Make up your own mind about this young man, Marcus Epstein, and his revealed preferences. (You can search for his name on these posts: 1, 2, 3.)

I found his comments on my blog when I remembered that some folks had defended Lew Rockwell’s appropriation of “Austrian economics” for neo-Confederate revivalism, said defense consisting of pointing out that most of the sessions at a conference on “Austrian economics” were, in fact, not on the confederacy at all, which I found rather remarkable. Mr. Epstein’s name came up, so I clicked on it to see his website, which has disappeared. Then out of curiosity I “Googled” his name to find out what he is up to….and found his experiences putting Rockwell’s ideas into practice. Mr. Epstein has some serious problems and I authentically wish him well in dealing with them. A good way to start would be to stop the self-hatred and reject racial collectivism.

Some, it seems!

Now I spent a lot of time reading Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and many scholastic thinkers, and I’ve learned a lot from them, but it’s remarkable to hear someone quote from them as if there were no, um, advances in knowledge about psychology, sexuality, or other matters over the past 800 years or so. (“The only intelligible end of the reproductive organ is reproduction, and insofar as the organ is utilized toward that end, it is a rational human act, a free act, an act of the free will, the rational appetite. Insofar as the sexual organ is utilized for instrumental reasons, it’s not an intelligible act, but rather a purely animalistic act.” Um, right. The part on the extraction of the intelligible species would have gotten an “A” in a history of philosophy class, or at least a “B,” but the study of perception and thought has come a long way since St. Thomas’s wonderful “On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists.”)

(Click on the image to enlarge it to a more readable size.)

The crackpots around Lew Rockwell are not content with trying to get countries to eschew or eliminate nuclear weaponry. No. That would be rational. Instead, their preference (link to post imaged above) is for countries ruled by wacky tyrants actually to acquire nuclear weaponry with which they can threaten all of their neighbors. The criterion for properly acquiring nuclear weapons, according to such people? Being a perceived enemy of the government of the United States of America, the lineal descendant of the one that defeated the Confederate States of America.

What the crazies don’t understand is that being horrified at or opposed to the possession or use of such weapons by one state, or condemning its use 65 years ago, does not entail that one should endorse their acquisition (or use) today. The wacko response they will offer in defense of their craziness? “Iran hasn’t actually used any nuclear weapons (yet), but the US has, so it’s ok for Iran to acquire them and to threaten other countries with them.” (It’s the same response to people who point out the ugliness of Rockwell’s publication and promotion of work by such advocates of murder as the racist/segregationist Sam Francis and the advocate of stoning gay people to death [and prophet of the Y2K hysteria some years back] Gary North, one of their top writers; they haven’t actually lynched or stoned anyone, whereas Senator XYZ has voted for stealing or bombing, and so what’s worse than promoting racists and advocates of stoning gay people is to live in the same city as Senator XYZ or to talk with him or her, unless you’re a Texas congressman.)

That web posting is the face of evil. But it comes as no surprise when you consider the source.

Note: In the event the post is dropped, as happens often there when someone notices them, the two links in the LewRockwell.com post were to this and this.

Michael Moynihan of Reason has been doing some super sleuthing. He wants to know, “Just what makes something humorous?” And now he has the answer: Jonathan Chait, to whom he has awarded the prestigious title of “The Left’s Own Topo Gigo.” If you’re not chortling and guffawing over Chait’s John McCain hand puppet telling the Sarah Palin hand puppet that he picked her as his running mate because “I was a sad, desperate old man trapped in a loveless marriage — I saw you and I saw a second chance,” then you must be like me: stupid and humorless, in the words of Matthew Yglesias, one of the smartest and funniest guys around. So smart and so funny he told my friend Veronique de Rugy to SHUT UP! about tax policy because she’s …. get this!!! … FRENCH. Ha ha! FRENCH!!!! Oh, how we laughed!

But you know, when you keep on having to say, “But I’m funny. Really!,” you ought to wonder whether maybe you’re….well, you’re just not. That you’re crude and boorish and that you really ought to apologize to the person you mocked because of her name and nationality. Or at least that your “humor” is not really suitable for grown-up conversation. (And yes, I do know that they were trying for some sort of “irony,” but they failed utterly [for one thing, saying racism is "unAmerican" and saying Jews and Catholics are "unAmerican" really are different uses of the term].) Moreover, undeniably hidden behind the protestations of humor was a very clear message to someone who disagreed about what the essence of America is [hint: not using the power to tax maliciously to punish people], and that message is:

SHUT THE HELL UP AND GET OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!

Thanks, Jonathan and Matthew, for raising the tone of policy discourse so. You’re great guys. Class acts. Really.

