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Monday, May 12, 2008 12:00 AM

Larry Di Rita's responses to questions about the "military analyst" program

The former top aide to Donald Rumsfeld seeks to explain major discrepancies in his statements.

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  • Monday, May 12, 2008 08:51 PM

    really? I stand corrected

    I sort of assumed it was new-york-centric. I certainly am aware that there is a big difference. Maybe I fixate on New York too much myself - when I said the other day that I didn't think I would like the USA, I should have said that I have a sort of sneaky fascination with New York. I hope that my various fascinations (i.e. emotions) are visible. I don't want to seem to be hiding them.

    San Francisco was a sort of mecca of the imagination for me back in the 1960s, for the usual reasons, but I think it lost its magical appeal over the decades since then. I remember when the Caliphate O.T.O. moved its headquarters to Austin, which must have been in the early 1990s, I was sort of sad, because it seemed like a little more of the magic (in this case, magick) was departing.

    Crowleyanity is itself a sort of psychedelic, cosmic libertarianism, of course - "Do What Thou Wilt", etc. But if you read Crowley's attempts to explain the so-called Thelemic Ethic, they are just as incoherent as everyone else's attempts to explain a libertarian ethic. The Book of the Law itself gives the best account of libertarian ethics I have ever seen, but it does so by using a sort of super-Nietzschean technique of paradoxes. I still think of it as an inspired work - you can't produce those sort of paradoxes to order.

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