Crypto currency proponents benefit from the existence of dark net marketplaces because they are some of the main places for the non-speculative use of crypto currencies. I think Ross and his pardon represent a sort-of metaphor in crypto-currency proponents' eyes for the government's toleration of these dark net crypto marketplaces.
If you meant Trump, it's not hidden, they released a Trump meme coin and the rug pull was after the inauguration timed with the release of the Melania meme coin, though entirely speculatively makes more sense for the investors to be foreign governments buying influence less obviously than the last Trump administration like Saudi Arabia hiring his son in law.
I doubt Trump cares about Ulbricht as much as he cares (for whatever reason) about the continued support of various American libertarians (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and various crypto elites).
While he has made many promises this is significant for being one that he has kept.
RFK Jr is definitely not a libertarian (even compared to someone mainstream like Gary Johnson or Jared Polis), he supports strong state intervention in many areas of the economy and society
It's odd because libertarian candidates usually only garner 1% to 3% of the votes. It does appear that there are a lot of libertarians that vote Republican because of the stigma third parties have, though. As someone who often votes for libertarian candidates, I can't understand it. Republicans are about as libertarian as a cheese sandwich.
Trump went around to a huge number of niche communities and promised to fix their core concerns in exchange for their support. The crypto and libertarian communities are obsessed with freeing Ulbricht. It was honestly a brilliant strategy, and probably the reason he won. Ironic that an authoritarian fascist was able to get elected by enlisting the help of anti-authoritarian communities with a single issue promise.
It’s not ironic at all. The MAGA movement is really similar to how Mussolini came to power.
The campaign against barbarians (Steve Miller’s) crusade, Elons “not enough white babies” stuff, sucking up to the church (Vatican City is a Mussolini scheme), aspirations for conquest of Greenland and Panama, etc are all analogous to the maga playbook.
Most people are clueless. There are idiots who think they are getting $1 eggs next week. Riling up weirdos like libertarians lets the movement punch above their weight.
'Left-libertarianism' and 'classical liberalism' as a philosophy (not as a party affiliation) are arguably the dominant perspectives on HN. You've been on here for more than a year, you've been talking to them the entire time.
However, most of them wouldn't ever use the term libertarian, for not wanting to be associated with right wing libertarians.
There were a few articles on this in the media a day or two after the election that had lists in them, but I can't find them anymore because this new news overwhelmed the search terms I remember.
Many of the promises were directly conflicting, and/or upsetting to other groups that also had promises made to them. One example would be he promised some groups to push for the death penalty for anyone involved in selling drugs, in conflict with his pardon of Ulbricht here.
Wouldn't surprise me the slightest. Politicians' promises are weak signals to begin with, and we're talking about a politician here who's explicitly labeled as populist. I found a similar inability with search.
Unfortunately you could level the same type of name calling towards Democrats. It's now public record they colluded with all the major media outlets, coerced big tech to censor and debank opponents, imprisoned whistleblowers, violated bodily autonomy with unconstitutional mandates, weaponized the courts to conduct lawfare, and now issued an unprecedented number of pre-emptive pardons for unspecified crimes committed by Fauci, Hunter Biden, et al.
I remember when the Democrats were the anti-war party, but Biden was escalating the Ukraine war in the final days of his presidency, and celebrated Dick Cheney's endorsement of Kamala Harris. Crazy how things have changed so much. The left unanimously viewed Bush and Cheney as obviously psychopathic war criminals, and now almost all the Neocons have jumped over to the Democrats. The left used to be extremely skeptical of globalization as evident by the Seattle WTO Protests, mass immigration as evident by Bernie Sanders' comments on its effect on workers' wages, and Big Pharma's perverse incentives to keep people sick and regularly consuming drugs. Yet the media has utterly psyop'd the progressives... it's kinda disturbing.
Authoritarianism is also popular with the democrats right now, but I don’t see how anything I said is name calling: I used terms with a specific meaning appropriate for the context- the only reason they have a negative connotation is because of what they actually mean. Do you know of other terms with the same meaning and more neutral connotations?
If you go by Trump's actions in his first term he was a pretty standard Republican, and mostly just cut taxes, with a lot of wild rhetoric which is part of his deal making shtick. In real terms I don't see Trump as uniquely authoritarian, probably less so than Biden, Obama and Bush. He seems to support free speech far more, which is the foundation for all other freedoms. He makes his money from the leisure industry, so his interests are aligned with Americans doing well and having disposable income. And he supports decentralization, so liberal states can adopt liberal policies, and so forth.
It seems people forget about the insane infringements of civil rights through the Patriot Act, NDAA, mass surveillance, lockdowns, firing people over vaccine mandates, etc. A poll showed about half of Democrats supported putting Americans into camps if they didn't take the vaccine, and a third supported seizing custody of their children. Democrats supported mass censorship and state control over media, which is far more authoritarian and fascist than anything the Republicans were doing.
