> most hilarious thing...Bwahahahaa!...massive hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness. Amazing.
This insulting style of persuasion has been shown to backfire. Here's a study on this effect - Negative Persuasion Via Personal Insult: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00221031679...
An individual directly insulted by a communicator attempting to persuade him will show a “boomerang effect” by increasing the extremity of his initial attitude position
You might be correct, but you're increasing the libertarianism in the world, not decreasing it.
People ought to step back from their beliefs about whether they right, and instead argue in such a way that, whether they are right or not, they advance the state of knowledge. Insults and ridicule don't do this! Insults can change people's beliefs, but usually in the opposite way we intend, and only by inflaming emotion, not based on any evidence about the world, so they're a tool wielded with equal efficacy by both the correct and the mistaken.
Creationists, racists, and all the others we know to be wrong can all belittle and insult their opponents too. Only by sticking to the best kinds of disagreement (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html) can we make progress, because people whose beliefs are wrong can only make flawed arguments. Those who are correct already hold the advantageous ground, so fight there, not in the quagmire of flamewars!
More generally, people aren't usually especially at fault for being wrong, so they don't deserve insults. I must be wrong about some percentage of my beliefs, as must you. Any libertarian is likely to be right about something that you and I are wrong about.
This HN article didn't need to be a flamewar about libertarianism. Even if you're right, you're opponents will likely respond with a similar tone, and you don't need libertarians belittling you about your views on economics or whatever. It won't change your mind, just as your insults don't change theirs.
If a libertarian is to doubt his libertarian ways, it'll be through the same way we might ever be persuaded about something. First, probably, we'll learn that someone we like and respect holds the view, and we'll realize it's a position that reasonable people can hold, not just idiots or bigots or sociopaths. Then we'll learn there's nuances that we'd not encountered before - maybe we'd only heard strawman versions of its arguments before. Then we'll shift slightly such that it seems like it applies in some limited situations. And so on, and maybe we'll hold a new belief after that.
