There aren't many people who are willing to evaluate their entire political decisions and come to the conclusion that they were wrong. Even fewer who will admit it publicly. Even fewer still who will accept responsibility and then do something about it.

Of the people I have respectfully disagreed with, the fact that he's come around is a huge testament to his willingness to be humbled and corrected.

Agreed. If right-libertarianism could work at all, they'd need to be on the frontlines of boycotting companies that do bad things.

They claim that the government doesn't need to force desegregated lunch counters; people would stop eating there until that place either changed or went out of business. Alright. Are they going to be the first ones to stand up and boycott companies that do anything like that? Because from what I saw, they were the first ones to say "they technically have a right to do that" and then do nothing. Almost like letting them get away with it was the actual point.

Gilette seems to have caught on to this trick at some point.

I'm a libertarian because the only thing I hate worse than Democrats are MAGA Republicans - And at least unlike Democrats and Republicans, I'm well aware that my party is a joke.

And before you criticize me, I voted Democrat against that orange wannabe dictator THREE FUCKING TIMES, grinding my teeth and swearing as I did so every time, but I still fucking did so, so spare me the lectures.

to say otherwise is either ignorance, stupidity, or malice

Why not all three?

Yeah, but the bar is through the floor at this point. I'll take anything I can get.

Libertarianism also was my first stop out of my childhood religious right upbringing. I still tend to see issues from a libertarian framing -- i.e., if it's not hurting anybody why should the government care? -- but most US libertarians seem weirdly fixated on ideas like "why can't I dump 5,000 gallons of hydrofluoric acid into a hole in the ground if the hole is on my own property?" or "why shouldn't I be allowed to enter into a contract with somebody that allows me to hunt them for sport?" or especially "why can't I have sex with a minor if they say it's OK?", where there's really obvious personal and societal harms involved and the only way that you can think otherwise is if you've engaged in some serious motivated reasoning.

Whereas my thinking these days is more like, "who does it hurt if somebody decides to change their outward appearance to match how they feel inside?" and the like -- i.e., the right to personal autonomy and free expression, rather than the right to do whatever I want to others as long as I can somehow coerce them into agreeing to it. I don't have much patience for the anarchist side of left-libertarianism -- in my experience you need robust systems in place to keep bad actors from running amok, and a state without a monopoly on violence is simply ceding that monopoly to whoever wants to take it up for their own ends -- but that starting point of libertarian thought, that people sold be free in their choices until those choices run up against somebody else's freedoms -- is still fundamentally valid.