Martin Radwin

Isn't YouTube wonderful? It gives a brilliant and witty philosopher the closest possible shot at television stardom. And it gives us the opportunity to enjoy his wit and wisdom on our computers. George H. Smith has far more than earned his fifteen minutes of fame for a lifetime of philosophical work in contribution to reason and liberty. Martin

Fran, Santa Monica is one of the nicest areas in LA. It's got a beautiful beach with a walking/biking/skateboarding path that stretches on for many miles. My stepbrother used to work at the Santa Monica pier. I really enjoy hanging out there when I'm in the LA area visiting family. Enjoy you stay in greater Los Angeles! Martin

A couple of months ago, over on the Atlantis_II forum, a poster was using the example of Dagny and the guard to argue his point that Rand believed that killing of the innocent was generally consistent with her philosophy. From post # 35066, he wrote: "This analysis is dead wrong. Ayn Rand was who she was and believed what she believed. She picked Leonard Piekoff as her intellectual heir for a reason: his beliefs mirrored her beliefs. In Atlas Shrugged, when attempting to rescue John Galt from governmental captivity she had her heros shoot a guard in cold blood because he did not immediately comply to their orders. "Capitulate or die!," was her literary standard for dealing with those who would oppose her. Why is surprising that her intellectual heir is taking the same "capitulate or die!," approach to Arab Muslims?". I replied, "Your analysis is just about as wrong as it is possible to be. Atlas Shrugged was, in fact, a story about and a tribute to libertarian non-rights-violating resistance. The strike was carried out accordingly to strictly libertarian principles involving no initiation of force. The strikers simply withdrew from society, depriving society of their productive labor. No one's rights were violated, and the NOIF principle was strictly enforced. Such acts of violence as were committed were strictly retaliatory and defensive. Ragnar Danneskjold did not seize any private property, only government ships carrying looted goods (not counting Francisco's ships carrying copper, which was done with the cooperation and consent of Francisco). Danneskjold never killed anyone; the crews of the government ships that he seized were set free. Francisco d'Anconia destroyed his own copper mines and Ellis Wyatt destroyed his own oil fields, something both men were entirely within their rights to do. Noone was killed as a result of this destruction, which was carefully planned so as not to kill anyone. John Galt was an almost Christ like figure in his dedication to non-violent resistance. The example you gave was, in fact, the only example in the book about a person being killed by the strikers. And this was arguably a case of justifiable homicide, being as the guard was working for a bunch of government goons keeping Galt imprisoned. The guard could have easily avoided his fate simply by stepping aside. The whole point of this episode was to illustrate that the guard would rather die than assume responsibility for making an independent decision. To extrapolate that the philosophy expressed in Atlas Shrugged is consistent with governments slaughtering innocent people in non-defensive wars is beyond ridiculous. Not one innocent person was killed by the strikers, nor did any of them attempt to justify such a thing." Rand's opposition to the killing of innocent people was also evident in Roark's destruction of the government housing project in "The Fountainhead". Roard made sure to do this in such a way that no people were killed or injured. Having read through the posts in this thread, I've revised my view expressed above about the killing of the guard. I no longer would view this as "arguably a case of justifiable homicide", unless the guard violently resisted and there was no way short of killing the guard to free Galt. Interestingly, none of the other people guarding Galt was killed. They all surrendered and were just tied up, except for the leader of the guards. He was shot by Francisco, but only in the wrist, after reaching for his gun (he was later shot and killed by one of his fellow guards). So Francisco used only the minimum amount of force necessary to subdue the leader. The case of Dagny killing the guard stands out specifically because it is the only case in either of Rand's two great novels of a person being killed by a "heroic" character. And the circumstances in which the guard was killed did not really justify the killing as self-defense. This did seem like Rand's attempt to illustrate that the guard, via his unquestioning obedience to the regime, deserved his fate. Martin

