In the just-past elections in California, the two Environmentalist "Propositions" on the ballot went down to overwhelming defeat. The game is up. Strangely enough, the enviruses themselves stopped pretending that their ideas were coherent even before that fact became obvious to California voters. Back in 2004 they already held a conference advocating for - no, this is not satire - an "Ignorance-Based Worldview."
Thanks to Aster, an e-mail friend, for the link above. Leonard Peikoff's point - that fighting the "disintegrationists" is, in relation to fighting the "misintegrationists," a waste of energy and time, because the disintegrationists are doing an eminently adequate job of self-elimination - is demonstrated again.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
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12 comments:
Um, the link doesn't work. It has two https where none are needed.
Thanks - I just fixed it.
Okay, but to my everlasting surprise prop 2, the chicken rights initiative, did pass. I still find that absurd but I guess I just don't care as much about chickens as the rest of California's population does.
Adam
Here is a good article about the centralization of energy policy. Obama wants to create an energy security council akin to the national security council.
See below: http://www.reason.com/news/show/130026.html
Gideon,
"Animal Rights" activists are M's, not D's (they include Ayn Rand's one-time lawyer Henry Mark Holzer and other militant subjectivists, the broader category to which Rothbardian Anarchists like Holzer belong. See http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2007/10/24/from-ayn-rand-to-animal-rights-an-interview-with-henry-mark-holzer-2/ ) They won on Prop. 2 by hiding "animal rights" in the background, and pushing how it would lower the price of free-range meat, eggs etc - a clever strategy that exploited California's "national culture" of upscale-wanna-bee hedonism.
Nick,
If I ever post on Obama's probable policies, it is more likely to be with a conceptual analysis from the perspective of political praxeology, than by addressing detailed developments like this one. But there is so much else to write about...
Quite right you are, I haven't written much about Obama on my own extremely erratically updated blog either. I did send out emails talking about the travesty of allowing the principle of justice to not be upheld. This was based on the probability that Obama wouldn't try George Bush and company for war crimes -- torture scandal. I am still hoping for an investigation though.
Nick,
I've never seen a principled analysis of that "scandal," and I'm putting the word in quotes because I don't have time now to analyze the issue, so I don't know if the word applies. I do expect that Bush, like Clinton, will give out pardons to his patrons, his cronies, and his minions, so any preparations for prosecuting them for anything would, at this time, be just a waste of resources.
Adam,
I was mainly thinking of this story: http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/Story?id=4583256&page=1
I thought the solid professional consensus was that waterboarding is torture and that torture doesn't work -- I guess the principle at work is proportional use of force. It's immoral and consequently impractical.
KSM allegedly claimed involvement in 30 terrorist plots or so under "enhanced interrogation" techniques. I wondered how much he said was reliable when I heard about it. You're right to remind me to make a principled analysis though -- especially in something as serious as a war crimes charge.
If Bush isn't guilty of war crimes, then he's certainly done enough to have warranted impeachment a long time ago. I doubt we disagree on that with our current respective knowledge bases.
I have to pay a compliment to you, Adam. I always tend to walk away scratching my head after an intellectual conversation with you. You truly display an admirable commitment to truth regardless of partisan bias in your public persona -- not that I am accusing you of being two faced. I just don't know you that personally.
It's impossible for me to be intellectually complacent when taking you seriously. It's very good food for the brain.
At the risk of running off topic, I'd like to mention something on the topic of torture as being immoral.
Basically, isn't torture just an extended use of force toward a specific goal? The only difference between shooting someone in the chest and torturing them is that, in the latter case, they are alive for a longer period of time (And thus, pain). But doesn't the same principle on the matter of the morality of force apply? If a country is at war with an enemy, and force has, I assume, been justified, then what difference, morally, does torture have other tactics, like bombing enemy cities?
As a caveat, I agree that torture, in most cases, is very impractical, and I certainly wouldn't want to risk lives or resources on the tenuous information that torture brings. I am still on-the-fence, though, on the issue of whether or not it is moral.
John,
The principle of defensive force doesn't erase distinctions among different ways of responding to force. An enemy soldier killed on the battlefield is in a different context than a defenseless POW.
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