Jonathan Chait disgraces himself once more. First he mocked Veronique de Rugy’s French name, then in his defense he makes fun of the “G” in my name, which I have there to remember my father and to distinguish myself from a lot of others out there with the same name. But whatever.

What’s actually interesting is that he thinks that it’s très amusant to write “Hey, you know what else is anti-American? Being named ‘Veronique de Rugy’” as a so, so witty response to Vero’s criticism of Barney Frank’s “mentality,” because it is allegedly wrong to state that a mentality is unAmerican, but he was very quick to tar advocates of tax cuts as “deeply unpatriotic” after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He wrote in The New Republic (not available online, as far as I could find), “There is something deeply unpatriotic about K Street’s rush to turn the tragedy into quick profit.” (Note the additional smear: “K Street,” which is in fact dominated by lawyers and lobbyists trying to get a piece of the taxpayers’ dollar, is used as the stand-in for taxpayers who would like to keep more of their money.) But what is the most interesting is how eager he was to smear people who favor tax cuts as “unpatriotic,” which is far stronger than referring to a “mentality” as unAmerican (or, in Vero’s awkward Frenchy phrase, “anti-American”). What can one say?….other than that his friends really ought to stop him before he embarrasses himself again.

UPDATE: Now We Know What Real Humor Is….Or at Least Real Jokes

Chait’s Response to the criticism offered below.

And a Little More: Now We Know What Real Humor Is….Or at Least Real Jokes

An old friend, Veronique de Rugy, has been slimed for her defense of some fundamental moral principles. I’ve known her for at least 19 years, since we organized the first English-language IES-Europe seminars (modeled on the IHS seminars in the US, which I had organized for some years before) in Szirak (Hungary) and Dalarö (Sweden). (I also stayed in her flat when she would leave Paris for weekends during the hottest Paris summer since Charlemagne; that was in 1995, and I was living in a one-room garret at 35 avenue Mac-Mahon near the Etoile. The heat was suffocating, even at night, and there was no running water, other than a tap in the hallway, so I would go to her place on those weekends when she visited her family to immerse myself in cold baths to survive the heat.) But I digress.

Vero recently criticized a proposal by Rep. Barney Frank for a special tax on high compensation and concluded “This anti-capitalist and anti-wealth mentality is scary and very anti-American.” (I suspect that what Vero was searching for was “un-American,” but you’ll understand why that may not have come to her as quickly as it might to some.) That did not sit well with two lefty bloggers. Jonathan Chait thought it clever to respond, “Hey, you know what else is anti-American? Being named ‘Veronique de Rugy.’” How very sophisticated. But, not to be outdone, Matthew Yglesias added some icing to the cake,

Veronique de Rugy is So Anti-American That She’s Not Even an American!

Jon Chait and I both likes it when Barney Frank dismissed concerns that a bank tax would drive talent out of the industry by quipping “I don’t know where people would go for comparable salaries, I guess perhaps they could star in major motion pictures.”

Veronique de Rugy begs to differ, saying “This anti-capitalist and anti-wealth mentality is scary and very anti-American.” Chait retorts “Hey, you know what else is anti-American? Being named ‘Veronique de Rugy.’”

My Googling has, however, revealed something even more disturbing — Veronique de Rugy is literally not an American. She’s French. She holds a PhD from the University of Paris-Sorbonne and is the author of an un-American book with the suspiciously French title Action ou Taxation. It’s true that she agreed to betray her native land by making this France-bashing video, but that doesn’t change the basic facts. Barney Frank is as American as an actual American.

Now, let’s unpack this. On the one hand, Chait and Yglesias just might think that people who are not from America should shut up, in which case they’re idiots. Or maybe they’re trying to be ironic, in which case they’re idiots. Or, if that’s too harsh, either they’re dim, or they’re dim.

Option one:

Yglesias and Chait are idiots (or just dim). They think that mocking people for unusual names is funny, or that only authentic Americans (perhaps native-born, so I don’t qualify, either, or citizens, or whatever) can or should ever make statements about what it is to be an American. That would qualify them as knuckle dragging neanderthals, that is, as idiots.

However, it’s worth considering whether Chait and Yglesias are attempting to be ironic. (I am going to be very careful here, as I recently criticized two dunderheads for their failure to understand the use of irony by a colleague).

