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Harley "Griff" Lofton's avatar

I really like the efforts made by "The Unpopulist" but really the comments section is simply too weird. Other than taking an opportunity to engage in 2 minutes of hate on a daily basis by a handful of discontents I don't see anything much here that seriously engages with the content presented and makes no effort to actually advance any sort of dialogue.

As far as I can tell the general orientation "The Unpopulist" tends toward the libertarian perspective. Hardly shills for "the left" as I keep reading in the comments.

My own experience has taught me to ignore anything where terms like "the right" "the left" "woke" are used as shorthand (without qualification) or used as a blanket way of dismissing inconvenient people. Such terms can be used WITH qualification but generally in the "antisocial media" universe they never are.

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Rajat Sirkanungo's avatar

Wonderful article! I consider myself a social democrat or social liberal, so basically left wing. I have much more respect for good faith CATO libertarians (like Alex Nowrasteh, Tom Palmer) or classical liberals than "paleolibertarians" like Lew Rockwell. The way I distinguish good faith libertarians from bad faith libertarians is how much anti-immigration they are, for example, if they are nearly open borders or open borders supporters, then they are good faith precisely because being generally pro-immigration or open borders is consistent with universalism or cosmopolitanism of liberalism, that is, all human individuals have human rights. This is foundational. The enlightenment ideologies - Liberalism and Socialism have always been cosmopolitan or universalist. The "paleolibertarians" give preference to this fuzzy collective rights concepts when they want to defend nativism, and interestingly these "paleolibertarians" would never argue for this collective rights stuff in any other context. I just consider paleolibertarians to be just nationalist conservatives who don't like the term "Conservatism" or "Nationalism."

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