Martin, I don't hate the USA government, although I despise some of its policies. I believe that this is the same attitude as all the thinkers you mentioned (maybe excepting Rothbard). If you want to see "grossly corrupt and incompetent" for real, go live in Brazil for 30 years. I did. It is getting a lot better now, but what is happening with the USA government, even with the attempted empire building, pales by comparison of a right-wing military depleting a country the size of Brazil, then handing it back to the civilians when the cost came due from abroad (it fleeced foreign banks, too, and anyone else foolish enough to go along). Every one of those high-ranking military people (and their cronies) have fat Swiss bank accounts. I don't even want to think about Fernando Collor's account and he was the transition from the military. Brazilians say that Brazil is great simply because it is still standing after so much corruption and incompetence. This life experience, which gives me a great context for comparison, is what makes me look at the good the US government does in addition to the bad. We live in a hell of a great country, warts and all. Michael Michael, Even though I have been frequently posting about what I consider to be criminal actions committed by the US government, this certainly does not mean that I consider the US government to be bad compared to most other governments. Far from it. In fact, with regard to its domestic policy, I consider the US government to be among the best governments in the world today. This is mostly attributable to the incredibly libertarian foundation established by America's founders, at least some of which still lives on to this day, although it is being continuously eroded. If you don't believe this, read any of the recent books by James Bovard, who has meticulously documented the continuing destruction of liberty in the US that has been happening over the last several decades. But despite this, I am still an American. I still live here, in the USA, in the heart of Silicon Valley, California. I'm not planning on leaving, not unless things here get really, really bad, at which time it may not be possible to leave. I know that most governments in the world today are far worse than ours. I believe every word you said about the hideous corruption in Brazil. This kind of corruption is endemic throughout most of the world. There's only a small handful of places I would consider living if I ever did feel that it was time to leave the US. Why do I write about what I consider to be the criminal foreign policy that has long been pursued by the US government, on an objectivist site such as this? Precisely because the mainstream objectivist organizations, ARI and TOC, along with most self-identified objectivists, refuse to even consider it. If either ARI or TOC has ever written even a single article even suggesting that our government is guilty of slaughtering thousands of innocent people abroad in pursuit of its foreign policy objectives, I am not aware of it. The worst they will ever say is that our foreign policy is "altruistic", in that it doesn't serve the best interests of the American people. Insofar as acknowledgement is made of the innocent people abroad killed by the US government, blame is shifted to the dictators that these people are unfortunate enough to live under. Ayn Rand herself used this line of argumentation, in her article "The Wreckage of the Concensus" (I think that was the name of the article, published in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal). In that article, she argued that American entry into the Vietnam War was evil by objectivist standards because it was altruistic, serving absolutely no legitimate national security interest. While this was certainly true, she neglected to mention that it was also evil because it involved our government bombing and murdering huge numbers of Vietnamese civilians in a war that was not even plausibly fought in self-defense. Objectivists have been using a similar line of argumentation ever since. So, once again, the fact that I talk about these things in no way means that I don't appreciate how lucky I am to live in the US, or that I don't think that life is infinitely worse in most other parts of the world, or that most governments other than ours are not sewers of corruption, compared to ours. You certainly seem to have lived an interesting life. 30 years in Brazil living as an American expatriate is not at all typical of the life of the average American. I don't know if you've ever done it or considered doing it, but, it you haven't already, you might want to consider writing an autobiographical post about your obviously very fascinating life and posting it here on OL. I'm sure that there would be lots of people here who would be interested in reading about your life story. Martin

Some day, the organized objectivist movement (ARI and TOC) may even acknowledge this fact. They may even come to see that the US government, which is grossly corrupt and incompetent at managing, health, eduction, welfare, education, environmental policy, monetary policy, and pretty much everything else that it does, for reasons that were long ago explained by Rand, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Spencer, and many other distinguished thinkers, should not be expected to be any more fair or competent in its execution of foreign policy. If the US government can't even run the post office competently, by what infernal reasoning should it be expected that it can successfully nation build in Iraq? Martin

