It's an indictment of mankind that adult human beings still fall for incoherent and nonsensical statist mental gymnastics
who owns the country right now?
What is "the country"? It's a conceptual label for a set of individuals, relationships, and terrain. But abstractions can't be owned. The question is analogous to "what color is a promise?"
I don't think anyone is born a libertarian or can even be a libertarian.
What kind of argument is this? Nobody has been born a Kiwi Farms user, yet Kiwi Farms users exist. Or if you take issue with that example, nobody has been born a designer of lithography fabrication processes, yet computers exist. Are you presupposing that concepts stop existing when you personally fail to be born with them?
Even the ideas you cite don't even come from you, but from the people you've read.
If that were true, then where did
their ideas come from? Either way it's a non-argument. If your standard is originality, then stop using geometry, for Euclid already did it. The real measure of ideas is coherence with reality and not some sort of authorship or pedigree.
We couldn't even communicate ideas, ethics, and thoughts without language.
And in order to communicate at all, we need oxygen and water. Did you think you were unveiling a deep secret of the universe? Language doesn't create truth, it's just a medium through which truth flows. Or do you fail to distinguish between the medium and the content?
It's pretty apparent men are not products of wilderness, but of specific circumstances that are observable.
Duh. The discovery that people are born somewhere is not the philosophical breakthrough you think it is. Circumstances describe the setting of action, but they say nothing about whether certain actions are universally conflict-free or not.
Yeah, a lot of his arguments are just contradictory normative platitudes without any grasp on reality.
Reads to me like a confession of someone who doesn't understand what a norm
is. If you can't tell the difference between a principle that forbids aggression and a platitude, you're not engaging in reality. Really though, if those contradictions are so obvious and trivial that the word "contradictory" alone is sufficient to settle the matter, then by all means, point to one and show where the contradiction is. Should be easy, right? Or are you so busy misdiagnosing contradictions in others that you're failing to see that you can't even deny ethics without practicing one?
Seeking to abolish political power is a political strategy.
That's like saying that the act of removing a tumor is itself a cancer. The libertarian does not seek to "wield state power correctly", instead the goal is to end the pretense that anyone is entitled to wield it. To treat that as a "political strategy" is to assume that every human interaction is political, which is precisely the pathology that you're suffering from.
To do anything in this world that shapes politics, you need power.
Power over nature yes, power over man no. You can shape the world by creating, trading, or withdrawing consent, none of which require a parliament or a badge.
Regardless, to argue that libertarians require political power to implement their ideas is nonsensical. Libertarianism requires the recognition of property boundaries, that's the entire point. The moment it must be "implemented" by force, it's not even libertarianism anymore.
Even if we take this claim at face value, it doesn't make sense either because he engages in politics all the time.
Is discussing medicine the same as performing surgery? Critiquing the state doesn't make you a statesman, and speaking about ethics is not politicking. Or do you fail to understand the difference between describing coercion and participating in it?
You keep presupposing that fighting against power is just another way of trying to grab power, as if the concept of a human act that isn't about dominating or submitting is beyond your understanding. Like, you literally can't imagine someone acting without a master, and from that delusion you conclude that freedom must be hypocrisy.
That is the essence of the statist mind. The statist is a domesticated animal that is so used to the leash that it thinks that biting it off is just begging for a tighter one. The tragedy is that these slaves have turned their obedience into a moral code and started calling it civilization.