Harry Browne, we hardly knew ye

[arkuat]

Yeah, I know about all the bad stuff about Perry Willis double-dealing with the party. But I just recently read for the first time some splendid things Harry Browne wrote during the time when I was ignoring him (which unfortunately for me extended until his death in 2006), about the recent wars and why they were wrong.

It starts here: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=24444 and continues for three more installments.

I'm a bit disturbed about the prospect of having Clinton succeed Rice as Secretary of State. If this is going to be the case, then I sure hope that Obama has read these posts of Harry Browne and paid close attention to them. I fear that this is not the case.

Comments

[pameladean]

Well, I guess you could use the form on change.gov to draw them to, if not Obama's attention, at least that of one of his staff.

I don't think the fourth one is going to be a big hit, though.

P.

[arkuat]

Yeah, I think by the fourth one he was getting tired of dealing with all the negative feedback (the first one was posted on 2001 September 12, after all), and lazily sinking back into the weak intellectual habit of shoehorning any and all problems into analysis by the traditional Libertarian ideology.

Or perhaps he was still planning to run again in 2004 and just trying to "reconnect to his base", as people say when talking about politicians, which class of people Browne always disparaged even after becoming one, of a sort.

[arkuat]

So I went back and took another look at all four, and what struck me about the fourth one is that it was built up as a response to this common objection: "I believe we can retaliate with few innocent people killed, and Afghanistan may be a better place when we leave."

I felt a little chill run down my spine when I realized that this was the tack of the Obama campaign over the last several months, building up support for withdrawal from Iraq by arguing that it will free up resources for more intensive intervention in Afghanistan.

And I remembered that when I was crowing exultantly about Obama's election to my mentor who you know of, her reply to me was something along the lines of "Oh, so you approve of what he intends to do in Afghanistan?" Well, no, I replied, I didn't, but...

And this is one more reason why I'd feel more comfortable with Richardson at State and Clinton at Commerce, even though I expect that if Clinton had only been offered Commerce, the Senate would have talked her out of it by further eroding the seniority rules of Congress.

Afghanistan sure wasn't a better place when the Russians left. I doubt that Alexander improved it much either, although it's hard to tell. Alexander was so long ago.

[scratchmonkey.livejournal.com]

It is a bit interesting to read in the first piece about the bombing of Libya and Grenada by Reagan while a Reagan t-shirt is being hawked in a neighboring banner ad.

Then again, that site also has a story about how Dawkins is responsible for good Christian youth committing suicide. Note: I think that Dawkins is pretty much a dick; however, that's giving him a little too much credit, no?

Excellent series of articles overall, thanks for the links.

[arkuat]

I'm grateful to the site in question, to which I gave almost exactly zero further examination, for keeping the articles in circulation. I'm sure there are many more ironies to be discovered! I'm glad you found the articles interesting (I would have found them extremely comforting in October 2001, when I was growing convinced that all of my compatriots were becoming collectively insane and was desperately seeking for counterexamples).

Dawkins is a dick, and I love reading his books. I too am embarrassed by his Atheist Jihad, but then again, I just tried to read the Acts of the Apostles again (after binging on Gospels), and that was just what I needed to understand that Dawkins's excesses are, well, understandable in the case of a too-comfortable cranky old English don. It also made me want to reread Nietzsche's The Antichristian. And I don't even want to touch the question of who deserves credit or blame for the suicide of good Christian youth. I'm sure that any serious investigation of the question would require detailed investigations of each individual case, which would turn out generally inconclusive, not to mention disrespectful of the dead.

Love your usericon, by the way. Have you tortured any lentils lately?

[scratchmonkey.livejournal.com]

I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the articles had been archived, as they're possibly the most level-headed response that I've seen yet to 9/11.

Yes on the question of blame re: suicide.

If you consider curries a form of torture, then yes.

[arkuat]

Give the Spleen my love.