So, Option Two:

Chait and Yglesias are trying to turn the tables on those who charge that X or Y is “un-American” (or “anti-American,” in Vero’s phrasing) by returning the favor. Ha ha, some may think. How clever. Yet, upon reflection, it would seem that, if that is their intent, they are too dim to understand the difference between A) calling, say, unequal treatment by the law “un-American” for violating the Constitution and the best core principles of the American tradition, and B) calling the serving of “saucisses et choucroute” “un-American,” in contrast to, say, “hot dogs and sauerkraut” [note the double irony, guys]. Vero criticized special laws punishing people for high incomes as un-American, in the way that one might call censorship “un-American” (Think! Think! The First Amendment is an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America); she did not remark that Hindus, or Catholics, or Scientologists, or sauerkraut are un-American, or use the term in any of the other ways in which the epithet “un-American” is slung around by knuckle-draggers, who confuse “America” with cuisine, or religion, or other inessential matters, rather than with principles of government, of liberty, and of justice.

Or maybe they’ve just put their feet in their big mouths and owe Veronique an apology. I doubt it would erase the embarrassment they should feel, but it would be the decent, French thing to do.

P.S. A note I got from Vero this afternoon: “Thanks also for correction my English. My french brain can’t totally get the difference between Anti and un- american but I can see that it was a mistake. Oh well.” I don’t see them as having any substantive distinction relevant to this smear of her. “UnAmerican” is what she was searching for, but “anti-American” is merely a matter of context; it’s usually used in the context of foreign activities (“anti-American riots,” for example), whereas the domestic context (which is obviously the context for Vero’s remarks about tax policies) would normally require “unAmerican.” In any case, the smear of her for being French and having a French name is disgusting. And the nativist comments from the defenders of Chait and Yglesias support my point. They are disgusting.

UPDATE: It turns out that Mr. Chait is guilty of accusing advocates of tax cuts of being “deeply unpatriotic” after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. As usual, he could not wrap his mind around the idea that any actual taxpayers favor cutting their taxes, so he directed all his bile toward “K Street,” apparently unaware that normally “K Street” refers to DC lobbyists, who normally have their hands out for more subsidies. But here’s what Mr. “How Dare You Call Barney Frank’s Policy Positions UnAmerican” Chait wrote about advocates of tax cuts in The New Republic: “There is something deeply unpatriotic about K Street’s rush to turn the tragedy into quick profit.” Now we get it, Mr. Chait. People who want to limit government are “unpatriotic,” but referring to “the mentality” of punitive taxation (and that is the most appropriate term for Barney Frank’s proposal) as “scary and anti-American” is cause for mocking the name of the “Veronique de Rugy.” I suspect there would have been tears if someone had responded to his smear by mocking the name of “Chait.” (Some might say a foreign name like that doesn’t really sound very patriotic to them!) Grow up, little Jonathan.

Updates here and here.

The racist Lew Rockwell (or do I repeat myself?) has once again launched an ugly smear. His post is vintage Rockwell: deceitful and malicious. Here’s what Cato president Ed Crane said at the launch party for the Daily Caller:

Federal Reserve System – Much as I hate to drop names, I had lunch with Ben Bernanke in the White House mess just about a week prior to his being named as head of the Fed. Nice guy. But it soon became clear that the man actually believes a strong economy is inherently inflationary. Please. An honest strong economy is deflationary, which is good, since the lower prices occur at the point of productivity gain and, hence, do not distort relative prices. But that’s not the way Ben looks at it. I said to him, it seems as though you disagree with Milton Friedman that inflation is solely a monetary phenomenon. He said, yes, that is true. Well, thank god the food in the White House mess is so good, or I’m out of there. The fact is we are in for a period of ugly inflation because Ben Bernanke doesn’t appreciate Milton Friedman. My long time friend, Ron Paul (who hangs with folks he shouldn’t) has a popular new book out, End the Fed. I’m for that. His bill to have more oversight of the Fed might be problematic but for Bernanke’s seeming desire to join the Obama Cabinet. Read my lips: The more of a commodity that exists, the less value each unit of that commodity will have. See the sinking dollar.

Here’s Lew Rockwell’s description:

After my formal talk on the Misesian vision, a man said to me: “In a recent article, Edward H. Crane, CEO of the Cato Institute, said ‘Ron Paul hangs around with the wrong people.’ Did he mean you guys?” “Yes,” I said.

“And was this the same article where Mr. Crane added, ‘I hate to be a name dropper, but I had lunch with Ben Bernanke in the White House mess the week before he was confirmed [as Fed chairman]. Great guy.’?” “Yes,” I was told.

Now note the change (and no link) from “nice guy. But it soon became clear that…” to “Great guy.” Native speakers of English know that “nice guy” means pleasant and affable, but not ([fill in the blank] wise, foresighted, hard-working, libertarian, smart, whatever), whereas “Great guy” means a “great guy,” i.e., [fill in the blank] wonderful, reliable, good to work with, on target, real libertarian, whatever. “Nice guy” and “Great guy” mean very, very different things. Rockwell is, in short, being deceitful again.

Keep that in mind whenever you read anything from that source. (It’s a nice follow on from this; and there’s lots more in The Fever Swamp.)

