nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

Everyone’s favorite smug sack of fecal matter is at it again. As if cheap Googlebombing campaigns weren’t enough, Dan Savage decided to put on his New Atheist hat and do what they—and 13-year-olds on Livejournal—do best: rattle on about the Bible in the same tone of self-righteous willful ignorance as they imagine conservatives adopting on evolution. “If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys, huh?” If Leviticus talks about shellfish, why do Christians still eat shellfish, huh?

Now, I’m not concerned here with his embarrassingly simplistic New Atheist view of theology, wherein all religion that was, is, and ever will be is fundamentally isomorphic to overliteral bookstore-Protestantism; having been raised into a thoroughly secularized version of said Protestantism (albeit one with some strange bits mixed in—I’ve put pepper on food maybe twice in my life), I’m most likely the least qualified person to talk theology out of those who are aware that there’s more to it than reading what’s in the monosyllables-only translation picked up for $5 at Walmart. (Now, now, Julius, put down that Talmud. You aren’t a rabbi; stop playing at it. You’ll poke someone’s eye out.) I’m also not going to bother with the lines he recycled from that hack Sam Harris; a ten-year-old could do that, unless the demon-virus Whiggery has already implanted itself in their knowledge of history. Even his shifty-eyed insistence that Universalism is somehow on the decline, when one would have to be delusional to think gay marriage will not be widely accepted in thirty years, will be left aside for now. My question here is a simple one:

“Pansy-ass”? Really? What are these high school students doing applauding a kindergarten line?

The answer, of course, should be obvious to anyone who has read Moldbug. One quick find-and-replace, and…

[Savage] really goes beyond smugness. Searing arrogance is more like it. I am reminded of the tone of the famous Soviet humor magazine, Krokodil, which loved to parody the buffoonish, corrupt doings of the hooligan dissidents. Alas, Krokodil is no more. But perhaps we can remember the entire trope in which the smug and powerful mock the hooligans, peasants and barbarians as crocodile humor.

Crocodile humor, from a crocodile. Notice his tone throughout the speech: raining curses with one finger raised, reveling in the worthlessness of his constructed enemy, he smirks and shakes his head at the filthy, fuck-dumb proles. I’ve seen it before: it’s the tone, the exact same tone, my professor takes when he goes colonial, starts rattling on about the backwardsness of the idiots in town, how silly they are for caring about little things like the college bringing in a crane to pluck the cross from its chapel, built on the highest point in town, or for almost electing a newcomer over an “all-around great guy” who just happens to be a colonizer Democrat. Dan Savage wishing that the Republicans would go away sounds exactly like the professor wishing… well, that the Republicans would go away. Odd coincidence, that.

“These savages don’t have a leg to stand on!”, the crocodile cries. “Why won’t they get out of our way? After all, we know better. We are better. With actual power, just think what we could do!”

The mere existence of active opposition, no matter how powerless, is enough to set the crocodile off. The enemy must be crushed: converted if possible, raped and slaughtered if not. (This, I suspect, is why crocodiles are so drawn to the left: a movement that advocates the mass rewriting of society will naturally draw those who want to rewrite society in their image.) Fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war; but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them: for the International Community is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that the rhetoric of war fits so naturally here; the main difference between caste-war and the normal kind is that the latter has an end. And once the Kernels are situated, that is when the game is afoot. The true war begins, light versus dark, good versus evil. This is a war that the forces of light are always destined to lose…

One of my classes this semester claims to be on the topic of “changing the world”: learning the methods of activism and the philosophical backings thereof in order to, as the course description puts it, “inform … decision-making about both ends and means in the struggle to change the world”. However, its actual content is concerned almost exclusively with a small subset of its possible range of topics: the behavior of the government. We are to focus not on our hideously small Overton window, but on SOPA and ACTA, to take one example: the topic of censorship is considered as the topic of state censorship.

This exclusive concern with the ‘public’ sector is a characteristic error of liberal political thought: the only power it recognizes is formal, centralized, and usually governmental. The glaring security hole should be obvious to anyone versed to any substantial degree in leftism or Moldbuggery. As Moldbug said:

A rule that tells us to “keep Mithra out of the schools” is overspecified, unless you think Mithra in specific is the great danger to impressionable young minds. If we keep Mithra out of the schools but we say nothing about Baal, Baal will outcompete Mithra and our children will grow up as Baalist bots.

