Rottcodd

Cadbury Mini Eggs.

And any decent quality or better saltwater taffy.

They never really did.

It was all, always, just about themselves. They claimed to love the country because they just saw it as a rightful extension of themselves, and they claimed to love democracy because they just saw it as the process by which they got what they wanted.

Now that they're faced with the fact that the country necessarily also accommodates other people and that democracy means that other people can get what they want, they have no reason left to pretend that they ever really valued either one.

So they're instead diving headfirst into xenophobic fascism, in the hope that they can recreate a world in which the country exists only for them and the government serves only their interests.

The idea of a libertarian party has always been a bit self-contradictory, though not entirely. The basic idea of libertarianism (narrowly defined - not the broader use of the term in things like the political compass) is specifically to minimize but not entirely eliminate government. That's what distinguishes it from anarchism.

So there's necessarily an immediate issue - which specific functions of government need to be kept in its minimized form? And that's where a party (or something like it) can legitimately come into play. It's still a bit self-defeating though, since such a party obviously should be sharply limited in scope and influence, but that's not the nature of hierarchical organizations. It's not that the idea is immediately contrary to the espoused ideals of the movement, but that it pretty much inevitably will one day grow into something that is.

I don't and never have held with no-true-scotsmanning the supposed wing alignment of whatever it is that one or another person thinks needs to be kept in a "libertarian" system. I always leaned much more toward the left than the right as far as that goes, but I never felt any particular threat from those (the majority even 40 or 50 years ago) who leaned to the right more than the left. Like me, they were fundamentally simply opposed to the whole idea of institutionalized hierarchy, but believed that some amount of it was unavoidable, so they, like me, were prepared to argue for their preference, rather than just taking the fundamentally authoritarian position of, "This is the way it's going to be because we say so, and if you oppose us, we'll shoot you."

I think that the transition to the latter stage was inevitable regardless of which wing the US movement leaned toward. It's not really a trait of the right or the left per se, but a trait of the dominant group, when it's reached the point that its dominance is so well-established that it comes to be seen as a justified state rightfully defended. And unfortunately, as history has shown repeatedly, both political wings are entirely able to reach that point, and at that point, the specific ideology doesn't even really matter any more, since the actual point of the organization is protecting and furthering its own privilege and power, and ideology just determines the rhetoric with which they surround that entirely self-serving endeavour.

Or more simply, I think that if US libertarianism had come to be dominated by left-wingers rather than right-wingers, it's likely that all that would mean in the long run is that the current version of it would be dominated by tankies instead of... whatever the current lot should be called (neo-feudalists? anarcho-fascists? gun nuts? mall ninjas?)

I guarantee that the ADA works for whoever is the biggest source of revenue, and thus the biggest funder of executive salaries.

That's just how it is in a system of hierarchical organizations. The executive positions inevitably come to be held by people who have come to hold those positions because they were the most willing and able to do absolutely whatever it takes to fight and claw and scheme and backstab their way into them. And those people not only aren't inclined to serve any interest other than their own - they necessarily aren't even equipped to. If they had any actual integrity, decency or empathy, they wouldn't have been able to do everything they did to win the competition for the position they now hold, and it would've gone to some other scheming, manipulating, self-serving psychopath.

And thus, we end up with something like this. Inevitably.

It's not surprising at all.

The Libertarian party has never been particularly libertarian (I discovered that when I briefly worked for them back in the '80s).

For a while there, through the 90s, the libertarian movement in the US was still relatively libertarian, which is to say, advocates for the liberty of each and all, and it was fairly common to see a distinction made between "libertarians" - advocates of the ideology - and "Libertarians" - followers of the party, who were pretty much just misled idealists and the opportunists who were misleading them.

That all started to change with 9/11 and the Bush presidency, as the movement as a whole started shifting toward right-wing authoritarianism and the party stopped pretending that it had ever been anything else.

Even then though, there was still a vestige of true libertarianism here and there.

That ended though when the GOP co-opted the Tea Party movement and transformed it from a series of protests against Bush's Wall Street bailouts to a traveling right-wing carnival of hate. Virtually overnight, any pretense that US libertarians valued individual liberty (other than their own) entirely vanished, and the few remaining genuine advocates of liberty abandoned the movement.

At this point, the US libertarian movement as a whole has morphed entirely into an especially toxic version of right-wing authoritarianism, and I would fully expect them to support whoever seems most likely to let them shoot people. And that's Trump.

Nicely clarified.

Yes - the way I said it leaves the possibility that they have to pay at minimum their profit, and no - that should not be the case. They should have to pay at minimum their total revenue.

This shouldn't be an exception - it should be the rule.

At the very least, companies should be fined every single cent that they made off of something criminal, and really, they should be fined much more than they made.

If they're fined less than they made off of it, it's not even really a fine. It's just the government taking a cut of the action.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn talked about exactly that in the USSR in Gulag Archipelago.

He said that in the entire time he was in the gulags, he never met one single person who hadn't been legitimately tried and convicted of an actual crime. And the key was exactly what you describe - the Soviet laws were so extensive and byzantine that whenever any official wanted to disappear somebody, all they had to do was investigate them enough to figure out what laws they'd inevitably broken, then try them for that.

That's how authorotarian scumbags implement a police state while maintaining a superficial appearance of justice and the rule of law.

And it's guaranteed that American authoritarian scumbags know that.

The US economy will be much worse than it is already, the country will be at war and the government will be cracking down on civil unrest.

Sort of.

More it's just the way I've pretty much always been. Before I was even really aware of it, I apparently figured out that I couldn't control the outside world but I could control how I reacted to it, so that was what I focused on. One could sort of say that I did it simply because it made sense to me, but even that makes it sound more conscious than it was. It's more that it just never occurred to me to do things any other way.

It was only much later that I discovered that there was a philosophy called "stoicism" that advocated that.

"You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength." - Marcus Aurelius

I recognize that the universe is so vast that it's likely that life forms other than us exist in it, but that's the extent of it.

I've seen no verifiable evidence that they in fact do, so I don't "believe" that they do.

Really, I don't "believe" in much of anything for which there is no verifiable evidence. I don't even understand how that works - how it is that other people apparently do. It's not a conscious choice or anything - it's just appears that there's a set of requirements that must be met before the position of "belief" is triggered inside my mind, and one of those requirements is verifiable evidence. Without that, the state of "believing" just isn't triggered, and it's not as if I can somehow force it, so that's that.

As far as I can see, governments are comprised almost entirely of psychopaths, opportunists, charlatans and fools, so I see little likelihood that they possess concealed knowledge regarding any nominal extraterrestrial life. First, and most simply, if they did possess any such knowledge, it's near certain that somebody would've blabbed something by now.

Beyond that though, I think it's exceedingly unlikely that any alien life form capable of traveling interstellar distances would, on arriving on the Earth, seek out contact with a government, much less limit its contact to a government. If they're that advanced, it can only be the case that they, in their own development, either never bought into the flatly ludicrous and clearly destructive idea of institutionalized authority or overcame it before it inevitably destroyed them, and in either case, I don't see any reason why they would lend any credence to our mass delusion that this one subset of humanity forms a specially qualified and empowered elite that rightly oversees everyone else's interests. That's our delusion - not theirs.