Walter Block and Tom DiLorenzo, neither known for his subtlety, seem to think that “irony” is what you do to get the wrinkles out of your shirts. My colleague David Boaz wrote an essay for the Washington Times (“We miss you, Bubba“), in which he compared the last two administrations to the “good ol’ days” of the Clinton administration, using a well known device to highlight the horrible policies that have been pursued since. Poor Walter Block thought that Boaz was “supporting” Clinton’s policies, including his foreign policy, since David wrote that under Clinton “Government spending was growing only slowly, the bad ideas were mostly small, and we bombed a lot of countries but didn’t put American troops at risk.” Thinking that Boaz was endorsing bombing a lot of countries, Walter Block jumped into action and denounced him as “no libertarian.” Just to emphasize that rhetorical devices other than the denunciation are not to be found in his repertoire, Block informed his readers

The executive vice president of the Cato Institute makes some good points (I’m being tongue in cheek here, for those whose sense of sarcasm is less well developed than my own).

It is hard to imagine anyone whose “sense of sarcasm” (or, to be more precise, any form of indirect expression) is less developed than Walter Block’s, but he felt, nonetheless, compelled to warn any such who might have been reading. He concluded that he now feels “physically ill.” Poor man.

The other dullard in the stable, Tom (“a travesty of historical method and documentation“) DiLorenzo, quickly jumped up and denounced David for apparently endorsing the Republicans, as well as the Democrats!

Now you don’t have to be very clever to understand David’s point, because he made it v-e-r-y s-i-m-p-l-e for everyone, even the irony-challenged, to understand: “Of course, what I’m really nostalgic for is divided government.” Economist William Niskanen (i.e., an actual economist), who was then Chairman of the Cato Institute, pointed out in 2003 that

The prospect of a major war is usually higher with a united government, and the current war makes that clear.

Each of the four major American wars in the 20th century, for example, was initiated by a Democratic president with the approval of a Congress controlled by Democrats. The war in Iraq, initiated by a Republican president with the support of a Republican Congress, is consistent with this pattern and has already proved to be the only use of U.S. military force lasting more than a few days that was initiated by a Republican president in over a century.

DiLorenzo further displayed his skills as an analyst by denouncing the thesis of the superiority of divided government over unified government (formulated as a desire for “gridlock”) on the grounds that “Bush expanded the welfare state as much as any president with his prescription drug welfare legislaition [sic],” somehow missing the fact that the “Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act” was passed when the GOP controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, thus being a rather weak counter-example to Boaz’s point about the relative virtues of divided government over unified, single-party, government.

But it’s been a long time since facts would have stopped Tom DiLorenzo from making a point. I realized that DiLorenzo had dropped off the deep end when he wrote a denunciation of David years ago for urging the voters of Mississippi to vote in a referendum to remove from the state flag a symbol that many people find, rather understandably, ugly and offensive. “Don’t Put Slavery in the Flag” was a temperate call for the voters to put the state’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and lynchings behind them and to remove from the flag a symbol under which such evils had been carried out. But DiLorenzo accused him of “calling for the eradication of the Confederate battle flag from public places,” which was, of course, simply false. David encouraged voters to remove it from the the state flag, not from “public places,” an equivocal term that may mean “all places open to the public.”

But what’s a little confusion and misuse of language for Mr. DiLorenzo, compared to the masses of errors that characterize his recent works? Mr. DiLorenzo would have us think that the reason for the secession of the southern states was, oh, tariffs and such like. His sole evidence is the erection of a straw man: that Boaz and “a small band of Marxist historians” claim that “the war was caused by slavery alone.” Now note the rhetoric: Boaz claimed quite rightly that without slavery, there would have been no secession, not that “the war was caused by slavery alone,” which is a view few could hold, if for no other reason than that “the war” followed the secession and was not necessitated by it. To dispense with the canard that slavery was not the overriding reason for the secession, one need but read the “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” which makes it quite clear that the process was very, very, very much about keeping people in chains. I strongly encourage anyone who supports the secession of the southern states — which is quite different from the subsequent decision to wage war on them; either might or might not be justified, but they are very different acts — to read that document. They may not be made “physically ill,” but if they are decent human beings (and more so if they are serious libertarians) they will be repulsed by the sentiments that motivated those who took the south out of the union.

But back to the rhetorical and literary poverty of Block and DiLorenzo. I will write this very slooowwwlly and very clearly, just for them:

David Boaz was using the contrast with Clinton’s terrible policies to emphasize the enormity of the folly and criminality of the foreign policies that followed, not to endorse those of Clinton, which the language suggests were repulsive in their own right. If I did not know that Block and DiLorenzo have all the subtlety of a brick, I would suspect that the reason for the publication of their blog posts was to smear David.

