User talk:Steeletrap

Tu ne cede malis

		The Austria Barnstar of National Merit
		Presented to User Steeletrap. For tireless editing to improve difficult articles on WP SPECIFICO talk 21:31, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

Thank you very much. You really helped me get on the right track after losing my temper earlier today. (Hope you don't mind I corrected the spelling of my name to Steeletrap. Steeletrap (talk) 21:35, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

I'm leaving Hoppe

Hello Steeletrap. I am no longer contributing on Hoppe, because the harassment and personal attacks have made it too wasteful of my limited attention and intelligence. I just could not participate there in the current environment on edits and talk. Having worked a bit on Hoppe, however, I hope that editors will now muster the effort needed to undo the damage caused by the unfounded attacks on your edits in the recent past. This will require some real concentration to restore the best of the deleted content. I do hope that you are able to relax after having devoted so much energy to your defense. Good luck, and please do consider finding a way to add an email contact to your WP account. All best wishes. SPECIFICO talk 03:29, 28 May 2013 (UTC) |

I fully understand your desire to avoid harassment, SPECIFICO. (Though I do hope you join me in celebrating the embarrassing defeat of the false allegations against us.) Regarding Doc. Hoppe's page I myself am less optimistic than you; I do not believe our improvements to the page will make a difference. That's because I believe the "movement" will revert all of the RS content we added and replace it with citations fron "Mises Academy", "Mises.org", "LewRockwell.com", "Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics", "Journal of Libertarian Studies", and other proxy publications run by Hoppe's co-workers at the Mises Institute. I expect that the descriptively accurate WP:Con sub-title invoking Hoppe's opinions on homosexuality will be eventually replaced by the descriptively inaccurate, non-NPOV "Academic freedom controversy" title.

While I emphatically reject the principles of libertarianism, this ideology undeniably has serious scholars associated with it, as does the "Austrian" School of Economics; however, the "movement"/"Pure Rothbardian Anarchism"/"Ron Paul for President" strain is (as my research indicates) viewed as disreputable even by mainstream libertarians, such as Tom G. Palmer, whose critical remarks of Mises Institute scholars are systematically cleansed from the pages of their scholars. Operating from a non-empirical, "rationalistic" "economics" framework and invoking (and distorting) dubious philosophical concepts like natural law in defense of their moral absolutism, "movement" libertarianism is little more than a dogmatic cult. "Movement" supporters in this regard are akin to Scientologists, insofar as they not only personally lack evidence for their beliefs, but are incapable of examining data which differ from their ideology and integrating it into their worldview. Their edits to "movement"-related Wikipedia entries should be viewed the same as Scientologists' edits to pages like L. Ron Hubbard and Lord Xenu.

Therefore, attempts to improve the pages of "movement" "scholars" such as those affiliated with the Mises Institute are likely to be met by irrational hostility and attempts to shoot the messenger. I am unfortunately resigned to the fact that the Hoppe page will soon be "restored" to indicate he has never said anything bigoted about homosexuals, that "Argumentation Ethics" represents some sort of epistemological breakthrough, that the UNLV controversy primarily related to whether professors ought to have academic freedom, and so forth. Steeletrap (talk) 12:54, 28 May 2013 (UTC)