We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
The Revolution: A Manifesto Glenn Reynold’s has a review at Pajamas Media of Ron Paul’s best selling new treatise, “The Revolution: A Manifesto”.
He has beaten me to the punch as my copy is waiting for me in New York City and I will not see it until Thursday, No problem though: Glenn seems to have almost exactly the same opinions I expect I will have. This is not so strange after all. We are both Heinlein Libertarians with a long shared background.
I guess I will just have to sit back in my favorite upper west Columbia University hangout (a Starbucks) and watch some of the regulars go apoplectic. Some times I just like to be evil.
But you knew that.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
I think it’s been a terrible shame that the Beltway libertarians have been so hostile to Ron Paul. He has helped spread libertarian ideas far further than anyone from the Cato institute ever did (apart from Uncle Murray himself, of course, the bête noire of the beltway crowd), but still they would rather knuckle down to the neo-conservative world view of endless pre-emptive aggressive war than dare admit they may have got it wrong. Being more of a The Moon is a Harsh Mistress man, rather than a Starship Troopers man, I have to wonder who Professor Bernardo de la Paz would have supported; Ron Paul or a pro-abortion beltway type? As the good professor is described by Heinlein as a rational anarchist and was based full-square upon the pacifist Robert Le Fevre, I feel pretty confident he would have been supporting Ron Paul, if given the chance, and proud of it.
BTW, if you can’t bear the excitement of waiting for Thursday (why would you?), you can read my own review of Doctor Paul’s manifesto either here, here, or here; not that I’m addicted to spreading the Paulinista message, of course! 🙂
Go Ron Paul.
I have also been watching the ‘quiet’ behind the scenes work the Paul team have been doing. The Republican Convention might be rather interesting this year.
Ron has done well by us all this year and deserves our gratitude. As Glenn notes, we may have differences of opinion on some policy issues, but they are just differences of opinion, not matters which place us in different camps.
Really I don’t know how different “Rothbardian” Libertarians are from “Heinlein” Libertarians as the likes of Paul are willing to send troops abroad. The question is whether troops should be sent abroad forever. The question is really what constitutes clear and present danger, or how proactive we need to be to defense ourselves properly. It’s a question of balance, and if one allows oneself to get too close to the idea that a good defense is a good offense, you end up becoming what you think you are fighting.
I have no illusions that if the US brought home all our hundreds of thousands of troops home tomorrow the world would love us, but would they want to attack us less? And if the answer is no, then we need to fight a real war the right way and settle the issues. Fighting protracted wars and having thousands of troops stationed around the world to bolster allies at American taxpayer expense has much more to do with empires than it does to my perception of libertarianism.
I guess it’s a matter of fighting the right way at the right time, but of course that’s the million dollar question – life/living is beset by risks, and when to mitigate those risks proactively. But much of Statism is built around inductive reasoning that fearsome things are much more clear and present than they really are, all to benefit the State much more so than individuals.
There is also the matter of Paul’s personality. He’s nuts.
Which doesn’t mean that all of his manifesto is wrong.
lol – ron pauls coalition of truthers, anti-semites, geeks and leftists is hardly a ‘revolution’. me thinks paul is suffering from delusions of grandeur. he may have a few good ideas on domestic policy but his hatred of Israel and America is enough to put off most right thinking people.
Dr. Paul does not “hate” Israel, any more than he hates any other country that receives U.S.-based foreign aid. He simply want to end such aid and thus reduce our entangling alliances. It’s unfortunate that the bien pesants can’t or won’t acknowledge this important distinction.
Some of the commentators on Pajamas Media make the obvious point. The problem with Ron Paul is NOT that he is an anti-war isolationist who favours significantly reducing the military budget. Though I happen to disagree with these ideas, they are leigitimate and I would certainly consider voting fo a candidate who held them if he also held views I agree with on domestic issues (as, often, Ron Paul does).
The problem with Ron Paul IS that he has a long career of fraternising with loathsome bigots of the far Right and Left behind him and that, in his analysis of the U.S.’s role in the world ,he departed long ago from a traditional isolationist conservative viewpoint, to something more akin to Chomsky. America First is one thing, Blame America First is another. (The suggestion, by the way, that his criticism of Israel is no different to his criticism of any other country that receives U.S. aid is simply rubbish, almost as absurd as his claim that “we gave him the gas”.)
