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No, and your absolutely correct. What I meant by my statement is that it’s possible Rand would have been labeled a neo-con by some Rockwellites for her continued support of her nation, while at the same time disagreeing with many of the policies being implemented both domestically & overseas. Based upon what I know of her, she wasn’t a big fan of our involvement in many of previous wars, but she still found a balance between recognizing & identifying the good in America, while acknowledging the bad.

I just don’t think that what many self-described libertarians are preaching had anything in common with what Rand spoke about. That being said, I admit that I am using a bit of a broad-brush in describing libertarians, and I shouldn’t. I am sure that there are probably many individualists out here (like myself) who don’t want anything to do with the twisted ideological viewpoints that some of Rockwellites stand for.

BTW - Is Gary North still writing for Lew’s site?

Sandy, my opposition the the von Mises style libertarianism is that they hold the right to possess private property as axiomatic, and I believe that this defames natural liberty, and properly should be construed as a first corollary right. It may seem trivial, but it is not. The only thing that should be held as axiomatic to a true libertarian is that a human has the natural right to act freely and unconstrained up until the instant that their actions directly infringe upon the natural rights of another human.

This predominance of property rights is also a logic contradiction in the utopian dreams of anarcho-capitalism, as most would posit that property rights are not preexistent to the state, nor are they secure without the support of a state. Quite a paradox, and an absurdity to claim there is an over-riding right to possess personal property.


This divergence in views is very relevant presently, because it leads to strikingly different views about immigration, Obviously, I am one to champion human rights over rights of material possession, so I am in the camp of open borders.

This cuts directly to the chase about what many people find distasteful at Lew Rockwell dot com too, although this does not affect me nearly as much as some. The Mises Institutes's anti-immigrant theory, and their defense of of the South's secession in the Civil War advanced through claims that slavery was not a primary cause of it, attracts unsavory characters, and Lew Rockwell is one to allow a very diverse group of authors to be published on the site. Last time I did some author checking at Lew Rockwell (i believe around two years ago) it was possible, and easy to perform a two-clickthrough web jump off of an author's link on Rockwell's site, and end end up staring at the odious Neonazi American website, Stormfront. I am happy to report that upon my check today, that creep is no longer published on Lewrockwell.com. The guy's name is Jared Taylor, and he is a regular writer at the anti-immigrant (mostly anti-Mexican) website VDARE. Here are links to two Jared Taylor stories that were once published at Lew Rockwell, and were collected by the Internet Archive: taylor1, and taylor2. Links to both of these stories are still found on a lewrockwell dot com article archive links page, but they lead to 404s. A VDARE article written by Taylor December 28, 2001, portrays the Mises Institute and Hans-Hermann Hoppe as unrelated, and fails to mention that he had twice been published at LewRockwell dot com by this time. Not evidence of his racism, but it shows him to be dishonest.

Without searching much further, another author published at the site caught my eye as troubling.

William Lind, of the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, Inc., who the Southern Poverty Law Center Fall 2002 Intelligence Report claimed said some creepy things at a holocaust denial symposium.

Why this doesn't trouble me as much as it would were I to discover it on another site, is that, as I mentioned, Lew Rockwell seems to like a diverse mix of authors on his site, and not too much should be inferred from other connections that they may have. Some notable leftys currently listed there, who I respect: Alexander Cockburn, Chris Floyd, and Tom Engelhardt. Two libertarians I read often: Justin Raimondo and Leon Hadar, a Cato fellow, who is in my opinion one of the best mideast policy wonks, and as far as I am aware, the earliest to publish a warning directly citing neoconservatism as a threat to National Security. Hader is originally from Israel, and for some time was the DC editor of a major Israeli Daily, although I am not sure which, so I won't speculate.

Also, since you mentioned CATO; I do not respect them as much as I once did, especially since two of their best former foreign policy wonks are affiliated with a different org: Ivan Eland, is Director of, and Charles V. Peña is a Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute's Center on Peace and Liberty. That's where I stop first to ingest libertarian foreign policy wonkage.

Also, I no longer define myself as a 'libertarian'. I believe term suffers from a connotative defamation because of The Libertarian Party's Sell-Out, and the willingness of non-liberty minded right-siders to jump on the band-wagon to avoid responsibility for their role in empowering the Bush Administration. I prefer to be simply know as a 'Friend of Liberty' or better yet, a Jeffersonian.

