Yes, this! The way I like to phrase it is that "life is self-productive machinery", where "productivity" is defined as a property of mechanical work such that that work decreases the entropy of the system it acts upon. Life is then any physical system that transforms some kind of energy flow through it (i.e. is a machine, does work) in a way that causes its internal entropy to decrease (necessarily at the expense of increasing the entropy of the environment). The operating conditions of such a machine are the conditions in which such life can live.

By this definition, all traditional (DNA-based) living things are alive, but viruses are not (despite reproducing), fire is not (despite consuming energy and reproducing), crystals are not (despite reproducing and reducing their internal entropy — because they are not doing the work that reduces their entropy, they don't consume energy to do that, they have to have energy removed from them and then that just happens spontaneously), and perhaps most interestingly, computers are: the processing and storing of information is a reduction of their internal entropy, and they are machines that consume energy to accomplish this. A computer that built other computers that built other computers (etc) would undeniably be artificial life... but then if we add "reproduces" to the requirements, as you say, mules are out, and we definitely want them in, more so I think than we want non-reproducing computers out.

Those internet age demographics you link seem to claim that absolutely nobody on the internet is under the age of 15, which makes me somewhat doubtful about the accuracy of the rest of the breakdown.

Que? Cómo "que" una broma? Quiso decir "queue"? O "más probablemente "cue"?

A republic is not synonymous with representative democracy. Democracy and republicanism are orthogonal concepts; they're akin to the ownership and administration of a business. Democracy is about the state being administered, controlled by, the people, be it directly or indirectly by representatives. Republicanism is about the state being owned by, operating on behalf of and in the name of, the people. It's possible to have one and not the other, or both, or neither.

A great example of this is the United Kingdom, which is a representative democracy because it is administered by ordinary citizens representing other ordinary citizens, but it's not a republic because that government does is not directing the official sovereign power of The People, delegated to it; it is directing the power of The Crown, which power is officially delegated to said Crown by God. An opposite example would be North Korea, which is a republic in that the state officially belongs to and act on behalf of and in the name of The People, but is not democratic because that power is administered solely by the Kim family and their lackeys.

The US is both a (representative) democracy, and a republic, but those do not mean the same thing.

He is not saying that the libertarian position is being misrepresented or really is anything. He's saying that people who really study the logical consequences of the principles that supposedly underlie the libertarian position reach a certain conclusion. He could be doing that because he thinks that conclusion is absurd, and so discrediting libertarians by showing that their principles, if taken seriously, lead to an absurd conclusion. Or he could be saying "hey, so-called libertarians, if you're really serious about your supposed principles like I am, adopt this position! Don't hold back!"

I do get the feeling that he is leaning more toward the latter, but I would not be surprised if it was the former instead.

This is why I think you didn't comprehend him. He is clearly not advocating that a line-item veto on tax forms should exist, so showing that that would be a stupid idea does not refute him at all. If he is really an anarchist as you suspect, he wouldn't be advocating that tax forms exist at all. But he's not directly advocating for anarchism or the abolition of all taxes there, or the modification of any tax system. He's saying that if a supposed libertarian principle, non-aggression, were taken seriously, then you would be able to elect not to pay for people to do things you don't want anybody doing, like rounding up and "reeducating" gays. In reality, that would happen because you wouldn't have any taxes at all. But if he just said "what if I don't want to pay taxes", there would be a bunch of predictable responses along the lines of "so you don't like having roads, schools, police protection, etc?"

I think it's pretty obvious that to be clear that he's not complaining about having to pay money for things he likes getting, he's positing a hypothetical reprehensible program doing terrible things that nobody should be doing, and saying "What if I don't want to fund just that in particular? What if I play along with the state on everything else, I'm not a general tax protestor, I'm happy to pay for roads and schools and stuff, but I just don't want to pay to have gay people brainwashed? What if I don't want that to happen and I don't want to be coerced into helping make it happen?" And then pointing out that he doesn't get that choice, and that that is in violation of the non-aggression principle: he can be aggressively forced to pay to have terrible things done to people, and that's perfectly legitimate according to any statist philosophy, so non-aggression entails the rejection of states.

Which is either an argument against non-aggression or an argument against states, depending on which branch of the resultant fork you choose. His argument only has the conclusion that such a choice is necessary; the two are not mutually compatible.

