"Easy to manipulate" must mean "surprisingly resistant to the idea that violence is acceptable" in libertarian.
Libertarians don't believe in anything like that. We don't believe that violence is acceptable in any form, we do believe in universal suffrage and representative democracy, and we highly value all people as a part of that democracy. To imply that Libertarians are misogynist violent abusers is very rude and ignorant.
I've been a part of the Libertarian party for over 10 years now, am on the Libertarian committee of St. Louis and am a voting member in our primaries. Internet Libertarians are a joke to anyone who is actually in the party. We will surely take their votes though. It is a damn shame that Libertarianism has been taken hostage by some fucked up version of the right wing when they are one of the worst things about the Republican party. You would think that with our staunch support of gay rights, marijuana legalization, and pro-choice agenda that it would be very clear to the misogynistic religious right that they are not welcome here, and yet I have to deal with this newly prevalent version of Reddit Libertarian all the god damned time. It's a huge pain in the ass and it sets back my party all the time. The best way to think of Libertarians who actually live outside of their parents' basements are as Democrats who want to reign in spending, or Republicans who want gay people to smoke marijuana on their wedding day. Everything else is essentially a stolen use of the word Libertarian.
Right there with you. Libertarian used to mean something entirely different: Libertarian came to mean an advocate or defender of liberty, especially in the political and social spheres, as early as 1796, when the London Packet printed on 12 February: "Lately marched out of the Prison at Bristol, 450 of the French Libertarians." The word was again used in a political sense in 1802, in a short piece critiquing a poem by "the author of Gebir", and has since been used with this meaning. The use of the word libertarian to describe a new set of political positions has been traced to the French cognate, libertaire, coined in a scathing letter French libertarian communist Joseph Déjacque wrote to mutualist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1857, castigating him for his sexist political views. Déjacque also used the term for his anarchist publication Le Libertaire: Journal du Mouvement Social, which was printed from 9 June 1858 to 4 February 1861 in New York City. In the mid-1890s, Sébastien Faure began publishing a new Le Libertaire while France's Third Republic enacted the lois scélérates ("villainous laws"), which banned anarchist publications in France. Libertarianism has frequently been used as a synonym for anarchism since this time. Although the word libertarian continues to be widely used to refer to socialists internationally, its meaning in the United States has deviated from its political origins. Libertarianism in the United States has been described as conservative on economic issues and liberal on personal freedom (for common meanings of conservative and liberal in the United States); it is also often associated with a foreign policy of non-interventionism. Since the resurgence of neoliberalism in the 1970s, free-market capitalist libertarianism has spread beyond North America via think tanks and political parties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism And here's a link to a part of that wikipedia page where it talks about different kinds of libertarianism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#Prominent_currentsThe term libertarian was first used by late-Enlightenment free-thinkers to refer to the metaphysical belief in free will, as opposed to determinism. The first recorded use was in 1789, when William Belsham wrote about libertarianism in opposition to "necessitarian", i.e. determinist, views.
No True Libertarian, and all that? I've been acquainted with quite a few members of the big-L Libertarian party, and the small l libertarian movement (Free State Project, Porcfest, etc.) and they generally fit all of the negative stereotypes they've been assigned.