I'll leave the authoritarianism aspect to someone else but I'll point out that the part of your comment where "he makes his money from the leisure industry, so his interests are aligned with Americans doing well and having disposable income" is not representative of his ability let alone judgement in planning/making decisions that reflect those interests. You can be in favor of something and completely botch the execution.
The PATRIOT Act was introduced by a Republican and signed into law by a Republican and had wide support from both parties. 62 Democrats and 3 Republicans voted against it in the House (there was only a single senate vote against it), and you can't have a discussion about the Patriot Act's introduction without bringing up the fact that it was enacted at the height of the post-9/11 fear. It has always been a controversial and flawed bill.
Most of today's social issues aren't about left versus right, they are about class.
The democrats are broken. They keep running women, and not getting messages out that appeal to the average voter. They lost their core reliable voters (old people, Catholics, unions) and are alienating more traditional voting blocs like African Americans and some Hispanic populations with the constant drama over trans issues. Nobody heard about anything this election cycle other than abortion and transgender issues. It’s a big tent party, but when progressives steal all the oxygen, the wheels fall off the train.
They need to run a tall white dude with good hair who talks about economic opportunity, fair play and protecting the future.
My parents live in the country. A farmer (whose father was the county Democratic Party chair) has a massive sign “Trump. I don’t like him, but we need him”. That’s the 2024 election unfortunately.
Ask the swing voters. The republicans seized the narrative.
I bet you 100% of democratic voters could accurately describe the maga platform. The number who could describe the democratic platform would be far less.
That's because the Democrats are corrupt and have no platform beyond managed decline. We just had sickly king Theoden in office with a coven of Grima Wormtongues controlling the executive. Kamala Harris is an empty suit devoid of original thought, and quite obviously only selected for her identity. When asked how she would be any different, she said Biden was an old white man and she was not. She couldn't speak even in the most favorable venues like Oprah, and refused to go on Joe Rogan's podcast because she would have obviously imploded and humiliated herself.
It's stunning how far the Democrats have fallen. They've been completely co-opted by the PMC class and simply use identity politics to distract from their utter inability to deliver on anything. One need only look at the sad state of California, its massively delayed and over-budget high speed rail to nowhere, homelessness and decay, over-regulation inhibiting everything including the beloved green energy projects, etc. Texas literally has more green energy and cheaper electricity than California because they let people build, which can even be seen in their falling rents. Progressives can't allow that because it might 'change the character of a neighborhood', which is ironically one of the most conservative and anti-progress positions you could take.
True, much of that is because old people are the only ones still watching legacy media like cable news, which have repeatedly torched their credibility. Young people tend to get their news from podcasts and social media, which tends to not be as blatantly controlled.
I am active in libertarian circles and Ulbricht was a cause celebre. The 2024 election was a game of inches, and many libertarians I know voted Trump purely on this issue. It is possible this was a key way Trump eked out a victory.
They just won something they cared about: perhaps you should be taking them even more seriously than you did.
And even if you are not a fan of a political group, you are the one being judgemental here on a factor that is very unlikely to be universal within the group.
Treating anyone according to political labels is divisive.
They got a single guy out of prison, but pretty much everything else in Trump's platform is diametrically opposed to libertarianism. It's hard to think of anything less libertarian than tariff-funded big government!
Tariffs are not good for free market diehards. However the nuance is that foreign countries like China do not operate on a fair playing field, they want free access to our markets but prevent our champions from entering their's. Something must be done here. I'm not convinced tariffs are the best tool, but at least it's something.
In terms of small government, there is news about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) every single day. There will be a massive downsizing in the federal workforce and the regulatory state over the next 4 years. This move towards small government is the thing that excites me most.
> In terms of small government, there is news about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) every single day.
Just to be clear, all they did is rename the US Digital Service to the US DOGE Service. The Digital Service already existed; it hires tech workers from industry on short-term rotations to work on government projects. Now that thing that already existed is called DOGE, and it will continue to do nothing more than bring in industry engineers to make websites for the government. If there’s a “massive downsizing in the federal workforce,” it won’t be because of “DOGE.”
Trump has is proposing a 10% tariff on China, and a 25% tariff on Mexico.
Also he's handing out tariff exemptions to his political allies like candy.
There's not some high minded principal or strategy here. It's graft and spite. Trump even seems to be holding out the tariff threat as leverage to force the sale of TikTok.
Look you can agree with this stuff if you want but none of it is remotely aligned with libertarian principles. Even squishy ones.