Michelle Malkin at a 'libertarian' function?. She's a Jack-Booted tout for our current urinary President, who will flip-flop overnight on her iterations of the propriety in an unbridled executive the very moment a different party enters the White House.

I must admit that my usage of Neoconservatism and its many variants (a few, like neoconniver, my own creations) is often only intended as a derogation. It is a poorly delineated group, and even some true Neoconservatives have denied the association.

Professor Cole's definition is actually one of the best I've seen, but it has never received much note, because it runs counter to claims he is rabidly anti-semitic:


The problem with this definition: it is so inclusive that it approaches failure in describing a subset, because of ubiquity. That is close to the same argument that Chomsky uses against persons who like to point fingers at The "Israel Lobby" in DC, btw. Chomsky asserts that the group is so large and diverse throughout politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats, that it is a disingenuous to call it anything other than mis-guided US Policy.

I'm not saying I wholly agree with Noam here, but I do enjoy the elliptic, and Chomsky is an olympic gold medalist in the linguistics floor routine, or maybe better stated as an adept linguisitor.

Here's a political prediction of mine fresh-baked: The current trend towards a Christian Gestalt in America has hit its apex, and is now beginning to dive downward. Soon I believe we will start to see radical evangelicals to again start slurring the Papacy as satanic, and describing ecumenicalism as the devil's work. The current Pope should bear a bit of the blame for this with his recent assertion of his most holy self, but anyone who is honest and knowledgeable about evangelic Christian sects in America would tell you there has always been a strong and deep anti-Catholic undercurrent running through it, and to a lesser degree, in all of Protestantism, which was founded in opposition to it. There are also some very large evangelic congregations that are now vocally espousing a strong New Testament based pacifism, as opposed to the eye for an eye quick justice essential to keeping order within a large nomadic tribal group. I sense there's about to be a whole lotta of shaking going on between the multitude of Christian sects, especially if word of the Christian Iraqis current plight as targets of opportunity in the no mans land as the final borders for the partitions in Iraq coalesce between the Shia, Sunni and Kurds, begins to be propagated widely in the US.

It pisses me off, not because of the religious struggle primarily, but because of the threat to History as well as Archeology if these ancient cultures are eliminated from Iraq, either by exile or genocide. I recently saw mention of a Kurd/Papal conspiracy on an Assyrian website, btw, and Assyrian Christianity is mostly of the Eastern Orthodox Schism from way back variant. It was not the most auspicious of times to promote a German Cardinal, who once was a member of the Nazi Youth when he was a child, to the Papacy. There are a few non-Christian ancient Iraq minorities at risk too; the Turkmen, who are largely Muslim, but do not have their own defense force, and the Kurdish Yazidis, who became newsworthy after the recent bombing in Nineveh. I recently found out that they practise a very strange religion which is a mash-up of Zoroastrianism/Manicheanism/Judaism/EarlyChristianity/Islam. There's enough apostasy to be found with that bit of weirdness to be considered deviltry across the whole spectrum of fundamentalist sects found in Western Religious thought. It does not help that a group of Yazidis backwater tribal people stoned one of their own daughters for converting to Islam and Marrying a Muslim Kurd last April. The stoning was taped by cell-phone, and then subsequently uploaded to YouTube where it got downloaded far too many times before YouTube was notified and disabled it. That sent some Muslim Kurds into a blood-feud rage.

The saying that there are no atheists in foxholes is a lie, and if you did find your god on the battlefield, you are a coward, who worships an agent of darkness.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot; I did notice the name Gary North in Lew Rockwell contributor section...{1 1/2 hours later}...damn it Mal! I was not previously aware of Gary North, and just read a bit of his published work at Lew Rockwell (the current North article archive count: 560), plus a shallow datadive that was enabled by Google. I have to score this as a minus for Lew Rockwell presently. It is unfathomable that a website that has many primary members who proudly wave the flag of anarcho-capitalism allow this guy to post on it. He's a Christian reconstructionist which means he believes that he has a god given duty to establish a Christian state on earth, and believe me, it won't be the limp-wristed New Testament kind of Christianity either; it will be the demonstrative OT earth opening up to swallow sinners alive, public execution of homosexuals, blasphemers, heretics, apostates, Fifth Commandment violators (Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee), females caught having premarital sex, and many more categories.

