Letters to the Editor
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@Anonymous
What do the ravings of a super pseudo patriot moron have to do with militartism? RMP spent years in the military and he is nothing like that, is he. Thank God.
Umm. It's okay to misinterpret, but not to be so way off. I was describing the attitude of a perfectly normal, i.e. majority normal, type in a country that was militaristic in the same way as pre-war Japan. His views represented the overwhelming majority of the population, not some "super pseudo patriot moron". The country was under martial law, the population was conditioned to a state of extreme nationalism. Kinda country where you get woken up at 7 in the morning on a Saturday by a sometimes friendly military oversight officer with, "Please get dressed and come quickly, the military police have your friend for a capital crime, and she can't speak well enough to resolve the situation."
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No, there are bigots
But I guess it takes someone like you to judge who is who? GTFO of town with the holier than thou, what makes you so righteous? I could give two shits about what color someone is or if they are pro-choice, pro-life, or whatever. All I look for are if people pander and/or buy into the big lie that currently is considered the status quo or they don't. I may have bad spelling and grammar but language and the way perceptions are formed by the likes of Frank Luntz and the Mainstream Media to influence the status quo are way more important to me than whether or not so and so hates so and so. Right now they are framing the war and the empire as secondary,
For example, Hillary Clinton's scary and contrived "presents" Christmas video. They had a present, "Bring Troops Home", that was third. NOtice how it wasn't, "bring all of the troops home", or "the troops", i.e. she is subtley implying that, indeed, troops will be staying there. "End the War" should have been the first present, and there should be presents like "Repeal the Patriot Act", "Pepeal the MCA", "Stop the Real ID Act", presents Ron Paul would deliver. Instead she wants to give us more corporate welfare and Brave New World.
As long as we are at using corporate welfare to blow up and police the world, and continue to be obsessed with secrecy, creepy clandestine shit, and surveilance, I don't really think things like the environment or abortion matter to the State. An oppressive society can flip the switch on abortion or twist the issue any way it wants to, and big government can kill the environment as well, e.g. China.
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Of Lew Rockwell And Roe Fetishists
Paul Dirks writes: If you spend enough time over at Lew Rockwell you eventually get a feel for who is in fact arguing from principle and who is in fact a bigot.
Actually, you won't. Rockwell gives Gary North a platform, which I find repugnant and wholly indefensible. North is a Christian Reconstruction who identifies as a "libertarian" for economic purposes. But he would abolish the Bill of Rights, and stone gay men (not women, because Leviticus doesn't call for it), as well as unruly children and adulterers. Freedom of religion would be extremely curtailed. But Lew doesn't publish THOSE North views.
Libertarians of the Reason and Cato variety have some concern that the Paul surge is identifying the libertarian brand in the public mind, when in fact Paul is a Rothbardian/Rockwellian libertarian, as most of us are not. Most libertarians favor abortion rights and marriage equality for gays. Yet, we tend to be pleased to see Paul making the anti-imperalism and local autonomy sales message. (Hard cases make bad uniform policy; that states' rights was the rallying cry for racists in no way means that centralized, federal control of every contentious issue is healthy for the nation.)
Myself, I was, for a long time, a libertarian pro-lifer. But if pro-life = all abortion is illegal, I stopped being pro-life a bit less than a decade ago and now think it should be legal for the first three months. Nevertheless, many arguments put forth in favor of abortion rights continue to disgust me, and I find the fetish many have made of protecting Roe frustrating beyond description. As South Dakota recently demonstrated, even many red states do not want to criminalize all abortions. As my parents' generation dies off, the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe abortion should be legal in at least the first trimester will only grow. Returning the issue to the states -- in the unlikely event Roe is ever overturned -- will have little impact. States who retain the anti-abortion laws they had on the books when Roe was decided will repeal/modify them, because the public will demand it.
And in those handful of states that would criminalize still, for a decade or two we'd have to have feminist charities and such willing to foot the bill to send women across state boarders for abortions, for those who lacked the means to get there themselves. The only abortion that I know of which has occurred in my immediate family took place across state lines for privacy's sake -- and believe me, the parties were poor.
Roe is not some effing Holy Grail to protected at all costs, and making it so greatly distorts our politics at the federal level. I'm sick of that nonsense, more than I can describe. Foreign policy and a tyrannical Executive are just a mite important, no?
Finally, I am wholly in Glenn's corner on all this, and think Ezra, Shakespeare's Sister and others are in hysterics' mode. They simply cannot deal with abortion reasonably or rationally, and so Glenn's posts about Pail -- in which Glenn does NOT endorse Paul's position on abortion -- are misconstrued by minds in the grip of the Roe fetish.
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@chris...
If you and I were to start arguing now it would have a similar characteras the dispute between Glenn and Ezra that is the topic of the post. We each have issues we care deeply about and other ones that are less important. The problem is that there are NO candidtates who actually understand both Freedom AND Equality.
The Democrats are full participants in the creeping fascism that's coming in the form of our reduced privacy and unending militarism but the only candidate speaking out against it happens to favor the religious intolerance and racism that would result if vital civil-rights issues could only be decided at a local level. I've already spent too much time living in places where mine was a sharply minority viewpoint to think that "States Rights" is a path to less oppression. It just ain't so.