From RR

• The price of empire.
• Who won the Iraq war?
• Wikileaks wins major journalism award in Australia.
• A cure for what doesn’t ail you. Government and Big Pharma.
• Righteous indignation. The seemingly eternal conflict in human societies is between slavers: people who see others as a collective to be used to “greater ends” (which are usually startlingly congruent with the slavers’ own self-interest), and individuals who simply want to be left alone to enjoy their lives, keep the fruits of their labour, not suffer from aggression, and be free to pursue their lives as they wish as long as they do not aggress against others. I’ve re-purposed Larry Niven’s term “slavers” from the known space universe to encompass all of the movements over the tawdry millennia of human history and pre-history which have seen people as the means to an end instead of sovereign beings, whether they called themselves dictators, emperors, kings, Jacobins, socialists, progressives, communists, fascists, Nazis, “liberals”, Islamists, or whatever deceptive term they invent tomorrow after the most recent one has been discredited by its predictably sorry results.
• Gut, not cut, the government. Ron Paul’s the only one with the guts to do it.
• Memo to Occupiers: Ten things “evil capitalists” really think. Chatting to some Occupy protesters this morning, I was struck by how wide of the mark were the beliefs they attributed to me as a Right-winger. In the interests of deeper understanding, here are ten things which – trust me – most of the Tory scum I hang around with think. My Occupy Philly chat moment: when I gave my bonafides as a Ron Paul person, a young black man pretended to gag then jumped and yelled several times ‘Ron Paul’s a fascist!’ ‘OK, I’ll bite. How’s he a fascist?’ ‘Some of his positions are racist.’ (So he’s not a fascist. Fascism isn’t ipso facto about race. You just think you’re mad at him about something so you smeared him.) ‘How is individual liberty racist?’ No answer. And no to egalitarianism. Equal opportunity. Not equal outcomes, which would be unfair.

Labels: Iraq, libertarianism, peace, politics