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leftlibertarian.org is now available with a mobile interface. Try it out - just navigate to leftlibertarian.org on your PDA, cell phone, or other mobile device.

Also, be aware that I’ll be trying out some new WordPress plugins over the next week or so. I’d like to get some diggability up in here.

As I have grown older and learned more, one thing has become abundantly clear to me: the more knowledge I gain, the more I realize how truly ignorant I am. For that reason, there isn’t anything to see here. I recommend reading this instead.

There’s a famous midrash about two brothers. One was single and the other had a wife and children. Each night each one would go out in secret to deliver a gift of wheat to his brother’s home. The brother with the family would figure: I am so fortunate to have a family; my brother has nothing; let me at least give him some extra wheat. The single brother would figure: I live alone, but my brother has a family to support; I have no need for all this wheat; let me give him some of the extra. One night, while each was delivering wheat to the other, they met on the road, cried, and embraced. The place where they met became the Temple Mount.

There’s a modern version of this midrash. Each night the two brothers go out in secret to take wheat from his brother’s field. The single brother rationalized: my brother is so fortunate to have a family; I have nothing; at least let me have a larger portion of wheat. The brother with the family rationalized: I have a family to support, but he lives alone; he has no need for all that wheat; let me take some of the extra for myself. One night, while each was walking home with the wheat he had taken from the other, they met on the road, cried out, and fought. The place where they met became the site of Parliament.

(Thanks to Micha Ghertner @ The Distributed Republic 2007-12-24.)

The move from one slice to another is complete. Please provide me with feedback about load times and any other issues.

This is my latest at the Partial Observer. Excerpts:

While there may be some room for quibbling around the edges, most educated, rational people would agree with all, or almost all, of these seventeen principles:...

2. The penumbra of the Bill of Rights creates a "right to privacy" that forces states to respect a woman's right to choose abortion, but does not force the federal government to respect a woman's right to choose medical marijuana.

3. The United States has an obligation to fight poverty worldwide - and also has an obligation to create even more poverty through economic sanctions against certain regimes we don't like.

...

13. Prohibition didn't work, but we must continue the War on Drugs.

14. Communism doesn't work, but central planning in education and health care is a necessity.

etc.

Comments welcome at the Partial Observer.

So the NFL caved, and not only will the Patriots-Giants game be carried on the NFL Network, but will also be simulcast free on NBC and CBS. This in at least partial response to pressure from politicians such as Sens. Leahy and Spector, who threatened to revoke the NFL's anti-trust exemption.

The conflict seemed to be that the NFL network wanted to be offered as a basic cable channel, but many cable companies have refused to do so. Presumably, these channels would have accepted the NFL Network as a premium channel. But this means people unwilling to pay extra would still be unable to see the game. Wouldn't there be an outrage over that? Wouldn't the NFL take an even bigger public relations hit?

In any case, why do people feel they have a right to watch this game? What if it had been scheduled at what would have been its normal time: 1 pm Eastern, as aregional-coverage game? Would that have been acceptable, because it's free?

I agree that the NFL shouldn't have an antitrust exemption, but that's because there shouldn't be anti-trust law, period. Particularly not for the leisure and entertainment industries, where no one is being "gouged" or otherwise forced to pay high prices for anything.

This struggle is between the NFL and cable companies. Public pressure may swing to one end or the other, but the government should stay out of it.

Last weekend, CounterPunch featured Howard Zinn’s introduction to elin o’Hara slavick’s book of cartographic drawings of American aerial bombing, Bomb after Bomb. I agree with Mark Brady that this is one of the best things that Zinn has ever written. Some of the most important stuff in the essay has to do with patriotism, the conflation of the country with the State, and the criminality of aerial warfare as such. A sample:

We have had enough experience, with the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leaders, with the bombings carried out by the Allies, with the torture stories coming out of Iraq, to know that ordinary people with ordinary consciences will allow their instincts for decency to be overcome by the compulsion to obey authority. It is time therefore, to educate the coming generation in disobedience to authority, to help them understand that institutions like governments and corporations are cold to anything but self-interest, that the interests of powerful entities run counter to the interests of most people.

This clash of interest between governments and citizens is camouflaged by phrases that pretend that everyone in the nation has a common interest, and so wars are waged and bombs dropped for national security, national defense, and national interest.

Patriotism is defined as obedience to government, obscuring the difference between the government and the people. Thus, soldiers are led to believe that we are fighting for our country when in fact they are fighting for the government — an artificial entity different from the people of the country — and indeed are following policies dangerous to its own people.

My own reflections on my experiences as a bombardier, and my research on the wars of the United States have led me to certain conclusions about war and the dropping of bombs that accompany modern warfare.

One: The means of waging war (demolition bombs, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, nuclear weapons, napalm) have become so horrendous in their effects on human beings that no political end— however laudable, the existence of no enemy — however vicious, can justify war.

Two: The horrors of the means are certain, the achievement of the ends always uncertain.

Three: When you bomb a country ruled by a tyrant, you kill the victims of the tyrant.

Four: War poisons the soul of everyone who engages in it, so that the most ordinary of people become capable of terrible acts.

Five: Since the ratio of civilian deaths to military deaths in war has risen sharply with each subsequent war of the past century (10% civilian deaths in World War I, 50% in World War II, 70% in Vietnam, 80-90% in Afghanistan and Iraq) and since a significant percentage of these civilians are children, then war is inevitably a war against children.

