I’ve said for years now that we need to take an analogy to David Ben Gurion’s position on WWII as our motto. His position was: fight the war against the Nazis as if there was no White Paper (British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine) and fight the White Paper as if there no war against the Nazis. We need to fight the Islamo-Fascists as if there were no State (or any more than a minarchist state), and fight the State as if there were no Islamo-Fascists.

That’s Billy Beck quoting former No-Treason’er Tim Starr. Beck agrees with Starr’s analysis, calling it “Exactly right”.

Thing is, it ain’t.

You can’t conduct a war against the Islamo-Fascists as if there were no State, because there is a State. Your behavior, your options, your whole course of life is directly affected by the government’s policies.

Think not? Imagine what you might do to help in The War Against Terror if there wasn’t a government. Maybe you’d hire people — superbly trained killers, you bet — to get there first with the most and just smash ‘em on the spot, like bugs. Except that it turns out that trying to get a private military up and running violates about ten-jillion Federal statutes, so getting involved in a free-market jihadi hunt is a good way to end up in the slam.

So are you really going to “fight the Islamo-Fascists as if there were no State”? Of course not, you’re going to recognize that the government can bring overwhelming force to bear on you, and you’re going to act accordingly.

Starr’s analogy is half right at best: conduct your affairs towards government as if there weren’t any Islamic terrorists. Matter of fact, that’s what I do. But that’s because compared to the State, Islamic terrorists have effectively no impact on my life. I judge that that’s the case for the vast majority of individuals as well. More to the point, Islamo-Fascists aren’t able to do anything to force me to change my behavior in regards to the government.

And as we’ve seen before, that doesn’t work the other way.

[T]o secure [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . Declaration of Independence.

As a market anarchist, I have no problem with this statement.

The problem is when “consent of the governed” actually isn’t consent. Iraq’s constitution is a good example of “consent” in action. 63% of Iraq’s adult populace turned out, 78% voted in favour. That’s 49%. 49% of the adult population just bound the other 51% (and their children) to a form of governance they did not choose, and in 2.5m cases, actively rejected. This is consent of the governed?

We are the people of Iraq, who in all our forms and groupings undertake to establish our union freely and by choice . . . Preamble, Constitution of Iraq, AP translation (emphasis mine).

Or not, as the case may be.

Chris Hitchens giving Mr. Galloway a much deserved gutting September 14, just as Galloway kicked off his book tour.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is obviously an uncommon person. He is quoted as saying, “common people having guns won’t provide security” after casting his ballot in favor of the proposed gun and ammunition ban, which was rejected by 64% of Brazilian voters–perhaps just the common ones. Not that such things ought to be decided by voters, common or uncommon. Yet, I strongly suspect that Lula’s bodyguards, and perhaps even Lula himself, regularly carry guns and ammunition.

Some obvious questions are, of course: security for whom? Security from whom? Choose appropriate answers, and perhaps Lula, like all tyrants, is correct in this matter, after all.

Apparently, though, an uncommon person can still be a private citizen. Scroll to the bottom of the above linked article for this one:

Lula joined actors and musicians favoring the ban to say in a newspaper opinion article on Oct. 9 — written as a “private citizen'’ — that the 2003 gun control bill already helped reduce violence.

Yes, I’m sure the common criminals disarmed as quickly and thoroughly as the uncommon ones.

Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems:

Encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work.

…

Wales was responding to author Nicholas Carr, who in a dazzling post on the transcendent New Age “hive-mind” rhetoric that envelops the “Web 2.0″ bubble, took time out to examine the quality of two entries picked at random: Bill Gates and Jane Fonda.

He wasn’t impressed by what he saw.

“This is garbage, an incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts,” he wrote.

Wikipedia is the Internet equivalent of a public toilet. Anyone can use the facilities, including that subset of folks who simply splash feces around for the fun of it, or who are too dumb or ill-bred to get everything inside the rim.

And what incentive is there for anyone to clean up a public toilet, or to correct Wikipedia entries? The adulation of people with opportunity costs similar to yours (that is, folks who have nothing better to do than mop up some stranger’s crap for free)? What kind of a job are they going to do?

As an experiment, I checked out Wikipedia entries on a couple of subjects I have a passing knowledge of. They were poorly written to the point of self-contradiction, and riddled with errors and omissions. I cleaned up a few sentences of one, but why bother with making that entry actually worth reading? A quick Google search of the matter at hand reveals companies who offer much more comprehensive information on the web, for free even.

And why?

Because they have a serious motive for doing so: profit. They’re giving away information in order to convince you that they’re subject matter experts and that you should buy the products they’re selling. Wikipedians on the other hand are busy correcting extra plurals or adding “Wikilinks” to their entry, because they lack both the motivation and the aptitude to add content. And I’m not about to help them, since I have better things to do than reproduce material from expert sources that’re only a mouse click away from anyone who gives half a damn.

Not to say that every Wikipedia entry is worthless any more than every park bathroom is inches awash in bodily fluids. But chances are that a for-profit produced reference or bathroom is going to be a lot nicer to use than its free-for-all equivalent. And stay well away from anything remotely controversial.