Ron Paul has done something that seemed impossible and done more to tarnish Libertarianism that even the LP managed. If you think it is an achievement to cause a brief media sensation by pandering to, in raging nick’s apt description, “truthers, anti-semites, geeks and leftists”, all the time bouyed by a Mainstream Media desparate to damage the GOP and obstruct the war effort then bully for you.
Dale, until now we had only suspected that you were evil. Now we know! Thank you for removing all doubt. I am going to send a priest with holy water over there to get rid of a batch of walking evil. (Maybe he’ll need Very Holy Water!)
As for Ronnie, whilst the book will make a splash, I won’t bet on it being a tidal wave. Maybe a few more people will think about cutting back the government, but I don’t think anything will be done. SOSO.
What might do something is popular entertainment. Someone is trying to make a movie of Atlas Shrugged. I think The Probability Broach could make a good movie, if it was called something like ‘The World That Killed Washington.’
toolkien
Let me introduce you to the concept of Forward Defense, which is essentialy ‘if you must fight it is better to mess up someone elses landscape than your own’.
Dale.
If you ever get to Oregon and want some good coffee try Dutch Brothers. There are a few other locations. If you manage to get to one on opening day it’s free.
But if you insist on drinking overpriced swill there are plenty of Starbucks around.
I think the problem is that a lot of these “Beltway” libertarians feared that RP’s anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, isolationist views etc would contaminate the word “libertarian” in the eyes of people who might be generally favourable. My impression is that RP is basically a good man of questionable judgement on his fellows.
I am more in sympathy with anti-interventionism than some on this blog: I think, however, that Paul’s statements on foreign affairs have come close to being dangerously naive. A trading nation like the US needs to be aware that it needs foreign alliances and bases to protect shipping and global trade links, etc.
I have always been a bit unhappy with Dr Paul’s stance on abortion – but have always kind of ignored it. He needs to elaborate his position more clearly –
Would he ban ‘the Pill’, as it is an abortifacient? What about restricting womens movement during conception as exercise during this period can lead to failure of fertilised embryo’s implanting i.e. BABY DEATH.
Dr Paul seems to hold the LP position on the abortion subject: it is not something that should be the business of the Federal government and should be decided at the State level. Then, as the founders intended, if you do not like the laws in your State, you vote with your feet. Many libertarians are doing this already as part of the Free State project.
To some extent this is still true to the extent the Feds can’t bully the State governments. Nevada has prostitution and gambling; Oregon and California have medicinal marijuana; most States have hidden carry, but some do not. With 50 States (or more if you believe Barrack) there is bound to be one you will find reasonable.
Personally I consider the abortion issue as a temporary one. I firmly believe that technological advances are going to insure woman have voluntary control over becoming pregnant. Total, 100% control means no abortion needed and no clinics for the anti’s to demonstrate in front off.
Issue sorted.
Of course I am sure some will howl over that too, but that’s life.
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on the particular policies of Dr Paul, Jonathan, otherwise we’re going to waste an awful lot of useless bits (again) on slinging outrageous entangling diatribes at each other. However, I would only have wished that the Beltwayers had slipstreamed in behind Dr. Paul, over the last 12 months, and then used what momentum he gained to then explain what they believed in, comparing and contrasting it to the views of this religious Austrian. As it was, however, they appeared to spend their entire time trying to destroy him and/or either raking up negative true stories about him, from yesteryear, or simply making up false ones, particularly that wretch Matt Welch, but more on him later.
The steamy Washington D.C. atmosphere seems to have gone to their collective heads. For instance, what about this current LP policy:
Crikey. I know child pornograhy is a difficult area, but actually begging for greater federal intervention is a bit strange, don’t you think, for supposed libertarians? This policy, and lots more like it, shows how far the Beltwayers have fallen into the clutches of Leviathan (what did they expect, by actually living in the mafia capital of the world, Washington D.C.?). Thus, for the most part, they have become just another part of the government machine, and from the state’s point of view, mostly harmless (thought still crucial in being an essential part of the state’s intellectual bodyguard, particularly when defending the power-extending warfare part of the warfare/welfare state.)