Every one of those 'noninterventionist' nations would have been a totalitarian soviet communist hell hole if it werent for the US and its "hundreds of overseas military bases, an arsenal of thousands of nuclear and conventional weapons, a huge active duty and reserve military, and a government that spends more money on its military than the rest of the world combined" As has been pointed out many times, the GNP of Western Europe greatly exceeded that of the Warsaw Pact nations. As such, Western Europe was quite capable of defending itself against any Soviet invasion. But the nations of Western Europe preferred to have their defense subsidized by the United States, which did subsidize their defense to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, quite unnecessarily. The US also subsidized the defense of wealthy Asian nations such as Japan and South Korea, which had booming economies and were also more than capable of defending themselves but chose to have their defense unnecessarily subsidized by the United States. The Soviet Union was an economic basket case, a third world nation with nuclear weapons. The idea that all of these wealthy nations could not defend themselves against the Soviet Union is ludicrous. Now that the Soviet Union is gone, where is the "peace dividend" we were all expecting? Why are US military expenditures at record levels? Why isn't the US abanding its overseas military bases, now that the bogeyman of the old Soviet Union no longer exists? Could it be that no bureaucracy will ever stand for being shrunk, including the huge bureaucracy that is the US military-industrial complex? Or do we really need to spend all of those hundreds of billions of dollars defending ourselves against "Islamo-fascist" nations that are even worse economic basket cases than the old Soviet Union? Martin

There is, in fact, nothing the least bit platonic or utopian about the idea of noninterventionism. Most nations in the world today basically follow this policy, if for no other reason than that they do not possess the economic or military capability to engage in military intervention in other nations. By contrast, the US has hundreds of overseas military bases, an arsenal of thousands of nuclear and conventional weapons, a huge active duty and reserve military, and a government that spends more money on its military than the rest of the world combined. Yet with all this vast wealth spent on our military, we are supposed to tremble in fear about our supposed vulnerability to our enemies should we even think about stopping our endless wars with nations that have not attacked us and do not threaten us. It is Bidinotto who engages in the platonic, utopian notion that US government military intervention is necessary for our defense, despite massive historical, economic, and philosophical evidence to the contrary. Bidinotto has nothing to worry about. The likelihood that Paul will shift the Republican party toward noninterventionism is just slightly higher than zero. As to the Democrats, they are and always have been just as interventionist as the Republicans. They have started just as many wars and have advocated basically the same policy of global US hegemony and empire. There is no significant number of "cut and run" Democrats. The Democrats, were they so inclined, could stop the Iraq war immediately, just by cutting off all funding for it. Needless to say, they have done no such thing. Since winnning the mid-term elections, they have given the Bush administration pretty much everything it wanted. They have continued funding the Iraq war without any conditions imposed on Bush whatever. They have also made it clear that they are prepared to fully support Bush should he launch military strikes against Iran. Of the Democratic presidential candidates, only Kucinich, Gravel, and Richardson have advocated an end to the Iraq war. None of these candidates has any chance of winning the Democratic nomination. The other candidates have all explicitly stated that they expect that US troops will still be in Iraq at the end of their presidential terms. The leading Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, is every bit as much of a "hawk" on Iran as Bush or Cheney. So much for these horrible "cut and run" Democratic bogeymen we are supposed to fear as such a great threat to our security. Don't worry, Mr. Bidinotto, you have nothing to fear from these horribly dangerous noninterventionists! We have already spent about a trillion dollars on the Iraq war, with about 4000 Americans dead and tens of thousands of wounded military casualties. We have killed probably hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, created millions of Iraqi refugees, destroyed Iraq's infrastructure, and turned the country into a worse police state than it was before we invaded the place. The US government is building multiple permanent military bases in Iraq. It doesn't intend for us ever to leave, and this goes for both Republicans and Democrats; they all support and advocate expansion of our existing military-industrial complex. I hope that this wonderful outcome of our intervention in Iraq is fully consistent with Bidinotto's non-utopian objectivist priinciples. Martin

