Two versions of the powerful antiwar song “One More Parade” – the original Phil Ochs recording and the more recent They Might Be Giants cover.
Tag Archives | Terror
Renorthed
I’m back from Orange Beach (which incidentally was filled with small flying bugs that had smaller bugs attached backward to them by their butts). Good conference, good food, good conversation, and I’m APS President again. Plus it didn’t rain all weekend.
Two news items of interest: why Britain really wanted the Falklands, and the thin blue line that protects us from student t-shirts. (Conical hat tip to LRC for both.)
Beat Your Swords Into Thetans
I just saw a commercial in which a girl acting in a school play suddenly breaks from the script and asks why soldiers should obey an unjust ruler’s order to go into battle, and why government should be allowed to serve only a few rather than everybody. Radical stuff, especially the former. (The latter is a pipe dream, though a well-intentioned one.)
So I went to the advertised website and discovered it’s some L. Ron Hubbard outfit. Does that mean the Scientologists are pushing military civil disobedience now? I didn’t know they swung that way.
Still, on said website one of the listed 21 Ethical Precepts is “Don’t Do Anything Illegal,” which would seem to conflict with the aforementioned suggestion of endorsing civil disobedience. Of course on a Socratic-Scholastic-Spoonerite understanding of law there’s no conflict, but is that what they mean?
I suppose I could satisfy my curiosity by shelling out 18 bucks for a bundle of booklets; but the last Hubbard tract I read did not awaken within me any desire to tackle another.
Six Years After
Today is the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and the fifth anniversary of both the Molinari Institute and this blog. Re 9/11, I have little to say that I haven’t said previously. Re the Molinari Institute, to those still patiently waiting for the appearance of the Industrial Radical, apologies for the delay (owing to illness and various kinds of hecticity) – it is coming! Re this blog, it’s been an amazing success – thank you! I now get the kind of stats in a month I used to get in a year.
War Spin
I’m a fan of Donald Kagan’s four-volume study (1, 2, 3, 4) of the Peloponnesian War, which includes some important information you won’t get from Thucydides and Xenophon, as well as a relief from their anti-democratic bias. Anyone with a interest in Greek history will read it with profit.
Unfortunately, along with Kagan’s appreciation for Athens’ democratic institutions (for my own defense of which see here and here) comes a tendency to gloss over or justify Athens’ imperialist foreign policy. I haven’t read Kagan’s condensed one-volume version, but this review of it strikes me as a fair assessment of that aspect of the longer version too. Kagan is right, of course, that Sparta was not the innocent victim that Thucydides sometimes suggests. But Kagan leans too far in the other direction. (It’s no coincidence that Kagan is also one of the signatories of this neocon screed.)
One thing I think Hans Hoppe is right about is that domestically liberal societies often tend to have aggressive foreign policies simply because economic freedom makes them wealthy enough to afford such policies. (I actually said this before I read Hoppe, here for example.) Athens seems like a good example of this phenomenon.
Goliath Whom Thou Slewest
This film sounds interesting.