Ron Paul is the "least favorite" among 45 "right-of-center" bloggers. There's little doubt this is driven by the warmongering (there, I said it) Republicans.
This of course is another data point in my growing suspicion that the right, and all of the right, is just as evil as the left, and all of the left. They're just different. The moral distinctions cover different subject matter, that's all. I'm confident that for every gross evil from the left, I could come up with one from the right.
I increasingly view it foolish to place the right at some moral advantage to the left in any meaningful respect.
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There's about a dime's worth of difference between the left and the right. As in opposite sides of the same very thin coin. And neither of them is worth said dime.
As a colleague of mine says: socialist party A and socialist part B (referring to the Democrats and the Republicans). And he has been saying it for over 20 years.
I am a former LP activist, now a libertarian-conservative unaffiliated with any party, precisely for moral reasons.
Those reasons deem the LP, and like-minded libertarians, morally unsatisfactory, because they don't see a moral difference between fighting to liberate or punish and fighting to subjugate or expropriate. If our military expeditions to quell the savagery in Afghanistan, which harbored Osama bin Laden — in point of fact, which made him the commander of its militia — and to free Iraq from the brutal Ba'athist tyranny of Saddam Hussein are not morally different from, say, the Taliban's attempts to reconquer Afghanistan and Hussein's war on Iran in the early 80s, then war is never justified and we ought not to have fought Nazi Germany, fought Imperial Japan, or rebelled against the British.
I was Ron Paul's 1988 New York State campaign manager. Dr. Paul is a fine man, but his isolationism is no longer appropriate to a world in which no two points are any farther apart than a 747 ride. When Party libertarians learn that, they might succeed in attracting some respectful attention once again.
Bob:
I've been saying the same for years with respect to the practical, or economic policy issues (i.e., increase the budget by 12%, or _only_ 10%, etc.), but now my refusing to draw much of a distinction has come to more moral issues.
Francis:
Yea, you appealed to the authority of your "enlightenment" last time you posted a comment. I can make the same appeal: I used to be just as fooled as you.
Paul has personally and recently addressed the "isolationism" lie, and he's right:
http://tinyurl.com/2w2xuf
"Those reasons deem the LP, and like-minded libertarians, morally unsatisfactory, because they don't see a moral difference between fighting to liberate or punish and fighting to subjugate or expropriate."
I see. So we can essentially engage in any expedition we wish, kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and because we're fooled by irrational fear, we can rationalize and then just call it something different, and it's A-OK.
The point is that our own survival is not clearly and presently contingent upon killing those people, and that probably goes back to WWII as the last time there was a clear and present danger. We never even traded shots directly with the USSR. When the stakes are high enough, clearly, we find alternative ways of demonstrating our strength and resolve.
So at a point, I have to ask myself whether it's worse to be fooled by fear and engage the precautionary principle to kill the world's economy through AGW policy, or being fooled by fear and appealing to the precautionary principle to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people in a fight where we stand no real risk of being overrun.
I think that it's possible that you and those like you are actually suborning evil that's far greater than what the left is generating.