You're absolutely right that Marx himself, Marxism per se, is all about the economics; that's why there's the adjective "cultural" marking this as a different thing, and why I described it as applying a "Marxist paradigm" to a different subject matter than Marx himself did; specifically, the paradigm of class conflict and class consciousness. I'm still not defending the concept here mind you, just elucidating what I've seen other people use, but to that end, a frequent example I see of a movement accused of "cultural Marxism" is modern feminism: the accusation is that rather than being subsumed as a special case of liberalism and egalitarianism, arguing only that no individual woman should be specially excepted from the same rules and standards that apply to all individual men, modern feminism instead constructs women as a class as being oppressed by men as a class ("Patriarchy"), and positions itself as the advocate for the former side in that class conflict.

Who the supposed upper and lower classes are supposed to be in each such supposed class conflict looks pretty obvious to me (and I listed a bunch of examples before), but as for how exactly the upper class is supposed to be oppressing or exploiting the lower class in each of those conflicts, you'd have to ask someone concerned with that particular conflict. In any case it's generally not the strict economic exploitation of literal Marxism, between owners and workers, as it's not literal Marxism, but rather (supposedly) the application of some Marxist paradigms to other subjects besides economics.

I always vote a split ticket in every election, in the sense that I never just pick a party and vote for everyone in that party. I research all the candidates independent of their party affiliation, and if there are two candidates I can't decide between at all, I try to vote for the one belonging to a party I haven't cast many votes for yet. I also try to vote for third parties if there's a toss-up between a major party candidate and a third-party candidate.

I was very disappointed this election to find that there were no third-party candidates on my ballot, most of the Democrat and Republican candidates agreed on almost all points almost none of which were of much interest to me, almost nobody had any actually interesting ideas beyond the usual "bad things are bad and I will stand against them!" rhetoric, and the few who did — all Republicans, surprisingly — also had some other horrendous position that I couldn't in good conscience get behind.

So in the end I wound up voting a depressingly straight Democratic ticket, not because any of the Democratic candidates actually sounded good, but just because they tended to run marginally less bad than the Republican candidates that were my only other choices.

It's like I went to a restaurant and the only menu items were a cheddar cheeseburger with pickles or a jack cheeseburger with jalapeños... and well, what I really wanted to get was chicken strips, but if I have to have a burger... well jack sounds more interesting than cheddar but I can't really stomach jalapeños, so I guess I'll have the cheddar burger? Meh.

Apparently you read but didn't comprehend, because they weren't arguing that a line-item tax veto should be the case, but pointing out that states, unlike any other organization, can force you to do things like involuntarily fund a program you find morally abhorrent, using any force up to and including shooting you dead that they deem necessary to do this. And that consequently, people who take non-aggression seriously tend to become effectively anarchists.

He's not arguing that anyone should take that position, but that it's the logical consequence of really taking the non-aggression principle to heart. Which he is also not arguing that anyone should do. Just that if one were to do so, and to follow through with it, that's where they'd end up.

You're correct that "libertarian" in European parlance is often short for "libertarian socialist", but your attempt to distinguish American-style right-libertarianism by way of voluntarism seems confused, because libertarian socialists are also voluntarists, and not "socialists" in the sense Americans would understand that as state socialists. That's why there's a "libertarian" in the front: early socialism split into two camps, a libertarian one and an authoritarian one. The authoritarian one became the dominant platform of the Second World in the Cold War, and moderate forms later gained varying degrees of popularity in First World countries, so that's the kind that we're most familiar with here in America.

The ideas of libertarian socialism are almost unheard-of in America, and indeed the very name seems a contradiction in terms to many, because they take "socialism" to mean "state ownership", and thus contrary to the principles of libertarianism. But libertarian socialists don't argue for state ownership, because they're generally against state power just like right-libertarians are; in fact there's even anarcho-socialists who want there to be no state at all. The main line of disagreement between right-libertarians and left-libertarians (aka libertarian socialists) is not who should own what, the state vs individuals; both agree on anti-statism. Rather, they disagree on what kind of rights come with ownership (and thus what kinds of actions it's OK to use force to stop others from doing, because those actions cross the line into a violation of your rights), and what kinds of things can be owned at all (and thus whether anyone can have rights over those things that justify limiting the actions of others upon them).

