I tend to revise my views a lot as I discover new arguments and new ideas.
Excellent! That's what I was hoping for as I read your original post. Too many people are far too dogmatic on these topics, IMO, and if we're unwilling to accept new information and change, we'll never grow.
I look forward to your clarifications and would like to know more about geo-libertarianism.
I'm trying to think of how to go about writing a response to this. My response is gonna be a little scattered. My thought earlier today was maybe moving this conversation to Orkut and linking it on Steemit, that way there could be a more conversational back-and-forth rather than a series of dissertations. Unfortunately, I just learned that Orkut no longer exists. I'd like to have this conversation on a forum where it could be more of a continuous thread for dialogue, but not like a chat room. There's a lot of things that we are approaching from different perspectives and we are using terms differently. I don't think our different definitions are equally valid though, so there's discussion to be had there too.
If you're open to a conversation on a public forum like that, and happen to know of a good forum we can use, let me know. Personally, I just like to do Steemit posts on a single topic, and this seems like it needs to be more of a dialogue on several related topics.
Sorry, I haven't replied to this yet. I'm not very interested in using other mediums at the moment. The nesting limit is annoying, for sure, but dialogues can still take place in a forum-like manner here.
And that is the problem with framing, language, and philosophy. If we go deep enough, we'll find many disagreements on how we view and define words. That's why these discussions often don't really change minds. Hopefully though, over time, people will grab bits and pieces of meaning that they value and use to further shape their views in the future.
I started off as a right-libertarian, having studied Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman shortly after getting out of high school. I was also very religious, deeply influenced by C.S. Lewis, Cornelius van Til, and Eastern Orthodox theology. I ended up reading Rothbard, becoming sympathetic to anarcho-capitalism but rejecting it in favor of individualist anarchism of the Lysander Spooner/Benjamin Tucker variety (partially because I had been influenced by Wendell Barry and by distributist ideas). Ultimately I started drifting more and more to the left, embracing a mixture of mutualism and libertarian municipalism. I also became an atheist somewhere along the way (thanks to Karl Popper and Mises). My general rule is that I follow the logic wherever it leads, so my views tend to be pretty flexible in response to new insights.
I might be open to having a dialogue on Steemit at some point, but I'm a little overwhelmed at the moment with other things.
That's a really great overview of your philosophical journey. Thanks for sharing! Mine is somewhat similar, in many regards, but I came to it later in life, I think. I'm still learning about mutualism and haven't read Wendell Barry, so I'm sure I have much more to learn which will certainly impact my thinking even more over time. One thing I do enjoy challenging my anarcho-capitalist friends with is to clearly articulate what they view as the real emergent properties that exist as many human beings come together and how his philosophy deals with the problems which emerge that are more than the sum of the parts.