I agree with you. There's nothing wrong with pointing out that you disagree with Beck's interpretation of the NAP. But that's not what people are doing, they are saying "he's not libertarian" because he has a different interpretation of the NAP when it comes to the Middle East. This is inaccurate and unfair of us for several reason, including: the NAP is not what defines a libertarian! The union under the NAP was a political strategy used to unite the two major competing libertarian sects at the time of the creation of the Libertarian Party. There are many schools of libertarianism which don't subscribe to the NAP at all! ...at least Beck isn't one of those types of libertarians.
I don't know when we became the word police movement--let alone the word police without any historical understanding of the various definitions of libertarianism. This kind of thinking is exactly why libertarians rarely win elections, because they focus on differences rather than commonalities ("he's not like us!"). That's our brand of libertarianism; that's not all or the only brand of libertarianism. Some libertarians fall into the belief camps of "the end justifies the means" category where they're permitted to attack (or kill) if it leads to a greater good and an overall increase in freedom (I call these wackos "neo-libertarians"; but technically it's not an accurate description, since "neo-libertarians" have been around longer than our brand of libertarianism). And there's plenty of other brands of libertarianism that are more exotic than even that.
First, I think we both understand that libertarianism, as I'm using it, is both the movement we each subscribe to generally speaking, as well as the popularly acknowledged definition. Noam Chomsky's usage of libertarian doesn't get near the popular acknowledgement that our usage does.
That being said, I have to disagree with you - I don't disagree with Beck's interpretation of the NAP - he's
flat wrong about it. Again, he could call himself a black female, but he's not. And no one other than the stupid, the insane, or the most poorlyl informed would agree with him.
I think you're right. But it's not like those two-bit middle eastern countries did nothing to make Beck think this (they do engage in some pretty awful hate speech and often legalized oppression or terror in the name of Shariah Law). If those two-bit countries changed their rhetoric, Beck would likely chill out a bit in the same way he chills out when Rand changes the rhetoric of Ron Paul. As it is, those countries hurt their own causes (assuming, and it's a big assumption since they've never publicly said it while they have said the exact opposite, they only want Americans to leave them alone) by using rhetoric which makes dudes like Beck and Americans at large see jihadists under every bed.
I don't think it's a violation of the NAP; it's just a tortured stretch of the NAP which none of us are comfortable with.
Insects can be scary. But people who
imagine insects crawling all over them to the point that they scratch and beat themselves to the point of bruising, bleeding and scarring aren't rational. They're insane. I don't say that those people just have a different understanding of insects than I do; I say that they are terrified to the point of self-destruction of something that isn't there. Again, insects can be scary; but a rational understanding of the threat they pose is integral to sanity.
Additionally, if Beck proposed burning all of nature as a consequence of his
irrational fear of insects, I wouldn't consider that an interpretation of reality that I just don't agree with; I would consider that to be insane.
In my view, one of the real problems with people calling Beck un-libertarian: they have no real understanding or historical knowledge of libertarianism beyond their own ideology.
Beck's use of "libertarian" jibes with neither our - and the popular - usage of that word, nor any other definition of the word. He's not a Chomskyite. He's not a Paulian. He's not a Rothbardian.
Everytime someone comes along and calls himself a libertarian does not mean that we are obligated to yet again expand the definition of the word. There is almost NO usage of the word libertarian under which Glenn Beck legitimately fits.
