Political Memes

Penn Gilette has always seemed to be driven by a level of honesty and compassion and valued the freedom to choose where to direct that compassion. I think earlier on he viewed other libertarians as having the same level of honest compassion as he does but over time it's become more and more clear that libertarians are overwhelmingly selfish rich white guys who don't want to be called Repuiblicans.

I mean in the early 2000s he was calling bullshit on the hysteria over the vaccine autism link saying the alternative of kids dying to preventable diseases is so much worse. He even gave the tenuous link a benefit of the doubt and accepted that even if they did cause autism,t he alternative is so much worse.

The smartest people in the room are those who are willing to admit a mistake, or that their opinions have changed.

"A lot of the illusions that I held dear, rugged individualism, individual freedoms, are coming back to bite us in the ass. It seems like getting rid of the gatekeepers gave us Trump as president, and in the same breath, in the same wind, gave us not wearing masks, and maybe gave us a huge unpleasant amount of overt racism."

Hats off to a man willing to admit he made a mistake.

As a big fan of P&T, this is a major win.

Not to mention the veganism which is also closely related to rejecting fascism.

https://vegnews.com/magician-penn-jillette-goes-vegan-for-the-animals

(Full disclosure: I saw an interview where Penn says he went vegan for health and weight loss. But maybe he's evolved to animal liberation as well.)

Cool to see the meme applied to someone who genuinely went to clown college!

I considered myself a Libertarian for a few years. I was a disillusioned Republican during the George Bush days and Libertarianism really grew on me. I voted for Gary Johnson twice.
As I became more concerned about climate change, I could not see a viable Libertarian solution to it. Private business is more than happy to keep chugging away with fossil fuels until it's far too late.
For Libertarianism to work, these same private businesses need to do the right thing voluntarily. In Atlas Shrugged, those businessmen and women are doing what is right for their business and it just so happens to be what is right for everyone else, that isn't always the case. All too often, what is right for business goes against what is right for society. Once I realized this, everything unraveled for me.
So anyway, here I am, years later, voting for Democrats because I've got no other option as the GOP became more and more insane since I left.

"I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative" - John Stuart Mill

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

John Kenneth Galbraith

I think Penn went there with a different mindset than those occupying the space now.