I wonder how a similar essay for other ideologies would look like. Do you buy things? You're a capitalist. Do you keep some things the way they are? You're a conservative. Do you clean your room? You're a fascist. But I doubt someone would bother writing such essays, and if someone did, I doubt it would get upvoted to the HN frontpage. What is it about this that appeals to people? An ideology that feels edgy, but doesn't actually offend anyone?
I have definitely seen those kinds of essays, for all kinds of positions. It's a natural strategy of persuasion -- "See, you already agree with me 90%, so why not take the final step and join me?" The most obnoxious one I remember reading was one that argued "Do you believe in a world that can be understood? Then by this tortured logic, you are already a Christian."
Aside: "Do you clean your room? You're a fascist" is very funny.
I think it's an particularly interesting thing posted here at the moment because of the protests and the frequent demonisation of anarchism in the media.
But it's also interesting on hacker news because of the popularity of libertarianism amongst some here. It must be obvious how close anarchism and libertarianism are. In fact when I was first made aware of libertarianism many years ago it was regarded as a branch of anarchist thought.
Libertarianism started on the far left - Dejaque criticised Proudhon for being a 'moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian' and went on to publish the first libertarian paper.
Parts of the Socialist League who counted William Morris, Friedrich Engels and Eleanor Marx as members were libertarian.
Right wing libertarianism first became a thing ca 1950s and was explicitly a project by Rothbard to bring together anti-authoritarian groups on both the left and the right.
The primary distinction tends to be that right libertarians see property rights as one of the things the state must protect, while left libertarians tends to see property rights as fundamentally oppressive.