This cannot be justified using large complete excerpts from the New Testament or the Words Attributed to Jesus. Instead what you'll most often find is the use of obscure out of context one verse quotes and an injudicious stringing together of disparate quotes from wholly different sections of the Bible in their 'Biblical Proofs'. it is doutbful that you'll see the implementation of anything significant taken from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5). In fact I'd be surprised to discover that they used much at all from the Gospels, which are supposed to detail the life of Jesus on Earth. Strange that persons who claim to be Christian would avoid basing their faith on what they believe to be the life and admonitions of Christ, isn't it?

It is in the works of Paul where the one verse quotes suitable for distortion can be found, but even in those, it would be difficult to use a significant portion of a whole chapter at one time top advance their arguments. It is after all "The Acts of the Apostles", not "The Axe of the Apostles".

I am an atheist, but my 1st through 8th grade education at a Protestant Grade School in which Bible was a subject taught once a day, just like Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, and I would gladly engage in a duel with these heretics, using King James at twenty paces on any Sunday at High Noon.

North is also a member of the Discovery Institute which is the main promoter of 'Intelligent Design". I was under the impression the the GW Bush presidency had settled the issue once and for all with verifiable evidence, and left no doubt: that the process of creation is nothing more than deaf, dumb and blind randomness. (sorry, i couldn't resist)

What do you know about North?

So you want North censored from Lew Rockwell's site? why not?

Absolutely not, please do not infer this from my opposition to what North publishes or my bewilderment regarding his association with Lew Rockwell.

I do not believe in censoring even hateful content (I did not notice that North was hateful, just wrongful), and am a firm believer in the free marketplace of ideas. If a society engages in censorship they are asking for trouble, because asinine and easily refutable concepts get propagated in dark back alleys, finding true believers in this environment that is absent any rational dissent.

Also note what I stated above; that I, a long term atheist, am ready willing and able to argue against the despicable theory, using their own book, The King James Bible. The message will shortly be indexed in search engines, but I'd be greatly surprised to find anyone take me up on the challenge.

You and I may be Atheists, but Lew Rockwell is a Roman Catholic. What's the big deal? North has been a Christian writer for many years. That does not offend me as he is consistent in his faith. What offends me to the bone are the internet voices for Jesus who insult, degrade, and even threaten those of us who are not believers. In my long life, I have never been insulted so brutally as I have been by the hypocrites who often post even here. Here they know better than to use that kind of verbal "attitude."

I am a supporter of Lew Rockwell.com and have been for many years. Have I ever asked him to keep religious writers off his site? Nope, as that would be like me asking you to stop smoking in my world. The solution is easy. There are several writers on Lew's site that I do not read. There are several ranters here that I do not read.

I constantly find myself in the minority of most groups. This may be because I avoided public schools except for business college; so I was not indoctrinated into collectivism. I also chose to live for many years without television so the commercialism did not get into the brains of my children. It made me an individual thinker but there is no room in these collective groups for an individual thinker.

I am always on the search for individuals who can analyze new ideas and learn new horizons for many of our problems. But sooner or later, they have to retreat back into the cocoons of their sheep pens. This is not a political problem but a problem of ill-educated minds. I am not offended by some of the leftish writers that many others are, as the older I get, the more respect I have for organizations like the ACLU who often defend the groups I support. Lew looks at the world through the eyes of an individual and I find that very attractive. I was fortunate enough to have dinner with him in Atlanta years ago and found him a sparkling individual. I love it when someone as young as Lew has the background of an old intellect. I've got easily 15 plus years on him and have been jealous of his ability to know instinctivly what I'm still striving to attain.

Three years ago I did find 250 individuals who can analyze new ideas and will be meeting with 500 more at the end of September. I have written about these amazing people called Secular Humanists who have blown the cobwebs out of their brains and are involved totally with science. Many had to fight off the ghosts of many gods but managed to land on their feet and pursue their own individual positions.

There is nothing political in this group but all agree that returning to the separation of church and state would clean up a lot of the crap America wallows in. Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, Shermer (who was on Cobert's show yesterday) Hitchens and 50 other speakers/writers will be presenting their points of view as individuals not sheep. I have been working all summer to strenghten my legs to be able to walk through this amazing convention.