Moldbug was referring to the separation of church and state—limiting the power of one kind of repeater will, at the very least, not touch the power of other kinds—but this applies equally well to forms of power. What difference is there in practice between thousands of small repeaters situated in a decentralized reinforcement mechanism such that they all send out the same packets and one large, sovereign repeater sending out the exact same packets? The same packets will be sent out either way, but the thousands will go unnoticed, and the one will not.

We can summarize this distinction easily by saying that liberalism, in many forms, is concerned solely with statecraft: the arrangement of the formal sovereign. Statecraft is a subset of politics: the arrangement of society, and the values and determiners of social standing therein. (Adjective forms: registerial, from Esperanto—any possible Latin root is already taken, and Greek would give something beginning with cyber-, which would be far too confusing—and political.)

The values and determiners of social standing thereof… We have already identified statecraft as our Mithra, the focus that brings about the security hole; could this be our Baal?

Well, who canned John Derbyshire? The state?

What was apparently important was not how mild he was but how mild-mannered he could present himself as being; the breach now, in terms of the National Review, may in the end be more one of politesse than politics.

Politesse. Civility, politeness, courtesy. Politesse fired Derbyshire. Values and determiners of social standing, in the ballroom, with a candlestick.

Note the strange liberal speech tic, the assumption that politesse and politics are mutually exclusive. It’s not a political matter, no, not at all; it’s just a matter of “being a good person”, as if such notions are utterly apolitical, outside the realm of dispute, right where liberalism wants them to be.

How, then, can activism, in the registerial sense in which it is taught, change the world? Trying to effect real change through activism is like trying to build a botnet using a hole closed back when OS/2 was the hot new thing, while there are millions of end-users running unpatched Windows installs as root who don’t know any better than to download FunnyCatPic.jpg.exe.

If you’re a fascist, say, no amount of activism will be as effective as getting the student body of Harvard into Von Thronstahl. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference what the government does if the Cathedral priests of the next generation rattle on about ‘honor’ and ‘degeneracy’ the way ours do about ‘justice’ and ‘racism’. (Of course, I’m not a fascist, but there aren’t any bands with my politics. Maybe I’ll start one someday. Bet I’d suck less than Von Thronstahl, or, for that matter, NOFX.) The ‘struggle’ to which my professors refer is far more ideographic than registerial, unless you support the existing ideography.

It’s not entirely ideographic, of course, but this post is long enough already.

(Note: Finals season has begun, so this will probably be my last post for a while. I might be posting some of my final papers here once my grades are in, since they may turn out to be of interest to at least the alt-right crowd. We’ll see.)

I’ve referenced the concept of ideography before, but I haven’t given it a proper treatment yet. In short, an ideography in the political sense is a set of ideographs: terms assigned a particular emotional load by an ideology for use in its rhetoric.

The use of ideographs will often seem absurd to readers outside the ideology to which they belong. An average American going through Nazi political material would almost certainly find the references to Volksgemeinschaft, das Führerprinzip, and Jewry to be, at the very least, disorienting, similar to the feeling one gets when traveling to a foreign country and finding that the toilets have foot pedals instead of flush handles. But then, so would the average Nazi upon hearing the constant references of Western political material to the somewhat isomorphic concepts of liberty, democracy, and fascism. For an example closer to home, consider the reaction of the average American ‘liberal’ (I’ll dispense with my usual scare quotes from here on out; just keep in mind that, contrary to my usual practice, all terms are to be taken in their usual American senses) to Newt Gingrich’s “secular socialism” routine.

Can an isomorphic example, of a conservative reaction to a sound bite applying the liberal ideography, be constructed? It is possible to come close, with, for example, the constant charges of racism leveled at just about every conservative figure and movement, but there is one crucial difference: liberals don’t respond emotionally to “secular socialism”, but conservatives most definitely do to “racism”. In fact, as the conservative line on affirmative action demonstrates, “racism” is just as much a part of the conservative ideography as the liberal one. And, for that matter, the white supremacist one: David Duke uses it.

Pretty pervasive ideograph we have here, if a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan uses it to deliver the exact same emotional load as Tim Wise. They both agree that racism is a Bad Thing; the only difference is in the definition. Duke wants to apply it to Wise, and vice versa. Any debate between the two (ignoring that, in reality, at least one of the two would have to be carted off by security five seconds in) would almost certainly consist mostly of redefinitions of the term, and other ideographs common to the American political arena. These semantic games are common: witness the attempt of Roger Scruton, one of the few conservatives with two brain cells to rub together, to split the positions he disagrees with that can be supported by the positive ideograph “liberty” into a new, negative ideograph, “license”, instead of rejecting the ideograph altogether.