Cosmology is a branch of astrophysics and is a genuine science. That it, it makes potentially falsifiable predictions. One of the earlier predictions was made by George Gamow, to with, that if the big bang were true there should be a uniform in all directions radiation at about 2.3 kelvin (a little above absolute zero). This prediction was verified by Wilson and Penzias at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1965. This verification established the big bang theory and eliminated Fred Hoyles theory of a steady state cosmos. Cosmological theory also correctly predicts the relative amounts of hydrogen, helium and lithium in free space and predicts the creation of heavier elements from the explosion of supernova stars. Ba'al Chatzaf Bob, I'm surprised that you got this one wrong, given your strong background in physics. Gamow did predict the existence of a background black body radiation from the big bang. But he wasn't even close on his prediction of the average temperature of 2.3 degrees kelvin. As I recall, he predicted a temperature of about 40 degrees kelvin. It is also worth nothing that there was an astronomer (I can't recall his name offhand) who did much more accurately predict this background temperature, and this astronomer preceded Gamow and was not working within the framework of the big bang. Regarding the big bang theory correctly predicting the abundance of light elements, I suspect that this is rather debatable, given the number of free parameters in the model. These parameters can always be adjusted after the fact to fit the observed data. I don't think that any version of the big bang ever made accurate predictions of light element abundance prior to the existence of this data. Martin

Really. Perhaps you would do us the service of re-documenting it or point to a reference? Here's a very good link that goes over the whole history of this issue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmad...onism.22_speech From the above link, "According to Juan Cole, a University of Michigan Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History, Ahmadinejad's statement should be translated as: The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad).[13] Norouzi's translation is identical.[12] According to Cole, "Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to 'wipe Israel off the map' because no such idiom exists in Persian". Instead, "He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse."[14] The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translates the phrase similarly.[15] On June 15, 2006 The Guardian columnist and foreign correspondent Jonathan Steele published an article based on this reasoning.[16] Sources within the Iranian government have also denied that Ahmadinejad issued any sort of threat.[17][18][19] On 20 February 2006, Iran’s foreign minister denied that Tehran wanted to see Israel “wiped off the map,” saying Ahmadinejad had been misunderstood. "Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," Manouchehr Mottaki told a news conference, speaking in English, after addressing the European Parliament. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognise legally this regime," he said." Quoting from another section of the above link, "Gawdat Bahgat, Director of Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, commenting on this saying of Ahmadinejad and Iran's nuclear program states: "The fiery calls to destroy Israel are meant to mobilize domestic and regional constituencies. Iran has no plan to attack Israel with its nuclear arsenal and powerful conventional military capabilities. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni summed up his country’s stand on the Arab-Israeli conflict by stressing, '[The] Palestine issue is not Iran’s jihad.'" In fact, Bahgat says that according to most analysts a military confrontation between Iran and Israel is unlikely.[30] In the speech, Ahmadinejad gave the examples of Iran under the Shah, the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq as examples of apparently invincible regimes that ceased to exist. Ahmadinejad used these examples to justify his belief that the United States and the State of Israel can also be defeated claiming, "they say it is not possible to have a world without the United States and Zionism. But you know that this is a possible goal and slogan." It's far from clear that Admadinejad's statements are any kind of real threat against Israel, rather than rhetoric designed for consumption by the Iranian public. Iran has neither the motive nor the capability to attack Israel, which has a nuclear arsenal of several hundred nuclear weapons. By contrast, both Israel and the United States do possess the capability to pretty much totally destroy Iran. The U.S. government has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran, with both conventional and possibly even nuclear weapons. "All options are on the table", according to almost all of the republican and democratic presidential candidates, the Bush administration, and Congress. The U.S. government, unlike the Iranian government, has the capability to make good on this threat. The Iranian government does not. I never suggested that. So Admadinejad has some wacky, bullshit ideas. So does our esteemed president George W. Bush. And Bush has far greater power and access to far more lethal weaponry than Admadinejad could ever hope to have. Martin

You are correct-Iraq had nothing directly to do with 9/11. They did however have something directly to do with al-qaeda. The 9/11 Commission even discovered that. So should we just appease the nations that support the terrorists groups which attack us? You just love making stuff up, don't you? Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The 9/11 commission discovered no such thing, since there's no truth to it whatever. Iran never called for the destruction of Israel. This so called threat by Ahmadinejad was based on a mistranslation of a statement he made, which has by now been well documented. But don't let the facts get in the way of your hysteria. Even if Iran had threatened Israel, Israel is more than capable of defending itself. Your analogy between Iran and Nazi Germany is laughably absurd. Martin