Let’s just hope that if Bob Barr gets the LP nomination for the U.S. presidential campaign, he can successfully defenestrate the Kochtopus within the Beltway establishment; but he’s got his work cut out. After being in Washington D.C. all of these years, I think these Kochtopussian Beltwayers are beyond saving and would rather see John McCain in the Whitehouse, than suffer listening to someone espouse Ron-Paulian views.
The worst of them, Matt Welch, the main raker-upper of anti-Ron Paul stories and editor of Reason magazine, the apocryphal “Spectator” of the LP Beltwayers, really needs to be drilled into. So let’s take a look at a quote from Mr Welch’s own personal blog:
That’s right, the main LP Beltway opponent of Ron Paul, and the editor of the libertarian flagship Reason magazine, doesn’t believe that education or health are, or could be, market goods. I think that’s all most of us need to know about the Beltwayers.
Incidentally, I too am opposed to the Good Doctor Paul on quite a few issues, most notably the abortion issue. I personally follow a more Blockian line on the right of a woman to “as gently as is currently possible” remove someone else from her body, should she so choose. However, even Walter Block himself is capable of slipstreaming behind the Good Doctor, with stated reservations, rather than just screaming abuse at him and thereby helping McCain and Obama carry on with more of the same old death, welfare, and destruction.
As well as Doctor Paul being a long-time obstetrician, who knows a lot more about the physical practice of abortion than I ever will, and as well his having served in the US Air Force in Pakistan, which will give him a lot less naive view of the situation in Afghanistan than most people give him credit for, I agree that it is fully possible for people to oppose him on particular issues.
But this blanket condemnation by the LP Beltwayers simply to me demonstrates how much they have sold out in order to enjoy their West Falls Church or even Georgetown condominiums. I think they ought to be ashamed of themselves, or at least sign up directly with the neocons to at least acknowledge what they have become.
No. They are deranged. Nuts.
As to some of his associates in the US and his support for the John Birch society… it’s not only in foreign affairs that he is a nut. I am curios if he mentions this in his book…
Yup, his foreign policy is nuts and he has unsavoury chums… and in that respect he is much like every other politician. But foreign policy is also much less important than rolling back the state at home at this particular juncture in time.
Absolutely correct.
But it gives libartarians a bad reputation to be aasociated with a nut like Ron Paul.
Of course, he isn’t the only nut around. Here is another: McCain.
Jack, I hold no brief for Matt Welch or Reason magazine and I agree with you on a lot of points.
One problem with Reason is that it, and its main writers, have tried rather too hard to make libertarianism “cool” to appeal to the young, at the risk of being slightly pretentious and smart-ass. As far as I know, Reason magazine supports things like vouchers, opposes socialised medicine and the rest. If Welch wants to resile from those ideas, he should stand down.,
“As the good professor is described by Heinlein as a rational anarchist and was based full-square upon the pacifist Robert Le Fevre, I feel pretty confident he would have been supporting Ron Paul, if given the chance, and proud of it.”
Dead wrong. Couldn’t be more wrong.
I never met LeFevre, but my father did and they corresponded extensively through the 70’s. It was his writing that convinced me of the moral objection to voting. His pamphlet, “Caravan Into Conflict” was written as a protest of the formation of the Libertarian Party, after which he never voted again in his life.
To the extent that de la Paz really was LeFevre, he would not have supported anyone in this or any other election. Never, ever.
Yikes! More socialism. You might want to flick through the following links, over a Martini, to see why most of us Ron Paulian Austrians are not so convinced as to the merits of school vouchers.
The Great Voucher Fraud
Vouchers: Another Name for Welfare
Vouchers: Another Income Redistribution Scheme
And finally, by the man himself:
Are Vouchers the Solution for Our Failing Public Schools?
Billy Beck, I stand corrected. LeFevre truly was a great man. Greater than I realised.
Jack: happy to help.
My father met him at a three-day seminar at the University of Hawaii in 1969. I was thirteen years old. For the rest of his life, my father always regretted that he hadn’t enrolled me in that seminar, too. Thirty-five dollars was a lot of money to an Air Force tech sergeant with a wife and five kids, but Dad knew that I would have understood LeFevre even at that age and wished he’d brought me along.
