-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 1:21 AM -0800 on 2/12/03, Lucky Green wrote:
> And this matters how? Why would Bush, or for that matter the > Europeans, care about rebuilding (what?) in Iraq? Other than the > minimum investments required to prevent the population from rising > up against their future leaders, why should the U.S. concern itself > with making investments in Iraq not directly related to creating > and maintaining oil extraction and transport facilities? Apropos of nothing, here's what I wrote yesterday about the entire article, remembering that Charles Rangel claims to want the draft back, straw man or not: At 12:14 PM -0500 2/11/03, R. A. Hettinga wrote: > Wherein we witness the spectacle of Paul Krugman fairly begging > George Bush to colonize Iraq and Afghanistan. > > Amazing. > > Almost as amazing as "liberal" democrats begging for a return to > the draft. > > "Liberal" logic continues to implode. > > "'Round the bowl, and down the hole..." I wrote the above yesterday because I'm possessed lately by this goofy notion that "liberals", and "social democrats", and "progressives", and all the other refried Marxists out there will collapse like degenerate electrons against their political opposites into some kind of statist neutronium someday, resulting in something with the political prayerbook of the modern small-l (as in lipservice) libertarian "right", with aisles patrolled the usual knock-you-on-your-head bluenose-and-busybody deacons of authoritarianism. Someday. This was brought on by a Bartley editorial in the Wall Street Journal a little while ago that observed that Bush & Co. are displaying all the hallmarks of an emerging establishment, operating under the same implicit rules, the same leaderless ability to turn setbacks into opportunities, that the original "liberal" elite was able to do after the cryptosocialists took over the Roosevelt agenda in the 1930's. Probably just wishful thinking, internet millennialism, and all that, but, if it does happen, the technology this list advocates be what, paradoxically, brings that collapse about. Ubiquitous bandwidth, cryptographic privacy and authentication and so on, pretty much kill closed societies, especially those who calculate their prices instead of discover them with markets. In such a world, actual Big-L Libertarians, as the political inheritors of that technological and economic whirlwind, will become the only logical political opposition to that strange-matter amalgam of refried Marxism and muscular Christianity, both of which, you notice, *are* pretty much theocrats. Like modern neocons had to do under the last 70 years of intellectual occupation, Libertarians will have to considerably sharpen their arguments and organization, and do so under a deluge of criticism that will make the recent liberal pulsar sound like background radiation. That is, if we don't all just collapse past degenerate neutron pressure into the event-horizon of crypto-anarcho-captialism, right? :-). Cheers, RAH Who -- until whatever degenerate political pressure takes hold -- is still voting for the muscular Christians, thank you very much, and who, as a consequence, thinks rather highly of the idea of paving the entire fertile crescent, after pounding certain political features of it to rubble, and replacing it all with a giant concatenation of freeways, strip malls, franchise restaurants and nudie-bars from one end of the Tigris/Euphrates valley to the other. Albuquerque. That's it. Albuquerque on the Euphrates. I *love* Albuquerque. Heck, I even like Walnut Creek (maybe even Concord, too :-)). Yeah. Pave the cradle of civilization. Who *says* you can't go home again? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPkq7XsPxH8jf3ohaEQJjDgCfRBwaKlU/BghTVU2ehJt38A/XhdAAn1jX cBPGGXgXxIsffFx6Q/kYCZxC =4Ocg -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
