Ron Paul vs. Rand Paul on the non-Ground-Zero non-mosque.
How come whenever Rand Paul deviates from Ron Paul it’s always in the wrong direction?
Tag Archives | Left-Libertarian
This is Your Brain on Stateless News
Some C4SS-related items worth checking out: [Note that this does not mean that other C4SS-related items not listed here are not worth checking out!]
- Kevin Carson on The Cognitive Biases of Hierarchy. (Turns out that power makes you stupid.)
- Charles Johnson on Is the Problem Really Too Little Trust in Government? (Can you guess the answer?)
- The C4SS’s pocket subversion edition of Lysander Spooner’s Constitution of No Authority, with a talk by me as the appendix.
- Several C4SS folks, myself included, will be speaking at Libertopia in October.
- News on other C4SS doings (and how you can help) in Brad Spangler’s July-August fundraiser announcement and Tom Knapp’s 8/13 and 8/20 media outreach updates.
Please support the Center’s work if you can. $5 here and $10 there can be a lifesaver.
Why Opponents of the Non-Ground-Zero Non-Mosque Are Tools For Al-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda seeks to combat the idea that people of different religions can live harmoniously together in the same society. The anti-mosqueteers are certainly doing their best to combat this idea as well.
Al-Qaeda seeks to subordinate private property rights to religious law. This is exactly what the anti-mosqueteers do when they declare other people’s property “sacred ground” and propose on this basis to interfere with their peaceful use of it.
Al-Qaeda seeks to position itself as the representative of the entire Muslim community. The whole anti-mosqueteer position makes sense only on the assumption that they support al-Qaeda’s claim on this point – since otherwise banning an Islamic cultural center because the 9/11 highjackers were Muslim would be no more salient than banning a YMCA because the highjackers were male. (“A young woman said to me: ‘I have had the most horrible experiences with furriers; they robbed me, they burned the fur I entrusted to them. Well, they were all Jews.’ But why did she choose to hate Jews rather than furriers?” – Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew.)
Al-Qaeda employs a double standard, condemning its enemies for killing innocents but excusing its own similar actions. This approach too gets its stamp of approval from the anti-mosqueteers, who express far more concern about what might be built near the site of the 9/11 bombings than about what might be built near the sites of American bombings of Muslims.
Al-Qaeda seeks to intimidate its opponents into appeasing its irrational demands. What are the anti-mosqueteers doing if not endorsing this tactic when they suggest that the Islamic Center should cave in and “compromise” out of concern for the anti-mosqueteeers’ “feelings,” regardless of the merits of those feelings? (Likewise, why couldn’t southern blacks compromise with the KKK? Sure, maybe legally the blacks were in the right, but the KKK’s bigoted feelings were strong and sincere and deserved respect, no?)
I’m not saying that the anti-mosqueteers are literally in the pay of al-Qaeda. But they might as well be.
A Puzzlement
I don’t get it. If Laura Schlessinger says “I’m Laura Schlessinger,” she gets no flak for it; everyone takes it in stride. But if I say the very same thing, people act like I’ve uttered some huge falsehood. Why the double standard?
Looking for Justice in All the Wrong Places
Inadvertently funny line from a press release for the new Americanised Torchwood:
His choice of career is significant. Someone like Rex could make a fortune in Wall Street, or Hollywood. But choosing the C.I.A. says a lot about him: that for all his swagger, he does believe in justice.
Uoltajre!
Michael Johnson’s article “The Delightful Voltaire” (linked from LRC today) tells me something I never knew before about Voltaire – namely that he chose the name “Voltaire” as an anagram of “Arouet l.j.” (the “l.j.” standing for “le jeune”). Johnson calls it a “loose” anagram, but it’s actually quite exact, given the once-prevalent convention that I and J are interchangeable, as are U and V (a convention that made sense in a culture steeped in Latin).
Incidentally, in another article recently linked from LRC, Tim Black claims that “the attacks launched against religion by thinkers like John Locke or Voltaire were not targeted at its content – they were targeted at its form as part of the state.” This sentence is a bit ambiguous, since Locke and Voltaire were attacking particular religious institutions and doctrines, not “religion” as such – but they clearly thought that various widely held religious views were false and dangerous, and were definitely attacking these views and not solely their forcible imposition by government (though of course they attacked that too).