So what kind of dishonest ass does it take to inflate "the most recent figures" of 78,000-85,000 and inflate them to "several hundred thousand?" I wrote, "This figure is a guess on my part, since the exact figure can never be known. As it says on the top of the Iraq Body Count web site, quoting Tommy Franks, "We don't do body counts". The most recent figures from Iraq Body Count estimate roughly 78,000 - 85,000 deaths, but these are deaths confirmed from multiple sources and only include non-combatant deaths. As such, they represent an absolute lower bound to the number of deaths. Other estimates are much higher." In other words, the 78,000 - 85,000 represents an absolute lower bound. The Lancet study estimated over 600,000 deaths as of last year. Other estimates are even higher. Due to deficiencies in accurate record keeping in a war zone, it is eminently reasonable to assume that many deaths were not documented to meet the rigorous requirements of IBC. This was all explained in my post, as well as at the link I provided. Why don't you learn to read, moron? Martin

I must continue to address this, as it just astonishes me. I referred to fighting filth. We are fighting(over there, rather than here) al-Qaeda operatives. Like hell we are. Al Qaeda had no significant presence in Iraq until the US attacked, invaded, and occupied the place. Only a tiny fraction of the people killed, wounded, and left homeless by the US attack had anything to do with Al Qaeda. Almost none of the Iraqi insurgency fighting the US occupation has anything to do with Al Qaeda. But, as you've so eloquently argued, they're all the same, just a bunch of islamo-fascists. You wrote, "Tell me, are you glad that our military is fighting this filth in Iraq, or would you rather sit around and wait for the enemy to come to us?" Nowhere in this sentence did you specify that the "filth" to which you were referring was Al Qaeda. And since, as I pointed out above, most of the people the US has been fighting in Iraq are not Al Qaeda, and almost none of the people killed in the war are Al Qaeda, the implication is clearly that the Iraqi people themselves, including the thousands of non-combatants, are "filth". Anyone reading these posts can decide for themselves which of us is "an amazing piece of shit". Martin

Again, please cite your sources for that "hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed by the US invasion and occupation..." Just the adults. Was Iraq poised to invade our shores? No. Was it a nation, or a few pieces of Islamic filth, backed by states that sponsor terrorism that attacked us on 9/11? Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Neither did Iran, the next nation that the Bush administration is looking for an excuse to attack. But never mind that. Those Muslims are all the same. Just a bunch of Islamo-fascists. So, if the U.S. government hadn't attacked Iraq, Iraq would have attacked us, killing tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans? Iraq was all poised to kill our innocent women and children? Or is Leonard Peikoff just full of shit? Martin

By god, you're right! We could have had a 15th U.N. resolution. That would have certainly prevented the nonexistent "several hundred thousand" deaths. Well, Sadam was doing pretty well at raking in deaths and mass killings...but I see that you're blaming the U.S. Which certainly the U.N. could have prevented! I am not blaming the "U.S.". I am blaming the U.S. government. The United States as a nation of 300,000,000 people may never justifiably be equated with the U.S. government. Why am I blaming the U.S. government? Because the Iraq war was a war of choice against a nation that had not attacked and was no threat to the United States. Since the war was not fought in self-defense, the U.S. government had absolutely no legitimate right to attack Iraq, and is therefore responsible for all of the devastation that has resulted from its attack. This figure is a guess on my part, since the exact figure can never be known. As it says on the top of the Iraq Body Count web site, quoting Tommy Franks, "We don't do body counts". The most recent figures from Iraq Body Count estimate roughly 78,000 - 85,000 deaths, but these are deaths confirmed from multiple sources and only include non-combatant deaths. As such, they represent an absolute lower bound to the number of deaths. Other estimates are much higher. For a complete reference to estimates of the death and devastation caused by the war, a good link is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of...Iraq_since_2003 Since the U.S. government has repeatedly argued (and millions of Americans believe) that the 9/11 attacks, which killed not quite 3000 people, "changed everything", justifying a massively statist reorganization of American society, abridgement of constitutional liberties, and the increasing implementation of police state measures, perhaps it is reasonable to assume that, even if the absolute minimum Iraq Body Count figure of about 80,000 is correct, in a country with less than 1/10th the population of the United States, the U.S. attack on Iraq certainly "changed everything" for them. The millions of refugees created by the war is not in dispute. But, of course, all this is the fault of the now deceased Saddam Hussein, a former ally of the United States. Martin

