it's right for society - too much enactment of other values hinges on it. I would prefer it be used sparingly and as predictably as possible, of course, in good and effective service of these other values.
I think society does make decisions and can be said to act as if it has a mind, for legal purposes.
That's an interesting perspective. I've never known "society" to be the defendant in a lawsuit, and when "society" acts it always seems to be some group of individuals who actually do the acting—often against other members of society, no less. I would be willing to recognize the possibility of collective decision-making, but only between voluntarily cooperating individuals, not society as a whole. I still reject the idea that society can "compromise", since the idea of getting true consensus from every member of society is laughable, but that's mostly a matter of semantics. My main point was simply that a decision accepted by a majority, but not by all those affected, is not voluntary in the manner which "compromise" would imply.
In this case we're working from different foundations. I doubt we can go any further on this point.
If regulation ... would make a private abuse impossible or less likely, then not having that regulation is a potential demerit ...
Agreed—but how do you define "abuse"? The whole idea of libertarianism is that property rights are strictly enforced; no negative externalities are permitted. So the only persistent negative externalities that would exist in a libertarian society are the ones which could not be prevented by private security, and were not repaid with full restitution after the fact. I acknowledge that such situations could exist, but the same can be said of other societies. Would the expected decrease in uncompensated crime be enough to offset the uncompensated aggression required to bring that about? I'm skeptical.
That's fair (or at least consistent) - I suspect there's some mix of broad categories of things that I would recognise as harms that you would not, or you would consider efforts to correct for them not worth the harm of coercion that would be needed. For example, I believe that the state-level restrictions on landlord-tenant contracts are a form of collective bargaining between prospective tenants and landlords and that they serve the public good, even should they effectively modify contracts after the fact. I suspect you'd disagree - I could iterate over the long history of English common law (that we've mostly inherited) that were designed to shape contracts to prevent specific abuses, but I believe you could plausibly and by your values fairly say that what I call abuse is not by your values abuse.
Thanks for satisfying my curiosity on you positions on those other matters - as I said I wasn't expecting to argue about them, I was mainly curious.
Best wishes...
I like your approach. One of the strongest ways to defend our (complex) common law legal system from those favouring absolutely private contract is to examine the abuses that common law adapted itself to deal with - some of these are (mostly) in the past like company towns, but some are still topical today (like landlord-tenant relationships). In modern times most people don't need to read contracts as much as they might have had to do in the past because they're protected from many possible abuses, particularly depending on what goods/services are being exchanged - people might at first be tempted to agree with the libertarians on contracts until we can show them the specifics of how they benefit from the public system.
It's unfortunate that we have to do this kind of whirlwind tour of civics to people to help them have more "buy in" to modern society, but I think it's necessary to stave off ideas that would reenable abuses we've long put behind us.
I don't think you should be so quick to call libertarianism and classical liberalism the same thing. Classical liberalism is considerably more mild and loose than the very tight derivation libertarian (or anarchocapitalist) thought tends to have from its central logic. There's a certain similarity, and in comparison to other political philosophies they may seem reasonably close, but the style of thought and actual conclusions are different enough that they should generally be discussed as distinct entities.
Oh, as another friendly aside, in case you follow British politics, it's interesting to contrast the positions of Margaret Thatcher (a former British PM known as the "Iron Lady", who as a member of the Tories privatised a reasonably large portion of the British economy) and David Cameron (recently elected British PM, also of the Tories) on these matters - Thatcher was of a faction of the Tories that was like a moderate form of Libertarianism (this is a gross oversimplification) and famously took a stance against political language that referenced society. Cameron is of a different faction (more of a euroskeptical social conservativism with light leanings towards markets). The faction relations in the Conservative party are like a soap opera. The Liberal Dems too - they're a rather weird party consisting of a mix of socialists and lassiez-faire free market types (very pro-Euro).
Collapsing it down to these dimensions is a bit parochial though - they have issues and political divides that we don't, just as the current alignment of US politics is over issues quite different than those over which the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans fought initially.
Hoping this is at least an interesting aside :)
I don't think it would be hypocritical - the idea that there's no principled objection to confiscation doesn't mean that there isn't one at all. Having legal traditions that state that property is a default and one needs a compelling social interest to merit its partial or complete surrender, with some associated legal traditions stating how high that bar has to be, is a very workable solution. This is reasonably close to what we have in practice in the US - while eminent domain is occasionally abused, it is usually pretty benign.
I think society does make decisions and can be said to act as if it has a mind, for legal purposes. It's significaltly more complex how it does this, usually through some mix of a mediated democratic process and legal traditions to temper that further. I recognise that you might prefer to phrase it that the system "effectively decides" these things rather than say that society decides it - I know that there's a distinction but I choose to use the terms knowing that there are caveats that separate them from actual individual decisions. Additionally, I recognise that democracy is not based on complete consent. This doesn't bother me that much (I am not in fact entirely committed to democracy - a perspective I've carried over from my libertarian days), largely because I don't see libertarian strong autonomy as a default position.
I think that if we're to fairly compare free market libertarian-autonomy societies with their alternatives, we should be willing to knock off points in any comparison for activities permitted by libertarian-autonomy societies that would be forbidden in others. If regulation (or different structure) would make a private abuse impossible or less likely, then not having that regulation is a potential demerit for the specific form of capitalism being considered even though it is private actors rather than the system itself (which is conveniently thinner by having little state control and thus unintuitive to blame for these failures - we have to (perspective-wise) reincorporate libertarianism with the structures it enables to judge it fairly).
I was kind of curious on your take regarding that last matter - it wasn't meant as a sparring point, just something I've been curious about. Libertarian philosophers (like Nozick in his early works) have never solidly agreed on the point and many libertarians I've known have had interesting discussions on the topic. Intellectual property, privacy rights, and a few other topics are interestingly divisive among libertarians, I've found. If you'd like to express your opinions briefly on those, I'd be interested to hear it (although I'm not sure I'd spar on those topics in response).
Best wishes.