The Lefty Libertarian |
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Political commentary from an askew angle.
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Friday, October 18, 2002
8:13 AM
Morning, all. First link 'o the day: Dark Horse 2000's Guide to Political Parties. There's some amazingly funny stuff here. There's also some incredibly disturbing stuff. Did you know there was an "American Nazi Party" (I'm not linking to it)? Jesus, you'd think after all this time..... ... we might have stamped those motherfuckers out. Thursday, October 17, 2002
10:02 AM
25,000 killed in terrorist attacks all over the worldSeems different that saying 20,000 people died of hunger today, doesn't it. The money we spent in the war on Afghanistan could have saved a hundred million lives. War is wasteful and often unnecessary.
9:23 AM
Hey to y'all Pundit readers... Good stuff you might want to see
So that ought to give you a good idea of what it's all about. Enjoy!
8:49 AM
YAY! INSTAPUNDIT ON DEMOCIDE AND GUNS.Just go read it. A quoteIt seems to me that the human rights community has things exactly backward. Given that the efforts of the international community to prevent and punish genocide over the past several decades have been, to put it politely, a dismal failure, perhaps it is time to try a new approach. International human rights law is supposed to be a "living" body of law that changes with the needs of the times in order to secure important goals -- chief among which is the prevention of genocide. Given that the traditional approaches of conventions and tribunals have failed miserably, the human rights community should be prepared to endorse a new international human right: the right of law-abiding citizens to be armed.Update: whoah... a link... ;-) I'm famous... I'd just like to thank the Academy......
8:41 AM
I'm an American sick of American lies. Woody Harrelson weighs in. Some of his figures are urban legends, but his heart is in the right place. Sunday, October 13, 2002
9:14 PM
The Australians are beginning to understand the shock of having your people killed in a terror attack. It's a blog, with a discussion which is largely made up of people wishing the Aussies well and offering condolences. And then there's me, being an over-political loudmouth. Some kid (I assume) was trying to turn the whole thing into a "So now you're with us, right? Let's go kick some ass!" . I just snapped at him. Not even at what he said: I re-read his original post, he doesn't even mention Iraq. But the tone... The young man ready to kill and die for his people. And wrong. I'm almost certainly stereotyping a perfectly reasonable human being and putting words in his mouth. But there's so much of it around. I just wish I'd picked a better venue and better words. Anyway, I wanted to repost what I said there, because... this is how I really feel. For the first time I've really dug down to some clarity about this whole issue, and this is it: James L: I just re-read what you wrote. Knock it off, man. If you're baying for blood, remember:So that's what I said. And if you followed me here to find out what kind of a butthead would shoot his mouth off half way through people mourning, it was this kind of a butthead: me.
7:13 PM
Ok, anybody know anything about these folks? This book is the culmination of a 25 year investigation into computer vote fraud. Journalists James and Kenneth Collier answer the question. “Why can't we vote the bastards out?” And the answer is, “Because we didn't even vote the bastards in!”I got the link from the Fringe Folk's page on the Gore victory. I normally wouldn't give this kind of thing a second glance: I think the established facts are pretty clearly more than I know how to deal with. Can you really say that you've integrated the existence of Operation Northwoods into your daily viewpoint on the world? Or that we got into Vietnam on a presidential lie? I can't. I struggle to understand what it means more-or-less daily. Betrayal of the public trust on that scale.... it seems to make almost anything possible. You know? I've got a lot of comments and feedback on my position on firearms and stuff like that, but nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the corner: we got into Vietnam and WWII via Presidents lying to us about what was going on in ways which ended up costing thousands and thousands of American lives.... Blows your mind when you think about it. It's like the bleedin' Matrix. So, anyway, normally I ignore conspiracy theory. But this... I dunno, has a certain ring to it? It looks a little like the sorts of things which show up, eventually, as history. What do you think? Is it legit, or bullshit? Is massive, systematic voter fraud a part of the way this country works, or isn't it? At this point, I know the Republicans out there are yelling: "Bush won, deal with it". Well, you know what? Ask the 48,000+ black voters who were "mistakenly" identified as fellons and denied their votes what they think of Bush's "victory" And yes, it did happen, and yes, it's legit. The NAACP just settled the case. Once again, ugly truths covered over by the mainstream media: BUSH CAME TO POWER BY CHEATING BLACK PEOPLE OF THEIR RIGHT TO VOTE. And I mean that in the most literal sense: those votes, mostly democratic by the demographic, would have made Gore the President. This is how Bush came to power: by blatantly illegal racial gerrymandering. There, stick that in your goddam republican pipes and smoke them! Bastards. How dare they do that in our democracy? And where's the outcry? The massive campaigns in the street from both Black and White, protesting this kind of violation of the basic rights of the people to choose their leader? You tell me. I'm indoors writing a blog post about it, not out there protesting. What are you doing?