Tip: Sunni Maravillosa.

This is interesting:

Conservatives have long understood the danger of the state, the danger that an overly powerful government will destroy liberty. But the next conservatism must also face a different problem: the danger to the state. If the 21st century develops the way some thoughtful people believe it will, it will see the decline and, in some cases, the disappearance of the state itself.

The thing to keep in mind, as an Anti-State.com poster noted, is that it’s not just people who want the state to die who think it will die.

There’s a fundamental difference between government quotas (imposed as they are by force) and a business decision. That seems simple enough, right?

Well, not so simple for Lewrockwell.com contributor Karen DeCoster. In a post titled “Affirmative Action NASCAR”, she whimpers

As with everything else Southern, the traditional roots of NASCAR are no longer acceptable.

The link points to a story about NASCAR’s new CEO:

AR CEO Brian France doesn’t like fans flying Confederate flags at races as he tries to make auto racing more appealing to minorities and women.

…

France is trying to broaden auto racing’s appeal with minorities in places like Los Angeles, where France moved the important Labor Day NASCAR event last year, and New York, soon to have a track.

Is that really “Affirmative Action“? Because it sounds like a simple business decision to me. People in New York and Los Angeles, shocking as it may be to the delicate sensibilities of neo-Confederates, have far more money to spend than people in the South. It certainly makes sense on the face of it for an entertainment company (which is what NASCAR is) to try to appeal to people with money.

In fact if the impending multiculturization of NASCAR were really a bad decision, then this presents a golden opportunity for Karen DeCoster and her ilk to swoop in with their very own Association of Stock Car Auto Racing and take the huge and neglected Confederate Flag demographic away from the NASCAR crowd.

Of course DeCoster isn’t interested in making a business case for the Stars And Bars, instead she segues into the main point of the matter:

From the Charlotte Observer:

It’s a stretch to call Adrian Fernández the future of NASCAR. But that’s who he is to a budding legion of Latino racing fans who consider him the “Dale Earnhardt of Mexico.”

…

(Thanks to MT for the link.) What next? Shall we have a Mexican/Yankee menu at Waffle House? (Chorizo, not grits, please.)

And that’s what this is about: simple racial/cultural paranoia. Why didn’t DeCoster just come out and say “I don’t like Mexicans and Yankees buying up my beloved Southern icons”?

Because that would have been far too honest. So instead of puzzling but forthright prejudice, DeCoster transparently disguised her screed as a takedown of “Affirmative Action”. It’s fair to note, however, that not every Lewrockwell.com blogger has forgotten that words have meanings.

John Bergstrom’s Attack Cartoons is back in some kind of blog-like format. I say “some kind” because the layout is frankly bad and the organization is near nonexistent. But the few cartoons that are even accidentaly visible are well worth the visit. To give you a taste of what Attack Cartoons is all about, what’s presumably a self-portrait of Bergstrom is reproduced below:

Onward.

There’s this guy, I think he’s a politician. No wait, he’s the President, and he nominated this chick to be a judge. Except that this chick is a crony. And some people don’t even think she’s qualified. Can you believe it? A politician nominates a buddy for office…that’s unheard of.

This is the worst thing ever, or like second to Pol Pot or something.

Don Boudreaux posts his An Open Letter to My Libertarian Friends Who Don’t Understand My Opposition to the War in Iraq. The content is predictable:

Still, the war in Iraq is unjustified. By this I mean that the justifications offered for the war by the Bush administration have proven to be mistaken or empty. Most obviously, Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Nor is there any credible evidence that the 9/11 attackers were in any material way aided by Saddam Hussein. And while it’s true that Hussein was an evil tyrant, this fact is neither among the chief reasons first offered by the administration for going to war in Iraq, nor is it a sufficient reason for going to war.

The world is full of evil tyrants. But given the nature of government, it’s not the role of government A to sit in judgment of government B. The most legitimate role for any government is to protect its own people from violence.

My personal opposition to the war in Iraq is quite simple. Not an open letter, an open sentence:

The Iraq war is funded in part with tax loot stolen from me, and I would prefer to spend my money on things that I value more than this war.

That’s it.

And here’s the kicker: unlike the Open Letter linked above, the Open Sentence is irrefutable. A libertarian can’t argue against an individual being able to make a free choice about the disposition of his own property without dropping all pretense of being a libertarian.

…That you could volunteer to take the place of a soldier in Iraq?

Any American who is for the continued occupation of Iraq, yet has not signed up to go take the place of a man who wants to come home is a pathetic coward and hypocrite.

So how does this work? Is there a list of soldiers that you can pick from? A website? Help me out here, AntiWar.com, I know you aren’t just talking nonsense…

Why? Because an indefinite detention at an undisclosed location isn’t good for your health, either:

CTV.ca | Elections Canada wants right to share voter list

OTTAWA — The chief electoral officer says he might be willing to break the law by sharing the confidential federal voters list if he thought it would help public safety or security.

That’s what you get for voting, suckers: another chance to get your name ran through the famously-accurate Homeland Security Terrorist Database.