Letters to the Editor
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See what I mean, William?
Look at his last comment. It's a bug that must be squashed.
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Q: How dumb is LWM?
A: He stared at an orange juice can all day because it said "concentrate."
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I see how it is
I'm not new to the Interwebs. Are there any more resident trolls on Salon? Is there a list? How do I get on it?
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Pearls ...
RP: "... In fact it is the federal government more than anything else that divides us along race, class, religion, and gender lines. Government, through its taxes, restrictive regulations, corporate subsidies, racial set-asides, and welfare programs, plays far too large a role in determining who succeeds and who fails in our society. This government "benevolence" crowds out genuine goodwill between men by institutionalizing group thinking, thus making each group suspicious that others are receiving more of the government loot. This leads to resentment and hostility between us. ..."
That is the message; that is why each 'team' wants to win so much --- to plunder the other side. A pox on both sides.
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I think one reason Mona doesn't come here much, aside from us "socialists"
is because she knows the Rockwellians are flocking here. She doesn't mind us leftists all that much, she expects to protect her left flank, but fighting on the right? That was a new development for her, and you all know it. She did say she urged Glenn to not allow his stuff to be posted there. He decided to let it slide. If you look at his archives there, they do title his articles rather oddly...
http://www.lewrockwell.com/greenwald/greenwald-arch.html
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@ Linear Chaos and all my other fellow libertarians
Look, LWM has a true idée fixe on the subject of libertarians. I've been down this same road with him back when Glenn was still at blogspot. He doesn't have a clue about the landscape of contemporary American libertarianism as represented by outlets such as Reason or Cato. For a time I ignored him, but he seems to have grudgingly been willing to give me some sort of "pass" in the last few months, and even admitted he doesn't know what he's talking about nearly as well as I do when it comes to discussing the arguments of F.A. Hayek.
Because of this obsession of his, it is not uncommon for Glenn's threads to get hijacked with the "libertarian wars." I try not to encourage that any more, out of respect for Glenn.
In the meantime, however, I proudly point out that one of my libertarian co-bloggers (and Reason's Dave Weigel), who writes under the cyber-nom "Thoreau," was today assaulted by The Weekly Standard. (Neocons do not like them no libertairans.) Thoreau has had many nice things to say about Ron Paul, and I am quite certain he could sniff any incipinet fascism in the doctor from TX.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2007/07/lieberman_restore_that_fear.asp
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Q: How dumb is LWM?
He links to some guy's page on std.com as though it were somehow authoritative. Or interesting. Some guy who describes himself as somebody who "used to specialize in Acarology (the study of mites), and built a collection of a thousand slide-mounted specimens (and who knows how many more in alcohol that I've never mounted.)"
Which probably explains why LWM knows him.
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That turn of phrase, WT
Do not try to eradicate them, I beg you. They are harmless, for one thing, and for another, nothing is more disheartening than watching a man try to rid his dwelling of cockroaches with an icepick. [It was that last clause that got me.]
...only confirms for me once more that you ought to be writing some kind of high-concept fiction. I still see you as something like the philosophical Travis McGee. What if he were to break the boundaries of the page and come to live to write stories of his own? You, sir, could write them.
I can imagine him going back in time from each of his ventures into "salvage," into the events and choices that inexorably brought them about.
No reason that politics could not also play a part, since MacDonald was himself fairly active in his local politics.
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Dear Linear Chaos
What most Cato Libertarians think of you...
For Mises' Sake
by Tom G. Palmer
Is the Ludwig von Mises Institute worthy of its namesake? The continuing saga . . .
(...)
I was moved to ridicule Rockwell's articles, letters, and essays by his truly ridiculous claims about the Emperor Franz Joseph's being a patron of classical liberalism and of the Austrian school of economics. Ennobling the father of a future Austrian economist and decorating that economist (along with thousands of other human cannon fodder) for battlefield bravery are, well, utterly risible when offered as evidence of a commitment to either classical liberalism or Austrian economics.
