Letters to the Editor
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Ug
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.
LWM, I just don't care "who is and who is not a libertarian." By no means do I mean to imply that some subjects are less worthy than others, but this recurrent fixation here over libertarianism looks very narrow and solipsistic to anyone not so fixated. It's also highly annoying and distracting to non-libertarian-related discussion (i.e., everything else), such as when there is a perfectly good topic to discuss, and somehow it inevitably gets yanked back to the endless libertarian death vortex. Also, the personal rivalries are insipid and parochial.
Just don't get me wrong, LWM and Timberman, I'm not trying to impose some kind of standard of worthiness for debate. I'm just trying to articulate what I think a lot of other people are surely thinking - that the Libertarian Wars get old and distracting. I'm sure a lot of people see certain names of commenters, and just scroll right on by, knowing there's nothing new to see.
I guess I wouldn't care if I had to click through so much of it to get to the interesting comments. That's all.
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totallyblase
i spend a fair amount of time each year in ontario's "cottage country" on lake huron. they seem to like me (or my family?) just fine.
so far the usa always takes me back...
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re: They feel they are the wizard to hold the one ring ...
Everything I know I learned from The Lord of the Rings.. Or was it Star Trek? In my perfect world, leaders would have to be literally drafted, no one who is really suitable and wise enough to be president would possibly want the job, they would have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the oval office.
That sounds great, but why have leaders at all? Why not trust the population to live on their own?
I kind of like the idea of a tax return with a checklist of where you want your money spent.
You think the environment is the most important issue? You can earmark your entire tax payment to environmental causes.
World hunger? Your entire tax payment can go to alleviating world hunger..
And so on and so on..
I wonder how many, in such a world, would vote for their entire payment to go to making war?
-- Aycharaych
That also sounds great. But why not let each individual decide where his own money is to be spent? I would give a lot more to help the homeless and downtrodden here in my city. We need to build the world one community at a time and that would be central Florida for me. I was educated here years before Disney made it a tourist destination, and with 'progress' has come the usual tragic human problems.
Perhaps if America left the world alone to exercise a little freedom in their lands and concentrated on its own people we would see a much better world.
Unfortunately, many here and most Americans can not stomach freedom. If a guy smokes a little weed, so what? If things need doing, people can do them without the force, coercion, and brutality of the government forcing a one size fits all society.
Wait, this is a dream --- how about 'live and let live' as a motto for the country? Or, "as you hurt no one, do as you will".
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Amen ...
"I guess I wouldn't care if I had to click through so much of it to get to the interesting comments. That's all." -- DCLaw1
You get an Amen and a 'good luck with that' from this corner.
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oops
I guess I wouldn't care if I had to click through so much of it to get to the interesting comments.
Obviously, I meant "I guess I wouldn't care if I didn't have to click through so much of it to get to the interesting comments."
OK, gone for real now.
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@DClaw1
I might not be making myself clear. The thread that almost reached 1000 comments was one of the posts on Spitzer, prostitution and the issues surrounding the impositon of the criminal sanction on victimless crimes. This is a topic Glenn returns to from time to time, be it drug war, legislating morality, spying on Americans without warrants, etc. Personal and individual liberties are part of the debate about limited and non-intrusive government. That's libertarianism. We all have our particular priorities. Some are here for the media critique. It is of less interest to me since I stopped reading newspapers 20 years ago and don't watch any newscasts on TV.
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bucky1
That sounds great, but why have leaders at all? Why not trust the population to live on their own?
Humans aren't wired that way, more's the pity.
I agree with you that government is an evil. but it is a necessary evil. Necessary in that if your group doesn't have it and the group over the next hill does, there is an excellent chance the group over the next hill will use their government to make war on your group and you will shortly become part of their group (possibly as a a slave or worse).
You might recall the opening sequence in "2001, A Space Odyssey".
In the most basic ways we haven't changed much since the jawbone of an ass was the latest thing in high tech weaponry.
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Re: I just don't care "who is and who is not a libertarian."
To bend a coined phrase: You just don't "know the situation" or "understand what is going on".
You care about personal and individual liberties. You care about limited, non-intrusive government. Then these are matters that are of concern to you. It is no different from the debate over who is or isn't an American, or anti-American. Who is a conservative, or liberal, and what do those words mean? Words mean something or they don't, thereby being rendered useless, and language, or the manipulation of symbols, is the WMD of political warfare. The object here is to control the language. Control of the language means dominance on the political battlefield. As Nixon observed, "Losers don't legislate." You should take the high ground whenever you can, whatever the sign or symbol may be, as long as it isn't a term, sign, label or symbol you do not want them to appropriate. Don't cede it to the opposition unless it is a word that describes them better than yourself. Leave them labels like fascist, authoritarian, totalitarian, weak, etc., because that is precisely what they are attempting to do to you.
"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death."
"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"
"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?
Semiotics, anyone?
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html