David Terry wrote: BH> Gregory's hyperbolic strawmen are easily <http://blog.360.yahoo.com/knowinghumans?p=244> diagnosed <BH
DT> It is amusing to hear Holtz criticize Gregory's strawm when he has spun more pyrite idols from virgin straw than anyone since Rumplestiltskin. <DT An example of a blatant Gregory strawman that I documented above is his claim that "the pro-war libertarian will often look the other way [from] petty domestic issues [such as] farm subsidies, Medicare expansion, or protectionist tariffs". I defied Gregory to identify a single pro-intervention self-described libertarian who doesn't oppose farm subsidies, Medicare expansion, and protectionism, and he never replied. I now defy you to find in my oeuvre an example of me attributing to my opponents views that are this blatantly contrary to what they actually assert. DT> "Hyperbole?" What are "liberventionists", "singleissuetarians"? Does Brian have a mint in his den where he coins and defines these anticoncepts. <DT If you're unfamiliar with the distinction between hyperbole and neologism, consult your nearest dictionary. "Liberventionist" is a term I first heard from Gregory himself in 2004, and it appears on 460 web pages at antiwar.com. I did coin the term "SingleIssueTarian" -- when I was told that my support for deposing Saddam meant I was unfit to be an LP candidate. I now tend to use the term LitmusTestItarian more than SingleIssueTarian, but neither is hyperbolic, as the quotes below show. DT> Is he the source of the scurious hyperbolic strawman, "Islamofascist"? <DT LOL. In a discussion of strawmen, you make the blatant drive-by strawman implication that I've ever used or endorsed the term "islamo-fascist". Here in the real world, the only time I've ever used that term is to criticize it. DT> There ARE no single issue Libertarians. It makes absolutely no sense that there could be. <DT There ARE no "pro-war" libertarians, and it makes absolutely no sense to assert that a libertarian would ever favor war as an end rather than a means. DT> There are many people who put so much emphasis on a particular issue that one could reasonably refer to them as single issue advocates. We all know at least one or two. The fact is none of them are Libertarians <DT I guess you missed it yesterday when Paul "goldrecordings" wrote: "I think we should offer the voters a real antiwar party." And I guess Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com disqualified himself as a Libertarian when he told <http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j030303.html> the Illinois LP convention in Mar 2003: JR> I make no apology for the harshness of this prescription.. Our movement was born in the fight against the War Party, against the cold warriors who thought they could run rampant over people at home and abroad, and we will fight for our legacy today - no matter what. [...] The only sort of debate on the war question that ought to take place within the LP ought to consist of the following words addressed to the few pro-war elements in our midst: Hasta la vista, baby! [...] The LP must make a strategic decision to intervene in the antiwar movement. Not tepidly, or tentatively: not half-heartedly - but in a massive, nationally-coordinated manner. [...] For too long, foreign policy has been treated by the national and state LP organizations like an unwanted stepchild: hardly ever mentioned, and, when one is forced to acknowledge him, only in the most general, perfunctory manner. Yet it has always been at the very center of libertarian ideology [...] This means endorsing the aims of the antiwar movement not only in a formal sense, but in the everyday sense of making antiwar organizing the primary task of our activists. <JR And how about Gregory himself, who has written: AG> The issue of war and peace is the most important issue for libertarians [...] Now is the time for the true defenders of liberty to stand up, and repeat the self-evident truth that war is the health of the state and the principal scourge on civilization. [...] <AG All of these people are repeating the old Rothbardian line that opposition to war is the most important libertarian policy position. This seems odd to non-anarchists, until they realize that war inevitably involves the death of at least one innocent, and that anarchists seem to value having clean hands over the real-world minimization of killing and coercion. DT> Reasonably consistent application of the fundamental principles of individual sovereignty and non-aggression is absolutely essential; otherwise it would be the "Libercritical Party" <DT If you believed Rothbard when he told you that The One True Libertarianism could be rigorously and completely derived from the zero-aggression principle, then you've been sold a bill of goods. Principled and self-consisted non-anarchist libertarian worldviews that can be assembled from combinations of elements like * radical <http://www.foldvary.net/works/auspc.pdf> federalism; * geolibertarian <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarian> resource communalism; * left-libertarian <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-Libertarianism> critiques of alleged coercion inherent in original property acquisitions and unequal economic associations; * the theory of public <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods> goods and free rider <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem> problems; * the theory of natural <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly> monopolies; * the theory of negative <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_externality> externalities; and even * libertarian <http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/conf/conf48/papers/thaler.pdf> paternalism based on game-theoretic analysis of bounded <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases> rationality. Even for a zero-aggression zero-state anarchist, there are at least 17 free variables <http://blog.360.yahoo.com/knowinghumans?p=371> in libertarian political theory. Alas, an analysis of these theories and variables cannot fit on a bumper sticker. DT> It isn't that the War in Iraq is the SINGLE ISSUE that we must deal with, it is that the War in Iraq is the MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE that we must come to grips with because it MOST drastically attacks and rejects the basic moral principles on which both the Libertarian Party AND the foundations on which this nation of free and independent citizens is based <DT You need to decide whether there is room in the LP for sincere and reasonable non-anarchist libertarians to disagree over whether the state's duty to defend liberty vanishes completely at its borders. The answer seems obvious to me. P> Many people have come to agree that the Iraq invasion and occupation are based on lies, <P BH> What "lie" can you quote from Bush's invasion-eve speech as a statement that Bush knew was false? See the analysis of Bush's invasion-eve speech here <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/1619> . <BH DT> "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." [...] <DT As I said in my posting <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/1619> : even if you delete this sentence because of the intelligence failures underlying it, the speech constitutes a reasonable self-defense argument for the invasion -- contrary to Paul's implication that the invasion's justification fails if we remove from it anything that might be a "lie". The main thing that makes the "lethal weapons" sentence a potential "lie" is the blatant "no doubt" exaggeration it contains. After the 1995 revelations about how well Saddam had been able to fool weapons inspectors in the past, there were reasonable grounds to believe that his systematic failures to comply with UN weapons inspections implied that he had WMD programs to hide. President Clinton and the US Congress had documented <http://www.milnet.com/public-law-105-235.htm> Saddam's systematic evasions over two years before Bush even took office. A stronger point to make against Bush's WMD arguments is that pressed by the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace: nuclear and chemical weapons should not be lumped together in the terrorism debate, since terrorists could do far more damage with a nuclear weapon than with any chemical agent. The 1995 Sarin attacks on five crowded enclosed Tokyo subway trains produced only 12 casualties, while Tim McVeigh's single fertilizer-based Oklahoma City attack killed two orders of magnitude more victims than the average number killed by these five Sarin attacks.