It's sort of an anti-revival meeting!

Aknight,

Thank you for your reply. Good points.

Who could have predicted a topic regarding Lew Rockwell would have resulted in us bringing Ayn Rand, Juan Cole & Noam Chomsky into the discussion? Considering the company, do you think it’s possible that Ayn is rolling over in her grave? ;-)

It’s interesting that your stated opposition to the von Mises style of Libertarianism is the concept of private property as “axiomatic”, because private property seems to be the very foundation upon which the von Mises philosophy is established, and it’s one that I personally agree with. If the right to private property isn’t self-evident, then what is?

Regarding Chomsky and Cole’s repetitive criticism about Israel’s influence on U.S. foreign policy, I admittedly don’t get it. Since her creation, Israel has been the most representative of Jeffersonian model of individual liberty and probably represented what he had in mind when he spoke of an American style revolution taking place across the globe. Do you think it’s possible that Jefferson would have been supportive of Israel? Putting aside that minor point for the moment, why is that folks like Chomsky or Cole don’t ever argue against the E.U. or U.N. lobbying groups in the U.S.? In addition, why is it that the entire anti-Israel movement only seems willing to talk about half of the story in our support of Israel, and how it’s supposedly tied to our own collective guilt for every Arab/Muslim grievance in the middle-east? What about other nations who supported the establishment of Israel, and what about America’s involvement in preventing Israel from capturing even more land from the nations who couldn’t tolerate a Jewish nation in the so-called Muslim holy land after her creation? Perhaps it’s worth going back in history and discussing how Jerusalem became sacred in the first place to the first generation of Muslims following the death of Mohammed and which religion is guilty of beginning imperialist religious wars for the state, but that topic is probably better suited a different thread.

What do I know about North? I know that he is something to the extreme right of Pat Robertson, and appears to have a lot in common with the Fred Phelps loonies, except that he is much more articulate and therefore better suited to further his own personal agenda. Considering his own stated end-game, he’s also something of an “olympic gold medalist in the linguistics floor routine”, but his underlying message is there for anyone willing to catch it. He’s also a contributor to Lew Rockwell.

He’s not alone over there, AKnight. ;-) If you wish to go through all of the fringe radical contributors on Lew Rockwell’s site, it might be better suited to it’s own thread.

R,

Mal

It always seems I spend a great deal of time explaining my beliefs about private property. My belief that private ownership of property is not axiomatic to libertarian theory is not intended to devalue property rights as much as it is to elevate to its proper position personal liberty. Property rights are first corollary rights which naturally flow from a belief in the primacy of individual liberty. Also, there can be no natural right to own property, other than a right to use what you presently control. It is only the state that can confer property ownership on an absent landlord. This is why I feel the the Von Mises people are being disingenuous when they claim to be anarchists.

As to Cole and to a lesser degree Chomsky, it is a distortion to call their views "Anti-Israel". Nowhere have I ever seen Cole state he is opposed to the state of Israel. His dissent against Likud should not be construed as anti-Israel, especially since Likud cannot achieve a pure majority in Israel's elections, and is instead forced to enter into coalition governments that often include agreements with fundamental Jewish sects, whose members, because of their religious views, are exempted from service in the IDF.

In fact, Cole's anti-Likud stance should more properly be viewed as pro Israel, since Likud's actions are only going to exacerbate the problems. The only path Likud has to success is through the genocide of the Palestinians, and that fact alone will always mean that Likud faces strong and vehement dissent within Israel itself, which could, if things progress far enough, be a cause of Israel's dissolution. I don't have the answers, but I can tell you that Likud does not even come close to a solution. If the response to kids throwing rocks are snipers; response to snipers, tanks and F-16s and response to militant acts by a minority, rampant destruction of personal property, hell awaits tomorrow. Of this I can assure you. There has to be a different path that leads away from this. I stated before, and I state it again: the recent disenfranchisement of the Palestinians' democratic will by dethroning Hamas was counter-productive. The best way to castrate political militants is to make them perform the bureaucratic functions within a society, to make them think of their future after the next cycle of voting, to banish them to the realm of the mundane. A corrupt politician is preferable to a terrorist, always. The way this was handled gave Hamas excuses for their failures, and further enhanced their own mystique amongst Palestinians. It would have been better to mortalise them by forcing them to perform their duties and run the occupied territories; to be responsible for the electricity, the water, and the garbage pick-up.