(P.S. A friend pointed out that I had placed a quotation mark in the wrong place ["all public places"--the quotation mark should have been around "public places" only], with the implication that the article to which I linked contained that phrase. It did not. It did necessarily imply it, however, as the phrase “the eradication of the Confederate battle flag from public places” contains the implicit quantifier “all,” rather than “some,” in the same way that the phrase “the eradication of life from oceans” implies “all life” and “all oceans,” rather than referring to, say, the killing of one fish, or of several fish, in the Pacific ocean. In order to avoid confusion among careless thinkers, I have moved the quote mark. The meaning remains unchanged.)

for economically illiterate advocates of monarchy: “Turks mourn relative of Ottoman sultan”

Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, from Osman I to Mehmed V

“No More Marches on DC”

Is it possible to be more transparent?

Note: The Post Magically Disappeared! Here’s the screen shot (click to enlarge to readable size):

So “the purpose” of the organizers of last Saturday’s march (disclosure: I neither organized nor attended it) was “to dissipate energy, and fool people into thinking that their time and money have accomplished something, as the regime laughs up its sleeve.” Ohhh-kaaay….

Who “protest” NATO meetings by setting buildings on fire, with evident impunity?

Anarchy…or…the Amero?

One thing I have been asked about at several public lectures I’ve made in Kazakhstan is when the “Amero” is going to be introduced, whether it is a plan to cancel the value of all dollars held abroad and shift to a new currency, thus robbing foreign holders of dollars of their value, etc. When I say that the “Amero” is an urban myth, that there is no serious discussion of such an abandonment of the Canadian, US, and Mexican currencies, that it seems to be more prominently discussed in Kazakhstan than in the US, etc., I get some astonished stares for my apparent ignorance of what is really happening. One person in a meeting pointed out that “they already have a name for it!” I responded that I could propose a union of the Tenge and the Ruble and name it the “Tuble,” but that doesn’t mean that there must be serious plans actually to abolish the Tenge and the Ruble in favor of the Tuble.

It’s a piece with the wacko fantasies about the “North American Union.” Once some people get it into their heads, no request for confirming evidence seems capable of getting them to question it. Conspiracy theories are very hard to disprove; the lack of evidence for them is just more proof that they must be right — after all, if there weren’t a conspiracy, why was the evidence all covered up?

This entry reveals the remarkably low intellectual depths that the Lew Rockwell Cult plumbs:

August 27, 2008

Taco on Russia v. Georgia v. S. Ossetia
Posted by Stephan Kinsella at August 27, 2008 08:50 PM
Re What About the Ossetians?: Cato’s piece on the Russia-Georgia-Ossetia crisis is a bit odd. First, as Sheldon Richman notes, “the Georgian military response to … the secessionist ambitions of the majority in South Ossetia … was the immediate cause of the current war”; but the Cato piece blames Russia (“The war was a spectacular provocation that had been long prepared and successfully executed by the Russian ’siloviki’”), without so much as mentioning Georgia’s own complicity, or Georgia’s status as neocon stooge.

Further, as Richman notes, “Defenders of liberty … should … champion the cause of the brutalized Ossetians, who … demand independence from Georgia. … When President Bush says the ‘territorial integrity of Georgia’ must be respected and GOP presidential candidate John McCain declares, ‘Today we’re all Georgians,’ they are putting politics above justice.” He’s right: any libertarian ought to favor decentralization, secession, and independence. Yet, the Cato piece seems to bemoan the possibility that the breakaway regions may actually succeed in gaining independence–it’s a “loss” (“Under the new situation, the idea of legitimizing the de facto loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia may gain traction in Georgian society.”)

Interestingly, the Cato piece is linked to approvingly on the smearblog of Cato’s vice president for international junketeering, hissy fitting, and slandering. And in the comments section, one of his fellow slimers apes the neocon line in opposing Ossetian independence in the name of the international law doctrine of “territorial integrity”. But the libertarian aspect of this doctrine is its prohibition of invasions of one nation by another. To the extent the principle is opposed to secession, it is unlibertarian.

Notice the sadly childish use of links. When it looks like it might be a link to someone critical of them, it goes instead to another sad and pathetic piece about legal issues facing someone who has, as far as I can tell, not in fact done anything to arouse their ire.

The two serious links on it are to a blog post (which links to a longer essay) by Sheldon Richman that raises important issues and to an analysis by a Cato scholar with a great deal of knowledge of the issues and the powers involved; that analysis does not call for any kind of military response, but the sad Mr. Kinsella twists it into something it’s not by highlighting the reference to Georgia’s “loss” of territory…..which is, as a loss of territory, stripped down into “a loss.” Not much of a point, but Kinsella isn’t much of a thinker. (It’s also interesting that there are no mentions of the large number of other analyses of the conflict by Cato analysts. Instead it’s “the Cato piece”; whatever.)

