OK, so my points in response to this:
1. The speaker demonstrates that he doesn't understand the libertarian political ideal.
2. By doing so, the speaker demonstrates that he is (a) not libertarian, and his statements show that he is, in fact, (b) biased against libertarianism in such a way that he will be unable to represent it fully, positively, and accurately.
3. The speaker's statements are extremely dangerous (not to libertarian ideals, but to libertarians as individual people), and the sentiment expressed by the speaker is borderline dehumanizing.
4. (Conclusion) Under the guise of a study into how emotions cause breaches in judgment, the speaker has in fact, committed an emotional breach in judgment. This video is at once frightening and humorously ironic.
Now, to elaborate a little...
1. The speaker correctly identifies the Libertarian attitudes towards the federal government, saying "their chief concern is that the government leaves people alone, and sort-of accept that there will be winners and losers in an economic game". However, any libertarian will tell you that this explicitly pertains to the federal government, and that they expect and desire for local and state governments to create laws pleasing to the populace thereof (be they "big government" or "small government" laws at the state level, a libertarian will say that the choice belongs to the people of each state). Libertarians repeat ad nauseam that this is because of their commitment to the constitution. What does that mean? It means that their representation in the "5 moral categories" actually leans very heavily on the "tradition" category. Not only that, but they believe that the constitution establishes conditions which promote freedom and equity in states, which I think that any Libertarian will tell you represent a "pure" condition for the free government. That is to say, I think that libertarians hold the "purity" and "tradition" bars very high.
[This conclusion required that I utilize a definition of "purity" which is different from what was probably intended by the speaker. This leads to a point I might discuss in another blog. I think his "5 categories of morality" are either flawed in design or a fundamentally bad idea]
2. This point stands alone, I think, as a logical step, and needs either very little or very abstract support. I hope that my thoughts on the following statement from the video will suffice.
[There was a substantial bit of argument here, which I've removed because I made an interpretive mistake.]
3. Lastly, and again perhaps most importantly, this "academic" video, produced by a university, describes libertarians with statements such as "libertarians are psychologically different", "their worldview is not a deeply moral worldview", "they tend to be...self oriented.", "They're lower in empathy", "They just don't feel other's pain" and (again) "You may be better able to accept life's losers the less you suffer vicariously with them". Issues...
First, the above statements describe a clinical narcissist directly. When applied to the entire group so called Liberatian, they are demonstrably not true.
Second, the statements are frightfully divisive. A gullible liberal who hears this speaker will become afraid of libertarians, because they are apparently heartless. A gullible libertarian hearing it will become afraid of everyone else, because he has just been painted in a way that should make others hostile to him. A conservative watching this ought to be confused, because libertarians are just far-right conservatives.
Third, the speaker has just dehumanized an entire political group ("libertarians are psychologically different"), and isolated them against two other political groups.
4. The conclusion, I think, requires no further elaboration.
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Now, to finish out this post, I want to ask and answer the following questions with a sort of internal dialogue.
Q. Is this kind of narrative characteristic of "left-wing media"?
A. Yes (Example: the above video)
Q. Is this kind of narrative characteristic of "right-wing media"?
A. Yes (Example: everything Prager U says about "the left")
Q. Is this type of thinking catching on among consumers of media?
A. Yes. (Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxm57q8QZac)
And a question for everyone, to which I don't know the answer: Why?
Why are we doing this to ourselves? What are the possible outcomes?
Is it the case that people are not willing to listen to the "other side" as is so often alleged by every media outlet I listen to? I don't think that that it is the case. I think it's more likely that people have difficulty finding access to realistic (as in, not extremely confrontational to the point of dehumanizing the other party) sources of media. I think the reason it's difficult to find such access is because of the behavior of popular sites such as Google and Facebook who, now, prioritize results containing ideas with which the searcher is likely to agree. I think that it leads to people thinking that their own view is the majority view and also the view with which every sane person agrees.
Personally, I think I can say confidently that I experienced an analogous illusion because of my sheltered upbringing. I thought that the majority of people I would encounter outside of the home would be solid Christians. I thought that Christianity was the sole unchallenged opinion of the masses until I got into highschool. In school, I was bombarded with atheist challenges based in subjects for which I hadn't studied any answers. College was another bubble, but it was even worse when I graduated and went into the workforce. Not long into my new life, a homeless person invited me to a church where they talked with me through the wide variety of arguments I was hearing, and I think that I now recognize the trains of thought used both within and without Christianity. The fact that I continue to believe is neither cognitive dissonance nor lack of information, but rather a decided measurement of the evidence in favor of Christianity, guided and drawn by God Himself for my good. The point here is that I know what it's like to become disillusioned, and I think that a mass disillusioning is a sooncoming and manufactured necessity.
Alright, sorry about the rant. Consider this the first of my aforementioned political commentaries, but don't expect me to focus on politics often.
"A zero is always false, and everything else is true."
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