The problem isn't science. The problem is science reporting.

In the case of nutrition, diet, and exercise, the primary problem isn't science reporting, it is government programs based on questionable science, from bad nutritional recommendations and bad labeling requirements to idiotic agricultural subsidies, public school curricula and lunch programs, and more.

Because what is the alternative? Alchemy? Voodoo? Religion?

The problem isn't with science per se, it is with linking government and science too closely. Without government funding for these studies, lobbying by big corporations, and various government agencies implementing flawed public policies and educational programs, these bad nutritional studies would never have mattered much.

Fine. All unvaccinated children can go to a special school together where all the parents share the same beliefs.

That's the libertarian position: you decide which schools your kids go to and pay for it, and the schools decide who they take and what requirements they have, including strict vaccination requirements.

Unfortunately, it's not what progressives and "liberals" want. After deciding that everybody must go to public schools and deciding how to assign people to schools in order to maximize diversity and accomplish other goals, you then get into discussions about what the curriculum must be, and whether kids have to be vaccinated or not. And since everybody is forced to pay for the public schools, this leads to irreconcilable conflicts.

The absurdity of this argument is that even if it were true, is having a mentally ill child worse than death?

That's a decision for parents to make, not for you or for the CDC.

He said that he has heard of cases. And if you look at the list of side effects on the CDC page, you find that he's right.

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/va...

Several other severe problems have been reported after a child gets MMR vaccine, including:
Deafness
Long-term seizures, coma, or lowered consciousness
Permanent brain damage

The argument for vaccines is that the benefits outweigh the risks. That's a good argument for taking them. It's questionable that it's a good argument for forcing people to take them.

actually, the small-l libertarian view is more nuanced. refusal to vaccinate your kids can easily be seen as an act of negligent violence against others (me).

Libertarianism (or classical liberalism) doesn't recognize "negligent violence". You're simply playing word games in an attempt to justify positive rights.

do libertarians believe that you shouldn't be forced to correct your eyesight before being granted a license to drive?

I think whether I drive on a road and what the conditions are under which I do so should be a voluntary agreement between the road owner and myself. Right now, it is not, since I am forced to pay for the roads and then forced to comply with often arbitrary and corrupt rules for using them. You may think that that's the only way of having roads, but it clearly isn't if you look at history.

stay in Galt's gulch if you want, but if you have the measles, keep the fuck away from me and my kids

I think that's a perfectly fine attitude to have, and in fact I am vaccinated. But you may be forced for your kids to associate with unvaccinated kids because you are forced to pay for public school, your school choices are limited both by money and by location, and public schools have to cater to religious objections. So now you are fighting with religious nuts over which vaccinations should be mandatory. If schools were privatized, private schools would have no problem imposing vaccine requirements, and you could send your kids to schools that require measles vaccines. Religious nuts could send their kids to schools for religious nuts and get wiped out by a measles epidemic.

The problems you are having aren't with libertarianism, they are with lack of libertarianism.

Men are claiming to be victims, feminists are. Why don't you work on getting them out of their "bubble of [imagined] victimhood"?

As long as the girls have equal opportunity to get in and aren't steered away for sexist reasons then or earlier in life, yes.

Of course, in the usual circular logic of liberals and progressives, if the outcome isn't equal, that is clear evidence for "sexist reasons". It just couldn't be that women make different choices from men for perfectly legitimate reasons.

The whole point of herd immunity is to protect those who, for health reasons, cannot receive a vaccination.

Herd immunity is simply a concept about whether a disease is likely to spread through an entire population or die out after infecting only part of a population. It's relevant if you look at animal herds and want to minimize the overall loss of life.

Human beings aren't cattle. Even if the assumptions of herd immunity apply to human populations (a big if), the measures to implement it don't. For example, in order to achieve herd immunity, you might well decide to slaughter animals that don't respond to the vaccine. Or you might preemptively restrict the movement of animals in a herd.

Treating humans as members of a "herd" or collective is wrong; human beings are individuals with individual rights, and those rights include not having the government inject substances into you that it deems beneficial for the rest of society. It doesn't matter how good the evidence is in any particular case. Vaccinations should be voluntary, period.

So, in effect, you want me to undergo a medical procedure to protect someone I have no connection with. What's next? Mandatory blood donations? Mandatory kidney transplants? I mean, blood donations and kidney transplants are much more clearly effective at saving lives than vaccinations.

Undergoing medical procedures to help other people should be voluntary.

If their unvaccinated kid gets an infection, that should not be covered by their insurance,

Why not leave this up to the insurance companies? Oh, right, because we mandate insurance for everybody. Once you do that, then you need to mandate specific coverage from the insurance companies. And then you need to mandate the vaccines people need to get. And then you need to figure out what rules to set up if people choose not to get vaccinated, or can't get vaccinated, or have religious objections, or were visited by unvaccinated relatives from Elbonia.

If we actually had private health insurance, health insurance companies would work this out themselves. It would probably come down to: you don't want to get vaccinated, you pay an extra $1/month.

The libertarian answer is pretty clear: nobody has a right to force you to inject stuff into your body. However, people of course have the right to exclude you from their private property (including schools, private roads, private developments, etc.) if you aren't vaccinated. That approach gets the government out of deciding which vaccines you should take and which you shouldn't.

So installing a free copy of an operating system will make you lose money or give you a disease?

Yes, it will make you lose money, because the time you invest in learning Windows and Windows programming gives you a poor return on your investment.

Didn't think so. Grow up.

You should take your own advice to heart.

I don't disagree. If I had my way, we would be inching toward states' rights instead of away from it.

States rights are certainly a good thing, as is restoration of the interstate commerce clause to its original purpose (unimpeded trade between the states), as is subsidiarity even below the state level.

For instance, I'm a big supporter of the Article V amendment process

I really can't think of much that I would want to amend the Constitution by. As written, it gives only a small and reasonable number of enumerated powers to the federal government. The problem we are having is that the federal government is simply ignoring the limits set by the US Constitution; how is amending the Constitution going to fix that?

Eventually, the highway bandits compete with each other, until one wins. The dominant winner doesn't hide. He and his group conspicuously controls the highways, to keep all the other highway bandits out. They wear uniforms. They streamline their collection. They create euphamisms, like "tolls", and "North Texas Transportation Authority" for their operations. We ultimately accept them, because they are us...

The error in your analysis is the assumption that there necessarily needs to be a single, centralized authority. That approach is characteristic of progressive, fascist, socialist, and communist states, mostly in the West, but it is hardly an essential part of government. Most societies historically have functioned perfectly well without it.

You can see where this is going.

Yes: into a false dichotomy.