Oh, absolutely! We obviously had only two choices, either bomb the shit out of Iraq, invade and occupy their country, kill several hundred thousand of them, destroy their cities, their homes, and their infrastructure, or to sit in our bunkers here in the US, trembling with terror, waiting for Iraq to launch an invasion against us. What other alternatives could their possibly have been? There's no such thing as islamo-fascists. There are Islamists and their are pan-Arab nationalists whose views have some things in common with fascism. These two groups don't get along very well; in fact, they have a long history of killing each other. But it sure is fun hearing repeated all these mindless neocon talking points. Oh, and there's a big difference between "isolationism" and "non-interventionism". Perhaps you should read Ayn Rand's essay on isolationism and the art of smearing before using the phrase "isolationism" to smear your opponents. How nice of you to describe the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed by the US invasion and occupation, along with the roughly four million refugees, as "filth". Does that include the Iraqi infants and children too, or just the adults? This definitely requires clarification. But I guess we just had to do it because, after all, if we hadn't, Iraq was all poised to invade our shores and forcibly convert us all into Bathists. Martin

In May of 1987 and Iraqi war plane attacked a U.S. Warship the U.S.S. Stark http://usscoontz.tripod.com/id23.html On June 8, 1967, Israeli fighter planes and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, killing 34 Americans and wounding over 100, about the same number of Americans killed by the attack by Iraq. I guess that, according to your theory of proportional retaliation, the US should have attacked Israel with cluster bombs, invaded and occupied Israel, killed tens of thousands of Israelis, and driven a million Israelis from their homes, turning them into fleeing refugees. That's about what the US has done to Iraq, relative to their populations. Last time I checked, Israel is not part of the United States, and the United States is not responsible for Israel's defense. If Israel decided to attack Iraq in retaliation, that would be Israel's decision and Israel's responsibility. There are many policy decisions followed by the US government that undoubtedly have "serious consequences" for other nations around the world. I wonder if you would consider these "serious consequences" to be justification for these nations launching military strikes against the United States? No? I didn't think so. An Iraqi attack against Saudi Arabia would constitute an attack against Saudi Arabia, not at attack against the US. To argue that this constitutes an attack against the US because the US uses Saudi oil is no different than arguing that any nation that is attacked constitutes an indirect attack against the US, as long as the US trades with the attacked nation. This is a formula for perpetual war and a blank check for the US to launch military actions against anyone it wishes and to then justify its aggression as "defense". Saudi Arabia has kindly repaid our generousity in defending them by financially supporting terrorist schools and training camps around the world. They are the leading source of Wahhabist Islam in the world today. And they also kindly repaid us by providing most of the 9/11 highjackers, in a plot launched by Bin Laden in retaliation for the US government decision to station troops in Saudi Arabia, which decision was justified as a defense of Saudi Arabia against an Iraqi invasion. So our decision to defend Saudi Arabia, based on the same kind of justification that you are using here, was probably one of the major motivating factors for the 9/11 attacks, which would probably otherwise never have happened. 9/11 has in turn provided the US government with the justification it has long sought to start turning the US into a police state. This is all part of the price we have paid for your idea of defending the US. Fortunately for all of us, the Bush administration, as viciously murderous as they have been, are not as crazy as you are. Martin

Had the US been following the non-interventionist policy advocated by Ron Paul, the 9/11 attacks would almost certainly never have happened. These attacks were organized by Bin Laden in retaliation for the criminally stupid decision by the US government to station troops in Saudi Arabia. The US invasion of Iraq, a country that never attacked or threatened the US in any way, besides being a criminal war of aggression that has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and created millions of Iraqi refugees, has greatly destabilized the region and almost certainly created a whole new generation of terrorists. Martin