To this day, I still have the copy of LeFevre’s “This Bread Is Mine”, autographed to my Dad, with Dad’s notes in it. It’s one of my library treasures. I have all their correspondence, too.
LeFerve is a big deal to me. Between him and Ayn Rand, my intellect got its kick-start that summer.
When I write or speak about the immorality of voting, people most often think I’m some kind of a nutter. Well, you know what? I keep good company in my nuttiness.
Stop fucking voting. Stop submitting your rights to the opinions of microcephalic herds. Do it on moral principles, and say why you’re doing it. Do it now. There will never be a better time.
Reminds me of:
Of course, one must add
As for the book, it was excellent. It’s also at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list, for the first time this week.
As for the abortion issue, removing it from Federal hands is enough for me for now. I’d like to see it legal in all 50 states, an issue on which I disagree with Paul (wow, I disagreed with somebody with out feeling the need to assert that he suffers from mental illness — maybe this isn’t the blog for me?), but it’s an issue on which there is no objectively ‘correct’ answer. Therefore, I’m satisfied to see it regulated as locally as possible.
On the voucher issue, if faced with a choice between what we have now, and replaceing state operated schools with privately operated schools which could be paid for by state provided vouchers, I would take the vouchers. If you add the choice of ‘no public education at all’, I’d choose that. Politics is the art of the possible.
“Politics is the art of the possible.”
Enough with the 1968-styled dreamy-eyed slogans, already.
Politics is the branch of philosophy that studies how human beings should deal with each other in a social context.
Not quite, Billy Beck. Politics is the branch of philosophy which deals with how human being actually deal with each other in a social context. Politics is applied philosophy. Go back and re-read Machiavelli. Or Robert Greene’s “The 48 Laws of Power”, another excellent book.
Politics is neither philosophy nor applied philosophy. It is a bunch of things people do, like football or cooking. Some people reflect upon it in a philosophical manner, we call them political philosophers. Some people reflect upon it in an entirely unphilosophical manner and get called political philosophers too because apparently “jumped up, hysterical pamphlet writer’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
Honestly, people say some damn weird things on this blog.
Laird, politics is unapplied philosophy for someone who refuses to participate in it, like Billy does.
Ok, OK, I surrender. I was addressing the “should” in BB’s post. There’s certainly nothing “should be” in politics, whether it qualifies as “philosophy” or not.
How about this:
Economics is the study of how civilized people deal with eachother.
Politics is the price we pay for failing to be civilized.
Paul is obviously an anti-semite, because he wants to treat all nations the same, rather than treating a theocracy which happens to have established Judiaism as the state religion differently. People who want to treat everyone the same regardless of their religion are anti-semites, just like people who don’t want to give blacks special privleges are racist.
Besides that, Paul thinks that Isreal should be able to make it’s own foreign policy decisions without having to ask the U.S. for permission. Anyone who does not want total control of something must hat the thing he does not want to control. Everybody wants total control over all things they do not hate.
Paul also wants to cut aid to Arab countries, which totals more than aid of Isreal. The semetic group of cultures includes both the Arab and the Jewish peoples. Therefore, he must REALLY be an anti-semite.
I still feel that Ron Paul’s Book won’t do as much to change either economics OR politics as a movie or TV series. Is anyone a gamer? Could you set up a virtual Freelife, set in a libertarian vision of what Britain might now be like if Mrs. Thatcher had stayed on, and privatised everything? That might reach more people, and be more informative, if they can ‘walk’ around a Freelife version of Britain, like Secondlife, but freer.
You have a point there, Nick.
Sounds like fun, Nick, but I haven’t a clue how to do it. You create the program and I’ll watch it, though (assuming it’s exported to the US).
Laird, if I was a gamer, I’d be making the world, and charging you to enter it! As I’m not, I’m seeing if some fellow libertarian will pick up the idea, and run with it.
If anyone can make Freelife, please do! It would be great advertising for all of us!
If you have any Randites or Objectivists there, why not build Galt’s Gulch? We could all e-visit it!
If they build Galt’s Gulch, I’m opening a bar. Get your ego sloshed! Sunfish’s Objective Ale, fermented by yeast who fully meet the criteria of your value system!