On the substantive issue, by all means support the right of people to secede from regimes they don’t wish to be ruled by. But it’s not at all so clear that they have a right to take with them others who don’t wish to secede, or who don’t want to be a part of their smaller state. That’s why issues of secession are not always easy, unless you simply don’t care about individual rights in the first place. For example, consider the enthusiasm of the Lew Rockwell Cult for the secession of the southern states, something done for the very explicit purpose of keeping the majority population of South Carolina in chains. (You see, they were slaves and not consulted on whether “the people” of South Carolina should secede from the US.) As the members of the majority population of slaves were not asked whether they wished to secede from South Carolina or from the slave masters who promoted secession, South Carolina’s secession was simply unjustifiable on moral grounds. (That is not the same as saying that everything that followed, including the unconstitutional and terrible acts of the Union and its armies, were justified. As Jeffrey Rogers Hummel has pointed out, the issues are quite separable.)

I wish I always knew the right answers to such questions, but chasing out the largest ethnic group from Abkhazia, enduring foreign military occupation, engaging in systematic ethnic cleansing, and then insisting that the remaining population have the right to take the whole territory with them into “independence” (in reality, military occupation and domination by the large neighbor to the north) doesn’t strike me as obviously right. If South Ossetia can “secede,” can the Georgian-populated areas of South Ossetia (which were quite substantial until a few weeks ago, and were more so before the nasty ethnic cleansing touched off by a mixture of rabid local nationalism and external interventionism in the early 1990s) “secede” from South Ossetia? Not according to the Rockwell Cultists. Mr. Kinsella says someone or other (not me, and I’m not sure who, but he doesn’t have the courage to provide any actual link to any arguments) invoked “territorial integrity,” which Kinsella rejects….except when it he eagerly invokes it to support the Russian occupation and expulsion of the entire Georgian population from the Soviet-era territory of the South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast. In fact, territory does have a status in international law, and for good reasons. It’s a good idea for states (the U.S. state among them, as well as the Russian state) not to use force to step over those boundaries, as the results can be quite terrible. One handy way to limit the power of states to do harm is to limit their actions to within the territorial borders that characterize the Westphalian system of states. And so invoking “territorial integrity” means that states shouldn’t send in armies to carve up the territories of other states. Unless, of course, that state is Russia, led by the man the Lew Rockwell Cult seems to idolize. (Click here and search for “Putin.”)

Now the Lew Rockwell Cult doesn’t allow anyone to comment on their blogs. Fair enough. And they also don’t link to any sources that might contradict them. Fair enough. Since I’ll be flying to Ukraine tomorrow, I’ll not have any comments here, as the Cultists are gleeful about posting many remarks under different names (but with the same IP addresses). In the meantime, if you’re interested in the study of puerile psychology, check out the links they provide and see if they seem worthy of being taken seriously. (In case the post is later changed without notice, as they so often are by the “airbrushers” there, I did take a screen shot.)

It gets more difficult to follow the absurdities at the Lew Rockwell Cult (LRC) and their spinoffs.

Thomas DiLorenzo, one of America’s finest, um, scholars, remembered something (a meeting of Cato scholars and speakers at a Moscow conference with Vladimir Putin), but was not able to get the link “to work.” So here’s what he wrote:

August 16, 2008
Cato “Hearts” Putin?
Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo at August 16, 2008 11:24 AM

It would seem so, from a photograph on the May/June 2004 Policy Report featuring Ed Crane and other Kochtopusians sitting around with Putin in Moscow. You can find it online by Googling “Putin and Cato in Moscow.” I couldn’t get the link to work, unfortunately. Crane must have had it airbrushed, kind of like the Soviets used to do to their “official photos.” I wonder where the Kochtopus stands on the hostilities in Georgia?

(Google cache, at least temporarily here; screenshot: here.) Then, after his equally brilliant colleague Stephen Kinsella located it, DiLorenzo….airbrushed his own oddly paranoid post and deleted the reference to not being able to locate it, a bit of incompetence on which his mind fastened as evidence that the photo had been “airbrushed.” It’s all so oddly amusing, not the least for mixing so much pure strangeness into one tiny paragraph (“Kochtopus,” a phrase from the last of the prophets, Murray Rothbard, from the 1980s, but a puzzling reference today; classical liberal thinkers referred to as “Kochtopusians sitting around with Putin in Moscow,” evidently referring to Grigory Marchenko of Khazakstan, Cato president Ed Crane, energy analyst Daniel Yergin, Andrei Illarionov of Russia, Kakha Bendukidze [then a businessman in Russia, now in Georgia], Jose Pinera of Chile, Mart Laar of Estonia; the reference to “airbrushing,” in a post that was then “airbrushed,” etc., etc.).

