Penn Jillette on why his views on libertarianism have changed

This right here is why I have such respect for Penn, even though he has expressed opinions that I highly disagree with. He isn't stuck in his ways, and his views alwayd come from a level of kindness. I might not agree with his conclusions, but I respect how he got there.

Penn’s career when south after his position on trump.

can you say he's a FRAUD
gender is absolute. he's got a problem with that now.
but it still is true.

Penn's views aren't conflicting. Social responsibility without a government mandate means that we do the right thing socially and stand up to the bullshit of what is actually wrong. I'm a libertarian and believe that open carrying a firearm should be legal everywhere the public has access to in the country, but at the same time, that doesn't mean you should do it.

Unless we all agree on absolute observable physical reality and consequences,
it is illogical (logically inconsistent) to talk about "responsibility" or "ethics".
Impossible to define when initiation of force happens, because it is impossible to define the boundaries the borders (around a person's body? around their prison cell? some arbitrary border of a country) when people cannot even accept proved scientific observable physical facts like evolution, history, Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).

Reductionism is the ONLY logically consistent way to think that puts quantitative testable physically observable actions & consequences that matter above bullshit like tradition, nationalism, patriotism, religion, culture for the sake of culture.
Reductionism is about putting fairness/justice above tradition, nationalism, patriotism, religion, culture.

It’s unfortunate how much penn’s view of his own community with the same political think was that foggy. The greed and regression of many libertarians were 20/20-clear

Masks don't work.

Responsibility w/o authority is slavery.
Authority w/o responsibility is tyranny.
Decentralized authority and responsibility to the individual level is the only rational and compassionate response.

Hitler was a libertarian too, at first.

You can be an optimist but don't be stupid and believe everything the "experts say." Trust but verify. And they didn't say you can't wear a mask, just that it was "Bulltsh*t" which it is.

Again, we didn't HAVE "lockdowns" we had QUARANTINES. You wouldn't have been allowed on the street outside your house if we had "lockdowns"

If the values which you endorsed for decades ,simply evaporate because of 2 years of a nasty respiratory infection….

…they were never truly values to begin with 🤷‍♂️

So, how long did it take Penn to figure out that Libertarians usually are misanthropists and that he doesn't really belong to them? Which was obvious from the start. I never thought he was a bad person. But man, how naive can you be!

I 100% agree on the masks, wearing them shouldn’t have been forced in public, but you should still wear it during a pandemic.

I’m not sure what happened with his perception on the vaccine, I kind of have to take the unflattering assumption that he treats science like magic.

Science did it, it’s good, the end.

But for those of us who understand that science is a process, repeated experimentation and information gathering, vaccine developed in three days is a red flag not a miracle.

And even one that I could support, if people are free to take it and not forced, there’s a valid risk reward to consider depending on your risk factor from the disease, as well as considering the people that you’re going to be around, and their risk factor.

No I don’t have TV myself so I don’t see these nearly as often as I used to, but on the occasion that I do stumble across a TV, i’ll still regularly see advertisements telling you that your potentially owed compensation if you used one medication or another and it caused permanent damage to you in some capacity.

Those medication’s actually passed the normal FDA testing and still managed to fuck people up, but this one, it’s apparently so good that we don’t even have to test it fully, before Biden tries to make it mandatory, sure he failed, but he literally tried to force upon the American people a vaccine that had a lower standard of testing than we require for medication that we give to pets.

The masks ended up doing nothing. Go back to rationality, instead of backing the use of violence to force people to do things. Come back Penn.

If they just didn't mandate the damn vaccine and misrepresent the effectiveness of it then we wouldn't have had this backlash against vaccines in general. The medical community and media shot themselves in the foot with how they handled the mandates and media coverage. They should have treated it like the flu....encourage vaccines to vulnerable people, be forthcoming about the effectiness, and not go out of their way to silence dissent.

Wealth accumulated by oligarchs goes towards determining the nations political direction be it in the form of corporate propaganda or super-pac. Wealth has perverted democracy, and the wealthy is its greatest threat

Because his daughter is "trans".

Who the hell cares what Penn Jillette thinks? He's not some major Internet influencer, he's a fucking magician.