It all seems to come down to which label a writer, politician or even a web site carries around. Many of us start out carrying the label of our parents/trainers/teachers and when the label does not fit, we start on a search to find one. Sadly we often do not bother to firm up our own agenda and are simply looking for that elusive label that defines who are are not!

If the parties had a firm agenda and all we had to do was learn and understand what it was, we could search for the less evil of the list.

I learned of the LP from reading Harry Browne and Ayn Rand and their combined, but not associated agenda of limited government and bringing the authorty closer to the voters. I read easily two dozen books on this agenda and felt the GOP was the closest at the time. When the GOP went bad and started selling the One World Order, I had a political melt down.

I find it refreshing to read all the points of view on Lew Rockwell.com. I certainly did not get convinced with the religious writers so I simply passed them over. It is called intellectual choice.

I asked Lew Rockwell in person in 2000 if he was insulted with the addition of the words "Under God?" He laughed and said the word "Indivisible" was far more insulting in our Pledge of Allegiance. Oh yes, he was right on!

aknight. Do you realize that millions of Christians want Israel to survive and unite as the Messiah will return to Israel and then all Jews and Christians will get to heaven. This has driven this whole Middle Eastern fight to either destroy Israel or protect it. I have a selfish interes in these Jews.

I respect their drive in education, their drive to contribute to Medicine, Teachers, Musicians, Composers, Conductors, Actors, writers and all those things that make my life joyful. I feel so strongly that these amazing people must be saved from Islam and anti-Semitism everywhere that I actually had made plans to retire there. It was about the time I hit 65 that I realized the weakness in America came from the dumbing down of the individuals. In our desire for socialism, we lost our independence. It took a new level of stupidity to elect men like Bush/Clinton/Bush to lead America.

Good God, what has happened to our American values? We stand in line with our hands out for what we can take from the federal pot. This is because we don't have the desire to educate ourselves or our children. We have passed the point of no return and we will simply sink under the weight of this hideous government.

aknight,

I respect your opinion regarding to private ownership, but I personally beleive that private ownership of property is one of the most basic rights that people universally identify with. I think we probably agree on this issue, even though I am admittedly misunderstanding your point. Maybe we both agree, and we're talking around each other?

Regarding Juan Cole. . .

I personally think that Juan Cole makes it a point to legitimize every Arab grievance upon a state the size of New Jersey in the middle-east. In addition, he also takes the ubiquitous pot-shots at American Foreign policy which is common practice in the bizarro world of the modern left-right convergence that frequently presents itself as Libertarianism, but I digress. My question is this – when has Juan Cole once engaged his readers in critically analyzing the effects that Arab Islamic fundamentalism within middle eastern politics, and how it directly relates to the Palestinian/Israel problem?

I’ve read many of Dr. Cole’s articles, and in my opinion there is a lot to be learned about Juan Cole’s bias by following the following three links, in order:

Manipulation of the Blogging World on Iraq?

Kommissar Cole

Iraq The Model


In my own personal opinion, Dr. Cole appears to bend over backwards in discrediting every single positive western influence in the world, instead choosing to focus upon every negative one, despite the liberal intentions on behalf the offending western nation. In addition, he questions the motives of any liberal minded Arab who offers an objective perspective opinion that contrast with Cole’s dogmatic & close-minded view of western influence in the world, and he has shown in the case above to instinctively discredit the possibility that the same values we share here in the west might be shared by citizens in middle-eastern Arab nations. After reading several of Dr. Cole’s articles I presume his overall argument as doubtful that America can possibly be viewed as anything but as an imperialist superpower seeking to overthrow every democratically smaller nation as part a vast Neo-Con/AIPAC conspiracy theory, and when an Arab speaks out against Cole and his (false) presumptions, he should immediately be viewed with skepticism as being a cog in the neo-con illuminati.

His writings show a repetitive bias towards the nation of Israel, and of any liberal minded Arab person who offers an objective opinion regarding the United States. If I'm wrong, please point me to the article where Cole has blamed any nation other than the U.S. or Israel for the the problems in the middle-east. I'm not saying he hasn't written any such article, but they seem to be few & far between on the WWW. . .