Ayn Rand was a libertarian. Objectivism as the political philosophy that she formulated is based on a recognition of the sanctity of individual rights and banning the use of force except in retalitation against those who initiate its use. She was an advocate of an unregulated laissez faire free market economy and a government strictly limited to the protection of individual rights. She even advocated voluntary financing of government, because she could not accept the coercive funding of government via taxation. These principles are the very essence of libertarianism. That Ayn Rand denounced libertarianism was largely based on the fact that it is strictly a political philosophy and not a comprehensive philosophy including epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. As such, many of its adherents disagreed with various aspects of objectivism, something that Rand found intolerable. Furthermore, she accused libertarians of ripping off her political ideas, even though libertarian ideas were around long before Rand formulated objectivism. Heretics are almost always treated worse than non-believers. Martin

On one post in the thread, Robert Winefield writes, "I was wondering if and when I would ever regret attempting to help free him from the jail in Michigan... I was kind of hoping that 30-odd days in jail without charge for a minor infraction of the law might have given him enough clarity to see the Saudi issue in its true light and the balls to say so unequivocally. Sadly..." The implication from the first sentence is clearly that he does now regret attempting to free Rick from jail. Obviously, disagreeing with Rick's views or posting style is sufficient reason to wish that Rick remain in jail on a technical visa violation. As to the second sentence, I wonder why it didn't occur to Robert that the jail sentence might just get Rick to start seeing how the US is becoming more like Saudi Arabia every day. In another post, Peter Cresswell writes, "Mr Giles is neither sane nor honest. I'm surprised it's taken so long for others to notice." So Rick is judged to be not just mistaken but insane. In another post, Robert Winefield writes, "Unlike Elijah, Linz (and PC, and myself) have known Rick for a number of years - at least 6 by my counting. And in that time, Rick has not changed his spots in that time." So Mr. Perigo, who, according to Robert, has known Rick for at least 6 years, had offered to use his influence to try to help Rick get released from jail. Perigo now declares that , addressing Rick, "There *is* a streak of evil within you". These people are a bunch of sick fucks. It amazes me that there are still any intelligent posters left on SOLOP. Martin

I have only one concern. Is Ron Paul a killer? Will he do for Britain what Winston Churchill, a drunken imperialistic bigot did for his country - namely kill its enemies. Winston Churchill made war. He appointed Arthur ("Bomber") Harris to rain hot death down on Germans, including women and infants. Will Ron Paul do that to our enemies? Or will he channel Neville Chamberlain? I want a President who will order the deaths of enemy women and infants. I want a Warrior. When is Ghengis Kahn or Atillah the Hun when you need him? Where is Abraham Lincoln? Hell! Where is Harry Truman who ordered the dropping of the A-Bombs? Order of precedence: First kill our enemies. Then see to constitutional niceties. If it is done in the other order, we won't have a country. Recall that the first thing Abraham Lincoln did was to suspend habeus corpus. Then he saw to it over a four year period that the secesh was ground into the dirt and god damn the women and the infants. Richmond burned. Forgive me. I am getting in touch with my Inner Fascist again. Ba'al Chatazaf "Enemy infants"? In my entire life, you are the only person I have ever heard use these words together. Ba'al, you are a true inspiration to life-loving objectivists everywhere, advocating the mass slaughter of enemy infants! Did it ever occur to you that, after Atillah the Hun becomes president and installs a bunch of his psychopathic friends throughout the executive branch, and orders the mass murder of all of America's enemies, real or imagined, including all of those millions of enemy infants, Atillah, being the paranoid psychopath that he is, may just decide that, in the words of Dr. Floyd Ferris, "Internal enemies can be as great a danger to the people as external ones. Perhaps greater." Whereupon he declares himself president for life, declares martial law, orders the execution of thousands or millions of US citizens whom he deems "enemies of the state", and orders the establishment of a nationwide network of concentration camps. One of the names on the list of Americans to be arrested and sent to a concentration camp for re-education is Bob Kolker, who is labeled as a danger to national security due to his exposure to subversive objectivist ideas. DHS agents come to arrest Bob, along with his children and grandchildren, who are labeled by the DHS as "enemy children". But not to worry. The US is now safe from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Martin

