Category: Uncategorized

Insanity is knowing what not to do but doing it anyway

The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?… And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq…. All of a sudden you’ve got a battle you’re fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques…. Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq…. Now what kind of government are you going to establish? Is it going to be a Kurdish government, or a Shi’ia government, or a Sunni government, or maybe a government based on the old Baathist Party, or some mixture thereof? You will have, I think by that time, lost the support of the Arab coalition that was so crucial to our operations over there.
– Dick Cheney, Speech to the Discovery Institute [1992]
Thanks to

Future of Freedom Foundation for supplying this text.

Social Justice

At Bleeding Hearts Libertarians

example of discussion

there is a lot of discussion about the importance of Social Justice, rectification of past injustices, and the need for establishing institutions that maximizes Social Justice.

My take:

A happy life is a journey not a destination. The initial condition for each person should be when that person declares emancipation from the parents. Any injustice that is present at that point is due to the parents conceiving and raising the person in an unjust world. Rectification for injustices before emancipation should be ignored.
 
We should consider the world at the transition from dependence on our parents as our initial condition, and enjoy developing the best path to seek happiness from there. Otherwise we are filled with envy, and in turmoil trying to seek retribution for historical injustices.

Sheldon Richmond on Representation

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/government-is-the-problem-2/

We didn’t intervene in Libya, setting the stage for the attack on the CIA post in Benghazi. We didn’t use a political double standard in ruling on tax-exemption requests from nonprofit organizations. We didn’t try to frighten government whistle-blowers by subpoenaing reporters’ phone records, reading their email, and even naming one journalist (Fox’s James Rosen) as a co-conspirator under the Espionage Act. We didn’t ask the NSA to gather data on us.

We did none these things. They did. Who are they? The wielders of power and the interests for whom they front.