6:49 PM
As detailed in Kwangju Diary (UCLA Asian Pacific, 1999), a text that I co-translated with Kap Su Seol and that was based on Jae-Eui Lee’s bestselling first-hand account, the city of Kwangju then began reorganizing its own economy and social life in the crucible of an armed uprising and general strike. Fuel and arms were rationed democratically, half-trained militias defended the city while townspeople prepared communal meals for hundreds in city parks, and nearby factories were plundered for vehicles and material to help spread the revolution.Another little speck of forgotten history. Makes me sad. You read these accounts every so often of democratic uprisings - people universally treat eachother well. For a while. And then they either get swept away, or normality resumes and the first movers get dug in and politicized and corrupt. It does give me hope, though, that people are in essence decent. That when the chips are down, we take care of eachother by instinct. Not because of our philosophy or politics, but by intuition.
10:29 AM
Environmentalists have been bitching about government sabotage of funding and research on renewable energies for decades. Little stuff like putting the agency for developing renewable energy under the agency responsible for developing nuclear energy, or mis-estimating the efficiency of wave power systems by a factor of four, then ruling them too inefficient to be worthy of further study. There is a solution to our current problems in this direction. Let's pay it some attention: reducing our dependence on oil cuts our foreign policy liabilities dramatically. Use less oil. It's patriotic - and it's one in the eye for BushCo!
10:02 AM
America is one of Iraq's biggest oil customers. Let's stop sending Saddam our American dollars. We will spend billions fighting him. Billions protecting Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. We say "lets have an economic war". Let's drive the price of oil down to $8 /bbl and then drive IRAN, Saudi Arabia, IRAQ, and Kuwait to their knees. Let's include every other government that accepts our dollars and then seeks to hurt us.
9:41 AM
So, on to a different tack. Let's talk about how dreams inform reality. Let's talk about the Cuban missile crisis. Think about this for a moment: USSR Vs. US. Cuba with nuclear weapons is the threat of the day. We were this close to nuclear war, which in those days would probably have been total and annihilated life on earth. We pulled through by genius and luck. Everybody involved put the welfare of the people first, and this is why we survived. The US not over-escalating, the USSR backing down - it looks like force, but at some profound level it is and was cooperation. To value the lives of your countrymen, and the fellow citizens of the world, over some local goal. Why is Bush so worried about Oil? It's simple: we need it to survive. Supplies will, one day, be scarce, and exactly when that day is nobody knows. Could be twenty years, could be fifty. As long as you ignore the probability of oil being made obsolete by technologies like fuel cells, this looks like a sensible strategy if you put the welfare of American people before that of everybody else. You could also argue that America is the world's best defence against Fascism and democidal regimes, and that for us to remain strong in some ways guarentees the welfare of the world. I can just about hear Chompsky spinning in his grave, but this is not an entirely flag-waving argument. Overall, we do pretty good. Either way, it's possible to construe the actions of the government as being in the "good but misguided" category, rather than the "flat-out evil armaggedon monkeys". Below, I've argued extensively for awareness of the potential for democide and oppression in our current political situation. Now I want to add a proviso: if nothing bad is happening, a heavilly armed population will make the Government more likely to slip into fascism. Not less, more. Our fear of them increases their fear of us increases their tendancy to cover their asses and you get into this kind of weird feedback loop. The pictures of eachother we paint in our mind construct the fabric of our reality.I don't know how to integrated my political and spiritual consciousnesses in these times.What would it take for peace to break out, and BushCo to simply be made irrelevant? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps it's already happened. If you knew the future was going to be perfect how would you act in the present? Consciousness matters: not to be blind to the bad, but not to be blind to the good either. Life on the planet appears to have been getting better for the average human being for most of recorded history. The curve is up, and I'm not convinced BushCo are anything other than a part of that process. Perhaps we just needed to be awakened to our reponsibility to rule our government and hem them in with our doubts. And everything I've said about democide exists in this context: we also got antibiotics and super-abundent food in the 20th century. Fuel cells. Methanol engines. Solar panels. Those are tools of peace these days - throwing snow on the fires of war requires little more than energy efficiency. So, buy a rifle and stop driving your car. Check out how cheap solar systems are these days. Envisage a reality where we are no longer dependent on oil, and start putting your dollars where your hopes are: on a future where people like Bush cannot exist because there is no scarcity for them to exploit and no division for them to pour salt into. This is the long term answer: peace through fair prosperity. We've poured a lot of money into developing fusion reactors. Turns out that they're incredibly expensive and difficult to operate if they are too small. The right size for a fusion reactor is 1,391,000km in diameter. All we need to do is pick up the radiated energy and use it. Do you see what I'm saying? Fighting over scarce resources will always cause trouble, and all forms of sharing require politics to try and achive consensus or fairness. The long-term solution to war is to move our economy away from dependence on scarce resources on to dependence on plentiful ones: if we had viewed removing our dependence on oil as a national security priority and poured a hundred billion dollars into it over the past twenty years, do you really think we would be in this mess today? But that requires breaking out of history, out of the patternen of fighting over scarcity. Create abundence. In the long term it is the answer to war. Update: Energy Victory. Don't agree with everything they say, but they get it. Energy payback time for photovoltaics is now between three and eight years. |