What a weird ad hominem.
Since you're clearly ignorant, and since "libertarian" can mean a whole bunch of things, I'm not replying for your benefit. I'm replying for others who might come across this.
I'm an Objectivist, meaning I subscribe to Ayn Rand's philosophy. I don't consider myself to be a "libertarian" because the objectivist world view is not anti-government like many libertarians are. The objectivist view of liberty presupposes that the element of force is removed from civil existence so that all interpersonal relations are consensual.
But objectivists are laissez-faire capitalists. As in, we would like to see a constitutional separation of economy and state just like, and for the exact same reasons, that there is a separation of church and state.
I once asked Leonard Peikoff about the topic of compassion, because it is a very common charge against Ayn Rand and objectivists that objectivism leaves no room for compassion. That Rand was this ruthless "fuck everyone but me" sense of selfish. When, in reality, that's a distortion and gross misrepresentation of objectivism. The context behind that question was that a family friend of ours had lost both her brother and her 12 year-old daughter in a car accident months after her losing her mother to cancer. I felt an insane amount of compassion towards this friend of ours and I wanted to unpack that through an objectivist lens.
You have to understand what objectivists mean by the word "selfish." Rand once asked a talk show host if he would object less to the word "self-esteem." Rand chose "selfish" as a refutation of the major religion-centric world philosophies that espouse altruism as a moral good. In the objectivist view, altruism is synonymous with suicide. With self-sacrifice. In a moral philophical sense, being "good" under an atruisitic moral framework means that anything you do in service of others is good, and anything you do in service of yourself is wrong. Which is why many here are critiquing Deno because they're like "If they benefit AT ALL this is not a moral good. They're assholes." See the problem?
An objectivist view of friendship and interpersonal relations is predicated on shared values, and the mutual exchange of values. I wouldn't want my wife to say "I love you because you are so awful." I want her to recognize my value and worth to her on both an emotional and practical level. I love her because of what she adds to my life, and I want that to be mutual. Happy wife, happy life. But more to the point: shared values bring people together because each party benefits greatly from that shared lived experience grounded on common values and interests.
As Rand once said, paraphrasing: it's not a sacrifice to use your life savings for your child's leukemia treatment. But it is a sacrifice to use your life savings for a complete stranger's leukemia treatment while you let your own child with cancer die.
Humans are complex and have their own individual opinions and beliefs. Not all altruists are going to say that it is morally good, in accordance with their personal values, to sacrifice their child for a stranger... but if you follow an altruistic framework to its logical conclusion, that's where you end up.
To bring this back to the topic of compassion, if you have a child (or even if you don't) and you value life, and you observe that there is an innocent person suffering who did nothing to bring that on themselves, there is a shared value there: life. This is why the car accident hit me so hard emotionally. I have two daughters, I have a brother, I have a mother. I value these people and how they make my life better. I can certainly empathize with others when those same values come under threat. And I want people that I love or care about to be happy. That's the root of compassion. There is no conflict or contradiction there.
Not ad hominem. Not a personal attack, it's an attack on an ideology, and more to the point, this isn't a debate, it's a discussion between random people and fallacies are concepts used to explore the intellectual errors present in formal arguments, not conversational trap cards. You can't just say "Aha! A fallacy!" that's not a rebuttal, you have to go on to explain why it's fallacious thinking. But again, neither is appropriate outside a debate.
If you wanted to make it a debate, you could reckon with the assertion at play: that Libertarianism as described is incompatible with compassion, and make that argument.
> I'm an Objectivist,
Your defenses of Objectivism are at least better constructed, however you're hinging the lot of it on an extremely narrow definition of compassion where it only "counts" if it is rooted in personal benefit, the same claim that spawned the discussion you arrived in in the first place. However you don't explain why this is and in so not doing, omit that doing nice things for people is also done for solidarity, for moral or ethical duty, basic decency, or again, nothing more complicated than the release of dopamine in the brain. We're social animals; it feels good, physically, to help one another. This is wired in our brains and not really optional, so much so we also see it in our more ape-like cousins, like chimpanzees and bonobos. And Libertarians. Sorry couldn't resist.
In any case, people generally and in this thread particularly critique ideologies like Objectivism because like many hyper-individualist frameworks, it treats interconnectedness, cooperation and intimacy as suspect unless a transaction can be defined to explain it. Not simply because Rand said "fuck everyone" (although I would certainly make an argument on how the politics she and those like her have fucked everyone in the United States and Britain especially) but because the framework struggles to account for basic tenets of society like collective responsibility, systemic biases and injustices, or, again, the simple notion that doing things for your fellow man makes one feel good, even if that good feeling is the only gain you have.
And yeah, all of that said, it's fucking gross that people film TikToks of themselves giving food to the homeless. Shitheads are shitheads and they've been with us since our ancestors left the caves, and critique of them has followed. That doesn't however mean there aren't countless acts of genuine charity happening every day that go undocumented, because the vast majority of people are not those kinds of people. Nor does it detract from our existence as social animals who benefit one another all the time, through simple acts all the way up to moments of genuine heroism and care that is simply not explainable in the Randian model.
Moreover, if you are properly-aligned in life, whats good for others/the world is ALSO good for you. Even those who make genuine self-sacrifices would say so - at the very least, NOT having done it would be the real, unbearable, sacrifice.
I really hope you'll reflect deeply on this, and perhaps that it even haunts you - even if just out of pure self-centeredness, since the only people who you would ever have in your life with a mentality like this would necessarily be completely self-centered as well.
People never "do good" "just for the sake of it" - there is always a reason, whether or not the person realizes it. The reason could be, e.g., as I said, the desire to seem good, some kind of religious belief, etc. Ultimately, it is never "just for the sake of it"
I am also disappointed, and I don't know what to do with this, but I am not willing to become some kind of ignorant, delusional lunatic.
Instead of labeling or patronizing them, a bit of tact and compassion go a long way. Otherwise you're just confirming what they're predisposed to think.
It feels nice. You should try it sometime.
Not to mention that wanting approval and recognition is not really “ulterior”. It’s a natural human desire. The people to watch out for are those who claim not to want it.