It is clear, then, that in addition to the conservative ideography, there exists an ideography shared by just about the entire American political arena, which I will call the American ideography. Its contents include, on the positive side, liberty, equality, freedom, democracy, progress, fairness, and justice, and on the negative side, racism, fascism, and anything related to Hitler.

The astute reader will, by now, have picked up on an omission: nowhere have I mentioned liberal ideography. There is a reason for this omission: there may be a few minor differences, but at least on the major points, the liberal ideography is the American ideography. Most ideographs used by liberals are also used by conservatives, and with the same intended effect. (This is less so on the alt-right; one of the many instances of convergent evolution between Mencius Moldbug and the European New Right is their explicit refudiation of that ideography.)

Now consider the history of the American ideography. Its terms’ associations have changed consistently, and in a consistent direction: leftward. Equality under the law became equality of opportunity, and is now becoming equality of outcome. Freedom from the tyranny of a single, unelected, overactive monarch became freedom from fear and want, and is now becoming freedom from any sort of moral judgment of all but the most repulsive forms of libertinism. And so on. Considering the structure and history of this ideography, and its identification with ‘Americanism’, there can be no American Right. The American ideography does not hold promise for conservatives, and yet they do not challenge it; in fact, they do the opposite, and in doing so, sign their own death sentence.

That is the failure of conservatism.

(Update: If you don’t care about Moldbug’s caste system but still want an analysis of juggalos, you’ll probably want to go here.)

I suppose it was inevitable that the alt-right blogosphere would discover juggalos eventually. Unfortunately, they come no closer to a proper analysis than anyone else.

Not all decay comes from the lower class; some comes from the middle, but due to the nature of the decay they bring about, they are never portrayed as such. It should go without saying that there is no cohesive society in much of America, but a patch to that bug has been found: to fill that alienating void, subcultures (more properly, sub-societies, although that is unfortunately not the established term) have been formed, which offer at least some of the benefits—institutions, shared culture, sense of identity, self-esteem—of a proper society. Mangan comes close to admitting this point:

One of the most repellant aspects of the Juggalos is the way they have themselves convinced that they comprise some sort of brotherhood, that they receive a form of acceptance from each other that “normal” society has somehow denied them

However, this is not a proper solution, for two reasons: that it increases cultural diversity, and that it is not available to everyone. Every ingroup is an outgroup to everyone else, and outgroups are commonly demonized on any available pretense. Subculture membership carries a significant social stigma, which rules it out to all but those who have nothing to lose and those who have no worries about losing anything; for everyone else, joining a subculture would be simply trading one form of alienation for another form whose consequences are, if not worse, at least far more visible. To put this problem in terms of Mencius Moldbug’s caste analysis, subcultures are a viable option to Dalits and some Brahmins, but not to Vaisyas or Optimates. (Helots, of course, have no need for a subculture.)

But, you ask, why “any available pretense”? Surely there must be a clear reason to demonize the juggalos? As Mangan says:

The video on the Juggalos shows us a motley, highly unappealing collection of the most idiotic, most pierced morons that one could imagine. None of them seem to be able to use any other adjective but f**kin’ or m*****f**kin’, nor to say anything that makes much sense. All of them appear to be on massive quantities of drugs and/or alcohol.

I will not dispute those points, but can someone point me to any negative aspect of the juggalo subculture that does not appear to a far greater degree in Brahmin subcultures? (And no, the fact that juggalos are encouraged to be alpha and Brahmins are encouraged to be beta does not count.) Brahmins are notorious for such behavior, and yet they hardly ever draw criticism for it, even in blatantly Vaisya circles. (Also, those traits, in and of themselves, are not negative; it is only when they are taken to extremes that they become negative. But an inability to grasp the concept of moderation is pervasive in America, so that does not complicate the analysis.)

In fact, these traits appear across the caste system, but some groups draw more criticism than others. Examination of those patterns of criticism reveal some interesting patterns: it is well-known that BDH institutions criticize negative traits of OV groups and vice versa, but BDH institutions also frequently criticize some Dalits; specifically, the white ones, commonly known as ‘rednecks’.

