[philh]

> Everything from chemtrails to anarchocapitalism.

Here we see one problem with downvoting lunacy: some people notice it where it doesn't exist, and others fail to see it where it does.

I'm not ancap myself, but I think the movement deserves respect; for example, I've not read The Machinery of Freedom, but I've heard good things about it, and I don't think you can dismiss it as fringe lunacy.

Chemtrails, though? Obviously dumb.

[pjc50]

"Lunacy" more as a modality of discussion than a property of the ideas themselves. Usually involving taking the ideas as dogma and failing to think about practical application or relevance to the particular subject under discussion.

Another example: Marx wrote a lot of reasonable analysis of the mid-19th-century economic condition (and some bad analysis). Marxists tend to be tremendously irritating write-only dogmatists. It doesn't have to be that way. The right has a similar bunch of people who are Friedman dogmatists.