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• Monday, December 4, 2006 05:57 PM

  You draw false dichotomies and assume crazy things, dude.

  Okay now I understand

  Well, my friend, if there is one thing i'm not, it's an oligarch. There are no political parties left in Russia. Remember, Khodarkovsky was sponsoring the Yabloko party, and now he's doing hard labor, and puting was reelected with 80% of the vote.

  Wow hold on -- are you implying here that Libertarians will agree to be led by a man who has tax collecting mayors murdered? Who kills tea shop owners to get the real estate?

  How many other Libertarians share this view? Is this a new platform of the party in America?

  I am stunned beyond words.

  Now I'm going to look at all of the Libertarians in the marijuana movement sideways. Oh wow.

  That is sooooo scary!!!!

  I have to be really honest here -- I really don't understand what you're talking about.

  I'm no longer a Russian citizen (stripped of it by the KGB back in the soviet days),

  Okay I get it. Okay I'm debating Russia with an angry pre-Gorbachev exile.

  Wow I guess I fell right into that one, didn't I?

  No, ma'am, you're going around assuming again. I'm not a pre-Gorbachev exile. I left the USSR in 1990.

  Why do guys like you end up so bitter and angry and right wing for the rest of your lives?

  I've been wanting to know that for many years actually. I've never had the courage to ask.

  I don't know why those people end up bitter. I'm very left-wing. I vote Democrat -- hard-left Democrat here in the US. And what's made me slightly more economically right-wing than the average very-left-wing Democrat was going to an American business school, not having lived in the USSR.

  But I will tell you one thing -- I'll call authoritarian dictatorship when I see it. I didn't support the war in Iraq or Afghanistan or bombing Serbia because i believed that the strategy and goals of those missions were naive and poorly thought out. But I sure as fuck didn't go around like Michael Moore painting pictures of these places as paradises before the murderous American forces came in. Many hard-left-wingers love to do that, and I refuse to make excuses for people like Hussein or the Taleban. I will never, ever say that i think Iraqis were better off under Saddam because he provided relative stability -- that is what my grandmother used to say, "Stalin made the trains run on times and put groceries on store shelves." But Stalin deported my other great-grandparents to Siberia. The false dichotomy, military/economic stability or civil rights, is just that, a false dichotomy. You can have both.

  I can condemn people like Putin and stand up for individual civil rights, and that does mean that i want economic anarcy. Equating the two isn't only misrepreseting my position the same way Putin wants to misrepresent his opponents' positions (both the ones left domestically and international ones), it's just plain wrong and illogical.

  PS

  I just think there's no credibility to be had when "government critics" are cozy and tight with people wanted for murdering tax collectors.

  If Russian politics is so demented that the Mafia is actually able to become a political force and attract the loyalty of Libertarians -- how can anybody's version of any story be trusted at all?

  Even accepting all that is true, isn't it better to not believe anyone, then to default to defending the ruling quasi-dictator?

  —LeCastor Read LeCastor's other letters
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