Mencius Moldbug’s caste system cannot explain this without an addition: the Antyaja caste, covered by Jim Goad in his Redneck Manifesto. Their exclusion from the original model is understandable, since, whether due to their status as a monkey wrench into prevailing Brahmin theology or out of honest ignorance, Brahmins almost never acknowledge their existence, and commonly confuse them with Vaisyas. (I have experienced this firsthand; my mother is a Brahmin from a vaguely Optimate background, but the rest of my family and many of my friends are Vaisyas, so I was raised somewhat between castes. I made the mistake of believing I was a Brahmin, going to a very strongly Brahmin college, and maintaining some Vaisya ideals, so I was treated as an Antyaja, by which I mean I was accused of being a member of the KKK, told that America and the world would be better off without people like me, and forced out after one semester.)

Another possible reason for their exclusion is that they severely complicate the model. They cannot be said to be allied with either side of the BDH-OV conflict; although they clearly fall on the OV side, OV have about as negative an opinion of them as they do of BDH. In addition, they pattern with BDH on some issues: they tend to be Democrats despite their generally Republican political views, and they, unlike Optimates and Vaisyas, can form subcultures, as exemplified by the thoroughly Antyaja phenomenon of juggalos.

Which brings us back to the original point. Although subculture formation results in higher cultural diversity and therefore higher levels of alienation, lack of effective subculture formation usually means even higher levels of alienation; the underclass (Dalits, Helots, and Antjayas) are better off in this regard than many Brahmins and even Vaisyas, as Van Jones pointed out, although those without a solution to the problem are far harder to criticize, due to their lack of identification with any specific group. But the worst possible scenario, I think, is ineffective subculture formation, which provides none of the benefits of subculture formation but all of the drawbacks. In other words, hipsters.

And as for the charge that Insane Clown Posse “sounds no different than the usual black rap”… well, I’d like to see Soulja Boy do this. Or even this.

After the war, the British wanted the Nazis shot, the Americans wanted them tried, and the Soviets wanted them tried and found guilty. Acodicalism, monocodicalism, duocodicalism; the series flows so smoothly that one must suspect a natural progression, a trip down the stream, cut brutally short by the leering face of an inevitable Buffalo Bill, or perhaps a circle, a Gumb-headed ouroboros eternally eating and excreting itself.

Why a circle? Why even the progression? Duocodicalism, of course, cannot arise without monocodicalism; without a lock, there is no need for a lockpick. And where there’s law, there’s lawyers—not to mention ideologues willing to take any means to their favored end—so one cannot expect a particular instance of monocodicalism to last forever.

The progression from duocodicalism to acodicalism I will admit to much more skepticism about, but duocodicalism appears to be a relatively recent development, so sufficient evidence may not yet exist. There is, however, one thing I do know for sure: when we caught our modern-day Hitler, we out-Britished the British and told ourselves that “justice had been done”.

I must admit to having employed a bit of false advertising. In my last post, I explained how to carry out a process that will have the same results as a revolution; however, that is only one form of revolution, and not the one that commonly comes to mind when a revolution is mentioned. The common conception of ‘revolution’, which I will call a reboot, is a single, abrupt event of which the beginning and end can be easily pinpointed. The process that I described, which I will call a Roman revolution (remember that the Roman empire still called itself a republic), is not abrupt; instead of a quick surgical strike at the old order, it eats away at that order from within and, once it is gone, wears its skin Buffalo Bill-style, resulting in something that I suppose could be called, in the spirit of alliteration, a Gumb government. (Although it occurs to me that duocodical bureaucracy might be a better term.) The difference between a Roman revolution and a reboot should be obvious; it is clear that a Roman revolution has occurred in America, but, unlike with the American Revolution (a military reboot), no starting point can be named.

Due to their origins, Gumb governments can only take on certain forms: they outwardly appear to be identical to the governments they replaced, albeit possibly more bloated, while inwardly operating on what Tom Ball termed the Second Set of Books: the heuristics it uses in place of the laws that have become too unwieldy to enforce, the mechanisms used to justify the new order in the eyes of the old, and so on. Certain other forms of government are clearly impossible, or at least unrealistic, to bring about through Roman revolutions: to bloat a government until it shrinks is a contradiction in terms, unless the method by which it is expected to shrink is a reboot—a full replacement of the old order, structures, philosophy, and all, usually in the form of a revolution. (And obviously, the result of a reboot could not be a Gumb government!) So Roman revolutions may be viable roads to power for philosophies centered around one strong central government (a New Order, one could say), but what if the intended new order is not a New Order? If that intended order is sufficiently different from the old order, a reboot is clearly in order, but it’s not as simple as throwing the bums out. Nature abhors a vacuum, and, as Hobbes et al. made clear, power vacuums are no different. A reboot leaves an open playing field, on which you may well lose. Notice that nobody knows what’s going to happen in the Middle East; the bums have been thrown out, but it’s anyone’s guess as to whether the liberals, Islamists, or Martians will be next on the throne.