Ron Paul blames America for the the 9/11 attacks. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt. Check your facts about this moron. Ron Paul never blamed "America" for the 9/11 attacks, as though such a concept of collective responsibility even makes any sense. Since so many self-identified objectivists think that the US government is perfectly justified in slaughtering tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people as collateral damage based on the sins of their leaders, this concept of collective responsibility obviously runs deep among such objectivists. This despite the fact that objectivism is a philosophy rooted in individualism that rejects the idea of collective responsibility. The "moron" Ron Paul, despite his deficiencies in some areas, is infinitely superior to any of the other presidential candidates from either branch of the war and dictatorship party, otherwise known as the Republicans and Democrats. That this fact is not patently obvious to any advocate of a philosophy, objectivism, that advocates laissez faire capitalism and government strictly limited to the protection of individual rights, is truly a pathetic indictment of just what modern day "objectivism" has evolved into. Martin

As a general rule, intelligence is almost always inaccurate. Even when it is accurate, it is usually ignored if it conflicts with a governmental agenda. The Iraq war is a perfect example of this; the intelligence was distorted and cherry picked in order to justify a decision to launch a war that the Bush administration had already made. Iran never threatened to wipe out Israel. This was based on a complete mistranslation of a statement made by Amadinajad, who does not control the Iranian military. Unless one believes that the Iranian rulers are suicidal, the idea that they would launch a major attack against Israel is ludicrous. Israel is well defended by an arsensal of several hundred nuclear warheads, enough to totally destroy Iran. Martin

Bob, I honestly try to take you seriously, but when you say things like this, all I see is a deluded old man. Nobody is going to eliminate Islam, just like nobody eliminated Christianity or Buddhism or even weird things like Satanism. An outright national, philosophical and military effort was engaged to eliminate Judaism (according to your recipe for Islam) and it did not work. Reality doesn't work the way your delusions work. It just doesn't. Michael Michael, In the areas of physics, mathematics, and philosophy of science, Bob Kolker is obviously a highly intelligent man. In these fields, he would probably even qualify as brilliant. Understanding the finer details of special relativity is not the province of fools. In the areas of political philosophy, ethics, and foreign policy, I doubt that there's a single person posting here who takes Bob very seriously. His views in these areas are not only ludicrous but criminally immoral. As such, Bob is a living example of the principle that a person can be absolutely brilliant in certain areas and absolutely stupid in others. As you've indicated, if a "final solution" to the Jewish problem was not successful, the probability of success of a "final solution" to the Muslim problem is vanishingly small, not to mention the utter barbarity of such an attempt. Martin

Chris, See my post # 19 on this thread, where I quoted a post made by Wendy McElroy on her blog. She didn't actually say that people participating in anti-war rallies were being deported from Canada. Rather, she said that they were being forbidden entry into Canada. I haven't actually heard of cases of people being deported from Canada for such activities, but this could just be what lies in our not too distant future. When confronted with such stories, I always remember the metaphor about slowly boiling the frog. One sad step at a time. Martin

Chris, I don't know. I certainly hope not. All I know is what I've read on the SOLOP thread, and Rick didn't address this. I'm sure more information about his rather unpleasant experience with US immigration authorities will come out in the future. I wouldn't be at all surprised to eventually find out that it did cost him his job. Not only that, but it might even turn out that he will be forever banned from ever entering Canada again, based on this petty violation of his US tourist visa. If Canadian authorities are now banning Americans who've participated in anti-war rallies, it's not much of a stretch to extrapolate that they would also ban foreigners who have violated US immigration law in even the most trivial way. This is, unfortunately, the way our world seems to be evolving. Governments now have the technological means, via computers, to track the activities of people no matter where they live and to cooperate with each other in crushing people's liberties. Not quite the way George Orwell envisioned it, but close enough. Martin