I’ve never actually met (face-to-face) a Randroid who drank. Pity. The only people who need it more than them are the folks with cordouroy pants and salad-bowl haircuts who hand out communist tracts on college campuses and go on and on about examining in critical dialectic mode the solidarity of the proletariat masses.
“Go back and re-read Machiavelli.”
What… like he was an innovator or something otherwise important?
Serious people begin this discussion with Aristotle, and he always gets to keep his seat at the table.
Deleted. Feel free to try again, but make your debatable but not unreasonable core contentions in a less gratuitously offensive manner.
Aside from my exhortation to jump in a lake I thought my response was perfectly calibrated to the *arguments* I was attacking. Anyway, since such monstrous untruths should not be left unchallenged I’ll have another go.
1) Obvious strawman.
Allegations of Paul’s anti-semitism arise from the following.
(i)His long associations with anti-semites.
(ii)His, un-rebuffed, endorsements by anti-semites.
As for hating Israel, Paul established that beyond doubt in a series of articles he authored in the 1980s. Whether this makes him an anti-semite I’ll leave, only noting that the correlation between anti-zionism and anti-semitism is very high indeed.
2) Israel is not a theocracy. Full stop, that’s just wrong. I can’t even imagine why anyone would think it was.
1) “Semitic” originally (first used by western scholars in the 18th century) describes a set of languages, not cultures. If you don’t know the difference I suggest you google Finno-Ugric.
2) “Anti-semite” was a term invented and used as a self-descriptor by 19th century Germans with a murderous hatred of Jews. It has never meant anything else. Nor do Arabs consider themselves semites, let alone victims of, putative, anti-semitism.
3) This joke is not funny and only reveals your ign***nce [happy?] of subjects you pontificate on.
Describing Israel as a theocracy is foolish. However my assumption is that this was an overwrought reference to the fact you can be arrested for handing out Christian bibles or proselytising Christianity to Jews in Israel. Israel is not a theocracy or as bad an many of its neighbours, but it is a civil liberties disgrace, even after you cut them a break due to their legitimate security concerns.
My guess is not that Paul is anti-semitic but rather as the issue of Israel drives so much US policy, he dislikes Israel as a source of entanglements.
Missionaries are prety unpopular there and every so often the Kenesset debates a law to ban them, but Israel’s chocked full of the blighters and they don’t end up in prison unless they act like this. So, again, more lies; no other state has to put up with this constant barrage of misinformation.
Why don’t Libertarians spend some of their time writing untruths about, oh I don’t know, Papua New Guinea for a change? It may interest you to learn that Israelis don’t return the favour by spending time making up lies about the Britain, because, uhh, they don’t really give a shit. Meanwhile, in the real world.
‘Disgrace’ is a relative term. I would be inclined to agree as it happens, but I can tell you this, pound for pound, it’s better than Britain.
Well, there’s really no reason to guess. Paul’s stated reason is because Israel is “an agressive, national socialist [ha ha, see what he did there? Classy.] state”.
Probably because we don’t get commenters here from Papua New Guinea who get hysterical if their country gets criticised for being just another fucked up country.
If I was misinformed about missionaries being restricted by law and handing out bibles being banned in Israel, then I apologise for the misinformation. I will try to find out the truth of that.
Gabriel, do you happen to have a link for that last quote?
Here, the standard Paulian defence, btw, is that he was unaware of these things being published in his name.
Being TNR they focus more on his homophobia and racism than his views on foreign policy and Israel, though I find those rather nasty too (and according to samizdata’s doyenne I’m a racist homophobe.)
Thank you.
Papua New Guinea is full of saints who don’t know what bribes are, and it’s governments are notoriously honest (can I get away with saying such stuff, even on a site that loves free speech like this one does? Oh, well, it’ll probably get deleted,anyway!).
Why should the Columbia leftists be upset with you reading a book by Ron Paul?
As far as most of them are concerned Ron Paul is just a guy who attacks the Republicans over Iraq and has a lot of 9/11 “truthers” following him around (rather to his irritation I would guess). Of course there is a lot more to Ron Paul than this – but I doubt that Columbia leftists would care.
If you want to be seen reading a book that really will put the Columbia leftists into a rage try “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and his fight against America’s enemies” – M. Stanton Evans, Crown Forum, New York, 2007.
If they see you reading that book you had better prepared for violence.