Six: We cannot claim that there is a moral distinction between a government which bombs and kills innocent people and a terrorist organization which does the same. The argument is made that deaths in the first case are accidental, while in the second case they are deliberate. However, it does not matter that the pilot dropping the bombs does not intend to kill innocent people — that he does so is inevitable, for it is the nature of bombing to be indiscriminate. Even if the bombing equipment is so sophisticated that the pilot can target a house, a vehicle, there is never certainty about who is in the house or who is in the vehicle.

Seven: War, and the bombing that accompanies war, are the ultimate terrorism, for governments can command means of destruction on a far greater scale than any terrorist group.

These considerations lead me to conclude that if we care about human life, about justice, about the equal right of all children to exist, we must, in defiance of whatever we are told by those in authority, pledge ourselves to oppose all wars.

—Howard Zinn, Introduction to elin o’Hara slavick’s Bomb after Bomb

Read the whole thing.

(Via Mark Brady @ Liberty & Power 2007-12-15.)

I've transcribed two rather obscure bits by William B. Greene:

• A New Gnosis: a short 1849 pamphlet touching on a number of Greene's theological and philosophical concerns, and,
• Declaration of Sentiments and Constitution of the New-England Labor-Reform League, written with Ezra Heywood in 1869.

I'm in the midst of transporting the texts in the Libertarian Labyrinth and some related collections to a Mediwiki-based archive. New texts will probably appear in the wiki. It will take some time to work through the indexing issues involved, but eventually this ought to be a much more usable resource.

There's some good news on the Liberty archive front as well. Before Christmas, a libertarian affiliated with the Distributed Proofreaders group contacted me about working on transcribing Liberty. That should take care of some of the "heavy lifting" involved with making that collection more usable.

Well, folks, next week we get to find out how accurate the polling has been. And, of course, I can’t resist the temptation to predict (especially after finally getting it right last year for once).

My initial prediction for the Iowa caucus back in early November didn’t account for the “Huckabee surge” of the last month — I had Mitt Romney picked for a solid 1st-place finish, followed by Rudy Ghouliani and Ron Paul. I also left out Fred Thompson, who continues, for reasons unknown to me, to attract some support.

New prediction: Romney (~30%) still wins the state, with Huckabee (~25%) falling back a little. Fred Thompson and Ron Paul will scrap for third, and I’m predicting that Paul (~15%) will win the scrap with Thompson (~12%) taking fourth. Ghouliani (~10%) in fifth, McCain (~5%), with a few holdouts casting votes for also-rans/drops Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo et al.

Poll-watchers: Yes, I know you think I’m nuts to call Paul in third, but his supporters are going to make the effort to get out and vote for him. There’s more support for Romney, Huckabee and Thompson than for Paul, but it’s “softer” support and Thursday is “ER” night.

Paul cultists [1]: Yes, I know you think I’m nuts and that Paul is going to carry Iowa with 90% of the vote. Put down the crack pipe. I won’t be surprised if he does better than I predict. I will be surprised — and not as unpleasantly so as you probably think — if he carries the state. As a matter of fact, I’ll probably have to go to the real ER to get my ticker started again.

Of course, the Republican caucus in Iowa is set up to allow for fuckery — hand-written ballots to be counted by local party bosses, with non-binding results and actual national convention delegates chosen later at a state convention. If Paul comes in at less than 10%, I’ll be right in there with the folks claiming a stolen caucus. I just won’t believe that Paul was actually at 90% before his votes got disappeared.

The Democratic Party’s caucus is more open — people stand in groups and identify themselves as supporters of the candidates they prefer. Then they do-si-doh and allemande and all that stuff until everyone is where he or she has finally chosen to be, and the delegates are distributed among the candidates who meet a “viability” threshold of between 15% and 25%.

Prediction: A three-way wash between Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards. They’ll split the bulk of the vote, and five points will cover the spread between them. My guess is that Clinton will just barely edge out the other two — she’s more popular and more organized than Edwards and more organized than Obama. The real question is whether Edwards’s organization or Obama’s popularity will carry 2nd place, and if I had to bet, it would be on Edwards. Call it Hillary ~29%, Edwards ~27%, Obama ~25%.

I’ve left 19% of the vote open to account for Christopher Dodd, Joe Biden, Bill Richardson, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel. What’s going to happen there? I won’t be surprised if Dodd makes that 15% “viability” threshold and gets some souvenir delegates, bringing the top three each down a point or two. I will be surprised if Richardson or Biden break 5%. And I guess we’ll find out how many diehard Kucinich and Gravel supporters there are in Iowa: What those guys lack in money and organization, they make up for in having devoted supporters who will brave the weather to stand up for their man. Neither of them will break out, of course, but it’s conceivable that either or both might do as well as Biden or Richardson.

—–
[1] — Not Paul supporters, Paul cultists. There is a difference. If you think Paul might get first, second or third place in Iowa, that doesn’t make you a cultist. If you’re absolutely sure that he’ll carry a majority of the GOP vote in Iowa, then you probably are one.

Interesting that Tim Russert didn't ask Ron Paul about the Iraq war, but did ask him about the Civil War. Didn't that end about 140 years ago?

MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. "According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery."

REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the--that iron, iron fist..

MR. RUSSERT: We'd still have slavery.

REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn't sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.

He might have emphasized that Lincoln did not forcibly prevent southern secession to end slavery but rather to preserve the Union and said that he would have maintained slavery had that been necessary to keep the Union intact.

But let his sink in. Russert didn't ask Ron Paul about Iraq but he asked him about the Civil War? What the hell is going on?

Here's the transcript.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.