He's said it a dozen different ways but as of yesterday it was 10% on China. Maybe tomorrow it will be 100%, it's not like the narrative is consistent apart from that there will be some level of tariffs.
Biden could have taken the wind out of Trump's sails by commuting Ulbricht's sentence when he was in office. If you don't think a group's interests are worth listening to, don't be surprised when that group votes for someone who does.
Very little about the Libertarian party is libertarian. Yet another party carrying water for authoritarianism, with the difference being that the implementation is through corporations.
Libertarians are a self selecting bunch. Very few were raised into this philosophy. You can appreciate that my self identification as a libertarian is a careful, reasoned decision and not one that was flippantly made. It is the philosophy that is the most accurate and truthful to me.
Read my comment again. I self-identify as a libertarian as I see individual freedom as paramount. But I kept going with the analysis to realize that the Libertarian Party does very little to represent that ideal.
My apologies, I thought you were accusing libertarians of authoritarianism (the irony!).
I find the Mises Caucus at least useful in pushing to do more than simply be an affinity group for people pretending to play politics. I find partying with LP officials to be very hilarious, what a group of odd balls. But the party itself has no hope of electoral victory, which is why everyone should vote Republican in the current iteration of two-party politics from the libertarian lens.
My point is that even if there were an electoral victory, the Libertarian Party would not bring individual freedom. They are operating from an assertion that starting with a list of moral axioms, every implication will be morally right by construction. By itself this is terribly mistaken (see Godel), but it goes askew even sooner when a few poor axioms are allowed to remain through "pragmatism", regulatory capture, etc.
As for the current political environment, I'd say that bureaucratic authoritarianism is at least the devil we know and can be routed around by individuals, whereas autocratic authoritarianism is at best a wildcard that stands to destroy a good chunk of the laws that have actually been restraining naked power.
Libertarians are a joke because they refuse to realize that allowing corporations unlimited freedom means that the individual has less freedom. Their entire ideology just removes the boot of the state and replaces it with the boot of the corporation.
Speaking of jokes, it's always funny to us libertarians when we see government proponents talk about "freedom" being lost to the corporations under a libertarian system of (non) government.
The government as it is the world over pretty much controls your entire life; It dictates what you can and can't do with your own body, it forces you into various forms of indentured servitude, it marks you and keeps track of you like an inventory item, it controls what you can say (where and with whom even), it takes your children from you and puts them into essentially indoctrination camps for "education", it comes up with arbitrary rules that you have to jump through hoops to abide by, and it can even take your children away if you don't teach them the approved things, it can take arbitrary control over any and all of your possessions for whatever reason, it orders you to harm your fellow man, etc... And most of all, it gaslights and forces you to go against your own morals or things you consider wrong, whatever that may be. And just to rub it all in? It says you have to do and abide by all these things whilst still loving government because it's "Democracy" and "Democracy" is pure and noble and fair.
Libertarians are not a joke. Some of the most powerful people on earth are libertarians. The people who write off libertarians are blind.
I prefer corporations because I can voluntarily choose to take my business elsewhere, or even better, create my own competitor. Why I dislike the government is that it's the ultimate monopoly, with guns, and operated mostly by power-hungry sociopaths who will use that power to destroy innocent lives.
Given the corporation or the state, I take the corporation every time.
Don't be fooled by powerful people who claim to be libertarian, but are actually only interested in promoting freedom for themselves while denying the same to others.
Your second paragraph is setting up a false dichotomy. It's not the corporation xor the state. Fundamentally, corporations as we know them are creatures of the state - government chartered legal entities, running on the government's legal system, with government granted liability shields. But the main point is that where the nominal state disappears, the corporation(s) step into the power vacuum and become the inescapable government. To be able to take your business elsewhere or create your own competitor, you need individual rights. While the underlying physics supports this directly for some abilities, for others you need coordinated collective action. This often takes place through the state, meaning that blanket calls to dismantle parts of the current government can often serve as cover for enabling newer less-constrained government. Think yin-yang and NP/Turing completeness circular reductions, not towering software builds.
I don't judge anyone too hard when they're willing to bend a bit to get someone out of jail after the key has been thrown away. I didn't vote Trump but I will admit the possibility of Ross being released made me pause when I marked my ballot, even his mom's image flashed in my mind and I felt guilty for not helping.
Of all the issues in this country that really has impact on millions of people, I am baffled when I hear people only caring about 1 person and not care about the common good of society and the hundreds of millions of people in the US who live in it. Fascinating and depressing.
Winning by 1.6% is not a massive victory. It's actually a smaller margin than Hillary won the popular vote by in 2016 (despite losing the electoral vote).
It's a trite thing to say, but when it comes to Trump it fits the pattern of inside dealing ... I'm guessing he personally will profit from this somehow / someone promised a donation / money.