Im for ancap but haven seen how people act and how the world is it just can't work. Ive also seen libertarian party and they are a joke. Why do rhey even even let leftist in that want to sabotage it. I saw one socialist say its important to infiltrate these things. Theres also a video of guy dancing naked and one person goes this is against NAP principal meaning that guy is pro censorship. i think in order to have an ancap society you would need generations to be schooled in that thinking. Even thomas paine said reason you need the state i people don't act decently.

well caring about other people is simply emotional blackmail thes days. " I saw people using that same word, ‘libertarian,’ to mean ‘I don’t care about other people.’” "
this is because too many people. weaponize compassion.

Libertarianism=Taoism too similar, like pure Advaita, whenever you are totally clear what you want is loving what is. It is what it is, no choice

When I looked at libertarianism. I saw this naivety that everyone and corporation would do the right thing. A brief glance at history shows this to be not true. In any society there need s to be enforceable rules and regulations.

Libertarianism does not work in any real way. The fact that he has finally started to see this is a good thing. The whole anti-vax and mask movement. Showed that in libertarian thought that any reasonable efforts at keeping people safe was not going to fly. This is not how society works. We are all in this together. Sometimes we need for the good of society do or refrain from doing things that would harm not just oneself, but others. Unless of course you think shouting someone on 5th avenue is just fone by you or driving drunk is OK.

Boy, is correct about never being right!😂

Libertarianism was based on a view of human nature that evidence (in psychology, biology, evolutionary psychology, behavioural economics etc) has, over the last 40 years...debunked. When the initial premise of a position has been proven false...the rest is merely a house of cards built on nothing. That's the reality. It was a semi-reasonable position to hold....50 years ago (semi-reasonable because it never stood up to logical analysis (cooperative social species is intrinsically libertarian? Contradiction in terms...however although not supported by logic it didn't have solid evidence based studies blowing it out the water - it does now). To hold it now is akin to believing in creationism or a flat earth. It's one of yesterday's theories.

Don't hang on to it. It's no longer anything more than a baseless belief system. And, as we all know, you lose nothing by discarding - to use a phrase familiar to Penn fans - bullshit.

Time to move on. Find a better alternative.

He should read Thomas Szasz. Libertarian liberty AND responsibility.

I'm EXTREMELY disappointed to hear that Penn Jillette actually thought that facial masks had ANY kind of use. Seriously, has he EVER looked at the scientific studies? There's ZERO evidence that facial masks have ANY effect on the spreading of a virus. NONE. I wrote expert systems about professional protective clothing and came across all that literature already in the 1990s.
In the medical field, it was well known that facial masks DO NOT REDUCE INFECTIONS during surgeries. A 1980 study showed that tracer particles were deposited on the wound during an operation but NOT on the facial mask, meaning that the ENTIRE air stream went around the edges, as anyone with minimal knowledge of fluid dynamics would immediately assume.
A study from 2020 by a fluid dynamics lab specifically tested the effect of facial masks and they found that the masks led to a GREATER number of particles being deposited in the dummy's simulated respiratory tract, because facial masks cause an acceleration of the air flow over the edges of the mask.
Lots of data is now available about the effect of facial mask. One study examined the outcome of facial mask mandates in 35 European countries and found that countries such as Germany that had very strict mask mandates (80-90% compliance) vs. Sweden with no mandate and a 5-10% compliance had the exact same infection rates. But countries with mask mandates had HIGHER DEATH RATES of all causes!
Which is unsurprising, given that facial masks cause innumerable severe health issues as well as psychological issues, as documented in several studies - before and during COVID.
Where children and parents were forced to wear masks, this caused severe developmental issues, as admitted by the doctor who was the CNN expert and propagandist for facial masks. She came forward and admitted that her own child had been harmed by the masks and that she would no longer recommend them.
The only use the CDC recommended masks for was SOURCE CONTROL, i.e. someone who is sick, coughing and sneezing, should wear a mask to protect people around him. Every article confirmed that facial masks do not offer any protection against viruses. Smoke particles go right through them - as anyone can test by themselves - and those are 10 to 100 times larger than viruses. But as mentioned, that's irrelevant, as most of the air flow goes around the edges anyway.
N95 masks apparently can offer marginal protection, but their filtration effect is so strong that they should not be worn for more than 15-20 minutes. The wearer is severely oxygen deprived.