And just to be clear here, it's the right-libertarians who are arguing that people should have broader claim rights, further limiting the liberty of others; not that that's necessarily a bad thing, I'm just making clear, as I expect American readers will misunderstand, that left-libertarians aren't just like right-libertarians minus a little bit of liberty for the sake of equality; they're like right-libertarians plus a little bit of liberty. Whether that becomes too much liberty — like both would agree the liberty to swing my fist clear into your face would be —is the subject of debate between them.

No I thought it was like vampires where first they have to drain your dick and then you have to drink from theirs to be converted to a gay.

That's why I'm only bisexual. I sucked his dick but he didn't suck mine, and I've since only sucked the dicks of guys who hadn't sucked mine, or had my dick sucked by guys who I hadn't sucked, so I remain perpetually on the verge between the straight world and the gay. I'm like Gay Blade.

Something like that yes, though I don't especially like the way that they break the axes down into "social" and "economic". As many libertarians are fond of criticizing of such a division, freedom is freedom, and limiting what people are allowed to do economically also limits what they're allowed to do socially, and vice versa. That chart's "libertarian left" isn't actually libertarian if it only favors social liberty but then also favors authoritarian intervention in economic matters.

The axes of my spectrum are not economic and social liberty vs authority; rather, they are libertarianism and egalitarianism. Those on the left think that everyone is, or should be treated as, equal; some of them favor using authority to enforce that equality, others believe it will emerge naturally if only proper liberty is ensured. Those on the right think that some people are naturally superior to others, or deserve more than others, with a zillion different ideas on the basis of that stratification (wealth, race, nationality, sex, religion, whatever); some of them favor using authority to enforce that stratification, others believe it will emerge naturally if only proper liberty is ensured. And both kinds of libertarian construct their notions of "proper liberty" such that if ensured it would (by their reckoning at least) result in the egalitarian or stratified result they expect/desire, or at least expect that result (and convince themselves it's desirable) because they reckon it would be the outcome of ensuring "proper liberty" as they conceive of it.

That other way of constructing the chart is actively ignoring the "upper left" corner of my spectrum, as happens all too often (and is part of what I'm complaining about here). The "upper left" of my chart is filled with libertarian socialists, an ideology almost completely unheard-of in America: the idea that the claim right to private property is what ruins the egalitarianism of libertarianism, and that what is known to Americans as anarcho-capitalism, minus the private property (but not plus a state to own that property; everything is simply unowned, and nobody has any claim to anything that would legitimize the use of force to deter others from making equal use of it), would yield a socialist form of libertarianism. (And in their terminology, "anarchism" simpliciter is a synonym with "libertarian socialism", in contrast to the authoritarian socialism of communism; and to them "anarcho-capitalism" is a contradiction in terms). The "libertarian left" of that other chart would be center left of my chart: those who favor a moderate exercise of authority only as necessary to ensure equality but no more. And Hitler would be, rather than bottom-center as on their chart, in the far lower right of my chart; not only was he heavily authoritarian, but also clearly believed in a stratification of society on the basis of race, religion, sex, orientation, etc. I'm not sure who they think was more right-authoritarian than Hitler.

Mind you I'm not an advocate of that upper-left corner of anarcho-socialism; I just think it's an important part of the political spectrum that's too often ignored as a possibility. We are so entrenched in the concept of private property that we only think about whether individuals should have the liberty to control some of it each themselves, or the state should have the authority to control it all, or what the balance between those should be; we forget that there is a whole school of thought that thinks we should abolish the concept entirely as antithetical to both liberty and equality. Again, not that I think that that's a good idea as such, but remembering that it's a possibility opens up room for thought. I place myself somewhere top-center on my own chart; between the anarcho-socialists and the anarcho-capitalists. I'm not able to place myself on that other chart because it's missing a whole corner of the spectrum (and has instead filled in an extraneous corner opposite it which I'm not rightly able to imagine the occupants of).