Since the Rockwell Cult has been openly jubilant about Russian imperialism and the invasion of neighboring countries by the Russian hegemon, it seems likely that some have suggested that that it blows their cover (claiming to be libertarians, rather than crackpot, racist, neo-Confederate cultists). To try to scrabble back some libertarian cover, the chief priest of the Cult, Lew Rockwell himself, had to post a denunciation of Russian policy in Chechnya, which does not sit well with their earlier endorsements of brutal policies to suppress the Chechens; as loony linkmaster Justin Raimondo so eagerly did. (Quick: get a screenshot before it, too, disappears down the memory hole.) As Raimondo, who seems to melt at the mention of the names of Eastern European strongmen, pointed out of an attack on a train, “That this augurs the beginning of a new round of attacks on Vladimir Putin’s Russia â?? and not only by Chechen separatists and other al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups â?? is a prediction hardly fraught with risk. A lot of people have it in for Holy Mother Russia, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out the other day in a rare television interview, and the Chechens are the least of it.” There you have it, Chechen separatists are all terrorists and are to be counted among “other al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups.” (Something made true by Russian policy, not by the initial leaders of Chechen independence, who were moderates, such as General Dudayev.) And they all have it in for “Holy Mother Russia.”

The final irony: the meeting with Putin included former Estonian prime minister Mart Laar explaining to him (a very unwelcome thing to do to a Tsar) that his policy in Chechnya was disastrous and immoral. And, in addition to Mart, the other most visible person at the table is Kakha Bendukidze, the current head of the State Chancellery of Georgia. To his left is Andrei Illarionov, whose views on Chechen independence were well known and publicly articulated even when he was working in the Kremlin (and whose views on Putin’s policies in Georgia are also clear enough).

But actually making a case for freedom is soooo much less satisfying than writing blog posts from obscure little towns (which they proudly call the “new Vienna,” minus, of course, the intellectual life, the cultural life, the interesting people, etc.)

Update: Another Rockwell post down the memory hole because it was so unhinged even Lew Rockwell wanted it taken down. And that’s saying a lot!

Can You Spell “Bigot”?

Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo at 11:35 AM
An emailer sent me a hilarious snippet from the personal blog of Cato’s vice president for international junketeering, hissy fitting, and slandering in which the psychotic one attacks this Web site once again by declaring that “there are no interesting people” in Auburn Alabama. Waaaaaaaa! In addition, says the sick one, there’s no “culture” there, either. (He’s never been to Auburn, of course).

Auburn is one of my favorite spots and yes, there is a culture there, but, admittedly, not one that would be agreeable to the “urbane, cosmopolitan” [T]Reason , magazine crowd, which celebrates the likes of Dennis Rodman, Madonna, Larry Flynt, and a book author who writes about having sex with animals as its cultural icons. D.C. and Hollywood are much more in tune with such cultural depravity.

Cached version here (for a while at least) and screen shot here.

“Sex with animals”…. oooohh-kay. Whatever. But regardless of Mr. D’s other interests, the post is a good example of Mr. DiLorenzo deploying his skills as a “historian.” For example, my statement that Auburn does not have the culture of Vienna (circa 1910) is the same as saying it has “no culture.” And “there are no interesting people” (using real quotation marks, too) is how he “quotes” my mockery of the comparison of Auburn, Alabama to Vienna “which they proudly call the ‘new Vienna,’ minus, of course, the intellectual life, the cultural life, the interesting people, etc.” That man has a reputation for historical reliability, alright. (And, of course, it’s hard to imagine any city in the world today with the intellectual magnificence of Vienna at its peak, and even for many years after. If New York is not close, what of Auburn?)

Bat Guano*

I’m in Germany and missed a staged demonstration by a couple dozen kooky anti-free-trade protesters outside the Cato Institute’s offices. But the “scholar Thomas DiLorenzo” did not. As he pointed out, in a display of his novel standards (“his sloppiness has earned him the abuse and ridicule of his critics“): “Recall that CNN dismissed Ron Paul as a crackpot for believing that any such highway exists. But of course, it does exist, and is even described on Wikipedia.” Right! It’s on the internet. Ergo….It’s true!!! Q.E.D.

DiLorenzo (whom I used to know many years ago, before he went off the far, far deep end, lost his connection to reality and evidence, and rejected individualism for racist collectivism) writes of an alleged conspiracy to connect Mexico and Canada and strip Americans of their jobs (rather like the warnings of “Jack D. Ripper“* in Dr. Strangelove of “a Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids”). The tinfoil-hatted professor reminds us that it’s “even described on Wikipedia.” There you have it. It’s even described on Wikipedia.

