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Wednesday, June 18, 2003
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US Censors Iraqi Press. "In Volatile Iraq, US Curbs Press," from the Christian Science Monitor. This is what it means to export US "freedom" to Iraq? My God. Here's a quote: "In an interview, editor Ni'ma Abdulrazzaq says the press edict decreed by Bremer... [LewRockwell.com Blog]
"Now they put plastic bags on our heads, throw us to the ground, and accuse us of being agents of Saddam Hussein," the editorial reads. "In other words, if you're not with America, you're with Saddam."
Interesting, that's the same kind of garbage crusaders here spew.
10:45:31 PM 
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Ten signs of the "freedom" that Iraqis enjoy now. 1. The Iraqi people are now living under direct military rule, with foreign military commanders ruling by decree.
2. Democratic elections are prohibited, and political rulers are being selected by military commanders.
3. Iraqi citizens are being required to turn in their weapons to the military authorities.
4. There is a mandatory 11 p.m. curfew, enforced by soldiers.
5. There are warrantless searches of homes and warrantless seizures of criminal suspects; these are conducted not by the police but by army troops.
6. Occupation troops are killing demonstrators and suspected criminals without a trial or due process of law.
7. The military authorities are continuing Saddam Hussein’s system of government-run schools for the nation’s children, albeit with new forms of official indoctrination.
8. The military authorities are continuing Saddam Hussein’s system of monetary central planning, even to the extent of inflating the currency by printing quantities of Iraqi money with Saddam’s photo on it.
9. There is military censorship and regulation of the media and a ban on anti-military speech and activity.
10. The military commanders are continuing Saddam Hussein’s and his Ba’ath Party’s socialist policies of public ownership of the means of production, central planning of economic activity, and
welfare.
(Did I also mention that widespread looting continues across the country, which, according to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, is also a part of Iraq’s new "freedom," albeit an "untidy" part?) (link)
Indeed. [Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs]
Note that at least one of the crusaders has gone on record as saying that this sort of thing is what he wants.
10:03:03 PM
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Smoking Out the Tobacco Nazis. The June 17, 2003 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has an article by Tobin Dickerson and Kim Janda of the Scripps Research Institute that shows that a byproduct of nicotine can arrest the development of Alzheimer's disease. This... [LewRockwell.com Blog]
The post concludes, "This will provide a test of whether the tobacco Nazis are really interested in public health, or are merely anti-capitalist extortion artists. If the former is true, then they should be celebrating this discovery."
The answer is obvious, of course. Many more people stand to benefit from expanding prohibition to tobacco than there are Alzheimer's patients, just as there are more people living off the prohibition of marijuana than there are people with severe nausea or glaucoma.
1:05:57 PM
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The Corruption and Debasement of Debate: Rationalizing, Moralizing, and Psychologizing. The state of intellectual debate about political/ethical isues, and related policy concerns, has been coarsening for a number of decades. But now, certain vices and failures of thinking have become very, very widespread, and almost everyone seems to engage in them. As a very good friend of mine described it recently in an email, these problems (which he calls "insanity" with considerable justification) have truly become a "pandemic." And so they have. In the course of identifying several elements of what I consider the major flaws in most analysis and discussion of current events, I will offer a few examples related to the war with Iraq, which has unfortunately provided a number of especially virulent expressions of these problems.
[...]
There is a great deal more that remains to be said about all these issues, and how they interact with and reinforce each other. I hope to get to some of it in good time. For now, I will conclude with these observations. When you hear someone say that, if you opposed the war with Iraq, or think that any looting that might have occurred during or after the war is a tragedy, you must be a "Saddam lover" or a "Saddamite," you are seeing an especially ugly combination of all three vices described above: rationalizing, moralizing, and psychologizing. The hoped-for effect of this kind of smear is to end any debate -- and to permit the accuser to stand by his convictions, however ill-founded they may be and however he may have arrived at them. And there is one victim above all of these kinds of tactics: truth. If one cares about the truth, then one must be willing to back up one's convictions with reasons and facts. It is for this reason that I have explained, for example, my opposition to our current foreign policy at great length. But, as I have noted, I have yet to see most supporters of the war address the concerns that I have raised, concerns that I would have thought would matter greatly to people who say they care about freedom and individual liberty. [The Light of Reason]
9:22:10 AM
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They're busting out all over!. Who, precisely, is busting out all over? People who call themselves 'socialist libertarians' are busting out all over, that's who. The latest addition to this roll-call of the ragged is a certain Mr.Paul Anderson who, I am advised, was previously a columnist for the left-wing newspaper 'Tribune'. Mr.Anderson has started a blog. Good for him. His blog is called 'Gauche' which is fine insofar as his Francophonic pretensions are entirely a matter for him. My... [Samizdata.net]
Here's an amusing post from a writer on a conservative site which pretends to be libertarian complaining that socialists are calling themselves libertarians. The irony has not gone unnoticed by some of the people posting comments.
8:32:20 AM
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© Copyright
2006
Ken Hagler.
Last update:
2/15/2006; 1:55:19 PM.
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