FWIW I also voted for Stein. I tend to vote either Green or Libertarian when given the option, trying to draw some attention both "upward" and "leftward", to counteract our country's slow sloping down and right. And though the Libertarians who actually run for office tend to run a bit right of my tastes, they're at least drawing attention upward toward liberty; and though the Greens may run a bit authoritarian to my tastes, they're really no worse and in many ways better in that respect than either modern Democrats or modern Republicans, and provide a nice solid leftward counterweight to our mainstream politics. I would love to see some kind of Libertarian-Green coalition, uniting on the common ground of social liberty against both the Democrats and Republicans, and then sorting out some kind of economic compromise after that at least is settled. But I don't expect to ever see that happen.

"Republic" does not mean "representative democracy". "Republic" means almost nothing besides "not a monarchy": any state which acts in the authority of "the People" rather than, say, "the Crown", is a republic. A republic could be a direct democracy; ancient Athens was. A non-republic could also be a representative democracy; modern Britain is. A republic can also be a representative democracy: America is and always has been. A republic doesn't have to be democratic at all; North Korea isn't.

You're right that the two major American political parties lean toward the very same extreme (and the other extremes are almost entirely unrepresented in this country), but to say they're "clustered very tightly" around any extreme is a bit parochial. There are depths of extremeness even our worst politicians have only begun to plumb.

I like to conceive of a political spectrum with four extremes: anarcho-socialists in one corner (let's call it upper-left), anarcho-capitalists in another corner (upper-right), "egalitarian" authoritarians like Stalin and Mao in another (lower-left) corner, and anti-egalitarian authoritarians like Hitler and Mussolini in the last (lower-right) corner.

The two major American political parties are both somewhere around the middle, both drifting toward the lower-right, both very near each other, but Republicans a bit further from center, but both with quite a ways to go before we start gassing Jews and invading Mexico for lebensraum. There are vocal pulls in subsets of the populace (with no real representation) toward the upper-right and the center-left. The lower-left exists as little more than a boogeyman these days, and the upper-left seems to be our national blind spot that nobody even realizes exists.

Not to defend (nor disparage) the concept, but since none of the other responses are actually answering your question:

"Cultural Marxism" is the application of the Marxist class consciousness paradigm to cultural classes rather than the material economic classes that Marx himself was concerned with. With straight white cisgender males (etc) as the "bourgeoisie", and gay people, people of color, trans people, women, etc, collectively as the "proletariate". Or rather with a privileged and underprivileged class along each of those axes (straight vs gay, white vs colored, cis vs trans, men vs women, etc), with many intersections between the different axes.

I'm not sure where you misunderstand me exactly, but you're saying things that I agree with apparently in an attempted rebuttal, so I guess I wasn't clear.

Pride and shame are the negations of each other's de Morgan duals. De Morgan duality is the relation that holds between concepts like conjunction and negation, necessity and possibility, and most relevant here, obligation and permission.

X is obligatory if and only if not-X is not permissible.
X is not obligatory if and only if not-X is permissible.
X is permissible if and only if not-X is not obligatory.
X is not permissible if and only if not-X is obligatory.

To be proud to be something is to think it, in a loose sense, "obligatory": it's some way that you ought to be. It's better to be that way than not. To not be that way would be, at least comparatively, shameful. (e.g. I'm proud to be intelligent. It's better to be intelligent than not, and if I were not, I would be comparatively ashamed of that).

To be simply not proud of something is to think it, in a loose sense, "not obligatory": it's not some way that you especially ought to be, though maybe it's nothing to be especially ashamed of either. (e.g. I'm not proud of my skin, hair, or eye color. There's nothing especially better about them than other ways they might be. There's nothing especially worse about them either, though; although if they were worse, I would still be not-proud, but I would also be ashamed).

To be simply unashamed of something is to think it, in a loose sense, "permissible": it's not some way that you especially ought not to be, though maybe it's nothing to be especially proud of either. (e.g. I'm not ashamed of my sexual orientation. There's nothing especially worse about it than other ways it might be. There's nothing especially better about it either, though; although if it were better, I would still be not-ashamed, but I would also be proud).

To be ashamed to be something is to think it, in a loose sense, "not permissible"; it's some way that you ought to not be. It's better not to be that way. To not be that way would be, at least comparatively, something to be proud of. (e.g. I'm ashamed of being out of shape. It's worse to be out of shape than in shape, and if I were in shape, I would be comparatively proud of that).