Hacker News Reader

Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

>>It’s easy to see why Nietzsche sociopathic ravings would have inspired so many repugnant movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, the Ayn Randian fringe of libertarianism, and the American alt-Right and neo-Nazi movements today

One of those things is not like the others.

View on HN

Presumaby you mean Bolshevism but that really depends on your parameters for evaluation. Presumably the author in this case wasn’t talking about economic principles ...

Actually, I was trying to defend Ayn Rand-style libertarianism, but it just goes to show how people's perspective differs.

that is one that I occasionally struggle with. I am fairly liberal but I find the absolutist attitudes that many libertarians have to be naive and often repugnant. I don't think it's a stretch at all to place them in the same bucket as those other groups. They all have taken simple defensible ideas to extremes and tend to offer no compromises.

Well, you could order those groups by death toll? I'm not aware of Ayn Rand-style Libertarianism killing people.

Opposition to building codes? vaccination? pretty much any organized effort to make society safer (or avoid societal catastrophe)?

Libertarianism is pretty much "the tragedy of the commons" as a political ideal.

The US healthcare system definitely leads to more death than other developed nations, and the arguments against fixing it are generally Randian in nature.

As St. Randall of Munroe has put it: I had a hard time with Ayn Rand because I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at 'therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com