Political Insanity

As Small Dead Animals said…

heh.

I love Sean Penn’s facial expression!

My post below describes the beginnings of a discussion over at Occam’s Carbuncle about the nature of libertarianism. Greg* has followed my response with the following:

Thank you for your post. It clarifies things a lot. For me though, it leaves me with the impression that libertarians want to be left alone by the state except when they or their property are in jeopardy. Now that sounds good, in theory, but I am not sure I would like to live in a society (if in fact we could even call it such)like that. I think you would find that it would quickly sort itself out into “winners” and “losers”, with the winners locked in gated compounds, afraid to come out for fear of the losers (or worse still using state force to hold onto their positions). In fact, it sounds very much like a third world country, like El Salvador or Honduras. If I am wrong in this, please let me know.

In what he describes as his “very first commissioned post,” Occam eloquently praises and defends freedom against the incursions of the Nanny State.

The best bits, taken basically from one entire “best bit” post:

No one is truly an adult in the nanny state. We are all mewling, suckling babes, requiring constant care and supervision, lest we poison ourselves on freedom or some other noxious substance, or suffocate in the complexities of the big bad world.

[...]

The statist shows the meanness and smallness of his world view in his desire to control and diminish his fellow beings. Whom we do not love, we do not trust.

Ezra Levant, the publisher of the Western Standard and, if I’m any judge, Prime Minister of Canada sometime between 2015 and 2030, mounts a keen defense of media freedom in a Senate hearing transcribed here (scroll down a little more than halfway, after “Mr. Chin” finishes his testimony).

Ezra successfully defends an individual’s rights to his own mind, his own property, and his own choices. It’s a great read, and I’m sure it was even better in person.

I especially enjoyed reading the exchange between Ezra and Senator Jim Munson, I believe the final Chretien appointee (although I may be wrong about that), who was a “media person” (CTV News) prior to his elevation to the Red Chamber.

This is a freakin’ scream. Evan Kirchhoff’s latest piece illuminating the inevitable and hilarious explosion over polygamy contains at least 3 gems:

(a) The concept of “libertarian one-upmanship”

(b) Highlighting the obvious attempt by the Libs to focus anti-polygamy attention on Those Weird Christians rather than Our Muslim Brothers

(c) The observation that Lib pro-gay-marriage arguments seem to rest on the tenuous foundation that there aren’t enough chicks for every dude

I can’t begin to do it justice. I’m still laughing.

Thank you avec un maraschino to Jerry Aldini for the pointer.

From the Ottawa Citizen’s Chris Cobb, via Norman Spector:

“A husband having a mistress is legal and socially acceptable in Canada ,” said Mr. Elmasry.

Aha. Aha ha ha. Ha. In my neck of the woods, this sort of declaration would be met by a rather… shall we say forceful response.

Japnaam Singh writes encouragingly about the health of the Canadian body politic since the 2004 General Election. He makes the point that the Tory loss can in some respects be seen as a partial victory, and notes approvingly another commenter’s observation that the Tories’ strength (and relative Liberal weakness) has had a salutary effect on Commons committee work.

Unfortunately for my reputation as a prognosticator and general political wizard of the right-wing nutjob blogosphere, Japnaam quotes at length a post I wrote in 2003 condemning the (then) potential Alliance/PC merger. My commentary included this sparkling gem:

As Norman Spector points out today, CanWest’s Robert Fife reports on His Excellency “flirting” with known terrorists, i.e. the Tamil Tigers, while on his soggy-Kleenex tour of Southeast Asia. Prime Minister Paul Martin is aghast at the notion that that he might conceivably be criticized for gladhanding a murderous terror cell. It would naturally be “illegal” for Martin to grip-and-grin with these terrorists chez nous, and clearly a wide variety of other countries AND Our Noble Overlords (a.k.a. the UN) have declared the Tigers to be a terrorist organization. However, just like Hamas, it appears that the Tigers are simply poor misunderstood waifs, who are in fact engaged in a panoply of worthy humanistic endeavours when they are not blowing up commuter buses and frog-marching child conscripts into battle.

So were those (in)famous CBS documents forgeries? Well, yeah, duh. Here’s another club with which to beat that dead horse:

The selected memo is that dated May 4, 1972, wherein the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian orders 1st Lt. Bush to report for a flight physical not later than May 14. This memo [...] is posited as a direct order to 1st Lt. Bush, mailed to his (wrong) home address. [However,] for the weekend that 1st Lt. Bush was supposedly ordered to report for his physical, May 13-14, 1972, the Ellington Air Guard Base was closed. It was Mother’s Day. Except for emergencies, Air Guard units never drilled on Mother’s Day…

If George Bush showed up at the clinic that weekend, he would have had to get the key from the gate guard.

The drill weekend for May 1972 was the following weekend, May 20-21. A survey of the pay and flight records of several of the Texas Air Guard members of that period shows no activity for May 13-14, but drill pay vouchers and flights for May 20-21. Guard flight physicals were normally conducted on the drill weekends, because that is the only time all the required clinic personnel were on hand to complete lab work and flight surgeon consultations mandated for aircrew. Does anyone think that Jerry Killian, squadron commander and one of the drill-schedule planners would not know on May 4 that the clinic was closed the next weekend?

(Story here)

Cranky Anonyblogger Headline:

Some Guy Urges World’s Dictators to Reduce Socialism, Theocracy