Now, I hesitate to describe anyone as incompetent or lacking in capacities, but the same person asserted that the ugliness uncovered in the Ron Paul newsletters by a young journalist was obviously a set up, for “How on earth would a kid just out of college know to go to a library in Kansas, of all places, to dig up such stuff?” Maybe it was because the collections of libraries in Kansas are available on the internet, the same internet that has “an entry” on the alleged plot to sap Americans of their vital jobs.

I am reminded of seminars with undergraduates when occasionally 19-year-olds will say something odd and I ask “Why do you think that?,” to which they answer, “I saw it on the internet.”

Sad. Very sad.

*Correction: I had originally written “Bat Guano,” but Dan provided a useful correction. Thanks!

P.S. I did find a residue of the last DiLorenzo outburst at http://digg.com/political_opinion/CATO_Protesters_Tom_Palmer_has_a_sputtering_hate_fit But when you click on the link, you get
Not Found

The requested URL /blog/lewrw/archives/022229.html was not found on this server.

The link was here, as shown by the Google archives: http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/022229.html

A Little Update: An internet troll (evidently the same “Francisco” who posted comments on Ron Paul support websites asserting, on the basis of “social networking theory” that I simply must have had an affair with a New Republic writer I had never met or had any contact with) has attempted to defend the undefendable in the long thread that follows. I can’t imagine any serious people being misled by it; a quick check of the links I provided in response should convince the unconvinced that there is something rotting on the fringes of the libertarian movement, something that denies its core principles and undermines its effectiveness. I leave it to readers to make up their minds for themselves. Click through to the links and see if what you find there represents your own self-understanding.

Nine face stoning death in Iran

Under Iran’s strict penal code, men convicted of adultery should be buried up to their waists and women up to their chests for stoning. The stones used should not be large enough to kill the person immediately.

There seems to be some controversy in the stoning community. The stoners in Iran want it done slowly, focusing on the agony and suffering of the stoned, whereas the stoner Gary North (sorta famous for his very influential and prescient prediction of the end of the world due to the “Y2K” disaster, which, well, sort of didn’t happen, but..whatever) and his colleagues favor the economic aspect (low-cost and ready-to-hand implements and the creation of public benefits), as Walter Olson explained in Reason:

Reconstructionists provide the most enthusiastic constituency for stoning since the Taliban seized Kabul. “Why stoning?” asks North. “There are many reasons. First, the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost.” Thrift and ubiquity aside, “executions are community projects–not with spectators who watch a professional executioner do `his’ duty, but rather with actual participants.” You might even say that like square dances or quilting bees, they represent the kind of hands-on neighborliness so often missed in this impersonal era. “That modern Christians never consider the possibility of the reintroduction of stoning for capital crimes,” North continues, “indicates how thoroughly humanistic concepts of punishment have influenced the thinking of Christians.” And he may be right about that last point, you know.

Maybe we could hold a contest, with Gary North and his friends volunteering to test the various techniques on each other. Better yet, invite the extremist Iranian mullahs to take part, as North and Co. consider them infidels (thus deserving of death, like gay people and adulterers), and the extremist mullahs return the compliment. Talk about a complementarity of interests! And the rest of the human race could live in peace without them.

(Let us hope that the voices of reason in that country prevail and that the nine Iranians are spared. The cruelty of the regime there — not to mention their destructive economic policies — is creating discontent and some hope for a liberal alternative. The last best hope of the regime is for the US to attack them with military force, which would create a surge of nationalist support to add to the dwindling reserves of religious fanatacism.)

I was looking for some old articles I’d written in years past and stumbled on this one from The Spectator (of London), which I think was, well, not bad:

“Hothouse of Hate” (not my title), The Spectator, 22. February, 2003

Death sentence for Saudi ‘witch’

Sharia law row: Archbishop is in shock as he faces demands to quit and criticism from Lord Carey

I’m in favor of choice of laws for arbitration, but I suspect that that is not what the madman from Canterbury has in mind…… I wonder how he reconciles his tepid support for rights for gay people with community-based Sharia law.

NOTE: I got a helpful email from a friend in the UK who is a Muslim and a libertarian and he told me that the Archbishop’s speech had been misreported and that it should be interpreted along the lines of “choice of laws for arbitration.” I based my interpretation on the earlier endorsement by the Archbishop of punishments for â??thoughtless and cruelâ? styles of speaking about religion. But my friend’s letter is thoughtful and he sent me the entire text of the Archbishop’s speech (which has a copyright notice on it from “Rowan Williams”), so I shall read both and reconsider.