My indirect harm litmus test would fall along the lines of like an OSHA style philosophy of regulation, for example for any kind of ledges we generally require rigid hand railings. If someone got hurt falling off a ledge at my workplace sure I didn’t do anything to cause it, but I’d still be on the hook for their injury because I didn’t take the required steps to reasonably prevent unnecessary injury.
Was that when a bunch of libertarians flooded a town as new residents, dismantled the municipal government and ended up being overrun by bears because they didn’t lock up their garbage cans after dismantling the requirements to lock up garbage cans?
Personally I believe flip flopping and changing your mind are 2 very different things, flip flopping is making an appearance of change in response to social pressures, ie “I need to appeal to this specific group of voters” or “I’m suffering backlash for something I said” where as changing your mind is “I’ve learned something I didn’t know before and I am changing as a result”
Penn Gilette has always seemed to be driven by a level of honesty and compassion and valued the freedom to choose where to direct that compassion. I think earlier on he viewed other libertarians as having the same level of honest compassion as he does but over time it’s become more and more clear that libertarians are overwhelmingly selfish rich white guys who don’t want to be called Repuiblicans.
I mean in the early 2000s he was calling bullshit on the hysteria over the vaccine autism link saying the alternative of kids dying to preventable diseases is so much worse. He even gave the tenuous link a benefit of the doubt and accepted that even if they did cause autism,t he alternative is so much worse.
I’m all for accountability and yes there should have been repercussions for Hilary Clinton for using a private email server but in 2016 Republicans used the emails as a cudgel to keep scoring points and drag out investigation after investigation and hearing after hearing to keep the buttery males in the news cycle and keep constant attention on smearing her and making her seem like the incompetent evil mastermind behind benghazi and the pizza parlor and the adrenochrome.
We go high. They go low. And when they go low, they win elections.
And it’s not even a good search engine either. It just spits out sarcastic jokes from barely up voted reddit posts.
To use a real world example of anarchism in action, shopping carts in a parking lot. I’m doubtful anyone has said “you have to return your shopping cart to a cart return” but the generally people do return their shopping carts. There’s also people in vests that come around and clean up the parking lot of loose shopping carts. Sometimes people might offer to pass off a cart they just finished using to someone else, or maybe even snag and extra errant cart on their way to cart return. There’s no heirarchy, no authority on high dictating the rules, just people doing their thing and generally following the rules but there is someone who is paid to make sure things get cleaned up when the inevitability of stupidity happens.