And why was I moved to spend twenty minutes writing about something that is merely absurd and risible? Perhaps it has something to do with a lecture I gave some years ago at Washington State University, after which I was introduced by the chairman of the department of economics to some graduate students whom he termed "our former Austrians." One might ask why the graduate students there called themselves "former Austrians." One name suffices to answer the question: Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Dr. Hoppe, leading light of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, had presented such a loopy, absurd and utterly unhinged picture of Austrian economics at a public lecture there, under the sponsorship of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, that those graduate students felt obliged to distinguish themselves publicly from such a strange and incomprehensible set of views. And I can certainly understand why they would feel compelled to do that. If Hoppe is the leading light of Austrian economics as the Mises Institute presents him, then Austrian economics should prepare for a long dark age. At George Mason University I saw Hoppe present a lecture in which he claimed that Ludwig von Mises had set the intellectual foundation for not only economics, but for ethics, geometry, and optics, as well. This bizarre claim turned a serious scholar and profound thinker into a comical cult figure, a sort of Euro Kim Il Sung.
Hoppe's scholarship is so pitiful that one of his own colleagues -- who is still involved in the Mises Institute -- once remarked to me that Hoppe's book on ethics was a truly remarkable achievement; it was the only book he had ever read in which every step of the argument was a logical fallacy. And Mark Skousen, in his introduction to Dissent on Keynes: A Critical Appraisal of Keynesian Economics (New York; Praeger Publishers, 1992), felt obliged to single out and strongly disavow Hoppe's cranky economic views. Skousen made subtle reference to the unreadability of Hoppe's screed, which required extensive rewriting by Hoppe's friends at the Mises Institute, as well as to Hoppe's failure to understand fundamental Austrian economic principles, such as the role of time in economic adjustment. "As the editor of this volume, I have to admit that I do not agree with everything Professor Hoppe presents as Misesian economics, even in this significantly revised chapter. For example, I have serious doubts about his claim that market unemployment is 'always voluntary.' Certainly, permanent unemployment is always voluntary in the unhampered market, but a dynamic market is constantly generating temporary unemployment that requires time to correct." Skousen included the chapter by Hoppe only because he was threatened with legal action by Llewellyn Rockwell if he did not. One could go on with examples of how Hoppe and the Mises Institute have proven embarrassing to the Austrian economists by whom they claim to be inspired but what would be the point? Those who have had contact with him know that Hoppe is an intellectual bully and an academic disgrace.
I was cautioned by a friend not to criticize Hoppe, on the grounds that one should never wrestle with a pig. I have not followed that advice. That may turn out to be unwise especially considering Hoppe's record for heaping abuse on those with whom he disagrees. I recall with great distaste witnessing Hoppe quite savagely attack Professor Don Lavoie of George Mason University at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society; in Hoppe's sustained rant, he said "I don't know what the world looks like when you're on LSD, but it doesn't look that way to me," with the clear insinuation that Don was a drug fiend, and that his paper was the result of a drug trip. My own little note in Liberty was described as follows in the Mises Institute newsletter: "Few writers today can match the anti-Habsburg rantings of Lenin, Wilson, and Hitler, but just by renewing the ties between the Austrian School and the Habsburgs we drew a hysterical attack from a D.C. partisan." The implicit comparison with Lenin, Wilson, and Hitler was bad enough, but what is a "D.C. partisan"? Does that mean that I lunch regularly with Hillary Clinton, or that I spend my time at the World Bank, plotting the world's financial ruin? I can only guess at the vituperation and slander that Hoppe and Rockwell must be preparing for me, as well as for anyone else who might voice doubts about their bizarre cult.
Poor Ludwig von Mises. He was a great man and a profound thinker. To have the likes of Hoppe and Rockwell as disciples is a sad fate.
The link is spotty. You can google Tom G. Palmer. He must be a troll at Cato.
http://critiquesoflibertarianism.blogspot.com/2005/11/for-mises-sake.html