What, then, is to be done?

For a new order to take power after a reboot, it must already exist as a viable institution—a set of existing, developed organizations with the support of its subjects (or at least most of them), the capacity for self-defense, and the ability to govern and carry out the functions of government in the absence of the currently existing government. If your institution is currently viable, it can be called an ungovernment, since, by definition, it has the ability, but not the power, to act as a government. Parts of an ungovernment, or organizations that could be incorporated into an ungovernment were one to be built, can be called ungovernmental organizations, as can organizations that realistically could become such.

Ungovernmental organizations take many forms, from church organizations to local currencies. The one thing that they have in common is that they are all alternative organizations, not reliant on the government, that perform, or have the capability and the legitimacy to, in the absence of the currently existing government, perform functions normally delegated to the government.

So far, we have seen two sorts of revolution: the ungovernmental revolution and the Roman revolution. To this I would add a third, the übergovernmental revolution: the creation of, as the name implies, an institution (the übergovernment) encompassing multiple existing governments, followed by the gradual strengthening of said übergovernment at the expense of the sovereignty—that is, the governmental status—of the former governments, resulting in one übergovernment ruling over some amount of ungovernments. Übergovernmental revolutions have taken place in both America and Europe, but the American case shows some of the characteristics of a reboot.

But the question remains: what sorts of governments can be created through ungovernmental revolutions? For ungovernmental revolutions to have unlimited possibilities would break the pattern established by Roman revolutions, which create Gumb governments, and übergovernmental revolutions, which create federations.

Ungovernmental revolutions appear to be less limited, since they can bestow sovereignty upon any viable ungovernment, but it seems to me that ungovernments and ungovernmental institutions would be more likely to form, and more viable once formed, on a smaller scale and in areas with higher social capital, meaning that such revolutions would be most likely to bring about small, localist, communitarian governments of the sort advocated on sites such as Front Porch Republic.

That, for reasons that should be obvious, make them my preferred form of revolution. Especially since, if the reboot never comes, the ungovernmental institutions may very well be more effective than the equivalent governmental institutions; I live in an area where, when it snows, someone on the block will usually drive around in a pickup truck with a snowplow attachment and get the roads cleared days, sometimes weeks, before the government snowplows show up.

Ban bill names.

As things are now, discussions and opinions on bills are most likely significantly shaped by their names. Imagine the reaction of the average person to a pollster asking for their opinion on, for example, the Patriot Act. They probably won’t know all that much about the bill itself, but if they haven’t formed an opinion on the bill yet (even if they’ve never even heard of the bill!), they will most likely form one right then and there, to have an answer to put down for the poll. And the only information available to them at that time is the name.

Then factor in the effect that word choice has on political positions (e.g. the ‘gay’/'homosexual’ study). Is it really all that democratic to allow such blatantly irrational factors to have such large effects on the political process? (It is important here to remember that democracy, by its nature as a product of the Enlightenment, relies on the flawed assumption that humans are rational. Although this ideal is impossible to reach, the effects of human irrationality can at least be slightly reduced.)

What, you ask, should be used in the place of bill names? My preferred alternative is to use the names of the politicians responsible for (i.e. writing/introducing) a bill. This would obviously be easier to implement if bills were required to be limited to a single issue, since some bills take pieces from many other bills written by many different politicians, or involve many different politicians. The Patriot Act, for example, took pieces from the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 and two versions of the USA Act, and its development involved Leahy, Ashcroft, Sarbanes, and several other politicians. The obvious advantage is that it holds politicians more accountable for the bills they write; it would be much more obvious that Leahy and Daschle were involved in the writing of the Patriot Act if it were called the Leahy-Daschle Act.

Another possible alternative, and the one that would be the easiest to implement, is an index number. This appears to be the system used in Arizona, if the name SB 1070 is any indication. There are, however, two disadvantages:

1. The name does not contain any relevant information. HR 3162 tells readers practically nothing about the bill, whereas Leahy-Daschle Act shows which politicians are primarily responsible for the bill.
2. Strings of numbers are harder to memorize and far more prone to error. If an error is made, the name refers to a completely different bill; HR 3612 is a failed bill about the Internal Revenue Code. 

Any better ideas?

