The week at RR

• Mugged by reality: Virginia Tech students join Liberty University in fight for gun rights.
• Say hello to the Libertarian News Examiner.
• Escalation unopposed.
• Rethinking WWIII.
• Orwell’s statespeak: Department of Corrections.
• The is/ought fallacy. The assumption is that if the government doesn’t provide these services than nobody will, and that by opposing the government being the provider of these services one also opposes the services being provided at all.
• Reality’s a b*tch. The discussion began with our Left-leaning friend saying that we need stringent government regulation of, well just about everything, in order to protect the Little Guy from rapacious Big Boys with lots of power. To do this we had to give the State lots and lots of power to counter-balance the Big Guys out to hurt the Little Guy. It’s a pretty standard argument from the Left. My reply was what I would call Libertarianism 101. Simply put, I argued that history has shown that when the State is given such powers it is rarely used to protect Little Guy. Instead Mr. Politician conspires with Big Guy to use the new fangled powers in order to make life for Mr. Politician and Big Guy better at the expense of Little Guy.
• Cindy Sheehan on antiwar.com radio.
• The ’Net is a bicycle for the mind.
• Thieves harvest personal info from social-networking sites.
• 32 planets discovered outside solar system. [anorak] Including the Greek-god one, the ’20s-gangster one, the Nazi one (of course it had to be Nazi not Falangist or Peronista thanks to Roddenberry’s cartoony mainstream liberal politics and the sets and props available at Paramount — as a 12-year-old once said the whole franchise was ‘a pinko TV show’ about a military dictatorship pretending to be a democracy), the ‘1960s Roman Empire’ one (OK social satire but they’d be speaking Latin or Italian not American English — then again everybody in the universe apparently naturally speaks English besides looking suspiciously human) and Mr Spock’s home? [/anorak]
• Anti-war vigil marks eighth year. It obviously doesn’t work and we probably disagree on how to run the peace (they trust the same state that bombs Iraqis and Afghans to run your life) but I salute their intentions.
• Managing the economy is ridiculous.
• The Pentagon’s recruitment two-step.
• World’s gov-thugs not making dent in heroin trade.
• Good news? Rift between US and Israel.
• A Rumsfeld-era reminder of what calls terrorism.
• The race hustle.
• Poland ready to join US missile shield.
• The year the dominoes fell. “If you want a picture of the future,”’ says an official of the totalitarian government in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” which was published soon after the Stalinist night had fallen on Eastern Europe, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Of course the Stalinist night was a result of WWII.
• Copenhagen treaty: will the US cede sovereignty?
• Marriage privatisation.
• War is a racket.
• Is adulation of the military really patriotic?
• Stop blaming racism for the failure of black parents.
• Taking Burke’s name in vain.

Labels: libertarianism, peace, politics, television, the Internet