I am not AT ALL optimistic about the decency and responsibility of my fellow chimps, but I am STILL a Libertarian (although I don't use the label) because I believe it is essentially wrong to use force and coercion to compel another free human.

Liberty and self reliance first. He was never a libertarian

I hope his vaccine opinion has changed.....you cannot develop a vaccine in the short time it took and it be effective...this has now been shown to be true.

If someone chooses to drive without a seat belt then we should limit how much healthcare they get in the case of a car accident. In a pure libertarian society that would be enforced by higher insurance rates for people who ride without seat belts or drive motorcycles without wearing helmets.

Optimistic libertarian...

100% agree with Penn here. I was a Libertarian around that time and was starting to see a lot of the flaws in it but the whole mask drama was just the final nail in the coffin precisely because of the reason he described. They weren't advocating to just not have a mask mandate and to wear it voluntarily instead, but rather they just simply didn't want to be told what to do. It just showed how weak the ideology is when it comes to handling a variety of political situations, and, as Penn said, how little a lot of them cared about other people.

uhhhh lol.....this didn't age well xD

The problem I find about the Libertarians as a Political Party is that there really is no such thing as a Libertarian Party. Libertarians generally believe in Limited Government and Greater Personal Freedoms, but there's a great divide among them about exactly how little government and how much personal freedom they want, there's no real unity among them and no strong leadership. And of course an even bigger problem, in more recent years too many of them have started identifying with the MAGA Movement, they talk about being Libertarians, but they slam Democrats and bow before Trump and the other MAGA Republicans.

Penn is completely clueless about what it means to be a libertarian. He voted for Hillary and Biden I am certain.

Boomer!

There is a naive sort of libertarian who thinks everyone would just do the right thing if they were not under coercion by the government. The only other people who think that way are Marxists.

Trump pushed it through….another promise made.

Since he's daughter announced she was TG, he changed. I'm not buying it.

Heres the difference between libertarian, democrat, and republican on one topic, murder:
Democrat: against it and wants it illegal
Republican:also against it and wants it illegal
Libertarian: murder is bad but thats a personal choice so no law for it should exist.😊

“I’m a libertarian and I have no idea what libertarianism means”.

This is the reason why jobody can take the party seriously. There’s too many like Penn.

Penn is a joke lol

Penn! Libertarianism has always been like that lol

There are a LOT of comments of people telling us about what they are. You're not Penn Jillette. We don't really care

Libertarianism is a pipe dream I used to believe until I got 23, from my teenage years until that point. Y'all can be bitter about Penn drifting from it, I felt it when he voted for Clinton in 2016 instead for Gary Johnson (who I dislike but don't despise). But nowadays, or better said for a good while, I understand it.
Libertarianism doesn't lead to anything, it's a dead end. You won't achieve nor you will convince people to vote for a party who wants to minimize the governments influence, like in easy terms "let it run itself, let society run by individuals (who very much get more influence because of the lack of regulation without supporting the society anyhow) without oversight whatsoever, expect you are - sorry not sorry - stupid enough to take Adam Smiths invisible hand literally".
Y'all libertarians can spam "read Mises/Rothbard/Hoppe/Hayek". They don't have any functional solutions to any problem. The so-called mainstream economists don't suppress y'all, your ideas (the Mises Caucus and associates) are just plain fucking stupid, it's no wonder y'all called the "marxists of free market economy".
I already hear the authoritarianism argument in my mind. Again, I was boderline anarcho-capitalist back then and would have said the same thing, I even was on a Erika Steinbach/Steven Crowder mind set, who said, that the Nazis where nationalSOCIALIST, therefore "socialist" aka economically left-wing. If you think that way, you should read books from legitimate historics instead of Mises or whatsoever.
I will take a flaws of (german) social democracy anyday instead of being a libertarian, which ideology would fuck over the majority of the population, it would just benefit the ones who have economical power. Period.

Everyone can be libertarian until they are scared.

Libertarians tend to be clueless about history and governance in general. Their arguments breakdown under very little scrutiny and the roads they’d have us go down all lead towards a feudalism hell scape. They’re just right wingers trying to sound hip and contrarian, maybe hoping to feel socially liberal but ultimately helping along any and all right wing ideology