I have, unfortunately, been forced by the college that I currently attend to take an intro-level course in political science. The class starts its unit on racism tomorrow, and considering the current intellectual climate of the American higher education system, that promises to be interesting, to say the least. (Note: I threw this article in the draft pile for a few days. It turned out not to be as interesting as I had thought. Considering that my definition of ‘interesting’ involves massive amounts of controversy, I am beginning to think that I might have been too pessimistic about this place.) One of the required readings for the class is an article by Howard Zinn for The Nation, the gist of which is that the Constitution has had only a minor effect on the lives of Americans compared to historical social movements.

This, of course, is patently absurd to anyone not steeped in the American political tradition to the point of being completely and utterly unable to imagine a set of circumstances outside those of that tradition.

The creation of the Constitution, along with the subsequent success of the federation it created (it only became a nation in the traditional sense after the Union crushed states’ rights), brought about not just policy shifts, but a full-blown paradigm shift. What’s the difference, you ask? A policy shift may result in a complete reversal in public opinion on an issue or set of issues, but a paradigm shift operates on such a deep level that it eliminates even the visceral knowledge that people once thought differently. Someone born after World War II would find the widespread belief that democracy (read: rational-legal authority; charismatic leadership was a large feature of post-WWI totalitarianism) had failed utterly incomprehensible, as a result of the paradigm shift set in motion by the establishment and ratification of the Constitution. Democracy and rational-legal authority are now Good Things. So much so, in fact, that Mencius Moldbug, a self-proclaimed reactionary, based his entire political ideology around the theory of formalism, which essentially states that violence is caused by absence of rational-legal authority. Hmm.

Policy shifts are easier to notice, especially when, as in the case of Howard Zinn’s article, they happened within the lifetime of the person doing the observing. It takes practically no intellectual effort to notice that de jure segregation no longer exists, or that the initiation of the Vietnam War did not go through the constitutionally proper channels for initiating a war. Paradigm shifts, on the other hand, cannot even happen within the lifetime of one person, and, when complete, cause there to be an entirely new set of fundamental assumptions that people carry about the world. The fun thing about fundamental assumptions about the world is that they go largely unnoticed; I have to wonder how many libertarians or Religious Right conservatives have noticed that their ideological  disagreements stem almost entirely from their differing views on human nature. Things that go unnoticed must go unchallenged and unquestioned, and so people assume that those fundamental assumptions are universal. How many people today would find it even conceivable that some parts of civilized Western society (this is important; wacky beliefs aren’t seen as outrageous unless they’re coming from people who are civilized and most likely white) once truly believed that faith was superior to reason? Or that the king was an agent of God? Or that “the people” should not be given a voice in the affairs of the government?

In short, a paradigm shift brings about the condition that I described earlier: that of being completely and utterly unable to imagine a set of circumstances outside those of the ideology launched into popularity by the paradigm shift. Foseti did a better job of describing this than I possibly could, although he didn’t put it in the same terms.

The right supports the death penalty while claiming to uphold the sanctity of human life, and the left supports abortion while claiming to oppose allowing the state to execute criminals. Aren’t those two positions ethically inconsistent?

Well, no, they actually aren’t.

The right’s actual arguments have nothing to do with the sanctity of human life, however much the rhetoric repeats that phrase. (If you haven’t noticed that the rhetoric spouted by talking heads and their legion of parrots rarely, if ever, bears more than a passing resemblance to what actual people actually say, I will be forced to assume that you have been living in a cave for the past… well, pretty much forever. Either that or you’re a parrot.) What it actually boils down to is to what degree people should bear the consequences of their actions. The left believes that people should be sheltered from those consequences as much as is realistically possible, whereas the right believes that they should bear the full consequences of their actions, and maybe have a few more consequences piled on also. So the left has no problem with aborting inconvenient consequences of a certain action, but they do have a problem with hitting criminals with the ultimate consequence. This also carries over into other issues, of which welfare is the most obvious example, and I’d go so far as to say that it’s the main division between left and right in American politics, especially considering that there is no significant conservative presence in American politics.

As far as I can tell, libertarians are in the middle here: they oppose intervention to save people from the consequences of their actions (thus putting them on the right) while also opposing a lot of intervention to impose more consequences (thus sort of putting them on the left). So, all things considered, they still fall on the right by this definition, but not by much.

I’m not quite sure what to do with left-libertarians. I’d guess they’re just further to the left than soccer-mom leftists, but I don’t quite understand the basis of their ideology, so I could be wrong.