Letters to the Editor
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@DClaw1
I am definitely aware of the libertarian/anti-libertarian pissing matches, I do what I can to avoid them.
This is unfortunate because it is an oversimplification of the dynamic and this really is the locus of the debate about almost every important issue we discuss here related to individual Liberty and the State and all that entails. Many different factions claim the mantle of libertarianism and as Mike Huben has wryly observed, attempt to: "Spiritually baptize the deceased as libertarians because they cannot protest the anachronism: Locke, Smith, Paine, Jefferson, Spooner, etc."
I don't want to get into that pissing match here but before you can designate any given "pissing match" on the subject as "libertarian/anti-libertarian" you first have to define libertarianism and decide who is and who is not a libertarian. They have been having this debate on the libertarian right and left long before I or Ron Pauliac (a play Howard Deaniac) arrived. I'll just say this: It is a good starting point for a debate about these issues. It is not a viable political party or coherent, cogent and sound ideology any more than Marxism is.
Sinnard asks rhetorically: "Or does the conversation just naturally flow to discussions about how prominant[sic] Libertarians and Paeoconservatives [sic} are bigots/racists/jerks/etc. whenever the L word is brought up around here?"
He willfully chooses to deny the racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-semitic roots of both paleoconservatism and certain factions on the right that claim the libertarian mantle.
This is just the Homophobia of prominent paleoconservative Pat Buchanan:
Homosexuality involves sexual acts most men consider not only immoral, but filthy. The reason public men rarely say aloud what most say privately is they are fearful of being branded "bigots" by an intolerant liberal orthodoxy that holds, against all evidence and experience, that homosexuality is a normal, healthy lifestyle.
-- Pat Buchanan, September 3, 1989
Homosexuality is not a civil right. Its rise almost always is accompanied, as in the Weimar Republic, with a decay of society and a collapse of its basic cinder block, the family.
-- Pat Buchanan, 1977
Gay rights activists seek to substitute, for laws rooted in JudeoChristian morality, laws rooted in the secular humanist belief that all consensual sexual acts are morally equal. That belief is anti-biblical and amoral; to codify it into law is to codify a lie.
-- Pat Buchanan, Wall Street Journal, January 21, 1993
The poor homosexuals -- they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution.
-- Pat Buchanan, discussing AIDS in 1983
With 80,000 dead of AIDS, our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide.
-- Pat Buchanan, in his syndicated column, October 17, 1990
AIDS is nature's retribution for violating the laws of nature.
-- Pat Buchanan, during his 1992 presidential campaign
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/buchanan.htm
Mona and I have our differences. We also agree on some things. I don't claim to be a "true libertarian" because none of us are sure what it really is. It changes from day to day, depending on situational exigencies.
And since defining terms is an important first principle in any meaningful debate, here is the exposition of the various behaviors known as internet sockpuppetry, and some notable examples.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_sock_puppet
Neither Ron Pauliac or myself have made the cut.