I don't think anyone forgets that. It's like a defining character trait.

If ever you can be legally punished not because you did something that hurt or even endangered someone, but simply because you didn't ask permission first, liberty has one foot already in the grave.

If someone with a license to do X does X and hurts or endangers somebody anyway despite their license, they get rightly punished for it anyway.

If somebody with a license to do X does X and nobody gets hurt or endangered in any way, they don't get in trouble for anything, as they shouldn't.

If somebody without a license to do X does X and hurts or endangers somebody, they get rightly punished for it too.

But if somebody without a license to do X does X and nobody gets hurt or endangered in any way, they get punished, not for causing any harm or danger, but for having the gall not to ask permission before safely and harmlessly doing something.

The only difference mandatory licensure ever makes is punishing people who wouldn't have been punished otherwise because they weren't doing anything harmful or dangerous. Mandatory licensure, of anything, only ever harms innocents, by punishing them for harmless behavior that they simply didn't ask permission for first.

Or the clothing ad (forget which company, possibly late '90s or early 2000s) with a young lady opining that "I want to be different, just like everybody else."

Depressingly many instances of communication are effectively just disguised commerials for something or other. People say things to manipulate others into doing something for the speaker's own benefit all the time.

Political science is not the same thing as politics. You're discussing the latter, not the former.

'Until they fail to meet their requirements' would mean 'immediately', as the requirements begin unmet; and if you mean they'd declare a deadline for meeting their requirements, that'd just be letting them set their own term limits. "I promise to [fix all problems] over the next 50 years!" and bam, president-for-life.

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.