Please tell me...
...that some kid with a terminal disease made a wish to write a commentary on Ron Paul/libertarianism for Wired. Surely this guy isn't a paid staff member?
Anyway, I was reading a cool Wired article about Thiel's funding of the Seasteading Institute (HT2LRC), and then I started following the related links at the bottom. That's what brought me to aforementioned critique of Ron Paul.
Now you're bracing for a rehash of the newsletters. Nope. This article makes such great objections as:
You can't be a good president in the 21st century when your chief concerns are the sovereignty of the American taxpayer and his right to bear arms.
Isolationism is no longer an option, and hasn't been for years. The world is too small and you can thank, or blame, technology for that reality. The stakes are far too high, as we've learned since Sept. 11, 2001, to act like we can do anything we damned well please anytime we damned well feel like it.
And this guy wants to pull us out of the United Nations. Terrific. The United States as rogue elephant. What a splendid idea.
He also equivocates on stem cell research, supporting it "generically" but again fobbing it off as a states-rights issue (like the old Confederacy, states rights is a major plank in the Paul platform). His chief concern isn't so much the morality of the research as who pays for it. That's a new one on me: turning the stem cell debate into a taxpayer-rights issue.
There are 300 million of us now, not 30 million, and we can’t all go running around unsupervised. This is where libertarian ideals get a little unwieldy. Besides, we’re not all John Waynes, saddled up and gazing with flinty eyes across the prairie. Some of us can barely cope. Sometimes, Ron, them dad-gum polecats in Washington jest have to step in and take charge. Dang it all.
And my personal favorite:
Avoid foreign entanglements? Who’s kidding whom here? If we avoid foreign entanglements what do we plan on doing for an economy?
OK I still sting from my goof on Cato below. Someone please tell me that this is a satire. I mean c'mon, this guy can't possibly think that Ron Paul's doctrine of free trade and avoiding foreign entanglements--and by the way, the writer quotes Paul on free trade, so I'm not supplementing that element of Paul's vision here--implies that we can't trade with foreign countries. He can't possibly think that, right? So then why is he wasting space with such a ludicrous argument? It's not particularly funny, and it's hard to distinguish from his other "serious" objections.
I think this guy's style is somewhat similar to Ann Coulter's, where you can rattle of a bunch of "am I being sarcastic?" rips, so that when someone points out how stupid they are, he can say, "Duh, I was kidding!"
But again, if this article were written by a 13-year-old with leukemia, then I apologize for the criticism. Yet the guy's byline suggests otherwise.
Anyway, I was reading a cool Wired article about Thiel's funding of the Seasteading Institute (HT2LRC), and then I started following the related links at the bottom. That's what brought me to aforementioned critique of Ron Paul.
Now you're bracing for a rehash of the newsletters. Nope. This article makes such great objections as:
You can't be a good president in the 21st century when your chief concerns are the sovereignty of the American taxpayer and his right to bear arms.
Isolationism is no longer an option, and hasn't been for years. The world is too small and you can thank, or blame, technology for that reality. The stakes are far too high, as we've learned since Sept. 11, 2001, to act like we can do anything we damned well please anytime we damned well feel like it.
And this guy wants to pull us out of the United Nations. Terrific. The United States as rogue elephant. What a splendid idea.
He also equivocates on stem cell research, supporting it "generically" but again fobbing it off as a states-rights issue (like the old Confederacy, states rights is a major plank in the Paul platform). His chief concern isn't so much the morality of the research as who pays for it. That's a new one on me: turning the stem cell debate into a taxpayer-rights issue.
There are 300 million of us now, not 30 million, and we can’t all go running around unsupervised. This is where libertarian ideals get a little unwieldy. Besides, we’re not all John Waynes, saddled up and gazing with flinty eyes across the prairie. Some of us can barely cope. Sometimes, Ron, them dad-gum polecats in Washington jest have to step in and take charge. Dang it all.
And my personal favorite:
Avoid foreign entanglements? Who’s kidding whom here? If we avoid foreign entanglements what do we plan on doing for an economy?
OK I still sting from my goof on Cato below. Someone please tell me that this is a satire. I mean c'mon, this guy can't possibly think that Ron Paul's doctrine of free trade and avoiding foreign entanglements--and by the way, the writer quotes Paul on free trade, so I'm not supplementing that element of Paul's vision here--implies that we can't trade with foreign countries. He can't possibly think that, right? So then why is he wasting space with such a ludicrous argument? It's not particularly funny, and it's hard to distinguish from his other "serious" objections.
I think this guy's style is somewhat similar to Ann Coulter's, where you can rattle of a bunch of "am I being sarcastic?" rips, so that when someone points out how stupid they are, he can say, "Duh, I was kidding!"
But again, if this article were written by a 13-year-old with leukemia, then I apologize for the criticism. Yet the guy's byline suggests otherwise.
That broke my brain.
ReplyDelete