That's nice. Now answer the question: how is anyone supposed to know what you consider unsuitable for your child? And why do you think it's reasonable for Wikipedia to go through all its present and future data to apply your standards just to save you some trouble babysitting your own kid?

I couldn't care less about what you get to see, but I would like a filter flag that allows me to ensure my kids are not exposed to gratuitous violence and/or pornography until they are mature enough to deal with it.

So what constitutes "gratuitous violence"? History? Descriptions of how snake venom operates? Book plot summaries? How is anyone supposed to know what you happen to consider appropriate or inappropriate for your kid? And that's not getting into the impossibility of actually implementing this: every existing article and every future edit would need to be reviewed to see what side of the divide they fall to. And of course any failures would open Wikipedia to liability lawsuits.

The code changes might be insignificant, but the effort to actually filter the data would be enormous and endless, and frankly your convenience doesn't justify it.

Christians are expected to memorize several passages word-for-word

Expected by whom?

I mean, it certainly seems reasonable to assume that a Christian might be familiar with the at least parts of the Bible, but you make it sound like a requirement, which leads to questions of just who has made such requirements and on what authority?

Even accepting that argument as is, I still believe there's some leeway here for smart people: educate the morons by force, ridicule their belifes on every occasion, don't just sit back and take their crap in the name of religious tolerance.

Smart people don't side with a would-be tyrant who openly declares his intent to violate people's rights. That your strategy of violent persuasion would almost certainly invigorate religious fundamentalism is just icing on the cake.

America can quote the names of countries it believes instills fear in it's populace all it wants, but those countries can't do jack shit when the rest of the world would oppose it.

The rest of the world won't oppose "it", as long as "it" is censorship. No politician on Earth has anything to gain from free flow of information, and plenty to gain from controlling what their citizens see, so the one thing they all can agree on is that the Internet needs to be censored. That's why more and more countries erect their own Great Firewalls.

The greatest thing about the Internet is that it allows people to see and discuss about things that offend "community standards", and that's also precisely the thing that community leaders hate. Allow communities greater control of "their" shard of the Internet, and it will die. Which is probably inevitable anyway, there's far too much power at stake for the powerful to allow it to continue existing.

All these "company towns" require extensive collusion with state and local (sometimes federal) governments in order to protect the assets of the business in question. Historically, that was taken away by labor law and anti-competitive regulation, but in a libertarian society, the business no longer has that powerful ally to protect it while it engages in harmful activities.

It also has no powerful opponent. Nothing stops it from hiring mercenaries to kill any who resist. Historically, we call this kind of system "feudalism", and it only ended when the central government became stronger than the local warlords; also, any country where the central government collapses tends to revert to some variation of feudalism in short order.

One needs social infrastructure that supports the libertarian strategy, eg, choosing to take on a tyrant, oppressive business, or crime lord and doing so in an organized way. This infrastructure simply doesn't exist in most of the world.

Sure it does. We call it "the government".

That's the worst argument you could have made. The market does a great job at setting prices that balance supply and demand, far better than any Central Planning Committee.

So it does. And history shows that there's almost always a huge surplus of labour for most professions, thus the prices - wages - are set at barely-survival level. So, letting the market set prices for labour means most people live in horrible poverty and the a few in the lap of luxury. Which is bad in itself and also leads to constant unrest and threat of revolts.

It is important to remember that the whole purpose of the market is to serve people, specifically by letting them acquire goods and services. Efficiency is a tool towards this end, nothing more; letting a tool get a higher priority than the goal is foolish. A market where a significant portion of the partitioners struggles to make ends meet has failed on its mission, no matter how "efficient" it might be, and letting the labour market go unregulated - for example by not having a minimum wage - leads to such a market.

What I want to know is how people deal with the cognitive dissonance of their (presumed) conviction that they're doing good, in the context of the methods that they're employing?

Some of the correspondence of the Nazis has been published, and some of it touches on this. If memory serves, it went something like "doing the right thing is hard, murdering people is hard, therefore murdering people must be the right thing to do." Yes, seriously.

Isn't there ever a moment of "Holy shit, my quest to make the world a better, more natural place is now manifest in me doing things like shooting nuns and throwing acid in infants' faces. I think I'd better go back to my hometown and spend a few weeks crying hysterically in the shower."

Admitting that you have a problem takes guts. It's hard enough when the worst you've done is puke into a gutter; imagine what it would take to admit that throwing acid on someone's face was actually a horrible thing, not a courageous act of religious or ideological commitment. Add the fact that hatred and violence are addictive, and it should hardly be surprising that people who've given in to them avoid admitting this to the last - and if they do admit it, they make up some bullshit story about being unable to change, as opposed to simply unwilling, thus turning themselves into the real victims, at least in their own minds. Which then justifies further degenerate acts in the name of vengeance.

Wouldn't you rather enjoy the high of self-rightenousness and adrenaline than face the hangover?

I guess since they are anarchists, when they are caught we can just forget all the usual mumbo jumbo about rights and privileges shoot them on the spot?

No, because unless you investigate you can't know if you've caught an anarchist or some poor bastard who just happens to be having a bad hair day.

Also, if you find legal rights to be "mumbo jumbo" to be ignored when given an excuse, why do you want to shoot anarchists, especially anarchist terrorists? Aren't you people kinda kindred spirits?

A good capitalist will not, as they will see that the long term value of their life outweighs the profit from the rope.

Rational actors in economics are like Newtonian physics: as long as there's little substance and nothing is happening in a hurry it's a reasonable simplification to assume that every entity knows everything there is to know and can integrate it all to determine its own reactions, but when things start heating up you need more complex models to explain all the seemingly irrational stuff that starts popping up.